Heat!

Thank goodness the current heat wave hasn't brought humidity with it. The next few days will apparently be hotter, though, and more humid! A predicted low of 82 F tonight, and triple-digit sizzle tomorrow!

(This fountain's on Seventh Ave. between 55th and 54th St.)

Me and Mamie O'Rourke

I serenaded my late grandmother on Grand Army Plaza today!

As part of British artist Luke Jerram's wonderful Play Me I'm Yours project, dozens of old pianos have been set up in public areas around the City - painted by artists, as artists painted fiberglass cows in the Moo York campaign - for anyone who's moved to play. A rickety old spinnet, painted like a map (a 4-lane road is painted along its top), sits just behind the arch at Grand Army Plaza, for anyone with nerve enough to play. As I passed by, after a Fourth of July picnic in Prospect Park, a lone jazz pianist was playing, so I hung around and had a go. I mean, how often do you get to tickle the ivories en plein air, as cars zoom by on either side? After a shambling version of "Wien, Wien, nur du allein," which I once played for some Japanese middle school girls learning etiquette in a Tokyo ballroom, I made my way to "Sidewalks of New York" - a piece the jazz pianist didn't know (he plays old school jazz, he told me, but doesn't know all the old tunes). It's a song I associate with my paternal grandmother, who played piano and loved New York (though I guess I'm not sure why I think that she loved that particular song), and it felt lovely to give it to the city (well, Brooklyn, but she lived here too for a time), remembering her.

Boys and girls together, Me and Mamie O'Rourke,
Tripped the light fantastic, On the sidewalks of New York.

Cuppa

I'm not following the World Cup, but enough people I care about do for me to know what's going on. I guess Germany mopped the floor with Argentina today! This will make my friend B happy. While not German, she was in Germany during the last World Cup, at the tender age of two. (Just don't ask about the goblins.)

Dreamworlds

Sometimes things line up in interesting ways that make a crazily wide-ranging project like mine seem worthwhile after all. In trying to write about Calvin, I learned (from Susan Schreiner) that he misattributes a quotation in the Institutes of the Christian Religion:

All must immediately perish, as Job declares, “Shall mortal man be more just than God? shall a man be more pure than his Maker? Behold, he put no trust in his servants; and his angels he charged with folly: How much less in them that dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust, which are crushed before the moth? They are destroyed from morning to evening,” (Job 4:17-20). (III.12.1)

These aren't Job's words, but Eliphaz', and recounting something heard from a figure in a dream. (At left, Blake's depiction of the scene.) This seems a curious mistake for as close a reader of the Bible as Calvin to make.

But maybe it wasn't exactly a mistake.

20th-century scholar N. H. Tur-Sinai argued, on the basis of later references in the Book of Job, that the dream at issue was not Eliphaz' but Job's. 4:12-20 may really belong at the end of chapter 3, but at some point in the text's transmission got moved. The Jewish Study Bible considers the argument convincing enough to recommend this correction. If the dream was not Eliphaz' but Job's, then its upshot is not accusation but defense - not that Job should shut up since even the heavenly beings are impure, but that even the heavenly beings need divine mercy so why ride a mere mortal so hard?

This might make sense in historical critical terms, but can it shed any light on premodern interpretation? Premodern interpreters didn't - couldn't - imagine the Bible has a history, and that its text might be marred by corruptions. But it turns out that Tur-Sinai's view has antecedents. Four Jewish liturgical poems, dating from the 6th to the 12th centuries CE, invoke the passage in question. But these are poems for the New Year and the Day of Atonement, during which it is forbidden to cite verses about judgment. Instead, each seems to use these words to plead for divine mercy. Here's part of Adon beshoftakh, composed by Elijah bar Shemaya at Bari in Italy c. 1160 CE and recited in penitential services held before sunrise on the night before the New Year:

Lord, when You judge man, the worm,
in your wrath remember [Your] grace and [Your] mercy.
As You hold trial to adjudge the guilty,
clear the erring and the foolish, holding them innocent.
Be kindly and good to the culpable;
do not draw out the quarrel to its fullest.
[A people] poor indeed and empty of ability
our calling to You to reveal Yourself to them.
Here we are before you, [confessing our] vast guilt
too ashamed to open our mouths and ask mercy.
For can man come out justified from [before] God?
Can he be reckoned pure before his Maker?

qtd. in Mayer I. Gruber, “Tur-Sinai’s Job in the Jewish Liturgy,”
Review of Rabbinic Judaism 6/1 (2003): 87-100, 96

Mayer I. Gruber, who discusses these poems in connection with Tur-Sinai's thesis, suggests that the later liturgical poets may have followed the examples of the earlier ones here: "For many Jews from a traditional upbringing, the meaning of the biblical text is the one it has acquired in Rabbinic midrash rather than the original meaning, which would be of interest to a Bible critic. Similarly, I imagine, for Elijah bar Shemaya the meaning of the dream vision, at least in the context of writing and reading liturgical poetry, was the meaning that had been given to that vision by his predecessors in the art of synagogue poetry." As for the earliest? He might have been "an original and brilliant biblical exegete"; or perhaps there were various recensions of Job floating around for a while - we know this to have been the case for some other scriptural texts. (Op. cit., 98) If 4:12-20 originally did come at the end of chapter 3, there must have been multiple versions as the text was altered, at least for a brief time. In any case, the liturgical poems suggest the existence of a centuries-long alternative understanding.

Can this explain Calvin? Perhaps. Though I'm not the person to do it (heaven forfend!), someone might find that rabbinic awareness of the possibility of reading 4:12-20 as Job's rather than Eliphaz' vision found its way into something Calvin read, perhaps the Postilla of Nicholas of Lyra, which apparently included Jewish interpretive traditions... Of course, for Calvin putting these words in Job's mouth rather than Eliphaz' doesn't make them any the less a leveling condemnation of human beings. On the other hand, we too quickly assume that Calvin's all about judgment, when he's also (but you have to go through the condemnation step to get here) about mercy.

Trobyll and aduersyte

Another little tidbit of exotic orthography for you, from what was perhaps the most popular play in 15th century England, "Mankind." The last lines are Job's words at 1:21. The earlier reference to iron (ern) rather than gold is a deliberate change from Job 23:10, to make his example less distant. Source: Lawrence L. Besserman, The Legend of Job in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1979), 110-111

A dream

It isn't often that one gets to say "That may have been the most beautiful thing I've ever seen" with tears in one's eyes, but I had the opportunity tonight, after American Ballet Theater's performance of Frederick Ashton's 1964 "A Dream," to Mendelssohn's incidental music to "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Everything about it is exquisite. I got tickets for this cast - Gillian Murphy, David Hallberg, and Herman Cornejo as Titania, Oberon and Puck, respectively - because of a glowing review in the Times three weeks, and am so glad I did. Magic, pathos, humor, love, all with such beauty!

(It's available on DVD in a 2004 production, though not on Netflix.)

(The Times' Alastair MaCauley found it "the highlight of the season"!)

Jobgloss

How did medievals read the Book of Job? Through authoritative commentaries. In the 12th century this was made visible in the "Glossa Ordinaria." You can't read even a sentence without help. Below Job 3 from a late edition, explaining why Job's cursing the day of his birth can not be read literally.
Oxford Bodleian Library MS Laud Lat. 9, fols. 14v-15r (Proverbs); in Lesley Smith, The "Glossa Ordinaria": The Making of a Medieval Bible Commentary (Leiden & Boston, Brill, 2009). Job 1 and 3 from a Biblia Latina cum Glossa Ordinaria (1480/1481 Editio Princeps of Adolph Rusch of Strassburg; facsimile Brepols: Turnhout, 1992)

Gadzukes

When doing IB Economics I remember learning about the East Coast zucchini wars: everyone's gardens produce so many that people were desperate to get rid of them, sometimes leaving enormous piles of unwanted harvest on each other's doorsteps in the dead of night. The rare case where demand is in fact negative! Surely this was an urban (indeed suburban!) legend, I thought: nothing grows that fast! Well, behold what the zucchini plants in the half-bed I'm using at the community garden have got up to in a mere two weeks! (Notice the first squash blossom at lower right, cracking a Little Shop of Horrors grin.)

