Stayer University Unit 5 Dante and Chaucer Perspective on Sin Paper Write a response that answers one or more of the following questions regarding today’s

Stayer University Unit 5 Dante and Chaucer Perspective on Sin Paper Write a response that answers one or more of the following questions regarding
today’s readings:Contrast sin as represented in the past readings for the course with its
representation in Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale and Dante’s Inferno.
Consider characters like Aeneas, Oedipus, Joseph, and Augustine. Are
their struggles with sin more or less complex than those we see in Dante
and Chaucer? What about the nature of the punishments?
o Requirements: Your response should adhere to APA formatting and be 350 words
in length. Please use references from the readings below.
Dante, Inferno, cantos I and IV in The Norton Anthology

 Chaucer, from The Canterbury Tales, The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale in the Norton
Anthology

 “Introduction to The Inferno” from World Literature from a Christian Perspective

 “Introduction to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales” in World Literature from a Christian
Perspective

 Scripture: 1 Corinthians 1:19-25

 Scripture: 2 Timothy 4:2-4 McAllister, E. J. World literature from a Christian perspective: Volume I. Unpublished
Manuscript. *PDF available in Canvas.Puchner, M., Akbari, S. C., Denecke, W., Fuchs, B., Levine, C., Lewis, P., & Wilson, E. (2014).
The Norton anthology of western literature: Volume I (9th ed.). New York, NY: W. W.
Norton.ISBN: 978-0-393-93364-2 World Literature from a
Christian Perspective
By Edwin McAllister
Table of Contents
Introduction
1
Introduction to the Old Testament
8
Introduction to The Iliad
17
Introduction to The Odyssey
29
Introduction to Agamemnon
39
Introduction to Oedipus
50
Introduction to The Aeneid
59
Introduction to the New Testament
73
Introduction to The Confessions
79
Introduction to Beowulf
84
Introduction to The Inferno
90
Introduction to The Canterbury Tales
96
Introduction to Luther’s Commentary on Galatians
104
Introduction to The Prince
110
Introduction to “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”
115
Introduction to Hamlet
121
Introduction to Paradise Lost
130
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World Literature From A Christian Perspective Introduction
When I was in grade school, I had an argument with a friend over the
ethics of telling lies. We were having a schoolyard fight over a lie I’d been telling
recently. I claimed to have broken my leg in order to avoid playing tackle
football at recess, and my friend told me that I could not lie because “the Bible
says lying is wrong.” I challenged him to “find the place” where the Bible says
lying is wrong.
Finding “the place” turned out to be more difficult than my friend
thought it would be. It took us half an hour to find the Ten Commandments in
the dusty old King James we dug up, but when we did locate them, “Thou shalt
not tell lies” was not among them. Instead, what we found was “Thou shalt not
bear false witness against thy neighbor.” (Exodus 20:16). That didn’t help
much, since it didn’t really cover what I was doing. At worst, I was bearing
false witness against myself. In our further attempt to find “the rule,” what we
discovered was a lot of stories and poems and precious few straightforward
“thou shalt not kill”-type rules.
Although we didn’t realize it at the time, my friend and I were learning a
valuable lesson about the Bible: often, rather than directly stating truth or
ethical ideals, the Bible uses literary techniques to embody or incarnate ideas.
In other words, rather than saying “do not lie,” the Bible shows God’s hatred for
lying in stories like that of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5 or in figurative
language like that Jesus uses in John 8 when he identifies Satan as “the father
of lies.” Acts 5 never literally says “Do not lie,” but when Ananias and Sapphira
are struck dead by God after lying to the Holy Spirit, the story shows that God
hates lying. When Jesus identifies Satan as the father of lies he does not
literally mean that Satan is a father who has lies as his children; instead, by
identifying Satan as “the father” of lies, he implies that Satan is the ultimate
source of all falsehood. Stories and figures like these embody God’s love of the
truth and his hatred for falsehood.
Literature not only embodies propositional truths like “God hates lies,” it
also conveys experiential truth, or what it feels like to live through a particular
experience. At times, such experiential truth can gratify our curiosity about
other lives, other cultures, and other times. None of us is likely to experience
the brutal hand-to-hand combat described so precisely in the Iliad, but reading
the Iliad can help us to understand something of the terror and exhilaration
these warriors felt.
