Posts Tagged Aristotle

I wrote a few months ago about the problems with the over-specialization that plagues the Academy. This morning I’m reading Aristotle’s Parts of Animals, which begins thusly:

Every study and investigation, the humblest and the noblest alike, seems to admit of two kinds of proficiency; one of which may be properly called educated knowledge of the subject, while the other is a kind of acquaintance with it. For an educated man should be able to form a fair judgement as to the goodness or badness of an exposition. To be educated is in fact to be able to do this; and the man of general education we take to be such. It will, however, of course, be understood that we only ascribe universal education to one who in his own individual person is thus able to judge nearly all branches of knowledge, and not one who has a like ability merely in some special subject. For it is possible for a man to have this competence in some one branch of knowledge.

It’s a sign of how far we’ve fallen that the polymath is now considered a “jack of all trades and master of none.” Now to go educate myself…

Our outro music this week comes from Michael Knott’s 1994 record Rocket and a Bomb. The song’s called “Jan the Weatherman.” Hey, “Jan” rhymes with “Dan,” and our special guest this week is tornado chaser Dr. Dan Dawson. He’s kind of a weatherman, anyway.

General Introduction
- Where’s David Grubbs?
- Welcome to our special guest
- What’s on the blog?

Our History with Science
- Dan Dawson dreams of tornadoes
- Michial’s near-failures
- Easy science at Milligan College

Ancient Science
- The four elements
- Aristotle and the geocentric universe
- Methodological contributions
- Rapidly changing science
- A gratuitous shot at 2012

Arab Investigators and Medieval Science
- Why Nathan doesn’t call it science
- Elaborate biology
- Effect on Medieval drama

The Rise of Modern Science
- Reverence for mathematics
- Science as a self-correcting system
- How philosophical is your average scientist?
- “Whatever works”
- No sense of history

Tornadoes
- The Wizard of Oz
- A history lesson
- Electric tornadoes
- How tornadoes work
- But can we fix it?

Mad Scientists and the American Renaissance
- Emerson, Poe, and the War on Science
- Romanticism and the Enlightenment
- Hawthorne and the dangers of scientific perfection
- Melville and the unspeakable
- The death of the imagination

Dan Defends Science
- The move toward the holistic
- A sense of mystery
- The end of history
- The myth of progress

A New Kind of Science
- The ecological movement
- Merging the Romantic and the scientific
- Interdisciplinary interaction

Scientific Threats to Christianity
- Hegel, Nietzsche, Dawkins
- Integration by example, not argument
- Learning from the nü atheists
- Are confessing Christians a lunatic fringe?

The Limits of Science
- Physics and metaphysics
- The limits of theology
- The geocentric universe and evolution
- Non-overlapping magisteria
- The natural shift
- Why we’re frustrated with militant atheism and militant creationism

What We Need to Know
- Science is your ally
- The what questions and the why questions

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. On the Heavens. Trans. J.L. Stocks. Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1984. 447-511.

—. Sense and Sensibilia. Trans. J.I. Beare. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1984. 693-713.

Bacon, Francis. The Major Works. Ed. Brian Vickers. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.

Baum, L. Frank. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. New York: Signet, 2006.

Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. New York: Mariner, 2008.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Each and All.” Collected Poems and Translations. New York: Library of America, 1994. 9-10.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “The Birth-Mark.” Tales and Sketches. New York: Library of America, 1982. 764-780.

—. “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” Tales and Sketches. New York: Library of America, 1982. 975-1005.

Melville, Herman. “The Lightning-Rod.” Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man, Tales, Billy Budd. New York: Library of America, 1985.

—. Moby-Dick. New York: Norton, 1967.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “Sonnet—To Science.” Poetry and Tales. New York: Library of America, 1984. 38.

Sagan, Carl. Contact. New York: Pocket, 1997.

Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.

That’s the end of Season 2, folks. We’ve had a great time doing the show, and we’re glad you listen. We explain our summer plans in the show itself. Keep listening, and keep reading!

General Introduction
- So long, Season 2
- Listener feedback
- What’s on the blog?
- Our summer plans and our love for decimal places

Beginning Apophatically
- Literary criticism vs. critical theory
- The Academy and the newspaper
- The professor and the amateur
- The unconscious and the conscious
- Literary criticism vs. book reviews
- Why age is more than a number
- The bleeding edge of criticism

Auden Makes the Rules
- Historical context
- Overcome evil with good
- Subjectivity
- How to tell if a critic is any good
- Development of taste
- The pleasures of the text

Old Stuff
- The extreme POETIX! of  Chuck “Ham-Bone” Aristotle
- Dorothy Sayers’s internalization of Aristotle
- The gaping hole of the Anglo-Saxon period
- Boethius and his epic, tragic harlots
- Philip Sidney to the rescue!
- Milton’s dismissal of fiction
- The Calvinist aesthetic defense of Scripture

The Aesthetes and Decadents
- The critic as artist and the artist as critic
- Creation vs. criticism
- Rules for independent critics
- Why Wilde would like Lester Bangs
- Complicating, not explaining
- What does “art for art’s sake” actually mean?

