Monthly Archives: November 2010

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 5 December 2010 (Second Sunday of Advent, Year A)

Isaiah 11:1-10 • Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19 • Romans 15:4-13 • Matthew 3:1-12

There was a time when I would have found Saint Paul’s initial statement in this week’s reading unbearably arrogant.  After all, the principles of responsible reading that I learned both as an English major and as a Bible minor (and later as a seminarian) all warn against solipsistic reading, the approach to a text that says that the only significant thing about a text is “what it means to me.”  When one comes to a text, my training told me, the task at hand was to discern the structures and particulars that constitute the text, reserving judgment until one had an adequate account of the text itself articulated.  I still battle that mentality when I teach college literature, anticipating with dread the inevitable moment each semester when a student is going to ask, “So this research paper is basically our own opinion, right?”  Of course, I have no place to complain when I confront that question–the role of a high school teacher is to teach students that there are differences between claims, and my job as a college teacher is to introduce students to a more robust and complex range of possibilities among those differences.  But being vigilant rather than assuming that my students are already college-educated is always part of the challenge.

I note my own background here because it points up my own hypocrisy: just as my own students lack the intellectual tools to go beyond the fact-opinion binary until someone teaches them a more complex range of options (or dies trying), so my own training pointed me towards a binary between solipsism on one hand and objective exegesis on the other, and my own shortcoming was to close off reality once those two had been covered.  I’m not sure what binary has me captured just now (the nature of such binaries, as T.S. Kuhn would remind us, is that one can’t spot them when one abides within one), but I know that the subjective-objective binary did not have Saint Paul captive as it did me.

For Paul, the Scriptures are written “for our instruction” precisely because both the Scriptures and we live and move and have our being within the larger schema of God’s creating and redeeming the world.  If one takes that larger system as prior not only to the text but also to the production of the text and the self’s encounter to the text, then there’s not too much of a problem asserting that, for instance, Isaiah might well have had a Jerusalem king rather than a Galilean tekton in mind when he spoke the oracle of Isaiah 11 about the shoot from the stump of Jesse, but nonetheless God’s interpretive agency could well add Jesus of Nazareth to the field of valid readings when the time was full.  Moreover, Jesus could well become the primary referent to that passage, taking priority over the historical content of the text’s earliest production without eradicating that original sense, without doing violence to either history or to devotion.  In other words, what Paul is doing is sloppy exegetical work only if one assumes that the post-German university’s model of history is ultimately the standard which judges all things.  If a living tradition instead is the prior context, then a different set of rules governs how a community reads a sacred Scripture.

And if that living tradition ultimately governs the use of the Bible, then the old saw about Jesus’ and Paul’s failing homiletics class is neither an indictment of Jesus and Paul nor a relativistic nod to “ever-evolving standards” of Bible-reading but a commentary on the narrowness both of strictly “objective” and strictly “subjective” readings of Scripture.  (Incidentally, from what I’ve gathered in conversations with seminary professors, people fail homiletics courses not because they’re too much like Jesus or Paul but because they take shortcuts to the big flashy payoff without taking seriously the historical work that underlies a really good allegorical reading.  Just sayin’.)  What seems like fast and loose use of the Greek ethne (Latin gentilum and English “nations” or “Gentiles”) in today’s reading only remains so if one fails to note that Paul’s self-identification as prophet and teacher “to the Gentiles” is an echo of Jeremiah and that “the Gentiles,” when Paul takes that word out of its narrow-minded Judean-nationalist framework and recasts it in light of Christ, comes to mean not “everyone but the Jews” but “all those human beings who have not yet confessed Jesus of Nazareth as anointed Lord.”  In other words, in Paul’s writing (and again, he’s echoing Jeremiah), “the circumcision” moves upwards in altitude several inches, becoming a mark on a person’s totality and patterns of life and rendering adiaphora the mark of Abraham and the diet of Moses.

As the Advent season rolls on, Scripture itself calls for the strongest efforts and most clear-minded awareness of the reading self as we approach the gift of the Scriptures, which in a real way do stand written for “our instruction” precisely because they have their own historical integrity and because they stand as moments when God makes God’s self known in the movement of allegory.  When “one crying, ‘In the wilderness make a path for the LORD” becomes “one crying in the wilderness, ‘Make a path for the LORD,’” God is teaching us how to read.  May all of us approach the Scriptures as students of the past and of the future, that our own presence might be a blessing to the nations.

• Why Christians should engage with popular culture.
• At least one classic author still sells books.

I’ve enjoyed this semester, not least because, for the first time since 2004, I’ve been called on to teach a general survey of literature, in this case Emmanuel College’s English 200 class.  The sort of class is not uncommon at small colleges: all students of all majors take it, and the instructor has a good deal of freedom to pick texts, arrange them, and evaluate students based on a mix of papers and exams.  In other words, it’s about the closest thing to a blank slate that exists in the English-teaching business.

In my own class I decided to arrange the class neither chronologically nor by genre but by four big ideas, and the running thesis of the class has been that certain human realities are in themselves so complex that talking about them in social-scientific or philosophical or even theological terms is going to miss some of the texture and complication and therefore the humanity of those realities.  So in the course of fifteen weeks our class got together twice a week to read love-texts, sin-texts, death-texts, and race-texts.