But the experiential dimension of literature does more than simply
gratify our curiosity about the experiences of other people and places. The best
literature teaches us something about how it feels to be a limited human being
living in a fallen world. The Iliad not only asks us to experience combat, but to
experience the grief of losing someone close to us. Achilles’ grief for Patroclus
can help us to understand our own grief and how to avoid the worst excesses to
which grief can drive us. Achilles’ grief can cause us to reflect on our own
human limitations and the temptation to live as if those limitations did not
exist. When we respond to good works of literature by saying to ourselves: “Yes,
that is what life is like; that is how it feels to be human,” we are responding to
the experiential truth that literature conveys.
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Finally, literature is frequently a better learning tool than propositional
language. Memorizing the ten commandments is a chore. Remembering the
basic outline of the story of Joseph is simple, yet that same story has as much
to teach us about the character of God as the Ten Commandments, and
perhaps more, as we shall see.
In addition to being pleasurable for its own sake (everyone loves stories),
literature can intensify the impact of what we read by speaking to our hearts
rather than to our heads only, implanting its lessons far more deeply than
“head knowledge.” Literature is also easier to remember, a way of saying a
great deal in a small space. When David writes “The Lord is my shepherd,” he’s
using a metaphor that contains volumes of information about God—information
that need not be memorized because it is packed into the metaphor itself.
Psalm 73, which we will explore at some length, is a great example of
how Biblical literature can embody both propositional and experiential truth.
Psalm 73
1
Truly God is good to the upright,
to those who are pure in heart.
2
But as for me, my feet had almost slipped;
I had nearly lost my foothold.
3
For I envied the arrogant
when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
4
They have no struggles;
their bodies are healthy and strong.
5
They are free from the burdens common to man;
they are not plagued by human ills.
6
Therefore pride is their necklace;
they clothe themselves with violence.
7 Their eyes swell out with fatness;
their hearts overflow with follies.
8 They scoff, and speak with malice;
in their arrogance they threaten oppression.
9 They set their mouths against the heavens,
and their tongue struts through the earth.
10 Therefore their people turn to them and praise them; and find no fault in them.
11 They say, “How can God know?
Does the Most High have knowledge?”
12 This is what the wicked are likealways carefree, they increase in wealth.
13 Surely in vain have I kept my heart pure;
in vain have I washed my hands in innocence.
14 All day long I have been plagued;
I have been punished every morning.
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15 If I had said, “I will speak thus,”
I would have betrayed your children.
16 When I tried to understand all this,
it was oppressive to me
17 till I entered the sanctuary of God;
then I understood their final destiny.
18 Surely you place them on slippery ground;
you make them fall down to ruin.
19 How suddenly are they destroyed,
completely swept away by terrors!
20 As a dream when one awakes,
so when you arise, O Lord,
you will despise them as fantasies.
21 When my heart was grieved
and my spirit embittered,
22 I was senseless and ignorant;
I was a brute beast before you.
23 Yet I am always with you;
you hold me by my right hand.
24 You guide me with your counsel,
and afterward you will take me into glory.
25 Whom have I in heaven but you?
And earth has nothing I desire besides you.
26 My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart
and my portion forever.
27 Those who are far from you will perish;
you destroy all who are unfaithful to you.
28 But as for me, it is good to be near God.
I have made the Sovereign Lord my refuge;
I will tell of all your deeds.
*This is the “New Revised Standard McAllister Version” (NRSMV) of this
Psalm, cobbled together from several other translations.
The psalm begins with a statement of propositional truth: “Truly God is
good to the upright.” We might notice, though, that the speaker begins this
statement with the word “Truly,” as though the statement needed some
intensification, indicating the speaker’s recognition that the propositional
statement of the first verse (“God is good to the upright”) is not self-evident.
From its beginning line, then, the poem embodies the truths of human
experience, where short-term observations do not always support the abstract
claims made elsewhere in the Bible. Is God really “good to the upright”? A
cursory glance at the world would certainly suggest otherwise, for it is
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frequently the case that those who despise God and trample his truth seem to
be the most “blessed.”
The dissonance between the Biblical truth that “God is good to the
upright” and the experiential evidence of human observation is the puzzle that
the speaker mulls over in this poem. The psalm itself embodies this dissonance
because the claim that is ultimately upheld in the psalm (God IS good to the
upright) is at first stated only as an abstract proposition, whereas the evidence
against the claim (the wicked are prospering) is presented in a series of concrete
images, which we will explore in some detail below.