A New Kind of Criticism
- Connection to the Southern Agrarians
- Reaction to the Old Historicism
- Text as self-contained and unified
- Why the New Critics overreacted
- New Criticism as all-consuming blob

Mythological Criticism
- Deeper into Tolkien
- The Mythography Project
- Finding patterns in mythology
- Frye’s embrace of archetype
- The Gospel’s role in myth criticism

Heroic Criticism and American Studies
- The Heroic Critic as true believer
- Defining the newly emergent America
- Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination
- The difference in seriousness
- Intellectual decline
- [] you, you bourgeoisie pig!
- Defining Americanism(s)

Jiving Criticism and Art
- Why poets can’t write well about poetry
- Historical moments
- The need for critical distance
- A fist-fight breaks out!!
- Artists who do great criticism
- Is this a difference in eras?
- The problem with self-accounts
- Michial prepares for hate mail from creative-writing students
- Does scholarship create better writing?

Getting Personal
- To what extent is our academic output literary criticism?
- Auden makes David self-aware
- Nathan’s Hegelian synthesis
- Michial tries to complicate, not simplify

Post-Theory Criticism
- The Emmanuel Laboratory
- Nathan as the singular Voice of Criticism
- David fights to stay in the middle
- The non-academic return to Auden’s world

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Auden, W.H. The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Bangs, Lester. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. Ed. Greil Marcus. New York: Vintage, 1988.

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. San Francisco: Hill and Wang, 1975.

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

Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Mariner, 1956.

Calvin, John. The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Trans. Ford Lewis Battles. Ed. John T. McNeill. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960. Two volumes.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. San Francisco: New World Library, 2008.

Chesterton, G.K. Charles Dickens: A Critical Study. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2009.

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

Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen, 1976. 47-59.

Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Anchor, 1992.

Frazier, James. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Frye, Northrop. Biblical and Classical Myths: The Mythological Framework of Western Culture. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004.

Jung, Carl. Jung on Mythology. Ed. Robert A. Segal. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Mather, Cotton. Magnalia Christi Americana. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006. Two volumes.

Milton, John. Paradise Regained. The Major Works. Ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. 619-669.

Parrington, Vernon Louis. Main Currents in American Thought. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1987. Three volumes.

Patterson, Lee. Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987.

Ransom, John Crowe. The New Criticism. New York: Greenwood, 1979.

Sayers, Dorothy L. The Mind of the Maker. New York: Continuum, 2004.

Sidney, Sir Philip. “The Defence of Poesy.” The Major Works. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. 212-251.

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007.

Tolkien, J.R.R. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1983. 5-48.

Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination. New York: New York Review of Books, 2008.

Updike, John. Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism. New York: Vintage, 1984.

Weston, Jessie. From Ritual to Romance. New York: Waking Lion, 2008.

Wilde, Oscar. “The Critic as Artist.” The Major Works. Ed. Isobel Murray. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. 241-297.

Wordsworth, William. The Prelude. New York: Penguin, 1996.

Another Gilmour-less episode. It may be until tomorrow before it gets added to iTunes, etc. I’m sure you’ll recognize the theme music.

General Introduction
- No Nathan
- What’s on the blog?

Our Emotionally Scarring Experiences
- The Shining haunts Michial’s dreams
- Slasher movies
- Beetlejuice and a man in a yellow wolf suit
- Toy monkeys
- Why dolls are so scary
- FREDDY KREUGER!!!!

