on Theology, Public-Personal

Developing the Dialogue–ETS Paper 2010

I’m continuing my little subtheme of papers addressing Buddhism in some way.  This piece is actually the most direct discussion, but unfortunately it was a fairly hastily written conference paper.  My second conference of the year, and my first time attending that conference, Evangelical Theological Society Conference 2010 was overshadowed for me by the trip I was taking to meet Sarah, my own rapidly growing conviction that the Catholic Church was where the Truth resided, and my almost desperate exhaustion–having transitioned jobs to my second evangelical faculty post, only to face moving on immediately.  A topic I had hoped to give slow, deep reflection to therefore became a quick summary, with no likelihood of an immediate resumption of the conversation.

Still, I think I was getting at something real, here, and I hope to have an opportunity to follow up on it.  Here, then, my rough-and-ready speaking text of my 2010 ETS submission:

The Time of God’s Long Suffering:
Reading the New Testament in Response to a Buddhist Problem
Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society
Atlanta, Georgia
November 17, 2010

Do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed. Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. Therefore, beloved, since you are waiting for these, be diligent to be found by him without spot or blemish, and at peace. And count the patience of our Lord as salvation[.]
1 Peter 3:8-15

Most of you will, as I do, tend to immediately read this passage with attention to two key contexts: the context of individual reassurance or exhortation, and the context of discussions among various eschatological systems. Obviously, the passage should be read in these ways. Let me ask you, though, to set those aside for a moment, and look more directly at the language of time itself, here. The “thousand years” and “one day” paradox suggests that God’s interactions with time are subject to compression and dilation relative to His concerns. The time frame of calendars and clocks, though part of the order of Creation, is not absolute. Instead, the Epistle’s readers are oriented to a time frame in which “the Lord is not slow […] but patient”; in which God’s reluctance to end the age before “all should reach repentance” will give way very unexpectedly, “like a thief,” and violently, even to the point of a distillation of the material cosmos to its personal, spiritual quintessence.

Perhaps most strikingly, the reader so oriented becomes a participant in this timing, “waiting for and hastening” the end while simultaneously able to “count the patience of our Lord as salvation.” From this brief reading, permit me to extract a framework of four assertions for later use:

  • The time of Creation (world history, the history of the cosmos) is contingent, not ultimate or definitive even for the cosmos.
  • Events within Creation time are more significantly ordered by God’s concern than by clock-and-calendar chronology.
  • God’s interactions with Creation time are pre-eminently concerned with relationships among divine and human persons.
  • Because of God’s concern, humans also participate in changing significance of Creation time.

I believe a framework like this should permit us to address Buddhist thought on its own terms, while still reasoning consistently from the language of Scripture.
Now, before I proceed, let me hasten to offer three disclaimers—yea, I will give four qualifications. First, I know that just “one small step for a man” from what I’ve just said lies a fruitful and ancient discussion of chronos and kairos in rhetoric and history. I would love to hear from some of you who are more deeply involved in that conversation than I am; I am sidestepping that discussion. Second, I am keenly aware that the readings from 1 Peter, Luke, Romans, and 1 Corinthians that I hope to offer, today, will hardly be groundbreaking—indeed, I hope that I will say nothing absolutely new. I hope only to emphasize certain elements of these texts that speak to a certain juncture in a certain discussion.

Third, when I turn to face Buddhism, I am aware of a double criticism that can be made against my main sources, which are Japanese Buddhists from the Kyoto School. Scholarly Buddhism is not folk Buddhism; and Japan’s uptake of Buddhism is idiosyncratic within East Asian context, even before we turn to Southeast Asia and the Subcontinent. I have done what I may within my background reading and selection of sources to deal with these known issues by using sources from both main traditions of Japanese Buddhism, privileging their direct interactions with Pali source texts, and staying as near as I may to “mainstream” collections of the teachings of the Buddha.

Beyond that, and fourth, I say to you that I very humbly offer these comments as an attempt to mark some clear connections within a Christian conversation that answers to a Buddhist conversation. When I say that these passages provide us with answers, I definitely have in mind neither the insistence of fact against the question, nor the reduction of the question to the scaffolding used to renovate it, but the apologia of a faithful response in another’s conversation, and a hope that can bear questioning.

While my personal hopes definitely have to do with the interaction of committed Christians with East Asian culture, I have also developed a keen interest in the convergence of Continental philosophy with Buddhism. There has been a steadily growing (though very uneven) interaction of Western philosophy with Buddhism throughout the past two centuries, correlating very precisely to the growth of a post-Christian consensus in the societies once comprised as Christendom. Nietzsche’s Antichrist at one point addresses the relationship of Buddhism to Christianity under the very late Nietzsche’s abrasive criticism of both religions. Significantly, Nietzsche compares the two in terms of the theology of sin: “Buddhism is the only really positive religion to be found in history, even in its epistemology (which is strict phenomenalism)—it no longer speaks of the ‘struggle with sin’ but fully recognising the true nature of reality it speaks of the ‘struggle with pain’” (17). Nietzsche does not have a particularly close understanding of Buddhism, but he does identify the difference in emphasis between Western philosophy and Buddhism reasonably well.

Equally imprecise, and apparently contradicting Nietzsche, J. Estlin Carpenter’s 1923 Buddhism and Christianity differentiates the Christian response to suffering from Buddhism as follows:

The revelation of the Rule of God instead of ending “the age that now is” has indefinitely prolonged it. And it has not altered its external conditions. The world is as full of the pains of sickness, the decrepitude of age and the sorrows of death, as it was when the son of Suddhodana first learned of them on his pleasure-drives. […] And we have not the insight claimed by the Buddha to relate each smart to some incident of wrong in a distant life. Christianity can never explain suffering. In the mingled web of pain and joy which is woven into every lot, it can lay no hand upon the ill and say “This is thy desert.” Under the Rule of God it has another word, “This is thy service.” (62)

Of course, from Carpenter’s later and fairly liberal standpoint, Nietzsche’s distinction between “struggle with sin” and “struggle with pain” has fallen into disuse; “sin” is simply one of the “external conditions” in the “mingled web.” What is interesting, however, is that Carpenter appears to believe that the Buddhist idea of karma definitely calls for one-to-one consequences for acts, while Christianity does not do so. Carpenter’s view seems to accord well with Christ’s rebukes concerning the man born blind or the sacrilegious murder of some Galileans, but also seems to ignore the principle of sowing and reaping, as well as the trial by works of Romans 2.

Both Nietzsche and Carpenter have tapped something, though, which is of crucial importance when trying to bring the Buddhist understanding of suffering into contact with the New Testament. As Carpenter’s assertion “Christianity can never explain suffering” suggests, Buddhism regards suffering as the trace, and also the essential determination, of being sentient. Suffering both marks and is the fact which consciousness explains. Christianity, however, has typically taken suffering as indicative, not of the nature of being, but of a defect within a goodness either remembered or anticipated. Christianity typically tries to account for the defect so as to distinguish the ill and its causes from the creature and its goodness (hence the perennial “problem of evil” is accompanied by the “problem of pain”). Buddhism, on the other hand, typically tries to account for sentient being’s apparently intrinsic capacity for suffering.

For Takeuchi Yoshinori, both religious and philosophical efforts have as their focus a “conversion,” the core of which is a shift from thinking of suffering as an individual experience to thinking of the individual consciousness a form of suffering. Takeuchi proposes in The Heart of Buddhism that “conversion is said to begin with self-purification, with a catharsis of soul” for “mystical traditions of all times and places.” He further differentiates “mere morality or ethics” from “purification that follows on conversion” in such traditions, for the latter “stands on a higher plane.” Takeuchi suggests that “such purification is permeated throughout by the problem of the impermanence of all things, by the problem of life and death,” but this problem is not merely a matter of finite lifespan. For this reason, Takeuchi criticizes “neo-Kantianism—along with the liberal theology based on it” for being “fettered to the immanentism of human reason and hence [. . .] only impeding our view of that abyss of death and sin and nihility that opens up under our very feet as the fate of being human” (72-3). Like the Curse of Genesis 3, the problem as Takeuchi takes it up is bound up with all of the joy and suffering of mortal life. For Takeuchi, this understanding of human moribundity tightly links traditions as varied as yogic Hinduism, various Buddhisms, medieval Christian mysticism, and post-Christian existentialisms. The crucial insight, he suggests, is a universalizing of the confrontation with suffering: “Without the memento mori, without an accompanying awareness and appropriation of death in the depths of one’s own being, those reflections become nothing more than pathological abnormalities.” Reflection on suffering which leads one to relate to such suffering as a defining feature of sentient being, rather than merely an unpleasant experience for such a being, is the essence of the “conversion” Takeuchi has in view.

In Takeuchi’s writing, the “turn” involved in this “conversion” hinges on the subject’s becoming conscious of what Buddhists term “dependent origination.” Takeuchi suggests that this conversion is often described in the “fundamental experience of artists and poets,” who in their self-conscious acts of representation may “experience an immediate embodiment of the dynamism of world and body, other, and life prior to the distinction of subject and object” (74). The writer whose characters “take over” the work, the carpenter who sees what the wood “wants to be,” the painter who realizes that he and his painting are illuminated by the sun no differently than the things he paints, are all having experiences that hint at the principle of “dependent origination.” Takeuchi describes “dependent origination” as follows:

the subject that, seen from the world, is part of the world, constructs its own being-in-the-world co-dependently and correlatively with the world, and yet does so as its own activity. [. . .] We may liken it to dreaming: when we dream, we live in correlatedness with the world of the dream and, through the phenomenal identity of dreamer and dream, keep the dream alive; but as soon as we become aware of this correlatedness, we have already awoken. (80-1)

Takeuchi extends this similitude of “dreaming” when discussing the consequences of a developed consciousness of “dependent origination”: “at the moment one awakens, the various sufferings that troubled the world of sleep are awakened to in the realization, ‘it was only a dream; I was sleeping’” (91). He proposes that the conditions for the construction of world and self “are only grasped in their primary sense when their essential determination is sought in terms of their extinction, when they are seen as past essences, as things that were.” The subject having awakened to the understanding that something which suffers—the subject, the self, personally and globally, as self or as deity—has originated through moribund desire, the practice of disassociation from such desire should cause, not a turn within that self, but a return to the world precisely as a universal suffering within which one need not be perturbed.

For Keiji Nishitani, this form of “conversion” is a key distinction between Buddhist and Christian responses to the nihility of secular life (its ultimate negation of its own ground for significance). Nishitani contrasts the Western responses of post-Christian figures such as Nietzsche and Heidegger, in which “nihilism is dealt with on the horizon of the so-called ‘history of being,’” with the Eastern response, in which a nihilistic crisis has not occurred (168). He argues that “the East has achieved a conversion from the standpoint of nihility to the standpoint of sunyata [or Emptiness, No-Thingness].” Rather than picture suffering as a disease or disorder within the individual, Nishitani’s Buddhism describes “the ‘sea of samsaric suffering,’ likening the world, with all its six ways and its unending turnover from one form of existence to another, to an unfathomable sea and identifying the essential Form of beings made to roll with its restless motion as suffering” (169). Thus, although “the nihilism of modern Europe […] could not help but awaken to itself as something pervaded by a Great Suffering,” Nishitani praises the Buddhist response which “goes a step beyond the existential self-awareness of suffering to speak of a ‘universal suffering’ where ‘All is suffering,’ and to recognize in suffering a basic principle.” In fact, Nishitani measures the post-Christian Western response to suffering in the person against Buddhist principles and suggests that “It might not be wide of the mark to suggest that Buddhism’s explanation of suffering as one of its Four Noble Truths—the ‘Truth about Suffering’—be regarded as an advance beyond the existential awareness of suffering to an existential interpretation […] of being-in-the-world.”

In other words, the Buddhism represented by Nishitani and Takeuchi affirms that suffering seen or experienced by the individual provides a hint toward a higher understanding, a re-interpretation of the cosmos from the standpoint of suffering. If suffering, whether by undesireable inflictions or unsatisfied desires, affects all things—and if death bounds every individual life within suffering—then suffering must be a more fundamental principle of sentient being than the pain and disease that bring it into consciousness. From this standpoint, the enlightenment for which the Buddha received that name is the belief, psychologically necessary and consistent with our humanity, that suffering is the reality of which particular individual thoughts, desires, concerns, lives, deaths, and discontents are the shadows. To perceive the world from the standpoint of all suffering would be, ironically, to cease to suffer any particular pains as any particular person. As a common Zen-inspired tea scroll says, “Nothing happens”; or rather, as the implied commentary says, “Things happen, but they happen to no one.”

