Generic Reading Practices

You have to rely outside a text to see what reading is about.

A reading practice is a procedure while reading that is applied as a rule for reading that makes the reading easier or coherent or more pleasurable. Roland Wulbert speaks of reading practices that apply to logic. What do people do so as to make one sentence follow from another? How are they to be read as coherent or tied together? Otherwise, sentences would dangle next to one another, not overcoming the synapses between the neurons. It is always fruitful to explore the way people use their imaginations to leap across the divide, sometimes presuming a cause of one to the other such as “I went to the store. I bought a sixpack.” or else a contradiction, as when one notices saying sentences like “God loves everybody” and “I hate my enemy” are to be treated as in tension or God and you having different responsibilities or not noticing the possible disparity.

Another meaning for the term “reading practice” refers to how people deal with the mastery of a language depending on the purpose of the reading. Some reading is skimming, which means reading the first sentence in every paragraph quickly on the assumption that most prose is quite repetitive and so doesn't require close reading, just so as to get the gist of the meaning. “Close reading” is reserved to a careful inspection of a set of sentences or a text so as to assess its reverberations and nuances, so as to assess what Conrad or Austen are offering in the way of ambiguities.  Also regarded as a reading practice is how to learn the mechanics of reading; the craft of learning and teaching people how to read, whether through phonics, or whole word reading, or providing computer assisted visuals so as to recognize the difference between the letters.The point is that the ways to learn reading are really the ways to provide ways to access texts and they are not themselves part of the texts. 

The same principle applies to watching film for its images or its plot or its dialogue, teens reading or remembering key lines in “Casablanca”, or watching the mayhem at the  ending of “Bonnie and Clyde”. An example of a reading practice for art was to ask what was it that was portrayed? Historically, portraits and landscapes and battle scenes were about their objects and could be assessed for that, while Jackson Pollack had the revolutionary idea that the objects he and others created was not the picture of a subject matter but something of itself alone and therefore without meaning, though in my old fashioned way think that Rothko should be understood philosophically as a swath of color before it is reduced or recognized as a patch of color. Or that Pollack is to be providing a philosophical appreciation of the sense of dimensionality in three directions via a two dimensional canvas.

A third kind of reading practice is what I call generic. It has to do with the rules that are used so that a particular genre of literature or any other of the arts can be understood for its own distinctive properties, novels and plays and declarative prose needing a rule so as to be understood for what they are, so everyone understands that people in “The Three Stooges” are not getting hurt and so slapstick is funny rather than experienced as wrenchingly brutal. Everybody knows this because cues to dealing with it that way are provided by the accompanying or initial music or even just because you know from the ads that this is farce, just as you know that a late night comedian is making jokes even when talking about the news and you are primed to think the remarks funny, just like an after dinner speaker.

A good example of a generic reading practice, something that has to be added by the reader or viewer so as to make the genre make sense, is what would seem an extreme case: that of reading scriptural texts, because the rules applied to them are different from those used with regard to other texts. Northrope Frye said of the Bible that it was a singular text in that it was given and so to be understood as to be read differently than other texts. Frye thought that the Bible was to be thought of as a great code from which a reader could infer morals and prophecies from stories. I would suggest some people think that the story of Sodom and Gehmorra is to be read as a condemnation of homosexuality, even though it is a story that does not announce its morality but the assumption is that the Bible is chuckful of stories to be read that way because it is the nature of that book to do so.

Here is another reading practice applied to Scripture that is not applied to other narratives or argumentative prose. Bert Erdman counters traditional Biblical scholars by showing that the story of the Resurrection is different in the four Gospels. In one, the risen Jesus meets a man on the road. In another the women who found the empty tomb went into town but did not in another gospe;. Which is it? There had to be a single correct account, not contradictory accounts. But Erdman is an historian, assigning to the texts their accuracy, when in fact the case is that people reading Scripture may decide to treat the text in another way. These texts that have become standardized for 1700 years or so are allowed to combine their various stories so that the life of Jesus includes all of its versions as part of the truth. Jesus met in the upper room in only one Gospel but that is also true rather than verified from another gospel. You can;t do that with novels whose parts of the story have to cohere, it being disquieting for Dickens to write two different endings to “Great Expectations”. 

The Bible also allows other violations of verisimilitude in story telling. The skeptic will ask how there could be a city Cain could be exiled to if he was one of only the two offspring of Adam and Eve. Some religionists will say there were a lot of other people who had been born after the first two brothers were born but hardly enough to create another town. But the point is that for those Biblical literalists there is no problem even if Clarence Darrow thought otherwise. All the stories are to be read as correct, Cain a member of the seminal family and then exiled to another community. There is no need to gloss over that exile was a common practice during the ancient Middle East. It just stays as its own, a way to hold at the same time texts that seem to contradict one another. Believers find it surprising that the apparent anomaly would arise.

Here is another though less specialized genre where people apply a reading practice to make sense of what is happening. Classicists tell me that classical tragedy was accompanied by sets and music and so should be understood as grand opera rather than as just drama. But the distinguishing theory of classical tragedy was the introduction by Aeschylus of the second speaker so that people could engage in dialogue. In “Oedipus Rex” there are a set of passages where people successively relate some part of the backstory for Oedipus, the reader well aware that he had a fatal flaw, that of hubris, and so it made sense that hewill come to realize he had married his mother and the consequences that would result from that revelation, the suspense coming from him not pressing on to what had happened in the past while the audience knew the dreadful outcome. The drama consists of partial and cumulative narrations. Never mind the sets and music. The audience decides to find the words crucial, the words highlighted in the theatrical unity of time and space. The same is true of modern theatre where lighting can be used to separate scenes and set decoration help establish a mood but the words, the interchanges, are what matters, as happens in “Death of a Salesman”, where Willy Loman has pivotal exchanges with his son and where his grieving wife concludes by saying that Willy mattered. In that sense, all of drama is Ibsenism, even if Shakespeare also uses action also to move the story along, full of short scenes whose connection also has to be read for coherence through providing how one scene is connected to the next. You remember Hamlet killing Polonius, but also Hamlet sparring with Claudius and also sparring with Polonius when Polonious was trying to figure out what Hamlet was up to. Those are the cruxes, not the soliloquies which are commentaries on the background setting of Denmark and also on life. The dialogues make the story development make sense even if students are required to memorize the soliloquies for their single voiced poetry. Attending dialogue makes the dramatic story clear even if teachers attend to other aspects of a play as the reading practice instructs otherwise. The decision about which reading practice to follow is cultural and imposed rather than inevitably the way the genre has to be read.

Now shift to.a different genre where a feature that in drama is unimportant becomes important and people are trained to attend to it or attend to it to get its bearings. That happens in the novel, where the setting becomes important, perhaps because the novel began as a report on exotic situations and places, like Robinson Crusoe arriving in a desert island. The setting gives pleasure, whether to know what the Thames is like in A Mutual Friend or the moors are like in Wuthering Heights or the York battlements in a Wilkie Collins novel. In fact, readers can decide that all that counts about a novel is its setting as when a strange environment is reason alone for the presence of a murder mystery where you don't care very much about the plot and thereby providing the answer to Edmund Wilson’s question of who cares about Roger Achroyd, the answer being not very much at all, but rather the attendance of the quaint circumstances. Most readers will get that but some may not notice what it is they care about while reading mysteries.

