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By Greg Carey, Huff Post Religion

This is the first installment of a three-part series.

We’ve survived Harold Camping. We survived Y2K, albeit with less distress than our ancestors survived Y1K. The world has survived end-time predictors as diverse as Billy Graham, William Miller and Jonathan Edwards. Now we face the purported final year of the Mayan Calendar.

Nevertheless, most Christian bookstores devote entire sections to the sort of “Bible Prophecy” literature that uses the Book of Revelation, among other biblical literature, to tell us that we are currently living in the last days.

Here’s the truth: no academic interpreter of Revelation understands the book as a roadmap for the future, much less as telling contemporary Christians that these are the last days. Instead, scholars understand that Revelation originally spoke to the conditions of its own time and place. It offered a specific group of first century Christians not only hope for the future but also an interpretation — a “revelation” — of the world they inhabited. In other words, the best way to understand Revelation does not require an official Dick Tracy Apocalyptic Decoder Ring. We best understand Revelation when we read it like any other ancient text, in its own historical and cultural context.

What makes biblical scholars so certain that Revelation does not provide a roadmap for the future? Two basic considerations lead us to this conclusion.

First, the book itself insists that it’s addressed to a specific group of churches to speak to their own circumstances. Let’s begin with Revelation’s introductory words (my translation, with notes):

A revelation (Greek: apokalypsis) of [or from] Jesus Christ, which God gave by means of him to show his [God's? Christ's?] slaves the things that must happen soon, and he [God? Christ?] made it known by sending his angel to his slave John, who testified to the word of God and the testimony of Jesus, everything he saw. Blessed is the one who reads aloud and blessed are those who hear the words of the prophecy and keep the things that are written in it, for the time is near. John, to the seven churches that are in Asia…

Working back, we observe several things. First, Revelation is addressed to seven churches in the Roman province of Asia. We’d locate them in western Turkey today. Identified in chapters two and three, these churches inhabited some of the major cities in the Roman Empire, including Ephesus, a top five city of the day. Second, Revelation’s author John describes the vision as speaking to things that must happen “soon” for “the time is near.” This is no minor point, nor is it to be spiritualized to mean something other than what it says. At several points Revelation reminds those ancient Christians to expect their redemption to come “soon” (1:1, 3, 19; 3:11; 22:7, 12, 20). Revelation was written not to tell us what to expect in our future but to give ancient Christians hope for dealing with their own. While modern interpreters disagree on many points, almost all agree on the basic historical circumstances addressed by Revelation.

(We’ll address Revelation’s message to those ancient believers in our next post.)

Second, we know a lot about the kind of literature Revelation represents. Revelation is an apocalypse, a form of literature with which biblical scholars have grown quite familiar. Indeed, Revelation constitutes the first book that calls itself an apocalypse. (The Greek word apokalypsisstands as the book’s very first word.)

Between the third century B.C.E. and the second century C.E., Judaism and Christianity produced several great literary apocalypses, along with a host of related literature. See my book “Ultimate Things” for an introduction to this literature or my entry, “Apocalypses,” in the new “Oxford Encyclopedia of the Books of the Bible.”) All of these books share some distinctive features. They all relate a vision experienced by a single visionary. The visionary receives instruction and guidance from a heavenly being, usually an angel. And the vision reveals either otherworldly affairs or the resolution of history. Readers encounter what’s going on in heaven, the arrival of the messiah, and the final judgment, among other topics. Striking images that require imaginative interpretation are common to all these works. Revelation provides a classic example of an apocalypse, as it includes every one of these features.

The Protestant Bible includes only two apocalypses, Daniel and Revelation. However, the Ethiopian Orthodox canon includes 1 Enoch, perhaps the greatest of the literary apocalypses. The New Testament epistle of Jude alludes to 1 Enoch on two occasions, and at least 11 copies or fragments of 1 Enoch were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Several important Jewish apocalypses date from about the time of Revelation’s composition, including 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, 3 Baruch and the Apocalypse of Abraham. Within decades of Revelation’s composition several other Christian appeared, including the Shepherd of Hermas, the Ascension of Isaiah and the Apocalypse of Peter.

Sharing many common traits, these literary apocalypses show us that the apocalypses represent a developing literary tradition, a form of ancient theology expressed in poetic symbols and sequences. If someone were to stand up in church and read a passage from 4 Ezra or Hermas, nearly everyone would assume the text was from Revelation.

On the second night I had a dream: I saw rising from the sea an eagle that had twelve feathered wings and three heads (2 Esdras 11:1, New Revised Standard Version).

The sun began to shine a bit and suddenly I saw an enormous wild beast, something like a sea monster, with fiery locusts spewing from its mouth (Hermas 23:6, trans. Bart Ehrman).

The apocalypses teach us that Revelation describes a moment of acute crisis for its own religious community, those seven churches in Asia. Like the other apocalypses, it critiques current events, even major political and cultural developments, from a divine perspective. And like the other apocalypses, it calls its ancient audience to rigorous, even dangerous, levels of faithfulness under challenging circumstances.

Revelation does not predict events in 2012 or some other future date; it spoke to our ancient ancestors in the faith, who had enough challenges of their own.

In future posts we will explore both the circumstances of Revelation’s composition and the lifestyle to which it called its audience.

******************************

Article written and published at Huffington Post by Greg Carey.

Greg Carey is Professor of New Testament at Lancaster Theological Seminary (PA). His most recent book, Sinners: Jesus and His Earliest Followers, pursues the role of transgression in early Christian identity. His Ultimate Things: An Introduction to Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic Literature provides a widely used textbook for courses on apocalyptic literature. His research interests include apocalyptic literature, the Gospel of Luke, and literary and rhetorical interpretation of the New Testament, and he has appeared on the PBS, BBC, Discovery Channel, and National Geographic Channel. A layperson, Greg serves as Scholar in Residence at Lancaster’s Evangelical Church of the Holy Trinity.

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By Kate Daley-Bailey

“Marley was dead: to be begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.” (Dickens 45)

Thus begins perhaps one of Charles Dickens’ most popular works. One need not be an avid reader of Victorian literature or an English major to be struck by this short story (total, its length is less than 100 pages). Even if you never sat down and read A Christmas Carol, if you live in the U.S. or Britain, you probably know the major components of the story: an elderly miser, Ebenezer Scrooge, undergoes visitation from a series of ghosts, each attempting to woo or terrify Ebenezer to reform. Who could forget Scrooge’s kind hearted clerk Bob Crachit, or his crippled and beloved son, Tiny Tim, who, despite his hardship, proclaims “God bless us, everyone!”? Among the plethora of versions of the Carol are Disney’s latest version starring Jim Carey, a modern remake starring Bill Murray called Scrooged, and, one of my personal favorites, A Muppets’ Christmas Carol. This is not even to mention the numerous black and white versions gracing TV screens every December. Upon my reading of the classic this Christmas, I was intrigued by something I had never noticed on previous readings: a woodcut image gracing the pages across from the description of Marley’s ghost. The title of the woodcut, done by John Leech, is Ghosts of DepartedUsurers. This image title haunted me because, despite the popularity of the term during Dickens’ time, one hardly ever hears the term “usurer” today. Albeit the infrequency of the use of the term today, the concepts behind “usury” are at the heart of what plagues our modern economies and religious lives. Here is the description which provided the inspiration for the woodcut mentioned above:

“The air filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley’s Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free.” (65)

The description of Marley’s Ghost is even more harrowing:

“The chain he drew was clasped about his middle. It was long, and wound about him like a tail; and it was made (for Scrooge observed it closely) of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel.” (57)

The spiritual burdens these spirits are bound by are symbols of their greed… and they appear to represent a particular type of sin greatly condemned throughout Christian history (that is until today), usury.

As mentioned earlier, “usury” as a term, is hardly a household name anymore and yet postmodern culture is greatly plagued by its effects. The term itself has developed a long history, especially among the Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). Interestingly, Islam still vehemently opposes “usury” and has developed special banking principals to guide devout Muslims. Like other ancient concepts, the word “usury” has been defined differently by various scholars and theologians. Usury, in its most common use today stands for “interest.” Could it truly be the case that earning interest could make someone culpable of a grievous sin in the eyes of the Christian Church? Yes and no.

For thousands of years, the Christian Church has identified “usury” as a sin… however various theologians and scholars living within these thousands of years disagreed over exactly what “usury” was and was not. A brief exploration of the term “usury” (and its multiple manifestations) may lead us to a better understanding of what was actually being prohibited by various religious communities, especially Christian ones.

In his book, Usury, Interest, and The Reformation, Eric Kerridge, gives us some insight into the intricate and sometime tedious art of trying to pin down a definition of “usury”:

“Usury or fenory is the taking of payment over and above the amount lent merely and solely in return for a secured loan.”(5)

Kerridge presents the definition explicated by the famed church father, Thomas Aquinas, to further clarify the concept of “usury”:

“To take money as the price of money lent, that is to take usury…the price for use, that is called usury.” (5)

Given this definition of “usury”, it seems that any interest on a loan is usury and therefore a sin in the Christian church. Aquinas bases his condemnation of “usury” in Biblical and Classical texts. For example, Aquinas’ view was in part dictated by Aristotle’s remarks on money:  “Aristotle… comments that money was not intended for this, but for buying and selling; usury merely produced money out of money, and so of all the ways to wealth was the most unnatural.” (15)

If one was not convinced by Aristotle’s argument against “usury”, one could always look to the multiple Biblical injunctions against “usury”:

“If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not treat it like a business deal; charge no interest.” (New International Bible, Exodus 22:25)

“Do not take interest or any profit from them, but fear your God, so that they may continue to live among you. You must not lend them money at interest or sell them food at a profit.” (Leviticus 25:36-37)

“Do not charge a fellow Israelite interest, whether on money or food or anything else that may earn interest. You may charge a foreigner interest, but not a fellow Israelite, so that the LORD your God may bless you in everything you put your hand to in the land you are entering to possess.” (Deuteronomy 23:19-20)

“Who lends money to the poor without interest; who does not accept a bribe against the innocent. Whoever does these things will never be shaken.” (Psalm 15:5)

“He lends at interest and takes a profit. Will such a man live? He will not! Because he has done all these detestable things, he is to be put to death; his blood will be on his own head.”(Ezekiel 18:13)

One might have noted that these injunctions are all found in the Hebrew Bible (which Christians refer to as the Old Testament). Another point to note is that these Biblical injunctions against interest apply only to taking interest from fellow Israelites (Jews), not other communities. Christianity, originally being a sect within Judaism, inherited these laws against taking interest but encountered a new dilemma due to the nature of the Christian community. Judaism fostered an exclusive religious and ethnic communal identity: there were Jews, those bound by the Covenant with the Hebrew god, and there were Gentiles, everyone else. Christianity, whose growth and strength depended on proselytizing to outsiders, viewed all outsiders as potential converts and thereby, potentially part of a worldwide community. The various Biblical laws mentioned above were ironically the very laws that allowed Jews to play the role of lender to European Christian communities (seen as Gentiles) and also the very same laws that prohibited Christians from playing any role but that of the borrower. The Christian New Testament is less lucid regarding the stipulations on lending and borrowing. Most theologians point to Jesus’ words as documented in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 6:35, “Lend, hoping for nothing again” as spiritual justification for legalized lending, although each may interpret these words differently. Some readers may interpret these words to mean that lending is allowed as long as no interest is charged. Others view these words as encouraging investment and others may read this passage as authorizing lending without any expectation of the principal being returned.

