That’s the Deal

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C.S. Lewis, Christian, Christianity, God, Job, New Testament, Old Testament, Problem of evil

The other evening, I watched for perhaps the third or fourth time Shadowlands, the film about how C. S. Lewis fell in love with his wife, Joy, and then watched her die of cancer.  Sometimes, I feel like the film caricatures Lewis’s pre-love intellectualism too much, but then perhaps I am sensitive because I am prone to similar intellectualism.  In the main, though, the film is a fairly good comparison of the differing approaches to grief and loss represented in Lewis’s Problem of Pain and his later A Grief Observed.  In any case, it got me thinking about death and why philosophical and spiritual responses seem so flat in the moment when we most need them, when we are confronted with the deaths of those close to us.  There are some particularly forceful moments in the film where well meaning Christians attempt to comfort Lewis with hollow sounding “answers,” and he rightly rebuffs them; I say rightly because having lost two friends to death, one a number of years ago in my undergrad, and another a year and a half ago, I know that such answers are offensive and irresponsible; personally, I prefer to mourn for my dead friends rather than burying them in obscenely simplistic platitudes.

In any case, I started to wonder why exactly such facile answers are so problematic, and realized that it is really because there is not a thing out there called “death”; rather, what we mean when we talk about death is the loss of someone – and no two people who die are the same.  A general answer can’t address the particulars of the friends I have lost; when I mourn the death of my friends, I am not mourning an event, but the loss of someone, with particular traits, habits, quirks and virtues.  There is no one in the world who can or should replace that person.  And that loss is something we will carry around always inside ourselves this side of heaven.

I think this is maybe why God is wise in not answering the so-called problem of evil in the Bible, or at least not answering it in the way Leibniz would have liked.  The book of Job of course would have been an ideal place to do this, but this is not what God does when he shows up at the end of the book.  Neither Job nor God denigrate with a philosophical proposition the depth of things that are lost in the suffering of persons in the world; people like Job’s children are not replicable, and cannot be doubled or replaced like so many sheep or cattle, as God sensitively recognizes at the end of the book in his restoration of Job.  Only resurrection can answer this, which is part of why Job has traditionally been taken as one of the first OT figures to prophesy NT resurrection.

And this too is, I think, why the New Testament likewise sidesteps the problem of evil.  Of course it gives the same general answer as the Old Testament in terms of causality, that death and evil came about through sin.  But particular instances go unanswered.  Jesus was asked why people perished when a tower fell on them, and he simply implied that they were no worse sinners than anyone else, and noted elliptically that everyone else would perish as well.

Of course, this is all to the good because it seems to me that, when we look for a God who will answer the problem of evil in philosophically or spiritually trite ways, we are really looking for a figure like the military Messiah the Jewish people had come to expect.  We want someone to deal with evil, death and suffering so we can go on living the way we want without being bothered.  The problem, of course, is that the way we want to live when we turn to such trite answers is one which steamrolls any hiccups in our well arranged life, including those persons who remind us of such hiccups.  God will not philosophically justify his ways to us when he knows that we will take such a justification and use it to justify our own negligence; if God permits evil and suffering to simply happen and sits back letting things run their course, we will be inclined to imitate him, perhaps even eagerly – it sounds like a good capitalist proposition.  Such a God was of course required to legitimate the brutality of a post-Enlightenment world, but He is not the Christian God.  The Christian God gives us Himself, again, and again, and again.

To return to the beginning of the post, this is why I think Christianity offers one of the best responses to the individualities of the people we lose.  God cares too much about his world to give a general response to death; he sees the sparrow fall, and is a God of particulars, of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, of my friends A and M who are now with Him.  No account of death and suffering can be sufficient that does not include all the tiniest details of the things that have been lost.  God respects us and loves us enough to withhold from us every answer that would let us get away with anything less than loving his creation in its entirety.  His silence is not one of embarrassment or stupidity, but rather that deep, pregnant silence reserved for things too awesome and complex to grasp with human language. For us, His own living Word beyond all words – Christ in us, the hope of glory – will have to be enough.