One key problem for the Christian, of course, is that this brilliant psychological strategy seems to amount to an evacuation of Creation—if all sentient beings were to achieve this enlightenment, then the world as we know it would cease to be full of people. If we remember the four tentative principles we extracted from the language of time and suffering in 1 Peter 2, though, I believe we can speak to the necessity which inspires the Buddhist to seek the life of a Buddha precisely by affirming the nature of our suffering as such. Let me review those assertions, briefly:

  • The time of Creation (world history, the history of the cosmos) is contingent, not ultimate or definitive even for the cosmos.
  • Events within Creation time are more significantly ordered by God’s concern than by clock-and-calendar chronology.
  • God’s interactions with Creation time are pre-eminently concerned with relationships among divine and human persons.
  • Because of God’s concern, humans also participate in changing significance of Creation time.

I believe these can be proposed to the Buddhist as an alternative response to the understanding of the universality of suffering. We may, for starters, accept the standpoint of all suffering as a profound expression of the reality of a fallen world, in which every sentient being suffers and is both actively (in actual sin) and complicitly (in original sin) a contributor to the suffering, even noting the very close correspondence of key Buddhist texts to the truth expressed in James 1:2-21. Verses 14-15 are especially on point: “each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.” (The language in James 4 about the origin of social conflict in spiritual conflict is also very helpful, here.)

We will not, however, propose a practice aimed at assuming the standpoint of all suffering, a “conversion” in which all things personal are taken to be shadows obliterated by one’s turning to see them. We know that, in the process of repentance and mortification by which we are conformed to Christ, we will come to exclaim with Paul that “I am crucified with Christ. Nevertheless, I live; yet not I, but Christ lives within me” (Gal 2:20). Yet we will find ourselves compelled to confess that God’s interactions with Creation time are pre-eminently concerned with relationships among divine and human persons. Suffering, especially unjust suffering, not only stresses our sense of God’s justice and goodness; it also reinforces our understanding that, in giving good gifts, God is never concerned merely with our separate, inner, immanent happinesses. In Luke 18:1-8, in fact, Christ’s teaching that “they ought always to pray and not lose heart” deals not only with the participation of believers waiting for vindication in the divine economy of justice, but specifically affirms God’s own impatience on the subject: “will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily.” This impatience to vindicate Himself and His people over against the violence of human sinfulness, and to bring an end to suffering, is also the proper theme of the language in Romans 9 concerning the “vessels of wrath, doomed to destruction,” which God “endured with much patience.” We are, as Peter says in his Epistle, to “count the patience of our Lord as salvation.” Vindication—itself the urgently personal defense of those who cry out for deliverance from suffering and injustice—waits because of the similarly urgent and personal desire of a God who is “not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.”

Because God is concerned with relationships among divine and human persons, the “turn” for the Christian believer is not from a world of personal suffering to a world of suffering impersonally, but from a world of personal suffering to a world of suffering with Christ for others. This is the lesson of 2 Corinthians 1:3-11, especially “If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. […] Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.” The historic Christian affirmation of the communion of the saints reflects exactly this economy of suffering, proclamation, and intercession, which is also enacted in “the communion of the body of Christ.” As many other texts in Scripture teach, particularly those most concerned with communion (both as a sacrament and as koinonea in its manifold meanings in the Body Life), to become a believer in Christ and a follower of Christ is not to become merely a member of a voluntary organization for the promotion of common goals; it is to become part of a divinely managed historical order whose interrelations—like they myriad interrelations of your body and mine—are real in complex ways which defy our efforts to reduce them to manageable lists of principles, visions, or sociological constructs.
There is urgency to this understanding, however. For just as the Buddhist who realizes that laughter makes no sense when the whole world is burning must proceed to enlightenment or live in madness and misery, we must not leave our friend in possession of our understanding without awakening him to the whole timetable; the insistency of an divine and human interpersonal norm on an eventual righting and reckoning of things, and the choice that requires of those who realize it. In Romans 2:1-8, Paul reminds us of the right ordering of time once more, most pointedly when he asks, “Do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?”

As I have said, these are not the final thoughts, nor the answers which make the questions stop, in this conversation. I do believe, though, that by focussing on the language concerning our participation with God in God’s long suffering as constitutive of the time during which we live, we will make ourselves available to Buddhist thinkers as interlocutors who—unlike the god-talking atheists who primarily represent Western and even “Christian” thought to East Asian intellectual historians—believe the language of the New Testament itself speaks directly to the concerns Buddhist teaching seeks to respond to. And that, at least, must be an enriching of our discourse with the very words of truth.

Public-Personal

Two out of Three–on Milton and Education

Here’s a piece from what I more-or-less regard as the “capstone” of my undergraduate work, the single-author Milton course I took with Dr. Hotchkiss in Spring 1999 at The Master’s College (end of my senior year).  Among my classmates was Esther Chua, now the head of that department; and we had a remarkable class presentation and candidate conversation from Grant Horner, a first-rate Miltonist who was hired into the department after that year [profiles here].

So this piece has a couple points of interest, aside from the way that a strong interest in Milton and in both Milton’s and Locke’s contributions on education were to blend into my special interest in Rhet/Comp and in Nineteenth-Century British.  One point is that I concede a lot to Milton, here, that I would (perhaps obviously) now be unwilling to concede concerning scholasticism and scholastic method; and I likely introduce the conflated sense of “classical,” myself.  If you’re very careful, you can see the cognitive dissonance between the Deweyan construal of “liberal arts” that I was formed in and my habitual rejection of pragmatism starting to work out; note the way that the “instrumentality” of language is a cipher for an awful lot that remains unarticulated, here.  My critique of Milton’s paradoxical adoption of an anti-rhetorical stance is one I’ll stand by, though there’s a lot of nuance needed (at the time I had no conception of the way that a Renaissance feud between “rhetoricians” and “dialecticians” was reverberating, here).  Likewise my critique of his deferral of writing (with quite a few years more experience, I think the idea of writing, translation, target-language composition was pretty astute for an undergrad, if perhaps a bit obvious).  And of course you will see on full display the strong sympathy I felt for Milton’s dissenting position, even making “protect dissent” a primary aim for educators.

Most quizzical, for those who were formed classically before engaging Modern Western philosophy, will be the way I seem to regard as structural a distinction between “scholastic and Aristotelian” or “Peripatetic” and rabbinical modes of philosophical discourse and instruction.  Of course, I inherited Milton’s own prejudice against the scholastics, and at the time it was amplified by a sense that the Augustinian tradition was fundamentally wrongheaded and included the “too Catholic” part of Christendom, including most Reformed thought, and certainly including the heirs of Aquinas.  It would be a decade later before I could really approach Aquinas without a kaleidoscope of wrongheaded assumptions interfering with my reading, of course; for now, simply note that an anti-metaphysical stance pervades this work, and that it ends up totalizing the individual will in alignment with a Divine Will that instrumentalizes all else; all mediation is either fallenness or directly the occasion of recognizing and aligning with the Divine Will.  It’s a common but utterly soul-sucking mistake for modern Christians, and the more seriously and rigorously you try to live by any such ontotheological program, the more damage it will do to your mind.

Having happily survived, I offer you this interesting, prickly, and flawed little response to Milton’s Of Education.

Review Essay
Milton–Hotchkiss
April 24, 1999
OF EDUCATION

Milton’s Of Education spells out an aggressive curriculum for youth from twelve to twenty-one years of age. Based in Milton’s own thirst for learning, and his understanding of the importance of language and classical literacy, the program of education is designed to create scholars of encyclopedic knowledge, moral vision and military acumen ideally suited to the revolutionary and utopian Puritan political milieu in which Milton moved and to which he was so passionately devoted.

Milton’s primary innovation against the education of his day is in privileging substantial reading in a language over linguistics and composition. He protests the “time lost . . . in a preposterous exaction, forcing the empty wits of children to compose Theams, verses, and Orations, which are the acts of ripest judgment and the finall work of a head fill’d by long reading, and observing, with elegant maxims, and copious invention” (980,1). Milton does not lack concern for the technical aspects of language use; rather, he believes that it is a waste to ask those who are only learning classical language and literature to begin writing and disputing in language they have not fully learned. In essence, he demands a literacy that is cultural, rather than merely technical. His Puritanical tendency for the practical also insists upon an instrumental view of language, so that “though a linguist should pride himselfe to have all the Tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet, if he have not studied the solid things in them . . . he were nothing so much to be esteem’d a learned man” (980). In reaction against this abstract learning of language detached from the literature itself, Milton proposes that the student be given the “preparatory grounds of speech by their certain forms got into memory” and immediately “led to the praxis thereof in some chosen short book lesson’d throughly to them” (981). Milton is convinced that as the student is thoroughly educated in the literature, he will learn the language both more quickly and more profitably than otherwise.

In a similar rejection of the tedium of classical education, Milton dislikes the tendency to immediately give the student “Logick & metaphysicks” (981), before they have a thorough cultural literacy. Their grammar and life experience still inadequate, the student is expected to cope with the foundational issues of human thought, “to be tost and turmoild with their unballasted wits in fadomles and unquiet deeps of controversie” (981). In Milton’s view, these issues are not to be entered into without a thorough body of knowledge, polished linguistic ability (derived from long study of the classical literatures) and extensive life experience. Milton’s experience suggests to him that students thus taught to dispute before they understand content, causes many to lapse into “hatred and contempt of learning” (981).

Milton’s alternative, then, is to create an environment in which cultural literacy may be inculcated in students without oppressive and abstruse classical methods. He recommends that the school be a large house and its grounds, fit for about “a hundred and fifty persons” (981). These 150 are to include about twenty attendants and one master. The entire education would be conducted in this school, “not needing a remove to any other house of Schollership” unless to study for a profession (981). He then lays out in detail a progression through the classics, beginning with grammar studied and exercised with the moral books and proceeding (in proper Puritan fashion) as rapidly as possible to the practical studies of agriculture, physiology, natural philosophy, mathematics, rudimentary medicine and military science (982,3).

One further innovation finds its way into Milton’s program at this point: he suggests that studies of these subjects should be reinforced by conference with their contemporary practitioners, such as “Hunters, fowlers, Fishermen, Shepherds, Gardeners, Apothecaries; and in the other sciences, Architects, Engineers, Mariners, Anatomists” (983). This continuing evidence of a concern for the practical aspects of learning is an important component of the Puritan ideal which contributed so greatly to the growth of modern science (and, less favorably, to the trade-school mentality of the modern academy).

The continuing progression of knowledge (ethics, drama, politics, law, theology) eventually culminates in the study of poetry, by which Milton means primarily the epic, dramatic and lyric forms which dominate classical studies (and Milton’s own writing). Such a proper education “would make them soon perceive what despicable creatures our common rimers and playwrites be, and show them, what Religious, what glorious and magnificent use might be made of Poetry both in divine and humane things” (984). Only at this point would Milton begin the process of “forming them to be able writers and composers in every excellent matter, when they shall be thus fraught with a universall insight into things” (984).

While Milton goes on to describe the exercise (mostly military drill) of his ideal academy, the real argument of his essay is captured in his expressed desire that students be “fraught with a universall insight into things.” In the end, Milton’s great enemy is provincialism of all kinds. He opposes the disputatious provincialism of the classical academy, locked away from practical learning by their abstruse speculations. He opposes the provincialism of the English, who ignore classical learning from a mistaken (in Milton’s opinion) notion of their superiority to the Latin cultures. In fact, even though he emphasizes the Puritan ideal of practical learning, Milton opposes the Puritan tendency to suppress drama and other potentially immoral and subversive learning. Milton’s view is that a student, wisely guided, will come through the learning process with sufficient insight to reject the shallow wit which hides the immoral, and to value that which is of lasting worth. This is in accord with Milton’s views on freedom of the press as expressed in Aeropagitica, and is a theme explored in Paradise Lost.

Insofar as Milton seeks to establish a universality of insight, his plan is laudable; it has, however, some vulnerabilities. First, Milton’s reaction against the wastefulness of asking young students to write an endless succession of meaningless assignments causes him to postpone nearly all writing to the end of a man’s education. Yet writing, like reading, is a habit gained from long practice; and while Milton is certainly correct to state that writing of worth develops only when cultural literacy is already present, it cannot then be said that no one who is not completely educated should avoid writing until his education is complete. Milton’s hypersensitivity to the misuse of the classical languages causes him to overreach himself here; his school would fail without opportunity for the students to respond to, and record their advances in, the literature studied. A better suggestion might be to allow students to write their first compositions in the vernacular, proceeding to translations of their earlier compositions into the classical languages, and then continuing with original compositions as their understanding of the literature flowered. However, Milton is almost certainly right to react against the concept (still current) that all learning must be exhaustively documented by assignments, grade-marking and other busywork.

