Judaeo-Christian Tradition Research Articles

The Paradoxical Fall: Eternal Recurrence in D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow

TH E P A R A D O X I C A L F A L L : E T E R N A L R E C U R R E N C E I N D . H . L A W R E N C E ' S THE R A I N B O W EVELYN J. HINZ University of Manitoba Explaining the "essential theme" of his investigation, in his Preface to Cosmos and History, Mircea Eliade observed: "The chief difference between the man of the archaic and traditional societies and the man of modern societies with their strong imprint of Judaeo-Christianity lies in the fact that the former feels himself indissolubly connected with the Cosmos and the cosmic rhythms, whereas the latter insists that he is connected only with H istory."1 No literary work, perhaps, evidences so identical a theme as D.H. Lawrence's The Rain­ bow ; for not only does Lawrence contrast the cosmic orientation of man in the past with the historical orientation of modern man - as many modern writers tend to do - but he also directly associates the origins of historical thinking with the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Furthermore, just as archaic man, according to Eliade, regarded a sense of history as symptomatic of his fallen condition - as evidence of his limited point of view rather than as an irreversible curse which would thus be visited upon his descendants - so Lawrence explores the origin and nature of man's fall into history within a context which demonstrates eternal recurrence. The theme of The Rainbow is the Fall from a cosmic to an historical or egocentric point of view and correlatively from a cyclic to a linear and sequential concept of time; but in demonstrating that the historical and egocentric perspec­ tives are limited or fallen ones, Lawrence dramatizes that the cosmic and cyclic is the reality. Thus the Fall as Lawrence presents it is not the unique historical occurrence recorded in the Bible; rather the Judaeo-Christian tradition becomes for him the characterizing feature of the fallen world and the force responsible for its historical and ego-oriented character. The Fall he evokes as the prototype for The Rainbow is the mythic paradigm behind the Judaeo-Christian redac­ tion, just as the controlling symbol in the work is not the biblical rainbow, but the old natural mythological emblem. It is at the beginning of The Rainbow that Lawrence announces this paradoxi­ cal Fall as his theme, but the opening of the novel has been rendered problematic as a result of critical dissension over Lawrence's attitude toward the Brangwen men and women. Hence it will be best to return to the beginning after discover­ ing how Lawrence formulates his governing rationale in other episodes. The English Studies in Canada, iii, 4, Winter 1977 467 "Flood" chapter which appears in the middle of the work and which, as the title of the novel suggests, is thematically central as well, serves perfectly, especially since for some curious reason it is rarely analyzed. Very drunk, so drunk that he cannot walk "straight," Tom Brangwen leaves the "Angel" inn at eleven o'clock one night. Facing a rainstorm, he takes consolation in the fact that the situation is not new to him: " 'Oh, well,' he said cheerfully, 'it's rained on me before.' " 2 But in addition to personal experience, Brangwen also recognizes a precedent for this deluge, ironically, given the moral of the event, the biblical story of the flood: " 'There'll be no volcanoes after this. Hey, Jack, my beautiful slender feller, which of us is Noah? It seems as though the water works is bursted. Ducks and ayquatic fowl'll be king o' the castle at this rate - dove an' olive branch and all'" (p 241). Later, on the road home, the relentlessness of the storm provokes him to comment on the futility of his efforts to improve things: " 'It was a lot of use putting those ten loads of cinders on th' road. They'll be washed to kingdom-come if it doesn't alter'" (p 242). Again, however, he finds consolation. First, in the fact that he has a son who has succeeded...

The Transformed Vision: Earle Birney’s “David”

