Philosophy

“The Idiot” by Fyodor Dostoevsky

I am wary of writing too much in this review lest I spoil  a wonderful read for those yet to become acquainted with it. And also because English Literature was the only O level that I failed, so I have a long held sense of inadequacy when it comes to writing about literature. Though I have of course read this book, which is more than can be said for the set texts of my O level syllabus.

The “Idiot” of the story is not so much an idiot as a rare case of a true innocent. Sent away at an early age to a sanatorium in Switzerland, Prince Myshkin has little to no knowledge of the social etiquette of his native Russian society. He is a man seemingly incapable of a dark thought or an evil deed. When he returns to Russia he knows no one and has nothing. Whilst he is immediately accepted into society he is nonetheless perceived as an idiot and a misfit, but the reader gets a sense that all the other characters in the book have far greater personal failings than that of Myshkin, whilst also being blind to their own idiocies. 

Myshkin, like Doestoevsky himself, suffers from epilepsy, which further singles him out as an oddball, but interestingly is also a life-saver at one point in the story (I see an exciting parallel with my own bipolar disorder (now thankfully under control with minimal input from medication), which I feel almost certainly saved my life in a very similar manner, which leads to interesting thoughts on illness as curse/blessing).

Myshkin becomes embroiled in a love triangle when he falls in love with Nastasya Filippovna after seeing her portrait. Nastsya is a complex character, a woman wronged and consequently damaged who seems incapable of restraining herself from a path of self destruction. She knows that she is capable of cruelty (though this is an acting out of her sense of  injustice over what has happened to her) and fears that she will be a corrupting influence on Myshkin. She is torn between allowing him to love her and her fear of dragging him under her dark influence. She sees Myshkin for what he is, a kind and good man, but cannot bring herself to trust that if she were to give herself to him then she could feel whole again (there are parallels here with people who feel unworthy of the love of Christ and see themselves as irredeemable).

Myskin’s rival, Parfyon Rogozhin, is deeply, madly, troublingly in love with Nastasya. He desires to have her so much that he discounts the fact that she openly does not love him. It is a blind love, the loving of the other being all-consuming.  

There is a secondary romance between two other characters which overlaps with the main triangle. Gavril Ardalionovitch was going to marry Nastasya despite not being in love with her, and Aglaia Ivanova stuggles with her feelings for Myshkin whilst knowing that Gavril is in love with her. 

There is an array of expertly described minor characters, all with interesting flaws. A vodka soaked pathological liar of a general provides some humour. A young nihilist dying of consumption who wishes to make his mark on the world before he departs provides some drama. A fawning verbose widower balances his dubious morality with his generous sociable nature.  They are a group of characters that, like them or not,  you would not feel bored by at a dinner party.

There are some big themes in this book, the nature of “goodness”, love in its different forms, religion, and death. The most disturbing aspect is that Myshkin’s character, as a good person, is shown to be incompatible with the society in which he has to live. He is routinely abused and mocked but is unfailingly compassionate and forgiving.

Dostoevsky introduces the concerns and topics of discussion of the day into the story. Written in 1868, one of these at least is decidedly modern. There is much talk of atheism. The “woman question” is alluded to on several occasions without being fully explained. Of course, if written and set a hundred years later, Nastasya’s situation would have been radically different. I am grateful that women today are not judged so harshly. Today it is easy to start again and leave your history behind, but then your reputation once tarnished was only salvaged (to an extent) by a good marriage. It is this sense of powerlessness that feeds Nastasya’s destructive tendencies.

The only thing I struggled with when reading this book was the Russian names. Everyone has at least three names (Myshkin’s full name being Prince Lyov Nikolayevitch Myshkin) which are used at different times in different situations. If I were to read the book for the first time knowing this I would make a note of these when they are introduced to save having to look back to check you know who is being talked about. The copy I have is the Wordsworth Classic that I got from Amazon for only £1.99. Other versions may have character lists in.

I thoroughly recommend that you read this book for yourself. I am sure it will be one of the very few books that I shall re-read. Right now though I have “The Brothers Karamazov” waiting for me.

The subtitle of the book is apt, since throughout its long and complex history the Bible has, in a sense, been regarded as a living text. Like the scriptures of all the major faiths, it has come to be seen as having an ontological status different from that of other documents; people have invested it with the weight of their aspirations, hopes and fears and have felt themselves, in return, introduced to something transcendental. It is important, however, to understand that the literal reading of it in all its component parts as the Word of God, inerrant and binding, is a relatively new phenomenon, dating back only to the 19^th century. Before the canons of the Old and New Testaments were finally established, the many writers and redactors did not hesitate to add new works or reinterpretations appropriate to their times, though they never eliminated or tried to reconcile the differences and contradictions in what had been written before. Likewise, the ways in which people read and interpreted the Bible have varied, changed and developed over time, and for the most part it was understood figuratively and intuitively.

The texts assembled, edited and expanded during the reign of Josiah and taken into exile in Babylon did not yet have the status of Scripture. But with the loss of the first temple and the homeland they gained added importance, and they were re-edited to account for the disaster of the Babylonian conquest and to suit the circumstances of the exiles. The Priestly (P) document, a revision of the E (Northern) and J (Southern) narratives, was added at this time, together with Numbers and Leviticus. The writings of Isaiah II, also of this date, contain the first unequivocal statement of monotheism and of the exclusiveness of the Israelites as a people.

Following the return from exile it was Ezra, sent by the Persian king with a mandate to establish the Mosaic Law as the law of the land, who was to establish the texts as Scripture and who, as a scholar and exegete, began to craft a spiritual discipline based on the sacred texts. His reading of the Torah marks the beginning of classical Judaism, seeing revelation through study of the scriptures as an on-going process. During this period other writings were added to the existing scriptural categories of the Torah and the Prophets, including Chronicles, which was essentially a commentary on the Deuteronomic texts omitting the polemic against the Northern kingdom, and the ‘Wisdom’ writings (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs and Job).

The Greek conquest of the Persian empire in 333 BCE introduced Hellenism to the Near East. Some Jews were drawn to Greek ideas, but a more conservative element was opposed, leading to the revolt of the Maccabees and the establishment of an independent Jewish state under the Hasmonean dynasty. The Book of Daniel, which was written during the Maccabean war, is a work of exegesis, reinterpreting the established texts in order to speak to the present. The study of the Torah was now becoming a prophetic discipline, and it is significant that the writer found inspiration in study of the texts, in contrast to Isaiah and Ezekiel who were seen as having received their prophetic initiation in the Temple.

By the end of the second century BCE, as a result of disillusion with the Hasmonean kings, people were searching for a new direction. Judaism split into a multiplicity of sects, including the Pharisees, Sadducees, the Essenes and, eventually, the Christians, and many new texts were being written, incorporating novel ideas of Jewishness and eschatological visions in which God would intervene to establish a new age of justice and purity. The library of the Essenes at Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls) is indicative of the diversity of new scriptures being produced. At the same time Hellenised Jews such as Philo of Alexandria, influenced by Platonism and finding much in the Bible which seemed crude and incomprehensible to the Greek-trained mind, used the allegorical method to find a deeper spiritual significance in the texts.

