Poetry and the End of Theology

After I posted "Our World Without Ambiguity, or humility" this morning, James K. A. Smith posted "Poetry and the End of Theology."

Smith is asking some dangerous questions again:

But how did a discourse so uncreative become the deputized voice of the Creator? How did a genre so flat and sober and unimaginative become the official mouthpiece of a God who created platypuses and larkspur? Frankly, how did the boring disquisitions of “systematic” theology emerge as the authoritative voice for a people who follow a story-teller like Jesus?

And he's making some dangerous comparisons:

The republic of [Christian] theology, like Plato’s city [i.e., The Republic], is built on the exile of the poets whose “fictions” are a dangerous distraction.

Smith sums up his own short story succinctly:

theology picked up some very bad habits in modernity.

What Smith hasn't yet done is to tell the story of where what he calls "modernity" has picked up its very bad habits from.  And yet Smith gives clues:

the language of propositions and syllogisms

Now, who invented such logic and refined the true systematic process of scientific knowing that we call "syllogistic reasoning"?  Who's the one who worked against "images and metaphors" and "fiction and poetry"?  Who's that one who railed against divine "revelation"? 

Yes, that's right.  It's the pre-modern, poetry-despising, anti-female, barbarian-(like-you-and-me)-hating, utterly-objective, father of modernity:

Aristotle.

Black Comparisons

Yesterday, I listened to G. K. Chesterton's introduction to Aesop's Fables.  (This is one of the advantages of modern technologies - http://librivox.org/ plays right into my iPhone through the automobile speakers while I'm driving).  As I listened to what Chesterton has written about Aesop and his fables, I couldn't help but make comparisons to what Aristotle has also written about Aesop and his fables.

Generally, I like things that Chesterton writes because he tends to open up meanings, like Aesop and his fables do.  But in his Introduction, Chesterton closes down meanings like Aristotle does; he tries to box meanings up much more like Aristotle does.

So let's compare.  Here's Chesterton on Aesop and his fables:

The historical AEsop, in so far as he was historical, would seem to have been a Phrygian slave, or at least one not to be specially and symbolically adorned with the Phrygian cap of liberty. He lived, if he did live, about the sixth century before Christ, in the time of that Croesus whose story we love and suspect like everything else in Herodotus. There are also stories of deformity of feature and a ready ribaldry of tongue: stories which (as the celebrated Cardinal said) explain, though they do not excuse, his having been hurled over a high precipice at Delphi. It is for those who read the Fables to judge whether he was really thrown over the cliff for being ugly and offensive, or rather for being highly moral and correct. But there is no kind of doubt that the general legend of him may justly rank him with a race too easily forgotten in our modern comparisons: the race of the great philosophic slaves. AEsop may have been a fiction like Uncle Remus: he was also, like Uncle Remus, a fact. It is a fact that slaves in the old world could be worshipped like AEsop, or loved like Uncle Remus. It is odd to note that both the great slaves told their best stories about beasts and birds.

Now, here's Aristotle:

It remains to speak of the proofs common to all branches of Rhetoric, since the particular proofs have been discussed. These common proofs are of two kinds, example and enthymeme (for the maxim is part of an enthymeme).  Let us then first speak of the example; for the example resembles induction, and induction is a beginning.  There are two kinds of examples; namely, one which consists in relating things that have happened before, and another in inventing them oneself.  The latter are subdivided into comparisons or fables, such as those of Aesop and the Libyan.

