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The Restoration of the Tarot of Marseille online version by Alejandro Jodorowsky

The Restoration of the Tarot de Marseille online version by Philippe Camoin

Who is Philippe Camoin?

The Camoin Tarot Code and Reading Method

Excerpt from The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards:

Online View of Jodorowsky-Camion Tarot de Marseille Restoration

The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky: The Creator of El Topo by Alejandro Jodorowsky (Park Street Press) In 1970, John Lennon introduced to the world Alejandro Jodorowsky and the movie, El Topo, that he wrote, starred in, and directed. The movie and its author instantly became a counterculture icon. The New York Times said the film “demands to be seen,” and Newsweek called it “An Extraordinary Movie!” But that was only the beginning of the story and the controversy`of El Topo, and the journey of its brilliant creator. His spiritual quest began with the Japanese master Ejo Takata, the man who introduced him to the practice of meditation, Zen Buddhism, and the wisdom of the koans. Yet in this autobiographical account of his spiritual journey, Jodorowsky reveals that it was a small group of wisewomen, far removed from the world of Buddhism, who initiated him and taught him how to put the wisdom he had learned from his master into practice.

• Jodorowsky’s memoirs of his experiences with Master Takata and the group of wisewomen--magiciennes--who influenced his spiritual growth
• Reveals Jodorowsky turning the same unsparing spiritual vision seen in El Topo to his own spiritual quest
• Shows how the author’s spiritual insight and progress was catalyzed repeatedly by wisewoman shamans and healers

At the direction of Takata, Jodorowsky became a student of the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, thus beginning a journey in which vital spiritual lessons were transmitted to him by various women who were masters of their particular crafts. These women included Doña Magdalena, who taught him “initiatic” or spiritual massage; the powerful Mexican actress known as La Tigresa (the “tigress”); and Reyna D’Assia, daughter of the famed spiritual teacher G. I. Gurdjieff. The teachings of these women and others enabled him to discard the emotional armor that was hindering his advancement on the path of spiritual awareness and enlightenment. The journey is set in a postmodern Zen that attempts to maintain an integrity to the tradition while adapting to the wilds of Mexican mores. Jodorowsky himself shows how well and unique such a training and process is. The wild tantra embodiment lessons for the artist these shamanic women present a living Sphinx riddle that I wonder, did not blind that artist as much as liberate him? Perhaps we only have the Oedipus story told from Oedipus's perspective, and it is more a kiss-and-tell which maybe the of why the Sphinx's sojourn into the wilderness. So it is with the flat eroticism of Jodorowsky' tales out of court.

• Ejo Takata on Koan:

  "Alejandro, poetry—at least the way you use it—is a game that I do not know. It amuses me to see how you use it to nullify koans. It is also a sacrilege, but that is good: Without sacrilege, a disciple cannot realize himself. 'If you meet the Buddha on the road, cut off his head: Now let us see how you will nullify the two major koans of the Rinzai school!"

  "Oh, Ejo," I protested, "I have had too much to drink to be able to do that."

  Ignoring this, he clapped his hands. "That is the sound of two hands clapping." He then raised his right hand. "What is the sound of one hand clapping?"

  I lifted my hand and placed it directly opposite his hand. "The sound of my one hand is the same as the sound of your one hand."

  The monk laughed uproariously and continued: "Does a dog have Buddha nature?"

  "The Buddha has dog nature."

  Staggering as a man staggers on a boat in choppy water, he went to the kitchen and returned with another bottle. Filling our glasses, he said: "Let's continue. This is an excellent game."

• Leonora Carrington:

  I understood: our relationship had arrived at an end. Without a word, without looking back, I walked down the stairs, out of the house, and into the street. In those days, the sky of Mexico City was still clear, and the stars lit up the sky almost like a full moon. I was stopped in my tracks by a cry like the wailing of a bird being slain. It was Leonora.

  "Stop, Sebastian!" she called, running to catch up with me, her clothes falling from her little by little as she approached me. Her body, bathed in the starlight, was silver. With a voice so soft it seemed to emerge from a beehive deeper than the earth, she spoke:

  "Before you go, I want you to know that your appearance has been absolutely essential for me. It goes beyond personal limits, beyond the celestial bodies that shine in the caverns of animal gods, beyond the murmurings of the praying mantis in my hair. It goes beyond that, and yet perhaps, even more, it is still under threat by the human body. I speak as one submerged in time. This umbilical cord exists only if we allow it to exist. You can always cut it, but as long as you want it, it will be there. For you, I am exactly what you desire, but never believe that you can lose me, because my role changes relative to you. That could happen—I could also become your bearded, toothless grandmother or your ghost or even an undefined place. If I withdraw someday, for human or nonhuman reasons, you should never fear to look for me, because you must know always that you will find me when you wish it. Later, we will communicate in such a perfect way that all our terrors and weaknesses will become bridges. Meanwhile, the ways remain warm and open. If by chance you sever ordinary communication for a period, I will be here each time you wish to find me, because the subterranean elements do not depend in the slightest on our personal will."

  Worried about her public nudity, I said, "Cover yourself, Leonora; someone might come by." She bent double, as if I had struck her in the stomach.

  "You do not yet understand," she groaned. "I am the moon!"

• Doña Magdalena:

  Doña Magdalena invited me to sit on the massage table. No sooner was I sitting upon the cotton padding than she was rubbing the bruises on my face with a cream that smelled of benzoin. My pain was soothed quickly.

  She seemed to have changed personality. I felt as if she came from another world. Her deep, pure regard had an intoxicating effect on me.

  I no longer heard the noise of the streets outside; voices and odors faded and reality became like a dream. She spoke in a slow, careful monotone, as if dictating to me.

  "For the moment, you do not know who you are, but you are searching for yourself with such intensity that we have decided to help you . . . we, the elementary particles of eternal consciousness. What we are going to teach you is not just for yourself. Seeds are given to he who sows in order for him to fructify the earth. What you will be given will also be for others. If you keep it, you will lose it. If you give it, you will finally be able to have it. Until now, you have worked by immobilizing your body, considering as ephemeral everything that does not belong to you, thinking to find in a corpse the immortal spirit that you are. Yet, my son, your mind is also on loan to you, and it too is doomed to disappear. Just as the body does, it must abandon all hope of immortality. They both must cease to live as separate beings and must unite the male and female, free from the tyranny of time, plunged into a now without end, giving totally to the work of creating a sublime state of happiness. When you dissolve the opposites that you have coagulated and, having been two, become one, then a star will shine in the dark night. . . . This happiness in being alive nourishes the divine eye that has been watching you from the center of your ephemeral existence. If your joy is authentic, if you have burned away all hopes, if you cease to be a body carrying a mind or a mind carrying a body, if you are at once dense and transparent matter, you will be received in the heart of the goddess like a lost sheep who returns home. Your individual luck will be the same as the luck of the cosmos. Until now, you have been traveling the way of the intellect, but we shall guide you in the way of the body..."

• La Tigresa:

  "I am what I want to be, that is my law.... When I first came here from my village, I felt defenseless before men. By luck, Diego Rivera had me model for his murals. . . . One afternoon, an Indian whom the painter knew well arrived from the mountains with a package. 'Here you are, boss,' he said. 'Good fresh human meat. I guarantee that it was a Christian in good health. I killed him myself.' Diego roasted the bloody meat on a spit, cut it into small pieces accompanied with chopped onions, coriander, and chili peppers, and made tacos, which he shared with me. . . . As I chewed this delicious meat, the beast that had been sleeping in me awoke. I`could eat men... . I could make them fall to their knees before me.... In order to accomplish this, all I would have to do is transform my body into the body of their ape dreams. Big breasts? I'll give them big breasts. Big buttocks? I got them with three hundred gelatin injections. Little by little, as my songs became hits, I saved up money for surgery on my cheeks, my chin, my full lips, my eyelids, hair implants, a thin waist. . . . Hell, creating your own body is just as impressive as creating a painting! I am the daughter of my own willpower. In my shadow, not even God calls the shots. . . . Besides, I've sent God to hell and chosen the devil. He's a lot more useful. He buys your soul, he gives you power—and that's everything in this world.... What do you think? Anyway, no matter what you say, you're risking your life with me. My master is a jealous one . . ."

  In the dense alcoholic fog, struggling with my swollen tongue and my lust to possess this arrogant woman, I found myself reciting a koan: "What is the way?"

  Quickly, the Tigress interrupted me, "I'm not a railroad track; don't ask me. And you—do you know what the way is?"

  This contemptuous retort made me aware of my mental confusion. The crow and the skull, life and death, good and evil, truth and lies—how to choose? In my all-consuming desire to master consciousness, I had lost the way. Tears came to my eyes as I quoted Master Haryo: "Because I was an open eye, I fell into the well." The Tigress burst out laughing...

• Reyna D’Assia:

  "Three days ago, I saw your film in New York. I fell in love with El Topo, that bandit who is at heart a visionary rabbi. I decided to come to Mexico. My excuse was to teach my group about the secrets of the Aztec calendar, but my real goal was to meet you. So you see? When your mind formulates a wish with true passion, it appears before you in the mirror we call reality."

  Her strongly perfumed skin stirred up a kind of madness in me. I allowed her to take me by the hand out into the street, where she hailed a taxi. During the drive, she kissed me with passion. When we arrived in her hotel suite, she undressed hastily, kneeled on all fours with her back turned to me, and lowered her head to the floor, forbidding me to undress. Then she asked me to penetrate her still dressed in my leather cowboy outfit, hat, and boots.

  With mad excitement amplified by the intense wetness of her vagina, I entered her with a fierce thrust of my thighs. I was about to begin the back-and-forth when I was paralyzed by a sudden cry of, "Stop! Don't move! I want you to serve as the axis of my passion!"

  With amazing agility and a precise use of my own body for support, she turned around so that she was facing me, her thighs around my waist, her feet crossed behind my back, and her own forehead pressed against mine. In this new position, I was overcome once more with the desire to thrust inside her Eden, but she nipped this in the bud with a "Stop!" so imperious I had no choice but to obey.

  A minute passed; it seemed longer than an hour. My whole pubic zone was trembling, aching to move inside her. In this tormenting immobility, the walls of her vagina suddenly began to shake with a gradually increasing tempo. Finally, her entire vagina was convulsing, squeezing, and vibrating like a quivering glove. Inside this muscular tempest, I had no more need to move. A few seconds later, my semen flooded her. I had three successive ejaculations.

  I told her that I had never before met a woman of such mastery. She confided: "I had a great master myself. I wish you to know that I am the daughter of Gurdjieff.* In 1924, the master visited New York with a group of disciples for a demonstration of his sacred dances. My mother, who was thirteen years old at the time, brought him some food that he had ordered from a Russian restaurant. He seduced her and taught her these vaginal techniques, which I learned from her. Gurdjieff said that through laziness, most women have a dead Athanor.' From childhood on, girls are taught that only the phallus is powerful, active, and vital and that what they have between their legs is a mere receptacle, a kind of swamp whose function is to be filled by sperm. People take it for granted that the vagina is a passive organ. But there is a world of difference between this kind of passive nature and that of a deliberately trained vagina. Gurdjieff taught my mother to awaken and develop her soul by developing a living vagina."

  Deciding to offer me a demonstration, Reyna spread her legs, contracted the lips of her vulva, and, with a soft airy sound, began to pump air into her vagina. Then she expelled it with a powerful hiss.

  "Phase one: learning to breathe in and eject with the vagina, as if it were a lung. When this is mastered, a woman can go much further..."

• Marianne Costa:

  In 1997, I had just had my sixty-seventh birthday. Divorced for the past fifteen years, I lived in a large apartment with my son Adan. I had mistresses stay there with me from time to time, but never for more than a week. Most of the time, the atmosphere was one of emotional peace and solitude. I was giving a tarot course to twenty students in the library when Marianne Costa arrived, slightly late.

