His soul, overflowing with rapture, yearned for freedom, space, openness. The vaults of heaven, full of soft shining stars, stretched vast and fathomless above him. The Milky Way ran in two pale streams from the zenith to the horizon. The fresh, motionless still night enfolded the earth. The towers and golden dome of the cathedral gleamed out against the sapphine sky.
(Dostoyevsky p 436)
My eyes perked when Appiah departed his knowledge of Dostoyevsky’s most oddly revered reference when mentioning “… just as easily as you can be the Grand Inquisitor supervising an auto-da-fé” (Appiah p 145). Of course Appiah jabs at the Grand Inquisitor and his penchant for burning heretics at the stake during his fictional reign in the Spanish Inquisition. Yes, that is rather counter-Cosmopolitanist.
I have read The Brothers Karamazov probably six times. Here Appiah goes straight for the jugular on the Dostoyevsky classic. While I do enjoy the theological imposition that Jesus, reappearing 15 centuries after long since departed; was here to abscond the power from The Grand Inquistor, who was just then emerging draped in his coarse cossack from his most recent fiery event of engulfing into the flames scores of heretics from just hours before. It was this man that was going to judge Him, the capital Him, as a prisoner. But had He come to judge The Grand Inquisitor whom had done this act of villainy in His name? The Grand Inquisitor berates and threatens Him. The Grand Inquisitor bellows that His responses to the Three Temptations (Dostoyevsky p 299) were not love but an existentential setup.
And yet through this the Prisoner says nothing. The story and its beautiful ending mean so much more in the context of the novel. The relationship between the brothers Alyosha, Mitya and Ivan intensify the meaning of the section by orders of magnitude not margins of error. Why people cling to just this part of the story alone is odd to me.
I enjoy this rebounding of existentialism above Appiah’s report on the reality that many modern neo-fundamentalist Christians and neo-fundamentalist Muslims can’t read the language of their respective holy scriptures. This situation is a comedically ripe moment promised to be full of impending revisionism. Not that I read or speak Russian, so fair is fair.
But I did study ancient Greek enough to understand that the Koine Bible was not more true in what I thought was the more original language of transcription and communication, ancient Greek. In my eyes the Bibles available today had an implied lineage of etymological purity that had something fairly certain to do penultimately with the Latin and then originally with the Greek. This is, fortunately for religious historians, not particularly true.
According to Misquoting Jesus, Bart D. Ehrman asserts that of the surviving contemporary reproductions of the Koine Bible are simply rejoinder translations of the Biblia Sacra Vulgata and others non-source language tranlations back into Koine Greek. The Vulgate Bible is the Roman Catholic Church’s Latin translation of the Bible. This translation is not the source language of the letters of the Apostolic writers, which were recording and transmitting the gospels in ancient Greek. You can see we are in a bit of a problem here. The contemporary Greek translations perceived to be more ancient and thus more authentic are based upon Latin translation whose authority rests upon the previously thought primary source, the ancient Greek version. Dizzying indeed.
At least the Qur’an can be had in its original language, like the Torah or the Vedic texts. Instead of recording an ever-updating criticism while maintaining the original like the previous listed scriptures, Christians somehow have dozens of various translations of four versions of one story originating in from some long lost source text. They are screwed built into their story. In the South we respond to that with a “Bless their heart” all covered it in a thick drawl. All of this internal frisson has led to groups that share the word Baptists in their organizational name yet one would blow up the other over female reproductive rights.
I have seen Diamond speak in Town Hall, Seattle, during his Collapse reading tour. I like the lack of cultural importance that Diamond regulates on his arguments at times. It is like he asks us to ignore the general discourse of human events for its short bits, like watching tv with the volume turned all the way down. I believe his ornithological background is such a vision into his world. He can listen and interpret the sounds of humans like enjoying and mimicking the songs of birds. He can then turn off sound off and only watch the actions like migratory patterns of finches. Because speech is nothing but verbalized persuasion. Intentions will tell you nothing of humans, but only of the temporally immediate desires of an individual or demands of the immediate. But it was with such that he started by Yali’s question.
The gorgeous autumn flowers, in the beds round the house, were slumbering till morning. The silence of earth seemed to melt into the silence of the heavens. The mystery of earth was one with the mystery of the stars…
(Dostoyevsky p 436)
Sources:
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. (W.W. Norton, NYC, 2007)
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. New York City: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages, 1950.
Ehrman, Bart D.. Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (Plus). SanFrancisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2007.
Guns, Germs, and Steel. New York, NY: W.W. Norton And Company, 2005.