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Nog een
klein verhaaltje
voor het slapen gaan.
Als vervolg op alle voorgaande
myDiverhaaltjes.

@

Take
your pick and change
the activity of the brain now &
forever!

@

About
mental circumcision,
'allegory and universal man'
through
the language of
"MAN":
Behold Israel according
to the flesh {1 COR 10:18} ~
Augustine:
'This I know
to be the carnal Israel;
but the Jews
do not grasp this meaning and as a result
they prove themselves
indisputably
carnal.'

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When Augustine
condemns the Jews to eternal carnality,
he draws a direct connection between anthropology
and hermeneutics.
Because the Jews reject reading
'in the spirit,' therefore
they are,
according to him, condemned to remain
"Israel in the flesh."

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Allegory is thus,
in his theory, a mode of relating to the body.
In another part of the Christian world, Origen also attributed the failure
of the Jews to a literalist hermeneutic,
one which is unwilling to go beyond or behind the material language
and discover its immaterial
spirit.

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THIS way of thinking
about language had been initially stimulated
in the "Fathers" by Paul's usage of in the flesh
and in the spirit
to mean, respectively, literal and figurative.
Romans 7:5~6 is a powerful example
of this hermeneutic structure:
"FOR when we were still in the flesh, our sinful passions,
stirred up by the law, were at work on our members
to bear fruit for death.
BUT NOW we are fully freed from the law,
dead to that in which we lay captive.
We can thus serve in the new being of the Spirit and not the old one
of the letter."

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In fact,
the same metaphor is used independently of Paul by Philo.
who writes that his interest is in 'the hidden meaning which appeals
to the few who study soul characteristics,
rather than bodily forms'"
{Abr. 147}.

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FOR BOTH Paul & Philo, hermeneutics become anthropology.

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Pauline religion
should itself be understood
as a religio~cultural formation
contiguous with other Hellenistic
Judaisms.
Among the major supports
for such a construction are the similarities between Paul and Philo ~
similarities which cannot be accounted for by influence,
since both were active at the same time in widely
separated places.

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The affinities
between Philo and such texts as the fourth gospel
or the Letter to the Hebrews are only slightly less compelling evidence,
because of the possibility that these texts already know Philo.
I take the affinities as prima facie evidence for a Hellenistic Jewish
cultural koine, undoubtedly varied in many respects
but having some common elements throughout
the eastern Mediterranean.

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Moreover,
in the first century it is, in fact, impossible to draw hard lines between
Hellenistic and rabbinic Jews.
On the one hand,
the rabbinic movement per se does not exist,
and on the other, Greek~speaking Jews such as Paul and Josephus
refer to themselves as Pharisees.
I am going to suggest, however, that there were tendencies which,
while not sharply defined,
already in the first century distinguished Greek~speakers,
who were relatively more acculturated to Hellenism,
and Hebrew~ and Aramaic~speakers,
who were less acculturated.

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THESE
tendencies,
on my hypothesis,
became polarized as time went on,
leading in the end to a sharp division between Hellenizers,
who became absorbed into Christian groups,
and anti~Hellenizers,
who formed the nascent rabbinic
movement.

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The adoption of Philo esclusively in the Church
and the fact that he was ignored by the Rabbis is e sort of allegory
of this relationship, by which the Christian movement
became widely characterized by its connection with middle~ and
neo~platonism.

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IN FACT,
THIS connection {between philonic Judaism and Christianity}
was realized in antiquity as well, for popular Christian legend had Philo convert to Christianity, and even some fairly recent scholarship
attributed some of his workd to
Christians.

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The
congruence of Paul and Philo
suggests a common background to their thought
in the thought~world of the eclectic middle~platonism
of Greek~speaking Judaism in the first
century.

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THEIR
allegorical reading practice
and that of their intellectual descendents
is founded on a binary position
in which the meaning as a disembodied substance
exists prior to its incarnation in language ~
that is, in a dualistic system
in which spirit precedes and is primary
over body.

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Midrash,
as a hermeneutic system,
seems precisely to refuse that dualism,
eschewing the inner~outer, visible~invisible,
body~soul dichotomies of allegorical
reading: Midrash and platonic allegory are
alternate techniques
of the body

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And
SO are WE!
In the hermeneutics of a culture which operates
in the platonic mode of external and internal realities,
language itself is understood as an outer, physical shell,
and meaning is construed as the in visible, ideal, and spiritual
reality that lies behind or is trapped within the body
of the language.

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WHEN
this philosophy
is combined with certain modes
of interpretation
current in the ancient East,
such as dream~reading in which ONE thing
is taken for Another similar thing,
THEN allegory is born ~
allegory in the most strict sense
of the interpretation
of the concrete elements of a narrative
as signs of a changeless,
wholly immaterial
ontological
being.

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Although
there had been
related techniques of Homeric interpretation,
such as those of the Stoics who interpreted the gods as natural forces,
it is really only with
Philo's "allegory of the soul"
that the specific western tradition of allegorical interpretation
comes into
being.

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The drive toward allegoresis
is the platonic valorization of unity and immovability
over difference and change.

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IN
THIS TRADITION,
language is a representation in two senses;
in its 'content' it represents the higher world, while in its form
it represents the structure of world as outer form and
inner
actuality.

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THE
universe itself
can be called a myth,
revealing material things and keeping concealed souls
and intellects.
Origen expressed himself similarly, explicitly comparing the structure of the Bible as outer form and inner meaning
to the ontological structure
of the world.

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The human myDiBeing
is ALSO a representation of world in exactly the same way;
in her dual structure of outer body and inner spirit
is reproduced the very dual structure
of being.



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18 okt 2004 - bewerkt op 05 feb 2008 - meld ongepast verhaal
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