Natural Law 4

For Aquinas it is a basic axiom that we should do what is good - which he locates in terms of the natural and essential inclinations of human beings. The application of his general conclusions, such as individul survival or social harmony, are then outlined in increasing complexity, so that in the end by a coherent logic he can build an impressive moral edifice.

...In questions of theory, truth is the same for everybody, both as to principles and to conclusions, but only in those principles which are called [by Boethius] ‘common conceptions. In questions of action, however, practical truth and goodwill are not not the same for everybody with respect to particular decisions, but only with respect to common principles; and even those who are equally in the right on some particular course of action are not equally aware of how right they are.

Further, Aquinas distinguishes between the determinations and conclusions of Natural Law. Restitution of a victim, for example, is a conclusion of Natural Law; whereas the content of the restitution is merely its determination. Lastly, it is worth noting that while Aquinas is certainly no utilitarian, neither is his ethics purely deontological, as has been often assumed. The precepts of the Natural Law aim at the goodness of the end over (even) the goodness of the act performed. Where Aquinas differs from utilitarian thought is that he does ascribe intrinsic value to human actions, in a manner subordinate to the ends. In addition, the good which is the end is not merely defined in terms of human pleasure. In this way, Aquinas can argue teleologically that adultery, homosexuality, drunkenness, gluttony, suicide, murder, lying and promise-breaking are unnatural and therefore contrary to Natural Law.

Natural Law 3

The locus classicus of Thomas’ doctrine of Natural Law is the six articles of 1a2ae, 94. The Natural Law he describes as a habitus, because it is present in the human conscience or synderesis; it “stays always in man” (semper in homine manet). The question of how Natural Law is known by the human subject is a vexed one worthy of further discussion; suffice to say that the Natural Law is the underlying assumption behind human moral discourse. It may be termed a habit not because it is a quality whereby one acts, but because it is steadily held. There is but one precept of Natural Law which Aquinas reveals by analogy with the basis of human apprehension in the real. Like the first principles of natural science, the first principles of practical reason are per se notum - “self-evident”. Practical reason first apprehends the good; thus the first precept of Natural Law, upon which all others are based is:

that good is to be done, evil to be avoided.

All drives of human nature, then, insofar as they can be “governed by reason” (regulantur ratione) are covered by Natural Law. The secondary precepts of Natural Law, which cover a vast range of human activity, derive from this primary command. Thomas tackles next the vexing problem of the universality of Natural Law. In theory, Natural Law must be universally applicable; but even cursory observation can identify the sheer diversity of human desires and behaviour. Aquinas’ solution is to point to the proper priority of the human intellect: humans may be blocked from knowledge of the good by “passion or bad custom or even by racial proclivity”; but all human inclinations should be governed by the intellect. Natural Law in the primary precept is immutable; but may be added to in the secondary precepts in special circumstances - by divine command, for example. It is the first, common precepts that, according to Aquinas, even the effects of sin cannot cancel in the human heart. Sin has effect on the secondary precepts up to a point. Human nature remains essentially sound despite sin: the human desire for virtue is blocked rather than corrupted at the source.

Natural Law 2

The Roman Stoic jurist Cicero gave Natural Law its classic pagan formulation. The Natural Law must needs be the law of right or sane reason. He wrote:

True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions.

Cicero held that Natural Law was really only discerned by the intelligent man. This is because he understood “nature” as related to reason in the human instance. Natural Law is not inscribed on nature per se, but is available to the human intellect.

This notion was baptised by Justin Martyr in the second century:

In the beginning He made the human race with the power of thought and of choosing the truth and doing right, so that all men are without excuse before God; for they have been born rational and contemplative.

