1.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0Margaret Gayfer and Richard Stingle\u2019s Notes for Frye\u2019s Religious Knowledge Course, 1947\u201348<\/p>\n
Course notes for twenty\u2011four lectures compiled by Margaret Gayfer from her class notes, incorporating some notes by Richard Stingle.\u00a0 The notes are repetitive in places because they are assembled from two sets.\u00a0 They also include some of Frye\u2019s answers to questions, and his review of the previous week\u2019s lecture.<\/p>\n
Magraret Gayfer and Richard Stingle were members of what Frye said was the \u201cmost brilliant\u201d class he ever taught (1947\u201348). \u00a0Gayfer became an editor for the International Council for Adult Education.\u00a0 She is the author of The Multi-grade Classroom\u2013\u2013Myth and Reality: A Canadian Study <\/em>(1991), An Overview of Canadian Education<\/em> (1991), and numerous other publications on adult education.\u00a0 Richard Stingle, who did his graduate work at the University of Wisconsin, taught English at the University of Western Ontario.<\/p>\n Lecture 1.\u00a0 30 September 1947<\/strong><\/p>\n The Bible is the grammar of Western civilization; it brings down an entire culture and civilization to us.\u00a0 Christianity and Judaism represent the only religions which have a sacred scripture; both have tried to achieve a single, definitive scripture.<\/p>\n The Bible is unique in its symmetry.\u00a0 It represents a vision of the whole of human life.\u00a0 Its aesthetic beauties are accidental.\u00a0 It contains transcendental genius and ridiculous genealogies side by side.\u00a0 It is crude, shocking, funny.\u00a0 The Bible has a beginning, middle, and an end.\u00a0 In telling a single narrative from Creation to the Last Judgment, it takes an epic survey of time.\u00a0 The Bible sees the whole of time as a category of time and as a thing separate from itself.\u00a0 Time is seen in the perspective of eternity.\u00a0 Jesus is the centre of the Bible.\u00a0 Jesus and the Bible are identical.<\/p>\n The traditional approach to the Bible is synthetic, to see it as one work.\u00a0 The modern approach is analytical and scholarly.\u00a0 For Frye, the synthetic approach is the real approach to the Bible, to see it as a unity.\u00a0 Several theological systems are based on the Bible and all claim to be equally correct.\u00a0 All religions are on a level as far as moral doctrines are concerned; the moral loftiness of the Bible is accidental, like its aesthetic beauty.<\/p>\n The synthetic approach sees certain recurrent symbols in the Bible that form a single pattern of symbols.\u00a0 The structure of the Bible is complicated and must be studied.\u00a0 The original authorship is a very minor point.\u00a0 The literary person can see lyrics, parables, letters, memoirs, and so on\u2014literary forms that have been smothered by repeated editings.\u00a0 The Bible is as much an edited book and its editorial processes must be regarded as inspired, too.\u00a0 The whole Bible is the history of man\u2019s loss of freedom and organization and how he got it back.<\/p>\n There are two kinds of symmetry.\u00a0 One is chronological, seeing the Bible story of creation, etc., as a legendary and mythical story of the fortunes of the Jewish people from 2000 B.C. to 100 A.D. and the spread of the Christian Church.\u00a0 (Some books are out of order.\u00a0 John should be the opening book of the New Testament since it is the Christian statement of the opening of the Old Testament.)<\/p>\n The second is a kind of symmetry that does not correspond to the chronological pattern exactly.\u00a0 The difference between time and false history doesn\u2019t arise in the Bible.\u00a0 The whole conception of true and false as we think of it is not dealt with in the Bible.\u00a0 The fall of man and the apocalypse have nothing to do with history.\u00a0 The Bible is not a straight line of chronology; its time is a circle.\u00a0 The beginning and end are the same point.\u00a0 You can\u2019t \u201cjimmy\u201d Adam and Eve into ancient history.\u00a0 The whole question of causation, order, purpose, etc., is not dealt with by the Bible.<\/p>\n Christianity clings to revelation, and the only practical way to do this is in a book.\u00a0 All we know about God is in the Bible; there is no God in nature or \u201cup there\u201d in the sky.\u00a0 The association of God and Man is the basis of Christianity.<\/p>\n CATEGORIES OF EXPERIENCE<\/span><\/p>\n Time and space are the categories of experience.\u00a0 Historical studies deal with Time, and science with Space.<\/p>\n The primitive mind arrives at the religious experience early and a place is assigned to religious myths, so that God resides in various places.\u00a0 In this way, religion reflects the society of the people.\u00a0 Foresters and farmers have a particular god, for example.\u00a0 The dying and revising god of the farmer reflects the pattern of the farming life.<\/p>\n When you get a Federal God, he is placed \u201cup,\u201d that is, in the sky, like Jehovah who is a mountain god.\u00a0 All gods fall under the monarch of the sky, a god who is \u201cup\u201d on a mountain, either Sinai or Olympus.\u00a0 This conception is seen in the theology of the Middle Ages in which God is \u201coutside\u201d the primum mobile.\u00a0 In Dante, one goes through spheres \u201cup\u201d to God.\u00a0 Although since Copernicus there is no \u201cup\u201d and \u201cdown\u201d in the universe, the idea persists. However, in religion, space is vanished.\u00a0 Heaven and Hell are not places.\u00a0 Even after Copernicus, God is still enmeshed in time; He started it and it will end.\u00a0 With Darwin, the lid blew off time; it has no beginning and no end.\u00a0 To go back in time gets you no nearer to God, since God is banished from time.\u00a0 The 19th\u2011 century deist position of the universe running according to a God who started things was blasted by Darwin.\u00a0 Evolution showed that nature can create itself; there is no need for bringing in an outside God.<\/p>\n Time and space are indefinite and shapeless, and in that indefinite universe there is no God.\u00a0 Time and space are categories of reality, and yet they are grotesquely unreal.\u00a0 Time has three phases\u2014past, present and future\u2014all of which never exist.\u00a0 The same is true of space.\u00a0 Man has an \u201cup\u201d and a \u201cdown\u201d category of experience and yet there is sometime in indefinite space which eliminates the idea of \u201cup\u201d and \u201cdown\u201d.<\/p>\n Man operates with points of reference\u2014time and space\u2014which he calls real.\u00a0 Time makes a distinction between Now and Then, even though neither of them can be proved as real.\u00a0 Our conception of space turns on Here and There, which also do not exist.\u00a0 \u201cHere\u201d in space and \u201cNow\u201d in time are the central points of man\u2019s reference.\u00a0 One of the functions of religion is a perspective of reality concerning these worlds.<\/p>\n Religion does not deal with time and space but with eternity and the infinite.\u00a0 Eternity seems to be indefinite time; infinity seems to be indefinite space.\u00a0 But this is not so; we are just confusing categories.\u00a0 Eternity and infinity are concerned with the real Here and Now.\u00a0 The religious perspective gets us clear of time and space to the point where you look down on both.<\/p>\n The Bible presents reality in eternal and infinite terms: time begins and ends as a circle.\u00a0 The Last Judgment re-establishes the world as it was before Creation.\u00a0 Time has a shape.\u00a0 Space has a shape too, a beginning and end which are the same place.<\/p>\n The Creation myth shows the tendency in the human mind to look at the world as not being subject to time and space.\u00a0 For most of us, Creation involves time. \u00a0Actually, Creation never happened in time. \u00a0Man\u2019s mind is hunting for something central to hang on to. \u00a0The real Creation myth is one which defines the present and continuous relation of God to Man.\u00a0 It happens in the real Here and Now.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the beginning\u201d is right now.\u00a0 God creates<\/span>.\u00a0 The Gospel story is not the biography of Jesus.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t tell how Christ came<\/span> but how he comes<\/span>.\u00a0 This is what always happens; this is the way redemption comes.\u00a0 The apocalypse never happens in the future; it happens now<\/span> within the individual soul.\u00a0 The nature of religion is that it reveals something; it does not threaten man with something he cannot see.<\/p>\n “Metanioa\u201d is the word for repentance, and it means \u201ca leap of the mind.\u201d\u00a0 The Bible responds to the child\u2019s request, \u201cTell me a story.\u201d\u00a0 The sophisticated mind wants an answer and will not relax and listen to the wisdom of simplicity.\u00a0 Simplicity comes from a relaxation of the mind which enables you to say, \u201cWell, why not?\u201d\u00a0 The parables are stories because the mind cannot take in abstract ideas.<\/p>\n NO FACTS, ONLY TRUTHS<\/span><\/p>\n The historical Jesus is not the basis of Christianity; the present Jesus is.\u00a0 Historical legends are in the Bible because they represent something which is timeless.\u00a0 There are no facts on the Bible, only truths.\u00a0 God defined by man is but a shadow of the human mind.\u00a0 It is like putting a corset on a finite thing; it won\u2019t do.\u00a0 The naive man thinks of two realities, subject and object.\u00a0 The Wisdom Literature shows that both subject and object are unreal.\u00a0 Reality is in the contrast between the two.<\/p>\n The usual primitive process is that natural forces become symbols.\u00a0 This is a conception of personal gods which appear as natural objects although they are not identified with them. \u00a0To see God as the epiphany of nature is all through 19th\u2011century poetry.\u00a0 But the quest for a God outside of man breaks down. \u00a0We must look for him inside. But, where is \u201cinside\u201d?<\/p>\n What it breaks down to is God versus nature, and yet, there is something called human nature. \u00a0Man is a natural being, and in the human mind there seems to be no eternal object or subject. \u00a0The usual notion of the soul is of a spirit, breath.\u00a0 This is nonsense.\u00a0 The Bible talks of a spiritual body.\u00a0 Leviathan in the Bible is organized monstrosity.\u00a0 He is surrounded by water. \u00a0The activity of salvation is drawing a fish out of water into the higher sphere of air.\u00a0 In the New Testament, light and fire are presented as higher elements.<\/p>\n People talk of the tyranny of the past.\u00a0 The Christian is delivered from time, but he is still involved in an irrevocable causation which makes every free moment done and accomplished without recall.\u00a0 How much of man can be redeemed from that? \u00a0What about the Leviathan within us?<\/p>\n First, we must separate human nature and humanity.\u00a0 In Adam all die; human nature always falls. \u00a0Christ becomes Man, but not human nature. \u00a0Not one person is with Jesus when he dies.\u00a0 With Pilate, we all deny the possibility of the union of Christ and Man. \u00a0We either condemn Jesus or condone him.\u00a0 Every man is Caiaphas and Pilate, who would not see God in Man.<\/p>\n \u201cMy river is my own\u201d is the key to the Book of Job. \u00a0Leviathan is the king of \u201call the children of pride.\u201d\u00a0 He rules the world of humanity as well as of tyranny.\u00a0 Every tyranny is the epiphany of Leviathan.<\/p>\n The fact of death is the fact of time.\u00a0 The world of death is the world of human nature which proceeds in time to death.\u00a0 There is no end to life for man but death; for natural man, that is. \u00a0To see the end of life as life<\/span> means you are not talking about human nature but humanity<\/span>.<\/p>\n THE WORD OF GOD<\/span><\/p>\n The Word of God is in the Bible, the person of Christ, God\u2019s power of creation.\u00a0 In Genesis, it is the words God speaks that create; they are what Blake calls \u201cthe originals of creation.\u201d\u00a0 In the Gospel of John, \u201cin the beginning was the Word<\/span>,\u201d which restates Creation.<\/p>\n If the central figure of Christianity is the God-Man, why isn\u2019t the Bible merely the Gospels? \u00a0How can we make the same phrase apply to the Bible and to Christ? \u00a0The Bible is the revealed form of Christ.\u00a0 The present Christ appears in the form of a book. \u00a0A real God must be anthropomorphic.\u00a0 It is an anthropomorphic universe he created for<\/span> Man.\u00a0 God doesn\u2019t create Man and then think up a job for him. \u00a0Man is born into a pattern of what he shows forth.<\/p>\n Milton\u2019s individuality is his poetry.\u00a0 He is a man born to write poetry.\u00a0 The part of Milton that survives is his book, as for all creative people. \u00a0The men themselves have disappeared into the unreality of the past.\u00a0 Their ego has gone.\u00a0 The book is not something salvaged from the life of the dead man.\u00a0 It is something alive, not dead.\u00a0 The revealed form of Milton is his book; nothing else in Milton\u2019s life ever did exist.<\/p>\n The life of the Bible is in its contact with the reader. \u00a0It must be chewed and digested, an organic process.\u00a0 After you have got to that point, then it doesn\u2019t matter about the editing, the censorship.\u00a0 The vision of the Bible in which you operate is your justification of faith.\u00a0 The fulfillment of man\u2019s being is an eternal progression open at the top.\u00a0 The Protestant revolution affirmed the autonomy of the Word of God.\u00a0 The church should never interfere with the contact of man with the Bible.\u00a0 The variety of readers is not important, but the reading is<\/span>; there is unity there.\u00a0 The church is one Man, one unity; yet there are individuals within it.<\/p>\n Christianity adopts the Jewish idea of redemption but places it in the eternal present.<\/p>\n In the Bible, Egypt symbolizes the state of bondage into which man is born, while the Promised Land is the paradisal state of man. \u00a0The forty days in the wilderness ends the \u201clegal\u201d phase of Jesus\u2019 life. \u00a0The law of Mount Sinai is the climax of the Hebrews\u2019 forty years of wanderings.\u00a0 The Sermon on the Mount is the climax of Jesus\u2019 time in the wilderness and re-interprets the Ten Commandments.<\/p>\n During their wanderings in the desert, the Israelites were rebellious and God sent a serpent to bite them.\u00a0 Moses intercedes, and puts up the Serpent of Brass on a pole and tells them look at it and be healed of the serpent\u2019s bite.\u00a0 The brazen serpent is the imprisoned sun on a dead tree.\u00a0 This is the Crucifixion.<\/p>\n The New Testament tells us what the Old Testament means.\u00a0 It is the consolidation of everything the Old Testament says about Jesus.\u00a0 In the prophetic mind, the recognition of God-Man, the epiphany, is always present.\u00a0 The apperception of this pattern is there in the Old Testament prophets.\u00a0 The articulation comes in the New Testament with the Word of God.<\/p>\n The whole effort of education is to discover the simplicity that is always there.\u00a0 First we must wander through the wilderness of sophistication, which is really the commonplace.\u00a0 The child lives in a universe in which all things are possible; that is, God\u2019s universe.\u00a0 The child doesn\u2019t leap over nature to get the transcendent but stays within his own experience.\u00a0 Leap over yourself and get to God.\u00a0 The simple transcends the commonplace.\u00a0 Some fairy stories search the centre of experience and are myth, that is, they are true.\u00a0 Once the myth is in your mind it matures and is never lost.<\/p>\n Lecture 2.\u00a0 October 7, 1947<\/strong><\/p>\n The writers of the Gospels were writing about Jesus, but they are not writing a biography.\u00a0 The events are there because they fit the pattern of what the writer was trying to present.\u00a0 The life of Jesus is the drama of spiritual Israel.\u00a0 When we study the Bible we see that the Book of Isaiah are fragments pasted together and that a lot of editing has been done. \u00a0We cannot accept the Bible as the work of one man, but we can look at it as a complete book, a unity. \u00a0It has editorial unity, and this is true of the whole Bible.<\/p>\n The first part of the Bible is arranged by people influenced by the Prophets.\u00a0 The opening books are later, written by men impressed by the earliest Prophets, such as Amos, in the 8th century.\u00a0 The Exile took place around 586 B.C.\u00a0 Before that, there were attempts to reform the early religion, such as taking old traditional laws and reforming religion according to the teaching of the Prophets.\u00a0 Then you\u2019d have the Law and the Prophets.<\/p>\n The Book of Laws is an attempt to reform religion according to the spirit of the Prophets that there is no God but our God.\u00a0 The Prophets taught a historical dialectic and Genesis to Kings is written in this light.\u00a0 The sanctity of the Law and the truth of the prophetic interpretation is their dialectic of history.\u00a0 The Torah is the Law, the first five books.\u00a0 The former prophets were historians, the latter were like Isaiah.<\/p>\n The Torah is the Jewish kernel of their Bible, and the Christian Gospels are the commentary on the Law.\u00a0 The Law in the first five books has an elaborate ritual and ceremonial code, as well as the moral duties of the law and punishments, as in the Ten Commandments.<\/p>\n In a primitive society there is little distinction between moral and ceremonial law.\u00a0 The framework of the narrative tells the story of the Hebrew people from the Creation to the entry into Canaan.\u00a0 The kernel is the descent into Egypt and the deliverance into the Promised Land.\u00a0 The narrative focuses on a different level: Abraham is the Hebrew tribe; Jacob is Israel.\u00a0 Here we are dealing on a plane in which the nation is conceived as a single person.\u00a0 The story of Jacob\u2019s descent into Egypt is the story of the people.\u00a0 It is based on historical reminiscence, but we don\u2019t know what.\u00a0 However, we needn\u2019t worry about it as history, but look at it as a single pattern.<\/p>\n The Israelites go down into bondage, a kingdom of darkness, another fall, of Israel.\u00a0 The plague of darkness is the most deeply symbolic.\u00a0 The dream of the Promised Land is the Garden from which man fell.\u00a0 The leader, Moses (Son), leads them through the wilderness to the boundary of the Promised Land. But Moses does not conquer it; that is reserved for Joshua, whose name means Jesus.