Paying Attention To The Sky

The Impossible Self – Laura Quinney

January 27, 2012

The archetype of the Creator is a familiar image in Blake's work. Here, the demiurgic figure Urizen prays before the world he has forged. The Song of Los is the third in a series of illuminated books painted by Blake and his wife, collectively known as the Continental Prophecie.

In one sense the self is thriving. Magisterial works such as Charles Taylor’s The Sources of the Self and Jerrold Siegel’s The Idea of the Self as well as the plethora of other recent titles on the self testify to the current fascination of the topic. Yet it is a widespread assumption among contemporary philosophers and literary theorists that the concept of “the self” is obsolete. At the end of their recent book, The Rue and Fall of Self and Soul, Raymond Martin and John Barresi conclude that the notion of the self as a “unified entity” has been permanently debunked by modern science and philosophy: “Analysis has been the self’s undoing. As a fragmented, explained, and illusory phenomenon, the self [can] no longer retain its elevated status. And it is hard to see how it might ever again regain that status. It is as if all of Western civilization has been on a prolonged ego trip that reality has finally forced it to abandon.”

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science did away with the concept of the “soul,” and the eighteenth century replaced it with the concept of “self,” but the march of progress liquidated that notion too, along with the related idea of the universal “subject.” Thus much contemporary thought dismisses the discourses of soul, self, and subject as anachronisms. This common view is, I believe, malformed because it entails dismissing the actual experience of subjectivity, that is, the subject’s experience of itself as a subject.

The self supposed to be obsolete is the unitary subject, the integral, transcendent self linked to the traditional religious idea of the immortal soul. I state categorically that the actual subject has never mistaken itself for a Subject of this kind. Modern skeptical thought congratulates itself for a work of demystification that the subject by virtue of its subjectivity performs every day.

Martin and Barresi concede that this “ego trip” is likely to go on despite our putative enlightenment: the idea of a unified self is not dispensable because many everyday practices depend on it. More deeply, the individual has an intuition of selfhood so strong that it cannot be summarily dispelled: “each of us seems to have a kind of direct, experiential access to him- or herself [a Cartesian intuition] that makes the development of theories of the self and personal identity, however interesting, seem somewhat beside the point.” The intuition of selfhood is tenacious; it rides roughshod over the rational truth.

As is often the case, we are enlightened in theory but benighted in practice: “For many central and persistent purposes of everyday life, theory and practice are likely to remain autonomous, at least when it comes to theories of the self.” But does the everyday self really live with itself so naively and happily? Here Martin and Barresi make a mistake characteristic of those who treat the concepts of self and soul in the abstract: they fail to inquire further into the self’s own relationship to the idea of selfhood. For whereas the intuition of selfhood persists within the self, it also is already embattled within the self.

If the intuition of selfhood attends Western subjectivity, then so does its frustration. Subject-life entails interior struggle and disappointment because the actual “self” fails to coincide with its own self-definition. Even to speak of “the self” or “subject” here is a misnomer: we must say that an elusive and as-yet-un-unified “self” feels an imperative to find in itself a “Self” worthy of the name and that the imperative never desists, although such a Self cannot be found. The self does not possess its intuition of selfhood in comfort — it does not fall back on a reassuring confidence in its integrity, but rather seeks for such confidence in vain; it seeks wholeness, but encounters self-division and self-doubt.

Disillusionment with “the self” that contemporary thinkers attribute to modernity actually defines the experience of selfhood. When Jacques Lacan deconstructs the Cartesian cogito and demonstrates that “I” is not self-coincident, he may scandalize the theorist, but the subject is likely to assent because Lacan’s claim captures the felt insecurity of selfhood. The “error” of Rene Descartes’s philosophical idealism cannot be sustained, Lacan says, for “There is no subject without, somewhere, aplianisis [vocab: fading, disappearance] of the subject, and it is in this alienation, in this fundamental division, that the dialectic of the subject is established.”

The rhetorical power of Lacan’s argument lies in its appeal to the experience of subjectivity. Whatever the ontological truth of the matter, to be a subject is to feel that such a description of subjectivity is true. The language of “self” and “subject” may have been rendered atavistic, but the concepts can never lose their hold on the individual subject, because subjectivity is constituted in its balked relation to them.

In fact, the intuition of selfhood has always been perplexed in theory as well as in practice. Western philosophy and literature have borne witness since the time of Greek mythology to the fragmentation of the self. This sense of fragmentation has given rise to the many fascinating paradigms of self-division: everything from Plato’s tripartite division of the soul to Gnosticism’s evocation of the “incrusted” transcendental spirit, Augustine’s description of the “darkness hidden within” him, Descartes’s dualism, and Kant’s faculty psychology, to Sigmund Freud’s map of the psyche and Melanie Klein’s kaleidoscopic “inner chaos.” Radically dissimilar as these paradigms of self-division and their provenances are, they all emphasize the confusion of the self in relation to its own selfhood. They begin by treating the self’s embattled experience of itself as a central fact that cries out for explanation. And the fact is sufficiently central that its explanation opens a window on expansive metaphysical views. It becomes the pivot of far-reaching claims.

The self’s experience of itself as fragmented testifies to larger truths about human nature and sometimes divine nature and the nature of reality. Each theory offers up this feature of subjective experience as a validation of particular ontological truths. Why must reason struggle with emotion and appetite? Because reason is the highest faculty of the soul; it is confirmation of the soul’s origin in the intelligible world. Why is the transcendental soul benighted in the world? Because it fell from heaven, and was waylaid here by an evil god. Why is there darkness hidden within? Because of the human soul’s inherent perversity. Why is the ego beleaguered? It is menaced by insubordinate repressed energies.

The beauty of these claims is that evidence of their truth becomes available to everyone through the simplest act of introspection. Common experience of selfhood is the proof, as Socrates shows in the Phaedo when he disputes the definition of the soul as a “harmony.” The soul is a harmony neither in our experience of the inner life nor in the literary representation of it. (The tripartite division of the soul appears in the Phaedrus; in this passage, “soul” is a unitary faculty but selfhood is divided.)

We previously agreed that if the soul were a harmony, it would never be out of tune with the stress and relaxation and the striking of the strings or anything else done to its composing elements, but that it would follow and never direct them?

We did so agree, of course.

Well, does it now appear to do quite the opposite, ruling over all the elements of which one says it is composed, opposing nearly all of them throughout life, directing all their ways, inflicting harsh and painful punishments on them, at times in physical culture and medicine, at other times more gently by threats and exhortations, holding converse with desires and passions and fears as if it were one thing talking to a different one, as Homer wrote somewhere in the Odyssey where he says that Odysseus “struck his breast and rebuked his heart saying, `Endure, my heart, you have endured worse than this.”
(9q c-d, Complete Works 82)

The soul must discipline the wayward passions and appetites, and the result is frequent internal conflict. This internal conflict, a basic fact of psychological experience, is offered as evidence for the soul’s sovereignty and then, in a leap, of its divinity and immortality. Strikingly, it is not the soul’s conviction of its own transcendence but rather the persistence and strength of inner conflict that proves it is transcendent. The self’s fraught experience of itself testifies to major metaphysical realities. It is a surety that, like Platonic recollection, lies in every heart as intimate and indubitable truth.

From the point of view of science, the authoritative discourse of our own time, the self’s experience of itself has lost its hold on truth-value. Since the eighteenth century, the evidentiary value of introspection has come under grave suspicion. The story of how and why this change occurred is incisively told by E. S. Reed in his book From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology from Erasmus Darwin to William James. Developments in eighteenth-century thought cast doubt on the significance of the subject’s testimony as to its own state.

The tradition of British empiricism in particular taught investigators to treat the witness of consciousness with suspicion: Humean skepticism introduced the idea that consciousness may be self-deceiving, and Hartleian associationism argued that it is shaped by unconscious processes of which, by definition, it has no knowledge. The subject’s experience of itself was thus radically demoted in testamentary status and the study of it banished to “unscientific” discourses: philosophy (primarily phenomenology), religion, literature, and “humanistic” psychology.

In Reed’s view, the chief casualty of this disciplinary divide is respect for “concrete, lived experience,” now treated by science as an amorphous and incidental phenomenon unavailable to analysis. Reed concludes severely that scientific psychology has thus rendered itself irrelevant: “Once the science of psychology arrogates the right to reject out of hand the content of a person’s experience — because it is too inchoate, mystical, or whatever — it can no longer pronounce on the meaning of that experience.

Psychology in its present divided state applies at best intermittently and incompletely to the lives most of us lead.” Reed warns that as a consequence, a void appears where authoritative response to ordinary inner struggle should be. Scientific psychology abandons “the important territory connecting everyday experience with meaningful self-understanding” to the seductive manipulation of demagogues and fanatics.

According to Reed, the last scientific psychologist to try to bridge the gap was William James, who in his view resisted the subdivision of disciplines and maintained the value of investigating “a wider realm of experience” than his contemporaries. James insisted not only on taking the experience of consciousness seriously but also on treating it as a subject about which science ought to find something useful to say. James wrote a deft argumentative sally that Reed does not cite but that clearly supports his view of James. It occurs in The Varieties of Religious Experience, at a moment when James is questioning the scientific ideal of objectivity.

It is absurd for science to say that the egotistic elements of experience should be suppressed. The axis of reality runs solely through the egotistic places, — they are strung upon it like so many beads. To describe the world with all the various feelings of the individual pinch of destiny, all the various spiritual attitudes, left out from the description — they being describable as anything else — would be something like offering a printed bill of fare as the equivalent for a solid meal. Religion makes no such blunder. The individual’s religion may be egotistic, and those private realities which it keeps in touch with may be narrow enough; but at any rate it always remains infinitely less hollow and abstract, as far as it goes, than a science which prides itself on taking no account of anything private at all.

Much as I delight in James’s polemical vigor, I cannot pretend I know enough to evaluate his comments on the limitations of scientific psychology. But neither do I think it is his aim to endorse “religion.” James points out that, when it comes to addressing “private” experience, there is a very strict division of labor between “scientific” and “unscientific” discourses. His polemicism enters in when he adds that supercilious disregard of subjective experience leads to a certain irrelevance. I quote this passage because I wish to draw an analogy between what James and Reed see as the neglect of lived psychological experience in scientific psychology and the suspicion of “the self” in much current literary discussion.

