From Word To Word

I have written before about how much I love the strange, dream-like, mystical novels of Charles Williams, but they are hard to come by now. They can be purchased new, of course, though they are never in stock and are often “unavailable to order a this time,” and I do not often buy books new in any case. My local library is even less helpful, as it usually is, so I am reduced to looking in used bookstores and thrift shops, which has so far met with only very limited success.

Last semester, however, I found one of Williams’ novel’s in the EBC library discard sale, so I thought I might check to see if there were any more of his books in the school’s collection. I had low expectations. The EBC library, serving a Bible College as it does, is adequate in areas like theology and biblical studies, but its English Literature section is literally a few shelves in the furthest corner of the stacks. I did not even bother to check the computer catalogue. I just went to the section and scanned the shelves, and there, against all my expectations, were every one of Williams’ novels and a book of his theology besides.

In retrospect, I should have expected that a Bible College library would be likely to include the fiction of a writer who was also a Christian theologian and a who was, perhaps more importantly, a close friend of C. S. Lewis, for several decades now the closest thing that Protestants have to a patron saint. None of analysis after the fact was able to spoil my mood, however, and I have just finished the first of these books, entitled Descent into Hell.

The novel is superficially about a group of actors who are putting on a play at the residence of its famous playwright, Peter Stanhope. More deeply, it is concerned with the way that some of these actors relate to themselves as selves. For example, the heroine, Pauline Anstruther, sometimes sees a copy of herself approaching along the street, and another of the actors, Laurence Wentworth, creates for himself a succubus that is never really distinct from his own substance, and he falls into a kind of demonic narcissism. Others of the characters are also self-obsessed in the more usual ways, and much of the book’s philosophizing has to do with this question of self.

In this context, Williams has Stanhope muse to Pauline about the shift that occurs from the Greek philosophical tradition’s “know thyself” to the Christian tradition’s “love thy neighbour”. The shift, he implies, is not just from knowing to loving, but also, perhaps primarily, from the self to the neighbour. Though Stanhope does not articulate this distinction at any great length, some of his other comments make it unlikely that he is opposing knowing the self and loving the neighbour absolutely. Rather, he seems to be arguing that it is only possible to know the self through loving the neighbour, that loving the neighbour is precisely what produces true knowledge of the self, and the conclusion of the plot goes so far as to suggest that knowing the self apart from loving the neighbour is productive only of a kind of hell on earth, where the human imagination creates succubi for itself and the dead cannot rest in their graves.

Of course, Stanhope’s observation makes most of Christian history an irony, since Christianity, especially in its Protestant guises, has been intimately bound up with all the various individualisms of personal salvation, democratic politics, capitalist economics, individual rights, and private property. The self trumps the neighbour here, again and again, resoundingly, even if this self remains largely unknown. What is more, this triumph of the self produces, at least according to the logic of the novel, a descent into hell on earth, and it implies that the Christian tradition, far from bringing about the heaven of the neighbour, has been far more concerned with bringing about the hell of the self.

I am not certain whether Williams would actually have levelled this criticism against Christianity, but I think that his logic is worth following. If Christianity, or any other faith for that matter, has anything worth saying in this age where the hell of the self has become our greatest ambition, surely it is that we can only come to know ourselves by loving our neighbours.  This is surely the only thing that it has ever had to say, the thing that it has always been saying, without end, though it is all too seldom heard, so I will quote:

“This is the first and greatest commandment: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

If God appears in the world primarily as the one who is revealed and therefore also as the one who reveals, since nothing else would be sufficient to reveal God, it is possible to understand there to be three parts to this appearing: 1) the God who reveals; 2) the God who is revealed; and 3) the God through whom God is revealed. This conveniently trinitarian appearing of God could by summarized succinctly in the phrase, “God, through God, reveals God,” or even, “God Gods God.”

