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| Construction sign south of Fergus, Ontario, Canada August 2014 ©Kristin Lord 2014 |
Cynical or merely
realistic, I allow extra time for road travel in July and August because it is
construction season in the northern hemisphere. This year there is more of it
than usual because the northeastern quadrant of US states and Canadian
provinces had such a brutal winter. Then add issues of population growth and
aging infrastructure. Finally, as is apparent from a recent article in the
Toronto Star, going into what the locals call Hogtown (although there are no
longer any hog processing plants within the city limits) is asking for trouble due
to refurbishment of one downtown artery and preparations for next year’s Pan Am
games. We could be forgiven for mistaking the lines of SUV’s and articulated
delivery vehicles extending from Pearson (the main Toronto airport) to Guelph
Line for the snorting sows and boars of a century ago. The advice for enduring
southern Ontario traffic is to be centered and keep one’s temper for the
inevitable.
Expecting problems to
arise is not always the advice that springs to mind from either the Bible or
the writings of early Friends. Admittedly, the Apostle Paul speaks of looking
“through a glass, darkly” in I Corinthians 13:12 (perhaps in part because of
the imperfections of mirrors in his day), but our eyes may light more often
upon the summation of the commands in the Sermon on the Mount at Matthew 5:48.
The King James version is elegant and succinct: “Be ye therefore perfect, even
as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” It is also a literal translation
of both the Greek New Testament (ἔσεσθε οὖν ὑμεῖς τέλειοι ὡς ὁ πατὴρ ὑμῶν ὁ οὐράνοις
τέλειός ἐστιν)
and the Latin Vulgate (Estote ergo vos perfecti, sicut et Pater vester cælestis
perfectus est).
Every translation is by its nature an adaptation, and modern
scholars, before attempting an up-to-date rendering of this passage, have tried
to clarify its context. First and perhaps foremost, the very fact that the line
begins with an imperative (“Be”) and is followed by a comparison (“as” or “just
as”) reminds us that as human beings we are not perfect. God is the example for
us to emulate. Nevertheless, for those worrying about the potential
psychological impact of perfectionism, parsing the syntax in this way may not
offer much consolation. Drilling into the Greek can be equally uncomfortable:
the word τέλειος (teleios) in the
King James as “perfect,” means either “perfect” or “complete,” as does the perfecti of the Vulgate. For similar
ideas expressed elsewhere in the Bible, commentaries direct us to Leviticus
19.2: “You must be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy” (REB).
Scholars are left to consider in what way we should drive
for the ideal. Since Matthew 5:48 is the summation of Jesus’s commandments
about love and moral behavior, the Revised English Bible translates it as “There must be no limit
to your goodness, as your heavenly Father’s goodness knows no bounds.”
We are left with the
question of how to square the emphasis on striving for perfection or
completeness with the message of Christianity as a religion of hope and
forgiveness —indeed, of the idea that humans are prone to lapses in judgment
and morality and need to be able to pick themselves up and go on. Here chapter
13 of Paul’s first Epistle to the Corinthians, which contains the related word τὸ
τέλειον (to teleion), best translated as the
English abstract noun “perfection,” is illustrative. This is the familiar
passage often read at weddings, and the same one read by British Prime Minister
Tony Blair at the funeral of Princess Diana.
1 Corinthians 13 is
subject to much interpretation. In this case, the King James Version, redolent
as it is for the culture of English-speaking countries, does not do modern
readers a favor. Nowadays we may speak darkly, in the sense of enigmatically
(“After hearing of the murder, she spoke darkly about a strange vehicle having
been left in the gully overnight the preceding week”) but we do not use that
expression for sight.
The general outline of
the passage, however, is clear if we consider the geographical and social
context and the Greek. Corinth in Paul’s day was, as it is now, a seafaring
town, located on a narrow isthmus between the Aegean Sea and the Gulf of
Corinth. People who drive through the Isthmus of Corinth on the modern
superhighway between Athens and the Peloponnese, where Sparta is located, can
see from one side to the other. In the heyday of the Greek city-states, Corinth
was a wealthy community, chock-full of artistic masterpieces; it was also
caught in the middle of every war that hit the eastern Mediterranean. Not
surprisingly, given its strategic location, Corinth was sacked by the Romans in
their conquest of Greece about two centuries before Paul preached in the area.