Posted in William Blake | Tagged the experience of selfhood, the science of psychology, the self, the self vs. the soul, William James | Leave a Comment »

William Blake’s Loneliness Of The Soul – Laura Quinney

January 26, 2012

Blake's Newton (1795) demonstrates his opposition to the "single-vision" of scientific materialism: Newton fixes his eye on a compass (recalling Proverbs 8:27, an important passage for Milton) to write upon a scroll that seems to project from his own head.

Blake’s essential topic is the unhappiness of the subject within its own subjectivity, or to use a more plangent idiom, the loneliness of the soul. This unhappiness is very often expressed in dualism, either of mind-body or of subject-object; both imply that subjectivity is anomalous in a material world and that each subject is isolated from others. Blake seeks to repair this deep ontological wound.

He starts from the premise that consciousness intrinsically experiences the intuition of soul and its loneliness in the world (its failure to fit in), or at least consciousness in what he would have called the “six thousand years” of Western history. The major religions and philosophical movements of the West have built on this intuition and also strengthened it. Sacrificial religion, Judaism, orthodox Christianity, Aristotle, and the Stoics all conspire to diminish the ontological status of the human being in its own eyes by representing the soul as “an atom in darkness,” a mere spot of consciousness engulfed by all-powerful external forces. The most recent avatars of this error can be found in empiricism and the New Science.

Blake’s critique of empiricism is usually described in philosophical terms as an objection to its ontology, its treatment of Nature and natural man as final realities. But Blake’s more profound objection to empiricism is psychological: the New Science is “a Science [of] Despair.” It encourages the center of consciousness, or “I,” to regard itself as passive and helpless. The “I” has been thrust into a material world whose power and influence over it are disproportionate; it is invisible and intangible where the world is solid and real.

The world was there before it, and so its “life” is largely reactive. It floats about, an immaterial node, embedded in its disturbing private experience. It can master neither the stimuli to which it is exposed nor the effects of stimuli in its interior. The “I” finds the self to be dark and strange, occupied by things it does not acknowledge as its own — hidden processes and extrinsic “impressions” the world has forced upon it.

In empiricist psychology, personal identity; or the unique “I,” is stranded. Because it is immaterial, it is isolated in the material world, and because it is an atomic or unique existence, it is isolated in itself. Blake summarizes this plight in The Four Zoas in the opening lament of Tharmas, who complains of having a troubling and contradictory sense of self:

I am like an atom
A Nothing left in darkness yet I am an identity
I wish & feel & weep & groan Ah terrible terrible
The Four Zoas, William Blake

Tharmas says he feels like an “atom” because he is experiencing his subject-life in the terms that empirical science suggests. He must figure the “I” as a thing because the spiritual terms have been debarred.

So he describes the “I” as a little node of consciousness adrift in a dark and alien world of matter. It is a like an atom: single, essential, small, opaque. And yet it is not material after all. Consciousness is not comparable to matter, but once matter is stipulated as the prevailing reality, consciousness loses definition. What place in a material world can that have which is immaterial, and hence wispy and spectral? So Tharmas pessimistically revises his formulation; his “I” is less than an atom, it is ‘A Nothing left in darkness.” But that description does not seem quite accurate to him either, and he has to revise again. “I am… A Nothing left in darkness yet I am an identity.”

Dwarfed by the dominance of matter, the “I” feels that it is nothing, and yet it also has the opposite intuition: it knows itself as the one reality it is sure of (as Descartes would say), the one true being, an “identity” How to explain this contradiction? The word “identity” takes over here from the word “atom”: it is still reductive, it still suggests thing-ness.

Blake no doubt alludes to the chapter of Locke’s Essay in which he defines “personal identity,” or continuity of the self, in minimal terms as present consciousness plus its continuous memories of itself. This is a narrow definition, befitting a materialist psychology, and to Blake’s mind it deserves parody. Blake counters empiricist definition in this passage by using the word “identity” in a subtly: ironic sense, intimating its perverse inadequacy. Tharmas clearly feels no better once he has defined consciousness as “identity” because he right away dissolves into incoherent emotional protest: ‘Ah terrible terrible.”

Thus he characterizes himself as an “identity” insofar as he “wish[es] & feel[s] & weep[s groan[s]” in vain. Tharmas finds that selfhood seems on the one hand insignificant, cant and on the other, absolutely central. Even in an empiricist, the inter life reasserts its urgency, but it cannot assign a meaning or purpose to either its tumults or their bearing on anything without. A Nothing left in darkness ought not to be burdened with a vain but engulfing internal life, and that is what seems so “terrible.”

Empiricism’s reductive accounts of identity fail to address the urgency the inner life. Blake’s point is not that philosophy remains irrelevant to our daily practice, but rather something much deeper. He perceives that the subject cannot possibly conform to the proscription on selfhood implicit empiricism; it cannot live peacefully with the contradiction between the conclusions of naturalism and the intuition of selfhood.

The place of the subject in a material world has become a vital issue with the rise of the New Science amid the New Science, Blake says, has imposed on the subject an untenable view of itself. One cannot live with the bracketing of subjectivity; it creates a form of psychological division too agitating to be ignored. The transcendent intuition pursues you even if you disavow it. It must be owned, but possibly the worst way to own it is through orthodox cosmology, theology, or eschatology in which the divinity of the soul is referred to the noblesse oblige of a tyrannical creator-god and to fulfillment in another life. Blake recommends instead identifying it with a creative power that is your own possession in the here and now. Above all, he says, how the self thinks and feels about itself must be taken into account. A descriptive psychology like his own, he asserts, speaks directly to the self’s intuitions and fictions about itself.

When Tharmas adopts the empiricist view of the subject — when he defines himself as Natural Man — he falls into a revealing state of confusion. His bafflement reminds us that although empiricism and the scientific materialism to which it is related claim to present an objective or “neutral” view, they are themselves ideological, forcefully “interpellating a subject,” [the process by which ideology addresses the pre-ideological individual and produces him or her as a subject proper]as we would say now, rather than leaving the domain blank, as it purports to do.

Peter Otto forcefully remarks: “Blake is not suggesting that Locke, Bacon, and Newton are wrong in their descriptions of fallen humanity. In fact they are correct.” That is how we live now. Any body of knowledge that gives an account of human nature automatically “interpellates a subject,” and it perpetrates bad faith when it claims that it does not. Blake makes this argument in his address “To the Deists,” where he insists “Man must & will have Some Religion; if he has not the Religion of Jesus, he will have the Religion of Satan” (J 52, Ezot).

Consciously or not, everyone holds some concept of the human and the divine and their interrelation. There is such a view hidden in empiricism, precisely insofar as it denies that anything meaningful can be said about the divine and the relation of the human to the divine. For embedded in this notion is an assertion of the subject’s helplessness. If we must have a view, says Blake, let us have a more constructive one. Let us have Blake’s own, in which there is neither a distant nor a punitive God and the human subject does not have to look upon itself as a poor thing abandoned to darkness.

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William Blake And The Intuition Of Selfhood – Laura Quinney

January 25, 2012

Portrait of William Blake by Thomas Phillips, painted in 1807. The original hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Martin and Barresi in “Paradise Lost,” their chapter on twentieth-century challenges to the discourse of the self, name as demystification’s major figures Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, the thinkers most influential for current literary study. In fact, neither Lacan nor Derrida scotched the topic of the self; they adduce the bafflements of the self’s desire for masterful selfhood with some degree of sympathy. More clearly influential for this particular species of demystification is the received Foucault, the poststructuralist sloganeer who coined the catch phrase “the subject is dead.” (I will return further on to a subtler, deeper Foucault.) The dogmatic reception of these thinkers has promoted wholesale disdain for psychological discourse.

This disdain sometimes reaches the level of unthinking caricature. The trend is so common that I hardly know where to begin citing instances of it. Consider this example, chosen at random from an undergraduate textbook on literary criticism. Catherine Belsey opens her essay “Literature, History, Politics” with a mocking portrait of the literary psychological subject: “The sole inhabitant of the universe of literature is Eternal Man (and the masculine form is appropriate), whose brooding, feeling presence precedes, determines and transcends history.” Belsey reflexively, and symptomatically, conflates attention to subject-life with sexism, ahistoricism, and gross metaphysical illusion. (The strangely, unintentionally Blakean phrase “Eternal Man” gives one pause be- cause it would have so radically different a resonance in his poetry) The assumption seems to be that analyzing the experience of selfhood automatically means endorsing a bogus concept of Self. But that is the very concept perpetually under siege in ordinary psychological experience.

The Self is always with us, already undermined, but there can be no progress in understanding its problematic relation to the actual experience of selfhood if the very discourse is declared taboo. Both James and Reed describe with admirable clarity the distortion that results from fixed inattention to subjective experience. It is ironic that literary study should have come to join in this neglect because subjective experience has since the Enlightenment increasingly become the province of literature and of other discourses dismissed as “merely” literary (such as psychoanalysis). Many literary texts have devoted themselves to dramatizing the experience of interior schism and struggle that science, the most authoritative discourse of our day, refuses to address. Yet a good deal of literary criticism now also refuses to address it.

As Socrates’s citation from the Odyssey suggests, Western literature has always paid attention to the self’s experience of itself and, particularly, to its experience of its own disunity. Yet literary treatment of these topics seems to accelerate from the late eighteenth century onward, and any number of compelling examples could be adduced from Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist novels and poetry. To give a smattering, consider the representation of the subject divided against itself or puzzled by its own nature in such canonical works as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Dejection,” George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The popularity of these topics is no accident.

As Reed shows, the later eighteenth through early twentieth centuries witness the official splitting of the subject between conscious and unconscious, with the result that the testimony of consciousness is demoted. Literary focus on the experience of subjectivity occurs simultaneously with the bracketing of subjectivity in scientific discourse, and it can be interpreted as a response. Literature picks up where some other contemporary discourses leave off, drawing on the fascinating new anatomies of the subject formulated in contemporary science and philosophy but seeking to explore them as they are experienced in psychological life.

The major philosophical debates in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain revolve around the clash between religion and the New Science. For our purposes, the important form of this clash is the dramatic challenge scientific materialism and a newly naturalistic psychology pose to traditional ideas of self and soul. Can the old theological discourse of the “soul” serve any function in a scientific environment? Can it be replaced with a naturalistic concept of “self,” which emphasizes the preservative instincts of the organism? Should that concept, too, be superseded by theories of mind and brain functioning founded on sensory atomism?

