The windless northern surge, the sea-gull’s scream,
And Calvin’s kirk crowning the barren brae.
I think of Giotto the Tuscan shepherd’s dream,
Christ, man and creature in their inner day.
How could our race betray
The Image, and the Incarnate One unmake
Who chose this form and fashion for our sake?
The Word made flesh here is made word again
A word made word in flourish and arrogant crook.
See there King Calvin with his iron pen,
And God three angry letters in a book,
And there the logical hook
On which the Mystery is impaled and bent
Into an ideological argument.
There’s better gospel in man’s natural tongue,
And truer sight was theirs outside the Law
Who saw the far side of the Cross among
The archaic peoples in their ancient awe,
In ignorant wonder saw
The wooden cross-tree on the bare hillside,
Not knowing that there a God suffered and died.
The fleshless word, growing, will bring us down,
Pagan and Christian man alike will fall,
The auguries say, the white and black and brown,
The merry and the sad, theorist, lover, all
Invisibly will fall:
Abstract calamity, save for those who can
Build their cold empire on the abstract man.
A soft breeze stirs and all my thoughts are blown
Far out to sea and lost. Yet I know well
The bloodless word will battle for its own
Invisibly in brain and nerve and cell.
The generations tell
Their personal tale: the One has far to go
Past the mirages and the murdering snow.
Edwin Muir, ‘The Incarnate One’ in The Penguin Book of Religious Verse (ed. R.S. Thomas; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 55.
We are all aware of the negative aspects of suffering. But we would be remiss to never contemplate the positive aspects. Both of self-induced suffering, and of externally-produced suffering. When I say self-induced, I do not mean that we revile our own selves. Rather, that we forcibly, violently, push ourselves beyond our current abilities. Both physically, and mentally.
This, of course, is not to blame the victim, or validate the suffering inflicted upon groups or individuals. I know for a fact that in Theology the Black Church has had a huge amount to say on this topic. I regret that I have not been able to be read in it yet. Just as Cone argued for God’s own identification in blackness, the cross argues for God’s identification in suffering. What can we say about our this cruciform image of suffering?
I recognize that if Occupy is anything – the last thing it is is theological. So I don’t expect them to co-opt a theologian’s understanding of cruciformity or of suffering. Yet, I do hope (and at some point expect) a broader treatment of suffering in relation to the long history of its thought in this country, and in philosophy.
Over at Maxistentialism Max writes about the epistemological problem of observations, and our own models of the world. He doesn’t have comments, so I decided to respond here (Hi, Max). How do you know if what you believe about what you observe is actually true? We build up models of the world and map data onto them. Only when enough data (and we are conscious of it) doesn’t match are we free to redraw our model of the world we observe.
I claim that the only escape from this epistemological trap is science
I think he takes it as a blow to his claim that Stephen Hawking doesn’t think this is accomplishable. I don’t think it is either (Max, take a read of Personal Knowledge by Michael Polanyi, a chemist and philosopher who also doesn’t think it is possible). But what I find really funny is that St. Augustine in the 4th century pretty much came to the same conclusions regarding epistemology (I’d recommend St. Augustine’s Theory of Epistemology by Bubacz – you’re likely to only be able to find that in a good library.)
What I really meant to say here, but lack the insight, ability, skill, and intelligence to do so poignantly is:
The great movement for independent thought instilled in the modern mind a desperate refusal of all knowledge that is not absolutely impersonal, and this implied in its turn a mechanical conception of man which was bound to deny man’s capacity for independent thought. Such objectivism must represent the public good in terms of welfare and power and set in motion thereby the self-destruction of freedom. For when open professions of the great moral passions animating a free society are discredited as specious or utopian, its dynamism will tend to be transformed into the hidden driving force of a political machine, which is then proclaimed as inherently right and granted absolute dominion of thought.
Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, pg 214
The refusal to allow personal knowledge a voice within greater society will diminish the society over time. It rules out of court the entire realm of value propositions (posited, at least, by Christianity) based on the common welfare which is unquestionably right to do so and ought not be challenged.
One thing I keep reading and hearing about is the separation of religion from politics. One fallacy I keep seeing is that “religion and politics” means the same as the separation of “church and state.” Historically this is purely untrue. The actual statement in the Constitution when applied to its historical context means something very different than the reification it gets today. It means that the structures of the church can in no way institutionally support, or validate the actions of the government. The head of Britain is the head of the Anglican church – this is the kind of thing the clause is actually talking about.
