Addressing Paul's understanding of the church (ekklēsia) means raising other difficult questions that a brief essay cannot adequately answer. The most critical question concerns which of the letters ascribed to Paul should be considered. Ephesians and 1 Timothy, for example, provide fuller information on aspects of the church than do some undisputed letters. But they are commonly regarded as pseudonymous. Should they be excluded altogether, read as a faithful continuation of themes in the authentic letters, or adjudged betrayals of the authentic Paul's spirit? In order to maintain conversation with the dominant scholarly position, this essay will discuss the evidence of the undisputed letters before that in Colossians, Ephesians, and the Pastoral Letters, even though there are strong reasons for accepting all thirteen letters attributed to Paul as authored by him through a complex process of composition. The present analysis does, however, emphasize thematic links between the disputed and undisputed letters, in order to respect the genuine lines of continuity among them and the marked diversity within even the collection of undisputed letters.

Another procedural question concerns consistency and variation amongthe expressions of Paul’s thought. Which images and understandings areof fundamental character, and which are only brought to the surface bythe peculiar circumstances that Paul faces in a specific community?

INTRODUCTION

Although the main center of the development and maturation of Jewish philosophy came to an end with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, Jewish philosophy did not disappear. The exiled Sephardic Jews who were interested in philosophy took with them their philosophical libraries and continued their philosophical pursuits in their new domiciles. Some of these transplanted Spanish émigrés continued to do philosophy in the ways they knew and were used to; some, however, absorbed in various degrees the philosophical environment of their new abodes, which were considerably different from the philosophical culture in which they were educated. This was most notable in Italy, where some of the more prominent Sephardic exiles settled. After all, Italy was the home of the Renaissance, during which philosophy, as well as the arts and literature, underwent some significant transformations.

The very existence of a distinctive Renaissance philosophy has sometimes been questioned, and consequently a distinctive Renaissance Jewish philosophy has been challenged. There is no question that medieval Aristotelianism, in its various forms, continued unabated throughout the fifteenth–seventeenth centuries, especially in the universities. And it found its adherents and advocates amongst Jewish philosophical thinkers, as we shall see. But there is no doubt that the philosophical climate in fifteenth-century Italy was changing and that new or different philosophical books were being read and made part of the philosophical culture of the period.

It is difficult to give an account of Swift's life without talking of the ways in which it has been represented. This does not mean that his life is merely “textual,” that whatever facts or certainties shared by his biographers are of less significance than the competing interpretations which they provide. Rather, it means that any account should acknowledge the history of Swiftian biography. That history was itself anticipated and imagined by Swift, who realized that his life would become as contentious as his work, and that he would be recreated and reinvented by friends and enemies alike. The extent to which a literary work reflects, betrays, or conceals its author is an issue which concerned Swift as much as it has concerned his biographers.

Right from the gate, Swift emerged as an original. He shocked, amused, perplexed, and outraged his first readers just as he has three centuries of readers since. Swift desired the lasting fame that even his earliest writings secured, but he originally addressed these works to specific people in specific historical circumstances that they might change. Although Swift often despaired of satire's efficacy, no satirist more forcefully provokes in his audience an embarrassed discomfort with the world as it is. The sharp aggression in Swift's writing speaks of the writer's deeply held beliefs about the true and the good and his outrage at their violation. And yet even in this conviction Swift betrays an equally deep vein of skepticism. From this volatile mixture of faith and distrust, Swift's early writing usually confronts us not with clear affirmation but with irony and unsettling contradiction - a particularly dangerous tack for a reformer to take. Swift's perilous strategy effectively puts his readers off balance, and that is precisely where the satirist wants us.

The most revealing aspects of Swift's relationship to Ireland are the contradictions at its very core, suggested by his own often conflicting statements about his place of birth and the antithetical attitudes he expressed about his native land, as well as by the widely divergent views about him put forward by readers over the years, their disagreements often hinging on whether they locate him in a primarily Irish or English context. This chapter, while recognizing the significance of the latter context, will explore the many reasons why Swift cannot be understood apart from his multi-varied ties to Ireland. There is room for disagreement about the precise nature and meaning of these ties, but there can be no disputing the fundamental connection itself - a kind of umbilical cord which, though sometimes perversely denied or concealed, was never severed and in fact greatly strengthened during the final quarter-century of his life. Ireland did not simply provide an inert background for Swift's life; it was an integral part of his identity, an essential ingredient in the way he viewed the world, an indispensable thread in the recurring patterns and textures of his writings. A man exceptionally sensitive to his immediate surroundings in all their concrete detail and steadfastly refusing to turn a blind eye to the material conditions of his existence, Swift settled into Dublin life with the whole of his being, fully inhabiting the spaces of St. Patrick's Cathedral and the surrounding area, known as the Liberties, with a physical as well as intellectual presence that demanded not only acknowledgment but also active engagement.