Essentially there is a showdown between scientific materialism and subjective intuition. The important intervention of literature is this: it shows that the questions raised by scientists and philosophers already influence the self’s experience of itself. The self carries on these debates and feels the force of these questions in the form of anxiety and self-bafflement. To give an example: the exploration of self-division might be said to climax in the period’s emblematic text on the subject, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In Jekyll’s last testimony, he reflects with repugnance on his “other” half.

[Jekyll] had now seen the full deformity of that creature that shared with him some of the phenomena of consciousness, and was co-heir with him to death: and beyond these links of community, which in themselves made the most poignant part of his distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead and had no shape, should usurp the office of life.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson

Reed discusses Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the context of contemporary speculation about the existence of a rational “unconscious.” To my mind, it more obviously dramatizes the contemporary discussion of “soul” in its relation to matter. Does matter think? Does mere neural activity create the “illusion” of consciousness and the intuition of soul? Regardless of whether Stevenson takes a position on the controversy, he makes a claim that the contemporary science does not: namely, that the intellectual debate is experienced as conflict by and within an individual psyche. For a tear is an intellectual thing. Jekyll is tormented by the gulf between subjectivity and material being; his horror at the errant vitality of Hyde reflects the subject’s alienation from the body and its autonomy.

Consciousness balks but cannot extract itself from its entanglement with the body. The body is neither inert nor, by contrast with Plato and Descartes, is it merely a source of deception and temptation; it has its own ways and will from which consciousness or reason can by no means detach themselves. Clearly Jekyll’s experience is not universal. Yet the novel does what horror stories commonly do: it raises everyday conflicts to the register of the supernatural. The literary text takes up the philosophical issues, translating them into psychological crisis: the center of consciousness, or “I,” reacts to material being with dread and uncertainty.

But the quandary from which Jekyll suffers is not necessarily substance dualism, for the “I” in him that quarrels with material being does not identify itself as a different order of being (an intelligible substance, something divine). Instead his anxiety seems topical; it reflects the pressure that scientific materialism exerts over the sense of self. (Not that materialism was invented in eighteenth-century Britain, but then and there it established a major cultural empire it had never had before.)

It was the Romantic poets, two generations before Stevenson, who first began to explore the impact of materialism on self within the experience of the subject. The isolation of consciousness in the material world is a topic uniquely associated with Romanticism. The contemporary prestige of materialism made the isolation of consciousness a more acute problem because, stripped of its transcendent provenance, consciousness must struggle to make sense of its existence. Why must one labor tinder the burden of subjectivity if there is no intelligible world to which the soul belongs, or if mind itself reduces to the firing of neurons?

One Romantic reaction is to reinstate the transcendent provenance of the spirit, although usually with considerable new refinements. In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge borrows from German Idealism to oppose the living Subject and the “dead” object world. Instead of arguing the issue in the abstract, the Romantic crisis lyric — Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” Percy Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” — dramatizes the plight of a subject struggling to understand its relation to the object world. Such dramatization can reach impressive heights of complexity: Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode presents the traumatic experience of consciousness awakening to its alienation from actuality and seeking, with all deliberate if uncertain will, to create for itself a faith in its transcendent provenance. No dramatization of this plight is starker than the anguished soliloquy of Shelley’s Alastor Poet, who addresses his urgent questions about the purpose of consciousness to a swan who cannot understand him.

And what am I that I should linger here,
With voice far sweeter than thy dying notes,
Spirit more vast than thine, frame more attuned
To beauty, wasting these surpassing powers
In the deaf air, to the blind earth, and heaven
That echoes not my thoughts?
Alastor,” 11. 285-90, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose 81

Shelley presents as psychologically tormenting the experience of the subject marooned in a no-man’s-land between lost transcendence and reductive materialism. With his intellectual sophistication and keen historical sense, Shelley might have thought the Alastor Poet’s anguish premature or primitive. But the whole body of his work, right down to the Neoplatonic poignancy of Adonais, with its fierce claim that “Life … Stains the white radiance of Eternity” (Shelley’s Poetry and Prose), manifests his respect for the aspirations of the subject and his insistence that pat formulas are insufficient to cure its unease.

This is where Blake comes in. Of all the Romantics, Blake was keenest and most systematic in his critique of materialism; more to the point, he was the one who insisted in the most explicit terms that the intuition of selfhood does not dissipate just because it has been renounced. For Blake the intuition of selfhood includes the intuition of its transcendence — its superiority to the material world — and he maintained that if this intuition is simply discounted as an illusion, it will not die down but rather rankle and torment. Martin and Barresi rather complacently say that it is progress to “shed illusions” and that it shows how important the repudiation of the concept of self is that “it may be psychologically impossible to embrace [it] wholeheartedly.”

But what happens when we are unable to embrace it? We become avatars of Hegel’s unhappy consciousness; we find ourselves living at odds with our own subjectivity. Blake satirized the proponents of such dead-end unbelief in the person of the Idiot Questioner, “who publishes doubt & calls it knowledge, whose Science is Despair” (M 41:15, E142). His target was equally the empiricists and the philosophes — “[Francis] Bacon, [Isaac] Newton & Locke,” “Voltaire Rousseau Gibbon Hume” (M 41:5, E142; J 52, E2o1) — all to his mind reductive skeptics who superciliously disregard the torment of subjectivity.

But Blake thought Lockean empiricism especially guilty of imposing cruel strictures on the subject, requiring it to regard its experiences as irreal [vocab: Not real. irreality], shadowy epiphenomena of a “real” physical world. This theory outraged Blake — he thought it entailed forcible suppression of the subject’s need and its nature; its just and unavoidable need to esteem subjectivity and its natural intuition of transcendence.

Blake claimed that the subject laboring under the injunctions of empiricism will suffer from a kind of schizophrenia in which it has to treat as phantasmal (the inner life) what at the same time presses upon it with the utmost urgency. In short, he found empiricist psychology simplistic and grossly inadequate.

Blake thought of himself as providing what his philosophical contemporaries had abjured: an account of inner realities from the subject’s point of view. For he perceived that the science and philosophy of his own day had become increasingly committed to discounting the value of perception and introspection, and that they were thereby simply abandoning the subject to its vexed experience of itself. The subject’s bewildering intuition of transcendence, in particular, was definitively discharged, which left it with no choice but to go seek a home in False Religion.

Posted in William Blake | Tagged conscious and unconscious, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, religion and the New Science, Selfhood, soul and matter, the self's experience of itself, Western literature and the Self | Leave a Comment »

The Prayer of Jesus: Jesus’ Prayer on the Mount of Olives in the Letter to the Hebrews – Pope Benedict XVI

January 24, 2012

William Blake, The Agony in the Garden, circa 1799-1800

We must turn our attention to the passage from the Letter to the Hebrews that points toward the Mount of Olives. There we read: “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and lip was heard for his godly fear” (5:7). Here we may identify an independent tradition concerning the Gethsemane event, for there is no mention of loud cries or tears in the gospels.

We have to admit that the author of the Letter is clearly not referring exclusively to the night in Gethsemane, but has’ in mind the whole of Jesus’ via dolorosa right up to the crucifixion, that is to say, to the moment when, according to Matthew and Mark, Jesus “cried out with a loud voice” the opening words of Psalm 22; these two evangelists also tell us that Jesus expired with is loud cry; Matthew expressly uses the word “cried” at this point, meaning “cry out” (cf. 27:50). John speaks of Jesus’ tears at the death of Lazarus, and this in the context of his being “troubled” in spirit — for which, as we have seen, John uses the word that was to reappear in the “Palm Sunday” passage corresponding to the Mount of Olives tradition.

Each time, it is a question of Jesus’ encounter with the powers of death, whose ultimate depths he as the Holy One of God can sense in their full horror. The Letter to the Hebrews views the whole of Jesus’ Passion — from the Mount of Olives to the last cry from the Cross — as thoroughly permeated by prayer, one long impassioned plea to God for life in the face of the power of death.

If the Letter to the Hebrews treats the entire Passion as a prayer in which Jesus wrestles with God the Father and at the same time with human nature, it also sheds new light on the theological depth of the Mount of Olives prayer. For these cries and pleas are seen as Jesus’ way of exercising his high priesthood. It is through his cries, his tears, and his prayers that Jesus does what the high priest is meant to do: he holds up to God the anguish of human existence. He brings man before God.

There are two particular words with which the author of the Letter to the Hebrews underlines this dimension of Jesus’ prayer. The verb “bring” (prospherein: bring before God, bear aloft — cf. Heb 5:1) comes from the language of the sacrificial cult. What Jesus does here lies right at the heart of what sacrifice is. “He offered himself to do the will of the Father”, as Albert Vanhoye comments (Let Us Confidently Welcome Christ Our High Priest, p. 60).

The second word that is important for our purposes tells us that through his sufferings Jesus learned obedience and was thus “made perfect” (Hebrews 5:8-9). Vanhoye points out that in the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, the expression “make perfect” (teleioun) is used exclusively to mean “consecrate as priest” (p. 62). The Letter to the Hebrews takes over this terminology (cf. 711, 19, 28). So the passage in question tells us that Christ’s obedience, his final “yes” to the Father accomplished on the Mount of Olives, as it were, “consecrated him as a priest”; it tells us that precisely in this act of self giving, in this bearing-aloft of human existence to God, Christ truly became a priest “according to the order of Melchizedek” (Hebrews 5:9-10; cf. Vanhoye, pp. 61-62).

At this point, though, we must move on toward the heart of what the Letter to the Hebrews has to say concerning the prayer of the suffering Lord. The text states that Jesus pleaded with him who had the power to save him front death and that, on account of his godly fear (cf. 5:7), his prayer was granted. But was it granted? He still died on the Cross! For this reason Harnack maintained that the word “not” must have been omitted here, and Bultmann agrees. But an exegesis that turns a text into its opposite is no exegesis. Rather, we must attempt to understand this mysterious form of “granting” so as to come closer to grasping the mystery of our own salvation.