That sinking feeling

I'm struggling with Calvin. What do you do with a statement like this?

Like as God’s goodness is endless and a bottomless pit: so also are his wisdom and righteousness, and the same is to be said of his power.

Sermons on Job, Sermon 110 (on Job 30:11-21) - 1574 ed., page 514a

Dictation time!

Something is different about this blog post. I'm not writing it. Rather, I am talking into a microphone! Friends have told me about dictation software before but this is my first experience with it… it's amazing! You have to read a certain text into it for a few minutes for it to recognize the way you speak and then you're good to go - even if you talk really fast like I do! (Indeed, it does best when you just rattle on; it knows how to pick out sentence structure, and can generally distinguish homonyms from each other this way. The transcription comes out not word by word but string of words by string of words.)

I ordered it to help me with the book, needless to say. Anything which can get the words out of the ether and on to the page is a welcome friend. I'm not sure it will help me write the damn thing, but it's already been an enormous help in note-taking. For instance, imagine my delight in discovering that I could dictate even from that 1574 translation of Calvin's sermons on Job! (I tried to modernize as I read, but a few times I forgot and it did it for me: the dictator has [I said "hath"] cause to rejoice.)

So far there have been only a few words and names it simply could not recognize. Some are archaic, like “mislike" for “dislike”; others which I would have thought were archaic, such as "behooves,” it recognizes (in a sentence: for the software to work, it behooves you to speak quickly)! As for names, Job often becomes just Joe. Eliphaz for some reason is in the database, but build that, so far, and Ellie who are not. (Got that?) Other Bible names as well as Aristotle, Maimonides, and Aquinas are in there, but the first few times I mentioned Calvin the dictation software heard Taliban! The software stumbles over "hiddenness"; sometimes it writes “hit or miss" and others "hipness"! Meanwhile the noun form of the allegorical usually comes out as Bill Clinton's vice president. And "wholly obey" came out as - "totally okay"!?! It's too wise by half!

But I'm not complaining, not really. It's possible to read things allowed without really processing what you're saying, so having to go over it one more time to make sure that everything has come out right taxi helps me digest it. (You'll have guessed that I didn't mean allowed in that sense and wasn't, actually, hailing a taxi…) I generally do pretty well in dictating, perhaps because of experience teaching English. (I also read aloud quite often, both in classes and for my own edification.) But I do occasionally mumble… maybe this will help me with that too!

[Just for the fun of it I'll try reading the text from a few days ago: So then, when soever God gives us the knowledge of his word, let us learn to receive it with such reverence, as a (our) receiving of it may not be to deface good things, nor to set the (a) color upon evil things, as oftentimes those of the most sharp wit (that be most sharpwitted) and cunning, do overshoot themselves, and abuse the knowledge that God has given them, under deceit and knocking us, turning all things topsy-turvy, in such wise as they do nothing but snarl themselves. Considering therefore how all men are given to such infirmity: it stands us so much the more on hand, to pray God give us the grace to apply his word to such use as he has ordained it: that is to it (wit), to pureness and simplicity. And thus you see what we ought to consider in effect. But now that we understand what is in this book: we must lay forth these matters more at length, in such sort as the things that we have but lightly touched, maybe (may be) laid forth at large according to the process of the history. – not bad, not bad at all!!]

Surfaces and depths

At the Henri Cartier-Bresson show at MoMA (which closes this weekend), I was blown away again by this picture, shot in Sevilla in 1933. At once so three-dimensional - as if a world had broken through the surface of the paper - and also so like a collage, each boy on a different scale and as if cut from another context. There are lots of unfamiliar photos, too, like this one (from Dessau in 1945), to which there can be no words.

