EMPOWERMENT OR AUTHORITY? SCHOLARLY OBJECTIVES FOR A PEOPLE OF THE BOOK David L. Jeffrey Faculty of Arts University of Ottawa Not only intellectuals and journalists, but ordinary men and women of our time are greatly preoccupied with the will to power. Empowerment is like desideratum of choice (if you will permit a playful tautology) featured in textbooks, trade magazines, and grocery store tabloids. It has even begun to creep into the language of the church. There it has tended to supplant an older and more generally reliable biblical word, “authority.” It has been able to do this, in part, because in the vernacular of our time “power” and “authority” are often confused. But spiritually speaking, this confusion can undermine a central truth of Scripture. Let me try to illustrate with a plain narrative from the country lore of my native district. When the road supervisor, a surveyor, was making preliminary sightings for widening of the county road, he stopped at one of our more eccentric neighbors to ask permission to enter his field to sight a few measurements. The old farmer grouchingly refused permission and invited the surveyor in typically unclerical terms to vacate the premises. The surveyor replied that he had “paper”¾written authority from the ministry of transport to do the work. The farmer resisted that gambit, demanding proof of this “authority.” At that the supervisor went to his pick up truck, and returned with a book of by-laws signed by the minister and showed the farmer the relevant paragraph as well as a letter with seal attached. Grudgingly, the farmer let The surveyor on to his field. He also went right up to the pens by the barn at the top end of the field and let out his large, old, and very cranky Holstein bull. As the distraught orange-jacketed surveyor ran transit akimbo toward the fence, going for all he was worth ~a few steps ahead of the bull, the old farmer yelled after him at the top of his lungs: “Show him your authority!” Power and authority are not the same thing. We who are called to live imitatio Christi, to be servants of the self-effacing Jesus, to take up the way of ~he Cross, to decrease that He might increase, are not encouraged to seek the way of this world's power. Rather, we are to serve¾and to speak as those who serve¾under authority. Even when it means that, as the world construes things, we are likely to be overpowered. Yet because of the nature of our authority, we know for a certainty what the world appears not to¾that the bull does not go on forever. And the authority by which we plot our course is eternal, from age to age The same. When Abram responded to the call of the Lord, he got himself up out of what archaeologists tell us was a luxurious and comfortable city, Ur of the Chaldees, to go across the backside of the wilderness to Haran. It must have seemed to his neighbors a flight from culture. Yet his active response to The word of God commenced, before a pen was lifted, the making of the world's most substantial book and fathered, before any parchment was rolled, a lineage of its most persistent readers. The story of Abram made Abraham, Sarai made Sarah, is the story of radical perspectival transformation, from an identity based upon mere derivation to identity based upon a promise God alone could offer. The history that begins in Genesis is indeed still for many of us the “grand narrative,” and for all those who trace their faith back over that desert track via The B'rith or by the pilgrimage of faith outlined in Hebrews 11, it has a narrative cogency no interpretative strategy, psychoanalytical trope or rationalist redefinition can eclipse. For it is the understanding of those of us who still think the Book worth reading that its existence testifies to revolutionary transformations in the human condition, actual historical responses to a call from God to go forward into adverse conditions in hope, seeking a history in the future optative, not merely in the past preterit sense. Thus, Lo be in The biblical way a “people of the Book” means anything but to be a people who live only in the past. It is to be a people who understand in knowledgeable gratitude what they owe to the past, to that which is already written, but who live forward, eagerly, in earnest hope of the fullness of our redemption. That is why, though Jewish and Christian thought are based upon a theory of limited understanding, “knowing in part” and “seeing through a glass darkly” (1 Cor. 3:9-12),there has always been in scriptural tradition a keen optimism about The process of learning. For as St. Paul put it to the Romans (in a chapter never more apt to contemporary readers than in our own time and context,) “the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are” (Rom. 1:20). Though narrowness of opportunity and personal subjectivity necessarily constrain the fullness of our understanding~ the joy of learning what we can is liberated by being premised upon confidence in the comprehensive reality of a larger 'knowing' in which all human perspectives, finally, are seen to be circumscribed. Centrality of the Book St. Augustine provides a convenient entry point into Christian thinking on this subject~, not only because he formalizes many of its central