We may distinguish different aspects of this “granting”. One possible translation of the text would be: “He was heard and delivered from his fear.” This would correspond to Luke’s account, which says that an angel came and comforted him (cf. 22:43). It would then refer to the inner strength given to Jesus through prayer, so that he was able to endure the arrest and the Passion resolutely. Yet the text obviously says more: the Father raised him from the night of death and, through the Resurrection, saved him definitively and permanently from death: Jesus dies no more (cf. Vanhoye, Let Us Confidently Welcome Christ Our High Priest, p. 60). Yet surely the text means even more: the Resurrection is not just Jesus’ personal rescue from death. He did not die for himself alone. His was dying “for others”; it was the conquest of death itself.

Hence this “granting” may also be understood in terms of the parallel text in John 12:27-28, where in answer to Jesus’ prayer: “Father, glorify your name!” a voice from heaven replies: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again. The Cross itself has become God’s glorification, the glory of God made manifest in the love of the Son. This glory extends beyond the moment into the whole weep of history. This glory is life. It is on the Cross that we see it, hidden yet powerful: the glory of God, the transformation of death into life.

From the Cross, new life comes to us. On the Cross, Jesus becomes the source of life for himself and for all. On the Cross, death is conquered. The granting of Jesus’ prayer concerns all mankind: his obedience becomes life for all. This conclusion is spelled out for us in the closing words of the passage we have been studying: “He became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him, being designated by God a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek” (Hebrews 5:9-10; cf Psalm 110:4).

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The Prayer of Jesus: Jesus’ Will and the Will of the Father – Pope Benedict XVI

January 23, 2012

Giovanni Bellini, Le Christ Benissant, 1465 – 1470, at the Louvre in Paris

What does this mean? What is “my” will as opposed to “your” will? Who is speaking to whom? Is it the Son addressing the Father? Or the man Jesus addressing the triune God? Nowhere else in sacred Scripture do we gain t deep an insight into the inner mystery of Jesus as in the laver on the Mount of Olives. So it is no coincidence it the early Church’s efforts to arrive at an understand of the figure of Jesus Christ took their final shape as a result of faith-filled reflection on his prayer on the Mount of Olives.

At this point we should undertake a rapid overview of the early Church’s Christology, in order to grasp its understanding of the interrelation between the divine will and the human will in the figure of Jesus Christ. The Council of Nicea (325) had clarified the Christian concept of God. The three persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — are one, in the one “substance” of God. More than a century later, the Council of Chalcedon (451) sought to articulate the relation between divinity and humanity in Jesus Christ by adopting the formula that the one person of the Son of God embraces and bears the two natures — human and divine — “without confusion and without separation”.

Thus the infinite difference between God and man, between Creator and creature is preserved: humanity remains humanity, divinity remains divinity. Jesus’ humanity is neither absorbed nor reduced by his divinity. It exists in its fullness, while subsisting in the divine person of the Logos. At the same time, in the continuing distinction of natures, the expression “one person” conveys the radical unity that God in Christ has entered into with man. The formula of Pope Leo the Great — two natures, one person — expresses an insight that transcended by fit the historical moment, and for that reason it was enthusiastically accepted by the Council Fathers.

Yet it was ahead of its time: its concrete meaning had not yet been fully set forth. What is meant by “nature”? But more importantly, what is meant by “person”? Since this was by no means clear, many bishops after Chalcedon said that they would rather think like fishermen than like Aristotle. The formula remained obscure. Therefore the reception of Chalcedon was an extremely complex process, and fierce battles were fought over it.

In the end it led to division: only the Churches of Rome and Byzantium definitively accepted the Council and its formula. Alexandria in Egypt preferred to remain with the formula of “one divinized nature” (monophysitism); while farther east, Syria remained skeptical about the notion of one person, as it appeared to . compromise Jesus’ true humanity (Nestorianism). It was not simply ideas that were at issue here: more significantly, contrasting forms of devotion burdened the debate with the weight of religious sensibilities, rendering it insoluble.

The Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon continues to indicate, to the Church of all ages, the necessary pathway into the mystery of Jesus Christ. That said, it has t be appropriated anew in the context of contemporary thought, since the concepts of “nature” and “person” have acquired quite different meanings from those they had at the time. This task of reappropriation must go hand to hand with ecumenical dialogue with the pre-Chalcedonian Churches, so that our lost unity may be regained in the core of our faith — in our confession of the God who became man in Jesus Christ.

The great battle that was fought after Chalcedon, especially in the Byzantine East, was essentially concerned with the question: If there is only one divine person in Jesus, embracing both natures, then what is the status of his human nature? If it subsists within the one divine person, can it be said to have any real, specific existence in itself? Must it not inevitably be absorbed by the divine, at least at its highest point, the will?

This leads us to the last of the great Christological heresies, known as ” monotheletism”. There can be only one will within the unity of a person, its adherents maintained; a person with two wills would be schizophrenic: ultimately it is in the will that a person manifests himself, and where there is only one person, then ultimately there can be only one will. Yet an objection comes to mind: What kind of man has no human will? Is a man without a will really a man? Did God in Jesus truly become man, if this man had no will?

The great Byzantine theologian Maximus the Confessor (d. 662) formulated an answer to this question by struggling to understand Jesus’ prayer on the Mount of Olives. Maximus is first and foremost a determined opponent of monotheletism: Jesus’ human nature is not amputated through union with the Logos; it remains complete. And the will is part of human nature. This irreducible duality of human and divine willing in Jesus must not, however, be understood to imply the schizophrenia of a dual personality.

Nature and person must be seen in the mode of existence proper to each. In other words: in Jesus the “natural will” of the human nature is present, but there is only one “personal will”, which draws the “natural will” into itself. And this is possible without annihilating the specifically human element, because the human will, as created by God, is ordered to the divine will. In becoming attuned to the divine will. it experiences its fulfillment, not its annihilation.

Maximus says in this regard that the human will, by virtue of creation tends toward synergy (working together) with the divine will, but that through sin, opposition takes the place of synergy: man, whose will attains fulfillment through becoming attuned to God’s will, now has the sense that his freedom is compromised by God’s will. He regards consenting to God’s will, not as his opportunity to become fully himself, but as a threat to his freedom against which he rebels.

The drama of the Mount of Olives lies in the fact that Jesus draws man’s natural will away from opposition and back toward synergy, and in so doing he restores man’s true greatness. In Jesus’ natural human will, the sum total of human nature’s resistance to God is, as it were, present within Jesus himself. The obstinacy of us all, the whole of our opposition to God is present, and in his struggle, Jesus elevates our recalcitrant nature to become its real self.

Christoph Schonborn says in this regard that “the transition between the two wills from opposition to union is accomplished through the sacrifice of obedience. In the agony of Gethsemane, this transition occurs” (God’s Human Face, pp. 126-27). Thus the prayer “not my will, but yours” (Luke 22:42) is truly the Son’s prayer to the Father, through which the natural human will is completely subsumed into the “I” of the Son. Indeed, the Son’s whole being is expressed in the “not I, but you” — in the total self-abandonment of the “I” to the “you” of God the Father. This same “I” has subsumed and transformed humanity’s resistance, so that we are all now present within the Son’s obedience; we are all drawn into sonship.

This brings us to one final point regarding Jesus’ prayer, to its actual interpretative key, namely, the form of address: “Abba, Father” (Mk 14:36). In 1966 Joachim Jeremias wrote an important article about the use of this term in Jesus’ prayer, from which I should like to quote two essential insights: “Whereas there is not a single instance of God being addressed as Abba in the literature of Jewish prayer, Jesus always addressed him in this way (with the exception of the cry from the Cross, Mark 15:34 and parallel passages). So we have here a quite unmistakable characteristic of the ipsissima vox Jesu (Abba, p. 5).

Moreover, Jeremias shows that this word Abba belongs to the language of children — that it is the way a child addresses his father within the family. “To the Jewish mind it would have been disrespectful and therefore inconceivable to address God with this familiar word. For Jesus to venture to take this step was something new and unheard of. He spoke to God like a child to his father … Jesus’ use of Abba in addressing God reveals the heart of his relationship with God” (p. 62). It is therefore quite mistaken on the part of some theologians to suggest that the man Jesus was addressing the Trinitarian God in the prayer on the Mount of Olives. No, it is the Son speaking here, having subsumed the fullness of man’s will into himself and transformed it into the will of the Son.

Posted in Jesus, Pope Benedict XVI | Tagged Christoph Schonborn, Early Church Christology, ipsissima vox Jesu, Jesus' Humanity, Jesus' use of Abba, Jesus' Will, Maximus the Confessor, Monophysitism, Monotheletism, Nestorianism, The Will of the Father | Leave a Comment »

The Prayer Of Jesus: The Prayer On The Mount Of Olives – Pope Benedict XVI

January 20, 2012

Christ in Gethsemane by Heinrich Ferdinand Hofmann, 1890

The prayer on the Mount of Olives, which follows next, has come down to us in five versions: first, there are the accounts in the three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew 26:36-46; Mark 14:32-42; Luke 22:39-46); then there is a short text in the Fourth Gospel that John places among the collection of Jesus’ sayings in the Temple on “Palm Sunday” (12:27 28); and finally there is one based on a separate tradition in the Letter to the Hebrews (5:7-10). Let us now attempt, by examining these texts together, to approach as close as we can to the mystery of this hour of Jesus.

After the common recitation of the psalms, Jesus prays alone — as on so many previous nights. Yet close by is the group of three disciples — Peter, James, and John: a trio known to us from other contexts, especially from the account of the Transfiguration. These three disciples, even though they are repeatedly overcome by sleep, are the witnesses of Jesus’ night of anguish. Mark tells us that Jesus “began to be greatly distressed and troubled”. The Lord says to his disciples: “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here, and watch” (14:33-34).

The summons to vigilance has already been a major theme of Jesus’ Jerusalem teaching, and now it emerges directly with great urgency. And yet, while it refers specifically to Gethsemane, it also points ahead to the later history of Christianity. Across the centuries, it is the drowsiness of the disciples that opens up possibilities for the power of the Evil One. Such drowsiness deadens the soul, so that it remains undisturbed by the power of the Evil One at work in the world and by all the injustice and suffering ravaging the earth.