The speaker begins with a series of relatively straightforward
observations about the prosperity of the wicked: “they have no struggles” and
“their bodies are healthy and strong.” The language becomes more recognizably
literary when the speaker claims that “pride is their necklace.” “Pride” cannot
literally be worn around the neck; this is figurative language. In this case, the
figure is called a metaphor, a comparison that does not use the words “like” or
“as.” Instead of saying “A is like B” (a figure called a simile), metaphor instead
makes the much stronger and more striking claim that “A is B.” Metaphor
helps us to grasp something abstract or unfamiliar (the pride of the wicked) by
comparing it with something concrete and familiar (a person wearing a
necklace). A necklace is something worn openly, often as a way of displaying
prosperity (especially thick gold chains or jewels). So the suggestion here is
that the wicked are not even ashamed of their pride, but rather display it
openly.
The speaker goes on to tell us that the eyes of the wicked “swell out with
fatness.” Again, the speaker simply presents us with a word-picture, but the
picture speaks clearly enough that no further explanation is necessary. In this
culture, fatness is not shameful, but is instead a sign of prosperity, indicating
that one does not have to do manual labor and can afford to eat a great deal of
rich food. So the image of the eyes of the wicked swelling out with fatness
embodies or incarnates the abstract idea that the wicked are prospering.
An even more interesting figure appears in verse 9, where we are told
that the tongue of the wicked “struts through the earth.” (NASB translates
“struts” here as “parades.”) The figure here is called personification, which
happens when a writer invests an object with human properties. In this case, a
tongue is made to walk grandly around the earth as if it had legs and a brain to
guide it. The psalmist asks us to see the picture as a way of understanding the
real object he is describing: the words of the wicked, which are obviously as full
of false pride as a lone man strutting through the earth laying claim to all that
he sees.
Verses 10 and 11 show us the effect of the apparent prosperity of the
wicked: other people admire the wicked and turn away from God. Seeing the
wicked go unpunished, they are encouraged to engage in wicked behavior
themselves. After all, if God does not punish the wicked but gives them
prosperity, maybe he does not watch over human behavior at all. Of course,
the psalm doesn’t literally say any of this. Instead, it simply reports the actions
and speech of “the people” and leaves us to infer what these speeches and
actions mean. The speaker even begins to report his own frustration with God’s
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lack of oversight in allowing the wicked to prosper by directly reporting his own
thoughts: “Surely in vain have I kept my heart pure.” In other words, “What a
waste of time to be obedient to God if wicked people have all the wealth, health,
and happiness.”
But the psalm does not leave us to sort unaided through the implications
of the disheartening experience of seeing the wicked prosper. Instead, just after
verse 14, at the exact midpoint of the psalm, the tone changes based on the
speaker’s having “entered the sanctuary of God.” This last phrase is more
figurative language serving to indicate not necessarily a change in physical
location, but a figurative change in thinking, since “entering” this sanctuary
involves an entire change of heart on the part of the thinker, a change that will
be embodied in the rest of the psalm.
This change of heart might be described as a shift from short-term to
long-term thinking; the shift is incarnated for us in figurative language. The
speaker remembers here that God places the wicked “on slippery ground.” Of
course, the speaker does not literally mean that God puts down wicked people
in the mud, but that figuratively speaking, the wicked are in “slippery places,”
places where one cannot stand long before falling. “Slippery place” is a physical
metaphor describing the spiritual position of the wicked before God. The
implication, here and elsewhere, is that destruction is coming on the wicked
eventually. The ultimate destruction of the wicked is one of the most
fundamental of all Biblical themes, embodied in stories all over the Bible.
When we begin to allow ourselves to think in Biblical terms, when our
hearts are soaked in the truth of the Bible, we understand that the prosperity of
the wicked is only temporary. God has never allowed the wicked to prosper
unpunished, though retribution comes on God’s timetable and not on man’s.
God’s character as the punisher of evil deeds has not changed. The history of
God’s interaction with humans is full of stories of the temporary prosperity of
the wicked being ultimately placed under God’s judgment.
In Psalm 73, the speaker’s ultimate embrace of God’s way of thinking,
comes through, rather than apart from, a wrestling with the fallen world and its
apparent contradiction of Biblical truth. The speaker in the psalm reaches
solid ground theologically only after looking carefully and actively at his world,
even in those places where the facts seem to contradict scripture, even at those
actions and behaviors that are displeasing to God, not hiding from them, but
encountering them and thinking about what they mean. To extend the
psalmist’s metaphor, we enter the sanctuary of God by passing through the
courtyard of critical thinking.
