Enemy Death

After President Obama announced that Osama bin Laden was dead, I was glad to see that Rod of Alexandria and Joel Watts directed us to the words of certain Jews:

one young rabbi said:

43 ‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the [imperial] tax-collectors do the same?

and one wise king had already said:

17 Do not rejoice when your enemies fall,
and do not let your heart be glad when they stumble

And in quoting Matthew 5:43-46 and then Proverbs 24:17, Joel and Rod might have also quoted many, many others (i.e., 2 Samuel 3:32, Job 31:29, Psalm 35:15, Psalm 35:19, Proverbs 17:5, Proverbs 24:18, Obadiah 1:12, Micah 7:8). 

The history of the Jews is replete with enemies and responses.  In September of last year, Rachel Barenblat was re-learning and teaching the history and posted on "The early history of Jews in Muslim lands"; in October she noted "Jews in medieval Christendom" and a few of their "dreadful enemies" back then and over there.  And, on the day when much of the the world watched the wedding of a future king perhaps and his bride, the history of the marriage of enemy Adolf Hitler to his bride was overshadowed for a moment; and who then celebrated the next day remembering that racist, sexist, evil enemy's death?  I'm sure there were some but we were quieter, weren't we?

I think a lot about enemies, and about this very Jewish concept of loving enemies, or of praying for them, or at least of forgiving them at some point.  How does that happen?  I have enemies.  Hitler, Osama bin Laden, and some who are still very much alive.  The goal for me is not to get rid of enemies.  I just can't do it, often for very real and practical reasons.  "Vengence is mine" is one of those scriptures quoted around me when I was little, and often it seemed very sour-grapes and was mostly helpful because it helps you imagine God as your hit man. 

But I think that there's more to it than just hanging around waiting for the one and only God (who happens to be on my side) to take out my enemy, to kill him.

There is much to learn from the abused and from the oppressed here that echoes the real Jewish sentiments of enemy love.

And reading Anne Lamott, when President George W. Bush was in office taking out all of our enemies, I used to laugh at how she'd work out forgiveness of him, because God commanded her to do so, because this was a scriptural thing to do. She learned not to grit her teeth and not to drink the poison of resentments.

And reading bell hooks, I learn about "definition."  How Aristotle, the enemy of females, taught definition was to avoid ambiguities, to define precisely, to "objectively" put your enemies into little and much lower boxes so as to keep yourself free and above and alive; I think I blogged at least once about his strategy.  But hooks has a better way of defining.  Here's one of her definitions that includes the word enemy, and that acknowledges with some force who that must be:

Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. This was a definition of feminism I offered in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center more than 10 years ago [in 1985]. It was my hope that at that time that it would become a common definition everyone would use. I liked this definition because it did not imply that men were the enemy. By naming sexism as the problem it went directly to the heart of the matter. Practically, it is a definition which implies that all sexist thinking and action is the problem, whether those who perpetuate it are female or male, child or adult. It is also broad enough to include an understanding of systemic institutionalized sexism. As a definition it is open-ended. To understand feminism it implies one has to necessarily understand sexism.
("Feminist Politics: Where We Stand," Feminism is For Everyone: Passionate Politics, page 1)

Notice her phrases "my hope" and "broad enough" and "to include" and "open-ended" and the repeated, "to understand."   This is key to loving one's enemy, to real understanding, I believe.  Notice who this woman's enemy is, although she suffered much because of men:  "[one does not need to] imply that men were the enemy."  This in not mere rhetoric.

