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Title: Essay On Faith
Author: Samuel Taylor Coleridge [More Titles by Coleridge]
Title: Essay On Faith
Author: Samuel Taylor Coleridge [More Titles by Coleridge]
Faith may be defined as fidelity to our
own being, so far as such being is not and cannot become an object of the
senses; and hence, by clear inference or implication to being generally, as far
as the same is not the object of the senses; and again to whatever is affirmed
or understood as the condition, or concomitant, or consequence of the same.
This will be best explained by an instance or example. That I am conscious of
something within me peremptorily commanding me to do unto others as I would
they should do unto me; in other words a categorical (that is, primary and
unconditional) imperative; that the maxim (regula maxima, or supreme rule) of
my actions, both inward and outward, should be such as I could, without any
contradiction arising therefrom, will to be the law of all moral and rational
beings. This, I say, is a fact of which I am no less conscious (though in a
different way), nor less assured, than I am of any appearance presented by my
outward senses. Nor is this all; but in the very act of being conscious of this
in my own nature, I know that it is a fact of which all men either are or ought
to be conscious; a fact, the ignorance of which constitutes either the
non-personality of the ignorant, or the guilt; in which latter case the
ignorance is equivalent to knowledge wilfully darkened. I know that I possess
this knowledge as a man, and not as Samuel Taylor Coleridge; hence, knowing
that consciousness of this fact is the root of all other consciousness, and the
only practical contradistinction of man from the brutes, we name it the
conscience, by the natural absence or presumed presence of which the law, both
Divine and human, determines whether X Y Z be a thing or a person; the
conscience being that which never to have had places the objects in the same
order of things as the brutes, for example, idiots, and to have lost which
implies either insanity or apostasy. Well, this we have affirmed is a fact of
which every honest man is as fully assured as of his seeing, hearing, or
smelling. But though the former assurance does not differ from the latter in
the degree, it is altogether diverse in the kind; the senses being morally
passive, while the conscience is essentially connected with the will, though
not always, nor indeed in any case, except after frequent attempts and
aversions of will dependent on the choice. Thence we call the presentations of
the senses impressions, those of the conscience commands or dictates. In the
senses we find our receptivity, and as far as our personal being is concerned,
we are passive, but in the fact of the conscience we are not only agents, but
it is by this alone that we know ourselves to be such--nay, that our very
passiveness in this latter is an act of passiveness, and that we are patient
(patientes), not, as in the other case, SIMPLY passive.
The result is the consciousness of
responsibility, and the proof is afforded by the inward experience of the
diversity between regret and remorse.
If I have sound ears, and my companion
speaks to me with a due proportion of voice, I may persuade him that I did not
hear, but cannot deceive myself. But when my conscience speaks to me, I can by
repeated efforts render myself finally insensible; to which add this other
difference, namely, that to make myself deaf is one and the same thing with
making my conscience dumb, till at length I became unconscious of my
conscience. Frequent are the instances in which it is suspended, and, as it
were, drowned in the inundation of the appetites, passions, and imaginations to
which I have resigned myself, making use of my will in order to abandon my
free-will; and there are not, I fear, examples wanting of the conscience being
utterly destroyed, or of the passage of wickedness into madness; that species
of madness, namely, in which the reason is lost. For so long as the reason
continues, so long must the conscience exist, either as a good conscience or as
a bad conscience.
It appears, then, that even the very
first step--that the initiation of the process, the becoming conscious of a
conscience--partakes of the nature of an act. It is an act in and by which we
take upon ourselves an allegiance, and consequently the obligation of fealty;
and this fealty or fidelity implying the power of being unfaithful, it is the
first and fundamental sense of faith. It is likewise the commencement of
experience, and the result of all other experience. In other words, conscience
in this its simplest form, must be supposed in order to consciousness, that is,
to human consciousness. Brutes may be and are scions, but those beings only who
have an I, scire possunt hoc vel illud una cum seipsis; that is, conscire vel
scire aliquid mecum, or to know a thing in relation to myself, and in the act
of knowing myself as acted upon by that something.
Now the third person could never have
been distinguished from the first but by means of the second. There can be no
He without a previous Thou. Much less could an I exist for us except as it
exists during the suspension of the will, as in dreams; and the nature of
brutes may be best understood by considering them as somnambulists? This is a
deep meditation, though the position is capable of the strictest proof, namely,
that there can be no I without a Thou, and that a Thou is only possible by an
equation in which I is taken as equal to Thou, and yet not the same. And this,
again, is only possible by putting them in opposition as correspondent
opposites, or correlatives. In order to this, a something must be affirmed in
the one which is rejected in the other, and this something is the will. I do
not will to consider myself as equal to myself, for in the very act of
constructing myself _I_, I take it as the same, and therefore as incapable of
comparison, that is, of any application of the will. If, then, I MINUS the will
be the THESIS, Thou, PLUS will, must be the ANTITHESIS, but the equation of
Thou with I, by means of a free act, negativing the sameness in order to
establish the equality, is the true definition of conscience. But as without a
Thou there can be no You, so without a You no They, These, or Those; and as all
these conjointly form the materials and subjects of consciousness and the
conditions of experience, it is evident that conscience is the root of all
consciousness--a fortiori, the precondition of all experience--and that the
conscience cannot have been in its first revelation deduced from experience.
Soon, however, experience comes into
play. We learn that there are other impulses beside the dictates of conscience,
that there are powers within us and without us ready to usurp the throne of
conscience, and busy in tempting us to transfer our allegiance. We learn that
there are many things contrary to conscience, and therefore to be rejected and
utterly excluded, and many that can coexist with its supremacy only by being
subjugated as beasts of burthen; and others again, as for instance the social
tendernesses and affections, and the faculties and excitations of the
intellect, which must be at least subordinated. The preservation of our loyalty
and fealty under these trials, and against these rivals, constitutes the second
sense of faith; and we shall need but one more point of view to complete its
full import. This is the consideration of what is presupposed in the human
conscience. The answer is ready. As in the equation of the correlative I and
Thou, one of the twin constituents is to be taken as PLUS will, the other as
MINUS will, so is it here; and it is obvious that the reason or
SUPER-individual of each man, whereby he is a man, is the factor we are to take
as MINUS will, and that the individual will or personalizing principle of free
agency ("arbitrement" is Milton's word) is the factor marked PLUS
will; and again, that as the identity or co-inherence of the absolute will and
the reason, is the peculiar character of God, so is the SYNTHESIS of the
individual will and the common reason, by the subordination of the former to
the latter, the only possible likeness or image of the PROTHESIS or identity,
and therefore the required proper character of man. Conscience, then, is a
witness respecting the identity of the will and the reason, effected by the
self- subordination of the will or self to the reason, as equal to or
representing the will of God. But the personal will is a factor in other moral
SYNTHESIS, for example, appetite PLUS personal will = sensuality; lust of
power, PLUS personal will = ambition, and so on, equally as in the SYNTHESIS on
which the conscience is grounded. Not this, therefore, but the other SYNTHESIS,
must supply the specific character of the conscience, and we must enter into an
analysis of reason. Such as the nature and objects of the reason are, such must
be the functions and objects of the conscience. And the former we shall best
learn by recapitulating those constituents of the total man which are either
contrary to or disparate from the reason.
I. Reason, and the proper objects of
reason, are wholly alien from sensation. Reason is supersensual, and its
antagonist is appetite, and the objects of appetite the lust of the flesh.
II. Reason and its objects do not
appertain to the world of the senses, inward or outward; that is, they partake
not of sense or fancy. Reason is supersensuous, and here its antagonist is the
lust of the eye.
III. Reason and its objects are not
things of reflection, association, discursion, discourse in the old sense of
the word as opposed to intuition; "discursive or intuitive," as
Milton has it. Reason does not indeed necessarily exclude the finite, either in
time or in space, but it includes them eminenter. Thus the prime mover of the
material universe is affirmed to contain all motion as its cause, but not to
be, or to suffer, motion in itself.
Reason is not the faculty of the finite.
But here I must premise the following. The faculty of the finite is that which
reduces the confused impressions of sense to their essential forms--quantity,
quality, relation, and in these action and reaction, cause and effect, and the
like; thus raises the materials furnished by the senses and sensations into
objects of reflection, and so makes experience possible. Without it, man's
representative powers would be a delirium, a chaos, a scudding cloudage of
shapes; and it is therefore most appropriately called the understanding, or
substantiative faculty. Our elder metaphysicians, down to Hobbes inclusively,
called this likewise discourse, discuvsus discursio, from its mode of action as
not staying at any one object, but running, as it were, to and fro to abstract,
generalise, and classify. Now when this faculty is employed in the service of
the pure reason, it brings out the necessary and universal truths contained in
the infinite into distinct contemplation by the pure act of the sensuous
imagination--that is, in the production of the forms of space and time
abstracted from all corporeity, and likewise of the inherent forms of the
understanding itself abstractedly from the consideration of particulars, as in
the case of geometry, numeral mathematics, universal logic, and pure
metaphysics. The discursive faculty then becomes what our Shakespeare, with
happy precision, calls "discourse of reason."
