Hope Of Salvation Research Articles

Medea; Hippolytus; Electra; Helen

In this new translation of the most profound tragedies of Euripides, one of the trio of the supreme Greek tragedians of the fifth century BC, James Morwood brings harshly to life the pressure of the intolerable circumstances under which Euripides places his characters. His dark and cheerless world, one where the gods prove malevolent, importent, or simply absent, reveals men, to use his own words, 'as they are'. His clear-eyed yet sympathetic analysis of characters such as Medea, Hippolytus and Phaedra, and Electra and Clytemnestra - and the supremacy of women is not accidental - is conducted with extraordinary psychological insight through the fearful symmetry of his plot construction. Medea, Hippolytus, and Electra give dramatic articulacy to their creator's howl of protest against the world in which we still live today. His Helen shows him working in a different vein. The themes remain deeply serious; the analysis is still proving and acute. Yet the happy ending, however equivocal, typifies a humour and warmth of spirit that offer, like Shakespeare's last plays, a fragile but genuine hope of redemption. There is a substantial general introduction and select bibliography by Edith Hall, and full explanatory notes accompany the translation.

Sidoine Apollinaire pasteur d'âmes

About 470, Sidonius Apollinaris was elected Bishop of the Arverni. Although his background had prepared him well to take charge of the material welfare of his flocks, there was nothing to indicate that this had equipped him to guide them along the path of God. All the evidence is that he took on his pastoral mission both conscientiously and efficiently. Knowing his own limitations, he confined himself theologically to the "rules of the Catholic faith" and pronounced only on its essentials: his faith in Christ, the hope of Salvation and his confidence in the intercession of the Saints. His first duty, he says, is to ensure the salvation of his flock through prayers, exhortations, preaching and generous forgiveness of sinners. The advice which he gives to the faithful on what they needed to attain the Kingdom of God was realistic and pragmatic. The key words of his message are: discretion, a sense of proportion, humility, and charity.

Governmentality and economic policy in Sub-Saharan Africa

Critical to the articulation and implementation of universally applicable policies for economic development is the question of whether development can be 'taught': of whether it results in essence from a set of policy prescriptions which can be implemented by (or imposed on) any currently underdeveloped Third World society; or whether, on the contrary, it results from characteristics specific to some such societies but missing in others, which in turn confers the hope of salvation on the elect, while at the same time denying it to the damned, who are thereby consigned to irredeemable misery. Raised in acute form by the startling differences in development performance between different regions of the Third World that have become apparent in recent decades, this conundrum is nowhere more relevant than to Sub-Saharan Africa. Of all the regions in the world for which economic data are aggregated by the World Bank, none has had a more disappointing economic performance. In the mid-1950s, as has often been pointed out, a relatively wealthy African state such as Ghana had a GNP per capita equivalent to, and an economic structure not vastly different from, those of South Korea or Malaysia. By the mid-1990s, when South Korea's per capita GNP was 18 times Ghana's, and Malaysia's was seven times, these states had economic structures and levels of human welfare that put them into completely different leagues.' Aggregate comparisons are less spectacular, but scarcely less disturbing. Levels of GNP per capita decline of 0.8% a year for sub-Saharan Africa over the period 1980-1993 compare with annual GNP per capita growth of 6.4% for East Asia and the Pacific, and 3% for South Asia. South Asian GNP per capita, at US$310 in 1993, was appreciably lower than the $520 calculated for those African states for which data were available-a figure which necessarily excluded several states such as Liberia, Somalia, Sudan and Zaire, in which economic and political collapse had prevented any information from being collected. In much of South Asia, however, and notably in its dominant economy, India, there were reasonable grounds for supposing that, with appropriate economic policies, an economic miracle comparable to that of China was possible, and might, indeed, already be under way. The prognostications for Africa were altogether more uncertain. This record has understandably attracted the interest and concern of the global development community. If Africans have failed to 'learn' how to develop, no-one could claim that this was because teachers were not available. A plethora of development experts of one sort or another has bombarded the continent with advice, expertise and aid, most of which has at best had very disappointing

