Genesis and the Genome

This recent NPR story about a debate over belief in a literal Adam and Eve raises some interesting interpretive points. While there's a longstanding basis for interpreting Genesis allegorically, some scholars say if you remove the literal Adam (and Eve), you remove Paul's interpretation of the meaning of the work of Jesus Christ.

"Without Adam, the work of Christ makes no sense whatsoever in Paul's description of the Gospel, which is the classic description of the Gospel we have in the New Testament," [Albert] Mohler says.

...

"The evolution controversy today is, I think, a Galileo moment," says Karl Giberson, who authored several books trying to reconcile Christianity and evolution, including The Language of Science and Faith, with Francis Collins

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A book that looks interesting and perhaps relevant

I'll be curious to see how Esotericism and the Academy, due in 2012, develops this fascinating topic:

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Esotericism and the Academy

Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture

• Wouter J. Hanegraaff, University of Amsterdam

• Hardback

• ISBN: 9780521196215

• 4 tables

• Dimensions: 228 x 152 mm

• Not yet published - available from January 2012
• 
  
• Academics tend to look on 'esoteric', 'occult' or 'magical' beliefs with contempt, but are usually ignorant about the religious and philosophical traditions to which these terms refer, or their relevance to intellectual history. Wouter Hanegraaff tells the neglected story of how intellectuals since the Renaissance have tried to come to terms with a cluster of 'pagan' ideas from late antiquity that challenged the foundations of biblical religion and Greek rationality. Expelled from the academy on the basis of Protestant and Enlightenment polemics, these traditions have come to be perceived as the Other by which academics define their identity to the present day. Hanegraaff grounds his discussion in a meticulous study of primary and secondary sources, taking the reader on an exciting intellectual voyage from the fifteenth century to the present day and asking what implications the forgotten history of exclusion has for established textbook narratives of religion, philosophy and science.Table of Contents

Introduction: hic sunt dracones
1. The history of truth: recovering ancient wisdom
2. The history of error: exorcizing Paganism
3. The error of history: imagining the Occult
4. The truth of history: entering the Academy
Conclusions: restoring memory.

The 17th Century

Hooke, Micrographia

In this interview, novelist Neal Stephenson touches on a peculiar aspect of the age of Milton and Newton:

The medieval is still very much alive and well during this period. People are carrying swords around. Military units have archers. Saracens snatch people from European beaches and carry them off to slavery. There are Alchemists and Cabalists. Great countries are ruled by kings who ride into battle wearing armor. Much of the human landscape--the cities and architecture--are medieval. And yet the modern world is present right next to all of this in the form of calculus, joint-stock companies, international financial systems, etc. This can't but be fascinating to a novelist. Complete interview here.

We're mostly about Ovid these days

As most of our current focus is on Ovid, please bookmark the Ovid Blog, where we' re posting with some regularity. Thanks.

Milton's God and Wagner's Wotan

Anyone who subscribes to the New York Review of Books should have a look at Stephen Greenblatt's piece, "The Lonely Gods." Here's the beginning of the article from the NYRB site:

When James Levine’s tangled halo of white hair was picked up by the spotlight shining down over the orchestra pit at the May 9 performance of Die Walküre, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the audience roared with pleasure and relief. With good reason. Levine’s bad back and other health woes had forced him to pull out of multiple events he was scheduled to conduct, including one recent performance of this opera, the second in the Ring cycle. But there were no signs of diminished vigor or control on that evening.

Greenblatt eventually gets to something important regarding the visions of divine power and human freedom as found in Paradise Lost and Die Walkure, but the full article is behind a paywall. Thanks to Jutta I have a print-out and will be happy to share. Here's a comment on it from a listserv. By all means have a look, especially if you happened to catch the recent Met Opera performance of Wagner's opera.

