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GRE文章之小讲(4)--终结篇 |
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| www.iselong.com 日期：2006-03-06 10:35
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Both Jewish law and canon law are more uniform than Islamic law. Though historically there is a discernible break between Jewish law of the sovereign state of ancient Israel and of the Diaspora (the dispersion of Jewish people after the conquest of Israel), the spirit of the legal matter in later parts of the Old Testament is very close to that of the Talmud, one of the primary codifications of Jewish law in the Diaspora. Islam, on the other hand, represented a radical breakaway from the Arab paganism that preceded it; Islamic law is the result of an examination from a religious angle, of legal subject matter that was far from uniform, comprising as it did the various components of the laws of pre-Islamic Arabia and numerous legal elements taken over from the non-Arab peoples of the conquered territories. All this was unified by being subjected to the same kind of religious scrutiny, the impact of which varied greatly, being almost nonexistent in some fields, and in others originating novel institutions. This central duality of legal subject matter and religious norm is additional to the variety of legal, ethical, and ritual rules that is typical of sacred law.
In its relation to the secular state, Islamic law differed from both Jewish and canon law. Jewish law was buttressed by the cohesion of the community, reinforced by pressure from outside; its rules are the direct expression of this feeling of cohesion, tending toward the accommodation of dissent. Canon and Islamic law, on the contrary, were dominated by the dualism of religion and state, where the state was not, in contrast with Judaism, an alien power but the political expression of the same religion. But the conflict between state and religion took different forms; in Christianity it appeared as the struggle for political power on the part of a tightly organized ecclesiastical hierarchy, and canon law was one of its political weapons. Islamic law, on the other hand, was never supported by an organized institution; consequently, there never developed an overt trial of strength. There merely existed discordance between application of the sacred law and many of the regulations framed by Islamic states; this antagonism varied according to place and time.
5. Jean Wagner's most enduring contribution to the study of Afro-American poetry is his insistence that it be analyzed in a religious, as well as secular, frame of reference. The appropriateness of such an approach may seem self- evident for a tradition commencing with spirituals and owing its early forms, rhythms, vocabulary, and evangelical fervor to Wesleyan hymnals. But before Wagner a secular outlook that analyzed Black poetry solely within the context of political and social protest was dominant in the field.
It is Wagner who first demonstrated the essential fusion of racial and religious feeling in Afro-American poetry. The two, he argued, form a symbiotic union in which religious feelings are often applied to racial issues and racial problems are often projected onto a metaphysical plane. Wagner found this most eloquently illustrated in the Black spiritual, where the desire for freedom in this world and the hope for salvation in the next are inextricably intertwined.
6. Two relatively recent independent developments stand behind the current major research effort on nitrogen fixation, the process by which bacteria symbiotically render leguminous plants independent of nitrogen fertilizer. The one development has been the rapid, sustained increase in the price of nitrogen fertilizer. The other development has been the rapid growth of knowledge of and technical sophistication in genetic engineering. Fertilizer prices, largely tied to the price of natural gas, huge amounts of which go into the manufacture of fertilizer, will continue to represent an enormous and escalating economic burden on modern agriculture, spurring the search for alternatives to synthetic fertilizers. And genetic engineering is just the sort of fundamental breakthrough that opens up prospects of wholly novel alternatives. One such novel idea is that of inserting into the chromosomes of plants discrete genes that are not a part of the plants' natural constitution: specifically, the idea of inserting into nonleguminous plants the genes, if they can be identified and isolated, that fit the leguminous plants to be hosts for nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Hence, the intensified research on legumes.
Ragtime remains distinct from jazz both as an instrumental style and as a genre. Ragtime style stresses a pattern of repeated rhythms, not the constant inventions and variations of jazz. As a genre, ragtime requires strict attention to structure, not inventiveness or virtuosity. It exists as a tradition, a set of conventions, a body of written scores, separate from the individual players associated with it. In this sense ragtime is more akin to folk music of the nineteenth century than to jazz.
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