In Hora Mortis: Évolution de la pastorale chrétienne de la mort aux IVe et Ve siècles dans l'Occident latin by Eric Rebillard

In Hora Mortis: Evolution de la pastorale chretienne de la mort aux IV sup e et V sup e SIECLES DANS L'Occident latin. By Eric Rebillard. [Bibliotheque des Ecoles francaises d' Athenes et de Rome, Fascicule 283.] (Rome: Ecole Francaise de Rome. 1994. Pp. xvi, 269.) This book studies the attitudes toward the fear of death and the fear of judgment at the turn of the fifth century. It sets out to document a significant and radical change in the Western Christian attitude toward the fear of death and judgment. A careful reading of this study may not seem obvious within a time when things like death, sin, and penance are rarely addressed in the mainstream of Christian life or conversation. Yet, the process of discovering the rich transformations of another age may well open the way to the positive, forward looking aspects of those themes for present-day Christian life and thought. In any case, this finely crafted book is worth the time and effort. In continuity with their predecessors, preachers such as Zeno of Verona and Ambrose of Milan spoke of death as a good; fear of death was a sign of a bad conscience (p. 19);faith was said to destroy the fear of death (p. 25). In the context of a Stoic philosophy or at a time when there is a need to affirm the value of Christian martyrdom, the view that death is a good to be desired and the fear of death is a sign of guilt may be understandable. However, by the beginning of the fifth century, figures such as Augustine, Peter Chrysologus, and Leo the Great thought of the feat of death as a normal, acceptable human and Christian experience, not a sign of a bad conscience. Rebillard provides a clear, detailed, and valuable analysis of sermons, burial inscriptions, and other related material from that time, thus documenting a changed pastoral approach toward death at the beginning of the fifth century. A significant aspect of his analysis centers on the impact of the Pelagian controversy on this multifaceted aspect of Christian experience. Holding that the fear of death is not a fundamental part of human nature, Augustine used the common fact of fear to say that death is a punishment original sin (pp. 63-65). He thus made a conscious break with the heroic ideal of the mastery of self, the keystone of which was the acceptance of death without fear (p. 119). It was the Pelagian controversy which led Augustine to crystallize some previously held aspects of his thought on the effects of original sin (p. 84). As with other fifth-century writers, his acceptance of the fact that one cannot be without sin allows him to emphasize daily penance and focus, not on fear of death or of judgment, but on the hope of salvation p. 144-145, 165-166). Rebillard's study of the fear of judgment is similar to that of the fear of death, showing how fear came to be a sign of a clear, rather than a bad conscience (pp. 148 and 225) and how penance itself came to be redefined in terms that touched all Christians rather than just the serious sinner (pp. …

Baptism in rural Russia: Village women speak of their children and their way of life

The disintegration of the Soviet Union made possible the collection of oral history testimony from Russian villagers, with the objective of recording firsthand the experiences of the women who participated in (and, indeed, themselves carried through) the demographic transition in Russia. Informants understood christening as an important aspect of child care and took pride in having held to these practices despite the efforts of the Communist Party/State to eradicate institutionalized religion in the Soviet Union. Baptism as the basic ritual of incorporation was common in Russian villages right through the Soviet era. Despite the assaults of the 1930s and beyond that caused the loss of 90 percent of their places of worship and clergy and despite the risks to their own livelihood and safety, peasants contrived to provide their children, through baptism, with protection againts the spiritual and temporal dangers of this life and to offer them the hope of salvation in the next. Women found ways in these communities to maintain social bonds and to defend familial arenas over which they still had some control.

