Religious Awe Research Articles

Miracles of Technology and Art: Ancient Religious Aesthetics and Byzantine Iconoclasm

This article explores the role of technology in arousing religious awe from classical antiquity to the time of Emperor Theophilos. People’s fascination with technology ensured that this trend, increasingly popular in Greco-Roman religious festivals from the Hellenistic period onwards, gained pace among Christians after an initial period of rejecting pagan religious aesthetics. Technology was highly prised by both pagan and Christian rulers who typically sought to impress their subjects by displaying the technology available at their disposal. However, while the emperors’ reliance on technology to allude to divine favour was tolerated, technology employed to stage miracles or influence faith was deeply harmful for Christianity. Theophilos’ father is reported by Eutychius to have punished paradigmatically the mastermind of one such mechanically enabled miracle in his native Phrygia. Thus, Theophilos’ iconoclastic views as well as his known obsession with automata are explored as part of a longstanding debate on Christian religious aesthetics.

Visual Experiences in Cinquecento Theatrical Spaces by Javier Berzal de Dios

Reviewed by: Visual Experiences in Cinquecento Theatrical Spaces by Javier Berzal de Dios Robert Henke VISUAL EXPERIENCES IN CINQUECENTO THEATRICAL SPACES. By Javier Berzal de Dios. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019; pp. 216. Javier Berzal de Dios’s excellent Visual Experiences in Cinquecento Theatrical Spaces persuasively rebuts received narratives regarding Italian Renaissance theatre architecture and design, offering a more complex, nuanced picture that includes the heterogeneous, sometimes messy experiences of actual spectators. The standard view (only slightly exaggerated): Italian Renaissance theatre designers and scenographers, such as Baldassare Peruzzi in his decisive 1514 design for a production of La Calandria, rationalized their designs with the new art of linear perspective, which created the illusion of an ideal representation whose unity aligned with neo-Aristotelian notions of the dramaturgical unities. This single, unified picture was passively received by spectators functioning as a homogenous unit, except insofar as they were aesthetically and politically subordinate to the sovereign, who was positioned at the ideal perspectival point in the audience. This new, Renaissance view of seeing in the theatre decisively broke with medieval habits and shaped a linear progression of these tendencies running the course of the sixteenth century, from Peruzzi to Serlio in the mid-sixteenth century to the Teatro Olimpico and Teatro all’antica at Sabbioneta. The old humanist paradox obtains in this narrative as elsewhere: what seemed new was really a return to classical ideas. Berzal de Dios’s short but incisive book demolishes these received notions. In his account, theories of spatial unity were not in concert but actually clashed with humanist experimentation, the desire for non-orderly aesthetic effects such as wonder and the heterogeneous experiences of actual spectators conceived more as participants in civic dialogue than as cheerfully obedient ducal subjects. Neo-classical restraint, order, and symmetry were contradicted by impulses towards excess, surplus, and saturation. The ideal of a unified visual picture, governed by the cool laws of perspective, is belied by the displacements, truncations, and distortions revealed in the surviving stage representations of Rome, Pisa, Siena, Florence, and other Italian cities. The author invites us to see Peruzzi’s iconic stage design for La Calandria, touted in traditional theatre histories as the epitome of the unified scenographic vision, as downright weird. The linear perspective located in the downstage part of the drawing tells only half the story, as Berzal de Dios examines the incongruities of what is illustrated on the backdrop, or flattened space in the background. There, the Colosseum is shrunk, and the Pantheon is sandwiched in front of the Castel Sant’Angelo. Linear perspective emerges not as the be-all and end-all, but merely “one of many tools, all of which were at the service of the artistic process” (15). Peruzzi’s Rome, too, is one of ruins and overgrown vegetation, hardly the ideal city abstracted from some versions of art history. To see such scenographers’ impulses to elicit wonder, surprise, and even religious awe is to contest the narrative that may have begun with artist and historian Giorgio Vasari, who in touting Peruzzi and others celebrated what he perceived as a rupture between Renaissance and medieval ways of thinking about the the stage. Berzal de Dios’s challenge to Vasari’s historiography helps us make more sense of Brunelleschi’s period-defying role in Italian theatre: the master of Renaissance perspective and engineering who designed wonder-inducing machinery for fifteenth-century religious plays (sacre rappresentazioni). Chapter 2, “The Artificial City on Stage,” examines designs by Beccafumi, Salviati, and others to show how designs for Pisa, Siena, Florence, and other Italian cities were characterized by “spatial dissonances, visual tensions, inquietudes, and internal inconsistencies that demonstrate the prevalence of a taste for playfulness” (37). These were [End Page 111] the work of experimental artists who played with classical ideas—not theorists and mathematicians bound by the idée fixe of consistency. Cinquecento spectators did not see through a two-dimensional window as passive viewers to a three-dimensional perspettiva but were embroiled in what the author calls the “apparato”: the entire complex of the stage, the scenography, the auditorium, and the “spectators’ act of viewing as made possible and conditioned by the space” (5...

