In a famous essay on “rites of violence” in sixteenth-century France, Natalie Zemon Davis argued that one motivation behind mob violence was the desire to purge “the community of dreaded pollution. The word ‘pollution’ is often on the lips of the violent, and the concept serves well to sum up the dangers which rioters saw in the dirty and diabolic enemy.” Thus, for instance: “A priest brings ornaments and objects for singing the Mass into a Bordeaux jail. The Protestant... Read more
In her study of Leviticus as Literature, Mary Douglas notes the “house that Jack built” quality of the Levitical descriptions of sacrifice. Priests put animal parts on the wood that is on the fire that is on the altar. Douglas takes this as a sign that Leviticus describes sacrifice as a “construction” within the altar. A small tabernacle is reproduced – the animals representing priests, the wood the tabernacle itself, formed around Yahweh’s fiery presence. The Chronicler borrows the same... Read more
The Chronicler’s account of the construction of Solomon’s temple (2 Chronicles 3:1-5:1) follows the creation week of Genesis 1 in general and in specific details. In general, the account moves from a description of the dimensions, materials and adornments of the three zones of the temple (porch, palace, most holy place, 3:1-9) to a description of the items of furniture that are placed in each room (3:10-4:10). First empty rooms, then the stuff to fill them. This mirrors the movement... Read more
Why didn’t the apostles move more quickly to protest and attempt to abolish slavery? There are various answers to that, but Oliver O’Donovan’s gets to the heart of the issue: The church “believed that Christ had abolished it” (Desire of Nations, 185). Of course, the church had little clout to change Roman law, as Wilberforce later did, but “it might have claimed to have taken a more direct route. It knew something about law and liberation from it. With this... Read more
When Jesus condemns hypocrisy, argues Oliver O’Donovan (Desire of Nations, 109–10), He is speaking of conformity to “public expectation.” O’Donovan suggests that the sense is captured by the word “performance.” Jesus is not speaking of motives in the modern sense of the word: “A motive, as we use the term, is a reason for doing a particular act located within the purposes of the agent. To understand the inner purpose from which an act arose, it appears, is both to... Read more
Garry Wills is the NYRB’s resident expert on Evangelicals, and he gives an overview of the Evangelical movement under three headings—crowds, drama, and cycles. It’s familiar territory, and much of it is unexceptional—neither mistaken nor particularly insightful. But Wills does include a bit of each—mistake and insight. He spends some time sorting through the millennial views of American Evangelicals, and says that Jonathan Edwards agreed with “John Winthrop (1588–1649) that Americans had come to a virgin continent to set up... Read more
In a review of new editions of the works of Israeli novelist S.Y. Agnon, Robert Alter highlights Agnon’s debts to both his Jewish heritage and modernist revolt against tradition. His description of Agnon’s story collection, A City in Its Fullness, captures both sides: “The stories, some folkloric, many realistic, all take place in a Buczacz [Agnon’s birthplace} of centuries past. Agnon wrote them relatively late in life, brooding over the fate of his hometown, where almost the entire Jewish population... Read more
Eamon Duffy tells the fascinating story of a Yale library manuscript, Beinecke MS 408, a book of herbal lore and astrology, written in an indecipherable code. It is also known as the “Voynich manuscript” because of the role of Wilfrid Michael Voynich (a “Polish-Lithuanian bookdealer and adventurer”) in its discovery and delivery to the library. From Duffy’s account, I’d say Voynich’s life is worthy of a film. Duffy concludes from the material properties of the book that it cannot be... Read more
Christopher Carroll reviews two volumes of music criticism written by Virgil Thomson at the NYRB. Carroll characterizes Thomson as a “knight errant” because of principles like this one, enunciated in his book, The State of Music: To expose the philanthropic persons in control of our musical institutions for the amateurs they are, to reveal the manipulators of our musical distribution for the culturally retarded profit makers that indeed they are, and to support with all the power of my praise... Read more
According to many biologists and philosophers of science, evolution has eliminated all notion of purpose, teleology, and form from biology. Living things are machines that operate by chemical and physical processes, guided by the purposeless process of natural selection. Stephen Talbott begs to differ, at length and devastatingly. Wherever we look, we see living things acting with purpose. We explain it as instinct, but that can’t be right. A robin tugs a worm from the earth and swallows it, because... Read more
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