The Romans looted every piece of art they could carry and smashed the city. To
Roman writers of a later generation, the destruction of Corinth stood in the
place that people of the post-World War II generation speak of the destruction
of Dresden in Germany in February of 1945. Cicero, in discussing his theory of
the “just” war in his book de Officiis
(On Duties), more or less holds his
nose when justifying its destruction. He writes, “I wish they had not
destroyed Corinth; but I believe they had some special reason for what they
did—its convenient situation, probably—and feared that its very location might
some day furnish a temptation to renew the war” (de Officiis 1.11.35, translation by Walter Miller).
By Paul’s time Corinth
was once again a thriving seaport. Like other communities of its sort, it
attracted people from other places wishing to better themselves. Some succeeded;
others did not. Many were lonely; there were tax-collectors, sinners, and
prostitutes. The church itself was subject to growing pains and quarrels about
belief and, so it seems from the letter, about much more mundane matters. The
more sophisticated among them would have been well aware of the history of the
town and its losses at the beginning of Roman rule. No wonder Paul speaks about
the primacy of faith, hope, and love, and emphasizes human growth and maturity
from childhood to adulthood. The metaphor of growth from childhood to adulthood
(“when I was a child...”) at 1:13.11 shows that this process is normal.
In this passage
perfection equals completeness. When perfection or completeness (τὸ
τέλειον) comes
to pass, that which is a part of the whole (τὸ ἐκ μέρους, a phrase which is
much more compact in the Greek than the English) shall pass away. There is no
time given for such completeness, but it is implicit that the perfection is not
of this world.
Now we get to the
“glass, darkly” section. The Greek reads, βλέπομεν γὰρ ἄρτι δι’ ἐσόπτρου ἐν αἰνίγματι, “For now we see
through a mirror in a riddle.” The word αἴνιγμα (ainigma
in our spelling), whose English derivative is “enigma,” is the standard word for
a riddle or a problem that is difficult to solve. We see this word, for
instance, in Oedipus’s taunt to the seer Teiresias that he, Oedipus, cannot be
the man who killed King Laius (who turns out to be Oedipus’s biological father)
in line 392 of Sophocles’ play Oedipus
the King. The word ἔσοπρον
(esoptron) is the standard word for a
mirror, and it is the most common translation (the word speculum, a hyper-literal rendition of the Latin Vulgate, is occasionally used to convey the idea
of moving through various levels of “seeing,” but for women, at least, the word
has a connotation that is definitely not what Paul had in mind).
But what does a mirror
have to do with a riddle? Isn’t a mirror what we use to see many entities,
including ourselves, clearly? It turns out that the answer is yes and no. Yes,
we hope for clarity. However, a mirror reverses left and right, and mirrors in
antiquity never provided close to the likeness that we see today.
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| Mirror, Roman period uploaded by Udimu for public usage Creative Commons License, Wikimedia Commons |
Secondly, the concept
of seeing indirectly is an idea that would have been familiar to most people in
Paul’s day who had a reasonable reading knowledge of Greek. The passage that
would have come to mind is the allegory of the cave in Plato’s Republic (514a-520a). (In this regard,
see, among others, J. Philip Wogaman, Christian Ethics: A Historical Introduction,
20112, p. 23.) In the cave people who have been imprisoned since childhood see
only shadows of puppets reflected from a fire; even when they are turned to see
the puppets, an activity that initially
hurts their eyes, they have not seen the physical beings that these puppets
represent. The prisoners need to go into sunlight in order to see the “real”
people, animals, and what-not that the puppets represent. Once again, they are
blinded until their eyes adjust and they are able to see clearly. Since Plato
is speaking metaphorically, ultimately abstract concepts (for instance, justice,
beauty, courage) take the place of physical ones, and the sun comes to represent
the idea of the good.