Unfortunately for Jewish communities in Europe and England, the livelihood that lending to non-Jews brought, also evoked a deep-seated hatred for the Jews among borrowing Christians:

“Not being Christians, they were debarred from the public exercise of lawful trades and occupations, but where allowed to practice them within their own community, which needed rabbis, physicians, surgeons, lawyers, butchers, bakers, and so on. Thus, while by no means all Jews were usurers, all lived by usury directly or indirectly, so the stigma attaching to usurers was extended to the Jews as a whole, and heightened by the general dislike of foreigners and foreign ways and beliefs.” (Kerridge 20)

In England, the words “Jew” and “usurer” became synonymous and one need only look to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, to see how Jews were often portrayed by Christian communities. From this vantage point it is easy, although disheartening, to see how easily the Christian condemnation of “usury”, meant originally to dissuade Christians from taking advantage of the poor, became a tool of propaganda used against Jewish communities. Dickens’ himself, although never naming Scrooge or Marley as “Jews” did include the Jewish villain stereotype, embodied in the infamous character Fagin, within his novel, Oliver Twist, referring to him many times simply as “the Jew”. However, there has been some mention of Dickens attempting to de-emphasize Fagin’s Jewish identity in later editions of the novel.

Kerridge notes that over time there are more distinctions made between “usury” and “interest”. For one thing, some writers commented that “interest” was not “usury” if it was charged as a penalty for not paying back the principal on an agreed date. Another distinction, albeit a rather murky one, is that “interest” requires that the lender or investor must share the risks of the business with the borrower or partner. The various terms linked with the concept of “usury”, such as “ochre”, “fenory”, etc., each had slightly different meanings and were often used interchangeably, making any definitive statement on the issue difficult. John Calvin, another significant Christian theologian, made a distinction between various kinds of loans and distinguished between who one could lend to based on the borrower’s economic status:

“Humanist that he was, Calvin knew there were two Hebrew words translated as “usury.” One, neshek, meant “to bite”; the other, tarbit, meant “to take legitimate increase.” Based on these distinctions, Calvin argued that only “biting” loans were forbidden. Thus, one could lend at interest to business people who would make a profit using the money. To the working poor one could lend without interest, but expect the loan to be repaid. To the impoverished one should give without expecting repayment.” Jones, Norman. “Usury”. EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. February 10, 2008. URL http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/jones.usury

Calvin also notes that the Latins (Romans) viewed “usura” as honorable but detested “fenory”, which he describes along with others (such as P. Melanchthon) as the “biting” kind of loan mentioned above. Cato, according to Calvin, put “fenory” on the same level as murder and described those who practiced it as those who “suck the blood out of others”(from J. Calvin, Commentarii in Librum Psalmorum, Amersterdam, 1567, p. 47, translated by Eric Kerridge). These biting and blood sucking allusions link to the negative caricatures used to demonize Jews such as the bizarre charge brought against Jews in England and Europe referred to as “blood libel”, which according to the Internet Medieval Sourcebook was the belief that some Christians held that Jews used the blood of a Christian child to make Passover matzohs.

According to Joseph Shatzmiller in his book Shylock Reconsidered: Jews, Moneylending, and Medieval Society, not only was “usury” considered a sin and a crime throughout Christian history, according to the Council of Vienne (1311-1312), it made one a heretic and made Christians and Jews vulnerable to church inquisitors (46). Despite the declaration of such councils against “usury”, many European governments had, by the 14^th century, gained from the well-entrenched credit system and profited from the Jewish moneylenders’ activities. The more criminalized lending became, the more reticent lenders and borrowers were of admitting their involvement. Lenders and borrowers had to depend on unwritten agreements, interest percentages were not documented, and payment, nonpayment and indebtedness sometimes led to violence. In his book, Shatzmiller also notes that during the Black Death of 1348-1349:

“many believed that the Jews created the pestilence, and as a result Jewish quarters were attacked by fear-stricken crowds. But even in these circumstances the populace was intent on destroying notarial records and other evidence of indebtedness, as Pope Clement IV noted in a bull of 2 October 1348” (49).

The major thinkers of the Protestant Reformation (Luther, Zwigli, Calvin, etc.) were particularly critical of what they saw as the Catholic Church’s abuses of the poor. They, like their predecessors, did not approve of “usury”, although their definitions of what “usury” entailed differed. Martin Luther, often depicted as the “father of the Protestant Reformation”, critiqued any enrichment which came at one’s neighbor’s loss:

“That is the deepest depth of greed, that just looks upon a neighbour’s want and need as an opportunity not to help him but to enrich oneself and become wealthy through one’s neighbour’s loss. Those who do that are all daylight robbers, thieves, and ockerers.” (36-37)

Although there is much argument over the terminology used and what limits should be placed on lending, perhaps Luther’s condemnation can shed some light on exactly what was at the heart of the issue—how one dealt with others, especially those less fortunate than oneself. Perhaps the condemnation of “usury” was not all about how much money was gained but rather how much money was gained on the backs of others. The sin of “usury” might be that it sees other people as a means to end, instead of an end in and of themselves. “Usury”, in this sense, is predatory and pitiless… it not only makes the borrower destitute financially but it also makes the lender destitute in spirit. Think back to the description of Scrooge, Marley and the other “usurer ghosts” depicted in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Take the passage where Marley explains why he is fettered:

“I made the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard, I girded it on my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it… My spirit never walked beyond our counting house- mark me!- in life my spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our money-changing hole; and weary journeys lie before me.” (61)

When Scrooge exclaims that Marley was always a good man of business, Marley remarks:

“Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business…” (62-63)

While many Christians may be reticent to abandon “usury” in the strictest sense, perhaps words such as those from the Church fathers and, in this case, Dickens, may make us think twice about what is, as Christians, truly “our business” in this world.

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Resources for further inquiry:       

Books:

• Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle Ran Hogwarts, Edited by David Baggett and Shawn E. Klein
• From Homer to Harry Potter: A Handbook on Myth and Fantasy by Matthew T. Dickerson and David O’Hara
• Secrets of the Alchemists, editors of Time-Life books
• Alchemy: An Illustrated A to Z, by Diana Fernando       
• The Philosopher’s Stone: Alchemy and the Secret Search for Exotic Matter by Joseph P. Farrell
• The Hermetic Cabinet: Alchemy and Mysticism by Alexander Roob (great images)
• Creations of Fire: Chemistry’s Lively History from Alchemy to the Atomic Age by Cathy Cobb and Harold Goldwhite
• Alchemy, The Ancient Science by Neil Powell
• Alchemists through the Ages by Arthur Edward Waite
• Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer by Michael White

 Websites:

• The Chymistry of Isaac Newton project-online access to all of the chemical and alchemical manuscripts of Isaac Newton.
• http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/reference/symbols.do
• http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/harrypottersworld/
• www.harrypotterforseekers.com
• www.mugglenet.com
• www.accio-quote.org

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By Kate Daley Bailey

Ever wondered where J. K. Rowling got inspiration for her magical world of the Harry Potter series? Did you know that Nicholas Flamel was a real man and famed alchemist, who according to mystical lore had created the illusive Philosopher’s/ Sorcerer’s Stone?  Alchemy, the ancient mystical practice of trying to turn crude metals into gold, while seemingly fantastic to modern people, was the precursor to Enlightenment Sciences and various forms of Christian mysticism.  Not purely an entrepreneurial venture, alchemy was not only viewed as a path to fame and wealth but also a spiritual practice grounded in religious symbolism.  

Some modern readers view Rowling’s alchemical leanings as advocating witchcraft and thereby denounce the series as promoting what they see as an anti-Christian agenda.  Ironically, much of the alchemical history, which Rowling utilizes, is linked to Christian mysticism.  Religious critics of Rowling are not the first to be made uncomfortable by alchemy: they have been pre-empted by the Catholic Church’s Inquisition, western academia’s understandable skepticism of alchemy’s secretive and spiritual language, numerous monarchs’ laws against gold “creation” (much like current governments’ laws against currency counterfeiting), and the general public’s vision of alchemists as bumbling oddball eccentrics who were consequently labeled as religious fanatics dabbling in witchcraft, misinformed quacks, or charlatans engaged in shady business dealings and faked precious metals.

How can we know that the history of alchemy influenced Rowling work?  Rowling tells readers in the interview quotation below that she used her knowledge of alchemy to “invent this wizard world.”

