There aren’t many transcendent things that we take seriously these days. And many of the things we do think are important occupy only a small part of our lives. Most of what we do revolves around employment, entertainment and the constant juggling of immediate priorities. Sadly none of these commitments necessarily leads us to the building of character - a concern that used to preoccupy the greatest individuals of history.
It isn’t really obvious how transcendence and the building of character are related. The key to understanding how they are linked lies in the way that we keep promises. Bear with me for a few minutes and I’ll try to explain.
I first became aware of the empowering nature of promises from Stephen R. Covey, many years ago. He mentioned that one could gain self-confidence by making a promise to oneself and then keeping it. He recommended starting with small promises in order to be successful, then moving on to greater ones. I have thought about this often and, with varying degrees of success, have practiced the principle. I can speak from experience that Mr. Covey’s principle is a correct one.
I have also learned that it is a sad commentary on our society that this very important principle has been nearly forgotten. This is not just a new management gimmick (Covey never suggests that it is). It has been at the very core of our moral development for millennia. Sadly, we are more likely to regard the keeping of promises today if it leads to professional success rather than to moral excellence. When this happens we trivialize a transcendent process.
For example, it might be argued that we really do keep promises. We just don’t call them by that name. If my wife asks me to pick up a gallon of milk at the store, and I agree to do it, I have essentially made a promise. Our lives are filled with these kinds of agreements. How then can I say that we don’t make promises?
This is where a little bit of historic perspective is helpful. In the past, not all promises were the same. Simple neighborly promises - social courtesies - have certainly been part of our lives for a long time, just like they are today. If a lot was at stake, our ancestors learned to formalize promises into legally binding agreements - or contracts. We do the same today. But this was only a part of the promises our ancestors lived by.
The Old Testament and other early Near Eastern documents contain many examples of promises made to God. Many of these promises were binding. - meaning that consequences were specified if they were not kept. Oaths tended to be binding agreements spoken in a public place where God’s help was requisitioned after a petitioner kept a promise. A vow tended to be a promise made by a petitioner if God provided certain blessings.
Other promises included covenants which were formal and legally binding agreements between two parties, and could be religious or civic in nature. A pledge was another kind of formal promise between individuals. We have an analogous example in wedding rings. They are promissory in nature and much more formal than a promise to buy milk. All of these ancient promises to God were similarly binding.
The importance of these different kinds of promises is lost on most of us today. Sadly, this misunderstanding even affects the way we understand sacred texts. Written religious truths that have universal application are not understood as possible individual pledges to God. But they can be, and should be.
Take for example John 8:31-32: “If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” This is an important conditional statement as it is written. But it has the potential of transforming one’s search for the truth if it were to be made a binding agreement between God and a sincere seeker of wisdom.
Another example, that is significant to my family, is Ether 12:27 (in The Book of Mormon). It was the favorite scripture of my grandmother - a Danish immigrant who in mid-life became paralyzed when a physician inadvertently cut her sciatic nerve:
“And if men come unto me I will show unto them their weakness. I give unto men weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them.”
The truths expressed in these verses are certainly truths for all people. But part of the reason that they are universal truths is because they have individual meaning in a broad number of circumstances. It is possible for someone to enter into one of these promises with God in a formal and individual way. The scriptures are full of these kinds of promises just waiting for those who wish to sanctify their lives.
Those that have formally joined a religion may not have realized that their initiation also involved a promise to God. This was a lot clearer historically before infant baptism became established - when promises to God were more important than institutionalized forms of worship. It isn’t clear in the Gospels that the Last Supper (when the sacrament was first offered) had anything at all to do with baptismal covenants. But the early Christians understood that it did.
Justin Martyr (in The First Apology of Justin, Chapter XLV, Administration of the Sacraments) wrote:
“But we … in order that we may offer hearty prayers in common for ourselves and for the baptized person … salute one another with a kiss. There is then brought to the president of the brethren bread and a cup of wine mixed with water; and he taking them, gives praise and glory to the Father of the universe, through the name of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, and offers thanks at considerable length for our being counted worthy to receive these things at His hands.”
In The Book of Mormon this relationship between the sacrament and baptism is even more clearly expressed (in 3 Nephi 18:3-5) where it is recorded how Jesus established the sacrament among the Nephites:
“And when the disciples had come with bread and wine, he took of the bread and brake and blessed it; and he gave unto the disciples and commanded that they should eat… [and said] there shall one be ordained among you, and to him will I give power that he shall break bread and bless it and give it unto the people of my church, unto all those who shall believe and be baptized in my name.”
Today we live in a time of great equalizing influences. This is a great boon to many people. Unfortunately, many of these same influences have become morally equalizing as well - diluting any lingering sense of divine involvement in our lives. In fact this equalizing epidemic has sapped many of us of any desire for personal excellence - of the desire to develop personal character. The corollary is that for those having little interest in developing character, the keeping of promises is of hardly any interest. And when we stop making and keeping promises, we cut ourselves off from most of what can be transcendent in our lives.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is a great strength available to anyone who is willing to make and keep promises. Social promises are nice and usually easy to keep. They are a good place to start. Personal promises are more difficult – but also more rewarding. They are also much less common. This is the place where character is discovered and built.
But it is when personal promises become promises to God that the truly transforming – and transcendent - miracle occurs. This is the point of the Greek metanoia - the turning of our minds away from the world, towards God. It is the place of repentance.
True repentance is a promise kept. It is a promise kept to oneself and to God and is both the refining fire and the proof of real character. Those that remain true to these promises are the strongest individuals among us. Our fathers and mothers knew this. It was part of their understanding of character. We would be wise to follow their example.
Friday, March 12, 2010
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
The Elephant Glyphs at Copan
Among the most enigmatic pre-Columbian glyphs in Meso-America are the elephant images on Stela B at Copan. There are two of them carved into the upper corners of the stone and only the heads and trunks are represented. When they were first discovered and copied, over 150 years ago, there was a human figure riding on top of one of the elephants looking very much like an Indian mahout, or elephant driver. This image has subsequently been broken, or perhaps eroded off.
The reason the elephants are so enigmatic is because they are not supposed to have existed in America since their extinction some 10,000 years ago when either human hunters or changing environments are believed to have caused their demise.
These glyphs are not the only representations of elephants that have been found in America (see Totten for examples of elephant figures carved in bone, on a votive tablet, on a pipe, etc.). But they are the only ones that can’t be easily dismissed as forgeries. This doesn’t mean that non-elephant explanations have not been proposed - they have. The images themselves, though, are so evidently elephantine that the question remains unanswered: what do they mean?
Did the Maya, their neighbors, or their descendents have firsthand experience with elephants? The images seem to argue that they might have. In so doing they support either a diffusionist argument (that there were pre-Columbian contacts between the Old and New Worlds) or that elephants existed in the same environments as late pre-Columbian Americans (and validating the reference to elephants in the Book of Mormon: Ether 9: 19), or both. It is little wonder that there have been disagreements on the subject.
The first reproduction of the images was published in 1836 by Frederick Catherwood (see opposite page 156 in John L. Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Yucatan – my Figure 1). Many details are missing in this drawing and it isn’t clear that the corner glyphs are
of elephants. The representation of the elephant driver is likewise difficult to interpret. Stephen’s, however, in the text, recognizes that the images do look like elephants. He writes: “The two ornaments at the top appear like the trunk of an elephant, an animal unknown in that country” (Stephens, p. 156).
Sometime after Incidents of Travel in Yucatan was published, Alfred Maudslay in his monographic study of Meso-American archaeology reproduced the images in much more detail (Figure 2). These are more visibly representative of elephants. It’s interesting, though, that Maudslay suggests that the images might represent a tapir (an animal phylogenetically related to an elephant but appearing quite different). This is a bit odd and might be an understandable explanation of the Catherwood images; but Maudslay's own drawings make it hard to draw the same conclusion. One is left wondering if the original glyphs are not very well represented in his own work (although this seems unlikely given his accurate renderings of other extant glyphs). Another more likely explanation is that he was aware of the controversy that elephants would pose to his work; and, rather than having to deal with the negative publicity, conveniently side-stepped the issue.
In 1924 Elliott Smith (Chair of Anatomy at the University College London) criticized Maudslay and a handful of others for suggesting that the glyphs could be anything other than elephants. His book, Elephants and Ethnologists, is a careful argument for an Asian influence in Meso-America before Columbus.
Smith’s main evidence includes the distinctly Asian elements in Stela B itself (including the spiral images and the mahouts - assuming that
there were, in fact, two of them) and the many other glyphs representing stylized creatures from Hindu mythology - the so-called makara images. These creatures are usually represented as crocodiles or dolphins but also as fish or elephants (see Figure 3). Very often a single image is made up of parts of more than one creature. Deities, such as the goddess Ganga, or other human figures are usually associated with these creatures. Often they are represented inside a creature’s mouth.
Smith argues that, not only are all these elements represented in comparable Mayan glyphs, but the Mayan glyphs also have the same overall sense of the Hindu makara, even down to the scales around the eyes. To argue for an independent development of these figures is, to Smith, nothing more than a veiled bias of preconceived notions.
Since Elephants & Ethnologists was published Smith’s arguments have been mostly ignored. They have not been convincingly disproved. Part of the reason for the academic silence has been that most diffusionist arguments have been out of favor in an increasingly nationalistic world that was eager to recognize contributions of individual cultures (see Mair). Another reason has been the uncertainty about Nat
ive American elephants themselves. When Smith made his argument, it was just coming to the attention of anthropologists that ancient humans even lived at the same time as extinct elephants (such as mammoths or mastodons).
Humans and Mammoths
The very idea that some kinds of animals and plants have gone extinct came to the world’s attention through the work of Georges Cuvier and his study of elephants (see Rudwick). Cuvier established that the elephant bones that were being discovered in Europe during the later part of the 18th Century were of different species than either the African or the Indian elephants. This suggested that extinctions had occurred prior to the advent of humans in Europe because there were no known records of a third species living in the northern hemisphere. There were occasional voices arguing that the third elephant might still be living in remote areas. Cuvier’s argument, however, was that there were no human remains or tools associated with any of the elephant remains and that humans had never known the extinct species.
Later, finds of mammoth paintings in caves throughout Europe clearly indicated that Cuvier was wrong. Not only had cave-dwelling humans known of mammoths but, as it turned out, they had hunted them as well. Proof of this was to be found in the Americas where extinct elephant bones were found with arrowheads.
Anthropologists and paleontologists then started asking themselves if humans had been the reason why the large animals had gone extinct, or were other factors, such as environmental changes, the cause of their demise. These questions still remain open. What is normally accepted, however, is that the American elephants went extinct around 10,000 years ago despite claims that it survived into historical times.
This date has been held inviolable by many authors for some time although earlier dates have been published. A comprehensive review of dated North American mega-faunal fossils (see Mead and Meltzer) shows a clear peak in the number of recovered fossils from around 10,000 years ago. But a few fossils do extend after this period. The most recent date for a mammoth was taken from Sandy, Utah and dated at 4,885 years ago. Some of the samples taken for these recent dates are of only average quality but enough extend past the 10,000 year mark to suspect that a major extinction, whatever the cause, did not eliminate all individuals at that time. From a strictly statistical standpoint the distributional peak is clearly around 10,000 years ago, but outlying data points would be expected earlier and later as Mead and Meltzer’s data indicate. The door is still open on this issue. A few surviving populations of mammoths in North and Central America may have survived into recent times.
There are two major groups of elephants known to have occurred in America - the mastodons (belonging to the family Mastodontidae) and the true elephants (belonging to the family Elephantidae). The two groups, though often similar in size and general appearance, are easily separated by their teeth. The chewing teeth of mastodons have conical projections along the grinding surface. True elephants, on the other hand, have a labyrinth of ridges. Other morphological characters undoubtedly occur but it is the teeth that resist decomposition and are more likely to appear in the fossil record. Both the African and the Indian elephants are true elephants as are the various mammoth species that have been discovered.
That said, there have been a number of mastodon species in America. Most of them lived before the periods of Pleistocene glaciation. The long-jawed mastodonts, for instance, lived on the plains as far west as the Rocky Mountains up until Pliocene times. Tetralophodonts and Serridentias, known to have migrated from the Old World, did as well. Other species included the short-jawed mastodons (true mastodons of the genus Mammut), the beak-jawed mastodons, and the notorostrines. The later two species occurred in Central America, although not into the glacial periods.
We only know of one mastodon species (Mammut americanum) that survived through the Pleistocene and lived concurrently with humans in America. It was a forest species and, as a consequence, did not lend itself to fossilization as readily as mammoths did (that seemed to frequent boggy areas more frequently). The first full skeleton of a mastodon was unearthed in 1845 south of New York City by a crew digging for peat. Since then, other remains have been discovered throughout North America and as far south as Honduras (see Polaco). It is unlikely that the American mastodon was the model for the Copan glyphs. It is unlikely to have lived as recently as the period up to or immediately prior to the rise of Central American civilization. Moreover, its low (or flatter) head is quite different than the heads of the elephants depicted in the glyphs.
