Vol. 2 No. 10 · 22 May 1980
pages 20-22 | 3766 words
Short Books on Great Men
John Dunn
- Jesus by Humphrey Carpenter
Oxford, 102 pp, June 1980, ISBN 0 19 283016 3
- Aquinas by Anthony Kenny
Oxford, 86 pp, June 1980, ISBN 0 19 287500 0
- Pascal by Alban Krailsheimer
Oxford, 84 pp, June 1980, ISBN 0 19 287512 4
- Hume by A.J. Ayer
Oxford, 102 pp, June 1980, ISBN 0 19 287528 0
- Marx by Peter Singer
Oxford, 82 pp, June 1980, ISBN 0 19 287510 8
To be truly a Master is to have authority. To claim to be a Master is to claim to possess authority. We can be confident that more persons claim to have authority than do truly have it. What is less easy to determine is who in fact does possess it. The place of authority in human life is both centrally important and irretrievably contentious. The personnel of the ‘Modern Masters’ series may simply map the credal disorder of our days, the fitful intellectual allegiances of a society of masterless persons. Past Masters, however, are, or at any rate ought to be, figures of historically proven authority. It is easiest to see historically proven authority as essentially the authority of continuing traditions. One question, therefore, which Keith Thomas’s series must confront at the start is simply whether for us as moderns any continuing traditions do (or even could) retain their authority. (An entire school of sociologists, for example, seeks to define modernity as a categorical denial of authority to tradition in its entirety.) What, then, is authority? And more particularly, how far is it genuinely open to us to think of authority as something which can be incarnated, realised in the historical persons of individual human beings?
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Letters
Vol. 2 No. 12 · 19 June 1980
From Nicolas Walter
SIR: John Dunn’s review of the first batch of ‘Past Masters’ LRB, Vol. 2, No 10) contains some ill-humoured and ill-informed sneers at Humphrey Carpenter’s volume on Jesus. Among these is the suggestion that a writer about Jesus should decide whether he is divine and must make a judgment about ‘who he thought he was and what he thought he was doing’, and that the ‘indispensable’ approach should be, among other things, ‘more credulous’. Surely even the most committed Christian must admit that the historical evidence about such issues is simply insufficient to make rational decisions or judgments, and that many if not most of the readers of such a book will not be committed Christians and would therefore resent and reject an obviously credulous approach. After all, the relevant evidence itself suggests that most of the people around at the time couldn’t make up their minds what Jesus was and who he thought he was or what he thought he was doing. Should we really be more credulous today? And how can we consider Jesus’s moral teaching except in the context of our own moral ideas? Dunn thinks Carpenter has gone too far; I don’t think he has gone far enough. But surely he was right to go as far as he can.
Nicolas Walter
Rationalist Press Association, London N1
John Dunn writes: Irony is a dangerous device. I must apologise to Mr Walter for having inadvertently misled him by my use of the word ‘credulous’. The central complaint which I wished to level at Mr Carpenter’s book was not that its author failed to believe that Jesus was ‘God’, a task at which I should abjectly fail myself, but rather that he failed in the event to muster virtually any clear beliefs about Jesus. As I noted in my review, a high degree of scepticism about the character of Jesus’s life seems to me eminently convincing in itself. But it scarcely assists an author to write a very compelling book under the rubric of a series like ‘Past Masters’.