Only two sects survived the disaster of the Jewish revolt and the destruction of the Temple (70 CE), one of them being the Jesus movement. The earliest Christians remained devout Jews, and Paul and the writers of the Gospels reinterpreted the scriptures using a form of exegesis known as pesher (deciphering), reading them as a kind of code containing references which foreshadowed the events of their own day and the coming of Christ. The Christian scriptures, though written at different times for different audiences, share a set of symbols drawn from the Law, the Prophets and Second Temple period texts and combined in a new synthesis. The Gospels are, in fact, so thoroughly works of exegesis that it is difficult to disentangle the facts.

The Pharisees were well placed to preserve and continue the traditions of main-stream Judaism, since their spirituality was not focused solely on the Temple, and they developed an imaginative form of exegesis termed midrash. According to this the scriptures were capable of yielding endless new meanings, and the exegete had to apply the Torah to each particular situation and make it speak to the needs and condition of the community of the time. The original historical context and meaning of the texts was irrelevant.

The early Christian fathers tended to see the Old Testament as a single book, the whole of which (rather than selected passages) carried a unified message – a subtext which referred forward to the life and death of Jesus and revealed the secrets of the cosmos. The Christians of Alexandria, following the hermeneutic tradition of Philo, developed the art of what they called spiritual interpretation. Like the rabbis, they saw the Bible as capable of yielding endless meanings and their methods were in some ways similar to rabbinical midrash. The Antiochenes (e.g. John Chrysostom) were, on the other hand, wary of allegory, and preferred to look for moral lessons in the plain sense of the texts. For Augustine of Hippo, as a Platonist, it was natural to elevate the spiritual over the literal meaning, but he also had a strong sense of history which enabled him to steer a middle course. For him, what was important was to seek a charitable explanation, and if a passage was not conducive to this it must be interpreted figuratively.

After the fall of the Roman Empire in western Europe, only the monasteries provided the conditions necessary for study of the Bible. Within the monastic tradition the ‘lectio divina’ (sacred study) was developed as a kind of meditative discipline. Monks were encouraged to enter the texts imaginatively in order to reach a spiritual understanding; the literal meaning was of little importance.

By the 11^th century CE Christians studying with Muslim scholars in Spain were beginning to rediscover the classical culture which had been lost to western Europe. The works of Aristotle were translated from Arabic into Latin, and Aristotle’s philosophy encouraged Western scholars to use their reasoning power in ways which affected the study of the Bible. Early in the 12^th century French scholars, beginning with Anselm of Laon, put together a standard commentary on the Vulgate (the Latin Bible), providing an explanation of each verse in the form of notes in the margins or between the lines, and this became a basic classroom text. The master would read the glossed text and the students would then ask questions and engage in discussion using Aristotelian logic and dialectic. As a result the cathedral schools and universities, interested in the new learning and objective biblical criticism, diverged from the monastic tradition in which the ‘lectio divina’ still prevailed.

At the same time there was a growing interest in the literal sense of the Bible. In Northern France Rabbi Schlomo Yitzhak, a philologist, studied the meanings of individual words and the ways in which they threw light on the text. He saw this literal exegesis as complementary to midrash, although some of his successors were more radical. Some Christian scholars began to consult local Rabbis and learn Hebrew, thinking that a correct literal understanding of the Bible was essential before allegorical interpretation was possible.

In the 13^th century the Dominicans aimed to adapt Aristotelian philosophy to Christianity and, while not abandoning the ‘lectio divina’, gave serious attention to the literal sense of the texts. For them the spirit of scripture was to be found in the literal and historical meaning, and Thomas Aquinas took the view that this spiritual meaning could be discerned in the events, which God had orchestrated to prefigure the redemptive work of Christ.

Jews living in the Islamic world had also attempted to apply Greek rationalism to the Bible, but found it difficult. Maimonides (1135-1204) tried to reconcile the Aristotelian view with the Bible, although he thought that religious experience and intuitive knowledge of the prophets was of a higher order than knowledge acquired by reason. Philosophical rationalism prompted a reaction which, in the 13^th century, produced the Kabbalah – a scripturally based mysticism which revived the mythical element in ancient Israelite tradition, and as life for the Jews in Europe became more difficult, this movement gained a wide following. In the 16^th century a Sephardic Jew, Isaac Luria developed an elaborate kabbalistic mythology which addressed their feelings of living in an unjust and evil world. According to this mythology a primal disaster had resulted in a cosmos where sparks of divine light were trapped in matter, yearning to be reunited with the infinite and unknowable godhead which existed outside the world. The literal meaning of the Bible, in which God appears as masculine and often cruel, was seen as symptomatic of this catastrophe, because in the world God could not be fully apprehended.

The Christians, in the meantime, were moving in the opposite direction, with increasing emphasis on plain exegesis and the importance of scholars reading the Bible in the original languages. The philosophers and humanists of the Renaissance were critical of medieval scholastic theology and wanted to go back to the Bible and the early Christian fathers. Taught by Byzantine refugees from the fall of Constantinople, many Western scholars were able for the first time to read the New Testament in the language in which it had been written, and the invention of printing meant that the edition of the Greek text which Erasmus published in 1519 was immediately and widely available. Reading the Bible in the original languages made people more aware of it as a collection of diverse books, and of the authors as individuals with different styles and points of view.

The authors of the Reformation, Luther, Calvin and Zwingli, introduced the principle of ‘sola scriptura’, giving the scriptures primacy over creeds, the liturgy and the pronouncements of the Church. The translation of the Bible into the vernacular meant that it became accessible by everyone, although it was still felt that guidance was necessary from scholars acquainted with all forms of exegesis. The new sciences were not, at this time, seen as undermining the authority of scripture. For Calvin the Old Testament demonstrated an evolutionary process, whereby God’s truth had been revealed in stages according to the needs and limitations of the people of the time. Allegorical interpretations were unnecessary, but it was also absurd to expect scripture to teach scientific facts.

In practice, ‘sola scriptura’ meant that everyone could interpret the Bible as they chose. but the problem with this was that the Bible could be used to justify opposing positions, and by the 17^th century people were beginning to realise that it was a very confusing book.

The ethos of the Enlightenment further affected the way in which the Bible was read. If, as Francis Bacon argued, the only reliable information was that which could be demonstrated empirically, mysticism, mythology and scriptural revelation were irrelevant. Some deists virtually ignored the Bible; others discounted what they considered the irrational elements. Spinoza (1632-77), a Sephardic Jew, concluded that the manifest contradictions in the Bible proved that it was not of divine origin, and in his objective study of it he pioneered the historical-critical method which was later to be known as the Higher Criticism.

