Advent Women 9

The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since I can't describe myself I can't ask for help. We are alone in this quest, and Fortunata is right not to disguise it, though she may be wrong about love. I have met a great many pilgrims on their way towards God and I wonder why they have chosen to look for him rather than themselves. Perhaps I'm missing the point - perhaps whilst looking for someone else you might come across yourself unexpectedly, in a garden somewhere or on a mountain watching the rain. But they don't seem to care about who they are. Some of them have told me that the very point of searching for God is to forget about oneself, to lose oneself for ever. But it is not difficult to lose oneself, or is it the ego they're talking about, the hollow, screaming cadaver that has not spirit within it?

I think that cadaver is only the ideal self run mad, and if the other life, the secret life, could be found and brought home, then a person might live in peace and have no need for God. After all, He has no need for us, being complete.

Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

My mother has a theory that JW wrote this novel as a sort of explanation/apology for Oranges are Not the Only Fruit. JW's mother was furious at Oranges and never read another book by her. It's sad because there is a tenderness in the mother-child relationship (almost obsessively portrayed by JW) in this novel that might have undone some of the damage. This book has a special place for me because it was the starting point for my phd, as an inspirational example of literature deploying theological themes and narratives. The funny thing is that I read it to help my mother who was writing an essay (and later teaching a course) on feminist myth-revision. I'm not going to say any more about this...

Christianity is not the only thing that JW revises, there's a whole lot of myth, fairytale and literature that gets picked up and twisted to her own ends. But the theology is what intrigued me. Her (foster) mother raised her a brethren and so Christianity and the mother have fused together into a complex ambivalent relationship. She memorized a lot of Scripture in her youth, along with T. S. Eliot and plenty of other Christian writers. Weirdly the very thing she ended up rejecting (Oranges tells a pseudo-biographical story of how her sexuality led to her being rejected [notably it's this way round] by her church) is what gives it so much depth. The passage above resonates significantly with the mystical tradition and she has (sort of!) described the novel as a reading of Four Quartets (which is sort of a reading of St John of the Cross's Ascent of Mount Carmel and Dark Night of the Soul). 

I chose this passage mainly because it highlights the central feminist issue with mysticism. How can you balance mystical kenosis and the assertion of feminine identity that feminism requires? I think there are options and she hints at directions here. The garden she mentions is surely the garden at Burnt Norton where Eliot finds his still point with Emily Hale (who he almost but didn't marry). The mountain is surely Elijah's, discovered at the point of exhaustion again in the silence after an earthquake. JW herself is complicated here. On the one hand, she frequently signals that the path for the soul is independent self-discovery; but then why are all her novels about obsessive love? Anyway enough mansplaining - it's Roaring's fault who's been too busy to write this month; all these Advent women have begun answers to this question much better than I could. There are doubtless many ways to create and discover yourself, just as there are the divine; they are necessarily the same question at the end of the day, whether or not that also means finally losing yourself and God again.

40BFL 9: The Darkness of God

What could you follow Illuminations with but The Darkness of God? Having gone to Yale, Denys Turner is the biggest loss to British theology in a long time. I often feel guilty that I didn't make more effort when I had the privilege of being taught by him - actually I remember with acute embarrassment asking him for an extension on my extended essay deadlines because I was at hockey practice most days preparing for the blues game. (We won 3-1 - ha!) Not the greatest mark of pedigree in a wannabe theologian and I must say I have lived every bit up to the promise shown there. At Cambridge I excelled at punting, short corners and coxing in last night's clothes, but the greater loss is mine.

This is the best entry into mystical theology. It's the sort of book you wish everyone had read because then you'd be dealing a lot less with the frustration of people's sunday-school theology. In a nut shell, it gives you a two-for-one deal. Firstly, by managing to present an intellectually defensible idea of God. And, secondly, by challenging spurious contemporary notions of 'mysticism'. Turner has a life long preoccupation of correcting experiential readings of John of the Cross, Julian et al. and shutting out all that voodoo, woowoo nonsense. He does it, I think, in every book he's written and quite right because it is really annoying.

The general thrust is a sort of historical tracing of one path of theology brought about, he very successfully argues, by the coming together of two narratives: Plato's analogy of the cave in the Republic and Moses ascent of Mount Sinai. These stories play on the imagery of light and darkness and ascent and interiority, where the seemingly contradictory metaphors get resolved. The dark, smokey mountain of Moses ascent is equated with the blinding light of the sun coming out of the cave which plunges the philosopher into greater darkness on re-entry to the cave; while in Augustine's journey into the soul, where God is within and I am without (another Turner favourite), where I most approach the centre of my being I am also raised in the encounter with God - the ascesis of the soul.

The language of contradiction is important because it's at the heart of this theology. Essentially, from St Denys we receive the understanding that the cataphatic and apophatic pathways to God are part of the same process. We name God by everything in creation as everything bears its creator's imprint - caterpillars and slugs - even spiders and wasps - through higher categories of goodness, power, knowledge, to the radical difference of the transcendent divine to all creation. This is the cataphatic way. But then begins the apophatic way, which is to say that actually God is nothing like anything in creation because God is uncreated, but to go further saying we cannot even say God is good, powerful &c. because God is not good like anything we know - a good stool, a good dog, a good human. Then further again to say God is not actually truly different, because to establish difference requires a frame of references - triangles and squares are different (both are shapes); but how would one say salmon and quantum mechanics are different? talking about God is even more different. But this takes us back into the cataphatic approach because, for example, say we start from a basic principle that God is male. The temptation is to say in negation "AHA! God is not male, I'm getting somewhere here!" But actually no - it is better to say God is male and female. If we say God is not male we may think we have a handle on God's gender - he is neuter or asexual like those angels in Dogma. If though we say God is male and female, there is more truth in the contradiction - we are closer to understanding something about God. So it turns out - as the Heracleitan epigram to Four Quartets has it - that 'the way up and the way down are one and the same'.