paradigms, but because his pre-Christian objections, as recorded in his Confessions, tally so well with perspectives of our own world. You may remember that for Augustine The convert, our thinking, the thinking of those who must turn to the middle to know anything about the beginning, to Christ to know about God, is necessarily the thinking of fallen minds, and has no beginning because it is necessarily circular. We think, exist, feel and will in a circle, and without the possibility of reference to something beyond itself our thinking wants to take this circle for the infinite and original reality and thus hopelessly entangles itself. But for Augustine before his conversion, The thing which made the opening words of Genesis so objectionable is in fact an expression of ~he same crux ¾ The reader's consciousness of his basic inability to construct the whole of his own narrative, to rewrite the “book.” For no one can speak of “the beginning” except One who was in the beginning. No ordinary person in the middle reaches cognitively from alpha to omega, even for the span of his own life. And so it is This very dilemma which highlights the implacable issue of reference for understanding. The real question posed by Genesis 1:1 for The reader (and it is the ultimate question in all forms of Christian thought)is: “In what sense will we let our author be our Author?” Modernist literary theory¾especially since the structuralists¾is acutely aware of this implication, and accordingly seeks to escape the sense of beginning or end as limit by seeking the “death of the author.” This particular strategy for the abolition of textual authority, which makes any attempt at veridical interpretation a specious exercise, was once [1970] most famously associated with Roland Barthes. Barthes argued the advantages of the assassination in this way: @INSET = Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text.... Literature...by refusing to assign a 'secret', an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text) 1 what may be called an antitheological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases ¾ reason, science, law. (Intro., S\Z) Then, “reality is our to make and remake as we please,” as another recent theorist has it (T. Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics [1977], 120-21). We are to become as gods. But ~he follower of Jesus, even if she is a literary theorist, no longer entertains such an ambition. The relationship of authorship to authority (“auctoritas” can mean either in Latin) remains a critical one for early, medieval, and¾in a slightly different version¾Reformational Christian thought. The real problem posed by man's “middleness” in reading Scripture¾or indeed any other text¾is the degree to which he will allow his author authority, or credibility, while the story is unfolded. The constraints which apply to human finitude in reading Scripture, the Book of God's Words, apply in some measure also to Nature, the Book of God's Works. Though is also a dark glass, it is nevertheless a glass, something through which we can see. One is invited to taste and see, to compare, to evaluate, to read, to interpret, and then to grow toward understanding. That is, granted our middleness, we are invited to begin where we are as in themuddled middle¾and to come by exploration and discovery to a place where, by reference to another text, we can in measure read and affirm the design of the Book which is written, not merely our own small part in one limited chapter. One sees here how such a biblically grounded world-view might be construed as historicist. But here it is necessary to urge caution against a modern, post-Christian understanding of the term “historicist.” Rather than the thesis-antithesis-synthesis dynamics of an Hegelian view of history, thinkers in the Judeo-Christian tradition have usually believed in history that unfolded, like a triptych, or the pages of a book in a pre-determined narrative, having the balance and the symmetries of story rather than the counterforces of Hegel's laboratory physics. In this story, like all good stories, meaning is not fully revealed until the ending. The structural prototype, the narrative model for the story of history, was, of course, the Bible. But the early and medieval Christian view of history is that historical judgments ¾ just as personal experience judgments ¾ are not construed in terms of a contest of forces and counter forces moving toward temporal compromise and a new synthesis. In this sense ~he popular term “medieval synthesis” is often misleading to our students. Medieval historical judgments are interim statements, process statements, construed in terms of contrast between ideal and fallen order. Or we could say that to some degree all historical actions constitute from a medieval Christian perspective either affirmation of or slippage from creational models. To take our bearings again from Augustine: the patterns of Creation, even patterns within the human psyche (e.g. De Trinitate, 12) reflect the mind of the Creator. Happily, this means that in learning about creation one is learning something about God at the same time. The universe ¾ that is, all created things which turn toward the One (unus + versus