It was recently announced that a bust of Julius Caesar was discovered last year in the Rhône river near Arles, a city founded by him. The marble piece probably dates to 46 BC and would be the oldest image of Cesar known so far.

Dans un article des Annales (“L’écriture de l’histoire et la représentation du passé”, No. 55, 2000, pp. 731–47), Paul Ricœur discute vers la fin les idées de Hayden White. A propos de S. Friedlander et du défi que présente la Shoah aux théoriciens du relativisme historique (Probing the limits of representation), il écrit:

H. White, interpellé, fit courageusement face au défi, en réitérant son argumentation et en avouant que sa rhétorique tropologique ne lui fournissait aucun critère immanent au discours pour distinguer la réalité de la fiction. La distinction, concédait-il, doit procéder `d’une autre région de notre capacité réceptive que celle éduquée par notre culture narrative.’

Il me semble que la réponse à cette question, ou plutôt un commentaire, se trouve dans l’essai de J. Cayrol, Pour un romanesque lazaréen et peut-être (moins) dans le style de La nuit de Wiesel. Le monde d’Auschwitz réside sinon hors discours, hors le mien, parce que tout discours (dis-cursus…) même bancal se rattache encore à l’idéal du discours, qui est d’être beau, convaincant, et imitant un déroulement de temps, et que cet idéal est lié à l’effet d’illusion créé par l’écriture. La prétention seule qu’il a d’imiter le déroulement du temps montre ses limites: que peut-il lorsque le temps est à la fois vidé et éternisé par la torture?

Re-reading M. Daraki’s book, Du stoïcisme d’Athènes à Saint Augustin, p. 214, in a section titled, “Le Dieu personnalisé et la Nature sacrée”:

In any case, cosmological dualism is a datable product. Man is wont to think of nature as matter as soon as he begins to transform it. The God of judaism became angry at first against technological hubris, then he saved what could be saved by focussing sacredness in sacred space. But profane space grew and grew, since man can’t be humble on all planes. He submits to an authoritarian Father and submits nature to his power. In this exercise, man ended up becoming more and more intelligent. From now on, he feeds daily on the fruit of knowledge that the humankind of another time had held as forbidden. And he hardly can believe anymore in a God whom he disobeyed with such admirable results.

I interpret the history of Judaism and Christianity in the reverse direction. Meaning, sacred space was broadened, or rather the possibility of a sacred-profane dialectics now extends to all aspects of human life and is not anymore a matter of external calendars and sacred space. It may play itself out in the soul.

The world Evangelical alliance, whatever that is, publicized again its intention to continue proselytizing among Jewish people in a statement page A13 of today’s NYT. I say again, because such declarations have surfaced from time to time. Note the condemnation of antisemitism, the declaration of friendship and love for the Jewish people, but the absence of mention of a covenant between God and his people. The latter is not surprising, since one would have to go through the Paulinian gymnastics of Romans 1–11 again and again…. Note also the language about deception or coercion: those Jews who convert to evangelical christianity do remain Jewish, by Christian fiat. Here is the text of this declaration:

The gospel and the Jewish people, an evangelical statement:

As evangelical Christians, we want to express our genuine friendship and love for the Jewish people. We sadly acknowledge that church history has been marred with anti-Semitic words and deeds; and that at times when the Jewish people were in great peril, the church did far less than it should have.

• We pledge our commitment to be loving friends and to stand against such injustice in our generation. At the same time, we want to be transparent in affirming that we believe the most loving and Scriptural expression of our friendship toward Jewish people, and to anyone we call friend, is to forthrightly share the love of God in the person of Jesus Christ.
• We believe that it is only through Jesus that all people can receive eternal life. If Jesus is not the Messiah of the Jewish people, He cannot be the Savior of the World (Acts 4:12).
• We recognize that it is good and right for those with specialized knowledge, history and skills to use these gifts to introduce individuals to the Messiah, and that includes those ministries specifically directed to the Jewish people (1 Corinthians 9:20–22).
• We deplore the use of deception or coercion in evangelism; however, we reject the notion that it is deceptive for followers of Jesus Christ who were born Jewish to continue to identify as Jews (Romans 11:1).
• We want to make it clear that, as evangelical Christians, we do not wish to offend our Jewish friends by the above statements; but we are compelled by our faith and commitment to the Scriptures to stand by these principles. It is out of our profound respect for Jewish people that we seek to share the good news of Jesus Christ with them, and encourage others to do the same, for we believe that salvation is only found in Jesus, the Messiah of Israel and Savior of the world.