August Wilson’s Fences, of course, is the perfect wrap-up to such a semester–Wilson is rightly known as a playwright who captures the life of real human beings in Pittsburgh’s Hill District in the twentieth century, and his characters really unfold wonderfully some of the social realities of being Black in the United States, being mortals fated to die and defined by death, being sinners in a world where sins have uneven consequences, and being capable of and sometimes doomed by love.  And the best thing about teaching this text at the end of the Fall 2010 semester was watching my Christian college students visibly upset by the fact that Troy Maxson, a sinner who betrays the woman he loves, goes to heaven at the end of the play.

(Sorry about the spoilers, folks.  More are coming.)

Troy Maxson is undeniably the center of this play, and the line of actors taking his role testifies to its power: among others, James Earl Jones, Laurence Fishburne, and recently Denzel Washington have auditioned to be Troy.  When other characters give speeches filling in the past, it’s always the part of the past that involves Troy.  He’s on the stage for every scene except the last, his own funeral (and we’ll get to that), and his inability to live out his own rigid sense of Stoic duty is the motor that drives the plot forward.  As he lays out his own past over the course of the play (of course his own speeches are about the past as it concerns Troy Maxson), the audience discovers that his own childhood ended on the day when he lost respect for his own father’s authority; that he moved from North Carolina to Pittsburgh only to find no work except for criminals; that he turned to professional sports when his criminal career nearly ended his life;  and that he fell in with the sanitation workers’ union in the years after his baseball career ended.

The scene that caught my attention this go-round (my own first return to the play-text since I read it as a sophomore in college) was the bizarre stage-direction at the play’s end.  As the final scene (the only one where Troy doesn’t have the lion’s share of the lines) opens, Troy has just died, and seven years have passed since the penultimate scene.  Troy’s middle child Cory, back in town from serving with the Marine Corps (the play never says Vietnam, but that’s my guess), refuses to attend the funeral of a man who intimidated him as a child, kept him from pursuing his dreams of playing college football as a high school senior, and ran around on his mother (Troy’s wife).  Troy’s daughter with “the other woman” (who died in childbirth), Raynell, is seven years old and living with the humiliated Rose when the funeral happens.  Rose, the ever-enduring wife of the philanderer Troy Maxson (and the closest character to a Christ-figure in the play), confronts Cory, making him realize that, no matter what evil Troy has wrought in the young man’s life, he’s always going to have just one father, and that one father is always going to be Troy Maxson.  The penultimate “moment” and the last one where characters’ words is most important involves Cory and Raynell, children of the same father by different mothers (Troy’s first child was by a third woman still), singing together the song Troy used to sing about his old Carolina hunting dog.

That the final moment in the script involves stage directions rather than characters’ lines offends my Shakespearean sensibilities, but the stage direction is striking nonetheless.  Troy’s brother Gabriel, whose brain injury sustained in World War II has rendered him unable to work and a nuisance to the neighborhood (he runs around for the duration of the play thinking that he’s the Archangel Gabriel and on one occasion getting arrested for making too much noise chasing off hellhounds), has the last lines and, more importantly, the last dance:

GABRIEL: Hey, Rose.  It’s time.  It’s time to tell St. Peter to open up the gates.  Troy, you ready?  You ready, Troy.  I’m gonna tell St. Peter to open the gates.  You get ready now.  [GABRIEL, with great fanfare, braces himself to blow.  The trumpet is without a mouthpiece.  He puts the end of it into his mouth and blows with great force, like a man who has been waiting some twenty-odd years for this single moment.  No sound comes out of the trumpet.  He braces himself and blows again with the same result.  A third time he blows.  There is a weight of impossible description that falls away and leaves him bare and exposed to a frightful realization.  It is a trauma that a sane and normal mind would be unable to understand.  He begins to dance.  A slow, strange dance, eerie and lifegiving.  A dance of atavistic signature and ritual.  LYONS attempts to embrace him.  GABRIEL pushes LYONS away.  He begins to howl in what is an attempt at song, or perhaps a song turning back into itself in an attempt at speech.  He finishes his dance and the gates of heaven stand open as wide as God's closet.]  That’s the way that go!

[Blackout.]

First of all, since I’ve never seen Fences on the stage or screen, I have no idea how in the world anyone would stage that.  Second, I was never aware until I read this play that God had a closet in the first place.  But neither of those matter–what struck me as I planned my lesson was that Wilson here is doing a divine bed-trick, the sort that Dante pulls on Guido da Montefeltro (he thinks he’s going to Purgatory but ends up, at the last minute, going to Hell) and later that Goethe pulls with his version of Faust (he thinks he’s going to Hell, but angels snatch him away to Heaven).  But Wilson is not content with the single reversal–he brings Gabriel onstage to blow his trumpet, faking towards heaven, then has Gabriel’s trumpet fail, double-clutching towards Hell before finishing up with Gabriel’s dance to send Troy Maxson straight through the Heavenly gates. The audience, pleased at first that Gabriel finally gets to usher Troy through the gates of Heaven as he’s always wanted to do, must make peace with the fact that Gabriel is going to be disappointed but that Troy is going to get what’s coming, only to discover that Gabriel’s strange dance brings forth divine favor after all.  Again, I’ve got no idea how a director would do this visually, but in terms of the play-text, it’s the two fake throws that really make the opening of Heaven’s gate hit hard.