My prayer is that, even as the psalmist’s view of the world is deepened by
approaching the evidence of experience from a Biblical perspective, your
encounter with literature will help you undergo the same process of
transformation this psalm embodies. This process is described by Paul in
Romans 12:2, when he warns against being “conformed to this world,” as the
speaker of the psalm appears to be in the first fourteen verses, relying solely on
his short-term observations of the prosperity of the wicked. Paul commands
instead that we allow ourselves to be “transformed by the renewing of [our]
mind[s], that [we] may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will
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of God.” Knowing the will, and thus the character, of God, is the end or
purpose of all human knowledge. The study of the best literature can be an
invaluable aid in that process.
Worldview
The Bible teaches us that humans are limited beings who exist in a fallen
world, a world that is very different from the world that God originally created
for us to occupy. God created us with a consciousness that was designed for a
perfect world, but, like fish out of water, we no longer occupy that world. As a
result, our minds constantly scream that something is wrong. The hard facts of
existence—death, disease, aging, human evil, our own loneliness and sense of
isolation—strike us as desperately wrong, so we naturally search for answers.
This search is as human and normal as breathing.
The mere fact of human consciousness, of existing in a fallen world,
forces on each of us certain questions. Who am I? Why am I here? What
should I be doing? What went wrong? Where am I? Who (or what) is in control
of events? No culture has ever existed that did not feel the need to answer
these questions, for they are built into the very nature of man.
Your answers to these questions define your worldview, your way of
thinking about yourself and your relationship to the world and to God. Every
human being has a worldview; some are more explicit and carefully constructed
than others, but we all have one. One of the goals of this anthology is to
encourage you to think more carefully about your own worldview and to begin
“taking every thought captive” so that your thinking will become more clearly in
line with a Biblical worldview. For organizational purposes, I am dividing these
worldview questions up into three areas: view of man (who am I?), view of the
world (where am I?), and view of the divine (what, or who, is in charge?). In
practice, we’ll see that all of these questions are inter-related, that answering
any of these questions in a particular way affects the way we answer the others.
View of Man
Who am I? Every worldview attempts to provide a meaningful answer to
this question, an answer that helps an individual to understand his
relationship with the world and with the divine. Am I created or did I “just
happen”? Do I have free will, or are my actions predetermined by some external
force? Can I take significant action? How can I live a meaningful life? How
useful is my reason? How do I balance my responsibilities to the community
with my own desires? Are my abilities and gifts in life the result of who my
parents are? How important are “every day” events like cooking, eating, and
caring for children? Are they less important than extraordinary events like
wars, counsels, and business meetings? How important is romantic love? Is
love merely a distraction from more important matters?
View of World
Where am I? The nature of the world we inhabit has been a subject of
reflection for philosophers and scientists since the beginnings of recorded
history. The primary questions that humans have asked about the world
involve orderliness. Does the world display an order, a predictable pattern of
behavior, or is the world simply random? Psalm 73 seems to be asking
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precisely this question; after all, if evildoers flourish, there must be no order.
Answers to this question are generally based on how one answers other related
questions: was the world created, or did it just happen? Is the physical world
all that exists, or is there a spiritual world as well? Does the physical world
really exist? Some non-Christian worldviews like Hinduism and Christian
Science hold that the material world is merely an illusion and that the only
“real” world is the spiritual. Other worldviews like Platonism hold that the
material world exists but is only a shabby and imperfect reflection of the truly
significant spiritual world. Finally, some worldviews like scientific determinism
insist that the spiritual world does not exist at all, or if it does it is unnecessary
for explaining the physical world. View of the world also includes views about
man’s ultimate destination: where (if anywhere) do we go after death?
View of the Divine
What (or who) is in control? The Bible tells us that God created humans
to be in a close and loving relationship with Him; when man sinned, he cut
himself off from his relationship with God. Ever since, man apart from God has
felt deeply that something or someone must be in control of the observable
world, working behind the scenes. But different cultures and groups without
the Biblical revelation of God have disagreed about the nature of that divine
someone or something. Is there a force that transcends the physical world that
controls it? Does that force have personal features like emotions, memory, or
planning? I…
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