Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Alice von Hildebrand (2)

Note: This post has been corrected to repair a mistaken attribution from an earlier version. There is some explanation in the comments.

Time to get back to Alice von Hildebrand's essay criticizing Christopher West.

She now turns to the Bible to back up her position. What happens is rather curious:
Man easily becomes prey to his feelings. The Bible is rich in such examples. Clearly, King David—a man after God’s own heart (1 Samuel 13:14)—totally lost control of himself when he saw Bathsheba who was very beautiful.  He was defeated by her attraction, and committed adultery, followed by murder.
If we go back and look at the actual story of David and Bathsheba where we find absolutely nothing to justify Hildebrand's suggestion that this is a story about a man losing control of himself. The problem is rather the opposite. What we see is a story of a king abusing his power in a very cold, calculated way.

The story opens with David rising in the late afternoon (where he has been napping miles from the front while his army is fighting to further David's glory by the way) and seeing Bathsheba bathing and he sends to find out who she is. Then he sends for her. Note how pre-meditated all this is. And note also that no resistance is recorded on Bathsheba's part.

The only way you could read that scene as David losing control is if you projected it onto the events yourself. Which, of course, is exactly what Hildebrand has done here.

And it gets worse. Hildebrand writes as if the murder of Bathsheba's rightful husband follows hot on the heels of the adultery but this is hardly the case. The Bible gives us a very important clue in that it tells us that when David and Bathsheba have sex she had just purified herself after her period. This tells us two things. First that she is not pregnant before going to David and second that, at a bare minimum, she has to go through her cycle before she will discover that she is pregnant. This has to be a number of weeks at the very least. The Bible is, as if it often does, telling us a story in a very compact way but the actual events are spread out over time.

When she does learn she pregnant, she sends David a note. This is a powerful hint that the relationship between the two is more amicable than Hildebrand's version would allow. (A point reinforced by their later marriage.) David now constructs an elaborate scheme to get Uriah (husband of Bathsheba) back from the front where he has been fighting and get him to go home to his wife so that he will mistakenly think he is the father. When this fails. he constructs another scheme to get Uriah killed in battle and this succeeds.

Not only does this belie Hildebrand's claim that David is out of control, it tells us that his primary motive here is not sexual but a matter of shame and honour. David has acted in a most shameful way while Uriah has always behaved with honour. David acts so as to prevent his shame from becoming public. It is fear of shame and not sexuality that is the cause of this murder.

Alice von Hildebrand, as I said in my first post on the subject, is writing in good faith. She really believes what she is saying. The problem when it comes to her reading of the Bible is that it is clear that she has a very poor grasp on the issues she is raising. She is just not credible here.

The first post in this series is here.

The next post in the series is here.

3 comments:

  1. But that's the thing Jules, everyone really believes what they're saying. I agree that the Catholic News Agency shouldn't give her credibility, but she's serving a purpose for them too in promoting an agenda, they obviously agree with her. But going back to my first point, I think things got all fouled up when the apostles and their successors took Jesus' call to evangelize beyond what He was talking about, i.e., love God and neighbor as you love yourself. That's unambiguous and is easy for everyone to understand. I really believe that.

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  2. But von Hildebrand's not citing 1 Samuel 13:14 as the location of the whole story; she's referring to where Samuel tells Saul that he blew it and that God will "seek out a man after his own heart"--that is, David.

    And, while I agree with you that David is far more calculating than von Hildebrand seems to believe him to be, my first impression of what she meant by "totally lost control of himself" was that David didn't behave at all as he should have--as a king. Instead, he succumbed to temptation in a big way. Perhaps just a poor choice of words on von Hildebrand's part?

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  3. Fair comment on the quote. You are right. I will modify the post to reflect that and leave this here as an admission of my getting it wrong.

    That still doesn't help make the example of David fit Hildebrand's story any better though. You are definitely correct that David did not behave as fits a king, or even as befits a man for that matter, in Hildebrand's point is that we have to be constantly on guard against concupiscence lest we be overwhelmed by it and that is not the David story.

    The David story does resemble something else, however, and I have a post coming up on that issue.

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