Ancient Horror
- What Nathan was going to talk about
- Monsters vs. monster-slayers
- Were these supposed to be scary?
- Lilith
- Scandinavian sagas
- Skipping Renaissance drama

English Gothic
- Horace Walpole
- A list of gothic conventions

American Gothic
- Charles Brockden Brown
- Ditching the castle
- Why Wieland is a failure
- Pseudo-science in Poe and Hawthorne
- The difference between Hawthorne and Poe
- “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and the folk legend

Frankenstein and Dracula
- David clarifies
- Scientific anxiety
- Does Frankenstein still resonate with us?
- Dracula and the Victorian nightmare of devolution
- Why Dracula is cooler than Edward Cullen
- Vampiric sexuality

20^th-Century Horror and “Weird Fiction”
- Kafka as pseudo-horror
- Crazy worlds and paranoia
- H.P. Lovecraft
- Existential horror
- “Dover Beach” as horror poem

Movies and Television
- What film does that literature can’t do
- The amorphous and the concrete
- The Twilight Zone
- The X-Files and its real-world grounding
- Jaws as Enuma Elish
- Michial gets very graphic

Why Do We Love Horror?
- Katharsis
- Making anxiety into fear
- Facing your fear
- Corruption of childhood

The Christian Response
- A spirit of fear?
- Didactic purposes
- The Christian and torture porn
- Analyzing the Pig People

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Arnold, Matthew. “Dover Beach.” The Poems of Matthew Arnold. Boston: Adamant Media, 2005.

Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Trans. Seamus Heaney. New York: Norton, 2001.

Brown, Charles Brockden. Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker. Kent, Oh.: Kent State UP, 1987.

—. Wieland; or, the Transformation, Together with Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1926.

Eirik the Red and Other Icelandic Sagas. Trans. Gwyn Jones. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation. Trans. Andrew George. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Enuma Elish: The Seven Tablets of the History of Creation. Trans. L.W. King. New York: FQ Classics, 2007.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “The Birthmark.” Hawthorne’s Short Stories. Ed. Newton Arvin. New York: Knopf, 1946. 147-164.

—. The Blithedale Romance. New York: Norton, 1978.

—. “Rappacini’s Daughter.” Hawthorne’s Short Stories. Ed. Newton Arvin. New York: Knopf, 1946. 179-209.

Irving, Washington. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” New York: Signet, 1981. 329-360.

Kafka, Franz. The Castle. Trans. Anthea Bell. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

—. “In the Penal Colony.” Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. The Complete Stories. Ed. Nahum N. Glazer. New York: Schocken, 1971. 140-167.

—. “The Metamorphosis.” Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. The Complete Stories. Ed. Nahum N. Glazer. New York: Schocken, 1971. 89-139.

King, Stephen. The Shining. New York: Pocket, 2002.

Lovecraft, H.P. Tales. New York: Library of America, 2005.

Meyer, Stephanie. Twilight. New York: Little, Brown, 2006.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Black Cat.” Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn. New York: Library of America, 1996. 597-606.

—. “The Imp of the Perverse.” Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn. New York: Library of America, 1996. 826-832.

—. “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn. New York: Library of America, 1996. 555-559.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Reviews and Interviews: A New Kind of Christianity Round-up

I have to admit that I’m more star-struck than someone my age should be at the fact that a writer of Brian McLaren’s public prominence has responded at length to something that I’ve written.  Michial and David have extended me the favor of responding quickly to his post, on the understanding that I’ll lay off a bit in the weeks to come.  (I’ll likely have plenty to do anyway, but that’s a story that folks already know.)  Because you took the trouble to address my post at some length, Brian, I’m going to try to write this post in second person, not talking about some chump who wrote some book but writing to someone who has taken the time to respond.

A Mea Culpa and an Initial Suggestion

I should start this little foray by saying that I probably played the consultant angle too hard.  When I looked at the opening to the “Unlocking and Opening” section, with its harsh change in typeface and rather strident tone, I did take it as a direct, head-on charge at designated teachers of the church (one of which I am) in general and at seminary grads (one of which I am) in particular.  So when the consultant bit came out of the blue towards the end of the book, I did become suspicious.   I probably should have mentioned (for those who have not been reading my material as long as I have) that I’m one of those English teachers who finds most kinds of hermeneutics of suspicion inadequate to a genuinely open life of the mind, and when I said I was getting suspicious, I was reproaching myself for the hypocrisy of practicing that hermeneutics of suspicion just as much as I was expressing irritation with the pitched battle that I thought I saw shaping up.  So I’ll take your word that you weren’t trying to start a fight so long as you’ll take mine that I didn’t think I was throwing the first punch.

