Some storm-tossed sailors have just landed on some coast outside Africa. They’ve just been saved from a gale sent by Juno, who has a thing with these Trojans. Venus, who has a different thing with these Trojans (Aeneas happens to be her son), comes whining to Zeus, calling him out for not keeping his promises to the poor, destitute Trojans. Not particularly worried about pandering to the special interests of lobbyists—he is a somewhat partisan figure himself—Jove consoles Venus, telling her that, in fact, the Trojans’ luck will turn. They’ll settle in Latium and someday have an empire. Bigger than anybody else’s. An imperium sine fine.

Vergil’s famous words are usually, and somewhat metaphorically, translated as “an empire without end”. We think immediately of duration—it’s going to last forever. But finis has a more fundamental meaning of “boundary” or “limit”. This is a limitless empire. Dictionaries even have “goal” as a denotation of finis. But surely Vergil isn’t saying the Roman empire is an empire without a goal. Surely not.

Take a look at modernity for a moment. Whenever anyone talks about modernity (if they want to remain reputable), they always have to qualify it with “whatever it is…”. We don’t exactly know. Even worse with post-modernity. You try to define it or quantify it or even qualify it, and somebody is sure to say, “You just don’t get it.” Well, sorry, maybe I don’t, but you’ve just proved my point. My point is that modernity (and its relatives) is limitless. It has no boundaries. It only has one rule—Do Not Limit.

You can see this everywhere. Do not limit my abilities. Do not limit my sexuality. Do not limit my ownership (oddly, this can apply to the most radical free marketeers and the most radical communists equally). Do not limit my profession. Do not limit my nationality. Do not limit my knowledge. We hate diseases and “gender roles” and ignorance and poverty. Picasso can’t seem to stand three dimensions. Schoenberg itches to be rid of the overtone scale (never actually managing it). Perhaps Philip could enlighten my ignorance, but isn’t that the point with Derrida as well? Or you could look at the two political philosophies of the last century—classical liberalism, which despises the limitations imposed by government, and modern liberalism, which despises the limitations imposed by poverty. Both speak endlessly in terms of liberal, which comes from another Latin word meaning “free”. Or look at Darwinism, the science in which taxonomy is only a matter of time and distinctions between me and an ape are transient at best.

Along with the European Union and other amusing attempts at globalization, you have, in the last two centuries, the largest-scale attempt to subvert Scriptural authority. Pardon me if I do the offensive and delve edgily into the ethos behind this, but why is it that Thomas Jefferson scissors out the parts of the Bible he doesn’t like? Why is it a woman priest in the Methodist church is not likely to believe in a logocentric Christianity? Because she doesn’t want to. It is only ever superficially a matter of academic persuasion. If it were fundamentally a matter of an well-founded academic disbelief in the infallibility of Scripture, then there would have been many more Karl Barths in the Middle Ages. People weren’t stupid back then. Higher criticism is not a function of higher intelligence, it’s a function of modernity. It’s lower tolerance to limits. We would rather have a god whose limits we define than be ourselves defined by the limits of a god. The imperium sine fine signals the end of the reign of Jove and the beginning of the reign of Augustus. But first you have to get rid of all the religious documents that put any boundaries on belief.

But take one more look at the phrase—an empire without end. This time think of telos. Think of “end” not as “finish” but as “purpose”. Finis as “goal”. Is that another reason why nobody ever lets you define (post-)modernity? Because, in the end, there’s nothing there really to define? Why is it that modern science makes the assumption that, if there is knowledge to be gained, it ought to be gained? Why is it that there is no knowledge of good and evil that is forbidden to us? Why must we know it? Only in a few noble instances is it so that we can find a cure for cancer or an end to suffering. But motives like that have always existed. Motives like that don’t explain tax money going to fund explorations of string theory. We seek to know simply because we can. No matter what the cost—having found a way to destroy everyone at once, can we really say our scientific exploration saves more lives than it endangers?—we continue to explore. To what end? Why? Pretend you’re Number 6. Type that question into the computer that seeks to answer every question and it’ll explode.