Judaism in the 18^th century branched into three main movements. Some, embracing the Enlightenment, came to see it as a rational faith, concerned principally with ethics based on the Law, and they accepted the authority of the Torah only insofar as they could be convinced of the rationality of its claims. It was these rationalists who were eventually to found Reform Judaism. In Eastern Europe the Hasidim followed a form of mysticism developed out of Luria’s kabbalistic mythology, but for them, reading the Bible was an exercise similar in principle to the medieval ‘lectio divina’, the object being to achieve a state of enhanced consciousness through which they could encounter the spiritual truth underlying the literal sense. Orthodox Jews maintained a middle way, giving priority to the scholarly study of the Torah, but seeking also, through intense study, to achieve a mystical communion with God

By the early 19^th century. German scholars led the way in Biblical studies, taking Spinoza’s historical-critical methods to new lengths. Their analyses identified the various different authorial hands in the Old Testament and worked out the sequence of writing. ‘Essays and Reviews’, published by seven Anglican Clergy in 1861, made this Higher Criticism accessible to the general reader, and the upset which this caused among religious conservatives led to a reaction which was the origin of modern Fundamentalism. In the USA Bible Colleges were founded to promote a literal reading of the texts which went further than any interpreters had done before. Some in the past had favoured the study of the literal sense, but none had believed that every word was factually true.

While Reform Jews were becoming assimilated into mainstream society, the Orthodox also felt themselves embattled and on the defensive, and the Yeshivoth which they founded for the intensive and rigorous study of the Torah and the Talmud were the equivalent of the American Bible Colleges. The Hasidim eventually joined forces with them against the perceived threat of the Jewish Enlightenment. The Yeshivoth which were founded in Israel after 1948 fostered an even more stringent form of Bible-based orthodoxy.

The interpretation of the Bible has always been affected by historical conditions, and Jews, Christians and Muslims have developed scripturally based ideologies which are imbued with the violent ethos manifest in the events of ithe 20^th century. American fundamentalists see in current events the approaching fulfilment of the apocalyptic vision of John Nelson Darby (1800-82), whose literal reading of Revelations had convinced him that God was about to end this period of history with an unprecedented disaster. In Israel a reductionist reading of the Bible provides the rationale for extreme religious Zionism.

Other scholars of the 20^th century, both Jewish and Christian, have tried to revive traditional Biblical spirituality, exploring various new ways of reading and deconstructing the texts to show how they may speak to the hopes and expectations of the modern world, while avoiding facile interpretations. In their view it is impossible to extract definitive ‘fundamentals’ of divine revelation from the many, complex and contesting visions in the Bible. Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916-2000), Professor of Comparative Religion at Harvard, stressed the importance of understanding the Bible historically – what it has meant to Jews and Christians at different times in their history, and how their experience has coloured their exegesis; but to concentrate on what the original authors meant is to distort its significance.

Elephantschild

Despite appearances to the contrary, this is ChooChoo’s article – not mine!

Here’s that promised piece on Kolbe. I must confess to finding it incredibly
frustrating to articulate and translate my thoughts into words on a screen.
But, for better or for worse, here it is (and apologies for the unseemly
length).

Maximilian Kolbe, 1894-1941 (and Charles)

A dear college friend once told me about Maximilian Kolbe in the midst of a
seemingly interminable late night discussion that flitted between morality,
religion and cooking Thai curries. In retrospect, my points in this particular
discussion – one of many I fondly recall – were not particularly compelling.  I
remember resorting to ‘that’s just your opinion’ rather too often, and my one
good point – about how wonderful galangel is when making Thai (or, rather,
vaguely South East Asian) food – was rather a meagre one. Anyhow, I remember
being quite taken by the story she narrated about Kolbe, and that was despite,
I confess, almost not wanting to be taken by it.

I won’t mention much about his life as a whole, though it is hardly
uninteresting. The aspect which continues to fascinate me is his death. I
cannot write much about the various sources with which this has been pieced
together, though I understand that it is based on the testimonies of various
inmates and camp wardens.  This does not trouble me at all: so much of what we
know about the concentration camps is based on such testimonies (as opposed to
administrative sources) and our knowledge is all the richer for it. The
writings of a Viktor Frankl or Primo Levi are far more compelling – and I mean
that including in the sense of writing history – than, say, a secretary’s log
(even if such a log is vital source material too). It does mean that there are
some things I will not be able to answer if quizzed: for instance, the account
below of Kolbe’s brief dialogue with an Auschwitz commandant doubtless glosses
over the fact of interpretation (I mean in the sense of language barriers).

In February 1941, Kolbe was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Warsaw.
(He had been involved in various print and radio undertakings before the Nazis’
arrival and, I understand, his arrest was related to this). In May, he was
transferred to Auschwitz. Though he would be dead a few months later, there are
some testimonies about his time there (for instance, by a doctor who treated
him: Kolbe had earlier in the year suffered an inflammation of the lungs).

Now, there was some sort of rule at Auschwitz that if a man escaped, ten men
would be killed as punishment. And, the story goes, in July, a man from Kolbe’s
block escaped. The men from the block were led out in front of the commandant,
Karl Fritsch.  It was understood that the punishment would be the starvation
bunker: at the height of summer, this meant an agonising death, usually in
days, without food or water. Ten men were selected. One of these, Franciszek
Gajowniczek, had been imprisoned for helping the Polish Resistance. He
instinctively exclaimed: ‘My poor wife! My poor children! What will they do?’.

At this point, Kolbe stepped forward, took off his cap and offered himself: “I
am a Catholic priest,” he explained to the commandant, “Let me take his place.
I am old. He has a wife and children.”

Interestingly, the commandant came to agree to this. Gajowniczek stepped back
into file and Kolbe joined the wretched nine in their grim fate. In the bunker,
things soon became terrible. Some men would drink their own urine. According to
a janitor (if my memory serves me correctly), however, there were no screams or
even the sounds of the desperate one might have expected. Kolbe is said to have
led these men in hushed prayers and hymns. A fortnight in, four men remained,
including Kolbe. Needing the cell (for more conspicuous punishment?), the camp
executioner came in to inject each man’s arm with a dose of lethal carbolic
acid. At his turn, Kolbe, kneeling down, is said to have raised up and offered
his arm to the executioner. He died on 14th August 1941. For what it is worth,
I should add that Kolbe was beatified in 1970 and canonised in 1982.
Gajowniczek, I believe, was present at both ceremonies. And, apparently, there
is also one more detail: the man whose alleged escape precipitated the whole
episode was, apparently, found dead in a latrine not long after. It appears
that he had fallen in by mistake.

Now, let me be clear. I do not think that Kolbe’s being Catholic – or even being
a priest – is separable from his story, from his very identity. But, I don’t at
all wish to recall this in a triumphalistic way. (My sister’s ex-boyfriend is a
quarter Polish. His maternal grandmother was an inmate at Auschwitz for several
years and he said that the greatest perversities – he did not specify – in
Auschwitz were perpetrated by Catholic priests).

Rather, I find it interesting – particular the exchange, the literal redemption
of Gajowniczek – for several reasons, albeit ones which are not easy to
articulate. First off, I am struck by, for want of a better phrase, the sheer
goodness of such a deed.  This begs all sorts of questions. What were his
duties? Was this a ‘supererogatory’ act? What were his motives? Do the
consequences matter? For instance, to a strict consequentialist – I mean the
devious kind who is not averse to torturing philosophy students with devilish
scenarios featuring fat pot-holers and narrow cave entrances – upon hearing of
the bare bones of the exchange, it might or might not be good.

