Bekisizwe "Stanley" Ndimande was born in a township in the northern Transvaal in South Africa. He survived the brutal segregated South African education system and did well enough on his school leaving exams or "matrics" to qualify for admission to an historically black university. But of course he did not have the money to pay the tuition fees that would gain him admission and access to the country's loan system. My scholarship organization, University Scholarships for South African Students, provided him with that money and he enrolled at the University of Durban Westville. He did well, supported each year by one of my grants. After graduation he came on a US government grant to the University of Massachusetts School of Education. From there he went to the University of Wisconsin at Madison to do a doctorate in education. Yesterday, I received an email from him, telling me that he has just been promoted with a large salary increase to the rank of full professor at the University of Texas San Antonio.
Some of you may be familiar with The Brothers Karamazov. If so, you will no doubt remember the fable that Grushenka tells Alyosha about the old lady and the onion. I often think that Bekisizwe is my onion. When I die and go to hell, I hope I will be able to restrain myself from kicking as I am pulled out of hell by the angel holding the onion.
19 comments:
Professor Wolff,
Your mentioning of Hell makes me want to read Dante's Inferno some more. I believe it was Niccolo Machiavelli who said the best way to go to Heaven was learning about how to stay out of Hell. One of his favorite books was Dante's Inferno. Although, I don't agree with some of the people he has tortured in Hell (e.g. I don't believe Plutus & the Prophet Muhammad are in Hell), I still believe it's an interesting read. The only problem is that you can't really find it translated in pure prose today. I only own one translation in pure prose & it is the entire translated trilogy of the Inferno, Purgatorio, & Paradisio in one book. However, the best verse translation that I could find is the Barnes & Noble Classics version of the Inferno. I think besides trying to be good we should try to be friends with God, Christ, or one of the Prophets by honoring them in some pragmatic form, or one of the best things we can do is try to befriend someone like Hercules. I believe in one of Euripides plays, Herucles goes down to Hell and fetches a nobleman's wife and brings her back to the Earth's surface alive and well to the great relief of her husband.
BTW, I think the play by Euripides is called Alcestis.
When Hermione, pretending to be a statue, 'comes back to life' after 16 years, she says only that she preserved herself so as to see her daughter again, and says nothing about her husband Leontes who had her arrested. Shakespeare leaves it unclear whether she hugs her husband, or tries to throttle him: Polixenes: "She embraces him." Camillo: "She hangs about his neck." Like Isaac, Alcestis says nothing when she's saved from death. The husbands might be relieved, but one wonders whether the wives were terribly keen for more time on earth with their spouses.
Many years ago, I read Alcestis for the first time, and I was very glad that Hercules brought her back to the Earth's surface. I thought while reading the play's beginning, 'not another Greek tragedy, tragedy!' --So I was very happy with the result. I had a similar feeling when seeing Star Trek III for the first time.
J.R.
I've read somewhere on Wikipedia that Alcestis couldn't speak for three days after her return to the surface out of respect for the rulers of Hades (or Hell).
If Hell is anything like Homer, Virgil, & Dante say it is, then I apprehendly conceive that just to get back to the surface would be a very great felicity indeed.
You probably could get PTSD just for being in Hell for one hour. If I were in Hell and not being judged or tortured, the first few thoughts I'd probably conceive are all of those horror & Zombie shows I've seen since my youth.
^I did the Paqui One-Chip Challenge recently. That's like a few minutes of Hell for one's taste-buds. (Thankfully I wasn't the one who purchased it - I think they go for $20 a chip. That would've been adding insult to injury.)
Less jokingly, I haven't acquainted myself with all the main lines of thought about Hell, and I don't really have the stomach to explore it that deeply, but...I can't think of anything more vicious and vile to say about another person than, "Yeah, they literally deserve to go to Hell." Maybe that's the point: Theologians speak of God as that than which no greater can be conceived, bliss as union with God - if you think of Hell in terms of the polar opposites of these, then...
The theologically correct response might actually be "absolute non-being," as in annihilationism. This would seem to follow from the identity of Goodness and Being. But somewhere along the way, someone got the lovely idea of unsurpassable conscious suffering.
What would that actually feel like: zombie movies? Probably not. Consistently with that saying about Hell being "locked from the inside," the worst pain might be to know oneself with full clarity to be a fundamentally, irredeemably vile character. Not that I think that anyone actually is that vile; I just think that ethical shame and self-disgust are among, if not the, most painful things a person can feel. Pretty much everyone, I assume, gets at least a small taste of them at some time or another, whenever they really "f@#$ up," say by gratuitously hurting or disappointing a loved one for the sake of some petty gratification.