That out of the way, I want to make clear that I don’t expect every book to be a commentary on one or more Platonic dialogues.  I think that Jacques Derrida does just that masterfully in his book Of Hospitality, but I also know that Derrida and people who enjoy reading Derrida are strange birds, and you’re not writing just to my sort of strange birds.  My objection to your own use of Plato and Aristotle is not that you took this or that side in a scholarly debate but that you took two of the folks who I think of as great tutors for the Church (I’m one of those John Milbank readers you allude to) and used them rather as blunt instruments to advance a point that I don’t remember seeing in their texts.  You seem to be concerned with certain points of theology that really do not concern those two philosophers, and your arguments suffer, in my view, when you try to import them.  You note yourself that the Greco-Roman thing wasn’t really essential to the argument, so my question in response is why you elected to bring their names into the argument at all.  Again, when I gave in to the suspicion that I think of as a temptation rather than a valid mode of inquiry, I did entertain the possibility that you’ve used them because they’re rather unfashionable in certain intellectual circles, that you were using a cheap guilt-by-association trick when you doubted the power of your argument, and I stand ready to repent of that suspicion as I did with the consultancy suspicion if you say that you did not intend such.  That said, I still see no good reason to bring Plato and Aristotle into fights that aren’t theirs, and I do wonder why you did so.

For what it’s worth, as you read in my initial review, I do find some of your theological points quite compelling, and I’ve been teaching the Bible-as-library model for some time.  (My senior sermon from seminary, “The Last Word,” does things with Job that resonate pretty plainly with the ways you read Job in ANKoC.)  And honestly, I think that you’re doing valuable work when you call into question certain modes of interpreting Matthew 25, Daniel 12, and other passages that folks often deploy to support what you call a “soul-sort” narrative.  If those doctrines are true, they should be able to weather some criticism, and I welcome writers who articulate such criticism.  My problem with the way you went about it is that you’ve actually obscured the urgency of and your contributions to those Biblical-exegetical conversations with faulty reference to writers and books that don’t have horses in those races.  (As I’m sure you told your students in your college teaching days, and as I tell mine, it’s a pity to derail a good thought with material that doesn’t advance the argument.)

Excursus: On the Origins of the Review

I should back up and tell a bit of a story of my own.  I’ve been a part of the Ooze Viral Bloggers program since it ramped up, and although I’ve enjoyed the free books, none yet has really knocked me over with its power of argument.  (The one I’ll be reviewing for this Wednesday was really quite good, but that will have to wait until Wednesday.)  When Mike Morell sent out the email soliciting reviews for your book, I threw my hat in the ring, figuring that all the copies would get snatched up and that I’d likely hear about your book second-hand, and that would be about the end of it.  But as it turned out, I was one of the quick ones or the lucky ones or whatever governed the selection process.  So when my copy arrived in the mail, I knew that the book came with responsibility, and after digging in I started thinking about what I could do in a review that other reviewers couldn’t do as well as I can.  When I got to the fourth chapter, I had a feeling that would constitute a healthy part of my review, not so that I could play “gotcha” with my book review but so that I could attempt to take something about your book and advance a discussion about the way that Christians use such terms as “modern,” “Greco-Roman,” “feminist,” “postmodern,” and other shorthands for complex debates among important writers.  Since I’ve spent the last three years teaching Plato to undergraduates at a state university, I figured I could position myself as someone who knows those particular texts and by extension call for a degree of caution when we Christians cite familiar names whose texts aren’t as familiar.

Of course, I didn’t count on the strange ways of the Internet.  I expected, when I gave myself too much credit, to appear in some list akin to Mike Clawson’s, perhaps the sixth of seven “generally positive” reviews of the book, and not hear much after that.  As it stands, it appears that I’m being claimed and condemned by folks who hold the book in all sorts of degrees of esteem and scorn.

Go figure.

That said, I set about writing my review as “the pedantic Plato guy,” hoping that other folks would articulate the points that I thought other folks could articulate, and for the most part, because of the sheer volume of reviews the book has gotten, I think that mission is accomplished.  That said, since I’ve gotten some attention, I figure I can go ahead and keep hammering on my point about relationships between philosophy and theology.  So behold as I raise my hammer.

Why Greeks at All? (or Byzantines, for that matter?)

I’m glad to read that you’re also an admirer of John Howard Yoder; his theology, more than most Christian writers’, has influenced the way I go about teaching and serving as a Christian professor and as a deacon in my own congregation.  I acknowledge that he holds what he calls “the Constantinian turn” in deep suspicion, and although I share his concerns about relationships between Christian congregations and empires of various sorts, I also see much merit in those critics of Yoder who note that his account (also largely in popular press books) rather flattens out the complexity and diversity of historic Christian responses to Constantine’s (and Theodosius’s) turn to Christianity and Christianity’s turn to the establishment.  What the most acute critics have noted, I think, is that Yoder’s theological point is strong enough that he should have advanced the theological point without trying to lean on a historical allegory that ultimately detracted from rather than advanced the power of his point.