Recently, for a course in world religions required by my high school, I had the opportunity to research and write a paper on the Islamic view of abortion– personally, I found it fascinating. As a sort of maiden post, I thought to share it in a set of two parts– at the very least, that’s how many sections I expect this paper to require. We’ll see.

Islam stands with Judaism and Christianity as one of the three great monotheistic religions. Its adherents number over one billion[1] and are spread out across the globe. Known for its conservatism, as the abortion campaign becomes ever more important in the West, the question arises of how Islam views abortion. According to the earliest Islamic tradition—and now, the more liberal factions of Islamic scholars, abortion is permissible before the one-hundred and twentieth day of pregnancy[2], but not after. However, conservative Islamic scholars, upon closer examination of both the Qur’an, the hadiths, and the writings of the imams, have determined that after the implantation of the fetus in the uterus, the potential for ensoulment is enough to place a ban on abortion, save for cases in which the mother’s life is in danger.

Ensoulment is defined by Arif Abdul Hussain as the entrance of the spirit, or ruh[3], into the growing fetus, and also as “the beginning of the potential for rational thought”[4]—rational thought, being, according to Ali ibn Abi Talib, the primary characteristic of the “human soul.”[5] To Islamic thought, our human existence is dependent on three factors: life, which is defined as “an expression of knowledge and ability,”[6] soul, and ruh. Life is also defined by Rida al-Sadr as “an expression of mobility and reproduction.”[7] Combining the two definitions, any plant or animal also lives, and to make the legality of abortion dependant on whether or not something is living also causes one to question the killing of animals and the eating of plants—thus, the potential for life is neither enough to condemn nor support abortion. The soul, the second aspect of existence, is divided into four types: the vegetative, the animal, the rational human soul, and the divine soul.[8] The soul is the ability to perceive and synthesize; the vegetative soul “retain[s], absorb[s], digest[s], repel[s], and grow[s],” [9]and is thus the lowest form of the soul. Like the name suggests, plants fulfill this requirement. The next type of soul, the animal, consists of the five senses, while the human soul is cognizant and is marked by its ability to remember[10]; finally, the divine, or “Godly” soul is persistent, “find[s] felicity in misfortune, dignity in humility, needlessness in poverty, and perseverance in calamities.”[11] In humans, who claim the first three types of souls, the entering of the ruh triggers the emergence of the appropriate souls.

The idea of ruh comes directly from the Qur’an, which states “But He fashioned him in due proportion and breathed into him something of His spirit.” (Surah 32:9)[12] In the Arabic, the word “spirit” is translated from the term ruh, which is used in other instances in the Qur’an, such as the creation of Adam and the conception of Jesus in Mary’s womb, to describe a life-giving spirit. [13] This coming of the ruh marks the time known as ensoulment, as at that point, the already living (as it fulfills the requirements for life by growing) fetus receives the potential for rationality, which then defines the fetus as potentially human. In Islam, the murder of a human being for any reason beyond that which justice requires bears a heavy consequence. For, “if anyone [slays] a person—unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land, it would be as if he slew the whole people: and if anyone saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people.” (Surah 5:32)[14]

Therefore, debate rings through the Muslim world as to when exactly ensoulment occurs. The traditional one-hundred and twenty day period before ensoulment comes from the Qur’anic description of the stages of gestation and a hadith—sayings or actions of the Prophet Mohammed—which states that “a human being is put together in the womb of the mother for forty days, and then becomes a clot of thick blood for a similar period, and then a piece of flesh for a similar period… then the soul is breathed into him.”[15] This “breath[ing]” of the “soul” is the ensoulment. From a legal standpoint, this one-hundred and twentieth day also marks the evolution of a fetus from another creature entirely to a human being—at this point, the blood money required after an abortion will “have to be paid in accordance with its gender since at that time it is a full human being.”[16]