However, the first systematic articulation of Christianised Natural Law theory was in the Summa Theologiae, that “great Gothic cathedral of human thought” (O'Connor) (and other works) of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Aquinas’ doctrine of Natural Law is not held in isolation from the rest of his thought; nor even the rest of his ethics. Rather, as Jean Porter insists, his thinking is continually informed by his Christian convictions and concerns. As Leo Strauss has explained, Thomas’ doctrine of Natural Law differs from the classical theory in that whereas the classical ethicists begin with everyday notions of justice and ascend to the sublime truth by a dialectical process, Thomas begins with God and His Eternal Law. He distinguishes the lex aeterna from the lex naturalis. These are but two of five types of law that Aquinas recognises. The Eternal Law is defined as the providence of God which regulates the universe proceeding from the intellect and will of God. Natural Law is the aspect of Eternal Law which applies to human beings alone and is in accordance with human nature, thus:

...Natural Law is nothing other than the participation of eternal law in rational creatures.

As O’Connor explains:
...Natural Law may be regarded as eternal law in so far as it is intuitively and innately knowable.

Aquinas here provides a corrective to Ulpian’s version of the doctrine , which allowed Natural Law as belonging to all creatures. Thomistic Natural Law applies only to rational human beings.

Natural Law I

What follows is a thirteen part series on the subject of Natural Law!

The doctrine of Natural Law argues that there is a law or rule of action inherent in the nature of things. For human beings, behaviour must be consonant with human nature, which is always held to be rational. In the writings of Thomas Aquinas, Natural Law is the result of divine providence being embossed on natural human reason. For him,

Natural Law is nothing other than the participation of eternal law in rational creatures.

It is possible to hold a minimal version of the doctrine of Natural Law within the context of a well-rounded theological ethic. However, the Thomist version of the doctrine, which is its most refined elucidation, leaves no room for confidence that adequate account has been given of either theological or empirical data. Natural Law strikes several problems of an epistemological nature. Further, lex naturae gives a poor explanation of human diversity unless its scope is so reduced as to make it a truism. Perhaps most significantly, Natural Law theory underplays the corruption of human reason by sin.

The doctrine of Natural Law has its origin in antiquity. The writings of Heraclitus and Plato reveal an understanding of the notion, but its clarification was left to Aristotle. In his Nicomachean Ethics he wrote:

The natural [law] is that which has the same validity everywhere and does not depend upon acceptance...Natural Laws are immutable and have the same validity everywhere (as fire burns both here and in Persia)

Aristotle drew the distinction between Natural Law, which is unchangeable and universal, and the variance of humanly-enacted laws. His primary concern was with biological phenomena, which led him to adopt a model where the Natural Law was analogous to fusiV - nature, or reality. Human beings are by nature rational; and the inner principle governing human life is reason.

Canons X

Is the Western Canon still tenable? The very concept of Canon - which imbues groups of writings with status and authority - looks extremely tenuous in the fractured and diverse post-modern world. Given the close association between Christianity and Christian ideas and the Western cultural heritage, will the demise of the Western Canon presage the demise of the Canon of Holy Scripture? Evangelical Christians are often predisposed as a result of this connexion to culturally conservative positions. Is this a healthy alliance given the incisive ethically-based contemporary attack on Western culture?

No, it most certainly isn’t. Christianity needs to renew its status as counter-cultural and seek, by proclaiming its Gospel, repentence, atonement and reconciliation between and within cultures as far as possible. Sensitive reading of the Canon will assist the process of humble cultural and personal reflection. Often by placing literature in a Canon however, it has been hermetically sealed from the careful and exacting reading that is necessary. Great literature, almost by definition, stimulates both individual and collective self-examination which is sometimes painful. However, history has illustrated what the Bible already teaches: that the reading of literature cannot keep us from the terrible effects of human evil and self-destruction. The failed moral optimism 0f the nineteenth century must not be re-endorsed.

The great books that comprise the Canon continue to be great. It is worthwhile for many reasons to “rub your nose in the stuff”. These works rise above the squabblings of academics. Let them be read, but not “canonically” - if that means granting them an authority they do not have or using them in the subjection of others. Let them be read, but not if that means importing into reading our own ideological proclivities at every turn. Let them be read, but not without due consideration of historical contexts. Let them be read, but not without appreciation of creative genius, imagination and artistry.