A further weakness results from Milton’s clash with the classical establishment’s abuse of logic and metaphysics. To be sure, taking students who have only at long last mastered the grammar of the classical languages, and expecting them to contribute meaningfully to the knowledge of metaphysics, would be a fool’s errand; and so Milton correctly values it. This flaw in classical education seems likely to have resulted from an environment of orthodoxy wherein scholastic philosophy and patristic theology (supplemented with Aristotelian cosmology) were to be learned and not challenged, however dialogic the actual teaching method may have been. In such a system, the foundational value of logic and metaphysics were in forming assumptions upon which all other learning could be based, rather than to cultivate rational inquiry and protect dissent. However, Milton’s solution is to banish rhetoric completely from the curriculum, and to eliminate the academic discipline of disputation. The harmful results of such an overreaction are apparent in the modern academy, where the absence of foundational emphases on logic and rhetoric (in the classical, not the postmodern, sense of the term). Whereas debate has a long tradition, extending at least to the rabbinic method among the Hebrews and the Peripatetic tradition in Greek philosophy, the more recent emphasis on teaching as solely an instrumentality for the conveyance of information. This method stifles dissent and banishes metaphysics and logic to the closet, as they are of marginal pragmatic value at best (except in the exceedingly dilute form of “critical thinking”). In the end, it leads to the trade-school mentality; learning is valued solely for its real-world value (easily measured by economists), and that which is not so measured is forced to either re-interpret itself or become extinct.

However vulnerable Milton’s thought in On Education may be at these points, it must be said that his presentation is generally quite good. His curriculum begins and ends with language and literature, and contains a wide variety of highly useful studies. Perhaps the ardent Milton critic should first attempt to complete the reading list contained in On Education; the project would undoubtedly rob him of his resolve to question Milton’s credentials–or if not his resolve, certainly his energy!

on Literature, Public-Personal

Not Nihility—Mishima, Lovecraft, and a little Buddhism

I’m connecting this piece from 2012 to my series of posts that develop my running side-theme of interaction with Buddhism, though that is not necessarily the focus of the piece.  This conference paper is another that was unfortunately written under great time pressure, and it features some very coarsely edited material from my dissertation and my thesis.  I was trying to bring these two into conversation, and I think that generally I achieved that in this piece.  Given time, I would someday like to make a smoother version of this work; I am convinced that it gets at something common to all my major scholarship, and something very basically human.

Here, then, my paper prepared for a panel I shared with Geoffrey Reiter at a Science & Science Fiction conference held at ORU in Tulsa:

ORU Conference on Science and Science Fiction
April 12 & 13, 2012

When East and West Collide:
Hope and Imaginary Bodies in Mishima and Lovecraft

Absolute selfhood opens up as nonobjectifiable nothingness in the conversion that takes place within personality.  Through that conversion every bodily, mental, and spiritual activity that belongs to person displays itself as a play of shadows moving across the stage of nothingness.  [. . .]  It is the field commonly seen as “outermost” by the personal self and referred to as the external world actually present in the here and now, ever changing.  [. . .]  The “outer world” emerges here as a self-realization of nonobjectifiable nothingness, or, rather, makes itself present such as it is, in oneness with nothingness.

The field of true human existence opens up beyond the outer and the inner, at a point where the “shadowy man” is in oneness with absolute selfhood.  We have here an absolute self-identity.  Thinking, feeling, and action are, on every occasion, entirely illusory appearances with nothing behind them, the shadowy heart and mind of the shadowy man. 

Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness

Introduction

There are few obvious similarities between Yukio Mishima and H. P. Lovecraft, but at first glance many readers will be hard put to tell which author penned the following lines:  “It naturally followed that when it did show itself unmistakably as a terrifying paradox of existence—as a form of existence that rejected existence—I was as panic-stricken as though I had come across some monster, and loathed it accordingly. ”  These words from Mishima’s Sun and Steel describe a phase of his development as man and writer in which his “stubborn refusal to perceive [his] body” could be accounted for by his longing for “the ideal body” that would “be absolutely free from any interference by words.”  Mishima’s idealization of what Shu Kuge calls “‘existence’ not yet translated into discursive language” could bear comparison to Lovecraft’s dream fantasies, his life-long memory of his childhood terror of “Night-gaunts,” and his fascination with things we cannot conceive before, beneath, and beyond our individual and collective consciousness, things that might turn out to be (literally) unutterably significant.  Focussing on Lovecraft’s story “The Outsider” and selections from Mishima’s Sun and Steel, I want to look at the ways that bodily experience of consciousness expresses nihility in both.

In bringing these two writers together, I am not only bringing an American and a Japanese writer onto the same stage, but attempting to build a bridge between various elements of my own research and teaching.  (In keeping with that goal, let me point out that significant portions of this paper are derived from earlier works whose arguments I am here advancing.)  In Lovecraft’s “The Outsider,” then, we are looking at a quasi-autobiographical work from the Coleridge-Poe-Lovecraft tradition which has helped to invest much of the field of science fiction, fantasy, and horror with significance.  In Mishima’s Sun and Steel, we are looking at a quasi-autobiographical work situated squarely at the confluence of Romantic and existential “Western” thought with the “Eastern” though of Japanese Shinto-Buddhist culture.  As with the works of Coleridge, or of Friedrich Nietzsche or Antonin Artaud, these radically global and personal works of Lovecraft and Mishima both assert and reject a radical opposition between life as articulated in significant actions and utterances and life idealized as an inarticulate, pre-discursive unity.  Like Mishima’s “I,” the first-person speaker of Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” finds his whole body of experience nauseating when he finally perceives his body.  We will begin by looking at how Lovecraft’s “Outsider” responds to such self-knowledge, then proceed to draw the parallel to the response Kuge reports from Mishima:  “The surface is not a representation or reflection of what is hidden beneath.  The surface is everything.”

“The Outsider”

The foremost editor and promoter of Lovecraft’s work, S. T. Joshi, characterizes Lovecraft’s 1921 story “The Outsider” as “haunting and inexhaustibly interpretable” (85).  Yet Joshi seems to find the story difficult to interpret, saying that “on the face of it, the tale makes little sense” and that “it is still hampered by conceptual difficulties, excessive derivativeness, an unfortunate reliance on overheated prose, and a ‘surprise’ ending that cannot be much of a surprise to many readers” (87).  It seems odd, though, to single out “The Outsider” as an example of “overheated prose,” as Lovecraft’s penchant for overwriting persists throughout his career.  Lovecraft did acknowledge that the story “represents my literal though unconscious imitation of Poe at its height” (qtd. in Joshi 86), and this accounts for much of its difference from Lovecraft’s later work.

More importantly, though, this dependence on Poe answers Joshi’s protest that “The Outsider” elicits no surprise at the end.  On this point, Joshi seems inexplicably insensitive to the conventions of the genre.  Both Poe and Lovecraft would tell him, in their critical writings, that the effect of such tales as “The Outsider,” in the tradition of Poe’s “William Wilson” and “The Cask of Amontillado,” is not surprise at all, but dawning awareness.  The reader does not experience a sudden and unexpected reversal of expectations; rather, the reader experiences a sudden confirmation of a pattern suggested but not proven by the events of the tale.  The mind, sensing the pattern, is drawn to look for confirming evidence, always suspecting the possibility of a reversal; as the evidence mounts, the conclusion begins to seem inevitable and the progress of the narrative at once inexorable and seemingly interminable.  When the sudden confirmation comes, all the evidence and suspicion–and the terror of the imagined possibilities which are not confirmed–is allowed to fall into place, effecting a sudden transformation in the reader’s perspective on the story.  Careful reading of such a story, then, should pay careful attention to problems of memory and perception that might appear as “conceptual difficulties” upon a first reading.

In reading “The Outsider,” the most significant such memory problem concerns the status of the narrator.  The story’s first-person narrator repeatedly speaks of the oblivion-inducing “nepenthe” which comforts him; he says of the climactic moment of the tale that “in the supreme horror of that second I forgot what had horrified me” (5); and the opening line of the final paragraph says that “nepenthe has calmed me.”  It is strange, then, that the very same paragraph closes with the narrator’s description of the “supreme horror” of the tale’s climax.  Upon a first reading, it seems impossible to explain the narrator’s ability to tell the story of an experience which he claims, while telling it, to have forgotten.

The speaker in “The Outsider” begins with a melodramatic pronouncement bewailing his memories:

Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.  Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books, or upon awed watches in twilight groves of grotesque, gigantic, and vine-encumbered trees that silently wave twisted branches far aloft. (1)

From the very beginning, the typical Lovecraftian disposition toward memory is established:  it is a burden, even a curse, that the speaker would escape if he could.  Other examples abound:  the narrator of “The Shadow Out of Time” finds it a source of hope that “my experience was wholly or partly an hallucination” (275).  The narrator of “The Call of Cthulhu” opens his account by saying, “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.  We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity” (52).

“The Outsider” intensifies this horror of memory by passing from the “fear and sadness” of “memories of childhood” to a horror even deeper:  “And yet I am strangely content, and cling desperately to those sere memories, when my mind momentarily threatens to reach beyond to the other” (1).  The main tension of the story unfolds in the space created by these two statements about memory:  no matter how unhappy the slice of reality depicted by his conscious memories may be, the speaker would rather “cling desperately” to those memories than allow his “mind […] to reach beyond to the other.”  The speaker then describes the tale of his own growth and exploration of his surroundings, his descriptions giving the reader a clear understanding of what the speaker refuses to clearly acknowledge: 

I know not where I was born, save that the castle was infinitely old and infinitely horrible […].  The stones in the crumbling corridors seemed always hideously damp, and there was an accursed smell everywhere, as of the piled-up corpses of dead generations. (1)

The narrator clearly signals his unreliability when he follows a statement about selective memory with a description beginning “I know not.”  In fact, the speaker’s memory is to be doubted at every turn, with the “smell […] as of the piled up corpses” being, in fact, a literal description rather than the metaphor intended by the speaker.  That the speaker found “nothing grotesque in the bones and skeletons that strowed some of the stone crypts” reinforces the reader’s impression that the speaker has, himself, grown up in the crypts or catacombs beneath an ancient castle.  That the speaker considers these things normal clearly flags the distance between his perceptions and those of his audience.

The narrator’s circumlocutions leave the reader to piece together the significance of “the other” which the narrator is so eager to forget.  Progressively revealing elements of the unsurprising “surprise ending,” the narrator prepares his audience for a sudden transformation from suggestive uncertainty to confirmation.  In keeping with the genre and Poe’s example, the confirmation is delayed until the very end, even at the cost of some awkwardness.  The reader finds the narrator in a place so dark “that I used sometimes to light candles and gaze steadily at them for relief” (1) and follows his ascent, beginning when

in the shadowy solitude my longing for light grew so frantic that I could rest no more, and I lifted entreating hands to the single black ruined tower that reached above the forest into the unknown outer sky.  And at last I resolved to scale that tower, fall though I might; since it were better to glimpse the sky and perish, than to live without ever beholding day. (2)

Having never seen the light, except that of candles and the gradations of twilight that exist even in the darkness of his world, the speaker nevertheless hungers for light; in this he echoes Poe’s critical appeals to a “thirst unquenchable” based on a “prescience of glories beyond the grave” which underlies all aesthetic appeals.  (Both of them, of course, are also refracting Plato’s parable of the cave through a lens of Christian apocalypticism.)  “The Outsider,” of course, is himself in the grave.  For the narrator in the story, the search for light will take him back up out of his grave, emerging into the world of the living in the first of the revelations for which the reader has long been prepared by the hints of the narrator:  “The sight itself was as simple as it was stupefying [. . .] there stretched around me [. . .] nothing less than the solid ground” (3).  In climbing the long tower up from his “castle,” the speaker has reached, not “a lofty eminence,” but the surface of the earth.  He emerges through a church, finding that “my mind, stunned and chaotic as it was, still held the frantic craving for light” (3).

As he emerges, the speaker becomes “conscious of a kind of fearsome latent memory that made my progress not wholly fortuitous” (4).  Here the narrator’s and the reader’s journey coincide:  both are becoming aware that this is not a quest after knowledge, but after memory; something has been forgotten which will be recalled.  As the speaker continues, he arrives at a “castle [. . .] maddeningly familiar, yet full of perplexing strangeness to me.”  Approaching the castle, he sees “open windows–gorgeously ablaze with light and sending forth sound of the gayest revelry [. . .] an oddly dressed company, indeed; making merry, and speaking brightly” (4).  Here, it seems, is what he has been longing for; yet the reader is already prepared to ask whether this is “the other” to which the speaker referred; the audience is invited to wonder why the “latent memory” which guided him to this sight, the light for which he longed, was termed “fearsome.”

The answer is not long in coming:

I now stepped through the low window into the brilliantly lighted room, stepping as I did so from my single bright moment of hope to my blackest convulsion of despair and realisation.  The nightmare was quick to come; for as I entered, there occurred immediately one of the most terrifying demonstrations I had ever conceived. (4)

“The nightmare” begins with all of the revelers fleeing in “clamour and panic” as the speaker enters the room (4).  Afraid of whatever could cause such a disturbance, the narrator looks around and approaches an archway, screaming “the first and last sound I ever uttered” as he sees “in full, frightful vividness the inconceivable, indescribable, and unmentionable monstrosity which had by its simple appearance changed a merry company to a herd of delirious fugitives” (5).  The speaker “cannot even hint what it was like,” but calls it “the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide.  God knows it was not of this world–or no longer of this world.”  Of course, the reader familiar with the genre will have predicted what the story reveals in its last sentence:  the speaker “stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame [. . .] and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass” (6).