\u00a0 Israel was guided through the wilderness of the dead world by the power of the Law and a man names Jesus began the assault on the Promised Land.<\/p>\n The Exodus is the central story of Israel.\u00a0 Here you get Joseph, one of the twelve brothers who goes to Egypt. There is a cruel king, a massacre of the firstborn.\u00a0 Then comes deliverance by Moses (son), the Exodus, the crossing of the water, the Red Sea, the forty years in the wilderness.\u00a0 The New Testament parallel is Jesus, Egypt, a cruel king, leaves Egypt, twelve followers, baptism in Jordan, forty days in the wilderness.\u00a0 Moses is the law, so he can\u2019t enter the Promised Land, but Joshua (Jesus) does.\u00a0 The Annunciation in the New Testament is the annunciation that the assault on the Promised Land has begun.\u00a0 Egypt is the fallen world, the Promised Land is the Kingdom of God.<\/p>\n The symbol and allegory of the Old Testament become reality in the New Testament.<\/p>\n Old Testament<\/span> New Testament<\/span><\/p>\n Manna\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Bread of life<\/p>\n Water out of the rock\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Water of life<\/p>\n Serpent of brass\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Crucifixion<\/p>\n Promised Land\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Resurrection<\/p>\n (Joshua)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (Jesus)<\/p>\n The Gospels are indifferent to proof, historical proof.\u00a0 The people who saw Jesus\u2019 life are a mixed bunch.\u00a0 They are not concerned with how He came but with how He comes<\/span>. This is what always happens.<\/p>\n Lecture 3.\u00a0 October 14, 1947<\/strong><\/p>\n There is a historical background to the Bible, but what is important is the imaginative ordering of the events.<\/p>\n Assyria<\/span> destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 715 B.C.\u00a0 David and Solomon illustrate a brief interval of prosperity.\u00a0 The Kingdom of Judea struggled on longer because Assyria (Nineveh) was destroyed.\u00a0 The Chaldeans come into prominence with the Babylonian captivity.\u00a0 The Jews in Babylon kept their own religion, literature, pedigree.\u00a0 The fall of Jerusalem consolidated them spiritually and nationally.<\/p>\n Then came the Medes and Persians<\/span>, especially the latter, which took over.\u00a0 The Persian Empire was organized under Cyrus, who became the pattern of the Great King.\u00a0 He had a different policy and let the Jews keep their religious traditions and allowed them to return.\u00a0 Nehemiah describes the rebuilding of Jerusalem. \u00a0Cyrus cleaned up on Croesus and got all of Asia Minor.\u00a0 Darius I was the great organizer and Xerxes carried on the conquest of Greece.\u00a0 The Persian Empire was destroyed by Alexander in the 4th century B.C.\u00a0 The Greeks enter oriental history in migratory droves.\u00a0 The Philistines were Aryan and closely related to the Greeks.\u00a0 For example, Goliath is described as \u201cgigantic.\u201d<\/p>\n At the time of Alexander\u2019s empire, Palestine was ruled by Selecus and Egypt by Ptolemy.\u00a0 These dynasties became absorbed into the country; Selcia became Syria.\u00a0 The tolerant policy was succeeded by attempts to force the Jews to abandon their religion.<\/p>\n At the time of the Maccabean rebellion, the third brother, Julius, was the field commander, and his success was consolidated by Simon.\u00a0 This independence gave them a small period of prosperity because the Romans had not penetrated that far.\u00a0 The rebellion lived on; people looked for a Messiah to deliver them.\u00a0 This was not very long before Jesus\u2019 time.\u00a0 The Maccabean period saw the consolidation of Jewish literature, and the patriotic party of the Pharisees was formed.<\/p>\n The Romans expanded under Pompey.\u00a0 Octavius became the first emperor and Jesus was born during his reign.\u00a0 The Romans became more intolerant; they couldn\u2019t stand the Jews and, therefore, the Christians.\u00a0 In 71 A.D. Titus wiped out Jerusalem and Hadrian completed the process that made the Jews a wandering people.\u00a0 They embarked on a new Babylonian captivity in which Babylon is the whole world.<\/p>\n We must see that the history of the Bible is a mental life, like a child\u2019s memory.\u00a0 Other events become superimposed upon another.\u00a0 For example, for the Hebrews, the Egyptian and the Babylonia captivity become one.\u00a0 Jerusalem is a squalid little town; its magnificence is in the mind.<\/p>\n History is not important, but the imaginative pattern is.\u00a0 The Jews are an oppressed people; therefore their imaginative pattern is greater.\u00a0 The Celtic imagination, for example, creates gigantic heroes, magic, enchantment, a super-nation idea to compensate for being oppressed.\u00a0 This leads to imaginative literature.\u00a0 In the USA, you get a historical sense of fact.\u00a0 What persists are not tall tales, like Paul Bunyan stories, but stories about Washington and Lincoln.\u00a0 America is a successful nation and therefore needs no compensating imaginative history.<\/p>\n Lectures 4 and 5.\u00a0 October 21 and 28, 1947 <\/strong><\/p>\n In dealing with mental truth we must detach \u201ctruth\u201d from the Bible as it is known in history and science.\u00a0 The first fact we are aware of is that we live on a flat surface and the sun rises and sets.\u00a0 Then, by explanation, we know it is an illusion.\u00a0 But the fact of experience is still real.\u00a0 The truth as it appears in the Bible is like the truth of that fact of experience.\u00a0 The accuracy of history in the Bible is in inverse proportion to its spiritual value.<\/p>\n In the Old Testament we see a chasm opening between two types of minds.\u00a0 One type sees experience in historical terms, and the other, the prophetic mind, transforms human reminiscence into drama.\u00a0 The shape and form of that story becomes a parable. \u00a0A cleavage emerges between the literal and the spiritual comprehension.\u00a0 The literal acceptance survives in Judaism and represents a type of attitude that Jesus condemned in the Pharisees.\u00a0 The Gospels bring the spiritual approach.<\/p>\n RITUAL AND MYTH<\/span><\/p>\n Ritual is the act, the thing done. \u00a0Myth is the Word, the revelation, the scripture, the story of how this came to be; that is, what is said in the Bible.\u00a0 Ritual comes earlier because the act must precede its explanation. \u00a0Myth is the explanation of the ritual. The Bible is a gigantic myth, a mythic account of human life. It is definitive myth which gets everything in and consolidates all mythic tales of any significance.<\/p>\n What ritual is the myth explaining? \u00a0The ritual of human sacrifice.\u00a0 This must be dug out of the Bible because it is clear only in myth. \u00a0Much editing has covered up this human sacrifice ritual and it survives only in odd and lurid passages in Judges, etc.<\/p>\n All myths do not explain a ritual.\u00a0 The explanation of customs of various tribes have mythical explanations.\u00a0 The anthropologist is looking for different explanations because a different conception of myth is necessary to him.\u00a0 Myths deal with gods.<\/p>\n God is the God of Christians; god is a supernatural being.<\/p>\n All products of human civilization are products of myths; they are attempts to reflect on life.\u00a0 Man doesn\u2019t evolve; he resists evolution.\u00a0 The development of consciousness is an evolution of mental form.\u00a0 Evolution takes place in time, while consciousness looks back at time.\u00a0 Myth is word, idea.<\/p>\n Natural\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Human<\/p>\n Ritual\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Myth<\/p>\n Act\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Word<\/p>\n Will\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Idea<\/p>\n Monoloty<\/span> is the stage of religious statement in which the Hebrews say \u201cJehovah is our<\/span> God.\u201d\u00a0 It is not polytheistic nor monotheism, but a kind of halfway house.\u00a0 Other people have gods and each god chosen is a war-god\u2013\u2013\u201cmy god can lick your god,\u201d which means no tolerance of someone else\u2019s god.<\/p>\n Monotheism<\/span> is when our<\/span> god becomes the<\/span> only true god, the only possible God.\u00a0 This represents the advance of civilization.<\/p>\n Polytheism<\/span>: Man never assumes he is the greatest thing in the world.\u00a0 He is a natural being among nature.\u00a0 God here is seen as unknown, which means we separate him from the known, that is, from nature.\u00a0 To make god knowable, he must combine subject and object, human nature and the forces of nature. There becomes a god for each natural phenomenon; the god humanizes the natural force of the storm, for example.<\/p>\n Man never forgets the circumscribed nature of his power. \u00a0He can use his intelligence to harness natural animals but he never forgets the power in nature. \u00a0He knows it is nonetheless powerful for being stupid. \u00a0Man creates God in his own image because he exists in a split world of weak intelligence versus powerful natura<\/em>.\u00a0 Therefore, God has intelligence and power.<\/p>\n GOD<\/p>\n subject \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 object<\/p>\n known\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 unknown<\/p>\n man\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 nature<\/p>\n intelligence\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 power<\/p>\n creator\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 creation<\/p>\n myth\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 ritual<\/p>\n word\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 act<\/p>\n We must approach God through the left side . . . .\u00a0 To look for God in nature, you stupefy God, you get a brutal God.\u00a0 There is a kind of stupefied sense of justice in nature, one of natural consequences.\u00a0 In nature you see an order and a form, cause and effect.\u00a0 Science tries to see how cause follows effect, to make nature predictable.\u00a0 Once power is predictable, intelligence subdues it.\u00a0 The ultimate aim of science (which is the application of intelligence to nature) is prophetic: science judges truth by predictability.\u00a0 It is true because it will work.\u00a0 Science stops before mystery before what it cannot predict.<\/p>\n The prophet in the Bible is dealing with human life which is unpredictable.\u00a0 He doesn\u2019t tell the future of man\u2019s behaviour and life.\u00a0 If that is true, science can reach it.\u00a0 When you look for God in man you see lack of power, the babe in the manger.\u00a0 Intelligence is vital, alive, but weak.\u00a0 Intelligence makes form out of chaos, but it is not a thing that is measurable.\u00a0 We also use the term \u201cintelligence\u201d in the sense of knowledge, which is the accumulation of comparative judgments.<\/p>\n The true God is the creator God.\u00a0 The deepest intuition of religion is that God must come out of the human side, not the natural side.\u00a0 You can\u2019t approach God as a creator of nature, although He did create it.\u00a0 The God of creation, of unknowable power, is a god of superstition.\u00a0 God as creator, as Son of Man, is true Christianity.\u00a0 Ritual comes from man in nature. Myth is concerned with stories of God.\u00a0 The Bible works along the line of myth, creator, intelligence.\u00a0 There is value in understanding that God is a person, has a sense of humor, loves children, prefers mildness to cruelty, and in understanding that there is an evil in nature that God loathes.\u00a0 He is not a lazy pantheistic god who has his own way.\u00a0 He has enemies to fight.<\/p>\n (Example of ritual act and myth.\u00a0 Judges II, Chap. 30, the rash vow which is followed by the ritual act; the four-day feast of lament is a mythical explanation.\u00a0 The ritual is growing out of human sacrifice.\u00a0 The God to whom Jephthah sacrifices is a much cruder God.)<\/p>\n Faith is not the uncritical acceptance of what is rationally absurd.\u00a0 Faith is associated with doubt.\u00a0 There are no limits to human comprehension.\u00a0 The sceptics set limits to the possibilities of knowledge.\u00a0 The same is true of a religion that says the Will of God is already completely known.\u00a0 Myth does not limit; it suggests infinite meanings.<\/p>\n MAN AND NATURE<\/span><\/p>\n Primitive man contrasts himself with what is outside him.\u00a0 He knows he is inferior to nature.\u00a0 The contrast between the human world and the world \u201cout there\u201d is the beginning of religious experience. \u00a0The more conscious man is of himself, the more marked the contrast is.\u00a0 The original impulse to postulate god or gods is to complement man\u2019s weakness.\u00a0 But the farther we go from man the more stupid nature is.<\/p>\n Freedom\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Death, hell, bondage<\/p>\n Intelligence\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Stupidity<\/p>\n Consciousness\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Unconsciousness<\/p>\n Morality (conscious\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Indifference<\/p>\n fabrication of a<\/p>\n social unit)<\/p>\n Weakness\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Power<\/p>\n Form\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Monstrousness<\/p>\n Conventional Christianity begins with strength\u2014God the Father, etc.\u00a0 Christianity starts with intelligent consciousness and moral weakness\u2014the child in the manger.\u00a0 God the Almighty has been annexed to Christianity.\u00a0 The Christian instinct is that one finds God in Man, not in nature.\u00a0 Religion then becomes polarized between a monster and the tamer of the dragon\u2014Leviathan and the Messiah.\u00a0 The Messiah is the God-Man who grows in power and kills the dragon.\u00a0 He is also the tamer of chaos.<\/p>\n Man seeks a state of freedom.\u00a0 As long as he is in the natural world, he in bondage to its power.\u00a0 The Messiah then, frees man.\u00a0 The fight between the giants and the gods in the Elder Edda saga, for example, suddenly ends and you wake up and find yourself in a garden.\u00a0 The human mind can wake up from the nightmare.\u00a0 The original sin is the fact that man is born into a stupid, unconscious world.\u00a0 The natural within man drags him down to the level of nature.\u00a0 The human deliverer is to overcome the stupidity of nature.<\/p>\n Nature has an order, a cyclic movement of natural law, repetitive and predictable.\u00a0 Science predicts what nature will do.\u00a0 The arts are divided into the arts of rhythm and pattern.\u00a0 The basis of human effort is the conception of predictable pattern of energy.\u00a0 In the cyclic movement, light and life conquer death.\u00a0 The sun fights the powers of darkness, the young, divine hero battles the dragon of death and darkness; he is swallowed but coughed up again.<\/p>\n The religious experience is crystallized in the dragon-killing myth.\u00a0 The Saviour withdraws man from the dragon so that he can see that the dragon is not alive after all.\u00a0 The rhythm of the seasons shows that life goes underground in winter, as in the Greek myth of Persephone.\u00a0 The power of the seed, of life, is imprisoned for half the year and returns in a cyclic victory.\u00a0 Human life has its analogy.\u00a0 Beyond man are civilizations that rise and collapse.\u00a0 The Israelites see the Egyptians, Syrians, Babylonians come and go.\u00a0 The cyclic movement of history is strong.<\/p>\n The divine deliverer is like the sun, the spring, and the national hero.\u00a0 A definitive myth about such a man will include these symbols.\u00a0 He is born at the solstice when the sun is weak; he is swallowed and coughed up; dies and revives in the spring.\u00a0 He has the same qualities of the national hero and will deliver the Israelites from Rome.\u00a0 He will suffer and die and his triumph is not simply killing the dragon, but his death will defeat the dragon.\u00a0 When you focus on the defeated deliverer, you get the dead sun pinned to a dead tree, mocked as a national hero.\u00a0 Yet this is the reverse of the real situation.\u00a0 The image of the dead hero is turned inside out\u2014the physical defeat is eternal victory.<\/p>\n This intuition of the divine deliverer is seen in the prophets.\u00a0 Amos teaches of a God who has human qualities, plus more: justice and spiritual balance.\u00a0 Hosea tells of a God who is concerned with man (Israel), a God who is willing to help Israel indefinitely, no matter if the people do go wrong.\u00a0 The exile supplies the key to this problem.\u00a0 The exile is the dawning of the conception that the deliverer cannot come from somewhere else; he must be Israel and go through the same suffering.<\/p>\n Lecture 6.\u00a0 November 14, 1947<\/strong><\/p>\n There are three periods to the Hebrew religion:\u00a0 Pre-prophetic, prophetic, post-prophetic or priestly.<\/p>\n The pre-prophetic<\/span> is a mixed cult. \u00a0The pre-exilic prophets\u2014Amos, Hosea, Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah\u2014represent a spiritual awakening in history. \u00a0It might be part of the general movement of Zoroaster whose teaching affected the life of the Hebrews. \u00a0The prophetic<\/span> follows the worship of Jehovah. \u00a0The post-prophetic (priestly) is the legalizing of Jehovah. \u00a0This period is Judaism, the founding of the second temple, the synagogue, the Pharisees, and an organized cult.<\/p>\n *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *<\/p>\n Amos is one of the earliest prophets.\u00a0 Genesis and Kings II have four or five main documents showing the people affected by prophetic teaching. \u00a0There is no \u201cpure\u201d pre-prophetic phase. \u00a0First there was YHVH (Yahveh) which became Jehovah, the tribal, ancestral God of the Hebrews.\u00a0 This is what the prophets preached. \u00a0The pre-prophetic religion which the prophets attacked as not \u201cpure\u201d: that is, it had a mixture of other gods.\u00a0 The mixing of cults was wrong, and the wrongness hinged on the ritual and the ceremony.