In its state of numbness, the soul prefers not to see all this; it is easily persuaded that things cannot be so bad, so as to continue in the self satisfaction of its own comfortable existence. Yet this deadening of souls, this lack of vigilance regarding both God’s closeness and the looming forces of darkness, is what gives the Evil One power in the world. On beholding the drowsy disciples, so disinclined to rouse themselves, the Lord says: “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death.” This is a quotation from Psalm 43:5, and it calls to mind other verses from the Psalms.

In the Passion, too — on the Mount of Olives and on the Cross Jesus uses passages from the Psalms to speak of himself and to address the Father. Yet these quotations have become fully personal; they have become the intimate words of Jesus himself in his agony. It is he who truly prays these psalms; he is their real subject. Jesus’ utterly personal prayer and his praying in the words of faithful, suffering Israel are here seamlessly united.

After this admonition to vigilance, Jesus goes a short distance away. This is where the prayer on the Mount of Olives actually begins. Matthew and Mark tell us that Jesus falls on his face — the prayer posture of extreme submission to the will of God, of radical self-offering to him. In the Western liturgy, this posture is still adopted on Good Friday, at monastic professions, and at ordinations.

Luke, however, has Jesus kneeling to pray. In terms of praying posture, then, he draws Jesus’ night of anguish into the context of the history of Christian prayer: Stephen sinks to his knees in prayer as he is being stoned (Acts 7:6o); Peter kneels before he wakes Tabitha from death (Acts 9:40); Paul kneels to bid farewell to the Ephesian elders (Acts 20:36) and again when the disciples tell him not to go up to Jerusalem (Acts 21:5). Alois Stöger says on this subject: “When they were confronted with the power of death, they all prayed kneeling down. Martyrdom can be overcome only by prayer. Jesus is the model of martyrs” (The Gospel according to Saint Luke II, p. 199).

There now follows the prayer itself, in which the whole drama of our redemption is made present. In Mark’s account, Jesus begins by asking that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him (14:35). This is then filled out by a statement of the essential content of the prayer: “Abba, Father, all things are possible to you; remove this chalice from me; yet not what I will, but what you will” (14:36).

We may distinguish three elements in this prayer of Jesus. First there is the primordial experience of fear, quaking, in the face of the power of death, terror before the abyss of nothingness that makes him tremble to the point that, in Luke’s account, his sweat falls to the ground like drops of blood (cf. 22:44). In the equivalent passage in Saint John’s Gospel (12:27), this horror is expressed, as in the Synoptics, in terms reminiscent of Psalm 43:5, but using a word that emphasizes the dark depths of Jesus’ fear: tetáraktai – is the same verb, tarássein, that John uses to describe Jesus’ deep emotion at the tomb of Lazarus (cf. 11:33) as well as his inner turmoil at the prophecy of Judas’ betrayal in the Upper Room (cf. 13:21).

In this way John is clearly indicating the primordial fear of created nature in the face of imminent death, and yet there is more: the particular horror felt by him who is Life itself before the abyss of the full power of destruction, evil, and enmity with God that is now unleashed upon him, that he now takes directly upon himself, or rather into himself, to the point that he is “made to be sin” (cf. 3 Corinthians 5:21).

Because he is the Son, he sees with total clarity the whole foul flood of evil, all the power of lies and pride, all the wiles and cruelty of the evil that masks itself as life yet constantly serves to destroy, debase, and crush life. Because he is the Son, he experiences deeply all the horror, filth, and baseness that he must drink from the “chalice” prepared for him: the vast power of sin and death. All this he must take into himself, so that it can be disarmed and defeated in him.

As Bultmann rightly observes: Jesus here is “not simply the prototype, in whom the behavior demanded of man becomes visible in an exemplary manner … he is also and above all the Revealer, whose decision alone makes possible in such an hour the human decision for God” (The Gospel of John, p. 428). Jesus’ fear is far more radical than the fear that everyone experiences in the face of death: it is the collision between light and darkness, between life and death itself — the critical moment of decision in human history. With this understanding, following Pascal, we may see ourselves drawn quite personally into the episode on the Mount of Olives: my own sin was present in that terrifying chalice. “Those drops of blood I shed for you”, Pascal hears the Lord say to him during the agony on the Mount of Olives (cf. Pensées VII, 553).

The two parts of Jesus’ prayer are presented as the confrontation between two wills: there is the “natural will” of the man Jesus, which resists the appalling destructiveness of what is happening and wants to plead that the chalice pass from him; and there is the “filial will” that abandons itself totally to the Father’s will. In order to understand this mystery of the “two wills” as much as possible, it is helpful to take a look at John’s version of the prayer. Here, too, we find the same two prayers on Jesus’ lips: “Father, save me from this hour … Father, glorify your name” (John 12:27-28).

The relationship between these two prayers in John’s account is essentially no different from what we find in the Synoptics. The anguish of Jesus’ human soul (“I am troubled”; Bultmann translates it as: “I am afraid”, p. 427) impels him to pray for deliverance from this hour. Yet his awareness of his mission, his knowledge that it was for this hour that he came, enables him to utter the second prayer — the prayer that God glorify his name: it is Jesus’ acceptance of the horror of the Cross, his ignominious experience of being stripped of all dignity and suffering a shameful death, that becomes the glorification of God’s name.

For in this way, God is manifested as he really is: the God who, in the unfathomable depth of his self-giving love, sets the true power of good against all the power of evil. Jesus uttered both prayers, but the first one, asking for deliverance, merges into the second one, asking for God to be glorified by the fulfillment of his will — and so the conflicting elements blend into unity deep within the heart of Jesus’ human existence.

Posted in Jesus, Pope Benedict XVI | Tagged praying posture, The Prayer On The Mount Of Olives, The summons to vigilance, Those drops of blood I shed for you, three elements in this prayer of Jesus | Leave a Comment »

I Believe In The Resurrection Of The Body, And The Life Everlasting — Fr. Ronald Knox

January 19, 2012

Fr. Ronald Knox, the famous Catholic convert and apologist who was a major figure in the English Catholic Literary Revival during the first half of the twentieth century.

From his classic, The Creed in Slow Motion.

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I WAS TALKING TO YOU LAST SUNDAY, if you remember, about sitting in the confessional on Saturday evenings, and how it’s liable to give you pins and needles. And for fear you should think that that is a very heroic sacrifice on my part, let me recall to your memory the life of that very nice Saint, St. John Vianney, the Cur of Ars. I should have liked to give you a whole sermon about him, but I expect you know something about him already; if you want to know what he looked like, you’ve only got to go to the pigsties in the old stables, and you will find him there on a window-sill, because he is supposed to be rather good at looking after the health of farm animals. And if you think he would mind being in the pigsty, it shows you know very little about the Cure d’Ars.

He used to spend about fourteen hours every day in the confessional. He came out for his lunch, which consisted of one or two potatoes, and he knew all his people and loved all his people and spent a lot of time visiting them, but, as I say, for fourteen hours every day he sat in the confessional, because penitents used to come to him from all over the world and queue up for absolution. He went to bed for three or four hours at night, but it didn’t do him much good, because the devil, whom he used to call the grappin (which I think means the toasting-fork) used to come and pull him out of bed nearly every night, in the hope of persuading him to live differently.

However, he went on living like that very happily till he was over seventy. And one day, talking to a friend, he said, “I know one old man who would look rather a fool if there were no future life “. Then he checked himself, and said, “Although, as a matter of fact, it is such an honor to serve God, that we ought to be proud and glad to do it, even if he gave us no reward at all at the end of it “.

Well, now we’ve got to the end of the Credo and we’ve got to think of our lives, and the reward we are going to get perhaps. When God put man in an earthly paradise, and man made a mess of it, he could perfectly well have arranged, if you come to think of it, that Adam and Eve shouldn’t have any children. And if they hadn’t, one would be disposed to think, the situation would have been very neatly cleared up. Adam and Eve might have been allowed to spend a longish and fairly comfortable life, and then died, and been annihilated at death; or some kind of Limbo could have been invented, in which they could have lived on eternally as a pair of curiosities.

But God, for some reason, didn’t want to do that; he wanted mankind to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and, when they died, to fill heaven. He was determined to have a lot of human beings about in heaven, sharing his happiness. That’s curious, if you like. Of course, you may think it’s jolly to live in a crowd; and perhaps you rather pity the poor nuns when the holidays come and they are left all alone by themselves.. . . Well, you know, Aldenham isn’t too bad in the holidays. Anyhow, God wanted to have human beings about in heaven; and he left us with our free will, so that we could make use of the grace which he gives us and go to heaven if we did. If we didn’t, that is the most mysterious thing of all, and a thing I suppose we shall never understand in this life, that God has left human beings free to go to hell, if they want to. He lets us have our way, like an indulgent Father, and if we insist on sending ourselves to hell, he allows us to do it.

There are plenty of difficulties about this last article in the Credo. We are talking about hell as well as heaven, when we say we believe in the resurrection of the body. Why it is that the lost souls in hell have to have their bodies restored to them after the general judgment is not immediately obvious. It isn’t so that hell can hurt more; because the souls in hell do suffer, even before the general judgment, bodily pain.

You see, all the pain which we feel in our bodies has got to get through to us, if it’s to hurt. There’s no harm in your tooth aching, if that were all. The trouble is that You have got a toothache. And these sensations of pain which we derive, on earth, through the body, are felt, now, by the souls in hell, although they have at present no bodies to feel them with; the process, somehow, is short-circuited. And the pains of hell go on forever. The lost souls live in an eternal, changeless moment of despair.

All that, as I say, is a thing which I don’t suppose we shall ever understand in this life. There’s a story of an Irishman who had doubts about hell, and the priest said to him, “Well, look at it this way, Pat; if there’s no hell, where’s Cromwell?” And he said, “Ah, your Reverence, I hadn’t thought of that “. But somehow I don’t know that even that makes it clear. All you can say is that if you’re going to have a faith you have got to believe what it tells you, the uncomfortable parts as well as the comfortable ones.

However, it isn’t necessary to be thinking about the uncomfortable parts all the time; and as we are getting to the end of the Credo and the end of the term let’s try and finish up with a pleasant taste in our mouths. Let’s pretend, you and I, that we are going to heaven. Mind you, I don’t say that you are, still less that I am; but there’s no harm in pretending. Even so, what are we going to make of this odd clause, “the resurrection of the body”?

