Are the ritual texts of Leviticus “practical” texts designed to guide priests and people in sacrificial and other rituals? If so, argues Leigh Trevaskis in Holiness, Ethics, and Ritual in Leviticus, they don’t do a very good job of it. Too much is left out, and things that are included are too obvious to need repetition. Does a worshiper really have to be told that he must lay his hand on the head of the animal at the beginning of a... Read more
Donald Rayfield reviews two recent essay collections on cultural relations between England and Russia in the TLS: Anthony Cross, A People Passing Rude: British Responses to Russian Culture and Russia in Britain, 1880-1940, edited by Rebecca Beasley and Philip Ross Bullock. The links are broader and deeper than geography might indicate. Rayfield notes, “When Ivan the Terrible first saw in Elizabeth I his sole refuge, should he be driven from his throne, and welcomed her merchants and the loan of a personal doctor,... Read more
Donald Rayfield reviews two recent essay collections on cultural relations between England and Russia in the TLS: Anthony Cross, A People Passing Rude: British Responses to Russian Culture and Russia in Britain, 1880-1940, edited by Rebecca Beasley and Philip Ross Bullock. The links are broader and deeper than geography might indicate. Rayfield notes, “When Ivan the Terrible first saw in Elizabeth I his sole refuge, should he be driven from his throne, and welcomed her merchants and the loan of a personal doctor,... Read more
John is so subtle that we nearly miss it. Jesus says, “While I am in the world, I am the light of the world” (John 9:4), implying that at some time he might not be in the world. Then he heals a blind man with clay and tells him to go wash (9:5). When the blind man comes back seeing, Jesus isn’t there. But it’s not until verse 12 that we realize this: “They said to the blind man, ‘Where... Read more
Historically, “aesthetics” has had an accidental relationship to art. Aesthetics, from aesthesis, referred to perception through senses. In this sense, an “aesthetic” theory of art is a theory with a particular focus on the sensory experience of art. If we put aside the peculiar theory of the senses embodied in aesthetics, Jonathan Ree argues, we need to revise what we say about art and beauty too. Looking at a mountain is not a matter of “gathering up a collection of... Read more
Last week at Slate, Mike Pesca assured us that, Montgomery Burns notwithstanding, steeplers aren’t necessarily evil. Steepling is what you do when you form a tent with your fingers. Touching fingers in succession while steepling is optional. Pesca cites the Definitive Book of Body Languageby Barbara and Allan Pease, who argue that “steeplers are exhibiting self-assuredness.” Well, that sounded pretty definitive, but as a steepler myself I wanted to know more. It’s true, the Peases do say that steeplers are a confident... Read more
You wouldn’t know as you slogged through his impenetrable prose, but Husserl’s turn to phenomenology was, Jonathan Ree argues, a “belated return to plain healthy common sense” (I See A Voice, 343). All knowledge comes initially through the senses, the scholastics had said, and early modern philosophers had tried to specify how the impressions coming from five very different senses can be unified in the singularity of our experience. By emphasizing our embodiedness in the world, Husserl broke through the... Read more
One of the most amusing contributions to the early modern debate on the origins of language came from Francis Mercury van Helmont. Like many others, he insisted that Noah spoke Hebrew, but his way of defending and explication that was uniquely his own. In his 1667 Very Short delination of the Natural Hebrew Alphabet, van Helmont argued (in the summary of Jonathan Ree) “the Hebrew characters were originally pictorial; and they depicted not the objects or ideas they referred to,... Read more
I state a thesis: Dostoevsky is a polyphonic hedgehog. The subthesis is that Tolstoy is a monologic fox. The second part of that comparison comes from Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox. Berlin cites the Greek poet Archilochus’s dictum, “A fox knows many things; a hedgehog knows one big thing,” and says, quite rightly, that Dostoevsky is of the prickly not the smooth-furred species. But Dostoevsky’s hedgehogginess is of a particular breed, identified by Bakhtin as “polyphonic” (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics).... Read more
Voice has often been seen as expression, as the coming into public space of something within. Given its reliance on breath, it was easy to conclude that voice is the expression of the soul. According to Ree (I See A Voice), it was Herder who broke through this illusion bt arguing that voice doesn’t move from in to out but relays and echoes within social space: “Herder heard a movement from speaker to speaker, from voice to voice. . .... Read more
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