The reaction in my class was striking if not surprising.  I’d spent the first part of class building up the compound sins of Troy Maxson, his squelching one son’s dreams of being a musician because Troy considers honest wage-labor superior to the nightclub scene (that son, Lyons, ends up doing time for petty theft in the intervening seven years), then crushing the next son’s dreams of going to college for fear that the world of college sports would treat the young Black athlete as it treated so many old Black athletes, discarding them when their bodies wore out without so much as a dollar, much less a college degree, to show for it (that son ends up in the Marines and probably in Vietnam).  Then, as the second act opens, he proves himself not only self-righteous and fearful but hypocritical, running around with Alberta and getting her pregnant as he follows precisely the impulses towards transcendence that he will not allow in his sons.  When he tells his wife, he gushes on and on about needing to feel alive and loving life when he’s around Alberta, the very things that run counter to the Stoic’s responsibility and duty that he prides himself upon and which he brutally instills in his boys. When I asked the class what they thought of Troy Maxson by the end of act two, the faces told me plenty before any student made any remark: this cat was scum, a hypocrite, a philanderer, and a destroyer of families.  And when I asked them whether they thought Troy’s attempt at self-justification counted for anything, whether they thought he deserved to feel alive, I could actually feel the laser beams coming from my students’ eyes at the very suggestion.

I should also note that, in a class of sixteen, there are three young men on the roll, and one of them was not in class that morning.  And the other two had the good sense to keep their mouths shut while I was digging this hole.

So when I had the class spend the last several minutes on this final stage direction (which, predictably, they had skimmed rather than read and had entirely missed the opening of Heaven’s gate), I couldn’t have done a better job preparing a room full of method-actors to play the roles of Pharisees.  People were scowling, shaking their heads, muttering, and all sorts of things when I declared (with the proper bombastic glee, of course) that a sinner had been forgiven, and even if they didn’t like it, Fences had sent him to Heaven.

I realize this is a whole mess of plot summary for a relatively brief payoff, but this was the sort of moment that makes teaching English worth my time.  I’m sure these students had heard from a dozen preachers that forgiveness is something that offends “the religious,” and I’m sure that some of them had made that statement themselves.  But this was a moment when a really good play script had done the mimetic work that Aristotle saw in the best tragedies: because the betrayal and the fear and the envy and the hypocrisy came at them so quickly, because they had been exposed to a lifetime’s worth of vice in just sixty pages of text, this play actually made them experience what it means to be the older brother watching the father celebrate the prodigal, to be the unforgiving servant who throws a small-time debtor in jail just after celebrating his own forgiveness of debt.  They knew full well that Troy Maxson’s attempts at self-justification were as rubbish, and they couldn’t emotionally handle the possibility that a higher authority had, seemingly arbitrarily, decided to forgive him. The moment was utterly senseless, and although I imagine all of them would agree to the statement that their own sins are horrible before Heaven, I think this moment really made them confront just how awful redemption is.

I’m certain that, a couple months from now, when they’re off doing their major classes, most of my students from English 200 will join in the chorus of those who mock the “useless” and “pointless” English classes they “had to take,” but right now, I think I’ll trade that scorn for the moment when forgiveness finally offended some of them.

That’s the way that go.

General Introduction
- Hey, there’s four of us!
- A needless interruption
- What’s on the blog?
- David pleases the king

Background
- A little-read Great Book
- Spenser’s social climbing
- The messy composition
- Disillusionment in the second half?
- Personal and civic virtue

Let’s Talk Carla
- The broad strokes of Carla’s thesis
- Female disappointment
- Does Britomart ever find satisfaction?
- Unspeakable disasters
- The block of the patriarchy

Let’s Talk Britomart
- Is Britomart a feminist?
- Self-hatred
- Gender bendin’ with Queen Elizabeth I
- The Ally McBeal of the 16^th century
- An endemic problem to Renaissance epic?
- What did Spenser intend?

Period Resonations
- Nathan brings his dissertation into it!
- Religious tensions of the era
- The sacramentality of marriage
- Milton’s gender division
- Boethius and the Fortunate Fall

Book One
- The only thing you’ve read: Admit it!
- Which church are you part of?
- The Catholic scarlet woman

The National Epic
- A New Kind of St. George
- Gloriana, the Faerie Queene
- Prince Arthur
- The anxieties of the empire

Allegory and Critical Theory
- Michial wrongly anticipates a cage match
- Why allegory confuses Britomart
- How emotion breaks it down
- Allegory as inherently limiting
- Authorial intent
- Did Spenser fall backwards into a great book?
- Allegory that creates a surplus of meaning
- Back to the Holy Grail!
- Is there a point of arrival?

Lightning Round
- What else in The Faerie Queene is worth your time?
- Sir Guyon discovers the limits of classical virtue
- The first buddy cop movie
- False Florimell’s phony romance novel
- Pyrochles sets himself on fire
- The adventures of Belphoebe and Amoret
- The Salvage Man’s nasty habits

Why Should You Bother and How Should You Proceed?
- The power of the poetry
- A shameful reminder
- Intangible meaning and beauty
- Understanding the historical roots of our modern beliefs
- Read it in a group
- Positive frustration
- C.S. Lewis’s strange mother issues
- Stuff for the 11-year-old boys in our audience
- White is a color, too—and the ambiguity of virtue
- Another tiresome comparison to Moby-Dick
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ariosoto, Ludovico. Orlando Furioso. Trans. Guido Waldman. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.

Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1995.

Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. Victor Watts. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Candler, Peter M., Jr. “The Anagogical Imagination of Flannery O’Connor.” Christianity and Literature 60.1 (Autumn 2010): 11-33.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: Norton, 2001.

Milbank, John. Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. New York: Norton, 2004.

Shakespeare, William. Othello. London: Arden, 1996.