The other elephants that were known to live concurrently with humans in America were the mammoths. The best known species is the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) that lived in northern regions and is the mammoth species that commonly turns up in frozen burials. A dwarf form of the wooly mammoth survived on Wrangel Island (in the Arctic Ocean) up until 1700 BC.
The Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) had a more southerly distribution. It ranged throughout North America and as far south as Nicaragua. It was believed to have gone extinct around 10,000 BC along with many other species, although more recent dates have been reported. The Columbian mammoth is most likely the species represented on Stela B at Copan if, in fact, it represents an American species at all. Its demise is the most recent of all the American elephant species and its head rises above the eyes as depicted in the glyphs. It was a large animal, fully capable of carrying an elephant driver.
Other American mammoth species are less likely candidates. The pygmy mammoth (M. exilis) from the Channel Islands of California was probably too small to support an elephant driver and it seems to have been restricted to the islands. The Jefferson mammoth (M. jeffersonii) and the imperial mammoth (M. imperator) did not occur as far south and may turn out to be the same species as the Columbia mammoth with further taxonomic evidence (the justification for recognizing the different species is primarily the size and shape of the tusks which are known to vary).
Asian Elements in America Before Columbus
Another explanation for the elephant glyphs is that they were made by emigrants from Asia who brought their cultural images (including images of elephants) with them to Central America. The difficulty with this explanation is that Asian peoples were not believed to have had contact with America before Columbus - at least that has been the scholarly consensus. Nonetheless, evidence for pre-Columbian contacts has been put forward from quite early in the history of American exploration.
Alexander von Humboldt, for example, noticed a handful of similarities between the calendars, legends and religious symbols of Asia and Central America as early as 1813. His work had a significant influence on both John Lloyd Stephens and William Prescott (The Conquest of Mexico) whose works were largely responsible for bringing early Central American civilization to the attention of the world (see Helferich).
Other influential arguments for early cultural contacts across the Pacific included Elliott Smith (as noted above), Betty Meggers et al., Joseph Needham, and Stephen Jett. Meggers showed remarkable similarities between the pottery of the Valdivia and Machalilla phases of coastal Ecuador and the pottery of the Jomon period in Japan. Joseph Needham showed several similarities between the two continents. One of his findings included the importance of jade in both places, where pieces (often painted red) that were placed in the mouth of the dead. Other findings included images of rabbits on the moon, sailing craft, etc. Stephen Jett’s work has revealed the sophisticated similarities in blowgun technologies.
These are just a few of the many examples that have come to light over almost two centuries now. John Sorenson’s exhaustive two-volume bibliography of trans-oceanic contacts before Columbus lists hundreds of sources discussing contacts between Asia and the Americas (see Sorenson and Raisch).
It seems that Smith’s arguments, that elephant glyphs at Copan are evidence of a transplanted Asian influence among the Maya, continues to deserve attention. Certainly the presence of mahouts on top of the elephants and the spiral element that is typical of the Hindu makaras suggest a cultural connection. The images of the elephants themselves also resemble Indian elephants.
Smith argued that these images were carved from artifacts that had been carried from Asia, and not that the artisans had carved them from living elephant models. His main argument for this was that there were morphological errors in the carvings. He believed that of the two openings in the mid-section of the head, that the posterior one represented an eye and the anterior one represented a nasal opening. Since elephants don’t have nasal opening in this position, it must be a mistake made by an artist without firsthand knowledge of elephants.
Smith didn’t consider the obvious possibility that the anterior organ represents an eye and the posterior one represents an ear. I say obvious because they are positioned where an eye and an ear should be. The only trouble with this explanation is that it makes the ear quite small - at least compared to the ears of living elephants.
Both living species of elephants have much larger ears. The Indian elephant has smaller ears than the African elephant but even these smaller ears are several times larger than the organ positioned where the ear should be on the Copan glyphs. If these glyphs do represent Indian elephants then Smith is right, they are stylized and were very likely reproduced either as a cultural memory or were copied incorrectly from a model carried from Asia.
Another possibility, however, is that the elephant glyphs do not represent Indian elephants at all but rather American mammoths. A century ago we didn’t know what mammoth ears looked like. We now do and it seems obvious in hindsight that they are small.
Mammoths are from a line of elephants adapted to colder climates where large appendages are maladaptive. This can be seen in living rabbits, for example. Species living in hot southern regions have large ears to dissipate heat more easily. Arctic species have much smaller ears. The same seems to have been the case for other mammals including mammoths.
In recent years, a handful of mammoths have been recovered from permafrost and the size of their ears is now known. They are small. Several images of these freeze-dried animals can be seen on-line, although caution needs to be taken when viewing their ears. Not all of them are in-tact or genuine. The ears of the Brerezovka mammoth, for example (on display in the Russian Academy of Sciences) have been reconstructed because they didn’t survive the excavation. Likewise the right (and most frequently photographed) ear of the baby Lyuba mammoth has been nibbled off.
So where does this leave us regarding the elephant glyphs at Copan? We do have quite a better view of ancient trans-oceanic migrations than we did when Smith wrote Elephants and Ethnologists. We also know a good deal more about American elephants. But the jury is still out. The Asian elements on Stela B make a strong case for an Asian influence. This has not changed since Smith’s writing. But it could very well be a mistake to presume that the Maya didn’t know about American elephants themselves.
Works Cited and Notes
Helferich, G. 2004. Humboldt’s Cosmos: Alexander von Humbolt and the Latin American journey that changed the way we see the world. Gotham Books, New York.
Jett, Stephen C. 1970. The Development and Distribution of the Blowgun. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 60 (4): 662-688.
Mair, H. Victor. Kinesis versus Stasis, Interaction versus Independent Invention; in, V.H. Mair ed. (2006) Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World. University of Hawai’i Press. Honolulu (see page 11).
Maudsley, Alfred. 1900. Biologia Centrali Americana (Archaeology, 1889-1902), Part II. Plates XXXIII to XXXIX. I have not seen this work. Figure 2 is taken from Smith’s monograph.
Mead, J.I and D.J. Meltzer. 1984. North American Late Quaternary extinctions and the radiocarbon record; in, P.S. Martin and R.G. Klein, Quaternary Extinctions, a prehistoric revolution. The University of Arizona Press. Tucson, Arizona.
Meggers, B.J., C. Evans and E. Estrada. 1965. The early formative period of coastal Ecuador; the Valdivia and Machalilla phases. Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology, No. 1:1-234.
Needhamm, J. and L. Gwei-Djen. 1985. Trans-Pacific echoes and resonances; listening once again. World Scientific, Singapore and Philadelphia.
Osborn, Henry Fairfield. 1925. The Elephants and Mastodonts Arrive in America. Natural History 25(1):3-23.
Polaco, O.J. et al. 2001. The American Mastodon Mammut americanum in Mexico; in, G. Cavarretta et al. The World of Elephants - Proceedings of the 1st International Congress, Rome.
Rudwick. Martin J.S. 1997. Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and Geologic Catastrophism, New Translations and Interpretations of the Primary Texts. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Smith, Grafton Elliott. 1924. Elephants and Ethnologists. E.P. Dutton & Co. New York. 1315 pp. Smith was an Australian anatomist who was drawn into the early diffusionist debate from his work on Egyptian mummification, that he saw influencing cultures throughout the ancient world. During his career he also held a traveling scholarship at Cambridge, served as Chair of the Cairo School of Medicine, as Professor of Anatomy in Manchester, and later served on the British General Medical Council. A biography on Smith can be found under: Smith, Grafton Elliott, in P. Serle, Dictionary of Australian Biography. 1949.
Sorenson, John L. and M.H. Raish. 1996. Pre-Columbian contacts with the Americas across the oceans, an annotated bibliography. Research Press, Provo, Utah.
Totten, Norman. 1981.Precolumbian [SIC] Elephants - From Birds to Invisibility. The Epigraphic Society, Occasional Publications Vol. 9 (no. 215).
The reason the elephants are so enigmatic is because they are not supposed to have existed in America since their extinction some 10,000 years ago when either human hunters or changing environments are believed to have caused their demise.
These glyphs are not the only representations of elephants that have been found in America (see Totten for examples of elephant figures carved in bone, on a votive tablet, on a pipe, etc.). But they are the only ones that can’t be easily dismissed as forgeries. This doesn’t mean that non-elephant explanations have not been proposed - they have. The images themselves, though, are so evidently elephantine that the question remains unanswered: what do they mean?
Did the Maya, their neighbors, or their descendents have firsthand experience with elephants? The images seem to argue that they might have. In so doing they support either a diffusionist argument (that there were pre-Columbian contacts between the Old and New Worlds) or that elephants existed in the same environments as late pre-Columbian Americans (and validating the reference to elephants in the Book of Mormon: Ether 9: 19), or both. It is little wonder that there have been disagreements on the subject.
The first reproduction of the images was published in 1836 by Frederick Catherwood (see opposite page 156 in John L. Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Yucatan – my Figure 1). Many details are missing in this drawing and it isn’t clear that the corner glyphs are
of elephants. The representation of the elephant driver is likewise difficult to interpret. Stephen’s, however, in the text, recognizes that the images do look like elephants. He writes: “The two ornaments at the top appear like the trunk of an elephant, an animal unknown in that country” (Stephens, p. 156).Sometime after Incidents of Travel in Yucatan was published, Alfred Maudslay in his monographic study of Meso-American archaeology reproduced the images in much more detail (Figure 2). These are more visibly representative of elephants. It’s interesting, though, that Maudslay suggests that the images might represent a tapir (an animal phylogenetically related to an elephant but appearing quite different). This is a bit odd and might be an understandable explanation of the Catherwood images; but Maudslay's own drawings make it hard to draw the same conclusion. One is left wondering if the original glyphs are not very well represented in his own work (although this seems unlikely given his accurate renderings of other extant glyphs). Another more likely explanation is that he was aware of the controversy that elephants would pose to his work; and, rather than having to deal with the negative publicity, conveniently side-stepped the issue.
In 1924 Elliott Smith (Chair of Anatomy at the University College London) criticized Maudslay and a handful of others for suggesting that the glyphs could be anything other than elephants. His book, Elephants and Ethnologists, is a careful argument for an Asian influence in Meso-America before Columbus.
Smith’s main evidence includes the distinctly Asian elements in Stela B itself (including the spiral images and the mahouts - assuming that
there were, in fact, two of them) and the many other glyphs representing stylized creatures from Hindu mythology - the so-called makara images. These creatures are usually represented as crocodiles or dolphins but also as fish or elephants (see Figure 3). Very often a single image is made up of parts of more than one creature. Deities, such as the goddess Ganga, or other human figures are usually associated with these creatures. Often they are represented inside a creature’s mouth.Smith argues that, not only are all these elements represented in comparable Mayan glyphs, but the Mayan glyphs also have the same overall sense of the Hindu makara, even down to the scales around the eyes. To argue for an independent development of these figures is, to Smith, nothing more than a veiled bias of preconceived notions.
Since Elephants & Ethnologists was published Smith’s arguments have been mostly ignored. They have not been convincingly disproved. Part of the reason for the academic silence has been that most diffusionist arguments have been out of favor in an increasingly nationalistic world that was eager to recognize contributions of individual cultures (see Mair). Another reason has been the uncertainty about Nat
ive American elephants themselves. When Smith made his argument, it was just coming to the attention of anthropologists that ancient humans even lived at the same time as extinct elephants (such as mammoths or mastodons).Humans and Mammoths
The very idea that some kinds of animals and plants have gone extinct came to the world’s attention through the work of Georges Cuvier and his study of elephants (see Rudwick). Cuvier established that the elephant bones that were being discovered in Europe during the later part of the 18th Century were of different species than either the African or the Indian elephants. This suggested that extinctions had occurred prior to the advent of humans in Europe because there were no known records of a third species living in the northern hemisphere. There were occasional voices arguing that the third elephant might still be living in remote areas. Cuvier’s argument, however, was that there were no human remains or tools associated with any of the elephant remains and that humans had never known the extinct species.
Later, finds of mammoth paintings in caves throughout Europe clearly indicated that Cuvier was wrong. Not only had cave-dwelling humans known of mammoths but, as it turned out, they had hunted them as well. Proof of this was to be found in the Americas where extinct elephant bones were found with arrowheads.
Anthropologists and paleontologists then started asking themselves if humans had been the reason why the large animals had gone extinct, or were other factors, such as environmental changes, the cause of their demise. These questions still remain open. What is normally accepted, however, is that the American elephants went extinct around 10,000 years ago despite claims that it survived into historical times.