First, let’s notice that for some reason the Credo we say is a mistranslation of the Latin. The Credo which is said by the universal Church hasn’t got Corporis Resurrectionem, the resurrection of the body, as its last clause but one. Its last clause but one is CARNIS Resurrectionem, the Resurrection of the Flesh. And the flesh, in theo-logical language (which comes from the Hebrew), means a great deal more than the body.

It means the whole of your human nature, gifts of mind as well as of body, so long as they are natural, not supernatural, gifts. However, that takes us into complicated questions of theology; so let’s just think about our bodies rising again, as they certainly will when the general judgment comes. Two common-sense questions naturally suggest themselves. One is, “How will it be possible for my body to rejoin my soul? Nothing will be left of my body by then, except a skeleton, if that “.

Do you know a book of poems called The Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers? Rather good, I think. In one of them Montrose, the Cavalier general who was killed by those very unpleasant people, the Covenanters, is made to say, “Go, nail my head to yonder tower, Give every town a limb; The God who made will gather them, I go from you to him “. That, in itself, seems rather a lot to hope for. But what about people who have been burnt in a fire; how are all their ashes going to be seccotined [vocab: A trade-name of a cement used to unite surfaces of paper, cloth, leather, etc] together again? And I think I’m right in saying that St. Thomas Aquinas, who always liked to allow for everything, discussed the question, What was going to happen about people who were eaten by cannibals? Because you might have a missionary saying, “Here, that’s my big toe “, and a cannibal saying, “No, it’s not, it’s part of my stomach “.

Well, that isn’t really as difficult a difficulty as it sounds. You see, it’s a mistake to think of one’s body as made up simply of so many bits of pink stuff. Your body is a living thing, which goes on changing all the time, as living things do. I think the scientific people tell us that every year every part of one’s body is made up of different pieces of stuff compared with last year. I’ve still got a scar where I had an operation in the year 1906. The pieces of skin round that scar have changed thirty-seven times since then, but it’s still there, which shows that I’ve still got the same body. The same body, though not made up of the same bits of skin; it isn’t going to be difficult for us, then, to get back the same body in the next world, without going round looking for lost bits and pieces. If you come to think of it, your finger-nails aren’t the same finger-nails, in a sense, as they were when the war started, because you’ve cut them a good many times since then, at least, I hope you have. But they are still your finger-nails. We shan’t want to collect, when the general judgment comes, every single piece of stuff in the world that has once been our finger-nails; if we did, we should find ourselves in heaven with finger-nails about a mile long. No, God can give us back our bodies without bothering about all the pieces of skin and hair that once belonged to them.

And there’s a third question that obviously suggests itself, about heaven. “What shall we want bodies for?” Think of the Saints in heaven now; our Lady’s body, as we know, was taken up to heaven when she died, but that isn’t true of St. Peter or St. Paul or any of the other Saints. Well, you can’t imagine St. Peter, now, in heaven, complaining that he finds it rather uncomfortable not having a body. And therefore, if people can get on quite, comfortably without their bodies till the general judgment, why can’t they get on quite comfortably without their bodies after the general judgment?

The answer to that, I think, is that body and soul were made for one another, and therefore both of them are in an unnatural state when you divide them, and demand to be reunited. It isn’t that the soul is unhappy without the body; it can express itself otherwise, in heaven. But the body, which has been our companion all through our earthly pilgrimage, must not be permanently left out in the cold; that wouldn’t be right. It, too, has its passport to eternity.

Not that, in heaven, our bodies will be in the same state as here. St. Paul tells us that our heavenly body won’t be any more like our earthly body than the harvest which you cut in the summer is like the miserable little wizened seeds which you sowed in the late autumn. Our bodies, in heaven, will be etherealized; they will have none of the disabilities which they had on earth; there will be no getting pins and needles in heaven. Our bodies, here, are rather a nuisance in some ways, aren’t they? Always running into things, or even into people. Our bodies in heaven, the theologians tell us, will offer no resistance to the touch, won’t be solid. And another awkward thing about our bodies here is that they can’t get about quick enough; we haven’t quite finished drying them when somebody shouts “Last bell!” and we know that they ought to be in the refectory. That will be all right in heaven; we don’t have the kind of body which takes time in moving from place to place. We shan’t have bodily needs, either, which we have to satisfy, by eating and drinking, for example. Perhaps you don’t regard that as very good news, but it’s all right really. I’m sure, before now, you must have been late for meals because you were so excited about a game you were playing or a book you were reading? Well, if you like to put it that way, heaven means spending eternity in a state of such excitement that we shall be eternally late for our meals.

Some things the theologians tell us about heaven are just guess-work, and don’t pretend to be more than guess-work. I think they say we shall all be thirty-three years of age, because that is the perfect time of life; I dare say it’s true, but it’s not in the Credo. They also tell us we shall all be good-looking; which is good news for some of us, and makes us wonder how our friends are going to recognize us; but that again isn’t in the Credo. What I think you can say with perfect confidence, although as far as I know it isn’t laid down officially anywhere, is that we shall know one another, and that part of our happiness in heaven will be due to finding ourselves re united with those we love. We shall be united, too, with the Saints who prayed for us while we were on earth; we shall be united by a love we never dreamt of to our Lord himself.

And at the same time, when we get to heaven, if we get to heaven, we shall realize that the Credo was true, instead of just going on believing it was true. We shall be conscious of God as our Father; we shall recognize that everything which happened on earth was part of an almighty design. We shall find it quite natural that there should be three Persons in the Godhead, and that the second Person should be both God and man; God’s only Son, our Lord, the visible object, now, of our worship, thanking us for all the little services we did for him.

We shall have no difficulty in seeing that our Blessed Lady became his Mother and yet remained a Virgin. And although pain and suffering will then be only a distant memory of the past, no part any longer of our daily experience, we shall be able to look into and understand the sufferings which our Lord underwent when he was crucified by Pontius Pilate, all those billions and billions of years ago; we shall understand those sufferings, and take, from them, the measure of his love. We shall look down into the twilight world of Limbo, where once the patriarchs were; quite empty, now, only a record of the past; and the strange old people we used to see in stained-glass windows will be real people to us then; brought to light when our Lord descended into hell.

The Resurrection will not merely be something that seems quite natural; we shall be conscious of it at every instant as the very condition of our being; for we, too, shall have become part of that Risen Life which our Lord brought back with him from the tomb. We shall see him, ascended, sitting at the right hand of his Father, thank him for the merciful judgments he passed on us, living and dead. We shall feel the presence of the Holy Spirit within us; we shall know the Church for Christ’s glorious Bride; we shall be in conscious communion with all the Saints; our sins, instead of looking black, will be rose-hued, like clouds at sunset, with the grace of final forgiveness. We shall be risen, soul and body; soul and body pulsing at every moment with the energies of an everlasting life.

Posted in Fr. Ronald Knox, The Resurrection | Tagged CARNIS Resurrectionem, Faith, serving God, the last article in the Credo, The Life Everlasting, The Resurrection Of The Body | Leave a Comment »

The Golden Virgin – Paul Fussell

January 18, 2012

Albert, France had been held by the Allies since September 1914 and had been an organizational focal point throughout the British Somme offensive of 1916. In a matter of weeks of the British departure artillery fire brought the famous, precariously leaning, 'Virgin and child' statue on the tower of the basilica of Notre Dame be Brebières, crashing to the ground.

Winner of the 1976 National Book Award for Arts & Letters, Paul Fussell’s accomplishment, The Great War and Modern Memory, was (in the words of Lionel Trilling) “an original and brilliant piece of cultural history and one of the most deeply moving books I have read in a long time.” It was listed as #75 in the Modern Library’s list of the 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Twentieth Century. A short vignette:

A memorable instance of the prevailing urge towards myth is the desire felt by everyone to make something significant of the famous leaning Virgin and Child atop the ruined Basilica at Albert. No one wanted it to remain what it literally was, merely an accidentally damaged third-rate gilded metal statue now so tenuously fixed to its tower that it might fall any moment. Myth busily attached portentous meaning to it.

Mystical prophecy was first. The war would end, the rumor went, when the statue finally fell to the street. Germans and British shared this belief, and both tried to knock the statue down with artillery. When this proved harder than it looked, the Germans promulgated the belief that the side that shot down the Virgin would lose the war. This is the prophecy recalled by Stephen Southwold, who associates the wonders attaching to the leaning Virgin with those ascribed to miraculously preserved front-line crucifixes:

There were dozens of miracle-rumors of crucifixes and Madonnas left standing amid chaos. In a few cases the image dripped blood or spoke words of prophecy concerning the duration of the war, .round the hanging Virgin of Albert Cathedral there gathered a host of these rumored prophecies, wonders and marvels, the chief one being that whichever side should bring her down was destined to lose the war.

The statue remained hanging until April, 1918, after the British had given up Albert to the Germans. Determined that the Germans not use the tower for an artillery observation post, the British turned heavy guns on it and brought it down, statue and all. Frank Richards was there:

The Germans were now in possession of Albert and were dug in some distance in front of it, and we were in trenches opposite them. The upside-down statue on the ruined church was still hanging. Every morning our bombing planes were going over and bombing the town and our artillery were constantly shelling it, but the statue seemed to be bearing a charmed existence. We were watching the statue one morning. Our heavy shells were bursting around the church tower, and when the stroke cleared away after the explosion of one big shell the statue was missing.

It was a great opportunity for the propagandists:

Some of our newspapers said that the Germans had wantonly destroyed it, which I expect was believed by the people that read them at the time.

But while the statue was still there, dangling below the horizontal, it was seen and interpreted by hundreds of thousands of men, who readily responded with significant moral metaphors and implicit allegorical myths. “The melodrama of it,” says Carrington “rose strongly in our hearts.”

The most obvious “meaning” of the phenomenon was clear: it was an emblem of pathos, of the effect of war on the innocent, on women and children especially. For some, the Virgin was throwing the Child down into the battle, offering Him as a sacrifice which might end the slaughter. This was the interpretation of Paul Maze, a French liaison NCO, who half-posited “a miracle” in the Virgin’s precarious maintenance of her position: “Still holding the infant Jesus in her outstretched arms,” he says, “the statue of the Virgin Mary, in spite of many hits, still held on top of the spire as if by a miracle. The precarious angle at which she now leaned forward gave her a despairing gesture, as though she were throwing the child into the battle.” Philip Gibbs interpreted the Virgin’s gesture similarly, as a “peace-offering to this world at war.”