We will now take up our reasoning again
from the words "motion in itself."
It is evident, then, that the reason as
the irradiative power, and the representative of the infinite, judges the
understanding as the faculty of the finite, and cannot without error be judged
by it. When this is attempted, or when the understanding in its SYNTHESIS with
the personal will, usurps the supremacy of the reason, or affects to supersede
the reason, it is then what St. Paul calls the mind of the flesh ([Greek
text]), or the wisdom of this world. The result is, that the reason is
superfinite; and in this relation, its antagonist is the insubordinate
understanding, or mind of the flesh.
IV. Reason, as one with the absolute will
(IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE LOGOS, AND THE LOGOS WAS WITH GOD, AND THE LOGOS WAS
GOD), and therefore for man the certain representative of the will of God, is
above the will of man as an individual will. We have seen in III. that it
stands in antagonism to all mere particulars; but here it stands in antagonism
to all mere individual interests as so many selves, to the personal will as
seeking its objects in the manifestation of itself for itself--sit pro ratione
voluntas;-- whether this be realised with adjuncts, as in the lust of the
flesh, and in the lust of the eye; or without adjuncts, as in the thirst and
pride of power, despotism, egoistic ambition. The fourth antagonist, then, of
reason, is the lust of the will.
Corollary. Unlike a million of tigers, a
million of men is very different from a million times one man. Each man in a
numerous society is not only coexistent with, but virtually organised into, the
multitude of which he is an integral part. His idem is modified by the alter.
And there arise impulses and objects from this SYNTHESIS of the alter et idem,
myself and my neighbour. This, again, is strictly analogous to what takes place
in the vital organisation of the individual man. The cerebral system of the
nerves has its correspondent ANTITHESIS in the abdominal system: but hence
arises a SYNTHESIS of the two in the pectoral system as the intermediate, and,
like a drawbridge, at once conductor and boundary. In the latter, as objectised
by the former, arise the emotions, the affections, and, in one word, the
passions, as distinguished from the cognitions and appetites. Now, the reason
has been shown to be superindividual, generally, and therefore not less so when
the form of an individualisation subsists in the alter than when it is confined
to the idem; not less when the emotions have their conscious or believed object
in another, than when their subject is the individual personal self. For though
these emotions, affections, attachments, and the like, are the prepared ladder
by which the lower nature is taken up into, and made to partake of, the highest
room--as we are taught to give a feeling of reality to the higher per medium
commune with the lower, and thus gradually to see the reality of the higher
(namely, the objects of reason), and finally to know that the latter are
indeed, and pre-eminently real, as if you love your earthly parents whom you
see, by these means you will learn to love your Heavenly Father who is
invisible;--yet this holds good only so far as the reason is the president, and
its objects the ultimate aim; and cases may arise in which the Christ as the
Logos, or Redemptive Reason, declares, HE THAT LOVES FATHER OR ANOTHER MORE
THAN ME, IS NOT WORTHY OF ME; nay, he that can permit his emotions to rise to
an equality with the universal reason, is in enmity with that reason. Here, then,
reason appears as the love of God; and its antagonist is the attachment to
individuals wherever it exists in diminution of, or in competition with, the
love which is reason.
In these five paragraphs I have
enumerated and explained the several powers or forces belonging or incidental
to human nature, which in all matters of reason the man is bound either to
subjugate or subordinate to reason. The application to faith follows of its own
accord. The first or most indefinite sense of faith is fidelity: then fidelity
under previous contract or particular moral obligation. In this sense faith is
fealty to a rightful superior: faith is the duty of a faithful subject to a
rightful governor. Then it is allegiance in active service; fidelity to the
liege lord under circumstances, and amid the temptations of usurpation,
rebellion, and intestine discord. Next we seek for that rightful superior on
our duties to whom all our duties to all other superiors, on our faithfulness
to whom all our bounden relations to all other objects of fidelity, are
founded. We must inquire after that duty in which all others find their several
degrees and dignities, and from which they derive their obligative force. We
are to find a superior, whose rights, including our duties, are presented to
the mind in the very idea of that Supreme Being, whose sovereign prerogatives
are predicates implied in the subjects, as the essential properties of a circle
are co-assumed in the first assumption of a circle, consequently underived,
unconditional, and as rationally unsusceptible, so probably prohibitive, of all
further question. In this sense, then, faith is fidelity, fealty, allegiance of
the moral nature to God, in opposition to all usurpation, and in resistance to
all temptation to the placing any other claim above or equal with our fidelity
to God.
The will of God is the last ground and
final aim of all our duties, and to that the whole man is to be harmonised by
subordination, subjugation, or suppression alike in commission and omission.
But the will of God, which is one with the supreme intelligence, is revealed to
man through the conscience. But the conscience, which consists in an
inappellable bearing-witness to the truth and reality of our reason, may
legitimately be construed with the term reason, so far as the conscience is
prescriptive; while as approving or condemning, it is the consciousness of the
subordination or insubordination, the harmony or discord, of the personal will
of man to and with the representative of the will of God. This brings me to the
last and fullest sense of faith, that is, the obedience of the individual will
to the reason, in the lust of the flesh as opposed to the supersensual; in the
lust of the eye as opposed to the supersensuous; in the pride of the
understanding as opposed to the infinite; in the [Greek text which cannot be
reproduced] in contrariety to the spiritual truth; in the lust of the personal
will as opposed to the absolute and universal; and in the love of the creature,
as far as it is opposed to the love which is one with the reason, namely, the
love of God.
Thus, then, to conclude. Faith subsists
in the SYNTHESIS of the Reason and the individual Will. By virtue of the latter
therefore, it must be an energy, and, inasmuch as it relates to the whole moral
man, it must be exerted in each and all of his constituents or incidents,
faculties and tendencies;--it must be a total, not a partial--a continuous, not
a desultory or occasional--energy. And by virtue of the former, that is Reason,
Faith must be a Light, a form of knowing, a beholding of truth. In the
incomparable words of the Evangelist, therefore, FAITH MUST BE A LIGHT
ORIGINATING IN THE LOGOS, OR THE SUBSTANTIAL REASON, WHICH IS CO-ETERNAL AND
ONE WITH THE HOLY WILL, AND WHICH LIGHT IS AT THE SAME TIME THE LIFE OF MEN.
Now, as LIFE is here the sum or collective of all moral and spiritual acts, in
suffering, doing, and being, so is Faith the source and the sum, the energy and
the principle of the fidelity of man to God, by the subordination of his human
Will, in all provinces of his nature, to his Reason, as the sum of spiritual
Truth, representing and manifesting the Will Divine.
[The end]
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Faith and Fiction: Literature as
Revelation
It has become commonplace that narratives
and metaphors provide central resources--perhaps the central resources--for
authentic discourse about our encounters with the sacred. Sallie McFague's
influential texts, Metaphorical Theology and Models of God, argue strongly that
all discourse about God is necessarily metaphorical because it struggles to
name the ineffable. 1 Stanley Hauerwas and L. Gregory Jones have put together
an anthology, Why Narrative: Readings in Narrative Theology, that traces a
diverse and growing theological interest going back at least to H. Richard
Niebuhr in 1941. 2 As a poet and storyteller, as a literary critic and a
literary theorist, I find such developments intriguing and sometimes baffling.
Texts centrally shaped by metaphor or by narrative? That sounds like literature
to me: poetry, fiction, drama.
From one perspective, these theologians
offer a stunning reversal of powerful western tradition. From Plato onwards,
poets and storytellers have been denounced as frivolous at best or, at worst,
threats to both morality and social order. It was one thing for poets to be
excluded from an ideal or theoretical republic because we could not be trusted
to use our acknowledged powers to "proper" ends. It was something
else again--especially during the reign of Christendom--to be denounced as a
threat to others' salvation. The medieval Catholic church was among the major
wealthy patrons of the arts, of course, and there have always been poets,
artists and composers among the ranks of believers. But artists have primarily
been regarded as illustrators--verbal or visual or aural--rather than as
autonomous and significant theologians. Later, Protestant reforms involved a
hostility to the arts as part of a general Enlightenment suspicion of all
things passionate and sensual. In the nineteenth century, the honorable claim
that literature is "dulce et utile" came down to demands for stories
that edify and entertain. The literary culture is now generally as hostile
toward religion as churches have been leery of serious and undomesticated art:
exceptions on all sides do not change the tradition. Denying the heritage is
akin to denying the heritage of misogyny: we don't transcend what we do not
have the courage and the common sense to admit.