“The other,” then, is himself–is a view of himself in a mirror.  The usage of the phrase at the beginning of the tale, though, implies more.  “The other” is a thing “my mind momentarily threatens to reach beyond to,” analogous with but not identical to the physical reaching of his hand to the monster.  Hence, also, the speaker’s plunge is “from my single bright moment of hope to my blackest convulsion of despair and realisation.”  “The other” represents a whole scheme of repressed knowledge.  As the speaker says at the moment,

In that same second there crashed down upon my mind a single and fleeting avalanche of soul-annihilating memory.  I knew in that second all that had been.  I remembered beyond the frightful castle and the trees, and recognized the altered edifice in which I now stood; I recognized, most terrible of all, the unholy abomination that stood leering before me as I withdrew my sullied fingers from its own. (5)

The speaker, having been dead, has returned, less than human but still animated, to his home; his memories are dim and antiquated, but very much his.  Having once been a member of the “merry company” of the living, he has fallen into decay.  He cannot help but look at the brightly-lit revel, and risks everything all he knows to see its beauty; but he cannot see the beauty without being shown, immediately and drastically, his unfitness to participate in that beauty.

Elsewhere I have traced the relationship between Lovecraft’s horror fiction and the aesthetics of apocalypse in the Christian tradition that Lovecraft energetically defined himself against.  We may note one simple distinction between the Lovecraftian protagonist and the response of prophets in the Judeo-Christian tradition at this point.  A prophet would follow this horror with a promise of restoration, a message of hope centered in the apocalyptic transformation of the believer into a being fit to behold God with loving desire.  In Lovecraft’s mechanistic materialism, however, there is no place for hope and no grounds for such a transformation.  The only fit solution for “realisation,” then, is unreality.  Immediately following the moment of “soul-annihilating memory,” the speaker continues by saying,

But in the cosmos there is balm as well as bitterness, and that balm is nepenthe.  In the supreme horror of that moment I forgot what had horrified me, and the burst of black memory vanished in a chaos of echoing images.  In a dream I fled from that haunted and accursed pile, and ran swiftly and silently in the moonlight. (5)

The “chaos of echoing images” could itself be a description of Lovecraft’s fiction, works which attempt to perform the sleight-of-hand whereby a culture which seeks to repress the irrepressible may both look on the “merry company” and forget the horror of its own unfitness.  Hence the central image, the all-important “realisation,” is always “inconceivable, indescribable, and unmentionable”; the speaker “cannot even hint” at it, but knows it for “a compound of all that is unclean, uncanny [cf. unheimlich], unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable,” a “nameless, voiceless monster” which earns “the first and last sound” of the speaker:  “a ghastly ululation that revolted me almost as poignantly as its noxious cause” (4-5).  The expression must be inarticulate because to articulate the “realisation,” to provide details of the life which the speaker remembers and then represses, would be to defeat the repression.  With no hope of transformation, Lovecraft’s narrator finds the only adequate response:  “In a dream I fled.”

Cosmicism

Lovecraft’s 1926 essay “The Materialist Today” helps to generalize the significance of the narrator’s responses in “The Outsider.”  Ironically, the passage is bracketed with statements which, taken alone, would seem to run exactly counter to the fictional narrator’s flight into dreams:  “It is most sensible just to accept the universe as it is, and be done with it. [. . .] He will get most satisfaction in the end by keeping faithful to these things.”  The sentences between, though, tell the story:

All is illusion, hollowness and nothingness–but what does that matter?  Illusions are all we have, so let us pretend to cling to them; they lend dramatic values and comforting sensations of purpose to things which are really valueless and purposeless.  All one can logically do is jog placidly and cynically on, according to the artificial standards and traditions with which heredity and environment have endowed him.

Lovecraft here recommends to his reader precisely the course of action taken by the narrator of “The Outsider”:  the reader should “pretend to cling to [illusions]” just as the speaker escaped “in a dream.”

Such efforts to avoid certain kinds of knowledge at any cost are typical of Lovecraft’s “cosmicist” philosophy.  The universe, he claims, is purposeless; but the illusion of purpose is necessary for human conduct and emotional stability.  In a 1927 letter to Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales magazine, Lovecraft defines “cosmicism” when he says

all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the cosmos-at-large. […] one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. […] when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown–the shadow-haunted Outside–we must remember to leave our humanity–and terrestrialism at the threshold. (209)

Ultimately, the nihilism from which some of his characters wish to protect the world is precisely what Lovecraft seeks to inculcate.  Lovecraft believes that, by facing the horror of a universe in which man does not matter at all, the reader will be forced to discard his illusions (among which, of course, Lovecraft would place religion) and to “jog placidly and cynically on.”  In Lovecraft’s materialistic universe, hope of the sort described by the Christian tradition is ridiculous; instead, as he wrote to Helen Sully in 1935,

What most persons can rationally expect is a kind of working adjustment or resignation in which active pain is cut down to a minimum. . . . This, therefore, should be the only norm in matters of expectation and endeavor (304). 

The experience of Mishima, and the troubling abandonment to dark fantasy of the living-dead narrator in “The Outsider,” suggest that this resolution is fraught with moral and bodily hazards.

The speaker’s flight is, indeed, an escape into a dream-world:  he joins “the fiendish ghouls that ride the night-wind”; but, after his “burst of black memory” has “vanished,” they are “the mocking and friendly ghouls” who “play by day” in exotic, faraway places (5).  Readers of Lovecraft’s Dunsanian fiction, the dream-fantasies which revolve around his story “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” will recognize the ghouls and their typical haunts.  While Lovecraftian ghouls may live in the subterranean reaches of the waking world, as in “Pickman’s Model,” and often haunt places where Lovecraft is wont to find stairways and gates between waking and dreaming, they are primarily creatures of the dream-world; only in a dream can the speaker “ride the night-wind” (5).  When we have taken a look at the parallel between this part of Lovecraft’s work and some elements in the work of Yukio Mishima, we will return to Lovecraft to build on this analysis, and hint toward a more general approach that will reach beyond the strictly post-Christian and Western horror fictions of Lovecraft.

Mishima

As also happens in quasi-autobiographical works from Coleridge, Nietzsche, and Artaud, Mishima’s works foreground a struggle between the self of utterable, lived experience and the self idealized as prior to that discursive being.  In Sun & Steel, Mishima seems to echo Lovecraft’s “Outsider” in what we are meant to take as a critical commentary on Mishima’s own development:

Interestingly enough, my stubborn refusal to perceive my body was itself due to a beautiful misconception in my idea of what the body was.  I did not know that a man’s body never shows itself as “existence.”  But as I saw things, it ought to have made itself apparent, clearly and unequivocally, as existence.  It naturally followed that when it did show itself unmistakably as a terrifying paradox of existence—as a form of existence that rejected existence—I was as panic-stricken as though I had come across some monster, and loathed it accordingly.  It never occurred to me that other men—all men without exception—were the same.

[. . .]  Never dreaming that the body existing in a form that rejected existence was universal in the male, I set about constructing my ideal hypothetical physical existence by investing it with all the opposite characteristics.  And since my own, abnormal bodily existence was doubtless a product of the intellectual corrosion of words, the ideal body—the ideal existence—must, I told myself, be absolutely free from any interference by words.  (Mishima 11)

The “ideal body” in this passage represents the hoped-for unity prior to the discursive formation of the self.  The effort to construe the human subject in this way, in Mishima as in Lovecraft or modern Western metaphysics, leads to “a terrifying paradox of existence” which leaves him “panic-stricken” before a global problem:  “other men—all men without exception—were the same.”  Mishima’s response to this is helpfully summarized by Shu Kuge:

The “body” in Mishima’s thought is a metonymy for “experience” that is not yet translated into discursive language.  Mishima once clamored:  Why don’t people realize the importance of the depth of the surface?  The surface is the depth; in other words, the surface is not a representation or reflection of what is hidden beneath.  The surface is everything.  (Kuge 66)

For Mishima, the “terrifying paradox” of “the body existing in a form that rejected existence” (the very crux of Nietzsche’s assault on Christianity, and his critique of Buddhism, in The Antichrist) is ultimately resolved, beyond the naïveté of simple oppositions, by an insistence on the surface—on the very skin itself—as the phenomenal being, here, now, than which nothing else can be meaningfully represented.  This ultimately meant, for Mishima, that only the act of ritual suicide by cutting into the skin with a sharp blade, only at the peak of physical perfection, and only at the historical moment when he (vainly) hoped his public political act would lead to revolution, could be meaningful.

The example of Mishima thus presses the urgency of the problems from which Lovecraft’s “Outsider” flees into narrative oblivion.  As Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel points out, drawing a parallel between the bodily experiences of Pier Paulo Paolini, Michel Foucault, and Mishima, the “terrifying paradox” passage marks a “horror of incarnation” in response to which “the author undertakes a quest for an incorruptible ‘ideal body’” (218).  The metal of weights that Mishima uses in body-building transform him so that “his muscles” can be seen as “the steel that becomes the sword for his disembowelment.”  As Chasseguet-Smirgel describes it, such extremes as Mishima’s may “constitute the culmination of mute unconscious gnostic ideas” which “is often allied with an unleashed eroticism that does not accommodate itself to the limits of the body” or to any of the differences which mark bodily experience and ground discourse in living bodies.  Like the problematizing move which authorizes the dead narrator of “The Outsider” to repeat for us a tale which denies his memory and his death, such radical experimentation attempts to realize the unthinkable, to experience that which is inconsistent with the conditions of bodily life.

As a result, this radical experimentation (whether sexual, political, literary, or religious) repeats the moribundity of the desire which founds the discursive being in more radical fashion:  such radical experimentation “can lead not only to murder—an absolute possession of the object—but also to suicide—an absolute dissolution of the subject” (219).  If “the surface is everything,” then fatally piercing the surface, in a final physical refutation of discursive being, appears as a conclusion which is not only logical, but emphatically actual.  Thus suicide comes to be, as it is represented repeatedly in Mishima, something akin to “apotheosis” (220), at least in some wish-fulfillment fantasies.  Chasseguet-Smirgel concludes that such a “Foucauldian body” provides us with “a particularly striking example of the wish for a body that is disorganized, without hierarchy, and with perfectly interchangeable parts.”  Such a body is not merely local in its conception and representation; the rupture of the body, which in lived experience never achieves or recovers this idealized inarticulate state, seems to achieve what it represents, the “dismembered body” that “is projected upon society or even onto the cosmos, so that the frame of the world collapses and the heavens are disemboweled.”

Lovecraft’s “Outsider,” who is already dead, flees his unfitness for the beauty of life in a life-rejecting oblivion of abandoned fantasy; Mishima’s “I” in Sun and Steel flees his own discursive being, his life as a particular body situated within the world, through a program of intentional idealization by which body and words were whetted for their own extinction.  Confronting the bodily experience of consciousness with any degree of artistic and intellectual honesty within a framework that insists on a reductive solution to the mind/body problem, that is, poses both moral and physical hazards of the first order.  Under such a schema, the bodily experience of consciousness must be treated as an illusion or error, rather than (as the Christian tradition would suggest) a flawed experience of a really present unity.  Under the reductive schema, this illusion or error must be corrected by efforts to achieve or recover an inarticulate unity of thought and sensation, a wholeness without difference.  Lovecraft’s “Outsider” mimics the hero of a Platonic allegory in his ascent to enlightenment, but finds “soul-annihilating memory”; Mishima’s words describe the hardening of his body which prepared him to protest his integrity with his life, leaving us with the dilemma of an entire discourse reduced to a single term—its last, the gesture futile in its political meaning and abortive in its self-rejecting personal and literary significance.

We may return to Lovecraft, then, to see once again that this is not a condition unique to Mishima’s personality or culture.  I apologize slightly for deviating from my proposal to discuss “The Dunwich Horror,” which would have provided me with a more obvious alien-monster hook for a sci-fi conference.  I think the significance of the parallel between “The Outsider” and Mishima’s work is elaborated much more clearly by revisiting Lovecraft’s Dunsanian fiction, writings about outlandish worlds of outer and inner space which have a very different flavor than Lovecraft’s very late stories of interplanetary aliens and advanced pre-human civilizations.  In particular, the somewhat obscure story “Celephais” and the prose poem “Ex Oblivione” rather neatly connect the ambivalence of Lovecraft’s “Outsider” to the decisive rupture of bodily and discursive being in Mishima.