Art of darkness: a poetics of Gothic

This text aims to describe the principles governing Gothic literature. Ranging across five centuries of fiction, drama and verse - including tales as diverse as Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto, Shelley's Frankenstein, Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Freud's Mysteries of Enlightenment, Anne Williams proposes three new premises: that Gothic is poetic, not novelistic, in nature; that there are two parallel Gothic traditions - Male and Female; and that the Gothic and the Romantic represent a single literary tradition. Building on the psychoanalytic and feminist theory of Julia Kristeva, Williams argues that Gothic conventions, such as the haunted castle and the family curse, signify the fall of the patriarchal family; Gothic is therefore poetic in Kristeva's sense because it reveals those others most often identified with the female. Williams identifies distinct Male and Female Gothic traditions. In the Male plot, the protagonist faces a cruel, violent and supernatural world, without hope of salvation. The Female plot, by contrast, asserts the power of the mind to comprehend a world which, though mysterious, is ultimately sensible. By showing how Coleridge and Keats used both Male and Female Gothic, Williams challenges accepted notions about gender and authorship among the Romantics.

THE NATURALNESS OF CREATION AND REDEMPTIVE INTERESTS IN THEOLOGY, SCIENCE, AND TECHNOLOGY

Abstract. This paper advances ways in which the understandings of “nature” and “creation” can be seen to overlap through specialized relations between humans and their environment. The hope of redemption of nature, united with evidences of grace in the advancements of science, can become helpful guides toward a theological interpretation of technology and the emerging character of human relations with nature.

Political Islam

This volume surveys the complex roles Islamic ideologies play in thepolitics of the Muslim world. The authors are distinguished scholars inIslamic history, philosophy, and law as well as specialists in the sociologyand politics of various Muslim countries. Despite their varied disciplinarybackgrounds and the vastness of their subject, the book features aremarkable degree of interconnection and does not sacrifice the analyticalspecificity needed for each essay.The volume's fourteen articles ate grouped into six broad categories:History of Islamic Political Theory and Practice. These essays offer twointerpretive histories of the evolution and cutrent status of Islam's role inthe political sphere. Ira Lapidus argues that Islamic political theory hasbeen governed by two paradigms, each grounded in a separate vision ofthe Islamic "golden age." The first paradigm is the "seamless" Islamicethos, a holistic conception of law, politics, and personal morality thatexisted at M a d i i under the Prophet and his four immediate politicalsuccessots. Even though this period lasted for barely four decades, it continuesto serve as the vision of the Islamic ideal, especially for the recurrentrevivalist movements and thinkes who have based their appealsupon this "first golden age." The second paradigm is chatactenzed by diffemtiatedreligious and secular institutions. Despite attempts by medievaljurists to maintain the theoretical church-state unity, Islamic Societies developedtacit and clearly articulated spheres of religious and secularauthority. This made it possible for the early Islamic empires to absorband then live with non-Islamic traditions and peoples (i.e., Persians andTurks). This "second golden age" is epitomized by the Ottoman Empire,which nxognized Islam as the "official" religion and whose ruler was acceptedas the titular caliph. Nevertheless, the fusion of teligion andpolitics was never complete, as reflected in the emergence of distinctly"religious" institutions parallel to those of the state.Modem Muslim states, Lapidus argues, are proof of the triumph ofthe second over the first paradigm. "Modern states can be seen as anexpression of the historical separation of state and Islam .... All hope ofsalvation has been concentrated in the nonstate realm, in the religio-civilcommunity, and in personal piety" (p. 23). As a result, states are notviewed by their own people, by and large, as the bearers of their religious ...

The death of `Dr. God' `Patient is always right' could ruin health care

In the beginning, there was Dr. God. We brought our bodies to his medical altar with a certain amount of fear, a lot of awe and some hope of salvation. Dr. God told us what to do and we did it, praying all the while that he — almost always he — would save us from experiencing the afterlife before our time. We lost this medical Eden for the same reason we lost the biblical one: knowledge. We came to know what doctors didn9t know. We became more informed and more skeptical. We even learned to get a second opinion. This is not something that you do with God.

