Author: myer4269

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The Gospels as a Field of Vision and Field of Play

In “The Gospels for the Life of the World”, Ben Quash focuses on the mediation of Christ by the Spirit through the Scriptures, giving special attention to the generative possibilities of fresh encounters with the Gospels. While the Spirit of Christ mediates the presence of Christ through the Scriptures and through the Gospels, people generally and the Church especially must accept the responsibility of faithfully receiving this mediation. The task of receiving the gospels and reading the gospels is an invitation into the on-going interpretation and enacting of the gospels.

The Spirit works to meditate and we must work to receive and interpret. The Spirit must continue the work of unfurling the meaning of the Gospels because their meaning is superabundant, both inexhaustible in themselves and in need of constant appropriation and reception in every time and place. As Quash puts it,

“We may expect certain qualities in the gospels in order that they will be suited to the Spirit’s work of gradual mediation. To lend themselves to the Spirit’s unfolding, they must first be, so to speak, folded texts. They must be texts that ‘keep on giving’ over time. They must be immensely, if not infinitely, generative of new and transformative insight: rich, dense, full of implications (implicatio being the Latin word for ‘foldedness’).”

The Gospels’ meaning was not locked in time for the people to whom they were initially addressed. To accept that the Spirit continues to unfold the meaning of the Gospels is to simultaneously accept that these texts are addressed to us and to those who will come after us just as much as they were addressed to those who first received them.

Moreover, in their superabundance the Gospels are both iconic and ironic. The gospels are first iconic because they display the multifarious glory of Christ. Using Graham Sutherland’s Christ in Glory, a tapestry that hangs in Coventry Cathedral, to illuminate this point, Quash argues that the four gospels must be taken together. In the tapestry, in accord with biblical imagery, the four beasts surrounding Christ represent the four gospels, and the space that they open up between them is the space in which we are able to behold Christ. While each individual gospel displays Christ, the four gospels taken together create an entire field of vision in which to behold him.

In addition to being a field of vision, it is also a field of play, for the four-fold witness of the gospels invites both interpretation and participation. The space they open between them, Quash says, pulling from Balthasar’s theodramatics, is a “Spielraum”–an acting area. It is not just a space of understanding, but a place of enactment, and more literally a space of play (spiel).

The gospels are also ironic because they, as Quash puts, “slip the frame”, they point beyond themselves as texts, and so invite generative encounter. Quash writes, “There is an apparent self-consciousness in the gospels by which they both acknowledge the specifics of an original narrative context and also anticipate an indeterminate number of future ones. They promise to seek ‘readers’ who will ‘understand’ wherever and whenever they may be.” The gospels wink at the reader, in other words, and that wink is an invitation to interpretation and participation. Rather than seeking to define once and for all the meaning of them within the world they came from, the task is to allow the gospels to slip out of themselves into the world we inhabit and so transform it.

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Not speed, not breadth, but purpose – On the Purposive Intellect of Abraham Lincoln

Not speed, not breadth, but purpose – On the Purposive Intellect of Abraham Lincoln

“The prime quality of his mind was not speed—which in the different world a century and more later would be thought to be almost the defining feature of intelligence. It also was not breadth—the embrace of the best that has been thought and said in the world of learned persons, which Thomas Jefferson aspired to—or instant knowledge of the inner details of public affairs of the twentieth-century policy wonk. Lincoln’s mind instead cut deeply, perhaps slowly or at least with effort and concentrated attention, into a relatively few subjects. It was purposive—personally, politically, morally.” Walter Lee Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography

Discussing the value of reading biographies, Cal Newport recently mentioned this biography of Lincoln on his podcast. I was instantly intrigued by the idea of an ethical biography. More than offering yet another sketch of Lincoln’s life, Miller seeks to account for Lincoln’s moral formation and to explore the reasons for and the consequences of his moral choices. In the podcast Newport drew a parallel between Lincoln’s purposive intellect and the three principles of his model for deep productivity—do fewer things; do this work at a slower pace; obsess over quality.

I’m struck by the idea of a purposive intellect, particularly as it stands in contrast to a quick intellect. Miller observes that different ages value different dimensions of the intellect, and he is certainly right to say that our age most praises speed. If you asked me outright to say which of these three I aspired to, I would probably say that I desired breadth. But if you probed that answer just a bit further, you would find that what I really want is breadth quickly, to master a lot of material, yes, but to master it quickly. What I really value then is speed. The ultimate version of this to my mind is the gnostic fantasy about learning in The Matrix. That one could learn kung fu, or anything for that matter with the speed and ease of a download is nothing but fantasy, but that fantasy grows out of the idolization of not just speed but of computers as ideal minds. We want to learn the way a computer “learns.” A computer may be fast, but it cannot be purposive the way described here, no matter what one thinks of AI.

One consequence of idolizing the speed of a mind? If speed is the primary attribute we praise, then to admit slowness or to intentionally attempt slowness, as if it were good to slow down, amounts to a confession—I am not smart (at least in the way the age currently defines or values it). If the videos YouTube suggests to me about reading more, more quickly are any indication, I must have more than a passing interest in speed and the attendant anxiety that I am not fast enough. But a purposive mind is slow by design, or if not slow at least deliberate. It distrusts quickness for the sake of quickness.

What are the qualities of a purposive intellect? The purposive mind works like a plow. As Miller says of Lincoln, “His was a mind inclined to plow down to first principles and to hold to them—not as a metaphysician does, abstracting from particulars and spinning great webs of speculation, linking abstraction to abstraction, but as a lawyer, a politician, a moralist does at his or her best: by tenaciously analyzing one’s way through the particulars, seeking the nub of the matter.” Though this is true as far as it goes, I would push the image further. One does not plow simply to turn over the ground. One plows the earth in order to prepare it to bring forth new life. The plowman follows slowly as the the long steady furrows cut into the earth. With each step the earth turns up rich soil that can cradle and give life to a seed. The purposive mind is therefore generative. The purposive is also tenacious. As Lincoln said of himself, “My mind is like a piece of steel—very hard to scratch anything on it, and almost impossible thereafter to rub it out.”