“Celephais” and “Ex Oblivione”

Given Mishima’s example, we need not be surprised to discover that the escape into illusion is represented as a suicidal journey in Lovecraft’s fiction, as well.  “Celephais” and “Ex Oblivione,” both written within a year of “The Outsider,” show clearly the relation between death and dream in Lovecraft’s tales.  “Celephais” begins with the following evocative passage:

In a dream Kuranes saw the city in the valley […].  In a dream it was also that he came by his name of Kuranes, for when awake he was called by another name. […] he was the last of his family, and alone among the indifferent millions of London, so there were not many to speak to him and to remind him who he had been. […] he did not care for the ways of the people about him, but preferred to dream and write of his dreams.  What he wrote was laughed at by those to whom he showed it, so that after a time he kept his writings to himself, and finally ceased to write. […] Kuranes sought for beauty alone.  When truth and experience failed to reveal it, he sought it in fancy and illusion, and found it on his very doorstep, amid the nebulous memories of childhood tales and dreams. (26)

Like the narrator of “The Outsider” or Mishima’s “I,” Kuranes is fixated on a solitary pursuit of beauty.  Both are repulsed by society, and both turn to illusion instead of truth, leaving behind articulation.  Whereas the already-dead narrator of “The Outsider” has no real options, though, Kuranes is very much living; his escape into dreams is, like that recommended by Lovecraft in “The Materialist Today,” a deliberate choice based on what he takes to be a failure of revelation.  That “truth and experience” do not disclose beauty to Kuranes begs the question whether they “failed to reveal it” or whether he, like “The Outsider,” found it intolerable, repressed it, and escaped into dreams.  On Lovecraft’s view, of course, the question does not arise; revelation will fail, and the escape into illusion is “all one can logically do.”

Kuranes finds himself increasingly drawn into his dreams, so that “the more he withdrew from the world about him, the more wonderful became his dreams; and it would have been quite futile to describe them on paper” (26).  Indeed, so fully does he escape into illusion that “he grew so impatient of the bleak intervals of day that he began buying drugs in order to increase his periods of sleep” (31).  The drug element, somewhat unusual in Lovecraft (though not unique), is strictly instrumental to the process of withdrawing from the world into dreams.  Kuranes, having reached the point where he no longer functions in the real world, eventually walks out of it:

Then one summer day he was turned out of his garret, and wandered aimlessly through the streets, drifting over a bridge to a place where the houses grew thinner and thinner.  And it was there that fulfillment came, and he met the cortege of knights come from Celephais, to bear him thither forever. (31)

“Fulfillment,” of course, is a word which, like “salvation” or “enlightenment,” makes a teleological claim; and in the texture of the work, this suggests the ascent to paradise of a spiritual seeker.  Only by understanding that the dream-world is in no way susceptible of articulation in the world of “truth and experience,” by noticing that it is utterly neglectful of body and the realm of embodiment, can the reader discern between the poetic fantasy of the tale and the horror which lies beneath its surface.

“Celephais” does not follow any of the conventions typical of a horror tale; but it is precisely this absence of horror elements that makes the fantasy’s completion of the dream-escape trajectory begun in “The Outsider” so dark.  The language is beautiful, the images rich and exotic, and the story richly communicates a longing for transformation, the desire to gaze on sublime beauty.  The dream, though, is death itself.  The story ends by saying,

And Kuranes reigned thereafter over Ooth-Nargai and all the neighbouring regions of dream, […] and will reign happily for ever, though below the cliffs at Innsmouth the channel tides played mockingly with the body of a tramp who had stumbled through the half-deserted village at dawn; played mockingly, and cast it upon the rocks by ivy-covered Trevor Towers, where a notably fat and especially offensive millionaire brewer enjoys the purchased atmosphere of extinct nobility. (32)

It is possible to conceive of this as a sort of afterlife, and indeed in Lovecraft’s later story “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” Kuranes re-appears and interacts with the protagonist.  At the same time, this afterlife is in the “regions of dream,” places of very questionable metaphysical status.

Like “The Outsider,” though, “Celephais” explicitly enacts its central illusion; for the reader is given fair warning that “it would have been quite futile to describe [the dreams] on paper” (26).  Whatever reality the dreams have is strictly the product of the reader’s willingness to suspend not only disbelief but memory itself; to leave behind even the demand for verisimilitude in order to gain a series of verbal impressions, beautiful enough in their way but deriving their true power only from what they conceal.  On the story’s own terms, the only communicable details of the protagonist’s experience are these:  a lonely, nameless dreamer quit working, quit writing, spent more and more time escaping into dreams, took drugs to enhance the dreams, and eventually walked off a cliff and died.

In his prose-poem “Ex Oblivione,” Lovecraft puts the same elements in simpler, more direct form.  In the middle of his troubled life, the poetic speaker seeks “the irradiate refuge of sleep” and finds in dreams “a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life” (2).  As the dreams grow more vivid, “the days of waking became less and less bearable from their greyness and sameness” (3).  Eventually, he learns of a drug which will enable him to pass the gates of sleep permanently, becoming forever a resident of the dream-world.  The drug must be taken while awake, of course, which means it affects the body; and the speaker, upon having taken it “last night,” now tells the reader,

I drifted on songfully, expectant of the glories of the land from whence I should never return.

But as the gate swung wider and the sorcery of the drug and dream pushed me through, I knew that all sights and glories were at an end; for in that new realm was neither land nor sea, but only the white void of unpeopled and illimitable space.  So happier than I had ever dared hope to be, I dissolved again into that native infinity and crystal oblivion from which the daemon Life had called me for one brief and desolate hour. (4)

As with “Celephais,” the words sound beautiful; the desire to gaze on beauty is aroused.  The arousal, however, is strictly pornographic; this false beauty can never be revealed in the realm of “truth and experience.”  If the reader wishes to be rapt by the beauty of the text, he can do so only by repressing several key truths:  that it is impossible for the speaker to be telling the tale if he has merged with infinity; that the text plainly despairs of all joy in bodily life, as the speaker claims that “oblivion” makes him “happier than I had ever dared hope to be”; that, at its most prosaic level, the entire piece is no more than a suicide note.

Conclusions

Given human mortality, a life of illusion and a suicide amount to the same thing.  Kuranes, who lives in his dreams only to die in reality, and the speaker in “Ex Oblivione,” who commits suicide in order to live in his dreams, in the end achieve nothing which the “notably fat and especially offensive millionaire brewer” of the last sentence of “Celephais” does not also achieve.  Lovecraft’s fictional speakers may dislike the secular illusion, may be dissatisfied or even tormented by the mundane, but they do not improve on it.  Seeking sublime beauty, “The Outsider” finds only his unfitness to participate in that beauty, represses the memory, and escapes into illusion.  The significance of the ambivalent dark fantasy of “The Outsider” is clarified when Kuranes’ body washes up on the shore, or when we realize that the body of the speaker from “Ex Oblivione” was eventually found lying in his bed.  Similarly, the idealization of the “surface” that led Mishima to hone his body and his words into razor-sharp instruments for destroying his bodily and discursive being did not survive his death; not even in the form of literary immortality, for the literary specimens we call “Mishima’s corpus” are only the preparatory strokes, the hesitation marks, before the act which those words declared significant.  Immortality for Mishima’s corpus would refute the violence with which he rejected bodily and discursive being in favor of the razor-sharp, honed surface tested to destruction by his final act.

Despite the intentions of their authors, these texts amply warn us of the nihilating tendency inherent in confronting the bodily experience of consciousness from a reductively idealist or physicalist perspective.  Having rejected any possibility that the significance the bodily experience of consciousness calls for is determined in a way that makes human acts and words participate in a personally significant, globally relevant enacting of history, and confronted with the incoherence of efforts to reduce the bodily experience of human consciousness within the scope of mere bodies or mere words, one risks being faced with a choice between mere illusion and frank suicide—a choice frequently offered, for example, in TV shows like House.  The nihility which grounds all uncreated being, if there be any such thing, can take place in history only as fictional rationales for postponing or hastening death; the works of Lovecraft and Mishima stand together in asserting that it lacks by definition the potential to create life.

on Literature, Public-Personal

Grad School Writing Sample–Conrad’s Lord Jim

Perhaps the strongest point of interest in this piece, which I reworked from a paper I wrote in the Fall 1998 (my senior year at TMC), is that my rejection of Romanticism is beginning to take shape, here:

Writing Sample
Baylor Graduate School
Department of English
April 1, 1999
CHARACTER VIEWS ON JIM’S DEATH:
A LORD JIM SPECTRUM

In Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad presents a highly stylized image of a young romantic, trapped in his own dreams of heroism on the high seas, falling to cowardice on his first real temptation—a fate worse than death, according to many of his contemporaries. Given a shot at redemption, Jim makes good and exceeds all expectations in a remote post in the interior where no one has heard of his great failure. However, the intrusion of outlaws from “outside” his territory ends in a great fall; Jim loses the faith of his native followers and faces death at the hands of their leader. It is in voluntarily facing this death, when he could have escaped, that Jim finally lives up to the romantic ideal he has set for himself. Ironically, it is this death which fulfills the expectation which immediately followed his first act of cowardice. However, in view of all that had transpired since that first fall, the voluntary submission to an unnecessary and undeserved death seems tragic or even foolish. It is this apparent folly which Conrad examines through several character viewpoints. An analysis of the four major character views of Jim’s death yields a multifaceted insight into Conrad’s pessimistic evaluation of the hopes and dreams of men.

In opening the last phase of the account, that which deals with the circumstances leading up to Jim’s death, Conrad presents the reader with a new character. One of the hearers of Marlow’s tale which makes up the bulk of the story, this person (unnamed) is revealed as a former adventurer who, according to Marlow, “showed an interest in him that survived the telling of his story, though . . . [he] would not admit he had mastered his fate” (252). It is in response to this continued interest that Marlow sends a letter revealing all he has been able to find out concerning Jim’s unfortunate end. Marlow sets the tone for the entire ending in his letter, when he says, “The point, however, is that of all mankind Jim had no dealings with anyone but himself, and the question is whether at the last he had not confessed to a faith mightier than the laws of order and progress” (253). In this way, Conrad flags to the reader what the theme underlying Marlow’s narrative will be and, through the character of the unnamed hearer, foreshadows what the outcome will be.

The four primary character views on Jim’s death are those of Jim, “the girl,” Marlow and Stein. Jim believes his fall (abandoning 800 people on a sinking ship of which he was Chief Mate) has left him dead to the world of civilization, where he must forever be branded a coward. Even his achievements in the interior, which include reviving a failed trading post, destroying one enemy of his tribal friends and forcing another into submission, and maintaining peaceful and profitable order, cannot erase from his mind the blot of his failure to face death honorably. He swears never to leave the girl (his wife, by common-law at least) because he knows he can never go back to the world at large.

As a result of this view of his relation to the world, when Jim finds himself face-to-face with death once more he is unwilling to run, though the girl implores him to do so (309). Having failed to do his duty before through his cowardice, Jim now compensates by deliberately going to his death in order to complete the redemption of his self-image. From his viewpoint, his death is the heroic expiation of his sins against his romantic ideal, the act of heroism by which he validates all that he once believed to be true of himself.

The girl, however, is unable to see it that way. She sees Jim only as false to his promise to her; for, in serving his romantic ideal, he has abandoned her and failed to uphold his promise to her. She casts this up to him as they part, trying desperately to induce him to fight or flee, rather than deliberately go to face death. She calls to him as he leaves in an especially revealing passage:

‘Will you fight?’ she cried. ‘There is nothing to fight for,’ he said; ‘nothing is lost.’ Saying this he made a step towards her. ‘Will you fly?’ she cried again. ‘There is no escape,’ he said, stopping short, and she stood still also, silent, devouring him with her eyes. ‘And you shall go?’ she said, slowly. He bent his head. ‘Ah!’ she exclaimed, peering at him as it were, ‘you are mad or false. Do you remember the night I prayed you to leave me, and you said you could not? That it was impossible! Impossible! Do you remember you said you would never leave me? Why? I asked you for no promise. You promised unasked—remember.’ ‘Enough, poor girl,’ he said. ‘I should not be worth having’ (309).

Here Jim’s view and the girl’s come into direct confrontation. For her, his death is unnecessary and faithless, a sign that his word has always been flawed—as she has always feared. He, meanwhile, cannot escape the sense that he is already dead because of his previous cowardice. His view of himself takes precedence over her claims on his love and honor; she, sensing this, cannot forgive him—for he is impenitent.

Ironically, when the girl’s perspective is taken into account Jim’s redemption by facing death loses its redemptive quality; instead, it becomes a second failure. In the first failure, Jim fails to live up to his romantic ideal and, in so doing, also fails to discharge his duties honorably. In his death Jim also fails to discharge his duties honorably, this time in pursuit of the romantic ideals he had previously failed. The irony is that Jim never does learn how to behave rightly and honorably; he simply swings from one extreme of narcissism to the other, without ever getting the point. As Marlow says to the stranger, “Jim had no dealings with anyone but himself” (253). Never learning love or honor, Jim is doomed to a fate for which the girl cannot forgive him—she who has devoted her life to him can only bitterly condemn him for his faithlessness.