"You Will Be like God": Richard Rorty and Mark C. Taylor on the Theological Significance of Human Language Use

Richard Rorty's residual theology can be stated in one sentence: the innovative power of human linguistic behavior, in causal interaction with the environment, is all that is left of God. Rorty believes that the principal engine of cultural and personal change is the occurrence of differences in linguistic behavior and the new vocabularies that are formed when some of these differences get incorporated into current linguistic practices. He thinks that we would be better off if we were to learn to be more selfreliant than our predecessors by depending on the innovative capacity of our own linguistic behavior for improvement of our social and personal lot rather than looking for salvation to come to us from higher powers. This neopragmatist theology has definite links with classical pragmatism. Rorty's account of cultural change through linguistic innovation parallels almost exactly William James's Darwinian reflections on the respective roles of mental innovation and the environment in social evolution. And his judgment that we should pin our hopes for salvation on the transformative power of human language use rather than on higher powers parallels John Dewey's application of the word God to human intelligence, in interaction with the larger environment, rather than to any extrahuman powers.' It is not my intention to defend Rorty's theology. While I am sympathetic to it, I am not at all sure that I agree with it entirely. I want rather to defend his version of neopragmatism, and by extension the classical pragmatism of James and Dewey, against the seemingly plausible charge that they all are forms of humanistic atheism. This charge has been brought

The "Pala Doria" and Andrea Doria's Mortuary Chapel: A Newly Discovered Project by Perino del Vaga

Based on the discovery of a previously unknown drawing by Perino del Vaga, here identified as an idea for an unexecuted altarpiece commissioned by Andrea Doria, the article posits a phase I to the campaign to transform San Matteo, the Doria church in Genoa, into the admiral-prince's funerary chapel. Major work on this church was carried out in the 1540s, when Montorsoli redesigned the crossing and apse - the Pieta with saints and prophets in the choir and Doria's tomb in the crypt date from this campaign - but it now seems possible that Andrea Doria's plans for San Matteo were conceived in the 1530s and that these were entrusted to Perino, his court artist, then still resident in Genoa. Perino's altarpiece design shares a common theme with Montorsoli's more elaborate sculptural program, the triumph over death - an appropriate topos for a mortuary chapel - and, considered in the larger physical context of the church and its furnishings, both articulate Doria's ambition forhis eternal resting place. This ambition was at once the celebration of his earthly fame and his role as Defender of the Church, and the expression of his hope for salvation and eternal life after death.

Die Zwei-Reiche-Lehre bei John Locke

Abstract Expecting the imminent triumph of religious and political absolutism Locke tries, in »A Letter concerning Toleration«, to define the true Christian and the true church. He invites his readers to differentiale between civil goverment and religious communities. A church is a voluntary association, the members of which are hold together by the common hope of salvation. In this association there is no need for power and force, which are necessary in civil government. Pursuing this theme in a subtile way Locke develops the reformatorical doctrine of the two kingdoms.

