Piranesi and Decreation

Last month I read Piranesi, Susanna Clarke’s belated follow-up to her best-selling Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Piranesi is as wonderful as advertised, a bona fide mystery box of pure prose, genuine wonder, and spiritual imagination. It’s also best to go in without knowing anything, so unspoiled readers who prefer to remain that way ought to stop here.

Much has been made about the theological character of the House, or the World, in which Piranesi finds himself. And rightly so: Clarke invites the comparisons, through interviews, the epigraph from Lewis, and the text itself. Is the House heaven? the divine mind? the realm of the Forms? an in-between place a la the Wood Between the Worlds? something else? (The TVA?)

One clue to the Nature of the Place—Clarke’s liberal capitalizations, like Katherine Sonderegger’s, are contagious—is that Piranesi, like all long-time inhabits of the House, slowly forgets himself. That is, he forgets earth, terrestrial history, his own history, even his name. He lives in a kind of utterly un-self-conscious perfect present of awareness of, and transparency to, the House in all its many-roomed splendor. His innocence and joy are childlike in their unadorned simplicity. Even when he contemplates what one would consider moral harm, he turns over the idea in his mind not so much as a moral quandary as an unthinkable question from which anyone would recoil.

As I read the book, this notion of the loss of self-consciousness in heaven brought to mind Paul Griffiths’ book Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures. (I wrote about the book a few years ago for Marginalia.) Griffiths argues there, as an admitted item of speculation, that beatified rational creatures—i.e., you and I—will not, in heaven, be self-conscious. We will be conscious, but what we will be conscious of is nothing less or more than the living and perfect and perfectly simple triune God. Saturated in his rapturous glory, we will gladly forget ourselves as we see, finally, face to face, our loving and gracious Creator, who is himself the highest good, ours and all creation’s, he who is beauty itself. But it is important to see that, for Griffiths, we will not choose to forget ourselves, as an intentional act of volition, thus retaining something like a property of self-consciousness. We will no longer be self-aware. And this condition of rapt awareness of nothing but the radiant light of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit will be final, unchanging. We will forever be, as the hymn has it, “lost in wonder, love, and praise.” We will forever be, in a word, happy.

Are these two depictions of heavenly self-forgetfulness the same idea, rendered in different modes? Or are they distinct? And either way, are they right?

I don’t have much to say on the question of their rightness. The matter is wholly speculative; we do not and cannot know, so the best we have to go on is the criterion convenientia, that is, the fittingness of the speculative claim to those matters about which we can claim to some measure of theological knowledge. And here Griffiths, it seems to me, is pushing back, appropriately, on modern trends in both philosophical and theological anthropology and eschatology. In the former, there is far too much emphasis on our cognitive abilities, on our self-transcendence through self-consciousness. In the latter, popular as well as scholarly pictures of the new heavens and new earth often appear as though life as we now find it (at least in the industrialized liberal West) will basically continue on—minus suffering, death, and procreation, plus God. And that is positively silly. The startling strangeness of Griffiths’ speculations does good work in helping us to shed some of those projections and illusions.

As for Clarke’s House, I think there is substantial overlap between Piranesi’s worshipful forgetfulness and Griffiths’ forgetful worship. Both see the human as basically homo adorans; self-consciousness is secondary to a teleology of praise. We are doxological creatures ordered to the Good. When we find it, we revel and glory in it, which elevates rather than denigrates us. Clarke understands this, and accordingly her ideological foe in the book is scientism—not science, properly conceived and practiced—in which the human quest for total mastery and absolute knowledge becomes an idol. “The Other” is incapable of worship, and therefore he is incapable of knowledge. He cannot know because he cannot see; he cannot see because he cannot delight; and he cannot delight because he refuses to be a creature, limited and limiting as that status is. He will not be a supplicant of the House. This makes him an idolater, curved in on the idol of his own self. Consequently the waters of the World rise and drown him in death.

