OLD TESTAMENT OR JEWISH/HEBREW BIBLE?

In the past twenty years there has been a move in British and North American scholarship to use the term 'Hebrew Bible' (less often, 'Jewish Bible' or 'Jewish scriptures') in place of 'Old Testament'. The question affects ethics, as will be shown shortly. The reason for the move has been a wish to be sensitive to Judaism, and to avoid the impression, undoubtedly created in many people's minds by the term 'Old Testament', that the books designated by this name are inferior to or superseded by those known as the New Testament. In addition, there has been the feeling in some quarters that the Christian term 'Old Testament' is inappropriate in academia.

It is easier to be sympathetic to the reasons for the move than to feel that the underlying problem has been satisfactorily dealt with. The terms ‘Jewish Bible’ and ‘Jewish scriptures’ most naturally refer to texts held sacred by and used distinctively within Judaism. They are legitimate designations in that context. ‘Hebrew Bible’ is more problematic, because, on analogy with ‘English Bible’, it most naturally refers to the Bible in Hebrew, although few students who take courses in ‘Hebrew Bible’ in universities and colleges actually read it in that language. There is the further problem that ‘Hebrew Bible’ and ‘Old Testament’ are not synonymous. For the majority of Christians for most of the history of the church, ‘Old Testament’ has designated not only the twenty-four books of the Bible in Hebrew, but has also included the thirteen to sixteen books that Protestants call the Apocrypha but which are scripture for the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches. A partial compromise would be for ‘Jewish Bible/scriptures’ to be used in the context of Judaism and ‘Old Testament’ in the context of Christianity.

In what follows, I will summarise elements of the emerging world debate over the family. I will set forth some of the facts and reasons that suggest this debate is not simply a product of conservative political rhetoric, although at times it is that. I contend that there is an emerging world family crisis, that it is worse in poor countries than in wealthy ones, that it is very debilitating even for rich societies, and that it is an independent variable undermining human wellbeing that is not reducible to poverty,war or natural catastrophe - all of which take their own tolls on families. I also believe that this crisis must be addressed at several levels - first at the religio-cultural level, then at the legal and economic levels, and finally at the level of education and individual development, in that order. This chapter will address primarily the first, the religio-cultural level. Addressing this level of human action is the central task of a practical or transformative Christian theological ethics.

ORIGINS

Themes akin to natural law emerged in Greek civilisation. The tragedian Sophocles (497-406 bce), for example, gave some indication of it in his depiction of the conflict between Antigone's obedience to King Creon and her stronger obligation to a higher law. Plato (428-348 bce) countered the relativism of the Sophists by arguing that goodness consists in living a life in accord with our rational nature and not in thoughtless social conformity. Aristotle (383-322 bce) followed suit in distinguishing the deeper 'natural justice' from what is legally just. For Aristotle, the good for every organism is 'to attain fully its natural activity'. Living 'according to nature' (kata physin) for human beings means living virtuously.

The cosmopolitan Stoics distinguished the human nature that pertains to all human beings as such from laws instituted by particular societies. They held that the right way to live can be discovered by intelligently conforming to the order residing in human nature. Their characteristic maxim – that we ought to live ‘according to nature’ – was an injunction to live virtuously rather than at the whim of fluctuating emotions or social approval.

A virtue is a trait of character or intellect which is in some way praiseworthy, admirable or desirable. When we refer to somebody's virtues, what we usually have in mind are relatively stable and effective dispositions to act in particular ways, as opposed to inclinations which are easily lost, or which do not consistently lead to corresponding kinds of action. And so, for example, someone who has the virtue of generosity will consistently respond in generous ways in a variety of situations, including those in which generosity is difficult or costly, in contrast to someone who is moved by pity to one uncharacteristically generous act, or someone whose generous impulses are frequently overcome by desires for self-indulgence. Today, the virtues are normally understood to be morally praiseworthy traits of character, but this has not always been the case; for example, many ancient and medieval writers considered intelligence and wit to be virtues.

Whilst it would be an overstatement to say that there are as many liberation theologies as there are practitioners, it is certainly true that liberation theology is not all of a piece. This is not just to point to the varieties of liberation theology - black, Asian, African, Jewish, feminist, womanist and so forth (and since feminist ethics are treated elsewhere in this volume, I will not deal with the subject here) - but to the variety of standpoints even within Latin America, where the movement started. Juan Luis Segundo, for example, had an essentially evolutionary understanding of reality which he shared with his fellow-Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin. He can cite with approval the view that every vice was probably at some time a virtue, and that what we call 'human beings' are only slowly emerging from the tangle of primitive drives and instincts. He frankly avows a situation ethic, an ethic in which the ends justify the means, but on the understanding that Christian ends are the most communitarian and generous-hearted imaginable. Míguez Bonino, on the other hand, offers us a survey of twentieth-century social ethics, but allows himself to formulate a principle which is virtually identical with utilitarianism: 'The basic ethical criterion is the maximising of universal human possibilities and the minimizing of human costs.'

