Robert Farrar Capon on God, matter, wine, and things

Yesterday I wrote more than 4,000 words in response to Nicholas Carr’s response to L. M. Sacasas on the topic of attention, enchantment, creation, and “things.” A friend wrote to remind me that, nearly sixty years ago, Robert Farrar Capon had already addressed all this in a much more adequate and beautiful way than I could muster. He was right.

The source is Capon’s classic book, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection. The following excerpt comes from pages 19-21 then 84-90 in the Modern Library Food edition (2002). I’ve bolded passages especially relevant to the discussion yesterday.

If you’ve not read Capon before, consider this a taste to whet the appetite for more.

*

Man's real work is to look at the things of the world and to love them for what they are. That is, after all, what God does, and man was not made in God's image for nothing. The fruits of his attention can be seen in all the arts, crafts, and sciences. It can cost him time and effort, but it pays handsomely. If an hour can be spent on one onion, think how much regarding it took on the part of that old Russian who looked at onions and church spires long enough to come up with St. Basil's Cathedral. Or how much curious and loving attention was expended by the first man who looked hard enough at the insides of trees, the entrails of cats, the hind ends of horses and the juice of pine trees to realize he could turn them all into the first fiddle. No doubt his wife urged him to get up and do something useful. I am sure that he was a stalwart enough lover of things to pay no attention at all to her nagging; but how wonderful it would have been if he had known what we know now about his dawdling. He could have silenced her with the greatest riposte of all time: Don't bother me; I am creating the possibility of the Bach unaccompanied sonatas.

But if man's attention is repaid so handsomely, his inattention costs him dearly. Every time he diagrams something instead of looking at it, every time he regards not what a thing is but what it can be made to mean to him—every time he substitutes a conceit for a fact—he gets grease all over the kitchen of the world. Reality slips away from him; and he is left with nothing but the oldest monstrosity in the world: an idol. Things must be met for themselves. To take them only for their meaning is to convert them into gods—to make them too important, and therefore to make them unimportant altogether. Idolatry has two faults. It is not only a slur on the true God; it is also an insult to true things.

They made a calf in Horeb; thus they turned their Glory into the similitude of a calf that eateth hay. Bad enough, you say. Ah, but it was worse than that. Whatever good may have resided in the Golden Calf—whatever loveliness of gold or beauty of line—went begging the minute the Israelites got the idea that it was their savior out of the bondage of Egypt. In making the statue a matter of the greatest point, they missed the point of its matter altogether.

Berate me not therefore for carrying on about slicing onions in a world under the sentence of nuclear overkill. The heaviest weight on the shoulders of the earth is still the age-old idolatry by which man has cheated himself of both Creator and creation. And this age is no exception. If you prefer to address yourself to graver matters, well and good: Idolatry needs all the enemies it can get. But if I choose to break images in the kitchen, I cannot be faulted. We are both good men, in a day when good men are hard to find. Let us join hands and get on with our iconoclasm.

There is a Russian story about an old woman whose vices were so numerous that no one could name even one of her virtues. She was slothful, spiteful, envious, deceitful, greedy, foul-mouthed, and proud. She lived by herself and in herself; she loved no one and no thing. One day a beggar came to her door. She upbraided him, abused him, and sent him away. As he left, however, she unaccountably threw an onion after him. He picked it up and ran away. In time the woman died and was dragged down to her due reward in hell. But just as she was about to slip over the edge of the bottomless pit, she looked up. Above her, descending from the infinite distances of heaven, was a great archangel, and in his hand was an onion. “Grasp this,” he said. “If you hold it, it will lift you up to heaven.”

One real thing is closer to God than all the diagrams in the world.

* * *

One honest look at any real thing—one minute's contemplation of process on earth—leads straight into the conundrum of the relationship of God to the world. The solution is hardly obvious. For something that could not be at all without God, creation seems to do rather well without Him. Only miracles are simple; nature is a mystery. Autumn by autumn, He makes wine upon a thousand hills, but He does it without tipping His hand. Glucose, fructose, and Saccharomyces ellipsoideus apparently manage very nicely on their own. So much so that the resolving of the conflict between the sacred and the secular (or, better said, the repairing of the damage done by divorcing them) has been billed as the major problem of modern theology. Permit me, therefore, glass in hand and cooking Sherry within easy reach, the world's most interrupted discourse on the subject. In vino veritas.

Take the largest part of that truth first. God makes wine. For all its difficulties, there is no way around the doctrine of creation. But notice the tense: He makes; not made. He did not create once upon a time, only to find himself saddled now with the unavoidable and embarrassing result of that first rash decision. That is only to welsh on the idea of an unnecessary world, to make creation a self-perpetuating pool game which is contingent only at the start—which needs only the first push on the cue ball to keep it going forever. It will not do: The world is more unnecessary than that. It is unnecessary now; it cries in this moment for a cause to hold it in being. It was St. Thomas, I think, who pointed out long that if God wanted to get rid of the universe, He would not have to do anything; He would have to stop doing something. Wine is—the fruit of the vine stands in act, outside of nothing—because it is His very present pleasure to have it so. The creative act is contemporary, intimate, and immediate to each part, parcel and period of the world.

Do you see what that means? In a general way we concede that God made the world out of joy: He didn't need it; He just thought it was a good thing. But if you confine His activity in creation to the beginning only, you lose most of the joy in the subsequent shuffle of history. Sure, it was good back then, you say, but since then, we've been eating leftovers. How much better a world it becomes when you see Him creating at all times and at every time; when you see that the preserving of the old in being is just as much creation as the bringing of the new out of nothing. Each thing, at every moment, becomes the delight of His hand, the apple of His eye. The bloom of yeast lies upon the grapeskins year after year because He likes it; C8H12O6=2C2H5OH+2CO2 is a dependable process because, every September, He says, That was nice; do it again.

Let us pause and drink to that.

To a radically, perpetually unnecessary world; to the restoration of astonishment to the heart and mystery to the mind; to wine, because it is a gift we never expected; to mushroom and artichoke, for they are incredible legacies; to improbable acids and high alcohols, since we would hardly have thought of them ourselves; and to all being, because it is superfluous: to the hairs on Harry's ear, and to the seven hundred and sixty-eighth cell from the upper attachment of the right gluteus maximus in the last girl on the chorus line. Prosit, Dear Hearts. Cheers, Men and Brethren. We are free: nothing is needful, everything is for joy. Let the bookkeepers struggle with their balance sheets; it is the tippler who sees the untipped Hand. God is eccentric; He has loves, not reasons. Salute!

But there is more. He creates in a mystery. What He holds intimately and contemporaneously in being, acts, nonetheless, for itself. The secular is not the sacred. Creation exists in its own right, is no parable, no front, no Punch and Judy show in which God plays all the parts, but a vast and raucous meeting where each thing acts out its nature, shouts I am I, as if no other thing had being. The world exists, not for what it means but for what it is. The purpose of mushrooms is to be mushrooms; wine is in order to wine: Things are precious before they are contributory. It is a false piety that walks through creation looking only for lessons which can be applied somewhere else. To be sure, God remains the greatest good, but, for all that, the world is still good in itself. Indeed, since He does not need it, its whole reason for being must lie in its own goodness; He has no use for it; only delight.

Just think what that means. We were not made in God's image for nothing. The child's preference for sweets over spinach, mankind's universal love of the toothsome rather than the nutritious is the mark of our greatness, the proof that we love the secular as He does—for its secularity. We have eyes which see what He sees, lips which praise what He praises, and mouths which relish things, because He first pronounced them tov. The world is no disposable ladder to heaven. Earth is not convenient, it is good; it is, by God's design, our lawful love.

Another toast then.

To Da Vinci's notebooks; to Einstein's preoccupations; to Mozart and to Bach, and to the child who hears a canon for the first time in “Frère Jacques”; to the singularities of chalk and cheese and to the delectabilities of all things, visible and in- visible; l'chaim because it is good; to health, for no reason but itself; to men because they are men, to women without explanation, and to the good company of every secular thing in saecula saeculorum. Toast them with their own watchword: Here's how!