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. New York: Penguin, 1979.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 28 November 2010 (First Sunday of Advent, Year A)

Isaiah 2:1-5 • Psalm 122 • Romans 13:11-14 • Matthew 24:36-44

I’ve read in a number of places (some of them even in the New Testament) that God uses events that the naked eye would interpret as bad luck as a sort of discipline, a reminder in cases of moral lapse that there are consequences for sin and a reminder in cases without any moral lapse that our true life is, to paraphrase Colossians, hidden in Christ.  I grant the validity of that vision of Providence (it is in the New Testament, after all), but I do think that some folks take that image too far, or perhaps more precisely, they fail to keep that reality in tension with the grand story of redemption that runs through the Christian tradition.  Some places, this imbalance manifests in horrifying meditations upon every detail of physical suffering and torture, forgetting that in the absence of the Resurrection, the suffering of the innocent is not martyrdom but absurdity.  Others, less dramatic and more everyday, inspire such lines as Garrison Keillor’s famous bit about the person in Minnesota who was worried that he was enjoying himself, only to be reminded by a helpful neighbor, “This too shall pass.”  Whether horrific or comic, these worlds of suffering-without-joy not only forget the inherent goodness remaining in creation but also ignore the proclamation of what is to come.

Advent is that season of the year that reminds us of the Christian virtue of hope, that expectation of redemption that renders the daily grind and the genuinely terrible moments intelligible because they’re not the final word in the matter.  This week’s Isaiah reading initiates a long string of hopeful oracles in the book, enlivening the expectations of an Israel who has come to expect, at best, some relative political stability and perhaps even a bit of wealth and comfort.  Isaiah bursts onto the scene to remind them that they have more than mere monarchy going for them: they have Torah, the divine instruction from God which, when the nations awake from their slumbers and repent of their idolatries, will stand as the city on a hill to which they flock for wisdom and instruction.  Against a relativism that threatens to overwhelm every international age (and before the long string of hegemonies ranging from Babylon to Persia to Syria to Rome, the world of the Israelite monarchies was decidedly a parity), Isaiah holds forth a vision in which Torah stands not only as “our” way of live but as a genuinely human way of life.

In the weeks before Christmas, which in America happen to correspond to the weeks after election day, folks like me need a reminder that what we proclaim is not merely a “spiritual” veneer to put over the compromises that make up our daily lives at work and in the State and sometimes (alas) among our congregations; our life in the “already” present Kingdom remains intelligible and allows for change and difference that is genuinely better (rather than being the flat Derridean sort of difference) only because of the eschaton whose vision generations have handed to us and whose coming remains our proclamation and the proclamation of generations after us, so long as God sees fit that the pilgrim people should wander this wilderness.

May the spirit of Advent animate and inspire our imaginations, drawing us towards an adequate vision of what God has promised.

• Gene Fant talks University Statements of Faith.
• Why Sherlock Holmes matters.
• Are non-overlapping magisteria a myth?
• Fred Sanders counsels writers on learning the craft.
• Aikido and the Art of the Question and Answer Session
• The Kindlings Muse scoops us with a discussion of Christian rock.
• That’s right, folks: Nate Gilmour is DANGEROUS.
  • Okay, maybe not so much.
• The Christian Calendar at Internet Monk.
• Are “the Humanities” even worth saving?
• For those who miss LOST: How it should have ended (wait for the whole clip to run–trust me.)
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A couple stories have been making the Internet rounds of late, making college teachers everywhere shake our heads (after all, I are one) and drawing forth the usual commonplaces about higher education.  In one such story, Central Florida University business professor Richard Quinn discovered that fully 200 of his 600 business students cheated on a midterm exam. In another, a writer with the pseudonym Ed Dante explained to the Chronicle of Higher Education the process by which custom-paper services provide untraceable documents for students to turn in, an opportunity to cheat with impunity for those with the cash to hand over.

What struck me about both of these pieces is that the students at CFU and Ed Dante seem to think of themselves as occupying some intelligible moral space, and the teachers reacting to the stories think of them as occupying an entirely different but nonetheless intelligible space.  In Ed Dante’s case he seemed to think himself a victim of a corrupt system dedicated to grades exclusive of education even as he thrilled as he described professors whom he regularly fooled.  The same professors regard him as a pimp and a fraud, two groups of people who do not fare nearly as well as others in Dante’s divine economy.  In the case of Central Florida, ABC news clips of the story (unavailable at the time of writing) featured sound-bites from students (pardon the spelling–I never do know which spelling of sound-bites to use) saying, among other things, that all students cheat and that it’s not fair to penalize those students who happen to have been caught cheating.  One student even referred to the event as a “witch hunt.”  The professor upon whose exam the students cheated described the event as something that made him wonder whether higher education were worth anything at all.

Friends of mine who have spread both of these stories via Facebook and in other media have lamented, growled, and done all of the other things that rightly go along with moral outrage.  I run with several college teachers, after all.  But very few have stated what should be obvious to us all: this is precisely what one should expect given Plato’s warnings against a democratic mindset.

Plato on the Desires for Good, Goods, and Consumption

By serendipity or by providence, I was teaching the following section of Republic to a group of freshmen when these stories were “going viral” among my fellow academics, and I could not help but note the precision with which Plato lays out a cultural and (anti-)intellectual framework within which these phenomena make sense:

‘… the pursuit of freedom makes it increasingly normal for fathers and sons to swap places: others are afraid of their sons, and sons no longer feel shame for the parents are spending all of them. And it starts to make no difference whether one is a citizen or a resident alien, or even a visitor from abroad: everyone is at the same level.’