Others saw her action not as a sacrifice but as an act of mercy: she was reaching out to save her child, who — like a soldier — was about to fall. Thus S. S. Horsley in July, 1916: “Marched through Albert where we saw the famous church with the statue of Madonna and Child hanging from the top of the steeple, at an angle of about 400 as if the Madonna was leaning down to catch the child which had fallen.” Still others took her posture to signify the utmost grief over the cruelties being played out on the Somme. “The figure once stood triumphant on the cathedral tower,” says Max Plowman; “now it is bowed as by the last extremity of grief.” And to some, her attitude seemed suicidal: she was “diving,” apparently intent on destroying herself and her Child with her. But regardless of the way one interpreted the Virgin’s predicament, one’s rhetoric tended to turn archaic and poetic when one thought of her.

To Stephen Graham, what the Virgin is doing is “yearning”: “The leaning Virgin . . . hung out from the stricken tower of the mighty masonry of the Cathedral-church, and yearned o’er the city.” The poeticism o’er is appropriate to the Virgin’s high (if vague) portent. In the next sentence Graham lays aside that particular signal of the momentous and resumes with mere over, which marks the passage from metaphor back to mere cliche: “The miracle of her suspense in air over Albert was a never-ceasing wonder. . . .”

Whatever myth one contrived for the leaning Virgin, one never forgot her or her almost “literary” entreaty that she be mythified. As late as 1949 Blunden is still not just remembering her but writing a poem of almost too lines, “When the Statue Fell,” imagined as spoken to a child by her grandfather. The child has asked,

“What was the strangest sight you ever saw?”

and the ancient responds by telling the story of Albert, its Basilica, the statue, its curious suspension, and its final fall, which he makes coincide with the end of the war.

And in 1948, when Osbert Sitwell remembered Armistice Day, 1918, and its pitiful hopes for perpetual peace, he did so in imagery which bears the deep impress of the image of the golden Virgin, although she is not mentioned at all. His first image, remarkably, seems to fuse the leaning Virgin of one war with the inverted hanging Mussolini of another:

After the Second World War, Winged Victory dangles from the sky like a gigantic draggled starling that has been hanged as a warning to other marauders: but in 1918, though we who had fought were even more disillusioned than our successors of the next conflict about a struggle in which it was plain that no great military leaders had been found, we were yet illusioned about the peace.

Having begun with a recall of the leaning Virgin as an ironic and broken Winged Victory, he goes on to remember, if subliminally, her bright gilding: “During the passage of more than four years, the worse the present had shown itself, the more golden the future . . . had become to our eyes.” But now, remembering the joy on the first Armistice Day, his mind, he says, goes back to two scenes.

In both gold is ironically intrusive: “First to the landscape of an early September morning, where the pale golden grasses held just the color of a harvest moon”: but the field of golden grasses is covered with English and German dead. “It was a superb morning,” he goes on,

such a morning, I would have hazarded, as that on which men, crowned with the vast hemicycles of their gold helmets, clashed swords at Mycenae, or outside the towers of Troy, only to be carried from the field to lie entombed in air and silence for millenniums under their stiff masks of virgin gold.

Thirty years after Sitwell first looked up and wondered what to make of her, the golden Virgin persists, called up as a ghost in his phrase virgin gold. Perhaps he thought he had forgotten her. Her permanence is a measure of the significance which myth, with an urgency born of the most touching need, attached to her.

Posted in Mary | Tagged Albert, Paul Fussell, The Great War, Virgin and Child atop the ruined Basilica at Albert | Leave a Comment »

Reading Selections Night Train to Lisbon – Pascal Mercier

January 17, 2012

Street Scene, Lisbon, Portugal

A middle-aged Swiss high-school teacher browsing in a second-hand bookshop comes across a collection of essays by a writer he has never heard of, in a language (Portuguese) he has never studied. Picking through the text with the aid of a dictionary, he is enthralled by the writer’s reflections on the difficulty of expressing ideas and experience in words. Within hours, the teacher abandons his hometown in the heart of Europe and travels to the writer’s native city on the continent’s western edge. The following reading selections will give you a feel for the novel:

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Nous sommes tons de lopins et d une contexture si injbrme et diverse, que chaque piece, chaque momant, faict son jeu. Et se trouve autant de difference de nous a nous mesmes, que de nous a autruy.

We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.
Michel de Montaigne, Essais, Second Book

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Cada um de nos e vdrios, e muitos, e uma prolixidade de si mesmos. Por isso aquele que despreza o ambiente ndo e o mesmo que dele se alegra ou padece. Na vasta colonia do nosso ser ha gente de muitas especies, pensando e sentindo diferentemente.

Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways.
Fernando Pessoa, Livro Do Desassossego

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The Book
Now the student shut the book and got up. But instead of putting it on the table with the others, she stood still, let her eyes slide again over the yellowed binding, stroked it with her hand, and only a few seconds later did she put the book down on the table, as softly and carefully as if it might crumble to dust with a nudge. Then, for a moment, she stood at the table and it looked as if she might reconsider and buy the book. But she went out, her hands buried in her coat pockets and her head down. Gregorius picked up the book and read: AMADEU INACIO DE ALMEIDA PRADO, UM OURIVES DAS PALAVRAS, LISBOA 1975.

The bookdealer came in, glanced at the book and pronounced the title aloud. Gregorius heard only a flow of sibilants; the half-swallowed, hardly audible vowels seemed to be only a pretext to keep repeating the hissing sh at the end.

“Do you speak Portuguese?”

Gregorius shook his head.

“A Goldsmith of Words. Isn’t that a lovely title?”

“Quiet and elegant. Like dull silver. Would you say it again in Portuguese?”

The bookdealer repeated the words. Aside from the words themselves, you could hear how he enjoyed the velvety sound. Gregorius opened the book and leafed through it until the text began. He handed it to the man who looked at him with surprise and pleasure and started reading aloud. As he listened, Gregorius shut his eyes. After a few sentences, the man paused.

“Shall I translate?”

Gregorius nodded. And then he heard sentences that stunned him, for they sounded as if they had been written for him alone, and not only for him, but for him on this morning that had changed everything.

Of the thousand experiences we have, we find language for one at most and even this one merely by chance and without the care it deserves. Buried under all the mute experiences are those unseen ones that give our life its form, its color, and its melody. Then, when we turn to these treasures, as archaeologists of the soul, we discover how confusing they are. The object of contemplation refuses to stand still, the words bounce off the experience and in the end, pure contradictions stand on the paper. For a long time, I thought it was a defect, something to be overcome. Today I think it is different: that recognition of the confusion is the ideal path to understanding these intimate yet enigmatic experiences. That sounds strange, even bizarre, I know. But ever since I have seen the issue in this light, I have the feeling of being really awake and alive for the first time.

“That’s the introduction,” said the bookdealer and started leafing through it. “And now he seems to begin, passage after passage, to dig for all the buried experiences. To be the archaeologist of himself. Some passages are several pages long and others are quite short. Here, for example, is a fragment that consists of only one sentence.” He translated:

Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us — what happens with the rest?

“I’d like to have the book,” said Gregorius.

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Translating Amadeu de Prado

PROFUNDEZAS INCERTOS. UNCERTAIN DEPTHS. Is there a mystery under the surfaces of human action? Or are human beings utterly what their obvious acts indicate?

It is extraordinary, but the answer changes in me with the light that falls on the city and the Tagus. If it is the enchanting light of a shimmering August day that produces clear, sharp-edged shadows, the thought of a hidden human depth seems bizarre and like a curious, even slightly touching fantasy, like a mirage, that arises when I look too long at the waves flashing in that light. On the other hand, if city and river are clouded over on a dreary January day by a dome of shadowless light and boring gray, I know no greater certainty than this: that all human action is only an extremely imperfect, ridiculously helpless expression of a hidden internal life of unimagined depths that presses to the surface without ever being able to reach it even remotely.

And to this amazing, upsetting unreliability of my judgment is added another experience that, since I have come to know it, steeps my life continually in a distressing uncertainty: that, in this matter, the really most important one for us human beings, I waver even when it concerns myself. For when I sit in front of my favorite cafe, basking in the sun, and overhear the tinkling laughter of the passing Senhoras, my whole inner world seems filled down to the deepest corner, and is known to me through and through because it exhausts itself in these pleasant feelings. Yet, if a disenchanting, sobering layer of clouds pushes in before the sun, with one fell swoop, I am sure there are hidden depths and abysses in me, where unimagined things could break out and sweep me away. Then I quickly pay and hastily seek diversion in the hope that the sun might soon break out again and restore the reassuring superficiality.

Gregorius opened the picture of Amadeu de Prado and leaned the book against the table lamp. Sentence after sentence, he read the translated text into the bold, melancholy eyes. Only once had he done something like that: when he had read Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations as a student. A plaster bust of the emperor had stood on the table, and when he worked on the text, he seemed to be doing it under the aegis of his mute presence. But between then and now there was a difference, which Gregorius felt ever more clearly as the night progressed, without being able to put it into words. He knew only one thing as two o’clock approached: With the sharpness of his perception, the Portuguese aristocrat had granted him an alertness and precision of feeling that didn’t come even from the wise emperor, whose meditations he had devoured as if they were aimed directly at him. In the meantime, Gregorius had translated another note:

PALAVRAS NUM SILENCIO DE OURO. WORDS IN GOLDEN SILENCE. When I read a newspaper, listen to the radio or overhear what people are saying in the cafe, I often feel aversion, even disgust at the same words written and spoken over and over — at the same expressions, phrases, and metaphors repeated. And the worst is, when I hear myself and have to admit that I too repeat the eternally same things. They’re so horribly frayed and threadbare, these words, worn out by being used millions of times. Do they still have any meaning? Naturally, the exchange of words functions, people act on them, they laugh and cry, they go left or right, the waiter brings the coffee or tea. But that’s not what I want to ask. The question is: Are they still an expression of thoughts? Or only effective sounds that drive people here and there because the worn grooves of babble incessantly flash?

