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.

Genres of Social Theory

Social theories are both assertions and stories, which might seem contradictory, but always both, and therefore raise the question of whether they are different things.

A story is a narration of events whereby the concluding episodes reflect on the opening episodes even if only to suggest times change or don’t change, as in “The Cherry Orchard”. A genre is a kind or type of story and so includes farce, tragedy and sitcom.And generic types are not limited to art and literature.The same is true of social theories, which claim as well to be true but can be sorted into types each having their own ironic strategies and provide more or less pleasurable trajectories, 

A major division in social theories is whether they are esoteric or exoteric and that makes social theory to have at least these two genres.. An esoteric theory is one in which its dynamics show why most people will not be aware of how the dynamics work and so there is irony in knowing what of social life is hidden and what is revealed.. Marxism is an esoteric theory in that the exploitation of the workers by the capitalists should be as plain as daybutthatdoesn’t happen because religion, patriotism and ethnic division which are longstanding social forces are mobilized by governments and other allies of capitalism to shroud what is really going on. Religion is an opiate of the people  just as are the consumer society and the facade of free speech in that the opinions of individuals mean little in that mass financial interests lure the electorate to choose between candidates all dependent on their capitalist benefactors, The working class get crumbs from the wealthy class and feel proud of having paid off their thirty year mortgages while the rich decide how large a yacht to build or what charity to sponsor to make themselves feel better. Real decision making is behind the scenes in Hyde Park or Mer A Lago among their cronies.

Freudianism  is also an esoteric theory. Most people are unaware of their own personal dynamics because they hide what they fear, which is the power of their father and the attractiveness of their mother, Freud thus explaining men, having famously asked the question of what women want. So only a very few people can emerge out of their ignorance and come to terms with the underground lives of their natures.  

Christianity is an esoteric theory of social life, which means everything that impacts on the way we all live. Christianity is esoteric because the overwhelming numbers are shrouded from the real dynamics of the way social life works not because of a conspiracy whereby some few people manage the strings and are therefore the populace is left in the dark but because there are systematic and all but inevitable forces and structures that accomplish that, even if, as in Christianity, most of a population is nominally Christian. People suffer from Original Sin, which means that they are not easily open to being compassionate or otherwise to have entered a condition whereby people can deal with moral advantage to themselves and one another. It takes the arrival of Jesus to lift that shroud and think with moral clarity. Moreover. people in ordinary life do not appreciate that that transformed life will free them. They see the poor as weak while not realizing that the poor will inherit the world either literally in a social revolution or in the afterlife, which would be the real life of humanity for forever. People live in the pettiness of the everyday rather than the life of the spiritual.

The reason it is so difficult to appreciate the real reality of a revolutionized or a supernatural life is because the vision is vouchsafed by faith rather than reason and faith is a very hard taskmaster. It requires suspending reason or at least fantasizing a desired situation that does not presently obtain and is contrary to what practical reason would offer. Therefore, faith is always subject to doubt even to many of those who ascribe to a formula of words about the doctrines of Christianity. Faith always has to be buttressed by communal adherence and also to rhetorical slights of hand so that, for example, the Son of God is coterminous with God the Father even though by definition an essential element of being a father is that he precedes his son. So we are playing with metaphors rather than exact statements, but in the auspices of faith, that will do.  and most people will bother to straighten out the logic and feel comfortable with the conclusions of faith regardless of their patent logic. And so even the believer remains shrouded from reality because they engage in words which only, reversing what St. Anselm said, only a fool can say in his heart that there is a God and most Christian people fool themselves about such though not other issues.

The nineteenth century was filled with esoteric theories, something well worth wondering why. Even Darwinism was a theory buried the sands of fossils and requiring discovery that is powerful enough to undermine the illusions from Christianity that kept people from seeing that evolution was remorseless and purposeless and rid of humanity, all of us living in a warm shelter while most of creation was occupied only by perydactyls. That was a cold world, absent of self-consciousness and no wonder that people would recoil from it, preferring the warm hearth of civilization..

The alternative kind of social theory was endoteric, which meant that the real world was perfectly accessible even if it required scientists and other smart people to see what was in front of that and so science has to grapple with not merely being a clerisy that promotes its own mambo jumbo but can be trusted to be able to be as verifiable as when any observant early modern seaman knew that the world was round because ships sunk behind the horizon. Reason has its difficulties but it does provide verifiable results. The great age of exoteric theories was the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, those indebted to the scientific revolution. Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and later Hume were able to see what was right in front of them: that, in their order, human identity was self evident, that there were regularity in the emotions, that the world was what it seemed to be, and that people want to be and think of themselves as being nice, Hume once unenshrouded from Christianity. 

The Christian philosophers from St. Anselm, who was an Augustinian, through the Scholastics, were endoteric in that clever people could untangle sentences to be true statements in that the sentences incorporated metaphysical truths, there being inevitable inferences to be drawn between the subjects and their predicates and so each were fiery banners before them, as when Aquinas said God existed because he was the best because it is better to be existent than nonexistent, which is to put aside the linguistic unentanglement  that existence is not a situation that is morally or existentially comparative. You either are or are not, which still confounds those who insist that God created the universe so that it could exist when it could just as well never have existed at all and we could have been rid of all of it, a great hollowness.