So far, so good then. God intimately creative; but things uniquely themselves. The paradox of being, by which the secular stands gloriously free of the sacred—on which it utterly depends. What next?

Ah, mischief. Man is not always content to take reality at such widths and depths. He cuts the wine of paradox with the water of consistency: The mystery of God and things is tamed to the simplicity of God or things; he builds himself a duller, skimpier world.

If he is a pagan, he abolishes the secular in favor of the sacred. The world becomes filled with gods. To improve his wine, he searches, not for purer strains of yeast, but for better incantations, friendlier gods. He spends his time in shrines and caves, not chemistry. Things, for him, become pawns in the chess game of heaven. Religion devours life.

On the other hand, if he is a secularist, he insists that God must have no part in the world at all. That God has made Saccharomyces ellipsoideus competent enough to ferment sugar on its own, becomes, for him, a proof that He never made it at all. Poor man! To be so nearly right, and so devastatingly wrong! To hit so close, yet miss the mark completely. Yeast, without God to give it as a gift, ceases to be good company. It becomes merely useful—a mechanism contributory to other mechanisms. And those, in turn, to the vast mechanism of the whole. And that, at last, to—well, he is hard put to say just what. He has found the sewing machine and lost the thread of delight. Unique goodnesses are swallowed up in process.

Worse yet, if he is a contemporary theologian, he acquires an irrational fear of natural theology. He distrusts people who claim to see the vestigia Dei, the footprints of God, in creation; he blames them for being pagans, filling the world with gods. Poor man, again! The vestigia Dei are not irrelevant divinities ruffling the surface of a matter for which they have no sympathy. They are rather the tracks of God's figure skating upon the ice of the world. They are evidences of play, not pilgrimage. He cuts them, not to make a point, but because ice cries out for such virtuosity. They prove He knows what the world is for.

So with all things. Creation is God's living room, the place where He sits down and relishes the exquisite taste of His decoration. Things, therefore, as things, are inseparable from God, as God. Separate the secular from the sacred, and the world becomes an idol shrouded in interpretations; creation becomes too meaningful to make love to. As religion devoured life for the pagan, so significance consumes the world of the secularist. Delectability goes by the boards, dullness reigns, and earth becomes a sitting duck for confidence men and tin-fiddle manufacturers of all sorts. Poor earth, poor stars, poor flesh. Without a Giver, they never become themselves.

We have arrived at an untoastable condition. Turn your glass upside down for a moment. There are demons to be exorcized.

Omnes dii gentium daemonia sunt; Dominus autem coelos fecit. Deliver us, O Lord, from religiosity and Godlessness alike, lest we wander in fakery or die of boredom. Restore to us Thyself as Giver and the secular as Thy gift. Let idols perish and con jobs cease. Give repentance and better minds to all pagans and secularists; in the meantime, of Thy mercy, keep them out of our cellars.

Now we may drink.

To the world, which belongs to those with tongues to taste it: Na Zdrovie! To God who gives the world to those with tongues: Er lebe hoch! And to the vast paradox by which the One enjoys the other: Bottoms up! Creation deserves the most resounding slap we can give it. Min skål, din skål, alla vackra flickors skål. He fathers forth whose beauty is past change. Praise Him!

One might have hoped that, with so gracious a creature as wine, even the most ardent religionists and secularists would have made an exception to their universal custom of missing the point of things. But alas, between teetotalism on the one hand and the habit of classifying it as an alcoholic beverage on the other, they have both lost the thread of delight.

Consider first the teetotalers. They began, no doubt, by observing that some men use wine to excess—to the point at which, though the wine remains true to itself, the drinker does not. That much, I give them: Drunks are a nuisance. But they went too far. Only the ungrateful or the purblind can fail to see that sugar in the grape and yeast on the skins is a divine idea, not a human one. Man's part in the process consists of honest and prudent management of the work that God has begun. Something underhanded has to be done to grape juice to keep it from running its appointed course.

Witness the teetotaling communion service. Most Protestants, I suppose, imagine that it is part of the true Reformed religion. But have they considered that, for nineteen centuries after the institution of the Eucharist, wine was the only element available for the sacrament? Do they seriously envision St. Paul or Calvin or Luther opening bottles of Welch's Grape Juice in the sacristy before the service? Luther, at least, would turn over in his grave. The WCTU version of the Lord's Supper is a bare 100 years old. Grape juice was not commercially viable until the discovery of pasteurization; and, unless I am mistaken, it was Mr. Welch himself (an ardent total abstainer) who persuaded American Protestantism to abandon what the Lord obviously thought rather kindly of.

Carr, Sacasas, and eloquent reality

In a list of the best living writers on technology in the English language, the top ten would include Nicholas Carr and L. M. Sacasas. Yesterday the two came together in an essay I can’t get out of my head.

The essay in question is the third in a series called “Seeing Things” on Carr’s Substack “New Cartographies.” Titled “Contemplation as Rebellion,” it continues Carr’s reflections on the nature of perception in a digital age. Perception is both neurological and social; it is a mediated phenomenon; it can be done well or poorly, deeply or cheaply. And works of art, especially visual art like paintings and engravings, have the power to call forth the kind of attention that repays time, energy, focus, and affection.

Interwoven with these reflections is Carr’s intervention in the “enchantment” discourse, one I have myself dipped into more than a few times (especially in conversation with Alan Jacobs). In yesterday’s essay, following meditations on Heaney and Hawthorne, Carr turns to something Sacasas wrote last August titled “If Your World Is Not Enchanted, You're Not Paying Attention.” He begins with an excerpt from Sacasas:

This form of attention and the knowledge it yields not only elicits more of the world, it elicits more of us. In waiting on the world in this way, applying time and strategic patience in the spirit of invitation, we draw out and are drawn out in turn. As the Latin root of attention suggests, as we extend ourselves into the world by attending to it, we may also find that we ourselves are also extended, that is to say that our consciousness is stretched and deepened.

Here is Carr’s response, which ends his own essay and which I quote at length:

Even as I find Sacasas’s essay inspiring, I find it troubling. The way he frames the contemplative gaze as a means of re-enchantment makes me uncomfortable. An enchanted world is, by definition, a world that presents a false front to us — a front composed of what Sacasas terms, at the end of his essay, “mere things.” To see what’s really there in an enchanted world, you need to see beyond or through the surface. You need to discover what’s hidden, what’s concealed, by the merely material form, and that requires something more than sensory perception. It requires extrasensory perception. In this framing, the contemplative gaze is not just unlocking what lies untapped within us — the powers of perception, imagination, interpretation — but also exposing some spiritual essence that lies hidden within the object of the gaze.

The issue I take with Sacasas’s essay is not a matter of sense — I’m pretty sure we’re talking about the same perceptual phenomenon — but of wording. When he suggests that “enchantment is just the measure of the quality of our attention,” he’s muddying the waters. When we look at the quality of attention demonstrated by Heaney, Muñoz, and Hawthorne, we’re not seeing enchantment. We’re seeing an exquisite openness to the real. A sense of wonder does not require a world infused with spirit. The world as it is is sufficient. The reason the wording matters here is simple. What bedevils our perceptions today isn’t a lack of enchantment. It’s a lack of reality.

“Things change according to the stance we adopt towards them, the type of attention we pay to them,” Iain McGilchrist wrote in The Master and His Emissary. He’s right, but it’s important to recognize that the changes take place in the mind of the observer not in the things themselves. The things, whether works of art or of nature, have a material integrity that’s independent of our own thoughts and desires, and the stance we adopt toward them should entail a respect for that integrity.