Perhaps there is something awry when we can even speak in the language of
consequentialism versus deontology versus virtue ethics etc in immediately
responding to this kind of deed. I’m certainly glad that my immediate reaction
was one which I can only imperfectly articulate as that sense of sheer
goodness. (It’s worth pointing out that this would still be my reaction, I
imagine, even if the commandant had decided to make Kolbe an eleventh damned
man). It is the kind of sheer goodness that animates and relieves so many of
the stories in the Holocaust. There is another one in Primo Levi’s If This Is
Man, and I think it’s worth quoting. The incident takes place during the last
weeks at Auschwitz, when Russian artillery was audible and liberation felt
tantalisingly close:

“That night held ugly surprises.
Ladmaker, in the bunk under mine, was a poor wreck of a man. He was (or had
been) a Dutch Jew, seventeen years old, tall, thin and gentle. He had been in
bed for three months; I have no idea how he had managed to survive the
selections. He had had typhus and scarlet fever successively; at the same time
a serious cardiac illness had shown itself, while he was smothered with
bedsores, so much so that by now he could only lie on his stomach. Despite all
this, he had a ferocious appetite. He only spoke Dutch, and none of us could
understand him…In the middle of the night, he groaned and then threw himself
from his bed. He tried to reach the latrine, but was too weak and fell to the
ground crying and shouting loudly.
Charles lit the lamp…and we were able to ascertain the gravity of the situation.
The boy’s bed and the floor were filthy. The smell in the small area was rapidly
becoming insupportable…And the poor wretch, suffering from typhus, formed a
terrible source of infection, while he could certainly not be left all night to
groan and shiver in the cold in the middle of the filth.
Charles climbed down from his bed and dressed in silence. While I held the lamp,
he cut all the dirty patches from the straw mattress and the blankets with a
knife. He lifted Ladmaker from the ground with the tenderness of a mother,
cleaned him as best as possible with straw taken from the mattress and lifted
him into the remade bed in the only position in which the unfortunate fellow
could lie, He scraped the floor with a scrap of tin plate, diluted a little
chloramines and finally spread disinfectant over everything, including
himself.”

I imagine that upon reading this sort of thing, we marvel at something. One
interesting, additional point, in both cases, lies with what might, from a
particular perspective, be the futility of these acts (though I do not think
that this is quite what we marvel at). Ladmaker will most probably die. Kolbe
might just end up getting both himself and Gajowniczek killed. Even at his
execution – the symbolic gesture of offering one’s arm, of accepting death, of
dying well – is futile, in a sense. And yet these are also symbolically
powerful acts. And something of their power, inevitably, lies in imagining
oneself in such a position. I must confess that, as much as I would like to
think otherwise, I could not vouch that I would act in such a way.

Second, even if our responses to these stories are emotional – and why should
they not be? – I am not so easily convinced that they can be easily interpreted
(and, rather summarily, dismissed) as ‘just’ emotive responses, as if the truly
objective/scientific/rational (delete as appropriate) response would be: Kolbe,
male, bearded, approximately 6”1, member of block x; at 1403hrs, Kolbe speaks
etc. The responses turn upon understanding what is enacted (and, to add another
layer, we might be responding both to Charles’ tenderness and Levi’s recognition
of this tenderness). The actions of a Kolbe or a Charles are intelligible to us.
This does not mean we can possibly know the precise intentions, though we might
imagine them and this imagining has certain limits. At the very least, is there
something about the enactments in such stories, about their very much
intelligible actions, which elicits such a response?

Third, these have to be stories. They are narratives. And I am quite taken by
the idea that, in all sorts of ways, narratives are central to our
understanding of all manner of things. To reiterate, even something like the
Kolbe story or anecdotes in Levi is both completely singular and yet wholly
informative for the light it sheds on the possibilities for human (inter)action
in somewhere like Auschwitz. And it offers the kind of illumination of being at
somewhere like Auschwitz that an entire textbook on the excavation of Auschwitz
could not.

These are scattered – and hopefully – not too trite thoughts. I think that I am
probably right in thinking that most people are moved by such stories and
respond to them with something akin to what I called a sense of sheer goodness
(whatever terms others might use). Let’s say as a general rule that most
people, roughly speaking, do respond in such a way.

Here are two possible questions to consider: what of those who do not respond in
such a way? Suppose someone were to say, ‘Well, Kolbe didn’t save any of the
other nine’, or ‘Charles was being stupid, he should have left that guy to
reduce his own chances of contracting typhus’: are our reactions ‘just emotive’
to the point that I cannot reasonably question the propriety – moral,
intellectual – of such a response?

There were many Jewish boys at my school, and I remember that we always had a
memorial for the Shoah each year. (Jewish assembly – religious assembly was on
Thursday, with various options, from Sikh to Catholic, and a non-religious one
too – was possibly the most popular: you would see boys with turbans listening
to a Rabbi sing on his guitar about kosher food). One time, I remember that we
finished and filed out. There had been readings animated by silent documentary
footage from various concentration camps, including those seemingly familiar
photographs of emaciated inmates. I still remember a boy (Jewish, as it
happens) make a joke, as we treaded out, about their being anorexics and all he
got were silent glares. My long-winded point is this: there is – or, I want
there to be – something more meet, more adequate about the solemn response
almost all of us quite naturally enacted rather than that of the boy who
quipped. It seems to me that our responses were more ‘adequate’ to what we had
seen and heard depicted, they grappled more with what was understood. Or, at
least, our reactions differed not just in terms of emotion, but in our
understandings of the gravity of what we had witnessed.

And, second, if I am right that most people do marvel at such stories, their
marvelling is undoubtedly real: that is, they really do marvel. But are they
just projecting a wholly subjective sense of the marvellous, of ‘sheer
goodness’, onto a Charles or a Kolbe? Or is it truly worthy of marvelling to
offer one’s life for or cradle a fellow inmate with “the tenderness of a
mother”?

Summary of, ‘The Bible Unearthed,’ by Finkelstein and Silberman.

In this book the authors examine the Old Testament narrative in the light of the archaeological evidence, in particular the results of excavations and large scale surveys of the region carried out over the past 35 years, with reference also to contemporary non-biblical documentary sources (mainly Egytian, Assyrian and Babylonian). These data, together with textual analysis of the scriptures themselves and the references they contain, indicate when, how and in what cultural context the books of the Old Testament were compiled.

Their conclusions are as follows:

The timescales in the OT are wildly incorrect.

Some of the scriptures were probably based on orally transmitted myths and folk traditions predating the period of the two kingdoms.

The stories of the Patriarchs appear to have been based on such legends and hero tales. The most that can be said of them is that the archaeological evidence suggests circumstances in which they might have originated. For example, there seems to be a recurrent pattern in which some of the people of the region shifted back and forth from a nomadic and pastoral way of life in times of political stability and prosperity, to agricultural subsistence when things were more unsettled.

The captivity in Egypt did not occur as described, nor did the Exodus; and the details given in the account are anachronistic, but Semitic peoples from Canaan did periodically move into the region of the Nile Delta and settle there, the most notable instance being the immigration which led to the Hyksos establishing a ruling dynasty in Egypt c.1670 BCE (later accounts depict this as a violent invasion, but the archaeology suggests otherwise). The Hyksos were eventually defeated and driven back into Canaan.