However, prior to this time, due to the fetus’ potential for rational thought (humanhood) and ensoulment, Islamic law demands a lesser amount of diya (blood money), consistent with the stages of pregnancy[17] described by the Qur’an, in Surah 23:12-14[18].  For a nuftah (sperm or fertilized ovum), the penalty is 20 dinars; for the clot of blood, or ‘alaquah, it is forty dinars. For the muzgah, or lump of flesh, sixty dinars; when the bones have formed, ‘azm, eighty dinars, and finally, when flesh appears on the bones (yaksu lahman), it is one hundred dinars.[19] [20] This potentiality also carries weight in regards to inheritance: from the point of conception on, a child is considered an inheritor, unless it is stillborn[21]. If a “newborn has raised its voice (and then dies), it is treated as an heir.”[22] From this it is evident that, legally, the potential to become a rational human being is enough to accord the fetus the rights of a human being (though, as in the case of the diya, these rights may be adapted to fit the situation.) According to Islamic law, then, a fetus is a potential child—and “verily, the killing of [your children] is a great sin.” (Surah 17:31)[23] And as the diya of an aborted child increases with each consecutive stage, it is

“indicat[ed] that abortion is unlawful and implies that the potentiality for ensoulment within the foetus is a determining factor in prohibiting abortion.. so that we note an increase in the penalty as the growing foetus approaches the stage of ensoulment.”[24]

With this then in mind, it is important to examine the first stage of the pregnancy which holds the diya, because it is this stage that defines the point from which abortion is prohibited. The term nuftah, which means both a sperm and a fertilized ovum, is the one in question; according to its definition, as given by Imam Zaynu ‘l-‘Abidin, abortion is forbidden as soon as the fetus has “settled down” in the womb—in other words, as soon as it has been implanted in the uterus.[25] Thus, as abortion is prohibited prior to ensoulment, it can be concluded that it is the potential for ensoulment, and not the ensoulment itself, that secures one’s right to life. After this potentiality has been established—that is, once the fetus has been implanted in the uterus, abortion is prohibited by Islamic law and the Qur’an.

[2] Syed, Ibrahim B. Abortion in Islam. IRFI. Islamic Research Foundation International, Inc. n.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2009.

[3] Hussain, Arif Abdul. “Ensoulment and the Prohibition of Abortion in Islam.” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 16.3 (2005): 239-250. Web.

[4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11] ibid.

[12] The Qur’an. Trans. Ali, Abdullah Yusuf. Elmhurst: Tahrike Tarsile Qur’an, Inc., 2008. Print. Pg. 272.

[13] Hussain, Arif Abdul. “Ensoulment and the Prohibition of Abortion in Islam.” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 16.3 (2005): 239-250. Web.

[14] The Qur’an. Trans. Ali, Abdullah Yusuf. Elmhurst: Tahrike Tarsile Qur’an, Inc., 2008. Print. Pg. 67.

[15] Bukhari, Sahih. Hadith. Trans. Khan, M. Muhsin. University of Southern California: Center for Muslim-Jewish Engagement.Vol. 4. Book 54 Num. 430. University of Southern California. n.d. Web. 18 Dec. 2009.

[16] Hussain, Arif Abdul. “Ensoulment and the Prohibition of Abortion in Islam.” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 16.3 (2005): 239-250. Web.

[17] Rizvi, Sayyid Muhammed. Marriage and Morals in Islam. Scarborough: Islamic Education & Information Centre, n.d. Web.

[18] Qur’an. Trans. Ali, Abdullah Yusuf. Elmhurst: Tahrike Tarsile Qur’an, Inc., 2008. Print. Pgs. 219-220.

[19] Hussain, Arif Abdul. “Ensoulment and the Prohibition of Abortion in Islam.” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 16.3 (2005): 239-250. Web.

[20] Rizvi, Sayyid Muhammed. Marriage and Morals in Islam. Scarborough: Islamic Education & Information Centre, n.d. Web.