The desire to re-enchant the world may seem like an act of humility, a way of paying tribute to the world’s unseen powers, but really it’s the opposite, an act of hubris. In demanding that the world hold greater meaning for us, that it be a reservoir for the fulfillment of our own spiritual yearnings, we are attempting yet again to impose our will on the world, to turn its myriad material forms to our own purposes, to make it our mirror. Whatever enchantment may once have been, re-enchantment is a power play.

It’s interesting that, in the English language, we have enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment. What we don’t have is unenchantment. A state of disenchantment is by definition a state of loss, one that begs to be remedied by a process of re-enchantment. A state of unenchantment presumes no loss and requires no remedy. It is a state that is entirely happy with the thinginess of things. So let me, by fiat, introduce unenchantment into the language. And let me suggest that the contemplative gaze is best when it is an unenchanted gaze.

There is much to unpack here. Before I respond, let me be clear that nothing whatsoever hangs on the use, retention, or recovery of the term “enchantment” and its many variations. This entire conversation could be held, and all that technologists, philosophers, critics, and theologians want to say about it could be said, without Weber’s Entzauberung or any of its translations. Weber, for his part, was seeking to offer a sociological description of an epochal cultural change. Whatever the merit of his description, neither the concept nor the term nor its denial bears on the substance of the arguments that Sacasas and Carr make above.

I take Carr to be taking issue with a spiritually charged material reality for at least five reasons. First, it is reductive; things become “mere” things. Second, it is narcissistic; things must be what I want or need them to be to have value, in themselves or for me. Third, it is coercive; it imposes upon things what they evidently lack. Fourth, it is ungrateful; it fails to receive things as they are and thus to attend to them with the care they deserve. Finally, it is unreal; it substitutes my subjectivity for the stubborn objectivity of the thing before me. No longer am I interacting with some material item of the phenomenal world; instead, I am playing with projections upon the screen of my mind.

These are all valid and useful worries; no doubt they have a legitimate target. I don’t think Carr’s comments are an adequate response to Sacasas, however, or a successful critique of the broader view of enchanted perception that Sacasas is seeking to represent. In part there seem to be some misunderstandings between them. But perhaps more than any serious misunderstanding there is simple, unbridgeable disagreement. That disagreement, in turn, reverses the terms of the reproach: it is Carr, not Sacasas, who makes the world into a mirror.

More on that later; for now, consider definitions.

Carr opens by saying that an “enchanted world is, by definition, a world that presents a false front to us.” This is an unfortunate way to begin. Let me offer an alternative. At a minimum, an enchanted world is one that is full of life, intelligence, events, experiences, agents, and phenomena that exceed the capacity of secular, instrumental reason—especially the “hard” sciences—to measure, name, calculate, contain, control, or grasp. For Christians, the word for such a world is simply “creation.” But creation is not a false front. There may be more than what you or I can measure or glimpse, but there is not less. Creation is artifice in the sense that there is an artificer; it is not artifice in the sense that it is a façade.

Carr writes: “When we look at the quality of attention demonstrated by Heaney, Muñoz, and Hawthorne, we’re not seeing enchantment. We’re seeing an exquisite openness to the real. A sense of wonder does not require a world infused with spirit. The world as it is is sufficient.” These claims are all question-begging. What if openness to the real discloses to one’s awareness a deeper reality than one previously supposed to be true or possible—a reality not limited to one’s consciousness but objectively existent in the very thing one is contemplating, antecedent to one’s act of contemplation? Whether wonder requires a world infused with spirit is beside the point; it’s a hypothetical we aren’t in a position to answer. The question instead is whether this world is in fact suffused with spirit. To call a spirit-less world “the world as it is” begs the question, therefore, because we cannot and do not know a priori that the world lacks spirit, or that the spirit it manifests to so many in such a variety of ways is contained without remainder in the mind.

Carr is right to insist on respecting the integrity of the things of the world and of the world itself. Things aren’t playthings, and when we reduce the former to the latter both we and they are diminished as a result. So let me avoid the generic and embrace the particular. What follows is a specifically Christian account of why, in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ words, seeing the world as charged with the grandeur of God is not a failure to attend to the thisness of things.

Hopkins is a good person to start with, as it happens, given his emphasis on “inscape” or the proper “thisness” of created things, drawing on John Duns Scotus’s haecceitas. Each thing is just what it is; it isn’t anything else. It is the particular thing God made it to be, and it is this precisely in virtue of its relation to God the Creator, to his creative power and good pleasure. To, in a word, his delight.

The doctrine of creation extends this notion to anything and everything in existence. Material objects, then, are not windows we will one day raise (much less smash) in order to see “true” reality more clearly. Nor are they akin to Wittgenstein’s ladder, necessary to climb but kicked over once used. Nor still are they masks donned to deceive us or allegories that, in pointing to what they are not, exhaust themselves in their reference (somewhat like the self-destructing tapes of Mission: Impossible fame).

No, the Christian doctrine of creation teaches that the surfaces of the world contain depths and that seemingly silent things have a voice. They speak. They sing, in fact. Reality, in the words of Albert Borgmann, is eloquent. Significance in the broadest sense is therefore not only a product or property of the conscious human mind; it belongs to the things of the world prior to my contemplating them and emerge, intelligibly and fittingly, in the encounter between us.

Two concepts govern this theological perspective, each centered on the incarnation. The reason why is straightforward: the man Jesus is fully and utterly human without being merely human. He is more than human, but he is not less. Nothing in one’s phenomenal experience of Jesus’s humanity—nothing measurable by observation, analysis, or a thousand scientific tests—would tell you anything about who he is, only what he is: namely, a human being and, in that respect, like any other. Yet this man is God. Who he is is thus hidden from view.

Are we back, then, to the “false front” of Carr’s worries? By no means.

On one hand, Jesus’s humanity is not a fiction; it is not like the façades of Petra, which appear to be exteriors of magnificent temples yet contain nothing on the inside. Jesus’s humanity is, apart from sin, like yours and mine in every way. He really is a human being, and his humanity is not a temporary meat-suit he sloughs off at the Ascension. Jesus is human forever.

On the other hand, Jesus’s divinity is not opposed to his humanity. He is neither a hybrid nor a shell in which two competing principles vie for space. In all his actions, in all he says and suffers, he does so as God and man, divinely and humanly. Indeed, part of the revelation of the God-man is that God can be man without contradiction. Contra John Hick, the incarnation is not a square circle.

The most common patristic image for this reality comes from Scripture: the burning bush. The divinity of Jesus suffuses and saturates the humanity of Jesus without consuming it. This in turn came to govern the fathers’ view of the sacraments, the Eucharist above all. Anthony Domestico draws this out in a review of Paul Mariani’s biography of Hopkins:

Mariani is most affecting when describing what he calls Hopkins’s idea of “thisness—the dappled distinctiveness of everything kept in Creation.” He links Hopkins’s concept of inscape and instress to the poet’s abiding devotion to the Eucharist. Hopkins was drawn to Catholicism, Mariani suggests, through the doctrine of the Real Presence, “God dwelling in things as simple as bread and wine … the logical extension of God’s indwelling among us.” His poetry and his religion are necessary to one another: Hopkins was the poet he was because of his Catholic understanding of the Eucharist, and he was the Catholic he was because of his poetic apprehension of reality.

To be sure, the world is not a sacrament per se; a sacramental logic applies to creation in virtue of its status as created. In this way the sacraments help to explain how creation can be just what it is and, in the language of Alexander Schmemann, an epiphany of its Creator. It seems to me that Carr and other critics of (at least a certain Christian style of) enchantment substitute an “or” for the “and,” seeing the former as necessary and the latter as impossible. For Christians, it is the incarnation that demonstrates the truth and thus the possibility of the “and.”

