Socrates and the Fat Rabbis

Daniel Boyarin

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780226069180
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What kind of literature is the Talmud? To answer this question, Daniel Boyarin looks to an unlikely source: the dialogues of Plato. In these ancient texts he finds similarities, both in their combination of various genres and topics and in their dialogic structure. But Boyarin goes beyond these structural similarities, arguing also for a cultural relationship. In Socrates and the Fat Rabbis, Boyarin suggests that both the Platonic and the talmudic dialogues are not dialogic at all. Using Michael Bakhtin's notion of represented dialogue and real dialogism, Boyarin demonstrates, through multiple close readings, that the give-and-take in these texts is actually much closer to a monologue in spirit. At the same time, he shows that there is a dialogism in both texts on a deeper structural level between a voice of philosophical or religious dead seriousness and a voice from within that mocks that very high solemnity at the same time. Boyarin ultimately singles out Menippean satire as the most important genre through which to understand both the Talmud and Plato, emphasizing their seriocomic peculiarity. An innovative advancement in rabbinic studies, as well as a bold and controversial new way of reading Plato, Socrates and the Fat Rabbis makes a major contribution to scholarship on thought and culture of the ancient Mediterranean.

1

In Praise of Indecorous Acts of Discourse:

An Essay by Way of Introduction

C. S. Lewis in an oft-quoted remark opined that, “this universe, which has produced the bee-orchid and the giraffe, has produced nothing stranger than Martianus Capella.”¹ I would like to claim that the dialogues of Plato and, even more, the Babylonian Talmud are as strange as Martianus Capella, bee-orchids, or giraffes. The interpretative traditions, both premodern and modern, have done everything in their power to reduce the embarrassment of such strangeness. I am delighted rather than embarrassed by the “monstrosity” of my “holy” books and find in them the key to a significantly different approach to the question of truth than what we are used to.² Literary criticism with its near ubiquitous insistence on “decorum” provides—even in my dispute with that very term—the grounds of my engagement and production of the different way of reading that I propose.

The literary term, decorum, used slightly differently than in common parlance, will be a very helpful one for the analysis throughout:

Decorum [dikorŭm], a standard of appropriateness by which certain styles, characters, forms, and actions in literary works are deemed suitable to one another within a hierarchical model of culture bound by class distinctions. Derived from Horace’s Ars Poetica (c.20 BCE) and other works of classical criticism, decorum was a major principle of late Renaissance taste and of neoclassicism. It ranked and fixed the various literary genres in high, middle, and low stations, and expected the style, characters, and actions in each to conform to its assigned level: thus a tragedy or epic should be written in a high or grand style about highranking characters performing grand deeds, whereas a comedy should treat humble characters and events in a low or colloquial style. The mixture of high and low levels, as in Shakespeare, was seen as indecorous, although it could be exploited for humorous effect in burlesques and mockheroic works.³

Horace’s definition of the opposite of decorum is very helpful here too: “The poetic body must avoid the monstrous conjugation of foreign parts.”⁴ As we will see further on, human obesity is frequently figured in antiquity as a sign of the opposite of decorum and the non-serious. This is not owing, I think, to any inherent humor in fat or mocking of fat people, so much as to the alleged incongruity of the body engendered by certain parts of it being out of proportion with others, as well as the sheer fleshliness that it forces us to pay attention to. As we will see, this is a figure, as well, for malformed and disproportionate, indecorous discourses, condemned by most authors, but praised—highly—in this book of mine. When the high, the middle, and the low, the serious and the comic, the realistic and the fantastic, the “classical” and the grotesque, are all conjoined in a single text, we have a monstrous conjugation.

One of the very emblems of the concatenation of the serious and the comic in Plato’s work is the incident of Aristophanes’ hiccups in the Symposium:

Pausanias came to a pause—this is the balanced way in which I have been taught by the wise to speak; and Aristodemus said that the turn of Aristophanes was next, but either he had eaten too much, or from some other cause he had the hiccough, and was obliged to change turns with Eryximachus the physician, who was reclining on the couch below him. Eryximachus, he said, you ought either to stop my hiccough, or to speak in my turn until I have left off.

I will do both, said Eryximachus: I will speak in your turn, and do you speak in mine; and while I am speaking let me recommend you to hold your breath, and if after you have done so for some time the hiccough is no better, then gargle with a little water; and if it still continues, tickle your nose with something and sneeze; and if you sneeze once or twice, even the most violent hiccough is sure to go. I will do as you prescribe, said Aristophanes, and now get on.

This incident involves a double “lapse in tone.” First of all, a text in which a serious investigation of the place of Eros in human endeavor is being discussed is hardly the occasion, it would seem, for such low bodily burlesque. As adumbrated just above, Plato himself insisted on a criterion of seriousness as being of ultimate import. Furthermore, the spoudaios is precisely that at which it is wrong to laugh, as we learn from the Euthydemus (300e): So I remarked: “Why are you laughing, Cleinias, at such serious and beautiful things? [κἀγὼ εἶπον: τί γελᾷς, ὦ Κλεινία, ἐπὶ σπουδαίοις οὕτω πράγμασιν καὶ καλοῖς].” Secondly, the implication of this hiccups passage is that the text itself (or at least its order), which one would have thought is carefully planned to make its points, has, in fact, been partly generated out of the out-of-control antics of the lower body. This all hardly conforms to Plato’s claim to composing the fairest of all, the truest of all, the most spoudaios of all texts. Why are you laughing, Plato, at such serious and beautiful things?

