Fallen, fallen . . .

Behold!

The ruins of Babylon.

Fallen, fallen is Babylon; and all the images of her gods lie shattered on the ground.
Isaiah 21.9

The ruins of Nineveh.

Nineveh is devastated; who will bemoan her?
Nahum 3.7

The outline of the ancient Neo-Assyrian walls of Nineveh is clear, even though the suburban sprawl of Mosul has resulted, shockingly, in a swath through the middle of the city being built over. Nearly nothing architectural survives. On the palace mound, a corrugated metal roof protects what’s left of the Assyrian throne room. Good riddance.

The ruins of Babylon are likewise encroached upon, though with more sinister implication. The three round shapes are artificial conical hills that the late, unlamented ruler of Iraq built to accomodate a few palaces for himself, with a view of ancient Babylon’s ruins, which he intended to resurrect to glory. The outline of the ziggurat is perhaps the most striking feature: it is now simply a sodden pit, as after Alexander the Great removed the bricks in order to facilitate its rebuilding, he died, and it was never rebuilt. The glazed and fired bricks were then looted to build various structures nearby. The walls and remains of the ancient suburb to the west across the river are now obliterated, though the moat around the city proper does trace the remnants of the walls.

In both cases, cruel as their masters were, two of the greatest, most beautiful, wealthiest cities in the ancient world are now heaps of mud and sand: ugly, unimportant, and uninteresting aside from their pasts. Who could help but think of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s most famous poem?

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said : Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear :
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings :
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias, 1817.

Ozymandias is a corruption of the praenomen of Ramesses the Great, Usermaatre, which in his own time would’ve been pronounced something like “Usermāria.” Shelley, here, was indulging in a bit of poetic hyperbole. The statue is indeed fallen, but Ramesses’ statues invariably show him with a slight, mysterious smile, never with a “wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command.” The shattered statue which inspired the poem is now known as the Ozymandias Colossus and stands not where “lone and level sands stretch far away,” but in the very impressive ruins of the Ramesseum, which is the mortuary temple of Ramesses the Great in the necropolis of Thebes.

Lastly, this post is filed in the category Poetry, not only for the poem quoted immediately above, but for the poetic justice meted out to the capital cities of the Assyrians and Babylonians, from which was directed the ruin of so many cities of so many tribes and nations.

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Jerome on Forcing the Scriptures

These instances have been just touched upon by me (the limits of a letter forbid a more discursive treatment of them) to convince you that in the Holy Scriptures you can make no progress unless you have a guide to show you the way. I say nothing of the knowledge of grammarians, rhetoricians, philosophers, geometricians, logicians, musicians, astronomers, astrologers, physicians, whose several kinds of skills are most useful to mankind, and may be ranged under the three heads of teaching, method, and proficiency. I will pass to the less important crafts which require manual dexterity more than mental ability. Husbandmen, masons, carpenters, workers in wood and metal, wood dressers and fullers, as well as those artisans who make furniture and cheap utensils, cannot attain the ends they seek without instruction from qualified persons. As Horace says:

Doctors alone profess the healing art
And none but joiners ever try to join.
Ep 2.1.115-16

The art of interpreting the Scriptures is the only one of which all men everywhere claim to be masters. To quote Horace again:

Taught or untaught we all write poetry.
Ep 2.1.117

The chatty old woman, the doting old man, and the wordy sophist, one and all take in hand the Scriptures, rend them in pieces and teach them before they have learned them. Some with brows knit and bombastic words balanced one against the other, philosophize concerning the sacred writings among weak women. Others—I blush to say it—learn of women what they are to teach men; and as if even this were not enough, they boldly explain to others what they themselves by no means understand. I say nothing of persons who, like myself, have been familiar with secular literature before they have come to the study of the Holy Scriptures. Such men when they charm the popular ear by the finish of their style suppose every word they say to be a law of God. They do not deign to notice what prophets and apostles have intended but they adapt conflicting passages to suit their own meaning, as if it were a grand way of teaching—and not rather the faultiest of all—to misrepresent a writer’s views and to force the Scriptures reluctantly to do their will. They forget that we have read centos from Homer and Vergil; but we never think of calling the Christless Vergil a Christian because of his lines:

Now comes the Virgin back and Saturn’s reign,
Now from high heaven comes a Child newborn.
Eclogue 4.6-7

Another line might be addressed by the Father to the Son:

Hail, only Son, my Might and Majesty.
Aeneid 1.664

And yet another might follow the Savior’s words on the cross:

Such words he spoke and there transfixed remained.
Aeneid 2.650

But all this is puerile, and resembles the sleight-of-hand of a mountebank. It is idle to try to teach what you do not know, and—if I may speak with some warmth—it is worse to be ignorant of your ignorance.

