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Theological Amnesia: dreaming a book to write in my dotage
Using Clive James’s book as a springboard for imagining a similar volume dedicated to theological themes and writers from the twentieth century.
I remain enamored with Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia.
By way of reminder, it’s an 850-page encyclopedia of twentieth century European letters, life, politics, and war, with diversions into Asia and the Americas as the occasion demands. It’s organized as a series of short essays on 112 writers, artists, musicians, dancers, comedians, actors, directors, generals, and politicians, ordered alphabetically by surname. There are maybe one or two dozen figures who antedate the twentieth century, mostly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Tacitus is premodern; I can’t recall if there is another). James selects the names entirely by personal preference, affection, and the importance he deems their role in the times—whether or not that importance is recognized by others. Most of the chapters are love letters: he wants his readers to love what he loves. But not all of them; Mao, Hitler, and Goebbels have entries, as do Sartre, Benjamin, Brasillach, and Kollantai. He despises them all. Another goal, then, is for readers to learn to hate what he hates, and why.
The themes of the work cluster around the twin disasters of Nazism and Stalinism, which is to say, the prelude to World War II, the nightmare of the Final Solution, and their contested half-lives in the Cold War. James celebrates the fragility and triumph of liberalism over communism and fascism. For “liberalism” read “humanism.” He wants his readers, whom he imagines as students, not to succumb to the forgetfulness so common to liberal cultures. Amnesia, in his view, is the precondition for political tragedy, because it makes the poison of ideology go down less noticeably. Memory is the antidote, necessary if not sufficient.
I noted in a previous post that, if all you had was James’s book, you would think religion was a failed experiment, universally accepted and proclaimed as such by World War I at the latest. He includes no explicitly religious writers and only a handful of Christians, whose faith, as he sees it, is utterly incidental to the value of their thought or the quality of their writing.
Although not all his subjects are writers, it is writing in which he is principally interested. This is a book about style: James admires no one whose prose lacks grace or verve; a unique voice on the page covers a multitude of sins. Each entry begins with a brief autobiographical introduction, then an epigraph from the artist, then an essay to match it. The essay is free to go in any direction it pleases, which sometimes means it isn’t about the name at the head of the chapter at all. But it is never off topic and never not a pleasure to read. That’s how he gets away with it. The book is a monument to his own vanity, and yet he pulls it off anyway.
Given how deeply personal such an endeavor must have been for James, I find myself imagining, as I come to the book’s close (I have around twenty chapters to go), what another version would look like. Scratch that: I wonder what my version would look like. It goes without saying that I could never write a book one tenth as good as this one. And for erudition and scope, only someone like David Bentley Hart could manage writing the book as it exists in my imagination.
That said, I can’t stop thinking about it.
Suppose the parameters were the same: An alphabetized encyclopedia of the century just past, centered on and after World War II, featuring mini-essays on more than a hundred authors, artists, and public figures, selected by whimsy and pleasure but centered around a determinate set of themes that would emerge organically as readers moved from name to name in a kind of spiral or web. But suppose, in addition, that the goal was to highlight religion, in particular Christian life and thought, in a supposedly secular century. Suppose, too, that the center of gravity moved across the Atlantic to North America, and instead of comedy, ballet, and journalism, attention was paid to film, sports, and philosophy. James’s interest in the lost world of prewar Vienna would be transmuted into contemplating the legacy of the American West and the subsequent export of American culture to the world. Further themes would announce themselves: the problem of atheism; the boredom of secularism; the rise of Islam; the irrelevance of public theology; the return of the convert; the renewal of monasticism; and the modern martyr, in all its varieties.
The secret of James’s selectivity is that, in considering only some, he sneaks in all the rest. He has no entries on Kant, Pound, Joyce, Auden, Berlin, Eliot, Heidegger, Solzhenitsyn, Costa-Gravas, Kissinger, Einstein, Shakespeare, Dickens, Stalin, Lenin, or Orwell, but look in the Index, and you’ll see plenty of page numbers for each of them. He makes no apologies for whom he does and does not include, since a potted history is the only possibility for a personal literary breviary such as this one. He’s certainly not choosing for race, gender, nationality, or ideological bona fides. Remember: this is a catalogues of his loves, together with a few of his hatreds, presented (with a straight face and tongue in cheek, neither somehow canceling out the other) as what’s worth remembering from the most violent century in human history.