Has "post-modernism" forced a
reversal of this venerable tradition? Does talk about metaphorical theology and
narrative theology herald a real change? If so, there is a way to go yet. Major
recent anthologies of "Christian thought" or "Christian
mysticism" or "spirituality" fail to note even such major writers
as Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, or Dickinson. 3 Anglicans once in a while take
passing note of great lines from Donne or Herbert or Eliot, but only these
three and only in passing. Popular accounts of spirituality commonly leap in a
single bound from the twelfth-century mystics to Carl Jung, as if there are no
powerful accounts of spiritual experience available from the intervening
centuries.
Having taught literature, not only in
classrooms and in church parlors but also from the pulpit, I can attest on the
contrary to how powerfully literature both articulates and engages the
spiritual hungers of our times. We live in a time of spiritual famine: the
people are eating grass while both literary critics and academic theologians
stand around debating esoteric doctrines in epistemology and ontology. These
debates are crucial--at times, fascinating--but so is the need for heartier
fare than the glossy hybrid of pantheism and narcissism called "New
Age" spirituality. I see an ongoing need to clear the common ground
between priests and poets, and this essay will offer some [alas ...] help in
that task. Poetry--classically defined, poiesis, the literary-as-such,
regardless of genre--has much to offer religion that religion fails to
understand and to accept.
One must understand the character of
literary power, I argue, if one is to understand both the literary power of
Scripture and the moral importance or ongoing revelatory power of literature in
our own lives. But it is crucial from the outset to recognize that the status
of Scripture is deeply implicated in any account of the character of
literature. Once the Bible was simply true. In retreat from that untenable
claim, both literary theorists and theologians began in the seventeenth century
to defend the truth of Scripture as poetic truth rather than scientific or
historical truth. With the advent of interest in the sublime, especially
Boileau's translation of Longinus into French in 1674, Scripture was widely
regarded as the premier instance of the poetic sublime. As Stephen Prickett
documents in great detail, the modern engagement between the literary and the
biblical has been both dense and reciprocal at least since the Enlightenment.
He also argues, quite astutely, for the influence upon both biblical and literary
studies of changes in university structure and differing national literary
traditions. 4 I would argue further that distinctive differences in theology
among French, German, and English Christians also reflect at least in part the
substantial differences in national literary traditions. 5
In the seventeenth century, the high
formalism of French neoclassicism dictated authoritarian "rules" for
art that, to English tastes, prized sterile and artificial conformity over the
genuine life and power of true art. The French, in turn, regarded English
"irregularity" with the same disdain that cardinals might have felt
for the immediate religious experience of peasants. At one level, the conflict
is a matter of taste: both highly stylized and highly realistic art are
perfectly valid. But at another level, the differences in theory reflect
national differences in literary experience. French literature has been more
formalized or strict in its use of highly regular forms--the villanelle, for
instance, or French neoclassic drama. Neoclassicism was as brilliant an era for
France as the Renaissance was for England. English literature has been more
realistic or less stylized in form partly because of the paucity of English
rhyme but partly also because of the influence of early masters such as Chaucer
and Shakespeare. English traditions in realism are commonly cited as explaining
why opera has never enjoyed the popularity in England that it has on the
continent.
In our own day, we have Jacques Derrida
and others who are extending a major and brilliant French tradition when they
argue that all language, especially literary language, is endless
self-referential play. Any highly stylized or non-mimetic aesthetic form enjoys
major elements of self-referential play, after all: watch yourself listen to
non-programmatic instrumental music. Note, however, that French theory has
strongly defined evaluative criteria for literary practice, claiming an
authority over art itself that is transparently akin to authority claimed by the
Roman Catholic hierarchy. Such an authority is never claimed by English
literary critics, not even at their most dogmatic and demanding. It is not
pushing the matter too far also to argue that sacramental religious practices
are, in the matter of religion, akin to stylized forms in art.
In the eighteenth century, German
romantic literary theorists tended to agree--broadly speaking--that art is
whatever sort of work was produced by persons of the appropriate and
appropriately rare imaginative sensibility. This has always impressed me as a
literary equivalent of divine election. These literary "elect" are
beyond the judgment, and indeed beyond the understanding, of lesser mortals.
The poet becomes a secular Christ figure, doomed to know the truth that might
redeem his society and to die for his allegiance to that truth, to die isolated
and misunderstood, offering a redemption that the culture is too crass to
accept. The poet's only hope for resurrection is literary immortality, the
approbation of poets in subsequent generations. This has become a general
western idea of the poet, of course; but its origins are in German romanticism.
English literary criticism from the
Renaissance through the nineteenth century has a balance that closely resembles
the characteristic balances of Anglican theology. This literary criticism
balances the immediate, intuitive, informed aesthetic response of the reader
(reason) against an attentive evaluative engagement of the formal features of
the text itself (Scripture) and both of these against a flexible relationship
to prior literary and critical tradition. No one measure is sufficient.
In this British tradition, the various
features of texts are defined and discussed at length and in a detail not so
consistently characteristic of continental criticism: the character of meter;
the definition and development of character; the shape of plot; the function of
rhyme or stanza; etc. (The so-called "new" criticism among American
academics after World War II took this textual tendency to a bizarre extreme.)
What is impressive, especially in contrast with either French formalism or
Germanic systematic philosophy, is how general or nonsystematic are the terms
of approbation or critique. There is no thorough-going and systematic set of standards.
In comparison to continental practice, this English pragmatism can look
impressionistic, aphoristic, and far too dependent upon the brilliant
individual sensibility of particularly talented readers.
Second, the British critical tradition
turns quite inventively to the history of literature, sometimes specifically
the national tradition but just as often western literature generally, seeking
models and precedents and practices that can illuminate some current issue. For
instance, Stephen Prickett argues that Lowth's translation of Isaiah and his
analysis of Hebrew poetic structure profoundly influenced the development of
English poetic diction away from high neoclassicism and toward the simple
directness so characteristic of Wordsworth and Coleridge, especially the
revolution announced by Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads 6. Prickett is absolutely
right, as a prosodically sensitive reading of the KJV verse might reveal to any
solid Wordsworthian.
But an interesting question is how much
those KJV translations depended in turn upon Anglo-Saxon ballad stanzas that
were also a key influence upon Wordsworth and whose direct simplicity--quite
popular at the time of Lowth--might in turn have influenced Lowth's
sensibilities as a reader of Hebrew poetry. Furthermore, in the free interplay
of anapests and iambs in the KJV verse one can also hear both Chaucer's iambic
pentameter, especially as it would have sounded at the time of that
translation, and the brilliant freedom of Shakespeare's blank verse: biblical
poetry is translated by the KJV into something loosely intermediate between
Anglo-Saxon accentual verse and the Renaissance/pre-restoration varieties of
accentual-syllabic verse. The central point here is that such catholicity is
quite English in how flexibly and inventively it uses resources from the
remoter past to solve immediate problems. The British literary sensibility in
this regard reflects not only theological position but political sensibility as
well--the great unwritten "constitution" of common law and practice.
Finally, English literary theory places
major but not exclusive emphasis upon the intuitive sensibilities of both poets
and critics. What Hooker calls "Reason" the literary community has
always understood not as "logic" but as something more like immediate
intuitive apprehension based upon broad, sensitive, and intelligent experience.
I was astounded to discover the term reduced to mere logic in popular accounts
of Episcopal tradition--as if one might intelligibly engage either tradition or
texts without using logic. In literary tradition, the critic no less than the
poet--or the individual Anglican believer--is understood as engaging in an
imaginative and creative process. That is why English literary history includes
an extraordinary tradition in which poets themselves write both practical
criticism and literary theory, all of which are quite highly regarded.
This individual critical sensibility,
however, is not the radically isolated unblinking believer toe-to-toe with the
Almighty. The proper or adequate literary critical sensibility is located quite
firmly within both a historical community of practice and a loosely but
clearly-enough defined set of analytical methods for engaging the objective
reality of the text. If what is lost in the process is the formal tidiness of
rigorously logical abstract system, well, the English do without. It is the
intellectual equivalent of their notorious social tolerance of the mildly
eccentric, especially if the eccentric in question be visibly intelligent.