There is no evidence for Joshua’s conquest of Canaan as depicted in the biblical account; in fact the Israelites were Canaanites. There was widespread destruction of Canaanite cities during the 13^th century BCE, but this is more properly understood in the context of a general upheaval and political crisis throughout the eastern Mediterranean region.

There is, however, evidence to suggest that there was a common culture in Palestine, which might loosely be termed Israelite, from about 13^th century BCE onward (there is, for example, an absence of pig bones in certain sites), but this cannot be seen as intrusive.

There was no united monarchy and the accounts of the ‘empire’ of David and Solomon have no historical basis. The north and south kingdoms were always separate and, of the two, the north kingdom (Israel) was the wealthier and more populous. If David and Solomon existed at all they were likely to have been local tribal chieftains from the hill country of Judah, ruling over very small populations. There is, nevertheless, some independent evidence that the rulers of Judah traced their descent from David, namely the inscription from Tel Dan, in which Hazael of Syria boasts of his defeat of Jehoram, king of the House of David c.835 BCE. The authors also note the correspondence between the tales of David as chief of an outlaw band and the 14th century BCE and Egyptian accounts of the Apiru as a class of brigands on the fringes of Canaanite society.

The first scriptures (The Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges and Kings) were compiled during the final days of the monarchy in Judah during the reign of Josiah (7^th century BCE); incorporating records from both kingdoms, although there were further redactions and additions during and just after the Babylonian exile (6^th century BC).

The monotheistic cult of YHWH only rose to prominence during this time – 7th and 6^th centuries BCE.

Much of the motivation for the writings was to demonstrate the superiority of Judah and, in particular, its king Josiah.. The northern kingdom had already been destroyed by the Assyrians, which is the reason it gets a bad press in the OT – history is written by the victors, or at least the survivors. The authors stress what they see as the religious as well as political motives of Josiah – the wish to establish the cult of YHWH as the sole religion of the people of Judah.

Manasseh was a successful monarch presiding over a long period of peace for Judah (and not as depicted in the OT), whereas Josiah is more likely to have precipitated the events leading to the destruction of the kingdom through his overt ambition, which was seen as a threat to the Babylonian empire.

The Authors: Israel Finkelstein is director of the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University. Neil Asher Silberman is director of historical interpretation for the Ename Centre for Public Archaeology and Heritage Presentation in Belgium.

Summary of, ‘Who Wrote the Bible,’ by Richard Elliott Friedman.

There are four main sources for the OT books of the Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings. There is also a redactor (R) who put them together.

The earliest two versions of the Torah (Pentateuch), except Deuteronomy and Leviticus were written at about the same time before (probably just before) the destruction of the northern kingdom in 722 BC. These are called J, where God is referred to throughout as YHWH (or Yahweh) and E, derived from His name, Elohim (which just means ‘God’ in ancient Hebrew). J was composed in Judah and E in the north. E was brought south after the fall of the northern kingdom by its custodians (probably Shilohite priests). These were from the Mushite (Moses) succession of priests.

Somebody in Judah (we don’t know who) combined them to produce a reasonably coherent narrative. The reason why both versions needed to be represented is because there were lots of refugees from the northern kingdom in Judah and if the southern account only had been proposed as the true version there might well have been trouble. This is why there are so many repetitions, inconsistencies and contradictions – two schools representing two different interests.

Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings were written by one person mainly during the reign of Josiah in Judah (late 7th or early 6^th century BC) but partly after its destruction by the Babylonians in 587 BC. That author was Jeremiah (with help from his scribe, Baruch), who fled to Egypt after the Babylonian invasion. He deliberately wrote from a Mushite perspective and emphasising Josiah as the Davidic successor and an example of a good king. This bit is accepted almost in its entirety by Finkelstein and Silberman

The fourth element is termed the priestly (P) source and was responsible for most of the Torah as we have it now, including all of Leviticus. It was written from an Aaronid (the line of Aaron) perspective and composed during the reign of Hezekiah (7^th century BC) – Josiah’s grandfather.

There were two priestly traditions – those who traced their ancestry to Moses and those to Aaron – and both of their writings were combined to produce what we now know as the Torah and histories by a redactor. This redactor was Ezra and it was all put together by him after the building of the second temple following the release of the Jews from their Babylonian exile. He was an Aaronid priest.

Friedman takes as read that the Egyptian captivity happened and that Moses and Aaron were real people. He also seems to believe that David and Solomon reigned over a united kingdom. He does not go so far as to suggest that the Patriarchs existed. His brief is not an archaeological history of the Bible lands but a textual critique of certain bits of the OT.

Summary of Bart Ehrman’s ‘Misquoting Jesus.’

Ehrman is an expert on New Testament biblical textual analysis and chairs the department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina. His personal spiritual journey is interesting. He grew up an average church-going child whose parents were religious but more by custom than conviction. In his later teens he joined a group who took the bible literally as the perfect and unadulterated word of God. Gradually, through his theological studies at university, he began to have doubts. These doubts grew as he detected more and more inconsistencies and contradictions. It was then that his interest in textual criticism really took flight as he tried to understand what the underlying message might be and how these variations arose. He is now agnostic.

The earliest fragment we have of anything from the New Testament is dated early second century AD and anything more substantial dates from the third century onwards.

There have been a huge number of alterations over the years for a number of reasons:

- Copyist error (the most common cause);
- Correcting what was thought to be an earlier error;
- Deliberate manipulation of the text to suit the scribe’s views; and
- Organised changes to make the document conform to the theological views of the group commissioning the copy.

Errors of the first kind were more prevalent during the early years before the advent of professional scribes. Most of the copies then were written by barely literate Christians, literate slaves and/or by dictation.

All scribes were prone to amending text to say what they thought the document should have said.

As most scribes were Christian many were tempted to alter text to suit their own views and prejudices, and to conform to the mores of their own era.

The last form of textual corruption was a consequence of the power struggle between various sects and doctrines. As the victors write the history, what we are left with is the proto-orthodox version.

Ehrman details various techniques used to sort the sheep from the goats and attempts to reconstruct what the original authors might have written.

He also points out that the earliest extant texts are not necessarily the most reliable and that most English translations, including the King James, are not to be relied upon. The best, in his view, is the NRSV – but it is still no substitute for reading the original Greek.

What we are left with are copies of copies of copies of copies etc, each with their myriad errors, compounding one on the other; and then poor translations of these.

Most of the errors are trivial but some are of fundamental importance to Christian beliefs. He cites many examples:

- The last 14 verses of Mark are later additions;
- The woman taken in adultery in John was added later;
- The only reference to the Trinity is fake; and
- Many of Paul’s letters were amended to reduce the importance and role of women in the early church.

He does not, however, try to identify the historical character of Jesus, who provided the inspiration for the letters of Paul and the Gospels. His email response to the question, ‘Why not?’ was that he was concerned solely with establishing the likely authenticity of the text and not the historical events that the NT depicts. He agreed, however, with our view that Geza Vermes is an expert on the subject who is well worth reading.