The third view, and probably the most impartial, comes from Marlow. In his view, Jim’s redemption is limited by Jim alone; while Jim achieves the ideal he sought, this is made tragic by its cost in terms of real human relationships. Because Marlow is Conrad’s major viewpoint character, he is fairly explicit about his views:

He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic. Not in the wildest days of his boyish visions could he have seen the alluring shape of such extraordinary success! For it may well be that in the short moment of his last proud and unflinching glance, he had beheld the face of that opportunity which, like an eastern bride, had come veiled to his side (312).

“That opportunity,” of course, is that chance to face death with stoic resolve which Jim had nurtured since his earliest days at sea—and which he had failed to take advantage of earlier. It is this glorious deathwish that, to Marlow, defines Jim; in an earlier passage, Marlow comments that “he had no leisure to regret what he had lost, he was so wholly and naturally concerned for what he had failed to obtain” (61). In the end, then, Marlow sees Jim likewise unconcerned with what he loses, in seeking to obtain that elusive glory which so concerns him:

We can see him, an obscure conqueror of fame, tearing himself out of the arms of a jealous love at the sign, at the call of his exalted egoism. He goes away from a living woman to celebrate his pitiles wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct. Is he satisfied—quite now, I wonder? We ought to know. He is one of us (312).

It is Marlow’s statement that Jim “is one of us” that sets the tone for the final evaluation of Jim’s behavior, and broadens the conceit of Jim’s “exalted egoism” to include, ultimately, all the hopes and dreams of humanity.

The final major character view of Jim’s death is that of Stein—which is not offered directly. Rather, Stein’s view is offered through the symbol of his butterflies, and through his position as a catalyst for Jim’s chance at redemption. Stein’s prophetic descriptions of Jim’s personality and needs are invoked at the very end of Marlow’s letter, which is the end of the novel: “Stein has aged greatly of late. He feels it himself, and says often that he is ‘preparing to leave all this; preparing to leave . . . ‘ while he waves his hand sadly at his butterflies” (313).

The image of the butterflies is a universal image of the mortality of human ideals, introduced earlier in the account when Marlow first goes to Stein for help in understanding Jim. Stein rhapsodizes about butterflies, prompting Marlow to exclaim, “And what of man?” To which Stein replies,

Man is amazing, but not a masterpiece . . . Perhaps the artist was a little mad . . . Sometimes it seems to me that man is come where he is not wanted, where there is no place for him; for if not, why should he want all the place? Why should he run about here and there making a great noise about himself, talking about the stars, disturbing the blades of grass? (153-4).

In describing the experiences of his own romantic youth, Stein equates the finding of the butterfly he had seen in a dream—the prize of his collection—with the love of his wife and child, the support of his friends and the discomfiture of his enemies (156). Of them all, only the butterfly remains, a fact Stein notes in summary fashion:

‘Friend, wife, child,’ he said, slowly, gazing at the small flame—’phoo!’ The match was blown out. He sighed and turned again to the glass case. The frail and beautiful wings quivered faintly, as if his breath had for an instant called back to life that gorgeous object of his dreams (156).

To make the analogy clearer, Marlow describes Jim to Stein as a “specimen,” though “nothing so perfect” as a butterfly. Stein’s revealing reply is, simply, “Well—I am a man, too” (156-7). When Jim’s case is explained to him, Stein diagnoses it simply: “He is romantic” (157). Asked for a remedy, Stein says, “There is only one remedy! One thing alone can us from being ourselves cure!” (157). The implication is clear: death alone will deliver Jim from himself. As Marlow says, and as the reader senses, “The case which he had made to look so simple before became if possible still simpler—and altogether hopeless” (157).

The issue Marlow and Stein are consulting about, however, is not how to cure romanticism—which Conrad makes clear is hopeless. Rather, it is how to live out life with it; and this, Stein makes clear, is a matter of man’s ideals outracing his mortality. Man wants to be more than he can be, and so fights to remove himself from the “destructive element” that is the world about him—to be delivered into an ideal realm which transcends daily life.

In the end, then, Stein’s opinion of Jim is that he fails to submit to the destructive element—that, like a drowning man, he tries to “climb out into the air” rather than “make the deep, deep sea to keep you up” (158). The dream, like all human dreams, must be followed—while remembering that, like the butterfly specimen, it too will die. Only the appreciation for the ultimate emptiness of dreams makes the dreams worth pursuing—while man is trying to transcend them, to idealize them beyond the limits of mortality, he is drowning.

When these views are taken together, Conrad’s theme is clarified: Jim has not truly “confessed to a faith mightier than the laws of order and progress” (253). Rather, he has failed to realize the mortal limitations of all human dreams, and therefore failed to even manage the minimum standard of his self-image. Jim’s egoism prevents his attaining those objects of love, friendship and victory which are the content of the romantic dream. Instead, his idealization of the dream is self-destructive. Only Stein, the romantic who has given himself over to the dream and survived its destruction, has a handle on the depths of the romantic problem—and he sees it as the underlying tension in all men’s lives, the reason why older men like Marlow long to relive their youth in younger men like Jim, yet know that they can’t go back; and the reason why, the dream gone and Jim gone, Stein begins to age badly.

In the end, Conrad’s view is deeply pessimistic. Despite his accurate perception of Jim’s fatal egoism, the stubborn clinging to the romantic ideal of himself which destroys all he loves, Conrad continues to imply that this is perhaps the best humanity has to offer. The element in which those who survive must immerse themselves is the “destructive element” which drowns dreamers; at the same time, the dream must be retained in order for there to be a reason to swim through the sea and breathe the air of dreams. In the end, Stein’s butterflies are better than humanity; but those butterflies are dead, pinned in cases. They are static beauties, once alive but transient; and while the beauty remains, the life passes. To Conrad, the greatest hope allowed a man is to live out his life in the expression of a beatiful dream, then die without having given up the dream. While he condemns Jim for confusing the dream and the reality, he generalizes Jim’s egoism into a description of all human hopes—and so precludes any possibility of a hope outside man’s ego.

Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim. New York: Pocket Books, Inc., 1965

Public-Personal

Another Interaction with Buddhism

In posting past scholarship, I’ve promised a few pieces that deal with Buddhism, which I’ve ended up discussing at various stages in my own cultivation.  Of these, this excerpt is the most technical, and assumes the most background.  I recognize that outside of the very (excessively) dense conversation I was having in my doctoral dissertation, some of this may make little sense.  I crave your indulgence, though, as it seems possible that something useful for one person or another may be buried in this or that fold of this reticulated and decussated edifice.

Herewith a portion of my doctoral dissertation, starting at page 111 (the beginning of Chapter Four):

CHAPTER FOUR
Being, Nothing, and the Text of Scripture

Absolute selfhood opens up as nonobjectifiable nothingness in the conversion that takes place within personality. Through that conversion every bodily, mental, and spiritual activity that belongs to person displays itself as a play of shadows moving across the stage of nothingness. [. . .] It is the field commonly seen as “outermost” by the personal self and referred to as the external world actually present in the here and now, ever changing. [. . .] The “outer world” emerges here as a self-realization of nonobjectifiable nothingness, or, rather, makes itself present such as it is, in oneness with nothingness.
The field of true human existence opens up beyond the outer and the inner, at a point where the “shadowy man” is in oneness with absolute selfhood. We have here an absolute self-identity. Thinking, feeling, and action are, on every occasion, entirely illusory appearances with nothing behind them, the shadowy heart and mind of the shadowy man.

Nishitani 73

It should, perhaps, be surprising that Zen practitioner and philosopher Keiji Nishitani, a chief representative of what has come to be called the Kyoto School of Japanese philosophy, so neatly retraces the quintessentially modern and Western representation of the human subject as found in Coleridge’s corpus and the related interventions of Nietzsche and Artaud, along with the comments of Heidegger, de Man, and Derrida. Nishitani’s discussion of the “play of shadows” by which humans perceive as phenomenal the “bodily, mental, and spiritual activity” which originates in the human subject corresponds closely to Coleridge’s discussion of origination. Going beyond Nietzsche’s statement about art, Nishitani describes all “Thinking, feeling, and action” as “illusory” insofar as they are themselves phenomena with regard to the “shadowy man.” This “shadowy man” is another name for the self as absolute subject, prior to what Coleridge calls the “act of self-duplication” which founds the conscious being of the human subject. Nishitani describes a conscious retracing of this origination as the “conversion” which introduces “absolute selfhood” once again into the consciousness. Like Artaud, and with reference to Plato as well as Nietzsche, Nishitani’s practice is self-consciously theatrical, taking as the goal of Buddhist practice and philosophy the freedom of the human subject from prior representations. This convergence of thought seems to be of just the sort predicted in Coleridge’s discussion of the universal philosophical and religious affirmation (even underlying apparent denial) of original sin in Aids to Reflection. Nishitani’s remark therefore serves as a further example of the telescoping of global and social concerns at work in Coleridge’s thought. Perhaps more importantly, it also serves as a step in examining to what extent Coleridge’s representation of the human subject and his discussion of original sin may actually reach beyond a parochially Christian or Western discourse.

The correspondence of Nishitani’s text with Coleridge’s corpus is less surprising than it might be, as Nishitani’s Religion and Nothingness throughout represents his Zen practice in terms intelligible to the Western tradition, with special attention to developments in Continental philosophy. There is in fact a steadily growing (though very uneven) interaction of Western philosophy with Buddhism throughout the past two centuries. Nietzsche’s Antichrist at one point addresses the relationship of Buddhism to Christianity under the very late Nietzsche’s critical reading of both religions. Significantly, Nietzsche compares the two in terms of the relationship between representation of the subject and the theology of sin: “Buddhism is the only really positive religion to be found in history, even in its epistemology (which is strict phenomenalism)—it no longer speaks of the ‘struggle with sin’ but fully recognising the true nature of reality it speaks of the ‘struggle with pain’” (17). Nietzsche (whose access to Buddhist works would have been extremely limited, likely to poor translations of derivative Sanskrit texts, and whose understanding of Eastern thought principally comes through Schopenhauer) does not have a particularly close understanding of Buddhism, but he does identify the difference in emphasis between Western philosophy and Buddhism reasonably well.

The case of Buddhism also occasions a considerable refinement in Coleridge’s analysis of the universality of original sin as a religious doctrine or philosophical exigency. “In that most strange phænomenon, the religious atheism of the Buddhists,” he says in Aids to Reflection,

with whom God is only universal matter considered abstractedly from all particular forms—the Fact [of original sin] is placed among the delusions natural to man, which, together with other superstitions grounded on a supposed essential difference between right and wrong, the sage is to decompose and precipitate from the menstruum of his more refined apprehensions! Thus in denying the Fact, they virtually acknowledge it. (188-9)

Coleridge’s understanding of Buddhism is very imprecise. What he grasps, along with Nietzsche, is that Buddhism completes what Coleridge’s “rhetorical self-containment” prevents in his representation of the human subject. This added perspective, in fact, helps to clarify the stakes in what Christensen calls “the infelicitous reliance of the absolute on the fall for its very manifestation,” and how Coleridge’s abridgement of the difference between creatureliness and fallenness complicates his strivings toward orthodoxy.

“Dependent Origination” and the Subject
The Zen-derived philosophy described by Nishitani, or the somewhat different Amida Buddhism (also called Jodo Shinshu) of Takeuchi Yoshinori, does begin with the insight that the desire through which the human self originates is moribund—the same insight encoded ambivalently in “Kubla Khan,” more clearly and personally in “The Pains of Sleep,” and confessed openly in Coleridge’s effort to articulate a Biblical theology of original sin. Takeuchi criticizes “neo-Kantianism—along with the liberal theology based on it” for being “fettered to the immanentism of human reason and hence [. . .] only impeding our view of that abyss of death and sin and nihility that opens up under our very feet as the fate of being human” (72-3). In Takeuchi’s writing, the “turn” toward what Derrida calls the “invisible interior” or Nishitani the “shadowy man” is represented as the subject’s becoming conscious of “dependent origination.” Takeuchi suggests that this conversion is often described in the “fundamental experience of artists and poets,” who in their self-conscious acts of representation may “experience an immediate embodiment of the dynamism of world and body, other, and life prior to the distinction of subject and object” (74). Takeuchi describes “dependent origination” as follows:

the subject that, seen from the world, is part of the world, constructs its own being-in-the-world co-dependently and correlatively with the world, and yet does so as its own activity. [. . .] We may liken it to dreaming: when we dream, we live in correlatedness with the world of the dream and, through the phenomenal identity of dreamer and dream, keep the dream alive; but as soon as we become aware of this correlatedness, we have already awoken. (80-1)

Takeuchi extends this similitude of “dreaming,” as though to accommodate reading with Coleridge, when discussing the consequences of a developed consciousness of “dependent origination”: “at the moment one awakens, the various sufferings that troubled the world of sleep are awakened to in the realization, ‘it was only a dream; I was sleeping’” (91). Takeuchi writes as though to suggest a Buddhist solution to the problem depicted in “The Pains of Sleep,” proposing that the conditions for the construction of world and self “are only grasped in their primary sense when their essential determination is sought in terms of their extinction, when they are seen as past essences, as things that were.”

