I recently interviewed for a teaching job and the interviewer asked me what I meant by saying that I respected and imitated the teaching methods of the Rabbis. I was referring specifically to their search for “surface irregularities” and the manner in which their interpretations of these glitches, holes, and repetitions enables a deeply particular creative form. As I’m preparing for teaching this summer, I just read a famous portion from the Talmud in which one rabbi asks for a sign from heaven to prove his point, at which point the sign is given, but then another rabbi jumps up and says, quoting, “It is not in heaven” at which point the Holy One (that is, God) starts laughing, saying, “my children have won over me, my children have won over me!” In no other religious tradition do we see this kind of resolute orthodoxy and textual mastery mixed with the most stubborn sense of the rightness and space of the human spirit. This sense that God must abide by God’s own law, respecting the sanctity of man’s response. But instead of obsessing over the fact that this seems to limit God, we should notice how much freedom and spirit it gives to man. And putting aside the question of how and whether God works on his own, let’s take note of the fact that God has given men and women an astounding responsibility, one to which even nature pays heed (check out Baba Mezia, 59a-59b, Talmud). It was this Jewish spirit (as found in Kabbalah) from which Pico della Mirandola took his inspiration when he penned one of the most optimistic calls to human action and responsibility, in his famous Oration, and in many of his other writings. In my meager researches in Sophia, this is something that immediately came out to me about her, that she was the spirit of human action and necessity–almost, in a way, putting aside the question of what God can do, here we are faced with a divine humanity whose limits have not yet been spanned. The Rabbis saw the formation of the Talmud as man’s response to the Divine Word given on Sinai, and the limits of this response were something that even God seemed to respect. I would argue that Sophia should be conceived in an analogous manner.
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LikeThe movie begins with us inside the voice of the old, soon to retire sheriff, and though ostensibly the action occurs elsewhere, we realize at the end of the film that we’ve never left this voice, in fact we’ve fallen deeper into its Texan cracks, even into its dreams. How do we know this? We know this because, like a sheriff, and unlike a movie, we miss most of the action. Sure, we come upon it in anticipation, but most of the killings are (literally) veiled from our eyes. We can’t figure out who the heroes are because they keep dying in very anticlimactic ways, right before, or right after, our attention has been called. I’m so excited that a filmmaker (two even!) have resurrected the art of “not showing”–Hitchcock definitely had that one down, as did many others, though perhaps in part out of regard for the censors. Well the censors have mostly gone home, but the viewers remain, and No Country for Old Men is described as a “violent” film or one that is “action packed,” but these lines come from censors who were once viewers. The truth is that the film simply shows us what it’s like to be an old man who is too slow, too peaceful, and too intelligent, for the world of terror.
The (very very) bad dude in No Country for Old Men is presented as our male hero: brave, loyal, trustworthy, unafraid, and most important of all, true to his word. He must kill an entirely innocent victim just because he said he will. He doesn’t enjoy evil for its own sake, but he simply performs what evil deed he must in order to live up to, even sacrifice himself for, some higher principle. He clearly enjoys his evil deeds, but whence cometh this enjoyment? We ask the same question about him that Augustine asked about himself when he remembered the theft of the pears, which he did not do because the pears were good to eat, or for any other reason, but simply to indulge in the shame of the act. Augustine actually doesn’t give us a good answer as to why he commits his crime–it is clearer in the film: Sigur Anton (bad dude) is the last man around, the only character with character, strength and values. A true hero, and yet when he crumbles into a puddle at the end of the film there shines a ray of something totally different, in the irrational refusal to live in his world of a cute girl who works for Wallmart, we see the beginnings of a glory on the far side of the American man.
Well I’m sure glad that Dan keeps himself on the theology, thus justifying this as a theology blog, cause I would like to write about Dracula tonight. I just finished Bram Stoker’s wonderful (and big) book, and then watched the Coppola film version of it. The movie is so-so (who the hell did Keanu Reeves sleep with to get these roles???); the big change Coppola makes is to throw in a love story between Count Dracula and his youthful love (way back in 1460 something). Due to Turkish treachery she commits suicide, the church (Romanian Orthodox I think?) shouts blasphemy, her soul is to rot in hell, and Dracula commits himself to evil. A little cheezy, but it actually pays off in the end, for Coppola then has the 19thc. Dracula fall in love with the British Mina, who is basically a reincarnation of his ancient Romanian darling. At the end Mina redeems the Count and sends his soul to heaven, which, though the the love story is not in the book, is pretty true to Bram’s plot, in which Mina emphasizes the save-ability of the vampires (of course they are saved by having their hearts run through with a stake and their heads chopped off!). This is, of course, the Faust myth, and a surprisingly reliable duplication of it. For even though Faust sells his soul to the devil, and messes pretty seriously with some good German souls, at the end he still gets into Paradise, due to Mephistopheles getting distracted by a cute boy angel (!!no kidding!!). I’m sure people have written scads on this topic, but what is probably less noticed is how close Harry Potter fits into (and I would argue, nicely completes) the Faust myth. Especially as concerning Dracula, in which Rowling borrows the device of the good guy and the bad guy having a telepathic communication (Mina and Dracula, Harry and Voldemort). Mina also wears a scar on her forehead where she is burned by the host, due to her burgeoning vampire blood, which cannot bear the sacrament. There are many other parallels as well, but the main theme, I believe, is the importance of redeeming the devil figure. Whether it is Milton’s Satan, Goethe’s Faust, (hell, even the damned in Dante), Frankenstein, Dracula, or Voldemort (and Snape too), it is the possible redemption of these devilish figures which really lights up these texts. I think Rowling does a great job of addressing this in her final book with the wailing baby figure which shows up in the sequence in King’s Cross station, clearly at least part of Voldemort’s soul. This is perhaps her most poetic moment. . . . In all these literary creations death and life are maddeningly enmeshed but what separates them can become razor sharp as well. There is a big difference between a dying life (that maintains itself in love as it struggles with death, as Jacob with the Angel {of death?}) and a living death, the undead, nosferatu, which, in a mockery of life takes blood to perpetuate its unliving undying death. All these Faust myths have a bit of that Germanic moral tone as well, in that we must, as Christians, look very carefully at what it means to be granted immortal life. Does it mean we have power over death, power to never die, power to rule nature and disease? Or is it perhaps the gift to die in the name of love, which is what God means by life, but we misunderstand him sometimes. . . .