Elephantschild and Boltonian

Buddhists are the followers of the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama (or Gotama), who renounced his privileged upbringing as the son of a local ruler in northern India to seek enlightenment about 2,500 years ago. He had noticed, whilst living at home with his young wife and baby son, that everything outside his privileged and secluded environment involved suffering. This led to an increasing dissatisfaction with his life and a desire to seek answers, so he left everything behind and took to the road.

Gautama travelled on foot throughout north east India seeking knowledge and understanding. He asked questions of the holy men he met and even tried extreme asceticism, which nearly killed him. Nothing produced satisfactory answers to his questions. When he was about 35 years old he resolved not to stir from the spot where he was sitting until he had experienced enlightenment. Through long meditation he eventually came to his great awakening and saw that which he had been seeking. It was at this point that he became the Buddha, which means the enlightened one.

For the remainder of his 80 years he was a mendicant teacher, walking from village to village with his food bowl. When it was full (he ate only once each day) he would retire to a secluded spot to eat and then interested locals would gather round him while he dispensed his wisdom.

His teachings were highly practical and central to them was the concept of dharma, which alternately means the path, the law and nature. Gautama insisted nobody should accept his teachings purely on faith, and instead people should see for themselves by following the dharma, the first step of which is to focus awareness on the breath. To this day, the overwhelming majority of Buddhist traditions place massive importance on the regular practice of meditation. Even if one agrees with Gautama’s teachings on the intellectual level, one is not following the dharma if one does not meditate.

It is not necessary, incidentally, to accept the historical veracity of Gautama’s life, nor even that he existed at all, to be a Buddhist.

These are the core tenets of his teaching.

Four noble truths:

Dukkha. All is suffering.

Samudaya. Suffering is caused by thirst, craving or desire.

Nirodha. The way to alleviate suffering is by controlling and then eliminating one’s craving.

Magga. This can be done by following the eightfold path.

Someone who has fully understood the four noble truths has become fully awakened, or enlightened. This happens during meditation through the attainment of Nirvana, the highest state of spiritual awareness, an experience that is likened to complete emptiness and unity with everything. To reach this state entails a complete dissolution of the ego, a recognition that we do not exist – at least not in the sense that we think we do.

The eightfold path:

Right understanding

Right intention or orientation

These constitute wisdom (panna in Pali)

Right speech

Right action

Right livelihood

These govern ethical conduct (sila)

Right effort

Right mindfulness

Right concentration

These form the necessary mental discipline (samadhi).

There is no Buddhist doctrine; these (and other concepts, teachings and techniques) are for help and guidance. There is no supernatural being that we might equate with God in Buddhism. It is a very human system of striving for self-improvement through compassion.

Born as it was in India, Buddhism derived from Hinduism, another dharmic religion, and the Vedic tradition. It shares with these not just a belief in karma and reincarnation but also the idea of the oneness of everything. Gautama was rebelling against what he saw as the obscuring of the true nature of dharma through dogmas, rituals all the usual accoutrements of religion that detract from the core message. He also saw enlightenment as something that was possible for everyone, not just India’s Brahmin caste.

As is commonplace with religion, some of the rites and rituals that Gautama was trying to break away from have solidified within what is now a multitude of different Buddhist schools. There are several ways in which it is possible to classify these traditions. Perhaps the most common division is into Theravada and Mahayana. However, Tibetan Buddhism is frequently thought of as a third category, also called Vajrayana.

Theravada Buddhism is that practised in Sri Lanka and South East Asia (except Vietnam). It is based on the scriptures, called the Tipitaka or the Pali (the language of the Buddha) canon because it was first written down on palm leaves in this language during the first century BC. These scriptures are a mix of the sayings of Buddha, stories from his previous, guidance on how to live one’s life in accordance with the Buddha’s teachings, and various philosophical observations. Theravada means, ‘The way of the Elders’ and is considered the most conservative of the branches.

Mahayana Buddhism is thought to have originated in south India and spread along the ancient Silk Road into China, Korea and Japan. As well as the Tipataka and the Pali canon, the more fantastical Mahayana sutras are also an important component of its scriptures. Central to Mahayana is the Bodhisattva ideal. Theravada Buddhists hold the specific objective of breaking the cycle of suffering by becoming fully enlightened, after which they will cease to be reincarnated. By contrast the Bodhisattva, who represents the embodiment of compassion and is the being that all Buddhists should strive to be, defers the final stage of enlightenment and instead continues to be reincarnated until suffering can be ended for all humanity. The form of Mahayana Buddhism best known in the west is Zen.

Tibetan is the most esoteric of all forms of Buddhism. Whereas Theravada Buddhism considers Mahayana inauthentic, Tibetan Buddhism accepts it and considers Vajrayana to be a higher expression of it. Its main distinguishing characteristic, apart from having its own scriptures, is that makes use of various Tantric meditation techniques also common to forms of Hinduism. Tibetan Buddhism also places the greatest emphasis on the relationship with the guru, to whom the student is meant to show great devotion.

Some people think that because Buddhism does not invoke a supernatural being that can be equated with God, this makes it atheistic. This is to project western hang-ups about religion onto a belief system that first grew in places without the Aristotelian conception of metaphysics, and Asian Buddhists frequently also believe in deities or forms of animism. Such projections, however, have helped Buddhism to appeal to individuals in the West with deep-rooted aversion to religion, who find themselves in need of some form of spirituality in their lives. Ironically, aversion is a corollary of desire, and as the second noble truth teaches us that desire is the cause of suffering, an inability to get over hang-ups about religion may be indicative of lack of progress along the eight-fold path.

dOm and Boltonian

Edmund Burke (1729-1797), was the son of an Irish protestant convert and a Roman Catholic mother. He was reputedly born in Dublin, although there is some evidence to suggest that this might have been a convenient fiction to disguise his true birthplace of Co. Cork.

He was born at a time of serious Catholic persecution, which is why his father converted to Protestantism, although his mother remained a lifelong Catholic. Converts, however, were regarded with suspicion from both sides of the religious divide and it is likely that the young Edmund had a pretty lonely time of it. He graduated from Trinity College, Dublin in 1748.

One 17^th century ancestor, John Burke, was mayor of Limerick and when he tried to introduce an element of realpolitik into his dealings with the Crown by supporting the reforms of Charles I he was severely beaten by the local mob of Catholic fanatics.

Edmund’s experience and family history informed his thinking for the rest of his life. His target was the abuse of power. This was a constant theme throughout his career, although his opponents accused him of inconsistency. It was this principle that led him to support American independence and decry the French Revolution.

Following graduation he came to England and disappeared from the records for about six years. There is a suspicion that he converted to Catholicism at this time, much to his father’s fury. What is certain is that he married Jane Nugent, who was, and remained a Catholic and they enjoyed 40 years of happily married life together.

In the late 1750s he began to make his political way in the world, initially as the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland’s personal assistant. In 1765 he became Private Secretary to the Marquess of Rockingham, who had just formed an administration in Parliament. He remained loyal to the Rockingham Whigs, whom he believed was the most principled party in Parliament, until the Marquess died in 1782.