An elegy by Catullus

Little could be further from the dramatic turns of Milton's Lycidas than this simple expression of pure, helpless grief:

By ways remote and distant waters sped
by Gaius Valerius Catullus translated by Aubrey Beardsley
By ways remote and distant waters sped, Brother, to thy sad grave-side am I come, That I may give the last gifts to the dead, And vainly parley with thine ashes dumb: Since she who now bestows and now denies Hath ta'en thee, hapless brother, from mine eyes. But lo! these gifts, the heirlooms of past years, Are made sad things to grace thy coffin shell; Take them, all drenched with a brother's tears, And, brother, for all time, hail and farewell! Found on Poets.org

King James Translation at 400

Shaw sends us a link from this month's Harper's Mag marking the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible:

KING JAMES, REVISED

History’s Best Seller Turns 400

A Forum with John Banville, Charles Baxter, Dan Chiasson, Paul Guest,

Benjamin Hale, Howard Jacobson, and Marilynne Robinson

Milton's Hamlet?

From a review of Harold Bloom's latest book, The Anatomy of Influence.

“The Anatomy of Influence” is Bloom’s effort — his last, he says — to recalibrate his great theory, only shorn of its “gnomic” obscurities and written in “a subtler language that will construe my earlier commentary for the general reader and reflect changes in my thinking.” One of those changes is that over time his notion of influence has become more orthodox, growing closer, in its sensitivity to echo and allusion, to the approach of the hated New Critics.

In a superb chapter, “Milton’s Hamlet,” Bloom shows how the Satan of “Paradise Lost” is the offspring of Hamlet, each a soliloquist who stands at a remove from the tragedy that engulfs him, puzzling out eloquent conundrums that press toward “depths beneath depths,” limitless self-consciousness. “It does not matter that Satan is an obsessed theist and Hamlet is not,” Bloom writes. “Two angelic intellects inhabit a common abyss: the post-Enlightenment ever-augmenting inner self, of which Hamlet is a precursor, intervening between Luther and Calvin, and later Descartes and Spinoza.”

Philyreius in Ovid and Milton

Here's a poem composed by John Milton when he was in his teens. His deep acquaintance with Ovid among other ancients is apparent in the use of "Philyreius," which means "son of Philyra." One would learn from Book 2.676 of the Metamorphoses that Chiron was sometimes called Philyreius.

Philyra incidentally has her own tale of transformation, told by Apollodorus among others:

PHILYRE (or Philyra) was an Okeanid nymph of Mount Pelion in Thessalia loved by the Titan Kronos. When his wife Rhea came upon their rendevous, he quickly transformed himself into a horse to escape detection. As a result, Philyre birthed a half-horse, half-man hybrid, the kentauros (centaur) Kheiron. To ease her shame, Kronos transformed the girl into a linden tree (philyra in Greek.)

Here's Milton's poem:

Learn to submit to the laws of destiny, and lift your suppliant hands to the Fate, O children of Iapetus who inhabit the pendulous orb of the earth. If Death, the doleful wanderer from Taenarus, shall but once call you, alas! vain is it to attempt wiles and delay, for all must pass through the shades of Styx. Were the right hand strong to repel destined death, fierce Hercules had not lain dead on Aemathian Oeta, poisoned by the blood of Nessus; nor had Ilium seen Hector slain by the base guile of envious Pallas; nor Sarpedon whom the phantom Achilles slew with Locrian sword, whilst Jove wept. If Hecatean words could put to flight sad fate, the infamous mother of Telegonus had yet lived, and the sister of Aegialeus, who used the powerful wand. If mysterious herbs and the art of the physicians could thwart the triple goddesses, Machaon with his skill in simples had not fallen by the spear of Eurypylus; and the arrow smeared with the serpent's blood had done you no injury, O Philyreius; nor had the arms and bolts of your grandsire harmed you, O son, who were cut from your mother's womb. And you, too, Gostlin, greater than your tutor, Apollo, you to whom was given the rule of the gowned flock, had not died, whom now leafy Cyrrha mourns, and Helicon amid its springs. You would still live, happy and honored to have shepherded the flock of Pallas. You would not have gone in Charon's skiff to the horrible recesses of the abyss. But Persephone broke the thread of life, angered when she saw how many souls you snatched from the black jaws of Death by your arts and your potent juices. Revered Chancellor, I pray that your body may rest in peace beneath the soft turf, and that from your grave may spring roses, and marigolds, and the hyacinth with blushing face. May the judgment of Aeacus rest mildly on you, and may Sicilian Proserpina grant you a smile, and in the Elysian fields among the blest may you walk for ever.