To both Griffiths and Clarke, however, I want to pose a question. Apart from awareness of ourselves as selves, it seems to me a nonnegotiable feature of the life of the saints in heaven that they do not lose their identities there. And if not their identities, then neither do they lose their histories. Mary is and always shall be the Mother of God, because on earth she bore Jesus in her womb. That is an irreducible and inextirpable fact of who Mary was and therefore of who she is and never will not be—precisely in heaven.

If that is so, then Piranesi’s slow forgetting of himself, including his past and his name, seems somehow unfitting. It is not merely that he is “forgetful” of himself, the way a lover is. He forgets himself, and his history is thereby erased. He must be brought back to himself by “16,” an emissary from his world, which is to say, from his forgotten past. The novel is thus patient of a reading that sees the House in less positive, more sinister terms; one might depict it as a kind of black hole, or parasite, that slowly saps the self of the self. Or, to put it theologically, the House would here stand in for a picture of God as competitive with creatures—for him to increase, we must decrease—by contrast with the classical view, which understands the glory of God and the well-being of creatures to be positively, not negatively, correlated. The more of one, the more of the other: the more I find myself in God and he in me, the more I become truly myself. (Aslan grows as Lucy grows.) God’s presence in me, far from crowding “me” out, expands and deepens my self, for my self is nothing other than his good creation, and it finds its ultimate good in him alone.

That is why the saints are known in heaven by their names and hence by their histories. Dante understands this. St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure can sing praises of each other and of the founder of the other’s order (St. Dominic and St. Francis, respectively) only because each of them remains, in heaven, who he was on Earth, yet now purged of every taint of sin and death and transfigured in Christ by the Spirit to the glory of the Father.

In sum, whether or not I will know myself as an “I” in heaven, you will know me as the “I” I am, at least, the “I” I am in Christ; and vice versa. On its face, then, it seems unfitting for that intersubjective beatified knowledge of each individual as the person she is in Christ, with the unique and irreducible history she had in Christ, to be coextensive with a kind of self-erasure for the person in question: as though you will know I am Brad, but I will not; as though we all will know St. Francis as St. Francis, but he will not—even when we glory him in song, or rather, glory Christ in him through song. Will the words mean nothing to him even, or precisely, when the chorus resounds with his very name?

The paradigm of the saints in heaven, after all, is Christ. Christ reigns in heaven as the enthroned Lord, to be sure, but equally as the One who was crucified. (Just as Mary is Theotokos henceforth and for all eternity, so it Jesus Mary’s son.) Nor does the incarnation cease, as though he sloughs off his skin once “returned” to heaven, for the union of divine and human natures in his person is everlasting. Suffice it to say, then, that Jesus knows who he is in heaven, when we sing of him and when we do not (though that “do not” does not obtain in heaven by definition); the name and history of Jesus are a condition of there being a heaven for beatified rational creatures in the first place: and that name and its history are what are praised, what will be praised, world without end.

That should give us a hint here. Whatever the status of our self-awareness in heaven, not only our selves, but our names and histories will not be struck through, much less forgotten. They will continue to constitute us as us, the great “us” of the bride of Christ. Piranesi, in the true heaven, would be just as dumbstruck in delighted self-forgetfulness as he is in Clarke’s novel. But he would still know his name, not least if addressed by the Voice of the House or by one of its fellow happy inhabitants. The difference is that the occasion of hearing his name would not rouse him to jealousy or confusion or dissatisfaction. It would function more like an echo, a reiteration of the great Rule that guides his life: The beauty of the House is immeasurable; its kindness infinite. It would function, in other words, like a living Amen.

Anonymous Americans

Perhaps someone else has made this connection before, but it seems to me that there is a secularized form of Rahner's so-called "anonymous Christians" at work in American political discourse. It has right and left variations, but the theme is the same: In principle, the world is always already America; persons from other places, citizens of other nations, are Americans in embryo: the potential merely needs to be made actual. In this way non-Americans are in fact anonymous Americans, Americans without knowing it, Americans of the heart: related to and defined by America simply in virtue of who they are and how they live. And though they may lack this knowledge, we Americans, we explicit, public Americans—we know it on their behalf.