Burke never held high office but he was recognised as one of the foremost political thinkers and commentators of his age, commanding high respect from Dr Johnson (a committed Tory), among others. He had many enemies, mainly among the many establishment anti-Papists but he retained the confidence of Rockingham throughout. He was elected to Parliament firstly in December 1765 as the Member for Wendover; Bristol from 1774 until 1780, and then Malton until 1794.

There are lots of examples of his courageous stand against state corruption; the most celebrated of which was the impeachment of Warren Hastings, sometime Governor of Bengal. He was outspoken, unbending when sure of his ground, and very rarely bested in debate.

His writings on France and its revolution, though the most profound of his works, cannot be read as a complete statement of his views on politics. Burke, in fact, never gave a systematic exposition of his fundamental beliefs but appealed to them always in relation to specific issues. But it is possible to regard his writings as an integrated whole in terms of the constant principles underlying his practical positions.

These principles are, in essence, an exploration of the concept of “nature,” or “natural law.” Burke conceives the emotional and spiritual life of man as a harmony within the larger order of the universe. Natural impulse, that is, contains within itself self-restraint and self-criticism; the moral and spiritual life is continuous with it, generated from it and essentially sympathetic to it. It follows that society and state make possible the full realization of human potentiality, embody a common good, and represent a tacit or explicit agreement on norms and ends. The political community acts ideally as a unity.

This interpretation of nature and the natural order implies deep respect for the historical process and the usages and social achievements built up over time. Therefore, social change is not merely possible but also inevitable and desirable. But the scope and the role of thought operating as a reforming instrument on society as a whole is limited. It should act under the promptings of specific tensions or specific possibilities, in close union with the detailed process of change, rather than in large speculative schemes involving extensive interference with the stable, habitual life of society. Also, it ought not to place excessive emphasis on some ends at the expense of others; in particular, it should not give rein to a moral idealism (as in the French Revolution) that sets itself in radical opposition to the existing order. Such attempts cut across the natural processes of social development, initiating uncontrollable forces or provoking a dialectical reaction of excluded factors. Burke’s hope, in effect, is not a realization of particular ends, such as the “liberty” and “equality” of the French Revolution, but an intensification and reconciliation of the multifarious elements of the good life that community exists to forward.

In his own day, Burke’s writings on France were an important inspiration to German and French counter-revolutionary thought. His influence in England has been more diffuse, more balanced, and more durable. He stands as the original exponent of long-lived constitutional conventions, the idea of party, and the role of the Member of Parliament as free representative, not delegate. More generally, his remains the most persuasive statement of certain inarticulate political and social principles long and widely held in England: the validity of status and hierarchy and the limited role of politics in the life of society.

His arguments in favour of the constitution as a living, moving and imperfect relationship of trust between past present and future is subtle and given thought comes alive in the idea of a changing contract and one that has much to commend itself to the short term ‘goals’ of contemporary politics.

The great strength of thoughtful conservatism is that it understands these contradictions and accepts its own limitations. For at its best and when given voice by men like Burke it once again takes its place within a great tradition of thought and action that mixes social obligation, humility of capabilities and trust in freedoms.

One gets from Burke the idea that things are as they are, by accident, design and serendipity and they could not be any other way. It is within what we have inherited that we must work and not to design all anew.

We hope that this very brief and inadequate synopsis gleaned from various sources will prompt some discussion of Burke’s legacy, philosophy (such that it is), and relevance to today’s political scene. One possible starting point for debate is whether his legacy is still detectable in the modern Conservative Party. Boltonian thinks that it is and Simon not.

Simon Boccanegra and Boltonian

In Dawkins’ ‘God Delusion’, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer is awarded the dubious honour of being considered a ‘thoughtful theologian’ for his rejection of a ‘God of the gaps’ approach to religious belief.  I’ve recently being reading through an old copy of Bonhoeffer’s ‘Letters and Papers From Prison’.  Bonhoeffer’s remarkable life is matched by the extraordinary originality of his thought.  Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor of the Confessing Church spent time studying in New York where he was greatly interested in the African-American churches of Harlem. He studied in Barcelona, a Benedictine monastery and as a pastor in Sydenham (1933-1934 – at this time Anscombe was a teenager attending Sydenham High School and converting to Catholicism, ChooChoo.).  Although a pacifist in his youth he became an active member of the German resistance to Hitler and was involved in the von Stauffenberg plot of 1944.  Although already imprisoned for helping Jews to escape to Switzerland, Bonhoeffer’s fate was sealed when his involvement in the plot became apparent and he was executed in April 1945 only a few weeks before the German surrender.

His thought is so extraordinary because of its attempt to deal with what he terms ‘a world come of age’ in which religion in general and Christianity in particular has been forced out into the margins through developments in secular thought from psychotherapy to physics, sociology to jurisprudence.  Much of his thought remains undeveloped (he was in prison after all) but it still retains a brilliance and a relevance for our times possibly because of the context of his writing.  One wonders what he would make of the CiF debates on science, religion and the meaning of life.

A phrase that is often deployed in his letters on the world come of age is a Latin quotation from the Dutch jurist Grotius, ‘etsi deus non daretur‘ which can be translated as, ‘even if there were no God.’  Allow me to quote at length from a letter to Eberhard Bethge dated July 16th 1944.

“God as a working hypothesis in morals, politics or science has been surmounted and abolished; and the same thing has happened in philosophy and religion (Feuerbach!).  For the sake of intellectual honesty, that working hypothesis should be dropped, or as far as possible, eliminated.  A scientist or physician who sets out to edify is a hybrid.”

“…we cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur.  And this is just what we do recognize – before God!  God himself compels us to recognize it.  So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God.  God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him.  The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34) ['My God! My God!  Why have you forsaken me?'] The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand constantly.  Before God and with God we live without God.  God lets himself be pushed out of  the world onto the cross.  He is weak and powerless in the world and that is the only way in which he is with us and helps us.  Matthew 8:17  makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence but by virtue of his weakness and suffering.”

The extent to which it is possible to construct a religionless approach to Christianity will inevitably be debated by believers and non-believers alike but Bonhoeffer’s story and his striving for intellectual honesty have a resonance that will survive for many years to come.

Your thoughts and observations are , of course, most welcome.

P.S. You can read longer extracts from this letter of Bonhoeffer’s by following this link: July 16th 1944

From Biskie

I feel a certain affinity for Alfred having been born and bred in what was once Wessex, and having lived for a while in the place of his birth, Wantage, Oxfordshire (formerly Berkshire). There is a statue of him in Wantage that I used to walk past on my way to work. There is also a statue of him in Winchester, which I see every fortnight when I drive there on some business (not financial) that is indelibly linked to the time when I lived in Wantage.  It would be nice to think that he watches over me, looks out for me and guides me, for an excellent guide he would make.
 