St Jerome, excerpt from Epistle 53 to St Paulinus of Nola. As presented in F. Sadowski, The Church Fathers On The Bible: Selected Readings (Alba House, 1987).

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Pre-Raphaelite Art

I have only just become aware that The Delaware Art Musem has placed online a site which very nearly renders me speechless (or typingless, to be sure): The Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Collection of Pre-Raphaelite Art. The collection houses the largest collection of Pre-Raphaelite art outside of England, but art in its widest sense, including jewelry, pottery, and other ephemera, in addition to the paintings and drawings and poetry that most who are familiar with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood might think of. Enjoy the implications of that for a moment, let your imagination take wing, and then, look at the beautiful pictures of the collection.

I do not believe that a person is truly civilized who does not appreciate the art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Only beasts and demons could despise such beauty, and barbarians who ride the former and are ridden by the latter. Let your eyes take their rest from the ugliness of the world around you, and enjoy these intimations of another, lost, world. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood attempted, in the face of a creeping secularism, to foment a return to a world in which the best of Christian symbolism permeated all, from wallpaper to earrings. Now their works are glittering reminders that touch . . . something . . . in us and remind us of a modern world that just might have been. There is a gentle melancholy to most of the art which I don’t think I imagine, but which may reflect the very Christian (one must specify “high church Anglican” if not “Anglo-Catholic”) disappointment with the late Victorian and early Edwardian ages: the latter the continuation of the former’s spiritual failures, the concretization of the capitulation of that spiritual war being found in the beginning of the Great War, the “war to end all wars.”

In any case, I’ve often showcased the poems and some prose of Christian Georgina Rossetti, sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the most well-known of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s artists. She’s one of the greatest of English poets, yet seldom gets the attention she deserves. Why? Because the vast majority of her work is explicitly Christian, which modern litterati cannot abide.

And whether you, dear reader, agree with all or any of the above or not, the images of the collection show us some beautiful creations sprung from the vastly inventive imagination and the skillful hand of humanity, and surely are to be admired. Enjoy.

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Waiting for the Typhoon

A middle-class district. The hammers tapping
All day, and all the radios talking of so many
Metres per second, and all the aerials flapping.
Cans and candles have vanished from the shops.
The price of timber, for boarding the windows,
Has gone up and up. The tapping never stops.

The worst since—when was it? Oh damn it all,
It is always the worst something since sometime—
The worst rainy season, the worst A-bomb, the
Worst H-bomb, the worst political scandal, the
Worst harvest, or the worst outbreak of sex-crime.

Listening to the hammers and the chattered warning,
Watching the tethered trees and the urgent clouds—
       tonight or tomorrow morning?
One thinks of those who are truly embarrassed,
Whose houses would faint at the sight of a hammer,
Whose homes, tomorrow, will have fallen down
       in the worst way since last time.

Even the cicadas begin to sound a little harassed.
       Turning a desperate somersault,
A small green insect shelters in the bowels of my
       quivering typewriter—
Good reason for me to call a halt.

D. J. Enright, from Bread Rather Than Blossoms, 1956. Available in Collected Poems: 1948-1998.

(For Doug, on the way to Japan. Highly recommended. All of Enright’s Bread Rather Than Blossoms poems were written while he was Visiting Professor at Konan University in Kobe.)