On the right, this takes the form of speaking as if other countries are good places to live just to the extent that they approximate the American way of life; so that any person or family beyond America's borders would, if given the chance to become American (without cost, risk, etc.), take the opportunity in a heartbeat. The American polity lies at the end of history, toward which horizon all the nations stream to receive instruction and pay homage.

On the left, this takes the form of speaking as if people from other countries are, in an almost metaphysical sense, already American, and thus owed, indeed entitled, to all the civic, social, legal, and other rights and privileges bestowed upon "official" Americans. If segments of the right envision open borders for the sake of freer movement of ideas and capital, segments of the left imagine open borders nominally as the elimination of the divisions enacted in the nation-state system, but effectively as the Americanization of the world: all are Americans, proleptically speaking; it just so happens that only a small portion of them have formal documentation to prove it at the moment.

No wonder that Americanists right and left so often unite in foreign adventurism, whether of the imperial or the humanitarian variety. Anonymous Americans around the world are living under conditions of great deprivation, definitionally speaking: they are expats of an ontological variety, exiled in advance of the great homecoming. No wonder, too, that the adventurism takes on the veneer of the Great Commission. Not only evangelization but eschatological in-gathering is the driving vision, the basis and the motivation for actions abroad rooted in faith, that is, the substance of things hoped for, the knowledge of things unseen.

On the last day, the great sorting will occur. But instead of Matthew 25, more often it is Isaiah 2, Micah 4, and Revelation 22 that fill out the picture of the End. The dazzling light of final freedom will disclose the hearts of the people, and the people's hearts will be, to a person, American. Even if—especially if—they never had a clue.

Paul Griffiths on the liturgy anticipating heaven

"[A]ttending to the liturgy is the closest we can get, here below, to attending to heaven. In examining it, we approach as close as we can get to examining the life of the saints in heaven as it is once they are resurrected and enjoying both sensory and nonsensory modes of knowing and seeing the LORD. This is because most of the elements of the life of the world to come are present in nuce in the worshiping assembly: the ascended LORD is present in the flesh; the gathered people is an assembly of those who know and love him as he is, at least to some degree; and the fabric of the event is woven from the threads of love exchanged—love given preveniently by the LORD, whose creature the church is, and love given responsively by the people, who have collectively and individually been brought into being by the LORD. The leitmotif of the words and actions of the liturgical gathering is adoration. All this is also true of the gathering of the resurrected saints around the LORD's ascended flesh in heaven."

—Paul Griffiths, Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures (Baylor Press, 2014), pp. 67-68

On the church's eternality and "church as mission"

"The Church is Catholic, that is, universal. First, it is universal in place, because it is worldwide. This is contrary to the error of the Donatists. For the Church is a congregation of the faithful; and since the faithful are in every part of the world, so also is the Church: 'Your faith is spoken of in the whole world' [Rm 1:8]. And also: 'Go into the whole world and preach the gospel to every creature' [Mk 16:15]. Long ago, indeed, God was known only in Judea; now, however, He is known throughout the entire world. The Church has three parts: one is on earth, one is in heaven, and one is in purgatory.

"Second, the Church is universal in regard to all the conditions of mankind; for no exceptions are made, neither master nor servant, neither man nor woman: 'Neither bond nor free; there is neither male nor female' [Gal 3:28].

"Third, it is universal in time. Some have said that the Church will exist only up to a certain time. But this is false, for the Church began to exist in the time of Abel and will endure up to the end of the world: 'Behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world' [Mt 28:20]. Moreover, even after the end of the world, it will continue to exist in heaven [Sed post consummationem saeculi remanebit in caelo]."

This is Thomas Aquinas's all too brief discussion of the church's catholicity in his exposition of the Apostles' Creed. Yesterday on Twitter I quoted the last section, on the eternality or temporal catholicity of the church, with some comments following it. Specifically, I wrote, "This text is ground zero for returning to the Bible to counter the argument that the church—God's people— is constituted by mission."