PINDAR, OLYMPIAN 2.5–7, TEXT AND COMMENTARY—WITH EXCURSIONS TO ‘PERICTIONE’, EMPEDOCLES AND EURIPIDES’ HIPPOLYTUS

In 1998, I suggested a new text for a notably corrupt passage in Pindar's Isthmian 5. This article is in effect a sequel to that earlier discussion. In the 1998 article, I proposed, inter alia, that the modern vulgate text of I. 5.58, ἐλπίδων ἔκνισ’ ὄπιν, is indefensible and the product of scribal corruption in antiquity, and that chief among the indefensible products of corruption there is the supposed secular use of ὄπις, as if used to mean something like ‘zeal’. This (as I hope to have demonstrated) is a sense for which there is no good evidence in classical Greek, where ὄπις always has a delimited religious denotation, meaning either (a) ‘gods’ response’, ‘divine retribution’, or else (b) ‘religious awe’ or ‘reverence’ towards the gods, through fear of that response or that retribution. If we discount I. 5.58 itself (and likewise the focus of the present article, O. 2.6), all the pre-Hellenistic attestations can be straightforwardly listed under these headings: (a) Il. 16.388 θεῶν ὄπιν οὐκ ἀλέγοντες, Od. 14.88 ὄπιδος κρατερὸν δέος, Hes. Theog. 221–2 θεαὶ . . . | . . . ἀπὸ τῷ δώωσι κακὴν ὄπιν, Pind. P. 8.71–2 θεῶν δ’ ὄπιν | ἄφθονον αἰτέω, sim. Od. 20.215, 21.28, Hes. Op. 187, 251, 706, along with, seemingly, a fragmentary fifth-century Thessalian verse inscription, CEG 1.120.1 Hansen; (b) Hdt. 9.76.2 θεῶν ὄπιν ἔχοντας, 8.143.2. In addition, one other instance can be interpreted as either (a) or (b), or in effect both: Od. 14.82 (of the suitors) οὐκ ὄπιδα φρονέοντες . . . οὐδ’ ἐλεητύν. In all cases, though, ‘gods’ are specified, usually as a dependent genitive with ὄπις, or else separately but in the near context. Hellenistic and later occurrences of the word are few, and (as I argued in 1998) hints there of a secular reading can actually be taken to reflect misunderstandings based on, precisely, the early corruption in I. 5.

Consumer Reception of New Technologies

At a subconscious level, many of us revere our favorite internet search engines and would be lost without them. We experience Google, Baidu, Naver, and Yandex as omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, very much like a god. We greet many other technological innovations with a similar sense of religious awe and reverence. However, we greet other new technologies with fear and foreboding. They take on monstrous proportions in the popular imagination and media treatments. Examples include atomic energy; the internet with its hackers, ransomware, and malware; social media with its election meddling and fake news; algorithms with unintended consequences like racial discrimination; and artificial neural networks and machine learning programs that seem to defy human understanding. As these examples suggest, there is no single pattern of technology reception, and our reactions evolve with time. Eventually most new technologies are domesticated and become normal. We examine these patterns of technology reception and derive implications.

My Wife Doesn't Get Either Job, and: My Lord How Do You Build a Lake?

"My Wife Doesn't Get Either Job" is a surreal meditation on the fact its title announces. "My Lord how do you build a lake?" is an unrhymed sonnet in the tradition of religious awe at the givenness and mystery of creation.