[21] Hussain, Arif Abdul. “Ensoulment and the Prohibition of Abortion in Islam.” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 16.3 (2005): 239-250. Web.

[22] Asqualani, Al-Hafiz Ibn Hajar al-. Bulugh Al-Maram. Riyadh: Dar-us-Salam Publications, 1996. Print. Pg. 336.

[23] Qur’an. Trans. Ali, Abdullah Yusuf. Elmhurst: Tahrike Tarsile Qur’an, Inc., 2008. Print. Pg. 178.

[24] Hussain, Arif Abdul. “Ensoulment and the Prohibition of Abortion in Islam.” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 16.3 (2005): 239-250. Web.

[25] Rizvi, Sayyid Muhammed. Marriage and Morals in Islam. Scarborough: Islamic Education & Information Centre, n.d. Web.

On YouTube, you can look up an interview with Kissin, who relates the instance of receiving a good review from a critic when he was 17, but with this barb at the end of the article – “In general, one gets an impression that, up till now, everything has been easy for Kissin in piano playing – sometimes even too easy. Both plusses and minuses of his art come from that fact. Now we only hear in his playing what comes from his great natural gift. This is, of course, wonderful, but in future, something definitely has to change. What? When? In which way? Everything will depend on that.”

Has everything been easy for Kissin in piano playing? When he was 17, he performed Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with Herbert von Karajan. And this critic expects us to believe it was easy?

As a pianist (one, I might add, who is stunned by Kissin’s playing), I can confidently say that that is rot. My reader may say I’m being arrogant – supposing that my limited piano experience is vaguely the same as this child prodigy. But I still say it’s nonsense – Evgeny Kissin’s “great natural gift” consists of an environment saturated in great music, hours upon hours of disciplined practice at a young age, and memorization skills that were whittled when children eat memorization out of the can with a spoon. To suppose that it has been easy for Kissin, who ostensibly bears an inherent talent, is lazy of the critic and insulting to Kissin. He had to work to get where he was – to credit it to a “great natural gift”, like something he can’t control, represents a pathetic understanding the great pianists of our age.

Again, my reader may think I have turned into a soft-and-squishy liberal politician who can’t stand to see people not on an equal footing. I just can’t stand to be inherently unequal to Evgeny Kissin, so I’m stripping him of his natural talent. The same with Mozart. The same with Bach. Well, no, not exactly.

I’m taking my cues from Bach himself. According to Christoph Wolff, his most recent and well-respected biographer, Bach reputedly said, at the end of his life, that he had worked hard and achieved great things, and that anybody who worked as hard as he had could do the same things. This is coming from the man who is rumored to have improvised, upon request, a 6-part fugue for the prince of Germany. Can you do that? Could you do that if you worked hard?

Well, no, I don’t think you could in all likelihood. But Bach is speaking from a specific culture, and we can’t just throw his words out as the modest and humble words of a “gifted” man. Bach is speaking from a culture that, as Glenn Gould once related, considered family entertainment sitting around the fire and composing a “quodlibet” – a contrapuntal combination of two or more folk tunes into one coherent song. Imagine living in a culture where the standard for a 10-year-old’s entertainment was competing with his Dad at writing counterpoint. Now, would a Bach (or a Mozart) coming out of that culture be such an anomaly? And, yet, we wonder why there aren’t any Bachs or Mozarts today.

Gone is the notion that music as paideia. Music teaches. It educates. It trains. It disciplines. It cultivates. This was the opinion of Plato and Boethius, who both commented on what a sly weapon music was for propagandists. Music is a matter of education – if our children grow up in a culture of Lutheran hymns, quodlibets, Bach chorale preludes, and village performances of coffee cantatas, then what we could call “talented” musicians should pop up everywhere. And they do in Bach’s Europe. A few years after Bach died, Mozart was playing, blindfolded, for the Pope.