I admit that Hell probably is no Zombie movie, but the way it's mentioned by Homer, Virgil, Dante, & the Buddhists, it probably comes close to that. Plus, there are supposed to be two Hells. The first Hell is Hades under the surface of the Earth. The second Hell is Gehenna, or the second death, that only Jesus, St. John, and the Koran mention. This is reserved for evil persons at the Final Judgement. If you read the last page of Xenophon's Estate Management, he talks about a Tantalus suffering great torments in Hades who is always afraid of a second death. This second death is probably Gehenna.
Surely Professor Wolff you have a few more onions than this. But if this is indeed your only one, then when the angel comes calling forewarned by Dostoyevsky you will know what to do (or rather what not to do).
Of course the point of Dostoyesky story is that it isn't so much the onion that is getting the old woman out of hell but the good deed she might do by letting the other damned souls get out of Hell by clinging onto her legs
Prof. Pigden, it is so nice to talk with someone who recognizes a literary reference :)
Heaven and Hell are the same thing looked at from a different perspective. It's Rudolf Otto's numinous, seen as the mysterium fascinans in the first case, and as the mysterium tremendum in the latter case.
Or like the Sakinah, equivalent to the Hebrew Shekhinah. The Arabic word Sakinah deriving from the roots s-k-n, which means "peace" or an "indwelling". This is what Christian mystics refer to as the "indescribable peace".
The word Sakinah is mentioned six times in the Qur'an, including descending at the Battle of Hunayn, when the Muslim army was trapped in a valley and shot at with arrows.
Assuredly Allah did help you in many battle-fields and on the day of Hunayn: Behold! your great numbers elated you, but they availed you naught: the land, for all that it is wide, did constrain you, and ye turned back in retreat.
But Allah did pour His Sakinah on the Messenger and on the Believers, and sent down forces which ye saw not: He punished the Unbelievers; thus doth He reward those without Faith. —Qur'an 9:25
Here, a brief summary of the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark:
Raiders of the Lost Ark is a 1981 American action-adventure film directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Lawrence Kasdan, based on a story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman. It stars Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Paul Freeman, Ronald Lacey, John Rhys-Davies, and Denholm Elliott. Ford portrays Indiana Jones, a globe-trotting archaeologist vying with Nazi German forces in 1936 to recover the long-lost Ark of the Covenant, a relic said to make an army invincible. Teaming up with his tough former lover Marion Ravenwood (Allen), Jones races to stop rival archaeologist Dr. René Belloq (Freeman) from guiding the Nazis to the Ark and its power.
In case it's not obvious, the Sakinah/Shakinah is inside the Ark of the Covenant.
When the Ark is opened, Harrison Ford tells his co-star to close her eyes and not look, the Nazis look, and what looks like bolts of fire go through their bodies and their faces melt off. Here, have a look-see:
Raiders of the Lost Ark - Face Melting Power
Here you see the same thing, i.e., the Sakinah/Shekinah but a different effect depending on whose doing the looking.
Further to my comment,
I forgot to post a link referring to the Rudolf Otto's mysterium tremendum et fascinans in my comment above. Here's the link:
Rudolf Otto's Concept of the "Numinous"
The same idea appears in Islam as jamal (beauty) and jalal (majesty). This from Dr. Annemarie Schimmel, who incidentally taught at Harvard, and one of the people from whose books I learned Sufi doctrine from:
THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ISLAM
HARVARD LECTURE COURSE
LECTURE 1
HARVARD, SPRING 1992
AS DELIVERED BY DR. ANNEMARIE SCHIMMEL
…The Phenomenology of Islam for this last semester of mine. I think that for all of you that have worked in the history of religion would be aware that Islam is usually treated rather badly or briefly because most historians of religion and most people in general think it a rather primitive religion with very little interest, but I think if you approach it from a different angle, it can yield highly interesting results. And the fact that put me on this track many, many years ago was when I was teaching in Ankara, at the Faculty of Islamic Theology, and I was at great pain to explain to my students the theories of Rudolph Otto about the numinous and the Mysterium Tremendum and the Mysterium Fascinans, and one of my students got up and said, “But this is very simple, we have had that in Islam for centuries and centuries. We have always spoken about God’s Jalal, his tremendous majesty, and his Jamal, his fascinating beauty.” And I thought, couldn’t one look at Islam also from this angle and see whether definitions that have been current throughout the centuries cannot be explained in terms of modern phenomenology of religion and would it not be fairer toward Islamic culture to do it this way instead of dwelling upon all the borrowings and influences from outside, so that Islam would be stood up in its true variety and its colorful forms? And so, in the course of the years I thought I should try to do it this way.
source: Annemarie Schimmel — The Phenomenology of Islam Lecture 1 — Harvard University
A brief bio of Dr. Schimmel:
Annemarie Schimmel (7 April 1922 – 26 January 2003) was an influential German Orientalist and scholar who wrote extensively on Islam, especially Sufism. She was a professor at Harvard University from 1967 to 1992.
source: Annemarie Schimmel
'...that Islam is usually treated rather badly or briefly because most historians of religion and most people in general think it a rather primitive religion with very little interest...'