It was a giant but understandable step to evolve from regarding sentences as real even if the universe never voiced it, as the Abrahamic visionaries said, to thinking that formulas, such as F=MA and such constants as the ratio of a circle to a radius, are real, the background or structure for existence, though the non-repeating decimals in mathematical constants suggests that the numbers themselves are nominal rather than the numbers themselves being real.

The seventeenth century thinkers were endoteric because a perception that was turned into words by some clever person was regarded as self evident which means self confirming which means requiring no proof not because it was based on faith but because it was so obvious, such a clear matter of experience as to be including different words for the same thing even though sentences were just descriptions of a reality that did not have words tied to it. People invented sentences rather than discovered them. Descartes says “I think, therefore I am” is to say thinking implies being but really means the same thing in that to think is to have consciousness and being is consciousness if you think about it even though the two words seem to apply to different things, The seventeenth century thinkers were following Euclid in his metaphysics as well as his exposition in that he picked objects to describe like triangles and circles which did not exist in nature but could be brought in as ringers because they could yield to accurate and coordinated descriptions. That was true of Spinoza whose various derivations are based on accurate observations of how emotions get altered into being different emotions and so there is no need for the term ethics to mean anything other than the way people behave.

The ideological world is now divided between what I would call right wing and left wing Hobbesians, which means conservatives and liberals. Right wing Hobbesians accentuate the insight and idea that force is what saves people from social anarchy. People are terrified of personal safety and so surrender to authority so as to secure their personal safety from marauders and arbitrary danger to life and limb. People groove on the need of the sovereign to be harsh so as to assure civility. The hangman is the best guarantee of peace. Everyone is on edge because chaos is always near. Left wing Hobbesianism concerns what happens next, which is what is allowed when the basic social compact which trades security from obedience. If peace is secure and enforceable, then ot is possible to arrange contracts, which are legally enforceable promises. That allows two things: a general social contract that can provide a constitution which can be amended or replaced when people find the ;last one to be obsolete, and in that case, Hobbes has been corrected to become Locke, new social compacts readily available because anarchy will not take place during the interim between general social compacts. That primary social contract can also allow its own modification whereby the government itself is capable of limiting itself and so securing civil liberties for its own population and so sovereignty need not be harsh but provide a sense and actuality of freedom, the population the masters of government rather than its servants. Second of all, there can be particular contracts that are economic matters and so allow the extension of entrepreneurialism and prosperity and so fosters that second feature of the modern world.

A second story to be told about social theories is whether they are continuous or arrive at a final point. A theory exemplified by Habbakuk the Old Testament prophet, is that there are endless wars. There is no respite, a very gloomy view of human experience, Social Darwinism abstracts that into a principle. There is a dog eat dog relationship whereby animals, racial groups and nations are in permanent conflict though some think that the rationalization of competing corporations can lead to a stable situation, as when Rockefeller rationalized the oil industry by monopolizing it so that prices are stable. But there is also a new industry that has to go through its struggles for dominance, as is presently the case with mega movie giant corporations or competing AI corporations. The process doesn’t end; it just moves on. 

The best way to understand Christianity as a conflicted social movement is not as a division between Catholic supernaturalism and Protestant internal transformation but as the difference between whether Christians are more concerned with history as continuous and history as arriving as an end state. The continuous view is that for the long run people may become gradually more decent by Jesus providing a moral example to all of us but that is steady work that lies ahead to the very far future before mankind will be improved enough to be worthy of Jesus. On the other hand, believers can dwell on the consideration of the end of the story, which is when there will be a Second Coming when Jesus arrives and the world is changed into its final state. Such believers focus on what the afterlife will be like and what the final days told of in Revelations will be like. The Gospels provide both accounts. The Messiah will arrive again during the time of those still alive but another way to read Jesus is as over the long haul transforming the population into being better people. It seems that less educated Christians are more likely to engage in supernatural intervention to bring things to an end while the more educated prefer the slow ascent of moral enlightenment.

A third story about social theory, which means a sequence of events where the concluding episodes reflect back on what has changed from the initial events, is more problematic, which means that it is not clear if these are distinctive stories or if they are part of the same story.. That is so about sociological and psychological theories. Are they different kinds of independent theories or a single more extended one which just has more steps? One argument is that sociological theory is independent of psychological theory in that people make decisions on the basis of circumstances rather than independently developed inclinations. There is no mediation between people and their circumstances other than their inherent treason, which is universal. People may not be able to name the forces to which people decide what they decide to do but have a sense of that happening. That perception is in the modern era as old as Hobbes. People knew they had to relinquish sovereignty to a power so as to protect themselves from anarchy even if they did not know that what was happening was in fact a social contract. Similarly, people know, as explicitly said by both Aristotle and Simmel, that cosmopolitan people are found in cities. The varieties of people intersecting with one another creates a different social landscape than if peo[ple live in a reasonably similar social life. They will have different preoccupations, one of which is that people in cities will be entrepreneurial. This perception is as old as the legend of the Tower of Babel. 