If you don’t share my reaction—that the world needs more books like this one—I don’t know what to tell you. If you do share my reaction, read on.
*
The title of my imaginary book, naturally enough, is Theological Amnesia. It’s an antidote to an antidote. James has forgotten faith: not his own, but others’. It didn’t go underground. It was never relegated to the private sphere. He and his ilk just chose to ignore it, and given the genuine changes in Western societies since the Enlightenment, they could afford to do so. They did so, however, at their peril.
Two subtitles are competing in my mind: Authors and Artists from a Long Secular Century vs. Authors and Artists from the Long American Century. The former is clearer, in its irony, about the book’s subtheme, whereas the latter foregrounds the cultural focus. (Now I’m wondering whether I should add mention of martyrs, saints, and others besides. Hm.)
Either way, that’s the pitch. Below are the names.
A few words of explanation. First, the number ballooned from 112 to 150. That was only after nixing an additional 150. I do not know how James did it. It’s an impossible choice.
Second, I justified the larger number—for, I remind myself and you, dear reader, my completely imaginary book—by recourse to James’s word count. While some essays are 4-6 pages, many are 8-12 pages, and some are much more than that. All in all, his book totals around 350,000 words. If I wrote an average 2,200 words per entry, even with 150 names that would make for a smaller book than James’s. In the alternate universe where a more learned variant of myself attempts to write this book in my 70s … a publisher definitely goes for it. Right? (Let me have this.)
Third and finally, I did my best to keep to James’s temporal center of gravity. No one on my list is born after the mid-1950s, and any of them who are still alive today (a) are approaching their ninth or tenth decade of life and (b) became famous, having done their most important and influential work, in the closing decades of the last century. Everyone else on the list lived and wrote between the Great War and the fall of the Soviet Union—except, that is, for the handful of premodern authors (five or six) and figures from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (maybe a dozen) whom I felt compelled to include.
Without further adieu, then, here is the fake table of contents for my imaginary book. If I live long enough to be an emeritus professor, full of leisure time and surrounded by scores of grandchildren, don’t be surprised when I self-publish a thousand-page version of this idea, with copies distributed to friends and family only. I’ll leave it to history to decide whether it’s an unheralded classic or a painful exercise in imitation gone awry.
Theological Amnesia: Writers and Thinkers, Saints and Martyrs from a Long Secular Century
Thomas J. J. Altizer
G. E. M. Anscombe
Hannah Arendt
W. H. Auden
Augustine of Hippo
Jane Austen
James Baldwin
J. G. Ballard
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Karl Barth
Saul Bellow
Isaiah Berlin
Georges Bernanos
Wendell Berry
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Jorge Luis Borges
Peter Brown
Sergei Bulgakov
Roberto Calasso
John Calvin
Albert Camus
John le Carré
G. K. Chesterton
J. M. Coetzee
James Cone
Christopher Dawson
Dorothy Day
Simone de Beauvoir
Henri de Lubac
Augusto del Noce
Charles Dickens
Annie Dillard
Walt Disney
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Frederick Douglass
Clint Eastwood
T. S. Eliot
Frantz Fanon
Patrick Leigh Fermor
Ludwig Feuerbach
John Ford
Michel Foucault
Sigmund Freud
Mahātmā Gandhi
Billy Graham
Graham Greene
Ursula K. le Guin
Adolf von Harnack
Martin Heidegger
George Herbert
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Alfred Hitchcock
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Michel Houellebecq
Aldous Huxley
Ivan Illich
P. D. James
William James
Robert Jenson
Tony Judt
Franz Kafka
Søren Kierkegaard
Martin Luther King Jr.