With the exception of John Milton, there is no English poet more learned than Ben Jonson, and none who makes learning such an integral part of his literary work. Jonson thought of poetry and drama as scholarly as well as imaginative enterprises, a conviction attested by his remark in the dedication to the Earl of Pembroke that the Epigrams were “the ripest of my studies.” The humanist educational and compositional ideal of imitation of the classics is exemplified by no one more thoroughly and successfully than by Jonson. He not only exhibits a remarkable familiarity with a wide range of Greek and Roman literature; he also converts ancient models into the very substance of his texts in a way that results in independent, coherent works of his own without erasing the visible features of the sources. Yet Jonson is not merely a literary antiquarian - the Renaissance counterpart to a modern writer who produces scrupulously accurate historical novels. Throughout his career and across the broad spectrum of genres that he attempted, Jonson manifests an extraordinary responsiveness to the political, social, and artistic issues of his age.

Lord Jim (1900) by Joseph Conrad and Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Bronte, published fifty-three years apart, ostensibly have little to do with each other aesthetically or ideologically. One is written by a man; one by a woman. One by an emigre and one by a native Briton. One is overtly a text of diasporic imperialism and the other a text of domestic colonizing. One is constructed leisurely in the impressionist-realist mode, with a fast paced romantic, even gothic, finale; the other is a dramatically bifurcated text, a domestic hybrid of romance and realism. Conrad's is usually classified as modernist; Bronte's is classified as Victorian. While Lord Jim is considered aesthetically typical of its historical moment, Wuthering Heights is considered an aberration.

Yet these two novels, which may be said temporally to frame the Victorian novel despite its official beginning a decade before Wuthering Heights and despite the very real difference between them, can be connected through issues of form, subjectivity, and ideology. The topic for this chapter is, of course, large and even unwieldy. It reminds me, in its scope, of what the words “Victorian novel” usually summon up in our minds: huge casts of characters, complex plots, cliffhanger sections due to serialization, even three-decker novels. By using Lord Jim and Wuthering Heights as a window on aesthetic and ideological transformations in the era's fiction, I am concerned to trace permutations and innovations in the Victorian novel and to show how it both registers historic pressures and alters aesthetically under them.

It may fairly be said that Ben Jonson was one of the most self-conscious of poets and also a man not noticeably plagued by self-doubt. For publication in 1616, he gathered together a collection of his plays, poems, and other pieces and changed forever the world's (or at least the English-speaking part's) perception of what constituted a man's works. “Works,” the word that Jonson selected as the title for his collection, was itself an act of audaciousness. No one before had thought, perhaps dared to think, that such a grand word, even translated (from the Latin “Opera”) into English, could be used to describe a collection that included mere plays. Seven years later, the collection of Shakespeare's plays bore the more modest title Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, and in 1647 Beaumont's and Fletcher's, similarly, were Comedies and Tragedies.

Victoria's coronation in 1837 signals the official inception of the literary form that we now designate the Victorian novel, just as her death in 1901 marks its official demise. However, for at least a century before the start of the period in literary history we term “Victorian,” the British novel had enjoyed cultural visibility and weathered critical scrutiny, so in a sense there was nothing momentously new about the novel in 1837. But critical discussion generated by the genre's increasing popularity in a profitable marketplace acquired a distinctive intensity as authors and literary intellectuals initiated an almost century-long debate about the moral and aesthetic nature of the novel. The central questions that fueled this debate tended to revisit with some regularity issues of whether novels should retain their racy affiliations with romance, teach uplifting moral lessons, educate curious readers about a rapidly changing society, or aim for a narrative singularity that would provide aesthetic correlation for the domestic realism that ruled the form for most of the period. By the end of the nineteenth century, after decades of cultural rule, novel-reading itself had become identified with those attitudes we now term “Victorian” (primarily to do with sexual repression, stultifying middle-class family life, and cramped vistas for women's lives), then being vigorously rejected. In George Gissing's The Odd Women (1893), for example, the feminist character Rhoda Nunn traces the defection from women's causes on the part of a Miss Royston to novel-reading, asking contemptuously, “What is more vulgar than the ideal of novelists?”