And that’s really my concern with your use of “Greco-Roman” as an umbrella term, Brian.  As I noted in my initial review, I think you’re a skillful and articulate advocate of a form of Christianity influenced by Hegel among others, a vision with which I’m going to disagree at many points but which forces me, precisely at those points, to examine and to articulate why my own vision of how things differ.  In other words, precisely where I think you’re wrong I want you to be the strongest sort of wrong that you can be, partly because I know that, as a mortal, I might actually be the one who needs to rethink things; and partly because someone who’s wrong in an intellectually powerful manner inspires me to try to get things right in a manner that rises to the challenge.  (Incidentally, that’s why I teach Plato to undergrads–it’s not that he’s right all that often but that he’s wrong in such compelling ways that he inspires my students in their own thinking and writing to produce Plato-caliber responses.)  And I think that, when you’re taking on the content of the theological questions at hand and performing exegesis of Bible texts, you’re at your best, especially in places where I disagree.  So when I see those places where you fall short of the argument you could make because of a sloppy guilt-by-association move, I’m disappointed because I know you could have done better, and I might have had occasion to attempt to raise my inquiry to match yours.

My call to you is not to stop doing the theology that you’re doing by any means; my call is to do so better, engaging the question at hand with the right rhetorical tools for the moment.  If that means bringing particular texts from the Greeks or the Romans to bear on the question at hand, by all means break out the Cicero, and let’s reason together.  But if you want to talk about eternal conscious torment, that’s not a question Plato’s interested in (unless you want to take his allegory of reincarnation at the end of Republic far more seriously than I do).  It’s not a question that especially concerns Aristotle.  It’s a Christian-era question, and my challenge to you is to frame your opponents’ positions not in terms of a syncretism that doesn’t find support in the texts to which you appeal but in your opponents’ own terms, matching Scripture for Scripture and contending on the open field of interpretation rather than avoiding the real Christian questions by slapping a label on your opponents that doesn’t really fit.

You express a hope towards the end of your email that you hope that we can meet some day and talk as neighbors and as friends.  As you’ll see if you click on “Why Christian Humanists?” at the top of our own site, we Christian Humanist writers are at our core dedicated to a vision of friendship advanced in its classical form by Aristotle in the last books of the Nicomachean Ethics, one whose basis is the common pursuit of excellence.  Part of that pursuit is honesty in difference, and if you do indeed wish to engage in the sort of friendship that the vocation of teaching calls for (and I believe you do), please believe me that my critiques of your book are not for the sort of points-scoring that Plato condemns in his Sophist opponents but all come your way in the spirit of friendship, a sincere conviction that you’re dedicated to doing the absolute best that your abilities will allow in the enterprises of writing good questions and trying out interesting answers.

(As you see, I’m quite inclined to cite Plato and Aristotle, which might account for my own focus in these exchanges.)

Oh, and Brian?  If you’re ever in North Georgia, look me up.  I’ll buy lunch.

This week’s music: The Wallflowers’ “6^th Avenue Heartache,” from Bringing Down the Horse (1996).

General Introduction
- Stamps, pogs, and other collections
- What’s on the blog this week?
- Response to Sam Mulberry

Introduction to Tragedy
- Will we all be dead in an hour?
- Our fearful, pitiful show
- Euripides, Hippolytus, and the quarrel with the gods
- Senseless tragedy vs. deserved tragedy

Aristotle’s Poetics
- Exclusion of the gods
- The Triangle
- Aristotle’s misreading of Sophocles
- The limits of Aristotle
- Characteristics of the tragic hero
- A tragedy in miniature for the information age

Plato’s Republic
- Why Plato hates poets
- How St. John resolves Plato’s contradictions
- Theory of forms
- The tragicomic irony of Plato’s legacy

The Pardoner’s Tale
- David tells the tale
- The Pardoner’s Tale and the heist movie

Shakespearean Tragedy
- Shakespeare as a student of Seneca
- Departures from Greek tragedy
- What feels modern about Hamlet
- Is Flash Gordon a tragedy?

We Finally Get to Movies
- The Godfather as tragedy of ambiguity (spoiler alert!)
- Yakuza films
- In which we spoil everything but Citizen Kane (you’re welcome, Victoria)
- Another tiresome discussion about the Coen Brothers
- Greek-flavored tragedy movies
- Oceans 13 is a tragedy?!?

Christian Attitudes Toward Tragedy
- Tragedy as precursor to the Gospel
- Flannery O’Connor’s false-bottomed tragedy
- Why Christianity goes beyond tragedy

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Buechner, Frederick. Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. New York: HarperOne, 1977.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Ed. V.A. Kolve and Glending Olson. New York: Norton, 2005.

