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.

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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.

What does an idol promise?

In a word, an idol promises blessing, but in general a false blessing or, at most, a mixed or penultimate blessing: either a poison pill, or a Faustian bargain, or a temporal good enjoyed for a limited time only.

I am tempted to say that an idol cannot bless, cannot impart gifts at all. But that cannot be true simpliciter. If, sometimes, demons lie behind idols, then it stands to reason that, as living beings, demons can exchange gifts for sacrifices, blessings for devotion. All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me. The false note is not that Satan’s offer is a lie without remainder but that, as always, it is intermixed with the truth; whether or not Satan can give what he offers, worship is due God alone regardless.

Others have done serious work on this topic, so I expect to be corrected in what I omit here. But on first thought, it seems to me that idols promise at least four concrete types of blessing, whether or not (like Satan) they can deliver on any of them:

1. Safety

2. Power

3. A future

4. A name

I almost included a fifth, “Beatitude,” but my instinct is that happiness is, in this context, a generic category that calls for concrete specification. In other words, each of these four types of blessing is a species of what makes humans happy, what they seek from the gods when they petition them, and so beatitude and blessing are two sides of the same coin.

What do I mean by these four variations on blessing?

By “safety,” I mean protection or deliverance from some opposing force or feared power beyond human control. Not all religion deals with salvation, but much of it does; furthermore, what one is saved from is not always known with exactitude, but remains formless and unnamed: whatever evil being or bad luck that keeps crops from growing, and rain from falling, and roofs from holding, and babies from being conceived, and marriages from lasting, and money from stretching, and so on.

By “power,” I mean the move from defense to offense. Here an idol offers not a protective wall but a weapon, not a shield but a sword, not preservation of life but the means of taking it. This is where, on an anthropologist’s account, religion becomes magic or superstition; what strength or force I lack by nature or circumstances, the gods provide in exchange for piety, prayer, or sacrifice.

By “a future,” I mean the promise of security and endurance beyond my life or the probable duration of my tribe—whether my household, clan, race, nation, or progeny. The biblical term is inheritance. This blessing is a ward against futility: the futility of finitude, time, and death, which threaten continuously to make a waste of every human life, not just your efforts or mine but all of them together.

By “a name,” I mean one’s reputation, or legacy, or heritage. Bound up with but not synonymous with one’s lineage and future descendants—the perpetual future of one’s nominal fame—this blessing increases one’s magnificence, elevates one’s personage, inflates the reverence and respect others owe the very mention of who you are and what you have done. The purported god promises a hallowing or halo effect, not just in years to come but here and now: People will recognize your name and [tremble with fear/shake with envy/give thanks/fall to their knees].

These, at least, are what came to mind yesterday morning, sitting in church. An idol promises its petitioners safety, power, a future, and/or a name. Unsurprisingly, these are echoes of God’s promises to Abraham and to his seed, the Messiah, and their fulfillment in Him and extension to all are in Him. Do idols make promises that God does not, or vice versa? Are there promises typical of false gods that I am missing? I welcome others’ thoughts.

Scialabba, Jacobs, and God's existence: where the real problem lies

Alan Jacobs is right about George Scialabba's latest review essay, in this case of John Gray's new book, Seven Types of Atheism, for The New Republic. Scialabba is always great, but his theological instincts fail him here. As Jacobs observes, Scialabba wants to speak up for nonbelievers who wish God—if he does in fact exist—would simply make himself known in some inarguably clear way. But since, apparently, he does not and has not, that in itself is evidence that no such thing as an all-wise, all-good, all-powerful deity exists; or that, if he does, our knowledge or beliefs about or relationship with God is a negligible matter, and all will be sorted out in the hereafter.

Jacobs takes Scialabba to task for both the unthinking glibness on display (frivolous speculation about our ancient ancestors; writing contemporary mystics and charismatics out of the picture; etc.) and the more serious inattentiveness to what a truly incontrovertible divine self-revelation would mean. Jacobs uses the work of David Bentley Hart to remind us just what we mean, or rather do not mean, when we use the word "God," and how Scialabba is functionally reverting to a mythical picture of god-as-super-creature who yet inexplicably remains opaque to us here below. Jacobs then (being Jacobs) draws us to a speech of Satan's in Paradise Lost, bringing the existential point home.

