Tag: Empire

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Virgil and Daniel – Two Visions of Empire

“The search for God is not the search for comfort or tranquility, but for truth, for justice, faithfulness, integrity: these, as the prophets tirelessly reiterated, are the forms of God’s appearance in the world” from Nicholas Lash, “Creation, Courtesy, and Contemplation” in The Beginning and the End of ‘Religion’

Does one read the Bible like any other book? R.W.L Moberly begins his The Bible in a Disenchanted Age: The Enduring Possibility of Christian Faith with this question. In exploring this question, Moberly works with a three-fold typology, based on what he takes to be the three main ways people read the bible–as history, as classic, and as Scripture. In each of the main chapters, Moberly offers comparative readings of the Aeneid, especially Book 1, and Daniel 7 as a way to explore these three approaches–history, classic, Scripture. So why is that we should read the Bible any differently than we read something like the Aeneid? It’s worth reading the whole book to see the ways he grapples with this question. Here I want summarize the contrastive reading he offers of Aeneid and Daniel 7 on the question of empire.

In Aeneid 1 Jupiter speaks of the coming Rome as a “limitless empire,” and in Daniel 7 the Ancient of Days promises “a kingdom that will not pass away.” So what is the difference? Moberly observes that Daniel’s vision stands in sharp contrast to the Roman vision of endless empire. In the vision of Daniel 7, the prophet beholds the bestial violence of earthly empires as they clash and jostle for supremacy. In contrast to this bestial violence, the promised “son of Man”, the truly human one, inherits a kingdom from the Ancient of Days. But in a strange ambiguity in the text, it seems that the kingdom entrusted to the son of man is then entrusted to holy ones, the saints of the earth. Because of their humanity these holy ones are able to resist the temptation to meet beastly force with beastly force. Beastly force must be met with a human serenity which itself rests on divine sovereignty.

The apocalyptic vision of Daniel 7 initially terrifies, both Daniel himself and any reader who dares to envision the horrifying parade of beastly empires. The horror and the violence these beasts perpetrate on the world and each other is all too real. It is precisely such bestial violence that Aeneid, if not commends (for Virgil is subtle in theses matters), at least inspired in Rome. For this reason the book of Daniel speaks acutely, both then and now, to the persecuted, to those who face the beastly. The encouragement is not to meet fire with fire, to fight a beast with beast, but to stay your eyes on true humanity, on the son of man, who resists the turn to the beastly, who refuses both coercion and violence.

As Moberly observes about Daniel, “the wider book portrays faithfulness and loyalty, and also wisdom, as the qualities of life expected for resisting the four beasts for as long as they have their dominion…A good case can be made for the thesis that the book of Daniel as a whole, in its own right, is subverting any straightforward notion of dominion and is reconceiving where, under the God of Israel, true power and dominion lie” (120;123).

And yet Christians have found the Virgilian vision of empire very tempting. In rehearsing the reception of Virgil by Christians, Moberly recognizes that throughout the history of the Church, “the vision of endless empire posed a particular temptation for Christians” (127). In other words there has always been a temptation to replace the Daniel 7 vision of human patience and faithfulness in the face of the beastly, with the Roman vision of conquering the world in the way of the beast.

But as Moberly rightly notes, these two visions cannot be conflated because they rest on different understandings of power:

“The ’unending dominion” of Daniel 7 thus is of a different order than the “limitless empire” of Aeneid 1, because Daniel 7 is not speaking of any prospect of power in the same way…The appeal of Daniel 7, however, appears to be less straightforward and more demanding. A positive appropriation of Daniel 7 would in principle entail a willingness at least to sympathize, and perhaps to identify, with a small and regularly oppressed people who have a strong commitment to faithfulness in adversity, and who through that faithfulness maintain confidence in the ultimate triumph of their vision of a just God" (128).

For the Christian the Daniel 7 vision of human resistance to the bestial forces of violence and coercion is only possible within a faithful community. It is only the faithful community, the church, who receives Daniel 7 as Scripture who can have any chance of living the kind of resistance it envisions. The Church, in other words, makes such living not only possible but first it makes it plausible. Using the Peter Berger’s sociological language of “plausibility structures,” with an ecclesial assist from Leslie Newbigin, Moberly describes the church as that faithful community: “The church functions as a plausibility structure not only through its contemporary witness but also through its persistence through the centuries in maintaining the importance of a particular way of God, the world, and ourselves” (156).

The church as plausibility structure is the place in which the Bible is received as Scripture. Though the Bible can be fruitfully read as history and as classic in virtually any context (even within the Church!), it can really only be read as Scripture within a communal context that not only receives it as Scripture but also tries to faithfully live it.