Aura 2.0

In 1936 Walter Benjamin observed the ‘fading of [art’s] aura’ as it underwent mechanical reproduction. According to Benjamin, technological advances had initiated a shift in art as a medium of ‘cultic value’ to art as a medium of ‘display value’ (Benjamin 2008, 9, 12). Eighty years later, do his observations retain their validity in a world on the brink of discovering the singularity and changing the genetic makeup of humanity, or, is art’s aura beginning to burn brightly again with the joining of science, art, and liturgy in operating room theatres, mythical labs, and magical tech companies which produce chimeras, clones, cyborgs, transhumans, and intelligent robots—all which inspire religious awe? Theorist Paul Virilio ask a similar question: ‘After all great periods of art, after the great schools such as the classical and baroque, after contemporary expressionism, are we not now heading for that great transgenic art in which every pharmacy, every laboratory will launch its own “lifestyles,” its own transhuman fashions?’ (Virilio 2003, 61). Virilio does not seem to suggest that this new school of art produces any cultic value or authentic aura, but much of his observations about this transgenic art warrant exploration in this regard. For that reason, this paper explores the return of art’s aura in the paradigm of techno-science, and in the process, develop an ethic that respond to this new art’s aesthetics and its curious liturgies.

Giotto's applications of embodied perception: Lateral and vertical dimensions of space

Giotto's Arena Chapel frescoes, dating from the early fourteenth century, provide salient illustrations of two types of embodied perceptions. One is universal, a consequence of biology and the physical laws of nature, linked to the vertical dimension of space, and impacting on affect and moral judgement. The other is culturally determined, acquired from the direction of reading script and affecting perceptions of directions of movement, time and causality. Giotto's intuitive use of embodiments, the result of a newly evolving realism in painting, may have prompted late mediaeval chapel-visitors to empathize with the storied biblical characters, so that figures that were once only the object of religious veneration and awe were now made into living beings with a shared humanity, resulting in an awakening of a personal agency that fueled the Renaissance and Modernism.

Church–State Relations in the Early American Republic, 1787–1846 by James S. Kabala (review)

Church-State Relations in the Early American Republic, 1787-1846. By James S. Kabala. (London: Pickering 8? Chatto Press, 2013. Pp. 264. Hardcover, $99.00.)Reviewed by Tara Thompson StrauchScholars tend to tell the story of religion and American politics either as an intellectual history of politicians or as an ecclesiastically centered history. This book by James Kabala looks instead at the creation of a Protestant consensus in the public sphere and thus escapes the somewhat artificial divide between political and thought. By looking at the decades between the Constitution and massive influx of Catholic immigrants in the late 1840s, Kabala isolates the immediate consequences of the Constitution's inconclusive statements on the relationship between Church and State. Rather than analyzing Jefferson's wall of separation or Washington's religious awe, although this book talks about both, Kabala looks at the realities of proliferating denominations and outsiders such as Indians, deists, Jews, and atheists. Such realities caused tensions between the secular federal government and the less secular states that, Kabala implies, eventually pushed Americans toward a new understanding of tolerance.Kabala's driving narrative is to uncover the existence of a Protestant non-sectarian consensus among and political leaders, which served to dampen both secular and radicalism within American politics. At times, the author's attempt to organize and political minds according to denomination or party leaves the reader with more exceptions than rules concerning the composition of this consensus; yet it seems quite probable that many Americans did ascribe to a set of common beliefs that marked polite society including acceptance of the trinity, anti-Catholicism, and a future system of rewards and punishments. Even for Unitarian John Quincy Adams, 'Christianity' and 'civilization' were regarded as inseparable (24). Even as Massachusetts, the last state to retain an established church, removed ministerial taxes and other elements of an intertwined church-state relationship, American leaders continued to stress that good civil Americans were Christians of a particular mold.The book begins by examining the confusing and often contradictory relationship between culture and the federal government. Despite the lack of an established church and restrictions on office holders, the United States government had extensive dealings with men and culture in the form of Indian missionaries, congressional chaplains, and Sunday mail, among others. Kabala stresses that political opinion was not decided on any of these governmental positions; often, it depended on the character and political acumen of the men championing these religiously minded institutions. Objections to these offices were often made not because of their nature, but because of the morality of the officeholder or, as in the case of the Sunday mail, the needs of a modem nation.By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the federal government and increasingly the state governments provided general toleration and tacit support to those who belonged to the Non-Sectarian Consensus. At this point, Kabala moves from a broad discussion of religio-political thought to a more concrete discussion of the legal implications of the limits of toleration in the form of test oaths and witness competency. These chapters are the most compelling of the book because their clear argument carefully illustrates the tension between political inclusivity and the fear of moral declension. …