The second concept that enters here is typology, or the use of “figure” in reading Scripture. The most famous study is Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis. He rightly argues there that the “types” or “figures” of the biblical narrative are not extinguished by their trans-local, trans-personal, trans-temporal signification. The fact that David figures Christ, or somehow mysteriously points forward to him, confirms and upholds his unique historicity; it does not obliterate it. Here is how Paul Griffiths puts it:

One event or utterance figures another when, while remaining unalterably what it is, it announces or communicates something other than itself. Eve’s assent to the tempter and her consequent taking of the forbidden fruit from the tree figures, in this sense, Mary’s fiat mihi in response to the annunciation and the consequent incarnation of the Lord in her womb. The second event—the figured—encompasses and includes the first, without removing its reality. The first—the figuring—has its reality, however, by way of participation in the second. This is in the order of being. Ontological figuration may, however, be replicated at the level of the text, and in scripture it inevitably is.

Put bluntly, figuralism falls apart if the human figures of history recorded by Scripture are neither truly human nor truly historical. It is exactly in their three-dimensional, irreducible humanity and historicity—their personal haecceity—that they “figure” Christ in advance of his advent. Saint Augustine writes in De Doctrina Christiana that humans signify with signs but God signifies with both signs and things. Salvation history, inscribed in Scripture, is thus the grand narrative of all creation, at once told by humans through written signs and told by God through created things—including the lives of human beings themselves, both their words and their deeds.

In sum, both typology and sacramentology manifest the logic embodied in the incarnation: a simultaneous affirmation of the goodness and thisness of creation in all its parts and of creation’s capacity to communicate, signify, or otherwise mediate depths of reality not immediately evident on the surface of things. “Re-enchantment,” as I see it, is one way to describe a Christian reassertion or recovery of this way of understanding and inhabiting the world. Carr acknowledges that such re-enchantment “may seem like an act of humility, a way of paying tribute to the world’s unseen powers, but really it’s the opposite, an act of hubris.” Why? “In demanding that the world hold greater meaning for us, that it be a reservoir for the fulfillment of our own spiritual yearnings, we are attempting yet again to impose our will on the world, to turn its myriad material forms to our own purposes, to make it our mirror. Whatever enchantment may once have been, re-enchantment is a power play.”

Whatever the truth of this critique applied to other types of (re-)enchantment, I hope I’ve made clear by now why it doesn’t apply to the Christian variety. Christian attention to the world and to things as the creation of God makes no demands, imposes no extrinsic meaning, bends nothing to our will to power or pleasure. It is a response (bottom up) to what we discover the world and its things to be, in themselves apart from and prior to us, just as it is a quest (top down) to see the world and its things as we have been told by God they in fact are. In the words of Psalm 19:

The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night declares knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words;
their voice is not heard;
yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world. (vv. 1-4)

The claim of the psalmist is that, in reality, the voice-that-is-no-voice and the words-that-are-no-words speak—are speaking, at all times, even now—whether or not we have ears to hear them. We do not imagine or construct what they say; we hearken to what they have to say to us. This is why Wendell Berry is so obstinate in his unfashionable insistence that the meaning humans find, whether in art or in the natural world, is just that: discovered, not created. Franz Wright captures the point well in his poem, “The Maker”:

The listening voice, the speaking ear

And the way, always, being
a maker
reminds:

you were made.

Berry himself puts it this way in a 1987 essay:

[Consider the concept] of artistic primacy or autonomy, in which it is assumed that no value is inherent in subjects, but that value is conferred upon subjects by the art and the attention of the artist. The subjects of world are only “raw material.” As William Matthews writes in a recent article: “A poet beginning to make something need raw material, something to transform.” For Marianne Moore, he says,

subject matter is not in itself important, except that it gives her the opportunity to speak about something that engages her passions. What is important instead is what she can discover to say.

And he concludes:

It is not, of course, the subject that is or isn't dull, but the quality of attention we do or do not pay to it, and the strength of our will to transform. Dull subjects are those we have failed.

This apparently assumes that for the animals and humans who are not fine artists, who have discovered nothing to say, the world is dull, which of course is not true. It assumes also that attention is of interest in itself, which is not true either. In fact, attention is of value only insofar as it is paid in the proper discharge of an obligation. To pay attention is to come into the presence of a subject. In one of its root senses, it is to “stretch toward” a subject, in a kind of aspiration. We speak of “paying attention” because of a correct perception that attention is owed—that, without our attention and our attending, our subjects, including ourselves, are endangered.

Mr. Matthews’ trivializing of subjects in the interest of poetry industrializes the art. He is talking about an art oriented exclusively to production, like coal mining. Like an industrial entrepreneur, he regards the places and creatures and experiences of the world as “raw material,” valueless until exploited.

Such an approach to “things” is, I recognize, just what Carr opposes. But the irony, and therefore the danger, is that Carr’s approach threatens to join hands with Matthews against Berry—as well as against Borgmann, Schmemann, Augustine, Wright, Hopkins, and Sacasas. (A formidable crew!)

Recall Carr’s modification of McGilchrist’s claim, “Things change according to the stance we adopt towards them, the type of attention we pay to them.” Carr writes, “He’s right, but it’s important to recognize that the changes take place in the mind of the observer not in the things themselves. The things, whether works of art or of nature, have a material integrity that’s independent of our own thoughts and desires, and the stance we adopt toward them should entail a respect for that integrity” (emphasis mine). It is crucial to see that the last sentence is a non sequitur. Enchanted, disenchanted, and unenchanted alike agree that all things possess a certain integrity (material and otherwise) independent of our thoughts and desires and that our relation to things ought to show respect for that integrity.

As a result, however, does Carr’s proposal not end up throwing us back into the cage of consciousness? Are not things thereby reduced to a mirror, in which we see not things but our thoughts about things? Are not things now become playthings in the inner theater of the imagination? So that I am no longer contemplating the thisness of what lies before me, but projecting it from a variety of angles—with countless filters and settings tried and tested—on the screen of my mind?

Consider Carr’s own words:

To see what’s really there in an enchanted world, you need to see beyond or through the surface. You need to discover what’s hidden, what’s concealed, by the merely material form, and that requires something more than sensory perception. It requires extrasensory perception. In this framing, the contemplative gaze is not just unlocking what lies untapped within us — the powers of perception, imagination, interpretation — but also exposing some spiritual essence that lies hidden within the object of the gaze. (emphasis mine)

So far as I can tell, the last sentence puts the shoe on the other foot. With respect to the contemplative gaze, what Carr seems to want is not for the conscious human mind to encounter an object as it is, much less to penetrate to its inexhaustible depths, but to double back on itself, thereby “unlocking what lies untapped within us—the powers of perception, imagination, interpretation” (emphasis, again, mine). It follows that, for Carr, “unenchanted” contemplation is not finally about the object in its independent objectivity but about the subject exercising his unfathomably creative subjective powers. Perception is turned inside out. Attention transforms into solipsism, even narcissism. What I see is ultimately about me, the one seeing, and what I choose or want to see. What is important is no longer the object interpreted but the change induced in the interpreter by his powers of interpretation.

This epistemic loop is just what Sacasas was worried about in his original essay. Following the work of Jane Bennett, Sacasas writes that we find ourselves “trapped in a vicious circle. Habituated against attending to the world with patience and care, we are more likely to experience the world as a mute accumulation of inert things to be merely used or consumed as our needs dictate.” He goes on:

And this experience in turn reinforces the disinclination to attend to the world with appropriate patience and care. Looking and failing to see, we mistakenly conclude there was nothing to see.

What is there to do, then, except to look again, and with care, almost as a matter of faith, although a faith encouraged by each fleeting encounter with beauty we have been graced to experience. To stare awkwardly at things in the world until they cease to be mere things. To risk the appearance of foolishness by being prepared to believe that world might yet be enchanted. Or, better yet, to play with the notion that we might cast our attention into the world in the spirit of casting a spell. We may very well conjure up surprising depths of experience, awaken long dormant desires, and rekindle our wonder in the process. What that will avail, only time would tell.