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n REVELATION IS CONSOLIDATED REALITY<\/span><\/p>\n One Leader\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Tyranny\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Human\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Community\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 One human body<\/p>\n Serpent\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Beasts of prey\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Animal\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Domestication\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 One lamb<\/p>\n (flock of sheep)<\/p>\n Dead tree\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Wilderness\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Vegetable\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cultivation (garden)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 One tree<\/p>\n Stone\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Ruin\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Organization\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 City\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 One stone \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0(cornerstone)<\/p>\n The prophets emphasized doctrine and teaching.\u00a0 Judaism, or the priestly period, was the synthesis of religious doctrine with the prophetic teaching.\u00a0 The prophets were actuated by a feeling of moral evil on the part of any mixed cult.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n WHAT CAUSED THIS FEELING?<\/span><\/p>\n Palestine is an agricultural country, a land flowing with milk and honey.\u00a0 Its chief products are grain, wine, oil.\u00a0 Before that, the people were nomads with their herds.\u00a0 The tradition is that the Hebrews were not always farmers.\u00a0 They learned it from the surrounding people.\u00a0 For the nomads, the sun is a destroyer and the moon is a friend.\u00a0 The word for moon is halle<\/em> = hallelujah. \u00a0The nomads were not interested in rain and nature.\u00a0 Abel is the idealized shepherd but the real shepherd is descended from Cain, whose name means smith, artificer.\u00a0 Cain founded the first city.<\/p>\n Reflected in this nomad-farmer background we see the steady expansion of civilization from farm to city.\u00a0 Every time this happens, the land of the nomads has been cut off\u2014by barbarians, Tartars, Huns, and so on, which inspires panic.\u00a0 We see it in American western stories of the ranger menaced by the city slicker.<\/p>\n Abel\u2019s sacrifice was accepted, but the bloodless one of Cain was not accepted.\u00a0 There is the paradox of the killing of Abel. \u00a0It is the death of humankind and marks war as a state of existence, springing from Cain, the artificer of the ploughshare and the sword.<\/p>\n In the story of Isaac and Abraham (Chapter 22), we see God accepting animal sacrifice still, but he doesn\u2019t like human sacrifice.\u00a0 The Canaanites practised it, and the characteristic of the Kings Who Went Wrong is that they practised the rites of the kings about them, human sacrifice. \u00a0Ahaz was influenced by the Israelites in this respect.<\/p>\n Connected with sacrifice is the idea of transference of power.\u00a0 The king is the reservoir of force, like a charge of electricity.\u00a0 The more he is a reservoir of power the more fragile he becomes, the more enmeshed he is in taboos. \u00a0When he is killed you\u2019ll feel something pretty terrific.\u00a0 This electric energy must go into the tribe, so they drink his blood and eat his flesh.<\/p>\n Human sacrifice is also a communion.\u00a0 The body of the king becomes the body of the tribe; the social body is the incarnate leader.\u00a0 The king\u2019s successor gets his share; he is smeared with fat, the anointed one.\u00a0 In the art form of tragedy, the king is killed on stage and his body and blood pass into the audience.\u00a0 That is catharsis.<\/p>\n However, a society so organized is not that stable.\u00a0 Some modifications came in with the idea of substitution, his own son or his wife.\u00a0 The king must die at the height of his power, about age thirty.\u00a0 The substitute king can be a captive from another tribe who may be made mock king for a while.\u00a0 It varies in tribes; he can be the buffoon or like the king.\u00a0 Christ has both the triumphal ride and the mockery.\u00a0 Sometimes it was the sacrifice of the king\u2019s son or mock-son.\u00a0 For the Canaanites, it was the son.<\/p>\n To a farming community, the king is solidarity.\u00a0 This is different from the solidarity of a nomad tribe.\u00a0 The centre of gravity in the farming community is in the land and its fertility, the harvest.\u00a0 Their king would be the harvest and the vintage, the bread and the wine.\u00a0 The God of farmland incorporates the forces of nature and the fertility of the crops.\u00a0 He sums up literally the social solidarity which is the wine and grain as his blood and body.\u00a0 It is not symbolic here.\u00a0 The tribe still has the leader who is<\/span> their blood and body.<\/p>\n Human sacrifice is not a bribe in this sense, but a communion with a god incarnate in a man.\u00a0 The original victim was a god-man; then came a substitute.\u00a0 The victim of the sacrifice would have more than human quality as the son of the god.\u00a0 There are rituals that are bribery to some demon in the sky.\u00a0 But the true religious impulse doesn\u2019t think of God as separate but as incarnate in a<\/span> man.<\/p>\n Lecture 7.\u00a0 November 18, 1947<\/strong><\/p>\n For farming people the sacrifice was concerned with the cycle of crops.\u00a0 First it was the pastoral, hunting age of existence, the Stone Age.\u00a0 It was followed by farming, the new Stone Age. To tell this story, the Bible gives us Cain and Abel, the pastoralist and the farmer.\u00a0 The Bible deals symbolically with what we have dealt with historically.\u00a0 From the tillers of the soil come the village, the city\u2014the move from stone to bronze to iron.<\/p>\n Out of the unity of social interests comes the unity of religion.\u00a0 Judaism and Christianity evolve out of a Mediterranean culture and religion.\u00a0 Palestine would be less independent than any other country because it is at the crossroads of the world.\u00a0 To expect a unique experience in Palestine would be like expecting New York to be invaded by wild Indians.<\/p>\n Much of the pre-prophetic religion is obliterated because the Old Testament is founded on prophetic writings.\u00a0 Solomon\u2019s temple shows a generous mixing up of religious influences.\u00a0 His successors show that every king who Does Right keeps to Jehovah and every king who Does Wrong mixes cults, which include Moloch.\u00a0 There are hints of pre-prophetic religion in the story of Jephthah\u2019s daughter, and at the end of Judges are queer stories of an abominated religion.<\/p>\n Samuel Book II, Chap. 21, describes an oracle system. When the famine comes one consults the oracle.\u00a0 David inquires because he is the king and therefore responsible for the famine as the principle of fertility in the society.\u00a0 It is a private prayer, but really an oracle.\u00a0 There is a feeling of divine vengeance for some crime, as in Greek tragedy.\u00a0 Because crime is unnatural, nature must right herself.\u00a0 It is the act of treachery of Saul that causes the sin that caused the famine.\u00a0 However, Jonathon\u2019s son is spared.<\/p>\n Ideas persist of a human sacrifice at harvest to right the famine.\u00a0 The sacrifice originally is the tribe in communion as one man\u2013\u2013through the one man who symbolizes the unity of the tribe.\u00a0\u00a0 They enter into communion as one body.\u00a0 For the farmer, the blood becomes the vintage and the flesh the harvest. The man sacrificed becomes the regular recurrence of the cycle of nature as well as the unity of the tribe.\u00a0 There is no<\/span> symbolism here; they are<\/span> the body and the blood.<\/p>\n IDEAS OF KINGSHIP<\/span><\/p>\n The Israelite kings take on the symbolic attributes.\u00a0 The Israelites do not have kings for a long time; there is a distrust of state religion. \u00a0The choosing of Saul is told twice in Samuel I, from the side of supporters and from the opposition side.\u00a0 The Israelites are aware of the lurking danger in the conception of a divine man, of the idolatry which is associated with the king.\u00a0 Saul is the biggest man in Israel.\u00a0 He is a great tragic figure, like Achilles sulking in his tent.<\/p>\n David is the symbol of what a king is.\u00a0 The Judaic phase of the Pharisees and Maccabean rebellion is the time when the Psalms were gathered.\u00a0 The Psalms concentrate on the king, like King Arthur.\u00a0 Solomon is the king of a united nation.\u00a0 He and David are the Great Kings.\u00a0 They represent a man of peace and a man of war, the wise and the valiant kingship.\u00a0 There is a primitive idea in kingship that the king must humble himself and that any wrong to society must be his fault.\u00a0 David must humble himself; the wrong is his fault.\u00a0 In the Psalms, the cult of the king is so symbolic that the historical David has little to do with it.\u00a0 Psalms 2 and 110 show the cult of the divine king.<\/p>\n There are two interpretations of kingship and therefore there must be a showdown between the spiritual and the physical king.\u00a0 In a monarchy, the literary king takes on qualities of a divine king, which will be interpreted in historical terms, e.g., the king will have the power to beat the Babylonians, etc.\u00a0 The issue must be forced between the divine and the physical king. As long as you have the King, the Temple, and a symbolic God, you will have a King to whom all of these qualities are attached.<\/p>\n The showdown comes when a foreign enemy triumphs. (In the Aeneid<\/em>, the defeat of the people means the defeat of the god that protects those people.)\u00a0 To get past the idea of your<\/span> God to the only possible<\/span> God, the chosen Son and the Chosen People, you have to take a big step.<\/p>\n The Book of Lamentations is an elegiac poem on the fall of Jerusalem at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar. Chap. 19: the king is captured; he is their God and he\u2019s done for and so are they. \u00a0From Jeremiah on, the issue is forced more and more between symbol and the realization that the king must be a universal spiritual force.<\/p>\n Trying to rebuild the Temple and the Monarchy in physical form is Judaism.\u00a0 That was the atmosphere when Jesus began his work.\u00a0 People were hanging on to the visible symbol and did not know what Jesus meant.\u00a0 All their hopes were bound up with the Temple.\u00a0 Jesus said, I will restore it in three days, meaning the temple of his body. \u00a0He is the man whose body is the whole people. \u00a0The real temple, therefore, is the body of God\u2019s people.\u00a0 The people are in the form of one man\u2019s body.<\/p>\n This is the Old Testament idea of the doctrine of the divine man, the Son of God who is all his people in bodily form. \u00a0He is responsible for the calamities of the people.\u00a0 The king takes upon himself the miseries of the people.\u00a0 The idea of suffering is attached to the idea of the king; he is also put to death when his powers fail.<\/p>\n Lecture 8.\u00a0 November 25, 1947<\/strong><\/p>\n David and Solomon represent the focalizing of the symbolism of the king, the consolidation of religious and secular authority. \u00a0These men are important not so much as rulers as for the consolidating of religion. \u00a0David captures Jerusalem, the focus of political and religious aspiration.\u00a0 But it is the same centralizing of something far more primitive.\u00a0 It shows up in the Middle Ages in the person of the consolidating figure of the priest-king, the head of religion and state,<\/p>\n Samuel II, Chap. 6: David brings the ark to Jerusalem, the City of David.\u00a0 Before Jerusalem was taken and the temple was established, the Israelites had a wandering temple, the Ark of God.\u00a0 This Ark would be the thing that represents the protection of the Israelites by God.\u00a0 When the Philistines captured the Ark of God, the Israelites knew they were licked.\u00a0 Then they got it back.\u00a0 A temple is built for the Ark.\u00a0 The return of the Ark is told in Samuel, in which it is regarded as a sacred thing, as a reservoir of electric force.\u00a0 David leads the dancing procession (verses 20-22).<\/p>\n The king who leads the service is also exposed to humiliation.\u00a0 David is willing to accept this as part of kingship.\u00a0 Verses 18-19: the entry of the Ark is signalled by a communion feast distributed by the king.\u00a0 This is repeated in the feeding of the 5000, which is the prelude to the communion feast itself.\u00a0 The conception of communion is still there.\u00a0 True honour comes from the act of suffering and humiliation.\u00a0 David is intimate with God, the chosen Son of God.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t make him divine, though.\u00a0 Psalm 45 shows the symbol of the king.<\/p>\n The city and the temple are seen as the only place were religion is.\u00a0 God is only there.\u00a0 The distinction between city and temple is dissolved until there is no distinction.\u00a0 The king represents the people in a single human form as the elected Son of God.\u00a0 David is the Son of God and, at the same time, all the Israelites are in the body of David.<\/p>\n The Songs of Solomon show the king in a real sense as the fertility of the land.\u00a0 They have three meanings:<\/p>\n 1.\u00a0 A love song between two people of whom the man becomes Solomon; the male represents the king;<\/p>\n 2.\u00a0 The marriage of sun and earth, the awakening of fertility. Chap. 4: the king speaks. The woman is the land that comes awake with spring; she is black because she is the fruitful soil.\u00a0 The male is Solomon who is all the people in one form; the woman becomes the man;<\/p>\n 3. An allegory of the love of Christ for his Church.<\/p>\n Zechariah himself describes the rebuilding of the temple.\u00a0 Verse 16 shows that the fertility of the land is bound up with observance of the cult.\u00a0 This marks the passing of the farmers\u2019 religion into the nomadic Israelite cult.\u00a0 But with the king as the male and the land as the female, this allegory holds only as long as you believe in sympathetic magic.\u00a0 All magic is founded on the fact that you can bring out an effect by imitating it.<\/p>\n The Israelites outgrew that stage.\u00a0 They realize that God sends rain on the just and unjust alike.\u00a0 They see that the laws of nature cannot be run that way.\u00a0 This involves a shift of symbolism.\u00a0 First you have the king and the people as one body (male) and the land as female.\u00a0 This shifts to God as the male principle and the people and the land as female.\u00a0 The people and the land are subordinate to God who is the real or active principle.\u00a0 The king and the people do not produce the fertility; God does.<\/p>\n In the prophets, it is the people of Israel who are the bride, the faithful. \u00a0The unfaithful is the harlot.\u00a0 In Christianity, God is Christ.\u00a0 Later on, the people are not associated with the land anymore; they are the church; the body of God\u2019s church are the people.<\/p>\n Among the prophets, you get Amos in the Northern Kingdom in the 8th century, then Hosea, first Isaiah, Micah.\u00a0 This is the first of many attempts to reform the pre-prophetic religion, the law of God. They want to reform the cult.\u00a0 This teaching continues to the fall of Jerusalem and Jeremiah.\u00a0 In the 8th century they prophesied before the fall of the Northern Kingdom. \u00a0When Jerusalem fell, then the pre-exilic prophecy ended.\u00a0 In the exilic period comes the hope of rebuilding, in Ezekiel and Isaiah II. \u00a0This is followed by the post-exilic prophets.<\/p>\n Lecture 9.\u00a0 December 2, 1947<\/strong><\/p>\n The king is regarded as the archetypal man in whom all the people who follow him find their own being.\u00a0 This is based on the idea that man is part of a larger human being.\u00a0 To see society as a larger self we must move from atomic individualism to some kind of abstract idea. \u00a0Man sees in society only himself and others like him, but knows there is more than must a mere aggregate of individuals.<\/p>\n \u201cBody\u201d and \u201cbeing\u201d are vague terms. \u00a0The essential thing is that society is seen as a human form, larger than the person. That\u2019s what man expresses in the king\u2014the larger body of society. \u00a0He picks out a concrete symbol to express that idea.\u00a0 The king is an individual and. at the same time, the larger human being.\u00a0 Cannibals express literally that they are members of a single human body.\u00a0 There is a certain distrust of the king in the story of Saul; he is seen as something of an idol.<\/p>\n The Israelites saw in Egyptian culture the idolizing of the king.\u00a0 Thus, deliverance from Egypt meant deliverance from the divine man, Pharaoh.\u00a0 When the Israelites pick a king, it develops from the genuineness of kingship.\u00a0 Instead of a physical idol, they saw the spiritual reality that the king symbolizes and that all subjects are united in a common human body.\u00a0 David rejoices, repents of his sins, etc., because he is the King.\u00a0 The individual worshipper says that David is myself, my larger human body in which I find myself.\u00a0 David is the typical man; therefore, each worshipper goes through his emotions when he says his Psalms.<\/p>\n The idea of kingship carried with it one important factor: the King in the Old Testament is not divine. And yet, there is danger in an idol and a danger in making the spiritual abstract. The danger of idolatry must be faced.\u00a0 The concrete symbol must be the king representing<\/span> the larger human body; the concrete stands for the symbol and has to be the flesh incarnate.<\/p>\n The king is society incarnate in a man.\u00a0 He is Israel incarnate because Israel is the larger human body of society.\u00a0 The Bible doesn\u2019t use abstract ideas.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t use the term \u201csociety,\u201d but Israel, or Jacob.\u00a0 The king, therefore, is the Son of Israel, the incarnate form of Israel, the Son of Man.\u00a0 Accepting the divine king in spiritual form is the consolidation of the symbol.\u00a0 We see that the most primitive is often the form of the most highly developed.\u00a0 The most crude form of the cannibal feast is the real form of the highest development at the other end.<\/p>\n KING, PROPHET AND PRIEST<\/span><\/p>\n Three ideas emerge, that of the King, Prophet and Priest.\u00a0 In the pre-prophetic religion the Israelites took on the characteristics of other religions, namely the farming religion.\u00a0 The common ancestral tradition was the nomad tribe with its own tribal God, Jehovah.\u00a0 The prophets want to get rid of the agricultural accretions and go back to the pure religion of one God, the only God.\u00a0 They idealize the nomadic stage of Israelite life, the patriarchal life, the pastoral life, the wandering free life, as opposed to that of the farmer.\u00a0 Abel becomes the prototype of the original god, while Cain moves on to found cities.