Holy Bible

In Florence, I took a fabulous art history class with Prof. Tim Verdon on early Renaissance art, and throughout the course I had felt that I lacked the religious backstory for many themes of the art. To fix this, I took a quick read over the Holy Bible; scrutinizing the entire work would be too much and analysis can go on ad infinitum due to the nature of faith, so I focused my reading on key themes and key plot points. The entire work still seems so odd for someone who wasn’t indoctrinated from a young age. The work has psychedelic details (God appearing and speaking as a burning bush, for example) as well as the very precise, obsessive, and often arbitrary listings of the Law of Moses in the Old Testament. Learning the key biblical stories have definitely helped with reconciling what I learned about art as well as my past readings of western philosophy.

Although I mention many of the keener details seem utterly bizarre, the entire macro-level plot (of the Old Testament), on the contrary, seems very much grounded in reality. Although the Israelites had God was on their side, they still faced many episodes of persecution and disaster. The Bible attributes the victories of the people to God who gave them strength, while the hardships were when God was angry at the people’s disobedience or was testing the people’s faith. If we remove God from the pure history retelling of the journey of the Israelite people, it would seem to be still realistic; with God in the mix, the senseless flow of history that directs the fate of the Israelites is masterfully channeled into the ethos of God, and this is why I hold the authors of the Bible in so much respect for their rhetoric. Machiavelli has a cogent explanation of the reason behind my so-called “ethos transfer to God”: “Many benefits of which a prudent man is aware, are not so evident to reason that he can convince others of them. Hence wise men, in order to escape this difficulty, have recourse to God”.