About Peter

After stints as a trial lawyer and a church worker, Peter Stephens has settled in as a Virginia high school English teacher. Peter has read several books and poems.

He wrote none of the posts below filed under "Passages." Click the link at the end of each post to see it in the context of the author's original post.

Marginal

May 20, 2012 By Peter Leave a Comment

On Philosophy in fiction. How does Shakespeare use ideas in fiction? On Friday, a friend referred me to a couplet I’ve never thought about, though I’ve taught Romeo and Juliet for eight straight years:

She’s not well married that lives married long;
But she’s best married that dies married young.

With these and other reflections on life and love, Friar Lawrence in act 4, scene 5 seeks to comfort the Capulets over Juliet’s ostensible death. The view of marriage expressed by this couplet seems to contradict those Lawrence expresses in act 2, scene 6 while counseling Romeo about marriage:

These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume: the sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
And in the taste confounds the appetite:
Therefore love moderately; long love doth so;
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.

(Is “love moderately” another of Romeo and Juliet’s oxymorons? After all, even the lover Jesus scolds in Revelation, “I would thou wert cold or hot.” But I think Lawrence’s advice here hinges on what he might mean by moderation: develop other interests in one’s marriage besides sex, and develop other interests in life besides marriage. (But what kind of play would such a life afford us?) Lawrence here also touches on another Romeo and Juliet idea: the link between sex and violence.)

I think the contradiction between Lawrence’s endorsement of “long love” in act 2 and his endorsement of what must be called short love in act 4 reinforces act 4’s dramatic irony. No one in the latter scene but Lawrence knows that Juliet is alive. So Shakespeare uses this dramatic irony to work in some thematic irony. Lawrence takes the opportunity while living this lie to aver in the starkest terms the antithesis of his own opinion.

What makes Friar Lawrence’s avowal of short love otherwise so convincing is the play’s focus on young love and the absence from the play of anything like long love (unless you count the long feud as long love by agreeing with Romeo that “Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love”). But the play’s treatment of moderation and violence reinforces what the dramatic irony suggests – that Lawrence in act 4 presents the antithesis of his own opinion. This antithesis strengthens both the drama and the theme.

Shakespeare, maybe even more than his devotee Dostoevsky, enriches fiction with ideas.

Filed Under: Marginal, William Shakespeare

Marginal

May 5, 2012 By Peter Leave a Comment

On Orality and intimacy. Woolf, too:

What has praise and fame to do with poetry? What has seven editions (the book had already gone into no less) got to do with the value of it? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?

Ong could have used that quote as an epigraph to something. (From Orlando, which I just finished rereading. Harcourt 1956 edition, page 325)

Filed Under: Marginal

Why Bork’s appointment should concern conservatives

April 27, 2012 By Peter Leave a Comment

Last year, Mitt Romney made Robert Bork the co-chair of his justice advisory committee. The appointment offers a window into Romney’s judicial philosophy and suggests that Romney would nominate people with Bork’s constitutional notions to the federal bench, including the Supreme Court.

Most commentary about Bork is the usual red-blue stuff. Conservatives generally like him for the same reasons liberals dislike him: he has conservative views on social issues, and he believes in expanding states’ rights. But can we get past his political beliefs, as important as they are, and look at his constitutional ones, too?

Bork’s constitutional beliefs are no secret. He sets them out in The Tempting of America, a bestselling book he published shortly after his failed Supreme Court nomination during the Reagan Administration.

Read the book: Bork doesn’t believe in inalienable rights. He doesn’t believe in self-evident truths. That should concern all Americans — conservatives, liberals, and moderates alike.

Instead of truths, Bork believes in certain values. (Haven’t I heard so many of my socially conservative friends mock the notion of “values” as a subjective substitute for the notion of objective truth?) If the Constitution is silent or unclear about a point, Bork believes, then the “majority morality” — the majority’s values — should control:

There is no way to decide these questions [placing moral positions at odds with one another] other than by reference to some system of moral or ethical principles about which people can and do disagree. Because we disagree, we put such issues to a vote and, where the Constitution does not speak, the majority morality prevails. (From The Tempting of America)

In our pluralistic society, he says, the controlling values are the majority’s. But is this really a majority’s prerogative? Isn’t this the kind of nihilistic thinking conservatives often attribute to liberals?