Or shift to another genre that is a step along from the novel, which is the film, which relies on the novel for its multiple stories and moods. Movie goers do not need to be schooled to read the films they go to. They may not follow the directors or the writers but to decide their own practices that discount plot and dialogue for the atmospherics of the setting, the recording of a visualization of what a place looks like, whether an urban slum or Monument Valley, the locales for John Ford movies. Viewers will decide what is important and what to neglect as when friends in my youth went into a movie in the middle and caught up on the first part in the next showing because it was easy enough to figure out the plot and you knew the actors to do what they were used to doing and wanted and trained themselves to see the spectacle, whether the mass scenes in Intolerance or the Lord of the Rings movies or Star Wars.

The reason for attending to what one cares to see is about a fact of the movie as a genre, which is that it is itself generic in that the types of movies are readily put into slots as to the kind of movie they will be. There are cute romances and westerns and war movies and family dramas, each following its well worn progress, with John Wayne and Claire Trevor escaping from their pasts to set up new lives, the central action the  world of its own, as the phrase goes, as that is evidenced in any number of ways, so that Shakespeare has short as well as long scenes so as to make him cinematic as well as deep themes whereby people become what they are, as happens with Othello a d Macbeth and Hamlet, that particular reading understood as an interpretation. But even the most pedestrian crime novel assault of the stagecoach by the Indians. That is different from novels which can also only be very general in their types, like mysteries or sagas, where the idea is to differentiate the particularity of the story, the Brontes are very different in composing strange romances, one filled in emotion and the other in social class conflict. In films, you want to see the same thing over and over again and so there are lots of remakes and franchises.

Just as there is a reading practice for sacred texts, such as the Koran or the Gospels or “Genesis”, whereby everything is simultaneously true even if contradictory, there is a reading practice that applies to secular texts, such as plays, novels and essays, which is very contrary in flavor. A reader is constrained to find a rule that shows the distinctive kind of thing that a particular poem or play pr novel us despite it changing from page to page or section to section, constructing a consistency whereby the created event seems to be of a piece, a particular and distinctive point of view, a, the central action the  world of its own, as the phrase goes, as that is evidenced in any number of ways, so that Shakespeare has short as well as long scenes so as to make him cinematic as well as deep themes whereby people become what they are, as happens with Othello and Macbeth and Hamlet, that particular reading understood as an interpretation. But even the most pedestrian crime novel has a way of being on its own, whether in mood or in motivations or in the vantage point in life. Dreiser novels are filled with accident, selfishness, and taken by as well as a sense that economic life is remorseless. Specifying the particu;ars of the novel can become a life long endeavor: to get this world just right, just l its own, but that is an idealization of making a work of art as an incomparable jewel, just itself alone as it also is a standard variation on a set piece.The art of criticism is to play these to noticings against one another.

Propaganda in World War II

Propaganda is emotionally appreciating contradictory or near contradictory propositions and that is what happens in the stories of German and Japanese POWs sent to North America during World War II.

Here is how propaganda works. It shows contradictory things to be held at the same time. Peace is war. Trump lauds Hispanics while chastising Hispanic immigrants as drug smugglers. Propaganda is different from ideology, which can be consistent. Hitler thought Jews a mongrel race by placing them within the range of races some of which are purebreds and some, like the English and the Germans, exhibiting superior civilizations. Such ideologies can be answered while propaganda is merely asserted so as to feel comfortable with the contradiction, by experiencing the two contradictory terms. John Calhoun is ideological in tuning that slavery is necessary so as to allow a democracy for the elite. Ideology may be self serving but it is rational. Thinking as some do that the slave and master cooperated for their mutual benefit is propaganda because it allows experience with each one of the sides of the contradiction that slaves are involuntary and mutually beneficial. Propaganda is a verbal assertion like that of a square circle where the term has no meaning but is saved by simultaneously feeling both sides of the opposition as valid. Propaganda is an answer to cognitive dissonance, which is the psychological theory that people have to resolve contradictions. To the contrary, people can always find a way of emotionally sensing the truth or the existence of what is logically or empirically impossible or just extremely unlikely. .The idea of “the dictatorship of the proletariat” is propaganda because it is clearly contradictory even if people assert it as a necessary historical development. That phrase is wishful thinking because dictatorship is by definition unenlightened and arbitrary unless it was temporary and was a transition to the time when all government would no longer be necessary because it had been replaced by a technocracy.

Here are a series of videos that have appeared on YouTube that purport to be anti-prapaganda but are in fact good examples of it. The narrator tells unknown stories about German and Japanese prisoners of war sent in the later years of the Second World War to stockades in Texas, Utah and Alberta, and documented from diaries, letters, memoirs and official military records.The stories are illustrated with photographs of the time of prison camps, hospitals and prairies, though the photos seem rigged because the military insignias are wrong and tears seem added to the faces portrayed. But never mind. The stories are the stuff of legend and so will be authentic because of the inevitable alterations of the past. 

Each story has the same trajectory. The prisoners arrive famished and shrunken and fearful of brutality and rape, most of the prisoners women who had been nurses or radio operators rather than combatants. They are unnerved to find that the guards were methodical but did not shout or threaten. They found cots with clean sheets and blankets and barracks that were clean and well heated and with electricity and flush toilets. They were even more surprised the next morning to find breakfast with bacon and eggs and bread and butter and real coffee and even orange juice in abundance and dinner would include meat and potatoes more ample than home rations had been for years. The prisoners were afraid they were being poisoned or lulled into a false security because the propaganda back home had said that Americans were monsters and that their own people were starving, which could not possibly be true because even prisoners were given such abundance. The prisoners hesitate but finally cannot avoid the temptation of eating. The prisoners set into a routine of food, medical care and assignments to voluntary work duty and so meet civilians who treat them kindly. 

The prisoners find that the Americans treat them well because they see even prisoners to be human, caught into a bigger picture for which they are not responsible. The lesson is that being nice is not weakness but strength and that slowly undermines their sense of things, that the Axis had been full of lies and cruelty and that America was so full of abundance that it would inevitably win. Some of the rangers or guards fell in love with the female prisoners and married or just returned to a defeated Germany so as to rebuild it as a democratic society, though the disparity between a rancher and his young prisoner suggests that the marriage had been at the start an arrangement of convenience even if it resulted in a long lasting union that allowed couples to raise American children and grandchildren. There are reunions decades later to celebrate the prison camp as a source of enlightenment and mutual respect, especially about in a Canadian brown with a number of ethnic Germans who had come there before WWI and taught the prisoners they could remain German culturally, singing German songs and using the German language without identifying with the ideology of the German government. This was a happy ending. Harrowing war experience had been replaced through human decency so as to be restored to humanity.

There is something wrong about these accounts, as salubrious as they might be. The Americans were nice and also very well off and so had luxuries even in a war, none of their cities bombed or heavily rationed, Yes, the allies won the war but that did not mean they were right, only victorious. Bacon doesn’t drive ideology, Some independent ideational force makes people decide that the losing side was on the wrong side. It took a hundred years of history to allow that the Confederacy had been on the wrong side and the rehabilitation of the Lost Cause has resurfaced in Trump renaming army bases to confederate names and rewriting American history. Moreover, it might not be that Americans were both strong and niceand so worthy of winning the war.Rather, it might be that  the war going well allowed the Americans the luxury of being nice. They were not pushed to the test though German soldiers preferring to surrender to Americans than Russians was evidence to that fact. The Germans voted with their feet. At any rate, winning a war does not make it just, just as losing an election does not mean that the winning sideways right much less than that humanity will prevail, There are many dystopian novels and films where the bad side wins and creates misery for the defeated nation: Oceana in Orwell’s “1984” and the United States occupied by Germany and Japan in Phillip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle”.

