On Passover prep.

The worst part isn't hands-and-knees scrubbing, nor the sweep-vacuum-mop-and-still-have-to-clean-again-the-next-day process, nor even throwing out food and sequestering things. It isn't dealing with gallons of boiling water for kashering and it isn't shopping and feeling pretty certain you're getting grifted for shopping at a kosher butcher. It isn't renouncing rice and beans and soymilk and peanut butter, though protein is a much bigger task during Passover than otherwise, for a vegetarian anyway. It isn't that there's always more that you could be doing. (How is this night different from every other night in that respect?) It isn't that you become aware of how much kitchen stuff you've accumulated, and are reminded that you're pretty accustomed, even attached, to a lot of more or less useless objects.

No, the worst part is that when you actually clean everything, you become intensely aware of how badly it's all needed cleaning all this time. *shudder* You never want to be looking that closely at the inside of a microwave or an ancient, inefficient, non-self-cleaning oven.

On the image of God.

Κύδιστ’ ἀθανάτων, πολυώνυμε παγκρατὲς αἰεί,
Ζεῦ φύσεως ἀρχηγέ, νόμου μετὰ πάντα κυβερνῶν,
χαῖρε· σὲ γὰρ καὶ πᾶσι θέμις θνητοῖσι προσαυδᾶν.
Ἐκ σοῦ γὰρ γενόμεσθα, θεοῦ μίμημα λαχόντες
μοῦνοι, ὅσα ζώει τε καὶ ἕρπει θνήτ’ ἐπὶ γαῖαν·

Noblest of immortals, many-named, omnipotent,
Zeus, First Cause of nature, helmsman by law --
Greetings. Appropriately I address you though mortal,
For we are born of you; we possess the image of god
Alone who live, and crawl earthbound, and will die.

-- Cleanthes, "Hymn to Zeus" ll. 1-5 (3rd century BCE)


I have been thinking a lot about what Cleanthes -- the second head of the Stoics -- can mean when he says we have the image of God. He doesn't mean what Genesis 1:26-27 means, whatever one makes of it: "And God said, 'Let us make Adam [or: "a man"] in our image, after our likeness ...' And God made Adam in his* image: in the image of God he made him, male and female he made them." The surprising plural (the verb for "said" is singular, as usual with that grammatically plural term for the divine, and Hebrew has no "royal 'we'"); the image and likeness, and then "likeness" dropped in the following parallelism; the juxtaposition of biological sex with the image of God -- they are not the same as Cleanthes' mysteries. Yet the question is the same, and comparison may illuminate. In any event it is impossible to read Cleanthes without hearing the Bible, so we may as well put that to work.

In one way his version should be easier to fathom, for he has more explicit ideas about what God is made out of than does Genesis -- so that it should be easier to understand what an image or likeness or representation (the Greek "mimema" can mean all of those and more) might be. Genesis often speaks as though God had a body, but never -- except here? -- gives any clue as to what such language might refer to. On the other hand, Cleanthes, like all orthodox Stoics, is a pantheist: he believes that "God" and "the universe" do not name or describe distinct entities, he believes that there is no piece of the universe that is not God -- not only not divine, but not God. So the initial clarity gives way immediately to fog. Cleanthes's God does at least have a clear material content, the sort of thing of which a likeness could exist -- but by virtue of the very same thesis, that God is the universe, we lose sight of what it could mean to single out a part of that universe as specially divine.

As Cleanthes was clear where Genesis said nothing, so oppositewise Genesis tells more than Cleanthes about what it means that Adam is made in the image of God. For the ellipsis above covers the omission of a sentence about ruling birds and beasts and land and so on. The plan is clear, if not the execution: God intended Adam to mimic the divine insofar as Adam was intended to rule Eden.

So far we have three options, none of which suits Cleanthes' purposes as stated:

(1) "The image of God" refers to God's physical pattern or shape. Our bodies -- both male and female -- reflect God's body because they resemble it.
(2) "The image of God" refers to God's material composition. As God is made of [body and spirit? spirit only?], so too are we -- and we alone.
(3) "The image of God" refers to God's role in the natural hierarchy. As God rules the universe, we rule our patch of earth.