Beckett and Tillich: Courage and Existence in Waiting for Godot

David McCandless BECKETT AND TILLICH: COURAGE AND EXISTENCE IN WAITING FOR GODOT iL I) eckett's strange achievement in Waitingfor Godot is to provide .13us, exploring the rubble, with the most compelling theatrical image of the courage-to-be."' Thus Herbert Blau implies, whether intentionally or not, a possible kinship between Samuel Beckett and Paul Tillich, author of The Courage to Be and other meditations on modern man's existential plight. Similarly, Lance St. John Butler, undertaking a Heideggerian analysis, quotes Tillich's sermon on waiting in order to support an assertion that the tramps' yearning for an absolute corresponds to Dasein's "comportment toward Being."2 These two allusions to Tillich anticipate my two principal objectives in applying his philosophy to Waitingfor Godot: first of all to clarify the specific nature of the tramps' courage—a courage not always acknowledged by commentators inclined to consider the pair as prisoners of habit and delusion; and second, to offer a reading of the play that goes beyond the seeming futility and insignificance of the tramps' emblematic lives and discloses a possible source of the play's paradoxically uplifting effect in performance . Vladimir and Estragon do not end the play submerged in nothingness . Rather, by finally reconciling themselves to nothingness, they begin to make contact with the infinite and so initiate an authentic search for a new version of God. Tillich undertook precisely the same search and the God that he finds bears a striking resemblance to Beckett's adumbration of ultimate being. I do not offer this resemblance as evidence of direct influence.3 My point is simply that the two men assess notions of being, faith, despair, and salvation from seemingly opposite ends and yet arrive at the same point, generating a new spiritual enlightenment from the abyss of existential anguish. Tillich challenged orthodox belief in an attempt to make Christianity 48 David McCandless49 more responsive to the spiritual crises of an existential age. Thus he asserts that the doctrinal symbols of Christianity are "no longer understood in their original power of expressing the human situation and answering existential human questions."4 He goes so far as to declare the traditional theistic God as dead for him as it was for Nietzsche (CTB, p. 185). Such views disposed him to find more religious insight in modern literature than in modern Protestant teaching. He seems almost to have Beckett in mind when protesting the Christian establishment's vilification ofmodern artists: "They attack as a morbid longing for negativity what in reality is courageous acceptance ofthe negative. They call decay what is actually the creative expression of decay. They reject as meaningless the meaningful attempt to reveal the meaninglessness of our situation" (CTB, p. 140). If Tillich evinces a sympathy for apostate writers, so Beckett, despite his well-known break with his Protestant upbringing, seems to share Tillich's radically Protestant mission of debunking doctrinal symbols and orthodox deities. Estragon's bewildered reaction to Vladimir's casual mention of "our savior," for instance, casts doubt on the validity of this conventional expression. "Our what?" Estragon asks, surveying a scene that offers little evidence or hope ofsalvation. The most gruesome indictment of the traditional deity, however, occurs in Lucky's speech: despite being incapable of passion, speech or movement, He is nevertheless a personal God who loves us dearly—with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell. The God alleged to be personal and loving is actually remote and mysteriously capricious. Those whom He favors are saved. Those whom, for reasons unknown, He does not, are "plunged in torment, plunged in fire." This system ofjustice can only leave man torturously uncertain of his prospects for salvation. This torturous uncertainty is the main theme not merely of Lucky's speech but of the entire play. The deity-figure on whom the tramps depend clearly parallels the "God with white beard" of Lucky's speech. Indeed, at the end of the play, the boy tells a trembling Vladimir that Godot's beard is white. "Christ have mercy on us," Vladimir replies. Godot beats the boy who tends the sheep but spares the boy who tends the goats, a choice that seems every bit...