is like “a great book,” to be read and studied. Analogy helps. Just as we write with parchment and ink, so God writes with people and events, and in his story they are like syllables, linked together, interlocking narratives, striving toward a closure and significance which can only be fully realized in the end term, the verb of God, the Word made flesh. Reflecting on Ps. 19 (“The heavens declare the glory of God') Augustine sees the ”Book" in which we live as a necessary mediation to our fallen condition, our conditional perspective: You have extended like a skin the firmament of your Book, your harmonious discourses over us by the ministry of mortals.... [But] the angels... have no need to look upon this firmament, to learn through reading your word. For they always see your face, and read there without temporal syllables your eternal will... the changelessness of your counsel. (Confessions) From the vantage point of the early church, we in the world read thus by the light of grace and Sacred Scripture, which comes to us by the Spirit's provision through the ministry of mortals, the mediation of pen, vellum, and parchment. And printout. And we read also by the ministry of the creation which surrounds us. Later, in the high Middle Ages, St. Bonaventure will explain things in much the same way: The whole world is a shadow, a way, and a trace; a book with writing front and back. Indeed, in every creature there is a refulgence of the divine exemplar, but mixed with darkness; hence it resembles some kind of opacity combined with light. Yet, it is a way leading to the exemplar. As you notice a ray of light coming in through a window is colored according to the shades of different panes, so the divine ray shines differently in each creature and in the various properties.... It is a trace of God's wisdom. Wherefore the creature exists only as a~kind of imitation of God's wisdom, as certain plastic representation of it. and for all these reasons, is a kind of book written... without. (Hex. 12.14) Creation is a book¾The Book of God's works. History (personal or universal) is a book¾the Book of Memory. Completing this is Scripture¾the anthology of specific revelation¾the Book of God's Word. These ideas are still commonplace after the Reformation¾one may find them, for example, in Bacon's Advancement of Learning (3.268, 301), Thomas Browne's Religio Medici (1.16; 12.12), Donne's Essays in Divinity (708), and Milton's Paradise Lost (8.66-69). In fact, wherever in classic Christian thought writers write books about personal learning, about coming to understanding or to love, these metaphors are usually implicitly or even explicitly present. And the meaning of the metaphors for the conjunction of intellectual and spiritual life is consistent with the doctrine of Revelation and divine providence¾of God's supreme authorship. In this quite specific sense, then, Christian life imitates the art of God. In Book 8 of Augustine's Confessions, the famous conversion chapter, Augustine puts off the old man and takes on the new in a garden, and through the medium of God's Book (Romans 13) understood in reference to the Book of Creation, affirms his middleness and the authority of Creation's author. In consequence, Augustine combines the advantage of the book written without with God's Book to produce his own little book ¾ a book “written within.” The biblical model (cf. Isaiah, John, Revelation) is foundational to the structure of Christian epistemology ¾ indeed, for practical purposes, to all elaboration of Christian reflection. The Book of God becomes the criteria of reference for every other book. Those who dismiss us as the disciples of “logocentrism” often misunderstand or misconstrue us in that term (Jeffrey [1990]). But they occasionally get something of the idea right. So Derrida is certainly apprehending something of the scope of our trope, so to speak, when he observes in his obscurantist fashion that this “idea of the book is the idea of a totality, finite or infinite, of the signifier; this totality of the signifier cannot be a totality unless a totality constituted by the signified pre-exists, supervises its inscriptions and its signs, and is independent of it in its ideality” (De la grammatologie, 30). What he means, of course, is that you don't have a view of the cosmos as a Book unless you believe in a cosmic Author, and that you don't believe in the world as a Book unless you believe in a world that both begins and ends. Belief in a finite universe, in a world that ends when the “heavens shall be folded up like a book” (Isa. 34:4; Rev. 5:14) is of course irritating to the modernist imagination in a way complimentary and opposite to that resistance to imposition of a beginning in the young Augustine. That anyone should suggest that a full meaning be withheld till revelation of an ending which is not of our own devising might seem to our contemporaries, as moderns, the real provocation proposed by the Book. They want to insist on total control. But the Christian view of history is a view of history with a definite and imposed conclusion. It sees both beginning and ending as beyond our empirical grasp¾for any comprehension we are therefore subject to our need for a mediating, joining