Carr is understandably worried that the “mere” in “mere things” suggests that things as they are are inadequate unless and until we impose on them a higher meaning suited to our needs, a weightier significance than they themselves can bear. Such an imposition both weighs them down and occludes their actual significance. What Sacasas has in mind, though, is the “raw material” of “industrial art,” the instrumental reason that sees things as nothing more than what they appear to be, nothing more, therefore, than their constituent elements. On such a view, what a thing is is what it is made of, which is only one step away from the constructivist view that what a thing is is whatever I make of it. In the words of David Graeber, “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.”

Sacasas is right to delineate an alternative. I don’t know whether he’d called it the Christian alternative, but I will. I’ve spent many words outlining it in detail, so let me close here by summarizing it by contrast to both Graeber and Carr.

Regarding Graeber, his radical constructivism fails to approach and attend to the world in its thisness, in its independence and integrity apart from and prior to us, and for this reason fails to receive it as the gift that it is. With this critique I think Carr is in agreement.

As for Carr, however, his own view falls between two stools. Theoretically, it lacks sufficient metaphysical grounding to anchor reality—both its thisness and its givenness—while practically, it terminates in a contemplation that is curved in on itself. Whether the result is modern in a Kantian mode or postmodern in a Graeberian mode matters little.

To be clear, my claim is not that Christians alone can or do attend to the world as it is or that Christian enchantment (what I’m calling the church’s doctrine of creation) is the only viable, coherent, or dominant version on offer. It is instead that Carr’s critique falls short in relation to a properly Christian account of creation, contemplation, and haecceity. And it is this account that I understand Sacasas to be explicating and defending in his recommendation of seeing the world as always already enchanted, if only we take the time to pay it the attention it deserves.

Burkeman’s atelic self-help

Oliver Burkeman’s new book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, is well worth your time. It is a splendid meditation on what it means to be a finite creature and what follows for making decisions, down to the most mundane, about how to spend one’s vanishingly small allotment of hours in this, our only world, with this, our only life. Like all Burkeman’s writing, the book is crisp, clear, well-researched, offered to the reader with a sincere smile of solidarity as well as a light touch. Like his other exercises in anti-self-help, Four Thousand Weeks is a gold mine for people obsessed with productivity, self-improvement, and endless to-do lists. That gold mine has a simple goal: for such people to cut it out. That is, to accept their limitations and to do what they are able, with pleasure, in the time they have with the people they love and the values they affirm. For the efficiency-obsessed, this message is doubtless a necessary tonic.

As I approached the end of the book, however, a single glaring weakness stuck out to me. It is a weakness shared by other entries in the genre today, including the very best. That weakness is simply put.

Neither Burkeman nor his other self-help authors can tell us the purpose or meaning of life.

Now, that may sound like rather unfair criticism. Who among us can articulate the purpose or meaning of life? Must it fit in a tweet? Be reducible to clickbait? How about the long title of a memoir?

But no, I’m not being unfair. Here’s why.

Burkeman wants his readers to see two things. First, that our lives are far shorter, far more limited, far less consequential, in a sense far less significant than we usually want to admit. We will almost certainly make no lasting difference in the world. The world will keep on spinning; the human race and/or the earth and/or the universe will endure perfectly well in our absence.

And that is true. But Burkeman goes on, second, to insist that this dose of reality is not (or should not be) depressing or frightening. Rather, it is a revelation, and a liberating one at that. It frees me from my narcissistic and false sense of my own self-importance. It bursts the bonds of my illusion of infinitude. Emancipated to see and accept my limits, I am enabled thereafter (and thereby) to live within them. And surely to live within the hard limits that bracket my life, whether or not I believe in them, is a recipe for happiness by comparison to the alternative.

But that “surely” is doing a lot of work in the previous sentence. Burkeman provides not one reason to suppose that human beings are built for happiness, living in accordance with our finitude or otherwise. Perhaps, instead, we have been programmed by natural selection to live a lie, the lie being our unbound immortality, and only so long as we believe in that are we (a) satisfied and/or (b) maximally productive. Perhaps we achieve great things only when we believe falsehoods about ourselves, our desires, or the world as a whole. Burkeman appears to be agnostic or atheist himself, which means that he must believe this to some extent. For most of civilization’s highest accomplishments—in music, art, architecture, and so on—have been conceived and produced by communities driven by zeal for God, for transcendence, for eternal life. Are we in a position to know, even and especially if we are secular believers in no intrinsic purpose apart from what remains after natural selection has done its work, that such ostensible illusions are not the requisite (false) premises for human and cultural greatness, not to mention happiness?

The answer is No, we are not. But there is more to say.

*

Burkeman rightly remarks on the pleasures of “atelic” practices. Walking in the woods, for example. There is no “point” to such a walk except the walk itself. It doesn’t lead to a product; there is no “winning” at such an endeavor. It is nothing but itself, and experiencing it is the only point of the practice: the telos is the doing of it, not something beyond or following it.

The problem is that Burkeman supposes, or assumes, that life is atelic: that the meaning of life lies not beyond itself, for it is its own point. The purpose of being human, on this view, is just the doing of it: to be human. But this doesn’t work, even on Burkeman’s own terms. There are at least three reasons why.

First, if an ordinary human being asks, What is the point or meaning of life?, it is inadequate to answer, The living of life. For the premise of the seeker’s question is that something beyond one’s life gives that life meaning, or purpose, or a point. So unless one is satisfied to reject the terms on which the question is asked, something more is required.

Second, then, Burkeman might have recourse to a constructivist answer: namely, that the purpose of one’s life is what one decides that purpose is. So the question remains meaningful but is turned back on the asker: Well, what do you value? But this answer fails in multiple respects. For one, it makes life’s meaning arbitrary, even relative. By the same token it suggests a fearsome causal sequence, as if the meaning of my life were what I value, and what I value is what makes it meaningful. In other words, my apparently random act of valuing (whether received from my genetic and social inheritance or chosen autonomously as a mature adult) carries an impossible burden: to create life-level significance where there is none in itself.

Does Burkeman, or anyone else in the self-help crowd, believe that ordinary human beings are capable not only of this purpose-conferring power but of self-consciously wielding it, that is, of engaging knowingly in making their lives teleological from within? As a matter of fact, while plenty of that crowd does believe this, I don’t think Burkeman does. But then, whence his confidence in essentially atelic normies self-bestowing meaning on their otherwise meaningless lives, underwritten by the active self-awareness that they are doing so while they are doing so?

This is not even to mention that, absent some antecedently given and shared human telos—some basic but substantive account of the goods and ends common to human life—“what I value” or “what I make the point of my existence” or “what I find meaningful in human life” or “what I want to spend my 4,000 weeks doing” may with perfect consistency be evil. Perhaps my self-constructed telos is serial murder, or ferocious avarice, or treating women like objects to be used and disposed of, or belittling children, or making the earth uninhabitable for future generations. When “the good” is a function solely of my own will, it is transmogrified into something called “value,” which is just another name for whatever I happen to want, prefer, or take pleasure in. The realm of “values” is paradise lost, which is to say, it is hell; as Milton has Satan declare:

All hope excluded thus, behold, instead
Of us, outcast, exiled, his new delight,
Mankind, created, and for him this World!
So farewell hope, and, with hope, farewell fear,
Farewell remorse! All good to me is lost;
Evil, be thou my Good: by thee at least
Divided empire with Heaven’s King I hold,
By thee, and more than half perhaps will reign;
As Man ere long, and this new World, shall know.

Third and finally, therefore, Burkeman has no answer or antidote to despair. It occurred to me, as I was writing this, that I’ve written about Burkeman once before, in a post responding to his review of a book by Jordan Peterson. I note the very same problem there. Burkeman seems genuinely not to countenance the seriousness of the problem of despair, precisely as a philosophical or theological problem. Imagine a young man who reads Burkeman’s book and finds himself persuaded that life is short, each of us is unimportant, and the whole shebang is without any meaning except what we bootstrap for ourselves. Far from embracing limits and finding, to his pleasant surprise, that he is even more economically productive than before, he kills himself instead. After all, he came to the conclusion that life is meaningless, and his self-assessment was just: he was neither impressive nor sufficiently special to manufacture enough meaning to get on with life without unmitigated pain, self-loathing, and anguish. Best to avoid that, all things considered. Whom will it affect, anyway? The universe goes on, without so much as a flinch.