So this set of stories about prisoners redeemed to and by their humanity is propaganda, Ittells wishfull and perhaps larelyaccuratstories with a clear political agenda, which is to say that humanity is more important than nationalism. Maybe that is true enough in the second world war. But what if the allies lost? They had to win the war for its humane ideology to prosper, and that meant more American liberty ships and fire bombings that a later humanism might decide was unnecessary. And the Second World War is a special case where virtue combined with efficiency wins the day and the temperament. Are we on the side against Iran and in favor of Israel? Israel is cruel so it can survive even if some think Israel has been too cruel and the war on Iran is muddled. Use those test cases as to what wars are, when nations for sufficient reason embark on the disasters of war.

A real sign that a story is propaganda is that the moral at the end of all stories is the same one and so Trump was always right no matter what he undertook or what befell him. That is why “Deuteronomy” is propaganda. Every event retold there was shown to be preordained because it was foretold or said to be inevitable. That is so because it cannot be otherwise because a contradiction is experienced as simultaneously true even if contradictory. That is different from a mystery whereby a person wonders how a contradiction, such as the Virgin Birth or the father and son being coterminous could possibly be true. That is a dilemma while propaganda is purely verbal, words losing meaning in the emotional sense that contradictory things like squared circles are both true. There is only a political reason for assuring the truth of the contradiction as when Tachel Maddow asserts that Trump is weaker than after even though Congress does his bidding, he foments questionable wars and engages in unconstitutional interference in congressional mandates. She wants it to be true and so senses it as true even though she also knows what the facts are. 

A good example of the same moral for different questions is another one of those Youtube narratives about World War II, though this one not about Japanese and German POWs resettled in stockades in North America, This one was about a rear admiral at the end of the war sent by submarine with men and supplies to hold a post in a remote island off Norway waiting notice to resume operations after being rescued because the Nazi regime was reasserting itself. That, of course, never happened. The incoming transmission never happened and two years later everyone there had died of starvation. A terrible Poe like story in which a redoubt had become a tomb. This was the opposite of a Robinson Crusoe story where isolated people triumph through ingenuity.

The moral of the story, however, as supposedly related by the commander in his diary before ingesting cyanide tablets to end the last life of the company was to say that he had been betrayed by the Nazi government because they hadn’t started fighting again or eventually prevailed over the allies. That was the same message that the POWs said as to the meaning of the war: betrayal rather than just defeat. The moral seemed added on, required by the message rather than by the story. There could have been a different message to associate with that story. Two soldiers had tried to escape the island but were killed by the turbulent waters. The radio instrument had broken and so could not have allowed for reverse engineering to make it into a transmitter whereby the group could surrender before they all died of starvation by 1947. These details seem a bit rigged but treat the story as a legend, which is an exaggeration for effect, like Paul Bunyan or John Henry. The real aspect of the story is that the men sent to that isolated place had remained organized and disciplined to the very end. No rebellions recorded, only slow starvation. And so a tribute to the dedication of people to their duty regardless of the outcome and perhaps an admirable German trait or perhaps German fatal flaw, but nevertheless different from the single message that human decency as combined with affluence is the key to American and Canadian societies,

Dante's Immorality

Dante’s “Inferno” is not a description of timeless rectitude. It is an expression of meanness and moral perversity.

Dante’s Inferno is the nadir of Christian religion. He tells complex stories clearly and tersely and is great at the visualization of the geography of Hell and Hell’s hierarchical moral structure, but his moral sense is cruel and perverse. Christians are in danger of trying to put Christian generosity into Dante’s constraints. Consider his near contemporary, Chaucer, as more generous and humane and without any need of supernaturalism and still very much a Christian..

If Dante follows Aristotle and so vices and virtues are self enforcing in that people continue to experience what they are, such as sad or happy or envious or generous, then there should be no need to additionally punish people for their characteristics, or else maybe the pains of Hell are just symbolic representations of bad feelings, but that can hardly be the case in that Dante makes Hell vivid enough to believe it to be an accurate picture, more or less, of what the afterlife will be, people suffering forever. Even if Dante simply means a very long time, it is still pretty long, something I would not wish on my worst enemy. I would not even condemn it to Hitler who Chirchill thought, quite correctly, should be shot on sight if captured by British troops because he was so dangerous to humanity, not because of a punishment. I would not want on my conscience the suffering of all those sent to Hell. So punishment in Hell is both gratuitous and cruel, which is a definition of evil. It is paradoxical to think that to put people in Hell is not itself an evil.

Consider the usual reasons for offering punishment and how they stock up against punishment in the afterlife. The most humane reason for punishment in a penal system is incapacitation. If you are in jail, you can’t commit a crime and maybe when you finish your sentence you may have aged out of the tendency to commit crimes again. But that doesn’t apply to those in Hell. They are already out of the way of committing crimes on the Earth and they cannot age out of criminality and Dante does not propose that those in Hell will continue to engage in crimes while in Hell. They are otherwise preoccupied. Another reason for punishment is to discourage others, those alive, from engaging in crime. That might seem plausible since people are engrained in the idea of punishment after death and so it is in their interest to curb evil tendencies for fear of what might happen to them when they die. But deterrence works in actual life only for rational crimes, so that muggers will not touch the muggee so as not to get a higher sentence for aggravated assault. It does not stop men killing their wives for being unfaithful. And since those condemned to Hell have their crimes in their natures, they will not be deterred from revenge or bloodlust or other sins. So deterrence does not apply to Hell. Yet another reason for worldly punishment is rehabilitation, which has a very low success rate in this punishment and the point of Hell is that those people sent to Hell are beyond rehabilitation, their nature regarded as permanent.

The single remaining reason for punishing people in Hell is justice, just as is the case on Earth where people are punished as retribution for their crimes. It seems just to punish people for their sins. But there is no equivalence of the punishment for the sin. The punishment does not compensate or recompense for the sin. It is just another act of violence or incarceration. I once said to a Holocaust survivor who wanted to have shot nazis that it was no use to want revenge because it brought no one of the six million back to life. Vengeance was useless except  to extend the experience of misery. Killing Hitler would not make up for the sixty million people killed in World War II. Vengeance is an act of futility in that people want to achieve the impossible, the creation of the status quo ante, and punishment is the result of frustration in that the only thing that can be done is to make someone suffer. But God is not acting out of frustration. He has to have a better purpose and I just don’t know what it could be to make people suffer when He need not command them to undergo pain.  Maybe He is just threatening people of Hell so as to deter them, but never carries out His threat because He is so humane, and if He is not humane He is not worthy of being God, only a Greek human like figure call;ed a god.

Here is a similar situation in real life to the permanent holocaust of Hell. Herman Kahn, writing in the Sixties about nuclear warfare, posited that the nation might have available to it a great horde of nuclear weapons but that they were not ever to be launched, and so just a bluff to keep opponents in line. He thought that improbable because the secret never to launch would get leaked and that knowing the arms would not be launched would alter the nation’s behavior, perhaps more likely to flinch if the opponent threatened, Kahn went on to consider first and second strike capabilities and even a doomsday machine which could destroy the world if it were automatically triggered. But, as a matter of fact, the bluff was the strategy of choice in that period for the United States. John Kennedy indicated to Robert MacNamara that he would never launch a nuclear holocaust against the Soviets even if Soviet missiles were incoming. Moreover, no mechanism had ever been developed to inform the President and give him enough time to decide whether to launch during the thirty minutes between the time the US knew the soviet missiles had launched and when they would arrive at their targets. So noone in power ever thought to really launch atomic missiles and destroy te world or maybe only a few hundred million people though the threat of it scared the bejesus out of me.