People think of “natural talents” in two ways – a gift from God to the child, as if his musical talent were some facet of his soul, sort of like a charismatic’s gift of tongues or prophecy, or perhaps a genetic disposition resulting from a sort of natural selection. The idea here is that many people start with piano lessons, but only the ones who have the right DNA and the parents with the most developed ear and limber fingers really have the chops. And they’re the ones that end up being on stage wowing us with their “talents”.

But, briefly, I’d like to remind those Christians out there who think I’m giving the glory to Kissin’s works rather than God’s grace, that the word the Old Testament uses for “artistic talent” is the same word it uses for “wisdom”. It’s something that God gives but that simultaneously a man acquires. That modern Christians see a tension between God’s grace and man’s works is not an excuse to rush after this idea of “natural gifts” but a clear indication that they need to read Thomas Aquinas, or, even better, John Calvin.

What about Jay Greenberg, the child with no musical parents, who attended Juilliard at 10 years old, composed an internationally broadcasted, fully orchestrated overture for the 9-11 terrorist attacks when he was the same age, and reputedly hears the music in his head – sometimes even several different pieces simultaneously – and writes it down just as he hears it? Surely this is a person with natural gifts and talents from God.

A very simple test can be done that reduces such claims either to absurdity or to a better grasp of reality. Imagine Jay Greenberg, if you would, born into a family of medieval aristocrats in the 14th century. Would he compose music that sounded like Rachmaninoff or Schoenberg or Beethoven or Bach, as he composes today? Or would it sound like Perotinus, Machaut, Dufay, and Josquin? His music bears the distinctive mark of environmentally induced music – the music he hears in his head does not come from some distant, detached spiritual psyche, granted to him by God upon birth. Yet this is seemingly the attitude that we take towards Greenberg.

To paraphrase Glenn Gould again, he also lamented the loss of equality between audience and performer. The performer is now lifted up as a talented genius, but Gould insists that this is the downfall of Classical music. He says,

“I think that what happened in the 18th century, when performers stopped being composers, was the great disaster for music. And I think that to look at it today as an irrevocable move and to say that this is not any longer correctable, that we cannot in fact get back to that glorious time when performers had a composer’s insight into music and when an audience consisted largely of people who performed and composed themselves – that we cannot get back to that is simply to say that music is finished. There are people around who would tell you that music in our purely occidental sense is indeed finished. I don’t share that gloom, I must say, but there’s good cause for it.”

Advent

So we begin again
digging our fingernails
to pry out tiny lightbulbs
jamming them back in
to make them blink or blue or both.

Warm, stifling air
we joy in
coming from dragons’ mouths
that first must practice with
arctic winds
while we drive home.

And the dead is silent, the innocent -
bright, trampled, muddied here.
And we rush to make new men and angels from it
but fear to disturb the covering over the marriage
of Heaven and earth.

(I’ve taken from Hannah Roorda’s idea of tearing apart one’s own poetry.) I’ll explain this a little bit and what I meant by it all. I was struck once or twice during this most recent Advent season with some of the symbolism. I knew it wasn’t any good to write it all out in dry prose. But I’m not satisfied with it still, especially the last stanza. I want to know what you think of it.

So we begin again….

The first line is simply there to express cyclicality in the Church’s placement of Advent at the beginning of the Church year. Perhaps what I chose to illustrate this new, recurring beginning was a little mundane – putting up Christmas lights in lines 2-5 – but it’s one of those things you do in Advent, that you associate with Advent, and that never seems to get boring (for me, anyhow).

I’m not sure what to do about the repeated “or” in the fifth line. I think maybe it’s a bit excessive to have an “or” between “blink” and “blue” and I can’t think of any reason why to keep it there. I could point out the long “I” assonance in the third line, ahem, but it’s unintentional and accidental, so it really serves no material significance as far as I can tell.

I don’t like participles in poetry – it makes it cliché pseudo-Eliotic, I think. (There are a lot in this poem, so if you can come up with ways out of them, comment.) But “prying” might make more sense that “to pry” in line 3. I’m hoping for some opinion on that one.

