The Venerable Bede and the parables (part 1)

The Venerable Bede

As I noted in my previous post, I am within striking distance of the word limit for the book but words are getting harder and harder to cut, and I still have the Introduction and Conclusion to write. At this stage I am looking at deleting entire sections on people/texts.

As I look over the options, I have considered many things, such as importance of the person/text, diversity of voices, and content on the parables. It seems like the section on Bede the Venerable may be the first "casualty," if it comes to cutting entire sections.

So why not highlight some of Bede's contributions here?:

Bede the Venerable (673–735)

           

Bede is the most important and influential scholar in Anglo-Saxon England (5^th century to 1066 CE). He was born in Northumbria in 673 CE, just decades after Christianity became established in England. In the conclusion of his famous Ecclesiastical History of England, Bede tells us a few details of his quiet life in northeast England. When Bede was seven years old, his family presented him as an oblate to the monastery at Wearmouth. Bede spent the rest of his life as a monk in the service of the church, becoming a deacon at the age of nineteen and a priest at the age of thirty. He became well versed in a number of fields—science, mathematics, grammar, rhetoric, history, theology, and the study of the Bible, which was his favorite subject.

Bede’s commentaries on Luke and Mark take the books verse-by-verse, starting with the words themselves and explaining any grammatical difficulties. He cites earlier writers when helpful (e.g., Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great); those interpreters serve as a foundation upon which Bede builds with his own insights. Bede treats the historical sense of the passages he exegetes, but he also seeks to strip “off the bark of the letter to find a deeper and more sacred meaning in the pith of the spiritual sense.” Bede, like Gregory, thus believes that Scripture must be explained in a fourfold way­­—the historical, allegorical, anagogical, and tropological—in order to “ascertain what everlasting truths are there intimated” with the guidance of the Holy Spirit (Bede 1985: x–xi; cf. Ward 2002: 15-16, 81; Gowler 2013).

Bede’s allegorical interpretations were in part reinforced by the power of the visual art he experienced. Bede’s monastery, for example, displayed some works of art that portrayed the Hebrew Bible as prefiguring the New Testament: In one set, for instance, a picture of Isaac carrying the wood on which he was to be burnt as a sacrifice was placed immediately below that of Christ carrying the cross on which he was about to suffer” (Ward 2002: 45). Such imagery of Isaac prefiguring Jesus, which was also common in the church’s liturgy (e.g., at Easter), was important for Bede and other early Christians, because the Bible was a unity that spoke with one voice, the voice of God. Any part of Scripture could thus be used to interpret any other part.

           

Such typological interpretations extend to Bede’s understandings of the parables. Bede’s Homily 2.25: On the dedication of a Church, for example, includes an exposition of the man building his house on a rock (Luke 6:47-48). He begins by stating that the man who builds the house is the incarnated Jesus, the “mediator between God and humankind” (citing 1 Tim. 2:5). The house designates the “beloved and holy” church that Jesus built and consecrated and in which Jesus would “abide forever.” Bede argues, though, that Jesus also is the foundation of rock on which his house/church is built:

Because he took pains to root out utterly whatever earthly intentions he found in the heart of his faithful so that when the rubble of old habits and superfluous thoughts had been cast out, he could have in them a stable and unshaken dwelling place. He himself is the rock upon which he laid the foundation of a house of this sort. For just as in the building of a house nothing is placed before the rock on which the foundation is set, so does the holy church have her rock, namely Christ, buried in the depths of her heart.

The flood symbolizes the afflictions that strike the church, afflictions that the church can weather, because its foundation is laid upon Jesus. On the other hand, individual believers can fall into sin, either being led by their own “concupiscence” (James 1:14) or attacked by wicked unbelievers or the devil:

But if any believers yield when overcome by evils, they certainly did not belong to this house, for if they had made their stand founded upon the rock of faith instead of upon the sand of faithlessness or inconstancy, surely they never could have been shaken (Bede 2011: 271).