This pragmatism still serves those of us
who might feel trapped between dogmatic French linguistics and ponderous, grim,
Germanic nihilism, the nihilism of both Hegel and positivist historicism gone
sour. What then can be said from within this British tradition about literature
as theology? How might literature be understood, or how might its truth be
appreciated and appropriated, so that art can play its proper role in the life
of faith? To answer such questions systematically and formally is, I propose,
quite impossible. If we have no agreed-upon or demonstrable knowledge of the
"real world," we can certainly have no equally certain knowledge of
the relationship between "fact" and "fiction," between the
"real" and the "literary"--much less any understanding of
the relationship between faith and fiction or between God and art. Fortunately,
that need not stop me: neither faith nor fiction depends upon access to a
formally demonstrable ontology.
It is commonly argued in our day that the
Bible is essentially metaphor and narrative that are meant to have a rhetorical
effect on the reader rather than an "objective" reference to the
"real world." That is, the Bible in our day is viewed through the lenses
provided by literary theory, just as it was in the eighteenth century when
Scripture was taken as the premier instance of the sublime. What shapes
Christian belief and believers and communities, as the argument goes, is this
heritage of stories about God and imagery in which to imagine "him."
I see four interlocked problems with this strategy. First, the traditional
truth-claims of poetry have now been thoroughly deconstructed by literary
theorists who have chased classical western epistemology into the last dark
corner of the last dark alley that intellect alone can supply. No discourse is
anything other than the endless, meaningless play of signifiers. Texts may be
daring in their witty play or courageous in their nihilism, but they never
"mean" anything. One reads not to learn but to engage in the game.
Casually or uncritically to ally Christian community with Christian stories is
to affirm the social and psychological implications of this absolutely closed
and futile hermeneutic circle.
Second, casually to ally Scripture with
literature at this point, intellectually, is to risk asserting that the very
real difficulties of the Bible are "intentional" recognitions or
embodiments of the meaninglessness of all discourse. Deconstruction as a critical
position credits no criteria of literary "merit," but the fact
remains that literary critics tend to read traditionally literary texts rather
than, for instance, assembly instructions printed on cardboard boxes. Texts
"worth" deconstructing tend to be those wherein the deceit or
artifice of "meaning" is most wittily dis/engaged. Especially to
those ignorant of its particular literary conventions, the Bible offers
engaging scope for such methods--methods that are among the common tools of
anyone who has earned a B.A. in the last fifteen or twenty years. It does not
demand much pedagogical nor literary experience to imagine the consequences if
such a person sauntered into a "pick a pericope and project upon it"
Bible study group.
Third, when theologians talk about
narrative theology, they do not usually or rigorously mean stories--successful
aesthetic wholes with beginnings, middles, ends, plot structures, settings,
character exposition and development, etc. They mean chronologically sequenced
exposition, something that functions for theology much as the
"methods" section of a scientific research report: I know I can't
tell you what I know or what I understand except by explaining to you, step by
step, how I acquired this knowledge or understanding. To play a bit with
current jargon, an argument or an idea cannot be "proved" but merely
"displayed," and the "display" is often fundamentally a
chronological exposition of one sort or another.
There is often something a bit slippery
or muddled about the transition from what is predicated about the role of such
chronological exposition in theology or ethics to arguments about the real
literary stories included as one of the subgenres of the Bible--as if these
authentic literary stories are the "display" of our faith. But if
they are regarded as "display" then they are not being regarded as
literary and aesthetic wholes whose "meaning" is intimately
determined by a wide array of artistic strategies. Various odd things have been
predicated of the Bible over the centuries, of course, but not much seems more
heartbreakingly inadequate than reducing that masterpiece to chronologically
sequenced expository display. Literary storytelling--in prose or in verse--is
far far more complex than chronologically-sequential exposition. Narrative
theology may not in fact solve the problems it wants to solve without engaging
contemporary forms of the older theories and methods that regarded literature
as visionary truth and sought to understand and to articulate the various means
whereby literature achieves what it achieves.
Finally, when theologians talk about
metaphorical theology, they usually seem to mean paradigms, not poetry.
Paradigms are of course quite powerful. Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions, not incidentally, centers itself in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries when the literary and scriptural arguments I have been
tracing are at their peak. "God said, Let Newton Be, and all was
light," quips Alexander Pope: the importance of metaphor, the changes in
the way literature uses metaphor, and the relationships among metaphor,
mathematics, and linguistics in this era are all intimate to the argument I am
trying to make. The massive influence of such formulations as "God the
Father Almighty" cannot be denied. Nonetheless, another and equally
generative power of metaphor can be located in the specifically poetic
strategies whereby biblical writers in prose and in verse force one metaphor to
play off of another in order to think and to feel and to say what cannot otherwise
be thought or felt or said.
A small example is King Solomon and the
prostitutes. Folklore, mutter the commentaries. Undoubtedly. But the two whores
are also quite transparently metaphors for the two kingdoms. They offer
spectacular metaphoric foreshadowing at many different levels of what is to
come both for Solomon and for the nation. Seeing this much, one sees other
questions. Who then is the child? What becomes of him? Why does the king not
reprove their promiscuity? Are they religious prostitutes? Perhaps that
explains the position of the episode immediately after the dream-vision in
which Solomon asks for wisdom and shortly before he begins building the Temple.
I hear thunderous irony in the narrator's
comment that the whores "stood in awe of the king, because they perceived
that the wisdom of God was in him, to render justice." One would think
that the wisdom of God--just affirmed by the dream-vision--would have done a
better job of discerning the real problem evident in adultery and promiscuity,
or that the narrator might have found someone better qualified to affirm
Solomon's gifts. The fact that the story is folklore does not diminish its
literary purposes in the text as it is. Amidst the celebratory tone of early I
Kings, it strikes a dark and terrifying note. One does not hear that note, nor
begin to understand it, without understanding what it is to think in metaphors.
What does it matter, what does it portend, that Israelites are now as numerous
as sand if the wisdom of Solomon is manifest in keeping order among whores?
And this is prose. As metaphoric thinking
goes, it is very very simple. Robert Alter's work sketches the complexity of
insight and nuance of meaning that the Bible offers to one who has mastered
both its literary conventions and its massively theological focus. 7
Theological recourse to narrative and to metaphor will not solve the
centuries-old problems it seeks to solve unless it engages narrative and
metaphor in the literary manner that Alter demonstrates.
In the meanwhile, in the face of the
despair and the nihilism so pervasive within western culture, it may be that
poets and priests are again, at last, on a common ground we have not shared
since early antiquity. But the space is bare ruins unless we begin at the beginning
to reconstruct ways of understanding and naming to one another the values that
we share. Poets and priests together may constitute something like a saving
remnant, sharing a common responsibility to teach and to preserve the sources
of meaning in the face of violence, social disorder, and manic consumerism.
And in that task, we can draw upon the
pragmatism of both Anglican tradition and British literary tradition. There can
be no thorough-going, elegant, systematic resolutions. There can only be bread enough
for today, fish and cup to share, something to go on that will feed us well
enough that we can feed those who listen to us. That's not much. But it may be
everything.
Central to the task is the work of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge: a poet, a literary theorist without compare, and an
influential Anglican theologian whose major theological text presents itself as
a formation exercise for seminarians. In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge argues
that the imaginative qualities necessary to appreciate a literary work are in
real but smaller measure the same imaginative qualities necessary to produce
that work in the first place. 8 Technical command of the art per se is another
matter. Furthermore, what qualifies a work as "poetry" is that it
elicit and sustain genuine imaginative activity on the part of the reader. The
characteristic linguistic features of poems--prosody, for instance, or
figurative language--are not, strictly speaking, required. They exist only
because they have proven, over time, successful in eliciting and sustaining
imaginative engagement and response from readers.
Coleridge's apparent dismissal of poetic
form has startled many readers and enraged some, but it is an ancient position.
Rhyme and rhythm alone do not make a text a poem. Witness, for instance,
mnemonic ditties like "Thirty days hath September." Or better yet,
read around in medieval encyclopedias written in verse. Or greeting cards.
Similarly, an imaginative writer at the peak of his or her power elicits an
imaginative response, despite particular decisions or choices about genre.
Novelists and, later, film-makers have proven this point. Sir Philip Sidney
adeptly formulates the essential claim: "There have been many most
excellent poets that never versified, and now swarm many versifiers that need
never answer to the name of poets . . . . It is not rhyming and versing that
maketh a poet--no more than a long gown maketh an advocate, who though he
pleaded in armor should be an advocate and no soldier." 9 Coleridge's
particular argument is that both reading well and writing well arise from the
imagination.