Interestingly, this trinitarian construction parallels the grammatical structures that characterize the English language, along with most others. God appears in it as subject, verb, and object, forming a complete, albeit unusual, sentence. It might even be argued that the trinitarian conception of the Christian God is necessitated by this very linguistic structure, which would be only one example  of how human understanding requires God to appear according to its own limits. Conversely, it might also be possible to understand a certain kind of human grammar as a reflection of the trinitarian mode of divine revelation. More likely yet, perhaps a certain structure of human existence, of human being in the world, has produced both of these effects, necessitating both the trinitarian nature of its grammatical structures and the trinitarian form of divine revelation, as God reveals God to us through the structures by which we have our being and our understanding.

Thus, even the trinitarian nature of God might be said to be an incarnation, a revelation that makes itself appear such that it can be apprehended but not comprehended, a tautological revelation that neither affirms nor denies God but merely recognizes that any God worth the name would remain beyond any human understanding, that any God worth the name would appear, if at all, only according to the limits of our humanity.

To say “God Gods God,” then, is really to say nothing at all, and yet it may be everything that can be said.

I am interested, not in devotional art, but in art as devotion, not in the artistic object made to be a site of devotion for its creator or for its receiver, but in the artistic practise that, with the proper spirit, becomes a discipline of the mind and of the body and of the spirit that allows devotion, perhaps, to occur in us.  In an artistic practise of this kind, the object of art, far from becoming an idol, never even becomes an icon, because the iconic function is played by the artistic practise itself.  It is a practise of art in which the artistic object and even the artistic act become radically secondary to an artistic discipline that seeks to be, before all else a devotion, though it knows that true devotion must always lie beyond it.  I would have my reading and my writing become this kind of discipline, this kind of devotion.

It is the responsibility of power to love.

Power may choose only to love or to oppress; there are no other choices that power can make.

Choosing to love almost always involves choosing to set aside power in favour of weakness.

This is the nature of power that oppresses: it continually chooses to be powerful.

This is the nature of power that loves: it continually chooses to be weak.

I am a bit backlogged, I must confess.  I have finished reading several books over the past few months, and I would like to write about them, some of them more than once, but these are not the kinds of posts that I am able to write in a few minutes, and so I now have a small stack of books on my desk, all awaiting my attention.

At the top of the pile, a book that I finished more than two months ago now, is Richard Kearney’s The God Who May Be.  It was given to me by Dave Humphrey, either this past Christmas or for my last birthday, I cannot now remember which, and it was a welcome gift, because I had heard a little about Kearney and was wanting to read him for myself.

The book begins with an admirable clarity.  “God neither is nor is not but may be,” Kearney says.  “That is my thesis.”  He argues for this thesis by making what he calls an eschatological reading of several biblical texts, a reading that opposes the onto-theological tradition that understands God in terms of existence or esse, as the God who either is or is not, with a reading that proposes an understanding of God as possibility or posse, as the God who may be.  Kearney articulates the substance of this position more concisely than I ever could, so I will quote him several times, and at length.

“God will be God at the eschaton, ” he says.  “That is what is promised.  But precisely because this promise is just that, a promise, and not an already accomplished possession, there is a free space gaping at the very core of divinity: the space of the possible.  It is this divine gap which renders all things possible which would be otherwise impossible to us – including the kingdom of justice and love.  But because God is posse rather than esse, the promise remains powerless until and unless we respond to it.  Transfiguring the possible into the actual, and thereby enabling the coming kingdom to come into being, is not just something God does for us but also something we do for God.”  In other words, God will come to be, but is not yet.  In the present time, God remains what God may be, remains possibility, and the transformation of this possibility into actuality requires us to respond to what is possible in God.

This response to God’s possibility, in Kearney’s view, becomes our primary responsibility to God.  Our duty is to decide the possibility that is God, again and again, in order that God will be transformed from possibility to actuality.  As he says himself, “It is the divine perhaps, hovering over every just decision or action, that ensures that history is never over and our duty never done.  The posse keeps us on our toes and reminds us that there is nowhere to lay our heads for long.  God depends on us to be.  Without us, no Word can be made flesh.”  Kearney’s claim here is radical.  It makes humanity responsible for the being of God, for the incarnation of God.  It makes God dependent on the decisions of God’s own creations.  It makes the future fundamentally undetermined.  It makes the nature of the coming kingdom of God rely on the decisions made by frail people here and now.