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Worship, Empire, and the Fickle Human Heart, Reflections on City of God

“But the worshippers and lovers of those gods, whom they delighted to imitate in their criminal wickedness, are unconcerned about the utter corruption of their country. ‘So long as it lasts,’ they say, ‘so long as it enjoys material prosperity, and the glory of victorious war, or, better, the security of peace, why should we worry? What concerns us is that we should get richer all the time, to have enough for extravagant spending every day, enough to keep our inferiors in their place…Anyone who disapproves of this kind of happiness should rank as a public enemy: anyone who attempts to change it or get rid of it should be hustled out of hearing by the freedom-loving majority: he should be kicked out, and removed from the land of the living. We should reckon the true gods to be those who see that the people get this happiness and then preserve it for them.” City of God, Book II, Chapter 20

In this passage, as a master of rhetoric, Augustine uses hyperbole to great effect. By adopting the voice of a typical Roman citizen, he skewers both the Roman deities and those who worship them. He also tellingly reveals one dark aspect of imperialism–the calloused disdain of the privileged for those beneath them. More broadly, here and throughout Book II, Augustine is examining the ways in which false worship distorts the worshipper. In Augustine’s logic worshippers become corrupt because the gods they worship are corrupt. Worship is formative and shapes the worshipper into the image of the thing worshipped.

As this passage shows, for Augustine what was ultimately disordered about Roman worship was that it was a means to an end. In other words, the worship was false not just because the gods themselves were false, but more importantly because the worship was offered as a way to secure some other thing, such as wealth, happiness, security, prosperity. The last line sums up this theology: “We should reckon the true gods to be those who see that the people get this happiness and then preserve it for them.” In other words, we will offer worship only to the extent that it benefits us. It is interesting on this count to see the ways in which Roman gods are in one sense simply personified versions of the thing desired–a god of war or reason, a goddess of love or wisdom. It is also interesting to note how many of the Greek and Roman myths narrate gods acting on their behalf to secure some thing desired.

This passage also reminds me of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, a book where the gods of the old world, the gods of mythology, roam the American landscape mostly as grifters and vagrants because they are no longer worshipped and are only vaguely remembered. They have been replaced by new gods, like television, media, celebrity, technology. And one of Gaiman’s points in writing, besides providing a vastly entertaining story and interesting world, is to show in which human worship is doled out in order to receive benefits. Old gods are traded for new gods when their are new benefits to be had.

Even if you aren’t religious in any way, I think it is instructive to take Augustine’s words and Gaiman’s story and think of how mercenary and fickle the human heart really is. Our affection is so fleeting. Our devotion so often given for selfish reasons. Why is that? Why do we have such a hard time remaining steadfast? It is also instructive to consider the inscrutable God of providence and Lord of history that Augustine commends and to wonder how it would shape and form us to worship Him.

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Would Augustine have kept a blog? Reflections on City of God, Part 1

On the First Things blog, Collin Garbarino suggested people join him in reading Saint Augustine’s City of God over the course of 2014. I decided to do just that because I’ve wanted to read it for a while now, but tackling it seemed so daunting. But his suggested pace of three pages a day or so seemed more than manageable, and the slower pace has its charms. For one, I am able to linger over the details a bit more, and for another, I am able to think about how the whole thing fits together. At this point, I’ve been able to keep up, so I’m about 125 pages in, and I thought blogging some reflections on my reading would help me process this mammoth book and keep me on my reading track. These reflections will not be systematic in any way and won’t serve anyone as a reading guide, but I do hope they might help me and maybe others process how vital Augustine’s thinking is even now and maybe even especially now.

In this first post, I simply want to reflect on how vital and relevant the book seems. It’s striking that even among a slew of historical details and all the particulars of Roman history that the underlying themes resonate so strongly. His reflections on the nature of empire, on suffering, on the nature of history itself have much to say to us now. Which I suppose is another way of saying the book is a classic for a reason. Even with its particularity it speaks almost universally. Take this statement, for example, where Augustine reflects on the desire of empires to insatiably expand:

“Why must an empire be deprived of peace, in order that it may be great? In regard to men’s bodies it is surely better to be of moderate size, and to be healthy, than to reach the immense stature of giant at the cost of unending disorders–not to rest when that stature is reached, but to be troubled with greater disorders with the increasing size of the limbs” (III.10).

One thinks here not only of empires that have expanded only to find themselves decaying from the inside, but in our own time, one thinks of corporations and financial institutions who are massive and lumbering and who may unknowingly carry cancer in their limbs as a result of their ever expanding size. I can’t but think when I read these lines that the flailing arms of an ailing giant can do great damage.

On another note, it’s interesting to reflect on how Augustine would have published his thoughts in our time. Certainly the thousand page brick sitting on my desk right now would have had a hard time getting published, even though the sprawling and discursive nature of the book is part of its charm. Because of its myriad interests and expansive scope, I wonder if he would have used a forum like this one to collect his thoughts. I know its anachronistic, and maybe even offensive to some, to think of City of God like a series of blog posts, but the book and chapter structure lends itself to small blog post like chunks. Of course, I could just be thinking this because I’m reading it in a blog-like way, three pages at a time.

Even so, there is something very un-blog like about the book because his project is to integrate the particulars into a coherent whole like a unified field theory of history and theology. It is hard to imagine any project in our time having such ambition, and if it did we would probably say it was doomed to failure from the outset. Which is one of the charms of reading old books–they don’t have to conform to our notions of what is possible and achievable.

I’m only a month into this, and it would be too hard to catch up, so if you read this, I would encourage to dive into *City of God* with me.