Turkey redux

Remember how round about this time last year I was in Turkey, and how a bit later I found I'd accidentally deleted most of my pictures? Well, I just found a lot of the pictures I thought I'd deleted!

topfieturuie

How's your sixteenth century English orthography? This is from a facsimile of the 1574 English version of Calvin's sermons on the Book of Job. With u for v, f for s, y for i - it's topsy-turvy indeed!

Unexpected fruit

More out of a sense of duty than hope, I put some tomato plants in a pot on my fire escape. No sun ever comes into my room, so I was sure not much would happen. Think again! Turns out sun does hit the fire escape for a short burst from the left just before sunset, and that seems to have been enough to bring a fruit, and now to make it (and me) blush!

Scene from the life of a religious studies professor

STUDENT WORKER
(a writing major)

Mark, you work in non-fiction, right?


MARK

That's a ticklish question...

(and not just because he's spent the day
thinking about Aquinas' theory of analogy)

Beauty of air travel

A thing of beauty (and carbon emissions) by digital artist Aaron Koblin. See how those red-eyes from the west coast bring the day to the east! (Watch in higher def, perhaps for more carbon emission, here.)

Diet of Worms

Did you know that Job was afflicted by worms? See and believe! (Or read about it in the "Testament of Job" and Septuagint.) Even more impressive in full color, with gilt backgrounds! (But the page below, from the end of Revelations, is the only one of which I have a color picture.)
But don't suppose you can understand any of these images on its own. In a "Bible Moralisée" like this, each Old Testament scene is paired with a New Testament scene which it prefigures. (Just don't ask me which scene goes with which, though I'd sorely like to know - if you can figure it out, I'd be happy to learn!) This is from a version dating perhaps to the early 1220s, and resides in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna. Sometimes "Bible Moralisée" pairings are horizontal, but usually, as here, they are vertical. From the same page:









Vienna 1179, folio 147r and 246r (color), in John Lowden, The Making of the “Bibles Moralisées” (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), vol. 1.

Dusky skyline

Garlic scapes!

Just say no

As I settle into this Job project, I go from panic (Maimonides in two thousand words? An impossibility, a travesty!) to relief (Maimonides in two thousand words? A possibility!) - and back and forth a few more times. My word limit permits me to resist the temptation to be superscholarly, every paragraph suspended above stalactite caverns of references. Meanwhile the need to be telling a story from one miniature to another is crystallizing something of its own - a recurrent set of questions which, I realize more with each section, are my own. The central interpretive angle in my book proposal was that Job offers a fascinating context for thinking about books and arguments: it wants to be a book (Oh that my words were now written, oh that they were printed in a book! - 19:23 [KJV]) but resists readers' efforts to make it one. But a second theme is emerging: the significance of Job's friends. I suppose I knew that was part of it too - the picture I'm hoping will appear on the cover is of the friends, after all. But I didn't think it would lead me to new interpretive discoveries...

Like this one, which looks like it will have to be part of the two thousand words on Maimonides! Maimonides' interpretation of the Book of Job in The Guide of the Perplexed is part of an extended discussion of divine providence, and the views on providence expressed by Job and his friends are explicitly linked to ancient discussions:

The opinion attributed to Job is in keeping with the opinion of Aristotle; the opinion of Eliphaz is in keeping with the opinion of our Law; the opinion of Bildad is in keeping with the doctrine of the Mu‘tazila; the opinion of Zophar is in keeping with the doctrine of the Ash‘ariyya. These were the ancient opinions concerning providence. (III.23; 494)

The Mu‘tazilites and Ash‘arites are Islamic sects, discussed, along with Aristotle, "our Law" and Epicurus, a few sections before, where we're told that there are only five possible opinions on providence, all of them ancient (III.17; 464). So the "parable" which is the Book of Job (III.22; 486) tells us that all human efforts to conceptualize providence are inadequate, silenced by the theophany - which makes its point by not being about what we take providence to be! [I]n the prophetic revelation which came to Job and through which his error in everything that he had imagined became clear to him, there is no going beyond the description of natural matters. (III.23; 496) The conclusion is clear:

