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.