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A Thoroughly Biased Impression of Bob Dylan’s Tempest

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Bob Dylan, Christian, Dylan, James Cameron, John Lennon, Prospero, Spectacle, Tempest, Titanic, Tragedy

To begin, I want to specify that I am not in this post trying to give an “objective” review of the new Dylan CD, whatever that might look like. I’m not in any case that concerned with intention – what in fact Dylan does or does not mean by his words.  It seems in fact to me that someone like Dylan often gets ahold of words, ideas, and phrases that mean far more than he in fact grasps at the time – his genius consists in putting them in even when they don’t make sense to him at the moment.

In any case, I have been puzzling over the CD for a few days now, and trying particularly to figure out what is up with the Christian references.  My initial conclusion is that the overarching theme of “Tempest” is the spectacle of tragedy.  The CD is, I think, about a postmodern world where tragedy has become entertainment, entertainment has become tragedy, and the difference between them has become hard to discern.

What got me thinking about this in particular is the disjunction between the references Dylan makes.  “Narrow Way” is jam-packed with Christian and Biblical references, but how are we to take these, given some of his others?  Particularly, I am thinking of the reference to Leo in “Tempest,” a song about the Titanic.  It is clearly a reference to the James Cameron film Titanic, and this reference makes the sinking of the Titanic sound rather bathetic; we can’t, in fact, tell whether he is talking about an event where many people died, or a film that won a number of Oscars.  But I think this is the problem the CD is getting at: in modern society, it is hard to know where tragedy ends and spectacle begins.

Perhaps even more alarmingly, tragedy, evil, and sin have become casual and commonplace, amusing things to pass one’s time.  There are some chilling lines delivered in a fairly sing-song way. For instance: “Two timin’ slim/whose ever heard of him/I’ll drag his corpse through the mud,” or the line where the speaker gleefully notes that his enemy fell into the dust, lost his lust, and broke apart because he had an iron heart.  At one point, the speaker says his “heart is cheerful, never fearful;” it is an innocuous enough line until one gets to the following line -“I’ve been to the killing floors.”  We live in a society where people can commit mass murder and then sleep soundly at night.

The theatrical theme continues with “Pay in Blood,” which speaks in the voice of a very stock, painted kind of devil – nothing clever or sophisticated, but the kind of devil who is red and has horns and a pitchfork tail.  “Early Roman Kings” also, I think, obliquely references a world that can be easily depicted in large figures drawn in artificial drama.  The villains are stock villains and the heroes are stock heroes, and we judge them as we would a play rather than reality.  Indeed, it is this theatricality that I think is referenced in the album and song’s title, for the Shakespearean Tempest is all about theatricality; things that some characters think of as happenstance – particularly the tempest itself – is artificially controlled by Prospero the magician.  We are never really terrified or anxious in the play in the same way that we might be in, say, Hamlet, because we accept its events as grounded in illusion and artifice – the stakes are not high enough.  And through this metaphor Dylan points to the very heart of a postmodern society.  There is nothing we take seriously, death, or life, or evil, or good, or anything.  Everything is a construct, and no one is playing for stakes.  People in the past used to take such things seriously; for us they are a form of entertainment that we yawn at.

But there is a price.  Prospero must break his staff and declare this thing of darkness his own.  And I think this is what Dylan does in Tin Angel.  In this bloody love ballad that ends in murder and suicide Dylan points us to the love story that typifies our age – we kill others and then kill ourselves. We act like we have run away for love, but have really run away for nothing except diversion, and so we kill.

But we don’t like to think of this, so we distract ourselves – with the peppiness of a song like “Duquesne Whistle,” or the superabundant sentimentality of “Roll On John,” a tribute that I am not sure we should take seriously.  By the time we have reached the line “Tiger, tiger you burned so bright,” we wonder if John Lennon is really here honored, or rather being slyly mocked. When you imagine there’s no heaven or hell, you don’t get a tragic humanism, but rather a world where people make paper heavens and hells and play at being paper gods and paper heroes – Lennon is, we might say, himself papered over with recycled lines from Blake and a sentimentalism that is the tonal opposite yet the exact product of Lennon’s bleak perspective.

Curiously enough, I think the whole moral core of the CD is found in Scarlet Town.  It conveys the life of the worldly weary, where good and bad exist side by side, and we are all in relationships with our sinful addicted selves, our junkie whores. But there is the potential for salvation.  The key to this song is the lines that say, “If love is a sin, beauty is a crime,/all things are beautiful in their time.”  The statement is conditional, and therefore not categorically true. But if we are referring to a world that perfect love could enter only to be crucified, we can see how, from that perspective, love is indeed the greatest of crimes.  The reference to all things being beautiful in their time is of course from the world-weary Ecclesiastes, and Dylan captures this passage perfectly.  It is something to look forward to, but there is a lot of stuff between now and perfection – our flat chested junkie whore is insistent, and pardon us if we don’t break out in spontaneous fanfare.