Even sociologists who follow Durkheim and Parsons in thinking that people follow internalized norms are also dealing with a rationally based theory, A norm is a present and perhaps momentary condition in a society where people feel it incumbent to follow that norm, suchasan attractive political candidate, oran adversion of eating pork or dancing, because to do so is embarrassing or shameful or punishable. So people know the norms as facts of their lives and adjust accordingly, even if norms arise or change or have reasons for themselves are quizzical. That is just the way it works. Parsons said early on that there had to be a mediating value that motivates people, but he abandoned that to his differentiation theory, relying on the customs of roles as explaining why people did what they did. But Parsons still hoped fora grand integrative theory whereby psychological and sociological theories would become a grand field theory. 

A psychological theory, on the other hand, insists that there are motives inherent or developed in the psyche which overwhelm or merely guide and influence merely rational considerations. You are subservient to authority not just because it makes sense but also because you are afraid of your father. You look to God because of a craving for authority, which is an irrational though perfectly ”natural” inclination. Moreover, there are internal rules or customs whereby emotions are transferred into other emotions. So being stifled can lead to rage if other certain elements are introduced. Obviously, Freud is a proponent of the psychological approach as are the neo-Freudians like Eric Erikson who emphasized that the ego developed independently as an aspect of the psyche and so each person, like Luther with regard to anal retention and Gandhi with coming to peace with his heritage, form their own characters, as also do the rest of us, each life an elaborate woven blanket of our influences, each of us trying to become whole, which is what everyone wants to do. Less poetic or, I might say more superficial motives can be found as the great psychological trigger such as a desire to achieve power or manage anxiety or social approval for its own sake.

But the ability to distinguish between sociological and psychological theories does not mean that tey are not necessarily incommensurate. Consider the history, which is a narrative that tries to give a true account of people and events worth remembering even if some of what is included do not fit very well into a well made story, as when Shakespeare includes a story about Joan of Arc in his history of Henry VI that is not related to the rest of the play but was a notable feature during events of the time it covered. What is worth noting about histories, to treat them as evidence, is that historians mix psychological and sociological explanations within the same tapestry, which suggests that an accurate tapestry has the two kinds of explanation intersect even though historians rarely stipulate their explanations as such, preferring to allow the reader to draw that out of the narrative and the historian not necessarily aware of the explanations he invokes so as to make the narrative coherent, just using whatever makes sense as plausibly drawn inferences about how the sequence of events are connected. Thucydides treats political negotiation as rational while the state of Athens is a cultural and psychological moment. David Hume, in his “History of England”, mixes the personal predilections of kings and statesmen with their calculations in presenting the true history of the beheading of a king. Macauley treats culture as an entwined mood through which individual actions proceed, and so on..

But social theory is different from history, which is a form of literature, in that it provides a narrative to keep it moving, to complete a story, and is judged as persuasive or not, though claiming that this is a true narrative. Social theory pretends to be relinquishing narrative. Its claim is that it offers propositions or sentences, if one prefers, that are individually true and supported by evidence, and so not merely persuasive but conclusive. Is the announced statement of how a process or structure or a matter of description true or not? Either the capitalists run the world or don’t they? It isn’t enough to say that it is appealing to think or speculate or build a narrative based on that imagery and dynamic. Noticing that the architecture of a theory turns out to have a literary structure, as is the case in the examples cited, is an afterthought, an exploration into the motivations of how theorists fall perhaps inevitably into what is one or another of its generic types even though humanists may claim that theory is nothing else than the exposition of its own narratives. 

The way a theorist earns his or her stripes is to provide intersecting descriptions using the same concepts and propositions again and again so that the propositions can be said to predict or more accurately replicate behavior and also because the concepts and propositions are so well articulated to one another so as to create a system of considerable general power, just as is the case in classical physics where force and power and other quantities can be turned into definitions where only one or another term has to be added or withdrawn. So social science is considered scientific even if its elaboration of formulas, as in Parsons, is verbal rather than mathematical. The division between literature and history on the one hand and social theory on the other is insurmountable. A historian will ask why social contract theory is true but a social scientist has to insist that it can be reduced to verifiable propositions. Is it true that people will in fact subject themselves to a sovereign so as primarily to get peace or is it that cultural forces like religion or ideology can make people think there are other reasons to challenge a sovereign? 

In sum, there are sentences, which are declarations of fact, and there are stories, which are descriptions of events where the outcome reflects on the origin. These are fundamental forms of linguistic usage. It is difficult to say which preceded the other. What is the difference between a pygmy declaring that a stick can kill a giraffe by jabbing a stick into its belly and the meat can be used for food, or saying that hunters went to find and kill giraffes and then brought the meat back to their camp? The difference may be metaphysical in that they are metaphysical in that they refer to two different states of being but have the same content. And yet that is a great divide between science and humanism that continues to create confusion among thinkers who are concerned with such matters. Here is a paradox. If you say “All assertions are generic”, is that not an assertion beyond genres? Only in case a paradox is a genre and in that case  sentences are genres and all genres are subject to assertions. How is it possible for included things to be in one of the included things?

Noah the Technologist

Noah introduces technology as morally neutral.