I got a lot of helpful replies, mostly pushing back or challenging my challenge to the claim that the church is constituted by mission. As I said later, the tweets weren't intended primarily to be polemical; I was preparing to teach Thomas's text in class, and so I jotted some thoughts down on Twitter before heading off. And though John Flett's The Witness of God is on my shelf, I've yet to read it, so I can't speak substantively to where our disagreements might lie, if anywhere.

But let me float a few questions to the church-as-mission folks, for greater clarity of understanding, at least on my side of things.

First, what motivates the claim that mission constitutes the church? Or, put differently, what are the stakes? One reply requested a less polarizing approach to this question. My response was and is this: I'm trying to lower the volume in our ecclesiological rhetoric. My sense is that, in recent decades and perhaps the last century, talk about mission has become over-inflated relative to its material importance to the doctrine of the church as such. What I'd like to say, simply, is: Mission is a crucial feature of the church, though it neither defines nor constitutes it. Or perhaps: Mission constitutes the church militant, but not the church triumphant. My question is: What would be lost if we say "the mission is consummated with the kingdom's coming in full, yet the church endures in the new creation as God's elect and holy people," etc., etc.?

Second, is there biblical support for the church's "sending" being something other than or beyond what is spelled out in Matthew 28:19-20 and Acts 1:8? That is, is God's people "sent" prior to Christ's sending of the apostles (and the apostolic church) or following his second advent? Where in the Bible suggests that?

Third, all the counter-proposals I saw (on Twitter: again, Flett excepted) very quickly became metaphorical in the extreme and/or reductive to the point of emptying the concept. That is, "sending" is interpreted in terms of Gregory of Nyssa's epektasis, the never-ending journey into the infinite life of the triune God's eternal, inexhaustible fellowship. (My friend Myles Werntz posed this idea.) Well, okay ... but what work is "sending" doing there that epektasis isn't already doing? Why hold on to "sending" when we have another term or concept that is perfectly adequate to the job? Others suggested something like the church's never-ending task in the eschaton of worshiping God or testifying to one another about God's grace and love. Sure, those are traditionally (and biblically) the description of what it is we'll be doing in the kingdom; but what conceptual connection exists between those activities and "being sent"? All kinds of descriptions of life in resurrected glory exist in the church's tradition, and few to none include or require language of "sending." (Cf. Dante's Paradiso.) So what, again, does "sending" add materially to the description? "Sending" cannot and should be reduced to "asked/called to do stuff"/"tasked with actions from and for God." Why not advert, say, to cultic language, in which we will all be priests, ministering in the one temple of the one new world of God? You don't need "sending" language for that.

So on and so forth. But my fourth and last query gets to the heart of the matter, I think, which is this: My push-back on church-as-mission is meant, theologically, to de-center ecclesiology that (a) makes Israel secondary or subordinate to the missionary church and/or (b) conceives of election and peoplehood as essentially instrumental, coordinated as a means to some greater end. My counter—and this will be the article, God willing, I write sometime in the next few years—is that divine election to peoplehood is in part an end in itself. Israel is called to be holy, set apart from the nations, to witness to the divine glory and grace, and to be a divine blessing to the nations: yes and amen. But Israel is also called by God simply out of God's inexplicable, unpredictable love for Israel, and therefore out of God's bottomless desire to bless the children of Abraham, the friend of God. Pentecost and ekklesia open up the people of God to the gentiles through faith in Israel's Messiah, and indeed, that was always God's intention for the world; hence the mission to the nations, Christ's sending of the apostles to every corner of the earth as his witnesses. But when the mission is completed—when the gospel has been proclaimed to every nation and people under the sun, when "the full number of the gentiles has come in" (Rom 11:25)—then all Israel will be saved, and will live as God's people under God's reign in God's new creation, no longer sent, but gathered in the city of God where God dwells with them, they as his people, he as their God. But "peoplehood" will not be defunct as a concept in the same way as "mission," for the saints in glory will not be a mere aggregate of individuals, but the corporate bride of Christ, the holy Israel of YHWH, from everlasting to everlasting.

Those are the stakes as I see them. But what say y'all?