I’ve never wanted to be a witch, but an alchemist, now that’s a different matter.  To invent this wizard world, I’ve learned a ridiculous amount about alchemy.  Perhaps much of it I’ll never use in the books, but I have to know in detail what magic can and cannot do in order to set the parameters and establish the stories’ internal logic.   J. K. Rowling

Rowling’s wizard world does have an internal logic and her depiction of how magic works is consistent.  While I would not recommend reading the series as an allegory of alchemy or any alchemical text, I would advise readers to view the series through the lens of alchemical transformation… and to see Rowling’s use of magic as a method or technology and not a glorified representation of magic or a endorsement of witchcraft (in its various forms).  

Rowling also repeatedly uses popular alchemical symbols and legends to advance her storylines: the legends surrounding the Philosopher’s Stone and the Elixir of Life, the symbol of the Phoenix, references notable alchemists such as Nicholas Flamel and Paracelsus, and many more subtle references to the alchemical world.

Rowling’s theme of transformation (from childhood to adulthood) embodied in the seven book series mimics an alchemist’s ultimate goal, to transform base metals into precious gold and silver and to transform themselves (from merely ‘crude matter’ to a more perfect reflection of the Creator and cosmos) and to purify themselves of the taint of human frailty.  For many alchemists, these practices were about spiritual transformations as well as physical ones.  It is often times difficult to separate the threads of mystical lore (primarily from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) from the purely material observations these alchemists made through years of research.

Alchemy: What is it?

This question is difficult to address for a multiplicity of reasons.  Many historians debate when and where this practice actually began.  Most historians divide the practice by its place of supposed origin.  Western traditions are said to originate in Egypt and adapted later by the Greeks.  Eastern traditions are linked back to both ancient China and India.  No matter which line one follows, the “origin” of alchemy remains in the murky and mythic past.

Another complication is that the hallmark attribute of alchemical practices is that they were intended to be secret and only passed on to the properly trained and initiated.  This translates into a slew of cryptic texts and images that are intentionally enigmatic.  Many of the stories about noted alchemists themselves are more akin to legend and fable than what a modern reader might view as a historical account.  These earliest “histories” do not cite dates, present conflicting information about said alchemists, and include unusual anecdotes (reading more like hagiographies than biographies).  

Reading the texts written by these alchemists themselves is even more confounding as many of the texts are written under pseudonyms or take on the mantle of earlier, more venerated authors from the alchemical community.  For example, a text written by a second century Greek alchemist whose was influenced by Jewish and Christian mystical traditions, might write under the name of a great patriarch, matriarch, or prophet from the Hebrew Scriptures.  Not only is authorship undeterminable, the texts themselves are designed to discourage the uninitiated reader… rendering them almost impossible to decipher with any accuracy.

Etymologically, we can turn to the term ‘alchemy’ itself for some kind of hint to the tradition’s origin.  Some sources link the base of the word itself to the Egyptian ‘keme’ which means roughly ‘black earth’—believed to be associated with the fertile soils of the Nile.  Another source states that the term comes to us via the Greek word ‘chymia’ meaning ‘working with metals.’ Later alchemists will view this dark fecund muck as the much coveted ‘original matter’ from which all creation came, and see its possession as a requirement for the production of the Philosopher’s Stone.

The ‘Stone’ was thought to have the ability (when used properly) to transform base metals into silver and gold and create the Elixir of Life (which granted one health and immortality).  Once historic and linguistic inquiries have hit a theoretical brick wall, we must turn to the mythic foundations of alchemy, which is choke full of symbols, images, and terms which practitioners of alchemy used to elucidate and obviscate their art.  

The Egyptian god Thoth—god of writing/hieroglyphics and magic—is idealized as the mythic founder of the tradition.  The Greek god Hermes/Roman god Mercury—god of messages (between worlds), magic, and healing—is depicted by the western alchemical tradition as the deity most comparable to the Egyptian Thoth.  Hermes/Mercury’s iconic staff, the caduceus, represents his healing attributes and is now most frequently recognized today as an emblem of the medical profession.  While these cultures (Egyptian, Greek, and Roman) are distinct and disparate, among later alchemists, the practice of syncretism (the mixing and blending of various religious and cultural traditions) was common.

Probably the most enigmatic contributor to alchemical writings was Hermes Trimegistus (thrive-great).  While numerous texts are ascribed to this person, there is no biographical information available regarding when or where they/he lived.  Hermes Trimegistus is the supposed author of an ancient text on alchemical transformation known as The Emerald Tablet, which highlights perhaps the most consistent theme in alchemical writing: the correspondence between worlds.

 That that which is Above is like that which is Below and that which is Below is like that which is Above, to accomplish the Miracle of Unity.   The Emerald Tablet

One of the primary themes of western alchemy is the concept of correspondence… that the natural world reflects the cosmic structure and that man is a microcosm (the cosmos in miniature).  Due to the microcosm/ macrocosm relationship, harmony and balance are perceived as vital to physical and spiritual health.  Each of the planets, which according to the ancients numbered seven, corresponds to a metal, and gold, representing the sun, was the embodiment of perfection, cosmically and spiritually.

However, regal patrons turned on their pets when they felt they had not gained what was promised to them.  Some felt deceived, and rightly so, and so extracted vengeance upon their former employees and other alchemists. Alchemists who fell out of favor were lucky to escape with their lives.  Other dangers lurked in the lives of alchemists.  Although many early alchemists were religious (a number were men of the cloth), some popes (like John XXII) issued papal bulls denouncing alchemy.

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Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University 

He was a largely self-educated writer who surpassed many an Oxbridge intellectual in general knowledge and in wit. He was a breezy and seemingly casual world traveler who nonetheless mastered that most difficult of all genres, literary travel writing. He lacked formal military training but was the mastermind of what was arguably the most swashbuckling Allied adventure of the Second World War. While he never went to university, he was undoubtedly one of the supreme literary stylists in the English language in this generation. And he was a student of comparative religion in a way that anticipated developments in the academic study of the world’s religions by more than a generation. And now he has died, on June 10^th, in his 96^th year. 

Patrick Leigh “Paddy” Fermor was born on February 11, 1915 in England. Like many another aspiring artist, his family and upbringing were unorthodox.  His father, Sir Lewis Leigh Fermor, was a civil servant of the late empire, working for the Geological Survey of India; the boy rarely saw his father in his early years. 

His mother, Eileen Taafe Ambler (a name that would prove predestinate), was an aspiring if poorly known playwright and poet. While Paddy spent the first four years of his life in the care of family friends, and thus developed the habit of living in a completely undisciplined and relatively unregulated environment, he lived with his mother after the age of four and remained in her care after his parents’ divorce. He was expelled from more schools than many a lesser light attended, most dramatically from King’s School, Canterbury, after the revelation of a romantic dalliance with a local grocer’s daughter eight years his senior. 

This would prove to be a recurrent pattern in his life: the pendular see-saw from intense romantic involvements to long periods of almost hermetic isolation. 

At the ripe age of “eighteen and three quarters” (his words), Paddy Fermor decided to take a long walk, in lieu of attending university. He determined to travel by foot from the Hook of Holland all the way to Istanbul (a city he always imagined Greek-ly, and referred to stubbornly as “Constantinople” or “Byzantium,” its first name as a Greek colony). The trip took some years, and it gave both flavor and form to the rest of his extraordinarily long and extraordinarily creative life. 

But he did not begin to publish his reflections on the journey until fully forty years later, and that generational lapse between a youthful excursion and a mature reminiscence is a central feature in what makes his writing so singular, and the genre he created so difficult to define. 

Fermor departed in December 1933 and thus, as fortune would have it, he was deposited into the very epicenter of a world about undergo a cataclysmic geopolitical upheaval. He found himself traipsing through Bavaria just after Hitler’s ascension to the post of Chancellor. And thus he witnessed at first hand a sudden chilling in his hosts’ reception of a young man who was clearly a unusually charming representative of the very best that British culture had to offer in the late afternoon of its imperial career. 

His recollections of a first long night in a Munich beer-hall are among the most memorable descriptions in any work of history or of travel, and they fade out with his collapse into drunken unconsciousness under a table, the theft of his passport and his walking staff (adorned with metal plaques, mementoes from each of his stopping points on the way). 

Content to sleep under bridges and in countryside train-or police-stations, the young man’s fortunes shifted decisively at the Hungarian border. He fell into easy conversation at the bridge with a man who proved to be a local aristocrat of considerable means and who invited him to spend his first night in the new country in an apartment in his castle. While it was a point of pride for the young Englishman that he cover his ground on foot, the Count sent letters of introduction ahead of him by horse, and thus Paddy Fermor spent virtually every evening in the care of some local grandee, and normally under the roof of some castle or fortress. What he could not have known at the time was that he was walking through a dreamworld that was about to come undone, enjoying his guiltless dreams under rooves that were destined to be obliterated in just a few short years. 

But not yet. Fermor arrived at the Turkish border on New Year’s Day of 1935, and after a brief sojourn in Istanbul, he returned to Greece which had especially captured his fancy.  After a brief turn in the Orthodox monasteries of Mount Athos (he was there on his 20th birthday), Fermor returned to Athens, then moved to Moldova with an aspiring painter (and Romanian princess) twelve years his senior, the divorcee Balasha Cantacuzene. The couple lived for three years in a kind of somnolent artistic bliss, she painting, he writing. 

But when the War finally came in 1939, Fermor bade paradise adieu.  He volunteered for the Irish Guards and, given his impressive language skills, he was sent back to Greece to prepare for the invasion everyone knew was coming. When the Italians were repulsed in the west and pushed back into Albania, German forces were diverted from the east to the south.  After a bruising five week thrust south through Yugoslavia, they made short work of a stiff Anglo-Greek resistance, the survivors of which (Fermor among them) took ship south to the island of Crete for what proved to be the last Allied stand in Europe. 

The German invasion came initially by air, and remains to this day the largest air invasion in military history.  The outcome was uncertain for five days (they lost more men in a week than they had in the entire French Blitz), but when German parachutists secured an airport on the western side of the island, they enabled the shipment of tanks and artillery in support. And thus Crete too was lost. 