Noah was a good enough engineer, whether he got the plans from God or dreamed them up himself under the inspiration of God, to correctly execute these very ambitious plans. The plans are spelled out in detail. The ark is to have three levels. It is to be caulked both inside and outside. It is to be three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits high. The dimensions of the ark are given so distinctly that they serve the literary purpose, of course, of concretizing the description and so make it as if it happened. But this is an interesting set of descriptors. “Genesis” could have said large or very large or as tall as a cedar of Lebanon or some other metaphor for size. “Genesis” does tend to exaggerate when it gives particular numbers, as when it gives the ages of the generations between Adam and Noah. That makes the story legendary: an exaggeration of what might have happened in the past rather than treating the past as having a very different set of processes than does the present, which is what happens when a mythology is created. There seems to be a different reason for concretizing here in the Noah story.

That  different reason for giving particulars of measurement is to suggest the magnitude of the building task, how much was to be accomplished if the task were undertaken, as is the case when we nowadays say a building will be 110 stories just so it can beat out the Empire State Building’s 103 stories. Numbers are the comparatives which show engineering greatness, both the grandeur and the near or actual impossibility of the task to be undertaken. Noah’s undertaking and not just his character are legendary.

The magnitudes specified for the ark are so great as to stagger the imagination of any era in which it was written about for inclusion in “Genesis”. They would have seemed implausible, and yet they are there in black and white. It is to be remembered that ships of a similar size were not built until the battleships that made up Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet were built in the first decade of the Twentieth Century, and they didn’t have the draft of the ark which, after all, was a cargo ship rather than a battlewagon. So it made sense, or at least a bit of sense, for the writers and editors of this passage of “Genesis” to think that they could include pairs of all the animals of the world, including the crawling things, if we take into account that they did not know about most species of insects or even of many mammals. And Noah, not God, is given credit for having built this ship, and so deserves credit in history for that alone, not to speak of having rescued humanity.

The scale of the ship opens up the reader’s imagination to a grandeur possible in legends without taking on the baggage of what would be required in an epic. Noah is not portrayed as particularly brave or wise, adjectives readily applied to characters in the Iliad or in Samuel I and II. Neither he nor the narrator reflects on the nature of the human condition, which is what characters in epics regularly do. And, most important, the conflict in the story of Noah is existential only in the sense that it involves the future of humanity, not that it involves some fundamental relation between people and the gods (or God), as would be the case in St. Augustine’s  “The City of God”, an epic-like retelling of the history of the world, or in Samuel I and II which also tells how human evils work their ways into human history, or in “The Odyssey”, which recounts how the foibles of mankind, harmless and customary, or deeply rooted in greed and memory, make it difficult for Odysseus to get back to and take control of his home. But epic it is, even though it is so brief, because it is the adventure of a man overcoming all the forces that swirl around him in the service of a magnificent ending.

Noah was not only the inspirer of and the design engineer for the ark; he was also its captain--Captain Kirk or Sir Francis Drake, it will be remembered, each holding only the last of the three titles. The very brief story of Noah details the days of the disaster and the mission to overcome the disaster with agonizing precision, just as is done by a procedural murder mystery or a movie about averting nuclear apocalypse. God announces that He will open the heavens for forty days and forty nights of rain, which presumably has been calculated as enough time to get the job done of cleansing the earth of its people by allowing waters to rise to a point higher than that of the highest mountains, the story going on to tell precisely how high over the mountains the water will rise, to fifteen cubits above their peaks. That is planning worthy of D-Day estimates of how much weight the sand on Omaha Beach can carry.

When the voyage begins, the narrator points out the number of days that have gone by since the rains started.  The waters abated one hundred and fifty days after the flood had been initiated. Ten months after the flood began, the tops of the mountains appeared. Meanwhile, Noah had sent out a raven forty days after the rains stopped (because if the time is counted from the beginning of the flood, then he would have sent out the raven on the day the rains ceased, which would have been a foolish venture). Then he waited seven days after another dove had been sent (presumably well after the initial raven so as to keep the counts of days aligned) to send out the second dove that did bring back an olive leaf. The dove sent out just seven days later did not return at all, which suggested that it had found a place to land, just as the earlier dove had found trees still growing, which suggests that trees survived the flood.

Think of what Noah had achieved. He had figured out a way to measure the state of the inundation, using his birds as instruments. That is the ingenuity of a technological mind that uses collateral features of the birds, such as their needing places to land and knowing how to get back to the ship if need be, to tell what is going on. Noah does not require God to tell him; nor does he just wait patiently; nor does he speculate. He engineers to provide himself with the intelligence he needs to keep the crew’s morale up, for what other end would it serve to find out how the abatement of the flood was going, since he couldn’t do anything about it but wait? 

Noah’s ark had been out of sight of land for at least one hundred and fifty days. (We are not told how long after that the ark came to rest on Ararat.) That is quite a voyage at a time when ships for the most part clung to coast lines. Indeed, it is difficult to think of any actual voyage on the Earth’s seas that lasted so long out of the sight of land. Columbus went five weeks. Captain Bligh, in his long boat, spent forty seven days on his way to Timor. Even nuclear subs come to the surface to look at ice floes. But Noah had no reminder that there was any dry land out there till the second dove returned. Now that is quite an accomplishment, the greatest feat of seamanship ever imagined, not to be equaled until astronauts will find themselves in space for a year on the way to Mars, which they will be able to see growing in size as they approach it, and also every day in contact with their fellow humans back on Earth.