  Absorbed in my explanations, I didn't even look at her. On the other hand, my large, reddish cat Moiche was so fascinated by her that for the entire hour and a half that the lesson lasted, he pawed unceasingly inside her purse. Perhaps my unconscious was influenced by the sensuality of this feline assault. At the end of the lesson, as was my custom, I embraced my students good-bye, French style. When Marianne's turn came, I somehow placed my hand on her waist, something I would never permit myself to do normally. An electric shock coursed through my entire body, from head to foot. Suddenly, I felt the beauty of her nudity and the intensity of her soul. She murmured: "It must be wonderful to be a cat in your house."

  Giving her a kiss on the cheek and heedless of the risk involved (with a thirty-seven year age difference between us), I replied: "Then I adopt you!"

  Thus began a strange, marvelous, and difficult couple relationship. If I had followed my reason instead of my intuition, I never would have dared to take such a step and would have missed the most beautiful experience of my life.

  "Between doing and not doing, always choose doing."

  ---

Excerpt: Throughout the history of western thought, images of women as personifications of wisdom or philosophy have been created. Examples of this are Lady Wisdom of the Biblical book of Proverbs, female personifications of intellectual and moral virtues in ancient Greek thought, women made into representatives of wisdom and philosophy in the medieval convention of courtly love, and the 19th century portrayal of Sophia by the Russian author Vladimir Solovyov. Such images speak to the imagination and many interpretations of them have been given in the course of time. Renewed interest in this long tradition has come from feminist thought of the past three decades. Feminists raise the question why women are described by men as personifications of abstract values and virtues, what this says about the social context within which this occurred, and what can be concluded from this concerning concrete women and the men speaking of them. Feminists ask to what extent the allegorical description of women should be seen as an affirmation of the strength, power and subjectivity of women and to what extent this portrayal means that women are objectified and made passive objects of the male desire for the virtues which they represent.

It is argued in this work that such questions cannot be answered without considering the factors which contribute to the creation of the allegories. This can only be done by analyzing the literary style in which the images of women are created, by examining the history of the convention of allegorization and personification, by placing the creation of such images within social, political and religious contexts, and by determining which intellectual, moral and religious virtues and values the authors cherish. This work shows that the relationship between allegorical images of women and the concrete lives of women is one which is mediated by a rich cultural, literary and intellectual tradition.

In this work, four images of women as Wisdom and Lady Philosophy are discussed — Penelope (Homer), Macrina (Gregory of Nyssa), Lady Philosophy (Boethius), and Beatrice (Dante). Penelope, as described by the epic poet Homer in the Odyssey, is the wife of Odysseus. She remains home while her husband is away on his journeys. Believing that Odysseus is dead, suitors beleaguer her. To gain time and thus delay an unwanted marriage, she spends the whole day weaving, taking out the strands again at night. A number of Stoic authors have interpreted this story in an allegorical fashion. Weaving is interpreted as an image for logical thought; unraveling is seen as the process of analyzing. Thus, the story of Penelope and her suitors becomes an allegory of philosophical thought which is confronted with unworthy admirers. To the extent that the suitors are unworthy of Penelope, they are unworthy of the study of true philosophy, since they are concerned only with preparatory subjects of lower intellectual worth.

Macrina is the sister of Gregory of Nyssa. He wrote about her in his book Life of Macrina (Vita) and in his treatise On the Soul and the Resurrection (De anima et resurrectione). She has an excellent character and toughness of spirit. She is rational and courageous in the face of the death of her brother and mother. She remains a virgin and transforms her house into a monastery, freeing the slaves. In all things she is wise and restrained. She is the ideal of Christian virtue, in opposition to pagan ideals.

Lady Philosophy is described in the book Consolation of Philosophy as appearing to Boethius when he is imprisoned and facing the death penalty. She comforts him and teaches him on complex theological and philosophical issues which allow him to rise above his present situation of misery and to place intellectual and religious matters in context. She is, however, not simply represented as a teacher but also as a caring nurse. In this way, she is not only an image of noble philosophical thought but also takes upon herself the loving and humble nature of Christ himself.

Dante speaks with love and reverence of Beatrice in his books New Life (Vita Nuova) and in the Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia). Beatrice is seen as the perfect representation of the feminine. In the latter work, she is described as guiding Dante from the gates of purgatory to paradise. She represents not only perfect beauty and love but also ultimately leads Dante to the love of God Himself.

The author concedes that she has chosen to cover a long and diverse historical time period. Yet she argues convincingly that there is a theme which unites these different characterizations of women, that of "reason versus passion". In many traditions, including that of Greek philosophy and much of Christian thought, women are seen as representing the lower passions and even as using their wiles to divert men from the true paths of reason and virtue. Men are often represented as the embodiment of reason. The images of women as representatives of philosophy and wisdom discussed here differ radically from such representations. These women embody reason, linked to virtue and nobility of character. Penelope represents theoretical thought, Macrina reason in the face of irrational passion, Lady Philosophy as insight into philosophical truths, Beatrice as true guide to the love of God. Besides representing reason, they also stand for the noble passions, such as that of love and compassion. These noble passions could very well be even more desirable than reason itself.

The men who admire these women are seen as rational, yet at the same time they are also passionate. This passion expresses itself in their admiration and love, and in their desire that the women lead them on the path to true insight into truth, morality and the divine.

This means that the commonly held view that in western thought women are seen to represent passion of the lower kind and men reason, must be reconsidered. Passion must be differentiated into lower and higher passions. Both men and women are seen as capable of the use of reason and the expression of the noble passions. But to what extent are the women portrayed as objects of desire — the desire of men for the great emotional and intellectual goods which they represent? Do these women have subjectivity of their own?

The author concludes that the women portrayed here are not simply objects, they are also truly subjects in their own right — making decisions, acting wisely, having insight, feeling love, and expressing compassion.

The main contribution of this work is to be found in the extensive scholarly research into the history of the literary style through which the allegories of the feminine are developed, and in the detailed discussion of interpretations of these allegories, both those written in the past and those given by the author herself. The author demonstrates that female personifications of intellectual and moral virtues should be taken seriously as a theme in the history of western thought. At the same time, this project opens up new questions. One of the issues of concern to feminists, mentioned earlier, that of the implications of allegories of the feminine for the lives of women, remains to be investigated. Did women in any way profit from these images, or were the images developed in the context of the repression of women? Are the female personifications completely separate from the lives of women themselves, or are they reflections of the capacities of concrete historical women? Another set of issues which give rise to further investigation is that of explaining why men are attracted to such female personifications. Does this tendency arise from literary conventions or is there a deeply rooted admiration for the feminine within the male psychological makeup?

This work is of interest to scholars doing research in various fields: that of women's studies, literary theory, philosophical anthropology and ancient and medieval philosophy. In addition, it is suitable for use as a textbook for a course in these areas. Through this work, readers will gain new perspectives and ask new questions concerning the convention of the allegorization of the feminine.

The world of Greco-Roman antiquity knew its sages, wise men and philosophers, all of them typically male. Yet literary depiction of Wisdom or Philosophy personified her as a woman. Pythagoras' classic definition of philosophy as the desire, love or search for wisdom made its own contribution to such personification, for love and desire are human characteristics.' In their personification the philosophers almost invariably depicted Philosophy or Wisdom as a young and beautiful maiden, a maternal figure or nurse, a physician, a teacher or guide.2 The Greeks were not alone in personifying Philosophy or Wisdom in this way. The Lady is well-known from the biblical account of Proverbs, where we hear of her as the companion of God, assisting in the work of creation. In fact within the Christian context, Philosophia has often been regarded as an figure who could be assimilated or equated with Sophia, Lady Wisdom. The search for wisdom was itself considered to be an important part of wisdom.

Lady Philosophy, as such, is probably best known from Boethius' unforgettable portrayal in his De Consolation Philosophiae. in philosophical literature the theme of "philosophy as a lady" can be traced hack to Plato's discourse with the Sophists. Stretching the proper meaning of the adjective "philos," Plato was`fond of using erotic language to describe the student's pursuit of philosophical knowledge. The theme was developed in Hellenistic schools of philosophy, especially among Cynics and Stoics who allegorized epic poetry, taking the figure of Penelope to add a measure of status for the study of philosophy. They also allegorized the story of her weaving to symbolize the important introductory role of logic. Non-Christian Neoplatonism of late antiquity regarded Penelope as a model of contemplative wisdom.` Gregory of Nyssa must have been aware of that feminine model of wisdom when he portrayed the life of his sister Macrina as one in which "she raised herself to the heights of virtue I through philosophy." Fourth century Christian literature used the term "philosophy" to depict a life of wisdom characterized by integrity of thought, word and action, a lifestyle first exemplified by the martyrs, and later by those pursuing an ascetic life. Gregory uses the Stoicizing Platonic formula of "reason in opposition to the passions" to express victory achieved over the flesh as the source of sin and separation from God.8 Thus Gregory portrays Macrina as the Christian answer to the pagan portrayal of philosophy as a wise woman.

Feminine personification of Wisdom, from Homeric Penelope and the Christian Macrina comes to a climax with the late medieval portrayal of Beatrice in Dante's masterpiece, the Divine Comedy. But this medieval presentation can hardly be understood without due recognition of Boethius' Philosophia, or Lady Philosophy, the central figure in the Consolation of Philosophy. Philosophia takes on the role of a master physician when Boethius languishes in prison; she diagnoses the illness from which he suffers as an overdose of passion, to be overcome by use of reason. With patient and persistent argumentation Lady Philosophy brings Boethius around to a far more healthy perspective on his condition, preparing him for the important battle which lies ahead, his confrontation with death. Lady Philosophy knows how to take charge, but her work of "reason" is also characterized by love and compassion. Feminine personification helps Boethius present Philosophy in a role that is new and appropriate in a Christian context.

Dante tells us explicitly of Boethius' Lady Philosophy coming to his aid when he was inconsolably troubled by the death of Beatrice. This philosophical lady provided the important source for Dante's allegorical personification of philosophy in the Convivio. But she also provides an important source for his depiction of Beatrice in the Comedy, coming to rescue her protégé from the depths of despair, and setting him on the road to highest bliss. As a lady she may be the object of desire, but in the epic poem she draws attention not to herself but to God, as she guides him to the summit of human achievement, the beatific vision of God. Although literary. Romanticism encouraged a literal and historical reading of Dante's presentation of Beatrice in the Vita Nuova, and even in the Commedia, a good case can be made for regarding her allegorically as Lady Wisdom. Like other medieval writers, Dante often conflates Wisdom and Philosophy (Sophia and Philosophia). And like Macrina, as well as Boethius' Lady Philosophy, Beatrice represents the rule of reason over the passions.

The present study focuses on four variants in ancient and medieval literature presenting a personification of Wisdom and Philosophy as a lady. They differ significantly in origin and in literary presentation. Based on Homeric epic, the story of Penelope is allegorized by later schools of philosophy who use her primarily to enhance various aspects of their own position. Macrina, on the other hand, has a secure historical basis; but the story of her life, as depicted in the Life (Vita) and the dialogue, On the Soul and the Resurrection (De Anima et Resurrection, abbreviated DAR) presents her in terms of a central philosophical ideal, the rule of reason over the passions.

Boethius' Philosophia provides us with a case of compositional allegory, the first substantive and creative portrayal of philosophy as a woman. Depicted initially with many a reminiscence from Homeric literature, she also speaks of having followers among well-known representatives of pagan philosophical schools, from Socrates and Plato on. Thus Boethius authenticates the lady as truly representative of the philosophical tradition going back to pagan antiquity. Her presentation in subsequent books of the Consolation demonstrates that she is not restricted to that context. Feminine depiction helps Boethius show that she belongs equally in the social and scholarly context of sixth century Christian Alexandria and Italy.

And finally Beatrice, the lady at the centre of love poetry in the Vita Nuova, the one to whom Dante appealed as the true source of happiness and salvation. Via Lady Philosophy of the Convivio, she comes back in the grand epic poetry of the Commedia to console, to heal, to restore and guide the author. Literal analysis cannot adequately account for the language applied to Beatrice. Commentators who took his words literally accused Dante of blasphemy for the claims he made on her behalf. The answer, as we hope to show, is to be found in the tradition which can be traced back to Macrina, whom Gregory presents as a type of Christ, not a "type" in the sense of Old Testament typology, but as representative of a tradition which regards Christ himself as the "prototype".