Fermor fell back with the survivors to Egypt, where he rode out the rest of the War as an organizer of the guerilla resistance on Crete.  It was there, in a legendary bar called “Tara,” that Fermor and some friends first cooked up the caper for which they would become famous.  They parachuted into Crete in April 1944 and arranged for the kidnap of the German general in charge of the Cretan occupation.  Alas, by the time they got to Crete the murderous General, who had been the original object of their designs, was gone and had been replaced by the somewhat more benign Heinrich Kreipe. 

The group ambushed Kreipe’s car as he was leaving his headquarters at the “Villa Ariadne,” built by the noted British archaeologist, Sir Arthur Evans, as the headquarters for his excavation of the Minoan palace at Knossos.  Much to Fermor’s chagrin, the driver was spirited away from the vehicle and summarily shot.  Kreipe was put on the floor with a gun to his head, and Fermor, dressed as the General himself, passed through more than 20 checkpoints in the capital city of Herakleion before running the General’s car up to the northern coast. 

The plan was to abandon the car there and to make it appear that they’d been picked up by British submarines.  In reality, the northern coast was too dangerous for the British navy, so the men walked the General over two mountain ranges to the southern coast where they had scheduled a pick-up. 

Everything went wrong.  The radio broke down.  Then Kreipe fell and broke his arm.  Given the unexpected delays, they missed their rendezvous and were forced to hide out in mountains crawling with German patrols.  Finally, they secured a second radio, arranged a second pick–up, and got the General off the island nearly one month after his capture. 

Fermor never wrote a word about this affair, nor surprisingly enough, about his beloved Crete (his only contribution to this literature was a translation of the charming eyewitness report of a local messenger, George Psychondakis’s The Cretan Runner in 1955). One of Fermor’s fellows, William Stanley Moss, did write a short account of the kidnap, Ill-Met By Moonlight, which was later turned into a film in 1957 (with Dirk Bogarde playing a dashing and funny Paddy Fermor). 

After the War, and after some more time in Athens, Fermor left in 1949 for a long cruise by sail through the French Antilles.  He was accompanied by a Greek wartime companion and by his beloved Joan, the woman who would later be his wife.  They traveled for nearly a year and the book that resulted, The Traveller’s Tree (1950), immediately established Fermor as a writer on whom to keep an expectant eye (the only novel he ever wrote, The Violins of St. Jacques [1953], was set in a similar Caribbean setting under the looming presence of a volcano that brings the book to a strange and jarring close). 

This first book shows Fermor at his best both as a traveler and as a person of uncommon eloquence, wit and charm.  But of equal importance was the clear declaration of his utter fascination, not just with history, but with religion. 

Three long chapters devoted to Haiti make this plain.  As an organizer of a guerilla resistance himself, Fermor had keen insights into the dynamics of the Haitian War for Independence.  He understood well how the imperial interests of the French collided with those of the freed people under Toussaint L’Ouverture, and he accepted the horrific violence of reprisal and counter-reprisal as a murderous fact he neither supported nor avoided.  But of far greater interest are his observations about the Afro-Caribbean religious synthesis we know as “Voodoo.” Fermor describes his own unmistakable and unapologetic addiction to the evening “drumming and rumming” ceremonies, so aesthetically rich in music and dance, collective performance and spirit possession.  His observations are on a par with Levi-Strauss, another European expatriate from the War, whose Tristes Tropiques had just been published two years before.

And now the pattern recurs.  Fermor left his friends for another stint in a monastery, a Benedictine monastery in Normandy this time.  He’d gone there to write up his notes from the Caribbean, but he ended up so fascinated by the monastic life that he wrote a short book about it, a luminous meditation entitled A Time to Keep Silence (1957).  His reflections on what living in a different order of time is like make a significant contribution to the literature on monasticism and meditation, alike, rivaling those of another one of his direct contemporaries, Thomas Merton. 

Fermor’s finest books came next, and both were devoted to and inspired by, his beloved Greece. The first one, Mani (1958) is dedicated to the rough-hewn mountains south of Sparta where he would eventually build his own home; the photographs by Joan Eyres-Monsell offer a powerful supplement to the text, including a memorable excursus on Byzantine icon painting that shows how lightly and how lovingly he could wear his enormous erudition. 

Fermor moved to the Mani in 1964, when he and Joan purchased some land on a splendid coastline and designed their own home in local stone (thus settled, the two finally married in 1968—truly a life-companion, she died in 2003 at the age of 91).  Roumeli, Fermor’s elegant first meditation on the northern regions through which he’d walked thirty years earlier, appeared in 1966.  A chapter on the Byzantine residue in contemporary Greek culture is nonpareil, and shows him at his anthropological and linguistic best. 

Fermor did not write explicitly of the walk that started it all until many years later—forty years, to be precise.  He claimed that it was a mixture of humility, anxiety, and winsomeness that kept him from the task.  And while he planned to devote three volumes to the trip, only two of those volumes ever appeared.  A Time of Gifts was published to great acclaim in 1977, and includes that bacchanalian description of the Munich brewhouse.  Between the Woods and the Water, his delicately nostalgic recollections of Hungary and central Europe, appeared in 1986. There is rumored to be a complete draft of the long-awaited third volume, but his publishers will not confirm this. We can only hope that it is so. (Desperate to break the logjam of his writer’s block, they commissioned another short travelogue, Three Letters from the Andes (1991), that shows what made him so masterful as a traveler, equally at home in public archives and on mountaintops at fourteen thousand feet).           

Patrick Leigh Fermor represented the swansong of a supremely confident, if fading, empire as well as much that was best, and noblest, about her heyday.  Cosmopolitan in spirit, uncommonly gifted in languages and in music, a lover of poetry and folksong in equal measure, his table was legendary for the quality of the conversation and an impressive dipsomania (a term that often found its way into his writing). 

It was while working on an excavation in western Crete that I first read the two volumes describing his walk in the 1930s.  Some of the local workers informed me that he was living in Greece, in a Peloponnesian town called Kardamyli (it is mentioned in the Homeric poems).

So I packed up his books, two bottles of the notorious Cretan grappa called tsikoudia, and made my way to Kardamyli. 

I waited all day, as there appeared to be no one in the house.  Resigned by day’s end, I left the bottles with an appreciative note and began the long trek back into town.  Then the skies opened—a very rare event in Greece in the summer—that lasted all night.  I took refuge in a local hillside shrine dedicated to St. George.  I lit a lamp, drank a bottle of wine, and rode out the deluge.  The next morning broke bright and clear, so I returned one last time to the house at Kardamyli. T he bottles were gone, but there was still no sign of the man.  Dispirited, I left for good.  Then came a booming voice shouting my last name, and the legendary 85-year-old came scampering up the hill with the impressive stride of a man less than half his age.  He indicated that he was working just then, but that he’d be delighted if I’d join him for lunch. 

His table was all I’d heard it was, and more.  One could imagine the likes of former Cretan comrades like Xan Fielding who’d graced this same table, but still more all the writers and poets, like Bruce Chatwin, Freya Stark, Philip Toynbee, and of course Lawrence Durrell.  Paddy and Joan were equally interested in religion, and equally well-informed on the topic, so my profession was my ironic first point of entry.  We spoke at length of Haiti and the Afro-Caribbean, of the unique curiosities of North American Protestantism, but mostly they were interested, as I was, in the continuities between Classical and Christian culture.   

Hours passed, and bottle after bottle fell, emptied, to the carpet.  Finally, Paddy and Joan confessed the need for a nap, and set me down on a canape in their library, one of the world’s truly splendid rooms.  I took a long swim, reveled in my good fortune, and looked forward to dinner. It was more of the same, lasted late and then, the sky opening for the second time in as many days, Paddy drove me back into town in a hilarious staccato four-wheeled imitation of the scamper I’d seen him undertake earlier in the day.  “Write what you see,” he smiled, then he was gone. 

I was asleep within five minutes of finding my seat. 

We corresponded periodically after that.  His cards were always, charmingly equal parts word and image.  He had an endearing habit of bordering his notes with images—of clouds and birds in flight, mostly.  Knowing that he should be the one to write a book about Crete, but knowing that he had no time (or inclination? it was never clear) to do so, I told him that I might have a go of it.  He was enthusiastic, sent me postcards suggesting books I should read, inevitably things I’d neither known nor heard of before. 

He was a man of uncommon generosity, sing-song creativity, sparkling eloquence, in all of the ways that matter most a true gentleman.  We will not see his like again.  He wrote what he saw. And what he saw was mesmerizing.  But his life was ever a pendulum swing between writerly seduction and long, hermetic silences.  Having seduced so brilliantly with his prose, he has walked ahead of us yet again, eyes open, into the Great Silence.

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By Kate Daley-Bailey

I have the perfect gospel for Glenn Beck; a Saxon retelling of the Christian gospel with Jesus as a warrior chieftain written in “song” or epic form in the early part of the 9^th century CE and was supposedly used to convert the pagan Saxons, after they had been conquered and forcefully baptized by Charlemagne.

This rendering of the Jesus story is no direct translation of a canonical gospel rather it is an actual retelling of the Jesus story. As an expert on the Heliand, the title of this Saxon gospel, G. Ronald Murphy, J.S. describes the text as “a reimagining of the gospel.” Murphy writes that the Heliand’s author, whose identity is still a mystery, “rewrote and reimagined the words and the events of the gospel as if they had taken place and been spoken in his own country and time.”

It is a synthesis: Murphy emphasizes this unique blend of seemingly disparate attitudes and belief systems by saying that the text is a “contemplative integration of Northern-European magic, sooth-saying, wizardry, fatalistic warrior values, personal mysticism, and the Christian gospel story give it compelling power and charm.” 

Murphy

Murphy describes the likely intended audience of the gospel as those in “the meadhall and monastery.” He also suggests that the intent behind the reimaging of the gospel story was NOT so that it could be used in church services but rather so that it could be used to explain a seemingly foreign story in a familiar context. Murphy writes that the epic poem appears to have been “intended to bring the gospel home to the Saxons in a poetic environment in order to help Saxons cease their vacillation between their warrior-loyalty to the old gods and to the ‘mighty-Christ’.”