This glimpse into something more earnest is just for a moment – it is only ever for a moment on this CD – and it is like the others soon lost amidst the world of artifice and theatricality.  As always, Dylan shows himself to be an astute critic of culture; I would say that the way he captures postmodernism reminds me of the way he captured the mood  of the sixties, but I wasn’t there, so I can’t comment.  I don’t know if such perception is exactly what he intended to do with this new CD, but I can’t help but wonder if there is not something very deliberate in his exploration of tragedy and spectacle; the CD was, after all, released on 9/11.

Torn Between Two Worlds, Part II: St. Gregory the Great

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Augustine of Hippo, Gregory, John Donne, Late Antiquity, Moralia, Pope, Pope Gregory I

St. Gregory the Great is not popular among modern Christians, nor do I think he is bound to be anytime soon.  Some of the fathers – and I here think particularly of St. Augustine – are attractive to modern Christians on account of their brilliance, innovation, and superb writing style; they are eminently quotable.  Gregory the Great is not one of these saints.

Perhaps this is because all he wanted to be was a contemplative monastic.  He certainly didn’t want to be Pope, though he took it up as the sort of sacrifice one makes for the Church, the Body of Christ.  And perhaps his books do not have as many one-liners as a writer like Augustine because his writing was defined by his ecclesial responsibilities, determined by occasional and pastoral matters rather than by a desire to be particularly memorable.  He is the silent middle-man, handing off the riches of Late Antiquity‘s theology to the later Middle Ages.  It is remarkable how little of himself one finds in his work, or at least the particular one I work on, the Moralia in Job.

Of his books, the Moralia is the least likely to become popular anytime soon.  It was last translated into English in the mid-Nineteenth Century, and it is a dense thicket of Biblical interpretation, encompassing the historical, moral, and allegorical senses (though when given the chance he will drop the historical and allegorical in favor of the moral).  The work was begun, not of his own volition, but as a set of lectures requested by fellow monks who accompanied on a trip to Constantinople before he became Pope.  The best way to make it sound appealing to a modern readership is to describe it as a creative exercise in free association where the scope of this exercise is the entire Bible and the tradition it accrued, and the basic skeleton is the narrative of Job.

So why do I like him?  And what does he have to do with John Donne?  I like him precisely because he was willing to bear the burden of the Church even when he would have been more comfortable praying in a monastic cell.  Particularly, he does not confine himself to a rarified spirituality inaccessible to the masses, but rather takes pains to care for the many little details that others might overlook.  We see this in his Dialogue with Peter, when he suggests that the Ecclesiast takes on the voices of a variety of positions so as to lead the holders of those positions to the truth; he would not have anyone left behind in the church, and this meant being patient with the questions of the simple and the connivings of the clever.  This unwillingness to leave even the smallest thing or person behind is perhaps even more evident in the Moralia; rather than giving a straightforward or plain interpretation of the text, he leaves no stone unturned in tradition or the rest of Scripture lest he should inadvertently misconstrue it – from a modern perspective this probably looks like madness, but I see in it the pastoral care of words and ideas.

I think by now it should be clear how Gregory is similar to John Donne in Satire I.  Like the narrator, Gregory no doubt would have loved to lock himself up in private with books and permission to pray; he had the heart of a contemplative and felt most at home in a contemplative capacity.  What I like about him is that, even so, he was willing to sacrifice this comfort for the sake of both dealing with the often more petty matters of church administration, and silently handing off to the Medieval world the riches of even the most obscure aspects of the Scriptural tradition developed in Late Antiquity.  He sacrificed his own preferred form of personal development to tend to the care of others, whether these others were the multiplicity of the Church or the words and ideas that must not be lost.  There is a line in the Donne poem where the narrator describes himself as a shepherd looking after the sheep that is his humorist friend.  This is where Donne and Gregory converge; both prefer the care of lost sheep over narcissistic pretension to self-development.