THE TR A N SFO R M E D VI S I ON: E ARLE B I R N E Y ' S " D A V I D " ZAILIG POLLOCK and RAYMOND E. JONES University of Alberta D a v id " is one of Earle Birney's most popular and most critically acclaimed works. However, critics of "David" have been better at dealing with isolated aspects of the poem, for example, its rhythm, narrative structure, or diction, than at demonstrating its underlying unity. In other words, no one has shown that "David" is a successful work of art. We believe that, on the whole, "David" does succeed as a work of art, precisely because of its unity. Through its unity of point of view, dramatic structure, and, especially, imagery, "David" expresses a central theme in a clear and powerful manner. "David" is a poem of initiation. That is, the central episode, Bob's decision to kill David, marks the end of one stage of Bob's life and the beginning of another. The importance of this episode is that, although Bob is fulfilling David's wishes, the decision is his own. Up to this point all decisions have been made by David; Bob's role is a passive one, to admire and to accept. In effect, David's relation­ ship to Bob is that of a teacher to a pupil. This relationship cannot last, however, for the great lesson which David has to teach Bob is the lesson of responsibility, and once Bob learns this lesson it is no longer possible for him to depend on someone else to take on responsibility for him. In other words, David's teaching succeeds only when Bob takes on responsibility for himself, and thus frees himself from dependence on his teacher. In the central episode, then, Bob demonstrates, in the most striking way possible, that he has indeed learned the lesson of responsibility. He kills his teacher.1 Bob's initiation into responsibility involves an initiation into guilt as well. The relationship between guilt and responsibility is one of the central facts of human experience. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, this relationship is ex­ pressed through the story of the Fall; in the classical tradition through the stories of Prometheus and Oedipus (at least in Freud's version). By making Bob's first responsible act a source of guilt, Birney makes the same point as is made in all these stories: moral responsibility, which distinguishes a mature man from an immature child, inevitably brings with it a burden of guilt. Bob's painful initiation, which transforms his immaturity into maturity, his innocence into experience, inevitably transforms his vision of the world around him. This transformation affects every aspect of the world of "David," since English Studies in Canada,iii, 2, Summer 1977 224 this world is seen entirely through Bob's eyes. In the passage following the climactic episode, the transformation in Bob's vision is obvious: everything he sees is a direct reflection of his new sense of responsibility and guilt. In the passages leading up to this episode there is a more complex vision at work, a double vision. On the one hand, we see things through the eyes of an innocent who does not foresee the experience which will put an end to his youth and its illusions. On the other hand, we are aware of an underlying irony, for the narrator who is recreating his innocent self is, of course, no longer innocent. Having been initiated, he no longer sees the events he is describing as he did when he was living through them. This double vision is expressed through a series of ironic foreshadowings of David's death, ironic because the innocent Bob, whose story is unfolding, is unaware of their significance, but the experi­ enced Bob, who is narrating the story, is aware, as is the reader who has read the poem before and knows its ending. One of the most effective ways in which Birney presents the transformation of Bob's vision as a result of his initiation is through imagery of sun and water (water in all its forms: lakes, waterfalls, glaciers, snow, mist, clouds, and...

The Fiscal Limits of the Warfare-Welfare State: Defense and Welfare Spending in the United States Since 1900

TT IS widely believed among scholars that defense spending in A-merica is excessively high and has gained an undue influence in setting national priorities which adversely affect our welfare programs. Some writers maintain defense expenditures are excessive because our defense effort has required a reduction in more desirable social welfare programs.' Others argue that in recent years our military system has become economically non-productive and causes stagnation and therefore rising welfare costs in the civilian sector.2 Still others believe that excessive and wasteful defense expenditures are deliberately planned and necessary for a capitalist system to survive.3 Finally, a substantial number of analysts simply believe that the fear of an external threat upon which defense budgets are based is grossly exaggerated, and, conversely, that welfare needs have been underestimated. Both our pacifistic and Judaeo-Christian t-raditions support this position. Those who argue for these propositions usually do so on the basis of a single and quite broad definition of defense spending and a fairly narrow definition of welfare spending. Moreover, the basis of funding is almost always limited to the federal budget. This method, of course, includes virtually all defense-related expenditures, but excludes much of the thrust of state and local welfare-related programs which have been rising almost as fast as federal outlays. These studies also focus on recent years and do not examine long-term trends in either defense or welfare spending. This essay will attempt to expand the number of working definitions of both defense and welfare spending, and compare the spending patterns derived by those different methods since these data first became available. In addition, a method of measurement common to both welfare and defense spending will be developed for purposes of better comparison. It is hoped that, by using a variety of definitions and methods of measurement and a more extensive longitudinal focus, the reader may gain a much more comprehensive picture of the interrelationship between defense spending and welfare spending in the United States and thereby be better able to determine whether either or both are excessive. Finally, I shall argue that our rapidly rising social welfare expenditure trends are far more unsettling than our shrinking defense commitments.