This is a way of opening up the possibilities.  It's akin to what Sappho does, to what Anne Carson helping us read and translate Sappho does (from her book, Eros: the Bittersweet).  It speaks to love, to hate, to how we divide unto death, or pray and forgive.  Yes, it's that Jewish idea, but here's from a Greek, from an English poet's perspectives that might help:

It was Sappho who first called eros "bittersweet." No one who has been in love disputes her. What does the word mean?....  Here is contradiction and perhaps paradox. To perceive this eros can split the mind in two. Why? The components of the contradiction may seem, at first glance, obvious. We take for granted, as did Sappho, the sweetness of erotic desire; its pleasurability smiles out at us. But the bitterness is less obvious. There might be several reasons why what is sweet should also be bitter. There may be various relations between the two savors.  Poets have sorted the matter out in different ways. Sappho's own formulation is a good place to begin tracing the possibilities. The relevant fragment runs:

Ἕρος δαὖτέ μ᾽ ὀ λυσιμέλες δόνει,
γλυκύπικρον ἀμάχανον ὄρπετον
Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me
sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up
_____________________________(LP, fr. 130)

It is hard to translate. "Sweetbitter" sounds wrong, and yet our standard English rendering "bittersweet" inverts the actual terms of Sappho's compound glukupikron. Should that concern us? If her ordering has a descriptive intention, eros is here being said to bring sweetness, then bitterness in sequence: she is sorting the possibilities chronologically....  But it is unlikely that this is what Sappho means....  Love and hate bifurcate Eros....  Paradox is what takes shape on the sensitized plate of the poem, a negative image from which positive pictures can be created. Whether apprehended as a dilemma of sensation, action or value, eros prints as the same contradictory fact: love and hate converge within erotic desire.
____Why?

Notice how Anne notices how "Love and hate bifurcate Eros" but also how "love and hate converge within erotic desire."  This isn't mere rhetoric.  This isn't just poetry.  This isn't at all how an extremist like Osama bin Laden or Adolf Hitler or an elitist like Aristotle would do things.  Yes, I know they're all men.  But who is implying the nature of the enemy?  My enemies?  Love our enemies?  Pray for those who hate us?  What kind of contradictory poetry or rhetoric or Bible teaching is that?

My wife and I once attended a conference on Love and on loving enemies; it was led by a counseling psychologist whose area of research was sexual abuse, on dealing with the trauma afterwards, on confronting the abusers.  His best friend, he said, was a scholar on the Hebrew Bible.  They advised, he told us, to define our enemies, "but to use a pencil with an eraser."  He then gave several categories for abusers of others so as to begin to have strategies and boundaries for moving forward with them in life.  "But," he reminded, "as you define the people in your life, write with that pencil and be ready to use the eraser to make changes."  I like that.  It seems Jewish in some ways, Bible-like in some ways, feminist in some ways, poetic and Sappho-like and literary-with-real-life in some ways.  As I think about what Joel and Rod posted as they thought about the death of Osama bin Lin, killed by the United States of America as announced by its president, it's useful.  I have living enemies today.  And if I pray for my enemies, then how does that change them and me?  It does.  Rather than causing enemy death, it tends to make me question why they are my enemy, death deserving.  These sorts of words, then, and practices, are helpful.

The Preacher Sunday

When preaching about Joshua and the people of God obeying the Lord by following His clear and precise but not really explained orders to march around the city of Jericho once a day for seven days and to do a certain number of exact things that seventh day, the preacher at my church Sunday also said this:

"Partial obedience is total disobedience."

Not having the Hebrew orders really explained to me very well, I shrugged when remembering to obey totally and impartially:

ואהבת את יהוה אלהיך בכל־לבבך ובכל־נפשך ובכל־מאדך

and

לא־תקם ולא־תטר את־בני עמך ואהבת לרעך כמוך אני יהוה

Fortunately, Matthew's translation of that other Joshua's summation of all this precisely sums it all up in all its parts:

Ἐν ταύταις ταῖς δυσὶν ἐντολαῖς ὅλος ὁ νόμος κρέμαται καὶ οἱ προφῆται

And my own father had gotten me to memorize all that totality this way:

"On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

Later I heard that, at the very same time in another church, someone had shot George Tiller presumably because he'd been a baby killer like the people of Jericho must have been and the leader of Nazi Germany certainly was. "Hang all" sure had a sad meaning yesterday.