We call him “The Great” but he wasn’t known by this title until a long time after his reign from 871-99. The earliest records which refer to him in this way are from 16th century historians. He definitely wasn’t a legend in his own lifetime, his greatness only being appreciated from a distance. As soon as he came to power (which he had to wait for, being the youngest child) he faced a tough time of it. A Viking army had invaded further north in 865. Anglia, Northumbria and Mercia (the middle bit of England) had all resorted to paying them off to stop them inflicting any further damage, and the Vikings had settled camps in these areas. Nearly the whole of Alfred’s reign was blighted by the Vikings who could not be trusted to keep to the oaths that they made and would regularly display what we would today call “challenging behaviour” and  “pushing the boudaries” ; ie they just wouldn’t bloody behave! Alfred himself paid them off to keep them sweet, but even exchanging hostages did not prevent the Vikings from going back on their promise. At one point the Vikings took over Thorney island (very near to where I live)  and were held under siege there until they agreed to leave. They were one monstrous pain in the backside who took up time and resources and cost the lives of a lot of Alfred’s men.
 
Alfred somehow managed to find the time to devote to his own education. He was “ignorant of letters” in his youth so had a lot of catching up to do. He was not only concerned with his own learning, but that of others too. He set up a school for his own children and those of the court.
 
Asser, who wrote his biography of Alfred in 893, was a monk from St David’s in Wales. He was one of several learned men that Alfred brought to his court to facilitate his own learning. Alfred learnt Latin which enabled him to translate a number of books which he felt were “most necessary for all men to know” . These were “Pastoral Care” by Pope Gregory, “Consolation of Philosophy” by Boethius and the Psalter (he managed the first 50 psalms before his death). Alfred didn’t feel the need to stick to a straight translation of these texts and often included very revealing aspects his own concerns, thoughts and history.  The translations were distributed widely so that people would benefit from their wisdom.
 
In addition to Asser’s work and Alfred’s translations we have the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as a contemporary source, as well as Alfred’s will and some charters, laws and letters. From these it is obvious that Alfred was a very just man, always concerned for the welfare and development of his subjects.
 
He suffered from a mysterious illness for much of his life which would cause him considerable pain. It is not clear from the desription what this would have been, but from my reading it sounds a bit like kidney stone trouble. It didn’t stop him marrying or having children.
 
The story of “Alfred and the cakes” is probably legend as it does not appear in any contemporary sources. There are several versions, each showing Alfred in a different light according to the intention of the writer.
 
One thing that I read which was unexpected was that Alfred twice travelled to Rome as a child. At only four years of age he accompanied his father on a visit, and two years later he went again. I dread to think how long that would have taken, and how uncomfortable it would have been.
 
Lastly, I smiled when I read the genealogy of Alfred, which of course went all the way back to Adam. The name of Alfred’s ancestor 23 generations back is the one that I choose for my own son.
 

Darwin wrote that altruism would give one tribe an advantage over another, even though individual members of that tribe might be at a personal disadvantage.

So, between group behaviour would override within group behaviour. This depends crucially on group selection. This approach was largely discredited by the 1960s and other theories were developed, such as kin selection; evolutionary game theory; and selfish gene (extended phenotype) theory. These are all theories that seek to explain apparent altruism through individualistic behaviour. The idea that there was such a thing as society as an organism was comprehensively rejected.

This concept has been recently challenged and what is called multilevel selection is gaining ground. It helps to explain not just tribal behaviour but animal behaviour, multi-species ecosystems, the nature of religion and rise and fall of empires, among other things. The revision has been made possible by the massive increase in computing power that has enabled complex models to be studied.

Experiments with microbes have shown that between-group evolution is very powerful. Observations in the field with lions and other creatures bear this out. Earlier theories trying to explain altruism through individual advantage had failed because they did not prove what they set out to do. Hamilton (kinship theory) and Dawkins (extended phenotype theory) have since admitted this.

Multilevel selection suggests that groups behave like organisms, which are a collection of co-operative cells. Hamilton’s original claim that this was to do with kinship has been shown to be wrong.

There are many examples in the article on how multilevel selection applies to humans. For instance, we enforce a certain level of egalitarianism on the group so that one individual cannot exclusively dominate all. This allowed teamwork to develop and helped facilitate between group activity; and it is this ability that has led to our world-wide dominance.

The article also says that within group selection has not been eliminated only suppressed, which explains the tensions existing between selfishness and altruism. It ends with a quote adapting Rabbi Hillel, ‘Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.’

It is a common misperception of the ‘new atheists’ – Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and the like – to treat religion as essentially a system of beliefs. This is a misunderstanding, I think. For religion is a way of living in the world that understands the goal of life to be the pursuit of the good life which is ultimately found in God.

Herbert McCabe, in his wonderful short book, The Good Life, presents an account of this philosophy. Here is part of his systematics in a nutshell.

The good life is one in which what someone does and feels leads to and is constitutive of their fulfilment. Such wellbeing is neither primarily an experience; nor is it found as a consequence of following moral laws. Rather, happiness is fundamentally an activity:
it is ‘the state of the person who is living without hindrance the life that becomes a human being’, as McCabe puts it.

For human beings, the question of meaning is at the heart of this.
Consider what Aristotle said about living meaningfully. He called it practical intelligence (theoretical intelligence is not to live meaningfully but is to talk about what it would be to do so – as this piece does). When ethics is reduced to a purely theoretical matter, as when say it is thought to be only about determining rules, principles or beliefs, it therefore fails. Practical intelligence not only judges well what is a good thing to do but also, crucially, springs from who you are and what is most becoming of your humanity.
It involves not only reason and intellect but character, imagination, stories and wisdom; in short, the whole of life’s experience.

This opens up another aspect of the good life, namely that of its having a narrative or story – the account of life within which intentions have meaning. Being able to give such an account of your life – to have an autobiography – is also, therefore, part of human meaningfulness. This is where religion comes in. McCabe argues that the life of grace, or divine life, is to participate in the narrative of God.

To put it another way, ethics is not primarily about what is good but is about what counts as good for human beings. So to be virtuous is not just to act ethically for the sake of something else that is good (as in consequentialist ethics) or to avoid something else that is bad (as in deontological ethics). It is a whole orientation of character and, again as McCabe would suggest, can be said to be religious since it is also a whole orientation of life, aimed at what is regarded as ultimately good – namely the divine.

This returns us again to the question of meaning. To have meaning is to enter into a language and, because language is social, thereby also a community. ‘Language is the nervous system of the human community. It is the context for meaning.’ Also, whilst my thoughts are my thoughts, meaning is found in the way in which they transcend my individuality by connecting me with something bigger than myself – which at least inasmuch as that is immaterial can be called that which is spiritual. Again, the believer sees God here.

Incidentally, this view is also the opposite of the Cartesian way of thinking, in which the spiritual is private: for Descartes individuals reach their spiritual selves by withdrawing from the community into themselves, not by engaging with it.

What then is human freedom? It is the choices and decisions enacted in the story of a life. But this stems from human meaning, which is to say, via language, from being part of the linguistic community: it is only by being able to interpret the world and give it meaning that it is possible for someone to act freely. So, freedom is not simply to be able to act randomly. The person who is the most free is the person who has the practical intelligence to act ethically; the free will is one that wants to act well. Again, for the believer, this finds its greatest expression in the will of God.

Mark Vernon is the author of two new books, ‘After Atheism’ and ‘What Not To Say’ – www.markvernon.com

www.markvernon.com