Some theologians argue similarly, Really there are no people assigned to Hell. It is vacant because God is too loving to do that to anyone. But there is a problem. Presidents are expected to lie about matters of state when it is in the national interest though most Presidents think that should be rare because it causes distrust in the populace, But the Pope should not lie about matters of faith, the repository about belief in the supernatural, because that is what the believers cherish: the faith based certainty declared by the Church. If they are shamming about Hell they might be shamming about everything. So there is no getting around that millions and millions of people will endure for eternity the holocaust of those who have died with considerable sin. Hardly the standard of the prince of peace.

Putting aside whether people should be punished at all for their misdeeds, consider how to make judgment on some particular individuals. Some people continually engage in some evil and so can be considered characteristic of that voice. That is the case of those who continually drown in blood because they are responsible for wars. But there are also those who have engaged in some very serious but single crime, like Brutus who as Shakespeare might later say, was otherwise an admirable man. Should he be judged for his singular failing? Perhaps there should be a balancing act whereby people are judged on whether on the whole they have done good or evil. Most people have entries on both sides of the ledger. Or God might be even more generous than that. Let us say a person has few or only one redeeming feature. Maybe that should be enough to earn that person grace. In that case, we would use as our measure of a person, as that person’s essence, the best the person does rather than the worst a person does. That, after all, is the way saints are treated. They don’t have to be perfect people, just people who in some glorious moment did something saintly, such as giving forgiveness to someone who had recently tormented them, even if they also didn’t like dogs or a childhood playmate. Dante is at odds with present day Catholic morality.

The best defense of Dante is that he is just showing people to stay by their own traits, what are their inevitable moral shortcomings, which means gluttons act like gluttons. But in most of these cases, the punishments are not appropriate to the shortcomings of their vices. Famously, the couples engaged in the sin of lust are represented by a couple entwined with one another who are wafted about by the winds because they have no anchors in social life. But that is to misunderstand illicit love. It is the result of people each so entwined with their own social life that it is painful and even painful to overcome the differences between those groups. Romeo and Juliet are mired in the war between the Montagues and the Capulets. Jane Eyre is forever separated from Lord Rochester because of the difference of their social classes. Humbert Humbert is fully aware that he wanders with Lolita because the society within which he lives finds this love for her to be disgusting.  Similarly, the nonbelievers are put in burning coffins to punish them for their disbelief as if to show them, to stick their noses in the face of the fact that the afterlife is eternal. But those sinners could claim they had just been mistaken and so not be punished for disbelief. A better image, I dare to offer, would be to have the unbelievers be deaf or blind so as to indicate that they could not perceive the visions offered byChristianity. The lowest circle of Hell is occupied by the betrayers, as if that is the worst possible failing but disloyalty against friends or to a spouse are too common to rank as the worst possible sin. Moreover, Brutus and Judas are put in the same level which is an affront to Christianity, where there are political alliances where people turn against one or the other, while there is a different order of things where God himself is the one who is betrayed. There is an enormity of violation, of betraying not just a person but the order of things, of morality itse;lf, and that would seem to deserve wandering in the void alone without any prospect of existence, though the idea of the vastless void is part of the modern imagination. Dante couldn’t have thought of that except as an educated man he could have considered from Lucretius a universe devoid ofGod, butDante was too narrow to think of that possibility because the emotions he considered were everyday vices, and so had reduced the true killer of Christ as an ordinary failure.

Apply rethinking what seems an antiquated sin in “The Inferno”. Simonics are people who took money for doing a holy thing. Dabte points our that Peter did not get money for accepting Jesus. He just git the reward of service. We might think of child abuse as the equivalent of simony because the glory of God and His Church are being sold for sexual exploitation ratheer than greed. The punishment of the simonics is that they are turned upside down and their feet are burned in fire. But that punishment is very general and could be applied to any transgression. A more appropriate sentence would turn a joke into a torture. Scrooge McDuck dives into his swimming pool filled with coins so he can swim in his wealth. But coins are hard and not soft. So a punishment for avarice would be to try to swim in hard things and be perpetually torn apart by the coins. That would represent avarice but not the betrayal of trust to those entrusted with faith, and so a shortcoming of this answer to this particular vice.

What is behind Dante’s punishments are not excruciating pain or appropriateness is the emotion of humiliation, that the persons have their self respectlessoned even if, when these characters speak, they seem to retain their self respect while enduring their agony. They do not cry or plead and so the punishment is to make them blush. The punishment for gluttony is not the immobility that might result from being overweight, or being forced to eat endless food. It is that feces drip down on them, which is an insult more than a pain. These nonbelievers might be punished by always being Tantalus- like, ever separated from what is now known to be real, but is made into a joke, a reminder that you thought the dead might have coffins where your consciousness would live. Brutus the betrayer is humiliated by being associated with the most stellar betrayer, which is of God, when Brutus merely portrayed a political rival. And so on. But if that were the case, that God was cackling about the unfortunates rather than resolute about the need for punishment, that would make God unworthy of being a God of law and justice. For shame.

The Gospels as a Dante-like Comedy

“Genesis” is an epic because it is a clash of civilizations and it also has a few sardonic jokes in it. The Gospels, on the other hand, are always serious minded but are a comedy in the sense that “The Divine Comedy” came to be called that because it is a vivid elaboration, as in Balzac, of the way of life of a particular and all too human society.

Mark Van Doren taught me a long time ago that an epic was episodic in that there were many events that filled in the space between the initial action and the final action. These  events did not so much move the action forward as take place within the environment created by the story’s parameters. From that I conclude, upon many years reflection, that epics are different from novels in this respect (as well as many other ways) because while there may be digressions and subplots in novels, much of the plot in novels is used to move the story forward. By these lights, I also conclude, “Exodus” is not an epic. It is too tightly plotted for that. It is more of what Vico would call sacred history, which means that it shows what had to happen rather than what might have happened or what in fact did happen. The Gospels are another sacred history because there too the narrators are recounting what had to have happened and did while the narrator of a novel is just along for the ride, for the telling of the tale, rather than the authoritative voice that commands belief in the inevitability of what is unfolded by a story or set of stories.

But the Gospels are certainly also an epic in the Van Doren sense. Even though the Gospels each present a biography of Jesus, there are, in fact, a limited number of episodes of what happens while Jesus is pursuing his calling as a preacher, no one of which is essential to the basic story, which is that a person born in a miraculous way is the long expected Messiah, something not established until after His death and Resurrection, a belief based, as St. Paul said in his letter to the Galatians, on faith rather than reason.