Stephen King
Ronald Knox
Leszek Kołakowski
Stanley Kubrick
Akira Kurosawa
Christopher Lasch
Stan Lee
Denise Levertov
C. S. Lewis
George Lucas
John Lukacs
Martin Luther
Dwight Macdonald
Alasdair MacIntyre
Malcolm X
Terrence Malick
Jacques Maritain
François Mauriac
Cormac McCarthy
Larry McMurtry
Herman Melville
H. L. Mencken
Thomas Merton
Mary Midgley
Czesław Miłosz
Hayao Miyazaki
Malcolm Muggeridge
Albert Murray
Les Murray
John Henry Newman
H. Richard Niebuhr
Reinhold Niebuhr
Friedrich Nietzsche
Flannery O’Connor
Robert Oppenheimer
George Orwell
Yasujirō Ozu
Blaise Pascal
Paul of Tarsus
Walker Percy
Karl Popper
Neil Postman
Thomas Pynchon
Sayyid Qutb
Joseph Ratzinger
Marilynne Robinson
Fred Rogers
Franz Rosenzweig
Salman Rushdie
John Ruskin
Bill Russell
Edward Said
Margaret Sanger
Dorothy Sayers
Paul Schrader
George Scialabba
Martin Scorsese
Roger Scruton
Peter Singer
Maria Skobtsova
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Sophrony the Athonite
Wole Soyinka
Steven Spielberg
Wallace Stegner
Edith Stein
Leo Strauss
Preston Sturges
Andrei Tartovsky
Charles Taylor
Mother Teresa
Thérèse of Lisieux
Thomas Aquinas
R. S. Thomas
J. R. R. Tolkien
John Kennedy Toole
Desmond Tutu
John Updike
Sigrid Undset
Evelyn Waugh
Simone Weil
H. G. Wells
Rebecca West
Oprah Winfrey
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Karol Wojtyła
Franz Wright
*
Update (8/2): I should have thought to include a list of James’s entries, so that those unfamiliar with the book could see the names he chose, as well as compare them with mine. Apparently his list comes only to 106, not 112; perhaps I came to that number by counting the introductory and concluding essays. In any case, here you go:
Anna Akhmatova
Peter Altenberg
Louis Armstrong
Raymond Aron
Walter Benjamin
Marc Bloch
Jorge Luis Borges
Robert Brasillach
Sir Thomas Browne
Albert Camus
Dick Cavett
Paul Celan
Chamfort
Coco Chanel
Charles Chaplin
Nirad C. Chaudhuri
G. K. Chesterton
Jean Cocteau
Gianfranco Contini
Benedetto Croce
Tony Curtis
Ernst Robert Curtius
Miles Davis
Sergei Diaghilev
Pierre Drieu La Rochelle
Alfred Einstein
Duke Ellington
Federico Fellini
W. C. Fields
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Gustave Flaubert
Sigmund Freud
Egon Friedell
François Furet
Charles de Gaulle
Edward Gibbon
Terry Gilliam
Joseph Goebbels
Witold Gombrowicz
William Hazlitt
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Heinrich Heine
Adolf Hitler
Ricarda Huch
Ernst Jünger
Franz Kafka
John Keats
Leszek Kołakowski
Alexandra Kollontai
Heda Margolius Kovály
Karl Kraus
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Norman Mailer
Nadezhda Mandelstam
Golo Mann
Heinrich Mann
Michael Mann
Thomas Mann
Mao Zedong
Chris Marker
John McCloy
Zinka Milanov
Czesław Miłosz
Eugenio Montale
Montesquieu
Alan Moorehead
Paul Muratov
Lewis Namier
Grigory Ordzhonokidze
Octavio Paz
Alfred Polgar
Beatrix Potter
Jean Prévost
Marcel Proust
Edgar Quinet
Marcel Reich-Ranicki
Jean-François Revel
Richard Rhodes
Rainer Maria Rilke
Virginio Rognoni
Ernesto Sabato
Edward Said
Sainte-Beuve
José Saramago
Jean-Paul Sartre
Erik Satie
Arthur Schnitzler
Sophie Scholl
Wolf Jobst Siedler
Manès Sperber
Tacitus
Margaret Thatcher
Henning von Tresckow
Leon Trotsky
Karl Tschuppik
Dubravka Ugrešić
Miguel de Unamuno
Pedro Henríquez Ureña
Paul Valéry
Mario Vargas Llosa
Evelyn Waugh
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Isoroku Yamamoto
Aleksandr Zinoviev
Carl Zuckmayer
Stefan Zweig
The hatred of theology
Baskin labels this approach the "hatred" of literature for two reasons. On the one hand, it does not treat literature as an end (however proximate) in itself, but only as a sort of weapon to advance or stymie the cause—whatever that may be. On the other hand, and more important, it quite literally does not arise from what usually stands as the origin story for so many students and teachers of literature: love. Love for the thing itself, for its own sake, just because. A love that does not demand agreement or relevance or revolutionary potential or the "right" politics, but only that ephemeral experience that is the root of all art: an encounter with that which outstrips the mundane, calling to the self from beyond the self. That old word "beauty" is one of the ways we try to capture such encounters.