Of course, these three qualities, speed, breadth, purpose, are not comprehensive, nor do they necessarily exclude each other. Think of a mind given to both speed and purpose. Mozart comes to mind as an example. He not only produced so much, so quickly but also so much of lasting value. Breadth and purpose readily also go together, while St. Thomas Aquinas seems to be a stunning example of someone who possessed all three. His was a mind that was quick and supple, a mind absolutely steeped in the breadth of the tradition, but also a mind that worked with great purpose.

(If you click the tag for intellectual life on this blog, you will find many posts dedicated to exploring various aspects of what the intellectual life is and what it entails, and more than a few posts sketching the main lines of The Intellectual Life by A.G. Sertillanges.)

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Vocation as Summons – What does ecstasy have to do with calling?

Vocation and Ecstasy

“Vocation calls for response which, in one effort to surmount self, hears and consents” (xxi). Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life

I want to take a pause from reflecting on what Sertillanges has to say about reading and loop back to the beginning of the book and draw out some of his thoughts about the intellectual life itself and in particular the summons to the intellectual life. His thoughts on vocation are interesting in themselves, but what I find most fascinating is the way he consistently discusses vocation and ecstasy together. For him they are twined themes because both are a summons for the self to move outside the self. To answer the call, to respond to vocation, one must move beyond the self, and this is literally the nature of ecstasy, ek-stasis, the self moving out of the self toward the object of desire, in this case Truth. The pursuit of truth is the telos of the intellectual life, and from Sertillanges’ point of view, whether one is a theologian or a physicist, both are after the same thing, Truth with a capital T. And this quest for truth is not simply one of duty but one of delight as well. As he puts it, “Every intellectual work begins by a moment of ecstasy; only in the second place does the talent of arrangement, the technique of transitions, connection of ideas, construction, comes into play. Now, what is this ecstasy but a flight upwards, away from self, a forgetting to live our own poor life, in order that the object of our delight may live in our thought and in our heart?” (xix).

One reason I’m interested in this idea is because in my doctoral research I’m looking at some of the things Hans Urs von Balthasar has to say about ecstasy as it relates to beauty. Ecstasy, ek-stasis, as I said requires the movement of the self out of the self toward the object of desire. Both Sertillanges and Balthasar agree on this but approach the question from two different starting points. Sertillanges insists on the ecstatic nature of Truth, while Balthasar insists on the ecstatic nature of Beauty. Both are looking at the same question from different angles, namely the question of Being, and its constituent transcendentals—Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. In Balthasar’s image each of the three transcendentals are different doorways into the cathedral of Being, and right contemplation of Being is a part toward knowledge of God.

On the question of Truth and its relation to Being, Sertillanges makes this seemingly startling statement when he asserts, “the quasi-incarnation of God in being, of eternal Truth in every separate instance of the truth, should also lead up to a heavenly ecstasy.” (131) One might be taken aback by the incarnation language, but what he says is perfectly aligned with St. Thomas and much of the theological tradition. He is saying in effect that every instance of truth participates in Truth, and the Truth is constitutive of Being itself. What Sertillanges says is really just a riff on St. Thomas, whom is the master theologian of ecstasy: “For St. Thomas, ecstasy is the child of love; it carries you out of yourself, toward the object of your dreams. To love truth ardently enough to concentrate on it and so be transported into the universal, into the heart of abiding truths, is the attitude of contemplation and of fruitful production. One is then in a sense like the animal in the forest, concentrated, watchful, crouching with his eye on his prey; and the inner life is intense, but with a sense of distance as if one were moving among the stars. One feels at once delivered from all trammels and yet enchained, free and enslaved; one is fully oneself in surrounding to what is above self; one exults while forgetting self: it is a nirvana in which the intelligence is intensely happy and active” (133).

What we all want it ecstasy and what is important here is the necessity of contemplation. Contemplation is the fundamental act of the intellectual life, and without it there can be no summons, no vocation, no ecstasy, because contemplation is the posture of receptivity, what Sertillanges referred to in the reading section as docility. We cannot hear a call, a summons, if we do not have ears to hear. Contemplation is a path outs of the self towards the other, and so is a path of love. As a path of love, it is also a path of joy: “According to the Angelic Doctor, contemplation begins in love and ends in joy; it begins in the love of the object and the love of knowledge as an act of life; it ends in the joy of ideal possession and of the ecstasy it causes” (255). Ideal possession means to receive things in the manner that they are meant to be received, to love things in the manner in which they are meant to be loved, and one can only come to know such things through contemplation.

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Four Kinds of Reading – More thoughts from The Intellectual Life

As I keep writing through The Intellectual Life, I’m struck how positively I respond to his approach to reading, which might in some ways seem heavy handed. Why do I even need his advice? After all, I’ve done a far bit of reading in my life already, and in some ways, I should already have settled some of these questions. And I suppose if somebody would have have asked me, I could have delineated some of my own approaches to reading, and what I would have said wouldn’t have differed substantially from what he suggests, even though my thoughts would not have been as systematic or as probing as his.

What I find most helpful, I think is having a typology, having categories that I can test my own approaches and experiences with reading against. And a typology of reading is precisely what Sertillanges offers. Like all typologies, it isn’t comprehensive, and it doesn’t account for borderline cases, meaning there is reading that bleeds from one category into another, or reading that is one type in a particular season and then becomes another type in another season. In any case, I’m happy for the categories if only as a heuristic to think through what I’m reading and why, and perhaps more importantly what I’m not reading and why.

In his typology, Sertillanges delineates four kinds of reading. But before listing the four types of reading, it is important to remember his framework. He is discussing reading in terms of the intellectual life and seeking to articulate how reading can best serve the quest for truth. Reading for him is directed toward that end. Certainly there are other kinds of reading, or other reasons to read, but these four types are meant to serve the vocation of the intellectual life.