That being said – we’re constantly reinterpreting everything. I understand that, and it is a necessary element. But it is only valuable when you can still remember the original context and meaning (if you’re not doing that, you are a revolutionary – not one who stands in the tradition).
Why does this bother me? Because under that clause we are systematically removing the values and morality of religion from speaking about public life. There is a grand delusion that people have fallen into where only science or fact can talk about public life. Only objective data (which boil down to Kantian ethics) are useful at all for the public domain. In this way the project of modernity is still ticking right along.
The movement to ban the ability of churches, or people of faith, from acting on behalf of that faith in public is growing. In effect, the message of Christianity is being censored out of public life. At this point it is only Christianity. But as soon as an imam or rabbi says something people don’t like, they’ll be out too.
The hypocrisy of it all, for me, is that Christian theology is only one way of talking about meaning and value. Other religions perform the same task. Other philosophies, including the materialist, secular, scientific philosophy which is in dominance today is performing the exact same task. All these systems of value do it on radically different terms and premises. But they are all playing the same game. The hypocrisy is that one value system, which now has power, is ruling out of court the other value systems that have the ability to topple it. They’re not doing it by appealing to an argument, or that their system is “better”. They are merely doing it by mischaracterizing what is actually going on. They say they’re not playing the same game, but different games – and that religion game is outlawed from public life.
I’m not worried for a minute that they’ll “win” and something will happen to religion. Religion has been the primary mover of humanity and culture until the mid 1800′s in Europe, and the mid 1900′s in America. It is still the primary mover in Africa and South America. Asia is a little harder to diagnose. I’m just worried that we’ve stopped actually thinking about what is going on. Because should the tables of power turn, voices for value should not be arbitrarily silenced.
I am, by and large, shocked that Protestant theology has refused natural theology a place. I’m reading De Visione Dei by Nicholas of Cuza right now, and I love every chapter. I am so taken up by this neo-Platonist natural theology. I find it so very compelling. It makes so much sense out of our experience, Scripture, and the place where both meet. I can’t ignore it’s argumentative force, I am compelled to agree with so much of it.
But Protestantism has gone hand in hand with the “Enlightenment” ideal of rational objective Aristotelian proofs. And correspondingly they’ve got no natural theology. The best they can do is the best Aquinas could do – God in the uncaused causer. Neo-platonism is capable of so much more.
I don’t understand why we’ve given it up. I really don’t.
Update
Kind of elucidates my point. Reading over that seems to be far less than what my, admittedly, cursory readings of Augustine, Bonaventure, and Cusa accomplish.
Thank you Steve Holmes at Shored Fragments for your stunning defense of theology being objective. I cannot count the number of people who think the only objective things, and therefore only things worth knowing (or at least talking about), can be “proven” under some sort of materialistic empiricism. Oh how that circle makes me tired. Under the definition, their method is not objective since it does not lay out its assumptions and make an effort within the discipline to critically engage them. Thank you.
A fantastic piece by Paul Helm on the discussion of what happens when we read, specifically the presuppositions inherent in reading Scripture as Scripture.
There are various ways of articulating and defending our sensory and intellectual capacities in their role as gatherers of reliable information about the world around us. None of these is ‘biblical’ in any direct sense, of course. We cannot lift an epistemology off the pages of Scripture as we can lift a doctrine of justification off them. The epistemologies that have been used, in the history of Christianity, are at odds with each other, though parts of one are not necessarily at odds with parts of others. What matters is that we have reasons that support our belief in the reliability (though not the infallibility, of course) of our epistemological equipment. This will be sufficient to identify a book as the Bible, and to read and understand some, if not all, of what it contains. And then we are in business
The inherit understanding that the Scriptures, actually the truth contained in them, is available to us wholly, completely, and without mediation, is the primary mistake most people make when arriving. In Paul’s words “It [the Scripture] is not free from the vagaries and perils of sense-experience, something which has immediately descended from heaven and entered immediately into our souls.” It is this sense-experience contained within the Scripture that we must deal with. And we must deal without our own world and all its sense experience. Only by bringing those two pieces together can we actually approach an answer to the question of a Christian life.
As Paul again makes clear it is this experience that must be dealt with: “A person may be a disciple while not knowing even whether there be such a thing as Holy Scripture. Remember the thief on the cross. And the hymn ‘There is life for a look at the Crucified One.’” It’s great that we have a book – but the words in the book is not what this is all about. Don’t get sidetracked by it.
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