Reading Baskin as an academically trained theologian, it made me wonder: Is there a similar phenomenon in academic theology? Does one find—or, in recent decades, could one find—in the academy "the hatred of theology"?
I think the answer is yes, in at least six ways.
First, there is a style of doing theology formally parallel to the "New Historicism." Namely, theology reduced to its sociopolitical function. What does theologoumenon X or Y accomplish with respect to certain desired political ends? There's plenty of that around, past and present.
Second, there is what some, at least in the U.K. a few decades ago, used to call "doctrinal criticism." This comprised the study of traditional doctrines from church history and the subjection of them to "critique" under the conditions and presuppositions of modernity. In other words: What is "modern man" permitted to believe, and what of the Christian dogmatic heritage must be revised, and in what ways, in order to fall in line with the Enlightenment and its heirs?
Third, in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, there was a kind of obsessive-compulsive anxiety about methodology that, as the old saw goes, never got around to actually talking about God, but only talked about talking about God. This, too, served as an avoidance strategy for academic theology.
Fourth, there is a mode of theology similar to the first example above that is nonetheless subtly different. It isn't so much about theology being merely a means to a foreordained end. But its utility as a source of or exercise in knowledge is indexed to its practical relevance. So that, e.g., the doctrine of the Trinity must have direct and obvious consequences for human social life—or else, why are we talking about it in the first place?
Fifth, a similarly practice-oriented theology is less interested in the potentially transformative implications of otherwise esoteric doctrines like the Trinity for human life. Instead, it works the other way: such doctrines are ruled out of court in advance. Only certain doctrines and topics are intrinsically practical; it is those that theology ought to attend to. Often this approach is coordinated to, or a function of, a laser-like focus on the church's life and the conduct of its ordinary members. Of what benefit is this doctrine to the average Christian? is the pressing question that filters the worthy from the unworthy loci.
Sixth and last, much theology simply proceeds with little to no reference to God as such. It is identifiable as a kind of Christian discourse (it speaks, as it were, Christianese), but the subject matter, by any reasonable account, is not the God of Christian confession. Something else is thereby sought to "make" the discourse "theological," whether or not that effort succeeds.
I should say that this is a quick and dirty list, with considerable overlap between the different items and almost certainly other examples left off. And I should clarify the quirkiness of theology compared to literature, since the analogy is imperfect at key points.
First, the subject matter of literature is literary artifacts written by human beings. Whereas the subject matter for Christian theology God: alive, on the one hand, yet inaccessible to empirical investigation, on the other. Knowledge of God is mediated by that which is not God. Furthermore, the "love" of which Baskin writes is disanalogous in the extreme compared to the "love" that grounds and sustains theology. For this latter love is personal love, directed (ideally) in complete and utter devotion to that than which nothing greater can be conceived: the author and perfecter of our very souls. Nothing similar can be said of literature (or when it is, it is sad to see).
But this only highlights the oddity, even the tragedy, of loveless theology. To speak and write about God as if he is not the all-consuming fire of one's life—as if, indeed, his existence and attributes are a matter of polite speculation—is to repudiate theology itself. Why bother? One can at least understand the literary critic who "hates" literature in Baskin's sense. In the case of the theologian who "hates" theology, and by implication theology's Sache, it is wholly unintelligible.
Second, theology has a natural home, and it is not the university or even the seminary. It is the church. So there is a community that both houses and is the beneficiary of theology's labor. In that sense theologians and believers are right to expect theology to service the church, which does at some level mean a practical effect. (That is why there is a tradition in the church that understands theology to be a practical science and not a theoretical one; compare, for example, the Franciscans to the Thomists.)
Third, theology concerns not just any God but the God revealed in Jesus Christ, who calls all people, including theologians, to follow him. This entails, in summary form, loving God with one's whole self and loving one's neighbor as oneself. The upshot: theology touches on all of life, for it considers all things in relation to God; therefore theology would be incomplete without speaking to moral, social, and political matters. Even by implication, to speak of God is inevitably to speak of issues of great human import, since that same God, who created humanity, became human in Christ and lived an exemplary life to which all are called to conform. To do theology abstracting from these facts would be a failure of serious magnitude.