<\/p>\n The idealization of the pastoral life is one of the reign of peace.\u00a0 But Abel was murdered.\u00a0 Therefore, we must return to the shepherd\u2019s life\u2013\u2013the Lord is my Shepherd.\u00a0 Farming is a curse\u2014Adam had to till the ground.\u00a0 The pastoral life is the only one of peace.\u00a0 But man has gone on to the city stage.\u00a0 If he gets back to the pastoral life, the experience he has gone through will still remain.\u00a0 He will live in a city state, possess the tools of civilization, and not let them possess him.\u00a0 This harks back to the old myth of the Golden Age.<\/p>\n It is important to remember that the prophets do not speak with their own words.\u00a0 They speak with the voice of the current God.\u00a0 The prophets become mediums.\u00a0 This is most fully dealt with in Saul, which describes the whirling dervish stage.\u00a0 Those qualities are not confined to the Israelites; Greek oracles spoke with the voice of the god.\u00a0 The theory is that God has taken hold of the medium.<\/p>\n The prophets are oracles.\u00a0 The oracle form is still there in the older prophets and this is particularly true of Isaiah.\u00a0 It is easy to trace the Hebrew religion to the days when the king had prophets around him as oracles, such as at Ahab\u2019s court.\u00a0 But the oracle is no longer a man in a trance.\u00a0 The Lord has taken possession of the whole man, his intelligence and his consciousness. Before Amos and Hosea, the prophet was a kind of magician.\u00a0 Ezekiel is taken as the typical prophet in the Old Testament.\u00a0 This is part of a pre-literary stage. \u00a0We are told stories about them; these early prophets are imbedded in history and religion.<\/p>\n Amos and Hosea are collected sayings of the king that make up the bedrock of Hebrew literature.\u00a0 \u201cThus saith the Lord\u201d\u2013\u2013the meaning may be conscious or the prophet may be unconscious of a great deal of the meaning.\u00a0 The prophet is like the artist: what he communicates is reserves of meaning of which he is completely unconscious.\u00a0 It is impossible for the prophets to know fully the meaning of what they are saying.\u00a0 The life of Jesus tells us what the prophets meant.<\/p>\n God takes possession of the prophet\u2019s creative power. The prophet does not abandon his mind; he is in the fullest possession of his powers when inspired by God.\u00a0 In the same way, the artist conceives of his work as something requiring all his faculties.\u00a0 Yet he is not the source of his own energy.\u00a0 The growth take place and yet it is in you.\u00a0 The prophet wants his mind to be clear.\u00a0 God doesn\u2019t want to drink out of a dirty glass.\u00a0 Milton thinks of himself as a spiritual athlete.\u00a0 The Nazarites abstain because they have a job to do.<\/p>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n Lecture 10.\u00a0 December 9, 1947<\/strong><\/p>\n The key ideas are ritual and myth. The active side of religion is ritual, the ceremony, the religious act.\u00a0 The myth side is the explanation of a ritual, the religious Word.<\/p>\n Ritual\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Act\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Ceremony\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 King<\/p>\n Myth\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Word\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Doctrine\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Prophet<\/p>\n The basis of ritual is sacrifice, and this goes back to the idea of the substitute for the human sacrifice.\u00a0 The prophets come along with teaching so that the doctrine aspect is connected with the prophet.\u00a0 The pre-prophetic is ritual dependent upon the king. Now, the symbol becomes interpreted in mythic terms through the prophet.<\/p>\n DEVELOPMENT OF PROPHECY<\/span><\/p>\n The Psalms are the doctrine of the king in prophetic language.\u00a0 The prophets are concerned with the meaning of the ritual, an attempt to explain the true nature of the king.\u00a0 The king is the visible symbol of the larger human body, \u201csociety.\u201d\u00a0 He is the social body united in one man.\u00a0 At certain points, the prophets have a special authority to appoint kings or heirs apparent.<\/p>\n The original motive for sacrifice is that the king\u2019s energy is that of the tribe.\u00a0 In pre-exilic prophets you get the feeling that the old king is not good enough.\u00a0 Isaiah is one prophet who has got beyond that mental tailspin.\u00a0 For him the source of inspiration is consciousness; he is the trusted adviser of the king.\u00a0 Mixed up with what he says is a criticism of what is going on in history.<\/p>\n Isaiah Chap. 6, v. 8<\/span>:\u00a0 \u201cI heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for me?\u00a0 Then said I, Here I am; send me.\u201d\u00a0 But no one wants to be a prophet.\u00a0 Isaiah asks, How long will it be? It\u2019s no fun.\u00a0 In the same way, says Frye, the artist is wholly possessed by what he wants to say.\u00a0 Genius has nothing to do with sanctity or with whether or not the artist is good or bad.\u00a0 When he has genius, it possesses the whole of him and gives him the power to shape words as he wills.\u00a0 Yet the work of art itself is taking form; the artist releases what is being created.\u00a0 The sculptor sees the statue in the block of marble; it is not an act of will.\u00a0 There are always times when the artist, the prophet, is saying more than he knows.<\/p>\n Isaiah 7: 10\u201312<\/span>: Ahaz represents conventional piety. \u201cI will not ask, neither will I tempt the Lord.\u201d\u00a0 This is the right answer, up to a point.\u00a0 But Isaiah takes up the idea of the \u201cgreat sign of the Lord thy God.\u201d<\/p>\n Isaiah speaks of the arrival of some new form of life, Immanuel, God with us.\u00a0 He speaks as if this is going to happen at once.\u00a0 In Chapter 8, Isaiah begets a child, and in the next chapter the arrival of this new life inspires him to say what is over Ahaz\u2019s head, and over the whole situation, too.\u00a0 He talks of a new king on the throne of David.\u00a0 He is talking about the real king here.\u00a0 In Chap. 2 he talks of the \u201clast days\u201d and the spiritual king who will restore the age of paradise.\u00a0 Still, there is not any doctrine here yet, which you could not match outside the Christian religion.<\/p>\n Micah makes the famous statement of the prophetic position against the sacrificial cult. Chap. 6, 6\u20138: the utter uselessness of ceremony in itself.\u00a0 Even human sacrifice will not attract God\u2019s attention. \u00a0There is the conception of the blood of a child as a redeeming scapegoat.<\/p>\n Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousand rivers of oil? \u00a0Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? \u00a0What does the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.<\/p>\n In Chap. 6, Hosea speaks a message of forgiveness, of the restoration of Israel through the love of God. \u201cCome, let us return to the Lord.\u201d<\/p>\n The pre-exilic prophets have the inspiration of the prophet and speak with consciousness.\u00a0 They condemn the moral evils of their community, the superstition, the mental attitude towards magic.\u00a0 But Amos is concerned with the paradox of the relation of God to his people.\u00a0 God has chosen one nation, and yet he is no respecter of persons.\u00a0 Amos denounces the neighbouring nations, and the audience loves it.\u00a0 He denounces Judah, the Southern Kingdom, and they still love it.\u00a0 Then, he turns and denounces the Israelites with the same voice.\u00a0 He acknowledges the uniformity of men, and yet retains the peculiar relation of God and Israel.\u00a0 To begin with, Israel means the larger human body, the concrete symbol of which is the King of Israel.<\/p>\n The prophets are led from the contemporary situation and the feeling that their own country is exceptional to the conception of the King of Israel as the source of authority in Israel and of its health and improvement.\u00a0 The prophets, therefore, become frank advisers of the king and will not flatter.\u00a0 The feeling merges that only the king is authority and God works through him.\u00a0 The pre-exilic prophets idealized the King of Israel as the Prince of Peace.<\/p>\n The paradox of a monotheistic state is seen in Amos where the hangover remains that God is concerned with the nation of Israel.\u00a0 This creates a difficulty that is not cleared up until the later prophets.<\/p>\n Lecture 11.\u00a0 December 16, 1947<\/strong><\/p>\n After the Babylonian Captivity, prophecy is modulated to the themes of the invisible king, since the Jews could no longer have a visible symbol for a spiritual reality.\u00a0 The ideal king may be eternal or an ideal to be re-established in the future. Two directions appear here.\u00a0 The distinction is already present in the exilic prophets and is finally expressed in the conflict of Judaism, which stopped at the exilic age, and Christianity.<\/p>\n With the destruction of Jerusalem, Judaism had to become a permanent exile, completing the idea of the coming Messiah as established in the Captivity.\u00a0 They rebuilt Jerusalem and staggered on, accepting the future Messiah bound up in time.\u00a0 The second exile under the Romans completed the pattern of the coming Messiah.<\/p>\n The breakaway started as early as Jeremiah, the first of the exilic prophets, and is carried on in the prophets.\u00a0 There is ambiguity in Isaiah II and in Ezekiel: they are read by both Christian and Jew.\u00a0 The prophets speak of a deliverer who is to vanish and return, which could be interpreted as an eternally present fact or one in time.\u00a0 The Jew and Christian both see it in the future, but it is the difference between resurrection and revival.\u00a0 The Jews speak of a rebuilt Jerusalem, which the prophets did speak about, and perhaps that is all they thought they were talking about.\u00a0 However, the conception of hope and confidence is connected with something that is symbolized in the future.<\/p>\n The pattern of exilic prophecy emphasizes that the city and the king have disappeared and must come again, symbolized by the future.\u00a0 It is important to remember that the Hebrew language has no future tense.\u00a0 It can differentiate between a complete and a progressive action, but not between the past, present and future. It is an admirable language for expressing a God in an eternally present existence; everything is complete in God\u2019s mind at once,<\/p>\n TWO STRANDS OF THOUGHT<\/span><\/p>\n From the exile on, we can separate two strands of thought.\u00a0 We see this same split in Buddhism.\u00a0 The Great Way: the Saviour of all time (China, Tibet, Japan), and the Lesser Way: the Messiah yet to come (Burma, Ceylon, Siam).<\/p>\n The Judaistic idea is one of a temporal deliverer, and this is still in the modern world, bound up with the future, anchored in time.\u00a0 Hope in the future deliverer is a fascist belief in the divinely inspired leader.<\/p>\n The enrichment of the symbolism of the King brings out the latent qualities of the divine\u2011king superstition.\u00a0 The symbolism includes suffering as an inevitable part of the king\u2019s duty.\u00a0 Their own last king was blinded and led into captivity. \u00a0The King must suffer even as the people suffer: this is a new feeling, that humiliation belongs to glory and kingship.\u00a0 The idea that the king must die and revive comes out of the feeling that the Israelite kingdom has been sent into exile and will return to the rebuilt Jerusalem.<\/p>\n In speaking of the Messiah, the prophets enrich the meaning from the pre-exilic Prince of Peace to the Suffering King.\u00a0 The heroic suffering of the Messiah is described in Isaiah 53: 6.<\/p>\n The King must exist on two levels.\u00a0 He is the King of light and splendor who descends into the valley of the shadow of death and of lost directions.\u00a0 Then he rises into his former state.\u00a0 He must descend into the fallen world of nature in order to re-emerge as King again.\u00a0 He is King of majesty, light, jewels, crowned with the Lord\u2019s anointed, but he must also descend into the order of nature and follow its pattern of death and rebirth.<\/p>\n The Messiah is the visible embodiment of Israel.\u00a0 He is the spiritual Israel, the larger human being in whom all the people find their existence.\u00a0 When historians of the Bible go to work on the traditional legends, they see the drama of the descent and resurrection of Israel.<\/p>\n There are two leaders of the Exodus, Moses and Joshua.\u00a0 One dies, the other carries on.\u00a0 God commanded all Israel to leave Egypt, and the people die in the desert, but a new generation carries on.<\/p>\n All the prophets are concerned with the focus on one God, but not someone different from Jehovah.\u00a0 The Messiah must be, in some strange way, Jehovah.\u00a0 The prophets see the early history of Israel and thus mirror that pastoral state.\u00a0 They see the traditional God when they were a wandering tribe when they worshipped only Jehovah.\u00a0 They idealize that nomadic existence and the life of the patriarch and the paradisal state of Adam and Eve.<\/p>\n But revival is something different from a mere to return to pastoral simplicity.\u00a0 There is something irrevocable about development: you can\u2019t reverse time.\u00a0 The real crisis of the Promised Land is the setting of the Ark in a settled place.\u00a0 This marks a change from a pastoral state to a civilized one.\u00a0 From then on, Israel is bound up with the idea of the city, as seen in David recapturing Jerusalem.\u00a0 The Golden Age of the past is the garden.\u00a0 The future is the city.\u00a0 The pastoral element is there, but it will always be a city.\u00a0 The Book of Job is the exception in that Job is merely restored to his former pastoral life.\u00a0 In the story of Adam and Eve we are told that they lost the Tree of Life and the Water of Life.\u00a0 The whole of the progression from darkness to light is found in all the prophets.<\/p>\n Psalm 23 <\/span>is the idealization of the pastoral life, and then comes the valley of death.\u00a0 God will descend from Eden with man to the valley of death.\u00a0 Isaiah II: 54; the prophecy of the Messiah is associated with the return of life in the spring.\u00a0 Verse 2 brings a new image of resurrection, the promise of the founding of a great building full of precious stones.<\/p>\n Chap. 54: 12: \u201cAnd I will make thy windows of agate and thy gates of carbuncles and all thy borders of pleasant stones.\u201d\u00a0 Chap. 41: the rebuilt temple is accompanied by the release of the waters of life.\u00a0 There is no more dead sea; the sea becomes a river.\u00a0 Verse 18:\u00a0 \u201cI will open rivers in high places and fountains in the midst of the valleys; I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water.\u201d<\/p>\n The last eight chapters of Ezekiel are about the restoration of the new city, the garden and the temple.\u00a0 The symbol of restoration is the city (a collection of buildings) and a temple (a single building) merged into one building that is yet a group of buildings\u2013\u2013a house of many mansions.\u00a0 \u201cSociety\u201d is also a collection of men and yet, somehow, one man.\u00a0 The King is a collection of men, and yet one man.<\/p>\n Around this city is a garden, a river and the Tree of Life. The river is a circulation of water, but not a sea, the same as the bloodstream it\u2019s a circulatory system.\u00a0 The prophets are showing the city as the home of man and the temple as the home of God. The city and the temple are the same thing.\u00a0 The home of man is his own body.\u00a0 The home of God is God\u2019s body.\u00a0 The city is the body of God who is Man.\u00a0 Our home is in the body of God who is Man, the God-Man. We live inside the body and the blood of God-Man. This theme is worked out fully in the Book of Revelation.<\/p>\n Lecture 12.\u00a0 January 6, 1948 <\/strong><\/p>\n THE HERO AND THE PROPHET<\/span><\/p>\n A distinction exists between two types of human beings: the hero and the prophet, and the relationship between them is of primacy importance.\u00a0 In the hero, humanity has projected a symbol of physical man fighting the forces of the power of darkness.<\/p>\n The Bible contains all literary forms.\u00a0 It is the super-epic and it deals with the act of the hero.\u00a0 One of the key ideas is the struggle, with nature or with other men who symbolize the forces of nature.\u00a0 The development is the great archetype of the hero\u2019s struggle with darkness, such as the dragon, and the victory of light over darkness at every sunrise.\u00a0 The solar symbolism here is exhaustive.<\/p>\n The Bible centres on a single heroic act: the struggle with darkness and the resultant victory.\u00a0 In medieval sculpture Jesus is pictured as dragon killer.<\/p>\n The hero, or king, is not fully conscious of what he is doing.\u00a0 The hero is illusive, inscrutable, and therefore commands loyalty.\u00a0 Christ as the suffering hero has that illusive quality.\u00a0 There is a feeling of the distant hero who proceeds to inevitable fate and triumph in the \u201cheroic\u201d Christ who says \u201ctouch me not.\u201d\u00a0 The hero is too preoccupied with his action to know what he is doing, like Achilles brooding in his tent.\u00a0 The heroes are figures moving in a ritual, not in the myth, and they move with a silent and unconscious quality.<\/p>\n The other type is the prophet who, in a sense, is the opposite.\u00a0 He has the disinterested view of humanity, and yet is articulate.\u00a0 He is not known for physical perfectibility and is likely to be stunted or deformed.\u00a0 He is the observer, the watcher, which the king is not.\u00a0 The man who is both hero and prophet is such a schizophrenic that he can\u2019t do anything.<\/p>\n The hero and the prophet are different.\u00a0 The hero is the actor, the prophet is the articulate person who explains the myth.\u00a0 The poet, then, is the prophet.<\/p>\n The hero is the centre of activity; the prophet is the circumference of activity\u2014the whole range of experience is in his mind.\u00a0 The hero is always \u201csomebody else,\u201d while the prophet is identical with ourselves because we have to go into his mind and make contact.\u00a0 All through humanity, in practise the hero and the prophet are separate.\u00a0 But ideally they are the same. \u00a0The hero\u2019s inscrutability is because he knows what is going on. \u00a0The prophet must be able to practice what he preaches.<\/p>\n The priest is the intermediary, neither prophet nor hero. \u00a0He stands at the point at which the ritual and myth converge. The hero still triumphs but he will be killed.