Festivity and Work

“To celebrate a festival means to do something which is in no way tied to other goals, which has been removed from all “so that” and “in order to.” True festivity cannot be imagined as residing anywhere but in the realm of activity that is meaningful in itself.

The further implication is, then, that anyone who is at a loss to say what activity that is meaningful in itself is will also be at a loss to define the concept of festivity. And if that incapacity is existential, instead of merely intellectual, then the prerequisite for achieving any kind of festivity is lacking. With the death of the concept of human activity that is meaningful in itself, the possibility of any resistance to a totalitarian laboring society also perishes (and such a regime could very well be established even without concomitant political dictatorship). It then becomes a sheer impossibility to establish and maintain an area of existence which is not preempted by work.”

Joseph Pieper, In Tune with the World: a Theory of Festivity, (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 1999 [orig. 1963]), 9.

Work as “Not-Leisure”

“Of course, the original meaning of the concept of “leisure” has practically been forgotten in today’s leisure-less culture of “total work”: in order to win our way to a real understanding of leisure, we must confront the contradiction that rises from our overemphasis on the world of work. “One does not only work in order to live, but one lives for the sake of one’s work,” this statement, quoted by Max Weber, makes immediate sense to us, and appeals to current opinion. It is difficult for us to see how in fact it turns the order of things upside-down.”

And what would be our response to another statement? “We work in order to be at leisure.” Would we hesitate to say that here the world is really turned upside-down? Doesn’t this statement appear almost immoral to the man or woman of the world of “total work”? Is it not an attack on the basic principles of human society?

Now, I have not merely constructed a sentence to prove a point. The statement was actually made–by Aristotle. Yes, Aristotle: the sober, industrious realist, and the fact that he said it, gives the statement special significance. What he says in a more literal translation would be: “We are not-at-leisure in order to be-at-leisure.” For the Greeks, “not-leisure” was the word for the world of everyday work; and not only to indicate its “hustle and bustle,” but the work itself…

…the Greeks would probably not have understood our maxims about “work for the sake of work.” Could this also imply that people in our day no longer have direct access to the original meaning of leisure?”

Joseph Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture, (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998 [orig. 1948]), 4 – 5.

The Warden, Anthony Trollope

‘Indeed, I like Mr Bold much, personally,’ continued the disinterested victim; ‘and to tell you the “truth,”‘–he hesitated as he brought out the dreadful tidings, –‘I have sometimes thought it not improbable that he would be my second son-in-law.’ The bishop did not whistle. We believe they lose the power of doing so on being consecrated; and that in these days one might as easily meet a corrupt judge as a whistling bishop; but he looked as though he would have done so, but for his apron.’

Hillary Mantel on A Grief Observed

A Grief Observed is a lucid description of an obscure, muddled process, a process almost universal, one with no logic and no timetable. It is an honest attempt to write about aspects of the human and the divine which, he fears, “won’t go into language at all”. At the heart of the enterprise is his quarrel with God, and in the end God wins, first philosophically, then emotionally.

But there is a puzzle as to how to categorise the book: where should it be shelved? Lewis’s reputation being what it is, it would be natural to place it under “religion”. But many of the people who need it would not find it there because, like Lewis, they are angrily running away from God, hurtling to abandon a being who seems to have abandoned them. It is more a book about doubt than about faith; it does not warn, exhort or seek to convince. Anger finds a voice in this book, more anger than the faithful are usually able to acknowledge. But it doesn’t belong in the “self-help” section either: it has no bullet points, suggests no programme, offers no cheering anecdotes.

What it does do is to make the reader live more consciously. Testimony from a sensitive and eloquent witness, it should be placed on a shelf that doesn’t exist, in the section called “The Human Condition”. It offers an interrogation of experience and a glimmer of hard-won hope. It allows one bewildered mind to reach out to another. Death is no barrier to that.

Hillary Mantel, ‘Re-reading C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed’, The Guardian, 27 December 2014

Happy Christmas from the Middle East

I will never forget the day in Baghdad when we had some visitors. They had come to see what it was really like for Christians in Iraq. They were so surprised by how happy the thousands of people were in our congregation. “How can you be so happy when you are surrounded by suicide bombs, mortar rockets and such violence?” One of our young people answered the statement. “You see when you have lost everything, Jesus is all you have got left.