In our study of these four ladies, our first aim is to give authentic presentation, true to the respective textual traditions as these have come down to us. Our analysis in each case is rooted in a text, and these texts vary in character and genre. In each case we seek to be true to what the text tells us, not simply to read in meaning from a later perspective. Our work therefore has an undeniable literary component. The texts we are dealing with also have a long history, being composed in historical and cultural contexts very different from our own. Although our understanding will inevitably reveal a subjective element, it is also important check our interpretation against other literature of the time, to make sure that we have not misunderstood intentions of respective authors.

The next element involves philosophical analysis. Lady Philosophy is, in each case, representative of traditions rooted in the schools of philosophy of classical antiquity and the middle ages. But for literary depiction we also recognize that the understanding or definition of "philosophy" may not be as narrow or exact as one could expect in a more "academic" or technical philosophical treatise; this is certainly a factor in our reading of Boethius' Consolation. Nor does philosophy, as such, have an exclusive claim on "wisdom", for wisdom has pedagogical, social and religious roots. Compared to philosophical writing of more recent times, philosophy in antiquity was never far removed from mythology and religious concerns; when philosophy entered the dialogue with Christianity it took on a religious coloring of a different kind. For ancient and medieval philosophy an understanding of wisdom can certainly not remain oblivious to the religious root of issues to which it gives attention.

When philosophy is personified, the ladies who represent it in each case also represent an important way of understanding the cultural or educational role of philosophy, whether in the context of Hellenistic Stoicism, Stoicizing Platonism or Neoplatonism of later antiquity. Allegorization of philosophy as Penelope contrasts her role with that of preliminary subjects in the curriculum. As a philosophical figure Macrina takes a role rooted in martyrdom and asceticism. Boethius may not have had direct connections with Cappadocian thought, but he was certainly in touch with the Alexandrian Platonist tradition of his time, the early sixth century. And while Dante was not a professional philosopher, we discover from his work that the Alexandrian tradition of Christian philosophy rooted in Christ as both Sophia and Logos, comes to a climax of allegorizing representation in the Divine Comedy.

A study of these four ladies has intrinsic merit, for they represent the philosophical enterprise in various ways, representing different periods in literature and history, and differing philosophical schools of thought. However, the present work also wishes to address these representations with new questions. One important issue which arises almost immediately from discussion of these ladies is the significance of gendered aspects of their presentation; closely related is the question of actual historical participation of women in the schools of philosophy of the time. Even though philosophy and wisdom are represented by women, we know that women were rarely engaged in philosophy as such.9 Some feminist studies have used such literary representation of women in the personification of wisdom and philosophy to argue that women are perfectly capable of philosophical work.° Even if we should agree with that particular assumption on the abilities of women, this approach does not help us in our analysis of the ancient or medieval historical context; history cannot be reversed." Although our study will certainly pay some attention to gendered aspects of the portrayal, the first and basic approach to answering this question has to come through an examination of literary aspects of these portrayals, as allegorical personification. We begin with a brief analysis of allegory as such.

Aside from the inherent interest of the four accounts of philosophical women, we know that historically "real" women were hardly considered capable of philosophical work, whether in the ancient world of Greece and Rome, or Christian middle ages. Nor have we found solid grounds to argue for an intellectual transfer from feminine personification of philosophy to recognition of philosophy as a preoccupation eminently suited for women. Even when philosophers like Plato were ready to accept women as perfectly capable of philosophical discussion, an undeniable distance remains between these accounts and the reality of everyday life when it came to presence of women in scholarly pursuits.

So what have we accomplished by calling attention to feminine allegorical portrayal? It is time to turn to literary and rhetorical aspects of these literary portrayals. The four ladies on whom the present study has focused come from different cultural and philosophical contexts, and are used by our authors to elaborate different issues. But they share common ground with respect to the central philosophical motif through which they are presented with imagery and metaphors based on the life of women, all of them portrayed with some connection to the issue of reason versus passion. This alerts us to the significance of allegory and personification for this study. Aside from Macrina, allegory plays a significant role for each of them; and even for Macrina we recognize a need to read the account, or at least some of the terminology, on more than one level of meaning. The story of Penelope is allegorized for new meaning in terms of central concepts related to philosophy, while the accounts of Lady Philosophy and Beatrice, as noted, give compositional allegory of wisdom, and allegorize philosophy as desire for and realization of wisdom.

There are different kinds of allegory. The stories of Penelope were approached with interpretive allegory, attributing a second underlying meaning to a well-known text. An underlying meaning constructed or invented, as it were, within a philosophical context, is applied to give the words of the text a new meaning, based on a different perspective. There must be a connection of similarity; but allegory can be unpredictable, as our study has shown. One text may well be the source of different and competing allegorical interpretations.

The approach in allegorizing may also be creative or compositional, as in the case of Boethius' Lady Philosophy, who is presented as a literary construct, metaphorical in meaning and intent. Here the surface text is also said to hide the real meaning underlying the text; the text functions like a dramatic persona, a facade, or mask for the real person, or real intention. The literal text may have its own validity, but the author's message, typically more abstract in nature, lies hidden under the surface of words, with some indicators that a second meaning is intended. In the first type of allegory we recognize that allegorical interpretation is secondary to the text itself, since it is unlikely that the original author would have intended to insert the second meaning. With the second type the allegorical presentation may be thought to be secondary with respect to the underlying message introduced (intentionally) by the author; however, for both Boethius and Dante, the literary skill and care with which they have presented the text belies that assumption.

Personification is perhaps the most important kind of compositional allegory. Like Wisdom, Philosophy is personified as a woman. Many comparable personifications of abstract concepts, of cities, or peoples can be identified in ancient literature; personification itself is common enough, if not so common in the extended form which Boethius presents. Allegory as creative composition, recognized for Lady Philosophy and Dante's Beatrice in the Divine Comedy, helps to enliven discourse through dramatization and appeal to the emotions; it supports the persuasive nature of the text.

Use of allegory in this sense may have begun with Orphic or Pythagorean mystery religion which forbade initiates to speak of the central message. Members wishing to communicate with one another without divulging the truth to outsiders, might construct a surface text actually meant to mislead, giving some indications embedded in their tale to indicate that a different underlying message was intended. Only insiders, or initiates, would know what was actually meant. Another approach on the origin of personification recognizes it as a type of character invention meant to give life to abstractions, like the virtues, thereby deifying them as well as anthropomorphizing, in somewhat the same way that

God is given eyes and hands in Old Testament accounts. This is but one possible reconstruction of religion arising among primitive Greeks. Xenophanes complained about anthropomorphism in religion, and the result was a more philosophical approach on attributes and portrayal of deity, as in Plato (Republic 2). But character invention is not necessarily the same as anthropomorphism. And in neither case does personification necessarily mean deification.

Although identification of allegorizing features for the literary texts studied in this work is not itself controversial, it is also true that the long prominence of Romanticism in literary theory meant a degree of embarrassment in recognition of allegorical technique. The nineteenth century Romantic movement took a serious interest in the work of Dante, particularly focusing on Beatrice as object of desire; convinced of her historic reality, they were more reluctant to recognize her portrayal as greatly idealized, representing the divine feminine, taking on the significant role of leading the lover beyond corporeal to unearthly love, such that it would lead to union with God. In the past few decades this attitude to allegory has changed. Postmodern literary theory is only too well aware of double layers in a text. Imaginative reconstruction is appreciated, along with a more subjective approach in literary criticism.

What is the advantage of recognizing aspects of allegory and personification? What does it mean to use allegory, and under what conditions was allegory useful? Has it meant any gain for philosophy itself? What is missed if the allegorical element is not detected as such? Both for Lady Philosophy and for Beatrice we noted that it is important not to ignore indicators for an allegorical reading, particularly if such ignorance leads to charges of blasphemy for Dante's description of Beatrice; by reading praise for Beatrice in the metaphorical and allegorical tradition of Macrina, such misunderstanding can be avoided.

Of course, the important issue for our study is not only the correct recognition of personification in allegory, with corresponding double presentation, but also an examination of implications for feminine personification.

Is gendered imagery determinative for the personification? Are gendered aspects used effectively? Contemporary discussion recognizes that feminine grammatical gender of words like Sapientia or Sophia is not to be regarded as determinative of the way allegorical ladies are portrayed. Even if we should agree with that claim, it is still necessary to discover the true significance of gendered characteristics. What can we say about gendered representation of women in the respective texts; how are we to understand a relationship to actual lives of women, particularly in the ancient world? We have already noted the illegitimacy of argument from feminine depiction of philosophy to the engagement of women in philosophy. A closely related issue which demands attention is whether gendered aspects of these representations tell us anything useful about the enterprise depicted? Can we detect a correspondence between literary and social factors?

The depiction of Penelope, who is admired and sought out by suitors, clearly reveals some characteristic aspects of feminine life and social realities, particularly with her work of weaving. Penelope is a heroine of noble status and high social pretension; allegorizing interpretation extends the significance of that status to philosophy (and especially logic) as a noble enterprise. Macrina is a real, historical woman whose life reflects involvement in feminine activities. However, from the age of maturity, when she is ready for marriage, we find her making decisions against the grain of expectations for women, rejecting what she calls "re-marriage", for she does not believe that the groom intended for her is really dead. She remains with her mother, frees the slaves, and turns the home into a monastic establishment. As in Penelope's efforts to delay a second marriage, Macrina too went beyond traditional expectations of women.

With the portrayal of Boethius' Lady Philosophy as compositional allegory the important question arises: was feminine personification truly more than a matter of convenience in using the feminine grammatical gender of her name Philosophia? Our study has revealed that Boethius portrays her in terms of traditional expectations of women, like weaving, or taking the maternal role of nursemaid. Yet that is not the complete answer, for she is also portrayed with the more masculine roles of physician and teacher in philosophy. Boethius did make positive use of feminine personification, presenting Philosophia with feminine characteristics as these are well-known and widely accepted for her role as nurse. Yet we know that allegorical personification was just as likely to present women in roles totally out of character for what was socially accepted in antiquity, as in Prudentius' depiction of the Virtues as fighting soldiers. Even if the Greeks knew of mythical Amazon female fighters, and some philosophers conceded that actual historical women might be capable of philosophical discussion, it is clear from our literary examples that passages using metaphor, rhetorical technique, or allegorical personification are probably not the best source for affirmation of actual involvement of women in such roles. And the rhetorical use of the life of women was as likely to reinforce negative popular stereotyping of women (as courtesans or prostitutes), as to provide grounds for a more positive appreciation.

To sum up the results of these literary studies, and to risk a statement of the obvious, I believe it is important to recognize that the rhetorical portrayal of the respective ladies is not to be read as an end in itself. Literary technique, especially in allegory and personification, serves the cause of that which the text seeks to communicate. Our study should serve as a warning for those who would examine literary usage of allegory and metaphor to detect a role for women not otherwise indicated. Whatever the significance of these ladies as such, and the significance of the roles they assume in their families or society, in literature or art, we need to recognize literary portrayal and rhetorical usage in literature as a means to an end, not just an end in itself. This is one of the significant conclusions derived from discussion of the underlying theme which connects our various portrayals, that of "reason opposing the passions".

Just as significant is a correct understanding of a major theme used in portrayal of women, that of erotic desire, a theme that surfaces particularly in stories of Penelope and Beatrice. Desire is a human quality, and it was not difficult for writers to find examples from everyday life, especially from language of erotic desire, for metaphorical portrayal of philosophical desire. In literary and philosophical discussion desire is ordinarily attributed to the philosopher, as the (masculine) student seeking wisdom; the lady (representing the object: wisdom) would function as object of desire. Of course, Penelope does not quite fit that model, since she may have been object of the suitors' desire, but is by no means passive; her activities in weaving have a positive role in delaying the dread day of remarriage, but also function subversively, in hidden unweaving, to thwart desire. Macrina too was not passive in her varied feminine roles; Gregory portrays her active in using philosophy to attain to virtue.