Coleridge’s expectation (which he shares with the Western tradition in metaphysics) is that the erasure he calls “scientific scepticism” has for its goal “certainty”—just as Derrida suggests when describing the metaphysical work as that “break with the domain of empirical history [. . .] whose aim is reconciliation with the hidden essence of the empirical.” Takeuchi, on the other hand, sets forth a Buddhist practice whose retracing of the constitution of the self has in view, not a recovery of antecedent unity, but its more complete erasure; it seeks to obliterate the trace, also, by counting the subject, self, spirit, sin, all among the phenomena of causation. The subject having awakened to the understanding that something—the subject, the self, Coleridge’s “I AM” both personally and globally, as self or as deity—has originated through moribund desire, the practice of disassociation from such desire should cause, not a return to that self, but a ceasing from those very perturbations of spirit which Coleridge envisioned in the prose introduction to “Kubla Khan” as “images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast” (43). Where Coleridge exclaims “but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!” over his apparent incapacity to remember the historical, religious, and poetic vision which the dream-vision represents, and is tormented by the memory of dreams and his apparent incapacity to regain his self-composure in “The Pains of Sleep,” Takeuchi’s Buddhism attempts to describe everything except the present phenomenon not only as originating (conceived) within the human subject but as therefore essentially illusory, to be awakened from and not to.

The Convergence: Coleridge, Artaud, Mishima
From Coleridge’s representation of the human subject, in view of the unhappy coincidence of original sin (the origin of the fallen human) with origination through repetition of the “I AM” (the unity of human and divine creativity), two paths forward seem to become one: the Western path of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida as exemplified by Artaud converges with the Eastern path as marked by Buddhism, whose singular distance from the Western metaphysical tradition has yet to be rendered fully intelligible. Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, a product of the Shinto-Buddhist culture of Imperial Japan whose postwar writings were among the most read in the West, serves as a convenient reference point. Like Coleridge, Nietzsche, and Artaud, Mishima’s works place the self-representing work of the human subject in the foreground. In Sun & Steel, Mishima seems to echo Artaud’s anxiety over his body’s being stolen by the priority of text:

Interestingly enough, my stubborn refusal to perceive my body was itself due to a beautiful misconception in my idea of what the body was. I did not know that a man’s body never shows itself as “existence.” But as I saw things, it ought to have made itself apparent, clearly and unequivocally, as existence. It naturally followed that when it did show itself unmistakably as a terrifying paradox of existence—as a form of existence that rejected existence—I was as panic-stricken as though I had come across some monster, and loathed it accordingly. It never occurred to me that other men—all men without exception—were the same.
[. . .] Never dreaming that the body existing in a form that rejected existence was universal in the male, I set about constructing my ideal hypothetical physical existence by investing it with all the opposite characteristics. And since my own, abnormal bodily existence was doubtless a product of the intellectual corrosion of words, the ideal body—the ideal existence—must, I told myself, be absolutely free from any interference by words. (Mishima 11)

The “ideal body” in this passage corresponds to both Artaud’s “body without organs” and the “absolute subject” in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. It represents the hoped-for unity prior to the discursive formation of the self, the “act of self-duplication” which in Coleridge’s work is both creation and fall. The effort to construe the human subject in this way, in Mishima as in Coleridge, leads to “a terrifying paradox of existence” which leaves him “panic-stricken” in the face of a universal failing: “other men—all men without exception—were the same.” Mishima’s response to this, as revealed in his own political and personal preoccupations, has the Buddhist pattern set out by Takeuchi. As Shu Kuge has helpfully summarized,

The “body” in Mishima’s thought is a metonymy for “experience” that is not yet translated into discursive language. Mishima once clamored: Why don’t people realize the importance of the depth of the surface? The surface is the depth; in other words, the surface is not a representation or reflection of what is hidden beneath. The surface is everything. (Kuge 66)

For Mishima, the “terrifying paradox” of “the body existing in a form that rejected existence” (the very crux of Nietzsche’s assault on Christianity, and his critique of Buddhism, in The Antichrist) is ultimately resolved, beyond the naïveté of simple oppositions, by an insistence on the surface—on the very skin itself—as the phenomenal being, here, now, than which nothing else can be meaningfully represented. This ultimately meant, for Mishima, that only the act of ritual suicide by cutting into the skin with a sharp blade, only at the peak of physical perfection, and only at the historical moment when he (vainly) hoped his public political act would lead to revolution, could be meaningful.

The example of Mishima thus presses the urgency of the problems which plague Coleridge’s representation of the human subject. In collocating “Kubla Khan” and “The Pains of Sleep,” and in classifying each as a “psychological curiosity,” Coleridge broaches the subject of madness and the more serious problem of damnation. The moral and spiritual, as well as the epistemological, dimensions of his theorizing of the human subject are at stake. The discourse of Western metaphysics from Coleridge’s time forward is increasingly studded with what Derrida calls a “tradition of mad poets” such as Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Artaud; and what is perhaps more significant (for, as Derrida says, “Artaud is not the son of Nietzsche. And even less so of Hölderlin.”) is the exemplary significance which the interrogators of that discourse have assigned to these works. Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger, de Man, and Derrida, to name but a few, have extensive recourse to these “mad poets,” whose primary distinction is the radical pressure they bring to bear on the language of metaphysics in their efforts to represent the “terrifying paradox” that Coleridge has also found.

For Coleridge, however, seppuku is not an option; neither is the extremity of Artaud, for whom “God is [. . .] a sin against the divine” and “the essence of guilt is scato-theological” (Derrida “La parole” 185). Coleridge’s representation of the origination of the human subject through repetition of the “I AM” of God’s creation creates a challenge for him, and for his readers, precisely because it does clash with his representation of the origination of the human subject as sinful through moribund desire. That is, whether in the context of the post-Christian West or of Shinto-Buddhist Japan, it is possible to completely conflate the subject’s creaturely being with the subject’s moribundity. At one extreme of the modern Western tradition, one may join Artaud in rejecting the repetition intrinsic to the discursive formation of the self, especially as that repetition comes to be the basis for knowledge of God and to be associated with the moribundity of human desire. On the other hand, one may carefully disregard, as Mishima does, “what is hidden beneath,” and attempt to signify only by and concerning the surface, the flesh of human being. The two seem to meet, however, in the fulfillment of the horrible expectations described in “The Pains of Sleep.” Coleridge, who makes an intellectual effort to reconcile himself to a Biblically orthodox confession of Christianity, continues to represent within his works the consequences of conflating the Creator/creature difference with the creature/fallen difference, confusing the origination of the human being as creature with the origination of the fallen human self.

on Literature, Public-Personal

Goldsmith, Plato, and the Opiate

Here’s another undergraduate paper (senior year at TMC), this one a straightforward thematic reading of Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield.  I remember being told, I believe by Dr. Hotchkiss, to enjoy those undergraduate days of such reading and writing, because from graduate school forward there would always be loads of criticism in the way.  He was not wrong.  There are certainly compensations; but there are costs, and the simple pleasure of reading, understanding, and explaining has often been obscured by many another concern for months, even years, on end.

Here, then, something simple, with a lot of little hints (often pretty unformed) of some of the key issues that would recur in my Religion & Literature work:  an anti-dualist theme, coded as suspicion of the “Platonic” here (the Vicar is nothing if not a Boethian, methinks); a very Milton-inflected insistence on “conscience” that provided a few more years of fuel for a misguided, defiant individualism; an interest in the temporal workings of Providence, and the integration of interior with public life.

The Vicar’s Dialectic
A Critical Paper Presented to Prof. John Hotchkiss
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of English Novel (E 405)
by Peter G. Epps
December 15, 1998

The hero of this book . . . is drawn as ready to teach, and ready to obey, as simple in affluence, and majestic in adversity. In this age of opulence and refinement whom can such a character please? Such as are fond of high life will turn with disdain from the simplicity of his country fire-side. Such as mistake ribaldry for humour will find no wit in his harmless conversation; and such as have been taught to deride religion will laugh at one whose chief stores of comfort are drawn from futurity (Goldsmith 305).

In The Vicar of Wakefield, Oliver Goldsmith presents both an easy, comfortable novel—and an horrible picture of a Job scenario acted out in eighteenth-century England. The interesting progression of the Vicar’s reduction from affluence to debtor’s prison, from a happy family to a more-than-decimated one, is told with all the charm of a pious (if somewhat pedantic) rustic. The Vicar and his family, though in many ways caricatures, are at the same time well-developed and likeable characters. Thus the reader’s sympathies are directed to the Vicar, and the points the Vicar makes at the depth of his suffering are as direct and true as the points he makes before it are often fatuous. The Vicar’s progress from affluence to poverty to affluence again is more than just a story, however; it is a learning process, at the end of which the Vicar and those around him have “learned their lessons” and are fit for a Providential change of fortunes once more. Along the way, however, a view of God’s relation to man is presented which is an mixture of truth, error and good intentions. In allowing the Vicar’s theodicy to be the crux of his return to good fortune, Goldsmith sets before the reader an idea and leaves it up to his good judgment to learn from the example, as he makes clear from his own preface (quoted above).

The Vicar’s beginning state, that of unsuspecting and comfortable affluence, is best characterized by simplicity. With his wife and family, frequent visits from neighbors and relatives, and good prospects for the future, the Vicar’s happiness is real but untried. Perhaps the best description of the “good life” for the Vicar can be found in the catalog of “those little rubs which Providence sends”:

My orchard was often robbed by school-boys, and my wife’s custards plundered by the cats or the children. The ‘Squire would sometimes fall asleep in the most pathetic parts of my sermon, or his lady return my wife’s civilities with a mutilated curtesy. But we soon got over the uneasiness caused by such accidents, and usually in three or four days we began to wonder how they vext us (306,7).

The family living is resigned to the Vicar’s wife’s care, while the Vicar bestows his salary to the unfortunate as the family has sufficient wealth to be able to afford such gifts. Thus there is no criticism to be made against the Vicar’s state of affluence, except that in his simplicity the Vicar wants some prudence; which is no grave fault, he never having had need of much. The parson’s plan for managing his parish is charming in its simplicity; he “set a resolution . . . of being acquainted with every man in the parish, exhorting the married men to temperance and the bachelors to matrimony . . . it was a common saying that there were three strange wants at Wakefield, a parson wanting pride, young men wanting wives, and ale-houses wanting customers” (308,9). Surely there is nothing in this to criticize. There is already present, in seedling form, the message which will become the book’s theme: “those little rubs which Providence sends to enhance the value of its favours” (306) are here minor mishaps; later, as the trouble grows and the Vicar learns greater prudence, he will also deepen out this view into an entire theodicy—and an evangelistic message.

The Vicar’s troubles begin when his pedantic pursuit of a minor theological battle ends up barring his son’s marriage; immediately on the heels of this gap between his simplicity and necessary prudence comes the loss of his fortune. Still, in the face of his own principles, the Vicar is honest when he refuses to dissemble until after the wedding. Here a paradox begins to open up. It is obvious that the parson’s scruple over remarriage (after the death, not divorce, of a spouse) is spurious; at the same time, it is obvious that he is right to stick to his conscience, rather than prudential considerations which might press him to dishonesty. This upholding of even a meaningless scruple against strong motives to bend becomes one of the Vicar’s primary characteristics throughout the story.

The descent takes several stages. First, the family is financially driven down into middle-class living, compelled to move to a new parish and take up farming to add to their living. The Vicar presses the family to adjust their standard of living to the new situation, with some success. The temptation to press up to the level of affluence is subdued, and the simplicity of affluence is replaced by a readily discovered sufficiency. In learning to be content with enough, rather than to rely upon the comforts of wealth, the family becomes able to live within its means and to provide for itself well enough.

The next level of the decline is when the family begins to be torn apart by the struggles of maintaining their standard of living, with the various social agendas attached to bourgeois life. From portraits to horses, the family tries to live up to the imagined expectations of those who style themselves better—often over the protests of the Vicar, though he acquiesces in them when he believes they may have some practical benefit. These attachments which seem to have so much promise fall through quickly, and the family are left with only the struggles. As they descend below the middle class toward the lower class, the struggle to hold the family together becomes greater. The desires of each to be more than their present circumstances will allow is difficult for even the Vicar to deny; and a series of unwise attempts to improve their economic condition result only in further losses. The family dissolution continues when Olivia, the oldest girl, elopes with the profligate Squire Thornhill. In pursuing her (by a false trail carefully laid to deceive him), the Vicar exhausts his health and his resources, finds his son George who has been wandering the continent since the loss of funds to support his education, and sees him off to a commission in the Army. Returning home, he finds Olivia nearly dead in an inn near town; he brings her back with him just in time to see the house burn down.