It is frightening though not surprising to see the Federal Reserve stepping in these past few days as lender of last resort to credit markets that were freezing up. Two hundred billion dollars! In effect, it is nationalizing the debt instruments so eagerly developed and gulped up by private banks and investor funds. The latest interventions by the Federal Reserve essentially mean that worthless or near-worthless instruments can now be put up as collateral (at face value?) by the banks. I understand that the credit markets needed to be jolted into making liquidities available again, but I fear the consequences of the moves. And I find it tragically maddening, rather than ironic and contradictory (which I find it to be also), that a government hell-bent on privatizing everything from health to education and social security, ends up picking the pockets of the public when there is need to correct the “irrational exuberances” of the private equity markets or ensure private control of energy sources. For the war in Iraq, public money too is just poured out to the tune of almost three trillion dollars into a national professional army *and* almost as vast a privatized military operation to serve (ensure, continue, bolster?) an entirely privatized energy policy. So here we are: robbing the nation and privatizing everything of real value, essential to life, but financing out of the public treasury (actually through indebtedness) the results of gross financial mistakes and foreign adventures that mostly large private interests profit from.

Sanctus Valentinus, Valentine Day, and love today

Romae, via Flaminia, natalis sancti Valentini, presbyteri et martyris, qui, post multa sanitatum et doctrinae insignia, fustibus caesus et decollatus est, sub Claudio Caesare.

Interamnae sancti Valentini, episcopi et martyris, qui, post diutinam caedem mancipatus custodiae, et, cum superari non posset, tandem, mediae noctis silentio eiectus de carcere, decollatus est, iussu praefecti urbis Placidi. (Martyrologium Ecclesiae)

February the 13th corresponds to the Ides of February. The 14th of February, corresponds to the first day of the Kalends of March in the Julian calendar. Plum trees are in bloom, almond trees have already blossomed. Spring is in the air, at least for coastal Californians and for the ancient Romans who lived at around 30–40 degrees of latitude (Santa Cruz: 39º N; Rome: 41º N).

In ancient Rome, the goddess Juno, who was seen as the queen of the pantheon in the late Republic, was honored on February 14th.  Juno was also revered as the goddess of women and marriage. Juno Lucina was the goddess of childbirth. 

The following day, on February 15th, Romans celebrated the Lupercalia, a festival animated by a sort of brotherhood (a sodalitas) of young men called luperci, i.e. the “wolf-guys,” (from lupus= wolf). Sacrifices were made in the Lupercal, the cave in Rome reputed to have sheltered the she-wolf who brought up Romulus and Remus. For the rest of the ritual, I quote from The Oxford Classical Dictionary (3d ed., 1996, article “Lupercalia” p. 892):

the blood was smeared with a knife on the foreheads of two youths (who were obliged to laugh), and wiped with wool dipped in milk; then the Luperci, naked except for girdles from the skin of sacrificial goats, ran (probably) round the Palatine [….] striking bystanders, especially women, with goat-skin thongs (a favourite scene in the iconography of roman months [….].

Perhaps this striking, or marking, of women was not left to chance but was the product of deliberation under the guise of mayhem, and was expected to lead to marriages.