\u00a0 The prophet will become articulate but never causes.\u00a0 The poet who enters the social causal sequence contaminates himself.\u00a0 It is the priest who understands the myth and who performs the ritual.\u00a0 The thing done and the reason for it are understood by the priest.<\/p>\n The function of the hero is to die for his crusade, but it is not the function of the prophet to die unless he becomes the hero. \u00a0Christ takes on aspects of prophet and king, and also priest, in the sense that he is the intermediary between man who suffers and a Father God who does not cause, although He has total comprehension.<\/p>\n Man begins his life in this world as weak; intelligence is weak and power is stupid.\u00a0 He tries to assign intelligence to the power around him.\u00a0 He thinks that lightning must be the power of a god with man\u2019s intelligence but with more power.<\/p>\n The function of art is to sharpen human imaginative conception of the world. \u00a0It is sharpened in epic, ballad forms which show the powers of darkness as dismal and stupid.\u00a0 The epic deals with the heroic act, human versus nature; that is, the physical world which presents itself to man as something to be overcome. \u00a0Man tries to develop the garden out of the wilderness, a city out of rock and desert, a river out of the sea, form out of chaos.<\/p>\n Human\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Natural<\/p>\n Garden\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Wilderness<\/p>\n City\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Desert<\/p>\n River\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Sea<\/p>\n Intelligence\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Brutal power<\/p>\n Form\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Chaos<\/p>\n \u201cNormal,\u201d the norm\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Monstrous: power and chaos<\/p>\n of existence, what<\/p>\n is true of oneself<\/p>\n In Exodus, the two great heroes, Moses and Joshua, are concerned with a heroic act. Moses is true to the epic hero who struggles against the wilderness and dies at the summit of his achievement.\u00a0 The Promised Land is both city and garden.\u00a0 The story behind this is that of Israel (a single man) versus a wilderness which can become the Promised Land.\u00a0 When the prophets foretell of a prophet-king, they talk in terms of killing a dragon, Leviathan.\u00a0 Isaiah 51: 9\u201310: the conquest of the sea is something which Isaiah takes us to.<\/p>\n Awake, awake, put on strength O arm of the Lord; awake as in the ancient days, in the generations of old.<\/p>\n Art thou not it that hath cut Rahab and wounded the dragon? Art\u00a0 thou not\u00a0 it which hath dried the sea, and the waters of the great deep; that hath made the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over?<\/p>\n The dragon is a sea monster connected with the power of God which defeats the sea; he dries it up.\u00a0 Jesus\u2019 ability to command the sea and still the tempest is part of this.\u00a0 Chap. 27: 1: \u201ceven Leviathan the crooked serpent . . . .\u201d\u00a0 On the day of crisis, God will kill the dragon.<\/p>\n Lecture 13.\u00a0 January 13, 1948<\/strong><\/p>\n Ritual embodies the ceremonial aspects of the law.\u00a0 The teaching of Jesus is a commentary on the law. He transforms the action to the understanding of the action; that is, myth explains the ritual.\u00a0 In the conception of ritual you act according to the law.\u00a0 In this aspect, sin is a positive act of breaking the law.\u00a0 But for the Gospel, law is the foundation of the human act, not the super\u2013structure.\u00a0 Sin is the failure to transmute the law into human life.\u00a0 All theories of law, justice and judgment are expressed by Jesus in spiritual terms.\u00a0 The Gospel is not a new law.<\/p>\n The law supposes a judge and a person as prisoner.\u00a0 The Last Judgment is usually seen as God \u201cup there\u201d with the people below as sheep and goats.\u00a0 But the sheep and goats are not human, and Jesus does not judge; he casts out devils, and the swine go over the cliff into the \u201cdeep,\u201d which is the Hebrew word \u201ctome,\u201d meaning nothingness.\u00a0 The arena of the Last Judgment is the human soul.\u00a0 God enters into the human soul and with His help we cast out the goats, the devils within us,<\/p>\n The apocalypse of personality is God\u2019s descent into the human soul.\u00a0 The Gospel does not bring peace, but a sword.\u00a0 It discriminates and divides.\u00a0 It brings the principle of absolute separation of good and bad in the world.\u00a0 The sheep are the pure, those who have used their talents.\u00a0 The bad are those who have not used their talents, but have buried them.<\/p>\n The myth of the Gospel is the explanation of ceremonial cleanliness.\u00a0 The white sheep are separated from the black goats, the light from the dark, the human from the monstrous.\u00a0 The image<\/p>\n to sum up Jesus is the act of casting out devils, the forgiveness of sin.\u00a0 The power of God descending into the human soul to cast out evil even as Jesus descended into the human and fallen world to cast out devils.\u00a0 It happens in<\/span> man.\u00a0 It is the descent of divine power into man.\u00a0 You cannot make a sheep out of a goat. \u00a0The sheep is a sheep no matter if it has strayed and been lost. Jesus will find<\/span> the lost sheep.<\/p>\n Sin is the negative act which fundamentally does not exist since all action is positive and good.\u00a0 The driving out of goats is driving \u201cnothing\u201d out to achieve the complete reality of unfallen man.\u00a0 I know this sounds like a riddle, but play with it for a while . . . .<\/p>\n If casting out devils is the symbol of Jesus\u2019 activity, then we see the relation between prophet and hero more clearly. \u00a0The prophet is the observer, the watcher, the interpreter of the hero\u2019s action.\u00a0 For the hero or king, what is the heroic act?<\/p>\n Fundamentally, it is the destruction of the powers of darkness.\u00a0 The Gospel tells you the spiritual aspect of the physical act.\u00a0 The religious experience is crystallized in the dragon-killing myth.<\/p>\n The Saviour withdraws man from the dragon so that he can see it is not alive after all.\u00a0 The fairy tale of St. George and the dragon, or the Perseus and Andromache legend, are not just \u201cstories.\u201d\u00a0 St. George is the symbol of the sun, of life, hence his colour is red.\u00a0 The dragon and the old man are the same; winter, waste, sterility.\u00a0 In medieval drama the old king is dressed up inside the dragon.\u00a0 In most variations of this story there is a sinister old woman to balance off the young daughter.\u00a0 In the same way, Perseus has to kill Medusa before he can get cracking on the dragon.<\/p>\n LEVIATHAN, THE POWER OF DARKNESS<\/span><\/p>\n The power of darkness in the Bible is Leviathan, the dragon.\u00a0 The Messiah is the dragon-killer.\u00a0 The pure \u201cnature\u201d force in the dragon isn\u2019t enough; the dragon is also an enemy.\u00a0 In Ezekiel he is associated with the King of Tyre, a tyrant.\u00a0 The hero\u2019s army is of another tribe or nation or social group.\u00a0 It can be an unrighteous nation of a city like Babylon or Tyre.\u00a0 In Psalms 87 and 89, Leviathan is also called Rahab\u2013\u2013\u201cthou has broken Rahab in pieces.\u201d<\/p>\n The dragon of folklore means the powers of chaos and waste.\u00a0 The parable of \u201ca certain young man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho\u201d means he went down from the unfallen state to the fallen state because Rahab lives at Jericho.\u00a0 Leviathan or Rahab means tyranny in some form.\u00a0 The hero is fighting for liberty against tyranny.\u00a0 It sounds phony, but it is something like that.\u00a0 The activity of Jesus becomes the true form of the hero\u2019s act; casting out devils equals the killing of the enemy of man.<\/p>\n Ezekiel 29: 3\u20134:<\/p>\n I am against thee, Pharaoh, King of Egypt, the great dragon that lieth in the midst of his rivers, which hath said, my river is mine own and I have made it for myself.<\/p>\n But I have put hooks into thy jaws and I will cause the fish of thy rivers to stick unto thy scales and I will bring thee out of the midst of they rivers and all the fish of thy rivers shall stick unto thy scales.<\/p>\n Chap. 32: 2 (of Pharaoh): \u201cthou art as a whale in the sea.\u201d<\/p>\n Psalm 74: 13\u20134:<\/p>\n Thou did not divide the sea by thy strength; thou brakest the heads of the dragon in the waters.<\/p>\n Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness.<\/p>\n Isaiah 27: 1:<\/p>\n In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent; even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.<\/p>\n In the Gospels, leviathan is the sea monster; but God can control the sea.\u00a0 The hauling of leviathan out of the sea is important to the fishing symbolism in the Gospel.\u00a0 Jesus is the fisher or men.\u00a0 The fish are not in the sea by accident.\u00a0 Leviathan is<\/span> the sea. When he is drawn out, the sea no longer exists, only rivers circulating freely.<\/p>\n Lecture 14.\u00a0 January 20, 1948<\/strong><\/p>\n The word ritual begins to expand its meaning.\u00a0 It begins to focus on certain symbols, for example, the killing of the dragon by the hero.\u00a0 This is the essential theme of the epic.\u00a0 It is given symbolic expression in the life of Jesus who embodies the character of hero and king.\u00a0 The theme of the epic takes place in the individual soul.\u00a0 The antagonists must be interpreted in a certain ways as chaos, sterility, wasteland, sea; that is, the unorganized aspect of nature.\u00a0 Leviathan in the Bible takes the form of cosmological and political enemy.<\/p>\n The so-called \u201claws of nature\u201d are sub-human; they are indifferent to the human and the conscious.\u00a0 God is not in nature.\u00a0 The order and precision of the stars is still sub-human; there is no conscious purpose of human qualities.\u00a0 Man\u2019s religious impulse is that he cannot worship a god who is no better than he is.\u00a0 God in nature is subconscious and sub-human.\u00a0 In human society, as man lives in nature, human civilization is in the grip of nature.<\/p>\n Psalm 87 contrasts the heavenly city with the earthly one.\u00a0 Revelation 11 has the symbolism of two cities, and of the city or the temple, as well as the emphasis upon accurate measurements.\u00a0 The city of God has shape; it is bounded and finite.\u00a0 There is emphasis upon the indefiniteness of the \u201couter court\u201d which is our world.\u00a0 The two witnesses are Moses and Elijah, the Law and the Prophet.\u00a0 Verse 7: \u201cthe beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit.\u201d\u00a0 Verse 8: the great city is the fallen city of Jerusalem, also called Sodom and Egypt.\u00a0 (\u201cAnd their bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified.\u201d)<\/p>\n Leviathan is that which binds man in the fallen state.\u00a0 The earthly city is part of the body of Leviathan.\u00a0 The doctrine of the two cities is the subject of St. Augustine\u2019s book, and it also shows in the opposition of light and the power of darkness.\u00a0 There is also the following contrast, in which the right\u2011hand side is the physical reflection of the spiritual side, as a type of parody.<\/p>\n Fertility\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Sterility<\/p>\n Form\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Amorphousness<\/p>\n Light\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Dark<\/p>\n Human body(individual or social)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Monster<\/p>\n Hero (Christ)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Dragon<\/p>\n Freedom\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Tyranny<\/p>\n Human\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Nature<\/p>\n Hero (dragon-killer)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Leviathan<\/p>\n Heavenly City\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Earthly City<\/p>\n Water of Life\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Water of death<\/p>\n Tree of Life\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Tree of death<\/p>\n Temple of God\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Heathen temple<\/p>\n Only in a state of nature is the power of darkness seen as continuous and fertile.\u00a0 In the natural cycle the serpent symbol has its tail in its mouth\u2014the circular or cyclic vision.\u00a0 Jesus lifts light out of darkness, not just for one turn of the wheel of fate and nature, but eternally.<\/p>\n Resurrection\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Renewal<\/p>\n Regeneration\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Generation<\/p>\n The aim of the Bible is to sharpen the antithesis between these two sides.\u00a0 Eternally there is a gulf between them; that is, between the state of heaven and of hell.\u00a0 In the natural world we tend to think of ourselves as individuals locked up in ourselves.\u00a0 With the co-operative act we are aware that there is something in humanity that is connectable.\u00a0 Man is either part of the body of Christ or he is swallowed up in Leviathan; that is, a complete individualist.\u00a0 Each of us is involved in dragon-killing; we kill the dragon or we are swallowed by him.<\/p>\n THE STORY OF JONAH<\/span><\/p>\n Jonah is swallowed and coughed up in three days.\u00a0 This is like Jesus\u2019 descent into hell for three days. \u00a0In the drama of the Middle Ages, hell is Leviathan, and Jesus walks into the monster and then comes out.\u00a0 In doing that he repeats the rhythm of the human soul.\u00a0 We are all born within Leviathan, within the order of nature.\u00a0 One sees it in the North American legend of the sun being swallowed up by a monster every night.<\/p>\n The Book of Jonah is a grim business; it just misses being sardonic.\u00a0 Jonah goes through an archetypal experience that is like The Tempest<\/span>, which takes place under the sea.\u00a0 Jonah has gone into a world of chaos and comes out of it.\u00a0 But the experience of a thing does not give you knowledge of it.\u00a0 Jonah is not changed when he comes out.\u00a0 (Israel went through the same experience without knowing what it was about: Egypt is the monster and Israel escapes through the dry land in the Red Sea.)<\/p>\n Jonah comes out still an agent of the Law.\u00a0 He denounced Nineveh and is annoyed when the people repent.\u00a0 He wanted the wrath of God to destroy the city.\u00a0 He believed in prophecy as foretelling the future.\u00a0 It failed in that, but it filled the other prophetic role.\u00a0 Jonah gets coughed out of the whale as soon as he realizes he is in there.\u00a0 Once you realize you are in hell you are no longer wholly there.<\/p>\n Jonah talks back to God. The humour of Jonah and the pattern is repeated in Job, which is also one of the greatest comedies of the world.\u00a0 The suggestion is there of suffering, doubt, despair, but no tragedy.\u00a0 It belongs to Shakespeare\u2019s maturer comedies like The Tempest<\/em> and The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em>, not to King Lear <\/em>or Macbeth<\/em>. The mature comedies have a sardonic bite that is lacking in the earlier ones.\u00a0 He has gone through the tragic phase of death and emerges with a comedy which takes tragedy in its stride. \u00a0There is tragedy within comedy.\u00a0 Tragedy deals with the tragedy of suffering and death, while comedy hinges on the comedy of life, which includes death.<\/p>\n Lecture 15.\u00a0 January 27, 1948<\/strong><\/p>\n THE BOOK OF JOB<\/span><\/p>\n The whole meaning of this book is complicated.\u00a0 It is completely a work of literary art, and affords the guarantee that, for the Bible, the use of the poetic imagination is legitimate and essential.\u00a0 It is akin to literary forms we meet elsewhere.\u00a0 The original of epics and sagas are all there in the Bible, but they have been incorporated into something else. \u00a0Only the forms that are on the more remote side, such as letters, memoirs, have continued as definite forms.<\/p>\n Job seems unconnected with anything else in the Bible, except in tone.\u00a0 It was probably subject to an editing process. \u00a0But the editing, as well as the writing, is inspired.\u00a0 It is a fairly late book.<\/p>\n Shakespeare\u2019s comedies start out as light, urbane, sophisticated romance, like Twelfth Night<\/em>, which has a lilt to it, and we enter into a carnival world where frustrations have disappeared. \u00a0The later comedies have elements which disrupt the feeling of pleasantness. \u00a0The Merchant of Venice <\/em>is practically a tragedy.\u00a0 Shylock disturbs us, and the metallic quality of the imagery effects the whole tone. \u00a0Then his comedy digs more deeply into the tragedy of life.\u00a0 The sense of escape, of the fairy world, fades out.\u00a0 All\u2019s Well That Ends Well<\/em> has an ironic title.\u00a0 Falstaff is an ambiguous character; he is not a figure of fun; the tragic and the comic are rooted in him. \u00a0The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em> and The Tempest <\/em>have serenity and repose.<\/p>\n Job is a tough piece of work.\u00a0 The last chapter has the feeling of comic resolution\u2014he has got everything back.\u00a0 Yet it isn\u2019t resolution.\u00a0 If you lose something, you don\u2019t get it back.\u00a0 The nation that Job could be restored doesn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n WHY DO THE INNOCENT SUFFER?<\/span><\/p>\n The heart of the book is a discussion as why the innocent suffer. T he three comforters are not fools; they are trying to help, to bring balance and reason into his mind through Jewish law.\u00a0 They are people of human sympathy, conventional people as in Greek tragic chorus, the voice of common sense.\u00a0 Job doesn\u2019t make a much better show than they do.\u00a0 The sense that Job is a tragedy is because of the dialogue concerning the suffering of the innocent, which is the theme of all tragedy.<\/p>\n It is tormenting to anyone but the reader who has read the prologue. We cannot forget that \u201cway up in the gods\u201d are God and Satan betting on Job.\u00a0 The one argument that newer occurs to the comforters is that God wants to settle a bet.\u00a0 They assume that Job is suffering because he has done wrong. \u00a0We know it is because he has done right.\u00a0 Job is happy and prosperous because he is attached to God. \u00a0Man fell because he detached himself from God. \u00a0Here, God withdraws from Man, a paradox.<\/p>\n Job and his friends take part in a dialogue.