L’Univers by Hubert Haddad

the sacred bond of friendship. But this is not an institutionally religious narrative. Mando’s mother, Enza, receives respect initially from Loup for her pious ways, but eventually they become suspicious as she loses patience with the sickly Mando. The religious awe builds up through the recurrence of rituals honoring the scapegoat , the sacrifice, and the stranger. Meanwhile, the narrator’s name reminds us of Freud’s case of the Wolfman. The title of Grimbert’s novel refers to the French rendition of the moment when a psychotic patient reveals his sickness. As a student of psychoanalysis, Loup not only reminds us of this term’s significance but also of his mentor, Professor Psychopompe as the two friends call him, who insists that psychosis is innate. When Mando reveals his madness by talking about a visitor who has taken possession of him, Loup tries to save Mando by telling him that they could find the words to tell their narrative together. But Mando has already written their narrative and gives Loup his journal. Loup then realizes that it is too late to save his friend. Mando’s suicide makes Loup the scapegoat, the sacrificed victim of a relationship that could not endure. As the survivor, Loup is busy in his story ascribing betrayal to himself. Loup’s reader does not have access to the words of Mando’s journal. What the reader sees is Loup trying to analyze who is responsible for Mando’s psychosis. Although Loup tells us that this is not a story about women, there are women who have important roles to play. Loup’s own mother is absent, so his Aunt Gaby raises him and becomes his best friend after Mando. Loup promises her he will attend her deathbed. But comical events with Anna, a local member of a hospice, intervene so that Loup once again betrays a friendship . Promises seem to be challenges for Loup, who represents himself as leaving a trail of faithlessness, and who by contrast sees his friend Mando as keeping his word. Finally, the spaces between the paragraphs of Loup’s story also represent the blanks of Mando’s own version of their unhappy friendship. Trinity University (TX) Roland A. Champagne HADDAD, HUBERT. L’Univers. Paris: Zulma, 2009. ISBN 978-2-84304-474-8. Pp. 510. 22 a. In Hubert Haddad’s novel, a middle-aged astrophysicist, adventurer, and explorer finds himself shipwrecked on an island in the Pacific, and as a result suffers from a rare form of amnesia that has impaired his ability to make rational connections to the multiple memories which assail him: “Ce n’est pas la mémoire qui manque, mais les connexions” (27). Without identity, feeling abandoned, desperate, and suffering from a terrible emptiness, he does not know what has happened to him but he nonetheless realizes that he must count on himself alone to understand his past: “Puisqu’on ne veut m’aider ni me croire, et qu’on me prétend fou, dissimulateur, affabulateur même, je ne compterai qu’avec moim ême” (13). He will attempt to reconstruct if not restore his life by writing a dictionary which will enable the sequential continuance of thought: “Ce cahier sera donc une sorte de conquête du dedans par le dehors” (19). Moreover, the dictionary stands for hope, even if it is imaginary: “Un monde vivant m’attend, dans une bouleversante proximité, peut-être imaginaire” (30). But at the end of the novel, the narrator, despite tremendous efforts and with more than 700 entries, has not yet attained the knowledge sought: “J’ignore mon nom. Je ne sais rien de moi vraiment” (510). 418 FRENCH REVIEW 84.2 Upon reading the text, the reader soon comes to understand that this is no ordinary dictionary, for the definitions of the words cannot be separated from the uniquely unorthodox and intensely subjective perspective of the nameless narrator . The overwhelming diversity and unusual complexity if not baroque aspects of the thematic fabric, together with the discontinuity of thought, often give the text an illusiveness and an obscurity which make precise comprehension and intelligibility difficult. In addition, many of these definitions, being grounded not only in an astonishing...

Young and Defiant in Tehran (review)