It is difficult to believe that the frightfulness of that separation from a humanity that was, after all, all dead, as well as from the land they would have to return to, would not make the psychological pressures on Noah and his family intense, though the Bible does not go into that. What we do know is that Noah became a drunk once he got back to Earth and reestablished human title to it by building an altar to honor God. It is a minor failing for a man who has accomplished so much and has for the rest of his life to contemplate what he had done. As usual, the Bible does not describe motives, but leaves them as inferences for the reader as those can be made from the few bits of evidence provided. Noah was entitled to be a cranky old sot, and his sons knew that.

Technology as the theme or underlying construct of the story of Noah might seem to be an “interpretation” in the bad sense of that word: it might just be the imposition of a contemporary concern on a narrative not at all preoccupied with that concern, but where there are dribs and drabs of the narrative that can be fit into that reading. How can one get around the inevitable drawback of textual analysis, that it can bear a number of readings some of which may be outlandish, irrelevant or simply wrong? One way to do that would be to have a companion document from a similar setting that allows for comparisons to be made. A narrative that is handled differently in one telling than it is in another suggests that the significance or meaning of one of the narratives is in how the same material is handled differently than it is in the other. That certainly is the case with the Four Gospels, which are apparently drawn from the same source material, the sayings of Jesus and other traditions about his life, and yet are told differently enough so that scholars can decide that Matthew, for instance, in intended to win over the Jews, and that John is interested in metaphysics. We could also draw a distinction between the source stories for Shakespeare and what Shakespeare does with them, except that what Shakespeare does is so far superior to his sources that the stories on which he based his plays are of relatively little moment next to the intricacies of emotion and meaning he has placed in the reworking of those stories.

There is, of course, a comparison to the Noah story. It is the flood story told in the epic of “Gilgamesh”. Indeed, the stories are so similar in detail that it is easy enough to think that the Biblical writers and editors were like Shakespeare in having worked over their source material so well that it doesn’t really matter where the story elements came from. Yet there it is for comparison, and that comparison provides evidence that the Noah story is engaged in the use of a very distinct, and perhaps distinctively new, concept of technology, a very different sense of how to transform nature than is known to the author of an epic of some hundreds of years before in another not too far distant Semitic culture.

The plans laid out in “Gilgamesh” for its ark are quite elaborate, just as is the case in the Noah story. The reason for building the ark, however, is quite different. In “Gilgamesh”, the ark is a plan by which some gods are going to undercut the plans of other gods to destroy the world. “Gilgamesh” is therefore mythic rather than legendary in that the building of the ark is a subterfuge, infused with the emotion of having outsmarted or turned the corner on the opposition, these contests between powerful people as old as time in that it is not possible to imagine gods that are not caught up in the worst of human emotions. 

That is very different from the Noah story where God both commands the flood and also the building of the ark and that there is something very new and significant in this particular motivation that God has introduced into the world. As has been suggested, God is doing contrary things and does not remark upon it. Yet if God’s voice to build the ark has come to Noah, the building of the ark is in itself, as I have already said, a neutral activity, something made available by the fact that people can make plans on how to beat nature, rather than leave the human narrative to a matter of how one god plans to outdo a different god. Technology has a quality of existence all its own, as something objective, and so is like a sword, or any other item of customary and inherited technology, that is not questioned as to how it came about, except in legends, like that of Arthur and Excalibur, where tools are made by gods and picked up or stolen by the person who can and therefore rightfully wield it. By that legendary view, Hitler could not have built an atom bomb because he was a bad man. But Noah, “Genesis” says, was not particularly good or bad and so what he mastered was an objective craft.

Another comparison between “Gilgamesh” and “Genesis” makes the same point. Gilgamesh mentions a man who is about to attack his neighbor. A god asks him if he has provided himself with enough food to withstand the ill that will befall him. He answers that he has built silos to provide food for seven years. This is clearly parallel to the story of Joseph predicting that there will be a famine of seven years which can be dealt with by building silos to hold seven years of crops harvested in seven years of plenitude. Yet the motives are very different. In “Gilgamesh”, the plan is part of a subterfuge to further the successful planning of a military mission. The question is asked to see if someone has been sly enough in his preparation for battle. 

In the Joseph story, the emphasis is on the invention of the idea of saving up crops from bountiful years to cover the shortfall in famine years. The idea of doing so comes to Joseph in a dream. It is an inspiration. “Genesis” implies that people had not thought of such planning previously—though clearly they had in that the Gilgamesh epic precedes the Joseph story by hundreds of years. The point is not that the redactors wanted to take false credit for having invented the idea; it is that they realize it is an idea that needed to have been invented, that it was an insight into the ebb and flow of agriculture rather than an insight into the human condition or into the minds of gods. Again, technology is neutral, therefore for the inventing, rather than a moral quality that is there only for its rediscovery in one context or another.

The overall point is that technology is treated by “Genesis” as a different kind of thing, as having its own special status as something other than good or bad. That may not seem much of a discovery, yet that is just the case, and theologians have argued for thousands of years about whether there are parts of the metaphysical furniture that are morally neutral, the Pope recently declaring that Darwinism is correct in that it describes the mechanism whereby some new species appears but that “radical” Darwinism is wrong if you take Darwin to mean that a new species comes about that without having been “approved” by God and so is therefore part of His plan for the history of natural life. The Pope thereby neatly takes away the recognition he has awarded to Darwin because the point of Darwinism is the coincidental nature of the selection of some mutations over others that might be successful. People might have wound up being green or having webbed feet or x-ray vision, and of a mind filled with emotions more similar to those of dolphins than of land mammals, should evolution have lumbered along down a different set of choice points. Religious leaders still fall into Gilgameshism.