Λοιπὸν δὲ περὶ τῶν κοινῶν πίστεων ἅπασιν εἰπεῖν, ἐπείπερ εἴρηται περὶ τῶν ἰδίων. εἰσὶ δ’ αἱ κοιναὶ πίστεις δύο τῷ γένει, παράδειγμα καὶ ἐνθύμημα· ἡ γὰρ γνώμη μέρος ἐνθυμήματός ἐστιν. πρῶτον μὲν οὖν περὶ παραδείγματος λέγωμεν· ὅμοιον γὰρ ἐπαγωγῇ τὸ παράδειγμα, ἡ δ’ ἐπαγωγὴ ἀρχή. παραδειγμάτων δὲ εἴδη δύο· ἓν μὲν γάρ ἐστιν παραδείγματος εἶδος τὸ λέγειν πράγματα προγενομένα, ἓν δὲ τὸ αὐτὸν ποιεῖν. τούτου δὲ ἓν μὲν παραβολὴ ἓν δὲ λόγοι, οἷον οἱ Αἰσώπειοι καὶ Λιβυκοί.

The translation above by J. H. Freese is older and technical English, which compares pretty well to Aristotle's older and technical Greek.  We could compare this with a newer English translation, one by W. Rhys Roberts, which actually shows how Aristotle (whether he intends to or not) is performing the kind of "rhetorics" that he, by logic, is trying to map out rather objectively.  Note how translator Roberts uses several English language devices -- (a) the grammar parenthesis, (b) the abbreviation "e.g., for example," and (c) the appositive -- to make more of a direct comparison in the last line here:

... and the fable (e.g. the fables of Aesop, those from Libya). 

Now, when we look at the statements of Chesterton and Aristotle side by side, what we may begin to notice are similarities.  Both Chesterton and Aristotle narrowly construct what Aesop's fables are (i.e., what they are vs. what they are not).  The categories of both Chesterton and Aristotle could be severely critiqued as not only limiting but also, in some instances, as inaccurate.

(Chesterton, for example, says "fables" are "not fairy tales," and he goes on to assert that Aesop "understood that, for a fable, all the persons must be impersonal. They must be like abstractions in algebra, or like pieces in chess. The lion must always be stronger than the wolf, just as four is always double of two. The fox in a fable must move crooked, as the knight in chess must move crooked. The sheep in a fable must march on, as the pawn in chess must march on. The fable must not allow for the crooked captures of the pawn.... Something of the same sort may have been meant by the animal worship, in which Egyptian and Indian and many other great peoples have combined. Men do not, I think, love beetles or cats or crocodiles with a wholly personal love; they salute them as expressions of that abstract and anonymous energy in nature which to any one is awful, and to an atheist must be frightful. So in all the fables that are or are not AEsop's all the animal forces drive like inanimate forces, like great rivers or growing trees. It is the limit and the loss of all such things that they cannot be anything but themselves: it is their tragedy that they could not lose their souls."

Notice in the words I've bolded above how Chesterton works to essentialize what fables are and are not; in essence, they are other than fairy tales, are abstractions, are pieces, are dependent on the essential nature of animals, are not fairy tales.  Notice how "other," how "impersonal," how "awful," how "Egyptian and Indian," how "abstract," how supposedly "Natural" Chesterton's categories for Aesop's fables must be for him.  However, when you read the fables of Aesop yourself, you can easily find counterexamples to Chesterton's assertions.  He can't keep Aesop or his fables in the box he constructs for them.  If you yourself read Aesop's fables, you can easily find in some of them humans interacting with animals as the Greek gods and goddesses interact with their humans.  You can easily see that the animals are personal and not always predictable.  And when we read Aesop's fables, ironically and fascinatingly, you see how Chesterton himself does much of what Aesop does -- what he tries to ignore the fable teller doing:  they both use comparisons to make points for, and with, the reader and listener.  This is like Aristotle too, who is using comparisons while disparaging certain "essential" aspects of fables qua rhetoric.  Aristotle is trying to be logical, at best trying to sound logical.  He opens his treatise on Rhetoric with a definition:  "Rhetoric is the antistrophos of Dialectic."  Essentially, rhetoric is different from dialectic -- and both are under logic, which can define them.  The funny, ironic thing is that Aristotle ends up abandoning pure logic when giving examples of fables, which he categorizes and essentializes.)