“Genesis” is also an epic. The story of the founding of a people, as that is prophesied by no less a figure than God, is told through episodes each of them interesting and yet where the scheme of the work would allow for any number of such stories, possibly there being more patriarchs with each their own set of stories. The seriousness of this story, moreover, is not mitigated but enhanced by our ability to notice the comic twist in one or another of the stories or the emerging character of the people who are created out of these stories. It may well be in the nature of literature that it can be read perversely or ironically, but “Genesis”, because it is so terse and requires the reader to infer the motives of the characters, is particularly prone to irony or some version of the comic. Perhaps the biggest irony is the one provided by the expulsion from Eden, Adam and Eve banished to a world where he will labor to provide food and she will suffer in childbirth. That is the way it is in the world. So the punishment of God is that people will live the lives they do in fact live, which can be regarded as not much punishment at all because it is no additional punishment, or else as a very serious punishment, in which case all of life is a kind of prison. Take your pick.

There is also comedy early on in God not knowing where Abel is. I know scholars nowadays say that the story shows God was regarded as walking among people and capable of being fooled. It seems to me, however, that Cain did not think he would very long get away with his denial even to a God who is a bit slow on the uptake. Cain shows his arrogance in a comic way by the bravado of saying he is not his brother’s keeper. A bit later on, Lamech says that he is greater than Cain because he slew a man who wounded him. To bestow that honor upon yourself is to show yourself as evil in a comic way because your words betray a foolish arrogance. There is no need for an outside description of Lamech’s grotesquely angry soul, only a transcription of what he says out of his own mouth.   

And Sarah, for her part, laughs and has to be reminded that she laughed when the angel told her that she would conceive. You do not laugh at God as a daughter might laugh at an earthly father. Nor does the reader laugh but is, rather, frozen cold by the fact that God has to be wheedled into being willing to spare Sodom if some good people can be found within the town. There is no joke in the fact that He made the promise, which suggests that He is not all that firm about using his powers, an “aide” able to change his policy, or that not even ten good men could be found. That irony makes the point that people are wicked, more so than because God is remorseless or because the evil of the people of Sodom had been spelled out, which it is not. Not all irony is funny.

The same comic touch is provided in that other tale that plumbs the nature of a people, the “Iliad”, where Ajax is a bit of a fool, Odysseus overly clever, and Achilles vainglorious. Did Homer not know that? We are fooling ourselves if we think that Homer was so entrapped in his own “culture” that he could not see he was overdrawing his characters. Shakespeare understood this when he wrote his dark farce, “Troilus and Cressida”

It is less easily said of Virgil that his characters, so highly motivated by their patriotic and other duties, are deliberately overdrawn for comic effect. That is perhaps why, despite its vividness, poetry and purposefulness, the “Aeneid” is just not on the same level as the “Iliad”. Nor is the comedy within the epic  rediscovered in Aristo or Dante or other medieval epics. That development awaits the Renaissance, that long delayed recovery from fifteen hundred years of Christian earnestness. There is Cervantes who, like Shakespeare, loved low jokes, and Shakespeare himself, who intrudes Falstaff onto “Henry V” so as to remind his audience that there is comic relief even in wartime.

But even if, by a stretch, one can find humor or irony in the Old Testament, there is nothing even remotely funny about the New Testament. Its whole tone defies interpreting it or any part of it in either a comic or an ironic way. There is dramatic irony in Jesus’ prediction that Peter will betray him, but that is not funny at all; it is to make one cringe. The emotions that dominate the Gospels and “Acts” are righteousness and mercy, those combined with an abiding sentimentality that would take offense if some incident in the life of Jesus and the lives of his followers were not approached with the utmost seriousness. The leper is cured. Marvelous! What about the leper further down the lane? It is an insult to raise that question; the auditor of the Gospel is more concerned to hear the cure as a proof of the divinity of Jesus than as an example of the possibility of lessening human suffering. We who are among the saved can rejoice even if the fruits of our salvation will not be visible to us until the next life, given our present life of toil and trouble, and we must, as Dante advises, remove our pity from those who are not saved, however pathetic or noble they may seem or be.

The New Testament, however, is a comedy, even if it is an unfunny one, if the term “comedy” is understood in the sense it has taken on ever since it was applied to Dante’s epic, which is also, for the most part, an unfunny comedy. What The New Testament does is to make familiar a way of life of a people, in this case made up of small farmers and market towns becoming ever more influenced by the cosmopolitan culture of Rome, just as Dante had made familiar the violent and mean-spirited life of late Medieval Italians. The New Testament portrays the vineyards and pathways and small towns and weddings that surround an itinerant preacher and his less than merry band, his solemn crew. This is a portrait not of a society in the making but of one that is already extant, the people softened as if they lived in a pastoral idyll, which is indeed how the times of Jesus may have seemed when they are recalled some thirty years later by those who composed the Gospels and “Acts”.

There are other great comedies of this type. There is, of course, Aristophanes, who is not a tragedian not only because he uses a low style and tells jokes but because his concern is the temper of his society as that is revealed by the way fools unravel pomposity and pompous people are shown to be fools. Plato’s “Dialogues” are a comedy as well as philosophy. They provide a vivid portrait of daily life among the Athenian citizenry. They do not do what modern anthropologists would like, which is to provide accounts of what people ate and how they prepared food. They provide more important things: what people said to one another at banquets; what they think about love rather than how they calculate the size of dowries. We get a sense of mental tastes and the variations on those tastes. 

And some of them are pretty funny. My favorite is the early dialogue, “Euthyphro”, which is a great comedy. Socrates meets a man who says he will try to get other citizens to join him in acquitting Socrates of charges of blasphemy, and then Socrates promptly goes on to demonstrate just how much of a blasphemer he is, cross examining this man on his way to prayers about why he is saying prayers in the first place and insisting that the man cannot just offer as a reason that it is the custom or that the gods demand it because Socrates wants to know the reason for the custom, Socrates also offering the telling remark that, after all, the gods disagree. So, Socrates, in defending a very abstract notion of religion, shows himself to be no friend of religion as it is usually understood (and as it continues to be usually understood, as a matter of piety, pure and simple). Euthyphro runs away at the end, saying he has no more time to talk, and you may be sure that he reconsiders his vote. You see the guy changing as the dialogue proceeds, becoming more and more uncomfortable with the sweetly stated but very nasty cuts taken against opinions he thinks so obviously true that it is outrageous to suggest otherwise. All of us can sympathize, our own balloons of pretension also every once in a while punctured, though most of us don’t get to sentence our tormentors to death.

Now, Plato might seem a ringer to throw into a list of epic-scale comedies. Plato provided, some say, the inspiration for our other main ancient example, The New Testament. That leaves us with a mighty few epic-scale comedies. The problem is that modern critics reclassify ancient comedies as novels. I was told by Moses Hadas that the “Odyssey” was the first novel. I am no longer sure about that. Yes, the “Odyssey” does give you a portrait of life on the islands, and it does have a plot that unifies it: a son searching for a father as the father tries to get home, with all that both of those searches imply. Yes, it has central dramatic scenes and long side excursions. The difference, though, between a comedy and a novel is that the novel takes the history of an ordinary family and spells that out against the backdrop of society. “Vanity Fair” is about someone who rides with Wellington to Waterloo, not about Wellington. It may take drama to show Bohr meeting Heisenberg (and opera to portray Nixon meeting Mao) and epic scale comedy is also about a great man, a hero, and that is what the “Odyssey” concerns, while the novel does not, even if its characters may act heroically, in their little and unknown ways, mimicking greatness, as they do in Shakespeare’s comedies and in Fielding. 