Jain and Judaeo-Christian Respect for Life

A comparison of Jain with biblical ethics suggests that the latter subordinates the sanctity of life to the sovereignty of God. But if God may ethically destroy innocent human life, the ethical question in the Judaeo-Christian tradition can only be, Who speaks for God? American democracy's latter-day, secular version of that question is answered: the majority. But now, in the abortion controversy, a large minority rejects a significant majority decision; and as a result, faith in the moral reliability of majority rule itself is weakened. That faith may be rebuilt but perhaps not without some recognition that the moral issue to be resolved is less what than it is who. W E are full of the Divinity, Jovis omnia plena, Pierre Proudhon complained in 1846. A socialist and self-styled humanitarian aetheist, Proudhon continued: Our monuments, our traditions, our laws, our ideas, our languages, and our sciences all are infected with this indelible superstition, outside of which we are not able either to speak or act, and without which we simply do not As the abortion controversy smolders on, settling elections and unsettling (or so it would seem) domestic tranquillity in the White House, it becomes increasingly difficult, even for the most determined, to wish the controversy away as an exclusively Catholic action against the expressed will of the majority. The majority is divided against itself. There are, to begin with, many Catholics who favor liberalized abortion laws, and there are notable non-Catholics who oppose such laws or voice misgivings. More than a year ago, in the New England Journal of Medicine, Bernard H. Nathanson, organizer of the National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws, later known as the National Abortion Rights Action League, and founder of the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health, one of the largest abortion clinics in the Western world, announced his resignation as director of the Center, saying that he was deeply troubled by my own increasing certainty that I had in fact presided over 60,000 deaths. One may be fairly certain that Catholic theology had little or nothing to do with Nathanson's resignation. Why then? What makes the issue linger? My premise is that Nathanson and all other parties to the current controversy Protestant, Catholic, Jew, Humanist, Atheist, and Agnostic participate in the Judaeo-Christian tradition as, after Proudhon, that without which they simply do not think. My thesis is that the manner in which JOHN A. MILES, JR. is managing editor of the BIBLICAL A RCHEOLOGISTand editor in the Religion Publishing Group at Doubleday and Company, Inc., New York.

The Interpretation of a Biblical Symbol

It is the purpose of this essay to contribute to a general discussion of hermeneutics by focusing attention upon the history of the interpretation of one particular biblical symbol, the symbol Reign or Kingdom of God. My hope is that by means of a discussion of the ways in which this symbol has been interpreted we may throw some light on the interpretation of other biblical symbols and perhaps also on the interpretation of symbols in general. One advantage of discussing the symbol Reign or Kingdom of God is that it has a history of something like three millennia of use and reuse, of interpretation and reinterpretation, in the Bible and in the literature of the Judaeo-Christian traditions. We have therefore a vast amount of data to choose from as we approach the subject, and I shall have to be highly selective in the periods, movements, and people I choose to discuss. I have tried to make the choice in terms of the con-

The Presidential Address: A Case for Asian Studies

There has always been a sizeable gap between public and national interests and needs and the capacities of a society's educational system to respond adequately thereto. Both teaching and scholarship are by their very nature conserving disciplines heavily involved with the preservation, elaboration, and passing on of a heritage of experience and knowledge acquired over great lengths of time. When one considers the degree to which our own national intellectual heritage is derived from the classical and Judaeo-Christian traditions, therefore, it is not at all surprising that our educational system should be profoundly Eurocentric in both form and content. But if it should persist in so confining a bias at a time when the central tendencies of the major technological, economic, and political developments of the past several centuries have been the compacting of global space, the convergence of cultures, and the emergence to positions of increasing salience and importance of an ever-expanding array of non-Western people, states, and interests, is this not cause for serious national concern?