What is most interesting, when comparing Chesterton and Aristotle writing, is how the two white men are comparing Aesop (likely a slave) and his fables to black people and their fables.  Chesterton says -- insinuating that Aesop could have been "ugly and offensive" -- that readers of Aesop really "may justly rank him with a race:  ... a race too easily forgotten in our modern comparisons: the race of the great philosophic slaves."  Chesterton then names Uncle Remus, an African American storyteller.

Aristotle, who writes to elite pure Greek males, makes this comparison:   τούτου δὲ ἓν μὲν παραβολὴ ἓν δὲ λόγοι οἷον οἱ Αἰσώπειοι καὶ Λιβυκοί.  To compare that with our barbarian English it goes something like this:  "There are stories thrown violently alongside your own:  Aesop's and Libyans'."  And just as Chesterton's readers and listeners understand the "race" and the name of "Uncle Remus" so Aristotle's readers and listeners understand the black race and his naming of the Libyans.

Uncle Remus, of course, is the black storyteller of African American folktales ostensibly.  And the Libyans, who might they be?

In the Odyssey, Homer suggests where Libya is.  And he insinuates what it's like, Afric, exotic, a place where goods and slaves are bought and sold.  The Greek hero Odysseus says, "I wandered to Cyprus and Phoenicia, and to the Egyptians, and reached the Ethiopians, Sidonians, and Erembi, and Libya, where rams become horned suddenly" (4.83-85) and "he put me on a seafaring ship to Libya, falsely advising me that I'd be bringing back cargo with him, but so he could sell me there and get an untold price for me" (14.295-97).

But Libya for the Greeks is also a woman.  She is a half goddess and a foreigner raped by a god to produce foreign men.  And Libyans also are related to Gorgones:

Pliny (H. N. iv. 31) thought that they were a race of savage, swift, and hair-covered women; and Diodorus (iii. 55) regards them as a race of women inhabiting the western parts of Libya, who had been extirpated by Heracles in traversing Libya.

The most famous Gorgon, of course, is the infamous Medusa:

In her images, her hair sometimes resembles dread locks, showing her origins in Africa. There she had a hidden, dangerous face. It was inscribed that no one could possibly lift her veil, and that to look upon her face was to glimpse ones own death as she saw your future.

So, when Aristotle compares Aesop to Libyans and their stories with one another, there is something either intentional or at best unconsciously denigrating.  Aristotle was not fond of slaves, or barbaric foreigners, or females, or their rhetorics.

I'm running out of time here.  But I do want to say that during black history month it's helpful for us to think more about "fable."  The Greek word Aristotle uses here (in his Rhetoric 1393a line 30) is παραβολὴ [transliterated with the English alfabeta as parabolḕ].  In other contexts of Aristotle's writings, translators tend to render that in English as "comparisons."  Bible translators tend to make it "sayings" or "words" when bringing the Greek translation of the Hebrew into English (i.e., from the LXX).  When it's "Jesus" telling the fables or giving the sayings or speaking the words, then Bible translators tend to technically assign that to him as "parables."  What's lost is the apt comparison of Jesus and his rhetorical methods to Aesop and his methods.  What's lost is the violence of a story thrown beside one's own, of a para bola.  What's lost is the simultaneous safety that hearing such a story provides the listener with ears to hear -- since the story is not exactly my story, I can suspend judgment.  What's lost is the apt comparison of Jesus to women, to black women especially.

Now, most of you already know I am neither black nor a woman.  But you do know how interesting, helpful, I think it is to compare afrafeminist methods with good parabolizing, as good translating.  When Suzanne calls my bible-reading influences "very feminist," I am very grateful how she notices.  And yet I think some of us, like me, have still a lot to learn from very (black) feminists such as Gayl Jones, who, like Chesterton's Aesop and Aristotle's Aesop, throw violent stories (call them fables, comparisons, and parables) beside our own.

on academic snobbery: where are the true feminists and Hellenists?