Canons IX

It is important to recognise that Canons are also a way of reading. A Canon exists within a reader’s reading brain, offering a highly specific component of the multi-functional process of reading. This has several ramifications. Firstly, to read a work canonically is to read it in reference to its place in a larger body of writing, and thus to be aware of its relations - by allusion, influence and repudiation - of other works within that body. These works are part of a tradition, as F.R. Leavis termed it, “The Great Tradition”; indeed Bloom sees the tradition, in Freudian terms, as an attempt of one generation to overcome the mastery of the previous. The Canon operates both directions in time: just as it is impossible to read Joyce without noting the influence of Homer, the Canon has the effect of making all reading of Homer post-Joycean. Allusion operates as a powerful coding mechanism, using images, quotes, characters, plot structures and devices, names, places, genres, tropes, types and phrases. By providing helpful footnotes to modern editions, scholarship has made modern readers better readers, but perhaps lazier as well.

Secondly, in including a work in the Canon the intentions of the author may of course be disregarded or superceded. The fantastic history of the interpretation of the Song of Songs is a case in point. Both the Rabbis and the Fathers ignored the appearance of the Song as an erotic poem and interpreted it canonically (as they saw it) - that is, non-erotically. The intentions of the (human) author were not important. Gibbons The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was written as a serious historical work. Today, when it is included as a canonical work it is on the basis of its great literary style and imagination rather than historical insight.
Further, the notion of Canon does imply authority. In the realm of scripture this is a familiar concept, but what of the literary world? As we shall see, canonical writings have been accorded a certain kind of authority over and against other works. The Canon is further given the task of being the repository of cultural value and memory - not in the narrowly historical sense, but as source of the mythology that all cultures need. For example, nineteenth century Australian poets like Patterson and Lawson successfully mythologised the Australian landscape and sense of national self. The task of cultures is to reflect on their heritage rather than accept or reject it out of hand. The Canon may hinder this process of mature cultural reflection by creating out of the past a package which extremists, radical or conservative, can deny or affirm holus bolus.

Lastly, many of these approaches are reductionistic - the literary value that distinguishes the Canon is either a purely aesthetic function, or it is merely ideological. The most prominent left-wing critics reduce all aesthetic value to a matter of politics only; but, on the other hand, it is equally a fallacy to remove all political or moral considerations from the discussion of literature. Beauty is not Truth, but it is part of the Truth. How can the aesthetic be separated from the good? Modern critics want either to relativise the beautiful, or to relativise the good.

Canons VIII

For Christians, the similarity to theological ideas of many of the terms and concepts used in this discussion may result in a knee-jerk conservatism. We may feel that attacks on the Western Canon in which not a few Christian themes are intertwined do damage to Christianity itself. Exegesis, hermeneutics, typology, allegory and homiletics are all terms and concepts that literary studies has adapted from biblical studies. The idea of a “Canon” - a grouping of significant texts - also found a secular application. This is no accident - the study of literature has attempted to replace religion as a moral force since the nineteenth century, as we have seen.

Do Christians, then, think differently about Scripture and literature? In theological study there has indeed been a debate on similar lines regarding the Canon of Scripture. Brevard Childs has for many years defended the intrinsic authority and unity of the biblical Canon as the founding bond of an interpretative community, namely the church. However, James Barr is convinced of an extrinsic ground to the Canon - in starting with the completed Canon, the church was taking its stand on something external to the Bible itself. This liberal Protestant position is, strangely enough, almost identical to the Roman Catholic understanding of ecclesiastical authorisation of the Canon.
However, there is the intrinsic power of the Word of God in the Scriptural Canon which sets it apart from “ordinary” literature. By claiming this much for the Bible, we needn’t accept that the Western Canon has a similar power or authority. The analogies that have been drawn between imaginative writing and Holy Scripture since the Romantic period - such as the idea of “inspiration” - are only analogies. That they collapse, if they do, need not compromise our view of Scripture.

