Lewis remarks on the high difficulty of adverse criticism, noting that the difficulty lies partly in the fact that the defects of bad literature are found in good literature: “The novel before you is bad – a transparent compensatory fantasy projected by a poor, plain woman, erotically starving. Yes, but so is Jane Eyre . Another bad book is amorphous; but so it Tristram Shandy . An author betrays a shocking indifference to all the great political, social, and intellectual... Read more
Lewis describes the process by which words that once expressed and aroused emotions by appealing to the imagination have been emptied of image-content and become purely emotional. “Damn you” used to be a real curse, because people believed in damnation. Now that fewer do, it’s a more or less purely emotional expression, hardly a word at all. Lewis sums up: “as words become exclusively emotional they cease to be words and therefore of course cease to perform any strictly linguistic... Read more
In Lewis’s defense, he is trying to explain some of the limits of language, which are worth noting (this in the last chapter of Studies in Words ). One limitation has to do with language’s inability “to inform us about complex physical shapes and movements. Hence descriptions of such things in the ancient writers are nearly always unintelligible.” Glad to hear Lewis say that. I thought it was me. Another limit is the difficulty we have of depicting a complex... Read more
CS Lewis says that language cannot do what music and gesture do, that is, “do more than one thing at once.” He admits that “the words in a great poet’s phrase interinanimate one another and strike the mind as a quasi-instantaneous chord, yet, strictly speaking, each word must be read or heard before the next. That way, language is as unilinear as time.” Of course, music and words are not phenomenologically identical, yet I think the analogy much closer than... Read more
INTRODUCTION At the middle of Matthew’s story of Jesus, Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ ( 16:16 ). But he doesn’t yet understand what that means. He still has to learn that being Christ means taking up a cross and losing life to find it. THE TEXT “When Jesus came into the region of Caesarea Philippi, He asked His disciples, saying, ‘Who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am?’ So they said, ‘Some say John the... Read more
Matthew uses the word “sign” in only four contexts. In the closely parallel passages 12:38-45 and 16:1-4, the Jewish leaders ask Jesus for a sign; the word is used several times in chapter 24, and a last time in 26:48 to describe Judas’s kiss. Chapters 12 and 16 are obviously linked, but the opening verses of chapter 24 are also verbally connected to these demands for a sign. In 16:1, the Pharisees come ( proserchomai ) and ask Jesus to... Read more
Yahweh rained bread from heaven to test Israel, to see if they would follow His instructions (Exodus 16:4). They didn’t follow Him. Instead, they disobeyed the instructions about manna (16:13-21) and turned the tables to put God to the test (17:2, 7). Jesus follows the same pattern. He is Bread from heaven, and gives miraculous bread in desolate places (Matthew 14:13-21; 15:32-39). This is a test for Israel, to see if they follow His instructions. They don’t, and instead put... Read more
The Pharisees and Sadducees ask Jesus for a sign from heaven (Matthew 16:1). The first “signs” in the heavens were the sun, moon, and stars. A sign from heaven is a sign of new creation, and Jesus’ response, alluding to the evening-morning pattern of the creation week, continues the creation symbolism (16:2-3). Later, he promises the Jews a sign from heaven (24:30) in conjunction with with the darkening of the sun, the fading of light from the moon, the fall... Read more
The tide started turning against the etymologists during the Renaissance. In Praise of Folly , Erasmus mocked the theologians for their obsessions with the minutiae of words: “I met with another, some eighty years of age, and such a divine that you’d have sworn Scotus himself was revived in him. He, being upon the point of unfolding the mystery of the name Jesus, did with wonderful subtlety demonstrate that there lay hidden in those letters whatever could be said of... Read more
In the time of the New Testament, Judea was a multi-lingual region. Aramaic was the common speech among Jews; but most had at least a smattering of Greek, could hear Latin spoken all over Jerusalem, not to mention Hebrew in certain settings. Linguistically, first-century Palestine was far more like Switzerland than like the US. Now, in this situation, the normal thing is to become a comparative linguist. It doesn’t require any formal training; becoming multi-lingual was a demand of survival,... Read more
Select your answer to see how you score.
Leithart
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In