So what are the four kinds of reading? “One reads for one’s formation and to become somebody; one reads in view of a particular task; one reads to acquire a habit of work and the love of what is good; one reads for relaxation. There is fundamental reading, accidental reading, stimulating or edifying reading, recreative reading.” Additionally, each kind of reading demands different things of the reader. “Fundamental reading demands docility, accidental reading demands mental mastery, stimulating reading demands earnestness, recreative reading demands liberty” (152).

All these kinds of reading are worth exploring, but I want to discuss fundamental reading in depth. One way to distinguish fundamental reading from accidental reading is that while accidental reading demands our mastery, fundamental reading demands that we be mastered by the reading itself. This is what he means by docility, for in fundamental reading we submit ourselves to the intellectual masters of a given field. In fundamental reading we apprentice ourselves to great minds, in order to learn the craft of thinking. In fundamental reading we learn way finding in the quest for truth. And for these reasons, “the choice of intellectual father is always a serious thing” (153).

He argues that for a given topic there are probably 3 or 4 such authors to be concerned with, who will most fundamentally form our thought on a given topic. Although I wonder how true this outside of disciplines like theology and philosophy, I do think that there are authors that provide the intellectual scaffolding for the rest of your reading in a topic, so that when you turn to accidental reading, we read through the lens of the masters. When we apprentice ourselves to a great mind, we are not just learning to read but also how to think.

Sertillanges’ master is clearly Thomas Aquinas, and with even a passing acquaintance with Thomas, one can see how Sertillanges has absorbed pithiness and clarity from him. And yet he is not simply parroting his master. His own voice emerges as he seeks to think Thomas’s thoughts after him in his present circumstances. And that is what becomes his original contribution, to bring Thomas’s way of thinking, his way of questing for truth to bear on his own moment.

I’m again left reacting as I did before. When I read these prescriptive guidelines, at first I bristle. I bristle at the idea of docility, but then I recognize that whether I want that to be true or not, it has been true. Those thinkers that I first submitted myself to have for better or worse become my masters. There is imminent wisdom here. First, because time is limited, we have to make choices, we have to decide who and what matters most. We can’t read everything, so the question becomes who will we submit our minds to. Who will we allow to form us?

Second, when I think of every important thinker I know of, they each have an intellectual master. Each have apprenticed themselves to a master craftsman. Even if they have moved beyond their master. Even if they have rejected their master, they never the less have been formed by their master. Without Socrates, no Plato. Without Plato, no Aristotle. Without Aristotle, no Aquinas. Without MacDonald and Chesterton, no Lewis. And so on and so on.

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Reading and Trying to Stay “Current” – More Reflections on The Intellectual Life

I’m continuing my reflections on The Intellectual Life by A.E. Sertillanges. You can read the first two posts here and here. 

After speaking of reading as a kind of food, Sertillanges discusses the temptation to stay current in our reading, especially reading about current affairs, and he makes this pun: “No current can take you to the point you aim at reaching” (148). He says that most people in the effort to stay current are swept away by the current. This picture and its attendant warnings seems especially potent in light of the ever present danger of being swept away by the streams of information we find ourselves swimming in. If information is a “feed”, then be careful of overfeeding at the trough. If information is a “current”, then be careful of being swept away, or worse still, be careful of drowning. 

So what to do? What does Sertillanges recommend? “A serious worker should be content, one would think, with the weekly or bi-monthly chronicle in a review; and for the rest, with keeping his ears open, and turning to the daily newspapers when a remarkable article or a grave event is brought to his notice.” (149) Interestingly, I’ve head very similar advice in our current environment, and it is striking to me that Sertillanges made his warnings in the the 1940’s. So while we may face unique challenges in terms of both sheer volume and ease of access, there seems to be a perpetual temptation to staying current and being in the know.

But what really challenges me is what he has to say about silence. “Never read when you can reflect; read only, except in moments of recreation, what concerns the purpose you are pursuing; and read little, so as not to eat up your interior silence” (149). Yes, indeed. Reading is not itself reflection; it only sets the table for possible reflection. However, it is so easy to say that reading is refection itself, so the goal becomes reading itself, consuming as an end in itself, and not processing and producing on the basis of the reading.

The admonition for silence is well worth noting. Silence is not nothing. Silence is a generative space. Benedict XVI said something similar to a group of theologians, reminding them that the speaking and teaching of words, especially words about God, must be steeped in silence: “Silence and contemplation: speaking is the beautiful vocation of the theologian. This is his mission in the loquacity of our day and of other times, in the plethora of words, to make the essential words heard. Through words, it means making present the Word, the Word who comes from God, the Word who is God.” (Homily at Eucharistic Concelebration with the members of the International Theological Commission, qtd. in Fire of Mercy: Heart of the Word, Vol. III by Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis)

Nevertheless, though I heed Sertillanges’s warnings, especially as it relates to digital reading, they can seem a bit paternalistic, as if I cannot control myself as a reader, which is a funny thought. If taken too literally, these prescriptions could seriously undermine serendipitous reading that leads one further along the path. But I take the central point very seriously, especially related to the reflections in the first post, that reading and reading and reading, can first of all be an excuse to not do what really needs to be done, can second of all be excessive in a way that dulls rather than sharpens the mind, and third of all can keep one from silence, which is always where the real work is done. And reading can be a din, a droning distraction from that essential work of silence.

In the context of the intellectual life, there is always a great temptation to believe that what you have read is what matters most. Sertillanges says no. It is rather your discretion about what you read and why you read and what you do with what you have read that matters most. And it is silent reflection that matters most of all. Similarly, for the pastor who wants to preach in light of the best exposition and best scholarship, the question looms, when do I turn to commentaries? But S. would challenge the pastor to ask a very different question, “How much silence have I practiced?”

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On Reading Less – Why deep reading is about intimacy

I want to continue reflecting on The Intellectual Life by Sertillanges by further exploring what he has to say about reading. In the previous post, I looked at his notion that in the intellectual life reading is proximate to and preparation for work. So if that is true, it implies that one must be careful of ones reading.