‘Yes, that happens,’ [Glaucon or Adeimantus--I never can remember] said.

‘Those are the most important cases,’I said, ‘but there are others. In these circumstances, for example, teachers are afraid of their pupils and curry favor with them, while people despise their teachers and attendance as well. In short, the younger generation starts to look like the older generation, and they turn any conversation or action into a trial of strength with their elders; meanwhile, the older members of the community adapt themselves to the younger ones, whose frivolity and charm, and model their behavior on that of the young, because they don’t want to be thought disagreeable tyrants.’  (Republic 563 a-b)

Plato’s vision of democracy is, of course, a dark one: it’s a system within which the pursuits of momentary pleasures override reason, civic pride, and even those desires associated with good, honest money-making.  All that remains is a horde of people, sponging off of the labors of the genuinely useful, waiting for anyone to come along and promise more pleasure for less work.  And with my democratic sympathies, I find his account somewhat uncomfortable.  But no matter what one thinks of popular election of public officials,  if the mentality that governs democratic political communities comes as well to govern an educational system, the hierarchy that makes education intelligible gives way,  and it only makes sense for students to achieve the ends of education, as defined by a consumerist (or democratic, to use Plato’s terms) system, by any means that are allowable within that system.  In the world that these students and Ed Dante inhabit, that pretty well includes whatever means do not get one caught.  A woman or man who purports to be a teacher within the system is little more to the student, morally speaking, than a pitcher is to a hitter or a linebacker to a tailback, except that the linebacker or pitcher does not live in fear of end-of-season evaluations filled out by hitters and tailbacks.  In that moral universe any efforts to “get grades” stand to be judged simply by effectiveness or failure, and teachers and our support staff are people who bar their own equals (remember, the democratic assumption is that nobody is “greater than” anyone else) from getting to the ends of the project.

Since teachers appear already to be enjoying those fruits of “success,” those of us who investigate such attempts at fraud are no more, in that system, than hoarders, determining arbitrarily who is “in” and who is “out,” and any among those ranks who attempts to articulate some sort of moral syllogism about why cheating is, in that system, wrong, the response is swift: these old teachers just don’t get the point of college.  There is no intelligible moral reason for any student to regard the teacher as anything different than a particularly nasty goalkeeper, someone who attempts to block the trickier shots from going in the goal, and who then declares that some rule has been violated when the shooter scores.  Within the rules of democracy-according-to-Plato, the teacher/police’s success and the student/trickster’s success are no more than conflicting goals.  And when one shoots at goals, trick shots do not occupy a place on a moral continuum so much as they represent one set of morally neutral means to a pair of agreed-upon and conflicting ends.

I take this essay in this direction with some hesitation because I know that some of my friends and beloved colleagues are quite enamored of what they would call perhaps anti-authoritarian or postmodern pedagogy, the sort of teaching that presumes correctly that students are mortal just as teachers are but wrongly concludes from that premise that no hierarchy can stand between teacher and student.  I know that I’m going to sound somewhat monstrous to some ears when I write this, but I assert nonetheless.  Teachers must in real ways stand superior to their students if we are to maintain the culture of college teaching as the tradition has handed it down to us.  An intelligible case that such behaviors as commissioning essays rather than writing them or downloading and distributing exam answers is anything but one more valid tactic assumes that, at the outset of one’s education, the professor stands as ontologically superior to the student.  And when that hierarchy does not stand at the outset, the cheating that follows only makes sense.  What students and teachers alike sometimes ignore is that such a fundamental difference of philosophies will necessarily make the enterprise of education absurd unless one gives way to the other.

Whose Grades?  Which Transcripts?

The ethical logic that governs the college classroom is larger than any given phenomenon of cheating.  Two narratives seem to govern that space and the practice of assigning grades, one of them rooted in individualism (or democracy, if one prefers to stick with Plato’s terms) and the other in a conservative vision of community life (or aristocracy, in Plato’s terms).  In one narrative, a student “needs to get an A” because the purpose of the classroom is to advance the student towards graduate programs, jobs, and other pursuits that have as their price of admission a currency measured not in U.S. dollars but GPA points.  In the other narrative, the grade is a professor’s good-faith account of a student’s performance for the sake of constructing a truthful story of the same student’s career within an institution.  These transcripts (to coin a term) are not the sum total of education but merely one device by which people less familiar with a student can tell quickly how the student fared when attempting the tasks that a given class, and a range of classes, required of all present in the class or classes.

If the former story governs a human being’s interactions within a classroom, then obtaining the requisite “currency” becomes a game of risk and reward: if one gets caught, the institution takes away the currency, and if one does not, one gains more currency in exchange for work that the goalie did not anticipate the shooter doing, work that might well translate into future adventures in gaming other systems.  If the latter story frames the moment of cheating, then the cheater becomes one who negates the possibility of true accounts, rendering the teacher, who stands in the position of excellence, incapable of telling the truth about which students are approaching the standards of excellence internal to the community and which ones have, at this point in the story, misidentified where their strengths lie and either need to rededicate themselves to the pursuits of the community or find another avenue by which they might serve the relevant human community.  In other words, “I need this grade to be an A” is unintelligible in the aristocratic system just as much as “the world might be better if you kept the grade that I assigned” is unintelligible to the individualist/democrat.