Feminists and Hellenists should provide antidotes to academic snobbery. More on that in a moment. First, a true story about some personal moments.

This is my introduction to the attitudes and behaviors of intellectual superiority. In the fall semester of my sophomore year of college, all my professors happened to be thirty-something know-it-alls. Sure enough, they fostered critical thinking in me and, I suppose, in my classmates. But they also heightened my painful sensitivity to academic snobbery. In the course of the next five semesters, I couldn't help but notice how even the most experienced, tenured professors tended to retain (well beyond their thirties) this quality: they were all arrogant intellectuals. They made us students know we were mere undergraduates.

I remember one prof who, in class, actually attacked the identity of one student. As the student left crying, the teacher declared victory of one sort or another. (The victory, I found out later, was also, at least, the professor's own "victory" over the "identity," a personal identity rejected. Two of my friends at that university, struggling over the same identity, had taken their own lives that same semester. I myself shared--but not openly--the same personal identity, an identity I did not choose. The next year, another friend with the same identity--a friend from high school who I'd followed to the college--decided to drop out the last month of the last semester of the senior year, just as the parents arrived from overseas for graduation. Private coping with a profound identity was not something snobs, in the public academy, helped with. At least we were not entirely alone). In all my classes, I clearly remember, the instructors who were men treated very differently the students who were women (just because they were women). Many of my classmates who were women, some of them feminists, were starting to talk about the arrogant thought and actions of power of some of these professors. (My classmates never used that radical word "feminist" nor the other useful terms many undergraduates today find commonplace: "sexism," "misogyny," "deconstruction," "hermeneutic of suspicion," "meta-narratives," "cultural studies," and "post structuralism, post colonialism." The U.S. was, then, riding out our second wave of feminism--and we had not yet begun to whiff the postmodern air stirring at the time in France. And I was taking semester after semester of classical Greek, not yet connecting the importance of the Hellenistic roots either philologically or philosophically. I will explain what I mean here below). It's taken me decades, now, to get to the point where I can find antidotes to academic snobbery. I've gone in and out of my thirties; in and out of my own hypocrisy, my own arrogance of intellect; in and out of a semester of seminary to examine academically--spiritually?--my own angst with my personal identity, which I need not name here; through a master's degree in linguistics; through the coursework and qualifying exams of a Ph.D. in "English" focused on ancient Greek rhetoric and on feminist rhetorics; into life as a spouse, life as a parent; and into a score of years of work with ESL college students--those women and men truly on the outside of the academy in monolingual America. It's June 3, 2007, and now I'm (nearly) ready to suggest two antidotes to academic snobbery.

First, feminists should offer an antidote to academic snobbery. Humility and profundity are the hallmarks of the woman who gets looked down upon by men (just because she's a woman) and who is seen as lacking the capability of being as rational as men are (precisely because she's not a man). Modesty and emotional depth are hardly the characteristics of self aggrandizing rational(izing) snobs.

I could say lots more. But I couldn't write anything better than Nancy Mairs has written, sitting in a wheel chair "waist-high in the world," in a body she didn't choose. So I just recommend scholar Mair's Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer.

Second, Hellenists should give us another antidote to academic snobbery in twenty-first century America. I use the English word, should, here with all the ambiguous imperative-subjunctive glory we academic insiders give it. Some of you are demanding, then, that I say what I mean. Let me just warn you that, with the classic poetic feministic Greeks, I'm mainly going to play with language. (I may sound like a snob, at first. But I'll try to translate if you'll agree to try to read on and ask me questions, continue this dialogue: jkgayle at gmail dot com privately or comment here publicly.)