Coleridge makes that point as part of his
larger, lifelong argument that imagination replicates and echoes within human
consciousness the essentially trinitarian character of God, synthesizing or
reconciling our abstract ideas and moral intuitions with our passionate
feelings and immediate, sensuous encounters with particular realities. For
centuries Christians murdered one another in arguments about whether faith is
an act of will or an act of knowledge. Coleridge speaks for an enormous
literary tradition when he says it is neither, when he argues that faith is a
creative act, the act of imagination; when he asserts that art and the
encounter with God share a common origin in the human spirit. 10 The knowledge
of God is not propositional but visionary, and consequently art is the human
activity that most finely records the human encounter with the holy. As a
result, the powerfully imaginative discourse called "poetry" constitutes
a massive resource for the life of faith or for the sustenance of believers.
Coleridge was convinced that William Wordsworth was uniquely situated,
historically and personally, to write the poem that would reveal or enact, once
and for all, how it is that imagination leads through art to God.
George Steiner's Real Presences is,
formally and among other qualities, a witty and deeply imaginative
"retelling" of Biographia Literaria. His opening paragraphs distill
Coleridge's position while yet rendering it far more tentative:
[This essay [ proposes that any coherent
understanding of what language is and how language performs, that any coherent
account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is,
in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God's presence…. The
experience of aesthetic meaning in particular … infers the necessary
possibility of this "real presence…." This study will contend that
the wager on the meaning of meaning, on the potential of insight and response
when one human voice addresses another, when we come face to face with the text
and work of art or music, which is to say when we encounter the other in its
condition of freedom, is a wager on transcendence. 11
Coleridge would not have called it a
wager, but an act of faith and an acceptance of grace. As Coleridge puts the
matter, faith in God "could not be intellectually more evident without
becoming morally less effective; without counteracting its own end by
sacrificing the life of faith to the cold mechanism of a worthless because
compulsory assent." 12
The public or "objective"
evidence for God that matters most for Coleridge--as for Steiner--is the
evidence provided by art and by his own passionate, imaginative response to
art. But Steiner contends that "on the secular level, on that of pragmatic
psychology or general consensus, the claims of nothingness cannot adequately be
answered." 13 According to Steiner, great art has asked and continues to
ask "the one question ineradicable in man: Is there or is there not God?
Is there or is there not meaning to being?" 14 Nonetheless, we feel what
he calls a "radical flinching" from and "embarrassment"
about assent to the reality of the transcendent. 15
Coleridge did not flinch. He was not
embarrassed. He was entirely, passionately convinced that God is real, that
God's reality in our lives is most powerfully, most centrally evident within
the works of imagination, and that both poets and critics were called to make
that evidence widely accessible to less talented readers. (He called at one
point for those blessed with literary imagination to be assigned to every
parish in the nation, the better to pursue this ministry: see Biographia
Literaria, chapter eleven.) I am not describing here the common tendency of
intellectuals to see art and not God as the centrally redemptive reality--the
kinds of positions, derived from German romanticism, that one sees for instance
in Iris Murdoch. I mean something else altogether. Art not only asks, "Is
there or is there not God?" Great art sometimes answers in the
affirmative. God then constitutes not only the warrant of meaning as an event
between reader and writer, but also the meaning itself. As poet, I in my
freedom address you as reader in your freedom, testifying to a truth "that
could not be intellectually more evident without being morally less
effective" and eliciting in you, through my command of aesthetic form, the
imaginative activity of consciousness whereby human and sacred find contact.
In The Revelatory Text: Interpreting the
New Testament as Sacred Scripture, Sandra Schneiders explores and defines that
contact; it is an elegant and persuasive book that draws widely upon both
Scripture scholarship and literary theory. 16 She argues that a text (literary
or Scriptural) can function as revelation, as a genuine locus of encounter with
the sacred, by the ways in which it creates and draws us into a possible
alternative reality. Genuinely to enter such a world, she argues, "is to
be changed, to 'come back different,' which is a way of saying that one does
not come 'back' at all but moves forward into a newness of being. From the
genuine encounter with the true in the beautiful, one cannot go home
again." 17 Needless to say, "true" here does not mean
"good" or "moral" but something more like "riveting":
the alternative reality conjured by art can be powerfully transforming in her
sense and even attractive without providing access to the sacred. Much
wonderful literature is quite secular. Furthermore, I suspect that evil can
also characterize the fictive reality without much compromise of artistic
quality as such. The good, the true, and the beautiful can form a single potent
reality, but I suspect that aesthetic power as such does not finally or
logically depend upon their union.
This is as true of Scripture as it is of
literature generally: consider the evil that can be justified by appeal to the
genocide in Canaan or the Levirite random slaughter of kin and neighbor after
the golden calf episode. Those are swashbuckling tales, brilliantly successful
by almost any literary measure. But taken on their own they are as appalling as
anything "secular" literature has to offer. Fortunately, we are not
to take them simply on their own: they are episodes in a complex and densely
self-critical, self-referential larger story.
The transforming, revelatory power
potentially exercised by literature rests in part upon its ability persuasively
to recreate the human encounter with the holy or to invite us into what
Schneiders--building upon Ricoeur--calls an "alternative reality." In
this alternative reality, God's power and God's grace are less equivocal and
easier to see than they are within the drudgery and pain of our own ordinary
lives. Doctrine founders upon paradoxes that literature can represent clearly and
persuasively without reducing genuine spiritual mystery into unconvincing
explanation. Systematic theology, like literary theory, is a good and necessary
discipline. But the life of faith is far better served by "truth carried
alive into the heart by passion."
Another small example: Garrison Keillor
offers stunning accounts of grace and of the interplay among grace, free will,
forgiveness, and repentance. His collection Leaving Home sustains a reflection
on exodus and exile, on the Promised Land and the realized Kingdom, which is
more subtle and more comprehensive and more deeply moving than anything
ostensibly "religious" that I have ever read or heard taught or
preached on these topics. 18 Garrison Keillor is probably not in the same class
as Milton or Dante or Wordsworth, but then again we recognize his allusions
without footnotes. We need no introduction to his "worldview," no
details on the French Revolution or the Guelphs and the Ghibelines. In a
wonderful little piece on the Episcopal Church, he describes his audience as
"my radio congregation." 19 That self-characterization seems to me
entirely apt. He is an extraordinary apologist and, I argue, a first-rate
theologian.
I think it would be marvelous fun to lead
a weekend parish retreat on Garrison Keillor. I'm sure that will strike many as
an innovative and creative suggestion. But Keillor has been extremely popular
for years now: this proposal would be old hat if the common ground between
literature and religion were better understood. And as good and as useful as
Keillor is, Emily Dickinson is just as accessible, undoubtedly richer, and
arguably almost as popular at least with the college-educated.
Keillor is a theologian and Dickinson is
a theologian if literature be theology, if art be revelation--not universally,
not necessarily, for grace is not a spigot we can turn by any verbal technique,
but potentially. There is probably no literary theorist more determined than
Coleridge to map the connection between literature and revelation, and even he
concluded that the literary connection between beauty and truth is empirical
not necessary. The most fully achieved literary forms will offer insight not
because the form itself guarantees it, but because the creativity necessary to
command such form arises from the divine in the human. They are
"independent variables," so to speak, but they commonly vary together.
How then might churches begin to collect
from these fields ripe for harvest? We must begin by recognizing that the
nihilism of postmodernism is not a position in which we are directly invested.
Superb contemporary critiques of positivist constructions of knowledge are for
us merely cautionary or propaedeutic disciplines for our intellectual lives and
discourses as thoughtful Christians. Such critiques do not call into question
our personal, passionate, immediate experience as members of the mystical body
of the risen Christ. The God we worship cannot be deconstructed, even if or
even when we find that words fail us in trying to explain who this God is and
how we have come to know and worship. As Steiner argues, the problem of
meaninglessness or of radically indeterminate meaning are predicated upon the
absence of God. But our lives and not just our writings are predicated on God's
vital and vivid presence.
And so we can let the
philosophers--literary or theological--go about their business just as
physicists do. We can acknowledge that both matter and texts are not as solid
as they seem, nor is the earth still beneath our feet. None of those facts
challenges a faith that knows its own ground in immediate experience. After
all, I can explain relativity and give a fair account of particle physics. In a
very amateur way, I am deeply interested in the history of physics. But
nonetheless I back the car down the driveway very carefully. Maybe the corner
of the house is not solid but rather seething and indeterminate. It will leave
quite a dent nonetheless.