Warm, stifling air…

This only works if that’s a universal experience, but I’ve always found one of the most unpleasant things about winter is getting into a car that’s been sitting out in the cold for hours at night, and waiting, waiting, waiting for the warm air to kick in. You can probably sort it out from there.

And the dead is silent, the innocent -
bright….

The first line explains it all, but I’m not sure the first line really works. What’s dead during winter or Advent, you ask? Well, everything. Plants, trees, grass, rocks, dirt, water, and all that. And I’ve noticed that in winter, everything (especially right before it snows) is quiet. The innocent is the snow.

The first line of the third stanza is synecdoche, and I’m not sure it works in this context. Anyway, the “innocent” snow is always very bright, but spoiled by the trampling and muddying. There’s some Christo-centric symbolism here I think, which is part of the reason I wrote the poem.

The cover is snow. One always wants to go out to build snowmen and wriggle around in the snow, but there’s something sacred about the snow that one is afraid to uncover. It seems improper to go and disturb it. Again, there may be some symbolism here that I’ve taken from the Virgins with Lamps and Oil, and Weddings, and all that.

For interest’s sake, I have a versed version here of the first two stanzas. Something arises up in me that kicks against free verse, so from conscience I wrote this (it’s not in meter, necessarily, but it’s syllabic):

So we begin again
our fingernails digging
into tiny lightbuls
to make them blink, blue (or) both.

We joy in stiffling air
from dragons’ mouths that first
awaken arctic winds
this while we’re driving home.

I don’t like at all, but I do like the “awaken” in line 7 more.

*******************

Here are some more haikus I’ve written down on whim.

Moldy pancakes soaked
In syrup, squished together.
It’s cytology.

(Nick suggested “cytology time” for the last line, which I at first thought was corny, but now it’s growing on me.)

*

like plane propellers
shattering my wine goblet
from too much Wagner

(Probably inspired by one of the Tenors. Thanks to Gabrielus who helped me out on this one.)

*

Glory be to God
for my sinus infection
around stinky cheese

*

Women, wittily
vaunt their two X Chromosomes.
Hm. I wonder Y

(Composed for my fellow Biology students, and most especially, MrsH.)

The Intelligent Design movement posits that Intelligent Design is a valid scientific theory. Scientific theories are generally agreed to be models which (1) are supported by a fair amount of evidence, (2) explain a certain set of phenomena, and (3) have a truth procedure* via the scientific method.

As I said before, I’m not in a position to analyze the evidence for Intelligent Design. And Intelligent Design could conceivably explain certain phenomena. Thus far, no objections. But when we get to the truth procedure and the scientific method, I think ID runs into trouble.

The physical sciences are empirical, and have been for a very long time; largely because the huge majority of scientists want to keep it that way. I’m somewhat skeptical as to whether this ought to be the case, and there is a little bit of blurring the line amongst the Philosophy of Mind community, especially. But until this change becomes more than merely blurring, the truth procedure for any theory must be empirical. Intelligent Design does not have such a truth procedure.

Let me elaborate. Let’s say I have a theory. My theory states that my tongue should look red. To test this hypothesis, and to prove my theory consistent with reality, I have to conduct an experiment: I go look in the mirror and see if my tongue is actually red. But when it comes to Intelligent Design, you can’t do this. The “theory” states there is an intelligent designer, but an intelligent designer outside the physical universe is not empirically verifiable. He does not have a truth procedure via the scientific method, and thus, must be thrown out of science.

Finally, I would like to note that this is not some obscure technicality those nasty Darwinian Evolutionists are pulling on Theists because they hate their guts. The same objection has been brought up against other “theories”. For example, String Theory has been attacked on these grounds, notably by Peter Woit in his book “Not Even Wrong”. Science is, for the present, empirical; until that changes, the Intelligent Design Movement has no case.

* A truth procedure is a procedure through which we can verify the truthfulness of a given piece of information.