Is it possible for the woman to be presented truly as subject when the author is masculine? Or can she be appreciated only as the object under those circumstances? Can only a female author do justice to the lady as a subject in her own right? These questions cannot possibly receive adequate attention at this point, for they open up a new area for investigation; they are raised only to uncover an assumption which often operates silently in discussion of feminine presence in the text of a male author. Certainly, women are all too often used as sexually attractive models not to have their own beauty appreciated, but for a secondary purpose of using that attractiveness in advertising products, like a good wine, or automobile. To appreciate the matter we need to remember that erotic and sexual desire in general represents one of the strongest human emotions, classified with the passions. But in the context of the popular philosophical motif of "reason opposing passion", use of a woman to represent wisdom, while the male student or philosopher represents desire for wisdom, has a strong potential for subverting the image of the student, while the woman, even as object of desire, retains a positive value. And I believe this is the clue to the significance of Penelope allegorized as representative of philosophy and wisdom, as a positive portrayal of the feminine figure.

If allegorizing was meant to call attention to Penelope's suitors as overcome with passion to the point that they abandoned respectable behavior, we find that Penelope herself emerges from the event positively, since her strategy in outwitting them may well be understood as representing the victory of reason over the passions. Of course, we are reading back into the allegory the more specific use of the motif given in the story of Macrina; but such a reading is consonant with Gregory's and also Boethius' use of the motif, particularly from Lady Philosophy's rebuke of the prisoner's fascination with Fortune (Cons. 2). What is at issue here, the role of the lady as subject as well as object of desire, remained submerged for the most part as a topic of consideration for ancient writers, but it came out into the open for discussion in Dante's Convivio, where he resolves the subject-object relationship by determining that the Lady represents both aspects when he identifies her in terms of "loving use of wisdom" (Conv. 3.12). Indeed, as we have noted, Dante was open about identifying Philosophy and Wisdom. Portrayal of the lady as emblematic of both wisdom and the desire for wisdom, poses less difficulty in a context where the distinction between philosophy and wisdom has for the most part evaporated.

We have studied the accounts of four ladies who in varied ways represent the victory of reason over passion. We have discovered that the feminine figure could be used in surprising ways, as in apologetic use of stories to correct popular perceptions of women in Christianity. There was a message for those who would allow passion to overcome reason. Penelope emerged as a lady whose reflective strategy was crucial in maintaining her home, family and marriage. The loom did function as the true symbol of stability of the household. As a feminine portrayal of wisdom the story of Penelope maintained its appeal even for late antiquity. Our reading of the account of Macrina shows that Christians could take on such a pagan model as a challenge, and counter its impact with a Christian depiction of the wise woman. As an embodiment of logos, Macrina's story can be understood as a capstone of apologetics in its attempt to answer traditional accusations of the role of "unreasoning" women in the transmission of the Christian faith. With Boethius' Lady Philosophy we have argued that feminine portrayal should not be taken for granted, for she claims the role of teacher and physician, as well as the more maternal role of nurse. The truly important contribution of feminine portrayal in that story is the compassionate aspect so well portrayed with the feminine maternal role. What about Lady Beatrice? In the Vita Nuova she represents Love, being valued almost exclusively as object of love. That changes decisively in the Commedia, where she is represented as subject of love, while also taking an active role redirecting "Dante's" passion. Accepting his ongoing desire for herself, she reroutes it to a highly appropriate goal, God himself. For Dante, as indeed much later for Solovyov, sexual corporeal love for the beauty of body represents the first step in a series taking one from material to spiritual levels of love, toward union with God himself. That theme, which remained at the heart of an important tradition in mystical devotion, takes us back via Augustine to Plato's Symposium. But even in the story of Macrina, love for the human beloved is consummated in higher forms of love.

We have not hesitated to acknowledge that even such very positive portrayal of women in the use of reason had no immediate or direct application for real life, for roles of women in academic application of reasoning capacities. Presence of women in the universities of Europe and the West was not at all common until the twentieth century. We have examined literary figures, rhetorical in nature. But more positively, we may conclude by noting that portrayal of the feminine figure in terms of a wisdom that overcomes the passions would eventually make its own contribution; for it carried the potential of reducing the threat posed by the feminine within a Christian tradition that all too often equated masculinity with reason, and femininity with passion and emotion, viewing the woman as a temptress, leading men astray, diverting them from better purposes in life. It could also make its contribution in undermining the view of women that was so strong in the Romantic tradition, woman as representative of the body, passivity and emotion.

We would not pretend to have exhausted the potential of the subject, even as it pertains to the limited examples brought forward in this discussion. Our study has revealed only some aspects of Philosophia and Sophia as Lady Wisdom, a topic which will undoubtedly continue to attract attention and fascination. Hopefully something of the inherent interest of these feminine portrayals of philosophy and wisdom has been communicated in the present work. It is important not to underestimate the impact of literary factors, especially allegory and the allegorizing potential of literature. It was our intention to draw out some of the meaning and significance of these literary and philosophical feminine portrayals, but also to advise caution for those who might overestimate the significance of feminine personification. We encountered the role of "reason versus passion" and, in a Christian context, its strong connection with Logos theology. Whether or not one is inclined to appreciate rhetorical technique and allegory, or the role of Logos theology, is beside the point. One cannot appreciate the presentation of these ladies without recognition of these themes.

From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature  by Barbara Newman (Middle Ages Series: University of Pennsylvania Press) Why did hagiographers of the late Middle Ages praise mothers for abandoning small children? How did a group of female mystics come to define themselves as "apostles to the dead" and end by challenging God's right to damn? Why did certain heretics around 1300 venerate a woman as the Holy Spirit incarnate and another as the Angelic Pope? In From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, Barbara Newman asks these and other questions to trace a gradual and ambiguous transition in the gender strategies of medieval religious women. An egalitarian strain in early Christianity affirmed that once she asserted her commitment to Christ through a vow of chastity, monastic profession, or renunciation of family ties, a woman could become "virile", or equal to a man. While the ideal of the "virile woman" never disappeared, another ideal slowly evolved in medieval Christianity. By virtue of some gender-related trait (spotless virginity, erotic passion, the capacity for intense suffering, the ability to image a feminine aspect of the Godhead) a devout woman could be not only equal, but superior to men; without becoming male, she could become a "womanChrist", imitating and representing Christ in uniquely feminine ways. Rooted in women's concrete aspirations and sufferings, Newman's "womanChrist" model straddles the bounds of orthodoxy and heresy to illuminate the farther reaches of female religious behavior in the Middle ages. From Virile Woman to WomanChrist will generate compelling discussion in the fields of medieval literature and history, history of religion, theology, and women's studies.

Excerpt:

Wisdom's Root Revealed: Ben Sira and the Election of Israel by Greg Schmidt Goering (Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism: Brill Academic Publishers) interprets the theme of election in the book of Sirach. Previous scholarship has often understood Ben Sira’s worldview to be dualistic, and has approached the sage's correlation of Wisdom and Torah as either a nationalization of Wisdom or a universalization of Torah. By probing Ben Sira’s ideas about election, this book suggests that Ben Sira does not collapse the traditional sapiential dichotomy wisdom/folly into a dualistic worldview, and that his understanding of the relation between Wisdom and Torah proves to be far more subtle than previous interpretations have allowed. The study demonstrates that the concept of election enables a profitable discussion of the relation of Wisdom and Torah in the thought of this pivotal Second Temple sage.

Excerpt: This study interprets the theme of election in the book of Sirach. When I first undertook this project, I never imagined that the end product would focus entirely upon Sirach, nor that it would treat the theme of election.

Perhaps as long as humans have existed, so has their cultural tendency to organize themselves into groups. As cultural anthropologists have shown, group identities are often formed by drawing boundaries between insiders and outsiders. I have long been intrigued by the formation of communal identities, especially as persons create these identities in order to traverse the ever-present terrain of exclusiveness and openness. I am particularly drawn to the ways in which members of a community ask and answer questions about their relationship to those outside their community. My interest in these questions originates, in part, because I was raised in the United States in a small religious and ethnic minority group where discussions frequently focused on who was a Mennonite and who was not. Only later did I learn that this discourse on inclusivism and exclusivism resonated with the perennial question posed within Judaism, "Who is a Jew?" Thus, when I first began to study Wisdom literature from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Israel, I was struck by the largely non-theistic and non-national idiom in which the sages communicated a wisdom ethos. I was also fascinated by the focus in this literature upon the individual, rather than the nation. Moreover, the exchange across national boundaries of wisdom ideas and genres—even literal borrowing in some cases—suggested a cosmopolitan outlook seemingly unconcerned with religious and ethnic boundary marking.

Yet, despite this apparent internationalism, a nagging question persisted. If much of the ANE Wisdom tradition could be characterized as cosmopolitan, what made a certain wisdom work distinctly Egyptian or Israelite? I began to research older Israelite Wisdom texts—such as Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes—for indications that, despite their apparent disinterest in the national traditions of ancient Israel, they nonetheless were products of Israelite sages who attempted to inculcate a specifically Israelite identity. I intended to conclude my study with Sirach, given the author's obvious concern to combine the cosmopolitan wisdom tradition with Israel's national heritage. Thinking that Sirach would be the easiest case of all to examine, I began my research with Ben Sira's book. It soon became apparent that the question of how Ben Sira relates Israel's national heritage to universal wisdom would fill a monograph in and of itself.

Even once I had focused my exploration on the interplay of universalism and particularism in Sirach, the theme of election did not immediately present itself. A central problem in the interpretation of Sirach concerns the relation of Wisdom and Torah. Many scholars have interpreted Ben Sira's juxtaposition of the universal Wisdom tradition with Israel's particular traditions of Torah as "identification." Scholars have understood this identification as either a nationalizing of Wisdom or a universalizing of Torah. Initially, I was inclined to choose between the nationalizing and the universalizing interpretations of Sirach. But as I inquired into the details of Ben Sira's wisdom teaching, both interpretations seemed to tell only half of the story. In particular, it was my discovery of the election motif in Sir 33.7-15 that proved to be the "aha! " moment. For there I found a reading of that poem that not only persuaded me of the incorrectness of the widely held dualistic interpretation of Sirach but also provided an interpretative key, which could make sense of other puzzling features of the book. The purpose of my study, then, became to show that the concept of election enables a profitable discussion of the relation of Wisdom and Torah in the book of Sirach.

I began my study with the observation that Ben Sira's correlation of Wisdom and Torah represents an attempt to relate the universal and the particular. Most scholars suggest that Ben Sira "equates" Wisdom and Torah. If Wisdom and Torah are essentially the same thing, then Ben Sira's correlation of the two amounts to either a universalization of Torah or a nationalization of Wisdom. But as I have shown, Ben Sira's understanding of the relation between Wisdom and Torah is more subtle than the asyndetic juxtaposition of the two terms initially suggests. Ben Sira does not nationalize wisdom, because he believes that all humans partake in a general wisdom that YHWH poured out upon the natural world. Neither does the sage universalize Torah, for Torah represents the special wisdom bequeathed to the elect people of Israel alone. Thus, the relation between Torah and Wisdom, in Ben Sira's mind, is more complex than the notions of "identity" or "equality" allow.

Like his predecessors in the Israelite Wisdom tradition, Ben Sira distinguishes between two classes of human beings. Older wisdom tended to refer to two categories of humans: wise and foolish, or righteous and wicked. Ben Sira also uses these terms. But the nature of the distinction between the two groups in the book of Sirach is not opposition, as many scholars have assumed. Rather, Ben Sira distinguishes his two groups of human beings based on the notion of election. According to the sage, YHWH "set apart" one group of human beings from all the rest, in order to confer on them a special wisdom. The chosen group consists in Israel and the special wisdom amounts to the Torah. Ben Sira derives this anthropological classification of the elect and the non-elect from a cosmological observation about the respective functions of the sun and the moon in marking profane and sacred time. Moreover, he alludes to biblical texts that describe the election of Abram from the nations and the choosing of priests from among the Israelites. This suggests that Ben Sira's understanding of election also represents an appropriation of the doctrine from the biblical tradition.

It is Ben Sira's appropriation of the doctrine of election, I maintain, that makes sense of his relation of the universal and the particular. In his understanding of election, a part is distinguished from the whole. Although the chosen entity is set apart from the whole, it nonetheless maintains a basic connection to the whole. In the same way that sacred days distinguished by the moon share with profane days the light of the one sun, so also the elect Israelites share with the non-elect the fact of their creation from the dust of the earth. Similarly, the Torah as Israel's special wisdom partakes in the general wisdom bestowed upon all human beings. The Torah as Israel's inheritance consists in a subset—a root, if you will—of general wisdom that has been set apart for YHWH's elect.