What does Valentine have to do with the Lupercalia? Under Claudius II, around the year A.D. 270, Valentine was a priest in Rome.  He was eventually arrested (for marrying young people?) before the Prefect of Rome, Placidus, who condemned him to be beaten to death with clubs and to have his head cut off (see Latin above).  He suffered martyrdom on the 14th day of February, about the year 270.  If the date of his death is correct, it might be the date alone that attracted to the name of Valentinus stories about his marrying young people in Rome…. The pull of the Lupercalia festival would have been strong enough to make Christianized Romans draw new meanings from the ancient Roman feast and attach them to Valentinus who died on that same day. Or did it happen the other way around, that is, Valentine was associated with marriage, and the date of his death was conveniently attached to that of the Lupercalia festival?

Eventually, the Christian church went further and tried to completely transform this early Spring festival . Gelasius, bishop of Rome at the end of the 5th c., is thought to have “banned Christian participation [in the Lupercalia] and transformed it into the feast of the Purification of the Virgin.” (see Oxford Classical Dictionary, quoted above). Again, a very ancient aspect of the Lupercalia has here been adapted, namely the lustrations (purifications) of this fertility ritual. The Saint Valentine cult appears therefore to have come into full bloom in the 5th c. as an early Christian counter-reform, an adaptation of an ancient fertility and pre-marital ritual.

One might look at the modernized version of the St Valentine as a third stage of development. Love, its random possibilities, and the sacred aspects of social contracts and fertility, are submitting to great pressures coming from agressive forms of relentless commercialization. Yet, the wild, “wolf-like” behavior of the Lupercalia somehow survives….

About the notion of revelation and its accommodation to human intelligence and opinions, Spinoza writes to Oldenburg:

At dices, Apostolos omnes omninò credidisse, quòd Christus à morte resurrexit, et ad coelum reverâ ascenderit : quod ego non nego. Nam ipse etiam Abrahamus credidit, quòd Deus apud ipsum pransus fuerit, et omnes Israëlitae, quòd Deus è coelo igne circumdatus ad montem Sinaï descenderit, et cum iis immediatè locutus fuerit, cum tamen haec, et plura alia hujusmodi apparitiones, seu revelationes fuerint, captui, et opinionibus eorum hominum accommodatae, quibus Deus mentem suam iisdem revelare voluit. Concludo itaque Christi à mortuis resurrectionem reverâ spiritualem, et solis fidelibus ad eorum captum revelatam fuisse, nempe quòd Christus aeternitate donatus fuit, et à mortuis, (mortuos hîc intelligo eo sensu, quo Christus dixit : sinite mortuos mortuos suos sepelire) surrexit, simulatque vitâ et morte singularis sanctitatis exemplum dedit, et eatenus discipulos suos à mortuis suscitat, quatenus ipsi hoc vitae ejus, et mortis exemplum sequuntur.

(Letter 75, Dec-Jan 1675-6, one year before his own death)

But you are going to say that all the apostles had completely believed that Christ rose again from death and really ascended to heaven: which I don’t deny. Well, even Abraham himself believed that God had lunch with him and all the Israelites [believed] that God, surrounded by fire, descended from heaven onto Mt Sinai, and that he spoke with them directly. These and many other things of the same type were apparitions or revelations adapted to the understanding and opinions of these people, by which God wished to reveal his mind to them. I conclude therefore that Christ’s resurrection from the dead was really spiritual and that it was revealed only to the faithful according to their understanding, indeed that Christ was granted with eternity, and that he rose from the dead (I understand the dead here in the sense in which Christ said: Let the dead bury their dead), by virtue of the fact that he gave an example of unique holiness by his life and death, and that he raises his disciples from the dead exactly inasmuch as they follow this example of his life and death.