My own working conviction is that higher-level, liberal education really should be the sort of training that the community offers to those with the most real potential for good public influence.  In other words, as much as I’m an Athenian democrat in matters of the state, I’m a Platonic elitist when it comes to education.  I can point to centuries of educational tradition that agree with me on this, and although I know that many readers have already branded me “reactionary” and tuned me out, I teach where I do, in an institution that admits students who would not have a fighting chance at the elite institutions (and I consider most state universities to be those sorts of institutions) precisely because we believe that the system as it stands misses many of those who have the most potential to be women and men of influence.  Therefore my own outrage at Ed Dante and at the cheaters at CFU stems not from the fact that “my team” is “losing” the game of hide-the-diploma but because I still believe that higher education exists not for its own sake but for the sake of a larger community.  That particular sort of benefit has at its root a set of aristocratic assumptions, namely that some human beings have over the years acquired a real and intelligible range of human goods alternately called wisdom, expertise, and learning; and that inherent inequality between teacher and student can and should have the erotic force (in the old Platonic sense) to draw students upward, inspiring them to emulate those professors whom they admire and to supplant those whom they despise.

For what it’s worth, I’m fully behind those who want to attempt experimental communities, intellectual and ecclesiastical and otherwise.  If somebody wanted to take a day job and spend the evenings facilitating a fully-democratic Emergent church or a fully-democratic thinkers’ circle, that’s just great.  But in contexts that pass along transcripts and promise students that professors will teach them, to deny hierarchy just seems like a bad-faith position that’s inherently open to the morality of gamesmanship.  My own working assumption, the assumption of aristocracy, is that students must rise in their relationships to their teachers, not assume a prior and all-consuming equality, and to cheat within this context is to betray the institution and the larger community. The open secret is that every professor worth anything at all longs for the day when student supplants teacher, taking the future of the community in directions that the teacher is incapable of imagining.  But a system corrupted by widespread cheating stands to ruin all chances of anything like that happening.  I stand behind CFU’s Dr. Quinn and all of the teachers who have been the victims of frauds like Ed Dante precisely because they render what ought to be a vocation in behalf of a community unintelligible, the worst sort of attack that one could imagine on an ancient and good way of life.

As I’m sure more than one web-writer has noted, these sorts of event is always a mirror of sorts–the emotional reaction, and perhaps even more whether one sides with the cheaters or with those cheated, is fairly predictable based on the prior philosophical and ethical convictions that one brings to the event.  My response, of course, is no exception to this.  But I do invite comments, conversation, and alternative theories to my own.

YouTube Playlist of St. Matthew’s Passion

Translation of the Libretto

General Introduction
- What’s on the blog?
- Yet more on Church Music
- Take that, rival podcast!

Defining and Destroying Our Terms
- David gets pedantic (GASP!)
- Why’s the chronology so wacky?
- The Neo-Classical Revival
- The Western tradition connection
- Cultural prestige marker
- What is Greek and Roman music?
- Classical as a golden age
- Replicability
- Classical as one-half of the classical-pop dichotomy
- Types of “classical” music

The Sacred/Secular Distinction
- How appropriate is it?
- Christendom throws a wrench in the works
- Bach’s coffee cantata

Bach and The Passion of St. Matthew
- Splitting the service
- Historical facticity
- The harpsichord and the pianoforte
- Complexity and counterpoint
- Music and performance
- Rock-star musicians and rock-star composers
- The composer biopic
- Participation and understanding

Who Owns Bach?
- Can you divorce “O Sacred Head Now Wounded” from its religious content?
- Chopin, Debussy and Beethoven in church services
- Reading Dante for the mythic structure
- David gets controversial (Internet atheists may direct their responses to him)
- Schleiermacher’s whitewashing of religious difference
- What does sublime mean, anyhow?
- Bach’s religion and his music
- Hindu spirituality and American excess

Educational Rants
- Getting rid of arts education
- What good is classical music?
- Stretching students
- Holistic education
- A new approach to the crucifixion
- Bach as a steadying force
- Making children perform
- Disciplining our desires
- Classical music education

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1985.

Kant, Immanuel. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. Trans. John T. Goldwaith. Los Angeles: U of California P, 2004.

L’Engle, Madeleine. A Circle of Quiet. San Francisco: Harper, 1972.

Lewis, C.S. Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.

Longinus. On Great Writing (On the Sublime). New York: Hackett, 1991.

Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Albert A. Anderson. Millis, Mass.: Agora, 2009.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 21 November 2010 (26th Sunday after Pentecost, Year C)

Jeremiah 23:1-6 and Luke 1:68-79 • Jeremiah 23:1-6 and Psalm 46 • Colossians 1:11-20 • Luke 23:33-43

I’ve thought for some time that the conventional distinction between the “Magisterial Reformation” and the “Radical Reformation” could be more precise categorically.  After all, Luther’s very project was to articulate the root (Latin radix) of the gospel in terms of saving grace, and Calvin’s Institutes dedicates its entire third book to cutting the structure of Church back to its roots.  The designator “magisterial” makes some sense, since Lutheran and Calvinist traditions tend to be more cozy with the civil magistrates than do Anabaptists, but both seem, in historical terms, fairly radical moves within the history of the Church.