The anonymous author of the Heliand has reimagined the story of Jesus the Jewish messiah or Greek savior (depending on which of the four canonical gospels you read) and transformed him into a brave Germanic warrior chieftain who was hung from a tree. The text contains such song titles as “Song 14. Christ, the mighty Chieftain, chooses His first warrior-companions” and Song 36. Christ the Ruler heals the daughter of a woman from a foreign clan.” The last supper is featured in song 55 as “the last mead-hall feast with the warrior-companions. And the communion feast is depicted in song 56 as “the words of Christ give great powers to the bread and wine.” No doubt the most remarkable reimagining that the text presents is the retelling of the story of Jesus’ arrest and Peter’s reaction. Song 58. Christ the Chieftain is captured; Peter, the mighty swordsman, defends Him boldly.

Christ’s followers, wise men deeply distressed by this hostile action, held their position in front. They spoke to their Chieftain. ‘My Lord Chieftain,’ they said, ‘if it should now be Your will that we be impaled here on spear-points, wounded by their weapons, then nothing would be as good to us as to die here, pale from mortal wounds, for our Chieftain.

The Simon peter, the mighty, the noble swordsman flew into a rage; his mind was in such turmoil that he could not speak a single word. His heart became intensely bitter because they wanted to tie up his Lord there. So he strode over angrily, that very daring thane, to stand in front of his Commander, right in front of his Lord. No doubting in his mind, no fearful hesitation in his chest, he drew his blade and struck straight ahead at the first man of the enemy with all the strength of his hands, so that Malchus was cut, and wounded on the right side by the sword! His ear was chopped off, he was so badly wounded in the head that his cheek and ear burst open with a mortal wound! Blood gushed out, pouring out of the wound! The cheek of the enemy’s first man had been cut open. The men stood back- they were afraid of the slash of the sword.

Then the Son of God spoke to Simon Peter and told him to put his sharp sword back into its sheath. ‘If I wanted to put up a fight against the attack on this band of warriors, I would make the great and mighty God, the holy Father in the kingdom of heaven , aware of it so that He could send me so many angels wise in warfare that no humans to stand up to the force of their weapons. No human army, however huge, could ever stand against them nor afterwards still be in possession of their life-spirits. But the ruling God, the all-mighty Father, has determined it differently: we are to bear whatever bitter things this people does to us. We are not to become enraged or wrathful against their violence, since whoever is eager and willing to practice the weapon’s hatred, cruel spear-fighting, is often killed himself by the edge of the sword and dies dripping with his own blood. We cannot by our deeds avert anything.

He went up to the wounded man and skillfully put the parts of his body back together, his headwounds, so that the sword-slash was quickly healed.

The gore and brutality of this depiction seems a far cry from the canonical gospel versions which simply state that Peter defended Jesus by cutting off the ear of a Jewish guard and in some of the gospels, but not all, Jesus rebukes Peter and heals the guard’s ear. Although all four canonical gospels mention this encounter, none of them include such a violent description. I’m half surprised Mel Gibson had not used this as a source text for his film of the Passion of the Christ.

Although the Germanic Jesus and Peter featured in this text may seem very odd from our perspective as modern people and we might be tempted to easily dismiss this reimagining as an anomaly in the world of Christendom… I would like to highlight that all forms of Christianity are and should be reimaginings of the Jesus story. The church fathers saw to it that four versions of the Jesus story were preserved in the Christian Canon. Each reader or hearer of the gospel story must try to imagine what it would have been like to be among the early followers of Jesus. While reimagining is necessary to make the gospel come alive in the here and now… Christians should also be aware of when this reimagining violates the spirit of the message.

Glenn Beck appears to be reimagining the gospel story in his own way and he is not alone. We seem to be experiencing a new wave of Muscular Christianity… one which, in extreme cases, violates some of the vital principles of the Christian message… primarily the Christian message of “agape”… “brotherly love.”

Glenn Beck recently is quoted as saying on his talk show that although

Jesus did identify with the victims… Jesus was not a victim. He was a conqueror…Jesus conquered death. He wasn’t victimized. He chose to give his life….If he was a victim, and this theology was true, then Jesus would’ve come back from the dead and made the Jews pay for what they did. That’s an abomination.” (See Sources)

The media fervor has been predominately over Beck’s blaming of the Jews for what “they” did to Jesus… and I admit this is very troubling especially because Beck’s admonishment of this “victim mentality” he sees in Liberation Theology sounds suspiciously close to the Nietzschean condemnation of Judaism and Christianity which was later appropriated by the Nazi propaganda machine. What especially stood out to me was Beck’s zealous statement that Jesus was NOT a victim but rather a conqueror. Does Beck subscribe to a radical Muscular Christianity view of Jesus?

Has Beck missed the “good news” of the Christian message in the gospels which exclaims that Jesus broke down the normal divisions… of Jew and Gentile, slave and master, woman and man, and of victim and conqueror? Part of the miracle of Jesus was that he was both… both victim (having died under the oppressive Roman Empire) and conqueror (having been raised from the dead and having offered hope in the face of extreme death and destruction)…100% human and 100% divine.

Obviously Beck’s comments are motivated by his view that liberal (liberation theology minded?) Christians are presenting Jesus as a Communist and a victim as opposed to a more Muscular Christian depiction of Jesus as a Capitalist and a conqueror. Perhaps we should revisit the Saxon Gospel I mentioned above to see an example of cultural and religious syncretism. This Saxon reimagining of Jesus is fascinating on multiple levels:

1. The Saxons were a warrior culture which engendered tribal loyalty, focused of magic, and fate… Jesus, in their eyes, was a Chieftain who had the power to use force but that he resisted it… for he was fated to die.
2. The Saxon culture celebrated valor and might… and the author had to think carefully about how to present the Christian message… so the Saxon gospel highlights the more masculine and mighty attributes of Jesus and his followers…. He is their chieftain and his disciples are his thanes… his warrior-companions.
3. The Saxons, despite their might, had been defeated and forced to convert to Christianity… they were a conquered warrior culture. The Saxon gospel not only explained Christianity to them in on their own terms… it also offered them a way to reimagine themselves as a conquered yet conqueror culture.

What does a Saxon gospel from the 9^th century have to do with us today? Not much on the surface but it has helped me understand a community’s ability to use sacred stories from ancient times and foreign cultures in order to understand that community’s own situation and time. However, when one uses another’s story to tell one’s own story… both are altered. These stories become inextricably intertwined. Some aspects of the sacred story are highlighted… other aspects are diminished or ignored all together. The question for American Christians is similar to the concern of Saxon Christians long ago… how do you negotiate these various identities in yourself?  How does one reconcile the powerful words of Jesus, even in the Saxon gospel, when he commands that his followers not turn violent… that “we are to bear whatever bitter things this people does to us.” Despite the Franks’ (and Charlemagne’s) victory in battle, the Saxons were reticent about adopting Christianity. The Saxons were rumored to be cannibals, were known to be ruthless warriors, and constantly rebelled against their Frankish overlords. How much of the 1^st century Jewish healer and teacher was replaced by the Saxon warrior Chieftain? How much of Jesus is left in American Christianity today? How high a price has Christianity paid to be seen as patriotic and American?

Christianity in America today is undergoing many of the same theological pressures which plagued these early Saxon Christians. Christian Militias, Gun-toting church goers, The Catholic Church’s condemnation of women priests in what was supposed to be a referendum on sexual abuse among a male priesthood, Glenn Beck’s attack on Liberation Theology as a “victim theology”… all of these movements point towards an underlying insecurity regarding the nature of Christian identity in America today. The matter of contention is not just social, political, economic, philosophical, or religious… it is all of them because what is at stake is identity.

Sources and Works Cited:

• Huffington Post article:  “Glen Beck: Jews Killed Jesus” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/15/glenn-beck-jews-killed-je_n_648134.html
• Glen Beck on YouTube video:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QttAXEGz3g

  

• The Heliand:  The Saxon Gospel, A Translation and Commentary by G. Ronald Murphy, S.J.
• The Saxon Savior: The Germanic Transformation of the Gospel in the Ninth Century Heliand by G. Ronald Murphy, S.J.

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By Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University

For obvious reasons, the 45^th Super Bowl was largely trumped in the news on Monday by events in Egypt, Tunisia and even Korea. But not on Sunday night. This Super Bowl was the most widely-viewed event in television history, with well in excess of one hundred million estimated viewers. That in and of itself makes it worth a closer look.

Last year, most of the back story–as well as the Monday morning quarterbacking–concerned the Tim Tebow’s participation (with his mother, Pam) in an advertisement that drew attention to “Focus on the Family,” inviting a visit to their website.  I noted the irony that another organization, “Go Daddy,” made a similar advertising plea for its own website. Focus on the Family chose not to advertise this year; Go Daddy did, in even more risqué fashion.

But that really isn’t the story of this Super Bowl. The advertising was comparatively bland and unimaginative this year; the half-time show was glitzy, but a bit ditzy as well.

No, this year the story really was in the game. That seems relevant to anyone interested in the curious and complex trajectories of the sacred in contemporary American culture. As Gary Laderman has argued, in his book Sacred Matters, professional sports, to the degree that they contribute to our contemporary cult of celebrity, are bearers of profound spiritual resonance. But they are also highly complex choreographed events, what the student of religion is trained to see as ritual.

It is worth asking what effects certain elaborate social choreographies are designed to create. In the context of a professional team sport like football, the complex choreography and the violent clashing dance, is designed to create moments when “it” happens. Naming what it is often requires a feat of imagination–and of generosity for those not particularly taken with the game.

Football, in its purest form, is an uncanny ballet of regulated male aggression, looking for all the world like warfare waged by other means, a battle in which injury is quite common though death, mercifully enough, is not.

The wild see-sawing of the battle-lines, the staking out of boundaries and the defense of territory, the punch-drunk dances of triumph, almost comical in their refusal to admit that the enemy will be dancing in his turn, very soon. For my purposes, this crazy choreography is an epic, and looks for all the world like the Homeric ones most of us had to read in school.