The trick, then, is to balance the theoretical and practical tasks of theology without denying one in favor of the other or rendering either synonymous to the other. Above all, though, theology must never be embarrassed to be itself. And to be itself, theology must speak of God, boldly and with unbreakable faith. So to speak of God, however, means one must love God, which is the beginning and end of theology. The theologian, it turns out, is one who loves God and thus, in a manner of speaking, loves theology too.
Defining fundamentalism
In my experience, both in print and in conversation, these definitions are very rarely operative. Colloquially, "fundamentalist" often means simply "bad," "conservative," or "to the right of me." I take it for granted that this usage is unjustified and to be avoided by any Christian, scholarly or otherwise; it is not only imprecise, it is little more than tribal slander. "I'm on the good team, and since she disagrees with me, she must be on the bad team."
Is there a workable definition beyond the options so far canvassed? In my judgment, it can't mean "someone who does not accept the deliverances of historical criticism," because those deliverances are by definition disputed; you can always find a non-fundamentalist who happens to affirm a stereotypically designated "fundamentalist" position. Postmodern hermeneutics cuts out the ground from the "sure deliverances" of historical criticism anyway.
Nor can the term, in my view, be applied usefully or consistently to specific doctrinal positions: the inerrancy of Scripture; male headship; traditional sexuality; young earth creationism; a denial of humanity's evolutionary origins; etc. On the one hand, "fundamentalist" isn't helpful because it carries so much historical and other baggage, while these positions can simply be named with terminological specificity. On the other hand, there are extraordinarily sophisticated historical, philosophical, and theological arguments for each and every one of these positions that belie the pejorative, "dummy know-nothing" evocations of "fundamentalism." That doesn't mean all or any of them are correct; it just means that branding them with the F-word is an exercise in both ad hominem and straw man tactics. The term itself has ceased to do work other than the functional task of marking who's in and who's out.
Finally, the term cannot mean "people or positions that use or allow the claims of revelation to trump other claims to knowledge." I fail to see how the epistemic primacy of revelation could ever be a mark of fundamentalism without thereby consigning all of Christian tradition and most of the contemporary global church to fundamentalist oblivion. And, again, it would come to mean so much that it would therefore mean very little indeed. If (nearly) everyone's a fundamentalist, then that doesn't tell us anything of value about the Christians so labeled.
So: Anyone got a useful definition to proffer? For myself, I'll limit myself in theory to the first two definitions listed, while in practice refraining from using the term altogether.
I've got a new article out in Modern Theology
"This articles engages the theology of Robert Jenson with three questions in mind: What is the doctrine of the Trinity for? Is it a practical doctrine? If so, how, and with what implications? It seeks, on the one hand, to identify whether Jenson’s trinitarian theology ought to count as a “social” doctrine of the Trinity, and to what extent he puts it to work for human socio-practical purposes. On the other hand, in light of Jenson’s career-long worries about Feuerbach and projection onto a God behind or above the triune God revealed in the economy, the article interrogates his thought with a view to recent critiques of social trinitarianism. The irony is that, in constructing his account of the Trinity as both wholly determined in and by the economy and maximally relevant for practical human needs and interests, precisely in order to avoid the errors of Feuerbachian “religion,” Jenson ends up engaging in a full-scale project of projection. Observation of the human is retrojected into the immanent life of the Trinity as the prior condition of the possibility for the human; upon this “discovery,” this or that feature of God’s being is proposed as a resolution to a human problem, bearing ostensibly profound socio-practical import. The article is intended, first, as a contribution to the work, only now beginning, of critically receiving Jenson’s theology; and, second, as an extension of general critiques of practical uses of trinitarian doctrine, such as Karen Kilby’s or Kathryn Tanner’s, by way of close engagement with a specific theologian."
The article has its origins in a term paper I wrote for Linn Tonstad at Yale, in a seminar a few years ago in which we read the manuscript for what eventually became God and Difference, a book now receiving warranted attention from all over the place, most recently in a series of rousing responses in Syndicate. It also has a degree of overlap with Ben Myers's recent series of tweets on the Trinity (gathered together in a post) summarizing the classical approach to the doctrine over against the last century's innovations and trends. Consider my article an exercise in that sort of frumpy theology—borrowing my friend Jamie Dunn's coinage—but in this case focused on a single important figure on the contemporary scene. I love Jenson's work and it means a great deal to me, but the article identifies within his trinitarian project a problem (a significant one, I think) internal the logic of his own system. I look forward to hearing what others think, especially those who read and value Jenson's thought.