Reading is such an important topic for anyone who does intellectual work. And because it is important, there is a lot of advice related to it, and where there is advice, there is often anxiety. PhD students harbor deep seated anxieties about many things, but there seems to be an almost universal anxiety around reading. Among PhD students anxiety about having not read enough, both in terms of breadth and in terms of depth, runs rampant. Does my reading show that I know the field? Have I read deeply and widely enough? Have I read the right people in the right way? How much do I read before I write? Take all these questions and situate them within a thinking community, within a specific department, at a specific university, where there are right and wrong people to read and right and wrong ways to read them, and the anxiety only compounds.

These are not unimportant questions, but they can paralyze more than they free one to do the work that needs to be done. To such people, what advice does Sertillanges offer? “The first rule” he says, “is to read little” (146). And why read little? Because reading is like food, and reading too much can lead to “the poisoning of the mind by excess of mental food, the laziness in disguise which prefers easy familiarity with others’ thought to personal effort” (146).

Ah, easy familiarity, I know you well. And how often I settle for you instead of hard won intimacy. In intellectual pursuits, intimacy may not be the first or even the last concept that comes to mind, but it is important to reflect on when discussing not just reading, but the whole life of the mind. In theology in particular we don’t simply explore ideas, but apprentice ourselves to great minds, to those who have gone before, and to gain true understanding of them requires a depth of not just intellectual but emotional investment. To take on someone’s thinking, to let it in, to try it on, to consider it first on its own terms—these are intimate things.

And here I think is another reason to read little and to read wisely. In economic terms, reading is an enormous investment of time and energy, which means that in reading we must consider opportunity cost. Reading one thing means I am not reading another, or to put it in terms of the Information Age, in reading anything I am choosing not to read everything. To continue the economic metaphor, some books are worth the investment and some are not. Some are worth a little time, worth what Mortimer Adler in How to Read a Book calls an inspectional read . And there are some books, some authors that reward every moment that you can give them. These are the books worth reading well, reading deeply, reading again. On the Incarnation is such a book. The Confessions is such a book. For me, Hans Urs von Balthasar has become the great mind that I am apprenticing myself to and investing deep effort into understanding. Sertillanges insists, and I have found this to be true, that the blessing of learning from great minds is that in understanding them you also come to understand so much else as well.

Reading little doesn’t simply mean reading less material, though on some level it does mean that. It means primarily reading select authors and books more and other things less or not at all. But how do I choose? This is the question that has launched a thousand book lists and has generated a million questions about what does and does not constitute a great book. I hope to get into some of these questions in later posts, but for now, I think there are some simple questions to question. The first question is who are the great minds in the field I hope to consider. This is not the question of who matters right now but rather a question of who has made a mark, not simply made a splash. There are trends, currents in every field, and we must at least be tangentially aware of them, but there are thinkers, writers, and books that are trend-proof, that endure, and I think there is wisdom in starting with these books

Our communities also help us choose, and this can be for good or for ill. It is worth thinking through what is read and what is not read in a given community and to ask why. As Sertillanges observes, “We never think alone: we think in company, in a vast collaboration; we work with the workers of the past and of the present.” This is by and large a wonderful blessing. I will admit that I have friends who do certain kinds of reading for me, meaning, I rely on them to tell me about books that might interest me but that I will never have time to read myself. I also rely on them to help direct my attention to things, to people, and to ideas that I might have missed otherwise.

But perhaps the most penetrating take away for me from this section is that reading less means starting to get ruthless about certain kinds of reading, and starting to curtail or eliminate those kinds of reading. One of the things that Sertillanges believes we could all use less of is news. I will take up his thoughts on staying “current” in the next post.

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Is reading work? Thoughts from The Intellectual Life

“Now reading is the universal means of learning, and it is the proximate or remote preparation for every kind of production.” A.G. Sertillanges, O.P. The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

Over the course of a few posts, I want to point to some of the wisdom that I gleaned from The Intellectual Life by A.G. Sertillanges. I first encountered the book in Cal Newport’s Deep Work, but I didn’t pick it up at that time. I wished I would have. Though Deep Work was very helpful to me at a time when I was deeply distracted and needed some more structure around my work, and though I still use Cal Newport’s time blocking techniques to schedule my time, Sertillanges writes from within the Christian intellectual tradition, so his book is more than technique, more than helpful hints for “getting things done” by overcoming distraction, and, most importantly, more than a vague exhortation toward “creating value”. Rather Sertillanges offers a vision of truth, and in lifting up that vision he spurs those who read him to seek truth by enumerating the means by which we can best undertake that quest.

The book is essentially an extended commentary on a letter St. Thomas sent to a fellow Dominican entitled Sixteen Precepts for Acquiring the Treasures of Knowledge. And The Intellectual Life is Thomist through and through. It offers a vision of a world of order, a world of virtue and vice, a world where ideas like vocation are not just a modern gloss for personal passion. Through his commentary on these precepts, Sertillanges grounds the intellectual life in the spiritual and contemplative quest for truth, which for Sertillanges is the quest for God. But the book is not just for theologians, and certainly not just for academics. The book is for anyone set on acquiring knowledge, on seeking truth.

I decided to read the book when a friend of mine, Aaron Jeffrey, mentioned Sertillanges in the context of thinking about vocation in general, and specifically in the context of the intellectual vocation of the pastor/theologian. I’m very grateful to Aaron for the recommendation. The book has been deeply affirming to me, but also deeply challenging. It has especially challenged my understanding of reading, which is why I started with the quote above. Even though it comes from the middle of the book, I want to start here because his discussion of reading encouraged me to start writing through his book as a way of turning reading into production and challenged me to turn more of my reading into something, to produce as he says.

Concerning reading and the quote above, here is what I took from him, and I think it has something to say to any of us who spend a good chunk of time reading and to any of us who do intellectual work. In the intellectual life there is no possibility of real work without real reading, but reading is not the real work. As Sertillanges has it, reading is not production itself but proximate to it. To read is to prepare to produce. In other words, reading is not meant to be an end in and of itself; it is meant to be generative. Reading is meant to beget.