There is not a doubt in my mind that such a scenario would fill Burkeman, who seems enormously decent and thoughtful, with sadness, compassion, and lament. Obviously he does not want anyone to commit suicide, not least someone who reads his book. He intends his message, as I said above, to be one of freedom, not bondage.

But I see no reason, given the parameters of his project, to forestall the judgment that atelic finitude is a cause for despair rather than joy. Why view limits as anything other than chains? Many people have seen them as just that, including some of the wisest of our writers and thinkers. Indeed more than a few of them, consistent with their principles, chose suicide as young or middle-aged men and women for this very reason: to escape the bonds of life, which held them in sway the way a despot might. Only by forcing death’s hand could they exert real agency in the sole respect that mattered: how and when one goes out, and on whose terms.

I don’t mean to pick on Burkeman (who in any case is safe and secure from being picked on by anyone, let alone me). Every other self-help and productivity guru is far, far more liable to the charges I’ve laid out than he is. But in another way he is the most guilty of this lacuna, because his book takes on board many of the ideas that despairing, existentialist, relativistic, constructivist, and nihilistic philosophers have proffered throughout the last two centuries. So he ought to know better. Yet he seems honest-to-God incurious about the fork in the road he constantly faces. The reader knows that he sees it as a fork, because whenever he comes to it, he reassures the reader, in assertive and consoling tones, that the annunciation of their atelic finitude is good news rather than bad. That implies the possibility of interpreting it as bad. Yet apart from his own confidence and kindness, we are provided no reasons to share his cheerful demeanor, at least no reasons that are not question-begging or that do not fall prey to the criticisms outlined above.

*

Two dissonances mark the book from beginning to end, and it is these dissonances that illuminate, not to say justify, the book’s failure to reckon with the terrifying possibility (a) that life is in fact meaningless or (b) that some, perhaps many, people, faced with a life made meaningful only by their own self-generated efforts, would judge it to be meaningless (whether or not they would be right to do so). Those dissonances are politics and religion.

Burkeman’s politics are clearly left-liberal, if of a moderate bent. Numerous times he admirably allows the convictions to which he has honestly come, about finitude and the unknown future and the relative unimportance of my or your life in the grand scheme of things, to override or modify political convictions he might once have believed or might, in the present, feel social pressure to maintain. Nevertheless, there are odd occasional interruptions of his otherwise steady emphasis on that one tiny sliver of a time-bound life you and I have to live. These interruptions almost always concern what he calls (always with nodding approval) “activism,” but especially climate change. It seems to me that he needs it to be true not only that the earth today is in dire straits (a premise I have no reason to doubt or dismiss) but also that urgent cooperative political action on its behalf, namely, making every effort to keep it from becoming worse, makes intuitive and even self-evident sense. But the truth is that it does not. Not, at least, on his own terms, terms he believes you and I may and ought to share. There are quite a few additional premises, premises that might call into question some of his own, required to cross that particular logical finish line. Yet he seems not to notice. Why?

I think it has something to do with his calmly but firmly non-religious beliefs. I call them “non-” rather than “anti-” religious because he doesn’t have an axe to grind against religion, and he is laudably open-minded about learning from religious and spiritual authors. (The self-help crowd may be alone among our public-facing and popular writers to read religious and theological texts seriously.) For example, I was delighted to see Burkeman quote Walter Brueggemann’s book on the Sabbath. He is also an avid reader of Buddhists and other adherents of Eastern, non-Abrahamic, and spiritual-not-religious thinkers. Again, I say, this is all to the good.

Burkeman himself, though, is non-religious, or at least presents himself as such. There is no God, at least one we may know or name. There is no afterlife. There is no soul, no eternity, no transcending the confines of this life, this world, these 4,000 weeks. Now Burkeman makes no arguments for this perspective, nor even alludes to them. He takes it for granted. So far as I can tell, he takes it for granted not only for himself or his readers but for all “modern” people living in the secular West.

That’s fine. He’s certainly not obliged to be a believer, or even to take seriously the counterclaims of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theology. But I do think the shortcomings of his book would be alleviated were he to do so. He would see that it is not obvious that a finitude absent God and ruled by death is a live worth living, much less a life capable of being made meaningful by one’s own labors. In this St. Paul and Nietzsche are of one mind. If Christ is not raised, Christians of all people are most to be pitied. Why? Because, as Paul says only a few verses later, death is the enemy of God—the “last” enemy, as he puts it—which means that death is the enemy of life, for God is the source and sustainer of life. Life without God is life without life. Or as St. Augustine puts it (anticipating Heidegger, but drawing a different conclusion), life defined by the inevitability and overawing power of death is not so much a life lived toward death as itself a living death. Which is no life at all.

That is why Burkeman is wrong to agree with the climate activist Derrick Jensen that life without hope is the only life we have, such that hopelessness is a spur to living life to the full rather than a sap to life’s vitality. To write such a thing is to betray a profound ignorance of actual human beings. Even if it were true—that is, even were it an undeniable and objective fact that there is no God, no hope, no meaning in life except what we construct of it and for it—it would be a recipe for despair for most of us, for all but the most heroic, most stoic, most self-possessed. Whether or not that tells us anything about the proposition’s likely truth or falsehood, to suppose that it is actually, really, believe-me-I’m-giving-it-to-you-straight a relief from unhappiness is pure folly. I share with Burkeman the premise that the truth sets one free. But I have grounds for believing it. He does not. His philosophy desperately wants, even needs, objective truth and personal happiness to be positively correlated. They may not be, however. The relationship between them might be inverted: the more of one the less of the other. Maybe there is no relationship at all. Best to face that uncomfortable fact, to admit it at the outset as an ineliminable question mark set next to all of one’s most cherished hopes.

But then, that would be to admit that hope is irreducible to the act of making sense of human life. And not only hope, but the irreducibly given. If we creatures who by nature not only pursue happiness but seek the truth, then we discover a telos within ourselves driving us beyond ourselves toward that which lies before, behind, and above us. The truth satisfies because and only because (a) it is other than us and (b) we were made to know it. That is, we were made for it. And it turns out that “it” is not an object but a person. St. Augustine was right all along; humans are teleological—rational, desiring, social, liturgical—creatures who, furthermore, cannot help themselves. We are not past saving, though. We just need to know where to look. Augustine knew. And so he prayed:

To praise You is the desire of man, a little piece of your creation. You stir man to take pleasure in praising You, because You have made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.

Angels

A few years back I had one of those serendipitous reading moments when all at once an unexpected theme or subject emerges from disparate and seemingly unrelated texts. The first was the Space Trilogy by C. S. Lewis; the second, the Catholic Catechism; the third, On the Orthodox Faith by St. John Damascene. The topic? Angels.

Space Trilogy

Lewis’s work is saturated with the angelic, and the adventures of Ransom in space (and on earth) are no different. Among Lewis’s many gifts, as both a novelist and a theological thinker, is his ability to depict supra-cosmic creaturely life in its necessary ineffable grandeur without becoming either saccharine or anthropomorphic. The angels aren’t like us only somewhat not. They exist on a wholly other level. The image that sticks with me, from one of the first two novels in the Space Trilogy, is Ransom’s impression that, though an angel manifesting to him inside a house is somehow or other present to his senses, the angel nevertheless appears aslant—as though the axis on which he stands were unrelated to the earth’s axis, or any other in this universe.

Angels are also present in The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce, among other works. My sense is that angels serve two functions in Lewis’s spiritual imagination. First, they represent and embody a rebuttal to a disenchanted, depopulated cosmos. From one angle, it’s a simple assertion: If God exists, then there’s nothing spookier, metaphysically speaking, for there to be other spiritual beings; it’s only natural. From another angle, it’s a powerful rebuttal: If angels exist, then the very notion of a mechanistic cosmos devoid of God and the soul and the moral law is bunk.