Genesis endorses (3) and, at least on the face of it, (1). (2) is a part of the way it is often taught among the traditionally religious, in my experience: not that as God is body and spirit so too are we (though perhaps Christians, who do believe that God has been mortal flesh, accept this), but that we have some special divine feature not shared by e.g. table lamps, or cobras. There is also a non-corporeal way of taking the patterns mentioned in (1): as God is merciful, so must we be merciful, as God is just so must we be just, as God feeds the poor and clothes the naked we too must do all we can to leave the world better than we found it. I do not include this as an interpretative option since "image of God" has given way to "imitation of God"; but anyway it is a famous midrashic interpretation. (See Talmud Yerushalmi Peah 15b; Sifre Deuteronomy 11:22; Bavli Sotah 14a; Genesis Rabbah on 23:19; probably more places.)

A fourth option is suggested by the more macabre invocation at Genesis 9:6:

"Who spills a man's blood, by a man shall his blood be spilt, for God created man [or: a man; Adam] in his image."

(4) "The image of God" refers to a special relationship between God and humanity. As we have obligations to God [the passage's context is God reexplaining to Noah how he is to live after he emerges post-diluvian from the Ark], so we have obligations to other human beings, for which God holds us accountable and expects us to hold each other accountable. (This interpretation of Genesis gains some support from its connection with Leviticus 19:2 -- "You shall be holy, as I the Lord your God am holy" -- and Deuteronomy 13:5 -- "After the Lord your God you shall walk.")
****************

With these options on the table, back to Cleanthes. He means a little of each of these, I think, but none of them as stated.

(1) "The image of God" refers not to God's physical pattern or shape but to the shape of a divine life. We participate in God's image insofar as what we require to succeed in life is to resemble God more and more.

(2) "The image of God" refers not to God's material composition (which of course we share, along with everything else in the universe) but to God's nature, which is reason. We are made in God's image insofar as our perfected nature reveals itself too as reason.

(3) "The image of God" refers not to God's role in the hierarchy of nature but to God's unequivocal embrace of nature. We have God's image insofar as we embrace the totality of things, which is God.

(4) "The image of God" refers to a special relationship between God and humanity, of obligation as well as of love -- hence Cleanthes's paternal language. But what this itself can mean, I do not know.

Further things I do not understand in the first lines of Cleanthes' "Hymn to Zeus":

-- the repeated allusion to our mortality -- is it defiant (of death, using divinity as shield)? humble? merely contrasting us with God?
-- "helmsman by law" (or "lawful helmsman") -- what can he mean by law, if not the law of nature that God is meant to embody? and if that, then what does it mean to acknowledge that God rules by law? merely to restate that the law is the true embodiment of everything that's excellent -- it has no kind of fault or flaw -- and God, our lord, embodies the law?
-- "born of you" -- ??????
-- and I still don't understand the meaning of "image of God," or its significance, or the use to which he's putting it here -- though I have my own thoughts on that, for another time.


*Personally I make it my practice to avoid assigning sex or any other attribute, and in particular physical attributes, to the divine; but I cannot misquote a source.

On reversal and appropriation.

1. Several weeks ago my father and I were reading Horton Hears a Who to two small children of our acquaintance. I mentioned afterward that I had forgotten how political Dr. Seuss could be. He said that yes, he had been a vocal liberal.

"But surely 'a person's a person, no matter how small' is an anti-abortion message?"

He was shocked. My father is a veteran of various civil rights and anti-war campaigns in the sixties and he said that it had been obvious at the time that this was civil rights language. I said that in my experience the only people who spoke that way were pro-life activists. Segments of the pro-life movement have also appropriated the language of civil rights in some other ways.