The life of faith is not unlike backing
that car down the drive. As a poet and as a believer, I orient myself to
practical, day-to-day reality in immediately passionate, sensuous ways that
these disciplines can enlighten but not essentially discredit. No theory in any
discipline can soften a brick wall or explain away the power of great art. Nor
do they claim to do so. David Hume observed that his devastating critique of
causality should stop no sensible man from enjoying his breakfast. Radical
deconstructionists publish exquisitely constructed arguments.
If the activity or the community called
"church" is legitimately an effort to share the experience of God and
to find our ways together through the woods of daily life, then literature as
such is inevitably and necessarily a part of the whole endeavor: there are
numerous literary works that speak eloquently and accessibly about the
experience of God. The power and the importance of these works can be denied
only by making illegitimate claims that the heritage of doctrine and Scripture
together or separately constitute absolute and exclusive knowledge for which
institutional religion is the sole appointed broker. Fortunately, that is not a
claim that can be made within the Anglican tradition.
I want to conclude with some thoughts
about the intimate connection between literary form and poetic truth. It seems
to me that the central difference between the reading habits of poets and
priests centers on what literary types call the "integrity" of the
text. Especially since Coleridge, and especially in the English-speaking
tradition, concern for the integral relation of parts to whole has been a
central literary-critical methodological presupposition, a method or habit of
reading that is presumed at the level of "common sense." But of
course it is not "common sense." It is an interpretive and
theoretical stance with deep historical roots. It is diametrically opposed to
the methods and presumptions of (essentially Germanic) biblical scholarship.
Furthermore, asserting "the integrity of the text" will, if taken too
rigorously or in continental fashion, raise very serious ontological
difficulties. I'll get back to those in a minute.
First, however, some examples. However
useful the Elohist vs. Yahwist distinction is for certain purposes, sorting
Genesis verse-by-verse into one or the other camp simply destroys the integrity
of the story as immediately or consecutively read. From this more directly and
more British literary perspective, it is utter nonsense to talk about
"two" creation accounts. There is one. We see the same events at
first from a more distant perspective and then more closely, a more intimate
look at our place in the world and at the very same and singular God. They are
prose versions of the doublets in Hebrew verse.
I am intrigued that the final redactors
assimilated both Elohist and Yahwist traditions, but for me that is akin to
saying that Wordsworth uses both Milton and Augustine in writing The Prelude. I
am delighted to have scholarly editions and commentaries identifying the lines
that closely echo each source, but Wordsworth is not just redacting two sources
on the question of what it means to be a human soul on a spiritual journey. He
is forging a new and distinctive whole that says something more and something
different than any of his sources. Shakespeare uses Holinshed and he uses other
sources as well; Shakespeare's achievements, however, remain both distinctive
and distinctively valuable. Wordsworth or Shakespeare submerged or reformed
their sources "more" than the artist finally responsible for Genesis.
But we are talking about differences of degree, not kind--I would contend--and
such differences are also closely governed by local literary convention.
"I have no right to tamper with your flute," observed Henry James,
"and then criticize your music." 20 Nor can I disassemble the
instrument altogether and expect a powerful performance from it.
Let me clarify further by pushing the
issue a little harder. The Priestly interpolations into the Exodus story are
undeniably startling to a late European-language reader. But the story as we
have it, the text in its final, redacted, aesthetic integrity, raises the
intriguing spectre of apparently unconditional rescue from Pharaoh's oppression
being followed immediately by massive regulations and violently enforced
strictures that are at times visibly resisted by this "stiff-necked"
people. Where others hear interpolations to be dis-interpolated by critical
reading, I hear a marvelous dramatic tension to be played out for hundreds of
pages.
Later still, one can divide the text into
pro-monarchy and anti-monarchy snippets. But I hear, in the tension between
these two voices, a stunning and subtle argument that perhaps "the
promised land" is not real estate after all, that perhaps the covenant is
a far more complex and subtle matter than the promise of vineyards and glory
that at first it seemed. Does Isaiah's promise of a covenant writ in the heart
inform this earlier argument? Or not? Do the parts of a text inform the whole
and inform each other with this kind of pressure? Or are the parts essentially
separable, especially in a text whose immediate or original composition is the
work of many hands, redacted by perhaps at least as many editors? Is the Bible
a quirky collection of disparate texts? Or is it--or has it become--a single
work whose complex and fundamental unity we are only beginning to appreciate as
our own art moves beyond traditional European-language habits of
"realist" narration and densely positivist versions of aesthetic
unity? As twentieth-century writers have demonstrated, those are not the only
successful forms of aesthetic unity. In questions like this, as in so many
other areas of life, one finds what one's theories or presumptions suggest is
there to be found. That is why becoming conscious of one's theoretical
presuppositions is so important.
Furthermore, the matter of aesthetic
unity or literary form is crucial not only for Scripture but also for
assimilating literature as a vital resource for Christian community. Literature
offers an experience of unity and coherence that is not evident or at least not
usually available within ordinary life and ordinary consciousness. When I am in
a funk, usually I just muddle around in my funk. Shakespeare's sonnet,
"When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes," is about a rather
ordinary experience of one such episode. But it is not the muddle that we all
know from our own inner lives. His sonnet both elicits the experience into
present consciousness and then gets us somewhere on the issue. Wordsworth's
sonnet "The world is too much with us" laments the spiritual aridity
of a crassly material culture. One hears such complaints at almost any
gathering, but usually not with such clarity and poignancy and insight.
Narratives--stories, novels, dramas, films--can capture not just a movement of
individual consciousness but all the actions and interactions and conflicts of
social reality. And our engagements with literary representations of those
movements or those social realities can teach us something both about ourselves
and about the world in which we ordinarily live.
Literary form can offer or generate an
image or a recreation of the "real world," and yet it is a "real
world" that has a clarity of meaning and a certainty of conviction that
our own empirical experience very seldom supplies. 21 Life is never as
unequivocal as art, except when life's mystery and paradox have been denied in
a way that art never denies them. Literature convinces us of its own reality
despite its capacity utterly to transcend all that is not just "solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish, and short" but also ambiguous, uncertain, and
despairing. And in that capacity to transcend all the chaos of real experience,
literature can reveal a transcendent God who is also blazingly, potently
immanent.
I contend that the visionary reality
offered by the artwork--Scriptural or secular--depends upon the reader's
consecutive experience of its formal or aesthetic or "organic"
synthesis of all its own details or elements or parts. Of course this synthesis
is relative and not absolute: the artwork does not occupy an ontological plane
all by itself. The presupposition of unity, carried too far, forces the
hermeneutic circle to collapse inward on itself or else raises the spectre of a
tyrannous hegemony of whole over parts. Furthermore, it is in various ways
illusory and in various ways dependent upon our willingness to engage its
specific conventions of representation: anyone who looks can see that art is
art and not life. Finally, no artwork is perfect. Even Homer nods.
The fact remains, I argue, that we need
not push the presumption as far as it can go. This is one critical presumption
or one strategy among other critical presumptions and strategies. The proper
application and interpretation of these critical elements are themselves
creative acts and not mechanical or arithmetic or even philosophic procedures.
Literary criticism is in most regards an art; it is never a positivist social science.
It offers no "results." I presume a certain pragmatic common sense
both in understanding and in applying my claim (and it is not "mine"
at all) that the full aesthetic experience of literary meaning, of engagement
with the text, depends methodologically upon a willingness to attend in so far
as possible to the cooperative function of all of its parts. My presumption in
this regard is distinctively British--even more distinctively American,
perhaps--and from continental perspectives (even in America) it will look a bit
impressionistic, vague, and potentially naive. But surely the issue makes an
enormous difference if we settle clown to particular instances such as those I
proposed from Scripture.
It rained last night, hard and abruptly,
distracting me from my work on this paper. So what? I have no answer. But if
this were a story about my writing a paper, that question should have an
answer. In reading literature appropriately, I argue, one reads with the
presupposition that nothing "just happens." Solomon's prostitutes
show up when they do because they contribute something. The young man who runs
off naked when Jesus is arrested contributes something. Maybe that young man
was "real" and maybe he was "not real." Maybe that event "happened"
and maybe it "did not happen." As a critic I do not particularly care
whether it happened, because as a critic and above all as a poet myself I know
that even my most literal or "historical" stories are such a radical
re-vision and re-selection of experience that nothing remains without earning
its place--even if it is a typically academic excess to suppose that we can
rigorously account for each little detail.
Nonetheless, a talented reader can
account for quite a bit. As a poet, I know how much that might seem incidental
is most carefully wrought. The particular calling or ability of the poet
(including the final redactors of Scripture) is to take all the muddled
disruptive incoherence of real fact and actual memory--whether communal or
personal--and then select and arrange, reform and recast them into a coherent
aesthetic whole that tells a visionary truth that facts alone cannot reveal. If
you splinter the text into parts, that visionary truth will be lost. And it
will be a crucial loss.
