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: 3. The Dialectic of Enlightenment

Men [sic] have always had to choose between their subjection to nature or the subjection of nature to the Self. With the extension of the bourgeois commodity economy, the dark horizon of myth is illumined by the sun of calculating reason, beneath whose cold rays the seed of the new barbarism grows to fruition.

This is a book that everyone ought to read at around the age of twenty. The quality of the writing is such that - for those who persist and read the whole - the result is almost certainly going to be conversion. It is the philosophical equivalent of the Christian Union for the lonely undergraduate. Its literary equivalent is nothing short of the Harry Potter series.

And this is a good analogy because its goal is to make you believe the story it is telling - a very convincing story. The story is that the entirety of human history can be read as a escalating series of attempts to gain mastery over the natural world. This begins with myth and primitive religion - attempts at basic natural science and magical appeals to trees, spirits, the weather &c. - before extending through more and more transcendent religions to the joy of science. The ultimate goal presumably is the atomic bomb where we can blow the whole thing to shit if we want. Along the way anything that harks back to our nature has to be suppressed and purged. So today religion harks back to superstition, just as witches used to; women generally with all their ickiness and bodily fluids need to be kept out of the way, anything that we’ve stomped on on our way to the top of the tree (preferably a metal tree house), the mad, the sick, less developed cultures, needs squishing and keeping out of the way.

Essentially it’s the story of someone who’s really insecure doing everything they can repress their primal fears.

These sorts of metanarratives are always charming. People like Freud and Marx of course wrote convincingly and had loads of people follow along behind - the principle of declaring that all history is really just about one thing is bound to make for good reading because it simplifies the world for a minute isolating what’s really important. This sort of thing still happens today, usually with more qualifications, but Charles Taylor and John Milbank attempt the same sort of genealogical historiographies.

You need to read this book when you’re twenty then because you need to see that ideas can change the world - to gain that passion for believing that thinking and writing matter. And this is a great book because it’s a powerful invective against the will to domination. It propels the reader to seek out the underdog, the unwritten history, to question authority and self-certainty: ‘In the general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men [sic] from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant’.

The truth is history is more complicated. There is plenty of evidence of how various religions, including present day religions, actually draw people back into their natural embodiment, return people to the mythical ille tempore. Equally science is not purely about the control and subjugation of nature. The Enlightenment itself moved humanity on in leaps and bounds to unmasking the domination humans practice on one another. History is not about one thing, and while sometimes being reductive brings to the foreground something worth fighting - or investigating - it can also mask a whole lot of other stuff.

Like Harry Potter this book is worth falling in love with, but then you have to move on. Otherwise you’ll be left fighting shadows in the dark, paralysed with insecurity, or going on and on about the same old thing, denouncing everybody and everything as ‘right wing’ or ‘imperialist’, bitching that Anne of Green Gables is "like so bourgeois", like a broken record.

Tainted Love

This Saturday Roaring is to become the Revd Roaring; a hard earned epiphet. By coincidence I also this week picked up Oliver O’Donovan’s very recently reissued commentary On the Thirty-Nine Articles. In the first edition Oliver had made no mention of Article 26 of which the guts is as follows:

"Neither is the effect of Christ's ordinance taken away by [the minister’s] wickedness [latterly “unworthiness”], nor the grace of God's gifts diminished from such as by faith and rightly do receive the Sacraments ministered unto them; which be effectual, because of Christ's institution and promise, although they be ministered by evil men."

Given the schismatic pulls the Church of England currently endures he returns in the new preface to note how this Article should have ‘warded off this vertiginous nightmare’ that is the conservative doctrine of Sacramental Taint.

Sacramental Taint has been addressed elsewhere in these conversations being the most pernicious doctrine that any sacramental action performed by a women is ineffective if not blasphemous, thus undermining the faith of those who receive sacraments from women and in the case of those ordained by women denying their orders.

But as Ben Quash pointed out some years ago this sad doctrine parallels almost exactly the position of the rejected, schismatic Donatists, where identical liturgical and creedal positions were violently separated by alternative episcopal oversight. The sense with which the Donatists believed the Catholic church to be polluted was the result of the holy perfection with which they imbued the church. A holy perfection that drew a boundary beyond which grace could not transgress.

From this we can see why Ben Quash draws Irenaeus’ distinction between schism and heresy, where heresy is a fault of faith and schism a fault of love: that schismatics ‘are destitute of the love of God, and... look to their own special advantage rather than the unity of the Church’. In like manner O’Donovan insists that whatever the error the conservative cannot forget the promise to the Church that ‘the gates of Hell will not prevail against it and that Christ is in its midst’; so even with a conscientious certainty of the Church’s error, sacraments are always effectual because of Christ’s institution and promise.

The posturing of conservative Anglicans and Donatists is shown up by the measure with which they pretend innocence. Holiness. Andrew Shanks has developed a particularly rigorous attack on the idea of innocence drawn from Gillian Rose. But the essential point is actually quite simple: that every attempt to present ourselves as innocent is self-justification. To feel innocent is to judge others guilty and feel superior. It is an act of exclusion; of violence; of turning away.

The subject remains on my mind because voting is continuing across the Church of England on the consecration of women bishops. This question, though, of how we agree to be one church is effectively prior. If it is the Church that acts sacramentally, if it is effective through Christ’s institution and promise, if the gates of Hell shall not prevail against us, then who are they that turn their backs on the sacramental promises of Christ? Schism is a failure of love and faith.

This may seem like a sour note to welcome with joy the Revd Roaring to the Diaconate. I take it though as an assurance of her vocation; that the Church has chosen her, brave lioness that she is; that Christ has chosen her to mediate his grace. It is also a reminder that Anglicans above all must ‘keep their minds in Hell but despair not’ - that we must forego the lure of innocence and holiness, live with the agony of a passionately struggling church but cling on in faith, hope and love to the presence of Christ.

But this has ever been the way. Schleiermacher wrote in 1799 of the constant struggle Christianity rightly asserts at the heart of humanity, forever gaining and losing its religion:

“Even while the finite wishes to intuit the universe, it strains against it, always seeking without finding and losing what it has found; ever one-sided, ever vacillating, ever halting at the particular and accidental, and ever wanting more than to intuit, the finite loses sight of its goal. Every revelation is in vain. Everything is swallowed up by earthly sense, everything is carried away by the indwelling irreligious principle, and the deity makes ever-new arrangements; through its power alone ever more splendid revelations issue from the womb of the old; it places ever more sublime mediators between itself and the human being; in every later ambassador it unites the deity more intimately with humanity so that through them and by them we might learn to recognize the eternal being; and yet the old lament is never lifted that we do not perceive what is of the spirit of God.”

Or, as T.S. Eliot put it more succinctly:

“The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without”

Congratulations to an ever more sublime mediator...

Oliver O'Donovan, On the Thirty Nine Articles (London: SCM, 2011)
Ben Quash & Michael Ward, Heresies and How to Avoid Them (London: SPCK, 2007)
Andrew Shanks, Against Innocence (London: SCM, 2008)
Schleiermacher, On Religion (Cambridge: University Press, 1996)
T.S. Eliot, ‘The Rock’, II, in Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1963)