\u00a0 The author is trying to fish something out of tragedy, to establish the point of tragedy.\u00a0 The point of Job is \u201cwhy do the innocent suffer?\u201d\u00a0 This is the same question as in Lear<\/em> in Cordelia\u2019s death.\u00a0 The tragic flaw as a moral judgment is not a tragic flaw at all.\u00a0 In Milton, the flaw in Adam is that he is a creature of free will.\u00a0 But Adam\u2019s flaw does not infer a moral judgment on God.<\/p>\n Job says, I have done nothing to deserve this.\u00a0 The flaw is that he exists.\u00a0 The flaw, therefore, seems to be in the God that made him. \u00a0Yet, a moral judgment on God is irrelevant.<\/p>\n Lecture 16.\u00a0 February 3, 1948<\/strong><\/p>\n ELEMENTS OF TRAGEDY<\/span><\/p>\n Aristotle\u2019s catharsis means that the audience is not to have pity or fear.\u00a0 The correct response is: the hero is a man suffering from the tragic flaw; how very like things are. The Greek idea of fate was not external; it is the way things always happen.\u00a0 The law of human life is not moral, but a law nevertheless.<\/p>\n Tragedy is a kind of implicit comedy.\u00a0 It is the full statement of which comedy gives only a part.\u00a0 The complete story of Bach\u2019s St. Matthew Passion<\/em> is a comedy.\u00a0 The implicit resurrection gives balance and serenity.\u00a0 Tragedy completes itself as comedy. The story of Christ has no ultimate tragedy.\u00a0 Death is a tragedy, but there is resurrection here.<\/p>\n In other tragedies the hero dies on stage and he revives in the mind of the audience.\u00a0 Tragedy is the development of the ritual of sacrifice.\u00a0 The typical act is the death of the central figure, the king or prince in whose death the people find life.\u00a0 Aristotle\u2019s catharsis is not a moral quality.\u00a0 It casts out<\/span> pity and fear, which are moral good and moral evil.<\/p>\n To say that Macbeth is a bad<\/span> man is the reaction of terror, of moral evil.\u00a0 Sympathy with him on the grounds of fate, his wife\u2019s influence, etc., is pity: moral sympathy with the hero.\u00a0 The real function of tragedy gets beyond moral reaction.\u00a0 The point is not whether Macbeth was good or bad.\u00a0 Tragedy goes beyond that.\u00a0 The catharsis in the audience is that the dead man on the stage is alive in them.\u00a0 The audience is united in the death of the hero.\u00a0 Modern tragedies are moral in that they stimulate sympathy or condemnation.\u00a0 Shaw\u2019s St. Joan<\/em> is moral.\u00a0 In King Lear<\/em>, though,\u00a0 his death is a release. He attempted to find divinity in his kingship and failed. He found it in suffering humanity.<\/p>\n From the spectator\u2019s point of view, Job is funny.\u00a0 The watcher is released from the action and his perspective, therefore, is one of comedy.\u00a0 Tragedy has the reversal of perspective.\u00a0 Tragedy is a work of art seen from the spectator\u2019s point of view as entertainment<\/span>.\u00a0 Hamlet asks to be written up: Othello, the same. Tragedy has a point when limited in art form and seen by an audience.<\/p>\n The audience\u2019s perspective is comic because they are the watchers.\u00a0 The tragic hero is unaware of the humiliation of being watched<\/span>.\u00a0 Lear is mercifully unaware of this when scampering around the stage mad.\u00a0 Hamlet feels that all eyes are upon him.\u00a0 He feels this to such a point that he takes it out on Ophelia.\u00a0 He kills Polonius because he is being watched.\u00a0 In Aeschylus\u2019 Prometheus<\/em>, he is stretched out on a rock.\u00a0 He speaks first so that people won\u2019t stare at him.\u00a0 He says, \u201cBehold the spectacle.\u201d<\/p>\n Job sees God as an inscrutable watcher.\u00a0 In Chapter 7. he describes his fallen state\u2013\u2013no sense in what happens\u2013\u2013if there is a God who doesn\u2019t interfere, then he is merely the watcher, and this is unbearable to Job.\u00a0 Verse 11: \u201cAm I a sea or a whale that thou settest a watch over me?\u201d\u00a0 Verse 8: \u201cThe eye of him that hath seen me shall see me no more; thine eyes are upon me and I am not.\u201d\u00a0 A sense of loneliness, but of being watched.<\/p>\n Othello\u2019s black skin means that all eyes are drawn to him.\u00a0 Here, it is subtler.\u00a0 The comforters are not making fun of Job.\u00a0 But sympathy is harder to put up with then ridicule.\u00a0 Job knows God acts \u2014 but why this way?\u00a0 It worries Job.<\/p>\n COMEDY INHERENT IN TRAGEDY<\/span><\/p>\n The audience is imaginatively detached from the tragedy: this isn\u2019t happening to me.\u00a0 This enables the audience to get rid of pity and terror.\u00a0 When you are detached, you let the whole stream go before you.\u00a0 Comedy is inherent in tragedy because the hero is separate from the people who are watching him.\u00a0 Shakespeare has some grotesque, horrible comedy.\u00a0 The Fool and Edgar and the madness in Lear contribute to a horrible comedy.\u00a0 In Othello<\/em>, there is the sense of a comical situation that twists the neck of tragedy.\u00a0 Yet, they are a part of the fact that comedy binds up the wounds of tragedy.<\/p>\n Job is not a tragic hero in the Shakespearean sense.\u00a0 The hero always has an aura of divinity, a man marked for this.\u00a0 Job\u2019s point is that he is not a special figure, but an ordinary observer of the law.\u00a0 Lear must go through more than Job because he has to fight his way out of kingship.\u00a0 Hamlet won\u2019t compromise and follows through the pattern of not submitting to the powers of darkness even when they are disguised as his own father.<\/p>\n The tension in Job is that of a Platonic dialogue rather than tragedy on the stage.\u00a0 Tragedy presents a sense of lost direction; the hero never knows why he suffers.\u00a0 Job finds out.\u00a0 In Greek tragedy there is the deus ex machina<\/em>.\u00a0 In Jewish law, it is the deus in machina<\/em>, the machine of rites and ceremonies.\u00a0 From the fulfillment of the law comes the highest good of man, but the progression of ceremony and rites can mechanize life.<\/p>\n God operates this \u201cmachinery\u201d of the world.\u00a0 In Job, God withdraws the machinery from the world.\u00a0 It is because Job refuses to let God withdraw that something eventually happens to him.<\/p>\n The effect of the prologue is to detach God from the moral and natural law.\u00a0 He is the watcher, not the ordaining, God.\u00a0 Job is thrown into a desert world where the law doesn\u2019t operate.\u00a0 The Jewish idea of deus in machina<\/em> means \u201cdo this and you get your apple\u201d: bribe and reward, happiness is the inevitable result of virtue, and so on, because God is the First Cause, etcetera, etcetera. Then God withdraws and the rain falls on the just and the unjust\u2013\u2013the evil prosper and the good man gets it in the neck.\u00a0 Job is forced to outgrow a God that causes<\/span> things.\u00a0 Job knows that, and therefore he won\u2019t listen to the comforters.<\/p>\n We feel that God has played Job a dirty trick, and Job feels it, too.\u00a0 He doesn\u2019t defy God; he curses the day he was born.\u00a0 Job is not given a chance to strike a pose or to look dignified; he is too busy scratching himself.\u00a0 Greek heroes suffer in dignity.\u00a0 The thing that permits dignity is the act of dying.\u00a0 But God spares Job\u2019s life.<\/p>\n You can never work out a consoling formula about the Book of Job.\u00a0 Tragedy ignores moral order.\u00a0 The feeling exists that Job is in the Bible and therefore must be reassuring and respectable.\u00a0 The same idea is in A.C. Bradley\u2019s critical work on Shakespeare: in spite of all the horrid tragedies, Shakespeare was a good guy at heart and believes in a moral force governing the world.\u00a0 All you have to do is to read the plays to see how completely that theory is blasted.<\/p>\n Here is God creating hell, and letting it happen in a way that creates the least sympathy for him.\u00a0 It resolves into the fact that there is no point in moral arguments at all.<\/p>\n Lecture 17.\u00a0 February 10, 1948<\/strong><\/p>\n To understand Job, you must see that the book is a blend of tragic, comic and satiric.\u00a0 All great drama is a blend of these three.\u00a0 The satiric tone is a blend of the moral and the humorous.\u00a0 Pure humor is not satire; pure denunciation is not satire.<\/p>\n Satire is a detachment from evil; it brings out its wrongness and ridiculousness.\u00a0 You can\u2019t find anything more detached from evil than God; therefore, there are some aspects of the sardonic in God, or the gods.\u00a0 This is inescapable in any serious religion.\u00a0 Wrath is the reaction of good when confronted with evil, and wrath is the opposite of irritation.\u00a0 God is incapable of irritation, which is a personal egocentric thing which desires to triumph over and score off someone.\u00a0 Wrath is impersonal, detached.<\/p>\n God speaks in the tones of the wrath of the sardonic.\u00a0 Yet these tones are different from Job\u2019s friends who approach him with elaborate friendliness and politeness.\u00a0 They talk in vague, general terms about the goodness of good and the badness of evil.<\/p>\n Then their approach sharpens; the reproaches come clearer to a point of open antagonism.\u00a0 They are trying to hint that Job had better \u201c\u2018get right\u201d with God.\u00a0 They are trying to interpret their own sense of the wrath of God, of man in an evil state.\u00a0 But Job insists that he\u2019s done nothing wrong.\u00a0 The friends become irritated; they want to score him off.\u00a0 Job tries to score them off, too.\u00a0 All agree there must be some justice somewhere.\u00a0 Only Job\u2019s wife suggests something else: curse God and die.\u00a0 At the end, God curiously enough seems of the same opinion.\u00a0 Man searches for a God equal to him.\u00a0 God feels the same way; he wants a man equal to him.<\/p>\n The dialogue breaks down into a deadlock.\u00a0 If Job has done nothing wrong, then nothing makes sense.\u00a0 His friends are pious Jews thinking in terms of the Hebrew law, the best of the Pharisaic mind that Jesus condemns.\u00a0 They try to interpret God\u2019s design in terms of the law. \u00a0Job comes to the discovery that rain falls on the just and unjust alike; the sun shines upon evil and good alike.<\/p>\n Job, his three friends, and Elihu are all under the same cloud.\u00a0 The breakdown point is that there is no revelation of God to Man.\u00a0 All seems to be mystery. The collapse is tragedy and satire, not comedy.<\/p>\n Tragedy and satire are inseparable.\u00a0 There is an ironic kernel in all Shakespeare tragedies.\u00a0 Hamlet\u2019s death is a tragedy, yet it takes place after a muddled attempt at revenge.\u00a0 Horatio must tell that Hamlet has been a damn fool.\u00a0 In Othello\u2019s last speech he is trying to cheer himself up and rescue some fragment of dignity.\u00a0 It is not that he realized what a fool he has been, but what a fool he is<\/span>.\u00a0 In Antony and Cleopatra<\/em>, the Antony who held the stage in Julius Caesar, the demagogue, in this play is crowded right off the stage by Cleo.\u00a0 She has him killed off in Act IV and has the fifth act to herself.\u00a0 She puts on a good show, but the irony is that it is a good show.\u00a0 Octavius comes in at the end of her show and says, \u201cOh yes, I heard she was doing some research on a painless way to die.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 The hanging of Cordelia, in Lear<\/em>, blasts any theory that there is a moral order in tragedy.<\/p>\n The point of tragedy is not punishment, but that the hero fell, whether he deserved it or not. That is the irony.<\/p>\n The author of the Book of Job is not trying to clear God\u2019s name, as Milton was.\u00a0 There is no self-defensive, aggressive tone as in Milton\u2019s God.\u00a0 At the end, God speaks with what seems colossal impudence. He feels he has a right to condemn Job, in a sense, for feeling that he is righteous in his own eyes.\u00a0 The reader has the curious feeling that God has done something wrong, in view of the prologue.<\/p>\n NO SUCH THING AS INNOCENCE<\/span><\/p>\n Why do the innocent suffer is the problem of the Book of Job.\u00a0 What is the meaning of the term \u201cinnocent\u201d?\u00a0 If we look at the people in the Bible who claim to be innocent, we come up against Pontius Pilate.\u00a0 For Job, comes the dawning that there is no such thing as innocence.\u00a0 There is no reason for Job\u2019s troubles other than that of his own existence.\u00a0 He was quite right in cursing the day of his birth.\u00a0 Both good and evil men are caught in the same rat-trap.\u00a0 The \u201cinnocent\u201d person is not only free from sin, but free from the consequences of everybody else\u2019s sin.\u00a0 There is no such person but God himself.\u00a0 So, there is some stain on Job\u2019s birth which the goodness of his life cannot remove.<\/p>\n Two things limit the rewards of virtue, if it can be said there are rewards:<\/p>\n 1.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 You can\u2019t escape the sin of other people.\u00a0 You cannot be a good man in a Nazi state.<\/p>\n You\u2019ll be polluted by it even if you become a victim.<\/p>\n 2.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There are diseases and disasters in the world that man cannot control.\u00a0 You cannot<\/p>\n discover any divine benevolence in nature or in other men.\u00a0 Nature is indifferent to<\/p>\n moral values.\u00a0 There is no guarantee that lightning will strike the drunk and not the saint.<\/p>\n Job is led to the fact that there is a fatality in being born which the goodness of your life will not remove.<\/p>\n Now we can see what Satan is and why he entered into the pact. Satan is the agent of all these disasters which fall on Job.\u00a0 He is bound up with this world that limits and conditions us.\u00a0 Satan actually is<\/span> this evil world.\u00a0 He is called the Prince of this world, Prince of the powers of the air, of tempests, floods\u2013\u2013and boils.\u00a0 When man is born there are two powers which control and watch him.\u00a0 There is God himself, but a certain amount of autonomous power is given to Satan.\u00a0 What finally unrolls is a picture of man born into a Satanic world, with God permitting Satan to have a certain amount of leeway.<\/p>\n Job has observed the laws of God, not for self-interest, but because he is good and because God is God.\u00a0 There are a lot of people who will follow God only so long as things are pleasant.\u00a0\u00a0 Satan bets on this.\u00a0 The bet is to test the holy-willys of this world.\u00a0 Liberty is given to Satan because it is the only adult conception of God above that of a God who says \u201cdo this or else.\u201d\u00a0 The immature idea is of reward and punishment for behaviour.\u00a0 If there was a law like this it would be a kindergarten world; there would be a visible and clearly operating moral law in this world.<\/p>\n Lecture 18.\u00a0 February 17, 1948<\/strong><\/p>\n In tragedy, something comes through directly, a vision beyond that of the social and the moral.\u00a0 Iago is a figure in a tragedy but he is not heroic. \u00a0Macbeth is an experiment in a tragedy where the hero and the villain are the same person.\u00a0 Emotions of pity for the hero through the reproach of the audience somewhere; for example, they blame Iago.\u00a0 In a social tragedy, such as the lynching of a negro, the audience is morally condemned for tolerating such cruelty.\u00a0 A tragedy in which man is innocent and blames God for the scheme of things is not a real tragedy.\u00a0 Even Henley\u2019s Invictus<\/em>\u2014\u201cI am captain of my soul\u201d\u2014is still handing out a high moral line.<\/p>\n Job gets past this morality stage.\u00a0 He will not condemn himself, and therefore his three friends have nothing more to say.\u00a0 At this point, Job leaves the moral aspect and goes on to the tragic.\u00a0 Elihu has an organic role because he brings the tragedy to a focus.<\/p>\n The arguments with the friends are based on law.\u00a0 Wisdom means following the tried and tested ways\u2013\u2013the fool is he who breaks away, etc.\u00a0 Yet, the law has not brought Job the wisdom he wants.<\/p>\n Elihu is the Old Testament conception of the prophet.\u00a0 He has no personal authority\u2013\u2013I must<\/span> speak; therefore it is God talking to you.\u00a0 The three friends are the old men of Job\u2019s generation.\u00a0 Elihu is the young spirit of prophecy.\u00a0 He condemns Job on grounds that are implicit rather than implicit.\u00a0 He places the condemnation on a broader basis and comes closer to the doctrine of original sin: Job is condemned because he exists.\u00a0 Elihu deals with the \u201cotherness\u201d of God from man.\u00a0 This is the first step in religious feeling, the sense of the opposition of the divine and the human; the feeling that man cannot reach God through the human means of reason, etc.<\/p>\n God himself breaks in on Elihu\u2019s speech and pushes him aside.\u00a0 It sounds as if God was merely continuing his speech, but he turns it upside down.\u00a0 The same thing is being said, but from a different quarter.\u00a0 Elihu has found the scent somehow or other.\u00a0 The voice which is outside Job is Elihu, but when the voice is inside Job, it is God.\u00a0 The Lord answers Job out of a whirlwind, the symbol of confusion.\u00a0 It is confusion in terms of what is going on around him.\u00a0 That is, out of Elihu\u2019s words without knowledge and the confusion they create in Job, comes God\u2019s voice.<\/p>\n Elijah is the typical prophet, and Elihu\u2019s name is close to his.\u00a0 Kings 1:19:\u00a0 Elijah repeats Jesus\u2019 period in the wilderness and also Moses\u2019 exile, so that he is the Law and the Prophet.\u00a0 Verse 9:\u00a0 the word of the Lord is represented by the pronoun \u201che.\u201d\u00a0 And he said unto him, \u201cWhat doest thou here, Elijah?\u201d\u00a0 The action turns inside Elijah.\u00a0 He goes through the wind, earthquake, fire and doesn\u2019t find God in any of them.\u00a0 But it is after the fire that there comes \u201ca still small voice.\u201d<\/p>\n Job\u2019s religious experience starts with God separate from man, up in the sky.\u00a0 Then Job realizes that God can\u2019t be up in the sky; he is inside Job.\u00a0 The speech of Elihu rounds off the tragedy and brings it to a tragic resolution.\u00a0\u00a0 Elihu says Job\u2019s sin is in getting born; it is not a moral sin.\u00a0 He is driving sin into the involuntary; it is not moral.\u00a0 The tragic resolution is on the point of evil attendant at birth.\u00a0 Evil things just happen.\u00a0 It is not moral but natural<\/span>.\u00a0 Nature is majestically indifferent.\u00a0 Morals are sticks and stones, a barricade against nature.