What can we then say about the Canon in response to these various approaches? Readings account is many ways the most convincing. Like the dragon, the Canon (in literary terms) is a large, mythological beast. Purported to be the list of books sanctioned for study in educational institutions, “Canons” by and large do not actually exist per se. The use of the term”Canon” which is meant to imply the say-so of a church-like institution here breaks down. While there are indeed powerful imprimaturs given from within the literary world, there is no fixed list of what constitutes Literature and there never has been. There is no literary equivalent to the standard metric weights kept in a safe somewhere in Paris. Canons are in fact centrifugal. That is, they have a solid core of largely undisputed material with an indistinct fringe. Very few would dispute that the Western Canon has at its heart the work of a writer like Shakepeare, but the status of sixteenth century poet Mary Wroth is far less certain. The notion of “Canon” in the literary world invites debate and contention as to its contents. The setting up of a fixed list of texts would be productive only of tedium!

Canons VII

5 - Extrinsic Arguments
Many authors attempt to account for the Canon on sociological or historical grounds only. The very notion of a Canon is elitist, archaic, oppresive - superstitious even - and thoroughly arbitrary. It is a tool of imperialism and/or patriarchy. Consequently, many non-western writers hold this view. Abdul R. JanMohamend writes of “attempts by ethno-centric Canonizers in English and other (Western) language and literature departments to ignore Third World culture and art...” . Feminist writers may also claim to subvert the very “idea (and ideal) of the Canon”.

6- Canon as “Figure”
Bill Readings, a proponent of deconstruction, holds that the Canon is a self-imploding literary construct. “Canonicity”, he writes, is “inherently deviant from any fixed form that a Canon might assume...[it] is a process, like writing, divided againts itself”. Canons are attempts to preserve texts in written form, to achieve stability and closure against the instability of speech. However, Readings argues, following Jacques Derrida, that writing is itself inherently instable and self-contradictory. Canon operates in culture as a substitute for memory. It is a way of reading a text.

Canons VI

2 - Conservative Culturalism
This view, of which T.S. Eliot is the most famous exponent , holds that the Canon defines a collective identity - in his words, the English “native element.” The culture is formed by an elite kind of writing - of which, naturally, Eliot’s notoriously “difficult” poetry was a model. The Canon is a great “Yes” to the culture it defines.

3 - Liberal Culturalism
There are many critics who argue for the inclusion of new works in the Canon, or perhaps the construction of new Canons - of works by women, for example. The notion of Canon developed on intrinsic grounds is implicitly approved: merely the content of the existing Canon is contested. The Canon remains “an organic totality that defines the culture it affirms”.

4 - Liberal Idealism
This view holds that the Canon operates as a negative ideal - a challenge that must be met by diversity. There is then a kind of dialectical relationship between the Canon and the culture. The Canon is a repository of humane ideals which function to make us struggle rather than confirm our smugness. It has a regulating impetus, saying to the modern world “Go thou and do a little differently”. Canonical literature is more diverse than at first appears.

Canons V

III
The differing approaches to the Canon issue may be summarised under six headings. (which I pinched from Bill Readings)
1 - Conservative Idealism
The aim of this position as far as possible is preservation of the “existing” Canon. In such literature may be found transcendental and uplifting values. They represent an ideal of literary merit. The Canon is “closed”. There is a growing band of more conservative authors, such as Robert Alter, Allan Bloom and Alvin Kernan who want to defend the Canon, or to bemoan its loss as an armageddon for Western culture. David Lehmann in his book Signs of the Times - Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man, writes of a “programmatic assault now in progress against the venerable idea of the Canon....The determination of a Canon, a syllabus, a reading list of any kind, is stripped of all but political considerations, with results that are nothing if not arrogant” .

Harold Bloom, as we have seen, argues vehemently that Canonical writings possess a purely aesthetic superiority, which in part explains how they have attained their Canonical status.