In her otherwise favorable review of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (i860), novelist Margaret Oliphant cautioned that novels that focused their attention upon the detection of crime as insistently as this one did represented a significant threat to the integrity of Victorian literature: “What Mr. Wilkie Collins has done with delicate care and laborious reticence, his followers will attempt without any such discretion,” she predicted. “We have already had specimens, as many as are desirable, of what the detective policeman can do for the enlivenment of literature: and it is into the hands of the literary Detective that this school of story-telling must inevitably fall at last.” Mrs. Oliphant's prophecy about the impending (if undesired) dominance of the field of Victorian fiction by the literary detective proved to be quite accurate. As she noted, several such figures had appeared on the scene already, and there would certainly be many more to come. Indeed, if we are to take The Woman in White as an example, where the detective work is carried out not by a policeman or a professional detective but by a drawing instructor who transforms himself into a collector of evidence and a solver of mysteries, the terms “detection” and “the Victorian novel” increasingly become synonymous as the nineteenth century progresses.

In On Revolution Hannah Arendt tried to settle accounts with both the liberal-democratic and Marxist traditions; that is, with the two dominant traditions of modern political thought which, in one way or another, can be traced back to the Enlightenment. Her basic thesis is that both liberal democrats and Marxists have misunderstood the drama of modern revolutions because they have not understood that what was actually revolutionary about these revolutions was their attempt to create a constitutio libertatis - a repeatedly frustrated attempt to establish a political space of public freedom in which people, as free and equal citizens, would take their common concerns into their own hands. Both the liberals and the Marxists harbored a conception of the political according to which the final goal of politics was something beyond politics - whether this be the unconstrained pursuit of private happiness, the realization of social justice, or the free association of producers in a classless society. Arendt's critique of Marxist politics has already become a locus classicus and requires no further justification. Her critique of the liberal and social democracies of the modern industrial societies seems more provocative from the point of view of the present. I want to raise the question of whether her provocation remains a genuine one.

On June 1, 1599 Archbishop Whitgift and Bishop Bancroft denounced and proscribed a range of recent works by, among others, Thomas Nashe, Gabriel Harvey, John Marston, Joseph Hall and Thomas Middleton. Many of these described themselves as “snarling” or “biting” satires, and the Bishops ban specifically required “That no Satires or Epigrams be printed hereafter.” Yet later that year Ben Jonson produced Every Man out of his Humour and called it a “comicall satyre”: the label figures prominently in the entry of the play in the Stationers' Register (April 8, 1600) and on the title page of the quarto printed shortly afterwards, the first of his plays in print. It is a gesture typical of the young Jonson, who seems to challenge authority by openly writing in a mode that had been proscribed.

“All is race; there is no other truth.” So says Sidonia, Benjamin Disraeli's fictional Jewish sage and alter ego. The novel in which Sidonia makes this pronouncement is Tancred (1847), the third in Disraeli's Young England trilogy. Even during his years as Prime Minister, Disraeli continued to believe in race as an all-encompassing explanatory category.

The metaphor of “choicest families,” suggesting divinely chosen branches of the one “great race,” provides Disraeli with a formulaic - indeed, stereotypic - explanation of Western civilization and its two ancient sources, classical Greece and Judaeo-Christianity.

Widely recognized as one of the most original and influential political thinkers of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt remains an elusive figure. She never wrote a systematic political philosophy in the mode of Thomas Hobbes or John Rawls, and the books she did write are extremely diverse in topic, covering totalitarianism, the place of political action in human life, the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the meaning of the modern revolutionary tradition, the nature of political freedom and authority, and the faculties which make up “the life of the mind.” These works are not constructed upon a single argument, diligently unfolded, or upon a linear narrative. Rather, they are grounded upon a series of striking conceptual distinctions - between tyranny and totalitarianism; action, labor, and work; political revolution and struggles for liberation; thinking, willing, and judging - which Arendt elaborates and weaves into complex thematic strands. The interconnections between the strands are sometimes left to the reader. Thus, it is no surprise that newcomers to her work are often baffled by how the pieces fit together (not only from book to book, but often within a single volume). They cannot help wondering whether there is, in fact, a consistent perspective behind her varied reflections on the nature of political evil, the glories of political action, and the fragility of civilized society (the “human artifice”) in the face of mounting natural, technological, and political pressure. The situation is not helped by the fact that many commentators on Arendt have tended to seize upon one strand of her oeuvre, elevating her reflections on political action, or her theory of totalitarianism, to a position of unquestioned preeminence.