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