Holy Week & the Beauty of the Western Canon

Notre Dame

By Olivia Pierson

The overlap of the Jewish Passover with our Christian Easter, still widely celebrated thousands of years after their respective advents, proclaims our combined Judaeo-Christian heritage like nothing else can. 

In a time of marked schisms, and stoked divisions by some very potent sources, I’m damned if I won’t speak to the 2000-year crossover between these two great Abrahamic faiths. Yes, I know there’s actually a third, but the last iteration during the seventh century is akin to being the motherlode of religious “fake news.”

Good people exist individually everywhere, in every sphere of faith and outside of them all, so do bad, but my heart sings to all of God’s creatures wherever there be a sincere striving towards “the good.”

Until Islam redeems itself for worthiness as a system of thought for the civilised world, I’m ignoring its big peaceful claims about itself when we can see clearly that they're not true.
 
The West’s 18th-century Enlightenment set in stone the idea of liberty of conscience with an eventual  separation of church and state. When the Islamic world has their own enlightenment to deliver that civilising concept to its own adherents without persecuting them, or stoning them or chopping off a body part, I’ll take it seriously. But that will require nothing less than the political separation of mosque and state, and I’m not holding my breath. 

Even when I spent 25 years as a bloody-minded atheist, I still felt a deep obligation to defend our heritage, since it had delivered us nations within a wider civilisation where I was free to not believe in anything at all, without any fear of physical persecution. That’s what liberty of conscience means. I judge it to be profoundly wrong to force the mind of any person to accept a creed that, for many various reasons, it personally rejects. Free will and free thought reside within sacred terrain.

The ancient Jewish Passover commemorates deliverance from bondage in Egypt, specifically the Exodus where Moses, 1200 years ago, instructed the children of Israel to sprinkle a lamb’s blood on the lintels of their doorposts so that the Angel of Death would passover their households. The blood of the lamb saved all Hebrew firstborns from meeting the same fate as the firstborns of Egyptians; death. To Pharaoh, Moses posits one tenacious demand: “Let my people go.”

As the blood of the lamb served as a sign of the covenant between God and the children of Israel, the Christian Easter, remembers Jesus crucified during the festival of Passover in Jerusalem (30-33 AD), signifying the beginning of a new covenant; his voluntary sacrifice transforming him into the “lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world.” The last supper Jesus ate with his Jewish disciples designated the unleavened bread and wine, symbolically his body and blood, into the ritual of the new covenant: the Eucharist.

In the New Testament, 1 Corinthians 5: 7-8, the apostle Paul wrote: “For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.” Here, Paul explicitly links Jesus’ sacrifice to the Passover, urging Christians to live in the light of this new covenant, “with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” Temporary sacrifices from the Mosaic Law were renewed into permanent deliverance and eternal redemption. One sacrifice for all time; a perfect sacrifice - perhaps more perfect because it was voluntary on the part of Jesus. 

The message of Christianity holds at its core that Jesus conquered death through his resurrection on Easter Sunday. Without getting into theological arguments between the old covenant and the new - we know that Judaism does not accept the Christian message of Christ being the Son of God or the Messiah. But the faiths are so intertwined that all diligent Christians study the Old Testament as well as the New.  

The themes, however, are universal: that of deliverance and redemption. Those themes over the last 2000 years became a zeitgeist (time-ghost) for thought, literature, art, music and eventually, films. During the 13th century the theologian Thomas Aquinas, in his great wisdom, sought to reconcile the rational insights of classical Greek philosophy with the revelatory teachings of Christian theology, a synthesis between religious philosophy merging with pagan, but only according to the light of reason. The Christianity we have today thoroughly absorbed classical philosophy, especially that of Aristotle, since he formulated systematic logic (the Organon) and had a passion for human morality (Nicomachean Ethics). Little wonder that his tutelage begot an Alexander the Great. 

The great achievement of Aquinas was Scholasticism, which went on to form the whole spine of European education right up to the 18th-century Enlightenment. Scholastic disputations were a formal method of learning: a question, followed by objections through argument against the idea contained in the question, then counter-arguments quoting various authorities (say the Vulgate or Aristotle), followed by responses from the disputant (the master who facilitates the debate) responding to each objection to clarify the ideas and resolve contradictions and doubts. This medieval form of logical, dialectic reasoning held sway in the West until it was gradually replaced by scientific rationalism and humanism - with their emphasis on literary analysis. 

The heritage of Judaeo-Christianity placed an absolute premium on the acquisition of knowledge tempered by wisdom, whilst holding true to their respective religious traditions. Up until the 20th Century, this combined cultural heritage, with its tried and true understandings of human nature, inspired nearly the entirety of the Western canon of literature, from the Psalms of David to Shakespeare.  

During the Scottish Enlightenment, seventeen years before Adam Smith wrote his tome on the theoretical foundation for capitalism, the Wealth of Nations (1776), he penned A Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which he considered to be his most superior work. In its pages, Smith grounds our humanity fundamentally in sympathy, caring for others because they matter to the self. He wrote:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

Smith observed that even very selfish people take an unselfish pleasure in the wellbeing of [some] other people, which he thought was a natural predisposition common to all humanity. ​

Smith also believed we had inside ourselves an “Impartial Spectator” which internally monitored our own behaviour:

We endeavour to examine our own conduct as we imagine any other fair and impartial spectator would examine it.

Smith argued that sympathy was universal to man and fostered moral behaviour toward others: 

The care of his own happiness, of his family, his friends, his country: that he is occupied in contemplating and endeavouring to promote these, is the business of every man; and he who should call in question the propriety of this conduct, would be regarded as deserving no attention.

That’s an eloquent and slightly long-winded way of saying “love thy neighbour as thyself.” 

One of the most unsympathetic characters in literary fiction would have to be the financier Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, until he meets the ghost of his former partner, Jacob Marley, who, bound in the chains of his own greed as punishment for his selfish life (yes, I note Dickens’ habit of penning Jewish first names regarding his stereotypes). Marley’s ghost warns Scrooge of his own impending doom. Marley laments: 

“Mankind was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The deals of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

Readers will remember that Scrooge experiences a great arc of redemption, a turning from his isolation and cold-hearted cynicism toward his fellow human beings, instead becoming engaged as a tenderhearted fellow: “as good a man as the good old city knew.”

Scrooge experiences a resurrection; the old Scrooge psychologically dies, while a redeemed Scrooge takes on a whole new life through a spiritual awakening.  Fear, regret and empathetic reflection drive his transformation, which is far from instantaneous.   

This holy week of Passover and Easter, instead of buying into the divisions that seek to sow so much strife among us, maybe consider that this enduring heritage that has anchored Western civilisation for over two thousand years is actually something golden.

From Athens, Jerusalem and Rome, to Europe, America and Downunder, our nations have an immensely rich cultural fabric with stories of redemption, deliverance and moral sympathy woven into them over long periods of time. Aquinas gave us scholastic rigour, Adam Smith left us with enlightened insights into man’s moral nature, while Dickens reminded us of the transformative power of empathy and spiritual awakening. 

The Western canon is itself a beacon of hope for us all, a treasure trove to help guide us in pursuit of “the good,” so that future generations may be the benefactors of a large measure of thoughtful, well-reasoned, compassionate wisdom. It’s up to us to pass it down to them. 
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