In a message dated 9/5/00 12:48:45 PM Eastern Daylight Time, [log in to unmask]
writes:
> Pat,
>
> The first question seems to me to have a ready answer, that those removed
> from Limbo are among the blessed. I recall some Last Judgement scenes
> including the likes of David. Your second question is the more intriguing.
> Are Job & Jethro, to name but 2 Biblical figures of non-Jews treated as if
> good "men," "virtuous pagans"? Also the Magi. What of the Sybils who were
> supposed to have prophecied the coming of the Messiah?
>
> I did some work on Circumcision a few years ago, & the Sentences
> commentators I read seemed to point to sacraments of the natural law, as
> well as those of the "Old Law." this opens the door for non-Jewish but
> pre-Christian figures among the saved.
>
> Tom Izbicki
On "natural law," Judaism differs from Christianity in that virtuous
non-believers can be saved, and the mechanism is built into the OT. What gets
most attention are the so-called Noachide commands, given to Noah and binding
on all of his descendants, whether or not Hebrew. But it seems to me there
are also 7 commands given in the garden of Eden (for the descendants of Adam
and Eve). Take, say the item on God's putting Adam and Eve in the garden so
that they could be the keepers of the garden. People don't read this as a
command, as it isn't cast in the imperative ("And God said, I command you
to..."). But the verse shows God's intention, and it seems to me that God's
intention has the status of a command, at least if proper behavior implies
acting in consonance with God's intention. Maybe, in the vernacular, "[God's]
wish is my command."
I was also assuming the main thought of the verse was that God, having
created the world, was entrusting it to human beings, who were expected
(commanded) to be its caretakers, and that the "garden," by metaphorical
extension, was the whole earth. Hope that doesn't sound too Kabbalistic. The
reading is actually no more ornate or metaphorical than that given to the
"forbidden fruit" which is not to be eaten, and to the serpent who brings
temptation. As above, however, it's usually the Noachide comands that are
pointed out as those binding on all human beings since the days of Noah. So
a virtuous non-believer would be a person who honored the Noachide commands.
Don't think of this as a "Jewish" understanding of the commands to Noah,
because it's also the plain meaning of the text, and as such would have been
available to Dante. Any careful reader who stops to think can see that
commands binding on the descendants of Noah would be binding on everyone, and
there was no such thing as a Hebrew at the time the commands were given (the
covenant with Isaac had not yet been made). Anyway, Dante sure does have a
bunch of folks floating around whose salvation is explicable under neither
the Old Law nor the New Law, and I'm just saying we may not need to bring in
"natural law" as a separate category as the Noachide commands may serve the
same function.
Examples include Ripheus, identified in the Aeneid as the most righteous of
the Trojans. I don't mean that Ripheus would have had any awareness of the
Noachide commands, but rather that these OT commands provide a precedent for
Ripheus's salvation. The Sibyl of Cumae turns up in a simile very near the
end of Paradiso, and I find the annotators (of the TC edition) way off base
in identifying her as no more than a character from the Aeneid. She shows up
in lots of texts, and Augustine singles her out in City of God as the author
of a manuscript (the Sibylline books) "prophesying" the coming of Christ. The
idea that all the Sibyls had so prophesied must have developed later. So my
question is whether Dante is referring to Virgil's Sibyl of Cumae or
Augustine's Sibyl of Cumae, and there's a lot of internal evidence in the
text that he may have meant primarily Augustine's Sibyl of Cumae, or is
unlikely to have meant only Virgil's Sibyl of Cumae.
In my book on T. S. Eliot (_T. S. Eliot's Bleistein Poems_), I said that most
of Eliot's early poems, through "The Hollow Men," are loaded with
improvisations on episodes from the Commedia, most of which haven't been
recognized in the Eliot literature to date. Here I'll add that he very often
chooses passages in which the annotators may have missed the point, or may
have overlooked something of importance. By the time one has grasped what
Eliot is getting at with his improvisation, one also notices that the passage
in the Commedia has an alternative reading (and in my opinion a plausible
alternative reading) that's apparently never been discussed or considered. In
the last two chapters of my own book, I've gone over some episodes in the
Commedia to show these alternative readings, and you might be interested as
some of them touch on issues you're raising.
pat sloane
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