Latin text here, notes here.

Cross-posted @ the Ovid Blog.

Book VI: Bum's Rush

As our reading of book 6 comes near to the end, a few things stood out in our discussion. To briefly summarize, Milton pulls out all the stops in bringing the first, cyclic half of his poem to a climax:

- the three-day structure of the book echoes the larger three-part structure of the poem, and of sacred history, which begins with a war in heaven, continues with a messianic triumph on Earth, and concludes with an apocalyptic final battle at the end of time.

- the hint that God and his creation are moving toward an ultimate convergence when God shall be "all in all."

- the diminished role of Satan, who is not directly presented or given a speech, yet ends up being mercilessly parodied.

- Milton's flawless use of Homer and the Bible, especially Exodus and Ezekiel, in portraying the action of the third day, when the Son in his Chariot singlehandedly triumphs over the rebel angels. The parallel with Achilles, whose rage dooms him, and the parody of Satan as a misguided Moses, leading his people to take a final stand before an onrushing King, only to find that instead of the Red Sea rolling back, the walls of heaven part to disclose a Promised Wasteland.

- The remarkable structure of the poem that presents a complete whole, or circle, narrating the doom of fallen Satan, then with Book VII opens a new book, a new world, and a new sense of what is at stake, of what can be lost, and where this might lead,

with wandering steps and slow.

Whatever the second half of Paradise Lost is, it is not a circle.

Notes on the Chariot of the Son

The chariot in Book 6 draws upon the vision in Ezekiel:

The Biblical Merkabah

See also: angelology

According to the verses in Ezekiel and its attendant commentaries, the analogy of the Merkaba image consists of a chariot made of many angels being driven by the "Likeness of a Man." Four angels form the basic structure of the chariot. These angels are called the "Chayot" חיות (lit. living creatures). The bodies of the "Chayot" are like that of a human being, but each of them has four faces, corresponding to the four directions the chariot can go (north, east south and west). The faces are that of a man, a lion, an ox (later changed to a cherub in Ezekiel 10:14) and an eagle. Since there are four angels and each has four faces, there are a total of sixteen faces. Each Chayot angel also has four wings. Two of these wings spread across the length of the chariot and connected with the wings of the angel on the other side. This created a sort of 'box' of wings that formed the perimeter of the chariot. With the remaining two wings, each angel covered its own body. Below, but not attached to the feet of the "Chayot" angels are other angels that are shaped like wheels. These wheel angels, which are described as "a wheel inside of a wheel", are called "Ophanim" אופנים (lit. wheels, cycles or ways). These wheels are not directly under the chariot, but are nearby and along its perimeter. The angel with the face of the man is always on the east side and looks up at the "Likeness of a Man" that drives the chariot. The "Likeness of a Man" sits on a throne made of sapphire.

The Bible later makes mention of a third type of angel found in the Merkaba called "Seraphim" (lit. "burning") angels. These angels appear like flashes of fire continuously ascending and descending. These "Seraphim" angels powered the movement of the chariot. In the hierarchy of these angels, "Seraphim" are the highest, that is, closest to God, followed by the "Chayot", which are followed by the "Ophanim." The chariot is in a constant state of motion, and the energy behind this movement runs according to this hierarchy. The movement of the "Ophanim" is controlled by the "Chayot" while the movement of the "Chayot" is controlled by the "Seraphim". The movement of all the angels of the chariot are controlled by the "Likeness of a Man" on the Throne.

Part of a Hasidic explanation:

The Man on the throne represents God, who is controlling everything that goes on in the world, and how all of the archetypes He set up should interact. The Man on the throne, however, can only drive when the four angels connect their wings. This means that God will not be revealed to us by us looking at all four elements (for instance) as separate and independent entities. However, when one looks at the way that earth, wind, fire and water (for instance) which all oppose each other are able to work together and coexist in complete harmony in the world, this shows that there is really a higher power (God) telling these elements how to act.

Passacaglia

Here's a tune by Stefano Landi that Milton might have heard on his visit to Italy in 1638-39. If nothing else, the stylized structure of the Baroque -- powerful emotion under the pressure of controlled form -- lends itself to the grand gestures and potent speeches of Milton's angels.