It may seem that he minimizes reading with this statement, but really he is reframing what reading is by saying what reading is for. There is a progression. First we learn, especially by reading, and then we produce. But learning is not itself production, and therefore reading is not itself production either. Now he is not saying that reading doesn’t involve work. If we think of work as expending effort, reading certainly costs something. Reading well is especially costly—it cost time and energy most of all, but also the opportunity cost of not doing something else instead. And for those for whom reading is especially cumbersome, it certainly feels like work. But in the context of the intellectual life and vocation, we can’t stop simply after we have read. We must ask, what might this reading beget? How might this reading be generative in the quest for truth?

What challenges me about this is that there is a real and meaningful distinction between learning and between production. For so long, I’ve thought of myself solely as a student, so learning was production, the work was to learn. But now as a pastor and as doctoral student, the task is to produce, and reading must serve that production. So now teaching becomes a means of production. Writing becomes a means of production. I read now, primarily, in order to teach and in order to write. (I’ll have something to say in a later post about what he calls reading for diversion and about pleasure in reading).

I began with this quote because this statement sets up much else of what he has to say about reading, especially why we ought to be careful of what we read and careful of how much we read. There is something in my that bristles against these prohibitions, but when I think of what he says in light of an intellectual life with the aim of producing work, I know that he is on to something. Also, thinking of reading as a means to something helps me think of my reading as moving me somewhere rather than as a destination unto itself, and so it pushes me to avoid reading that is for reading’s sake. If we think of reading as work itself, as productive in and of itself, then we can be pulled into an endless vortex of reading. If we read for the sake for reading, then reading begets more reading instead of reading begetting work.

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Vain in Our Imaginations

pexels-photo-24123“…who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse…they are futile in their thinking (vain in their imaginations).” Romans 1:18b–21

The question of the last essay was how do we sharpen our senses to perceive this world as God’s world. The stars are singing, the psalms tell us, the world is speaking, so how, I asked, do we develop the sensibilities of the psalmists who hear the singing of creation and then sing back to the world the song they have heard. One way, as my friend Seth pointed out to me, is to write psalms. And he’s right. The sensibility I’m talking about is a poetic sensibility, and part of what I’m trying to do with these essays is write theology in a poetic/literary way. But maybe that isn’t far enough. Maybe I should write poetry instead.

And yet here is another essay because as I reflected on that last essay and on this project as a whole, I realized that what I am ultimately after is an account, at least for myself, of how to become the sort of person who rightly perceives and responds to God and his revelation in the world. Another way to put it is that I want to work through what difference theology makes, if it makes any difference at all. As I have said again and again, theology at its most basic level is our accounting of and response to revelation. Writing in the mode of the essay is one way to make such an account, one way to fumble towards answers. So here you are, reading, fumbling along with me.

Such much for the goals. Now for the problems. The last essay left us standing in front of a looming obstacle, a behemoth that blocks our way, a colossus so large it seems to blot out the sun. It is an obstacle Paul sums up in the words quoted above. He says, in effect, “Oh, you can experience God in the world all right. The trouble is you don’t really want to. Look, God is not hidden. You can find him. You simply don’t want to because you aren’t willing to pay the price that such knowledge costs.”

In these verses from Romans and the ones that follow, Paul lays human experience bare to ask and attempt to answer that most vexing question—what can account, really, for human behavior? Where does the madness come from? What is the glitch in the code, the chink in our universal armor? Why the buzz of anxiety? What about the torpor of depression, the sometimes crushing inertia of being human? How is it that we have become millstones tied around our necks? And he says, in effect, we are pulled inward by a gravity so powerful that we eventually implode and become black hole versions of ourselves. We become, as he says, futile in our thinking. We have become, as the KJV has it, vain in our imaginations, which means, among other things, that the way we receive and then process the world has become distorted in some significant way.

Now, there are any number of questions we might have of Paul at this moment, but here is mine—how does he know this? What is his evidence? Admittedly, Paul doesn’t have any longitudinal studies or double-blind experiments. He doesn’t reference brain scans or discuss things in terms of family dynamics, or in terms of evolution by natural selection, but he is nonetheless an incisive observer of the human condition. I’d have to imagine that if he were alive today, Paul would read such studies, that he would acquaint himself with their inward logic and acknowledge both their truth and their limits and then he would leverage their rhetorical power. And he would, in the end, say this of our scientific, psychological, socially conscious and therapeutic means of discussing the human person, “These all are fine as far as they go, but does appealing to the lizard brain really explain your anger? Does your lack of healthy attachment really explain why you can’t love or be loved? Are just-so stories about the natural selection of beneficial human traits satisfying explanations for the highs and lows of human experience ? Does all this data account for our frivolous disregard of each other, for the disposable way we treat ourselves and others?”

On one level, Paul knows what he knows because he has looked at the way we treat ourselves, others, and the world God has given us and finds all the evidence he needs. But on another level (and this all brings us back to the thing we can’t escape if we are going to take the Christian faith or theology seriously at all), Paul knows what he knows because of revelation. These are things he knows because God has made them known, and he wouldn’t have and we couldn’t have known them otherwise. Romans as a whole is Paul’s account of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, what he refers to in shorthand as the gospel. And Paul begins this letter by announcing that something definitive has happened. The axis has shifted because of Jesus. History has a new centerpiece because of his resurrection from the dead. This is not exaggeration. There is no hyperbole in Paul’s notion that the whole world has been remade in the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. This Jesus, this one who is both son of David and son of God, has been raised from the dead. In his rising is our healing, and there is now a new king of the world. Paul says, Let us marvel. Let us not be ashamed of this good news but rather let our faces shine with its light. Let us reassess what we know or what we think we know about human nature in light of Christ.

And then he says but. But let us not forget the real darkness. There is the definitive act of God in time and space. There is the creation of the world. The redemption of his people. Yet we deny it. It’s not that we don’t see it. It’s that we do see it and then we turn away. We make, as Paul says, a trade, an exchange. There is truth, but we trade it for a lie. There is the creator, but we trade him for his creation. There is light, but we trade it for darkness. And there is glory, but we trade it for a kind of weightless existence, preferring to be untethered rather than acknowledge the weighty giftedness of life and the world.