This date has been held inviolable by many authors for some time although earlier dates have been published. A comprehensive review of dated North American mega-faunal fossils (see Mead and Meltzer) shows a clear peak in the number of recovered fossils from around 10,000 years ago. But a few fossils do extend after this period. The most recent date for a mammoth was taken from Sandy, Utah and dated at 4,885 years ago. Some of the samples taken for these recent dates are of only average quality but enough extend past the 10,000 year mark to suspect that a major extinction, whatever the cause, did not eliminate all individuals at that time. From a strictly statistical standpoint the distributional peak is clearly around 10,000 years ago, but outlying data points would be expected earlier and later as Mead and Meltzer’s data indicate. The door is still open on this issue. A few surviving populations of mammoths in North and Central America may have survived into recent times.
There are two major groups of elephants known to have occurred in America - the mastodons (belonging to the family Mastodontidae) and the true elephants (belonging to the family Elephantidae). The two groups, though often similar in size and general appearance, are easily separated by their teeth. The chewing teeth of mastodons have conical projections along the grinding surface. True elephants, on the other hand, have a labyrinth of ridges. Other morphological characters undoubtedly occur but it is the teeth that resist decomposition and are more likely to appear in the fossil record. Both the African and the Indian elephants are true elephants as are the various mammoth species that have been discovered.
That said, there have been a number of mastodon species in America. Most of them lived before the periods of Pleistocene glaciation. The long-jawed mastodonts, for instance, lived on the plains as far west as the Rocky Mountains up until Pliocene times. Tetralophodonts and Serridentias, known to have migrated from the Old World, did as well. Other species included the short-jawed mastodons (true mastodons of the genus Mammut), the beak-jawed mastodons, and the notorostrines. The later two species occurred in Central America, although not into the glacial periods.
We only know of one mastodon species (Mammut americanum) that survived through the Pleistocene and lived concurrently with humans in America. It was a forest species and, as a consequence, did not lend itself to fossilization as readily as mammoths did (that seemed to frequent boggy areas more frequently). The first full skeleton of a mastodon was unearthed in 1845 south of New York City by a crew digging for peat. Since then, other remains have been discovered throughout North America and as far south as Honduras (see Polaco). It is unlikely that the American mastodon was the model for the Copan glyphs. It is unlikely to have lived as recently as the period up to or immediately prior to the rise of Central American civilization. Moreover, its low (or flatter) head is quite different than the heads of the elephants depicted in the glyphs.
The other elephants that were known to live concurrently with humans in America were the mammoths. The best known species is the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) that lived in northern regions and is the mammoth species that commonly turns up in frozen burials. A dwarf form of the wooly mammoth survived on Wrangel Island (in the Arctic Ocean) up until 1700 BC.
The Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) had a more southerly distribution. It ranged throughout North America and as far south as Nicaragua. It was believed to have gone extinct around 10,000 BC along with many other species, although more recent dates have been reported. The Columbian mammoth is most likely the species represented on Stela B at Copan if, in fact, it represents an American species at all. Its demise is the most recent of all the American elephant species and its head rises above the eyes as depicted in the glyphs. It was a large animal, fully capable of carrying an elephant driver.
Other American mammoth species are less likely candidates. The pygmy mammoth (M. exilis) from the Channel Islands of California was probably too small to support an elephant driver and it seems to have been restricted to the islands. The Jefferson mammoth (M. jeffersonii) and the imperial mammoth (M. imperator) did not occur as far south and may turn out to be the same species as the Columbia mammoth with further taxonomic evidence (the justification for recognizing the different species is primarily the size and shape of the tusks which are known to vary).
Asian Elements in America Before Columbus
Another explanation for the elephant glyphs is that they were made by emigrants from Asia who brought their cultural images (including images of elephants) with them to Central America. The difficulty with this explanation is that Asian peoples were not believed to have had contact with America before Columbus - at least that has been the scholarly consensus. Nonetheless, evidence for pre-Columbian contacts has been put forward from quite early in the history of American exploration.
Alexander von Humboldt, for example, noticed a handful of similarities between the calendars, legends and religious symbols of Asia and Central America as early as 1813. His work had a significant influence on both John Lloyd Stephens and William Prescott (The Conquest of Mexico) whose works were largely responsible for bringing early Central American civilization to the attention of the world (see Helferich).
Other influential arguments for early cultural contacts across the Pacific included Elliott Smith (as noted above), Betty Meggers et al., Joseph Needham, and Stephen Jett. Meggers showed remarkable similarities between the pottery of the Valdivia and Machalilla phases of coastal Ecuador and the pottery of the Jomon period in Japan. Joseph Needham showed several similarities between the two continents. One of his findings included the importance of jade in both places, where pieces (often painted red) that were placed in the mouth of the dead. Other findings included images of rabbits on the moon, sailing craft, etc. Stephen Jett’s work has revealed the sophisticated similarities in blowgun technologies.
These are just a few of the many examples that have come to light over almost two centuries now. John Sorenson’s exhaustive two-volume bibliography of trans-oceanic contacts before Columbus lists hundreds of sources discussing contacts between Asia and the Americas (see Sorenson and Raisch).
It seems that Smith’s arguments, that elephant glyphs at Copan are evidence of a transplanted Asian influence among the Maya, continues to deserve attention. Certainly the presence of mahouts on top of the elephants and the spiral element that is typical of the Hindu makaras suggest a cultural connection. The images of the elephants themselves also resemble Indian elephants.
Smith argued that these images were carved from artifacts that had been carried from Asia, and not that the artisans had carved them from living elephant models. His main argument for this was that there were morphological errors in the carvings. He believed that of the two openings in the mid-section of the head, that the posterior one represented an eye and the anterior one represented a nasal opening. Since elephants don’t have nasal opening in this position, it must be a mistake made by an artist without firsthand knowledge of elephants.
Smith didn’t consider the obvious possibility that the anterior organ represents an eye and the posterior one represents an ear. I say obvious because they are positioned where an eye and an ear should be. The only trouble with this explanation is that it makes the ear quite small - at least compared to the ears of living elephants.
Both living species of elephants have much larger ears. The Indian elephant has smaller ears than the African elephant but even these smaller ears are several times larger than the organ positioned where the ear should be on the Copan glyphs. If these glyphs do represent Indian elephants then Smith is right, they are stylized and were very likely reproduced either as a cultural memory or were copied incorrectly from a model carried from Asia.
Another possibility, however, is that the elephant glyphs do not represent Indian elephants at all but rather American mammoths. A century ago we didn’t know what mammoth ears looked like. We now do and it seems obvious in hindsight that they are small.
Mammoths are from a line of elephants adapted to colder climates where large appendages are maladaptive. This can be seen in living rabbits, for example. Species living in hot southern regions have large ears to dissipate heat more easily. Arctic species have much smaller ears. The same seems to have been the case for other mammals including mammoths.
In recent years, a handful of mammoths have been recovered from permafrost and the size of their ears is now known. They are small. Several images of these freeze-dried animals can be seen on-line, although caution needs to be taken when viewing their ears. Not all of them are in-tact or genuine. The ears of the Brerezovka mammoth, for example (on display in the Russian Academy of Sciences) have been reconstructed because they didn’t survive the excavation. Likewise the right (and most frequently photographed) ear of the baby Lyuba mammoth has been nibbled off.
So where does this leave us regarding the elephant glyphs at Copan? We do have quite a better view of ancient trans-oceanic migrations than we did when Smith wrote Elephants and Ethnologists. We also know a good deal more about American elephants. But the jury is still out. The Asian elements on Stela B make a strong case for an Asian influence. This has not changed since Smith’s writing. But it could very well be a mistake to presume that the Maya didn’t know about American elephants themselves.
Works Cited and Notes
Helferich, G. 2004. Humboldt’s Cosmos: Alexander von Humbolt and the Latin American journey that changed the way we see the world. Gotham Books, New York.
Jett, Stephen C. 1970. The Development and Distribution of the Blowgun. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 60 (4): 662-688.
Mair, H. Victor. Kinesis versus Stasis, Interaction versus Independent Invention; in, V.H. Mair ed. (2006) Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World. University of Hawai’i Press. Honolulu (see page 11).
Maudsley, Alfred. 1900. Biologia Centrali Americana (Archaeology, 1889-1902), Part II. Plates XXXIII to XXXIX. I have not seen this work. Figure 2 is taken from Smith’s monograph.
Mead, J.I and D.J. Meltzer. 1984. North American Late Quaternary extinctions and the radiocarbon record; in, P.S. Martin and R.G. Klein, Quaternary Extinctions, a prehistoric revolution. The University of Arizona Press. Tucson, Arizona.
Meggers, B.J., C. Evans and E. Estrada. 1965. The early formative period of coastal Ecuador; the Valdivia and Machalilla phases. Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology, No. 1:1-234.
Needhamm, J. and L. Gwei-Djen. 1985. Trans-Pacific echoes and resonances; listening once again. World Scientific, Singapore and Philadelphia.
Osborn, Henry Fairfield. 1925. The Elephants and Mastodonts Arrive in America. Natural History 25(1):3-23.
Polaco, O.J. et al. 2001. The American Mastodon Mammut americanum in Mexico; in, G. Cavarretta et al. The World of Elephants - Proceedings of the 1st International Congress, Rome.
Rudwick. Martin J.S. 1997. Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and Geologic Catastrophism, New Translations and Interpretations of the Primary Texts. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Smith, Grafton Elliott. 1924. Elephants and Ethnologists. E.P. Dutton & Co. New York. 1315 pp. Smith was an Australian anatomist who was drawn into the early diffusionist debate from his work on Egyptian mummification, that he saw influencing cultures throughout the ancient world. During his career he also held a traveling scholarship at Cambridge, served as Chair of the Cairo School of Medicine, as Professor of Anatomy in Manchester, and later served on the British General Medical Council. A biography on Smith can be found under: Smith, Grafton Elliott, in P. Serle, Dictionary of Australian Biography. 1949.
Sorenson, John L. and M.H. Raish. 1996. Pre-Columbian contacts with the Americas across the oceans, an annotated bibliography. Research Press, Provo, Utah.
Totten, Norman. 1981.Precolumbian [SIC] Elephants - From Birds to Invisibility. The Epigraphic Society, Occasional Publications Vol. 9 (no. 215).
Friday, February 5, 2010
A Sympathetic Agrarian
There is a sizeable number of would-be agrarians in America that live in cities. I am one of them. We are a varied lot with different experiences and desires. I don’t pretend to represent all of us. Nonetheless, I do offer a few insights into how an agrarian at heart can be true to himself (and possibly herself too) even while living in a city or a town.
My insights come from over two decades of dealing with this conflict: between where I live and where I want to live. The formative years of my youth were spent on a small farm in Utah Valley. I grew up cleaning the barn, milking goats, and irrigating the orchard and garden at all hours of the day and night. I learned from experience not to lick an ice-covered fence post, and that one should take care in flaying a rabbit not to puncture the digestive tract. I didn’t enjoy getting up early to do the chores before school. But I did come to love the miracles of new life in the spring, of summer rain storms, and the wild mountains that started almost from our back yard.
Since then I have lived in a dozen cities and have fond memories of each place. Nonetheless, my desire for a simpler agrarian life has remained with me wherever I go. I make a living doing agricultural research and this has provided me with some rural opportunities. But it has also been a constant reminder to me that I no longer live a rural life.
In my efforts to pull myself out of a recurring rural nostalgia, I have come to rely on three agrarian helps that are very applicable to city life. In fact they are keys for me (a sympathetic agrarian) to making city life meaningful.
The first and most important thing is to work. There are, of course, many kinds of work and not all of them are agrarian helps. Work in front of a computer, no matter how worthy the cause (such as writing an agrarian essay) doesn’t qualify. Work on the phone, in any of it’s modern forms, doesn’t qualify either. There are, however, a surprising number of other kinds of work that do qualify: washing the dishes by hand, planting and caring for a garden (no matter how small), repairing the lawn mower, polishing the silver, cleaning the shed (or garage). The list is nearly endless. The key part of qualifying work is to be doing it - and to be doing it with a conservative or a creative deliberation.
This may sound a bit too obvious but it needs to be emphasized. Work means that we’re not lost in mindless past-times that are the bane of our time (and the primary reason for the epidemic of our whole-body neuromuscular neglect). Mindlessly watching television or engaging in computer games neither conserves nor creates anything. As possible ways to relax after an honest day of work, they may be nice. But they should never be confused for agrarian helps.
Another important help is to develop trusted friendships. One of the givens of rural life is to know your neighbors. City life is quite a bit different. In fact I hardly know who the people are that live on our small street. We wave to each other to be courteous and at Christmastime we take each other treats. But they know next to nothing about us and we know next to nothing about them.
In the more rural area where I grew up, I knew who lived in every house along the street - not just the mom and dad, but everybody - including the dogs. Come to think of it, I even had lunch (at least once) in every one of those houses.
