Written in the stars

All the signs pointed in one direction:

the words of the prophets of old,

the genealogical records,

the dream of Joseph,

the voices of the angels from heaven,

the paranoia of a puppet ruler,

and even the stars themselves,

sang together in a glorious symphony of the baby born to be King – the one called Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.

In the ancient world, it was not unusual to think that occurrences in the natural world were telling us about the lives of human beings.

If you were going on a journey, or embarking on a business venture, then it was vital to read the signs.

You might get a soothsayer to say some sooth – to perhaps slaughter an animal and make a reading from its entrails ; or to watch in the sky for the flight patterns of geese.

But what happened on the black canvas of the heavens held particular fascination for ancient people.

And heavenly events were associated with Kings and rulers.

When Julius Caesar was backstabbed by Brutus and the boys in 44BC, the ancient writer Suetonius said that “a comet shone for seven successive days... and was believed to be the soul of Caesar”.

It became known in Rome as “Caesar’s star”.

At Christmas we recall an even more famous star : the star not of vast Rome and mighty Caesar, but of tiny Bethlehem and its baby in a manger.

Matthew tells us that

“in the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking

“Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage”.

Who were these most unexpected visitors intruding into this thoroughly Jewish scene?

We call them ‘wise men’, but the word the text uses is ‘Magi’, which is word we get ‘magic’ from.

These were the star-gazers : the astrologers. Perhaps they’d come from as far away as Persia, or Babylon, places well known for their star-gazers.

How many were there? Matthew doesn’t tell us – we always picture three because there are three gifts, but they must have had an entourage to be able to travel safely with such treasures.

Reading the heavens like an ancient sat-nav, they made their way to the court of King Herod in Jerusalem.

I say they are unexpected visitors, because the Bible is for the most part quite critical of astrologers and astrology.

In the Old Testament, the wise men of Egypt and of Babylon are shown to be incompetent at best and in league with evil at worst.

In the book of Daniel, we are supposed to laugh at their foolish efforts to interpret dreams and tell the future.

The Bible gives us no hint that their methods of interpreting the stars, or dreams, or other portents are anything but empty. They simply don’t work.

This fits with our modern view: that the appearance of omens in the skies are not omens, but merely coincidences. Caesar’s star was nothing but a beautiful collision of history and astronomy.

But in this case, the foreign star-gazers of the East with all their elaborate but fanciful astrological calculations appear to have found – or maybe stumbled across - the truth :       

that a king is to be born of the Jews.

There do appear to be records of extraordinary astronomical events that the Wise Men could easily have read as heralding a King of the Jews.

The recent work of Dr Michael Molnar, an astronomer of Rutgers University in New Jersey, provides some fascinating background. Using astronomical calculations and historical accounts, Molnar shows that in the year 6BC the planet Jupiter – which appears like a star to the naked eye – appeared in the constellation of Aries. Jupiter was the planet associated with kings, and Aries was linked to the Jews. On April 17^th of 6BC, Jupiter was eclipsed by the moon in Aries. Later that year in August, it appeared to change direction and move: before becoming stationary on December 19^th. This pattern seems to match very well what we read in Matthew’s account: that the star rose, and then, after their interview with King Herod, went ‘ahead of them’, “until it stopped over the place where the child was”.

There seems then, good reason to think that on this occasion, extra-terrestrial events pointed to terrestrial ones.

The birth of the Messiah was announced to those who were listening to the old prophecies : but it was also announced to those who were peering into the heavens.

And should perhaps not be as surprising to us as it is. Should we not expect that, in this one instant around which the whole universe turns, the creator of all that is, seen and unseen, could arrange the massive rotating wheels of space and matter and time to reveal his purposes to those on earth who happened to be watching?

And so the Magi came to see a King, and pay him homage.

The word is perhaps even stronger than that : they came to worship him – they ‘knelt down’ before him, and they gave him precious gifts, the gifts due to a ruler and a deity.

This year has seen the birth of another future king – England’s Prince George.

And he was given some gifts, too : apparently the Northern Territory gave him a crocodile named after him.

Kanye West and Kim Kardashian gifted him some little hoodies and skinny jeans.

The Samburu community of Kenya present George with a black bull and a goat.