<\/p>\n Elihu takes you to the bedrock of natural man: you are not different from that world that knocks you around.\u00a0 This is \u201cfate\u201d in tragedy.\u00a0 What Oedipus did wrong, he did unconsciously.\u00a0 The moral sin is one of choice; in tragedy, it is involuntary and inevitable; it is the co-incidence of nature with the involuntary ignorance of man.\u00a0 Tragedy is the identification of nature with man.<\/p>\n Job is unwilling to surrender his conscious identity.\u00a0 Elihu says there\u2019s nothing in man over which he can call himself king.\u00a0 What has man got that is better than the natural forces which swallow him up?\u00a0 Law and morality won\u2019t help him.\u00a0 Job won\u2019t find God in \u201cthe foundations of the world.\u201d\u00a0 The point is that God can\u2019t be found in the sky, in space or time as the First Cause.\u00a0 He is not outside the limits of time and space because there are no limits to time and space.<\/p>\n Job, instead of being the centre of what is happening to him, is the circumference of an entirely new vision.\u00a0 He finds himself wholly removed from the things which he thought were outside him.\u00a0 Nothing exists outside him.\u00a0 What use is a God at the beginning of time when man is Here and Now in the middle of time?\u00a0 Law is founded on causality, a God who starts things in time and space and is therefore enmeshed in the natural cycle.\u00a0 Even knowledge itself is different from what we thought of it as getting hold of this and that: these are terms we use when panicky.<\/p>\n The wisdom of Job is not grasping but letting go of something. It is the same as an experienced guide and an inexperienced man getting lost in the forest.\u00a0 The inexperienced man gets panicky; all he can see is the thereness<\/span> of the forest all around him.\u00a0 He feels helpless, fated; thinks about how he will starve to death, but at least then the forest won\u2019t be there<\/em>.\u00a0 The experienced guide accepts the conditions under which he finds himself, but he is no longer imprisoned in the forest.\u00a0 He is not aware of the thereness of the forest; it neither exists nor does not exist.<\/p>\n In the same way, Hamlet and Falstaff are both real and unreal, just as a point in mathematics is (a) a point and (b) not a point.<\/p>\n The growth of knowledge is a growth of freedom, a detachment, a letting go of the world around.\u00a0 The man who gains knowledge comes back to saying that \u201csomething\u201d is the master of his fate and the captain of his soul\u2014but the word \u201cI\u201d\u00a0 means something else.\u00a0 It is no longer the ego of the suffering man job but the universal voice within him, which is God-Man.<\/p>\n Lecture 19.\u00a0 February 24, 1948<\/strong><\/p>\n THE SEARCH FOR WISDOM<\/span><\/p>\n There are concentric spheres in the Book of Job. The inner sphere is a morality play with virtue and vice in argument with friends. From the deadlock of the argument to the end of Elihu\u2019s speech is another sphere. The still-wider concentric sphere is that of a divine comedy\u2014God watching Job and then restores him.\u00a0 There are ironic overtones to the \u201ctragic\u201d story.<\/p>\n The same concentric pattern is in the life of Jesus.\u00a0 The active Jesus, the teacher and healer, is the kernel of the story.\u00a0 His tragedy is another sphere.\u00a0 Then comes the divine comedy of redemption.\u00a0 King Lear<\/em> is a morality play at heart with the good people against the bad.\u00a0 Outside that is tragedy which is not moral because Cordelia dies.\u00a0 Around that is the adumbration of the comedy, of a man who attempted to find divinity in kingship but finds it only in suffering humanity.<\/p>\n In the last chapter, verse 8, Job becomes the redeemer of his friends.\u00a0 \u201cAnd my servant Job will pray for you.\u201d\u00a0 But Job has suffered too much for the restoration of his flocks and children to be the answer to his problem.\u00a0\u00a0 Job\u2019s is a personal search for wisdom.<\/p>\n What the restoration of his children represent are the symbols of that new wisdom.<\/p>\n In the Old Testament, the histories focus on a king.\u00a0 In the prophecies, they focus on the watcher as opposed to the doer of the New Testament.\u00a0 Job is the third division of the Old Testament, the Wisdom books, like Solomon, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.\u00a0 What takes place is a personal form of wisdom.<\/p>\n Comedy will not come with restoration.\u00a0 Too much has happened.\u00a0 God is too responsible.\u00a0 Job is not hankering after his goods and children but the reality of which they are symbols; this he identifies with wisdom.\u00a0 He begins the search for wisdom with \u201cwhy did God do this to me?\u201d\u00a0 This expands into \u201cwhat is God?\u201d\u00a0 The search for God is the search for wisdom.\u00a0 And God is inside Job.<\/p>\n In Chapter 10, God describes Behemoth and in Chapter 14, Leviathan.\u00a0 The chief point is this description is the phrase \u201che is king over all the children of pride.\u201d\u00a0 Why is this so significant? Why does it enlighten Job so that he says \u201cnow<\/span> my eye sees<\/em> thee.\u201d\u00a0 We would expect God to lead him to Satan, but he leads him to Leviathan.\u00a0 Satan and Leviathan are the same person.\u00a0 Satan stands for the tyranny of nature and man.\u00a0 Job sees the form of his tragedy as a monster, that is, now he can see it because he has been coughed out of the belly of Leviathan.<\/p>\n Job is detached from a world of the tyranny of man and nature.\u00a0 He has found a new centre of balance in a spiritual world where God is, which is inside himself. \u00a0He no longer lives in the moral world of the conflict of good and evil.\u00a0 The world he is in has only heaven and hell, a personal God who is human against a monster which is evil, that is, Satan.<\/p>\n Man has two alternatives.\u00a0 He can be caught up in the body of God or swallowed by Leviathan.\u00a0 What you see of Job in this world no longer matters, whether he is restored to prosperity or sitting on a dunghill like Ezekiel.\u00a0 Ezekiel 28:14:<\/p>\n Thou art the appointed cherub that covereth; and I have set thee so; thou wast on the holy mountain of God; thou walkest up and down in the midst of the stones of fire.<\/p>\n Ezekiel 29: 3-4:<\/p>\n Pharaoh king of Egypt, the great dragon that lieth in the midst of his rivers, which hath said, My river is mine own, and I have made it for myself.<\/p>\n But I will put a hook in thy jaws, and I will cause the fish of thy rivers to stick unto thy scales, and I will bring thee out of the midst of thy rivers, and all the fish of thy rivers shall stick unto thy scales.<\/p>\n There is a link with Genesis 3:24, describing the Covering Cherub who guards paradise, and who is also associated with the King of Trye.\u00a0 They both prevent man from returning to paradise.\u00a0 Job can see these monsters because he\u2019s pushing them aside on his way to the unfallen state of man.<\/p>\n God\u2019s description of Leviathan is full of humor and zest, as if he was the biggest pet in God\u2019s zoo.\u00a0 God asks Job, where were you when the world was created.\u00a0 Job\u2019s answer is to see, not to make the world but to get free of it.<\/p>\n The advance of knowledge is a letting go of the world.\u00a0 The panicky desire to come to grips with knowledge is like fighting a dragon too big for yourself.\u00a0 You must find the centre of reality in yourself, not of yourself, so you can relax.\u00a0 Detach yourself from the pursuit of knowledge and you\u2019ll find it.\u00a0 The true philosophic gesture is to throw your head back to get your brains free; remove yourself from the problem order to see it, like climbing a tree in order to see the landscape.<\/p>\n When I say that God is in Job and therefore wisdom is in Job, I don\u2019t mean the egocentric Self because the ego never understands anything; it only uses.\u00a0 When you understand something you are surrounded by it.\u00a0 It is in you but at the same time it is the circumference.\u00a0 Something you understand takes a shape of its own although it is in your mind.\u00a0 The study of mathematics shows you the pattern and shape of science but you still contain that in your mind.<\/p>\n Lecture 20.\u00a0 March, 2, 1948<\/strong><\/p>\n THE WISDOM LITERATURE<\/span><\/p>\n The Book of Job is like a Platonic dialogue in that out of it emerges a form; out of the conflict of ideas arises something like a dialectic.\u00a0 Job\u2019s task is to find wisdom. His story is an intellectualized romance, a quest which is realized in human form.<\/p>\n The conception of wisdom in the Old Testament is Egyptian as much as anything else because the Hebrews took from it their idea of practical wisdom.\u00a0 The Egyptians have little literature but what we have of it is the practical kind of wisdom of making your own way in the world.\u00a0 The Jews regarded the Egyptians much as Christians regard Judaism: we have escaped from its bondage but we can still see its spiritual form.<\/p>\n The Jewish wisdom books at first were like the Egyptian: little sayings about the wisdom of following tried and tested ways. The Book of Proverbs has many of these ancestral sayings.\u00a0 Under the influence of the prophets the emphasis upon pagan wisdom changed. \u00a0Job and Ecclesiastes are full-fledged wisdom literature.<\/p>\n The Apocrypha contains the Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiastica, and the Book of Esdras.\u00a0 It says something for the ecstatic stupidity of the Protestant canon that it excluded these books because they were not written in Hebrew, but in Greek and Latin.\u00a0 It is impossible to understand the Bible without the Apocrypha.\u00a0 Its books are of central importance, as Job is, both to the Bible and to literature. \u00a0St. Jerome followed the Hebrew tradition, but he got it in the Bible.<\/p>\n Ecclesiastes is somewhat obscure and easily misunderstood. \u00a0The author is a Hebrew Montaigne and like him easily typed, inaccurately.\u00a0 Like Montaigne, he is labelled a sceptic, wrongly, because both Montaigne and the author of Ecclesiastes were showing the limits of sceptism.\u00a0 In the 19th century when pessimism was fashionable, Ecclesiastes was quoted as a pioneer of scepticism. Schopenhauer was read widely then, too; or, rather, was quoted widely.\u00a0 Both pessimism and optimism are attempts to find a formula, and the author of Ecclesiastes is too shrewd to fall into the trap of a formula.<\/p>\n The problem here, in many ways, is subtler than Job\u2019s.\u00a0 The author is a good man, too, etc. etc.\u00a0 Then comes a sudden breakdown in motivation.\u00a0 In medieval times the word for it is accidia<\/em>; in Elizabethan, melancholy<\/em>; for Baudelaire, ennui<\/em>; and for Blake, the Selfhood<\/em>.\u00a0 It is the feeling: what is the use of it all?<\/p>\n The sudden collapse of one\u2019s sense of motive is very contemporary.\u00a0 Existentialism is a commentary on Ecclesiastes, a search for the unmotivated act; to act in such a way as to eliminate choice between this action and that.\u00a0 In Ecclesiastes, there is this sense of collapse of moral values.\u00a0 What is the value of doing this rather than that?<\/p>\n The basis of existence is, naturally, man himself.\u00a0 A philosopher is always assigning undue place to man\u2019s reason and consciousness.\u00a0 For the poet, man is imaginative; for the statesman and economist, man is active man, attaching much importance to the voluntary, to the will.\u00a0 There is a tendency to interpret man in terms of one thing that he is.\u00a0 Descartes said that man exists because he is thinking man.\u00a0 But how many people are consciously thinking?\u00a0 A great philosopher may spend about four percent of his time thinking.<\/p>\n The focus must narrow fundamentally to the fact that man is. That is what oppresses the writer of Ecclesiastes.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t matter if the fool isn\u2019t being a real man; he exists, as does the wise man.\u00a0 What is implied in the fact of existence is life and death.\u00a0 Existence is not life but a<\/span> life.\u00a0 The basis of all philosophy, poetry, religion and economics is man squeezed between the barrow limit of birth and death.<\/p>\n The feeling here is one of dread.\u00a0 It is not fear, for that implies fear of<\/span> something.\u00a0 This is the fundamental character of human existence.\u00a0 Dread may turn into fear, fear of death, for example.\u00a0 This is the basis of the existentialist movement today, which is crawling over the pages of every magazine you pick up. It is the Americans who have taken up this movement.\u00a0 The rise of Nazism had convinced people that we know absolutely nothing about the human mind.\u00a0 Reasonable ideas about the mind and American middle-class bourgeois psychology aren\u2019t going to help, either.<\/p>\n MAN IS. THEREFORE HE DREADS<\/span><\/p>\n Ecclesiastes isn\u2019t a tired book.\u00a0 There is terrific energy in it.\u00a0 The point: Man is, therefore he dreads.\u00a0 This breakdown of motivation, loss of usefulness in life, is a paralysis of activity by the uselessness of it all.\u00a0 This is the manifestation of dread of life which is always there.\u00a0 You are unable to focus your mind because there\u2019s no place on which to focus it.\u00a0 In that state, we see the world as the writer of Ecclesiastes sees it, as vanity and vexation of spirit.\u00a0 Dread, when pursued long enough, is dread of death.\u00a0 You see how close Montaigne is to existentialist philosophy in his statement:\u00a0 The aim of philosophy is to know how to die.<\/p>\n You all know the feeling when you have a completely free evening and you don\u2019t do anything but wander around.\u00a0 You feel trapped in limitless expansion; you have a persistent sense of dread.\u00a0 It can be channelled into work but the force of dread is always there.\u00a0 Nothing can remove it.\u00a0 The sudden feeling of tears for no reason; you make yourself miserable, oppressed, by the fact of your own existence.\u00a0 Dread excites the panic which prompts the search for distraction, novelty.\u00a0 People who are free can relax and sit by themselves, even though the dread is still there.\u00a0 Those who let dread haunt them can\u2019t be alone.<\/p>\n Dread is above religious or atheistic feelings because it is inherent in the fact of existence.\u00a0 Anyone with atheistic tendencies can channel it into a revolutionary belief and into a force against something, like society, the bourgeois, etc.\u00a0 A person with religious tendencies, when aware of dread, may have the feeling of fear of God.\u00a0 If dread if a fear of something it may be removed, like fear of economic security, of parents, etc.\u00a0 But the dread is still there.<\/p>\n For the existentialist, man lives; therefore he dreads.\u00a0 The ability to distract oneself is still motivated by dread.\u00a0 A hobby is a pernicious thing if only taken up to pass time.\u00a0 Man is the only being who can have dread because he is conscious of it.\u00a0 Yet I am sure it is in animals, too.\u00a0 This dread could also be a dread of life, which is just as common as dread of death.\u00a0 The Nazi state focused dread into a concrete form\u2014fear of life is more concrete than fear of death.\u00a0 The Nazis weren\u2019t afraid to die<\/span>.<\/p>\n The sense of dread results in a feeling of discontent; the sense of finiteness.\u00a0 It is not so much a fear of life or death but the ticking of the clock reminding one of the finiteness of life.\u00a0 Whenever we start studying or doing something worthwhile, we know we are tackling a job that will outlast our lifetime.\u00a0 This is the state of mind which psychology cannot reach.\u00a0 This is what the theologians mean by sin and guilt: man\u2019s sense of finiteness.\u00a0 It goes beyond the moral sense of \u201cI have done wrong\u201d to \u201cI have not done much.\u201d<\/p>\n Religion heightens the feeling of dread.\u00a0 To see finite life in relation to eternal life is appalling, like an eternity of evenings at home with nothing to do.\u00a0 We can\u2019t relax in that state.\u00a0 Religion has an answer\u2014we\u2019re coming to that!\u00a0 Any respectable religion worthy of the name has within it the awareness of this inherent sense of dread.\u00a0 But the dread exists whether one is religious or not.<\/p>\n Kierkegaard, the existentialist philosopher, was a deeply religious man; yet existentialism has used his philosophy.\u00a0 The author of Ecclesiastes is a religious man, yet Hardy uses him to express deepest feelings of Nihilism.<\/p>\n Lecture 21.\u00a0 March 9, 1948<\/strong><\/p>\n The sense of dread is not religious melancholy.\u00a0 It might appear in a religious or atheistic person\u2019s experience.\u00a0 Ecclesiastes is not a religious book, some feel.\u00a0 Without this feeling of dread there is no realistic or wise life.\u00a0 This is the basis of intelligence and of consciousness.\u00a0 If the book was not in a biblical context it could be looked upon as non-religious.<\/p>\n The book belongs to the Wisdom Literature.\u00a0 The author knows there are two solutions, neither of which are good.\u00a0 Do not be overly righteous (Pharisee) or overly sceptical (Sadducee).\u00a0 He is not a sceptic, but a realist.\u00a0 There is something \u201coriental\u201d in this book, like Buddhism.\u00a0 Oriental literature is saying the same thing, and it requires a mental discipline to read it.<\/p>\n The Preacher\u2019s \u201cvanity\u201d is emptiness, or \u201cvoid\u201d as in Buddhism. \u00a0It doesn\u2019t mean things aren\u2019t there.\u00a0 The Buddhist attitude is that there are two forms of illusion, attraction and repulsion, to good and away from evil.\u00a0 But this doesn\u2019t work because both good and evil are degraded knowledge and therefore aren\u2019t knowledge at all. \u00a0To find reality, we must avoid illusions of moral varnishing.\u00a0 Life is not a moral doctrine.\u00a0 Knowledge of good and evil is fallen knowledge.\u00a0 One should become detached from all things, good and evil.\u00a0 In this detachment, all things are empty or moral content.<\/p>\n Job discovers his problem is not a moral one.\u00a0 There is something illusory about the life in which he thought he was allied with the power of good.\u00a0 The first step of detachment is that things don\u2019t make moral sense. You have a vision of the senselessness, the emptiness, of all the things you see around you.\u00a0 The starting point of consciousness is the consciousness of dread; existence is the narrow limit between birth and death.<\/p>\n The problem is also cosmological.