All you have got left is the love of that refugee child. That to us in the Middle East is all that matters this Christmas. The terrorism has got so bad in Iraq that I have had to leave. So I have moved to the other place where I work, Bethlehem. That little town where Jesus first came. Two-thousand years after he first came, he is still everything to the people. He is still everything to our Christians in Iraq and he can still be everything to us. You see when Christmas is over, when you have had all your presents and food, Jesus is all we have got left.

Canon Andrew White, “Happy Christmas from the Middle East” (via writing in the dust)

Suspension of Disbelief and Research

According to Friedel, the historian, scientists rely on the stubborn conviction that an obvious obstacle can be overcome. “There is a degree of suspension of disbelief that a lot of good research has to engage in,” he said. “Part of the art—and it is art—comes from knowing just when it makes sense to entertain that suspension of disbelief, at least momentarily, and when it’s just sheer fantasy.” Lord Kelvin, famous for installing telegraph cables on the Atlantic seabed, was clearly capable of overlooking obstacles. But not always. “Before his death, in 1907, Lord Kelvin carefully, carefully calculated that a heavier-than-air flying machine would never be possible,” Friedel says. “So we always have to have some humility. A couple of bicycle mechanics could come along and prove us wrong.”

John Colapinto, ‘Material Question’, The New Yorker, 22 December, 2014

The Past is Strange

For several decades in the later nineteenth century, the favorite spectator sport in America was watching people walk in circles inside big buildings.

The story Algeo tells begins in 1860, at the start of the Civil War, when a New Englander named Edward Payson Weston made a facetious bet with a friend that, if Lincoln won the Presidential election, he would walk all the way from the State House in Boston to the unfinished Capitol, in Washington, in ten days. Lincoln won, and, ten days before the inaugural, Weston set off. Though he didn’t get there quite in time, his progress, chronicled by the newspapers, enthralled a nation in need of some small fun, and he became an improbable American hero, a kind of Lindbergh of the corns and calluses. Liking his new celebrity, and the money it brought, Weston decided to keep a good thing going and, when the war ended, began to engage in competitive, six-day (never on Sunday) walking marathons in Chicago, New York, and, eventually, London.

For the next two decades, while baseball burbled around the amateur edges and boxing went on in the shadows, walking really was the dominant spectator sport in America, and Weston its central figure. He had the brains to adopt a singular and consistent costume, a gentleman’s gear of hunting trousers, boots, and riding crop. In time, a poor Irish immigrant to America, Daniel O’Leary, emerged as his opposite in style, and so his great rival; together, they staged walking races, symbolic class contests, immigrant vs. native, over several long sessions in several big towns. O’Leary was, in a Jackie Robinson-like way, perceived as a credit to his race, restoring the honor of the Irish, stained most recently, in Chicago, by the episode of another O’Leary and her cow. Working-class enthusiasm for the contests was so keen that indoor stadiums were needed. In New York, P. T. Barnum’s Roman Hippodrome, in the East Twenties, got covered, first by a tent and then, soon afterward, by a real roof, in part to contain and show off the walking marathons. (Eventually, that Hippodrome evolved into the original, sadly lost Madison Square Garden, where walkers walked, and where, in 1879, Weston, freshly returned from his London exploits, was given a hero’s welcome.)

Adam Gopnik, ‘Heaven’s Gaits’, The New Yorker, 1 Sept, 2014

Adele Reinhartz on the dilemma of the ‘Jew’ or ‘Judean’ debates

Mason is surely correct that ioudaios was a complex term that carried ethnic,
political, cultic, and many other dimensions, even if the jury is still out on the
existence or non-existence of religion in antiquity (see Shaye Cohen, Cynthia
Baker, Seth Schwartz, and Daniel R. Schwartz, who have more nuanced
positions on the matter). But why broaden the referent of Judean from its primary
geographical meaning when there is a perfectly good English word — Jew —
ready to hand? As the Pew Report and many previous surveys and sociological
studies have shown, Jewish identity includes the same elements — including
ethnic, political, cultural, genealogical, and, yes, geographical — that, in
Mason’s view, are conveyed by the Greek terminology. To define Jew solely or
even primarily in religious terms is simply wrong. Further, erasing Jews from
Jewish antiquity, while presumably solving one historical problem, creates
another historical dilemma: how to account for the sudden appearance of Jews
in late antiquity as a fully-formed ethnic and religious group that saw itself —
and was seen by others — as continuous with the ioudaioi of the Greco-Roman
era? Scholars of the Greco-Roman period may not feel called upon to answer
such questions, but the dilemma cannot be ignored.