Faith and Philosophical Enquiry by D. Z. Phillips

160 BOOK REVIEWS Faith and Philosophical Enquiry. By D. Z. PHILLIPS. New York: Schocken Books, 1971. Pp. £77. ££.50. Half-baked uses of Kierkegaard and Heidegger had much to do with Paul Tillich's "symbolic" and curiously atheistic Systematic Theology. Half-baked uses of Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein have much to do with Dr. Z. Phillips'" linguistic" and dubiously theist, though allegedly Christian, philosophy of religion. Faith and Philosophical Enquiry is a collection of thirteen influential papers, first published between 1968 and 1970, which typify ingenious muddle-headedness, but which are like Tillich's writings in their importance as indicators of major modern trends. Phillips shares Tillich's penchant for speaking for the Judaeo-Christian tradition as a whole, while eclectically avoiding anything that might seem superstitious (or even faintly supernatural) to defend in a scientific age. Phillip's tactics put one in mind of Tillich's responses to "challenges" like: "Now that we know so much more about physics and biology than Moses or Jesus or Aquinas ever could, how can we consistently believe in a Transcendent Creator? ". Tillich's relatively explicit responses throw much light on Phillips's real directions. Tillich would reply that such questions dealt a healthy blow to "superstition" and "fundamentalism." Creation stories, like Fall-of-Man stories, are not literal but symbolic. Traditionalist clergy left them crudely and outdatedly symbolic. Updated symbolic and wise Tillichian theology teaches that anthropomorphic, traditionalist (e. g., Thomist) talk about God as a transcendent, purely spiritual, triunely personal ens realissimum distinct from the physical universe created by him debases God by making him a mere Supreme Being who creates and lovingly relates himself to personal creatures. Traditionalist talk objectifies God as a Being among beings. Such dying, unacceptable symbols must give way to live symbols: God is Being-Itself, not a distinct Transcendent Being. God is Ultimate Concern itself, not a concerned, personal Creator. God is beyond Existence and Essence and presumably beyond ever giving any earthly help to those old-fashioned enough to call upon His name in prayer. (Compare Phillips at pp. 108-105). Phillips does not list any Tillichiana in his bibliography. But it is well worth bearing Tillich in mind when one feels lulled by many widely scattered and moving passages in Faith and Philosophical Enquiry which seem to be pronouncements of an ardent Kierkegaardian theist. For sudden echoes of Tillich and his emulators show that these appearances of Christian fideism are misleading. Phillips uses Kierkegaard's contrast of Eternal God and temporal man not, as first appears, for the Sad Dane's Supernaturalism but rather for the earthier Cultural Relativism of Wittgenstein -a-la-P. G. Winch. " The objector who accuses me of denying the objective reality of God may have in mind a statement which I should support-namely the state- BOOK REVIEWS 161 ment that God is not an object. That is a statement of grammar. Those who deny it, I suggest, speak of God in a way which is a logical extension of ways in which we speak of human beings. If God is a thing He is finite; and a finite God satisfies the needs neither of religion nor of theology." (p. 60) The convenient quasi-ambiguity of the words "object" and " thing " here may put some off the scent. It does indeed seem demeaning to a theist to call God a thing or an object as those words are often used in ordinary language. For the theist takes God to be both personal and supreme. In a similar way, when Phillips typically says that God is not a thing among things or an object among objects, (p. 85) or that God in his heaven is not an extra domain over and above our natural world, the Christian may interpret Phillips as saying something highly theistic. (Cf. Chapter Ill) For the theist agrees to the extent that God is not just one being among many, not just "something else" besides created nature: the Transcendent God is the uniquely perfect being, the only ens a se. But what Phillips really means in philosophical terms is that God is not a Substance, that God is not a Transcendent Being. Look again at the...

Euthanasia: Man's right to die

In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, one quality consistently required of all men is that of mercy. "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy." Much of our modern medicine must be classified as good scientific medicine, but is it as well human medicine? Is the physician himself acting like a human being concerned with another human being? Doctors are men, and they should be men with aesthetic interests; they should be men with moral concern; and they should be men who have other qualities besides scientific technique and efficiency. I have been an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church for thirty-two years and a licensed physician for twenty-seven years. Through this span of time I have become increasingly concerned about the medical and public attitude toward death. When I was in clinical medicine, it was very easy to sign a death certificate. All that was required was my opinion that respira tion and heart beat had stopped. Today it is not so easy. Life, at least physio logical life, can be maintained by the most extraordinary means. If kidney function fails, the patient can be hooked to an appropriate apparatus that will do the work of the kidneys for a considerable period. Indeed, patients go in periodically to use such apparatus. If one has a disturbance of the respiratory gas exchange, it is a simple matter to connect him to various

Gross National Product, Economic Welfare and Christian Virtue

In Christian literature, for more than nineteen centuries, a conflict seemingly exists between material success and the Christian concept of virtue. Material goods are somehow corrupting (money is the root of all evil, it is harder for a rich man to enter heaven than a camel to crawl through the eye of a needle, etc.), and thus economic success for the individual, and perhaps even economic progress for society, is a Pandora's Box from which evils rather than benefits emerge. It would, of course, be easy to dismiss this apparent conflict between economic progress and Christian virtue as just another example of the warfare between science and religion. However, this would be contrary to the present trends in economic science. First, economists are today becom? ing more and more concerned with welfare and ethical propositions to the extent they see them connected with their science. Secondly, modern developments in the theory of both the firm and household place emphasis upon the psychological and social process through which both firms and households arrive at their decisions. Thus any continuous tradition of human attitudes is fit subject material to be investigated by social scientists, even the economic scientist. This paper is written as a short note rather than a true article on this subject.1 An attempt will be made to show that a discussion of Christian virtue is psychologically a natural extension of present-day welfare economics and to suggest that perhaps it might be a fruitful area of inquiry for the religiously oriented economist of the Judaeo Christian tradition. My stand is briefly as follows. A Christian welfare economics will encompass three kinds of functions which spell out in some way increasing or decreasing returns at increasing or decreasing rates. The first is a produced goods-and-services function (G-func? tion), a measure of useful goods and services produced through the market system and thus identical with Gross National Product. Sec? ondly, there is a welfare function (W-function) representing the trans? formation of goods and services into want satisfaction and human welfare. Third, there is a virtue function (V-function) through which what is specifically economic welfare (however defined) is transformed into complete total human welfare as denominated in the traditional 164