2. Proponents of what used to be called "the New Modesty" -- Wendy Shalit and a whole bunch of Campus Crusade for Christ members, mainly -- speak of themselves pointedly as sexual revolutionaries along the lines of Brook Farm or Greenwich Village 1912. Of course they are right insofar as their values are no longer legally mandated or culturally assumed, but you will not be ostracized for wearing a promise ring,* and you cannot be put in prison for engaging in heterosexual relationships or declared an imbecile and forcibly sterilized because you restrict your childbirth to marriage.

One instance in which the analogy is not necessarily as strained: laws against the veil, which are not only religiously inflammatory, typically anti-immigrant and/or racist, and distressingly paternalistic -- but also inappropriately treat Muslim women's sexuality as the property of the public so-called, rather than their own. (Put more coarsely, "white men saving brown women from brown men.)

(Myself I am inclined to view the way fat people are treated as analogous to the way women -- especially women who are attractive and/or pregnant -- are treated: strangers assume they have a right to comment on the bodies of all these groups.)


3. Forget Protestants who consider themselves marginalized in America.** Forget white people for whom only liberals and non-whites can be racist or racially aggressive or oppressive. Turn instead to the very rich who consider themselves slandered and powerless in the public discourse. Their defenders raise the specter of the tyranny of the majority -- a good Madisonian concern in some circumstances, but not those in which we live. Yet they're perfectly sincere. Jamie Dimon of JPMorganChase is sincere when he compares the "vilification" of big banks unfavorably to Lincoln's rhetoric about the Confederacy (!). The AIG people who felt like the real victims during the bonus uproar, and the people who tell the Times and the Journal that making $500,000 a year doesn't make them feel rich, and the ones who complain that Democrats just want to "punish success" and "soak the rich" are sincere. Okay, Lloyd Blankfein is being sarcastic when he says Goldman Sachs is doing God's work. But they really think that the deck is stacked against them and sometimes the little guy just can't win.


4. It is not incidental to the above cases that they involve reactionary appropriation of the language of causes that have "won." It is, however, quite incidental to them that the reactionaries in question are in the main politically conservative. For one, I am in sympathy with them on several of the issues even if I think their language choice is naive-sophisticated (sophomoric?), too clever by half, and altogether blinkered. For another, everyone is defensive, every group is defensive, when feeling under attack. The editors at Harper's try to break strikes with the fervor of a Frick, albeit without the violence. Unions run cartels, and professional licensing groups run cartels (e.g., doctors and dentists waste vast amounts of time and money by insisting on being present and getting paid for nurses' and hygienists' work), and universities are run as cartels (adjuncts being paid less to do more with no job security than tenure-track and tenured professors -- with attendant lack of status and loss of academic freedom; economists extracting higher salaries because they could make so much more money in the private sector; &c.) All of these groups use language that suggests the highest purest motivations when from the outside they seem clearly to be protecting their own and getting what they feel is their due. It's just the way things are.

Cf. this and that: we aren't intimidating, we're protecting from intimidation. People want to be in the right.


5. W.S. Gilbert finely satirized the Victorian literary convention of reversal in which the poor are valorized and the wealthy condemned by putting in the mouth of an Earl (in "Iolanthe") the following lines:

Spurn not the nobly born with love affected,
Nor treat with virtuous scorn the well-connected.
High rank involves no shame;
We boast an equal claim
With him of humble name
To be respected ...

and further

Hearts just as pure and fair
May beat in Belgrave Square
As in the lowly air of Seven Dials

-- as one might say now,

Fine morals flourish will
As much in Beacon Hill
As in the confines chill
Of Roxbury, or even Southie ...



*Although people may be weirded out if your father brags about making you wear a promise ring. That is absolutely incompatible with the New Modesty; the New Modest speak in terms of self-assertion and self-respect, not paternal ownership of daughterly genitalia.

**I suppose it doesn't seem relevant to them that Sunday is not everyone's day of rest, and no other group's holidays are recognized by the United States government, and that no one has ever been lynched in America for being a Protestant or formed a political party to protest the mass arrival of Protestant immigrants, or argued that Protestantism is not protected under the First Amendment because Protestantism isn't a religion, it's a cult, or subjected Protestant public figures to ridicule over their weird religious texts and rituals, and so on.