Adele Reinhartz, ‘The Vanishing Jews of Antiquity’, MRB, 24 June 2014

One thing that has become increasingly clear to me is just how much the socio-religious phenomenon we call ‘Judaism’ was itself a matter of intense debate and negotiation in the first century CE. As Reinhartz goes on to emphasize in her response to Reed, a certain anachronism is perhaps inevitable in historical work, yet I wonder if some approaches don’t risk more distortion than others. In other words, the risks of ‘atomizing’ linguistics, ‘parallelomania’, and anachronistic ‘imposition’ of frameworks are well-known, but I wonder if the shape and scope of certain types of scholarly theses and monographs increases rather than attenuates exposure to these risks.

‘There is no résumé submission or recruiting booth if you want to make a career as a novelist.’

Learning is supposed to be about falling down and getting up again until you do it right. But, in an academic culture that demands constant achievement, failures seem so perilous that the best and the brightest often spend their young years in terrariums of excellence. The result is what Deresiewicz calls “a violent aversion to risk.” Even after graduation, élite students show a taste for track-based, well-paid industries like finance and consulting (which in 2010 together claimed more than a third of the jobs taken by the graduating classes of Harvard, Cornell, and Princeton). And no wonder. A striver can “get into” Goldman Sachs the way that she got into Harvard. There is no résumé submission or recruiting booth if you want to make a career as a novelist.

Nathan Heller, ‘Poison Ivy: Are élite colleges bad for the soul?’, The New Yorker, Sept. 1, 2014

Annette Yoshiko Reed on atomizing approaches to language

The recent Jew and Judean Forum at Marginalia Review of Books is worth careful consideration for anyone interested in ancient Judaism and Christian Origins. Also, thanks to the editor Timothy Michael Law, you can read the posts here or download them in handy ebook format or pdf.

I found the two paragraphs below by Annette Yoshiko Reed in her contribution “Ioudaios before and after ‘Religion'” particularly helpful.

The focus on word-level translation reflects a longstanding tendency in Biblical Studies to treat the etymologies and histories of specific words as direct windows onto ancient thought — with the first known occurrence of a word in writing too often conflated with the birth of a concept. [See Malcolm Lowe’s essay in the forum.] If such approaches feel natural, even despite their bizarre atomization of language, it is in part because modern scholars of ancient ioudaioi have long delighted in quests for the “origins” or “invention” of concepts now common in the West. Teleology, of course, makes for poor history, and presentism courts anachronism. Yet their enduring power may help to explain the appeal of reducing the meaning of ioudaios to a question of when. To assert a moment before which a word bore a now-familiar meaning, after all, is also to evoke the point after which we might confidently presume what it means to us today.

For the limits of such approaches, we need look no further than to the use of the English term “Jew.” Those who prefer to translate first-century uses of ioudaios as “Judean” argue that “Jew” is a religious affiliation and therefore anachronistic prior to the Christian invention of “religion” in the third or fourth centuries. But this line of reasoning, as Reinhartz notes, presumes that “Jew” denotes a religious affiliation for “us” — an assumption not all English speakers who self-identify as Jews today share, as 2013 Pew polls made dramatically clear. The persistence of multiple meanings can be seen even in the scholarly debate about ioudaioi. If anything, the debate demonstrates how the term “Jew” can seem self-evidently religious to some people from the very same time and culture (and even the same profession and similar education) as others who understand it as self-evidently ethnic, political, cultural, or otherwise not or not just religious. It is not simply that the history of the meaning of ioudaios might be told differently if we chose a different end-point, such as the modern equivalents in Hebrew or Japanese or German. Even the English term “Jew” resists reduction to a single meaning at the end of a single story.