When Homer describes warfare, then religious concepts like the gods, and the fate which hangs over everyone (even the gods), is never far from view. “No atheists in foxholes.” A veteran of the gridiron, very much like the survivor of a war, knows a great deal about those mystifying but undeniable swerves of momentum that make it seem for all the world as if divine forces have suddenly massed against you–or turned unexpectedly to your side.

How a human being finesses fate and the willfulness of the divine says a great deal about his or her character. There is a virtue in this finesse, a heroism in bending rather than breaking–much like those long-suffering offensive and defensive linemen, groaning through the violent surge of collision after collision, for the gridiron equivalent of what seems an eternity.

Those long-suffering linemen never get the big, public reward. They are never named as “most valuable players,” though more often than not they shed their blood defending the men who are so named–halfbacks and quarterbacks mostly. This, too, looks remarkably similar to the militant choreography at Homer’s Troy, where a nameless sea of soldiers come to their crashing crescendo, after which individual heroes–whose names we do know–emerge from the group and become the focus of our attention, if only for a day.

Achilles is the name of that hero in the Iliad (he is called “the best of the Achaeans”there); Odysseus is the name of that hero in the Odyssey.

And yet, they could not seem more different.  Achilles is a bruiser, a force of nature, and he fights in a way that leaves it all on the field.  He dies, tellingly enough, at Troy. Odysseus, while powerful and ferociously talented in battle, is a survivor.  He is clever, smart, charming, and he is determined to make it home again.  He does, as most of the Greeks did not.  And it took a lot of artful lying to make it.

This Super Bowl was choreographed to give us not just a surprisingly Homeric conflict, but also two veritable Homeric figures: the Achilles-figure of Ben Roethlisberger, and theOdysseus-figure of Aaron Rodgers.

Roethlisberger, thickly bearded and a hulk of a man, crashes through linemen and is terribly difficult to bring down.  He is a bruiser, with a ferocious competitive streak. Arguably no professional athlete has suffered more concussions than he.

Rodgers, with those striking blue eyes, seems smaller, though he is larger (and faster) than he appears. He has a lightning-quick delivery, and he knows how to get away from crowds. He doesn’t run through people; he runs around them.  He’s also not above running away.  He’s smart about it, clever and calculating all the time.  He’s harder to read, seems subtler somehow.

There’s also the inescapable question of women, and their relationship to these heroes.  This may seem an odd addition–of women to an ancient battlefield, but Homer does that. Where the two Homeric heroes differ most is in terms of the intimacies they enjoy.

Achilles kidnaps women, argues about the women in his possession, is even depicted sleeping with a woman, but never talking to one.  Odysseus, by contrast, is kidnapped by women (goddesses, admittedly), and he is depicted in the climactic moment of his entire story, back in bed talking with a lover he has not seen for twenty years.  He and his wife, Penelope, are depicted in a very intimate moment, sharing their stories together, and we quickly discover that her cleverness is every bit a match for his.  Still more remarkable, Odysseus clearly recognizes this, and clearly seems to prefer it that way.  It’s the only way he’s not bored, the only way he’ll stay.

It is no easy task to get home; that’s the main moral of Odysseus’s story.  The Odyssey offers a messy choreography if ever there were one, reminding us of all that it takes to get to your goal—whether that goal is named Ithaka, or end zone, or Super Bowl—a little luck, a lot of cunning, and an occasional goddess like Athena to come to your aid.  It also takes the kindness of strangers, and their gifts of hospitality along the way.

Last year, the city of New Orleans was an essential part of the epic story of Super Bowl XLIV, their team’s stunning victory symbolized a city rising Phoenix-like from the ashes, or the mud.  But this year, that story was impossible to tell, both of these cities–Pittsburgh and Green Bay– have been wasted by the post-industrial economy no one has yet found sufficient cleverness to negotiate.  So you can’t feel good about one city winning this battle.

Which is what brought the epic story of this Super Bowl back to the people, and the proverbial conflict of character that brought it back to sex.  Roethlisberger’s troubles with women are well known, and the legal difficulties he faced in Milledgeville, Georgia landed him a four-game suspension this season. It was as anti-heroic a beginning as people could imagine, and made it easier to feel good about Rodgers winning his first Super Bowl ring.

And now, just days later, those strange “Go Daddy” commercials (like Big Ben’s alleged sexual violence) are already a fading memory.  Aaron Rodgers smiles directly into the camera, crystalline blue eyes twinkling and a half smile on his lips, and he tells us that he’s going to Disney World.

But he is the Odysseus-figure this year, and we know that it’s a lie.  Where he will wander next is his own business, and anyone’s guess.

Which reminds us that an epic is fundamentally the story of a quest, and a quest, even if it’s not for a grail, is fundamentally religious.  This Homer knew.  And so do some of our own padded warriors.

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 By Kate Daley-Bailey

In this time of celebrity worship when too many American students think how you look is more important than what you do, students must be taught that happiness comes from “living well” not necesscarily living “well-off.”  In such a world, how do we teach children to make good decisions, to become moral citizens? I have chosen to write on the Harry Potter series because these books lure readers into their pages with promises of adventure and fantasy, all the while covertly educating us on how to live well. Disguised as pure entertainment, these children books instruct both children and adults on how to make good choices in difficult situations. In the introduction of Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle ran Hogwarts, the editors, D. Baggett and S. Klein (2004) state:

Rowling’s novels are obviously not written as philosophical treatises, yet they are rife with philosophical significance. They are not only interesting and well-told stories, but thoroughly engaging emotionally, imaginatively, and intellectually.

Rowlings

This is not the first time fantasy has acted as a vehicle for conscious or unconscious moral instruction. One need only think of J.R.R. Tolkien’s tiny hobbit’s duty to face unbearable odds and evil in order to save Middle Earth or the inspiring words of Gandalf the Grey to see elements of moral education or mentoring in many faerie stories. Another similarity between Tolkien and Rowling is their emphasis on the slightly flawed hero who must learn to make the right but difficult choice. The emphasis on making the right choices in order to “live well”, whether in narrative or real life, comes to the West through one of the most celebrated Greek philosophers, Aristotle.

Aristotle

Aristotle lived more than 2,000 years ago and although the world has drastically changed, mankind’s ultimate desire remains the same, man wants to be happy. Now, what does that mean exactly? According to Louis P. Pojman (2000), eudaimonia, Aristotle’s word for happiness can also be translated as “living well” and, in Aristotle’s mind, happiness was the highest good. Now, we might think of happiness as a mere feeling… a fleeting feeling we experience when our basic needs are met but Aristotle requires that we look deeper. To Aristotle, happiness is an activity…happiness is human flourishing. According to Mortimer J. Adler, in his work, Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought Made Easy (1978) various goods are needed, bodily, external, and goods of the soul in order for a human to begin to flourish. Beyond this, Aristotle lists one more type of goods that we need, as Alder explicates “good habits of choice.”

How do we “live well”… how can we flourish? Individual flourishing occurs when the individual has consistently developed a balance between reason and desire, when the individual acts in moderation… when the individual has attained the mean, a middle road of sorts, between excess and deficiency. Adler highlights Aristotle’s example regarding food and drink to explain this relationship. Food and drink are “real goods” but “only in moderate amounts”. Happiness or “living well” can only be achieved by cultivating virtues of character, for it is in the happy medium that an individual properly functions. Aristotle, according to Adler, defines moral virtue as “the habit of making right choices”. Adler continues to elucidate this concept by explaining that the virtuous individual, the flourishing individual, is one who “makes the right choices regularly, time and time again, although not necessarily every single time”.

So, how do we cultivate these virtues of character? Well, how do we get better at doing anything? We practice. We must train ourselves to make good moral choices through an endless pattern of action and correction. According to S. Klein (2004), this is not about trying to attain the static state of “being good” but rather constantly “becoming good.” Action is an essential element in becoming anything.  In the first Harry Potter books, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (1997), Albus Dumblore, the headmaster of Hogwarts, cautions Harry about the dangers of fantasy. Dumbledore warns Harry of wasting his life sitting before the mirror of Erised, a magical mirror which shows the viewer the deepest desire in the viewer’s heart:

It shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts… However, this mirror will give us neither knowledge or truth. Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen, or been driven mad, not knowing if what it shows is real or even possible.

Note that the mirror’s name is merely the word desire spelled backwards. Could this be a warning for both Harry and the novel’s readers, namely that dwelling on our desires is a fruitless effort if one does not act in the world? The mirror shows the viewer their deepest desire but not the activity it takes to obtain that desire. The mirror reflects the desired “being good” but it is dangerous because it neglects the “becoming good” aspect. The mirror is deceptive in its very nature for it shows only the distant, illusive, static “good” without providing any instruction on how to obtain that “good”, hence the necessity for Dumblebore’s intervention and explanation. For Aristotle, the virtues require constant cultivation of the virtues from a young age… in a word, education.

It is not incidental that Rowling sets her novels at a school, nor is it coincidence that Harry is constantly facing difficult choices. Harry, and vicariously, the reader, are put in positions of peril, guided but not coached by mentors and friends, and asked to make extremely difficult choices. Harry, although far from perfect, consistently makes the right choices. In the Harry Potter novels, just as in Aristotle’s philosophy, you are how you choose.  Or as David Baggett puts it in his chapter: Magic, Muggles, and Moral Imagination, “Harry is what he consistently does.”  As referenced by L. Pojman (2000), in his Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle writes:

It is by our actions in the face of danger and by our training ourselves to fear or to courage that we become either cowardly or courageous… So the difference between one and another training in habits in our childhood is not a light matter, but important, or rather, all important.

Our choices determine who we are or rather who we become. Harry begins the series as “the boy who lived”, he is famous and revered in the wizarding world, but not by any choice or action of his own. However, Harry ends the series by having to make the most self-less and painful choice of his whole 17 years. The Harry Potter series is about Harry becoming a hero through his choices.