We got along as neighbors pretty well too (most of the time) and helped each other out when we found ourselves in need of it. One time our next-door neighbor Denny managed to rope our runaway cow Lulubell and bring her to heel. He somehow lapped the rope around a big cherry tree and slowed her down. I also remember helping my friend next door move a truckload of rocks so we could play basketball together. I ended up smashing my finger and couldn’t play after all. Life was usually a team effort, even with the accidents.
Less than a mile from where we lived was a subdivision. Houses there were on small lots (like the one I live in now). I only knew a few of the people who lived there. We had very little sense of community with them.
It is certainly one of the ironies of our time that the closer we live to one another, the less we seem to know of each other. But life in a city does not have to be that way. There are people in your neighborhood that you will like if you get to know them. The difficult part is getting to know them.
For us it helps to meet people at church, while walking the dog, or just picking up the mail. Taking an agrarian friendliness into the city may not be intuitive - especially considering how suspicious most people are - but it can be done. It’s also quite remarkable how helpful friends can be in making city life bearable for a sympathetic agrarian like me.
My final agrarian help is to live in the natural world as much as possible. The life of a farmer is almost completely determined by the order of nature. Many of us living in cities, on the other hand, have practically cloistered ourselves completely from anything that isn’t manmade.
A farmer expects to get his hands dirty and knows that a harvest only comes after planning, much work, and the contributions of the Creator. The office troglodyte, however, is content to nourish his body with fast food. He is also more than happy to contract-out the yard work in order to have more time for TV.
A farmer rises with the chickens in order to avoid the heat of the day. The contemporary urbanite doesn’t even get to work until 9:00 and then stays up long after the sun has gone to sleep.
The farmer is also very much in tune to the seasons and to subtle changes in the weather. At the end of the year he knows it is the time to gather wood and then to cozy-up to the fire and let the slumbering world alone. The city dweller, on the other hand, runs from a heated house to a heated car to a heated office in the middle of winter. If she owns a coat, it’s more for fashion than for keeping warm. Who wants to be out in the cold anyway? Not even a blizzard can slow her down.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The truth is that even those of us living a city life can still respect the cycles and rhythms of nature. Perhaps the stars are dimmer in town but we can still plant a garden - even if its only a few potted plants in a window. We can turn off the TV and take a walk in the park. We can even vacation in a forested retreat instead of at an amusement park. It is possible for a sympathetic agrarian to find sustenance for the soul in a city despite the distractions of demos.
There are a lot of us living on earth these days. Most of us have no choice but to live in a city. Sometimes this is frustrating when we know that we prefer a quieter and less frenetic living space. Fortunately, all is not lost. The virtues that inhere naturally to rural communities do not by necessity have to be riven from the fabric of urban life. A bit more thoughtful work, neighborly kindness, and natural engagement are all opportunities still open to us. If they don’t present themselves to us naturally in our artificial environments, they are at least part of our human natures. With a bit more care they can still do us a lot of good.
My insights come from over two decades of dealing with this conflict: between where I live and where I want to live. The formative years of my youth were spent on a small farm in Utah Valley. I grew up cleaning the barn, milking goats, and irrigating the orchard and garden at all hours of the day and night. I learned from experience not to lick an ice-covered fence post, and that one should take care in flaying a rabbit not to puncture the digestive tract. I didn’t enjoy getting up early to do the chores before school. But I did come to love the miracles of new life in the spring, of summer rain storms, and the wild mountains that started almost from our back yard.
Since then I have lived in a dozen cities and have fond memories of each place. Nonetheless, my desire for a simpler agrarian life has remained with me wherever I go. I make a living doing agricultural research and this has provided me with some rural opportunities. But it has also been a constant reminder to me that I no longer live a rural life.
In my efforts to pull myself out of a recurring rural nostalgia, I have come to rely on three agrarian helps that are very applicable to city life. In fact they are keys for me (a sympathetic agrarian) to making city life meaningful.
The first and most important thing is to work. There are, of course, many kinds of work and not all of them are agrarian helps. Work in front of a computer, no matter how worthy the cause (such as writing an agrarian essay) doesn’t qualify. Work on the phone, in any of it’s modern forms, doesn’t qualify either. There are, however, a surprising number of other kinds of work that do qualify: washing the dishes by hand, planting and caring for a garden (no matter how small), repairing the lawn mower, polishing the silver, cleaning the shed (or garage). The list is nearly endless. The key part of qualifying work is to be doing it - and to be doing it with a conservative or a creative deliberation.
This may sound a bit too obvious but it needs to be emphasized. Work means that we’re not lost in mindless past-times that are the bane of our time (and the primary reason for the epidemic of our whole-body neuromuscular neglect). Mindlessly watching television or engaging in computer games neither conserves nor creates anything. As possible ways to relax after an honest day of work, they may be nice. But they should never be confused for agrarian helps.
Another important help is to develop trusted friendships. One of the givens of rural life is to know your neighbors. City life is quite a bit different. In fact I hardly know who the people are that live on our small street. We wave to each other to be courteous and at Christmastime we take each other treats. But they know next to nothing about us and we know next to nothing about them.
In the more rural area where I grew up, I knew who lived in every house along the street - not just the mom and dad, but everybody - including the dogs. Come to think of it, I even had lunch (at least once) in every one of those houses.
We got along as neighbors pretty well too (most of the time) and helped each other out when we found ourselves in need of it. One time our next-door neighbor Denny managed to rope our runaway cow Lulubell and bring her to heel. He somehow lapped the rope around a big cherry tree and slowed her down. I also remember helping my friend next door move a truckload of rocks so we could play basketball together. I ended up smashing my finger and couldn’t play after all. Life was usually a team effort, even with the accidents.
Less than a mile from where we lived was a subdivision. Houses there were on small lots (like the one I live in now). I only knew a few of the people who lived there. We had very little sense of community with them.
It is certainly one of the ironies of our time that the closer we live to one another, the less we seem to know of each other. But life in a city does not have to be that way. There are people in your neighborhood that you will like if you get to know them. The difficult part is getting to know them.
For us it helps to meet people at church, while walking the dog, or just picking up the mail. Taking an agrarian friendliness into the city may not be intuitive - especially considering how suspicious most people are - but it can be done. It’s also quite remarkable how helpful friends can be in making city life bearable for a sympathetic agrarian like me.
My final agrarian help is to live in the natural world as much as possible. The life of a farmer is almost completely determined by the order of nature. Many of us living in cities, on the other hand, have practically cloistered ourselves completely from anything that isn’t manmade.
A farmer expects to get his hands dirty and knows that a harvest only comes after planning, much work, and the contributions of the Creator. The office troglodyte, however, is content to nourish his body with fast food. He is also more than happy to contract-out the yard work in order to have more time for TV.
A farmer rises with the chickens in order to avoid the heat of the day. The contemporary urbanite doesn’t even get to work until 9:00 and then stays up long after the sun has gone to sleep.
The farmer is also very much in tune to the seasons and to subtle changes in the weather. At the end of the year he knows it is the time to gather wood and then to cozy-up to the fire and let the slumbering world alone. The city dweller, on the other hand, runs from a heated house to a heated car to a heated office in the middle of winter. If she owns a coat, it’s more for fashion than for keeping warm. Who wants to be out in the cold anyway? Not even a blizzard can slow her down.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The truth is that even those of us living a city life can still respect the cycles and rhythms of nature. Perhaps the stars are dimmer in town but we can still plant a garden - even if its only a few potted plants in a window. We can turn off the TV and take a walk in the park. We can even vacation in a forested retreat instead of at an amusement park. It is possible for a sympathetic agrarian to find sustenance for the soul in a city despite the distractions of demos.
There are a lot of us living on earth these days. Most of us have no choice but to live in a city. Sometimes this is frustrating when we know that we prefer a quieter and less frenetic living space. Fortunately, all is not lost. The virtues that inhere naturally to rural communities do not by necessity have to be riven from the fabric of urban life. A bit more thoughtful work, neighborly kindness, and natural engagement are all opportunities still open to us. If they don’t present themselves to us naturally in our artificial environments, they are at least part of our human natures. With a bit more care they can still do us a lot of good.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Boys are not Girls
A young man I know quite well - we’ll call him Casey - is a very talented gymnast and diver. When he was five years old he started doing rudimentary back flips off his mother’s organ. When he turned six, he started taking tumbling classes and his teacher soon discovered his abilities. Within a year Casey could climb the gym rope (without using his legs or feet) faster than any of the other students (of any age). In subsequent years, Casey would learn all of the men’s gymnastic events well. As a young teenager, he competed successfully in several state competitions. During one eventful meet at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Casey placed first in the state on rings - probably the most difficult of all the events. He had a bright athletic future to look forward to.
About a year later, just as Casey was starting his sophomore year in high school, his family moved to North Carolina. It was there he learned that there was no longer a future in men’s gymnastics in America. Casey couldn’t find a single gym anywhere with a men’s (boys) gymnastics program in the major metropolitan area where he lived. He practiced alone for a few months and then, sadly, gave it up. The problem he had run up against was Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. This (apparently appropriate) piece of legislation prohibits discrimination in any educational program receiving Federal financial assistance.
I understand if you’re confused by this. What do anti-discrimination laws have to do with men’s gymnastics, after all? Have men gymnasts been discriminating against minorities? Hardly. The problem comes down to something quite unexpected: misanthropic feminist activists and school budgets. It turns out that most schools have traditionally placed quite a bit more money into men’s sports than they have into women’s sports. This was a natural thing to do. Men’s sports have always had higher levels of participation and have drawn bigger crowds. Now this is all being interpreted as discrimination.
More damaging, however, is the attempt to use this difference in athletic participation as a tool in pushing forward a gender-neutralizing agenda. Men’s athletic programs should not be funded any more than women’s athletic programs these activists insist. If they are, lawsuits are threatened and institutions stand to lose all of their Federal grant money. Since nobody wants to give up their men’s football and basketball programs, other sports have to make up the difference. Men’s gymnastics is one of them.
For Casey this meant ending his gymnastics career many years before he wanted to. All was not lost, though. He joined his high school’s swim team and started diving. During both his junior and senior years he took first place in regional diving competitions. His training in gymnastics was serving him well - at least until he neared graduation. He then discovered that there was no use diving at the collegiate level. Title IX had taken away male scholarships for these events too. Casey’s future in competitive sports was over.
This is a sad story for those of us who know Casey. In fairness, I realize that similar sad stories must exist of frustrated women athletes who, prior to Title IX, were unable to fully develop their talents. The temptation is to ask for some kind of unbiased numerical comparison just to see how fair this whole thing really is.
Do women really want as many athletic scholarships as men do? I doubt it. It would seem much fairer to look at the total number of scholarships across disciplines (academic and athletic) if we’re really looking for equity. I am certainly not suggesting that we limit athletic opportunities for women who want them. But I am suggesting that we use better judgment in how we allocate resources.
Men are more physically competitive than women. This often turns out to be a problem for those men who haven’t learned how to express it appropriately. Most women, on the other hand, have a different perspective in potentially competitive situations because they are able to minimize confrontation. This has always been a feminine virtue. For men, virtue resides in mastering their competitive instincts not in pretending they don’t exist. Team sports, for instance, were originally promoted to help boys (and men) learn to channel their competitive instincts gallantly.
But this is not the main issue here. The bigger issue with the Title IX legislation is that we are letting gender-neutralizing advocates succeed in a campaign that is devastating boys. A big part of this campaign is the effort to minimize competitiveness.
There are very fundamental differences between men and women. This should be obvious. There are also important differences between boys and girls. And although most of these differences only become visible at puberty, differences at younger ages are also important. One of these differences that has been investigated quite a bit in recent years is Rough and Tumble (R&T) play.
Consider for a moment the research of Vivian Paley, a former kindergarten teacher in Chicago (Sommers, 2000). Vivian observed her young students in many settings and often noted the differences between boys and girls. When they would enter the “tumbling room” the boys would run and climb the entire time they are in the room, or until they “fall down dead” to rest momentarily. The girls, after several minutes of arranging one another’s shoes, concentrate on somersaults. Then they stretch out on the mats and watch the boys. When the girls are left alone in the tumbling room, they run and climb for a while and then lose interest, moving to other activities like painting and playing with dolls. Boys, she noticed, when left on their own never lost interest in tumbling.
Rough and tumble play also occurs in other animals. One of nature’s more endearing scenes is the unexpected discovery of baby animals tumbling around in mock combat with their siblings. We understand intuitively that they are having “fun”. In the last few generations we have also learned from researchers that this behavior helps prepare the young for more serious and life sustaining activities later in life. A wolf pup needs to know how to grapple with a sibling before it can bring down a deer. This also makes intuitive sense.