Aristotle on Love

Aristotle on the Golden Rule:
Eavesdropping on (Male-Logical-Ethnocentric Ethical) Love

In a post yesterday, we said far too much about us and, therefore, hardly anything about Aristotle. (We were so amused by our own categories of history and fiction, religion and secularism, politics and prayer, and law and love - that we ran out of attention to the father of our logic and how we think it must derive his ethics for us. Yes, I'm talking about how we tend to co-opt a method of knowing in order, for example, to rob Jesus of the Golden Rule as if that's our moral obligation. "But we're only being objective," we protest, "merely investigating the nature of what's really real." We hardly think about why Aristotle hated Heraclitus and why Einstein loved Heisenberg and why Toni Morrison's blind, wise woman, who is "the daughter of slaves, black, American, and . . . alone in a small house outside of town," will, without forgoing much at all, kindly point out the fact that the "systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation.") So today let's get right to Aristotle on Love.

Let's let Aristotle speak for himself, shall we? Translator Harris Rackham does. (But aren't we amused that Jeffrey M. Perl and his friends suggest that Aristotle and his translators need anything more than logic? Perl and his pals recognize nuance, complexity, and un-forgone mid-wifery properties: "It takes a rhetorician more ingenious than Aristotle to refigure 'a lover of war' as an isolated pawn — though, as Harris Rackham demonstrates, a translator can devise a sort of logic: 'For one by nature unsocial is also a "lover of war" . . . inasmuch as he is solitary, like an isolated piece at draughts.'" Yes, I know, I'm suggesting we're not so much going to listen to Aristotle's original authorial intent as much as we are going to listen with our own. And yet Krista Ratcliffe suggested this long ago: our recovering Rhetorical Listening from its banishment by Aristotle so as to authorize eavesdroppers). When Aristotle says one thing, Rackham gets it as that very same (dynamically equivalent) thing (and the Greek reader, especially the one of racial and sexual and academic privilege should not make an error). When the author writes, the invisible translator renders precisely. First a glossary, then Aristotle:

φιλίας [philías] = "friendship"
φιλήσεις [philēsis] = "affection"
φιλοῦντες [philoũntes] = "affection"
φιλοῦντες [philoũntes] = "friendship"
ἀντιφίλησις [anti-phílēsis] = "reciprocal affection"

φιλούμενός [philoúmenós] = "friend"
φιλούμενός [philoúmenós] = (person) "loved"

φιλεῖται [phileĩtai] = (to be) "loved"
φιλητοῖς [philētoĩs] = "loveable"
φιλοῦσιν [philoũsin] = (to) "love"
φιλοῦσι [philoũsi] = (to) "form attachments"

ἀγαπῶσι [agapōsi] = (to) "enjoy"
ἀγαπῶσι [agapōsi] = (to be) "fond of"
ἀγαπᾷ [agapã] = (to) "care for"

ἐρωτικοὶ [érōtikoì] = "to fall in love"
ἐρωτικῆς [érōtikēs] = "love"

ἀλλήλους ... καθ’ αὑτοὺς
[allēlous ... kath' aűtoùs]
= "each other in themselves"

Now listen:

Now these qualities differ in kind; hence the affection [φιλήσεις] or friendship [φιλίαι] they occasion may differ in kind also. There are accordingly three kinds of friendship [φιλίας], corresponding in number to the three lovable [φιλητοῖς] qualities; since a reciprocal affection [ἀντιφίλησις], known to either party, can be based on each of the three, and when men love each other [φιλοῦντες ἀλλήλους], they wish each other well in respect of the quality which is the ground of their friendship [φιλοῦσιν]. So that there is a different species of will-wishing in each case.

Thus friends whose affection [φιλοῦντες] is based on utility do not love each other in themselves [ἀλλήλους οὐ καθ’ αὑτοὺς φιλοῦσιν], but in so far as some benefit accrues to them from each other [ἀλλήλων].

And similarly with those whose friendship is based on pleasure: for instance, we enjoy [ἀγαπῶσι] the society of witty people not because of what they are in themselves, but because they are agreeable to us.

Hence in a friendship [φιλοῦντες] based on utility or on pleasure men love their friend for their own good or their own pleasure, and not as being the person loved [φιλούμενός], but as useful or agreeable. And therefore these friendships [φιλίαι] are based on an accident, since the friend [φιλούμενος] is not loved [φιλεῖται] for being what he is, but as affording some benefit or pleasure as the case may be.