Shahram Khosravi, Young and Defiant in Tehran. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. 240 pp. In Young and Defiant in Tehran, Shahram Khosravi examines youth and popular culture, generational divides, popular spaces, spatial dominance and resistance, and defiance in contemporary Tehran. He is centrally interested in exploring politics and how young Tehranis defy forms and practices and seek to create their own. He argues that more than two decades after Islamic Revolution, much revolutionary spirit has evaporated. Indeed members of generation that has recently come of age in Islamic Republic (over half of Iran's population) see Revolution as project of their parents' generation. Khosravi illustrates how in particular middle and upper-middle class youth in Tehran, caught in a rather authoritarian and patriarchal context, carve out and create their own spaces where they seek to live their own lives and actively create and negotiate everyday cultures. He argues that, in absence of larger social movements, there are plentiful individual acts of defiance and instances of escape among Tehran's youth. Khosravi introduces concept of cultural crime that emerged in Islamic Republic, which denotes violations of 'collective sentiment' of Muslim community (17). The concept covers much that is associated with youth, popular culture, sexuality, and passion. While somewhat eased in 1990s, its hold continues. Khosravi notes that when the shariat (...) was extended to cover public law, distinction between illegal, immoral, and sinful disappeared. Thus crime, vice and sin become synonymous (18). Aspects of youthful experimenting, misbehavior and protest were criminalized. The author shows how concept of gharbzadegi (Western-struck) denotes alienation, sell-out, or worse, betrayal of national and Islam, and plays an important role in Iranian debates and politics. Consequently, principle of mutual discipline (25) emerged to monitor and suppress defiant (and often gharbzadegi) practices, which are identified as counter-productive to individual wellbeing. The caring power (28) of state works to set individuals back on straight path. The aesthetics of Islamic Republic are central in Khosravi's discussion. Revolutionary leaders associate gharbzadegi with consumerism, as opposed to virtue of self-restraint. The Islamic Republic has developed its own aesthetics, revolutionary and officially sanctioned art, an aesthetic of modesty, and most prominently, veiling. Khosravi describes official of theocracy [as] characterized by a tone of petrified seriousness, based on religious awe, lamentation and humility (53)-its favorite color black. Public life turns into a performance with predetermined roles and little space for agency (56). Khosravi's ethnographic work is based in Shahrak-e Gharb, an upper class Tehran neighborhood. Designed by French architects in 1970s, quarter has its own infrastructure of schools, clubs and shops. In addition to its elite status, quarter is marked by a distinct sense of different, worldlier, and more modern than other quarters. Residents oddly position themselves as the victim of state's policy and being best (64). Unlike in most other capital cities, this wealthy and educated elite does not represent state and takes up an awkward position as a simultaneously powerful and powerless social class. Forced to hide some preferences and social practices, this group has nonetheless more freedom to transgress rules. More than elsewhere in Tehran, signs of globalization, like global media or patterns of consumption, are visible in Shahrak. Because of this vague and precarious freedom and superior access to global by way of satellite TV, internet and international travel, Khosravi stresses that Shahrak is a center for diffusing Westernized youth culture (87). …

Ayala at the Casa Lis: A Self-Acknowledged Modernist

In his prose poem, El chalet art nouveau, from the early 1970s, Ayala identifies with the Casa Lis (Salamanca), built only a year before his birth (1906). Dilapidated upon Ayala's visit, the house reflected the fallen condition of humankind, while its architectural harmony afforded esthetic enjoyment, capable of redeeming it from oblivion (as Ayala's prose poem aspired to do). The contrast between fall and potential for redemption stems from a modernist sensitivity, which gave rise to the Casa Lis as well as to Ayala's writings. In proof, I examine the Casa Lis as modernist architecture, akin to Gaudi's. Next I define modernism as a cultural attitude respecting novelty for its own sake, subordinating tradition to current goals, stemming from the post Darwinian crisis in religion and science, and revering creativity with religious awe. Finally, applying these traits, I interpret select works from Ayala's avant-garde period, the post-Civil War, and the 1970s.

"At the Dead Center of Things" in Don DeLillo's White Noise : Mimesis, Violence, and Religious Awe