In recent years, however, it has become fashionable to limit the play time of children - especially the R&T play of boys. Some schools have eliminated playgrounds altogether. The underlying argument for this is that rough play in boys leads to aggressive and criminal behavior in men. Aggressive men, so the reasoning goes, must learn their delinquent behavior somewhere. Since we know that boys are more physically active than girls, it seems logical that an excess of activity, if not corrected, will lead to crime.
The trouble with this reasoning is that it is based on guesswork. In reality boys, just like puppies, learn how to be true to their natures by wrestling with each other. Researchers are learning that it is the boy left out of physical games that is the one more likely to develop behavioral (including criminal) problems later on.
Pam Jarvis (at Leeds Metropolitan University) wrote that R&T play “forms the basis for male socialization, in that boys who successfully engage in mock-fighting… are creating neuronal pathways that will later be developed in rule-based sporting activities and language-based competition, while those who are unable to group concepts of play fighting in early childhood are at risk of becoming less socially successful, more aggressive adolescents.”
Gender activists, on the other hand, argue that these play differences are not natural - that parents are responsible for teaching their children to behave this way. If this is how boys and girls act, it is because boys are picking up discriminatory habits from their fathers. Girls should be, according to this reasoning, just as active as boys, all things being equal.
One has to wonder what closet these activists have been living in. Did they never go outside during recess when they were young? I don’t mean to imply that rough boys don’t grow up to be criminals. A few of them do. I do mean that if we deny boys a healthy active place to grow up, we’ll be creating bigger problems than we thought we were solving. A typical healthy boy is a competitive boy. A typical healthy girl is noticeably less competitive. This is part of the natural order of things. If we ignore this – or worse, if we legislate policies based on this ignorance – we will certainly come to regret it.
We wouldn’t, for example, agree to give air conditioners to Eskimos because we give them to Navajos. Such “fairness” may be equitable in one sense but hardly fair in any meaningful sense. In contrast, we do give library cards to all kinds of people regardless of any differences among them. The poor are benefited just as the rich are. It comes as no surprise that because of this equality, libraries have been one of the most effective government-funded programs ever implemented.
So what kind of legislation is Title IX then? On the surface it looks like it might be fair. In reality it has turned out to be much less so. Policies that go against nature will never be truly fair. The reason things have gotten to this point is something that should concern us all a great deal: special interest groups have become much more effective interpreters of our laws than have people with common sense. In fact special interest groups have tried to force equality where it doesn't exist - against nature.
This is bad news for American boys, who are being steered (even manipulated), into a gender-less society and asked to fare however they can. Those of us who care about boys and girls need to be aware of this and take every opportunity we can to encourage young men to get involved with boy-friendly programs such as Boy Scouts, competitive sports, church groups, etc. - even as we encourage girls to be involved in girl-friendly programs of their own. We also need to better prepare ourselves legally against the special interest groups who are out to diminish boys. As odd as it might seem, we need to affirm the obvious fact that boys are not girls.
Works Cited
Jarvis, Pam. 2006. “Rough and Tumble” Play: Lessons in Life. Evolutionary Psychology 4:330-346.
Sommers, Christina. 2000. The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming our Young Men. Simon & Schuster, New York and London.
About a year later, just as Casey was starting his sophomore year in high school, his family moved to North Carolina. It was there he learned that there was no longer a future in men’s gymnastics in America. Casey couldn’t find a single gym anywhere with a men’s (boys) gymnastics program in the major metropolitan area where he lived. He practiced alone for a few months and then, sadly, gave it up. The problem he had run up against was Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. This (apparently appropriate) piece of legislation prohibits discrimination in any educational program receiving Federal financial assistance.
I understand if you’re confused by this. What do anti-discrimination laws have to do with men’s gymnastics, after all? Have men gymnasts been discriminating against minorities? Hardly. The problem comes down to something quite unexpected: misanthropic feminist activists and school budgets. It turns out that most schools have traditionally placed quite a bit more money into men’s sports than they have into women’s sports. This was a natural thing to do. Men’s sports have always had higher levels of participation and have drawn bigger crowds. Now this is all being interpreted as discrimination.
More damaging, however, is the attempt to use this difference in athletic participation as a tool in pushing forward a gender-neutralizing agenda. Men’s athletic programs should not be funded any more than women’s athletic programs these activists insist. If they are, lawsuits are threatened and institutions stand to lose all of their Federal grant money. Since nobody wants to give up their men’s football and basketball programs, other sports have to make up the difference. Men’s gymnastics is one of them.
For Casey this meant ending his gymnastics career many years before he wanted to. All was not lost, though. He joined his high school’s swim team and started diving. During both his junior and senior years he took first place in regional diving competitions. His training in gymnastics was serving him well - at least until he neared graduation. He then discovered that there was no use diving at the collegiate level. Title IX had taken away male scholarships for these events too. Casey’s future in competitive sports was over.
This is a sad story for those of us who know Casey. In fairness, I realize that similar sad stories must exist of frustrated women athletes who, prior to Title IX, were unable to fully develop their talents. The temptation is to ask for some kind of unbiased numerical comparison just to see how fair this whole thing really is.
Do women really want as many athletic scholarships as men do? I doubt it. It would seem much fairer to look at the total number of scholarships across disciplines (academic and athletic) if we’re really looking for equity. I am certainly not suggesting that we limit athletic opportunities for women who want them. But I am suggesting that we use better judgment in how we allocate resources.
Men are more physically competitive than women. This often turns out to be a problem for those men who haven’t learned how to express it appropriately. Most women, on the other hand, have a different perspective in potentially competitive situations because they are able to minimize confrontation. This has always been a feminine virtue. For men, virtue resides in mastering their competitive instincts not in pretending they don’t exist. Team sports, for instance, were originally promoted to help boys (and men) learn to channel their competitive instincts gallantly.
But this is not the main issue here. The bigger issue with the Title IX legislation is that we are letting gender-neutralizing advocates succeed in a campaign that is devastating boys. A big part of this campaign is the effort to minimize competitiveness.
There are very fundamental differences between men and women. This should be obvious. There are also important differences between boys and girls. And although most of these differences only become visible at puberty, differences at younger ages are also important. One of these differences that has been investigated quite a bit in recent years is Rough and Tumble (R&T) play.
Consider for a moment the research of Vivian Paley, a former kindergarten teacher in Chicago (Sommers, 2000). Vivian observed her young students in many settings and often noted the differences between boys and girls. When they would enter the “tumbling room” the boys would run and climb the entire time they are in the room, or until they “fall down dead” to rest momentarily. The girls, after several minutes of arranging one another’s shoes, concentrate on somersaults. Then they stretch out on the mats and watch the boys. When the girls are left alone in the tumbling room, they run and climb for a while and then lose interest, moving to other activities like painting and playing with dolls. Boys, she noticed, when left on their own never lost interest in tumbling.
Rough and tumble play also occurs in other animals. One of nature’s more endearing scenes is the unexpected discovery of baby animals tumbling around in mock combat with their siblings. We understand intuitively that they are having “fun”. In the last few generations we have also learned from researchers that this behavior helps prepare the young for more serious and life sustaining activities later in life. A wolf pup needs to know how to grapple with a sibling before it can bring down a deer. This also makes intuitive sense.
In recent years, however, it has become fashionable to limit the play time of children - especially the R&T play of boys. Some schools have eliminated playgrounds altogether. The underlying argument for this is that rough play in boys leads to aggressive and criminal behavior in men. Aggressive men, so the reasoning goes, must learn their delinquent behavior somewhere. Since we know that boys are more physically active than girls, it seems logical that an excess of activity, if not corrected, will lead to crime.
The trouble with this reasoning is that it is based on guesswork. In reality boys, just like puppies, learn how to be true to their natures by wrestling with each other. Researchers are learning that it is the boy left out of physical games that is the one more likely to develop behavioral (including criminal) problems later on.
Pam Jarvis (at Leeds Metropolitan University) wrote that R&T play “forms the basis for male socialization, in that boys who successfully engage in mock-fighting… are creating neuronal pathways that will later be developed in rule-based sporting activities and language-based competition, while those who are unable to group concepts of play fighting in early childhood are at risk of becoming less socially successful, more aggressive adolescents.”
Gender activists, on the other hand, argue that these play differences are not natural - that parents are responsible for teaching their children to behave this way. If this is how boys and girls act, it is because boys are picking up discriminatory habits from their fathers. Girls should be, according to this reasoning, just as active as boys, all things being equal.
One has to wonder what closet these activists have been living in. Did they never go outside during recess when they were young? I don’t mean to imply that rough boys don’t grow up to be criminals. A few of them do. I do mean that if we deny boys a healthy active place to grow up, we’ll be creating bigger problems than we thought we were solving. A typical healthy boy is a competitive boy. A typical healthy girl is noticeably less competitive. This is part of the natural order of things. If we ignore this – or worse, if we legislate policies based on this ignorance – we will certainly come to regret it.
We wouldn’t, for example, agree to give air conditioners to Eskimos because we give them to Navajos. Such “fairness” may be equitable in one sense but hardly fair in any meaningful sense. In contrast, we do give library cards to all kinds of people regardless of any differences among them. The poor are benefited just as the rich are. It comes as no surprise that because of this equality, libraries have been one of the most effective government-funded programs ever implemented.
So what kind of legislation is Title IX then? On the surface it looks like it might be fair. In reality it has turned out to be much less so. Policies that go against nature will never be truly fair. The reason things have gotten to this point is something that should concern us all a great deal: special interest groups have become much more effective interpreters of our laws than have people with common sense. In fact special interest groups have tried to force equality where it doesn't exist - against nature.
This is bad news for American boys, who are being steered (even manipulated), into a gender-less society and asked to fare however they can. Those of us who care about boys and girls need to be aware of this and take every opportunity we can to encourage young men to get involved with boy-friendly programs such as Boy Scouts, competitive sports, church groups, etc. - even as we encourage girls to be involved in girl-friendly programs of their own. We also need to better prepare ourselves legally against the special interest groups who are out to diminish boys. As odd as it might seem, we need to affirm the obvious fact that boys are not girls.
Works Cited
Jarvis, Pam. 2006. “Rough and Tumble” Play: Lessons in Life. Evolutionary Psychology 4:330-346.
Sommers, Christina. 2000. The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming our Young Men. Simon & Schuster, New York and London.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Rethinking Chivalry for Boys
A number of years ago, while living in Columbus, Ohio it was my habit to ride a city bus to and from The Ohio State University campus each day. My normal route took me through an area of frequent crime. Some of the passengers that boarded the bus there often looked menacing. Some of them looked downright scary.
On one occasion a couple of these characters seated themselves right behind me and for several minutes carried on the most colorful conversation imaginable. They seemed incapable of uttering a sentence without an expletive. Usually there was more than one - piled on top of each other in adjectival abandon. Often they were very graphically offensive. I was quite upset by it but didn’t, at first, dare to say anything.
In the seat in front of me was an elderly lady. I had not paid much attention to her at first but as I became more and more uncomfortable with the vulgarities behind me, I noticed that she was uncomfortable too. It was then that I realized I needed to do something. For some reason unknown to me then, I felt a responsibility to protect her.
I then ran through in my mind a couple of ways I might confront the offenders. In the end I just turned around and asked them in a friendly way if they wouldn’t mind toning their language down a bit. To my surprise they apologized and then got off the bus a couple of stops later. When my stop arrived and I got up to leave, the woman thanked me for what I had done. I remember stepping down from the bus onto the street feeling like I had done something significant - something morally empowering. Later I would come to realize that I was feeling chivalrous.
Chivalry is a medieval word. It brings to mind a warrior spirit and a protective instinct for those that are weak - particularly women and children. It reminds us of a time when chivalrous men protected ladies and fought in defense of Christ. These days it seems to be quite out of favor. This may seem odd at first. After all, who doesn’t know of a teenage girl that dreams of being a princess, live in a castle, and be courted by a brave and handsome knight? One can even argue that the simple act of opening a door for a woman is a small nod to the spirit of chivalry. And most women still appreciate the gesture. At church the other day a gentleman offered his seat to a young mother carrying her child. She graciously accepted it, and I was glad that some women still allow men to watch out for them. How then can chivalry – even a modern version of it – be out of favor?
The problem is that our society is becoming more and more reluctant to acknowledge that men might be stronger than women. We’re even uncomfortable acknowledging that women might have greater endurance than men. Unless a situation is “gender-neutral” we get a little nervous - at least in mixed company.
The case for a manly defense of Christian morality is even more unacceptable in public. The separation of church and state - a policy that we established to guarantee religious liberty in a Christian nation - has become a bludgeon that is used to enforce public agnosticism. A boy that presumes to be motivated by his faith to care for the “weaker sex” is unacceptable on two counts. He is much too public about his religion, and he seems all too condescending to women.
Another concern with Christian morality in its chivalrous form is that it is thought to lead ultimately to imperialism with its suppression of minorities. Some authors have even gone so far as to suggest that terrorism has its roots in chivalry. One can begin to see that bringing chivalry back into such a world would involve a good deal of resistance.