There's more in the Nichomachean Ethics:

And the tastes of youth change quickly. Also the young are prone to fall in love [ἐρωτικοὶ], as love [ἐρωτικῆς] is chiefly guided by emotion, and grounded on pleasure; hence they form attachments [φιλοῦσι] quickly and give them up quickly, often changing before the day is out.

The young do desire to pass their time in their friend's [φιλίαν] company, for that is how they get the enjoyment of their friendship [φιλίαν]. The perfect form of friendship [φιλία] is that between the good, and those who resemble each other in virtue. For these friends [φίλοις] wish each alike the other's good in respect of their goodness, and they are good in themselves; but it is those who wish the good of their friends [φίλοι] for their friends' sake who are friends in the fullest sense, since they love each other for themselves and not accidentally. Hence the friendship [φιλία] of these lasts as long as they continue to be good; and virtue is a permanent quality. And each is good relatively to his friend as well as absolutely, since the good are both good absolutely and profitable to each other. And each is pleasant in both ways also, since good men are pleasant both absolutely and to each other; for everyone is pleased by his own actions, and therefore by actions that resemble his own, and the actions of all good men are the same or similar.—

And there's the distinctive distinguishing of love based on science - far separate from that of the poets and pseudo scientists like Heraclitus and Heisenburg - who know nothing of logic or objectivity:

Some try to find a more profound and scientific explanation of the nature of affection. Euripides writes that ‘Earth yearneth for the rain’ when dried up, ‘And the majestic Heaven when filled with rain Yearneth to fall to Earth.’ Heracleitus says, ‘Opposition unites,’ and ‘The fairest harmony springs from difference,’ and ‘'Tis strife that makes the world go on.’ Others maintain the opposite view, notably Empedocles, who declares that ‘Like seeks after like.’

Dismissing then these scientific speculations as not germane to our present enquiry, let us investigate the human aspect of the matter, and examine the questions that relate to man's character and emotions: for instance, whether all men are capable of friendship [φιλία], or bad men cannot be friends [φίλους]; and whether there is only one sort of friendship [ἓν εἶδος τῆς φιλίας] or several [πλείω]. Those who hold that all friendship [...] is of the same kind [οἰόμενοι] because friendship [...] admits of degree, are relying on an insufficient proof, for things of different kinds also can differ [τὰ ἕτερα] in degree. But this has been discussed before.

Perhaps the answer to these questions will appear if we ascertain what sort of things arouse liking or love. It seems that not everything is loved [οὐ πᾶν φιλεῖσθαι], but only what is lovable [τὸ φιλητόν], and that this is either what is good, or pleasant, or useful. But useful may be taken to mean productive of some good or of pleasure, so that the class of things lovable [ὥστε φιλητὰ] as ends is reduced to the good and the pleasant.

But before we leave there's that hint at a Corinthian love, that Christian one, of that man named Paul, who begins to stretch in an other way Aristotle's more objective "agape" love (before he tells the women to be silent in the church and to ask their husbands at home). Says Aristotle, in his Ethics, logically avoiding hyperbole and other extremes:

The man who exceeds these limits cares [ἀγαπᾷ] more for such pleasures than they are worth. Not so the temperate man; he only cares for them as right principle enjoins. . . . Men who have inherited a fortune are reputed to be more liberal than those who have made one, since they have never known what it is to want; moreover everybody is specially fond of [ἀγαπῶσι] a thing that is his own creation: parents and poets show this. But it is not easy for a liberal man to be rich, since he is not good either at getting money or at keeping it, while he is profuse in spending it and values wealth not for its own sake but as a means of giving.

That brings us back to Jesus, to the Golden Rule, to the various translations of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John of the conversations and questions. They are not so logical, so predictable, so categorical. They listen, with their own intent, as they listen to Moses, and to God. Have we answered all of our questions about Love, and the Law? Do we know its shape definitively (as if Greek male elite ethically)?