Plato on Philosophic Character

Plato on Philosophic Character RICHARD PATTERSON IN BOOKIX of the Republic(esp. 58od-58 lc) Socrates gives full and emphatic recognition to the important fact, left implicit in his tripartition of the soul in book IV (435b-44tc), that all three parts or aspects (v.i6vl,435b, c, e, 439e; ~}VVl, 441c, 443d; ~QVl, 44~b, c; cf. 439b, c, d) and not just that labelled "appetitive" (~ ~0vbt~lTtX6v), have desires and pleasures peculiar, even natural, to them. Further, proper enjoyment of learning by the reasoning part, of victory and good repute by the spirited part, of food, drink, and so on by the appetitive part, reinforce the psychic harmony called justice in Book IV, since each part not only has and sticks to its own job, but positively enjoys doing so. Further still, these natural and proper pleasures, including those of the lowliest sector now contribute significantly--as benefits accruing to the just person simply through the presence of justice in his soul, whether or not its presence is known to gods or men--to the victory of the just life over the unjust (e.g., 588a, 589b-c). This amplification of Plato's celebrated tripartite psychology is important also for the explanation of human action--for explaining why philosophers philosophize and soldiers soldier as well as why gourmandizers gourmandize . Desire can now enter explicitly into the explanation: reason desires and delights in learning, straining always to know where the truth lies (581b); spirit seeks, and takes pleasure in, victory, dominance, and good repute (58 la-b); "appetite" or "lower appetite" desires, most conspicuously, food, drink, and the pleasures of Aphrodite (58oe). 1Such developments are philosophically healthy ones, but Plato's upgrading in book IX of the status of at least natural pleasures, especially those of reason, creates a number of interPlato had not made any secret of reason's desires, however: see, e.g., his description (49ob) in highly charged sexual terms of the philosopher's union with true being. Recall also the love of learning and truth requisite for philosophy (475b, 485a). For further references to this theme see below, n. 2. [325] 326 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 25:3 JULY 1987 esting complications about which little or nothing is said in either Book IV or IX. ~ For example, once the reasoning part itself includes rational desire, there would exist at least a theoretical possibility that reason's appetite for truth might lead it astray, tempting it to seek truth in an inefficient or even self-defeating manner. This is not the sort of thing that occurs to the reader of Plato's encomia upon reason as our only rightful ruler, our only hope of salvation in a very imperfect world (549b, 5o5e-5o6a; cf. 463a-b, 52 lb, ff.). Nonetheless I would suggest that the possibility of trouble in paradise is not merely academic, that factors internal to reason (as opposed to corruption, domination, or interference from outside by some other psychic part--the sort of difficulty that/s discussed explicitly and at length in Republic IV and VIII-IX) do sometimes lead reason astray. If this is so, the seeker after truth will require relevant virtues (self-control, courage, and others) within the realm of philosophic activity itself. The Platonic philosopher will need, To stress the existence and importance of rational appetite is hardly original, and I take the fact of desire on the part of ~ ~.oytozt~v as a relatively uncontroversial starting point for this first section. One does sometimes encounter a certain reluctance to bring reason and desire into quite such close conjunction: see the generally magnificent Chapter VII of Dodd's The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), which is concerned to preserve the "perfect unity" of the "transcendent rational self," or W. K. C. Guthrie's "Plato's Views on the Nature of the Soul" (collected, with Dodd's chapter, in Plato H, Gregory Vlastos, ed., [Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1971]), which likewise insists on the purity and simplicity of the Platonic intellect. Most of the key passages for this question will be either cited or quoted as the discussion of philosophic character proceeds...

Race, Presbyterian Missionaries, and American Indians in the Nineteenth Century

Race, writes historian of anthropol ogy George W. Stocking, Jr., was characteristically nineteenth-century phenomenon. Historians generally be lieve that during the century, growing numbers of scientists and ordinary Americans came to accept that certain races were innately inferior, retarded by inherent biological qualities which were unchangeable, or changeable only over long periods of time, and that cul tural manifestations were primarily ra cial. By late in the many Ameri cans ranked races and cultures in a hierarchy which stretched from civi lized whites at the top, to dark skinned peoples at the bottom. Although not typical Americans, men and women of the Board of Foreign Mis sions (BFM) of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (PCUSA) were members of their changing national culture. And from what they wrote about American Indians it might appear that they too had imbibed some of the racism of the age. Like missionaries of other denom inations during the great century of Protestant missions, those of the BFM possessed an all-encompassing vision the Christian civilization. The BFM variant fused evangelical Presbyte rianism with an idealized American way of life, and from this perspective tribal cultures appeared shockingly inferior. Thus, during the six decades of BFM involvement with the Indians (1837-1893), its missionaries relent lessly denounced almost every cultural value and trait of Choctaws, Creeks, Omahas, Nez Perces, and more than a dozen other tribes. The rigidly exclu sive missionaries would accept no syncretism, no expression of Christian truths through Indian forms. They demanded that converts totally reject tribal religions and sex roles, patterns of kinship, economic subsistence, lea dership, and even Indian names and styles of clothing. Resorting to the stock evangelical vocabulary of hea thenism and darkness, they conveyed an almost paradoxical double-image of undisciplined and self-willed Indians, who simultaneously groaned under the tyranny of chiefs, customs, and kin. Such lawless but pitiable wretches had one hope of salvation in the next life and of survival in this, acceptance of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and of the total cultural package of the Christian civilization.