August 3: Update on the book

One (not preferred) way to edit for word length

I have gone through the five main chapters of the book draft for a second time and have cut another 20,000 words (in total I have cut about 45,000 words). This round of cuts was not yet very difficult--I thought it would be harder--but I am getting to the point where I cannot cut much more from each individual section. 

The five main chapters--I have not yet written the introduction or conclusion--now total 108,594 words, and the total word count needs to be around 100,000.

I have probably reached the stage where I need to cut entire sections of people/texts. Bede the Venerable and David Flusser seem the first two most likely options at this point.

You can see the entire list of interpreters here. Feel free to offer advice, if you wish, to dgowler@emory.edu about sections to cut!

The current word counts per chapter are:

Introduction (not written)
Chapter 1:  22289
Chapter 2:  21913
Chapter 3:  21096
Chapter 4:  20343
Chapter 5:  22953
Conclusion (not written)

I'm stepping away from the book this week and am completing the chapter for the book on characterization I mentioned previously, as well as starting a couple book reviews. I will return to the next round of editing (or perhaps writing the Introduction and Conclusion) after the semester begins; much work also remains for getting ready for the fall semester at Emory. 

I am pleased with the progress on the book, and I am actually extremely pleased with a number of sections--the section on Emily Dickinson is one of the better parts, for example, but there are many others, I think. Hopefully, other people will find the book both helpful and interesting. 

New York Times article references the Workers in the Vineyard parable

Offered without comment but as an example of current receptions of the parable and the way other employees resented the newest workers getting paid the same as they did.

Here is the link to the full article about the Seattle business person who raised the minimum salary he pays to his employees to $70,000 per year.

The opening paragraphs:

There are times when Dan Price feels as if he stumbled into the middle of the street with a flag and found himself at the head of a parade.

Three months ago, Mr. Price, 31, announced he was setting a new minimum salary of $70,000 at his Seattle credit card processing firm, Gravity Payments, and slashing his own million-dollar pay package to do it. He wasn’t thinking about the current political clamor over low wages or the growing gap between rich and poor, he said. He was just thinking of the 120 people who worked for him and, let’s be honest, a bit of free publicity. The idea struck him when a friend shared her worries about paying both her rent and student loans on a $40,000 salary. He realized a lot of his own employees earned that or less.

Yet almost overnight, a decision by one small-business man in the northwestern corner of the country became a swashbuckling blow against income inequality.

Here is the reference to the parable:

The new pay scale also helped push Grant Moran, 29, Gravity’s web developer, to leave. “I had a lot of mixed emotions,” he said. His own salary was bumped up to $50,000 from $41,000 (the first stage of the raise), but the policy was nevertheless disconcerting. “Now the people who were just clocking in and out were making the same as me,” he complained. “It shackles high performers to less motivated team members.”

Mr. Moran also fretted that the extra money could over time become too enticing to give up, keeping him from his primary goal of further developing his web skills and moving to a digital company.

And the attention was vexing. “I was kind of uncomfortable and didn’t like having my wage advertised so publicly and so blatantly,” he said, echoing a sentiment of several Gravity staff members. “It changed perspectives and expectations of you, whether it’s the amount you tip on a cup of coffee that day or family and friends now calling you for a loan.”

Several employees who stayed, while exhilarated by the raises, say they now feel a lot of pressure. “Am I doing my job well enough to deserve this?” said Stephanie Brooks, 23, who joined Gravity as an administrative assistant two months before the wage increase. “I didn’t earn it.”

When Mr. Price chose $70,000 as the eventual salary floor, he was influenced by research showing that this annual income could make an enormous difference in someone’s emotional well-being by easing nagging financial stress.

He might have also considered the parable of the workers in the vineyard from the Gospel of St. Matthew, where the laborers hired at sunup were upset that their pay was the same as those who showed up right before quitting time. Early adopters and latecomers may be equally welcomed in the Kingdom of Heaven, but not necessarily in the earthly realm, where rewards are generally bestowed in paycheck form.