Like the rest of his writing, Swift's poetry is often disturbing and uproariously funny at the same time. It can be excessive, ungenteel and informal: equally it can be surprisingly conventional in form and dry in tone. Its language may be robust or, on occasions, almost prim. One of the things that makes the poems so appealing and accessible is their gusto, which comes in part from a scorn for false solemnity, self-pity, and existential complaints. The famous Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift provide a case in point.

The key concept for understanding Swift's satire is not a rhetorical precept about persona, but a deeply held principle about what it means, in Swift's view, to be a person. For Swift, language, religion, and politics are not strictly divisible, but are all inextricably linked as integral parts of human endeavor. The serious business of Swiftian satire is that it invites (or provokes) the reader to be critical: that is, to judge. Most often, the judgments that Swift's satires ask us to make go well beyond straightforward condemnation of the work's obvious target; rather, we are led to form a series of deeper judgments about language, religion, and politics, and about the operations of human vice and virtue that govern these activities in others and in ourselves. The comic exuberance and imaginative plentitude that often characterize Swift's satirical writings should not blind us to the fact that Swift, though never moralistic, is a relentlessly moral writer. Even when being self-denigrating about its aesthetic qualities, Swift himself is adamant about the purpose of his work: “I have been only a Man of Rhimes, and that upon Trifles,” he writes, “yet never any without a moral View” (C iv: 52). This “moral view” pervading Swift's writings in both poetry and prose is not about adherence to a set of pious ordinances, but is deeply concerned with how people act as linguistic, religious, and political beings.

Dictionaries define the noun intellectuel as a person devoted by profession or taste to the exercise of intelligence, to the life of the mind. Yet the word - in both French and English - has a more specific meaning that, while widely recognised, almost never makes it into these definitions: that of a person of recognised intellectual attainments who speaks out in the public arena, generally in ways that call established society or dominant ideologies to account in the name of principle or on behalf of the oppressed.

This more pointed definition of the intellectual must be given pride of place in a chapter such as this one, which obviously cannot begin to cover all the French-language intellectual contributions of the twentieth century, or attempt a synthesis of philosophic, scientific, linguistic, literary, aesthetic, sociological and anthropological thought. At the same time, the porous boundaries between the different definitions of the intellectual make it impossible to remain solely within this canonical perspective. At times philosophic, literary or scholarly work by itself has sufficient impact to give its authors a role in public life. Perhaps more disconcertingly, the public intervention of the intellectual on behalf of a cause has become a stereotypic act that can seemingly be performed (or mimicked, purists would say) by individuals who lack the imprimatur of their peers as legitimate contributors to the life of the mind: entertainers, celebrities or essayists not esteemed within the intellectual community.

The period from about 1900 until the Spanish Civil War (1936-9) is often considered a second Renaissance in Spanish culture, a “Silver Age,” as José Carlos Mainer calls it. The novel of this period was particularly precocious, showing early signs of the artistic innovations that came to be called modernism in other European literatures. From 1870 onwards the novel had come into its own as a major cultural form in Spain for its ability to mirror a bourgeois society anxious to read portraits of itself. By the turn of the century, however, a growing intelligentsia was losing patience with middle-class values and their political and artistic manifestations. The Restoration government, which replaced the revolutionary initiatives of 1868-74, had created a peace and stability that Spain had not enjoyed during most of the earlier nineteenth century; at the same time, intellectuals were disgusted with its corrupt politics and support of conservative Spanish institutions such as the church hierarchy and the landed aristocracy. Modern philosophy and ideologies gave the intellectuals and writers the impetus they needed to seek new social and cultural forms.

“¡Adentro!” (“Turn inward”) exhorted Miguel de Unamuno in 1900,arguing for a reorientation of the collective psyche away from the material,scientific, technological aspects of life to the internal and spiritual.

By the end of the nineteenth century, a deep sense of disillusionment and exhaustion had settled over Spain. While the perception of decay and lost opportunities was generally felt throughout Europe, in Spain the circumstances were particularly striking. Despite a century of enormous progress and changes, the Old World was ill at ease with itself, a feeling of crisis at hand. Somewhat belatedly, Spain, too, had participated in the economic and social advances of the period, but always with the awareness of having once been an empire. Indeed, by 1898 the loss of empire was almost total after the disastrous war with the United States in Cuba. The sense of having come undone nationally, however, coexisted paradoxically with another feeling: the growing suspicion that the nation had never really coalesced ideologically or historically. Both regionalistic and political differences became more pronounced at the same time, as elsewhere secularization signaled a crisis of spiritual and moral values. On a personal level, Unamuno expressed Spanish isolationism thus: “Every soul lives alone among other souls alone, in a naked, sterile desert, where they twist and turn like the poor spirits of skeletons shut inside their anemic skins.”

The role of the State

The most original feature of French media is perhaps to be found in the role of the State which to a large extent has shaped the current situation of the broadcasting media and plays a supporting role in the survival of national papers with strong political commitments but devoid of sufficient advertising resources.