Second, Lewis rightly portrays the angelic in its double dimension: not only the good, but also the bad. He writes of demons, in other words. No reader of the Bible could plausibly imagine that whatever created life transcends us is only beautiful and glorious; it also includes the horrific and the wicked. It includes Satan and all his pomp. Lewis thinks that is morally and metaphysically interesting, which it is, and therefore worth writing about in an age like his (and ours), which it was (and is).

Catechism

Around the time I was making my way through the Space Trilogy, I read the following section in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It comes from Part I, Paragraph 5, titled “Heaven and Earth.” It’s part of an exposition of what Christians believe, following the Rule of Faith codified in the creedal narration of biblical teaching. Here’s what it says:

The Scriptural expression “heaven and earth” means all that exists, creation in its entirety. It also indicates the bond, deep within creation, that both unites heaven and earth and distinguishes the one from the other: “the earth” is the world of men, while “heaven” or “the heavens” can designate both the firmament and God’s own “place”—”our Father in heaven” and consequently the “heaven” too which is eschatological glory. Finally, “heaven” refers to the saints and the “place” of the spiritual creatures, the angels, who surround God.

The profession of faith of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) affirms that God “from the beginning of time made at once (simul) out of nothing both orders of creatures, the spiritual and the corporeal, that is, the angelic and the earthly, and then (deinde) the human creature, who as it were shares in both orders, being composed of spirit and body.”

I. THE ANGELS

The existence of angels—a truth of faith

The existence of the spiritual, non-corporeal beings that Sacred Scripture usually calls “angels” is a truth of faith. the witness of Scripture is as clear as the unanimity of Tradition.

Who are they?

St. Augustine says: “‘Angel’ is the name of their office, not of their nature. If you seek the name of their nature, it is ‘spirit’; if you seek the name of their office, it is ‘angel’: from what they are, ‘spirit’, from what they do, ‘angel.’“ With their whole beings the angels are servants and messengers of God. Because they “always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven” they are the “mighty ones who do his word, hearkening to the voice of his word.”

As purely spiritual creatures angels have intelligence and will: they are personal and immortal creatures, surpassing in perfection all visible creatures, as the splendor of their glory bears witness.

Christ “with all his angels”

Christ is the center of the angelic world. They are his angels: “When the Son of man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him. . . .” They belong to him because they were created through and for him: “for in him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities - all things were created through him and for him.” They belong to him still more because he has made them messengers of his saving plan: “Are they not all ministering spirits sent forth to serve, for the sake of those who are to obtain salvation?”

Angels have been present since creation and throughout the history of salvation, announcing this salvation from afar or near and serving the accomplishment of the divine plan: they closed the earthly paradise; protected Lot; saved Hagar and her child; stayed Abraham’s hand; communicated the law by their ministry; led the People of God; announced births and callings; and assisted the prophets, just to cite a few examples. Finally, the angel Gabriel announced the birth of the Precursor and that of Jesus himself.

From the Incarnation to the Ascension, the life of the Word incarnate is surrounded by the adoration and service of angels. When God “brings the firstborn into the world, he says: ‘Let all God’s angels worship him.’” Their song of praise at the birth of Christ has not ceased resounding in the Church’s praise: “Glory to God in the highest!” They protect Jesus in his infancy, serve him in the desert, strengthen him in his agony in the garden, when he could have been saved by them from the hands of his enemies as Israel had been. Again, it is the angels who “evangelize” by proclaiming the Good News of Christ’s Incarnation and Resurrection. They will be present at Christ’s return, which they will announce, to serve at his judgement.

The angels in the life of the Church

In the meantime, the whole life of the Church benefits from the mysterious and powerful help of angels.

In her liturgy, the Church joins with the angels to adore the thrice-holy God. She invokes their assistance (in the Roman Canon’s Supplices te rogamus. . . [“Almighty God, we pray that your angel . . .”]; in the funeral liturgy’s In Paradisum deducant te angeli . . . [“May the angels lead you into Paradise . . .”]). Moreover, in the “Cherubic Hymn” of the Byzantine Liturgy, she celebrates the memory of certain angels more particularly (St. Michael, St. Gabriel, St. Raphael, and the guardian angels).

From its beginning to death human life is surrounded by their watchful care and intercession. “Beside each believer stands an angel as protector and shepherd leading him to life.” Already here on earth the Christian life shares by faith in the blessed company of angels and men united in God.

The claim that the existence of angels is de fide—a revealed truth of the faith incumbent on all Christians to believe—struck me like a thunderbolt. And yet the rehearsal of the witness of Scripture and sacred tradition makes clear the warrant for the assertion. Angels are everywhere in the biblical story. And as St. Luke knew well, they show up at the biggest moments. They are, as the Catechism teaches, Christ’s own angels, the heavenly messengers and soldiers of Israel’s Messiah. And they aid the church on earth in various ways, largely invisible and mysterious, but nevertheless as our guardians and helpers and, ultimately, our fellow servants of the Lord. They join us in worship. Or rather, we join them.

The Damascene

The very same week, perhaps even the same day, that I read that section of the Catechism I read the following from St. John of Damascus; it’s found in Book II, chapter 3 of An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, which was written in the early to mid eighth century:

[God] is Himself the Maker and Creator of the angels: for He brought them out of nothing into being and created them after His own image, an incorporeal race, a sort of spirit or immaterial fire: in the words of the divine David, He makes His angels spirits, and His ministers a flame of fire: and He has described their lightness and the ardor, and heat, and keenness and sharpness with which they hunger for God and serve Him, and how they are borne to the regions above and are quite delivered from all material thought.

An angel, then, is an intelligent essence, in perpetual motion, with free-will, incorporeal, ministering to God, having obtained by grace an immortal nature: and the Creator alone knows the form and limitation of its essence. But all that we can understand is, that it is incorporeal and immaterial. For all that is compared with God Who alone is incomparable, we find to be dense and material. For in reality only the Deity is immaterial and incorporeal.

The angel's nature then is rational, and intelligent, and endowed with free-will, changeable in will, or fickle. For all that is created is changeable, and only that which is uncreated is unchangeable. Also all that is rational is endowed with free-will. As it is, then, rational and intelligent, it is endowed with free-will: and as it is created, it is changeable, having power either to abide or progress in goodness, or to turn towards evil.

It is not susceptible of repentance because it is incorporeal. For it is owing to the weakness of his body that man comes to have repentance.

It is immortal, not by nature but by grace. For all that has had beginning comes also to its natural end. But God alone is eternal, or rather, He is above the Eternal: for He, the Creator of times, is not under the dominion of time, but above time.

They are secondary intelligent lights derived from that first light which is without beginning, for they have the power of illumination; they have no need of tongue or hearing, but without uttering words they communicate to each other their own thoughts and counsels.

Through the Word, therefore, all the angels were created, and through the sanctification by the Holy Spirit were they brought to perfection, sharing each in proportion to his worth and rank in brightness and grace.

They are circumscribed: for when they are in the Heaven they are not on the earth: and when they are sent by God down to the earth they do not remain in the Heaven. They are not hemmed in by walls and doors, and bars and seals, for they are quite unlimited. Unlimited, I repeat, for it is not as they really are that they reveal themselves to the worthy men to whom God wishes them to appear, but in a changed form which the beholders are capable of seeing. For that alone is naturally and strictly unlimited which is uncreated. For every created thing is limited by God Who created it.

Further, apart from their essence they receive the sanctification from the Spirit: through the divine grace they prophesy : they have no need of marriage for they are immortal.

Seeing that they are minds they are in mental places , and are not circumscribed after the fashion of a body. For they have not a bodily form by nature, nor are they extended in three dimensions. But to whatever post they may be assigned, there they are present after the manner of a mind and energize, and cannot be present and energize in various places at the same time.