Joyce’s turn on the “Odyssey” is precisely, obviously, to show that his characters are like mythic figures, not that they are mythic figures, given that they sometimes fumble with words or sit on the pot. Part of everyday life is to go to funerals that are in part made embarrassing because of the people you are required to be polite to. Joyce’s novel is very funny and, I suppose, there is no need to declare that it is not a grand scale comedy rather than a novel except to keep our categories straight. Dreiser devotes “The Financier” to the fictionalized life of a real life robber baron who had also been disgraced before again ascending to power, but the whole point of turning it into fiction was to show how he came to terms with lust and shame and pride and his own financial talents. That is how fiction is different from journalism or hagiography. 

There are not that many grand scale comedies. They seem to have died out as an art form. “Don Quixote” is clearly an epic comedy, as is “The Canterbury Tales”. Perhaps Montaigne, writing about that abstracted character known as Man, is the last one to provide us with an epic-scaled comedy that provides the nuances of what it is to be such a creature through the depiction of its natural habitat, its social setting. The novel begins after Montaigne leaves off.       

There are many reasons for this interest of the novel in the ordinary person. Maybe it was that Shakespeare made kings into ordinary persons, or that there were so many ordinary people around who could now read novels and so learn about people who were on the same scale as themselves. Maybe it was the opening to literature as a form of journalism and so making journeys to different settings and to people of different class and background a kind of education, the novel a kind of National Geographic of the world of those who lived not many miles away-- perhaps in a manor and also perhaps in a rural village. And maybe, of course, it was part of the overall growth in the early modern age of the importance of the individual and therefore of the individual life. Everybody is important.

The rise of the novel, however, distracts from a consideration of how the New Testament provides some of those same pleasures even though its protagonist is so special a hero as to be the incarnation of God himself, and even though the Gospels are by no means written for the purpose of giving its readers a look see into the Palestinian community of the time. Rather, it is written to do what it says, spread the good news of the coming of the Lord by recounting his deeds, his sayings and his fate, along with numerous facts of his biography, so that subsequent generations will have a sound grounding in the historical sources of their religion because it is that history that makes a difference, that changed the world. At the beginning, at least, Christianity is not a priest bound religion but a text based one, however much the rituals that are developed by its priesthood do have biblical allusions as their basis. The ritualization of Christianity begins early on, even if one source of its power is the story it tells, which had not happened before, even if it had been prophesied that it would occur, and so is a new thing in the world, which makes of Christianity a truly historical religion, even as Judaism is historical because it relies on the image of God parting the Red Sea as a moment in history also awesome and ever to be commemorated.

There is an asymmetry, though, in this explanation of the great works of the Western imagination in that it applies the Greek theory of genre, as that was developed by Aristotle from instances of Greek literature, to works produced by one of the Semitic civilizations. Greek categories make “Exodus” an epic and make the New Testament a comedy. A theory of genres is a theory of tones, each genre hitting a distinctive emotional chord that can be regarded as a “natural” emotion of the human psyche, or as one fashioned out of cultural experiences that are both overt and the product of given or found culture in the sense of “culture” as that is known to anthropologists. Particular works of literature can combine those tones, as when Shakespeare alternates between comedy and tragedy and melodrama all within the same play, or when Beckett fashions tragicomedy as what can be regarded either as a new tone or a blending of old ones. The genre is a guide to the audience or the reader in that it sets off the universe of feeling that is allowed within a particular work, and the failure to maintain a consistent tone jars against the ability of an auditor to hold the work together as a fiction.

The imposition of Greek categories on Semitic literature would be arbitrary were it not for the fact that one can claim that these are universal categories applicable to any literature at any time, however it was that one or another culture came to craft what we would regard as journalism or epic or tragicomedy. But a perhaps more satisfying reason for applying the Greek categories to other cultures is that they allow the deepening of appreciation founded on other grounds. Criticism finds multiple confirmations of what it takes a book to be what it is. That is certainly clear in the case of “Samuel 1 and 2” which has long been recognized as something the equivalent of a Thucydides history: large political events are motivated by personal greed and other individual emotions as well as the play of other forces, all of these mediated through rational self interest and so providing a world which it is difficult to admire but rings very true to life.      

Seeing “Samuel 1 and 2” as an epic elaborates that insight. There are two main protagonists, Saul and David, just as there are two main protagonists in “The Iliad”-- Achilles and Hector. Each set acts out of very different motives and although one of each pair triumphs over the other, both are heroic in that they stand for an archetypical emotion larger than themselves. Achilles stands for gaining glory from heroism, however that diminishes personal life, while Hector stands for duty to country whatever sacrifices that entails. Achilles does not look to create a family; Hector is out to protect his family. Saul is like Hector. He is the responsible king, troubled at being king, unwilling to do what even God commands, such as kill all the Amalekites, if it conflicts with his duty as king. David, on the other hand, is rash and glory bound and as he evolves as a character becomes more tainted by his iniquities but does not often seem troubled in his dreams.  

So we can return to the Gospels and “Acts” as literary triumphs. They invest us in a world of olive trees, weddings, the betrayal of friendships, and a singular unapproachable figure who has a distinctive character and yet is an enigma which continues to trouble us, our imaginations taken up not just by Him but also by his setting, by the everyday life around him, this more familiar to the Sunday School graduate than any other environment in which the student has not himself lived. Don’t sell short the literary properties of texts that are sacred.

The Horseless Israelites

Only the Egyptians have horses in “Genesis” and “Exodus” though Canaanites do have horses in “Deuteronomy”. (No wonder the people of Israel were reluctant to embark upon an invasion of the Promised Land.)  Solomon had horses, but he is the possessor of what is supposedly a great kingdom. The domestication of horses is therefore the sign of great military power as well as of an advanced civilization. Wendy Doniger reminds us of this in her recent “The Hindus: An Alternative History”. She makes a big deal of the importance of horses, both for commerce and conquest and also as religious sacrifices. By that standard, the Israelites of the Five Books of Moses must be regarded as an inferior people even if they are possessed of what they think to be a superior God, one which is carried around by them, on foot, in an Ark. Remember, they walked rather than rode out of Egypt.

That image and idea of a horseless people is of central importance to what is ever afterwards regarded as the central moment in Jewish history: the liberation of the Israelites from Egypt. “Exodus”, which is a cohesive and extended narrative, and so very different from “Genesis”, which is known for its abbreviated narratives, is different as well from the retellings of the Exodus story that are found in the three other of the Five Books of Moses, interrupted as they are with digressions on law and authority. “Exodus” gives horses a certain pride of place, even if scholarship suggests that a chariot cavalry was anachronistic in that it did not develop until a few hundred years after the supposed time of the exodus. Four times in a few paragraphs in “Exodus” is repeated the tag phrase: “the Pharaoh, his horsemen, his chariots, his soldiers”.  These are all the same thing: the sign and the fact of a highly disciplined and trained fighting force available at a moment’s notice to a ruler, and the sign of an economically and technologically developed country, as is the case today, when rapid movement of devastating force is available to nations engaged in “asymmetric” combat with suicide bombers and guerillas equipped with weapons and only such transport as is captured from the enemy. 