He was also given a monogrammed mini-motorbike.

The wise men, however, weren’t giving their gifts to a recognised prince, whose baby photos were in all the papers.

They were giving their royal gifts to the baby who was born in a manger : gold, frankincense, and myrrh, the gifts you give to a king in order show that you recognise that they are the king – or to a divine being, in order show that you recognise that they are God.

The stars do not ordinarily point to anything. But in this case, they pointed to the appearance of God as man with man to dwell.

Even these pagans – these outsiders - could see it.

We shouldn’t fail to notice the contrast that they make with King Herod – a man notorious for murdering members of his own family because of his fear that they were plotting against him.

Of all people, he should have been prepared for the coming of the true King. He had the chief priests and teachers of the law come and tell him that the Messiah of Israel was to be born in Bethlehem.

He had all the insider knowledge he could want.

At this news, he should have been rejoicing, and adding his adoration to that of the wise men.

But how does he react?

First, he is greatly frightened when he hears about the birth of the Messiah.

And secondly: he tricks the wise men into becoming his agents on the pretext that he intends, like them, to ‘pay him homage’.

Really, as we later discover, he means to add another murder to his tally. He does not want to bend the knee to another, not even the one sent from above to be the true King of Israel. He does all he can to destroy him.

All the signs still point in one direction.

They point to Bethlehem, and they say: here was the one human being in whom God was pleased to live.

Here was the one born to be the true King not just of Israel, but of the whole world.

Here is the one who will save his people from their sin, by his death on the cross.

Here is the one who will triumph over the grave.

Here was born the one who now reigns over all, and to whom every knee should bow.

How will you respond to the signs?

It is easy to paint Herod as a sideshow villain : but his refusal to see the signs can be our refusal, too.

His determination not to submit to another King can be ours, as we cling to our own independence.

We all know that Herod cannot succeed in terminating the Son of God : even he knows it, really, you suspect.

Yet his self-defeat can also be our self-defeat, if we refuse the true King.

But the wise thing to do is to do what the wise men from the East did: to worship him : to give to him the things that are his due.

To offer to him not simply gold, frankincense and myrrh, but the sweet-smelling sacrifice of our whole selves.

The invitation then comes to you and me today to gather with these wise men not merely around the cradle at Bethlehem, but around the heavenly throne on which Jesus, one born King of the Jews now sits, and whose glory the whole universe itself declares.

Lullabies of Lucre

We live in the middle of a branded universe, in which everything is designed to make us devote ourselves to things. And advertising doesn’t speak to the rational part of us: it goes for the heart. It produces desires and longings in us. It sings to us: advertising jingles are lullabies of lucre, helping us to fall in love with the promise that owning material goods will secure us and complete us. To stroll through Bondi Junction Westfield is to stroll through a soaring cathedral of consumer goods, bathed in a transcendent holy white light, not quite sure where you are going, other than that you feel the burning urge to purchase something. It is a powerful cult, this cult of mammon, and we are in its church 24/7 – because its siren songs are beamed into our homes and burned onto our brains.

We gather in church, for  one precious hour on Sunday, to escape from the god of material wealth and possessions. Here we find a place where that God is banned. His domain is outside the door. We are here to retrain our hearts: to remind us of that the God that died for us is the true God. To hear the words of life; to sing different songs, and to awaken in ourselves different heart-longings. Which is why the disciples of Jesus in the 21^st century, if they are to serve the true master, need more than ever to dedicate this part of their lives and more to him. How else can your heart survive in such a world? How else can you be protected from the deep longings for material things that this city so openly worships?