Canons IV

3 The problem of Western aesthetics
The problem of articulating the nature of aesthetic merit continues to vex Western culture. The notion of beauty is in many ways intuitive, and the reader or observer decides what is beautiful on an inarticulate level. Aesthetic theories have never been entirely convincing. This has led to a deep mistrust of the idea of the aesthetic. For political critics like Eagleton, the idea of the “aesthetic” is mythical, an instrument for denying the ideological forces at work in art and literature.

The intuitive sympathetic response of people to the aesthetic quality of great literature was the reason that the study of a Canon of great literary works was developed on such a large scale in the nineteenth century. In response to the crushing Utilitarianism of Benthamite England and the sheer drear of industrial work, the Canon of literature promised a realm for the imagination. However, the perceived failure of religion is the most significant reason for the development of English studies in the nineteenth century. George Gordon, one of the first professors of English at Oxford delivered this message at his inaugural lecture:
England is sick, and...English literature must save it. The Churches (as I understand) having failed, and social remedies being slow, English literature has a triple function: still, I suppose, to delight and instruct us but also, and above all, to save our souls and heal the State.

English was a liberal, humanising pursuit, dulling the razor’s edge of extremism. The aesthetic response of the reader supposedly taught him or her universal human values. Even the Bible was recast in the role of a literary rather than a religious document - Matthew Arnold, for one, advocated ignoring the gauche doctrinal aspects of the Bible in favour of its literary qualities. The Canon, then, has been part of a specifically pedagogical programme aimed at enlightening the morally backward masses in culture and ethics. It was however, some time, before “English” was accepted as a subject worthy of study in the major Universities, rather than a matter of developing “taste”, as if reading the right books was akin to choosing the right drawing room curtains, or the selection of imaginary cricket teams. It was rather the domain of the Schools of Arts, Mechanic’s Institutes and women’s colleges. English literature was the new opiate for the masses who did not study Classics.

The moral/aesthetic ideal was renewed in the twentieth century by a group of Cambridge academics - F.R.Leavis, editor of Scrutiny; Q.D.Leavis, I.A.Richards, L.C.Knights and William Empson. The argument was similar to the nineteenth century one, but the tone was more aggressive, heated, urgent. Rigorous critical attention was demand to the “words on the page”. Mass commercial society was reducing life to banality; literature would lift it to a level of vitality. To study English was to encounter the core of intellctual life - far more important than mere science, law, history or philosophy. The critic had a prophetic role to play, because literature was now a matter of high moral seriousness involving social and political questions. Leavis followed a modus operandi familiar to Christian exegetes: his insistence on ‘close reading” was a form of exegesis. He coupled this rigour with the tone of a preacher.

Where Leavis preached his criticism with a quasi-religious fervour, his Cambridge colleague I.A. Richards founded his approach on a science - psychology. In the scientific age, we must look to poetry to supply a soothing balm to the troubled human psyche. Literature was the hope of the side as far as social order went. “Poetry”, he wrote, “is capable of saving us; it is a perfectly possible means of overcoming chaos.” In his book Practical Criticism, Richards wrote up the results of quasi-scientific “experiments” on the reactions of readers to poetry.