Would we recognize that "The love of God and for God resides in a gap"? Why are we listening to silenced women, like Julia Kristeva with her Tales of Love and their erotic, apagetic, philetic ambiguities? Like Jane's attention to ... Maggi Dawn and Jeanette Winterson and Simone preaching ... Bits and pieces, fragments, gaps, inbetween.

Who is my "neighbor"? and what must that mean?, asks Suzanne.

If we keep up this nonsense, we'll never listen to Aristotle only and only to his original designs on the Golden Rule.

Aristotle on the Golden Rule

Aristotle on the Golden Rule: A (Mere) Preface

Two Aristotelian problems have occurred this week. Alas, convenient natural categories are getting blurred again despite the work of academicians and politicians.

First, some Bible bloggers are arguing this week about whether "the historical" Jesus really taught the Golden Rule. For instance, Mark Goodacre (also a New Testament scholar) is questioning the parroted answer of Loren Rosson III to the somewhat rhetorical question of John Meier, that question (you remember) which was once asked and definitively answered so long ago by the votes of the majority of scholars of the "Jesus" Seminar. Just look at all that black and grey ink for the words Jesus didn't say. But Meir, you see, is not content to sell just three volumes of his scholarship; so he's added another: A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Volume 4: Law and Love. Lest you missed it, or failed to imagine it, or were distracted by Love, their univocal answer (Goodacre's doubts aside) is: "No." "Christianity's founder" did not "champion" the "secular wisdom" called the Golden Rule."

Second, there's this: This week President Obama apparently did not get the memo; he certainly did not read the biblioblogger dispute. When he wrote his own memo to his Nation yesterday, he came off sounding like he thought the Golden Rule is religious (not secular) and, as such, has something to contribute annually and perennially to the Day of Prayer: ". . . we remember the one law that binds all great religions together: the Golden Rule, and its call to love one another; to understand one another; and to treat with dignity and respect those with whom we share a brief moment on this Earth." And that memo-to-remember is inserted right in the middle of another fat debate or two or three this week: (you know) - the debates over how to keep separate church and state and Law and Love and executive prayer and Executive propriety (when the rest of the secular government gets stood up and is left all alone, right out in public with their voices cocked up towards the skies, with television camera crews from Fox News and CNN News and so forth making ready for youtube).

These are threats of a perhaps-real historical rabbi teaching something secular. OR of certain Christian writings (albeit with an academically-doubtful founder) harking back maybe to something Jewish. These are risks of mixing absolute categories - and of bringing together very distinct domains of dominance - that may cause some of us even to want to change the natures we were born with!

It reminds us of that lovable literary scholar who turned from solid atheism to intellectual theism to a path towards life-bending concessions of something radically different altogether. He also turned from serious literature to popular apologetics (and, thankfully, vowed never intentionally to mix the two, leaving his readers to do that job for him). Yes, I'm thinking of C.S. Lewis and of his little afterthought of an "Appendix" to The Abolition of Man. Yes, you remember it too, don't you? It's what he called, "Illustrations of the Tao," which, I think, too many Christians have appropriated in the pages as some aristotelian natural law if not that platonic ideal found also within the words of "The Word of God," which is also known as "The Bible." (Fair enough - that appendix was no afterthought of the author. And Lewis really was the evangelist of Mere Christianity, wasn't he?)

But Lewis was also thoroughly anti-modernist well before the French post-philosophers posted anything along those lines; and he says (to introduce the Appendix) that he is "not a professional historian," and he adds, "I am not trying to prove its [the Tao's] validity by the argument [of historical artifacts]. . . ," and he goes on to claim that "biology and anthropology" won't support some universal construct of a meta-narrative absolute Law. Which is why his first illustrations of rules found around the world and through the histories of it run right into Love.

He notes (8 illustrated LAWs - 8 and not 7; 8 and not 10 Commandments, nor 2 in 1), the first being:

"I. THE LAW OF GENERAL BENEFICENCE"

And he lists "Ancient Egyptian" and "Ancient Jewish" and "Old Norse" and "Hindu" and "Babylonian" and "Ancient Chinese" and "Roman" and "British" and "Christian" quotations from religious and from secular texts. What a mix. What a motley mix.