The fact that human cultural evolution went down the path it did, producing the “Genesis” version of the flood story as well as other strange intellectual notions, is very profound, for it is one of the only things that can explain why the Western world, as that is descended from Greece, Rome, Israel and, some would say, Germany, is very different from other parts of the world, where culture has led elsewhere. A simple and well documented point is that Chinese culture, which was so technologically fertile for so long, ceased being so, possibly because the Chinese did not see its significance, but treated invention as a source of novelty and fun rather than the basis for the mastery of nature and social life. It isn’t that the Chinese had not become educated enough or prosperous enough to reach a takeoff point for industrialization. It was that they had no interest in doing so until the concept and fact of industrialization was introduced from the West, a movement they resisted as best they could for as long as they could. There is something special about the West.

Moral Absolutes

There are no moral absolutes. There are just consequences and preferences and rules that apply for only a short or long time.

Most people think, to the extent that they think about the matter, that almost all people think they have basic principles of conduct and that people more or less try to abide by their principles, while acknowledging that people in other cultures may have different basic principles and so follow those different ones. Everyone has their principles, whatTalcott Parsons called “values”, and that is what differentiates people. Values are the axioms from which behaviors are implied or descend. So people believe that you should not kill or steal, and some emphasize that they are loyal to religion, family, or church, and there is no logical way to dissuade them from their values even if you might disapprove of those allegiances although you might try to argue an opposing point of view was cruel or revengeful but your antagonist might simply embrace that point of view however contrary it is to your own values, or try to move an advocate of reproductive rights that a fetus looks like a human being but the reproductive rights person could steel themselves to this appeal by asserting that nonetheless a woman controls her own body.  

I want to suggest that this point of view is not true. There are no such things as values, just short or long chains of  causes and consequences which justify a behavior and the eventual end of the chain is a matter of fact which is true or false and so that the value has been reduced to being true or false rather than good or bad. This apparently outlandish view of morality is consistent with Spinoza, the Pragmatist tradition of William James and John Dewey and, I would say, of G. E. Moore, who claimed that a sense of right or wrong was independent of theories of ethics but a particular sense of the rectitude of a behavior as when a person might sense it was acceptable to kill enemy soldiers even if killing is generally wrong.The reconstruction of philosophy Dewey contemplated meant that a number of traditional terms in philosophy just disappear as meaningless. Among them, I would say, is “nature”, which simply means everything, so that angels living on clouds and having wings would be natural rather than supernatural if that in fact was the way they existed even if you know that fact only on faith. Another term to be abolished is “cause” which is a force and that can be substituted with the word “context” and so people don’t get pneumonia because of germs because pneumonia germs are always present and a necessary condition for the disease but also require people who are run down in one way or other, all the conditions together and being arbitrary as which condition is to be regarded as the cause. 

There is also no need for the word “justice”, however much the term is bandied about. “Justice” is a term that cannot be defined because there is no balance of interests, as there are with weights, and so perhaps applicable to some damages, such as restitution for a wrecked car, but when applied in the criminal court system simply means punishment as if incarceration or execution somehow balances the original offense. All it does is repeat the action of killing. The victim of murder does not come back to life. All that can be meant by “justice” is palliative or remedial programs for those who live under dire conditions. Similarly, there is no need for the word “should”: even though Kant insisted the word was so essential in conversation that it must necessarily have meaning, when the word “should” is a shorthand for all the consequences one prefers that, as I say, resolve into being matters of fact, as when I say I should be nice to my wife because to do otherwise leads to wear and tear on a relationship and wanting to have that relationship is satisfying, which is a fact not a value. Now consider the status of a number of well known values that are absolute in the sense that they are axiomatic and so beyond appeal when that is clearly not the case.

A simple derivation that reasons to an absolute are the morals in the Ten Commandments. “Though shalt not steal” can be found in its consequence that this is functional for the maintenance of society. As Hobbes might say, allowing people to steal leads to anarchy and so has to be raised to the status of a moral outrage. That practical usefulness is reason enough. But some religionists might say that the implication need not be practical, that it is akin to dietary laws which some people say are sanitary or otherwise useful, but have to be obeyed because God mandated it for whatever reason He had. Your’s is not to argue. But if God commands something, the question resolves itself to the factual question of whether God exists and I have said elsewhere (See my “Contra-God” in Wenglinsky Review) that the term God is essentially meaningless, just a set of metaphors drawn from lords and masters. The commandment doesn’t hold if there is no God to command it.