Fiery Speech in a World of Shadows: Rosebud's Impact on Early Audiences

When I first saw Citizen Kane with my college friends in 1941, it was in an America undergoing the powerful pressures of a coming war, full of populist excitement and revolutionary foreboding. But cynical Depression kids that we were, we had little hope for salvation through armed uprising. Nor did we believe any longer in America's self-proclaimed values. Nevertheless, those values were still part of us, and it was America's blind self-destruction that we instinctively recognized in the shattering experience of watching a little wooden sled go up in flames. From the moment the huge lips opened and said Rosebud, to the sled's final immolation in the furnace of our desires, we were both thrilled and terror-stricken. It was the flaming consummation of sex and politics that we had been looking for in movie theatres all our young lives. We somehow knew that we had experienced our own flaming love-death and that it had taken place in the tragic heart of our country. Welles and Mankiewicz had revealed, in two short hours of perception, how energetically Miss America had been raped of her dream, of her promise, of her rose; and then how she had dutifully prostituted us, her own bastard children. We no longer had a place we could call home. Pessimistically, and yet with the hope of finding some sort of transcendence through great eschatological events, we let

Virtue Triumphant in Cueva's La libertad de España por Bernardo del Carpio

Juan de la Cueva's fourth play, Comedia de la libertad de España por Bernardo del Carpio , produced in Seville in 1579, holds special fascination for serious inquirers into early Spanish literature, and particularly for those drawn to the development of the Spanish national theater. This play dramatized the story of the Spanish medieval hero Bernardo del Carpio, and his defeat of the French at the battle of Roncesvalles. A closer study of the play reveals that Cueva did more than present history on the stage. The play is an affirmation of patriotic zeal, moral virtue, and religious precepts. Cueva uses the struggle of Bernardo as a means of urging his audience to consider questions of morality and of religion. As a moralist, the dramatist presents the example of two kings — Alonso of Spain and Carlo Mano of France — whose intemperate character should not be emulated. For Cueva, Bernardo's reasoned approach to solving personal and national problems represents the golden mean. At the heart of the lesson in morality lies a subtle message that is religious in nature. The themes of sin and salvation are woven throughout the drama and give the play a distinctly religious foundation. The errors in judgment made by Alonso and by Carlo Mano are reversed at the end of the comedia when Bernardo is crowned with laurel by Marte, god of war. Through the appearance of a divine figure, Cueva reassures his audience that evil will not win and that there is hope for salvation.