Ben Sira's notion of election extends beyond the mere idea that YHWH distinguishes a part from the whole. The divine act of distinguishing one particular people and one portion of universal wisdom furthers a purpose. For example, Ben Sira understands the Torah to be Israel's book of sapiential instruction given by the divine sage YHWH. In the same way that the older Wisdom tradition viewed performance of wisdom instruction (torah) as the means to bring one's life into harmony with the cosmic order, so also performance of the ritual and ethical commandments of the Torah brings the Israelite's life into harmony with the covenantal order. Moreover, Ben Sira's association of wisdom with the Jerusalem temple indicates that he views participation in the cult as having the effect of sustaining and renewing the cosmic order upon which the world is founded. In this sense, the "election" of the Torah and the election of Israel as the people obliged to practice a Torah piety serve purposes beyond the confines of the covenantal community. Torah observance benefits all humankind, indeed the entire created world.

Moreover, Israel is not the only people with obligations. In Ben Sira's view, all peoples ought to observe the instruction (torah) of the international wisdom tradition and practice a general piety. This general fear of YHWH involves the expression of awe at his creation and acknowledgment of him as the creator of the world. By virtue of the general wisdom available to them as creatures, all humans are capable of this general piety. Nonetheless, the nations do not always fulfill their duty to fear YHWH in the general sense. If the nations fail to express the proper fear of the creator and oppress his elect people, YHWH rescues Israel and uses the opportunity to demonstrate his "shock and awe" to the nations. Thus, the election of Israel also serves the larger divine purpose of bringing about an eschatological reality in which the nations practice a proper fear of YHWH.

This purposeful election of the part from the whole structures numerous elements in the book of Sirach. YHWH bestows general wisdom upon all humanity, including upon Israel, and he additionally bequeaths a special wisdom to Israel. General wisdom is codified in the instruction (torah) of the sages, which all humans are obligated to follow, including the Jews, while Israel's special wisdom is codified in the Torah, the observance of which is enjoined upon Israel alone. The nations are obligated to practice a general piety of awe, while Israel additionally must practice the particularities of a Jewish piety. In each of these cases, it is impossible to say that wisdom, instruction, and piety are wholly universal or wholly particular. Rather, Ben Sira maintains the universality of the international wisdom tradition while, at the same time, he portrays the distinctive features of Israel's historical traditions as a kind of particular wisdom. Israel's wisdom, instruction, and piety represent particular subsets of the universal wisdom, instruction, and piety accessible to the nations. The notion of election as the purposeful distinction of a part from the whole allows Ben Sira to hold in tension the universal wisdom tradition and the particular national traditions of Israel. Moreover, the notion of election provides a justification for maintaining an interest in the universal and the particular, and a means for relating the two: the particular serves to enhance the universal.

Ben Sira's appropriation of Israel's election represents an astonishing transformation of the Jewish Wisdom tradition. The motif of election is at best nascent in the portrait of Job as a favored patriarch or in proverbial statements that God favors the upright) Older Israelite wisdom literature betrayed little interest in the historical traditions of ancient Israel. As a result, the outlook of books such as Proverbs, Job, and Qohelet tended to be universal. Anyone, regardless of national identity or religious practice, could perform the instruction of the sage and pursue wisdom. As a corollary, the specific Jewish customs of Torah and cult, for example, seemed to matter very little to these authors. Ben Sira alters immeasurably this worldview of traditional wisdom. By incorporating the particular customs of Israel and relating them to the international wisdom tradition through the notion of election, the sage created a new synthesis between universal wisdom and the particular traditions of ancient Israel.

Moreover, the sage's location of his doctrine of Israel's election in his theology of creation represents a remarkable development in the biblical traditions concerning election. In general, the Hebrew Bible portrays YHWH's election of an individual or of Israel as a whole as a historical event. In contrast, Ben Sira suggests that Israel's election results from a primordial divine act. The difference between the two models of election perhaps finds an analogy in the different motivations given to Sabbath observance in the versions of the Decalogue in Deuteronomy and Exodus. Deuteronomy provides a historical motivation for Sabbath observance, citing YHWH's rescue of Israel from Egyptian slavery (Deut 5.15). The Exodus version, in contrast, grounds observance of the Sabbath in a creation myth similar to Gen 1.1-2.4a, in which the deity rested on the seventh day (Exod 20.11). While Ben Sira considers Israel's election to be the result of a primordial decision, he nonetheless sees it as a drama unfolding in history. Thus, in the same way that the biblical tradition preserved both cosmological as well as historical motivations for observing the Sabbath, Ben Sira blends cosmological and historical aspects of Israel's election. The sage develops the biblical tradition by elevating election over the historical to the cosmological realm while at the same time retaining its rootedness in history.

Thus, Ben Sira's understanding of Israel's election influences his view of "history" from beginning to end. In the past, Israel's election originated in a primordial decision. In the present, Israel's separateness influences how they are to behave: they must observe the ritual and ethical requirements of the Torah, as well as the sapiential instruction. In the future, their election plays an important role in his eschatological vision for bringing the nations to a proper fear of YHWH. While Ben Sira's grounding of election in creation represents a significant development from the biblical tradition, such a move is not without parallel in the Second Temple period.

Why did Ben Sira choose the via media? While it is unlikely that the sage's sociohistorical context determined his response to the problem of the universal and the particular, it nonetheless must have an intimate relationship with the Jewish deity through the philosophical quest of seeing God. Nonetheless, because Philo inherited the biblical tradition of Israel's covenant with YHWH, he also retained certain particularistic understandings. One could situate each of these late Second Temple authors on a continuum defined by particularism on one end and universalism on the other. Due to his portrait of Jews as different in kind—and therefore radically separate—from other human beings, I would locate the author of Jubilees near the particularist end of the continuum. Given the universalizing effects of Philo's allegorical approach and his openness to proselytes, I would situate him somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, but more toward the universalist end. Since Ben Sira betrays no interest in having non-Jews convert to Judaism, I would place him somewhere in the middle. Ben Sira's approach represents a via media between the extremes of universalism and particularism, even between the positions occupied by Philo and Jubilees, respectively.

IMPLICATIONS OF THE STUDY

By comparing Ben Sira's view of Israel's election to that of Philo and the author of Jubilees, one can see that other Jewish authors in the late Second Temple period also responded to the problem of universalism and particularism. Moreover, from the range of responses observed, it is clear that in this period, various strategies existed for addressing the problem of the universal and the particular. Jubilees represents one extreme position, that of the particularist. Philo embodies an opposing position, that of the universalist. Ben Sira exemplifies an intermediate position. He recognizes the inherent tension between universalism and particularism, and adapts the ancient Israelite notion of election as a device by which to mediate between the two extremes. He affirms that Israel is a particular people with a special relationship to God but recognizes that Israel's existence and behavior have universal implications.

Like Ben Sira, Philo notes the universal benefits of Israel's election. In some passages, Philo suggests that the Jewish people as a whole function as priests for all humankind. Specifically, the Jews as a priestly people offer prayers and sacrifices for the other nations.' Moreover, Philo suggests that the Jewish high priest prays and offers sacrifices for all humanity as well as for the natural world.' Both Philo and Ben Sira, then, associate the universal benefits of Israel's election with the role of the Israelite high priest.

Like Ben Sira, but unlike the author of Jubilees, then, it seems that Philo wrestled with the tension between the universal and the particular. In general, Philo tended toward a universal view, in played some role in shaping his intermediate approach. Whereas the author of Jubilees may have experienced the turbulence of the Maccabean period and developed his radically particularist understandings of Israel in response to it,' Ben Sira lived before the crisis brought on by Antiochus IV.' Given the cosmopolitan demographic of the city of Jerusalem, resulting in part from successive foreign occupations, Ben Sira's world confronted him with the problem of the universal and the particular. Moreover, the relative benevolence of Seleucid policy toward Jerusalem in the sage's day lent itself to a more charitable attitude toward non-Jews.' Ben Sira's social location also differed from that of Philo. Whereas Philo, as part of "the rich provincial elite of the Greek East," was active in political affairs in a largely non-Jewish city of Alexandria, indeed in the larger Roman empire,' Ben Sira served the Jewish priestly ruling class in a predominantly Jewish Jerusalem. It seems likely that this sociohistorical world in which Ben Sira wrote formed the crucible for his revolutionary synthesis of the universal wisdom tradition and Israel's particular customs.

In this relatively tolerant milieu, Ben Sira did not take the path of the dualist, as so many modern interpreters have suggested. The dualist tends to associate good with "us" and bad with "them." And it is easy to imagine how a synthesis between the older wisdom dichotomy of wise/foolish and righteous/wicked, on the one hand, and the biblical election tradition, on the other, could have led to a strict dualism. But in Ben Sira's case, it did not. While Ben Sira saw the world in terms of Jew and non-Jew, he did not associate wisdom and righteousness entirely with the Jew, and folly and wickedness wholly with the non-Jew. In his work, the sage portrays both Israelites and non-Israelites as good and bad. His view that good and bad reside both within Israel and without contrasts sharply with the acknowledged dualism of other late Second Temple Jewish works, such as 4Qlnstruction. And that he does not turn the good and bad within every human being into a principle of cosmic structure distinguishes his work from a text such as The Treatise of the Two Spirits in the Rule of the Community  The dualist is concerned with the well-being of a particular people alone—everyone else be damned. In contrast to the dualist, Ben Sira is concerned with the well-being of all human beings, especially with their acquisition of wisdom, which aids them in recognizing the creator and living a good life. Consequently, the widely held assumption among scholars regarding Ben Sira's supposed dualism must be abandoned. Ben Sira's notion of election—unlike that of Jubilees, for example—does not collapse into a dualism. Rather, election serves as a means for the sage to meaningfully relate the particularities of Israel's existence to the universal well-being of humankind.

Culture and Explosion by Juri Lotman and Marina Grishakova (Semiotics, Communication and Cognition: Mouton de Gruyter) Culture and Explosion is the English translation of the final book written by legendary semiotician Juri Lotman. The volume demonstrates, with copious examples, how culture influences the way that humans experience "reality". Lotman's renowned erudition is showcased in a host of well-chosen illustrations from history, literature, art and right across the humanities. Now appearing in English for the very first time, the volume is made accessible to students and researchers in semiotics, cultural/literary studies and Russian studies worldwide, as well as anyone with an interest in understanding contemporary intellectual life.

In 1990 Umberto Eco wrote a brilliant introduction to Ann Shukman's remarkable translation of Lotman's book, Universe of the Mind. By focusing on the emergence of the terms semiotics and structuralism in the European academic community and their interrelationship, Eco contextualizes Lotman's work historically and presents a slice of Lotman's contributions that successfully captures the essence of this powerful scholar and thinker. It is difficult to imagine an introductory article that can attain the profundity and scope of Eco's evaluation of Lotman's work, which makes the present task quite daunting. However, the central ideas given in what was to be Lotman's final monograph, Culture and Explosion, which he dedicated to his wife, the notable literary scholar Zara Grigorievna Mints, are sufficiently robust that they have already been the subject matter of a series of analyses attempting to further the study of the semiotics of culture, and it is to these ideas that we turn the readers' attention.

It would be impossible to discuss the ideological fundamentals of Culture and Explosion without evocation of Lotman's concept of the semiosphere, originally introduced in 1984. The semiosphere is the prerequisite space that guarantees the potential for semiosis, which is in essence the generation of meanings. In Lotman's own words, the semiosphere is "the semiotic space necessary for the existence and functioning of languages, not the sum total of different languages; in a sense the semiosphere has a prior existence and is in constant interaction with languages... a generator of information." Semiospheric space is the precursor to and the result of cultural development. Lotman outlines the fundamental organizing principles of the semiosphere in Universe of the Mind as heterogeneity of the space, asymmetry of internal structures, binariness of internal and external spaces, boundaries defined as bilingual filters that allow for the exchange of semiotic processes, and the "development of a metalanguage" as the final act of the system's structural organization. Of these five points, only one is discussed in Culture and Explosion. (In fact, the term semiosphere only appears in Culture and Explosion on two occasions.) Specifically, in the chapter entitled The Logic of Explosion, Lotman focuses on the notion of heterogeneity as a characteristic of not only spatial differentiation, but even different rates of change between and within individual subspaces of the semiosphere:

Semiological space is filled with the freely moving fragments of a variety of structures which, however, store stably within themselves a memory of the whole which, falling into a strange environment, can suddenly and vigorously restore themselves...Completely stable invariant semiotic structures apparently do not exist at all.