Let me piggy-back on Jacobs' critique and suggest an even deeper problem with Scialabba's musings, one I've reflected on before at some length. The problem is twofold.

On the one hand, it cannot be emphasized enough that the kind of skeptical atheism that Scialabba sees himself standing up for here is vanishingly small in human history, both past and present. So far as we can tell, nearly all human beings who have ever lived have taken it for granted that reality is more than the empiricists suggest; that there is some Power or Goodness or Being that transcends the visible and tangible, preceding and encompassing it; that human life, though brief and sometimes terribly burdened, carries more weight and has more depth than those features would suggest on their face, and that it may or will in one way or another outlast its short span on this earth. Even today, the overwhelming majority of people on this globe "believe" in what we in the West call divinity or practice what we in the West call religion. The anxious queries of skeptical atheists, while worth taking seriously at an intellectual and emotional level, could not be less representative of humanity in general's relationship with "the God question."

In short, the sort of defeaters Scialabba offers as evidence of God's lack of self-revelation bear little to no relation to the average person's thoughts or experience regarding God's existence. Most people don't need God to write his name on the sun. In a sense, he already has.

Such a response doesn't go very far, though, in responding to Scialabba's true concern. Perhaps most human beings, past and present, are just not philosophically rigorous or serious enough to ask the tough questions that inexorably lead to atheism. Or perhaps it's not "religious belief" in general but the challenge of revelational certainty, i.e., which religion/deity to believe in, that's at issue. Here's what's most deeply wrong with his argument then.

The Christian tradition does not teach, nor has it ever taught, that the most important thing to do is believe that God exists, or even that the Christian God exists. Instead, the most important thing is to love this God with all one's heart, soul, mind, and strength. What God wants from you—demands, in fact—is not affirmation of a proposition about himself or mental assent to the facticity of his being. Rather, it is the totality of your being, the absolute and unconditional lifelong allegiance of your very self. What God wants is faithfulness.

And it turns out, according to the painfully consistent testimony of Holy Scripture, that faithfulness is a lot harder than faith. By which I mean: total devotion to God is far more difficult than belief that God exists. As the epistle of James says, the demons believe that God is one—and shudder. Israel at Sinai doesn't lack the belief that YHWH exists; there's evidence aplenty for that: lightning and thunder and a great cloud and the divine voice and Lord's glory; everything Scialabba wants from God! But what do the Israelites do? They make a golden calf and worship a false god. In doing so, they do not subtract belief in YHWH; they add to that belief "belief" in other gods. Which is to say, they add to worship of the one God the worship of that which is not God.

Our problem, therefore, isn't belief that God exists in the face of a thousand reasonable doubts. Our problem is idolatry. When the one true God comes near to human beings, when they hear his voice and see his face, they know it to be true—and they turn away. They know God—and sin. They believe "in" God—and disobey him. They lack doubt—and hurt others.

For Christians, this problem is illustrated most of all in the Gospels. Time and again the apostles see with their own eyes the identity and deeds of the incarnate Son of God, and time and again they misunderstand, mis-hear, mis-speak, fall away, to the point of deserting him in his hour of need and even denying ever knowing him.

Scialabba wants God to make it impossible to disbelieve in his existence. But even if God were to do that, it wouldn't change the fundamental problem—our sinful, wicked hearts, prone to evil and violence from birth and a veritable factory of idols—one bit. Or rather, what we would need is the kind of belief, the sort of knowledge, that went to the root of that problem, transforming us from the inside out. Making true worship possible; ridding us of idolatry; supplying us the power to do what we could never do for ourselves; making faithfulness a reality, that we might finally and wholeheartedly love God and love our neighbors as ourselves.

Christians believe God has done just this for the world in and through Christ. No dispositive evidence will persuade a Scialabba that this is the case. But the gospel isn't meant to answer such a request. Contained within the solution it offers is an entirely different diagnosis of our situation and thus of our greatest need. If the gospel and the faith it proclaims are to be rejected, those are the terms on which to do so.