One of the most haunting aspects of Silence is the sense you get that Christianity meets its match in this land of “swamp.” That here we have a group of islands whose rockiness has proved inpenetrable to the truth of the cross, and the blazing sword of God’s love. Strangely enough, I just read that Lacan said the same thing about this land, but that he said it concerning psychoanalysis, that Japanese people couldn’t be psychoanalysts because of the way their writing system could be read in two completely divergent ways. That is, the on-yomi and the kun-yomi, two different ways of reading Japanese Kanji (characters imported from China–this of course isn’t even mentioning the two different syllabaries also used in everyday writing, whose doubleness perhaps images the dual readings of the kanji). In other words, you could have the very same kanji that would be pronounced completely differently depending on the mode of reading you were using. Before I knew this, but after I studied a very small amount of Japanese, a language which for English speakers is a cinch to pronounce but a bitch to read, I also droned on to my World Religion classes that the Japanese were fascinating because they could be in two places at once, they could be completely traditional and completely modern/techno/industrial/secular at the same time. In the West, I said, we felt torn between those two options, whereas the Japanese pulled it off so naturally, the way they might design a insurance building according to the ki streaming down the mountainside or start the baseball season off with a Shinto blessing. There is a certain nonchalance about everything in Japan, a confidence that anything can be Japanified, any word absorbed into the language, that they have the secret to digesting everything. Of course, this is the complaint in Silence, that Christianity has just become another variant of Japanese thought, that it was some kind of seed not mentioned in the parable of the sower, the seed that is planted but becomes genetically modified and grows into something else! Continue reading ‘Things that are Impossible in Japan’
This is meant as a response to the discussion to the previous post on Dumbledore. It is directed towards this sense in Christianity in which all believers are feminized as the “bride of Christ.” To say we are feminized is simplistic because we are feminine in that particular formulation, but at the same time that we are the “body of Christ,” which is. . . . . male, I guess. But I’d like to preface this by saying that I do believe in heaven, and I do believe in talking about what it will be like when we get there, but I don’t believe we’ll be discussing who is gay or straight. There are many reasons for that by the first that springs to mind is that heaven ought not to be shoot-myself-in-the-head-boring. Continue reading ‘Why didn’t the Jews circumcise their women?’
Recently J.K. Rowling revealed that she always thought of Dumbledore as gay, and that he had fallen in love with the (eventually) evil wizard Grindelwald as a youth, which partly explains his ideological mistakes made with that wizard. The revelation came when a student asked her if the headmaster who always spoke so highly of the power of love had ever fallen in love himself. I think that this is an opportunity for a wise person to say something about the current debate on homosexuality in culture and church, esp. in the Anglican communion. Unfortunately, I will speaking on the matter instead.
Janet recently requested more writing on blessed Theresa of Calcutta, hopefully soon to be sainted, and it was a topic that came up last night in Bible Study as well, in the context of the healing stories in Luke. The question came up that if Jesus did so much healing when he walked the earth, what kind of bodily healing should we expect our prayers to effect? Should healing be part of our walk? You might think this a strange topic for an Anglo-Catholic crew to be discussing, but it caused me to see an important distinction in what Jesus does when he’s alive and the legacy he gives us in his death. What is this legacy but death? This is our starting point. What Jesus gives us is perhaps a healing, but one that comes to us from the far side of death, from the wound that opens out to us from a resurrected body, from a spiritual body that is incorruptible. Our entrance to this wound, our celestial gate, is death in the form of baptism. It is a drowning of the blind kitten of sin. Jesus first comes to us as grim reaper, which is consistent with the opening of the New Testament, Matthew’s sermon on the mount, which is no walk in the park, but the imposition of a law more stringent than that of Moses. It should not be a shock, then, when we learn that Theresa’s life was dominated by the absence of God, an absence which she felt as pain to her very bones. Notwithstanding that this absence is also communicated in her published writings which have been available for years, this epiphany should serve to deepen the mystery of her life. Why? Because out of this absence she acts. She acts out the commandment given on the mount as well as in John, to love because you have been loved. That is it, quite simply. We are not guaranteed physical well-being, or spiritual comfort, but we are told that because we have been drowned in the blood of Christ’s love, we will have the gift to perservere in loving actions.