The epic human: 2

Lukács and Bakhtin both treat the epic as a product of the particular tradition of epic literature that begins with the Homeric pieces. While other accounts of the epic genre attempt to take a more global perspective, including literature from many diverse cultures in their discussion, the reality is that the epic in the West has been framed by an ongoing conversation with the Homeric tradition. For example, the Japanese scholar Masaki Mori attempts to expand the number of texts to be considered as ‘epic’ by listing three basic elements of works that are classified as epics – elements which can be found in texts outside the Homeric tradition. These are 1) an epic is long and 2) an epic is a narrative. That’s as much as Mori will say about the formal characteristics of the epic. To these he adds a thematic element, which he calls 3) ‘epic grandeur’.[1]  Mori’s ‘epic grandeur’ emerges on his account from three underlying thematic elements: the hero’s attitude toward his mortality, his communal responsibility, and the dual dimension of time and space ‘he and the entire work must cope with’.[2]

 

Mori notices that the epic hero is fundamentally human. Even if he is the son of a goddess (as is Aeneas), he is not immortal. Even Achilles alleged invulnerability emerges from later legends, and is not part of the Homeric tradition. He must act, therefore, within the limits of his humanity, since he cannot transcend death, or invoke some particular special power. As Mori writes, “How the protagonist comes to terms with the end of his life and what he can achieve within a limited life span determine his status as an epic hero”.[3] Nevertheless, this hero is not simply interesting because of who he is; rather, he must act on behalf of a community, or within the context of a community. Bakhtin somewhat clumsily names this as a ‘nation’. However, the community in question need not be so neatly demarcated; and indeed, one of the most compelling things about epic is the way in which the universally human is reached through the narrative of the particular.

Mori’s third criterion for epic grandeur is the sense that the narrative occurs within an vast expanse of time and space. The epic’s relationship to time stretches back and forwards. The traditional beginning of the epic in media res allows for a retelling of the past. This is then interwoven with a prophecy of the future, and the powerful sense of a telos binding the past and the future together in one line. Geographical space is also expansive in epic. Even if the action is compressed into a present moment in a particular place (as with The Iliad), the audience is made very much aware that it takes place on much larger stage. The scope of the story thus overspills the momentary and the local because it is so comprehensive.

Mori’s attempt to open up the epic to works that do not belong to the Homeric tradition is both useful and unsatisfactory at the same time. Broadening the scope of the genre enables us to see epic themes in works that are not strictly speaking ‘epic’ – for example, works written in prose rather than in verse. It also enables the consideration of works that belong to the oral and written traditions of other cultures. The notion of ‘epic’ as a device for the classification and analysis of literary works still retains its Western heritage, though, which largely begins with Homer as its first exponent and Aristotle as its leading theorist. It is arguably impossible – even if it were desirable – to simply cast off the Homeric perspective on epic. Thus: while it would be better not to be trapped into a classification of epic containing virtual no works other than the Homeric, it is still the case that the place of the Homeric poems within the tradition of epic is unparalleled. As Louise Cowan writes:

It has been customary to say that Homer invented the epic; it would be more accurate, however, to say that he discovered it, for the epic is the portrayal of something potential in the human soul from the beginning, though not known until expressed in poetic form. [4]     

In the previous chapter I cited Charles Bazerman: ‘Genres are not just forms. Genres are forms of life, ways of being’.[5] From this conversation with Bakhtin, Lukács, and Mori we may begin to venture a number of propositions about the theological anthropology of the epic – propositions which we will test with reference to the epics of Virgil and Les Murray. The first, and most striking of these (1), is that in epic the human being inhabits a world which is highly teleological. The narrative may well be impeded at a number of points – indeed, it has to be if there is to be any dramatic interest in it – but there is no doubt about the outcome. World history is what it is because of the divine desire and direction. As Hegel put it: “In the epic individuals act and feel; but their actions are not independent, events [also] have their right.” “Events” in epic are not, however, are not the creation of the author of the epic. They belong to the divine will. The divine will is revealed to the characters and/or to the readers, but never completely, which allows for the route to destiny to appear somewhat indirect.

Hegel rightly raises the question of the individual’s independence; for in the epic, the question of human freedom is always being negotiated (2). Human beings are indeed viewed as genuine agents and not merely as puppets without conscious awareness of their need to act upon the vast stage of the epic cosmos. But the secret of true human agency in the epic is to act in line with fate and not against it. Their duty is to recognize their destiny and to follow it. Events turn against them when they do not do this.