device, something which can knit each middle chapter into the sense of the whole unfolding book. And this, of course, is something we cannot plausibly generate for ourselves. The notion that “Men perish because they cannot join the beginning with the end” for Christian thought as well as for certain Greeks (e.g., Alcaemon of Crotona), describes a critical problem in epistemology, not just of biology. Its ultimate solution in biblically-informed thought is concisely summarized in the last book of tlle Bible. The conjoiner is noL just Lhe compleLe narraLive of the great “book that had writing on back and front” (Rev. 5:1) but the Word of the One who dares to read it¾the Author himself¾who in the opening words of St. John the n the closing words of that text, proclaims, “I am the Alpha and the Omega ... who is, who was, and who is to come, the Almighty” (Rev. 1:8). That is, the ending which God provides, the fullness of his Revelation seen already in Jesus, is to be an ingathering or 'comprehension' (in the radical sense of the word) of every Lhing, even the original beginning. In the meantime, our interim appreciation of his Logos, made flesh in Jesus, governs the principle of reference for understanding to ~he Great Book, a principle that makes history and creation middle ¾ alike more readable. BuL it also poses certain obvious conditions of limit on the time-bound reader. Implications of Our Bookishness From the earliest inception of Christian missions to evangelize the then-known world, the bookishness of a biblical people implied that to transplant the gospel meant to develop literacy. The earliest missionaries accordingly became translators, first orally and then with pen and ink making available Scripture and its commentaries in languages where before this book had never been read. As time went on, this extended to languages where nothing had ever before been read. Among my own pagan ancestors, for example, the Bible became in every practical sense foundational for literacy as well as for the growth of literature. Eventually, because of the growth of foreign missions out of Britain and then America, many who spoke the unlettered dialects of four farflung continents and many islands of the sea learned first the lineaments of their own language written, as well as in turn the Latin and English many came also to speak and write. To the central resource of Scrip~ure was soon added the benefits of indigenous commentary, as well as the commentary of the earlier Mediterranean Christian communities. This in turn produced the first Christian scholarship, first directed to the letter and implications of Scripture, then to the development of sustained ethical and scientific reflection. The astonishingly swift passage from illiteracy and barbarism to literacy and a love of learning is memorably cap~ured in the opening pages of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England: within a generation or two rustics became poets and hymnists, rough Vikings became theologians and veritable Brunehildas became abbesses and spiritual direcLors of Christian communities. (Bede's favorite abbess, under whom many of his colleagues respectully served, was the apparently formidable¾and godly¾Hilda.) Soon there grew up successions of genuine Christian cultured lay-leadership: one thinks inescapably of that wonderful scholar-king Alfred, justly called “the Great,” who regarded it as his first duty to copy out portions of the law of God in his own hand, to translate Scripture, commentaries, prefaces, and theological writings into the native language of his Anglo-Saxon people. That they might be a people of God, he said, they needs must be a people of his Book. The notion of the Christian as a philosopher of Christ, so prominent in the work of faithful Christians from Gregory the Great through Bernard, the Victorines, Aquinas, Wyclif, Luther, Calvin, Beza, Erasmus, Owen, Watts, and J.H. Newman is everywhere marked by commitment to the language of the Book and to Lhe literacy required to understand and communicate it: lex Dei, lex Christi, liber apostolorum. Even the formula sola Scriptura, to which the Reformers aspired, is in effect a vigorously renewed invitation to apprenticeship in Christian scholarship, to being a “people of the Book” in the widest sense of the old metaphor (cf. Bouwsma, John Calvin, 98-99). Perhaps nowhere is the enduring image of the Christian scholar more memorably etched than in the admiring biography of St. Jerome published in 151~ by Erasmus as the introduction to his monumental edition of the collected writings of the great scholar, translator, teacher, and theologian. Jerome was for Erasmus the chief model of Christian scholarship. (He was also that for the Brethren of the Common Life with whom Erasmus had once lived.) It is interesting to reflect on the reasons Erasmus offers for finding Jerome inspirational. First and foremost, Jerome is said to have acquired “a perfect memory of lloly Scripture” ¾ he was a person of the ingested Word, a man of the Book. Accordingly, he spoke, wrote and lived frotn the Book. His subsequent study and acquisition of mastery in bib1ica1 languages, in rabbinic exegesis and patristic commen~ary, were for bookish Erasmus characteristic