Whether they are equals in essence or differ from one another we know not. God, their Creator, Who knows all things, alone knows. But they differ from each other in brightness and position, whether it is that their position is dependent on their brightness, or their brightness on their position: and they impart brightness to one another, because they excel one another in rank and nature. And clearly the higher share their brightness and knowledge with the lower.

They are mighty and prompt to fulfill the will of the Deity, and their nature is endowed with such celerity that wherever the Divine glance bids them there they are straightway found. They are the guardians of the divisions of the earth: they are set over nations and regions, allotted to them by their Creator: they govern all our affairs and bring us succor. And the reason surely is because they are set over us by the divine will and command and are ever in the vicinity of God.

With difficulty they are moved to evil, yet they are not absolutely immovable: but now they are altogether immovable, not by nature but by grace and by their nearness to the Only Good.

They behold God according to their capacity, and this is their food.

They are above us for they are incorporeal, and are free of all bodily passion, yet are not passionless: for the Deity alone is passionless.

They take different forms at the bidding of their Master, God, and thus reveal themselves to men and unveil the divine mysteries to them.

They have Heaven for their dwelling-place, and have one duty, to sing God's praise and carry out His divine will.

Moreover, as that most holy, and sacred, and gifted theologian, Dionysius the Areopagite , says, All theology, that is to say, the holy Scripture, has nine different names for the heavenly essences. These essences that divine master in sacred things divides into three groups, each containing three. And the first group, he says, consists of those who are in God's presence and are said to be directly and immediately one with Him, viz., the Seraphim with their six wings, the many-eyed Cherubim and those that sit in the holiest thrones. The second group is that of the Dominions, and the Powers, and the Authorities; and the third, and last, is that of the Rulers and Archangels and Angels.

Some, indeed, like Gregory the Theologian, say that these were before the creation of other things. He thinks that the angelic and heavenly powers were first and that thought was their function. Others, again, hold that they were created after the first heaven was made. But all are agreed that it was before the foundation of man. For myself, I am in harmony with the theologian. For it was fitting that the mental essence should be the first created, and then that which can be perceived, and finally man himself, in whose being both parts are united.

But those who say that the angels are creators of any kind of essence whatever are the mouth of their father, the devil. For since they are created things they are not creators. But He Who creates and provides for and maintains all things is God, Who alone is uncreated and is praised and glorified in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Doesn’t that fill you with awe and delight? St. John’s quotes and references could lead us down further paths: to the Pseudo-Denys and St. Gregory Nazianzen, backward to St. Augustine and forward to St. Anselm and St. Thomas Aquinas, even on to Karl Barth, who has a hefty angelology for a modern theologian.

The point I drew from this exegetical serendipity at the time, and draw now, is rather plain. Prior to reading these texts I had the theoretical knowledge of angels: I could have told you what the theological tradition says about them. But to read these two estimable authorities devote such loving attention to them, in tandem with Lewis’s novelistic rendering, brought home to me at a deeper level—in my heart, in my soul—just how wonderful as well as important the angelic is to the life of the church and the testimony of the gospel. And ever since I’ve noticed my hackles are raised, my antennae buzz, when the over-educated but under-informed among my fellow believers, but primarily among pastors, roll their eyes at ostensibly silly and outdated things like “angels and demons.” (Usually prefaced by that absurd and meaningless modifier, “literal.”) I do my best not to be That Academic who flies in to correct and rebuke. But it gets under my skin. For the condescension is wholly unearned. It’s not as though an archeologist or astronomer discovered the nonexistence of angels in 1927. They are no more subject to empirical investigation than God. Yet true-blue believers in God in the year of our Lord 2021 look down their noses on every other Christian, past and present, themselves excepted as if it were everyone else, and not themselves, who are the naive, the unenlightened. But, again, such haughty know-it-alls didn’t arrive at a considered conclusion about angelic superstition by a process of reasoning. They did so as a function of their class and education; possibly through half-skimming a now-forgotten but once-faddish academic in grad school.

To which I say: Get over yourself. There’s nothing culturally hip about being a Christian who believes all the spooky stuff—God, resurrection, incarnation, miracles, et al—minus angels. You don’t get any societal cache for it, even if it makes you feel set apart from the losers and boobs who read the Bible “literally.” Face it: You’re one of us. You’re among the shabby and disreputable, at whom the well-to-do look down their noses. Embrace it! It’s okay. It’s part of the deal.

You have our blessing. Permission granted. Believe in angels. One day you might even find that you need one.

Incomplete theses on God's will, providence, and evil

Last week, in my upper-level majors course on systematic theology, the topic was providence. We read classical accounts of divine and human agency and discussed the nature of God's will. I wrote up some provisional, incomplete theses to help guide them through the thicket. I'm sharing them below, partly as an aid to others, partly as an invitation to be corrected by my betters—this area is simply not my specialty. St. Thomas, pray for this theologian's poor soul!

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Affirmations

1. God, as the sole creator and author of creation ex nihilo, is solely responsible for the ongoing existence and well-being of the creation.
2. God is sovereign, omnipotent, omniscient, and good.
3. God is Lord of creation.
4. God upholds creation as a whole and in all its parts at all times, without ceasing.
5. God underlies, informs, and enables any and all activity in creation: nothing happens apart from God; no creature can act apart from God’s sovereign will.
6. God conducts creatures and creation as a whole toward their proximate and final ends, in this world and the next.
7. Nothing exists or happens outside the scope of God’s will.
8. Sin and evil are contrary to God’s will; sinful deeds and evil events occur.
9. God does not will sin, nor is God the author of evil.
10. When and where sin and evil are found in creation, God permits it.
11. God is able to bring good from evil and sin, including when they are intended by creatures to obstruct God’s purposes.
12. In the end, God will triumph over all sin and evil, and they will be no more in the new creation.

Implications

1. We do not know why God permits sin and evil.
2. On its face, a sinful deed or evil happening is a surd: meaningless in itself; neither sin nor evil is ever (really, deeply, ultimately) good.
3. The experience of suffering or loss is not itself necessarily sin or evil.
4. God may therefore actively will (rather than permit) our suffering in this world.
5. “Everything happens for a reason” is either true in an incomprehensible way (where that “reason” is Christ, who will reveal all to us only in glory) or false in a facile and pastorally disastrous way (where the starvation of children has a readily intelligible reason we can grasp in the moment).
6. The relationship between God’s will (as primary cause) and my will (as secondary cause) when I engage in sin (say, lying) is mysterious and inscrutable: somehow my willing as a free agent in bondage to sin possesses some deficiency (or, rather, lacks something necessary) that keeps it from fully performing righteous activity in full in accordance with God’s will and command.
7. So that: 
1. We may say that God wills in all my willing, but...
2. ...we may not say that God wills the sin I invariably will.

Ian McFarland on the doctrine of creation from nothing

"In short, if the doctrine of creation from nothing means ... that even prior to being created, creatures are not absolutely nothing insofar as they are grounded in the Word, it also implies that creatures, as created, are absolutely nothing apart from God. The richness of divinity not only lies behind creation's diversity as its presupposition (nothing but God), but also is an active presence that underlies and sustains every feature of that diversity at every moment of its existence (nothing apart from God). Not can this perspective be charged with compromising the integrity of creatures' relationship with God, as though that which has absolutely no existence part from God is reduced to the status of a puppet. Once again, the Trinitarian framework of the Christian doctrine of creation is crucial here, since the existence of creatures is rooted in the Word, whose very being establishes, within the divine life itself, a set of relationships whose constituent terms (viz., Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) also have no existence apart from God. From this perspective, the idea that ontological independence from God is a necessary condition of genuine relationship (and more particularly, of love) fails to reckon with the character of God's own being as relationship."

—Ian A. McFarland, From Nothing: A Theology of Creation (WJK Press, 2014), p. 94