Media broadcasting emerged in France as the result of the initiative of wireless set manufacturers (Radiola) or of publishing groups (Le Petit Parisien). The government lost no time in asserting the State's monopoly over 'the sending and the receiving of radio-electrical signals of all kinds' (1923 Finance Bill) on the basis of the scarcity of national radio frequencies considered as a national asset. This restrictive approach to a new medium, enshrined in an article of the Finance Bill of 1923, was in fact the logical continuation of the traditional official position defined as early as 1837 which restricted the use of telegraphic signals to the suppliers licensed by the government.

In 1923, however, the law allowed the government to grant licences to private radio broadcasters under the control of the Ministry for Post, Telegraph and Telephone (PTT). Radio-Paris was in fact the only private radio station licensed by the administration, later to be relaunched by the State under the title of Poste National. By 1929, broadcasting was taken away from the supervision of the PTT Ministry to be put under the sole control of an Information Commissar directly responsible to the Cabinet (Council of Ministers).

For the intellectual historian of nineteenth-century Europe, certain words flag critical foci of interest: “revolution,”“evolution,” “nation,” “travel,” “industrialism.” These words are no less important in the literature of the period, and in Spain they have a particular relationship with the regional novel. Of these words, “evolution,” habitually associated with the ideas of Darwin, will be central to the discussion in this chapter. Common usage has accustomed us to apply it retrospectively and rather indiscriminately to areas of nineteenth-century life which, in their day, were innocent of such concepts. Yet the term “evolution” itself is one that has evolved. Coined by Haller in 1744, it initially indicated “preformationism,” the gradual unfolding of a form of life already perfectly formed. In the course of the nineteenth century, “evolution” came to have the force of “transmutation” with which we associate it today. Thus the shift was one from a consoling thought to achallenging one, from a position that maintained that change was, as it were,always and already foreseen, to the idea of evolution as a much more disturbingand challenging perspective, signaling that a change effected mightbecome something new. The evolving concept of the term “evolution” thusmoves from the idea of change as part of a pre-existing master plan (evolutionas development) to the idea of change as a process lacking linear certainty(evolution as variation).

As a commentator on the politics and social relations of his age it would have been hard for Jonathan Swift to ignore economic circumstances. The later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw a commercial revolution in the British Isles, transforming patterns of trade - both foreign and domestic, raising living standards, and permeating human relationships with commercial values. On its heels came the financial revolution associated with the European wars of the 1690s, with the emergence of an embryonic stock market, and the growth of new forms of credit both public and private, developments which would culminate a quarter of a century later with the world's first stock market boom and crash in the South Sea Bubble and Mississippi Company debacle of 1720. The financial innovations to which the Wars of Grand Alliance gave birth led to the establishment of new forms of wealth and a class of financial interests, known as the “moneyed men,” who challenged the hitherto established predominance of the landed gentry and aristocracy. These developments transformed the world of politics, creating opportunities - sometimes rather questionable ones - for enrichment for wider circles than the financiers themselves and bringing into existence forms of wealth that were not merely intangible but to many people barely comprehensible. Amongst those drawn into such activities were leading ministers and military commanders. In the later stages of theWar of Spanish Succession even the Duke of Marlborough, England's greatest general since the Hundred Years War, came to be seen as putting self-enrichment through war before the interests of his country, corruption for which he was memorably satirized by Swift, along with his inordinate political ambition, in The Conduct of the Allies in 1711.

Philosophy and kabbalah were highly variegated programs for the interpretation of rabbinic Judaism. Although kabbalah was rooted in the esoteric traditions of late antiquity, it became a self-conscious program for the interpretation of Judaism at the end of the twelfth century, to counter Maimonidean intellectualism. Nonetheless, kabbalists addressed the theoretical issues of concern to the rationalist philosophers and theorized within the conceptual framework of contemporary philosophy. In the second half of the thirteenth century, two types of kabbalah were consolidated: theosophic kabbalah mythologized philosophical categories while articulating a comprehensive alternative to rationalist philosophy. Prophetic (or ecstatic) kabbalah, by contrast, developed a full-fledged intellectual mysticism on the basis of Maimonides' theory of knowledge and gave kabbalistic doctrines a philosophical reading. During the fourteenth century a few Jewish philosophers, especially those who cultivated the study of astrology and astral magic, viewed kabbalah and philosophy as compatible schemas that give different names to the same entities. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the philosophic reading of kabbalah was prevalent in Italy where kabbalah was viewed by Jews, and even by some Christian humanists, as ancient speculative lore necessary for intellectual perfection. In Spain and in the Spanish diaspora the mythical aspects of kabbalah were more prominent. While some kabbalists had a very negative view of philosophy, the dominant attitude toward kabbalah among Iberian philosophers was quite positive. They considered that kabbalah revealed knowledge that completes and perfects human reason and went on to recast medieval Aristotelianism in accord with the teachings of kabbalah.

The number of books and articles about Swift is extensive. The works listed below only begin to suggest the sheer range of writing on Swift. This list can be updated and supplemented by consulting the works listed in the bibliographical section below and by browsing such online search engines as MLAIB, The MLA International Bibliography of Books and Articles on the Modern Languages and Literatures and ABELL, the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature. Printed journals such as The Scriblerian and Swift Studies also contain helpful listings of recent work.