The language of trade and exchange is key here. Because there is something transactional taking place, there is therefore something willful taking place. And this is one way I know Paul is telling the truth because, if I am honest, I know that I make such exchanges every day and the truly sinister thing is not simply the exchange but the denial that it is happening at all. The darkness, the denial, the vanity that Paul describes, is my own darkness and denial. This is about me. It is my heart that traffics in darkness. My heart that is a dark web, flooded with encrypted communications, bustling with illegal commerce. The battleground is not out there. It is in me. That is where you, where I, tussle over boundaries of constraint, where we fight to push what is barbarian in us back to the hinterlands.

This, of course, is Paul’s point. He’s at pains to show how everyone, Jew and Gentile alike, fall short. This passage is not intended to and should not be used to rank specific sins or specific acts. It is rather universal diagnostic tool, a heuristic for the human heart. We all make the exchange. The way you make the exchange and the way I make the exchange might look different but they are both rooted, as Paul says, in a fundamental denial of the truth that as creatures we owe our ultimate allegiance, and more than that our love and worship, to the one who created us. God’s created world sings back to God is that he is the blessed creator, and so often we will not join the chorus.

Learning to hear and then sing again the song of creation means that we must remember that before we are called anything else, we are called creature. We are created beings who inhabit a world of other created beings and things. And this identity of creature is primary and expresses our fundamental relationship to God. He is creator and we are creatures. And this is what we are most likely to forget. The darkness of our thinking, the vanity of our imaginations, the very things Paul is at pains to point out, compel us to exchange our relationship with the Creator for a relationship with creation. So we must remember our first name. Creature.

Beware though. Answering to the name creature requires our allegiance, our lives, our worship of the one who created us, and part of what we call salvation is relearning our name as creatures. Beware because there is a kind of magic in names, as so much ancient literature and so much contemporary fantasy literature shows us. In The Tombs of Atuan, the second book of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle, a girl is taken from her family to serve as high priestess of a group of gods called only the nameless ones. In service of these nameless gods, she is stripped of her own given name and renamed Arha, which means the eaten one. Her entire identity is consumed by these dark powers that she serves. That is until she meets the wizard known as Sparrowhawk who reminds her of her true name, Tenar. He speaks that name over her and in that moment the dark hold of her dark masters begins to break over her.

When we hear our true name of creature, the dark hold of our own dark hearts begins to break too.

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The Baby, the Bunker, and the CIA: Thoughts on Revelation

The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours out speech,
and night to night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are their words,
whose voice is not heard. Psalm 19:1-3

The more I seek the more I’m sought… Joe Pug, Hymn #101

Lovers are the ones who know most about God; the theologian must listen to them. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible

Here’s a dirty secret about the study of theology. For all the footnotes, for all the jargon uttered in its name, and for all the systems erected to scaffold its dignity, theology is ultimately dependent on something it cannot produce itself. And that something is called revelation. Without revelation, theology is impossible. Without God first speaking a word, without God first showing something about Himself, there would be no Theo for the ology to speak about. God must first reveal and then people respond. That’s what theology is at bottom, a response to and an account of revelation.

This is no cause for alarm though. You might think revelation is something that you must go searching for, that God is somewhere out there, out there being wherever it is you currently are not. But it is not so. Every morning you wake to find that you are born anew and that there the world is once again waiting to speak. “The heavens declare the glory of God,” after all, and “day to day pours out speech.” The implication is that this world is waiting to tell you things about God, waiting to impress upon you revelation. Simply to wake up and feel sheets against skin, to sense the warmth of a body next to you, to curl your muscles and crack your back, to sit up and brush away crusts of sleep from the corners of your eyes, is to encounter revelation. You wake to find that there is a God and that his world is speaking.

Born anew you wake to find that you are a helpless creature. Like an infant who hungers for that which he cannot provide for himself, you wake to find that you are once again a babe in the arms of your mother, rutting for milk. The wonder is that as you clutch and crawl and grasp to find something to feed you, as you squint and screw your head in search of a face, you find that there is such a thing as milk, that there is such a thing as a face looking for you too. You come to learn in the first moments of life a truth for all your searching—what you most need can’t be found in yourself. The wonder of Christian theology is that we are all of us infants and that the world and the word are milk to us. The wonder is that there is nourishment everywhere; we just have to start clutching our way toward it.

Take what I have just said and imagine that it is true. It is overwhelming, isn’t it, to think that every moment we rub against the edges of the world is a moment when we might encounter revelation. And our response to that revelation is critical. In the simplest terms, theology is an accounting for revelation. And if that is true, then doing theology is a little bit like being an intelligence officer. A theologian, or any human being for that matter, is like a field agent in the CIA. In developing assets, following leads, trying to sniff out who can be trusted and who cannot, there is always the question of what really matters, what is hard intelligence worth acting on and what is simply chatter, noise in the system. The difficulty is this—if the heavens are declaring the glory of God, if creation itself is a testament to God, a source of revelation, then everything is latent with meaning. Everything is both chatter and intelligence, useless and useful, insignificant and significant.

But in one sense we aren’t intelligence officers at all because there is no such thing as critical distance. We don’t observe and collect data from afar. We are within the data. We are the data. And for some this is why theology can never be taken seriously. This is an embarrassing fact for those who critique theology’s validity from the outside as a genuine mode of inquiry and from those on the inside who drone on in pseudo-scientific language and armor themselves with infinite footnotes to try and make theology something it is not. Wouldn’t theology be so much better, they seem to say, if it didn’t have to account for creation, didn’t have to account for every bloody thing, really, as revelation, or, horror of horrors, contend with Scripture? For those who harbor these objections, these latent fears boil down to one disturbing fact—revelation is not something that can be caused or controlled. It is only something that can be received and responded to.