The chariot is made possible by the large scale domestication of horses rather than just of asses and also by the invention of that very elegant machine, the chariot, which combines a platform with wheels. The platform is able to move at considerable speed, perhaps nearly as fast as the horses that pull it were they shorn of that burden. This machine can deal with the uneven ground that might easily unseat a standing rider. Chariots allow projectiles to be sent out into the air for long distances because the spear thrower who might accompany the charioteer has a solid place on which to set his feet and that gives energy to his throw. The chariot is therefore the tank of its time, a formidable weapon of war, here in “Exodus” used to recapture a departing people, even though a great number of the departing might be killed when rounding them up, something not thought advisable in the recapture of slaves, who are valuable property, and so a chariot led attack on the departing is a measure to be taken only if the previously subjugated population really does seem to be making good on its exit from home territory. Maybe they would have faltered or returned to their homes and their slavery if they had been left to try to get themselves organized and had failed at that. But the Israelites had done well enough to get to the borders of Egypt, and so the chariots had to be sent, like the cavalry, at the last minute. 

Not that the Pharaoh had not been willing to use harsh measures before. The narrative provided by “Exodus” suggests that the Pharaoh had used near genocidal means from the beginning to try to control the political impulses of the Israelites. He had ordered the Hebrew midwives to kill off the male offspring, which they had not done, claiming that the Hebrew women gave birth on their own, without benefit of midwives, and for this God praised the midwives, because otherwise that would have put an end to the Israelite rebellion then and there. So it was clear that the Israelites had a well organized social structure on their own that was independent of the Egyptians.

The Egyptians then tried to rule the Israelites indirectly. They made it more costly for the Israelites who, we may surmise, had a monopoly in the construction industry, to produce bricks. The Egyptians required the Israelites to provide their own straw, a necessary additive in the manufacture of bricks, but the Israelites were able to manage that. Then the Egyptians imposed the equivalent of a one child rule similar to the one that has operated in China for a few generations now, presumably as a way to control the population of a group growing too powerful.  

Maybe the Israelites weren’t really slaves but just a subordinated people. Maybe, on the other hand, they were slaves and the Egyptians were just culling the herd so as to keep the number of Israelites manageable. The “Exodus” account seems garbled because getting rid of male children would bring an end to the Israelites, which is not what you want to do with either a slave population or a subordinate population that is working for you. Maybe it was supposed that some males would live because their births would slip through the cracks but a great number would not, and that is all the policy makers care about. The presentation of the story as calling for the death of all male children is of use because it serves the literary purpose of bringing this story into line with the other attacks on children: the Egyptian massacre of first born followed afterwards by the massacre of the first born of the Egyptians. 

The heart of the matter may be that the slaves, or whatever they were, were becoming too numerous and that was a political threat but they were also so productive that fewer of them were needed. How do you control a subordinate population when you don’t want to kill the golden goose? Whatever the answer to that question, the fact of it is itself of the highest importance. This is a new kind of threat, one to the stability of the social structure, and such is not the case with occasional food shortages or the tribal unrest or the failed amalgamation of populations (as that is recounted in the tale of Dinah) with which “Genesis” had made the reader familiar. Distinctive bodies of people do not rebel in oriental despotisms, but here it is happening. 

Whatever the answers to the textual questions might be, the overall pattern is clear. God serves as an advisor and cheerleader for the Israelites who manage their own rebellion. They first resist by using internal social structure--the professional community of midwives-- to protect their children and are apparently successful at it. God need do nothing but praise them for that. Then they succeed at maintaining their prosperity even though they have to manufacture bricks rather than just build with them. This draws no comment from God, who is not required to weigh in on a purely economic issue as well as because the narrator does not want to draw attention to the fact that the Israelites managed this hurdle. It would be as if Jefferson had also listed in the Declaration of Independence all the good things King George had done for the Colonies. 

Then Moses and Aaron negotiate with the Pharaoh for the terms of release of the Israelites. That itself is a sign that things were going well for the Israelite cause. The apartheid regime began negotiating with Mandela only when they realized that the game was about over. The negotiations between the Israelites and the Egyptians were conducted against the background of plagues, which is the sort of guerrilla warfare that makes negotiations between ruler and ruled all the more urgent, however much it may also prompt one side or the other to contemplate ending the negotiations altogether. God takes credit for the plagues and for the parlor trick whereby Aaron’s rod turns into a snake, but doesn’t provide advice on what the Israelite negotiators should settle for. This is left to Aaron and Moses, who are engaged in the normal process of high stakes negotiation: what, if anything, to compromise so as to achieve their aims, which is the evacuation of the Jews from Egypt rather than an autonomous region within it or rights within the Egyptian polity. This aim is like that of Spartacus, to take people to a seacoast and thereafter elsewhere.  

Intergroup maneuvering, economic interplay, negotiations, are all the stuff of ordinary political life, whatever the magical trappings, and however bloody the relation between a superior group and a subordinate group can become. These interactions are just of the sort that S. N. Eisenstadt says are characteristic of bureaucratic empires such as ancient Egypt. The ruler pursues the political interests of the government by inveigling the cooperation of various subordinate groups through taxation, special favors, and regulation. The ruler is never secure; the people under him never satisfied. (Spinoza made the same point about the Seventeenth Century French monarchy.) But, for some reason, the Israelites would not settle for some compromise, even if it would better their material and social situation, and even though the Pharaoh had expected that compromise would be the outcome in that he withheld his chariots until the last minute. Why couldn’t the Israelites settle for some reasonable accommodation?

Once they had moved themselves to the shores of the Red Sea, the Israelites could no longer manage the conflict. They have to hope that God will exercise his powers to intervene in a most visible way when the chariots confront them as they are about to make good their escape. That may have always been the Egyptian plan--not to call up the cavalry until the last minute, should they then become necessary--but it was not a plan that the Israelites could have planned to deal with. The Israelites were not an organized military group on their own, just a number of families moving along on foot with perhaps some asses to carry their baggage. They were as surprised as were the Egyptians by what God did and that is part of what makes the story a miracle: it is an intervention unexpected as well as fortuitous. Brute force is not so manageable as politics, especially not the brute force of the greatest army then on the face of the earth.  So “Exodus” is, among the many other things it is, a tribute to the power of technology and to the fact that technology is distinctive in that there is no answer to it with negotiations or clever practice.

So the Israelites are mesmerized by the technology of chariots as the final appeal of a ruler. What did they have to contest it? They had shown they were good at social organization and at entrepreneurship and at moral clarity. These traits were among the ones that Joseph had brought with him to Egypt, though it may have been in Egypt that he picked up the ability to disguise his perspicacity about people and situations as a gift for the interpretation of dreams. The distinctive virtues of the Israelites will flower when they leave Egypt and form their own nation. Talents hidden or stunted in adversity can blossom in another environment. Organizational and political skills and moral clarity would make them a great nation. They would get chariots later. The intellectual inventions that allow the Israelites to think they can go against the grain of history is the invention of a literal God and the conception of that God as one of abstractions.These two claims on reality exist independent of the power conferred by chariots. 

A literal God is one who acts directly on history rather than as a metaphorical force in history. A literal God might seem to be an appeal to superstition or primitivism, while an appeal to metaphor is to think of all the signs God can give in history that an event is carrying a moral meaning. So it is a metaphor but realistic to take notice of the fact that an assortment of wise men are all telling you to do the same thing, and so that is to be regarded as a way God “intervenes”, so to speak, into the world. What makes a literal God as plausible as a metaphorical one and, indeed, far more psychologically impressive, is that this characteristic of direct action is reserved for very few events and very few personages. Most Catholics can understand that Santa Claus is a metaphor while Jesus, the Son of God, is not.