Plato’s Republic is a work of pagan literature,
and Paul’s idea of the good is part of a monotheistic mindset. Nevertheless,
the progression in types of vision is the same. When Paul describes people
“then” seeing “face to face,” they will have the same wholeness of knowledge
that Plato described earlier. (The word “to know” is the same in classical and
New Testament Greek.) In the interim, we have faith, hope, and love (ἀγάπη, agape, the non-erotic love sometimes translated as “charity”). Also, it
happens that this passage is not the only one in the epistle to refer back to
Plato; if we substitute ἀγάπη for ἔρως (eros,
or erotic love), Paul’s description of love is reminiscent of that of Agathon
in Plato’s Symposium 174a-d (see Thomas L. Cooksey, Plato’s Symposium: A Reader’s Guide,
2010, p. 55).
As we know, the path
to perfection can lead to despair, and Jesus himself was no stranger to it. For
Quakers, George Fox provides a detailed description of both the ideal and the
less-than-perfect reality. When considering what Fox asks his followers to do, people
often refer to the letter to ministers which he dictated to Ann Downer in
Launceston jail in 1656. The main portion of this letter ends with the famous
command, “Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations,
wherever you come, that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of
people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world,
answering that answering that of God in everyone.” This passage is sufficiently
important in the development of Quaker thought that it is cited without the
surrounding context at the end of the
Advices and Queries of Britain Yearly Meeting’s Quaker Faith and Practice. However, Fox’s command is part of a
longer discussion of how to build the church; this discussion showcases a
metaphor of the back-breaking work —especially with seventeenth-century
technology!— of making the soul into fertile ground. He advises us that “none
are ploughed up but he who comes to the principle of God in whim which he has
transgressed.” (Journal, Nickalls
ed., p. 263; see citations in Britain Yearly Quaker Meeting Faith and Practice 2013 for sources for the complete
document)
George Fox himself was
known to suffer from periods of disillusionment; today we might be likely to say
that he suffered from episodes of depression, which is now considered to be as
much of an illness in its own right as heart disease or diabetes. In 1647,
after leaving both the priests of the Church of England and the dissenting
preachers, he felt that “there was none among them all that could speak to my
condition.” He came to find that “all my hopes in them and in all men were gone.”
The culmination of this period is hearing the voice which said, “‘There is one,
even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition,’ and when I heard it my
heart did leap for joy.”
Understandably,
George Fox wonders why God tormented him for so long, not only with isolation
but with all sorts of temptation. Fox writes that the Lord answered that “it
was needful I should have a sense of all conditions, how else should I speak to
all conditions; and in this I saw the infinite Love of God. I saw also that there
was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love,
which flowed over the ocean of darkness.” (passages in the last two paragraphs
from George Fox, Journal, Nickalls
edition, p. 19 and 33; sections 19.01 and 19.03 in most recent Britain YM Quaker Faith and Practice)
I was mulling over
these passages and what they might mean for me personally a couple of weeks
ago, as I was attending the
Festival of the Sound, which features primarily chamber music in the
village of Parry Sound, about two hours north of Toronto on Georgian Bay. James
Campbell, the director of the festival, asked all of us in attendance to list
ten pieces for instrumental solo or chamber ensemble we would like to hear next
year; slips were available in the foyer. I asked a staffer for elaboration as
to whether he was going to count up the ten answers seen most often (e.g., five
thousand requests for Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata), or whether we should
include ten pieces that were perhaps not heard as often. She suggested making
more than one list and including both types of suggestions. In the end, I wrote
two lists.
My husband submitted
no list of his own but was curious as to which selections I put on mine. As he
is an aficionado of Frédéric Chopin, he was not disappointed to find Chopin’s
first Ballade on my list, but he was curious as to why numero uno on my first list was Beethoven’s Sonata no. 21 in C
major, opus 53, dedicated to Count
Ferdinand Ernst Gabriel von Waldstein and known by the name of the
dedicatee. (For those who wish to hear it, I attach a link to one of the
magisterial performances of Daniel Barenboim; as far as I can
ascertain, Barenboim has given the requisite permission for a complete set of
his Beethoven sonata performances to be uploaded onto YouTube.) My husband
prefers Chopin because of the relatively compact range of emotions (strange as
this may sound) in each particular piece. I prefer Beethoven precisely because
of the kinds of unexpected and abrupt incursions of fear, anguish, and
temptation in a piece written at least nominally in the open and optimistic key
of C major. In reality, of course, neither of us disparages the preference of
the other; it is more a question of who ranks 9.9 and who achieves 9.95 on a
scale of 1 to 10 among the pantheon of the immortals of the piano.