In his appendix, Lewis seems to have forgotten that he quoted Aristotle in Chapter One, where he quoted him right out of the Nichomachean Ethics. And here's the thing: the evangelical Christians I know who've read Lewis's little book - and who have liked it - have also likened it to "The Bible." They have likely done so because of Aristotle. It's not so much that they really have Lewis's appreciation for the Ethics (and Lewis seems to stomach Aristotle's ethics because he finds Aristotle's ostensibly natural "ought to" to be just a surfaced outcropping of the much deeper, less visible morality of Plato's ideal. Hence, Lewis says he doesn't have to "argue" or "prove" the Tao as Aristotle would, because Plato spared thinkers of that problem). The Christians who I know who have liked Lewis's book rather like the game of logic, which they play very seriously. Absolute premises can lead to absolutely rigid conclusions. Therefore: Categories are inherently natural and cannot (therefore: "should not") be mixed.

What hardly anybody notices and talks about out loud is that Lewis's "illustrations" of the "Tao" start (and end) with The Golden Rule. (Keep your eye on and your ear to The End.)

The mix of secular and religious historical quotations that Lewis cites (several from various groups and cultures of histories) is a mix of a Law, which is a mix of Law with Love. We rarely laugh at the irony, "Thou shalt love . . . ," but we "ought to" laugh. And we ought to laugh "involuntarily," - just the way we do when we've had just a bit too much to drink at a party and our best friend more-than-whispers that inside joke (within earshot of everyone else). We know, right then, while still sober, that categories have been mixed. Helplessly mixed.

(There now can be no Berlin wall erected between the "Greco-Roman world, going back as far as Herodotus and the sophists" and "Jesus" and "the historical" Jesus.)

And is there really a logical "reason" that the last illustration in Lewis' mixed up set comes from "Matt. vii. 12.": "Do to men what you wish men to do to you."?

Aristotle would say there is a reason. He'd join that argument to keep Jesus out of it. He'd repeat some of what he said in his secular Politics too. But he wouldn't be talking to you, or to me. Not if you're a woman, or any kind of bar-bar-ian. His Ethics were written for his son, Nicomachus, and for his father, Nicomachus, and for the elite boys in his Academy who might just some day conquer the world, logically and so forth. (Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics were not written for his mother. Nor were they for his wife who only bore him a daughter, nor for that daughter who is a female which is a mutant male according to his logic, nor for his concubine who bore him his Nicomachus, nor for any of his slaves.)

At the risk of breaching such natural categories, however, wouldn't you like to know how Aristotle writes the Golden Rule? If you've peeked by translation at his Ethics alone, then you know how Aristotle was concerned about three categories of "love." (I'm not just talking about how separate he must keep notions such as "agape," and "phileo," and "eros." He gets enough mere help from C.S. Lewis and Christian Bible scholars on that). When we have more time together, let's look and eavesdrop.

Obama on Prayer

Barack Hussein Obama was "overheard" praying a prayer: a written one, in his hand writing in Jerusalem. It goes, ostensibly, like this (as we lurk and eavesdrop on a conversation between a human being and his Creator):

"Lord, protect my family and me. Forgive me my sins and help me guard against pride and despair. Give me the wisdom to do what is right and just. And make me an instrument of your will."

Old news, but it casts a shadow perhaps on the latest public attention to his behavior and words on praying. On this Official United States of America Day of Prayer, the now-President Obama issues, and signs by his hand, this statement:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Presidential-Proclamation-National-Day-of-Prayer/

". . . As we observe this day of prayer, we remember the one law that binds all great religions together: the Golden Rule, and its call to love one another; to understand one another; and to treat with dignity and respect those with whom we share a brief moment on this Earth. . . . I call upon Americans to pray in thanksgiving for our freedoms and blessings and to ask for God's continued guidance, grace, and protection for this land that we love."

These words remind me of some of my favorite passages in one of the President's favorite books. Blogworthy passages (after time for reflection, and prayer).