Lotman's reiteration of the importance of a complex dynamic within and around the semiosphere speaks to its critical role in capturing the essence of its explanatory power as a modeling system. Peeter Torop, one of the central figures of contemporary Tartu semiotics, explains the multiple perspectives from which the concept of semiosphere is explicated, which include a universal research level, a concept encompassing all facets of cultural semiotics, and as a functional mechanism to understand diachronic and synchronic dynamic processes. Although the term itself is hardly mentioned, it is clear that there is a profound relationship between Lotman's earlier work on the semiosphere and his work in Culture and Explosion. It is precisely this relationship that will be the focus of the following remarks.'

We are constantly reminded of the fundamental tenet of Lotman's approach to semiotics, which is the importance of semiotics as a dynamic process of semiosis, which is a system-level phenomenon engaging multiple sign complexes that are given simultaneously across spatio-temporal boundaries, and not merely the study of individual signs artificially frozen into one slice of the space/time continuum. As Lotman's work is contextualized into the broader fields of structuralist and non-structuralist semiotic paradigms (e.g. comparisons with the works of Saussure, Hjelmslev, Peirce, Jakobson and others) and even the cognitive sciences, it is crucial to understand Lotman's decision to target his theoretical models at the system level, and not at the individual sign level. This fact may explain, for example, why Lotman does not devote more works to explications of sign types using iconicity, indexicality and symbolic distinctions.

Lotman's work has often been read through the prism of other semiotic contributors of the twentieth century, resulting in what often appears to be an attempt to position Lotman as more of a borrower of ideas than an innovator of ideas. While it is certainly true that Lotman was deeply influenced by his own professors and some of the most outstanding intellectuals of his day, Lotman's work is unique in its achievement of a broadly-based metalanguage for the mod elling of cultures, a system of systems. Lotman's formulation and explication of semiospheric space is the single most powerful contributing factor to his success in presenting a usable metalanguage for cultural analysis. Vjacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov, Lotman's colleague and co-founder of the Tartu-Moscow School, is very emphatic in his refocusing of the semiotic agenda to contextualize itself within the defining principles and mechanisms of the semiosphere itself.

The discipline of cultural semiotics as viewed by Lotman has caused a significant shift away from more traditional structuralist models of semiotic space. Specifically, Lotman defines this new discipline as focused on analyzing the interaction and mutual influence of diversely-structured semiotic spaces, the ever-present irregularities and unevenness contained in the structures of semiotic space, and an obligatory shift to cultural and semiotic polyglotism. It is precisely the last point that is featured early on in Culture and Explosion and emerges many times throughout the book. In the opening chapter, Lotman outlines the importance of a minimum of two languages in order for semiotic space to realize its meaning-generation potential, and it is precisely these languages ("a minimum of two, but in all actuality the list is open-ended" that, by definition, mutually require each other in order to provide the inevitability of the other. Furthermore, he notes that those spaces beyond the boundaries of a given semiotic space (which he calls "reality" or the "external world") also can never be captured by a single language; rather, only an aggregate of languages can meet this requirement. The idea of a single, ideal language is, at best an illusion and must be abandoned. Ironically, the desire to achieve a single, universal language is one of the trends that helps create cultural space.

Lotman's requirement of multiple languages as "the minimal meaning-generating unit" may be interpreted in a variety of ways and on a variety of levels. For instance, these different languages could be the languages of the internal spaces of the semiosphere and the surrounding spaces in which the semiosphere is situated or could include Lotman's fundamental distinction between I—I (also called autocommunication) and I-s/he models of communication as presented in Universe of the Mind. Although not mentioned in Culture and Explosion, the concept of autocommunication is one of the most powerful concepts given by Lotman for defining mechanisms for the generation of meaning within the semiosphere. The primary function of autocommunication is to create new information at both the cultural and individual levels. This new information displays an important series of characteristics, including (1) its qualitative reconstruction, (2) not being self-contained or redundant, and (3) the doubling and redefinition of both the message and the code.

This is an appropriate point to mention Lotman's baseline requirement, which is actually a corollary of the requirement of a minimum of two languages: all phenomena must be translated in order to be perceived in semiospheric space. Such a formulation brings Lotman close to the non-structuralist semiotic theory of C. S. Peirce. Furthermore, all translations necessarily change meaning, and the act of non-comprehension is as salient as the act of comprehension. The importance of non-comprehension deserves further explication.

The relationship between translatability and nontranslatability in Lotmanian theory is an important source of tension, which is a basic structural principle of all semiotic space that plays an integral part in the realization of discontinuities in the dynamic form of explosions. In the introductory chapter of Culture and Explosion, Lotman describes the interrelationship of the multiple languages that lie at the heart of semiotic space and their mutual untranslatability (or limited translatability) as the "source of adjustment of the extra-lingual object to its reflection in the world of languages." Lotman expands this description in his definition of semiotic space:

Semiotic space appears before us as the multi-layered intersection of various texts, which are woven together in a specific layer characterized by complex internal relationships and variable degrees of translatability and spaces of untranslatability.

While it is generally true that the internally distinct and bilingual filter-like boundaries within semiotic space provide a baseline for potential translatability, it is also the case that cultural spaces and texts in a diachronic perspective may contain pockets of information that are not accessible to particular synchronic spaces because of the different languages and codes used, or even due to a breakdown in the cultural knowledge of the codes defining the internal spaces. In each of these cases, the heterogeneous structure of semiotic space gives rise to different types of tension, including the tension that gives value to the "translation of the untranslatable." In short, there are two types of contradictory tension that are at work simultaneously in all communication acts: (1) the attempt to make comprehension easier by expanding the intersecting spaces of the addresser and addressee, accompanied by (2) an attempt to increase the value of the communication by maximizing the non-intersecting spaces of the addresser and addressee. Extracting knowledge and new meanings from these less accessible textual spaces increases the value of the content of the utterance.

One of the most significant outcomes of the interplay of tension in the semiotic act is reiteration of the fact that the semiotic process does not guarantee a veridical outcome. It is on this point that Lotman and Peirce are in profound agreement. Lotman notes that misunderstanding and breakdown in communication are as significant as successful transmissions, while Peirce talks about the role of false signs and underdeveloped signs. And thus, "misunderstanding (conversation in non-identical languages) is as valuable a meaning-generating mechanism as understanding."

Lotman's definition of tension and explosion are at the heart of his final monograph. Tension, as we have shown above, is manifested in a variety of guises, some of which are contradictory in nature. It serves as a structural principle for endless dynamic change in semiotic space that leads to different levels of information growth. Tension is at the basis of the primary mechanisms of gradual and explosive cultural change. These two mechanisms are inextricably linked, both coexisting and alternating in space-time, and illustrate and explain cultural evolution. One of the ways to contextualize the importance of these two types of mechanisms is to look more closely at the connection between discontinuity and explosion conceptually. As we noted earlier, the notion of boundedness is one of the central defining characteristics of the semiosphere. With boundedness comes the implication of discontinuity and discreteness of structures. In any given cut of semiospheric space, Lotman guarantees that both continuous and discrete (explosive) processes occur in an feedback configuration, such that continuity guarantees discontinuity, and discontinuity guarantees future continuity. I have argued elsewhere that the "moment of explosion" clarifies Lotman's understanding of gradual and explosive processes. Specifically, the inception of the explosion (discontinuity) is the beginning of a new stage of development for the semiotic system that is a focal point for extraordinary expansion of information on the one hand, and a signal of the beginning of a new era on the other; however, this new stage is of a cyclic, not linear, nature, and the force of change in one area evokes an equally powerful change in the other. Furthermore, Lotman is careful to distinguish between actual discontinuity and the perception of discontinuity. Periods of cultural self-awareness are "usually recorded as intermissions," resulting in an asymmetrically-defined culture text. This asymmetry is clearly seen in the relationship constructed between the past and the future:

The spectator, having mentally placed himself in that "present moment" in which the text was realised ... , seems then to turn his attention to the past which converges in a cone, whose apex touches the present moment. Facing the future, the audience is immersed in an array of possibilities which have not yet met with potential selection. The uncertainty of the future allows significance to be assigned to everything.

Lotman's definition of explosion is differentiated into distinct segments and incorporates the viewer/participant's perspective by establishing specific relationships of present to future or present to past. In the first case (present to future), one has "a flash of a space of meaning not yet unfolded," where potentially everything is meaningful, whereas in the second case (present to past), the situation becomes regularized, law-based, the result being interpreted as inevitable and other possibilities becoming unthinkable.

One of the distinct segments of the moment of explosion identified by Lotman is the moment of exhaustion of the explosion, a turning point in the process that is realized as both the "moment of future development" and the "place of self-realization" (see below and 1992a: 30). Self-realization leads to a qualitative re-evaluation of the process that has just occurred, and facilitates the interpretation of what was, in fact, a purely random event as the only possible outcome.

I have often been struck by an important philosophical overlap between Lot-man's characterizations of tension and explosion and manifestations of these notions in the fiction and philosophical writings of E. I. Zamiatin and have found that many of Lotman's central theoretical principles seem to speak directly to Zamiatin's work. I have imagined what insightful analyses Lotman could have provided on Zamiatin, especially given Lotman's rich body of literary, historical and semiotic analyses of Russian texts and Russian culture. However, Zamiatin's works were forbidden and removed from the Russian canon in the early 1920s and his works only reappeared in print in the Soviet Union in 1988. Zamiatin's works provide a wonderful set of case studies that reinforce Lotmanian principles on the creation of culture texts and characterizations of cultural space. I would like to mention here that there are two passages in Culture and Explosion that could be substituted into the narrative of Zamiatin's novel We, and no one would notice them as "foreign" texts; namely Lotman's discussion of individual and collective behavior in chapter one, and his statements on removing ambiguity and "straightening all contradictions" in chapter 16.

While much of Culture and Explosion remains unexplored in this essay, I would like to make one more observation that speaks to the richness of the analyses presented in Lotman's last work — his contributions to the study of Russian culture and Russian culture texts. Lotman himself serves as a profound model of his conceptualizations of semiospheric principles as universal mechanisms of cultural spaces and individualized strategies for understanding culture texts. Lotman gently inundates his entire work with wonderful examples and studies taken from Russian cultural space. His references to masterpieces of Russian literature and important critical contributions to the study of Russian literature, history and culture are vibrant examples of the unprecedented depth and breadth of his knowledge and profound critical understanding of Russian culture texts. Ivanov notes that Lotman had no equals in his knowledge of Russian culture in general, and specific subcultural phenomena. Ivanov mentions Lotman's knowledge of the specific rules of Russian duels and the special features of Russian dueling weapons as one example of his "bottomless" knowledge (1998: 705). Culture and Explosion is an invaluable source of information about Russian culture and is an important link that synthesizes a large cross-section of Lot-man's contribution to a theory of semiotics with individual representations of cultural meanings. This synthesis includes important moments of intersection with Lotman's unforgettable series of lectures entitled "Dialogues on Russian Culture," which were first televised in 1986.

Culture and Explosion is a remarkable contribution to the study of cultures and cultural spaces, semiospheres and the mechanisms of meaning-generation that define these spaces. It is a brilliant conclusion to the body of invaluable contributions made by Juri Mikhailovich Lotman, a scholar whose lifetime of work is characterized not only by extraordinary and original research, but also by unlimited generosity to his students and colleagues.

Culture and Explosion opens with the paradoxical question of how a system (here, the system of culture) can develop and, at the same time, remain true to itself.

