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.

Subjunctive scholarship

If you read enough biblical scholarship, you come to realize that one of the guild’s endemic features—for at least a century, probably two—is an overweening confidence in its claims. Such claims usually partake of a rhetoric of calm certainty; all too often what are contestable judgments based on slim evidence are instead asserted as facts, or at least as bearing a supreme likelihood of being true. These judgments in turn become the basis for still further judgments, or proposals, that are themselves even flimsier in terms of probability or breadth of justifying reasons. So far as I can tell, this style of scholarship is of a piece with the broader approach not only of history but also the social sciences.

I’m not here to bury these disciplines. Rather, I want to suggest what I wish biblical scholars would do in their work. Better put, how I wish they would approach their subject matter and write about it. A certain sensibility and style. Call it the subjunctive mode.

I can think of at least two ways the subjunctive mode of scholarship would work. One would be marked by variations on this phrase:

In what follows I will write as if it were the case that X, though I am by no means certain or even confident that this hypothesis is true…

Note well that this style would neither eliminate strong or interesting rhetoric in the outworking of theories nor require constant and repetitive qualifications of such theories. It would only make clear—with no ifs, ands, or buts—that one or more premises of the work are arguable, indeed so arguable that it would be laughable to presume them to be self-evidently true to any reasonable person. Such a proviso would also signal the self-awareness on the part of the scholar that seemingly commonsensical consensus scholarly judgments inevitably come under fire in and by subsequent generations of scholars. What is taken for granted today is up for grabs tomorrow. No reason to act as though that isn’t the case. Moreover, to remember as well as acknowledge it surely increases humility and fallibilism in one’s own epistemic habits.

Here’s a second way the subjunctive mode could work in scholarly writing:

In this essay/book I will follow lines of speculative reflection regarding a set of issues about which we lack anything close to sufficient evidence to support confident claims; accordingly, my ideas and proposals will follow a certain pattern: “If it is the case that X, then Y might reasonably follow,” allowing that I can make no dispositive arguments in favor of X, and that any number of alternatives to X are plausible; for that reason I will also trace some of those plausible alternatives and see what they might lead.”

Among theologians, Paul Griffiths is a model of this approach. In his book Decreation, for instance, he regularly offers forks in the road to the reader, before following one, then the other, to wherever it leads. He makes no commitment to either being true, or at least obviously true. He simply suggests that both are plausible, and makes arguments for what would be the case if either were true—admitting, too, that it may well be the case that neither is true.

I most often find myself wishing biblical scholars did this (and they do, though in my experience only in the tiniest of historical and textual details) when reading their work on the dating of New Testament texts. I am utterly uninterested in a scholar spinning 10,000 theories on the single basis—sorry, “fact”—that no Gospel was written before AD 70, or that St. James’s epistle wasn’t written before the extant letters of St. Paul, or that the latter’s so-called disputed letters couldn’t possibly have been written by him, or that Luke–Acts unquestionably belongs to the turn of the second century, or that the beloved disciple wasn’t an eyewitness of Jesus’s comings and goings in Jerusalem, or that Mary obviously gave birth to brothers and sisters of Jesus. What I see in this kind of rhetoric is, on one hand, a confounding absence of curiosity; and, on the other, a wholly unwarranted confidence in the to-any-reasonable-person-or-serious-scholar certainty of one’s presuppositions. But those presuppositions, precisely as premises, are conclusions to arguments, and those arguments comprise probabilistic judgments of contestable processes of reasoning built on slim evidence, incommensurate and inadjudicable methodological frameworks, and finally subjective acts of interpretation that depend heavily for their value on intellectual virtues like honesty, modesty, courage, and prudence. In a word, they are defeasible, even when they are defensible.

Better to say: “So far as it seems to me, the evidence suggests that St. Mark’s Gospel was written in the late 60s, and partakes of knowledge of the assault on Jerusalem and its temple. Having said that, there are reasons to suppose otherwise. So in what follows the main thrust of my proposals will presume the former dating, but where appropriate, I will suggest what might be the case if I am wrong—as I no doubt I am, if not in this then in another matter.”

I remember, for example, reading a brilliant Pauline scholar asserting as an incontestable fact that the disputed letters are pseudonymous and that Romans is the last of his “authentic” letters to have been written. I don’t mind that assertion, modestly argued and supported with evidence and reasons. But what I wanted next was this: “And if I am wrong about that—if Philippians is dated AD 62, or if Ephesians is a circular letter delegated by St. Paul to St. Timothy to write in his name, or if Paul was released in 62 and later dictated his second epistle to Timothy from another Roman imprisonment circa 66—then that would alter my account of Pauline thought in the following ways…” I mean, why not admit that one might be wrong in one’s highly speculative hypothetical reconstructions of 2,000-year old texts and events? Why not trace alternative routes?

Why not, in short, write scholarship in the subjunctive mode?