Euripides. Heracles. Trans. John Davie. Heracles and Other Plays. New York: Penguin, 2002. 8-46.

—. Hippolytus. Trans. John Davie. Medea and Other Plays. New York: Penguin, 2003. 135-174.

Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribner, 1995.

Plato. The Republic. Trans. Desmond Lee. New York: Penguin, 1987.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Neil Taylor and Ann Thompson. London: Arden, 2006.

Sophocles. Oedipus the King. Trans. Robert Fagles. The Three Theban Plays. New York: Penguin, 2000. 155-252.

A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith
By Brian D. McLaren
320 pp. HarperOne. $24.99

When I praise Plato and defend my teaching Republic to college freshmen, I often say that Plato’s excellence lies not in the fact that he’s always right but that when he’s wrong, he’s wrong in compelling ways, ways that inspire me to imagine a better alternative.  While Brian McLaren is no Plato, parts of his most recent book A New Kind of Christianity have that Platonic character to them, getting things very wrong in ways that set me thinking about how I’d improve on his points.  Other parts of the book resonate quite nicely with things that I try to do as a Christian teacher or realize now that I should try to do.  But other parts still, alas, smack of the sleight-of-hand, the well-poisoning, and the other dirty trickery that make me mistrust apologetics literature of various sorts.  In other words, A New Kind of Christianity is a complex book, not consistently excellent but nonetheless very helpful in places.

Brian McLaren Gets it Right

As Phil Rutledge pointed out in response to our podcast on the Haiti Earthquake, when I talk about the Bible, I tend to talk not about one unified document but a library, various not only in cosmetic details but in a more robust sense of genre, asking certain questions in this book that lie out of bounds in other books, offering teachings here that seem to stand at least in tension with teachings there.  (I should note the obvious, namely that I do not speak for the other Christian Humanists on this point or necessarily on any given point.)  I tend to think that the flexibility of such a collection is part of the Bible’s strength, that the practice of being Christian community is richer because Christian teachers can pull from a broad range of resources depending on the contingencies of the moment without having to pretend that every moment is the same as every other moment.  When we need a text that shakes us out of complacency, the Bible has a book for that.  When we lean over the precipice of despair, the Bible has a book for that.  And so on.  I think that McLaren offers a handy next step in that thought process, noting that the Bible is a true collection of texts precisely because of the “spaces between” those strong positions of Deuteronomy or 1 Chronicles on one hand and Ecclesiastes or Job on the other.

Furthermore, McLaren highlights the God-defining character of Christ and insists that the Palestinian Jew Jesus of Nazareth and not the Aristotelian Unmoved Mover is a better starting point for disciplined reflection upon the character of God.  I know that making the historical Jesus that radically central flies in the face of much systematic theology (including that of Thomas Aquinas, one of my favorites), but I agree with McLaren that such a move is ultimately more faithful to the gospel of John among other Scriptural witnesses.

Finally, when McLaren gives advice to parishioners and clergy who find themselves resonating with progressive ideas, and his counsel leans consistently towards humble and peace-seeking measures rather than grandstanding, intellectual and moral arrogance, and other vices that so often characterize folks who think they’ve gotten something right while their neighbors still get it wrong.  His exhortation to “be a blessing” is probably my favorite part of the book.

I noted above, and I write again, this book does get some things very right, and by no means should anyone think that it’s error, error, error all the way down.

Brian McLaren Gets it Wrong

That said, as someone who loves intellectual history and who values some degree of historical precision, I do blame this book for playing fast and loose with historical identifications for the sake of scoring cheap rhetorical points.  One of the jokes that was current during my days at The Ooze forums was that the Emergent words for “really quite bad” were “modern” and “modernist,” and the word for “so much better, don’t you think?” was “postmodern.”  McLaren seems to have left that ugly and misleading binary pair only to settle on another pair, just as ugly and even more misleading (and also a binary that I started encountering back in seminary), the Manichean dualism of “the Bible” and “Greco-Roman religion.”  Resisting the temptation to examine every instance of “Greco-Roman” meaning just plain “bad,” I’ll point out a few that drew a chuckle from me for their historical naivete: Greco-Roman religion, apparently, has no place in it for homosexuality (175–apparently all of that Athenian praise for pederasty as superior to love-of-women doesn’t count), does not allow for multiple religions (212–never mind the Roman Empire’s grand scheme of syncretism that incorporated pantheons as diverse as the Celts’ and the Egyptians’), and stands as a pernicious idol called Theos, who stands as enemy to the Biblical god Elohim (65–I suppose the New Testament authors didn’t get the memo that the Greek language had that idol mixed in there).