The Book of Exodus is so rich in imagery that there are images other than that of the chariot to provide a sense of an efficacious power that might counter the literal power of the chariot. That would show the engagement of God with his creation in a way that cannot be denied. God must act as a truly causative force and therefore not through nature but in nature. One image is that of the wall of water to the left and the wall of water to the right of the dry path through the sea that has now been presented for the Israelites to use to gain their freedom. That would have been quite a formidable sight, one available to everyone there at the time, not just the religious cognoscenti, nor as God was available to an unaccompanied Moses at the time of the burning bush. It is as if God had descended in a chariot upon Central Park so as to make himself available for a photo op. 

The Israelites would have had to have considerable confidence in their perception that a miracle was indeed taking place if they were to step onto the path left open by the cleaving of the sea, much more courage needed than is required today to drive over tall bridges or over causeways that move out of the sight of land. All you need in the modern instance is confidence that unseen engineers have set the bridge or causeway down properly. And yet the Israelites did it, perhaps because the approaching chariots left them little choice. Well, they could have surrendered, but this time it might have been full scale genocide rather than a return to slavery, the mutual killing of the first born making further negotiation impossible. 

The image of the walls of water in part has resonance because it is a reminder of the Flood. In a place with many arid and semi-arid districts, an abundance of water is a threat as well as a boon. Everyone knew the Nile was a sliver that kept Egypt alive, and so the Israelites were engaged in negative space: the dry sliver keeping them alive. It is also a powerful image because it is so unnatural, so clearly a violation of the way seas operate and so is clearly miraculous to anyone who witnesses it or trusts to the accounts of what happened. Robert Alter appreciates that the image of the walls of water is meant to be understood literally. He supplies the Hebrew word that describes the cut as being sharp and rough and so there is no possibility of it being merely an exaggeration of some “normal” kind of parting of the seas. Martin Noth says that all of the source texts for the final redaction of the story also present the event of the parting of the sea as literal.

The most visually and theologically rich portrayal of the parting of the Red Sea does not make use of the device of walls of water, however much that image is present in “Exodus” and is the common understanding, thanks to Cecil B. De Mille, who makes the water roll back on itself, so that it is like a Niagara that does not make wet those close to it. That profound portrayal is supplied in Poussin’s “The Crossing of the Red Sea” which shows not the actual divide of the waters but the immediate aftermath, as if Poussin had read G. S. Lessing and knew that portraying the moment before or after the central event, whether in sculpture or painting, is more effective than portraying the central moment. Poussin treats the Israelites as if they were only slightly more composed than survivors of a shipwreck. They pull themselves out of the still flailing waters as if the sea had closed over them as well as the charioteers and so some of them had probably been lost to the waters. There are casualties that accompany even miracles, which is a very sobering thought. 

The moment Poussin chooses to portray is right after the miracle and so is like the first few seconds after the Big Bang, when the aura of what happened is still around even though what is presented in now back in normal time. The people are just gathering themselves together, in twos and threes, in those intricate compositions that are so well known in Poussin, as well as being dragged down by their draperies, which some of them tug at so as to get out of the water. The faces of the survivors are painted small but even so they capture a moment of being dazed and yet awed and serene, not what would be expected of everyday survivors of a shipwreck but perhaps appropriate to this very special world historical event made by God. One man on the lower right is dragging a shield from the breakers, which is to be supposed to be from an Egyptian because the Israelites had no weapons of their own. So Poussin is paying tribute to the dead even at this moment of potential exaltation. 

This brief moment of the aftershock of a momentous event is accompanied by the wordlessness of awe and gratitude for what God has done. The glow of that moment will dissipate, but for the moment God is still present in the dark rectangular cloud mentioned in “Exodus” as what shows the way during daytime. It hangs in the sky of the Poussin painting so as to suggest the end of a storm, but the shape suggests something more. It is the barrier that God created between the Egyptians and the Israelites before the Israelites began their crossing. It is also like the rectangular solids Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick use in “2001” to mark the presence in this solar system of Clarke’s substitute for God: some far off intelligent race which every once in awhile intervenes to allow a race of sentient beings to survive. Only rarely do these creatures make themselves known through their objects

Poussin is more able than anyone else I can think of to treat the crossing of the Red Sea as both a religious and a natural event. All the physical elements of a shipwreck are there as well as the emotions and surroundings that would accompany a shipwreck, except there are intimations of something more: there is a feeling of release after a great religious moment has passed, it having transformed not only individual lives but all of human history. The reader of “Exodus”, however, knows full well that there are many more magisterial religious moments that will soon transpire: the wandering in the wilderness; Moses’ trip up and down Mount Sinai; the arrival at the door to the Promised Land.

Treating the miracle of the parting of the Red Sea as something to be explained away by providing a scientific explanation of how the winds could have separated the Sea of Reeds so as to provide a path through the water is to miss the point of the story, which is that it takes God’s grandeur to counter human invented technology, just as it had taken God’s grandeur to defeat the Tower of Babel, another claim of the power of human ingenuity to recraft the world. Moreover, the imagery seriously redefines the relation of God to his people and God to the world. 

There is a sequencing of events, the stakes ever more significant. The beginning and most of the struggle between the Egyptians and the Israelites can be understood, as has been suggested, in strictly secular terms. There are group dynamics between the rulers and the institutions of those oppressed; there are economic sanctions; there are negotiations. Even the plagues can be understood as urged on by God through his siding with Aaron and Moses, but the plagues are themselves mostly natural: kinds of pestilence and other disaster that can come in that climate. The parting of the Red Sea, however, is a necessity in that the failure to do so will result in the destruction of Israel, and that God cannot allow. And so He steps out of the shadows, no longer the instigator or the presiding presence, to take an active part in the history of Israel. Moses may be the one who raises his arms to part the seas, but he is acting out of his special relation to God, and so here distinguishes himself from being a mere patriarch or prophet or priest or magician by becoming a co-adjustor with God, a singular relation to God not to be repeated until the same claim is made for Jesus. 

This intervention of God into history contributes to making of Judaism what it would become called: a historical religion. That means that the interventions of God into the world is always momentous and also very rare. Not every chance event or bad emotion bears the mark of the supernatural. God intervenes, becomes clear in history as an actual force, only when there is no other recourse than God to change things, and only then does God declare himself by indeed changing things, his capacity to do so become visible. So the story of the parting of the Red Sea can be taken as part of the path to the secular because it restricts the arena for the operation of the supernatural. It also helps put humankind on the road to the secular because these few events when God intervenes are to be taken as having actually happened, “historical” in the same way that events of ordinary life are actual. It is therefore possible to describe them as being true or untrue, while mythological events always play on the close relation between a metaphor and a simile, the wise man or magician always knowing that what is attributed to the gods can also be attributed to a human passion and who is to say whether it is better to refer a feeling or event to one or the other? 

Putting a truth value on a supernatural intervention, treating it as a fact, means that there is no need to distinguish between miraculous times and non-miraculous times. There never was, to the imagination of “Exodus”, a time whose characteristic was that miracles occurred on a regular basis, only times when miracles were called that because they took place only when they had to. The same goes for another of the momentous interventions by God into human events that takes place in “Exodus”: the giving of the Ten Commandments to Moses. It was the enormity of a people living without a law that made Mount Sinai necessary, for only afterwards would it be understood that people needed law not only as a practical expedient whereby tribal unrest might be mitigated, as is provided for in the Book of the Covenant, where penalties are assigned for bad deeds done when one tribe raids another, but as the necessary bedrock upon such an obstreperous people as the Israelites can become suitable to abide together rather than remain an anarchic mob subject to the whims of the moment.