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As for the raw feelings of friends or staff members, Mr. Price readily admits that he can be contentious, even censorious. A disagreement often comes across as a personal attack. “It’s just as painful for me as anyone else,” he said.

Octavia Butler and the Parables (part 9; Parable of the Talents)

Octavia Butler's Parable series

The novel continues as Olamina--while still searching for Larkin--begins to rebuild Earthseed by converting and teaching people not just to be followers but also to be teachers themselves. 

Olamina gains a partner-pupil, Belen Ross. Belen argues that Olamina needs to focus on what people want and then explain how Earthseed will help them achieve it. Olamina begins proselytizing again, not with words alone but also with deeds, and teaches others to do the same. Earthseed begins to grow and years later, in the words of Larkin, it grew into “an unusual cult”:

It financed scientific exploration and enquiry, and technological creativity. It set up grade schools and eventually colleges, and offered full scholarships to poor but gifted students. The students who accepted had to agree to spend seven years teaching, practicing medicine, or otherwise using their skills to improve life in the many Earthseed communities. Ultimately, the intent was to help the communities to launch themselves toward the stars and to live on the distant worlds they found circling those stars (340).

It wasn’t until Larkin was 34 (~2067) that she realized that the now-famous Olamina was actually her birth mother, and they finally met. When a blood test confirmed that they were mother and daughter, the person administering the test said to Olamina, “I had heard . . . that you had a daughter who was lost. And now you’ve found her” (358). But, unlike the parable of the Prodigal Son, the child and parent this time remained unreconciled. Once Olamina learns of Marcos’s deception, she is unable to forgive him, and Larkin is too devoted to her Uncle Marcos to accept Olamina’s rejection of Marcos.

           

Olamina, at age 81, finally witnesses her Earthseed dream coming true. Members of Earthseed depart in shuttles for the stars, and Earthseed begins to fulfill its essential purpose, according to Olamina:

It will force us to become more than we might ever become without it. And when it’s successful, it will offer us a kind of species life insurance (352). 

The novel ends with Olamina saying, “I know what I have done,” and then it includes the full text of the parable of the Talents from Matthew 25:14-30. Olamina had used her talents; she had been a good and faithful servant; the rewards were sure to come as Earthseed fulfilled its Destiny.

Butler herself explains what this hopeful ending symbolizes for her. Olamina realizes that the Earthseed people who are traveling into space into "paradise" will face significant problems. Probably many of them will die; problems of the human condition travel with them, but she hopes that the difficulties of surviving on another planet will enable them to grow into something better. People will have to work together—and avoid the “worst behaviors”—in order to survive. So, Butler says, this novel about the dangers of global warning and abuses of power reflects her own hopefulness for the human race (Francis 2010: 185). The book, like many of Jesus’ parables, is openended; it is up to the readers/hearers to respond.

Butler started a third novel in the Parable series, Parable of the Trickster, in which the people who went to other planets became homesick. But after many efforts and false starts, she gave up. A review in the The Los Angeles Review of Books by Gerry Canavan puts it this way:

And there Butler left it. The long-promised third book, Parable of the Trickster, never arrived.

Last December I had the improbable privilege to be the very first scholar to open the boxes at the Huntington that contain what Butler had written of Trickster before her death. What I found were dozens upon dozens of false starts for the novel, some petering out after twenty or thirty pages, others after just two or three; this cycle of narrative failure is recorded over hundreds of pages of discarded drafts. Frustrated by writer’s block, frustrated by blood pressure medication that she felt inhibited her creativity and vitality, and frustrated by the sense that she had no story for Trickster, only a “situation,” Butler started and stopped the novel over and over again from 1989 until her death, never getting far from the beginning.

My own analysis of The Parable of the Talents remains unfinished, because by the time I worked through the second volume of Butler' series, I realized that I would only have room to include an analysis of the first volume in my own book, so my in-depth analysis stops with the first volume (see previous posts)--a volume I recommend highly.

Octavia Butler and the Parables (part 8; Parable of the Talents)

Octavia Butler

Reminder: These entries contain spoilers about Octavia Butler's books, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. In addition, almost none of the material from the posts about Parable of the Talents will appear in my reception history of the parables book.