[O]ur intellects do not reach the point of apprehending how these natural things that exist in the world of generation and corruption are produced in time and of conceiving how the existence of the natural force within them has originated them. They are not things that resemble what we make. How then can we wish that His governance of, and providence for, them, may He be exalted, should resemble our governance of, and providence for, the things we do govern and provide for? ... [T]he notion of His providence is not the same as the notion of our providence; nor is the notion of His governance of the things created by Him the same as the notion of our governance of that which we govern. The two notions are not comprised in one definition, contrary to what is thought by all those who are confused, and there is nothing in common between the two except the name alone. (III.23; 496)

So far so good; this I knew was part of the story before. It's entirely in keeping with Maimonides' negative theology: the description of God, may He be cherished and exalted, by means of negations is the correct description (I.58; 134).

But what I've recently noticed comes from my interest in the friends. Maimonides says that in some parables every word matters, while in others the meaning is only in the whole, and once you've found it the rest should be left aside (Introduction; 12). Job is of the second kind, and Maimonides claims to have told us all it is there to say, nothing being left aside except such matters as figure there because of the arrangement of the discourse and the continuation of the parables (III.23; 497). That line appears where an account of Job's restoration would appear - evidently not important to the message of the parable!

But Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar and Elihu get lots of attention - more than in modern readings, which tend to assume they're hypocritical windbags and all saying the same thing. Indeed, Maimonides acknowledges that to the untrained eye they do all seem to be saying the same thing: If you consider the discourse of the five [E, B, Z, E and Job] in the course of their conversation, you may almost think that whatever one of them says is said also by all the others, so that the same notions are repeated and overlap. (III.23; 491) But the discerning eye sees farther. The differences matter.

Letting the friends represent the gamut of philosophical views of providence, all transcended by the prophetic vision of the theophany, fits Maimonides' larger project. But the apparent overlap of their views matters, too. To see this, you need to go back to the descriptions of the ancient opinions, which are presented not as distinct views but each (except the Epicurean denial of all providence, which forces the conversation) as an attempt to avoid the problems of another. While each was then pushed into "incongruities and contradictions" of its own, it is primarily concerned to avoid an error.

To my mind no one among the partisans of these three opinions concerning providence should be blamed, for every one of them was impelled by strong necessity to say what he did. Aristotle followed what is manifest in the nature of that which exists. The Ash‘ariyya tried to avoid having to ascribe to Him, may He be exalted, ignorance with regard to anything … The Mu‘tazila also tried to avoid having to ascribe to Him, may He be exalted, injustice and wrongdoing.” (III.17, 468)

Why does this matter? Well, it explains why the disputation between Job and his friends is important to the Book of Job - why we need the friends. And more fundamentally (since we're no longer interested in Aristotelian vs. Ash'ariyya, etc.) why a debate, often spilling over into anger and recrimination, could matters. It's not in its affirmations but in its negations that debate takes us closer to an understanding of God (well, farther from misapprehensions). To say that God's providence is unlike ours in every way but the word takes you nowhere, and may unattended lead you to fall back into thinking in human terms. To avoid these dangers, study natural philosophy and read Job's exchanges with his friends - making sure to understand what drives them - and you'll understand anew what Maimonides described in the closest thing to a discussion of providence in the negative theology section of the Guide:

we say of Him … that He is powerful and knowing and willing. The intention in ascribing these attributes to Him is to signify that He is neither powerless nor ignorant nor inattentive nor negligent. (I.58, 146)

I haven't seen other interpreters link Maimonides' reading of Job with his negative theology. It's only because of my dogged commitment to his friends that I've seen that one might. It makes good sense that an apophatic theology might be as interested in the sparring of human debate as in the silencing of the human by the prophetic - and find the Book of Job a compelling way of showing this.

Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago, 1963)

Images from a 1347 Hebrew translation of the Guide from Catalunya, now in Copenhagen