This radical reunderstanding of God and of humanity’s responsibility to God, says Kearney, is the condition of a hope for the future.  “The posse keeps us open to hope,” he says, “even if it is a hope against hope, in other words, the hope that in spite of injustice and despair the posse may become more and more incarnate in esse, transmuting being as it does so into a new heaven and a new earth.”  The hope here is that the God who may be will more and more come actually to be, as we respond to the possibility that God opens in us.  The hope is always that the possibility of love and justice and grace will become ever more the actuality of love and justice and grace.

There is much that I appreciate about Kearney’s argument.  I agree that the God of existence, the God of onto-theology, does not satisfactorily account for the God that is portrayed by the Bible or required by theology or encountered by experience.  I am attracted to the idea that God is a God of possibility rather than existence, and I am attracted even more to the idea that this possibility places an unending responsibility on me to make God be in the world what God desires to be.  I am moved by the hope that is in this possibility.

I am not convinced, however, that Kearney’s idea of God as possibility actually escapes onto-theological existence.  I will not go into the details of my reservations because I am aware that this question is not one that everyone finds compelling, but my main argument would be that Kearney’s understanding of God as possibility that is ideally coming more and more to be, really only defers existence into the future, to the time when it will become actual.  Such possibility escapes existence, perhaps, but only for a time.  It is constantly slipping into existence, moment by moment, and so is already under the sign of existence.  Far from escaping onto-theology, it finds its culmination there, precisely as it moves from possibility into actuality, precisely as humanity makes actual the possible God.

I would suggest that any God who is truly founded in possibility, any God who truly escapes onto-theological existence, is a God whose possibility never becomes actual, either because it remains always still to come, as in Jacques Derrida’s messianism without a messiah, or because it comes to being in such a way that being does not recognize it, as in Jean-Luc Marion’s saturated phenomenon.  As soon as the possibility of God become actual, either now or in the future, either in this time or in some time to come, it becomes subject to onto-theology, to presence, to being, and becomes fraught with all of the problems that this entails.  This means that Kearney is suggesting, not an alternative to existence at all, but merely a teleology that defers the existence of God to a future and coming time, even if this time is only the end of time.

The problem here is not God as possibility.  The problem is that this possibility is being understood as always anticipating an actuality which then becomes the limit and completion of God, becomes the end of God as possibility.  This is why it is necessary, I would suggest, to begin seeing the possibility at the heart of God as a possibility that never require an actuality, at least not in any of the ways that would be available to human understanding, because the purpose of this possibility is not to make itself be at all, but to make us be in its place.  It does not require being.  It requires us to be as its possibility would make us to be.  It is neither what is, nor what is not, nor what may be.  It is what brings us to be as we respond to its possibility.  The responsibility that the possibility of God lays on us is not to make God come to be, which will never be possible in any case, but to bring ourselves to be in the ways that we can only be as we respond to the possibility at the heart of God.

The opposition between predestination and freewill is a false one. It presumes that God is bound by the same relation to time that binds humanity.  Merely because the human intellect cannot conceive of how God could both have foreknowledge and permit freewill, it presumes that God cannot conceive of such a thing either, as if God was bound by the limits of human logic and understanding.  Any such God would not be a very poor God indeed.

The alternative is to acknowledge the possibility that, for God, foreknowledge and freewill are not exclusive of one another.  If the conjunction of these things is represented to us as a mystery, surely reducing this mystery to the limit of our human logic is a gross presumption, for it assumes that our human understanding, our human experience of being, marks the limit of God.  Any such assumption is the greatest heresy, perhaps the only heresy, even if it is also the heresy of every theology, even the one that I am writing now.

The Jewish scriptures tell of a stone that the Israelites erected in order to memorialize a place where God had helped them overcome their enemies.  They called the stone, Ebeneezer, which means, “Thus far God has helped us,”  and I am interested in how this kind of memorial might represent a proper theology’s attempt to articulate the moment of encounter with God.  Let me outline what this might mean.