The word “chivalry” itself traces back through Middle English to the French “chevalier” and ultimately to the Latin word for horseman. In its English form, chivalry has a long association with knights and there is an immense romantic literature about them. One aspect of the medieval knight that is usually forgotten, though, is that the knight was originally part of a lower class of society. Often knights were servants. In English (and German) the term for horseman also carried with it a sense of a young lad on the verge of manhood (Braudy, page 66). This was because becoming a horseman implied a great deal of responsibility. A horse is a powerful animal and, unless it is well trained, is not something that a boy can handle by himself. A man on a horse, on the other hand, regardless of his status in society, is capable of going into battle. In fact, such a man becomes a powerful part of a battle.
As a chivalric symbol, the man on a horse represented power and the epitome of manhood. No doubt there were examples of this power being used for evil purposes. But these examples never became the norm in medieval society. Instead the power of the horseman / knight was encouraged to the degree that it assumed to role of defending virtue. In fact the combination, of this strength coupled with principle, is what virtue actually meant. The words “virtue” and “virile” come from the same root meaning manliness. The phrase “virtuous manliness” would have been considered redundant many generations ago. This is certainly no longer the case. Manliness today can mean a lot of things other than virtue. To understand why and how this change took place, though, requires a better understanding of what we mean by the word chivalry itself.
Many people think of a gentleman when they think of a modern example of chivalry. This is because of a history linking the two words that goes back to the time of Sir Walter Scott, and the revival of chivalry in 18th and 19th Century England. The trouble with linking these two words today, however, is that the meaning of “gentleman” is no longer the same as it used to be. To us a gentleman is a polite and considerate man with high standards. Perhaps he is of noble birth; or, conversely, he could be just any male person referred to in polite society. A couple of centuries ago a gentleman was much more than this.
One of the 19th Century’s most influential writers on chivalry was Kenelm Digby, author of The Broad Stone of Honour. Digby understood a gentleman to be a man with the qualities of chivalry which, to him, included: belief in God, generosity, high honor, independence, truthfulness, loyalty, hardihood, contempt for luxury, courtesy, modesty, humanity, and respect for women (see Girouard pp. 61-62).
Digby’s view of a gentleman was a bit grander than many of his time (or ours) felt comfortable with. He also had a penchant for hyperbole and, because of this, was often referred to as “silly”. Nonetheless, many serious writers were sympathetic to his ideals. Macaulay, Wordsworth, Ruskin and others all admitted that they liked reading his book.
What made The Broad Stone of Honour so popular was its placement of character above mere reason. This was a significant issue in the 19th Century, which saw the rise of Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism. Bentham abhorred emotional appeals and looked with suspicion on people with idealistic motivations. In many ways, the differences between traditional faiths and the so-called methodological atheism of our time are similar to these differences of the 19th Century. For the Utilitarian, the highest end to which a good society could aspire was the greatest contentment for the greatest number of people. If this meant sacrificing traditional values, then so be it. An evolving world needed to be ready to change, even its basic principles, if circumstances required it.
A good number of Englishmen, however, were not so sure. Many felt that truth, beauty and honor were worth defending. To them Digby’s call to chivalry was profoundly resonating. What also made it immediately useful was the direction it gave to young men. His very definition of chivalry addressed its relevance to boys directly:
“Chivalry is only a name for that general spirit or state of mind which disposes men to heroic and generous actions, and keeps them conversant with all that is beautiful and sublime in the intellectual and moral world. It will be found that … this spirit generally prevails in youth than in the later periods of men’s lives; and, as the heroic is always the earliest age in the history of nations, so youth, the first period of human life, may be considered as the heroic or chivalrous age of each separate man …As long as there has been or shall be, young men to grow up to maturity, and until all youthful life shall be dead, and it’s source withered for ever, so long must there have been, and must there continue to be, the spirit of noble chivalry.”
This version of chivalry carried with it a contagious zeal that inspired a nation of young men with noble dreams. And, in fact, Digby‘s influence did not end with his generation. It has extended clear through the 20th Century into our own time in the organizations of the Boy Scouts. Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of scouting most likely read from Digby in his youth, “and certainly went to it for ideas when he was forming the Boy Scouts” (Girouard, page 64). In early scout handbooks, there were sections comparing knightly errantry to daily good deeds. Pictures of knights were also included to inspire boys to virtuous acts of service.
Today this image of a strong Christian man going to war sends mixed symbols. Sadly, religion itself has become a synonym to many people of intolerance - even the cause of all the evils of war. The most influential atheists of our time use this argument as one of their chief exhibits in “proving” that God does not exist.
Where then does chivalry have anything helpful to say in such a world? The answer should be: everywhere. At the very core of chivalry is the insistence that there are some things that need to be defended. A society that ignores this - or worse, a society that tries to hide this - will soon find itself precariously vulnerable to enemies without.
Men are programmed to be defenders. Boys that are becoming men are too. This willingness to fight if provoked is not just a cultural artifact of a troubled society as some people think. It is hardwired into a man’s psyche. And there is real danger if we think we can remove it when it becomes a social problem - as it often does when we no longer know what we should be fighting for.
Chivalry should be our response to an ever more violent and virtue-less world. I don’t mean by this that we take up arms and suddenly become belligerent. (I believe that at its core, chivalry is defensive and not offensive.) Neither do I mean that we ignore the Christian virtue of turning the other cheek. True chivalry, after all, is able to take abuse. I do mean that we as a society should begin to recognize and encourage the man who will stand up for what is right - staking his honor on it. I also mean that we should encourage boys to defend young women at all costs against anyone that would threaten their virtue. This requires, of course, that we raise boys with moral courage. It requires that they learn about their birthright - which is to become men of honor.
We can easily make too much out of chivalry. One doesn’t have to dig too far to find examples of its abuse or of those that have wandered from its ideal. Those who are against any kind of manliness at all tend to focus on these deviations. Certainly we don’t need belligerent Christians or more honor-saturated gangs. But boys still need to have dreams. Should they be content to wile away their youth wishing to be nothing more than computer game champions or paint ball warriors? Are there no virtuous ideals left to fight for?
Where is the church or school sensible and willing enough to admit a curriculum honoring the dreams of chivalry – at least those dreams that inspire a boy to become a virtuous man? Where are the stories of the modern knight-errant: of a young hero befriending an unpopular girl, of the man refusing to act dishonestly, of a burly teenager giving his coat to a child? It’s time we started giving these stories a bit more attention.
We have been trying for too long to fix a criminally violent world by destroying manliness. What we should have been doing all along – and what we desperately need to do now – is to prepare virtuous and manly men to fix the problem. We need to raise boys that have valiant dreams.
Works Cited
Braudy, Leo. 2003. From Chivalry to Terrorism. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
Digby, Kenelm Henry. 1846. The Broad Stone of Honour: or the True Sense and Practice of Chivalry. Kessinger Publishing’s Rare Reprints.
Girouard, Mark. 1982. The Return to Camelot, Chivalry and the English Gentleman. Yale University Press, New Haven and London.
On one occasion a couple of these characters seated themselves right behind me and for several minutes carried on the most colorful conversation imaginable. They seemed incapable of uttering a sentence without an expletive. Usually there was more than one - piled on top of each other in adjectival abandon. Often they were very graphically offensive. I was quite upset by it but didn’t, at first, dare to say anything.
In the seat in front of me was an elderly lady. I had not paid much attention to her at first but as I became more and more uncomfortable with the vulgarities behind me, I noticed that she was uncomfortable too. It was then that I realized I needed to do something. For some reason unknown to me then, I felt a responsibility to protect her.
I then ran through in my mind a couple of ways I might confront the offenders. In the end I just turned around and asked them in a friendly way if they wouldn’t mind toning their language down a bit. To my surprise they apologized and then got off the bus a couple of stops later. When my stop arrived and I got up to leave, the woman thanked me for what I had done. I remember stepping down from the bus onto the street feeling like I had done something significant - something morally empowering. Later I would come to realize that I was feeling chivalrous.
Chivalry is a medieval word. It brings to mind a warrior spirit and a protective instinct for those that are weak - particularly women and children. It reminds us of a time when chivalrous men protected ladies and fought in defense of Christ. These days it seems to be quite out of favor. This may seem odd at first. After all, who doesn’t know of a teenage girl that dreams of being a princess, live in a castle, and be courted by a brave and handsome knight? One can even argue that the simple act of opening a door for a woman is a small nod to the spirit of chivalry. And most women still appreciate the gesture. At church the other day a gentleman offered his seat to a young mother carrying her child. She graciously accepted it, and I was glad that some women still allow men to watch out for them. How then can chivalry – even a modern version of it – be out of favor?
The problem is that our society is becoming more and more reluctant to acknowledge that men might be stronger than women. We’re even uncomfortable acknowledging that women might have greater endurance than men. Unless a situation is “gender-neutral” we get a little nervous - at least in mixed company.
The case for a manly defense of Christian morality is even more unacceptable in public. The separation of church and state - a policy that we established to guarantee religious liberty in a Christian nation - has become a bludgeon that is used to enforce public agnosticism. A boy that presumes to be motivated by his faith to care for the “weaker sex” is unacceptable on two counts. He is much too public about his religion, and he seems all too condescending to women.
Another concern with Christian morality in its chivalrous form is that it is thought to lead ultimately to imperialism with its suppression of minorities. Some authors have even gone so far as to suggest that terrorism has its roots in chivalry. One can begin to see that bringing chivalry back into such a world would involve a good deal of resistance.
The word “chivalry” itself traces back through Middle English to the French “chevalier” and ultimately to the Latin word for horseman. In its English form, chivalry has a long association with knights and there is an immense romantic literature about them. One aspect of the medieval knight that is usually forgotten, though, is that the knight was originally part of a lower class of society. Often knights were servants. In English (and German) the term for horseman also carried with it a sense of a young lad on the verge of manhood (Braudy, page 66). This was because becoming a horseman implied a great deal of responsibility. A horse is a powerful animal and, unless it is well trained, is not something that a boy can handle by himself. A man on a horse, on the other hand, regardless of his status in society, is capable of going into battle. In fact, such a man becomes a powerful part of a battle.
As a chivalric symbol, the man on a horse represented power and the epitome of manhood. No doubt there were examples of this power being used for evil purposes. But these examples never became the norm in medieval society. Instead the power of the horseman / knight was encouraged to the degree that it assumed to role of defending virtue. In fact the combination, of this strength coupled with principle, is what virtue actually meant. The words “virtue” and “virile” come from the same root meaning manliness. The phrase “virtuous manliness” would have been considered redundant many generations ago. This is certainly no longer the case. Manliness today can mean a lot of things other than virtue. To understand why and how this change took place, though, requires a better understanding of what we mean by the word chivalry itself.
Many people think of a gentleman when they think of a modern example of chivalry. This is because of a history linking the two words that goes back to the time of Sir Walter Scott, and the revival of chivalry in 18th and 19th Century England. The trouble with linking these two words today, however, is that the meaning of “gentleman” is no longer the same as it used to be. To us a gentleman is a polite and considerate man with high standards. Perhaps he is of noble birth; or, conversely, he could be just any male person referred to in polite society. A couple of centuries ago a gentleman was much more than this.
One of the 19th Century’s most influential writers on chivalry was Kenelm Digby, author of The Broad Stone of Honour. Digby understood a gentleman to be a man with the qualities of chivalry which, to him, included: belief in God, generosity, high honor, independence, truthfulness, loyalty, hardihood, contempt for luxury, courtesy, modesty, humanity, and respect for women (see Girouard pp. 61-62).
Digby’s view of a gentleman was a bit grander than many of his time (or ours) felt comfortable with. He also had a penchant for hyperbole and, because of this, was often referred to as “silly”. Nonetheless, many serious writers were sympathetic to his ideals. Macaulay, Wordsworth, Ruskin and others all admitted that they liked reading his book.
What made The Broad Stone of Honour so popular was its placement of character above mere reason. This was a significant issue in the 19th Century, which saw the rise of Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism. Bentham abhorred emotional appeals and looked with suspicion on people with idealistic motivations. In many ways, the differences between traditional faiths and the so-called methodological atheism of our time are similar to these differences of the 19th Century. For the Utilitarian, the highest end to which a good society could aspire was the greatest contentment for the greatest number of people. If this meant sacrificing traditional values, then so be it. An evolving world needed to be ready to change, even its basic principles, if circumstances required it.