\u00a0 You feel there is an objective mattress \u201cout there\u201d for consciousness to sleep on. \u00a0The feeling that there is something objective and beyond us. \u00a0You don\u2019t feel a mystical confidence in the world \u201cout there.\u201d\u00a0 Wisdom doesn\u2019t trust itself to anything outside itself. \u00a0Wisdom is not external, mysterious, and unknown.\u00a0 The pursuit of reality outside oneself ends in mystery.\u00a0 Are we to assume that nothing exists outside yourself? \u00a0You must avoid the sceptical attitude that you are the only real subject matter, alone and an individual.\u00a0 That leads to the \u201cI am captain of my soul\u201d bilge. \u00a0You must also avoid an objective belief in \u201cout there.\u201d<\/p>\n Ecclesiastes points out that there is something the matter with the religious life which seeks validity outside itself, like people who try to buoy up their religious faith by taking vows. There are converts who must attach themselves to something. \u00a0You don\u2019t run around and find external compulsion.\u00a0 Wisdom isn\u2019t in any place.\u00a0 As you grow, you catch the rhythm of existence. \u00a0You can\u2019t reduce life to a formula.\u00a0 \u201cThere is a time for life, a time for hate . . . .\u201d<\/p>\n THE REALITY OF THE HERE AND NOW<\/span><\/p>\n If you look outside yourself, you see neither flux nor permanence.\u00a0 You see a combination of being and becoming.\u00a0 The law of recurrence shows that things go away and return.\u00a0 This doctrine of recurrence enables you to see the rhythm.\u00a0 This brings you close to the datum of experience; man is a moving point between birth and death.\u00a0 Dread itself is a recurrence,<\/p>\n \u201cMan is, therefore he dreads\u201d equals the symbol of the wheel.\u00a0 Consciousness of renewal is the starting point of wisdom.\u00a0 The vision of formlessness takes on a concrete form.\u00a0 Once you see that you are part of the unconscious machinery you are trying to fight, you give up trying to fight.<\/p>\n But to learn how to die is the see yourself in the eternal recurrence which is neither being nor becoming.\u00a0 The wise man has got to a point where he can look down and see his own life going through the pattern of life and death.\u00a0 The fallacy of withdrawing from life\u2014this is the giving in to the illusion of the non-reality of things.\u00a0 The hermit attempts to order things on the assumption that all things are an illusion, which is in itself an illusion.<\/p>\n We must live in a world of good and evil and remain spiritually detached.\u00a0 The whole perspective is that of choice.\u00a0 Frye is contemptuous of those who chase an external reality\u2014\u201csomeday we\u2019ll understand\u201d and \u201clet\u2019s wait and see and it will all be cleared up when we are dead.\u201d\u00a0 If you postpone the consciousness of eternity until you are dead you\u2019ll never get it.\u00a0 You carry your own solitude with you.\u00a0 Eternity is not in the future, but is the reality of the Here and Now.\u00a0 It is not something seen in terms of progress but recurrence.<\/p>\n Lecture 22.\u00a0 March 16, 1948<\/strong><\/p>\n TWO PLANES OF REALITY<\/span><\/p>\n In Wisdom literature there is the figure of the monster who must be overcome.\u00a0 Job is presented with them.\u00a0 There are two planes of reality: one makes sense and one doesn\u2019t\u2014that\u2019s the one we are living in.\u00a0 The world we are in is associated with the monster, a world without conscious intelligence and purpose.<\/p>\n For the 18th century, the intricacy of the natural law argued a conscious creator.\u00a0 The 19th century blew it up.\u00a0 The law of nature is a subtle affair, but consciousness or morality of purpose is not there.\u00a0 A God inferred from nature is a pretty stupid God.\u00a0 You can\u2019t postulate intelligence from the world we see.\u00a0 The Bible discourages us from trying to advance arguments which make God a logical inference from chaotic nature.\u00a0 Man is conscious of the world\u2019s size and indifference to human values.\u00a0 Man is conscious of being imprisoned within a monstrous body.<\/p>\n The other plane of reality, which makes more sense, uses symbols derived from man\u2019s fight against nature\u2013\u2013man in nature, in the wilderness, in the forest, the desert, the prairie.\u00a0 Man evolves there the farm, the garden, the park.\u00a0 That sort of symbol is used.\u00a0 A world humanly ordered makes sense.\u00a0 Paradise means park.\u00a0 The symbol of the city is a human palisade of conscious and intelligent ideas in a world of man against nature.<\/p>\n The higher plane of existence is not a mental or spectral order, but is portrayed by certain symbols. Also, the sea, which is associated with Leviathan.\u00a0 The river is the necessity of human existence, live water circulating within a body like the bloodstream.\u00a0 The other plane of existence is life inside a body, as this world is life inside the body of Leviathan.\u00a0 The former is a conscious, purposeful human body.\u00a0 The other is a stupid, monstrous body.<\/p>\n The two forms of reality show us a human, universal body and a monstrous and chaotic body.\u00a0 Reality is not a place but a state of existence.\u00a0 Job eventually discovered the natural world in terms of Leviathan.\u00a0 He started off within the monster.\u00a0 His story is like that of Jonah.<\/p>\n There are two forms of existence:<\/p>\n 1) Inside the human body (which is our own) and which ends up as the universal form of the<\/p>\n city and the garden;<\/p>\n 2) Perpetual imprisonment of the monstrous body of nature.<\/p>\n Natural law is the development of mental and spiritual values.\u00a0 Man\u2019s development from this is to human law, building up from an ordered and predictable nature his own law.\u00a0 Scientific knowledge is a phase in the evolution of the human spirit.\u00a0 It is not the knowledge of God.\u00a0 God is not at the end of wisdom.\u00a0 The progress of science will not bring the world nearer to God, although it might bring an individual nearer to him.<\/p>\n In a flight from the body into the spiritual you are betraying reality.\u00a0 Man constantly tries to realize in bodily form the body of his spiritual values.\u00a0 The Word becomes Flesh and dwells among us.\u00a0 The New Testament presents enlightenment in terms of the future.\u00a0 Christianity does not give light, but it presents a crisis by which you can see the light, the potential infinite in man.<\/p>\n Death is potential evolution.\u00a0 Death is a means of adjusting one\u2019s body to a different state of affairs.\u00a0 Physical death is part of the evolution of the spirit.\u00a0 In death you get a more sensible idea of time and space.\u00a0 The time-and-space world is bewildering and unreal, a world of indefiniteness.\u00a0 Yet, all of our conscious life is concerned with form and limiting.\u00a0 You can\u2019t find a Here and Now in this world in which the present is a continual moving point.\u00a0 The way to visualize the real Here and Now is as infinity and eternity.<\/p>\n This is what is revealed in the Bible: two planes of existence.\u00a0 The reality that dawns upon us is a familiar one, the home, the human body.\u00a0 For Jesus, no one goes to heaven; you are already there if you are aware of it, and you work from there. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 You don\u2019t have to die to get from one plane of existence to another.\u00a0 If you do wait, you\u2019ll never get there.<\/p>\n The people who look for revelation are those who knock at the door, and it will be opened to them.\u00a0 The child has this simplicity of mind; she is content to listen to stories, to take in symbols, has an active and alert mind, not the glossed-over mind of the sophisticate.<\/p>\n Revelation goes beyond good and evil.\u00a0 There is a form of knowledge which is forbidden knowledge because it is degraded. The part of the artist that survives is the body of his work and is his eternal body.<\/p>\n Lecture 23.\u00a0 March 23, 1948<\/strong><\/p>\n APOCALYTIC LITERATURE<\/span><\/p>\n Apocalyptic literature is very late and is contemporary with Jesus.\u00a0 The Book of Daniel and Revelation are the most important. \u00a0The others are Second Esdras and Enoch.\u00a0 These are pseudo-biographia, ascribed to people tho could not possibly have written them. \u00a0Apocalyptic literature is often written to evade the censors. \u00a0This is true of the Revelation of St. John the Divine, in the sense that it attacks Caesar.<\/p>\n The Apocalypse grew out of literature that is suspect and therefore represents free and uncontrolled vision. The impetus to apocalyptical literature is given by two contradictory things:<\/p>\n 1.\u00a0 The rise to prosperity of the Jewish people under the Maccabees, and the imminent<\/p>\n coming of the Kingdom of God. Many Messiahs tried to rebel against the Romans.\u00a0 In 70 A.D. the Romans razed Jerusalem.\u00a0 The conception of the rebuilt temple, the coming glory of Israel haunts a great deal of the Old Testament, some of the Psalms and Daniel.\u00a0 The 100th Psalm hints at the \u201clast days.\u201d<\/p>\n 2. The spiritualizing of the conception of the temple and of the king.\u00a0 In origin, this was<\/p>\n attached to physical things.\u00a0 Around the time of Christ, there was a tendency to spiritualize things.\u00a0 The Nativity in Luke, and the Magnificat, etc., are stories that crystallize from the popular consciousness.<\/p>\n In the New Testament, the apocalyptic tone is there in the whispered hush, the waiting for the complete clarification of vision\u2013\u2013\u201cthe time is at hand.\u201d\u00a0 Jesus is born into a period in which certain conceptions are made mental and spiritual realities.\u00a0 Jesus annihilates the physical counterparts.\u00a0 He brings the reality of the idea, not the physical.\u00a0 The physical temple will be destroyed; the real temple of Jesus\u2019 body takes its place.<\/p>\n The author of Revelation is working along the same line. \u00a0His central figure seems <\/span>to have no relation to the Jesus of the Gospels.\u00a0 It is worked out with immense care, everything taken from the early prophecies and welded into a unity.\u00a0 The four beasts are from Ezekiel; Babylon and the broken cup from Jeremiah and Daniel.<\/p>\n The book is called Revelation.\u00a0 What is revealed is the unfallen world of mental and spiritual reality which has a human form, not a monstrous one.\u00a0 The Holy Scripture of this world is almost wild allegory, you don\u2019t get a clear impression of what\u2019s going on.\u00a0 It is a curious example of the type of writing like Finnegans Wake<\/em>\u2014we see the point of such as experiment\u2014to clarify vision. Gertrude Stein does it to break down the customary association of words.<\/p>\n This New Testament book is overpoweringly child-like; a child trying to tell a story about the purple elephant in the backyard and the great big gleaming city full of precious stones, with a big witch in the middle of it.\u00a0 The book has elements of the child\u2011like vision: the simple mind of the child who will listen to a story.<\/p>\n The book seems deliberately written to baffle those who want a logical story.\u00a0 The villain is the Whore of Babylon\u2014Mystery\u2014and yet most people regard it as one of the most mysterious books in the Bible.\u00a0 Chapter 7 is like a child\u2019s map of the four angels holding the winds of the earth.\u00a0 The children of Israel are one body.\u00a0 Israel is Jacob and the twelve children are the twelve tribes.\u00a0 Jesus is a spiritual Israel, with twelve apostles united in one body.\u00a0 The number 144 means the allegory is based in twelve.\u00a0 A thousand merely means a great many.\u00a0 It is pre-American; now he would have used millions!<\/p>\n In Chapter 2, the real temple is the God-Man.\u00a0 The cleansing of the temple is the casting out of the devils from the human soul, the temporary triumph of the power of evil.\u00a0 The real meaning of this is the fallen city of this world\u2014Sodom, Egypt, Jerusalem, Babylon, Rome, Tyre, etc.\u00a0 Verse 6: Moses and Elijah, the law and the prophet, the past and the future in the eternal present of the body of God.\u00a0 The tree is the real thing of which the three corpses are the parody.\u00a0 Zechariah 4 is the origin of the two witnesses, Moses and Elijah, the two olive trees, candlestick with seven lamps, etc. (Rev. 11:3-4.)<\/p>\n Lecture 24. \u00a0March 30, 1948<\/strong><\/p>\n FORM OF THE UNFALLEN WORLD<\/span><\/p>\n The symbols of the fallen world are scattered, but the unfallen one makes up one form.\u00a0 Man must impose a human pattern on the natural world.\u00a0 Out of the mineral world he builds a house; the city is the human form of the mineral world.\u00a0 Out of the vegetable world<\/p>\n he makes a garden, etc.<\/p>\n Divine\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 God\u2019s body<\/p>\n Human\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Human body\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Spiritual body: one man, human and divine. . j<\/p>\n Animal\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Domesticated animals\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 the Lamb<\/p>\n Mineral\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 City & temple\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 made of living<\/span> stones<\/p>\n The unfallen existence is a continuous dwelling of fire.\u00a0 This is not the fire of hell, but it is light and fire.\u00a0 Hell is heat without light imprisoned within the furnace of the body of Leviathan.\u00a0\u00a0 Christians are spoken of as stones of the church, the \u201cliving stones who cry out.\u201d\u00a0 Jesus is the cornerstone of the temple.\u00a0 The stones of the New Jerusalem shine with their own light.<\/p>\n The tree of life is a body, the water of life is the circulatory system, blood and water, which flowed from Jesus\u2019 side. The tree is the erect vertebrae of this body.\u00a0 It is the burning tree, a burning bush which is not consumed.\u00a0 Dante\u2019s red tree is the mystic rose, the culmination of his vision, and it is cross-shaped.\u00a0 The tree is the living form of which the cross is the dead form.\u00a0 The Lamb is the innocence of the unfallen world.\u00a0 Daniel 3: the fiery furnace, and yet the men in it are not consumed.<\/p>\n Our categories in this world are time and space, which are indefinite.\u00a0 The un\u2011commonsense of the unfallen world demands that you become the circumference of vision, not the egotistical centre. The religious perspective of reality is that there is only one human being, one human body.\u00a0 When two people are together they feel they are beating against prison bars because there is really only one human body.<\/p>\n We must achieve annihilation of Self.\u00a0 Rimbaud says, \u201cJe, c\u2019est un autre.\u201d\u00a0 There are two people inside us.\u00a0 One is the kicking, squalling ego; the other one has the sense of objectivity.\u00a0 The lunatic is the man who has looked inside himself: he becomes the circumference, but he loses the opening; something is sealed up. \u00a0We must control the imaginative vision.\u00a0 The genius has everything in common with the neurotic, except his neurosis.\u00a0 He may have it, but it is controlled and directed.<\/p>\n The fallen vision of the world, the commonsense one, becomes a vision of eternal recurrence, wheels and wheels.\u00a0 The doctrine of eternal recurrence is that of being imprisoned within time and space.\u00a0 Christian immortality is the real Here and Now.\u00a0 It is not a place in time.\u00a0 You can only grasp the nature of it by seeing things in nature as a single human form.\u00a0 This recurrence produces the inverted religion which is the first opposite to Christ-\u2014the dead lamb on a dead tree and a dead stone against his tomb.<\/p>\n The enemies of religion feel that the death of the man is the death of the god.\u00a0 The dying and reviving god of winter and spring is Christ in time, Christ imprisoned in the body of death, the Adonais of cyclic nature who demanded animal sacrifice.<\/p>\n The man of action without vision is caught in a squirrel cage; what he does only contributes to the cycle.\u00a0 Caiaphas says \u201cone man must die for the people,\u201d that is, the wheel of sacrifice must be kept going.\u00a0\u00a0 Christ on the cross is the most obvious form of the cyclic sacrifice: the flogged, naked, crucified Jewish wretch. \u00a0The more anti-Christian a society becomes, it seizes on this as a symbol.\u00a0 The Nazis selected the anti-Christ as a symbol and quite rightly chose the twisted wheel.<\/p>\n The dead God is what man does to God.\u00a0 The dead Christ represents the complete form of Caliphs and Pilate, which is commonsense religion.\u00a0 Jesus assumes this character in order to consolidate error, to show what the opposite of Christianity is.\u00a0 There are symbolic patterns in the Bible, and it doesn\u2019t matter if they are conscious or not.<\/p>\n The Nazi life was one of sleepwalking in which the dream is life in terms of unconscious habits and rituals.\u00a0 Hitler knew he was one form of anti-Christ; he accepted that role deliberately. People of goodwill cannot understand what a lost soul is.\u00a0 They cannot understand that the Nazis knew what they were doing and liked it.<\/p>\n The martyr is the watcher whose vision is focused on another vision of reality.\u00a0 The real martyr sees the divine in the human body.\u00a0 It all depends on what you see.\u00a0 You do not lose individuality in the larger spiritual body; you merely lose the Ego.\u00a0 Rebecca West, in her book on the Nuremberg trials, The Meaning of Treason<\/em>, describes the lost soul.\u00a0 A dead man is not terrifying, but a man who casts his vote for eternal death is terrifying.\u00a0 The opposing principle cannot be wiped out by the death principle.<\/p>\n The Nazis were terrified of winning.\u00a0 They wouldn\u2019t know what to do with victory because they were organized for death.\u00a0 That is what made them dizzy, the dizziness of the temptation upon the pinnacle in Paradise Regained<\/em>.\u00a0 There is a balance, a permanent reality of the spiritual body.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 1.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0Margaret Gayfer and Richard Stingle\u2019s Notes for Frye\u2019s Religious Knowledge Course, 1947\u201348 Course notes for twenty\u2011four lectures compiled by Margaret Gayfer from her class notes, incorporating some notes by Richard Stingle.\u00a0 The notes are repetitive in places because they are assembled from two sets.\u00a0 They also include some of Frye\u2019s answers to questions, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"class_list":["post-19496","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\n