The content of McLaren’s “Greco-Roman” tradition came about as the fruit of a conversation he relates in which an epiphany came to him, namely that the broad outlines of the traditional Evangelical narrative (he extends it to Catholic and Magesterial Protestant traditions as well) derive not from Biblical narratives but from Plato.  Unfortunately, McLaren casts Plato only as the first step in a larger metanarrative, and that move is what makes things go downhill in a hurry.  In McLaren’s “six-line narrative” to which he refers again and again as he digs into his ten questions, Plato is only the first stage in the grand narrative, ruined when the world falls from Platonic perfection (which sounds more like Plotinus’s realm of Ideas) into the “storied” world of Aristotle.

I’m certain Aristotle would have been surprised to find out that he was writing a simple sequel to Plato rather than supplanting his philosophy, but even more surprising to Alexander’s tutor would no doubt be that, according to McLaren, Aristotle held that forms do not have any existence, properly speaking, save as mental constructs.  (If Dante’s right that Aristotle is in Limbo, where he might converse with future ages’ non-Christian philosophers, no doubt someone has told him by now that the forms as purely mental was actually one of William of Ockham’s central contributions to philosophy in the fourteenth century.)  Perhaps more surprising still would be that, after dwelling in the Aristotle trench, the eternal souls that Plato does talk about (though sometimes in terms of reincarnation) return to a “Platonic” stasis, some by achieving salvation (another category rather alien to Plato and to Aristotle) and then reaching a final Platonic (neo-Platonic?) ideal, and some by falling into what McLaren calls “Greek Hades,” a construct that of course predates Plato and Aristotle by a few centuries and has little to do, in the texts I’ve read, with punishing earthly evil.  If one says anything about Homer’s Hades, one should say that it’s terrifyingly egalitarian, and that’s what Achilles hates so much–he’s forgotten just as readily as all of the other shades about him.

If all of that sounds familiar through the haze of misused Greek texts, it’s because the “Greco-Roman narrative” that McLaren would impose upon Plato and Aristotle (the tag team!) is far more akin to what Origen, Augustine, and other Christian writers would call the narrative of creation, fall, and redemption.  Although certain iterations of that narrative sequence deserve criticism, McLaren does nobody any favors (especially those of us who love teaching Plato) by inventing a syncretic thought-system that simply does not exist in classical texts and then loading that cumbersome burden on some of Christianity’s best tutors.

As a passing comment in the introduction to one of his chapters, McLaren notes that, although he’s not been a seminarian, he has read “thousands of theology books” (78).   I suppose my own counsel for aspiring Christian writers is that we read fewer books, perhaps dozens, but take the time that good books deserve to understand and live with them.

Brian McLaren Gets Sneaky

Given the unhappy choice between accusing a writer I like (and I do like Brian McLaren) of duplicity and insinuating that the same writer has forgotten or misread, I’ll usually err on the side of charity and say that, for example, McLaren probably read some really bad books about Greco-Roman philosophy instead of reading translations of Plato and Aristotle themselves, and that likely led to his strange construction “Greco-Roman.”  But there are moments of this book that make me deeply suspicious, and although I’d prefer not to approach people I like with suspicion… well, here goes.

In an early section of the book, McLaren relates a talk he gave at a conference in which he lined up seven people on the stage, each representing a historical figure. In a diagram that I won’t reproduce here (I’m going to be cross-posting this review, and so I’m trying to keep html to a minimum), McLaren labels seven stick figures as follows:

Jesus, Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther or Erasmus, Calvin or Wesley or Newton, Pope Benedict or Jerry Falwell or Billy Graham

After he briefly notes that folks who get their theology from this stream aren’t “directly seeing Jesus” (36), he gives the people in the row a different set of names:

Adam, Abraham, Moses, David, Amos or Isaiah or Jeremiah, John the Baptist, Jesus

His point seems to be that the reading of Biblical texts that will follow in his book, unlike the “Greco-Roman” version of things, would work forwards up to Jesus rather than backwards to Jesus, therefore giving a different sort of story.