Would the reading of literature make you a better person? Could it save society? Would it halt the march of barbarity and vulgarity in the modern world? If this was still believed in 1939, it was difficult to believe in 1945. The volume of Goethe on the shelf of the camp commandant does not seem to have restrained his savagery. Indeed the totalising nationalism of which our world has been so lately cursed has a relationship to the use of such literature in the formation of a national literary heritage. However, an optimism about the achievements and possiblities remained, especially among the New Critics of North America in the post-war period. Perhaps in reaction to the terrible events of the immediate past, they sought to study texts in isolation from the historical circumstances of their production. The literary text (preferably a poem for the New Critics) was like a “well-wrought urn”, to quote the title of Cleanth Brooks’ book. The author’s intentions were unknowable and in any case, irrelevant. Great literature could stand on its own (iambic?!) feet. In a different way, the New Critics believed in the social possibilities of literary study: the balancing of the tensions of complex language forms mirrored the process of liberal democracy. John Crowe Ransom wrote that the poem was “Like a democratic state, so to speak, which realises the ends of a state without sacrificing the personal charcter of its citizens”.
In more recent times, Harold Bloom has argued for the aesthetic value of Canonical literature in The Western Canon. For him, however, aesthetic value is not to be entangled with morality. In this work, the scholar holding two of America’s most prestigious professorships (Yale and NYU) vigorously defends the Canon with all the rhetorical strength he can muster. “Without the Canon”, he writes, “we cease to think”. Bloom argues that considerations that are either moral or ideological have no place in the question of the literary Canon. He does not equate the Western Canon with western cultural imperialism. “The greatest enemies of aesthetic and cognitive standards are purported defenders who blather to us about moral and political values in literature.” What counts, Bloom insists, are aesthetic qualities, not agendas of one kind or another. The relativisation of beauty is his great enemy. Aesthetic value must pass the test of history: a work must survive the struggle between texts within culture. “The Western Canon is a kind of survivor’s list”. Canonical works “live”: they have a vitality which sustains their presence in the cultural memory. However:
If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation...All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality.

Canons III

2 The problem of Western discourse
Tension over the Canon has also pointed to the problem of discourse in contemporary discussion, highlighted by Jacques Derrida and others. Western thinking has historically given prominence to the author-ity of the Author of the text. French structuralist critic Roland Barthes proclaimed “The Death of the Author” in his essay-cum-obituary of 1964. By “Author” he meant the author as used by critics to author-ise a particular interpretation of a text over another, the author as the object of discovery. He wrote:
We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture...Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on the text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing...We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

The presence of the Author in the text is a powerful illusion, but an illusion nonetheless. The study of “Classics” - works by “great” “authors” - is thus dramatically undermined, so it seems. Barthes saw that texts had to be “disentangled” rather than “deciphered” - the notion of an “ultimate” meaning is untenable. Barthes was of course sensitive to the theological consequences of his manifesto: the Death of the Author was also the Death of God, the ultimate Author.
As a consequence, notions of literary value break down, a savage blow to the Western Canon which was conceived as a repository of values. Reading now needs to be suspicious of the construction of reality in texts, not sympathetic to it, less still guided by it. The perceived order in the rhetoric of the West is susceptible to deconstruction.

Canons II

II
The contemporary debate about the Canon highlights three major problems that Western culture has yet to resolve - the problem of Western history and politics, the problem of Western thinking, and the problem of Western aesthetics.

1 The problem of Western history and politics
Discussion of the Canon of Western Literature uncovers the problem for Western culture of its dubious history. Leading contemporary (well, he is dead now) cultural critics such as Palestinian-American Edward Said rightly point to rather equivocal past of Western culture. In his magisterial book Culture and Imperialism, Said aims
...to focus as much as possible on individual works, to read them first as great products of the creative or interpretive imagination, and then to show them as part of the relationship between culture and empire...Since narrative plays such a remarkable part in the imperial quest, it is therefore not surprising that France and (especially) England have an unbroken tradition of novel-writing, unparalleled elsewhere.

Literature, then has played a role in the dubious process of Empire. Much undoubted good has come from the hegemony of the West in the modern world. Yet the construction of a monolithic cultural identity, to which poetry and narrative literature are fundamental, has been to the specific exclusion of other cultural identities - classes, races, even genders. We may cite for example even the English language itself - today, truly a world language, opening exciting possibilities for communication between peoples; but at the same time privileging some and disadvantaging others, working against diversity, by its power sucking the life out of other languages. Said admires the great literary works of the Western tradition as an unparralleled corpus of imaginative literature; but he deplores the use of this corpus in the exercise of power and privilege.