In 'Statement of the problem', Lotman draws attention to the relational aspects of his semiotic theory of culture and the notion that culture is not a 'closed' system but, rather, proceeds to a process of self-description only in terms of its relation to the extra-system, which he describes, here, as 'the world beyond the borders of language'. This positioning of culture as but one element within a polylingual semiotic reality is used to introduce the notion of dependency and reciprocity between co-existent systems, neither of which — alone — can wholly reflect the 'space of reality'. This inadequacy points to the 'necessity of the other (another person, another language, another culture) and thus produces the need for a form of translation to be effected between systems and at the same time reflects the multilayered complexity of semiotic space and the tensions and boundaries that are generated between the disparate systems that occupy it.

Lotman continues this theme in Chapter 2 where he uses Jakobson's communication model to elaborate on these notions of tension and translatability in the lingual spaces of communication. Differentiating between 'code' and 'language', he suggests that the former is an artificially created structure that implies no history, whereas the latter 'is a code plus its history'. He distinguishes between the linguistic and the lingual, suggesting that 'lingual communication reveals itself to us as the tense intersection between adequate and inadequate lingual acts' and uses the example of an exchange of codes, e.g. 'cat' and 'gato' as a relatively easy translation between two closely related languages, whereas a translation from poetic language to that of music is presented as much more problematic, if not impossible. In these notions of adequacy and inadequacy of the translation act, and the concomitant increase in informativity in the system generated by ambiguity and the apparent impossibility of translation Lotman, here introducing the notion of extra-lingual reality, not only distances himself from common perceptions of the relationships between language and culture, but also begins to sow the seeds of the concept of 'explosion'.

In 'Gradual progress', Lotman returns to the concept of cultural development, exploring this in terms of predictability and unpredictability, continuity and discontinuity and the stability and instability of the system and how these dynamic processes contribute to the gradual or radical development of culture. To gradual processes, he assigns the metaphor of a fast flowing river in spring; to radical ones, he assigns the metaphor of 'a minefield with unexpected explosive points'. That these two are mutually co-dependent, complex and antithetical is demonstrated in the examples Lotman gives of the relationships between the dandy, his artifice and his audience. In this chapter, Lotman also elaborates his view of the positive qualities of 'explosion' as a creative phenomenon reflected in the epoch of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment in contrast to the common perception of 'explosion' as a destructive tendency linked to gunpowder and nuclear fission.

The theme of 'continuity and discontinuity' is elaborated in more detail in chapter 4. Building on the notion of gradual and radical development introduced in the previous chapter, Lotman constructs a complex picture of the unfolding of cultural development in a multilayered synchronic space. Where gradual processes ensure succession, explosive ones ensure innovation. However, the multi-discursive nature of culture ensures that its component parts develop at different rates and, in this sense explosive moments in some layers may be matched by gradual ones in others. In this way, Lotman describes culture as being immersed in a semiotic space that is greater than the sum of its parts and which forms a unified, integrated semiosic mechanism.

In chapter 5, Lotman draws an interesting limitation in relation to the use of metaphor and mathematical models to represent the intersection of semantic spaces and the explosive tension this creates. He suggests, instead, that we have in a mind a mental model which comprises a 'specific semiotic mass whose boundaries are framed by a multiplicity of individual uses'. This notion of the indeterminate structure of the semiosphere and its boundary spaces echoes Lot-man's earlier work in Universe of the Mind where the boundaries are described as permeable, filtering mechanisms, which intersect with the 'other' at multiple points and levels rather than boundaries in the sense of a solid line 'drawn in the sand'.

Lotman draws on the writings of Pushkin and the idea of 'inspiration' as a form of creative tension to illustrate the dynamic processes at work in the interactions of the individual in relation to the semiotic mass (that is the semiosphere). He frames 'inspiration' as the product of ambiguous tension in semiosic processes in which understanding is achieved and framed retrospectively as an element of 'discovery' that is simultaneously creative and logical. In a sense, Lotman, here, presents the notion of 'inspiration' as the 'moment of explosion' as an element which, as stated earlier, is 'out of time' and recognizable only in retrospect, at which stage it is no longer viewed as explosive but is framed by its participation in the gradual development of culture.

In 'Thinking reed', Lotman develops his notion of culture's opposition to non-culture which he relates to 'nature'. Lotman uses notions of harmony and disharmony in nature to frame man's disruptive presence. Whilst he acknowledges the signifying acts of animals, Lotman draws on the work of Tyutchev to distinguish these ritualized processes from those of man: 'as a "thinking reed" —he constantly finds himself at odds with the basic laws of his surroundings' whose behavior 'gravitates towards the invention of something new and unpredicted'. Thus, we see in man's capacity to generate a mental model of reality, a unique form of semiosis linked to culture, memory and representation.

In chapter 7, Lotman takes up this notion of representation, focusing on man's use of language and the use of proper names to categories and classify cultural artifacts. He uses this to highlight the concepts of choice, selection and the mental positioning of the individual within the dual framework of 'I' and `Other'. Once again, the distinction between 'one's own' and the 'other' or alien is made, generating a sense of boundary in the individual's social and cultural construction of the world. At the same time, he makes much of the ludic qualities made available to humans in their use of language in the interplay between the general and the specific, the individual and the collective. In 'The fool and the madman', Lotman considers the positioning of semiotic value in terms of 'the norm', however, he introduces the notion of a ternary structure where the more traditional structure of the binary opposition is refrained as a semiotic continuum marked by the extremes of 'the fool' on the one hand and the 'madman' on the other, each of which is balanced or 'measured' against the notion of 'the wiseman' which is the norm. Focusing on the 'madman' as an unpredictable entity Lotman suggests that there are, nevertheless, moments (of explosion) in which the madman is able to present his 'madness' as a moment of genius or effective exploit, e.g. in extreme circumstances, such as war, where the unpredictable behavior of the madman works to his advantage. He draws on examples from folklore, myth, war, chivalric literature and the theatre to demonstrate the use of 'folly' as permissible behavior with alternating semiotic values and as a harbinger of explosive potential.

Whereas in the previous chapter, Lotman focuses on the unpredictability of the text (in the sense of a singular scenario), in chapter 9, 'The text within the text', he turns his attention to the unpredictability of the system as a whole. He argues that semiotic space is populated by multiple systems that are in constant and dynamic interaction not only with each other but also with fragments of those systems which have been 'destroyed' as a result of which these systems are in dialogue not only with themselves but with others with which they frequently collide, occasionally producing a third, new and unpredictable phenomenon. As an interesting example, he refers to the `Frenchification' of the culture of the Russian nobility at the turn of the 18th century and the use of French language by Pushkin and Tolstoy as a reflection of everyday reality of the period, alongside Griboyedov's critique of the practice. In chapter 10, Lotman uses the example of the trope as a destruction or disruption of the norm to further elaborate the

value of the unpredictable as a measurement of cultural development, describing it as a 'complex dynamic reservoir' which constantly pushes 'the boundaries of the permissible'. He presents an interesting range of examples around fashion, cultural values and the 'signifying function of clothing' to demonstrate the relationship between ritualistic behavior on the one hand and eccentricity on the other. Describing this inverted world as 'the dynamics of the non-dynamic' he makes the point that explosive moments may also arise out of unexpected shifts in fashion, ritual, and other forms of behavior which pass beyond the bounds of the norm (e.g. tyranny, role-swapping — whether by gender, status or intellect, and homosexuality) which are subsequently 'normalized' as forms of social ritual.

In 'The logic of explosion', we are returned to the paradox of language and culture and the struggle to free ourselves from its limits. Lotman writes:

We are immersed in the space of language. Even in the most basic abstract conditions, we cannot free ourselves from this space, which simply envelops us, and yet it is a space of which we are also a part and which, simultaneously, is part of us.

Here, again, Lotman draws a contrast between the seemingly stable, isolated texts of formalism and early structural studies and the heterogeneous, dynamic and (at least partially) chaotic nature of the semiosphere. Lotman presents the work of Charlie Chaplin as an example of 'a chain of sequential explosions, each of which changes the other, creating a dynamic multi-levelled unpredictability'. He points to the transfer of circus language (pantomime and gesture) to the film screen, which then developed into a completely different genre characterized by the sharp contrast between gesture and theme, e.g. the comic origins of pantomime and the depiction of life in the trenches during the First World War. The latter, in turn, paves the way for Chaplin to develop further semiotic distance between his initial forays into film and the complex mélange of language and topic theme apparent in his later movies such as 'The Great Dictator'. Thus, in this final satirical frame, we find traces of the previous semiotic systems framed by circus language and early cinematic slapstick comedy.

In 'The moment of unpredictability' Lotman reiterates the view that the `moment of explosion' is unpredictable not in the sense of randomness but in terms of 'its own collection of equally probable possibilities... from which only one may be realized'. At the point in which the explosive moment is realized, the 'others' are dispersed into semantic space, whereupon they become carriers of semantic difference. In chapter 13, Lotman explores culture from the point of view of its internal structures and external influences. He argues that culture is traditionally viewed as a bounded space and suggests that it is wrong to view culture this way. He posits culture as a dynamic entity which is in constant collision with the extra-cultural sphere within which it is immersed, whose development is the result of a 'constant transposition of internal and external processes'. In this sense, culture is seen to be in constant dialogue not only with itself but also with the greater semiosphere. What is internal is regarded as orderly, one's own, whereas what is outside is regarded as chaotic or alien. The perception of chaos is relative to culture itself and, Lotman suggests, the chaotic space is nevertheless organized in its own terms, albeit in a language unknown to the culture of origin. When the spaces of culture and extra-culture collide in this way, new texts are drawn into the cultural space, generating an act (or multiple acts) of explosion. In the avalanche of possibilities this presents, some elements are assimilated, whilst others are rejected and expelled. Those that are assimilated by the culture contribute, in turn, to the gradual or radical development of the cultural space.

In 'Two forms of dynamic' Lotman returns to the distinction between explosive and gradual processes. He is particularly at pains to emphasize that neither concept should be taken literally. In chapter 15, Lotman returns to the unique human trait of consciousness, contrasting this to the natural impulse of stimulus-response, which he links to the notion of memory and the development of the activity of mental representation and the translation of activity into a sign. The important element here is the notion of abstraction, the unique ability of man to generate meaning independently of the immediacy of the stimulus-response action. However, in this chapter, Lotman does not journey from symptom to language but rather, points to the threshold of meaning previously suggested in the chapter on 'inspiration' which is, here, evidenced as the dream. Interestingly, and almost in analogy to the phrase 'semiotic mass' used in chapter 5, Lotman uses the Russian word klubok (literally 'woollen ball') to describe the tangled web of meaning potentials and the polylingual nature of the dream space. In a beautifully expressed metaphor, he suggests that the space of the dream 'does not immerse us in visual, verbal, musical and other spaces' rather, it immerses us in their 'coalescence'. The 'coalescent' space is unpredictable, uncertain and indeterminate and, in Lotman's word equates to 'zero space' or a space absent of meaning, except in its correlation to the 'carriers of communication' which occupy it and which, in turn, are dependent on the 'interpreting culture' which generates them. To this 'zero space' Lotman assigns the value of an essential function in the development of culture, the provision of a 'reserve of semiotic uncertainty' which may act as a stimulus for creative (explosive) activity.

Following on from this Lotman, focusing on the artistic text, looks again at culture from the point of view of the move from the individual (unique) to the universal (general) and suggests that the structure "I" is one of the basic indices of culture. He points to the rationalist tendency to 'streamline contradictions' and to 'reduce diversity to singularity' but suggests that more needs to be understood about the contradictory nature of the artistic text.

In 'The phenomenon of art' Lotman outlines the transformative interaction between the 'moment of explosion', the modelling of consciousness and the act of memory, which he describes as the 'three layers of consciousness'. Turning from the realm of the dream, he focuses on the nature of art, its relation to freedom of action and, through this its ability to transform the real to the unreal, the illegitimate to the legitimate and the forbidden to the permissible. Art is construed as an experimental domain which creates its own world. As such, and like the inverted world of the trope discussed above, it generates a reservoir of dynamic processes which contribute to the explosive potential of the semiotic space of art. Here, too, Lotman provides with a much greater degree of clarity his understanding of the dynamic processes of the semiotic world.