A good number of Englishmen, however, were not so sure. Many felt that truth, beauty and honor were worth defending. To them Digby’s call to chivalry was profoundly resonating. What also made it immediately useful was the direction it gave to young men. His very definition of chivalry addressed its relevance to boys directly:
“Chivalry is only a name for that general spirit or state of mind which disposes men to heroic and generous actions, and keeps them conversant with all that is beautiful and sublime in the intellectual and moral world. It will be found that … this spirit generally prevails in youth than in the later periods of men’s lives; and, as the heroic is always the earliest age in the history of nations, so youth, the first period of human life, may be considered as the heroic or chivalrous age of each separate man …As long as there has been or shall be, young men to grow up to maturity, and until all youthful life shall be dead, and it’s source withered for ever, so long must there have been, and must there continue to be, the spirit of noble chivalry.”
This version of chivalry carried with it a contagious zeal that inspired a nation of young men with noble dreams. And, in fact, Digby‘s influence did not end with his generation. It has extended clear through the 20th Century into our own time in the organizations of the Boy Scouts. Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of scouting most likely read from Digby in his youth, “and certainly went to it for ideas when he was forming the Boy Scouts” (Girouard, page 64). In early scout handbooks, there were sections comparing knightly errantry to daily good deeds. Pictures of knights were also included to inspire boys to virtuous acts of service.
Today this image of a strong Christian man going to war sends mixed symbols. Sadly, religion itself has become a synonym to many people of intolerance - even the cause of all the evils of war. The most influential atheists of our time use this argument as one of their chief exhibits in “proving” that God does not exist.
Where then does chivalry have anything helpful to say in such a world? The answer should be: everywhere. At the very core of chivalry is the insistence that there are some things that need to be defended. A society that ignores this - or worse, a society that tries to hide this - will soon find itself precariously vulnerable to enemies without.
Men are programmed to be defenders. Boys that are becoming men are too. This willingness to fight if provoked is not just a cultural artifact of a troubled society as some people think. It is hardwired into a man’s psyche. And there is real danger if we think we can remove it when it becomes a social problem - as it often does when we no longer know what we should be fighting for.
Chivalry should be our response to an ever more violent and virtue-less world. I don’t mean by this that we take up arms and suddenly become belligerent. (I believe that at its core, chivalry is defensive and not offensive.) Neither do I mean that we ignore the Christian virtue of turning the other cheek. True chivalry, after all, is able to take abuse. I do mean that we as a society should begin to recognize and encourage the man who will stand up for what is right - staking his honor on it. I also mean that we should encourage boys to defend young women at all costs against anyone that would threaten their virtue. This requires, of course, that we raise boys with moral courage. It requires that they learn about their birthright - which is to become men of honor.
We can easily make too much out of chivalry. One doesn’t have to dig too far to find examples of its abuse or of those that have wandered from its ideal. Those who are against any kind of manliness at all tend to focus on these deviations. Certainly we don’t need belligerent Christians or more honor-saturated gangs. But boys still need to have dreams. Should they be content to wile away their youth wishing to be nothing more than computer game champions or paint ball warriors? Are there no virtuous ideals left to fight for?
Where is the church or school sensible and willing enough to admit a curriculum honoring the dreams of chivalry – at least those dreams that inspire a boy to become a virtuous man? Where are the stories of the modern knight-errant: of a young hero befriending an unpopular girl, of the man refusing to act dishonestly, of a burly teenager giving his coat to a child? It’s time we started giving these stories a bit more attention.
We have been trying for too long to fix a criminally violent world by destroying manliness. What we should have been doing all along – and what we desperately need to do now – is to prepare virtuous and manly men to fix the problem. We need to raise boys that have valiant dreams.
Works Cited
Braudy, Leo. 2003. From Chivalry to Terrorism. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
Digby, Kenelm Henry. 1846. The Broad Stone of Honour: or the True Sense and Practice of Chivalry. Kessinger Publishing’s Rare Reprints.
Girouard, Mark. 1982. The Return to Camelot, Chivalry and the English Gentleman. Yale University Press, New Haven and London.
Monday, December 21, 2009
One of Us
Right after Jesus was born He was wrapped in a crude little piece of cloth and placed in a feeding trough. That is, He was wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger. Wise men at some time after his birth - maybe many weeks after - brought Him the ointments of kings. But at the time of He came into the world, Jesus lacked any kind of a regal reception. He came into the world surrounded by the sights, sounds and smells of farm animals.
For over two millennia we have been trying to understand what it means that the Creator of the world became like one of us. Christian orthodoxy accepts that He was born like a human baby, that he grew up like we do, and that He experienced the joys and the pains of mortality - only without committing sin. Nonetheless, according to this same orthodoxy, God was not transformed into a man, nor for that matter, was man changed into a god. It all seems a bit confusing. He is like us and yet he isn’t. Why did He come to earth this way in the first place? It leaves one wondering if we haven’t left something important out of the “official version.”
Fortunately at Christmastime we celebrate the birth of Christ as related in the gospels and not as indicated in the official creeds. If we stop and reflect on these remarkable verses, we can still somehow hear the bleating of sheep and the lowing of cattle. We can imagine the farmyard steam rising around the baby Jesus in His morning manger, and breathe in the rural pungency of a warming spring day in Bethlehem.
Perhaps Baby Jesus had a lock of curly black hair, a freckle on his chin, maybe even playful greenish brown eyes. He probably puckered His nose for a noisome fly. And if you tickled His feet with a piece of straw, He very likely curled His chubby little toes. It seems to me that if these stories were written for any reason at all, they were written to make one thing perfectly clear: Jesus is one of us.
This turns out to be a troubling thought if you don’t have a very good perception of human beings. In fact it almost verges on blasphemy. How could a divine being - even living without sin - become a mortal being and still be God? Even worse is the conclusion atheists draw from a very mortal Jesus: “of course he was mortal, what else did you expect?”
The question that needs to be asked is: where did we come up with this poor perception of human beings to begin with? For “Ye are Gods; and all of you are children of the most High” (Psalms 82:6.). if we start with the understanding that we are created in the image of God and that He insists on calling us His children (for the very obvious reason that He is our father) why should we wonder that our older brother Jesus Christ was born a human being just like us?
We have trained our minds for too long imagining that we can never understand the condescension of god (or call it the incarnation if you like). As a result, we have lost sight of our own potential. We have lost sight of who we really are.
The little baby wrapped in swaddling clothes is our brother, and He has made it possible to return home. If we haven’t figured this out yet, it’s time to think again about the true meaning of Christmas.
For over two millennia we have been trying to understand what it means that the Creator of the world became like one of us. Christian orthodoxy accepts that He was born like a human baby, that he grew up like we do, and that He experienced the joys and the pains of mortality - only without committing sin. Nonetheless, according to this same orthodoxy, God was not transformed into a man, nor for that matter, was man changed into a god. It all seems a bit confusing. He is like us and yet he isn’t. Why did He come to earth this way in the first place? It leaves one wondering if we haven’t left something important out of the “official version.”
Fortunately at Christmastime we celebrate the birth of Christ as related in the gospels and not as indicated in the official creeds. If we stop and reflect on these remarkable verses, we can still somehow hear the bleating of sheep and the lowing of cattle. We can imagine the farmyard steam rising around the baby Jesus in His morning manger, and breathe in the rural pungency of a warming spring day in Bethlehem.
Perhaps Baby Jesus had a lock of curly black hair, a freckle on his chin, maybe even playful greenish brown eyes. He probably puckered His nose for a noisome fly. And if you tickled His feet with a piece of straw, He very likely curled His chubby little toes. It seems to me that if these stories were written for any reason at all, they were written to make one thing perfectly clear: Jesus is one of us.
This turns out to be a troubling thought if you don’t have a very good perception of human beings. In fact it almost verges on blasphemy. How could a divine being - even living without sin - become a mortal being and still be God? Even worse is the conclusion atheists draw from a very mortal Jesus: “of course he was mortal, what else did you expect?”
The question that needs to be asked is: where did we come up with this poor perception of human beings to begin with? For “Ye are Gods; and all of you are children of the most High” (Psalms 82:6.). if we start with the understanding that we are created in the image of God and that He insists on calling us His children (for the very obvious reason that He is our father) why should we wonder that our older brother Jesus Christ was born a human being just like us?
We have trained our minds for too long imagining that we can never understand the condescension of god (or call it the incarnation if you like). As a result, we have lost sight of our own potential. We have lost sight of who we really are.
The little baby wrapped in swaddling clothes is our brother, and He has made it possible to return home. If we haven’t figured this out yet, it’s time to think again about the true meaning of Christmas.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Hope Abides
Some time ago in a class at church I listened as a comment was made about the principle of hope. “It’s an important principle,” admitted one of the class members, “but it’s kind of a weak one compared to some of the other principles of the gospel.”
This seemed rather sad to me, although I understood how someone might think so. Hope to many people is not much more than wishful thinking. In fact the dictionary considers hope to be just an optimistic desire about the future. And since the future is so ill-defined, how can hope be anything more substantial than a birthday wish made over candles on a cake?
It then occurred to me that hope has an additional meaning in Spanish. It can mean “waiting” - esperanza. Is it possible, I thought, that waiting was originally an important part of the meaning of hope that we have lost - except by those speaking Spanish?
I looked in new dictionaries without much luck. Then I went to older dictionaries and still could not find any evidence for my hunch. Even the word elpida (in the Greek New Testament) and the Latin speranza (in the Vulgate) lacked this sense of waiting. I was about to give up when I decided to check my copy of The Complete Biblical Library (Gilbrant et al.). In the second volume of the Greek-English Dictionary (in the discussion of “elpis”) I found it. Hope at one time had everything to do with waiting.
“There is probably no area in which the contrast between the Greek and the Hebraic concepts of life appear more clearly than in the differences between their conceptions of hope.”
So wrote the editors of this dictionary. In ancient Israel, hope did mean waiting. In fact it sometimes meant longsuffering. Certainly it could involve an optimism about the future but this optimism was tempered with time. It could also be tempered with grief. I was beginning to learn that hope was not necessarily a weak principle at all. To have hope - to endure the trials of life while remaining true to a divine desire - is to prove one’s faith. If faith is central to religion, hope becomes its refining fire.
The Hebrew word that conveys this sense of hope is qāwâh, and an important example of how it is used can be found in Isaiah 40:31:
“But they that wait [hope] upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”
This word for hope is usually translated in our scriptures to mean waiting. This is, of course appropriate. The trouble with it, though, is that because it carries more than one meaning, translators ended up having to choose between them. It seems that the sense of waiting was lost.
Having made this discovery, I then looked in the New Testament to see if there was any of this Hebrew sense of hope there. I was pleased to find that there was, but one has to look for both words (hope and wait/endure) to find it.
One remarkable example is the 13th chapter of 1st Corinthians. This is Paul’s famous discussion on charity and not the first place you would think to look for references about hope. But Paul understood charity as a culmination of faith and hope. Specifically, he saw both faith and hope as virtues that endure.
What stands out in his discussion of hope is his creative use of the Greek language and his expansion of the Hebrew concept of hope - with its sense of waiting and longsuffering - to include a Christian optimism in Christ.
There are primarily two words that are used in the Greek New Testament to convey the Old Testament meaning of hope. One is hypomeneo (the most commonly used) which means waiting or enduring. The other word is elpida which is very close in meaning to our word hope. In Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, he uses both forms, although if you don’t read it in the Greek you will miss it.
“And now abideth [meneo] faith, hope [elpis], charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity” (1st Corinthians 13:13)
Paul uses the optimistic form of hope (if we can call it that for convenience) here - the Greek elpida. For him, hope in Christ is something to experience optimistically. But he is also sensitive to the Jewish understanding of waiting and also refers to it (he uses the word meneo - a less onerous form of hypomeneo). In this verse (from the King James Version) it is translated as “abideth”.
This may all seem a bit technical but the meaning is very simple. It is also significant: hope is much more than just wishful thinking.
This dual sense of hope continued into the early Christian period. The Epistle of Polycarp to the Philippians (written in the 2nd Century) pleads for both longsuffering and patience in hope (see Roberts and Donaldson).
“Let us then continually persevere in our hope, and the earnest of our righteousness, which is Jesus Christ … Let us then be imitators of His patience; and if we suffer for His name’s sake, let us glorify Him.”
Augustine, in his work on faith, hope and charity (the Enchiridion, written in the early 5th Century) does not have much to say about hope but does acknowledge Paul’s epistle to the Romans with it’s understanding of waiting.
“For we are saved by hope: but hope that is see is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.” (Romans 8:24-25)
By the time of Thomas Aquinas, however (mid 13th Century), the Old Testament understanding of hope is difficult to detect. His treatise on faith, hope and charity (in the Summa Theologica) is comprised of roughly 500 pages. But just over ten percent of this is given to any discussion of hope, and most of these pages are only a discussion contrasting hope with fear. The older concept of waiting is acknowledged briefly but ambiguously.
“The expectation which is mentioned in the definition of hope does not imply delay although longanimity may pertain to hope. But hope implies a reference to the Divine assistance, whether that which we hope for be delayed or not.”