If the Canon is an instrument of oppression, exclusion and elitism, how can it maintain any credibility? Wouldn’t it be better to dismantle the very idea of a Canon as outmoded and imperial? Terry Eagleton, the marxist-learning formerly professor of English at Oxford, argues for the dismantling of the idea of “Literature” on ideological grounds. He proposes rather the study of “discourse”, by which he means everything from Shakespeare and Tolstoy to advertising copy and government memoranda. A document surveying “The Humanities in the Princeton Undergraduate Experience 1989” summarises the debate:
Is there a Canon of great books? What is a masterpiece? Who decides what the ‘great books’ are?...Are the currently revered books chosen ‘by Western white men for Western white men’ as some critics claim? Do colleges and universities have an obligation to expose undergraduate students to some of the great works of Western civilisation by requiring some course or set of sourses designed specifically for that purpose? Do we also have an obligation to expose students to the work of other cultures and of the historically dispossed within our own society?

Canons

I
It is now considered a truism that the study of the humanities within the university is in a state of foment. The English faculty at the University of Sydney, where I studied form 1989-92, provides a not unusual case study. For years the department had insisted on a core of study made up of traditional literary classics, from Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton and Pope to Keats, Austen and Dickens. The Twentieth Century was represented by Woolf, Joyce, Yeats and Eliot; and we even studied the writings of such latter-day stars as Helen Garner and Thomas Pynchon. The core was supplemented by a smorgasbord of optional courses which tended to reflect the predilections of the faculty. The reading was at times a chore - I would not have chosen to read several of the authors. Often I was pleasantly suprised, or challenged - but not always. Yet, as one of my favourite teachers said: “If you are going to study literature, you’ve got to rub your nose in this stuff.”

The year after I left, however, the faculty controversially voted to revamp its syllabus in a way which reflected a philosophical change in the way literature was to be understood. A core syllabus was no longer required: students could choose their entire course of study. An undergraduate student, then, could avoid studying Shakespeare or Austen if she wanted to. It was no longer deemed necessary to a literary education to receive instruction in classic or “Canonical” works. The focus of what had been “literary” study was now more broadly “cultural”. Works by minority groups or by women were given a space under the new umbrella.
That the stakes were high was revealed by the arresting acrimony under which the whole syllabus review was undertaken. For example, Andrew Riemer, now chief literary reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald, and one of Australia’s foremost writers and critics, resigned in protest after more than two decades at the University. He made no secret of his disgust at what he saw as the erosion of important standards. What occurred at the University of Sydney happened not in isolation, but as one of the results of a debate about culture that has affected the teaching of literature everywhere, a debate that has focussed on the issue of the Canon.

The Greek word kanon originally signified a measuring rod. However, its subsequent uses have been with reference to collections of books: first, to the list of books that comprised the Old and New Testaments; and second, in a literary context to refer to the set of works (of which the Bible is one), which, by a cumulative consensus in the past, have come to be considered “major” and to serve as the persistent subjects of literary history, criticism, and scholarship.” It is common to speak of the Canon as being that of the Western cultural tradition. The Canon is meant to include those works that are called “Literature”; indeed, the two terms are coterminus. In current practice, “Canon” is also used to signify the key authors in a literary subgrouping. For example, a recent (well, 10 years ago now!) edition of Southerly was devoted to the “Australian Canon”.

The notion of the Canon has been one of the most keenly contested areas of literary study in the last two decades. It would be difficult to find a University whose faculty of English has not been rent asunder over the issue of the Canon, because it directly affects what is taught. In fact, the Canon is what is taught, pretty much. Yet the Western Canon as commonly conceived has come under intense pressure from the ideological interests that now permeate English faculties; and even the idea of Canonicity itself has been called into question.

What we might call “Western” culture - the heritage of those societies having origin in the west of Europe - is a culture which Christianity has shaped profoundly. Indeed, the Judaeo-Christian tradition must be counted as one of the two pillars on which the entire Western tradition of intellectual and cultural endeavour, from biology to poetry, is founded (the Graeco-Roman being the other). Western culture and Christianity are yoked together, historically speaking. The spread of Western power and influence roughly coincides with the spread of Christianity. Western political, economic and military thinking has theological roots. In many painful passages of history the “Western” and the “Christian” have been indistinguishable. Until comparitively recently the term “Christendom” was used to indicate what is now meant by “the Western world”.