Here’s conservative Edward J. Erler‘s response to Bork:

Indeed, Madison, like Jefferson, argued . . . that a majority may do only those things “that could be rightfully done by the unanimous concurrence of the members.” Thus it is not simply the will of the majority that “rightfully” rules in a democracy, but the rational will of the majority. In the same vein, Jefferson wrote that “[i]ndependence can be trusted nowhere but with the people in mass. They are inherently independent of all but moral law.” Thus, it is clear that Madison and Jefferson viewed the people as a moral entity, not simply as a collection of discrete value-positing individuals. The positivism of both Bork and Rehnquist is predicated on a kind of moral relativism that ultimately leads to nihilism.

– Edward J. Erler, in his introduction to Harry V. Jaffa’s Storm Over the Constitution, p. xxix

What makes a Strict Constructionist a Strict Constructionist? At bottom, the denial of self-evident truth. Strict Constructionists adhere to the letter of the Constitution even in situations when traditional Constitutional construction would lead jurists outside of the text. (John Marshall, for instance, sometimes would argue a Constitutional provision only to reinforce a finding he would make chiefly through natural law.) What drives Strict Constructionists to overly fixate on the Constitution’s text? Partly the same literalism with which some Protestants approach the Bible in response to the Enlightenment. Partly their core belief that no one can divine the Constitution’s spirit or distinguish between its ideals and its political compromises. And partly their reaction to the progressives’ Living Constitution. But Strict Constructionists never meet the Living Constitution’s argument that we can’t know what the Framers meant. Instead, they reinforce the Living Constitution’s argument through their over-insistence on the Constitution’s letter.

We can usually know what the Framers meant. It’s no secret. Sure, a lot of important, fundamental matters divided them — the nature of federalism and the extent of the franchise, for instance. But a relatively new philosophy and an older heritage united them: Lockean liberalism and the broader notions of natural law and English common law. Original intent is an open mind informed by a vigorous legal and constitutional tradition. Beside it, Strict Constructionism and the Living Constitution appear merely as simplistic rules of statutory and constitutional construction.

Bork believes that we cannot, as a society and through reason¹ and difficulty, rediscover the first principles in the Declaration of Independence that animate the Constitution. But if our society is incapable of discovering first principles, then self-government must in the long run fail. No one with such a narrow and pessimistic view of human nature can believe in American republicanism.

Are conservatives so anxious to reverse the last century of progressive gains that they would surrender their beliefs in self-evident truths, inalienable rights, and republican government to do it?

A lot of conservative Christians, reacting to the Enlightenment, have a problem with the notion of reason. Reason is both biblical and foundational to self-government, however. ↩

Filed Under: Civil, Journal

George Szirtes

April 25, 2012 By Peter

Our servants were invisible. They ran about with heavy trunks containing their own lives. When we tipped them they glowed like embers.

Sometimes we wanted rain. We knew the right people. They’d come running with their dry excuses. It was the excuses that we really wanted.

From George Szirtes.

Filed Under: Passages

John field notes 13c: Shakespeare’s sop to global warming

April 25, 2012 By Peter Leave a Comment

The sop as prophecy. Matthew, Mark, and Luke use the sop at the Last Supper to show how a disciple’s betrayal fulfills Scriptural prophecy. And John has Jesus use the same sop as a means of prophesying that Judas will be that betrayer.

Shakespeare foresaw the melting of the polar ice caps:

. . . the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores
And make a sop of all this solid globe

(From Act 1, Scene 3 of Troilus and Cressida.)

Interesting, though, that like the gospel writers, Shakespeare prophesies with a sop.

Filed Under: John field notes, Journal, William Shakespeare

John field notes 13b: Seder place tags

April 21, 2012 By Peter Leave a Comment

Every Seder table I’ve sat down to since childhood has had place tags. Matthew’s, Mark’s, and Luke’s don’t, though. In the Synoptic Gospels’ Last Suppers, everyone hears everything said by anyone. But John restores my place tags.

John brings his layers of proximity to the Last Supper, which for John also means layers of intimacy and understanding. Just as John assigns the master of the feast, the servants, the reader, and Mary to different circles when Jesus turns the water into wine, he assigns the disciples to different positions at the Seder table, and therefore to different levels of relationship and intimacy.