This week’s reading from Jeremiah leads me back to a question of Church-historiography that has troubled me for some years, namely the prophetic tradition of radical reform.  Jeremiah, of course, shares the image of the “bad shepherds” with a number of the prophets and with Jesus in the gospel of John, and the imagery has less to do with modern connotations of “pastor” (which tends to be a position without the authority of imperium) and more to do with the ancient imagery of the king as shepherd and the subjects as his sheep.  In Israel’s case, of course, because the monarchy can claim divine origins and mandate just as much as the priesthood, today’s oracle from Jeremiah frames the impending Babylonian invasion in terms also familiar to the prophets: God is using the Babylonian empire as a tool for extracting the bad shepherds, throwing them down by the might of Nebuchadnezzar (but always for the ends of YHWH), and when the remnant returns (this “remnant” passage is less famous than Isaiah’s), YHWH will raise up new shepherds, those who will be faithful to the roots of the mission of Israel.

The question, of course, is the extent to which such radical reforms are possible in the Christian era, and in our own time, the conventional modern connotation of “pastor” begins to make more sense.  Some traditions, notably the Catholic and Reformation streams, would hold that what appears to be radical reform is mere schism, the imposition of one’s generation’s ambition and whim upon the generations that came before.  Others hold as central the slogan semper reformanda.  And predictably, English teachers like myself can see the appeal of both sorts of claims.  If in fact the work of Christ is final, and if the gathering of Christ (which often goes by the word Church) does indeed stand undefeated by the gates of Hades, then one ought to be reluctant to point to large swaths of centuries and declare, “Not Church.”  On the other hand, if in fact the last five hundred years or so of Protestant happenings (not to mention the last thousand years, in which both Catholics and Orthodox have been on the earth), I tend to be reluctant to point to large swaths of centuries and declare, “Church here.  No Church there.”  And on a third hand still (that one’s for you, David), I don’t want to point to the German Christians of the 1930′s or the People’s Temple of Jim Jones and say “Church here.”

My solution, and I don’t claim that it’s without its problems, is to go with the call to radical reform as an always-present historical possibility, to hold that the noun ekklesia in the statement “The Church of Christ Jesus shall prevail over the gates of Hades” has the conceptual and lexical flexibility to name an ecumenical spectrum of phenomena, limited by the root content of Christian doctrine but to allow the possibility of genuine and meaningful difference within those confines.  Such would neither negate the possibility of genuine heresy or schism nor hold that there can be only one form of Christian community that stands as Church but subject all of Christian history to the rigorous theological examination that the term Church History entails.

When Paul sets forth the grand Christ-hymn in the opening of Colossians, he does so not simply for atomized individual piety, and certainly not in the name of “art for art’s sake,” but in order to remind a community that its constitution is in the person of Christ, one who beckons for all to follow.  May our gatherings of followers show both the grace and the shrewdness of the One whom we follow.

Something about nineteenth-century America made great novelists shoot for immense public success by eliminating what it was about their writing that made them great. The most obvious and egregious example is Herman Melville’s follow-up to Moby-Dick, 1852′s little-loved Pierre: Or, the Ambiguities. The official story is that Melville had set out to write a sweet and light domestic novel–he referred to it, in a letter to Sofia Hawthorne, as “a bowl of milk”–then got the negative reviews for Moby-Dick, at which point Pierre became a dark Calvinist beast of a novel: ugly, misanthropic, and terribly plotted.

There is reason to doubt the official story. John Updike explains:

[T]he reviews [of Moby-Dick] weren’t all that bad. Not as bad, certainly, as those which had greeted Mardi two years before. . . . Even those with strong reservations about Moby-Dick spoke respectfully of the author’s talent, and a number of early enthusiasts for this willful and extravagant work were among the reviewers. It is true, Melville did not receive what might have been psychologically useful at this time–a fully generous public salute from a high-minded peer, such as he had given Hawthorne, or as Emerson was to give Whitman (in a private letter that became public) upon receipt of Leaves of Grass. . . . Melville’s critical and popular position after the publication of Moby-Dick was still high; he was commonly written of as a genius, and, in a London New Year’s survey of new presences in American literature, ranked with Hawthorne and the now forgotten Richard Burleigh Kimball and Sylvester Judd. There is nothing in his situation like the obscurity in which, at his age, Hawthorne and Whitman labored, or for that matter in which Joyce, Proust, and Kafka secreted their modern classics.

So much for that excuse, then. But that means we still have to figure out why Pierre took such a dark and disturbing turn. For a clue, I suggest we turn to Stephen Crane’s second follow-up to The Red Badge of Courage, the nearly forgotten The Third Violet. Crane apparently began writing this novel a mere two months after the release of Red Badge, justly one of the most-celebrated books in American literary history. The acclaim was nearly universal and immediate–the novel went through two printings in less than five months, and reviewers fell over themselves praising it on both sides of the Atlantic.

Not so The Third Violet, which flopped like a beached whale in the bookstores and which American critics, anyway, detested. British critics were substantially more positive, but I am not enough of a scholar of late-19th-century England to know why–perhaps realism and naturalism had not gripped Britain as strongly as they had America. The hatred is understandable. The Third Violet is a radical shift from The Red Badge of Courage, which anticipates Hemingway in its understated brutality and misanthropy. (Hemingway would later call Red Badge the finest war novel ever written.)

The Third Violet, on the other hand, at least flirts with every conceivable trope of romantic and domestic novels. Two young people, one (of course) an artist from a poor background, the other an heiress, meet on vacation and fall in love. Fate intervenes to keep them apart, and both return to their wildly disparate lives in New York City, until Fate intervenes once more to bring them together. It could be Pride and Prejudice or Jane Eyre–less favorably, it could be The Minister’s Wooing or The Wide, Wide World. Katherine Heigl and Ryan Reynolds would star in the movie adaption, which your mother would see in the theater and recommend to you for three months.