of the genuine scholarly vocation of a person who, as he writes, had been “reborn in Christ ... and sworn allegiance to him” (CWE 61.27). Jerome saw his apostolic task as “taking every thought captive for Christ.” He made iL his business, Erasmus notes, to get “a thorough education in profane literature” and in classical philosophers ¾ at least those whose whose declared purpose in study was to know “that which is good.” Further, “he diligently examined all the libraries and met men who were distinguished either for their learning or their moral integrity, and everywhere he appropriated what he thought useful for the Christian life” (28). We could do worse than to imitate, Erasmus suggests, adding thoughtfully: “At length he went into hiding, as it were, in tllat remote desert,” discouraged with the crass and materialist superficiality of much of what passed for Christianity ¾ even in Antioch. There “for four years, far removed from the assembly of mell, he commenced on]y with Christ and with his books.” Amids~ a rou~ine of prayer and fasting, “he reread his entire library, renewing the memory of his old studies; he [memorized] Holy Scripture word for word.... From the Gospels and the apostolic letters as from the purest springs he drew the philosophy of Christ.... He read other exegetes with discretion and judgment, overlooking no writer at all from whom he might glean something, pagan or heretic. For he knew, prudent man, how to gather gold from a dung-pit... [and to] take from the Egyptians to adorn the temple of the Lord with the riches of the enemy” (33). I have quoted extensively from Erasmus' biography of Jerome, not simply because it reveals the admiration of one great Christian scholar for ano~her. Rather, because I believe both the Renaissance academic and his ancient teacher have much to tell us about what it is to be a Christian scholar, an intimate and disciplined reader of the Book in the specific as well as larger sense. Jerome's times, of course, even more than those of his biographer, foreshadow our own. Erasmus' metapllor of the dung pit for late Roman scholarship is polite. Jerome hated the corruption of his culture and civilization. He mourned at its visible crumbling, shuddered for its obviously immanent demise. But while he did not hide from himself that degeneration, neither did he preoccupy himself and others around him with wailing abou~ it publicly as though it were the only subject worth talking about. There seemed to him lit~le point in prophecying the obvious. In a world in which genuine wisdom was being ~rampled underfoot by rationalized cupidity and every kind of sophistry, he worked full speed ahead, wi~h all of his moral and intellectual energy, at being a philosopher of Christ (Epist. 127, 128). He raised the standards of biblical textual scholarship as of philology and commmentary to unprecedented levels. He taught whoever was willing to learn¾and against every cultural norm of his time cheerfully enrolled among his disciples women, both young and old. Many of the brightest of his students and confererates in fact were women (cf. his Pref. to Galatians). There are other reasons for heeding Erasmus in regarding Jerome as an especially valuable model for those of us in academic life who would (in the old sense) be “people of the Book.” Because they strike me as important today for pretty much the same reasons they were then, I would like to list them now by way of summarizing what I take to be perennial intellectual implications of our trying to be such a people. First, Jerome grounded all of his scholarship on a coherent doctrine of revelation, and made thorough possession of the text of Scripture his first and last priority. He knew, as Carl F.H. Henry puts it plainly in the first volume of his six-volume magnum opus (God, Revelation, and Authority), that “More is sacrificed by defecting from the truth of revelatioll ttlan simply the tru~h about God and man and the world; loss of truth and Word of God plunges into darkness the very truth of truth, the meaning of meaning, and even the significance of language” (1.29). Second, he had a respect for apostolic traditions of interpretation, and sought to recover as much of this as he could to enrich and constrain his own subjectivity as a reader of Scripture. Like Augustine, he knew that to some considerable degree we are what we remember, and that our common memory of God's redemptive action in Jesus is what gives us our continuing identity as a community of faith, a community which is diachronic and multicultured, not narrowly synchronous and monolithic. Third, he sought to have a view of human history and present human action both as sub species aeternitas. Which is to say, he regularly undertook a scholar's examination of conscience. He would well have appreciated Kierkegaard's dictum that it simply is not the same thing to say to someone “live responsibly” and to say “Live responsibly: there is a Last Judgment.” Fourth, he sought always to achieve a cognitively discoursable credo, and within the Christian community and without to be open to and engage in discussion concerning how that might continually be improved and made pertinent. Fifth, to do this, he strove to be in the highest degree