Anyway that was very long winded. Basically it's a great book that returns a bit of sense and imagination to theology. And it's a joy to read - particularly the penultimate chapter on St John of the Cross, which contains a lot of truth and wisdom together with some personal and searching theology about depression and selfhood; combining all those requisites for truly great writing: honesty, clarity, insight and imagination. It's this chapter that first got me reading St John who is one of the few to successfully combine being a good theologian and a genuine poet. More from him later.

40BFL 7: Four Quartets

Not here/ Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Eliot had a gift for seeing the future. In these lines he remonstrated against the banality of Twitter, before the internet had even come upon us. Earlier in The Wasteland he predicted the Twin Towers attack, listing the centres of civilization fatefully up to New York:

What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

Spooky huh?

It is impossible to condense my thoughts on Four Quartets. They were the centre-piece of my ph.d. and I’ve read them so many times that I regularly hear the words in my mind triggered by any old conversation, much like lines from Will Ferrell movies.

When they were published people complained that they were too prosy and unintelligible. People are stupid though. And the theology is excellent. Eliot understands transcendence and writes it beautifully - with the strength of feeling of a convert, which he was both to Christianity and to Englishness. It’s the sort of transcendence that raises the quotidian, transforms experience and gives it new meaning. So it is not a turning against or away from the world, but, through attention and desire, discovering eternity in the world, which points beyond itself to the dancing stillness of God. Through the poems he captures both the cataphatic phase of theology - as God is discovered in all manner of creation, described through faltering over-description, by language stretching beyond its own possibilities, desperately trying to grasp and give shape to experience - but also the apophatic phase, borrowing from St John of the Cross, as the world is stripped away into darkness and poetry fades into silence.

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.

But the poems are not abstraction - again and again they focus on the particularity of experience. They are full of England and (the later poems) the war in which they were written. But this is gathered into the richness of the Western Christian tradition and each makes sense of each. So 'Little Gidding' climaxes with a night patrol during the blitz but the language is suffused with medieval theology, drawing a wartime nation into the narrative of God’s love.

Four Quartets have the character of liturgy. Read properly they seek to draw you into the presence of God, to help communicate the structure of the universe in which God and the redemption of humanity can be known through Christ. And this is acknowledged as a communal activity, not just for the saint but for a nation at war: 'History is now and England'. If any book more concisely or beautifully describes the Christian vision of the world I have not come across it.

40BFL 5: I and Thou

This little book is simply the best written work of philosophy or theology I have read. It is literally poetry for the soul. It gives a wonderfully simple account of transcendence and the divine and it is the only work of philosophy I know that gives a properly convincing defense of a personal God. The beauty of it is that the whole work is premised on an incredibly simple idea - essentially that there are two ways of being in the world, either in an I - It relationship or an I - Thou relationship. The former is concerned with utility and experience, it's understanding is set in the past, and it fundamentally treats the world as a collection of objects. The latter does not separate the world into objects, but knows only present relationship understood as mutual, connected love. But it doesn’t turn this into a preachy binary. I - It relationships are important, but it is through I - Thou relationships, with God, other people and the world that we experience transcendence: ‘without It man cannot live. But he who lives with It alone is not a man’.

Anyone who has read T. S. Eliot’s later poetry and plays will feel the resonance strongly. But in a sense culture is full of this kind of philosophy - whether it’s Gaga’s You and I, Michael Jackson’s Earth Song, and We are the World, the Source’s You Got the Love. Obviously half the time the principle is expressed in totally sentimental ways, or becomes simply about a feeling rather than relationship, but the fundamental human ability to experience transcendence in a relationship with God, other people or the natural world is basic and recognised by many who would not think of themselves as particularly religious or philosophical.

What it also recognizes is the precarious nature of transcendence. Like Schleiermacher (coming later), and like we had earlier with Mackinnon, transcendence is not something that can be systematically figured out and described, nor is it bottled within institutions (though systematic approaches and institutions are necessary), but it is something that needs to be continually sought and refound, as Eliot said ‘humankind cannot bear very much reality’; or for Buber, ‘It is not possible to live in the bare present’ - ‘God, the eternal presence, does not permit himself to be held. Woe to the man so possessed that he thinks he possesses God!’

The work also has a persuasive ethical side to it that remains relevant. So when he talks about society, the ‘mechanical state’ has its place but not without also ‘living mutual relation with a living centre [and] with one another’. True community must be a ‘community of love’, just as true marriage is only sustained by ‘the revealing by two people of the Thou to one another’.

There is so much more that could be said about this wonderful little book. Written by a Jewish philosopher, it is a landmark work of Christian theology - which is not to usurp it but to find in it a basis for dialogue and inclusivity. It is written with wisdom and poetry which is all any of us can really hope for, and it is ethically demanding - both in terms of our practical love of others and how that is related to our vocation and salvation; the fear being that:

‘the continually growing world of It overruns him and robs him of the reality of his own I, till the incubus over him and the ghost within him whisper to one another the confession of their non-salvation’.

"Let the little children come unto me"

 



So perhaps the now super-sensationalist E4 series Skins has finally gone the way of all shock-TV in trading its original subtlety and humour - or at least lightness of touch - in portraying the teenage underworld of Bristol, for a more shock-and-awe/smash-and-grab approach. Still, what it has maintained throughout is an overriding preference and sympathy for the boozing, pill-popping, promiscuous wastrels - at the expense of the adults who, celebrity not withstanding, unfailing come across as dull, stupid, thoughtless, lumbering or downright evil.