Has Don DeLillo's supermarket satire, White Noise, passed its own use-by date? Critic Dana Phillips suggests that the work's contribution to our understanding of postmodernism has been thoroughly examined (235). 1 His claim that critics have mined the novel of its slogans and readings confirms a widespread impression the novel is a resource all but depleted. A feeling of belatedness marks the commentary, as though White Noise now has become like its own "most photographed barn in America" (12). Arguments about this and the novel's other scenes of simulacra 2 have made this passage the "most discussed passage in DeLillo"—and suggested both it and the novel can no longer be experienced directly (Cowart 87). Much of the commentary resembles the news in the novel where "no one thing is either more or less plausible than any other" (129); one observer's recommendation that we suspend criticism in "a state of permanent flotation" tells of the exhaustion. 3 Since the novel's publication, though, DeLillo has increasingly revealed, in his other works, interviews, and essays, questions largely of anthropology—not only has White Noise not expired, a fundamental element in the author's art has remained unexamined. Where the novelist's early work announced especially American topics, the later [End Page 648] novels like Libra (1988) , Mao II (1991), and Underworld (1997), along with greater public commentary, have emphasized an ongoing concern about mimesis, violence, and the sacred: an apprehension of culture like that found in the work of René Girard. The contemporary writer, notes DeLillo, "has lost a great deal of influence," but the margins of the culture are still "a perfect place to observe what's happening at the dead center of things" ("American Strangeness" 16)—DeLillo's reflections upon many ground zeroes and his question about why "we depend on disaster to consolidate our vision" ("Power of History" 63) resemble those illustrations by Girard and Eric Gans that show how the sacred and the significant in our culture stem from the misunderstood human tendency toward imitation and violence. In Libra 's "seven seconds that broke the back of the American century" (181), in Mao II 's "raids on human consciousness" once made by novelists but now terrorists (42), in Underworld 's "awe of central events" (826), and also in response to September 11, the author has explored how imitation and mimetic violence in particular generate crises that become, problematically, sacred in their power. In White Noise, though, the sacred and the other anthropological elements have scarcely been considered—despite the religious awe looming in the airborne toxic event and the narrator's invitation to consider "the scientific study of the cultural behavior and development of man" (320). 4 Hidden among the novel's characters—hidden by them—is an imitative tendency that first shapes not representational behavior but desire itself. The same desire DeLillo identifies first in Americana, which "moves from first person consciousness to third person . . . a universal third person . . . we all want to be" (270); the same triangular desire Girard documents in the French novel 5 structures much of White Noise. Commentators have alluded to its symptoms of imitative desire, but without following the paths from the mimesis to the crises. 6 Missing in the conversation about White Noise, in other words, is the possibility that mimesis in fact precedes language. The critical problem for the species, it appears, stems not from the "precession of simulacra" as Baudrillard argues (2), but the fact that humans, individually and historically, imitate not the world around them first, but each other. The crucial problem for the species, Girard and Gans argue, 7 is the escalation of imitative rivalry: in protohuman history, the institutions of language and the sacred appear during crises when animal hierarchies can no longer contain the violence arising from rivalries...

Religious awe: Potential contributions of negative theology to psychology, "positive" or otherwise.

A hallmark of Christian mysticism is negative theology, which refers to the school of thought that gives prominence to negation in reference to God. By denying the possibility to name God, negative theology cuts at the very root of our cognitive makeup—the human impulse to name and put things into categories—and thereby situates us “halfway between a ‘no longer’ and a ‘not yet’” (Iser, 1978, p. 213), a temporality in which “the past is negated, but . . . the present is not yet formulated” (Iser, 1978, p. 217). The affective corollary of this “no longer” and “not yet” state is the “dark night of the soul” that mystics are known to have bouts of. One particular variant of the “dark night of the soul” is awe, which will be the focus of this paper. My investigation starts with an introduction to the two primary themes of negative theology—negativity and self-reflexivity, followed by a critique of Keltner and Haidt’s model of awe, which is compared with Rudolf Otto’s phenomenology of mysticism in general and religious awe in particular. In the concluding section, I examine the relevance of religious awe to contemporary life on the one hand, and to emotion research on the other. The soul’s greatness takes its measure from its capacity to achieve the flaming vision by which the soul becomes at home in pain. (Heidegger, 1971, p. 18.) Negative theology refers to the school of thought that gives prominence to negation in reference to God. St. Augustine’s statement is a fine example: “God is wise without wisdom, good without goodness, powerful without power” (quoted by Derrida, 1992, p. 113). This mode of thinking and speaking has been a hallmark of Christian mysticism, in which: “Negation is both a means of distinguishing mystical experience from other acts of cognition—“unknowing” from “knowing,” for example—and a corrective to misleading propositions about the being of God” (Lees, 1983, p. 7). How do we understand this “ascendancy of negative over affirmative values” (Lees, 1983, p. 137) in negative theol\\server05\productn\T\THE\22-2\THE204.txt unknown Seq: 2 21-MAR-03 12:52

