A Lament for Witches

The West has been threatening to get rid of the witch for centuries, but back she’s come anyway. When the fashion for witch trials died out in Europe by the middle of the eighteenth century, the witch’s spectral powers—otherwise known as her particular talent for inducing hysteria—might have become a thing of the past. The Enlightenment had arrived, with science and logic ready to wrest broom from hand. But the witch remained a skilled survivalist even in defeat.

She flourished for hundreds of years in her natural habitat: theological debate. In 1835, for instance, David Strauss, a young, upstart theologian and a former student of Hegel’s, published “Das Leben Jesu,” a book in which he treated the life of Jesus not as historical or even religious fact but as a legend. He read and thought about the Testaments in just the same way one might think about a novel. He detected certain fibs, of course, but he was most interested in discovering what the authors of the Bible meant, the morals they conveyed, and not in the literal or historical truth recorded there. To prove his point, Strauss highlighted traces of the authors’ own eras left behind in Biblical texts—like his old teacher, Hegel, he was a historicist. Today such an attitude toward the Bible might be obvious; in Strauss’s time, it was blasphemous. He lost his university position and never taught again, but his message had already cast a certain spell.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/10/a-lament-for-witches.html#ixzz2LmUmIrFe