Try another commandment: “Thou shalt not kill”. Leave aside the functional argument that allowing killing also leads to eternal fear amidst anarchy. Or that there are qualifications whereby enemy soldiers at the least are allowed to be killed. Consider the legal death penalty. People offer the reason for allowing it is that it may serve as a deterrent and that under present guidelines it is more expensive to do that rather than put a murderer into life imprisonment but underlying the practical considerations is the view that killing a person is worthy because it shows the sanctity of a society to protect itself, and so execution symbolizes the authority of the state. Opponents of the death penalty go beyond the practical claims that there are people who are wrongly convicted or rehabilitatable to the bedrock, axiomatic symbolic idea that refusing to execute people shows the respect of a society for all human life, even of those who are just awful. But in both cases of symbolism, the object is empirical: whether to enhance the glory or value of either the state or the individual. 

Avoid the shorthand of referring to God or symbolism and so provide the practical chains of reasoning for policy decisions. A particularly complex chain of causation to ultimate ends or values means a longer one. These are political ones such as price supports and making castes into ethnic groups. These chains, however, do not follow the model of Euclid and Spinoza to assemble axioms, already proven theorems and lacunna so as to arrive at a very different and perhaps surprising result ending with “ergo something”. Instead, a moral absolute is challenged by a logical or empirical objection followed by an alternative moral absolute that is also answered with a logical or empirical response until all the moral absolutes are used up for that particular question. 

J. F. K. said that price supports for farmers were necessary because they had been promised to them and we should honor that promise. That seems pretty weak, begging the question of whether price supports were a good thing in the first place. A more candid answer to why to continue to honor price supports is because farm states have a disproportionate number of Senators and get the support to trade favors with other things that are important to industrial states. A more generalized and moral value for farm price supports can instead be offered. It is that farm families need it and the government should provide help to whatever constituency needs it, whether struggling farmers or inner city youth, even if some politicians support one or the other because of their own interests. That moral principle is too general because it would include financial and moral support for Nazis or criminals, and indeed there is political support for either one in that Trump thought Nazis in Charlottesville were among the good people there and that Liberals want criminals to get good conditions and rehabilitation. The more economic and practical issue underlying farm price supports is that agriculture is a different kind of business than manufacturing where you can cut back on production and so cut costs when there is less demand but that farms don’t save much money by decreasing production and so the question is if there is the demand for the ample opportunities farms produce. Farm subsidies and government bought food like butter ate up some of the farm crops and other products. But things changed in that the family farmer was replaced by the industrial or corporate farm and large amounts of farm products like soybeans were sent to overseas markets at least until Trump upset the applecart with his tariffs. So farm subsidies largely become obsolete, which is not a value but an empirical question, a matter of fact about the rural economic and institutional structure. 

The same practical issue of obsolescence holds with regard to slavery which was regarded by Southerners as a necessity and Northerners as an abomination even though, not for them, the reason to go to war. The absolute moral claim of whether all people are by their nature free and that to enslave others is to diminish oneself, is countered by William Graham Sumner, the turn into the twentieth century sociologist, who said that slavery was obsolete as a method for procuring workers because wage workers were more productive and less costly. The same goes for Jim Crow. Integrating the work force and other amenities to the South helped in the decades after the Second World War, along with air-conditioning and Northern investment, to make the South prosperous. So the moral sentiment for treating people as equal is not a moral absolute but the question of obsolescence, which is an empirical matter as well as an operative rather than idealized condition.

Here are two other social policy issues that seem to rely on the same absolute value: the taking of risk. The overt and initial reason for providing Social Security is that it provides income to the elderly and old people are no longer the worst income groups in America and so easing the elderly is a good thing because people should be nice to old people. The objection to that is that the provision of pensions to the elderly allows people not to provide for their own old age by saving money and investing in private insurance or investment instruments. Those who are self indulgent, like the grasshopper, aren’t able to last the terminal winter. But that again can appeal to the cruelty being inflicted on the old. Another objection to Social Security is that people of even moderate means will never make up in their benefits from the contributions they have made in withholding payroll income taxes, and so that is unfair to the better off workers, and the answer to that is that Social Security is not an annuity but a tax scheme whereby money is transferred from the people working to the people no longer working and can easily enough be funded despite the lower number of workers to people retired with minor tax adjustments such as lifting the cap on incomes to be taxed. 

Underlying these other reasons for and against Social Security is a very different issue. Social Security is a system where people do not have to take risks and risks are a good thing, part of a person being alive and an active member in life. So Social Security would be alright if people were allowed to invest their Social Security contributions into stock portfolios and so risk making either a profit or maybe a loss and so a participant based on their own judgment even though the conversion to such a system would require massive amounts of money and also require the government to list which stocks were eligible for investment lest citizens invest in very long term odds and lose their money and have to be supported by a supplementary Social Security fund for bad investors. But that would mean engaging in the unprecedented event of the government intruding in the stock market to decide which companies were winners and losers, either worthy or unworthy objects of investment. Those who support the insistence on everyone engaging in risk as a natural and praiseworthy enterprise for all people, a kind of right, are willing to accept the costs and the transformation of the American economy in a radical way in order to accomplish this end. Risk is the absolute value.