“One Endless Round”: Something Happened and The Purgatorial Novel

“ O N E E N D L E S S R O U N D ” : S O M E T H I N G H A P P E N E D A N D T H E P U R G A T O R I A L N O V E L PATRICIA MERIVALE University of British Columbia W h i,e Joseph Heller’s first novel, Catch-22, is by general agreement one of the most attractive good books of the twentieth century, surely his second novel, Something Happened (1974), must, to go by the scathingly negative reviews and the lack of subsequent critical or public response, be one of the least attractive. In sharp contradistinction to Catch-22, it has usually been judged as a long, repetitive, and tediously unsuccessful satire on American corporate life, city and suburban, or at best merely another example of the male menopause novels of the sixties and especially the seventies, to which every American novelist over forty has by now made a contribution. I cannot defend Something Happened from charges of length, repetitive­ ness, and tediousness, but I can at least suggest a purposiveness and intel­ lectual integrity in the book if it is seen not as an ineffectual satire (if it is chiefly satiric, as many critics supposed, they were quite right in finding it ineffectively so), but as a purgatorial novel, one whose proper literary associations are with the purgatorial fictions of Albert Camus, William Golding, and some nineteenth-century Russian authors (especially Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin)1 rather than with the middle-aged identity quests of Bellow, Updike, Roth, Cheever, Percy, John Fowles, and even of Heller himself, in his two more recent novels, Good as Gold and Good God! . . . [Go] sit and bite your nails in Aquitaine. In the small circle of pain within the skull You still shall tramp and tread one endless round Of thought, to justify your action to yourselves, Weaving a fiction which unravels as you weave, Pacing forever in the hell of make-believe Which never is belief. ... T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral2 These lines provide an appropriate epigraph for all those nineteenth and twentieth-century fictions (by Yeats, Beckett, Conrad, Strindberg, Eliot himself), whose place of action is some purgatorial landscape, whose time is a past, present, and future all at once, a time-out-of-time, whose characters E n g l is h S tu d ie s in C a n a d a , x i, 4, December 1985 are in one way or another the living dead, and whose theme is a neverending recollection and confession of guilt. The purgatories of Heller and of his nearest analogues, the Camus of La Chute (which Heller has read)3 and the William Golding of Free Fall and Pincher Martin (which it seems safe to assume he has read), are more like Yeats’s4 or Beckett’s5than like Dante’s, for they all lack the hope of redemption. But insofar as each author echoes Dante, it is the Dante of the Inferno rather than of the Purgatorio. Golding epitomizes the theological imprecision of the modern usage of “purgatory” and “hell” by saying “ ‘Just to be Pincher [Martin] is purgatory; to be Pincher for eternity is hell.’ ”6 “Just to be Pincher” is enough to stretch the novel form to its limits. The narrative structure in Something Happened, La Chute, and Pincher Martin (both 1956) and Free Fall (1959) is basically that of the confes­ sional. It is obliquely Dantean: “I was such and such a person, and I did thus and so; that is why I am here.” But Dostoevsky in Notes from the Underground provides a model for expanding the Dantean anecdote to novel length. For the most part other persons and “actual” events exist only in the narrator’s confessional retrospect; the narrator chiefly exists in the timeless world of reminiscence, “tread[ing] one endless round” to recollect, make a pattern of, and “justify” his actions to himself. And to justify them, also, to some ambiguously fictional auditor, “hypocrite lecteur, mon sem­ blable, mon frère” ; “you,” fellow-lawyer of La Chute; “you,” the reader in...

In Search of a Truly Interdisciplinary Semantics. A Sermon on Hopes of Salvation from Hereditary Sins

In Search of a Truly Interdisciplinary Semantics. A Sermon on Hopes of Salvation from Hereditary Sins

From Messianism to Materialism: The Later Aesthetics of Walter Benjamin

Despite its pronounced esotericism and manifestly recondite character, Benjamin's early literary criticism is consistent, at times single-minded, in the pursuit of its program. At issue is the character of human such that it takes on the appearance of natural history, a history that is consigned to an inexorable, rigid fate of decay and decline. subjective corollary of this fate is an inescapable network of guilt, a guilt which originates with man's expulsion from Paradise, which is redoubled with each subsequent transgression, and which serves as a ceaseless testimony to the seemingly infinite distance that separates historical man, man in the here and now, from the state of grace represented by the Messianic era. Benjamin takes his stand, initially, in the midst of profane life. And from his lowly station in the fallen historical world he sifts through the ruins of by-gone ages for traces of redeemed life. He does this in the hope that, if these traces can be renewed for the present upon entering into contact with the re-vitalizing powers of theological insight possessed by the critic, the link between the Messianic era, the key to which is mysteriously inscribed in man's past, and the present era, however godforsaken it may appear, can be, if not guaranteed, at least prevented from fading into oblivion: The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.' Thus, the paradox, the magic, the labor of Sisyphus of Benjamin's early aesthetics consisted in the effort to conjure traces and images of 'Messianic time,' which represent possible links to the sphere of redeemed life, in the midst of an iniquitous historical era that could only seem emphatically removed from all hope of salvation. In contrast, the aesthetic concerns of the later Benjamin are hardly so