The novel is as bad as the movie adaptation makes it sound. Its first half, the vacation scenes, work all right if you pretend the author is someone other than Stephen Crane, but things go south very quickly once everyone hauls it back to Manhattan. The Third Violet isn’t as fantastically bad as Pierre–but it’s much less interesting as well. As Cameron Crowe points out in Elizabethtown, a trainwreck in its own right, “There’s a difference between a failure and a fiasco. A failure is simply the non-presence of success. Any fool can accomplish failure. But a fee-ass-scoe, a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions. A fiasco is a folk tale told to others that makes other people feel more alive because. It. Didn’t. Happen. To. Them.” (Full disclosure: While I saw that movie, I’m taking the general idea of failures vs. fiascos from Nathan Rabin’s excellent “My Year of Flops” series over at The AV Club–now available in book form!) Pierre is a fiasco. The Third Violet is merely a failure. I can’t imagine teaching it except in a class that taught everything Crane ever wrote, or perhaps one that sought to determine the real difference between realism and romanticism.

But there’s the rub. Paul Sorrentino argues (quite convincingly, I think) that The Third Violet is one of the very best places to go to find the tension between literary romanticism and literary realism–the former was mostly dead critically but remained popular among the masses for…well, to this day, and the latter was well into its ascent amongst “serious writers.” The Third Violet reflects this conflict–but not where Sorrentino thinks it does. His mistake is in identifying Crane with the main character, a painter named William Hawker; in fact, Crane’s biography echoes more strongly with the novel’s chief author character, Hollanden.

Hollanden is a distinctively American character type: the artiste who has completely sold out but is aware of it and thus maintains his charm for the reader. As he says to a group of fawning vacationing women,

Well—you must understand—I started my career—my career, you understand—with a determination to be a prophet and, although I have ended in being an acrobat, a trained bear of the magazines, and a juggler of comic paragraphs, there was once carven upon my lips a smile which made many people detest me, for it hung before them like a banshee whenever they tried to be satisfied with themselves.

The naturalist author is meant to be a prophet; he is meant to convict society of its sins. But instead he becomes a clown, doing tricks for them. Surely Crane feared that’s what was happening to him as he wrote The Third Violet, which is so different in tone from Maggie and The Red Badge of Courage.

It’s important to note, by the way, that Hollanden’s self-description echoes Crane’s interview with the godfather of American realism, William Dean Howells: “Ah, this writing merely to amuse people—why, it seems to me altogether vulgar. A man may as well blacken his face and go out and dance on the street for pennies. The author is a sort of trained bear, if you accept certain standards.” The naturalist self-critique here is quite clearly intentional and significant.

The question thus stands: If Crane was so aware of the loathesomeness of the Third Violet project–it would be like Martin Scorsese directing a movie based on a Nicholas Sparks novel–why didn’t he complicate the plot? The novel has a standard romantic ending. The two leads get together and live happily ever after. The answer seems to be that Crane was interested in a more subtle problematizing of the romance genre, thus Hollanden’s bitter self-critique.

Thus also the frequent demonstrations of the difficulties of being the friend or lover of a naturalist artist. At one point, the female lead (and Hawker’s love interest), Miss Fanhall, says to Hollanden, “And yet you—really Hollie, there is something unnatural in you. You are so stupidly keen in looking at people that you do not possess common loyalty to your friends. It is because you are a writer, I suppose.” Indeed, it’s not easy to have a relationship with someone who sees himself as a prophet, much less a fallen one. Hawker seems to agree; he says to Miss Fanhall, “You know what a bear I am sometimes. Hollanden says it is a fixed scowl from trying to see uproarious pinks, yellows and blues.” To tell things as they really are, one apparently must see people mostly in terms of their composition.

It could be, then, that The Third Violet is Crane’s attempt to integrate with the rest of society–his attempt to move beyond ugly but prophetic naturalism and to make nice with the rest of the world. He recognizes that this attempt is selling out to the magazines and the best-seller list, but part of him obviously thinks it worth the danger. That he sold out without the result achieving either artistic or commercial success must have pushed him permanently back into the naturalist mode.

But as I said, The Third Violet is a failure, a bad novel in a rather uninteresting way. Pierre is a much worse novel in a much more interesting way. There’s an odd twist midway through the novel, which begins as a domestic fantasy and ends in death and destruction: the titular Pierre suddenly becomes a professional writer, albeit a failure. Critics have traditionally seen the point at which this subplot is introduced as the point at which Melville began to read the reviews of Moby-Dick. But if Updike is right and those reviews weren’t all that bad, we need another explanation.

Enter The Third Violet. What if, as I want to suggest, the ugly turn in Pierre has less to do with the world outside of Melville’s house than the world inside his own head? What if Melville genuinely wanted to write the sort of novel Sophia Hawthorne would have liked to read, a sunny domestic caper but part of himself wouldn’t let him? What if the Calvinist God Melville hated and feared had placed in his soul the ability only to write of the dark and angry underbelly of human existence?

My suggestion–and I’m going to have to leave it at a mere suggestion, which is why I’m glad this is a blog entry and not an academic paper–is that Melville began Pierre as a domestic fantasy but that part of him wouldn’t let himself complete it that way. The dark turn in the novel, along with the strange and ineffective authorial subplot, comes from the same place in Melville as Hollanden’s self-critique comes from in Stephen Crane. Something about these authors won’t let them write outside their milieus.

The real question is: Would we have been better off if they hadn’t tried?