Helen (or Ἑλένη) is, after all, the beautiful beginning, middle, and end of Hellenism. She is a person whose personal identity--an identity she did not choose--divides and unifies. Hence, she is humble and profound. She did not choose, either, to be captured by Paris of Troy or recaptured by Menelaus or Theseus, or in epic legend by Homer and in rhetorical praise by Sappho and Gorgias and Isocrates. (I know this sounds like snobbish name dropping.) Here's how we should care: the stories of Helen are stories of a person; they are stories of beauty and of battle; they are stories of nation building; they are stories of people; they are stories of stories; they are stories of learning, of literature, of letters, of literacy, of orality. They are stories of personal identity, of passion, of profundity, of deep change in who I am and in who you are. They are stories of flawed deities and flawed humanity, stories of humility, stories of woman and man and of common humanity. They are stories that should bring down the arrogant academic.

We get our English word, academic, from their Hellenistic origins. Plato used the word to name his Ακαδήμεια, his Academy. It's related to that other word we Americans tend to love: δημοκρατία, or democracy. Both words, of course, share a common root: δῆμος, the Hellenistic word for common people, for the ones who tend to be on the outside. So where do arrogant academics in America get the right to their attitude and their behavior of power over the common sophomore? Hardly from the humble, profound Ακαδήμεια. (Just a quick aside on Plato. Feminist scholars in the history of Greek rhetoric, including Cheryl Glenn, Susan Jarratt, Lisa Ede, and Madeleine Henry, have begun to show us that just as we know of Socrates from Plato, we know of Aspasia from Plato. The former, Socrates, is the much more famous teacher of Plato, the inventor of the famous Socratic method. The latter, Aspasia, is hidden in the infamy of her membership in the ἡετερεία, or "heterae," the kept women of ancient Greek higher education. But now our more inclusive, more humble and profound histories of Hellenistic influences on our American academy show something new. Of course, Plato credits Aspasia for writing for and influencing male speech givers. And yet, Plato may also have known that the Socratic method really was something that Socrates received from Aspasia, from a profound, lowly woman in higher education.)

Will you now revisit with me the first sentence of Homer's Hellenistic Odyssey? I want us to look at, to listen to, a phrase from the fourth line of the first book (repeated in Book XIII, Line 90).

It reads and speaks (humbly and profoundly) this way:

πολλὰ πάθεν ἄλγεα ὃν κατὰ θυμόν

or

many passions [Odysseus, our hero] suffered by heart

These are the very same sorts of words and ideas that Aristotle, in his Hellenistic Rhetoric, uses much later. In the opener of his treatise on rhetoric, for instance, Aristotle complains that all previous compilers of writings on the "skills of statement" have neglected central concepts. He talks about how common rhetoric is among all people, and he names πάθος and θυμα (or passion and heart) as key concepts thoroughly mixed up with and mixed in with the common rhetoric and conversation of all people.

Here's our problem now in America, where the academy tends to be full of academic snobs.
We have divided the common from the ivory tower. That is, we move from Homer's opener to Aristotle's and think there's nothing common between them, and hardly anything here or there for the common person.

So, in our literate minds, we move from the heart of orality to literacy alone.
From epic poetry to didactic rhetoric.
From story to precept.
From passion suffered to "pathos" as merely one of three available means of persuasion competing somehow with "ethos" and the much preferred "logos."
From passion, then, to "pathos," and from "pathos," ultimately to "logos."
From profound heart to shallow "enthymeme," as a heady syllogism in formal rhetoric.
From Helen to Hellenism, from Hellenism to Greek, from classical Greek to American academic English.
From the common to the snobbish.
From either feminism to Hellenistic intellectualism or from intellectualism to feminism
(but never to feminism in Hellenism or Hellenism that is feministic).
From the personal identity of Hellenism, feminism
to the impersonal intellectualism of higher ivory tower education.

We can hardly fathom that anything we do in the university in this nation today, from our high vantage, should cause us to bear any responsibility for the suicide of two undergraduates and for the decision to drop out of college by a third. Will the higher education labels we put on ourselves and our students (whether "traditionalist" or "feminist" or something else) bring down our arrogance? Do we work against student passion and profundity? What can we learn from our dropouts? Are we too snobbish also to acknowledge the humble feminist and deep Hellenist roots of our academy?