Axioms of Christian exegesis

I … rejoice, as any interpreter of scripture should, to find such a clear case of prima facie contradiction [in the text]; such instances are efficacious in prompting theological thought because of the axiom that the canon of scripture is not incoherent. …

But what about the pleonasm [in the biblical passage under consideration]? It’s axiomatic for Christians that the text of scripture has no accidental features, which entails that the pleonasm isn’t one.

—Paul J. Griffiths, Regret: A Theology (University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), 4, 20

The catholicity of art

In Jamie Smith’s latest monthly newsletter—to which I recommend you subscribe—he has a reflection on the relationship between art and faith. In particular he has a bone to pick with those well-meaning Christian writers and artists whose approach to art is (in my words) variations on, or elevated versions of, the God’s Not Dead approach. They are “BCFC”: religious art by Christians and for Christians. The result is parochial, hokey, dull, blinkered, constricted, in a word, un-catholic. Go big or go home: don’t retreat to nostalgia or to enclaves of the sub-sub-sub-group; make art for the world. It’s God’s world, after all.

With all of this, given a certain interpretation, I think we should all agree—even if we allow, as Paul Griffiths rightly reminds us, that we ought not thereby to denigrate kitsch or its audience, though we don’t mistake it for high art. But there’s also an interpretation of this approach, and perhaps an intended meaning behind it, that I want to place a question mark next to.

Here’s the way of speaking I’m wondering about: Avoiding, rejecting, or downgrading art made for “the enclave,” for “the sub-culture,” for the collective, for the “us” by contradistinction to the “them.” Such art, on Smith’s view, doesn’t have the kosmos as its subject or audience. It’s concerned only with our little corner of it. And invariably those limits restrict to the point of strangulation. They lead to myopia of the worst and most boring kind.

It’s clear who and what Smith has in mind. But I don’t think his description quite matches his object. What he’s so repulsed by is nostalgia, sectarianism, rigidity, kitsch; art that is ornamental or didactic or self-validating (or all of the above). Hallmark art. Shallow and faux inspirational “content” that fails to live up to the venerable name of art. “Art,” therefore, whose meaning and purpose are written in shining neon letters on the first page, forestalling and alleviating the challenge—the adventure—of endless and untamed interpretation.

To that I say: Amen!

But is that best described as “sub-cultural” art by and for “the enclave”? I don’t think so. Why not? Because some of the best art we have, past and present, was and is made by and for the enclave. In fact, that’s what makes the most beautiful or moving art so endlessly compelling. Better, it’s what makes it so catholic: its very particularity. The universality of a great work of art is directly, not inversely, related to its specificity, its granularity of detail. And often as not, that granularity is a function of the artist’s parochial upbringing, identity, formation, and even initial audience. It’s only once that audience expands—in the lifetime of the artist or across the generations—that it becomes clear, perhaps even to the artist and his or her sub-group, that other people are interested in this odd little corner of the world. Sometimes such artists and groups are at a loss for words why anyone else would take an interest in them!

This goes for more recent artistic endeavors (just think of the spiritual, musical, literary, and artistic contributions of African Americans, for example, or of Catholic or Jewish American immigrants) as well as long-established canonical works. Contemporary people don’t in general care about long-dead Greeks and their wars, or about the petty rivalries of fourteenth century Italy, or about medieval Japanese ladies-in-waiting. But they (we) keep reading them, and inadvertently learning about all the background details necessary to understand them, because we believe, or we have come to see, that they continue to have something to say to us—different though we may be from them.

My only point is that the criterion of “not by and for an enclave; having the whole world as an imagined audience” does not well fit these, or plenty of other, examples of lasting, “catholic” art. The proper catholicity is located in the artifact’s mysterious capacity to speak to the world, not in its maker’s worldliness, whether real or aspirational. There is no question that Christians in American today do appear to lack that catholicity; that that lack is a feature, not a bug; that it hampers serious Christian art from getting off the ground or being appreciated by fellow Christians, much less “the world”; and that it is well worth rooting out the causes, whatever they may be.

But in a sense, I want to go further and suggest that the problem is we aren’t enclaved enough. That is to say, our sub-culture isn’t some magnificent thing worth limning in everlasting vernacular lines. It’s largely defensive in posture, lacking the courage of its convictions. It’s squirmy and unsure of itself, anxious of others’ judgments. Grand sub-cultural art is born not of insecurity but of the crystal clarity bestowed by a firm identity, deeply held beliefs, and an integrated dense network of fellow members of the selfsame community. For whatever reason (and we could enumerate many reasons), Christians in America do not fit this description. Their anxiety is revealed most pitiably in the shrill spreadsheet-hollowness of their proselytizing efforts, not to mention the pure commercial parasitism of their aesthetic products.

If I were formulating a critique of the state of “faith and art” in the contemporary American scene, that’s where I’d begin.

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.

Politics on the pattern of the martyrs

In my Comment essay earlier this year titled "The Church and the Common Good," I wrote the following, describing and recommending Paul Griffiths' idiosyncratic spin on quietism as the proper form of Christian political action:

"At bottom it is a radical call for epistemic, moral, and theological humility. For we cannot know either the actual or the unintended consequences of the policies for which we advocate; nor can we know those of the policies we oppose. We must assume our opponents act in good faith, even as we admit we act from mixed motives ourselves. If we fail, we may trust that providence has allowed it, for reasons opaque to us; if we prevail, we are in an even more precarious position, for we will be responsible for what results, and we will be tempted to pride. In any case, what good comes, we receive with gratitude. What evil comes, we suffer with patience.