... the dynamic processes of culture are constructed as a unique pendulum swing between a state of explosion and a state of organization which is realized in gradual processes. The state of explosion is characterized by the moment of equalization of all oppositions. That which is different appears to be the same. This renders possible unexpected leaps into completely different, unpredictable organizational structures. The impossible becomes possible. This moment is experienced out of time, even if, in reality, it stretches across a very wide temporal space. [... This moment concludes by passing into a state of gradual movement. What was united in one integrated whole is scattered into different (opposing) elements. Although, in fact, there was no selection whatsoever (any substitution was made by chance) the past is retrospectively experienced as a choice and as a goal-oriented action. Here, the laws of the gradual processes of development enter into the fray. They aggressively seize the consciousness of culture and strive to embed the transformed picture into memory. Accordingly, the explosion loses its unpredictability and presents itself as the rapid, energetic or even catastrophic development of all the same predictable processes.

In chapter 18, the notion of the 'end' and the principles of continuity and discontinuity are reflected in the stark boundary between life and death. Death is marked out as both the beginning and the end. Lotman speaks of the 'special semantic role of death in the life of man'. It is the boundary which frames all meaningful activity and which, simultaneously, marks the contradiction between life in the general sense and the 'finite life of human existence'. And yet, what is finite, is continued in the memory of the 'son' so that even the boundary of ' death', as it were, is permeable and filtered.

In 'Perspectives', Lotman reiterates the view that explosion is part and parcel of linear dynamic processes. He distinguishes between binary and ternary structures, emphasizing that explosion in the latter takes the form of a specific form of dynamic, whereas in the latter it permeates the multiple layers of semiotic space at different speeds and different intervals, such that whilst its effects are felt throughout all the layers of culture, traces of the old remain to which the ternary system strives to adapt itself, transporting them from periphery to centre. In binary structures, by contrast, the explosion penetrates life in its entirety, replacing all that previously existed in an apocalyptic manner. In these concluding remarks, Lotman expresses the hope that the events of the early 1990s in Russia reflect a shift in Russian culture from a binary structure towards a more accommodating ternary system, capable of generating renewal and innovation.

In the final chapter, Lotman offers his concluding remarks on the paradox of cultural development, returning to his initial question as to how a system (culture) can develop and at the same time, remain true to itself. He argues that the starting point of any semiotic system is not the isolated sign or model but, rather, semiotic space which itself is characterized as a 'conglomeration of elements whose relations with each other may be encountered in a variety of ways'. This interconnectivity of the system and the polylingual elements which populate it can, he argues, only be understood 'in terms of the ratio of each element to the other and all elements to the whole'. The foregrounding of the relational and interactional elements of culture in its immersion in semiotic space, and the sense that in these terms, culture is viewed as embedded in a semiotic network far greater and more inherently dynamic than itself, coupled with the heterogeneity and explosive potential of that structure, has important implications for the future study not only of culture, communication, and new trends in technology but also for the generation of new strands of interdisciplinary research into the ever expanding world of semiosis. In particular, this dynamic systemic approach to cultural analysis and semiosis offers interesting potential in the realm of new media technologies, cultural studies, and recent streams of semiotic study such as multimodality, nexus analysis, semiotic remediation, and, of course modeling systems theory itself.

In the closing chapters of the book, Lotman reflects on endings and new beginnings. It is particularly poignant in the titling of chapter 18 — 'The end! How sonorous is this word' if we consider that at the time the book was produced, Lotman himself was sufficiently ill that this book was dictated rather than written by him and, indeed, he died less than a year after the book was published. In addition, his wife of many years had died shortly before the book was produced.

And, last but certainly not least, the former Soviet bloc was undergoing a period of immense change. The final chapter, 'In place of conclusions' is particularly interesting as Lotman, rather than drawing conclusions, invites us, instead, to look forward ... with an eye to the past, and our feet firmly in the present.

And to finish, a parting remark made by Professor Mikhail Lotman in the closing discussions of the 1st International Conference on Semiosphere, which may serve to illustrate Lotman's contribution to our ongoing researches:

"For my father there were two types of scholar - the one who has the questions and the one who has the answers. He belonged to the first."

Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology (2-Volume Set) by David Kelsey (Westminster John Knox Press) What does it mean to be a human being? Kelsey expertly probes this complicated issue in his exhaustive and ambitious examination of theological anthropology. Divided into three parts, Kelsey’s work posits that humanity’s relationship to God is a basic claim of Christianity and that God actively relates to human beings in three major ways: God creates them; God is there at the end of all things eschatological; and God reconciles humans when they are alienated from Him. The result of this seminal theological work is a textured affirmation of humanity’s relationship with God and with each other. It represents the culmination of decades of theological thought and is certain to be recognized as a major achievement.

The title offers a hint of how Kelsey attempts to reconcile his theological anthropology with the tradition out of which it stems: Kelsey accepts modernists definitions and scientific orientation to ground human becoming in partiality. Hence the eccentricity. He then asks big questions to emphasize how our human being is inadequate to hold the full image of God without serious distortion, despite the mystery of Christ; and then, he grounds the triune God in privileging the narratives of the Synoptics as  a trivocal humanism. This work will appeal to modernist apologetic theologians and educated Christians who are more scientific than religiously oriented. It is  more rational and stroty-formed than is it liturgical and sacramental.

Excerpt: I suggest that the claims about human beings that are nonnegotiable for Christian faith are claims about how God relates to human beings. These claims are as follows: (a) God actively relates to human beings to create them, (b) to draw them to eschatological consummation, and (c) to reconcile them when they are alienated from God.

These claims describe human beings' ultimate context, and they deeply shape descriptions of human beings' proximate contexts. Christian anthropology's remarks about human beings take them in their ultimate and proximate contexts. Hence such anthropological remarks are nonnegotiable to the extent that they are implied by Christian beliefs about our ultimate and proximate backgrounds.

Theological anthropology's background beliefs about our ultimate and proximate contexts do not generate all of the content of a theological anthropology. However, they do provide the criteria of selection regulating what anthropological wisdom is borrowed from Christian communities' current host cultures. They also generate the conceptual pressures under which that borrowed wisdom is conceptually bent as it is used in Christian theological anthropology.

In the famous opening to Institutes of the Christian Religion, quoted as the epigraph to this chapter, John Calvin points out: "Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But, while joined by many bonds, which one precedes and which brings forth the other is not easy to discern?' Calvin subsequently elected to begin with questions about knowledge of God. Although I do not follow Calvin by focusing first on questions about knowledge of God, I do propose to follow Calvin's example by subordinating claims about humankind to claims about God. Although our questions are anthropological, we should frame the questions and the proposed answers in terms governed by a doctrine of God.

Accordingly, the root question to which this Christian theological anthropology proposes answers is this: What is implied about human being by the claim that God actively relates to us to create us, to draw us to eschatologiocal consummation, and to reconcile us when we have become estranged from God? Correlatively, the three perennial anthropological questions, "What are we?" "Who are we?" and "How ought we to be?" should be refrained in ways shaped by Christian background beliefs about our ultimate and proximate contexts.

These background beliefs that help frame the questions asked, as well as the answers proposed, by Christian theological anthropology are rooted in the common life of Christian communities whose traditions are conflictual. For Christians the ultimate context of life is God and God's ways of relating to us, as Christians understand these matters. And the way Christians understand these matters is shaped in some way by their beliefs about Jesus Christ and God's relation to him. That is ultimately what qualifies theological answers proposed to anthropological questions as authentically Christian theological anthropology. At the same time, the phrases "as Christians understand these matters" and "in some way" are place-holders for seams and stark breaks within and between Christian communities generated by ongoing arguments and conflicts through which Christians negotiate their individual and communal identities. They disagree precisely on how to understand God's ways of relating to us, how to understand God's relation to Jesus, and in what ways the latter should shape the former. To insist on framing anthropological questions and proposals theocentrically is not a move that makes theological anthropology easy by giving it a pre-formed "basis" and a consensus conceptual scheme. Quite to the contrary, theological anthropology merely identifies a set of continuing arguments that it must engage.

The Tone of Voice and Structure of the Project

I consider this entire project in theological anthropology to be in the mode of making theological proposals so that it repeatedly has the form: Here is an important theological question; try looking at it this way. In that fashion, this project seeks to promote and provoke further exploration of the issues and further discussion, rather than assert conversation-stopper pronouncements of what Christians must say on a given topic.

I also consider the project to be in the hypothetical mode, in this fashion:

1. Assume with me that there are communities that describe themselves in self-involving ways as communities whose common life and whose members' individual lives seek to be formed as appropriate responses to the ways God relates to all else. I propose that we characterize the communities' common life as consisting of sets of social practices whose enactments express appropriate responses to God's ways of relating to all else, that enactments of those practices constitute some of the members' "existential hows," and that the practices themselves shape the communities' identity and the members' individual identities.

2. Assume with me further that some such communities include in their self-involving self-descriptions that the ways in which God relates to all else are mediated to them in part through the ways in which they live with the writings of canonical Christian Holy Scripture in the practices that constitute their common life of response to God and that shape their collective and individual identities.

3. Assume with me that some such communities also include in their self-involving self-descriptions that they hold themselves accountable to be self-critical about whether they are indeed responding appropriately in their current contexts to the ways in which God relates to them (judgment begins at home), that self-critique is a rational endeavor, and that it is responsible in particular to the accounts given in canonical Christian Holy Scripture of the ways in which God relates to all else, as norms of what count as "appropriate" responses.

Note that the practice of self-critical examination of the appropriateness of the communities' other practices as "appropriate" responses to the ways God relates to all else itself has two levels. The practice of primary theology is usually ad hoc critique of current concrete enactments of communal practices that employs received conceptualizations and formulations (creeds, confessions, and traditional locutions) as criteria. The practice of secondary theology (the second level of the practice of theology) is enacted when the adequacy or appropriateness of the received conceptualizations and formulations themselves come into question. I think of Eccentric Existence as a set of remarks regarding three types of anthropological questions (the "what?" "who?" and "how to be oriented to proximate contexts?" questions) that are made as enactments of the communal practice of secondary theology. A major hypothesis is that there are now a lot of reasons to reexamine the adequacy of received theological anthropological formulations used in current primary theology.

The intersection of the rationally self-critical character of secondary theology, the three ways in which God relates to all else as narrated in canonical Christian Holy Scripture, and the three types of perennial anthropological questions generate a structure for Eccentric Existence that has four sections:

Introductions (chaps. 1A and B, 2A and B, 3A and B). These address questions about the nature of this kind of theological project, questions about how the Bible is read and used in this project, and questions about how the God who relates to humankind is to be understood (answer: in a Trinitarian way).

Part 1. Living on Borrowed Breath (chaps. 4A and B, 5A and B, 6-8, 9A and B, 10, 11). These explore the anthropological implications of the theological claim that God relates to all else creatively.

Part 2. Living on Borrowed Time (chaps. 12A and B, 13, 14, 15A and B, 16, 17). These explore the anthropological implications of the theological claim that God relates to all else to draw it to eschatological consummation.

Part 3. Living by Another's Death (chaps. 18, 19A and B, 20A and B, 21A and B, 22-25). These explore the anthropological implications of the theological claim that God relates to all else when it is estranged to reconcile it to God.

Each of these three parts has the same structure:

— An account of human beings' ultimate context entailed by the way in which God relates that is under consideration.

— An account of human beings' proximate contexts (i.e., lived worlds) entailed by the way in which God relates that is under consideration.

— An address to the anthropological "What?" question.

— An address to the anthropological "How?" question.

— An address to the anthropological "Who?" question.

— Exploration of ways in which human "existential hows" may be distorted and human flourishing compromised (i.e., "sins in the plural") and how such distortion is possible.

— Exploration of ways in which human personal identities (who they are) may be in bondage to living deaths and their flourishing obscured (i.e., "sin in the singular").

Codas (Coda: Introductions A & B; Coda). These exhibit how the three parts hold together as a systematically unsystematic whole in which they are related to one another in a triple helix as facets of the way in which human beings are imagers of the image of God, Jesus Christ.