There is another kind of risk, a social rather than an economic risk, which seems to have come to prevail in American and Western society as the essential way to manage a practice. That is courtship. People in the old days and in the Old Countries had arranged marriages. That meant that potential spouses would be culled and even marriages enforced by parents or professional matchmakers who might have better judgment than young people about what couples might get along as well as fit their lifestyles. Never mind romance. People of good will will find it easier to become companionable with a chosen mate rather than one found otherwise. But people decided differently. The young men and women who came to America decided that Western liberty meant finding a spouse on your own though usually from their own neighborhoods or mixers where the people they met were likely to be compatible. They had romantic love  interests as the basis for settling down and even had serial love affairs, as it now turns out, before settling down. Yes, that creates considerable emotional wear and tear on people and leads to computer dating and other sketchy devices for identifying who is the One, but it is worth it because romance is the greatest risk people will have in their lives, remembering how the two hit it off at a bar or a mixer, and so everyone becoming a kind of hero and heroine in their own lives however pedestrian their occupation or other activities in life might be. You did it yourself. You risk-take for better or worse. And that is an end in itself to have that adventure, something no longer available only to knights on a pilgrimage or an explorer going into the wilderness, and so part of the pursuit of happiness available to all rather than just some elites. 

Given that both Social Security and courtship, very different things, are both rooted in risk, it might be thought that risk was a moral absolute but that would be incorrect because it leads to a deeper idea than absolute value. People can either decide to accept risk or reject it as a moral principle and there is no way to insist on taking risk or not taking risk though a different value, such as the obligation to answer a military draft can entail risk and is maybe morally mandatory without it being an absolute value but one of the many obligations that people take on by being a citizen or an employee or a spouse. Rather, risk is a preference, which means a voluntary choice akin to liking Chinese or Italian food or one of the range of breakfast cereals in the supermarket, these considered in a trivial sense to be matters of taste, which means of no significance. Only your spouse cares about whether you like asparagus.

But there are also matters of taste that are significant that they are deep expressions of character. A preference for Verdi melodramas paraded as tragedies rather than a Mozart rom-com is a test of what you sound as simpatico about life, just as is the case in preferring middle brow John Steinbeck to high brow Modernists like Mann or Joyce. It tells you who you are and adopting one or the other is also a matter of taste in the sense that Hume meant that taste was a sense of something deeper not deeply explored or what C. E. Moore meant when he said that morality was taste in that it was a sense of what is right or wrong in a particular matter without reference to some moral rule which necessarily does not spell out what might be or might become regarded as exceptions. So the heart of morality is  preferences and not rules, much less absolute values, which can exist singularly as a sense of justice rather than a code of justice. And there you have it: you have a taste for or a preference for a potential spouse or a politician and that tells a lot about you but that does not exhaust you and you can change your preferences and these still have the weightiness of moral decision making but are not moral absolutes, just possibly very bad judgments that other people or even yourself find disreputable or invoke mean thoughts rather than whatever other thoughts and feelings that a politician can evoke.

There is another meaning to “moral absolutism” other than the one discussed, that it is axiomatic, and it too can be dispensed with. This second and related meaning is that moral principles are not only true but are always applicable, the view that if that timelessness is abandoned for cultural relativism, it means that it is not truly a moral principle and is subject to the whims of cultural fashion, so that principles of “Thou shalt not kill” are acceptable in some cultures or times rather than in others. When in Rome do as the Romans do applies to togas or good manners (which I would argue are in fact long lasting rather than transitory, only the expression of good manners varying from time to time but the function of good manners is more or less permanent). The status of whether a moral is absolute is just a question of whether you look at the short run, such as that of a few millenia, or the very long run, in which case a moral principle changes only when the social structure changes so fundamentally as to be difficult to imagine when the absolute moral principle disappears. 

Consider “Thou shalt not steal” again. That makes sense for all societies that have existed so far (though some Marxists believe that caveman societies might have had a primitive communism where everyone worked together and distributed goods on a need to have basis.) It makes sense that people should not take grab of the holdings of another person, whether a meal or an item or a piece of land appropriated except by law, or even a woman, though the Ten Commandments speak of two other ways not to take women, neither to engage in adultery or even just to covet them. The ancient Hebrews must have been a lascivious people, just like everyone else. Think of stealing as becoming no longer meaningful if there is so much abundance created by technology that everyone can get free of charge everything they want, available online to your heart’s content, money an unnecessary transaction, even though there still might be records of transfers so as to keep the production and distribution line going. There would be no scarcity, which ends economics and theft as a meaningful idea. That is a very long way away and so we might think not stealing a universal and permanent rule for the game of organizing social life but still nevertheless theoretically terminal.

A less fanciful notion of a permanent moral principle that could in fact become suspended because it is no longer meaningful is “Thou shalt not kill” which would occur when there arrived what Kant called “perpetual peace” when a world organization made it no longer necessary to have wars and killing people for greed was unnecessary and killing women or men for lust or jealousy gave away to the pacific world of Diderot who thought that women in Polynesia might think they were kind to even ugly men. Even closer to the horizon are the abolition of penitentiaries as punishment just as penitentiaries replaced a very general death penalty when rehabilitation of criminal minds could be successful rather than serious crime to be the result of bad social conditions or a bad seed. A shorter time frame would be to eliminate the forbearance of those who suffer from illness if most illness was eliminated through vaccines and quick surgery of the sort imagined in “StarTrek” which is just half a millennium from now, which is not very far away. Then, people would not have to be patient with the pathetic because no one would be pathetic however much that aspect of human compassion may seem a bedrock of moral existence.and universally admired as a virtue. Absolute morality, therefore, is always for a relatively short time.

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.