The relation between art and reality,
then, is much like what we understand to be the relation between what Jesus
called "the Kingdom of God" and ordinary experience. The Kingdom of
God is not a reality dreamt of in our philosophy, which is partly why
contemporary literary theory does not provide terms and methods that can
account for literature's moral value within Christian community. To recur to
Coleridge, faith is the work of imagination, synthesizing and subordinating
both knowledge and will to imagination's own capacity to generate "A new
earth and new heaven,/Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud." 22 To
find that Kingdom translucent within literature--secular or Scriptural--we must
first of all read properly, which is to say attentively, to details regarded
not as historical facts but as poetic choices. One who reads in such a way is
powerfully engaged by the text, and the psychological and ethical power of that
engagement with "illusion" has long been feared by those who would
maintain social control. Art, like the Kingdom, is inherently subversive in its
visionary certainty. Jesus taught in parables.
The ethical potential of our engagement
with stories is hilariously illustrates by Woody Allen's story, "The
Kugelmass Episode." 23 Allen traces the adventures of a middle-aged
humanities professor who by means of magic transports himself into Madame
Bovary--lectio divina come alive. Of course Kugelmass merely recapitulates the
problems that shape his life to begin with: when he brings Madame Bovary out to
New York, their relationship is soon beset by all the same woes as his
marriages. Literature has not offered him the escape he has fantasized that it
would: the hermeneutic circle traps him. But Allen pushes the point a step
further:
"I can't get my mind around this," a
Stanford professor said. "First a strange character named Kugelmass, and
now she's gone from the book. Well, I guess the mark of a classic is that you
can read it a thousand times and always find something new." 24
We do not expect to find ourselves in
stories, as Kugelmass does; and we certainly do not expect to find our
contemporaries, as the professor does. But we do. As Coleridge explains, as
Schneiders explains, as Martin Smith explains, each in slightly different ways,
which endlessly repeated rediscovery underlies the permanence of art. 25 But it
depends--utterly and profoundly--upon our correlative willingness to respect
and to engage the full aesthetic subordination of parts to wholes and not to
history or to orthodoxy or to conventional propriety and our own individual
psychological self-preoccupations. Here as elsewhere, of course, consistent
virtue will elude us. All we can do is try.
From this perspective, John Dominic
Crossan's account of the allusive structure of the passion narratives renders
the spiritual reality of the resurrection far more vivid and convincing for me
even while discrediting revivification and an empty (or literally nonexistent)
tomb. 26 Accounting for "the facts" of the accounts poetically not
historically transforms them into a story that is richer and denser with
meanings than mere journalism could ever provide. Freed of journalistic duty to
mere facts, the passion narratives become a visionary reality that transcends
and transforms ordinary experience. Kugelmass's magic box could not exist, any
more than bodies can be revivified (or if either could be literally real in
some other time and place, whether Jerusalem or New York, such magic would not
have much moral meaning in my own nonmagical middlewestern existence). But
Kugelmass's particular ability to create and to sustain the problems afflicting
his life is a quandary that exists for all of us. The facts of redemption and
resurrection are also daily facts in the life of a believer.
The moral power of the passion
narratives, like the lesser but real moral power of this little short story,
lies in its ability to transport us, however briefly, to what Coleridge calls
"the willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes
poetic faith. 27 We go along, neither crediting nor doubting but rather
engaging all the elements of the story on all of their own terms. And thereby
does grace find access, thereby can our vision be changed, thereby do we find
an order and meaning and moral clarity that ordinary experience cannot provide.
The death and resurrection of Jesus become not merely a fact of history but a
meaning in our lives. "I never told a story that wasn't true," said
an Irishman, "whether or not it happened just exactly as I tell it."
The paradox of this is massive: "The
Kugelmass Episode" never happened: no experience of any sort is as lucid
and coherent as a well-built little story (and with the right techniques, of
course, the unity of stories can also be exploded). If we are enchanted, then,
we are enchanted by lies and by illusion. No wonder poets are banished and
prophets are killed and aggressive French theorists demonstrate that
"meaning" itself is fundamentally political oppression. That, or else
meaning is the central creative act, the Word made flesh among us.
Steiner eloquently summarizes the ways in
which the artist's ability to conjure up a convincing and utterly engaging
alternative reality has traditionally been understood as a rivalry with God. 28
This "seductive" power of art is in fact acknowledged by the various
historical attempts to restrain or at least ignore artists (or to
"protect" believers) behind tall fences of orthodoxy and doctrine.
But if we take the Trinity seriously, if we genuinely believe that our God is
incarnate, then art is (potentially) part of God's ongoing act of Incarnation.
True spiritual discernment is still necessary, here as everywhere else in life;
but orthodox doctrine and above all domesticated conventional habits of expression
and belief will not take automatic priority over the arts themselves. The
church may have something new and serious to learn about crucifixion from Emily
Dickinson or about immanence and spiritual growth from William Wordsworth or
about sin and repentance from Dante Alighieri.
Sidney's defense of poetic
"illusion" still sets a standard for eloquence after all these
centuries:
Now for the poet, he nothing affirms, and
therefore never lieth …. The poet never maketh any circles about your
imagination, to conjure you to believe for true what he writes. He citeth not
authorities of other histories, but even for his entry calleth the sweet Muses
to inspire into him a good invention; in truth, not laboring to tell you what
is, or is not, but what should or should not be. 29
"What should or should not be" is not
to be construed as petty moralizing but as full poetic vision of the Kingdom
that both should be and is, the coherence and the meaning of what we
"half-create/and what perceive" by the forceful, poetic, imaginative
re-vision of our own lives and experience. 30
The power of "good invention"
depends upon its thorough-going control over all its own parts, I have argued;
but it must be admitted that no one has ever quite explained how that control
works either in the text or within the reader. That is part of why the claim
remains a controversial one: the coherence of a literary work and the interplay
of its parts can be experienced but not formally demonstrated. Alexander Pope's
famous lines remain definitive. The great poet, he argues, does not work by
"rules" (which is what he means here by "art"). Instead,
the poet can
… snatch a grace beyond the reach of art,
Which, without passing through the
judgment, gains
The heart, and all its end at once
attains. 31
We can dismiss our initial or primary
experience as readers, calling it naive illusion. Or we can conclude that grace
is real, that Pope chose the right word: art and the reception of art are both
works of grace and not merely achievements of human intellect and will. As
Marcus Borg says, if you have no immediate experience of God, you will have a
much harder time understanding and defending any of this. 32
The word "grace" refers
simultaneously to effortless beauty and to sanctification. We have a word for
it. We have a word for many realities that theorists cannot explain. That is
why we have poets and not just philosophers. "The imagination may be
compared to Adam's dream," said Keats, "--he awoke and found it
truth." 33 Put down the book; get up from the dust where you sat listening
to a parable; startle and reach for the prayer book because the sermon is over
and we must get on with the liturgy. Any way you do it, if you have heard a
story told skillfully then it is an awakening.
But we awaken changed, mysteriously
changed. We awaken in a world that has been changed, a world whose potentiality
has been abruptly and mysteriously revised. As Schneiders argues, as many
traditions worldwide have argued for millennia, there is no going back once
one's vision has been broadened and deepened. As Stanley Hauerwas argues in so
many different ways and places, Christian communities must above all be
interpretive communities or discourse communities where the transforming power
of poetry is known and taught and sustained as a vital social reality. It is
the poetry of Scripture and above all the artistry of worship that distinguish
churches from PACs and from social service agencies. And, I have argued, poetry
itself, literature-as-such ought to be more widely recognized and engaged as a
vital and valuable resource for the forming and transforming activity of
Christian community. Historically, aesthetically, morally, literature per se is
an inseparable element of the Kingdom.
Furthermore, literature-as-such embodies
a crucial aspect of God's continued creative presence among us. It is not just
that the Bible has been a massively fruitful resource for western poets,
important though that fact may be. Rather, the continued vitality of our common
or shared perception of the sacred depends upon the incessantly revised and
revisioned vitality of art. Anglican theology insists and literature
demonstrates that we keep seeing God in new ways, in ways that may build upon
tradition but that also constitute a serious and autonomous revelation. Poets
are as crucial to that enterprise in our day as they were for the ancient Jews
and the first Christians.