The problems are obvious, of course: without even reaching for my bookshelf, I could tell you in which books Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Erasmus, Calvin, and Pope Benedict talk about the six figures that McLaren seems to think he’s rediscovering. Beyond that, McLaren’s progressive theology, a tradition that doubtless deserves a hearing in its own right and on its own terms, has its own “hidden six” that McLaren never names. So if I might offer one possible lineup, some whose influence I detect globally and others with page numbers where I detected some of their influence:

Jesus, Vico (50-51), Hegel (239), Marx (239) or Darwin (14-15), Nietzsche or Wellhausen, Foucault (31) or Freud or Bultmann, Ehrman or Crossan or Borg

Such is not to say that the Traditionalist Six automatically deserves more of a hearing than do the Progressive Six. But I do think that anyone, left-wing or right-wing, should have the honesty to name one’s own influences rather than pitting one’s own Bible-loving self against one’s traditions-of-men enemies. All of us who come to the Christian tradition know Adam and David; let’s have some honest conversation about how we’re using them and how they influence us.

Beyond the invisible-influence suspicion, I had some real troubles with the ways that McLaren talks about professionally trained authority figures. In one passage he would say that folks who hold seminary credentials likely have good intentions but, because of their need to support themselves and because they haven’t progressed along his (Maslow-flavored–this is another instance of invisible influence) color-coded scale of theological awareness. In another he would refer to clergy-types as prison guards (31) who are keeping folks from their spiritual freedom. And with regards to formal training itself, McLaren in this book, as in his other books, makes a point of boasting that he’s not had formal seminary training (though apparently he’s read thousands of theology books), but late in the game, giving advice to clergy who think their congregations might be interested in moving up a step on the Maslow-McLaren rainbow, writes thus:

Get a consultant. There is enormous power in having the guidance of a wise, gifted, and experienced person who remains outside your congregational or denominational system. Good consultants are expensive, I know, but so are good heart surgeons, and the two have a lot in common. (247)

First of all, as someone who loves Plato (the real Plato, not the one whom McLaren invents earlier in the book), I immediately recognized Plato’s community-leader-as-physician riff, and I chuckled (just for a second) that McLaren was now out-Platonizing Plato.  For those who have not read much Plato, his argument for appointing the best and the brightest to administer a community rather than trusting such things to democracy involves comparing justice to medicine and noting that very few people want medical decisions made on the basis of popular opinion.  I would have expected such an argument to extend to ordained and seminary-trained clergy rather than freelance consultants, given the rather structured and hierarchical world of heart surgeons, but I was still chuckling.

But then, once the immediate amusement wore off, I remembered the mercenary and self-serving motives assigned to folks who actually dedicate their lives to one place as pastors and priests, and I was quite angry that he reserved none of that fury for hirelings who jet around the country collecting “consultant fees.”  For whatever reason, my angry self thought, McLaren prefers temporary fee-grabbers to those who practice the old monastic virtue of stability.

Then I realized that both Brian McLaren and Tony Jones pitch themselves as consultants, and after a bit of Google searching, I realized that Doug Pagitt and Len Sweet also advertise themselves as consultants. That’s when the anger turned to suspicion.

Please understand that I’m an equal-opportunity religious-consultant-hater; if Mark Driscoll or Jim Dobson or Ken Ham do the same, I don’t like that either. As an Aristotelian (the Aristotle whose Nicomachean Ethics I love, not the Ockham-Aristotle that McLaren invented), I believe that leadership happens best, especially for communities dedicated to reconstituting the body of the Cosmic King (that would be churches, folks), when those communities look within rather than shuffling through resumes, and I’m inclined to hold consultants far below the permanent-hire-from-out-of-town in terms of the goods they do for a community.  And given that McLaren in other places fires pot shots at the folks who dedicate their lives to particular communities in particular places, I couldn’t help but continue in my suspicion.

I realize that not everybody is as suspicious of out-of-town “experts” as I am, and I’d be fine if McLaren were consistently sanguine. But as it stands, it looks like he decided to use this book, which pitches itself as a moment of honesty, as a platform to promote himself and his Emergent Village buddies while calling dedicated ordained folks prison guards, and that’s an inexcusable bit of duplicity.

Brian McLaren Gets the Nod

As I wrote at the beginning of this marathon review, a book’s excellence lies not in its being right but in its being interesting. Given that criterion, I’d still recommend this book for folks interested in reading some philosophical-progressive alternatives to modern evangelicalism. There are some moments of sloppy thinking and others of outright self-serving dishonesty, but on balance, I can accept those sorts of things in a book that spurs me to think for a while, and I think that this book did. If you run into folks like the ones in the book’s opening anecdote, folks who tell you that Brian McLaren is too dangerous a writer for Christians to read without throwing their souls into peril, do those folks the courtesy of saying what the old lady in McLaren’s story told him: “I don’t see what the fuss is about” (2).