You are here to receive. You are here to bear witness to this singing, showing world God has made, this world that pours forth speech. God first speaks and then this world he has made speaks back, speaks of the God who made it and that speech goes on and on in what Balthasar calls a “voiceless articulation”(from Epilogue). And what is being said is not nonsense. The world does not say any old thing it pleases. Psalm 19 once again tells us something indispensable about all this revelation—the heavens declare the glory of God. It might all seem like noise, like meaningless din, but the heavens aren’t speaking gibberish. In fact they are saying one thing, over and over again, and that thing is glory.

Begin to receive and meaning will begin to impress upon you and so will glory. Everywhere creation drips with revelation, so you come to find yourself soaking with the stuff. You will come to feel the friction of it because this is a world textured with truth. You will come to breath in its fragrance, both the rank and the perfume. You will come to taste both the sweet and the savory, the salty and the bitter, to be nourished and delighted with the food of God, to be disgusted and sickened with all that isn’t. You will come to hear the singing, to discern harmony and order, point and counterpoint, to feel too the dissonance, to cringe at those notes that are sharp and those that are flat. You will come to behold the splendor and squalor, to see the swallowing darkness, yes, but also to see light bend and fold, to reflect and refract shapes and movement to your open eyes.

Let’s consider once again that what I am saying is true. How do you even begin to live in a such a world? Psalm 19 has something to say about that too. At the end of the Psalm, once David has meditated on both the world God has made and the words God has spoken, he has to come to terms with himself, and so he prayers in response. “Let the words of my mouth and meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer,” he prays, saying in effect, “Make me the kind of person who is capable of rightly receiving the glory of the world you have made and the sweetness of the word that you have spoken.” Within in the span of that single psalm, David moves first outward and then inward. He begins with the heavens declaring the glory of the Lord and ends by asking that his words and meditations would be pleasing to the very Lord whose glory has been declared. Revelation first pulls us out of ourselves only to plunge us back into ourselves as we wonder at the thing revealed.

This rhythm of wonder and awe followed by prayerful response is not unique to Psalm 19 but is seen throughout the Psalms. The psalmists have a lot to teach us about revelation and how we should respond to it because they take for granted that the world says things about God. They experience that revelation and in turn take what it said, filter it through their own lives and imagination, and say it back to God. The world speaks to them, and they start reaching for metaphors. They start connecting one thing to another in a web of figures and reference. There it is in Psalm 1—the righteous man is like a tree. There it is in Psalm 23—the Lord is a shepherd, and I am a sheep. Like intelligence officers the psalmists string yarn between scraps of evidence, make connections, follow the trails. Like lovers the psalmists read the world as if it were a letter from the beloved. They trace themes from sheet to sheet, searching for what is said in words both written and unwritten. They feel the paper for traces of touch, for fragments of presence. “There is no speech, nor are there words whose voice is not heard,” David says in Psalm 19. Everything in the world is here for us to hear, but it is only the lover who wants to hear it all. The psalmists, like lovers, are especially attuned to the “voiceless articulations” of the world, so they learn to read the glory of God in creation like a kind of body language. God is not the subject of their inquiry, or the object of their scrutiny. God is their beloved, the one whose name is blessed, who is like honey on their lips, like water to their souls. The psalmists hear the world speaking, and they say back to God in love, “You are a rock, a fortress, a warrior, a rush of mighty waters, an eagle, a Father, a king, a lover. And we are trees, sheep, vines, arrows, children, subjects, lovers.”

I’ve been asking you to imagine that all this is true. Now I’m going to ask the harder question. It is true, so why don’t we live like it is? The skies, the stars, the handiwork of the heavens haven’t just shown David and the other psalmists that there is a beautiful world and that God has made it. These things have spoken to us too, and they have shown them and us that we, all of us, are accountable to that God, a God who is responsible for our consciousness, for our ability to even consider the heavens. For David in Psalm 19, the skies and stars are a gift that pull him first outward and then plunge him inward. Outward to glory and inward to his own smallness. Outward to the immensity of what God has made and inward to his own consciousness that can, by God, even in its own smallness contemplate such things as stars and shepherds and stones and conclude that there is goodness beyond and behind the stars.

We have to come to the point where we are ready to ask ourselves the questions that the psalmists asked themselves. If the skies are speaking and I am here listening, then what kind of world is this? What does it say about me that I am capable of hearing such things? How am I supposed to live in such a world that speaks?

These are not easy questions to answer, and some of the answers must wait for another essay, but one reason is that we make ourselves the primary obstacle to this way of living in and experiencing the world. As Paul tells us in Romans 1, the skies are speaking indeed, everything around is telling us that there is a God and that he is powerful, but our response is to actively ignore that fact. We make ourselves willfully ignorant of that glory because that glory demands a response. Ultimately, glory demands our worship of the God who made the splendor and the glory we behold. Whoever goes in search of revelation cannot say the journey is done until they have worshipped the God revealed. Revelation is a means to worship. The heavens aren’t declaring facts about God. They declare “Glory!” and the proper response to glory is awe, is wonder, is worship.

Theologians, if they are doing what they should, traffic in revelation which means they must also traffic in humility, awe, and wonder. Theologians must traffic in worship. This does not mean that the task of theology is easy. There are distinctions to be made, there are categories to articulate. There are systems to develop. There is hard work to be done, but in the end God reveals himself so that we might worship him. The stars shine so that we might worship God, but Paul says in effect that we have made the world a kind of starless bunker. We have lived as if these were starless, silent skies. Without humility, awe, and wonder theology can, and more than that life can, become a self-perpetuating, self-terminating activity, and soon we will find ourselves in the starless bunker murmuring to ourselves because we have forgotten that the stars are singing.