I am struggling with the sheer positivity of Bulgakov’s vision. He is inspiring to me but I have to admit I feel like I’m an Englishman in deep Russian water. And I’m not even English! but I adore clotted cream. . . . it occurred to me reading today that there is no greater pride than to imagine that our sin could keep us from God, or God from us (“Breath returning to its birth”). (The image is from the tower in Herbert’s Prayer I, see Janet’s comment on the previous post). But the question is: how can we safeguard hell and freedom from the smashing positivity of God’s love? I also remember that in Lacan anxiety is a rememoration of being too close to the real. I almost said being loved too much, but that’s not it, but maybe the difference between those two would help. Love definitely is ringed in with the real, but it does not defend itself from it. Or perhaps it’s silly, un-sophialogical, to think that because our embrace with God is written in the Book of Embraces that this removes our freedom. Perhaps our freedom is more like God’s, insofar as God is never free to not love. This is all wretchedly written. . . .
The Russian Orthodox thinker Sergius Bulgakov is interesting to me for a couple reasons. First he articulates a vision of Sophia that challenges the quaternity of Jung which I am currently dissertating about. Second, Bulgakov was very active in promoting dialogue between the Russian Orthodox and Anglican churches, and so it is fitting for me to introduce Bulgakov by looking at George Herbert’s poem, Prayer I, which I reproduce here:
PRAYER the Churches banquet, Angels age,
Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth ;
Engine against th’ Almightie, sinner’s towre,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six daies world-transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear ;
Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bels beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud,
The land of spices, something understood.
So many of Herbert’s themes are here in such a compact, concise form. One of the first things I notice with this poem is that prayer has its dark and light sides. We start by characterizing it quite positively as God’s breath but then it immediately becomes sinner’s tower. This tendency for a good thing to be ruined by a bad man is a theme of Herbert’s, the way a priest abuses the priesthood in Affliction I or the way the poet perverts his own gift in Jordan II, but it is even more stunning here because what the sinner is perverting is God himself as Breath (I am reminded here of Barth’s trinity in which the Father speaks, the Son is spoken, and the Spirit is the response within us). Such a sin must be punished in Herbert’s world. Such a sin demands suffering and agonizing, and we know that Herbert does not lack the knack to express this. Yet that is what is so conspicuously missing in Prayer I, for the dark turns to light again with no explanation or expiation: “softness, and peace. . . . . ” but how? What of Christ’s blood? What of the sinner’s stubborness? There is a strong sense in this poem that it is God who is writing, God who is praying, and even man’s best effort to pervert the work of that God, even his “Christ-side-piercing spear” comes out to no more than “a kind of tune which all things hear and fear.” A mere tune? What is this tune? What is it if not the idea of creation itself, the heavenly archetype which informs all made things and which demands to cleave to its author and God? But Bulgakov, in describing (divine) Sophia, wants to go beyond a simply conceptual relationship between God and the world and so Sophia becomes, in Bulgakov’s The Bride of the Lamb, a kenosis of the “Trinity in unity.” In another place he says that Sophia is the “nature” of the Holy Trinity (without it being a separate hypostasis; in fact the hypostasis of Sophia comes from the human personality) (I have to admit that I am not always completely sure where Bulgakov is conceptually, so if I seem to be off the mark, please don’t hesitate to correct!) What I’m getting from this is that the divine Sophia (to which the earthly Sophia corresponds and strives) is part of the dynamism of the Trinity itself (Bulgakov denies the position that God might not have created, even though he affirms God’s satisfaction apart from creation). This would explain Bulgakov’s position of universal salvation, or something very close to it: “Evil loses the very foundation of being after the separation of good and evil. Evil is not eternalized as a result of this separation but, on the contrary, is ontologically annulled in the parousia,” and “Heaven does not exist in its fullness as long as and insofar as hell exists.”
This sense of man’s destiny for God and of unstoppable divine love is perhaps consistent with Orthodox thought, and I would question my readers whether it is not also evident in the Anglican tradition. And although I don’t think one sees it always in Herbert, in Prayer I we definitely get very close to it. Are not the atomic images somewhat like archeytpes in the mind of God, in their lack of syntax in the midst of precise order? Is not the turn from man’s sin to God’s “softness,” in that there is no explanation given, redolent of God’s illogical love of sinners? Is not the final phrase, of “something understood,” redolent of Wisdom herself? And is there not a confidence here in human Wisdom (erring as it is), such that Sophia is not a divine hypostasis but finds her hypostasis in us, in humanity, in the pinnacle of Creation? And what is this hypo-stasis, or this sub-stance, except something thats stands under?
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