St. George: Distract him, li’l Bullet Head!
Li’l Bullet Head: Booga booga! Booga booga! Looky here!
Dragon: Check out all of my majesty!
St. George: Ha! Smiting shall I smite thee, and smitten shalt thou be!
Dragon: rrrrRRRAWRrr!
Li’l Bullet Head: Your consummate Vs can’t save you now!
St. George: Where are all the dragons? I’m lookin’ around, and I don’t see any!
Dragon: RRRRRRRRRR
Li’l Bullet Head: Good one, St. G.!
St. George: Down he falls!
Dragon: *
It is hard for people today to respect commentary as an actual exercise of the intellect. We can’t help thinking that great minds, when engaged in worthwhile thinking, must surely strike out on their own. If you want ideas, you should look to modes of thought such as argument, analysis, persuasion, polemic, enquiry, or advocacy, but surely you should not look to a mode of thought such as commentary.
Commentary as a mode of thinking is –by definition– dependent on a prior text. It seeks to be judged by how well it leads its own readers into that prior text, in whose service it places itself. How servile! How timid! How thoughtless!
Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic would like to “restore commentary as a primary activity of serious intellectuals.” He protests against
the idea that commentary is in some way a benighted activity, a secondary or tertiary activity rather than a primary one. Anybody who knows the history of commentary knows that it was for many centuries, and in some ways still is—at least in the books that will really matter—one of the great intellectual opportunities for originality, indeed radicalism, of thought. Certainly the great works of Jewish philosophy are almost all of them works of scriptural commentary … The majesty, the depth, the diversity of this tradition strongly suggest that it is almost incumbent upon a serious philosophical mind to engage in the work of commentary. (Leon Wieseltier, in Center Conversations 27:7-8. I first found this passage cited in Jaroslav Pelikan’s new Acts commentary)
I wouldn’t believe this if it didn’t come straight from the prolific and estimable Ben Witherington. He has been working hard equipping churches to respond intelligently to the DaVinci Code as the movie release draws near. On his blog he reports that Andy Griffith and Ron Howard recently chatted about the movie:
…I was privy to a conversation between Andy Griffith and the man who once played his son on the Andy Griffith show— Ron Howard (aka Opie!). Griffith, who is a commited Christian made clear to Opie over dinner he was not best pleased about this movie but that he was a Christian and he still loved him.
Witherington’s point is to encourage Christians to have the attitude of Andy whenever we talk with people about the serious theological and spiritual implications of their entertainment choices. That’s good DaVinci Code advice (don’t be a big jerk when your neighbor says she thought the movie was fun, but do try to help her understand that the movie has bad juju). Come to think of it, that’s just good advice in general: have the mind of Christ and the attitude of Andy.
But Andy and Opie having a sit-down talk about good movies and bad movies. Too good to be true!
Now, Ope… I know all the fellas at school are gettin’ excited about this newfangled gnosticism, what with all the post-Christian whatnot. And there ain’t nothin’ wrong with havin’ some fun and gettin’ to know the new god in town. But there comes a time when you have to decide what really matters to you, Ope. And that’s not always the most popular thing. Ope, I can’t tell you what to do about this, you’ve got to decide for yourself. But I want you to know I’m proud of you, and I know you’ve got what it takes to do the right thing. Aunt Bea, is there any of that lemonade left?
I wonder if they had fishing poles with them? And What Would Barney Do?
Augustine’s City of God is a thick brick of a book, provoked by the troubled geopolitics of late imperial Rome, but ranging over all of human history and, before it’s over, providing the first classic attempt at a full-fledged Christian philosophy of history. The book’s cultural and political legacy is equally vast, as it has bequeathed to the Western world a political realism based squarely on recognizing the utter transcendence of God’s purposes.
At the end of a helpful essay on “Augustine’s Philosophy of History,” Rüdiger Bittner attempts a summary:
“So here is the overall Augustinian picture of history. It is a nested structure, like a Russian doll.
First, beyond all history, and indeed beyond time, is God, existing timelessly. What the word ‘beyond’ means in this sentence remains unexplained, given that it does not literally mean ‘prior to’ or ‘outside of.’ The idea is, at any rate, that God encompasses everything that is not God. Second, there is the realm of temporal things, the realm of history, as this word has been used here. History has a beginning, creation, and so it has a certain age now, even if we do not know what it is; but it will go on indefinitely. There is a reason there is history, but we do not know that either. Third, within history there is human history. Later than and surrounded by a history that merely unfolds in time the stable nature of things, human history introduces free will and thus novelty: no nature is realized in the workings of free will. Fourth, within human history there is, surrounded by the uniform life in paradise and after judgment, the changing life of fallen humanity, which is unchanging, though, in its basic misery. Fifth, there is within this age of human misery that unique event in which God who is beyond all history enters history. This is the turning point of the whole structure. Thanks to it, a path is opened for humans to leave their misery and to enter a new life that is as much in accordance with the eternal God as is possible for a temporal creature of this kind. - - Rüdiger Bittner, “Augustine’s Philosophy of History,” in Gareth B. Matthews, ed, The Augustinian Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 345-360.
Bittner draws a conclusion from this: for all the eventfulness of the centuries of human history, there is very little of it that actually matters. Augustine doesn’t subdivide history into holy history and secular history, he just sees the holy part as the main events and the rest as insignificant. Anybody who wants to say that Augustine is being small-minded about this is of course welcome to do so.
But if we take him on his own terms, he has nested human history within such vastly larger structures that he is not unduly impressed by the fall of Rome. Sure, it was an “excellent empire” with a lot of Pax Romana to spare for anybody it wasn’t crushing. But empires come and go, and they’re all the city of man in various guises. It’s even proper for a citizen to be patrioitic about the city of man, but then “patriotic” is a word that gives the game away, isn’t it? “Patria,” to Augustine’s classically-trained ear, meant “homeland” as in “the Father’s house,” and Augustine knew better than to seek his home in Rome or its outlying provinces, just as he knew the way to his Father’s house, out beyond history.