David and Catherine Deavel (2004), in their work A Skewed Reflection: The Nature of Evil, point out the Harry Potter series advocates judging people on their choices and not their abilities. In the following passage, Harry explains to Dumbledore that the sorting hat, a magical hat which sorts students into the various Hogwarts houses according to their abilities and desires, had considered putting Harry into the same house, Slytherin, as the evil and power-hungry wizard Voldemort. According to Harry, he pleaded to be put in any house but Slytherin. Dumbledore points out that, although Harry’s upbringing and his skills resemble Voldemort’s, that does not mean that Harry is destined to be like Voldemort… for a person’s choices, not their abilities or heritage, shows truly who that person is:

‘It [the Sorting Hat] only put me in Gryffindor,’ said Harry in a defeated voice, ‘because I asked not to go in Slytherin…’

‘Exactly,’ said Dumbledore, beaming once more. ‘Which makes you very different from Tom Riddle. It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are far more than our abilities.’

Tom Riddle, the real name of Lord Voldemort, had a very similar start in life to Harry. Both Harry and Tom were raised as orphans in not so pleasant circumstances, both accidently discovered their skills in magic, both have the rare ability to speak parcel tongue, the ability to speak to snakes, both were courted by Dumbledore, attended Hogwarts, and both became powerful wizards. However, as Dumbledore points out, a person’s choices make them who they are. We have control over our choices, even if we are choosing between two evils.

If we judge people, as some do, by their family history and bloodline, by their natural skills and abilities, or by anything else that they were born into, we are judging them on something they have no control over. Tom Riddle, who becomes Voldemort, uses his skills in magic to harm and his intellect to trick and manipulate. He chooses power and he sacrifices anyone and anything to get it. At the end of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000), the fourth book in the series, Dumbledore warns all Hogwarts students of Voldemort’s return to power and advises them, when the time comes, to make the right, not the easy choice, by remembering a boy who was murdered by Voldemort:

Remember Cedric. Remember, if the time should come when you have to make a choice between what is right and what is easy, remember what happened to a boy who was good, and kind, and brave, because he strayed across the path of Lord Voldemort. Remember Cedric Diggory. 

Rowling, through the words of Dumbledore, is reminding all readers that there will come a time when they must choose between making the easy choice and the right choice and both their identity and the fate of this world depend upon which decisions they make.

Although Harry is the protagonist and unarguably the hero of the series, Dumbledore is the mentor that guides Harry through advice and by example. Dumbledore even exposes Harry to danger once he feels Harry is ready, much to the chagrin of Hermoine, one of Harry’s closest friends. Harry tries to explain this to Hermoine at the end of the first novel:

He’s a funny man, Dumbledore. I think he sort of wanted to give me a chance… Its almost like he thought I had the right to face Voldemort if I could..

Harry is quickly cut off by Hermoine, not known for holding her tongue when she disagrees with someone. Here and throughout the series, Dumbledore is preparing Harry for the most difficult battle in Harry’s life.

Dumbledore knows he would be doing Harry a great disservice if he always protected Harry… for the time would come when Dumbledore was no longer physically there to help Harry and Harry would be left alone to make his own decisions. Dumbledore even tells Harry in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000) of his reason for not shielding Harry:

If I thought I could help you by putting you into an enchanted sleep and allowing you to postpone the moment when you would have to think about what has happened tonight, I would do it. But I know better. Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.

Rowling’s readers, too, must face the harsh realities of this world and will be left alone to make their own decisions, once they have closed the binding of these books. Rowling can only hope she has taught them well. Rowling, who was once a teacher, uses her narrative to guide and mentor her readers and through the character of Dumbledore and the book series itself, exposes her readers to these different decisions. Her readers can “fight the good fight” vicariously through the characters she portrays. For although we do not live in the wizarding world… our world is much like it. Some wizards judge others by their bloodline or their wealth rather than their actions.

Dumbledore emphatically condemns the minister of magic, Cornelious Fudge, for his reluctance to see past a person’s heritage in the 4^th Novel, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000):

‘You place too much importance, and you always have done, on the so-called purity of blood! You fail to recognize that it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be!’

So Rowling, like C. S. Lewis and Tolkien before her, uses fantasy (consciously or not) to educate readers in ethics, showing them how to “live well.” Rather than writing a treatise of morality, she wrote a story and teaches through symbol, metaphor, and troupe.

In the last century, many scholars have revisited the meaning of myth and fantasy. The imagination to some is the most important tool we have for understanding the world. As highlighted in From Homer to Harry Potter: A Handbook on Myth and Fantasy, Thomas Howard (1969), writes in his book Chance Or the Dance:

Imagination is, in a word, the faculty by which we organize the content of our experience into some form, and thus apprehend it as significant. Put another way, it is what makes us refuse to accept experience as mere random clutter, and makes us try without ceasing to shape that experience so that we can manage it.

The imagination allows us to make meaning of our lives and fantasy allows readers to live vicariously through the characters in the novel… it allows the reader to encounter an alternate reality in which the reader becomes cocooned. Critics of fantasy writing often describe it as merely escapism. This is but a half-truth. The readers are enveloped in an alternative world but the lessons they learn are meant to carry back over into the so called “real world”. While Voldemort and his deatheaters are not truly attempting to take over our world, violence and terror are a very real part of our existence. Parents may be reluctant to speak to their children about how to live in a world with terrorists, genocide, and discrimination and rightly so. However, the reality of this world is a harsh one and it is a reality that our children will inherit, whether we wish it to be so or not. Just as Frodo comments to Gandalf in Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring, we may not have a choice regarding the times we live in but we do have a choice of how we will respond to this world:

‘Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again.’
‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo.
‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’

How we respond to this world, the choices we make, that is who we are… who we become. Just like in the Harry Potter novels, as with Aristotle, you are how you choose. How will we choose? Who will we be? Will we live well?

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By Heather Abraham

Last week, my husband Teo and I attended a birthday party for our very dear friend Jena.  It was her fiftieth and the day before she celebrated this milestone by jumping out of an airplane three miles above a Georgia plain.  As part of her celebration, her lovely partner Karen arranged a surprise performer of the spoken word to entertain the birthday girl and her friends.  Kween Shantey was more than a surprise; she was a force of nature whose gift of poetry moved the intimate gathering to laughter, tears, and cheers.  Her voice moved our souls and I was not the only one who felt as if her words were coming from within.  Kween is a poet who recites her craft in an art form called the spoken word which you can yourself experience in this video captured by Teo using his iphone.  Although the quality is not as I would have wished, I believe you will catch a glimpse of the power of Kween’s voice and words.  I must relay that Kween, in person, can really rock your world.  Take a few minutes and watch Kween’s performance of her poem Judge Me Not which begins one minute into this video. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91kDZpHTZ1o

I bring this delightful and unexpected experience to Religion Nerd readers because I believe we often overlook this powerful art form which was once the prominent form of entertainment, communication, and the recorder of human histories.  Watching Kween perform I was reminded of another poet and his epic poem so steeped in legend and history.  Homer’s Iliad, that epic poem which so often catches our imagination on the big screen, was originally created to be orally transmitted to an audience by a professional and specialized performer or rhapsodist.   Throughout my long university career, I was assigned the Iliad for many classes in literature, ancient history, and religious studies.   Each time I read the book I struggled, not quite able to find that intimate connection that usually comes so easily.   I mentioned this to one of my professors, Lou Ruprecht, who was the first to point out to me that the Iliad was not meant to be read but was meant to be heard by an audience.  

Several months after I graduated from Georgia State, I came across the Iliad on tape at a neighborhood yard sale.  Taking home my prize, I popped the first cassette into my ancient tape player, put on the earphones, and hit play.  To say the least, I was enchanted and profoundly moved; finally finding that intimate connection for which I had been longing.  Hearing the Iliad in the form of the spoken word was a transforming experience.  I found myself deeply connected to the events and characters of this ancient and revealing epic.  I found myself at times, laughing out loud, recoiling from the devastation of war, and lamenting the death of characters to which I had become so attached.  The Iliad is just one of many ancient texts we read without comprehending their original oral history and method of transmission.  

McCowen

Like the Iliad and the Odyssey, the New Testament was also meant to be performed for an audience.  Today, we often experience the sacred books of the Christian Bible in small portions and not as narratives meant to be transmitted in the whole.  The cherry-picking of biblical verses has become the norm and many of us have never experienced any book of the Christian Bible as a narrative wholly performed.  Once upon a time, the New Testament Gospels were performed by the few and heard by the many.  As most early Christians were illiterate, performing the Gospels was the most efficient way to relate the Jesus stories found in Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, and the many non-canonical gospels.  More than three decades ago, a Shakespearean actor, Alec McCowen, opened on Broadway with his one man show entitled The Gospel According to Saint Mark.  McCowen’s performance of Mark’s Gospel astounded and enthralled many as he packed the house each night for almost two years.  Take as an example this modern performance of the Gospel of Luke, by Bruce Kuhn, which gives us a glimpse into how the Gospels were once transmitted by word, voice, and body language; all of which are lost in the reading of scripture.    

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlaUUTUSrgU

Many of the world’s great sacred texts were for centuries upon centuries kept alive by professional performers schooled in the cadence of their sacred art form.  The Jewish Tanakh, the Hindu Vedas and sacred epics, the Quran, and the Christian Bible are but just a few examples of scriptures that, in days of old, were recited to or performed for an audience.  In this modern era of multiple media forms and an expectation of entertainment, it is easy to overlook the power of the spoken word or to remember that it was through the instrument of the human voice that the message of many emerging religious movements found an audience.

• A more formal version of Kween Shantey’s “Judge Me Not” performed at an Atlanta Church http://www.facebook.com/#!/video/video.php?v=1141048665554&ref=mf

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By:  Kate Daley-Bailey

The literary vampire represents the ultimate ambiguous being… neither dead nor alive but rather undead.   Vampires straddle boundaries, be they physical or metaphysical, that few other fictional beings could manage.  Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the image of the vampire has captured reader’s imaginations for roughly two hundred years and continues to haunt the pages of numerous popular novels.  But over the span of these years, literary vampires have changed.  In Bram Stoker’s Dracula… the Count is not much more than an inversion of his enemies, a demon, or a supernatural serial killer.  In Anne Rice’s novel series, penned some 80 years later, the fledging vampire Louis is a tormented being… extraordinary and yet pitiful.  Then some 25 years after Louis’ debut in Interview with a Vampire, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series introduces the Cullens family to the literary vampire scene… oddly enough, as moral exemplars.  