However, we live in a time of a thorough reconsideration of the Western cultural heritage. In the post-holocaust, post-Hiroshima, post-colonial age the Western past is no longer something of which simply to be proud. The unprecedented power of this culture has come at the cost of tremendous human suffering. The utopia of Western technological progess is for everyone else an apocalypse. Political post-millenialism of the kind seen even now in the USA has been manifestly dishonest. The success of the West has, it seems, less to do with the blessing of God and more to do with simple theft and murder.

In recent years the literary academy has been the site of a new self-loathing towards the cultural heritage of the West; and it is the “great” books of Western literature - the Western Canon - that are the focus of the discussion. Is the Western notion of what is aesthetically pleasing tainted with the bloodguilt of that culture? Do the works that comprise the Canon represent the tools of centuries of oppression? Can we ever extricate Christianity from Western culture, or are the two joined at the hip? In the discussion that follows I hope to shed some light on these difficult questions.....

Nietzche and Christian eschatology.

Nietzsche famously called Paul ‘the greatest of all apostles of revenge’. In his vehement treatise The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche described this Pauline Christianity as driven by ressentiment – which names the feeling of the weak/slave to the strong/noble. It was this ressentiment that had driven Paul to cast his Christianity as a life-denying eschatology and drained whatever dignity Jesus Christ had brought to it. Christian eschatology, as Nietzsche reads it, is a form of systematic cruelty against the natural shape of human life – a wicked instrument of priestcraft.

This Christian denial of life consists in that it renders weak and passive the man who would otherwise ennoble himself through action in the world. In this we can see a convergence with Arendt’s thought. Thus:
Whom then does Christianity deny? what does it call 'world'? Being a soldier, being a judge, being a patriot; defending oneself; preserving one's honour; desiring to seek one's advantage; being proud.... The practice of every hour, every instinct, every valuation which leads to action is today anti-Christian...
The hypocrisy of the nineteenth-century prince who can call himself a Christian and yet acquit himself impressively as a man of action produces in Nietzsche a visceral reaction. Nietzsche quite rightly recognizes the critique of human pride in the Christian gospel and claims that this cuts against the grain of that which is most natural to human life: to act and to be proud in action.
For Nietzsche, Paul’s apocalyptic gospel renders any ethical teaching he might give not only meaningless but abominable. As so many (including Arendt) have done before and since, he attempts to drive a wedge between the Jesus of benign practical good works and the Paul of dangerously abstract apocalypticism. We see this in Section 42 of The Anti-Christ. Nietzsche says of Paul:
What did this dysangelist not sacrifice to his hatred! The redeemer above all: He nailed him to his Cross. The life, the example, the teaching, the death, the meaning and the right of the entire Gospel -- nothing was left once this hate-obsessed false-coiner had grasped what alone he could make use of. Not the reality, not the historical truth!
Nietzsche portrays Paul as the real sacrificer of Christ. He is the one who reduces the living, flesh-and-blood Christ of the gospels to a trick of the metaphysical light. By not making even the slightest use of the life of the Redeemer, Paul perpetrated an unparalleled fraud on mankind. He was unable to make use of anything real, and instead inculcated the grand deception of Christian apocalypticism. For Nietzsche, ‘Paul simply shifted the centre of gravity of that entire existence beyond this existence – in the lie of the ‘resurrected’ Jesus.’

For our purposes in this paper it is important to note that Nietzsche refers explicitly to 1 Corinthians in Section 45. The talk of judgement (1 Cor 3.16-17; 4.2, etc) and of the overthrow of the strong/mighty/wise by the apocalyptic action of God (1 Cor 1.20ff) outrages him. Interestingly, these same texts are all linked very closely to what Rosner and Ciampa describe as the 'backbone' of 1 Cor 1-4 -- the quotations from Isaiah and Jeremiah about the expectation-shattering action of God (which Paul urges has happened in the crucifixion of the Messiah).