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ESV with Apocrypha

New blogger Theophrastus at What I Learned From Aristotle (which looks like it’ll be a really great blog: his name and title rock, and among his first posts are some on lipograms and new editions of Dracula!) makes note of a new edition of the English Standard Version Bible with Apocrypha. [The book is now published in a variety of bindings by Anglican House Publishers.] Oddly, it’s published by Oxford University Press, USA, rather than Crossway. The apocrypha in this Bible are apparently the RSV Apocrypha only very lightly reworked (Theophrastus was unable to find any differences in a quick spot-check of various passages). Unfortunately, it sounds as though the physical attributes of this edition are of unacceptably shoddy quality. Both Theophrastus and a blogger he links to mention negatively the extremely thin, non-opaque paper used in this edition. Bleed-through is the bane of all heavy readers. Also, the Apocrypha section is placed at the back of the book, after the NT. Granted, my Oxford Annotated Bible (first edition with the RSV) also has the Apocrypha at the back, but it’s just as odd there, too. So, I’m going to pass on this particular edition. If they release an edition of better quality, I’ll consider it, but it’s not at all compelling. I enjoy the Apocrypha in the NRSV more than those of the RSV, particularly the GII text of Tobit and the full text of Greek Esther. Overall, it sounds like a real non-plus, which is disappointing. These days, I’m much, much happier with another Oxford Bible: the New English Translation of the Septuagint. The work that the translators went to in order to represent in English the peculiar literalistic rendering of the Hebrew in the Greek is simply astounding. Also, having the so-called apocryphal books interspersed in their traditional localtions amongst the other books in the NETS is a real plus. The introductions are without compare, and necessary reading for anyone interesting in the Septuagint.

So, many thanks and welcome, Theophrastus!

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Bible Study Magazine

Some time ago I was sent a review copy of the inaugural issue (November/December 2008) of Bible Study Magazine, a print magazine published by Logos Bible Software (ISSN 1945-0923). Here, finally, is my review.

First, let’s focus on the physical aspects. This is not a very thick magazine, consisting as it does of 49 pages excluding the cover. But the paper stock is of a higher quality than most print magazines, a matte stock which is as pleasing to the eye as it is to the hand. The cover is a bit thicker stock, but also matte. This lends a very nice, modern, higher quality aesthetic to the magazine. It also feels a bit heavier in the hand than it looks it should, which is not a bad thing. The printing is full-color throughout, stem to stern, with a good ink that doesn’t smear easily, thankfully. All this is for the low price (or at least two out of three of the prices are low) noted on the cover: US$ 4.95, CAN$ 5.95, and UK₤ 4.95. However, an annual subscription is a mere US$ 14.95, which is a steal, compared to the cover price.

Now to the content. The Letter from the editor and masthead information appear on page three, with the Statement of Faith being, surprising and refreshingly, the Apostles’ Creed, rather than some cobbled-together denominational foofaraw. By my count, only about 16 pages are ads out of 51 (including the back cover as a page, but excluding the front cover), which not bad at all for any magazine. Hopefully that ratio will remain throughout its run. One of the interesting things about the layout of this magazine, to which most of the ads seem also to have been conformed, is the presence of plenty of white space. This causes some more graphic/text-intense (read “traditional”) ads to look cluttered in comparison, and thus comparatively ugly, an unfortunate incident for the advertisers, who should most certainly design and provide some different ads in future, or at the very least permit the staff of the magazine the license to create ads for these sponsors in such a way that they blend better with the general aesthetic of the magazine. Some particular ads I find particularly jarring in this respect are, for example, those of pages 30, 37, and 48. An interesting feature throughout the magazine is the strong connection to the online world. URLs appear throughout, intended to lead readers to more information on various publications (often appearing in Logos Digital Library format), people, or subjects.

Continue reading “Bible Study Magazine”

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I got me a . . .


Aaron Taylor at Logismoi has awarded me with a Superior Scribbler Award, for whatever reason.

Now, although there are a number of conditions attached to further spread this award, these strike me as too close to something of an electronic version of a chain letter. So, in this particular instance, the buck stops here. I can say that every writer I link to in my sidebar is someone I consider worthy of a Superior Scribbler Award, or I honestly wouldn’t read them or link to them. I can also say that I honestly had hoped to avoid one of these, as I didn’t want to have to be such a party-pooper in not creating more work for others. I am nonetheless thankful to Aaron for his appreciation and his kind comments.

The award originated with The Scholastic Scribe, that is, Melissa B., a high school journalism teacher. It’s a really fun idea, a peer-driven award based entirely and simply in reader appreciation.

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On Reserve

In all matters keep something in reserve. It is to insure your position ; not all your wit must be spent nor all your energies sapped every time ; even of what you know keep a rear guard, for it is to double your advantage, always to have in reserve something to call upon when danger threatens bad issue ; the support may mean more than the attack, because it exhibits faith and fortitude. An intelligent man always plays safe, wherefore even here that sharp paradox holds : more is the half, than the whole.

Gracian’s Manual, § 170

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