This is the next to the last blog post about Butler's series:

Olamina and her followers are now prisoners in the “Camp Christian Reeducation Facility” (formerly Acorn), and the children of Acorn have been sent away. Not only is Olamina’s missionary dream of building other Earthseed communities like Acorn apparently ended—much like some aspects of the parable of the Sower or the Mustard Seed or the third servant in the Talents—but the existence of Earthseed itself is threatened. Earthseed appears to be “stamped out” in its infancy, before the “one small seed” could grow and spread, including the “Destiny” of taking “root among the stars” to ensure its survival and the survival of human beings themselves (161-165). Olamina, however, even in the midst of her enslavement and suffering, still has faith that although “Jarret’s Crusaders have strangled Acorn” to death, “Earthseed lives and will live” (195).

For the next seventeen months, Olamina and other survivors live as slaves in the new “Camp Christian,” as “Jarret’s Crusaders” who captured the camp seek to “educate” them and teach them to “behave as decent Christians” (184). And, of course, these “Christian” crusaders themselves betray virtually all tenets of Christianity (e.g., they sadistically torture and rape their “heathen” prisoners). Many of the Acorn prisoners, such as Bankole, do not survive their harsh treatment and torture. Yet, through all this, Olamina realizes that many of her captors are “decent, ordinary men,” who believe in what they are doing but power has corrupted them; they have been convinced that punishing people like Earthseed “is right and necessary for the good of the country” (211; cf. 238). As Butler herself notes:

I don’t write about good and evil with this enormous dichotomy. I write about people. I write about people doing the kinds of things that people do. And, I think even the worst of us doesn’t just set out to be evil. People set out to get something. They set out to defend themselves from something. They are frightened, perhaps. They set out because they believe their way is the best way to perhaps enforce their way upon other people. But, no, I don’t write about good and evil (Francis 2010: 164).

On February 26, 2035, a flare of lightning destroyed the control center for the slave collars that enslaved the prisoners, so they were able to kill their “teachers” (232), cut off their slave collars, burn what remained of “Camp Christian” (so that it could no longer be used as a reeducation camp), and escape (236). The members of Earthseed broke into smaller groups, and those who had children taken from them, like Olamina, started an often-futile search to find them.

Ironically, while still at Acorn, Olamina had discovered that her own brother Marcus, whom she thought was killed years before, was alive. She rescued him from slavery, but he could not agree with her new religion, so he left Acorn, and eventually became a high-ranking and very famous minister in Jarret’s Church of Christian America, taking the name his adoptive parents had given him, Marcos Duran. As Olamina searched for Larkin, she also made contact with her brother Marcos, but he continued to reject any connection with her. Unbeknownst to Olamina, however, Marcos had located Larkin only two years after Acorn was captured, and he never told Olamina that he had done so. This deception led to a final breach between them, once Olamina found out. Marcos had also revealed himself to Larkin when she, at the age 19, came to hear him preach. In addition, Marcos deceived Larkin by telling her that both her mother and father were killed at Acorn many years before (317).

In the meantime, as Olamina searched for Larkin, she began rebuild Earthseed by converting and teaching people not just to be followers but also to be teachers themselves. As Larkin writes, in retrospect:

She needed a different idea, and, in fact, she had one. She knew that she had to teach teachers [in order for Earthseed to survive]. Gathering families had not worked. She had to gather single people, or at least independent people—people who would learn from her, then scatter to teach and preach as, in effect, her disciples (319).

Part of the key to recruiting and teaching teachers is that belief alone will not “save you”:

Are you Earthseed?

Do you believe?

Belief will not save you.

Only actions

Guided and shaped

By belief and knowledge

Will save you.

Belief

Initiates and guides action—

Or it does nothing (313; cf. Matt 25:31-46; James 1:22-25; 2:14-26).

On Wednesday, I will post the conclusion to my discussion of Butler's Parable series.