And it seems to me that what Donne and Gregory get at here is of the utmost importance at present.  We are in a culture that highly prizes self-development, the buzz of personal spirituality and the like.  Many Christian churches have even bought into this.  In the meantime, there are people for whom no one cares, and words of wisdom from the past that no one bothers about, even if we ostensibly have more access to them through technology.  It seems to me that one of the most Christian things we can do in the present time is to follow Donne and Gregory in their willingness to sacrifice their own personal developments and spiritualities in order to love God and our neighbour – and the words of those neighbours who have died before us.

Torn Between Two Worlds, Part 1: Donne’s Satire I

Tags

Gregory, John Donne, love, Milton, Pope Gregory I, sarcasm

As someone who did my Masters in Early Modern literature and is finishing my doctorate in Old English literature and patristic exegesis, I sometimes have trouble figuring out what it is that motivates me.  How can I do one degree on Milton, one of the more self-professed anti-Catholic figures of the early modern period, and another on St. Gregory the Great, one of the architects of the medieval Catholicism that the Reformation would later reject?  What is the common thread?

At the moment, I won’t answer for Milton (though I often suspect him of being of a medieval Catholic party without knowing it), but one thing that did strike me as I was thinking about it is the similarity between a quality that has led me to appreciate both John Donne and Gregory the Great.  In this post I will discuss Donne, and will talk about Gregory in the next.  The part of Donne I am thinking of in particular is the often neglected Satire I.  The poem takes some work to understand, but it is rewarding work.  The basic premise is a poem written from the perspective of a scholar who would prefer to stay in his house and read books – theologians, philosophers, and political philosophers – but instead joins his friend, a “humorist,” in a walk through the streets.  His friend is extremely superficial – attracted by all the worst excesses of fashion, flare, and social climbing – and ends up being thrown out of a brothel or a social gathering figured as one; the poem ends with the humorist returning to be cared for by the philosophical narrator of the poem.

What attracts me to this is the way that the narrator manages to care about his learned books, but does not let that distract him from caring for his rather foolish friend, in some ways entering the latter’s world to protect him from himself.  I realize that some will probably dislike the narrator very much, as he is crusty and sounds manifestly uncompassionate in his biting description of events; others will dislike him for being condescending or overprotective etc.  And I suppose in an ideal word – the world many people imagine has come about through modern “progress” – these things would be true, and one could be perfectly loving without being satirically sour and all the rest.  But I find myself to be not a perfect human being, and so it is very easy to find such biting satirical commentary going through my own head with regard to certain situations and people, and I have to make do with a mind that sometimes automatically does this.

It is because of this that I like the narrator’s response; it can help me formulate my own response to similar situations.  I suppose in a perfect world we would all think charitably and act charitably, but I think Jesus might be getting at something in his parable of the two sons (though not the one you are thinking of).  In this parable, a father asks one of his sons to undertake a task; the son says yes, but never does it.  Conversely, when he asks his other son, his initial answer is no – but that son in fact does end up doing his father’s will.  I presume that in a perfect, heavenly world, words and actions will accord.  But the point of the parable seems to be clear – if you have to choose between a rhetorically sophistic charity that does nothing or an ostensible misanthropy that in fact ends up performing love in spite of itself, by all means choose the latter.

What I like about the Donne poem is that, though the narrator gripes through the whole poem, he in fact does not abandon his friend, and ends up being the only one he can turn to when all of his more superficial “friendships” have been spent.  Rather than taking the easy route of simply closeting himself up with his books, he allows himself for the sake of love – a love both effective and dragging its heels – to be torn between his preferred world of thought and the superficialities of his friend’s world.

I can be fairly caustic in my criticism of things; it is often because I see the devastation caused by so many situations and ideas in the world and what passes as the church.  Whereas some people are very passionate about changing the world, I often find myself wondering if the world including myself is worth changing.  But I pray that, when it comes down to it, I will be one of those who did something anyway.  I am not attracted to flash and noise and popularity and all the things that everyone seems to celebrate as revolutionary.  I do though admire those who are faithful and loyal even when everything in them screams “no” to the rhetoric of optimism and progress around them, and I daily require the grace of Christ and His church to help me live up to their example.

Faith and Mental Illness

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Christ, Christian, church, depression, drug, Faith, Germanic, Latin, mental illness, rational, self, Sin

Today’s topic has been brewing in my head for a while, as it is one that affects my own life and the lives of those close to me.  My purpose is to clarify exactly what the difficulty is in thinking about one’s faith and one’s mental illness.  I will start at what seems to be the most surface part of the tension, and try to work my way into what is actually going on.