Not in my case. I was fortunate enough to have a great Muslim professor teaching a eastern humanities course at U.H. West Oahu many years ago. He spent two classes just on Islam, and later I heard he taught entire courses on Islam at Leeward Community College. I learned quite a bit about the Islamic religion from him. He went into detail about Ramadan and how though it is tough as nails that it's not meant to kill you. I learned that Imams trained in Cairo, Egypt are the most highly trained Muslim Imams of the Sunni world. And that Alexander the Great is thought by Muslims to be a rock star--and that he is believed to be a mixture of European and Asian ethnicity by the Muslim world. That part of being a Muslim means to give to charity by via the Zakat tax. And that he personally believes the Buddha to be a prophet of God. --In fact the reason I wanted to learn about Buddhism & also Confucianism was because of his instruction and course lectures.
But none of them can get out of Hell. By kicking them off from her legs, the old woman dislodges the onion and falls back into Hell. But if she doesn’t kick them off, they will pull her and the onion back into Hell. It takes more than having given an onion to a beggar to redeem oneself.
AA
Your belief on redemption quite possibly may be true. From a Christian perspective one must be more pious than the Pharisees & scribes to enter God's Kingdom. Many of the Pharisees only gave tithes in mint as charity. And the scribes probably gave much less. However, giving an onion to a poor person may be enough as written in Matthew 25:31-46. --Now the question is why do more than the minimum requirement for redemption? --Probably because of possible heavenly compensation. Why have an average rating of piety when one can be treated like a saintly king in the end instead? Patton said he wouldn't give a hoot-in-hell for the man who lost at a game & laughed. Perhaps that's why many Buddhists & Catholics renounce the world to become nuns and monks? They don't mind serving the holiest ones in the next life, but they'll be gosh-darned! if they'll serve the punks and fools (after death) which they grew up with in this life.
^Just an onion, ML? I thought the instructions required us to sell everything we have. (Though I think you could argue that this violate Kant's ethics in a way. It wouldn't seem to pass the "universalizability" test: It's impossible for everyone to sell everything they own, because every act of property-selling entails a new instance of property-owning, which is just what the maxim prohibits.)
Sorry, just having a cheap bit of fun. Honestly, there is much more to religion than that which inspires smug mockery, though I'm guilty at times of pretending otherwise. Religion seems capable of inspiring just about the whole spectrum of emotional responses, though some of these obviously get emphasized to the exclusion of others. There is a sort of humorless traditionalist orientation that can't really muster the honesty and self-awareness to see itself in a ridiculous light; but there's also an orientation that sees nothing but the ridiculous, and this arguably misses something as well.
Fascinating couple of comments, BTW, Ahmed.
M
You are probably right; perhaps an onion is not enough.
A Pharisees mint charity is like a condiment for food, so is an onion. And it was Christ who said one's righteousness must surpass that of the Pharisees to enter Heaven's Kingdom. --And as far as selling all of one's belongings & giving the money to the poor, that is not a requirement of entering the Kingdom of God, but a requirement for a person to be perfect. The majority of people who enter the Kingdom of God are imperfect. If simply read, one can make the mistake of thinking Christ is still talking about eternal life to the young man. But the young man was boasting that he kept the commandments all of his life, so Christ humbled him by showing the young he wasn't perfect like he thought. --This can be the interpretation of Matthew 19. Of course in Mark 10 the evangelist doesn't record Jesus saying 'if you wish to be perfect,' but Matthew is the more detailed account. Soon after Jesus says (in both Gospel accounts) that it would be very hard for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Traditionally this is viewed as a rich man's futility at doing good deeds. But it can also be interpreted that a rich man may feel there is no need to do good deeds because that is not part of his character. Just as a camel may not wish to make an effort of passing through an eye of a needle because of its futility, the rich man will not wish to give to charity, since just as he was blessed in this life with wealth, there is no need to make the effort of charity so that one can be blessed in any possible life after death. I recall in one of the Gospels that a certain tax collector or rich man said he would give 50% of his wealth to the poor. Jesus' reaction was along the lines that that man was also part of God's salvation.
Bravo! Irish fishermen drive the Russian navy away from the Irish coast! St. Patrick would be proud.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2022/01/29/russia-naval-games-irish-fisherman-osullivan-nrwknd-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/around-the-world/
Professor Wolff, are you okay? I hope everything is good with you and your family.
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