But we, like Dante, can emerge from the hell of the starless bunker and can begin again to hear the speech being poured forth from the heavens:

“Upon this hidden path my guide and I
entered, to go back to the world of light,
and without any care to rest at ease,
He first and I behind, we climbed so high
that through a small round opening I saw
some of the turning beauties of the sky.
And we came out to see, once more, the stars.” Inferno, Canto 34:133-138

 

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Every Tooth, Every Bone: The Dangers and Delights of Disarticulation

Every Tooth, Every Bone: The Delights and Dangers of Disarticulation

“We live on a little island of the articulable which we tend to mistake for reality itself.” Marilynne Robinson, When I Was Child I Read Books, “Imagination and Community”

“Only God Himself can let the bucket down to the depths in us. And, on the other side, he must constantly work as the iconoclast. Every idea of Him we form, He must in mercy shatter. The most blessed result of prayer would be to rise thinking, ‘But I never knew before. I never dreamed…’ I suppose it was at such a moment that Thomas Aquinas said of all his own theology, ‘It reminds me of straw.’” C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

My sister is an interior designer, so when she come to Dallas, she likes to take us with her to design shops and furniture stores she’s eager to visit. A couple of years ago we found ourselves in one such shop called Grange Hall. I had heard of the store, and knew that they had loose leaf tea, which excited me, and that they specialized in curiosities, which interested me, so walking in I expected to find quirky things, and what I found was certainly more Diagon Alley than Dallas, Texas. Among stuffed raccoons and bobcats with bared teeth were sculptures of blindfolded babies holding nail-pierced sacred hearts. On one wall there was a matrix of porcelain faces, forty to fifty in all, with Felix the Cat, Elvis, and Jesus all staring off into the middle distance.

For all that, I found one object especially curious. Hanging on a wall next to a distressed cabinet filled with crystal jewelry there was a wooden plaque covered in tiny, white bones, and on the bronze plate nailed to the bottom it said “Disarticulated Dog Skull.” I don’t know if the bones were real or if they were molds, but they were bleached white, the teeth perfect and unused, the bones ivory slick. The skull was complete from what I could tell, but every tooth, every bone was disjointed from those next to them and every piece was labeled in minuscule and immaculate Latin.

I have to say that before seeing that plaque I had never seen or thought about the word disarticulated, but that skull pulled apart and named only to be arrayed again as a complete thing suggested a concept to me that I had been struggling to name.

Anybody who thinks about words has thought about articulation, about the elegance and precision of the right words in the right order at the right time. Articulation also has to do with the pronunciation and sound of words, with the clarity and progress of musical notes, and with joints. By definition, then, to disarticulate means to disjoint, to take things that naturally or ideally go together and pull them apart. When it comes to bones, disarticulation can mean pain, and when it comes to communication or music disarticulation can mean confusion, the smearing of clarity. So in most cases the act of disarticulation is undesirable, the result of negligence, accident, or violence.

The skull, however, showed me that not all disarticulation is bad, that for the student of a given discipline disarticulation is invaluable. Without the ability to break a subject down into component parts, whether physically or conceptually, learning would be almost impossible. When learning or seeking to understand an idea or topic we need to be able to ask, what are the component parts? What are the smallest digestible logical pieces? For the veterinary student such a plaque would prove an immensely helpful study tool, and the knowledge gleaned from a disarticulated dog skull would prove a great aid in the actual care of actual dogs.

In the same vein, theology benefits from the mode of disarticulation. Thinking about the study of God and of His revelation, we can ask what are the component parts of the discipline, what are their names, what topics fall under them, and how do they all fit together? What comes first? What comes next? Is there pride of place, a privileging of order? There is knowledge that can only be gained from disarticulation and from the subsequent synthesis, from taking things apart and then attempting to explain the whole in terms of the constituent parts.

One way to think of the study of theology and especially the study of systematic theology is to think of them as exercises in disarticulation. In fact, one of the primary things that distinguishes one systematic theology from another is the way in which it disarticulates, the way it pulls apart the relevant topics and then names and arranges the parts. The resulting synthesis is driven by questions of shape and form, by asking how the pieces all fit together. A systematic theologian might ask, what happens when you begin theology with Christ at the center? What happens when you emphasize creation or ethics or community or the Trinity or sovereignty or freedom or beauty or drama?

There are two primary dangers, though, when it comes to the mode of disarticulation in theology. The first is a kind of tunnel vision created by the temptation to live at the level of pulling apart and naming so that all you ever have is parts and never a whole. Here the distinctions multiply. Hairs are split only to be split again. The things named become more innumerable and less distinguishable. Battles are waged over ever diminishing parcels of land. The second is the temptation to memorialize, to mount your theology on the wall like the dog skull, and let the meticulous placement of the bones and the tiny scrawl of names stand for theology in perpetuity, as if theology were a task that could be completed and not a continual response to the revelation of God.

And this is the thing I so often forget, the thing that the people I talk “theology” with so often forget–revelation itself does not change, but we do, and our ability to process it, to respond to it, to synthesize it does. Over time, for the individual or for a school of thought or for a movement, things must be reconsidered, things must be rebuilt from the ground up. This is what is so provocative about Lewis’s image of God as iconoclast because it so often God Himself who brings us to the point of reconsideration, and more specifically, to the point of disintegration. Just ask Job as he peers into the whirlwind. Ask Isaiah as he stands in the temple and experiences a kind existential disarticulation as he gazes on the majesty of God. Ask the everyday mystics who labor in prayer. Ask those people in your church who stand on the other side of trauma or tragedy.

The message is clear. While theologians engage in disarticulation, no one is immune or excluded from being disarticulated by God himself. We too can be undone by our encounters with revelation. As the writer of Hebrews puts it, God’s word itself is engaged in the work of disarticulation, taking apart what we assumed could not be taken apart, “piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow.” Theology is not itself revelation; it is rather our best accounting for revelation, and if we treat our theology like the the dog skull mounted on the wall, labeled and named for all time, and it will eventually only be useful as a curiosity or conversation piece. When we become comfortable, and make no mistake theologians and Christians alike are oh so prone to comfortability, God in His pleasure reserves the right to tear the pieces apart so that we have to start putting them back together again. Or as Jason Isbell sings,

You thought God was an architect, now you know
He’s something like a pipe bomb ready to blow
And everything you built that’s all for show goes up in flames
In 24 frames

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