literate, and to pursue literacy for others, finding in myriad ways the means to make the Word of God accessible in the words of men. As he was fond of saying, a translator is an interpreter; a teacher or interptreter ought to be a translator in effect. Finally, like Augustine, he shows us how Scripture itself is his pattern for each of these tasks: (a) It inculcates gratitude for the past, and asks that we remember the record of God's providence which is our guarantee of purpose in history ¾ yet insistent that it is not the past we worship; (b) Scripture shows us fur~her that we are to obtain truth where God gives it, and that we ought not to be surprised when, as in that pearl of Wisdom Job, it comes from as unlikely a place as Edom; (c) Scripture teaches us our need for a diversity of perspectives, the corpora~e experience of God's people agains~ and across ~ime composing a complimentarity of understanding more full than any possible singular perspective; (d) Scripture keeps us living and vital sense of God's strellgth for today's task, but (e) keeps us pointed toward the future, and that time when we shall meet him who is the knowing, when seeing him face to face our joy at last becomes full. Living within the Book means recognizing, as we have now noticed, that the beginning and the ending are surely not of our own devising. But because of Scripture, because of Revelation, the Christian is able nolletheless to commit with impunity that romantic sin against suspenseful reading,and take a quick peek at the script for the ending. That quickens our hope, and prompts renewed effort. For the joy of studying from the middle is that we are already engaged in the process of that full disclosure which our love of truth and wisdom seeks. Our task from the middle is to grow in that wisdom which begins in the fear of the Lord and ends in his praise for ever. But for the Christian scholars who have gone before us, that is as much as to say, our task is to grow by the application of our will as well as our intellect to God's Word until we come into the stature and measure of Christ (Eph. 4:13). Here too, He is alpha and omega, the first and last. Augustine has it that “a person is more or less wise as he is more or less deeply imbued with the book of God's Word” (On Christian Doctrine, 4.5.7-8). For Jerome, “we know that Christ is wisdom. He is the treasure which in the scriptures a man finds in his field” (Epist. 66.8). Their advice suggests a point of discernment for our common task. Worldly wisdom is by us never to be merely “rationalized” to that 'wisdom which is Christ', but rather subordinated to it. And what that means in effect for the scholar, as Jerome said a long time ago, is that we are not to presume too much upon the wisdom of the world or to seek its kind of 'power'. Rather, we are to examine everything with acuity, and yet to keep ourselves in meekness and self-effacement committed first and last to our study of that Book of all Books, the great and authoritative “grand narrative” which will bring us at last to the Author and Finisher of our faith Himself. Selected Reading Ellul, Jacques. The Humiliation of the Word, tr. J.M. Hanks (Eerdmans, 1985). Fish, Stanley. “There's no Such Thing as Free Speech and It's a Good Thing Too,” in DebatinR Political Correctness, ed. Paul Berman (Laurel, 1992). Franklin, Phyllis. Profession 92 (Modern Language Association of America, 1992). Frei, Hans. The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in 18th and 19th Centurv Hermeneutics (Yale, 1974). Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernitv (Stanford, 1990). Grant, Patrick. Literature and Personal Values (St. Martins, 1992). Henry, C.F.H. God, Revelation, and Authoritv. 6 vols. (Word, 1976), esp. vols. 1, 3. Hoesterey, Ingeborg, ed. Zeitgeist in Babel: the Postmodernist Controversy (Indiana, 1991). Jeffrey, D. L. “Mistakenly 'Logocentric': Centering Poetic Language in a Scriptural Tradition.” Religion and Literature 22.2-3 (1990), 33-46. Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. (Knopf, 1980). Lyotard, Jean Francois. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. (Minnesota, 1988). ¾-. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. (Minnesota, 1984). Lundin, Roger. The Culture of Interpretation: A Christian Encounter with Postmodern Critical Theory. (Eerdmans, forthcoming). Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Idea of the Universitv: Reexamination. (Yale, 1992). Ricoeur, Paul. History and Truth (Northwestern, 1974). Rorty, Richard. Consequences of Pragmatism. (Minnesota, 1982). ¾-. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. (Cambridge,1989). ¾-. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. (Princeton,1979). Rosenberg, Alfred. Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts. (Munich: Hoheneichen, 1943). Spanos, William. The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism (Minnesota, 1992). Steiner, George. Real Presences: Is There Anvthing in What We Say? (Faber and Faber, 1989). Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self. ¾-. The Malaise of Modernity. (Anansi, 1991). Walhout, Clarence and Leland Ryken. Contemporary Literarv Theory: A Christian Appraisal. (Eerdmans, 1991).