The Founding Murder in Machiavelli's The Prince

THE FOUNDING MURDER IN MACHIAVELLI'S THEPRINCE Jim Grote Archdiocese ofLouisville One ofthe doctors ofItaly, Nicholas Machiavel, had the confidence to put in writing, almost in plain terms, "That the Christian faitii had given up good men in prey to Üiose who are tyrannical and unjust." (Francis Bacon) A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian ofdie Cross calls the tìiing what it actually is. (Martin Luúher) René Girard has written eloquently ofthe founding murder described by Friedrich Nietzsche in aphorism 125 from The Gay Science (Girard 1988). In aphorism 125, Nietzsche reflects on the modem prophecy that "God is dead." The crowd, who surrounds the Madman in this aphorism, assumes that God has died ofnatural causes. As Girard says: "Nietzsche is taken to be the great prophet ofthe natural death ofGod" (Girard 1988, 232). The belief in God remains in modernity as a vestige ofthat senility to which God succumbed a long time ago. Unlike the crowd, the Madman cannot keep from hysterical outbursts about the unnatural death of God. "We have killed Him—you and I! All of us are his murderers!" According to Girard, the Madman's ravings are clues to an original collective murder that human culture JimGrote119 has been unable to repress despite its artistic and philosophic endeavors to the contrary. In fact, this founding violence is the foundation ofculture itself. It is surprising that Girard has written little about another modem prophet, Niccolo Machiavelli. A comparison and contrast of Girard's thought with Machiavelli's sheds an interesting light on both ofthem. IfNietzsche is the modern prophet (however misunderstood) of the unnatural death of God, Machiavelli is the modem prophet concerning the unnatural death ofhuman beings. A recent translator ofMachiavelli's The Prince argues that the heart ofhis teaching can be summed up in die simple adage: "you can get away with murder."1 One might summarize Girard's thought in a similar manner: "You cannot get away with murder." In order to better understand the role of the founding murder in modem thought it is useful to turn to the thought ofNiccolo Machiavelli. According to the political philosopher, Leo Strauss, the modernity that culminated in the work of Nietzsche was bom in the work of Machiavelli.2 Strauss describes Machiavelli as the founder ofmodernity. For Machiavelli all foundings entail violence. No enduring society can come into being without the equivalent of Romulus' murder of his brother Remus. Political order is established by a crime that necessarily transcends the boundaries of that order because it creates that very order. Morality is founded by immorality. Girard articulates the founding violence as a cultural rather than a political phenomenon. Machiavelli's political foundings presuppose Girard's cultural founding. In Girard's view of the founding murder, the original chaos or Hobbesian war of all-against-all is replaced by the sacrificial order of allagainst -one. Consider Gil Bailie's description ofthe founding murder: Primitive religion is bom at this moment, the moment when, as Girard puts it, "the atmosphere of terror and hallucination that accompanies the primordial religious experience" reaches its climax, and "the detente that follows only heightens the mystery of the whole process." In the beginning was the hush. Human culture as such begins with 1 See Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr.'s translation ofNiccolo Machiavelli's The Prince (vii). All quotations in the present essay cite both the chapter from The Prince and the page number from Mansfield's translation. Quotations from Machiavelli's Discourses are from Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov's translation, NiccoloMachiavelli: Discourses on Livy. 2 See Leo Strauss, "The Three Waves ofModernity" in Hilail Gildin, An Introduction to PoliticalPhilosophy: TenEssays byLeo Strauss. The three waves are Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Nietzsche. 120The FoundingMurder the community of victimizers looking at the corpse of its victim in solemn astonishment at the miracle of camaraderie that hasjust taken place. Whereas but a moment before strife had prevaüed, now there is a unanimous religious awe focused on the corpse ofthe victim. (22) This original sacrifice is not a rational decision or social contract. It is an unconscious mechanism. "There is no such thing as conscious scapegoating. Conscious...

Religious Awe, Aesthetic Awe

Religious Awe, Aesthetic Awe

Mind, Mountain, and History Revisited

More than forty years ago this journal published an article under the title Mind, Mountain, and History.' It attempted to show the evolution of the attitudes which Western man evinced with regard to mountains and to probe his mentality from classical to times. They led from religious awe to medieval otherworldliness, to revolutionary Renaissance world view, to the rational approach of the Enlightenment, to the aetheticism of the romantic age, to Darwinian concepts in times of growing materialism and advancement in technical thinking, and to a period when mountains became an object, for sport and business, to be conquered. Even nationalism and collectivism entered in the attitudes of man toward mountains. The picture which the article gave with regard to Western mentality and mountains, a picture typical of a trend in various areas of Western man's life, now needs supplementation both backward and forward, for historical knowledge gained since has broadened our perspective. It is the discovery of the Otzi which directs our minds backward beyond classical times; it is the ascent of Mount Everest which challenges us to direct our minds also forward beyond modernity. Once we are ready for this extension of our investigation, we may come to realize that what has appeared to be an evolution from primitive to modern makes room for a broader view which questions such historical assumption of an evolution. When in 1991 the Otzi, a human skeleton some 5200 years old, was found in the ice of the glaciers above the Otztal in Austria and when archaeologists could identify, despite the damage done to the site, the corpse, the implements, the tools, the hair, and some of the food the Otzi carried with him, the question obviously arose what type of a man could possibly have dared venture into so forbidding regions.2 It is not known whether or not the Otzi was alone, but indications are that the trek across the mountains, notwithstanding actual and mythical dangers, was frequented regularly by

Hécate, gardienne de la propreté : défense de déposer des ordures sous peine de...