The Serious, the Comic, and the Seriocomic

Five quotations on page vii—four from ancient sources and one from a modern writer—announce the theme of this book as its epigraphs or mottos. Since these quotations track the overall structure of the argument of the book, I have chosen to gloss them each briefly as a way into the essay presented here. The first epigraph: “As for jests, since they may sometimes be useful in debates, the advice of Gorgias was good—to confound the opponents’ seriousness with jest and their jest with seriousness. Περὶ δὲ τῶν γελοίων, ἐπειδή τινα δοκεῖ χρῆσιν ἔχειν ἐν τοῖς ἀγῶσι, καὶ δεῖν ἔɸη Γοργίας τὴν μὲν σπουδὴν διαɸϑείρειν τῶν ἐναντίων γέλωτι, τὸν δὲ γέλωτα σπονδῇ ὀρθῶς λέγων” (Aristotle, Rhetoric 1419b).⁵ It is clear from this quotation that at least as far back as Aristotle’s time, and if we trust him in his report, as far back as Gorgias himself, the categories of spoudaios and geloios—“serious” and “humorous”—were already active in Greek culture and recognized modes of discourse. An oblique witness can be found, perhaps, at the Gorgias 473e, where Socrates upbraids Polus: “What’s this, Polus? You’re laughing? Is this still another kind of refutation, to laugh someone down whenever he says something, but not to refute him?” According to Gorgias, moreover, they stand somehow in opposition to each other, such that one can “confound” the other; either one can demolish the other (this is a key point). Aristotle, perhaps surprisingly, entirely endorses Gorgias’s view on this issue.

We don’t quite know what Gorgias meant by spoudaios, and we can only guess at the cultural import of this opposition. One clue, however, is provided by the following passage from Herodotus (1.8.1):

VIII. This Candaules, then, fell in love with his own wife, so much so that he believed her to be by far the most beautiful woman in the world; and believing this, he praised her beauty beyond measure to Gyges son of Dascylus, who was his favorite among his bodyguard; for it was to Gyges that he entrusted all his most important (spoudaiestera) matters.

VIII. Οὗτος δὴ ὦν ὁ Κανδαύλης ἠράσθη τῆς ἑωντοῦ γυναικός, ἐρασθεὶς δὲ ἐνόμιζέ οἱ εἰναι γυναῖκα πολλὸν νασέων καλίστην. ὥστε δὲ ταῦτα νομίζων, ἦν γάρ οἶ τῶν αἰχμοɸόρων Γύγης ὁ Δασκύλου ἀρεσκόμενος μάλιστα, τούτῳ τῷ Γύγῃ καὶ τὰ σαουδαιέστερα τῶν πρηγμάτων ὑνερετίθετο.

From this eloquent passage, we can learn something of the meaning of spoudaios. The most spoudaios is that with which one entrusts the most trusted of one’s retainers (indeed the story goes on to inform us that he wished to share the beauty of his wife’s nakedness with said Gyges).⁶

Derived originally from meaning “haste,” spoudaios came to mean “energetic,” and thus, perhaps paradoxically to our ears, “in earnest”; hence spoudaios as the earnest, the important, the serious, as opposed to the joking, the laughable, as the next citation from Aristophanes’ Frogs (391), makes clear:

Chorus:
and that I may say much that is funny and much that is serious

Χορός
καὶ πολλὰ μὲν γέλοιά μ’ εἰ-
πεῖν, πολλὰ δὲ σπουδαῖα

One wonders how serious the Chorus of the Frogs is in stating that it will say much that is spoudaia in the course of that play, but in any case, we see here the contrast between spoudaios and geloios, as used by (Pseudo?)Gorgias.

One final quotation, from Demosthenes (Speeches 24.4), will help further specify the meaning of spoudaios among Plato’s contem poraries:

Now it is the common practice of those who take up any piece of public business to inform you that the matter on which they happen to be making their speeches is most momentous, and worthy of your best attention.

εἰώθασιν μὲν οὖν οἱ πολλοὶ τῶν πράττειν τι προαιρουμένων τῶν κοινῶν λέγειν ὡς ταῦθ’ ὑμῖν σπουδαιότατ’ ἐστὶ καὶ ιάλιστ’ ἄξιον προσέχειν τούτοις, ὑπὲρ ὧν ἄν αὐτοὶ τυγχάνωσι ποιούμενοι τοὺς λόγους.

This quotation adds further specification to the meaning of spoudaios by defining it precisely as “that which is most worthy of attention,” the implication being further that the geloios as the opposite of the spoudaios is not worthy of attention, or at any rate less worthy of attention. (Note that I am not claiming that the only antonym of spoudaios in Greek is geloios.) This meaning will be crucial for understanding Plato’s usage of these terms, which is what is central, of course, for this book.