Oscar Wilde's trenchant critique of
nineteenth-century realism, "The Decay of Lying," offers a quite
accurate account of art's visionary power in a community:
For what is nature? Nature is no great
mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she
quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we
see it, depends on the arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very
different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its
beauty. Then, and only then, does it come into existence. At present, people
see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have
taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs
for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we
do not know anything about them. Now, it must be admitted, fogs are carried to
excess. They have become the mere mannerism of a clique, and the exaggerated
realism of their method gives dull people bronchitis . . . . Yesterday evening
Mrs. Arundel insisted on my going to the window, and looking at the glorious
sky, as she called it . . . . And what was it? It was simply a very second-rate
Turner, a Turner of a bad period, with all the painter's worst faults
exaggerated and overemphasized. 34
"What we see, and how we see it, depends
upon the arts that have influenced us . . . . One does not see anything until
one sees its beauty." I have watched a train pull into a train station
every weekday morning for years, but I knew I had never really seen the train
on a cold winter day until I read Anna Karenina. Furthermore, while riding on a
train one afternoon, I watched a buck with a huge rack of antlers bounding away
across the Indiana dunes through chest-high golden sedge. It looked like the
most clichéd of drawings atop cheap calendars, and I felt myself cheated out of
my own life by my exposure to bad art. The experience of God is no less
powerfully evoked by, and perhaps not much less vulnerable to, the powers of
art. God is there as the fog is there or the sunset, but without aesthetically
powerful witness to God's transforming presence, the lonely soul at a window or
on a train may see only through the haze and streaks that nihilism smears
across New Age banalities.
God is there as the mountains are there.
But most of life goes on in the woods where, like Dante, we can easily find
ourselves lost and beset by the powers of evil both within and among us. It is
wise, then, to welcome and to heed whatever visionary guides grace offers, even
if in the guise of pagan poets.
NOTES
1. Metaphorical Theology (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1982); Models of God (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987).
2. Why Narrative: Readings in Narrative
Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1989).
3. See, for instance, the following
substantial anthologies: Hugh T. Kerr, ed. Readings in Christian Thought, 2nd
ed (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990); Louis Dupré and James A. Wiseman, O.S.B.,
eds., Light from Light: An Anthology of Christian Mysticism (New York: Paulist
Press, 1988); Cheslyn Jones, Geoffrey Wainwright and Edward Yarnold, S.J. eds.,
The Study of Spirituality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), Lavinia
Byrne, ed, The Hidden Tradition: Women's Spiritual Writings Rediscovered, An
Anthology (New York: Crossroad, 1991). Jones et al. does include an entry on
Dante.
4. Stephen Prickett, Words and The Word:
Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986).
5. The following brief synopsis could easily
be an eight-hundred page scholarly tome. But it seems to me that the world has
enough such tomes, and not enough plain poetic confidence that the forest can
in fact be distinguished from the trees. What I trace are general outlines
perfectly visible to an informed Christian reading of any of the graduate-level
anthologies of literary criticism and critical theory. My favorite criticism
anthology is Hazard Adams, ed., Critical Theory Since Plato (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1971); for the reader's convenience, I will cite to this
single volume wherever possible. Other useful volumes include W. J. Bate, ed.,
Criticism: The Major Texts, enlarged ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1952); Dan Latimer, ed., Contemporary Critical Theory (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1989); and Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle, eds., Critical Theory
Since 1965 (Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida 1956) For help with
contemporary jargon, one can turn to Irena R. Makaryk, general editor,
Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms (Toronto,
University of Toronto Press, 1993).
6. Prickett, Words and The Word, pp. 104ff.
7. Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical
Narrative (New York: Basic Books div. HarperCollins, 1981); and The Art of
Biblical Poetry, (New York: Basic Books div. Harper Collins, 1985).
8. I trace the relationship between
Coleridge's theology and his literary theory in The Design of 'Biographia
Literaria' (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983).
9. "An Apology for Poetry," rpt. in
Adams, ed., Critical Theory Since Plato, p. 159.
10. I work this out in detail in my essay,
"Coleridge's Theory of Language," Philological Quarterly, 59 (1980):
338-352.
11. George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 3-4.
12. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria,
ed. J. Shawcross (London: Oxford University Press, 1907), vol. 1, pp. 135-136.
13. Steiner, Real Presences, p. 199.
14. Ibid, p. 220.
15. Ibid, p. 178; p. 200.
16. Sandra Schneiders, The Revelatory Text:
Interpreting the New Testament as Sacred Scripture (New York: Harper San Francisco,
1991).
17. Ibid, pp. 167-168.
18. Garrison Keillor, Leaving Home (New York:
Viking Penguin, 1987).
19. Garrison Keillor, "Episcopal,"
in We Are Still Married (New York: Viking Penguin, 1990), p. 206. He locates
his first Episcopal parish in a narrative landscape in which one sees, first,
the museum of Danish Resistance, then an enormous statue of a woman from Danish
mythology who turned her four brothers into oxen and with them carved out the
land of Denmark. Behind this huge statue is a much smaller one of a little
mermaid, "a small damp sad person in the midst of a personality
crisis." And behind the mermaid is the church.
20. Henry James, "The Art of
Fiction," rpt. in Abrams, ed. Critical Theory Since Plato, p. 667.
21. From the seventeenth through the
nineteenth centuries, one sees dramatic changes in the metaphors used to
represent the relationship between literature and the "real world."
The central analysis of these changes is M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp:
Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London: Oxford University Press,
1953). "Mirror" and "lamp" or "light" are, of
course, metaphors with important biblical echoes, but Abrams makes only passing
references to Scripture. It is in fact difficult even to begin to think and to
talk about the character or role of literature in western culture without being
haunted by imagery ultimately linked to the Bible and especially to the
Prologue to the Gospel of John. We have, after all, a God who creates not
"ex nihilo" but by speaking, by using words that make real what they
name. What else do poets do, imaginatively or psychologically, to their readers?
22. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. "Dejection,
an Ode," lines 69-70.
23. Woody Allen, "The Kugelmass
Episode" from Side Effects (New York: Random House, 1977).
24. Ibid.
25. Martin Smith, The Word is Very Near You
(Boston: Cowley Press, 1989); see also Schneiders, The Revelatory Text: ".
. . the classic text is classic precisely because it does not merely convey
information but affects existentially the life of its readers. In other words,
interpretation of the classic is engagement with its truth claims, which remain
relevant to succeeding generations of readers. The classic must be not only
deciphered, that is, translated and exegeted, not only 'replayed,' that is,
criticized: it must also be recontextualized in the present situation and
appropriated" (p. 151; cf p. 156).
26. John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A
Revolutionary Biography (New York: Harper San Francisco, 1994), chapters six
and seven, especially pp. 143-152.
27. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia
Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross, volume 2, p. 6; cf volume 2, p. 107.
28. George Steiner, Real Presences, pp.
200-216, He acknowledges that his account is deeply androcentric in its
emphasis on rivalry, jealousy, and rage. Perhaps a woman's direct and powerful
biological experience of participation in the actual generation of human life
can mean that all forms of creativity are for us more secure and more freely
mutual with the God who (epistemologically) assures their intelligibility and
meaning. In light of how biology privileges the feminine experience of
biological reproduction, Steiner too lightly disregards the sociological
obstacles facing a woman who is an artist. Having biological command of
creation as we do, we are all the more threatening to the male as Steiner
depicts it if we command aesthetic creation as well. German romanticism aside,
artists always need an audience--and that usually means brokered access to
audience--that androcentric cultures will be unconsciously reluctant to provide.
29. Sir Philip Sidney, "An Apology for
Poetry," rpt. in Adams, ed., Critical Theory Since Plato, p. 168.
30. William Wordsworth, "Lines Written a
Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," lines 107-108.
31. Alexander Pope, "An Essay on
Criticism", lines 155-157; rpt. in Adams, ed, Critical Theory Since Plato,
pp. 278-286.
32. Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again For the
First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith, (New
York: Harper San Francisco, 1994), pp. 14-15, 33-35, 86-88, 95n56. He nicely
explains a common wisdom among believers: it can be difficult or even impossible
to explain religious experience or even theology to someone whose metaphysics
excludes the transcendent. If we take the reality of God as a given--not as
something we have either established ourselves or that needs somehow to be
discursively established for our conclusions to be valid--our tasks as writers
are suddenly far simpler and so is the formal structure of our discourse.
33. John Keats, letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22
November 1817; rpt. in Adams, ed., Critical Theory Since Plato, p. 473.
34. Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of
Lying," rpt. in Adams, ed., Critical Theory Since Plato, p. 683.
Faith and Fiction: Literature as
Revelation
Published in the Anglican Theological
Review, 78 (Fall 1996), pp. 382-403.
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