http://www.leithart.com Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:37:40 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en RPC Hanson notes an "ingenious" application of the euhemerist theory that the pagan gods originated from human beings: The god Separis "who was represented as having a bushel for a headdress, was in reality the patriarch Joseph whom the supertitious Egyptians had deified after his death out of gratitude for ... http://www.leithart.com/2009/06/30/euhemerist-typology/ A footnote to From Silence to Song. In Hezekiah’s rededication ceremony, the Levites play instruments and sing during the ascension offering (2 Chronicles 29:25-30). Their offerings ascend with song; they ascend in song. Alongside the smoke from the animal, they offer up prayers and an offering of praise. Mingled with the ... http://www.leithart.com/2009/06/28/ascension-in-song/ 1 Corinthians 10:16-17: Is not the cup of blessing which we bless a sharing in the blood of Christ? Is not the loaf which we break a sharing in the body of Christ? Since there is one loaf, we who are many are one body; for we all partake of ... http://www.leithart.com/2009/06/28/eucharistic-meditation-48/ Words are central to human relationships. We can see only the outside of other people, but words bring out things from within. But relationships are not just words, but an exchange of words, offering our words and getting words back, giving and receiving words. A one-sided conversation is no conversation. ... http://www.leithart.com/2009/06/28/exhortation-43/ It was an ancient axiom that truth comes before error.  "The real thing always exists before the representation of it," Tertullian wrote, "the copy comes later."  This means "truth comes first and falsification afterwards." The "always" in first statement is self-evidently false; the reality is frequently the opposite.  In some cases, ... http://www.leithart.com/2009/06/27/truth-and-error/ And another thing: Who could believe that you could make a movie that is not just watchable but deeply engaging with basically two people, one of whom says nothing?  What kind of artistic chutzpah does it take to try to wring drama out of a 2-hour monologue?  What kind of ... http://www.leithart.com/2009/06/27/persona-again/ Ingmar Bergman's 1966 Persona is brilliant cinematic philosophy.  Elisabet, an actress, becomes confused during a performance and falls silent.  Her psychiatrist gives this diagnosis: She got tired of playing roles, putting on masks, and knew that every word she spoke involved some sort of performance.  So she stopped speaking.  But ... http://www.leithart.com/2009/06/27/persona/ Is it fair to use the sequence of offerings in Leviticus 8 and Numbers 6 as models for Christian worship?  After all, these two texts are specialized - the "filling" ceremony for the priests and the rededication of a Nazirite. When we find the same sequence in Chronicles, it's also for ... http://www.leithart.com/2009/06/27/feast-of-rededication/ Carlin Barton closes a brilliant article comparing concepts of honor, sacrifice, and sacramentum found among martyrs and gladiators with some observations on the wider cultural import of her work.  One of her main aims is to overcome the perception that Christians and Romans were working in completely separate symbolic universes, ... http://www.leithart.com/2009/06/26/savage-miracles/ Yoder argues that from the time of the Babylonian captivity, the Jews developed a proto-"free church" model of community life.  True in some respects.  Jews didn't have their own polity.  But I've got doubts if that's a fair characterization of Jews in and after the exile. Why? The Bible for starters. ... http://www.leithart.com/2009/06/26/hebrew-and-hellenist/ Maximilian of Tebessa is often cited as an example of early Christian pacifism.  When Roman officials pressured him to accept a military seal and swear the sacramentum by reminding him that other Christians served without qualms, he still refued, saying "They know what is expedient for them; but I am ... http://www.leithart.com/2009/06/26/maximilian-the-martyr/ Warwick Ball's Rome in the East is a treasure trove.  Instead of telling the story of Rome from an occidental standpoint, he goes east and looks back.  What does Roman history look like from Arabia, Syria, Edessa, India?  One of his remarkable conclusions is that before the triumph of the ... http://www.leithart.com/2009/06/26/orientalizing-revolution/ In reaction to the lax respectability of the majority church, many hardy souls retreated to the desert or the frontier.  So the story goes. Only the monastery was another form of cultural conformity.  RA Markus (The End of Ancient Christianity) says that "the ideal of the philosophical life was among the ... http://www.leithart.com/2009/06/25/monastic-conformism/ Florence Dupont points out in her Daily Life in Ancient Rome that in Latin enemy (hostis) andguest (hospes) "were formed from the same root, which had the meaning 'the other who is similar to you.'" http://www.leithart.com/2009/06/25/linguistic-girardianism/ In her study of Roman gladiatorial combat and arenas (Blood in the Arena: The Spectacle of Roman Power) Alison Futrell describes the Phoenician practice of human sacrifice transplanted to Carthage: "The young victim was placed in the arms of the bronze image of Ba'al Hammon, arms that sloped downward toward ... http://www.leithart.com/2009/06/24/carthaginian-tophet/ Hippolytus tells the story that Apsethus of Libya trained parrots to fly over North Africa crying out "Apsethus is a god," and Libyans were taken in and began to offer sacrifices to him. Then a "clever Greek" caught one of the parrots, and retrained it to cry out: "Apsethus, having caged ... http://www.leithart.com/2009/06/24/apsethus-the-god/ In his encyclopedic Later Roman Empire, A. H. M. Jones explains that the church after Constantine failed to transform ordinary social behavior and culture not because it was too lax but because it was too rigorist.  Ordinary Christians felt they couldn't live up to the standards, and responded by delaying ... http://www.leithart.com/2009/06/24/failure-of-the-church/ Michael Hollerich, who has done some superb revisionist work on Eusebius of Caesarea, explains in a 1990 article from Church History that Eusebius employed a "similar situation" form of typology that focuses on similarities rather than differences between type and antitype, and draws out the similarities in great detail.  He ... http://www.leithart.com/2009/06/24/moses-and-christ/ Milbank, discussing the possibility of educative coercion: "although Christianity . . . certainly requires in the end free consent to the truth, it does not fetishize this freedom merely as a correct mode of approach: truth is what most matters, and moreover a collective commitment to truth, since truth itself ... http://www.leithart.com/2009/06/22/truth-and-freedom/ Milbank notes that "science and art have always first mimed the horrors to come."  Darwinian evolution and avant-garde prepared the way, for foreshadowed, twentieth-century horrors.  He asks, "what may the far more shocking interventions of 1990s art and science . . . betoken for the present century?' http://www.leithart.com/2009/06/22/what-rough-beast/