"Quietism, in short, is politics on the pattern of the martyrs, who, like Christ, did not consider victory 'a thing to be grasped, but emptied' themselves, entrusting themselves in faith to 'the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being the things that are not.' Christ forsook the sword as a means of establishing justice in Israel; the kingdom came instead at the cross.

"Banished is every utopia, including the confident Christian rhetoric of justice in our time. As St. Augustine teaches us, the only true justice is found in the city of God, whose founding sacrifice constitutes the only true worship of God. The celebration of this sacrifice is the eucharistic liturgy. Approximations of this justice in politics are difficult to assess in the moment, not to mention predict in advance. The church therefore cannot be codependent with politics. Its hope lies in a future not of its making."

I then ask the inevitable question: "How, you may ask, is this not secession from politics, a status quo–baptizing desertion of the common good?" I go on:

"Answer: Because Christians remain as engaged as ever, even to the point of laying down their lives, only without the vices that attend a realized eschatology (activism absent resurrection): the desperate need to win, the entitled expectation of success, the assumption of God’s approval, the forgetfulness of sin, the recourse to evil means for good ends. Domine, quo vadis? Christian political witness is figured by St. Peter—the rock on which the church is built, surely an ecclesial sine qua non—following the Lord back into Rome, certain that his end is near, but equally certain that all his noble plans and good deeds are not worth resisting the call. For the End is not in his or any human hands, and depends not one iota on our efforts."

All that is by way of preamble, to make a single and simple point. This week has seen the conservative intellectual world roiled by an explosive intramural spat, sparked initially and mostly carried on by Christians, concerning their proper political witness and their prospects, and strategies, for victory.

Here is my question. Of what relevance, if any, is the witness and example of the martyrs for the way that Christians conduct themselves politically? Is "politics on the pattern of the martyrs" exemplary in some way, and thus possible, and thus a goal to strive to approximate? If so, what difference does that make for Christian theory and practice of public engagement? If not ... well, I would like to read someone make the case either that martyrdom is irrelevant to sociopolitical matters (women and men put to death by state authorities regarding their convictions or deeds) or that, though relevant, the stakes are too high to pay them heed in this matter, today, in our context.

Put differently: The martyrs teach us, at a minimum, that sometimes letting go is more faithful than fighting, dying more faithful than continuing to live. The first three centuries of the church's life attest to the vitality of this witness precisely in the arena of politics, as does the church's experience across the globe at present and in recent centuries.

The martyrs were not doormats, and martyrdom is not despair or acquiescence before evil or persecution. It is the power of the cross made manifest in the world. Surely that power has a word to speak to our moment, and to the dispute alluded to above. If we listened, what might it say?

The value of keeping up with the news

If you've been paying attention the last two weeks, an ongoing controversy erupted Saturday, January 19, and is still unfolding in one of the many seemingly endless iterations such controversies generate today through social media, op-eds, and the like. Last week, in Alan Jacobs's newsletter, he wrote this:

"On Tuesday morning, January 22, I read a David Brooks column about a confrontation that happened on the National Mall during the March for Life. Until I read that column I had heard nothing about this incident because I do not have a Facebook account, have deleted my Twitter account, don’t watch TV news, and read the news about once a week. If all goes well, I won’t hear anything more about the story. I recommend this set of practices to you all."

This got me thinking about a post Paul Griffiths wrote on his blog years ago, perhaps even a decade ago (would that he kept that blog up longer!). He reflected on the ideal way of keeping up with the news—and, note well, this was before the rise of Twitter et al. as the driver of minute-by-minute "news" content. He suggested that there is no real good served in knowing what is going on day-to-day, whether that comes through the newspaper or the television. Instead, what one ought to do is slow the arrival of news to oneself so far as possible. His off-the-cuff proposal: subscribe to a handful of monthly or bimonthly publications ranging the ideological spectrum and, preferably, with a more global focus so as to avoid the parochialism not just of time but of space. Whenever the magazines or journals arrive, you devote a few hours to reading patient, time-cushioned reflection and reporting on the goings-on of the world—99% of which bears on your life not one iota—and then you continue on with your life (since, as should be self-evident to all of us, no one but a few family and friends needs to know what we think about it).

Consider how much saner your life, indeed all of our lives, would be if we did something like Griffiths' proposal. And think about how not doing it, and instead "engaging in the discourse," posting on Facebook, tweeting opinions, arguing online: how none of it does anything at all except raise blood pressure, foment discord, engender discontent, etc. Activists and advocates of local participatory democracy are fools if they think anything remotely like what we have now serves their goals. If we slowed our news intake, resisted the urge to pontificate, and paid more attention to the persons and needs and tasks before us, the world—as a whole and each of its parts—would be a much better place than it is at this moment.

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