My theology needs to be, not an idol, not an altar, but an ebeneezer.  It needs to be, not an attempt to show the face of God, not an attempt to provide an adequate sacrifice to God, but a necessarily inadequate gesture which says, like Samuel, “Thus far God has helped us,” or like Jacob, “Here I wrestled with God; here I was broken; here my name was changed.”   It is not an idol to which I might scarifice nor an altar on which such a sacrifice migt be made, but a marker that recalls to me the reason for my sacrifice. It does not attempt to make God present, but recalls a moment when God was present, beyond all guarantee, and anticipates the moment when God will be present again, beyond all hope, according to a promise.

The gesture, the act that I perform for the other, is sacramental.  Though it is nothing in itself, neither is it purely formal, and when it is performed in the proper spirit, it becomes what it always purported to be, comes to bear what it always claimed to bear: a giving. This moment of becoming, of coming to bear, of giving, is not and cannot ever be seized or grasped, because it is inaugurated and accomplished only by a proper spirit. Neither can this moment be guaranteed, because the giver and the recipient of the gesture are incapable in themselves of producing or grasping the proper spirit through which it finds its accomplishment. Nevertheless, the sacramental nature of the gesture resides within any act as its potentiality, and this potential underwrites the very possibility, not of ethics as such, but of ethical response in the world.

A certain stillness, of the mind if not of the body, is inextricably related to a certain knowledge, to a faithful knowledge that neither seeks nor attains a guarantee.  “Be still,” reads the biblical injunction, “and know that I am God.”  This does not mean, “Be still in order to know that I am God.”  Neither does it mean, “Be still because you know that I am God.”  The two commands are not consecutive.  They are parallel.  They could be separated by a colon rather than a conjunction, reading,  “Be still: Know that I am God.”  They imply that there is a stillness that is equivalent, correspondent, correlate to knowing that God is God.  The two statements repeat, reiterate, reinforce each other.  I am still: I know that God is God.  I know that God is God: I am still.

My friend James Shelley has just recently posted on how community gardening has given him an appreciation of the role played by fertility dieties in agriculural societies.  Though anthropology is not exactly my area of expertise, and though I am wary of drawing conclusions from anthropological generalizations in any case, I think that there is something significant in the relation that he is recognizing between the physical labour of farming and spiritual practice of religion.  In fact, I am inclined to extend this relation to other aspects of the home as well, to cooking, to building, to eating, to storytelling, to sewing, to all the activities that should form a spiritual practise for us but often do not.  It seems to me that as we engage in these things more fully, as we participate in them more intimately, we begin to understand the spiritual significance that these things once had.

As James recognizes, it is only in our affluent society that we can afford to be separated from these things, by technology, by the labour of others, by space and by time, only in this kind of society that we can seriously believe that the activities of the home and garden are not in fact spiritual in nature.  It is only because of this affluence that we become subject to the illusion that these things are merely physical and mundane.

To use the language of classical mythology, there can be no dryads so long as trees are merely for shading our patio sets, no nyads so long as rivers are merely for feeding ducks.  There can be no Pomona when the garden is just one more way to impress the neighbours, no Lares or Penates when the house is just the place where I sleep between work and amusement.

The local gods and godesses only appear when we become concerned with them, when we begin to love the trees and the rivers, the garden and the home. When I grow the tree from seed or from cutting, when I nurse the tree from a sapling, when I eat of its fruit and sleep in its shade, when I watch it grow year by year, then I discover that a spirit inhabits the dance of its branches.  When I wade in the water of the river, when I clean garbage from it with my own hands, when I watch the tadpoles and the minnows increase as the water grows cleaner, then I discover that a god stirs its waters.  When I plant what feeds me, build what shelters me, cook what nourishes me, sew what clothes me, then, and perhaps only then, I discover the gods of home and garden, the little deities that make the work of the home and the garden into a spiritual practise.