This means that (3) the epic human being is not much given to the internal dilemmas and deliberations so characteristic of the novel (to concur with Lukács). Authentic humanity – human being realized as true to its nature – is not discovered by reconciling tensions internal to oneself. In fact, it might be possible to argue that the epic does not have a view of the human being as a self at all – if by that we are indicating the self-reflexivity so characteristic of other narrative forms. There are no true soliloquys in epic. Dido commits suicide in book IV of the Aeneid, but the causes of this are not complex. She is not depressed: she is in love, and fate has taken her love from her. Her suicide is as much an act of piety as Aeneas’ departure is.

The epic seeks to make or recover an identity for a community or group (5). Sometimes that is a “nation”, though the value of this term is questionable. The individual’s identity as against other identities is not the issue. Rather the community recalls its own identity through the story of its origins, or the story of its survival through military struggles. The question of ‘who am I?’ is subsumed by ‘who are we?’ In epic, then, heroism is a matter of representation: the hero is an embodiment of the community’s view of the ideal human life. This is why he is not super-heroic, since to be endowed with gifts surpassing those of ordinary mortals makes him unfit to be an exemplar. He exemplifies a virtue, which is capable of imitation in ordinary.

This is why (6) the epic hero does not deny his human limitations, least of all his own mortality. It is also why genealogy is important for epic, since that is the only means that the mortal has for transcending death. The epic hero (as Mori notes) is a human being, and will one day die. Even after he achieves his goal, he must leave behind a legacy.

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[1] Mori, p. 47.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., p. 48.

[4] Louise Cowan, "Epic as Cosmopoesis," in The Epic Cosmos, ed. James Larry Allums, Studies in Genre (Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1992), p. 24.

[5] Charles Bazerman, "The Life of Genre, the Life in the Classroom," in Genre and Writing : Issues, Arguments, Alternatives, ed. Wendy Bishop and Hans A. Ostrom(Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook : Heinemann, 1997), p. 19.

An epic view of the human? 1

Of all the literary genres, it is epic that is experienced by contemporary critics as most alien and obsolete. There is no doubting that the Homeric tradition of epic still exerts an extraordinary influence over the telling of stories, and even overspills literature to speak into art, culture, politics and war. The great Greek and Latin epics of the past are still read, but are arguably not emulated; or, at least, they are incorporated by way of ironic reference. There is, then, by no means a consensus as to whether epic has an ongoing relevance – which is not a question of whether the Iliad or the Aeneid cannot be read with any benefit today, but of whether the epic mode enables an author to say about the human condition that which needs to be said in our present time. Frederick Turner suggests:

Perhaps, in a skeptical and self-critical time, we are embarrassed by the emotions and partisanships aroused by the half-remembered nobility and grandeur of the old stories. We are so much more conscious, self-aware, and disillusioned than that now.[1]

That’s as may be. Though Turner is at pains to show that there are contemporary epics being written, including his own, he also has to concede that epic is not the preferred form of contemporary literary authors. 

As with each of the genres of literature, the definition of the genre is not simply a matter of ticking off a list of formal structures. There is with most theorists an agreement that different formal features arise because of different thematic concerns; and in turn, the preference for certain formal features generates a particular perspective on the world that then becomes characteristic of that genre. Thus, we may validly speak not only of an epic in formal terms but also of an ‘epic sensibility’.  

As we shall see, two of the best-known twentieth century theorists, György Lukács[2] and Mikhail Bakhtin[3], compare the epic with the novel (as opposed to say ‘tragedy’ or ‘comedy’). The Hungarian theorist Lukács published his The Theory of the Novel in book form in 1920 (English translation, 1963).[4] Ostensibly, it is a work about the development of the novel; however, it is subtitled A historico-philosopical essay of the forms of great epic literature. For Lukács, the novel is what the epic has become. The narrative that underpins the work is a description of how the great epic poems flourished under historical conditions that no long prevail. Lukács begins with an arresting description of the ‘happy ages’ – by which he means chiefly the era of Homer - in which

…there is not yet any interiority, for there is not yet any exterior, any ‘othernesss’ for the soul. The soul goes out to seek adventure, it lives through adventure, but it does not know the torment of seeking and the real danger of finding; such a soul never stakes itself; it does not yet know that it can lose itself, and it never thinks of having to look for itself. Such an age is the age of the epic.[5]

That is: the inner struggle which engenders the psychological inwardness of the novel – the struggle to overcome the self’s otherness to itself. The Greek epic is a world in which there is already an answer to the question ‘how can life become essential?’[6] The epic describes a ‘totality’, in which the world is almost oppressively coherent. Meaning oozes out of every passing event: every goose flying north for summer may turn out to be an omen of the future. It is (though Lukács doesn’t use this term) a theological vision of the universe in which destiny is perhaps impeded for a time but never ultimately diverted from its course. ‘For the epic, the world at any given moment is an ultimate principle.’[7] The epic poet did not have to struggle to explain transcendent realities, since the gods frequently walked on the ground.