Although the Count in Dracula is a great deal more monster than moral being, he is a clear representation of the uncolonized Other… seeking to reverse the colonization process and populate England with his vampire harem.  Rice’s vampires are Others too… whose relationships with one another are often read as homosexual or rather asexual in nature, which for the 1970s was extremely provocative.  The vampires of the Twilight series, in particular, the Cullens are extraordinary in ways which makes them seem alien to the human residents of Forks and suspect to the rest of the vampires in Meyer’s novels. Yet the Cullens also represent the Other.  Investigating how an author presents vampire literature and how an audience of readers accepts the Other in literature may help cultural observers, like myself, to determine how a community defines itself.  In particular, I am interested to see if there is a correlation between the method of narration used in vampire literature and the degree to which these so called Others are humanized in the minds of readers.

Novels as self-contained worlds

Successful fantasy literature, like enduring religious narratives, must draw people into their constructed worlds.  As the noted sociologist of religion Peter Berger states “every human society is an enterprise of world-building. Religion occupies a distinctive place in this enterprise.” This world-building and world-maintenance of which human societies are involved, is often regulated by legitimizing narratives which, for many cultures, are still religious in some sense. Authors of novels, too, are involved in this process, even if only within the confines of their literary microcosm. 

A community, in literature as well as outside of it, is often regulated by individuals, institutions, and values. Members of these communities are differentiated simply by the presence or belief in the presence of outsiders… Others.  Reading about how cultures have described these Others informs the reader more about the hopes and fears of the narrating culture than anything definite about the Others themselves.  This same concept seems to work when dealing with morality.  The question of morality rarely comes up in solitude because the question of morality is a question of concern for the community.  Community and morality both need a collection of selves and at least the possibility of Others to exist. Community and morality are in fact relational institutions. 

Reading as a Moral Activity?                                                           

Nussbaum

Famed ethicist Martha Nussbaum, in the preface to her work Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, speaks of a class she taught at the University of Chicago on Law and Literature. While her law students read Sophocles and Dickens, Nussbaum comments that the class   

talked about ways in which texts of different types present human beings- seeing them, in some cases, as ends in themselves, endowed with dignity and individuality, in others as abstract undistinguished units or as mere means to the ends of others. 

Nussbaum champions the literary imagination as pertinent to law, as well as other public spheres and defends her reasoning for choosing novels, in lieu of histories or biographies, as her medium by focusing on the roles each play.  She writes, “…history simply records what in fact occurred… literature focuses on the possible.”  And later she states: “the novel is a living form and in fact the central morally serious yet popularly engaging fictional form of our culture”. 

Theoretical thinking about Law, Literature, and Religion, is often concerned with possible worlds, ideal worlds perhaps, but how does this help citizens of the “real world”?  To answer this, Nussbaum pulls from another ethicist, Wayne Booth, who illustrates how the activity of reading, particularly reading fiction, can be a practical path to ethical inquiry.  Nussbaum writes, 

Booth argues that the act of reading and assessing what one has read is ethically valuable precisely because it is constructed in a manner that demands both immersion and critical conversation, comparison of what one has read both with one’s own unfolding experience and with the responses and arguments of other readers. 

Reading can be an ethically valuable tool in that it requires both immersion into a different set of circumstances and elicits some sort of dialogue between, at the minimum, reader and text.  Questions of community are inherently linked to questions of membership in said communities.  This issue is crucial to our questions of morality because if morality is somehow tied up with membership… then we must ask what qualifications must one possess to be part of and therefore, bound by the rules of personhood, as set by that community? 

Does simply being human categorize someone as a person?  Historically, in the West, this has not been the case.  If humanity is not the only requirement for personhood then what qualities must a human exhibit to count as a person?  In his chapter Can a vampire be a person?, Nicolas Michaud questions the criteria for personhood which western philosophy has used to categorize various sentient beings. He summarizes the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s description of a person as someone who is rational and “part of a moral community.”  What makes up a person? This line of inquiry ties into my title- regarding the paradoxical construct of a moral monster… what happens when an entity, albeit fictional in this case, exhibits both monstrous, even abominable qualities and simultaneously moral ones? 

The Monstrous

Stout

What makes something or someone monstrous? Theorist Jeffrey Stout defines a similar concept, using the term abomination.  According to Stout, in order for a society to view something or someone as an abomination, the thing or person in question must be anomalous, consisting of  “combined characteristics uniquely identified with separate kinds of things”, and be connected to a socially significant issue.  Applying Stout’s recipe for abomination to our concept of monstrous, the concept of a vampire, no matter how sparkly, can easily be placed into the category of monstrous.  The vampire is beyond anomalous, only existing in the pages of fiction, and most assuredly combines “characteristics uniquely identified with separate kinds of things.”  For the vampire is neither dead nor alive; it is technically neither god nor evil and it has extraordinary strengths and crippling deficiencies.  And while the topic of vampires may hardly seem like a socially significant issue, one need only look at America’s obsession with perpetual youth and beauty to see the appeal of vampire fiction.                  

The Moral Monster:

Telling one’s own life story has historically been a method for demonstrating selfhood, i.e. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Autobiography of Malcolm X, etc.  While Douglas was neither fictional nor a vampire, his narration of his experience was a very successful tool in eliciting sympathy from his readers.  The atrocities that American slaves suffered were well known in the North as well as the South, but when Douglas narrates his own experience and tells his own story… he becomes the authorizing figure of his story in the minds of his readers.  His readers hear FROM him…. not merely ABOUT him. 

But how can we extend this concept of narration as a form of self definition to fictional vampires?  By tracking the transformation over time of literary vampires from bloodthirsty fiends, such as the Count, to the more “cuddlier and gentler” vampire, such as Edward Cullen, alongside the changing methods of narration used in these vampire novels, we might be able to see the reason for the radical reimagining and redefining of the vampire in literature.  

 The Count

Bram Stoker’s classic novel Dracula, published in 1897, was written as a compilation of various character’s letters, diaries, newspaper clippings, etc.  The contributing characters narrate different sections of the novel.  Ironically, the Count, the antagonist of the novel, is not a contributor to the narrative.  Lucy, Mina’s flirtatious aristocratic friend, pens a few letters to Mina at the beginning of the novel but after she succumbs to the Count’s will and becomes a vampire herself, the reader never hears directly from Lucy again… the reader only hears ABOUT the vampiric Lucy.  Let’s listen as Dr. Seward narrates Lucy’s drastic change, “the sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless, cruelty and the purity to voluptuous wantonness.”  The Count is only heard through the editorializing of the novel’s narrating characters and Lucy is stripped of her narrating ability once she becomes a vampire. Could there be a correlation between a character’s muteness and their being characterizes as monstrous?  Is the Count monstrous to the reader BECAUSE we never hear his voice… his narration of himself?

 Louis of Interview with a Vampire

Martin J. Wood discusses the issue of narration in his chapter New life for an Old Tradition: Anne Rice and Vampire Literature:

When a monster already removed from the reader spatially and psychologically becomes removed narratively as well, becomes a creature accessible only through several layers of narrative filtering, that monster more than ever becomes something outside the reader’s experience.

Rice’s vampires are much more complex than the Count of Stoker’s Dracula. Wood recommends that readers

consider Rice’s vampires not as monsters of the tradition but simply as ‘Strangers,’ people on the outside, outcast, alien, monstrous. The Stranger is not the same as the human readers but is similar to them.

Louis, in Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire, gets to narrate his story, albeit via the filter of the interviewer. Wood advises that we “overcome the alienation, the strangeness, the monstrousness perceived in those who are different from ourselves, finally to locate the true horror not in the other but in the self.”

Bella and the Cullens

Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series reads like a fictional autobiography.  Bella, the primary narrator, tells her own story… describes her own transformation from human to vampire… and continues to narrate, as a trusted source, well after her transformation.  Might speculation regarding the mode of narration in this series provide us with insight regarding why Bella’s vampirism is nothing close to monstrous but rather beautiful, why her transformation appears more like apotheosis than abomination?

Let us take for example Bella’s description of her transformation in the last novel in the Twilight Series, Breaking Dawn. Bella refers to herself a “newborn” with heightened perception, strength and “dizzying beauty”.  She also has the unusual ability to control herself…when newly “born” vampires are known for being particularly irrational and uncontrollable.  Bella even wonders if at any moment she will lose control and “turn into a monster”.  But she doesn’t.  In many ways, her former human existence seems like a mere shadow of her full vampiric form.  Bella has become the heroine of her own story…she has morphed from a clumsy, accident prone, very mortal, girl to a beautiful, powerful, and self-composed woman.  She has narrated her own transformation. Oddly, Bella’s change flips the vampire as monster concept on its head.  Bella, a young beautiful woman fully embraces a vampiric identity… it is not forced upon her, like in the case of Lucy in Dracula.  And in embracing this identity and embodying it in her story… she is not remade in the image of the vampire but rather the image of the vampire gets remade in her. 

Authors as Others

Meyer

Meyer’s series may never be categorized as literature in a canonical sense but she has mesmerized more than merely prepubescent teens with her tales of unlikely heroes and monsters who prove to be more human than human.  Meyer, as well as Rice, and Stoker before them, are striking representations of outsiders in their own right.  Stoker was an Irish transplant in England working in theatre when his novel was written.  Rice was a

Rice

 lapsed Roman Catholic living in San Francisco pining for the haunted Southern landscape of her home, New Orleans, when she wrote Interview with a Vampire.  And Meyer, a modern mother and Mormon, too represents a somewhat “Othered” and demonized community in American religious history. Perhaps these novels are attempts, conscious or not, by the authors to come to terms with the “Other” in themselves?  And perhaps our desire to read and identify with these novels is a way for us, as readers, to come to terms with the “Other” in ourselves?