Hecate as the guarantor of cleanliness, or the deposit of offal will be prosecuted. Vienna museum (Austria) preserves a marble from Salone (Dalmatia). A representation of the triple Hecate complete with daggers and whips is accompanied by a curious caption : the goddesses shall be favourable to him that will abstain from urinating or defecating in the vicus ; should he infringe the law, consequences will follow. The contributor studies other inscriptions forbidding the deposit of stercus ; their aim is to protect shrines and sepultures. It seems that the minds of people at Salone were steeped in religious awe threatening divine vengeance in case of sullification of the vicus. There is every reason to believe that the marble of the triple Hecate at Salone protected a shrine of Diana-Hecate.

The French Background of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America

“In America,” Tocqueville wrote, “I saw more than America; I sought there the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or to hope from its progress.”’ In other words, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is really a book about France. More than that, it is a book about the future of the world. “The whole book,” he said in his introduction to Democracy in America “has been written under the influence of a kind of religious awe produced in the author’s mind by the view of that irresistible revolution which has advanced for centuries … and which is still advancing in the midst of the ruins it has caused.” Tocqueville’s attitude was the product of his own family background, of his own education, and of French history. In this paper I would like to take up these three roots (personal, intellectual, and historical) of his Democracy in America and then give a brief overview of what he found.

The French Background of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America

“In America,” Tocqueville wrote, “I saw more than America; I sought there the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or to hope from its progress.”’ In other words, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is really a book about France. More than that, it is a book about the future of the world. “The whole book,” he said in his introduction to Democracy in America “has been written under the influence of a kind of religious awe produced in the author’s mind by the view of that irresistible revolution which has advanced for centuries … and which is still advancing in the midst of the ruins it has caused.” Tocqueville’s attitude was the product of his own family background, of his own education, and of French history. In this paper I would like to take up these three roots (personal, intellectual, and historical) of his Democracy in America and then give a brief overview of what he found.

Lucretius, Cybele, and Religion

F OR A CENTURY, SCHOLARS HAVE BEEN PUZZLED by what they regard as the un-Epicurean flavour of Lucretius' allegorical interpretation of the cult of Cybele in De Rerum Natura 2.600 ff., which appears to favour a morality based on religious fear. Patin viewed it as a digression betraying Lucretius' actual enthusiasm for religion (l'antilucrece chez Lucrece). Perret and Boyance attempted rather to explain the passage by postulating that Lucretius had taken it more or less uncritically from another source. Mueller has modified this view substantially by noting that Lucretius does not copy the allegory uncritically, but introduces it in order to reject it.' However, it has yet to be appreciated how Lucretius' allegory actually expresses an orthodox Epicurean point of view. Admittedly, there is conclusive evidence that at least the kernel of the allegory was derived from a source. Similar interpretations of this cult were elaborated by Varro, Ovid, and the Stoic L. Annaeus Cornutus, and all four versions show sufficient correspondences to establish a common source. It is unfortunate, however, that the discovery of these parallels has led scholars to interpret Lucretius from the other sources without fully analyzing how his version differs. In fact, the differences in all four authors are more telling than the similarities. Each author shows not only accidental variations, but a pattern of changes which mould the allegory systematically to express his own point of view. This applies to Lucretius as well, and in the present paper, I shall attempt to understand his version philosophically, and to evaluate it as an Epicurean critique of the Cybelean cult. The systematic alteration of the allegory can be illustrated also from the other authors. Varro's version, for example, is preserved by Augustine (Civ. Dei 7.24 B-C). When Varro differs from our other sources, he tends to relate the mythic and ritual manifestations of Magna Mater to the physical earth, which he believes to embody the Divine Spirit. Thus, for him, the processional clangour which Lucretius presents as a powerful incitement of religious awe merely signifies the plying of the earth with metal tools in agriculture. Similarly, only Varro suggests a special meaning for the drum; it