For Lukács, the era of Greek civilization was echoed by the world of the Christian Middle Ages, in which once again the whole created order was thought to be suffused with transcendence and redolent with meaning. All human actions were enclosed with the divine providence. The Enlightenment has unraveled this enclosed and total system and introduced a radical open-endedness and uncertainty to the world, and separated out the transcendent from the immanent, as Kant did with his description of the noumenal and the phenomenal realms. The novel inserts itself in this moment of history as an attempt to give totality to a world in which totality is no longer obvious or directly revealed by a deity. Totality may indeed be discovered in the novel; but it is no longer something that is to be presumed upon. Lukács writes gnomically: ‘The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.’[8]

What of the human being? Lukács makes a number of comments about the contrast between the epic view of the human and the human being that emerges from the world of the novel. In the epic hero we do not encounter an individual meeting his destiny but an individual carrying the burden of the destiny of a community. There is not a personality as such. Interiority is simply not the interest of the epic, since the individual is not interesting in and of himself; what he does has import because he represents a people. Epic heroes are unlikely to be low-born for this reason, for they are connected by destiny to many others; as Lukács says, ‘the epic hero, as bearer of his destiny, is not lonely [in contrast to the hero of the novel], for this destiny connects him by indissoluble threads to the community whose fate is crystallised in his own.’[9]

The theo-anthropology of the epic is, as Lukács sees it, governed by the way in which the empirical world of space and time encloses human life with its order and beauty. Man knows his place in this cosmos under the government of the gods, a government which is constantly (though opaquely) being revealed to him. There are no Nietszchean übermensch here; even the rage of Achilles is not exercised in any defiance of the gods. Lukács writes:

Living empirical man is always the subject of the epic, but his creative, life-mastering arrogance is transformed in the great epics into humility, contemplation, speechless wonder at the luminous meaning which, so unexpectedly, so naturally had become visible to him, an ordinary human being in the midst of ordinary life.[10]

The appearance of the divine subdues the human. This gives the impression that Lukács views the epic as emerging from a kind of pre-fallen world in which, even though there is struggle and death, it is all at least a facet of the extraordinary design of Zeus. The epic has little to do with madness or crime: these are not explanations in the epic, since these are chiefly psychological categories in which the epic has so little actual belief.

Lukács limits his analysis of epic to the world of the Greeks, indeed to Homer, who alone he recognizes as a proper epic poet. He concedes a place to Dante, but only to the first two books of the Divine Comedy. This narrowness of this field seems to jar against his attempt to see the novel as the epic carried on under new conditions. The contrast between the novel and the epic in terms of interiority and the totality of life seems so crucial to him that it is difficult to imagine what the continuity between the two categories might be. Nevertheless, Lukács has recognized that a particular theo-anthropology is deeply embedded in the epic genre: it is a narration of the human experience according to a particular arrangement of time and space and those (the gods) who organize them.

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[1] Turner.

[2] Gyœrgy Lukács, The Theory of the Novel : A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans., Anna Bostock (London: Merlin Press, 1971).

[3] M. M. Bakhtin, Michael Holquist, and Caryl Emerson, The Dialogic Imagination : Four Essays, University of Texas Press Slavic Series (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).

[4] In an later introduction to the work, Lukács speaks almost with embarrassment of his earlier writing. Nevertheless, political conditions in the Hungary of the 1960s were scarcely congenial to scholarly free speech.

[5] Lukács, p. 30.

[6] Ibid., p. 35.

[7] Ibid., p. 46.

[8] Ibid., p. 88.

[9] Lukács @ p. 67

[10] Lukács, p. 50.