Musicians and
musicologists have a wide range of opinions about the Waldstein sonata. For
intermediate-level pianists like myself, it is a painful reminder of where we
stand on the pianistic totem pole, since the Waldstein is fiendishly difficult
even for professionals to play. (Indeed, the scales in one section have been
adapted because of the changes in the construction of the instrument since
Beethoven’s time.) As a Quaker educator, it is a reminder of the Divine message
that Fox received of the importance of experiencing all conditions in order to
speak to all conditions; if my initial forays into Beethoven’s self-entitled
“Sonata facile” (“Easy Sonata”) no. 19 in G minor, opus 49.1, make me feel
foolish, it is an important insight into how students who claim to be “not good
at languages” might feel when taking a foreign language class. Professional
pianists apparently either thrill to its challenges and its musical
achievements (e.g., Vladimir Ashkenazy, Daniel Barenboim, Alfred Brendel) or
dislike the piece. Sviatoslav Richter, the great Soviet
pianist who left a magnificent recorded legacy of just about everything else,
never performed the Waldstein as far as we know. Anton Kuerti, for his part,
has a wonderful recording of the Waldstein in his complete Beethoven cycle, but
the liner notes exhibit some concerns about the way the piece is constructed.
Jan Swafford, in his
newly released biography of Beethoven, takes a middle road. Although he points
to the Waldstein as one of the composer’s major breakthroughs, exceeded in his
middle period only by the “Appassionata” sonata a bit later, Swafford notes why
the beginning of the Waldstein, in particular, sometimes sets people on edge.
Briefly put, it breaks the standard compositional rules about the use of
themes. Swafford writes of Beethoven’s pieces of motifs and that the beginning
of the first movement of the Waldstein is “an accompaniment in search of a theme.”
(Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph, 2014, p. 372)
Perhaps only Beethoven
can break the rules in this way. The abrupt changes of mood and key signature
in the Waldstein sonata, however unexpected, are not random or without purpose.
In the first movement of the Waldstein, we may feel that we have foiled a home
invasion, only to have the armed robbers chase us down a darkened street, which
in turn turns into a blind alley or a construction zone. The hints at
redemption are brief and all too often dashes. How can the tension thus created
be resolved? Finally, after the brief and meditative Introduzione (introduction) that takes the place of the second
movement originally written for the sonata, Beethoven does release the tension,
bringing in the short but triumphant theme of the rondo (the third and final
movement) which wins its own battle over the forces of darkness.
The music of
Beethoven's second period —a
time in his life when he was surrounded by, shall we say, an ocean of
silence— prefigures both the horrors and the beauty of the world one to two
hundred years later, as well as musical innovations by much later composers. As
my husband and I were talking about Beethoven and Chopin, we came to the
inevitable road construction and considered whether to turn on the hourly news.
This year, perhaps more than any since the Cuban missile crisis, when we were
both small children, the world seems a foreboding place. There have been wars,
police brutality, and bloodshed, whether deliberate or accidental. Diplomats,
negotiators, and jurists from various places have set up deliberations with the
best of intent, but they have not as yet (August 20, 2014) succeeded. Last week
Robin Williams, a brilliant and beloved comic actor, who suffered from
depression in the past, succumbed to his personal despair.
The weather, too, has
gone awry. In some parts of the North American continent, there is too much
sunlight and not enough rain, leading to record-breaking droughts and forest
fires. Here in the northeastern states and provinces we have had more than one
summer polar vortex after the winter ones, leaving us with the household
furnace running on July and August mornings when we are accustomed to heat
waves.
Ultimately,
construction seasons come to an end (see the linked article by Chris Johnstone from the Guardian website as to how to remain confident about this). In the political sphere those who desire
peace and understanding are not willing to give up, and Friends are unstinting
in their support of them. Likewise, in the personal realm periods of despair
often lead to new growth. If, however, someone is not experiencing gloomy
periods as a normal “construction season” but rather as endless red lights, or
if one sees ditches (literal or metaphorical) ahead, it is time to call for
help.
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| Darkness and light: sunset on Georgian Bay, Lake Huron August 2014 photograph taken during intermission at the Festival of the Sound ©Kristin Lord 2014 |
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