John places his own personae (always “the disciple whom Jesus loved”) next to Jesus. John even uses the Seder tradition of reclining at table — the perogative of a free man, thanks to the exodus from Egypt — to suggest John’s inner-circle status. The Revised English Bible has John “reclining close beside Jesus,” but the King James declares that John was “leaning on Jesus’ bosom.” Peter, who is not next to Jesus or John, has to signal John to have him ask Jesus a question. Judas is within arm’s length of Jesus, presumably: Jesus gives him a sop after he dips it in the wine.

John’s Seder is more like a real Seder or like any meal with a dozen or more people present. Not everyone hears everything. The volume goes up and down. Conversations happen simultaneously at times. John’s Last Supper is therefore more like modern theater than the Synoptic Gospels’ Last Supper, but it’s still John’s theater. The stage directions, the intimacy, even the dramatic conversations itself point to layers of relationship and understanding.

John’s drama centers on the sop. The Synoptic Gospels use the sop as a generalization, a means of turning a specific question into an indication that Scripture is being fulfilled. Here’s Mark’s version:

They began to be grieved and to say to Him one by one, “Surely not I?” And He said to them, “It is one of the twelve, one who dips with Me in the bowl. (Mark 14:19-20)

The New American Standard notes suggest that “one” may also be read “the one.” This ambiguity is as close as the three gospels come to using the sop as the means of identifying Jesus’ betrayer. Jesus doesn’t answer the disciples’ question directly in the Synoptic Gospels; that is, he doesn’t make the sop a means of identifying Judas. He simply paraphrases Psalms, making the verse prophetic of their last meal together. Here’s the verse Jesus alludes to:

Even my close friend in whom I trusted, who ate my bread, has lifted up his heel against me. (Psalm 41:9, NNAS)

But John transforms the sop into the means of identifying the betrayer. How? Here’s the King James Version of the text:

When Jesus had thus said, he was troubled in spirit, and testified, and said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me. Then the disciples looked one on another, doubting of whom he spake. Now there was leaning on Jesus’ bosom one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved. Simon Peter therefore beckoned to him, that he should ask who it should be of whom he spake. He then lying on Jesus’ breast saith unto him, Lord, who is it? Jesus answered, He it is, to whom I shall give a sop, when I have dipped it. And when he had dipped the sop, he gave it to Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon. And after the sop Satan entered into him. Then said Jesus unto him, That thou doest, do quickly. Now no man at the table knew for what intent he spake this unto him. For some of them thought, because Judas had the bag, that Jesus had said unto him, Buy those things that we have need of against the feast; or, that he should give something to the poor. He then having received the sop went immediately out: and it was night. (John 13:21-30, KJV)

First, Jesus here doesn’t use the sop as an allusion to Scripture. It simply is a means of designating to one of his closest disciples who is betrayer is: “He it is, to whom I shall give a sop, when I have dipped it.”

Second, Jesus’ remark about the sop isn’t spoken to everyone at table but only to John. Peter’s need to signal John suggests that not everyone can hear everything. Peter’s signaling also suggests that, if Peter has his way, only he and John will know who the betrayer is. We know that no one but John hears the sop remark since “no man at the table knew” why Jesus says, “That thou doest, do quickly.” The sop remark would have made the meaning of Jesus’ remark to Judas evident. It’s not clear if Peter learns the significance of Jesus’ remark to Judas, but I like to think John makes it clear to him after supper.

Peter and John have a special role with respect to the Seder in Mark’s and Luke’s gospels, too. Mark says that Jesus sent “two of his disciples” to secure a room for the Seder (Mark 14:13). Luke makes clear that the two disciples sent are Peter and John (Luke 22:8). Mark and Luke therefore designate Peter and John as intimates by what they do. Consistent with the rest of his gospel, however, John designates Peter and John as intimates by what they know.

[I'm reading John's gospel. My reactions here vacillate between notes -- a list of impressions -- and something less sketchy. A note on nomenclature: the note number in my post's title indicates the chapter of John's material I'm reacting to. A title's letter, though, differentiates the post from earlier posts about that chapter. "John field note 2c," then, is my third post concerning John's second chapter. N.B.: 12a may precede 3d: I skip around.]

Filed Under: John field notes, Journal