Very simply put, the surface issue seems to be this: Christianity speaks to us and calls us to Christ as rational human beings responsible enough to take initiative for things; that, at least, is what we mostly seem to presume when we exhort our congregations from pulpits to be more fully Christian.  Mental illness on the other hand takes away our volition and ability to control ourselves – we are vulnerable and at times not even functional enough to take in the content of a sermon if we would.  This, at least, seems to be the surface tension: we perceive the gospel to be one preached to sane, normal, rational people, and mental illness as something that keeps us from being one of these people; hence, the difficulty posed in this post is knowing what exactly a gospel for normal people might have to do with us who are insane.

As one might guess from the above paragraph, part of my means of dealing with this is to trouble the idea that Christianity is for normal people and also that people with mental illness have no volition.  It seems to me that Christianity starts with the basic presupposition that we are all freaks – we are stuck with sin and the effects of sin; please note here that I am not saying that those who have mental illness are so because they in particular have sinned, but rather that mental illness seems more generally to be the sort of thing that could only come about in a fallen world.  In any case, the gospel seems to be the good news that Christ has come to save freaks – from themselves, from others, from their own freakishness – and believing this would seem to be a precondition for receiving God’s grace, so that perhaps the real problem is not how we can help those mentally ill “freaks” receive the gospel, but rather how we can bring the gospel to those who think it is for normal people, that is, those who are probably the majority of people in our churches.  I have been thinking a lot about the parable of the wedding banquet – how the master at the end of the parable brings in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.  We often look at this and tell each other how nice it is that God cares even for these people, even for the least of these.  I wonder though if the reality  is not more shocking.  Maybe it is because we need these people at our “normal” banquets to convert us, to teach us what the gospel really is.  Maybe we need to see them to realize that we ourselves are in a worse state than they – not physically affected, but heartblind, crippled in our wills, and poor in righteousness.

So I have troubled the waters of the “normal” church, but now I would like to trouble the waters regarding the helplessness induced by mental illness.  The point I want to make here is that, though mental illness will limit the ways I can make choices, I am never wholly without choice.  A good example is this.  Imagine that I am depressed, and I therefore treat everyone around me miserably.  In many ways, once I am in a situation where depression is in full swing and there is something to aggravate it and make me act bitterly toward others, there is very little I can do – the reaction is sometimes as inevitable as mixing baking soda and vinegar.  But there are some things I can choose.  I can know my own weakness and deliberately withdraw myself (where possible) from situations where the reaction will take place.  I can explain what is going on to others so that they know the damage I may cause is not as intentional as it may seem.  We are also in a society blessed with antidepressants and counseling, which offer yet another choice.  In my opinion, one of the most cruel choices a mentally ill person can make is to refuse treatment and just “get by” when that getting by is taking a horrible toll on those around them.  Christians are often very worried about antidepressants etc., whether it is right to be influenced by a drug.  What they should worry more about is whether deciding to refuse drugs and forcing those around one to shoulder the burdens caused by this refusal is in fact concordant with loving one’s neighbor.  There are of course many more factors than can be discussed here, and I don’t at all mean to suggest that those who refuse medication or refuse treatment are categorically bad people.  But I would suggest that the question is framed wrong and the actions and intentions therefore skewed when we are more worried  about preserving an intact “all natural self” (which we do not preserve in any other area anyway) than about loving God and loving one’s neighbor.

There; I have hopefully upset everyone equally.  I had initially intended to post about my faith and my own particular brand of mental illnesses, OCD and depression, but realized that in order to do that I would have begin figuring out more generally the tension or perceived tension between faith and mental illness; you can expect further on these things in later posts.  As a side note, I have also chosen very deliberately to use words like blind, freak, lame etc. because I think that the more publicly acceptable terms are tools that we use to trick ourselves into believing we are sensitive and caring – we speak of the visually impaired because we would rather not deal with the blind, let alone love them or see ourselves reflected in their condition.  Also, it annoys me that most politically correct terms simply replace a Germanic word with a Latinate based word, and so in our own way we are simply promulgating another longstanding stereotype, that Germanic words are more vulgar than sensitive Latin words.