Much of the problem seems to be that there just hasn’t been an adequate word that conveys both the senses of waiting and of wishing that the ancient authors appreciated. Translators have been left on their own to decide the best word to use in any given context, assuming they understood the language nuances to begin with. An alternative would be to describe both meanings in repetitive or contrasting ways like Paul did in 1st Corinthians. Fortunately we have a handful of places where this method does occur. The best examples happen to be in the Book of Mormon.
One of the key chapters on faith in the Book of Mormon is Alma 32. It is also an important, though rarely recognized, chapter on hope. In fact verse 21 (perhaps the most widely quoted verse in the chapter) shows that the two principles are interconnected in an important way.
…"faith is not to have a perfect knowledge of things; therefore if ye have faith ye hope for things which are not seen, which are true."
And what are these things that can’t be seen that we, with faith, will hope for? They are actually quite simple, but Alma first wants to explain something else. He wants to shows us that through experimenting on the word and nourishing it that we can look forward to the fruits of faith. And it is by looking forward to this fruit, coming from a tree that has become rooted and well cared for, that we can hope for eternal life (Alma 32: 41).
It is this journey of faith to the fruit of faith that requires hope. And it isn’t until the last verse of this remarkable chapter that Alma mentions how this is to be done. In fact he doesn’t even use the word hope at all - at least the word for hope that we’re familiar with. Instead he describes it in the words of his scriptural heritage where hope means waiting.
“Then my brethren, ye shall reap the rewards of your faith, and your diligence, and patience, and long suffering, waiting on the tree to bring forth fruit unto you” (Alma 32: 43).
Obviously Alma understood hope to be much more than wishful thinking.
It appears that faith is to be tried. It is to be experimented with - even proven. And it is this trying of faith that informs hope. The prophet Ether, in another important chapter on faith, teaches that if men will humble themselves before the Lord and have faith in Him, will He turn their weaknesses into strengths. And then will faith, hope and charity bring men unto Christ the fountain of all righteousness (Ether 12: 27-28). So it is that faith must endure through trials of its own. As it does so, it waits. It endures. In a word, it hopes. As it is refined, it knows charity and brings us unto Christ.
Finally at the end of the Book of Mormon, Moroni includes some of the teachings of his father Mormon about the interconnectedness of faith, hope and charity. He then adds his father’s prayer that God the Father will keep him through the endurance of faith on his name to the end (Moroni 8: 3).
Sadly, our generation, more than any other, is handicapped from being able to understand hope. Part of the reason for this is that we find it difficult to wait for, or through, anything. It’s truly revealing how agonized some of us become over a slow traffic light, a slow computer, or the delay of a package by a day. Our hope-less condition becomes almost a spectacle in the long frustrated lines of cars waiting for fast food at a drive-through window. Efficiency is the name of the game, and the innovator that helps us save a few minutes is our hero.
But who understands the Law of the Harvest anymore – the principle of reaping what we sow, the principle of working and waiting before we receive? Our ancestors used to know about waiting by the sheer necessity of living off of the land. They also knew that the planting of seeds was an act of faith that required a period of gestation – a period of patient maturation and care.
This is the way things are meant to be – both for seeds and for faith. The Lord doesn’t normally test our faith by requiring some immediately difficult task. He tests our faith in the prolonging of our trials. Without this period of testing we would never grow to understand the love of God.
This pathway to Christ - the pathway of faith, hope and charity - is quite a different pathway than we sometimes think. It is also different than our generation is able to easily understand. Faith is certainly much more than a blind rational belief when it is truly experienced. Charity, likewise, as a gift from God is much more than another word for love or for almsgiving. And hope - that “middle” virtue that so often gets lost in between faith and charity - is much more than a weak doctrine of wishful thinking. It is the very path of patience in faith that brings us to Christ. It is the connecting link that makes faith and charity understandable in a world of doctrinal semantics and temporal confusion. It is, most certainly, a crowning virtue. Faith, we are taught, is the evidence of things not seen that are true. And hope, as it should be properly understood, is the evidence of this faith. It endures. It abides.
Works Cited
Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica Part. II, Question 17, Article 5.
Gilbrant, Thoralf et al. eds. 1991. World Library Press, Inc. Springfield, Missouri.
Roberts, A and J. Donaldson eds. 1995 Anti-Nicene Fathers. Vol. 1, Chapter VIII.
This seemed rather sad to me, although I understood how someone might think so. Hope to many people is not much more than wishful thinking. In fact the dictionary considers hope to be just an optimistic desire about the future. And since the future is so ill-defined, how can hope be anything more substantial than a birthday wish made over candles on a cake?
It then occurred to me that hope has an additional meaning in Spanish. It can mean “waiting” - esperanza. Is it possible, I thought, that waiting was originally an important part of the meaning of hope that we have lost - except by those speaking Spanish?
I looked in new dictionaries without much luck. Then I went to older dictionaries and still could not find any evidence for my hunch. Even the word elpida (in the Greek New Testament) and the Latin speranza (in the Vulgate) lacked this sense of waiting. I was about to give up when I decided to check my copy of The Complete Biblical Library (Gilbrant et al.). In the second volume of the Greek-English Dictionary (in the discussion of “elpis”) I found it. Hope at one time had everything to do with waiting.
“There is probably no area in which the contrast between the Greek and the Hebraic concepts of life appear more clearly than in the differences between their conceptions of hope.”
So wrote the editors of this dictionary. In ancient Israel, hope did mean waiting. In fact it sometimes meant longsuffering. Certainly it could involve an optimism about the future but this optimism was tempered with time. It could also be tempered with grief. I was beginning to learn that hope was not necessarily a weak principle at all. To have hope - to endure the trials of life while remaining true to a divine desire - is to prove one’s faith. If faith is central to religion, hope becomes its refining fire.
The Hebrew word that conveys this sense of hope is qāwâh, and an important example of how it is used can be found in Isaiah 40:31:
“But they that wait [hope] upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”
This word for hope is usually translated in our scriptures to mean waiting. This is, of course appropriate. The trouble with it, though, is that because it carries more than one meaning, translators ended up having to choose between them. It seems that the sense of waiting was lost.
Having made this discovery, I then looked in the New Testament to see if there was any of this Hebrew sense of hope there. I was pleased to find that there was, but one has to look for both words (hope and wait/endure) to find it.
One remarkable example is the 13th chapter of 1st Corinthians. This is Paul’s famous discussion on charity and not the first place you would think to look for references about hope. But Paul understood charity as a culmination of faith and hope. Specifically, he saw both faith and hope as virtues that endure.
What stands out in his discussion of hope is his creative use of the Greek language and his expansion of the Hebrew concept of hope - with its sense of waiting and longsuffering - to include a Christian optimism in Christ.
There are primarily two words that are used in the Greek New Testament to convey the Old Testament meaning of hope. One is hypomeneo (the most commonly used) which means waiting or enduring. The other word is elpida which is very close in meaning to our word hope. In Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, he uses both forms, although if you don’t read it in the Greek you will miss it.
“And now abideth [meneo] faith, hope [elpis], charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity” (1st Corinthians 13:13)
Paul uses the optimistic form of hope (if we can call it that for convenience) here - the Greek elpida. For him, hope in Christ is something to experience optimistically. But he is also sensitive to the Jewish understanding of waiting and also refers to it (he uses the word meneo - a less onerous form of hypomeneo). In this verse (from the King James Version) it is translated as “abideth”.
This may all seem a bit technical but the meaning is very simple. It is also significant: hope is much more than just wishful thinking.
This dual sense of hope continued into the early Christian period. The Epistle of Polycarp to the Philippians (written in the 2nd Century) pleads for both longsuffering and patience in hope (see Roberts and Donaldson).
“Let us then continually persevere in our hope, and the earnest of our righteousness, which is Jesus Christ … Let us then be imitators of His patience; and if we suffer for His name’s sake, let us glorify Him.”
Augustine, in his work on faith, hope and charity (the Enchiridion, written in the early 5th Century) does not have much to say about hope but does acknowledge Paul’s epistle to the Romans with it’s understanding of waiting.
“For we are saved by hope: but hope that is see is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.” (Romans 8:24-25)
By the time of Thomas Aquinas, however (mid 13th Century), the Old Testament understanding of hope is difficult to detect. His treatise on faith, hope and charity (in the Summa Theologica) is comprised of roughly 500 pages. But just over ten percent of this is given to any discussion of hope, and most of these pages are only a discussion contrasting hope with fear. The older concept of waiting is acknowledged briefly but ambiguously.
“The expectation which is mentioned in the definition of hope does not imply delay although longanimity may pertain to hope. But hope implies a reference to the Divine assistance, whether that which we hope for be delayed or not.”
Much of the problem seems to be that there just hasn’t been an adequate word that conveys both the senses of waiting and of wishing that the ancient authors appreciated. Translators have been left on their own to decide the best word to use in any given context, assuming they understood the language nuances to begin with. An alternative would be to describe both meanings in repetitive or contrasting ways like Paul did in 1st Corinthians. Fortunately we have a handful of places where this method does occur. The best examples happen to be in the Book of Mormon.
One of the key chapters on faith in the Book of Mormon is Alma 32. It is also an important, though rarely recognized, chapter on hope. In fact verse 21 (perhaps the most widely quoted verse in the chapter) shows that the two principles are interconnected in an important way.
…"faith is not to have a perfect knowledge of things; therefore if ye have faith ye hope for things which are not seen, which are true."
And what are these things that can’t be seen that we, with faith, will hope for? They are actually quite simple, but Alma first wants to explain something else. He wants to shows us that through experimenting on the word and nourishing it that we can look forward to the fruits of faith. And it is by looking forward to this fruit, coming from a tree that has become rooted and well cared for, that we can hope for eternal life (Alma 32: 41).
It is this journey of faith to the fruit of faith that requires hope. And it isn’t until the last verse of this remarkable chapter that Alma mentions how this is to be done. In fact he doesn’t even use the word hope at all - at least the word for hope that we’re familiar with. Instead he describes it in the words of his scriptural heritage where hope means waiting.
“Then my brethren, ye shall reap the rewards of your faith, and your diligence, and patience, and long suffering, waiting on the tree to bring forth fruit unto you” (Alma 32: 43).
Obviously Alma understood hope to be much more than wishful thinking.
It appears that faith is to be tried. It is to be experimented with - even proven. And it is this trying of faith that informs hope. The prophet Ether, in another important chapter on faith, teaches that if men will humble themselves before the Lord and have faith in Him, will He turn their weaknesses into strengths. And then will faith, hope and charity bring men unto Christ the fountain of all righteousness (Ether 12: 27-28). So it is that faith must endure through trials of its own. As it does so, it waits. It endures. In a word, it hopes. As it is refined, it knows charity and brings us unto Christ.
Finally at the end of the Book of Mormon, Moroni includes some of the teachings of his father Mormon about the interconnectedness of faith, hope and charity. He then adds his father’s prayer that God the Father will keep him through the endurance of faith on his name to the end (Moroni 8: 3).
Sadly, our generation, more than any other, is handicapped from being able to understand hope. Part of the reason for this is that we find it difficult to wait for, or through, anything. It’s truly revealing how agonized some of us become over a slow traffic light, a slow computer, or the delay of a package by a day. Our hope-less condition becomes almost a spectacle in the long frustrated lines of cars waiting for fast food at a drive-through window. Efficiency is the name of the game, and the innovator that helps us save a few minutes is our hero.
But who understands the Law of the Harvest anymore – the principle of reaping what we sow, the principle of working and waiting before we receive? Our ancestors used to know about waiting by the sheer necessity of living off of the land. They also knew that the planting of seeds was an act of faith that required a period of gestation – a period of patient maturation and care.
This is the way things are meant to be – both for seeds and for faith. The Lord doesn’t normally test our faith by requiring some immediately difficult task. He tests our faith in the prolonging of our trials. Without this period of testing we would never grow to understand the love of God.
This pathway to Christ - the pathway of faith, hope and charity - is quite a different pathway than we sometimes think. It is also different than our generation is able to easily understand. Faith is certainly much more than a blind rational belief when it is truly experienced. Charity, likewise, as a gift from God is much more than another word for love or for almsgiving. And hope - that “middle” virtue that so often gets lost in between faith and charity - is much more than a weak doctrine of wishful thinking. It is the very path of patience in faith that brings us to Christ. It is the connecting link that makes faith and charity understandable in a world of doctrinal semantics and temporal confusion. It is, most certainly, a crowning virtue. Faith, we are taught, is the evidence of things not seen that are true. And hope, as it should be properly understood, is the evidence of this faith. It endures. It abides.
Works Cited
Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica Part. II, Question 17, Article 5.
Gilbrant, Thoralf et al. eds. 1991. World Library Press, Inc. Springfield, Missouri.
Roberts, A and J. Donaldson eds. 1995 Anti-Nicene Fathers. Vol. 1, Chapter VIII.
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