Plato, in any case, expounds what he means by “serious,” and he shows it to be consistent with all of the above citations when he writes, “for we have come to see that we must not take such poetry seriously as a serious thing that lays hold on truth” [ᾀσόμεθα δ’ οὖν ὡς οὐ σπουδαστέον ἐπὶ τῇ τοιαύτῃ ποιήσει ὡς ἀληθείας τε ἁπτομένῃ καὶ σπουδαίᾳ] (Republic 10.608a). Plato has given us here, indirectly at any rate, quite a precise definition of the spoudaios as he sees it, namely that which seeks to seize on Truth. Any other kind of discourse, from tragedy to rhetoric, any discourse that resists the notion of Truth, will be by definition not serious, but geloios. The Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth is that which according to Plato is worthy of attention (which is not to claim that Plato thinks it accessible).

Andrea Nightingale has discussed this issue with respect to Plato’s attitude toward tragedy. She shows that Socrates repeatedly uses the term “serious thing” (spoudaios) and grammatical variants to discredit tragedy as not being spoudaios: “Socrates claims at [Republic] 602b that tragedy is a ‘mimesis’ that is παιδιάν τινα καὶ οὐ σπουδὴν [a child’s play and not serious].”⁷ Most important for my semantic purposes, however, are her following remarks:

In that text [the Laws 7], after distinguishing comedy and tragedy as genres concerned with (respectively) γελοῖα (816d9, e5; cf. γέλωτα, e10) and σπουδαῖα (817a2), the Athenian proceeds to contrast the “so-called serious” creations of the tragedians (τῶν δὲ σπουδίων, ὥς ɸασι, τῶν περὶ τραγῳδίαν ἡμῖν ποιητῶν, 817a2–3) with the “most beautiful and finest tragedy” that he and his interlocutors are themselves producing in their construction of a good code of laws (ἡμεῖς ἐσμὲν τραγῳδίας αὐτοὶ ποιηταὶ κατὰ δύναμιν ὅτι καλλίστης ἅμα καὶ ἀρίστης, 817b2–3). Here, Plato not only denies that tragedy is truly “serious,” but confers upon his own creations the title of serious tragedy.⁸

In contrast to and defiance of general Athenian usage (as so frequently in Plato), that which they call spoudaios, namely tragedy, is declared by Plato to be only “so-called.” What we learn very well and clearly from this passage is that, for Plato, “seriousness” is the mark of an important, significant discourse, that which deserves the name “tragedy,” while the playful and mimetic—even on tragic themes—is not serious, not beautiful, and without virtue. The comic, it would seem, is even more contemptible than the tragic in poetry, as Nightingale elegantly argues.⁹ In contrast to Aristophanes, who seems to allow for both the spoudaios and the geloios in a comedy such as the Frogs, for Plato neither the comic nor the tragic is spoudaios.

Perhaps the richest, most explicit reflection by Plato on “seriousness” is given in the Laws 7.803.

ATHENIAN: [803b] And notwithstanding that human affairs are unworthy of serious effort [spoudes], necessity counsels us to be serious [spoudazein]; and that is our misfortune. Yet, since we are where we are, it is no doubt becoming that we should show this earnestness in a suitable direction. But no doubt [803c] I may be faced—and rightly faced—with the question, “What do I mean by this?”

CLINIAS: Certainly.

ATHENIAN: What I assert is this—that a man ought to be in serious earnest about serious things [spoudaion spoudazein], and not about trifles [me spoudaion]; and that the object really worthy of all serious and blessed effort is God, while man is contrived, as we said above, to be a plaything of God, and the best part of him is really just that; and thus I say that every man and woman ought to pass through life in accordance with this character, playing at the noblest of pastimes, being otherwise minded than they now are.

[803d] CLINIAS: How so?

ATHENIAN: Now they imagine that serious work should be done for the sake of play; for they think that it is for the sake of peace that the serious work of war needs to be well conducted. But as a matter of fact we, it would seem, do not find in war, either as existing or likely to exist, either real play or education worthy of the name, which is what we assert...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Frontispiece
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: The Cheese and the Sermons: Toward a Microhistory of Ideas
• Chapter 1: In Praise of Indecorous Acts of Discourse: An Essay by Way of Introduction
• Chapter 2: “Confound Laughter with Seriousness”: The Protagoras as Monological Dialogue
• Chapter 3: “Confound Seriousness with Laughter”: On Monological and Dialogical Reading—the Gorgias
• Chapter 4: Jesting Words and Dreadful Lessons: The Two Voices of the Babylonian Talmud
• Chapter 5: “Read Lucian!”: Menippean Satire and the Literary World of the Babylonian Talmud
• Chapter 6: Icaromeʾir: Rabbi Meʾir’s Babylonian “Life” as Menippean Satire
• Chapter 7: “The Truest Tragedy”: The Symposium as Monologue
• Chapter 8: A Crude Contradiction; or, The Second Accent of the Symposium
• Appendix: On the Postmodern Allegorical
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index