Radios et journaux ne parlent que de la baisse des actions boursières. Mais on ne parle jamais du travail des gens, aide-soignants par exemple: les bras vont-ils baisser de 10% demain, suite aux caracolements de la bourse? D’ailleurs, pourquoi la page de Business n’est-elle pas appelée la page du Travail?
Réaction des gouverneurs de banque et de la Réserve Fédérale (« Réserve »! de quoi? il n’y a de réserve que de crédit, confiance accordée aux uns et aux autres parce qu’ils sont de bonne foi, dans une chaîne sans fin): baisser le taux d’intérêt immédiatement, avant l’ouverture des cours à New York, de 0.75%, ce qui veut dire qu’à leur réunion prévue pour lundi, ce taux pour les prêts de banque à banque sera de nouveau diminué, probablement de 0.5%, puisque l’essai de calmer le jeu ce matin n’aura mené qu’à de nouveaux calculs par les investisseurs que la Réserve Fédérale leur fera un autre cadeau, pour protéger leurs acquis, lundi prochain. Et si cela marche, ne serait-ce pas simplement parce que tout le monde comptera sur une nouvelle vague de commercialisme où principalement le consommateur américain achètera encore plus à crédit? Jusqu’où ira-t-on dans ce jeu de crédit?

Parables have been a main object of allegorization. What is allegorization? Some time, I’ll give the history of the process, and why it is a very fruitful and logically sensible way of interpreting texts. First moment, one will present not only the Alexandrian school, but its influence on Jewish textual practices, Philo as textbook case, Origen as one of the great allegorizers. Second moment, sometimes corollary of the first, the misuse of allegory, and the free-for-all allegorization, right up to our modern and less modern preachers, in whose hands and mouths allegorization became a political and moral weapon rather than an instrument of discovery and return to the text. Hence a third moment, with late XIXth century exegetes, and first of all with Jülicher and followers, who wish to escape the intellectually sterile world of allegory (the reason for this being that as the Christianized world, in its successful capitalist incarnation, has moved away, or thinks it has moved away from ancient modes of production and their accompanying fidelities or forms of group thinking, it becomes necessary to free also the individual as moral being and kantify him, or in other words, to enlarge one’s economic freedom to a freedom of thought in regard to a model in which the allegory is one-directional. A form of late cartesianism, with the usual suspension of the divine). We are now in a fourth moment: a return to allegory as an instrument of discovery (reasoning by analogy), but with the possibility that not only the one-directionality has been put aside for good, in favor of a multi-directionality (controlled: i.e. we know how to use the tools: history, sociology, anthropological questions, etc.), but that the terms of the analogies set up in the allegorizing moment are better understood as revelations. An important point about the parabolic form: it allows the listeners to confront the truth(s) of their situation indirectly, unthreateningly. For instance, in Luke 16.1–11,a frightening thought on the nature of God and hence on the nature of society is hidden yet approachable through the paradoxical form of the story of the unfaithful steward.

The president was in Israel, Palestine (a few minutes), Bahrein, etc. It is a constant surprise to hear him talk about peace, though to be fair, he speaks of it only after security, freedom, etc., as a sort of automatic by-product. He had the obligatory mention concerning the settlements: they must stop. One wants to ask him: which? the present extensions on Har Homa and Ma’alei Adumim? Or all of them? He doesn’t mention UN Resolution 242, or at least I haven’t heard him say it. And I remember him a number of years ago speaking of “facts on the ground” that would have to be taken into account, just the language Ariel Sharon and others on the right hoped to hear.
Back to the US: I wish I could believe in Clinton, but distrust the way she is making the kind of close calculations her husband did. After Bill Clinton’s election in 92, it was disappointing, to say the least, to see him delegate the vital issue of national health to his wife and not be willing to spend essential political capital himself on this project. I thought at the time she should have been the president. But now? Would she be able to tackle such an issue any more sucessfully now, let alone phase out the military adventures in the Middle East and in Asia? I think political calculations would take over…

Meanwhile, the governor in California speaks of tightening the budgetary belt. He was happy enough to buy votes by cancelling taxes (DMV) once upon a time. Happy to issue a lot of bond paper too, as his predecessors. Happy to pick the pockets of school districts, promise them the money would be returned, which didn’t happen. And now he is going to pick what crumbs are left in public pockets…