Then I go to the beach and hold my head far into the wind, which I wish were icy, colder than we know it in these parts: May it blow all the hackneyed words, all the insipid language habits out of me so I could come back with a cleansed mind, cleansed of the slag of the same talk. But the first time I have to say something, it’s all as before. The cleansing I long for doesn’t come by itself. I have to do something, and I have to do it with words. But what? It’s not that I’d like to get out of my own language and into another. No, it has nothing to do with linguistic desertion. And I also tell myself something else: You can’t invent a new language. But is that what would I like? Maybe it’s like this: I’d like to reset Portuguese words. The sentences that would emerge from this new setting might not be odd or eccentric, not exalted, affected or artificial. They must be archetypal sentences of the Portuguese that constitute its center so that you would have the feeling that they originated directly and undefiled from the transparent, sparkling nature of this language. The words must be as unblemished as polished marble, and they must be pure as the notes in a Bach partita, which turn everything that is not themselves into perfect silence. Sometimes, when a remnant of conciliation with the linguistic sludge is in me, I think, it could be the pleasant silence of a cozy living room or the relaxed silence between lovers. But when I am utterly overcome by rage at the sticky habits of words, then it must be no less than the clear, cool silence of the unlighted outer space, where I pull my noiseless orbits as the only one who speaks Portuguese. The waiter, the barber, the conductor — they would be puzzled if they heard the newly set words and their amazement would refer to the beauty of the sentences, a beauty that would be nothing but the gleam of their clarity. They would be — I imagine — cogent sentences, and could even be called inexorable. Incorruptible and firm they would stand there and thus be like the words of a god. At the same time, they would be without exaggeration and without pomposity, precise and so laconic that you couldn’t take away one single word, one single comma. Thus they would be like a poem, plaited by a goldsmith of words.

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Life-Changing
Portugues. Gregorius started, opened his eyes, and looked out at the flat French landscape, where the sun was bending down to the horizon. The word that had been like a melody lost in a dreamy expanse, all of a sudden had lost its force. He tried to retrieve the magical sound of the voice, but what he managed to grasp was only a rapidly fading echo, and the vain attempt only strengthened the feeling that the precious word, the basis of this whole crazy trip, had slipped away. And it didn’t help that he still knew precisely how the speaker on the language record had pronounced the word.

He went to the bathroom and held his face under the chlorinated water for a long time. Back in his seat, he took the book of the Portuguese aristocrat out of his bag and started translating the next passage. At first, it was mainly an escape, the desperate attempt, despite the fear, to keep on believing in this trip. But after the first sentence, the text fascinated him again as much as it had in the kitchen at night.

NOBREZA SILENCIOSA. SILENT NOBILITY. It is a mistake to believe that the crucial moments of a life when its habitual direction changes forever must be loud and shrill dramatics, washed away by fierce internal surges. This is a kitschy fairy tale started by boozing journalists, flashbulb-seeking filmmakers and authors whose minds look like tabloids. In truth, the dramatics of a life-determining experience are often unbelievably soft. It has so little akin to the bang, the flash, or the volcanic eruption that, at the moment it is made, the experience is often not even noticed. When it deploys its revolutionary effect and plunges a life into a brand-new light giving it a brand-new melody, it does that silently and in this wonderful silence resides its special nobility.

From time to time, Gregorius glanced up from the text and looked out to the west. In the remaining brightness of the twilight sky, it seemed the sea could now be imagined. He put the dictionary away and shut his eyes.

If I could see the sea just once, his mother had said half a year before her death, as if she felt that the end was near; but we simply can’t afford that.

What bank will give me a loan, Gregorius heard the father say, and for such a thing.

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Posted in Book Recommendations, Readings | Tagged life-determining experience, Night Train to Lisbon, Pascal Mercier | Leave a Comment »

The Nature of Jesus’ Resurrection and Its Historical Significance – Pope Benedict XVI

January 16, 2012

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas is a painting of the subject of the same name by the Italian Baroque master Caravaggio, c. 1601-1602. It is housed in the Sanssouci of Potsdam, Germany. Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus (at the National Gallery in London) graces all our pages where the world these apostles knew, like ours, is analogous to the basket of food and teeters perilously over the edge.

Let us ask once more, by way of summary, what it was like to encounter the risen Lord. The following distinctions are important:

Jesus did not simply return to normal biological life as one who, by the laws of biology, would eventually have to die again.
Jesus is not a ghost (“spirit”). In other words, he does not belong to the realm of the dead but is somehow able to reveal himself in the realm of the living.
Nevertheless, the encounters with the risen Lord are not the same as mystical experiences, in which the human spirit is momentarily drawn aloft out of itself and perceives the realm of the divine and eternal, only to return then to the normal horizon of its existence. Mystical experience is a temporary removal of the soul’s spatial and cognitive limitations. But it is not an encounter with a person coming toward me from without. Saint Paul clearly distinguished his mystical experiences, such as his elevation to the third heaven described in 2 Corinthians 12:1-4, from his encounter with the risen Lord on the road to Damascus, which was a historical event — an encounter with a living person.

On the basis of all this biblical evidence, what are we now in a position to say about the true nature of Christ’s Resurrection?

It is a historical event that nevertheless bursts open the dimensions of history and transcends it. Perhaps we may draw upon analogical language here, inadequate in many ways, yet still able to open up a path toward understanding: we could regard the Resurrection as something, akin to a radical “evolutionary leap”, in which a new dimension of life emerges, a new dimension of human existence.

Indeed, matter itself is remolded into a new type of reality. The man Jesus, complete with his body, now belong totally to the sphere of the divine and eternal. From now on, as Tertullian once said, “spirit and blood” have a place within God (cf. De Resurrect. Mort. 51:3, CCSL, II 994) Even if man by his nature is created for immortality, it is only now that the place exists in which his immortal soul can find its “space”, its “bodiliness”, in which immortality takes on its meaning as communion with God and with the whole of reconciled mankind.

This is what is meant by those passages in Saint Paul’s prison letters (cf Colossians 1:12-23 and Ephesians 1:3-23) that speak of the cosmic, body of Christ, indicating thereby that Christ’s transformed body is also the place where men enter into communion with God and with one another and are thus all, to live definitively in the fullness of indestructible life. Since we ourselves have no experience of such a renewed and transformed type of matter, or such a renewed and transformed kind of life, it is not surprising that it over steps the boundaries of what we are able to conceive.

Essential, then, is the fact that Jesus’ Resurrection was not just about some deceased individual coming back to life at a certain point, but that an ontological leap occurred, one that touches being as such, opening up a dimension that affects us all, creating for all of us a new space of life, a new space of being in union with God.

It is in these terms that the question of the historicity of the Resurrection should be addressed. On the one hand, we must acknowledge that it is of the essence of the Resurrection precisely to burst open history and usher in a new dimension commonly described as eschatological. The Resurrection opens up the new space that transcends history and creates the definitive. In this sense, it follows that Resurrection is not the same kind of historical event as the birth or crucifixion of Jesus. It is something new, a new type of event.

Yet at the same time it must be understood that the Resurrection does not simply stand outside or above history. As something that breaks out of history and transcends it, the Resurrection nevertheless has its origin within history and up to a certain point still belongs there. Perhaps we could put it this way: Jesus’ Resurrection points beyond history but has left a footprint within history. Therefore it can be attested by witnesses as an event of an entirely new kind.

Indeed, the apostolic preaching with all its boldness and passion would be unthinkable unless the witnesses had experienced a real encounter, coming to them from outside, with something entirely new and unforeseen, namely, the self-revelation and verbal communication of the risen Christ. Only a real event of a radically new quality could possibly have given rise to the apostolic preaching, which cannot be explained on the basis of speculations or inner, mystical experiences. In all its boldness and originality, it draws life from the impact of an event that no one had invented, an event that surpassed all that could be imagined.

To conclude, all of us are constantly inclined to ask the question that Saint Jude Thaddaeus put to Jesus during the Last Supper: “Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?” (John 14:22). Why, indeed, did you not forcefully resist your enemies who brought you to the Cross? — we might well ask. Why did you not show them with incontrovertible power that you are the living one, the Lord of life and death? Why did you reveal yourself only to a small flock of disciples, upon whose testimony we must now rely?

The question applies not only to the Resurrection, but to the whole manner of God’s revelation in the world. Why only to Abraham and not to the mighty of the world? Why only to Israel and not irrefutably to all the peoples of the earth?

It is part of the mystery of God that he acts so gently, that he only gradually builds up his history within the great history of mankind; that he becomes man and so can be overlooked by his contemporaries and by the decisive forces within history; that he suffers and dies and that, having risen again, he chooses to come to mankind only through the faith of the disciples to whom he reveals himself; that he continues to knock gently at the doors of our hearts and slowly opens our eyes if we open our doors to him.

And yet — is not this the truly divine way? Not to overwhelm with external power, but to give freedom, to offer and elicit love. And if we really think about it, is it not what seems so small that is truly great? Does not a ray of light issue from Jesus, growing brighter across the centuries, that could not come from any mere man and through which the light of God truly shines into the world? Could the apostolic preaching have found faith and built up a worldwide community unless the power of truth had been at work within it?

If we attend to the witnesses with listening hearts and open ourselves to the signs by which the Lord again and again authenticates both them and himself, then we know that he is truly risen. He is alive. Let us entrust ourselves to him, knowing that we are on the right path. With Thomas let us place our hands into Jesus’ pierced side and confess: “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28).

Posted in Jesus, Pope Benedict XVI, The Resurrection | Tagged an ontological leap, Nature of Jesus' Resurrection, the dimensions of history, the manner of God's revelation in the world, the nature of historical event | Leave a Comment »

Paying Attention To The Sky

The Impossible Self – Laura Quinney

William Blake’s Loneliness Of The Soul – Laura Quinney

William Blake And The Intuition Of Selfhood – Laura Quinney

The Prayer of Jesus: Jesus’ Prayer on the Mount of Olives in the Letter to the Hebrews – Pope Benedict XVI

The Prayer of Jesus: Jesus’ Will and the Will of the Father – Pope Benedict XVI

The Prayer Of Jesus: The Prayer On The Mount Of Olives – Pope Benedict XVI

I Believe In The Resurrection Of The Body, And The Life Everlasting — Fr. Ronald Knox

The Golden Virgin – Paul Fussell

Reading Selections Night Train to Lisbon – Pascal Mercier

The Nature of Jesus’ Resurrection and Its Historical Significance – Pope Benedict XVI

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