With the burning down of the house, the Vicar’s family begins its slide from the lower class into the underclass. This is completed when the Vicar is cast in debtor’s prison and his family dispossessed of their lands by the Squire, when the Vicar refuses to withdraw his objection to the Squire’s marrying another woman. The social context is complex and largely irrelevant to this exposition: the key fact is that the Vicar is once more standing on a scruple that many would vacate to the prudential considerations that weigh against his stand. In this case, however, it is more than a matter of his beliefs in some arcane theological controversy; it is his daughter’s honor which is at stake. In taking his stand, the Vicar ends up imprisoned, burned from the fire and ill; Olivia is believed dead, Sophia kidnapped; George (the eldest son) is arrested on a capital charge (for challenging the Squire). The dissolution of the family is complete; though the younger sons remain, the underclass pattern of living disrupted by constant chaos and the seducing influence of lower characters has manifested fully.

However, the Vicar remains faithful, preaching to the prisoners until some actually begin to reform their lives; and it is in this context, on the occasion when the misfortunes have been capped by the news of George’s imprisonment, that the Vicar delivers at last the full message which has been weaving itself throughout Goldsmith’s dialectical narrative. In the message, the Vicar distinguishes between philosophical and religious modes of dealing with the pain in the world:

“philosophy . . . tells us that life is filled with comforts, if we will but enjoy them; . . . that though we unavoidably have miseries here, life is short, and they will soon be over. Thus do these consolations destroy each other; for if life is a place of comfort, its shortness must be misery, and if it be long, our griefs are protracted. Thus philosophy is weak; but religion comforts in an higher strain” (437).

The error, according to the Vicar, lies in the shortness of the view; the exigencies of this life cannot be stretched into anything like a fulfilling pattern. Rather, the Vicar advocates an Irenic view of the world’s troubles: “Man is here . . . fitting up his mind and preparing it for another abode” (437). Of course, the Vicar’s religion has more than a little Platonist philosophy in it; he speaks of the “good man” who “leaves the body and is all a glorious mind” (437). Therefore, “to religion . . . we must hold in every circumstance of life for our truest comfort; for if we are already happy, it is a pleasure to think that we can make the happiness unending; and if we are miserable, it is very consoling to think that there is a place of rest. Thus to the fortunate religion holds out a continuance of bliss, to the wretched a change from pain” (437).

It is at this point that the critique becomes applicable; to steal a march from the Marxists, this sort of religion is the “opiate of the masses” if not carefully tempered. It gives to those who are downcast hope in the hereafter rather than temporal hopes, and directs them to accept the exchange as for their benefit. It gives to those who are wealthy and stay within the bounds of religion no direct connection with the well-being of those around them; after all, their concern is with the way they are presently building toward their eternal happiness. However Goldsmith may shape the plot in The Vicar of Wakefield, teaching such as this tends to dull the daily activity of the poor in acquiring means of betterment and the rich in aiding them.

The dialectic is completed; having uttered the whole truth at last, the Vicar is soon delivered from his trials: he is released from prison, finds Olivia alive and Sophia rescued; George is freed; the family is restored to affluence; and Olivia’s honor is upheld. Sophia and George are married, and all is well. Though there is no causal link between the Vicar’s speech and the resolution which immediately follows, the thematic relation is too obvious; having realized the understanding necessary to his fuller appreciation of Providence, the Vicar is Providentially delivered and restored to that simplicity of life—but now with greater wisdom. Thus does Goldsmith, under the guise of a tale, take the reader through the entire development of a worldview; and thus does the Vicar end by saying, “I had nothing now on this side of the grave to wish for, all my cares were over, my pleasure was unspeakable. It now only remained that my gratitude in good fortune should exceed my former submission in adversity” (461).

Goldsmith, Oliver. The Vicar of Wakefield and other writings. (New York: Random House, 1955)

Public-Personal

Another Religion Theme

I want to continue this series of bits from my scholarship with a few excerpts that happen to discuss Buddhism (in one case, mostly as a quick stop on the way to Confucianism).

I hasten to point out not only that, being the person I am from the place I grew up in the years I grew up there, my inner sympathy with Buddhist or Confucian thought is a matter of intentional cultivation–cultivation that had just barely begun in the Fall of my senior year as an undergraduate.  I can tell you from a later vantage that half of my generalizations about Buddhism in this early paper are pretty inaccurate, though in a few relevant details they come close to making the point I intend.

Here, then, my undergraduate paper from Dr. Morley’s World Religions class:

THE VIRTUOUS SELF IN BUDDHISM AND CONFUCIANISM:
A COMPARISON IN CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE
A Research Paper
Presented to
Dr. Brian Morley
In Partial Fulfillment
Of the Requirements of
World Religions (BMS 385)
December 2, 1998

The Western mind often conceives of all Eastern thought as a homogenous whole on the model of Hinduism and Buddhism. It is not, however, always so; a number of differing strains of Eastern thought may be contrasted to the Hindu/Buddhist mysticism. Among these variant movements, Confucianism stands in sharp relief against Buddhism; the Confucian concept of the ruler who wishes to “illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom” by encouraging bonds of filial and national piety is utterly antithetical to the Buddhist search for freedom by non-attachment. The Christian will recognize in the altruistic, public ethic of the Confucian a resemblance to the ethics of the Old Testament Scriptures and of Christ.

In the Buddhist view, the human self is illusion; the notion of self-existence is the barrier to understanding of the truth. Only by learning to reject the illusion of selfhood can a man begin to live in such a way as to become conscious only of truth; by being conscious only of truth, that man escapes samsara, the continuing cycle of death and rebirth occasioned by the karmic effects of desire.

Learn to distinguish between Self and Truth. Self is the cause of selfishness and the source of evil; truth cleaves to no self; it is universal and leads to justice and righteousness. Self, that which seems to those who love their self as their being, is not the eternal, the everlasting, the imperishable. Seek not self, but seek the truth (World Library).

The relationship between right action and self in Buddhism is antagonistic; only by learning to negate self does one achieve “justice and righteousness” which lead to non-attachment and, ultimately, to freedom. As Janwillem van de Wettering says,

Buddhism is negative. It will tell you what it is not. When you insist that it must be something it merely allows for an open space, which you can fill in as you like. It is only specific about its method (Comstock 160).

Because of this negativity, Buddhism in practice resolves into either a basic anti-rationalism coupled with various superstitions or a basic rule-based merit system. In either case, its primary ethical focus is on method; and despite appeals to compassion, it remains that compassion is a part of the method to achieve a given end, which is personal freedom. This internal tension–the desire for a compassionate, ethical life in a metaphysical system which must negate compassion itself–is one of the greatest vulnerabilities of Buddhist thought.

In stark contrast is the Confucian emphasis, which begins with the desire to cause moral excellence to abound:

The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things (World Library).

Here the end to be achieved is not escape from the world of existence, but an abundance of virtue within it. The accomplishment of virtue begins with a virtuous ruler who knows that public virtue begins with private cultivation of right thoughts. Here Buddhism and Confucianism briefly meet: both agree that private knowledge of truth is the starting point; but where Buddhism seeks truth in negation, Confucianism seeks truth in “the investigation of things.” Where Buddhism sees self as the enemy of truth, Confucianism sees truth as an understanding of the self and of others which leads to sincerity and right relationships.

This concept of right relationships by self-knowledge and cultivation of virtue is reinforced throughout Confucian writings; it forms “the root” of Confucian ethics. Not only is it the ruler’s duty to pursue and exemplify virtue in his personal, family, social and political life, but all must do so together: “From the Son of Heaven down to the mass of the people, all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything besides” (World Library). As a result of this cultivation of the person, men are rightly related to others through all the various social roles they adopt. Referring to the respected ancient King Wan, Confucius notes that

As a sovereign, he rested in benevolence. As a minister, he rested in reverence. As a son, he rested in filial piety. As a father, he rested in kindness. In communication with his subjects, he rested in good faith.
When each knows his own heart, and by investigation understands the hearts of others, he is able to engage in right action. When men are given to understanding, they are able to trust each other; the result is rest, or reverence for the piety which makes for right relationships. The heart of this self-knowledge which makes for right relationships is integrity:
What is meant by “making the thoughts sincere” is the allowing no self-deception, as when we hate a bad smell, and as when we love what is beautiful. This is called self-enjoyment. Therefore, the superior man must be watchful over himself when he is alone.

It is interesting to note that this philosophy makes ethics an aesthetic phenomenon in a way which transcends specific legalities. The man who makes his thoughts sincere is the man who knows himself for what he is and tolerates nothing which is repugnant to his knowledge of the good. In order to carry this beyond the realm of rule-based morality, Confucius invokes the analogy of the “bad smell” which men recoil from and the “beautiful” which men love. This ethic engages the entire man in an effort to create superior moral worth–not simply the negative ethic of commandment-keeping, nor the self-negation of Buddhism or asceticism, but the moral excellence or virtue idealized by the imperial civilizations, by primitive Christianity and by the warrior cultures of Northern and Western Europe. Such an excellence transcends mere physical prowess or mere pristine purity; it is the positive presence of something worthy of admiration, something which ennobles both those who have it and those with sense enough to revere it. The creation of great art, the winning of noble battles, the defense of an honest man’s cause–these are the virtues which all civilizations not degraded by a low view of God’s image in man have sought to exemplify.

The result of this aesthetic ethic is the impulse of the great to “illustrate illustrious virtue” among the peoples of the world. Despite a general optimism, however, Confucius is not silent as regards the evil in man’s heart:

There is no evil to which the mean man, dwelling retired, will not proceed, but when he sees a superior man, he instantly tries to disguise himself, concealing his evil, and displaying what is good. The other beholds him, as if he saw his heart and reins;-of what use is his disguise? This is an instance of the saying -“What truly is within will be manifested without.” Therefore, the superior man must be watchful over himself when he is alone (World Library).

It is in truth not merely a prudent gesture, nor a means to a personal end–in order for public virtue to be worth anything it must be the honest end of private virtue. Confucius here gives elegant form to the old adage, “You can fool some of the people some of the time, and you might even fool most of the people most of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time”–or, in the words of Scripture, “Be sure your sin will find you out” (Num 32:23). A man’s reputation may in some points deviate from his true character, but those who are discerning will readily discover the discrepancies; and, generally, all men know at a very basic level whether they are seeing an honest man or a deceitful one.

The emphasis on true personal integrity is just one of several points where the Confucian ethical system coincides closely with Scriptural principles. This should not be surprising, however. Confucius, writing circa 500 B.C., never claimed to be original; rather, he was gleaning his knowledge from the ancients, the great rulers of the earth from times now obscured by millenia of conflict and a century of modern historical revisionism. Another great collection of historical wisdom of the ancients can be found in the works of Solomon, who “set [his] mind to seek and explore by wisdom concerning all that has been done under heaven” (Eccl 1:13). In the end, the Preacher attains a simple insight into the basis of all human wisdom: “Fear God and keep His commandments . . . For God will bring every work into judgment, everything which is hidden, whether it is good or evil” (12:13,14). It is this direct theism which is lacking in Confucian thought; yet the basic patterns are the same, implying a common origin. Personal piety on a very basic level becomes the groundwork for right action and right relationships; and the “hidden” or private things will be judged as well as the public.

It is no surprise, then, when Solomon’s method for inculcating these virtues in his people–with a special focus on his own descendants–is similar to that of Confucius. Indeed, in Ecclesiastes Solomon makes clear that he has collated the wisdom of many into his books of sayings:

In addition to being a wise man, the Preacher also taught the people knowledge; and he pondered, searched out and arranged many proverbs. The Preacher sought to find delightful words and to write words of truth correctly.
The words of wise men are like goads, and masters of these collections are like well-driven nails; they are given by one Shepherd (Eccl 12:9-11).

Much of Solomon’s wealth of collected wisdom has been lost to the ages, but one important collection has been preserved in the book of Proverbs. The variety of sources available to Solomon probably included some of the same sources available to Confucius 400 years later; it is tantalizing to consider whether Confucius may have seen Solomon’s writings (as Socrates almost certainly did, having studied Hebrews). It is known that some of Solomon’s proverbs came from others (as, for instance, Agur and King Lemuel); and older copies of virtually identical passages have been found in Egyptian texts.

If one accepts a recent flood, basing ancient chronology as strictly as possible on the Scriptural geneaologies and tables of the nations, then it becomes apparent why each of these collectors of ancient wisdom–and others like them–have such similar thoughts. Not only are these transcendent human ideals; they are also the core elements of a literature which was ancient even in the days of Confucius, Buddha and Socrates. The wise men, patriarchs and rulers of the second and third millennia B.C. would be to Confucius or Solomon as Plato or Aristotle or Cicero are to modern man, only greater. Not only were these ancients of the ancients great thinkers of past days, but they were the very founders of all the world’s civilization: they were the progenitors of all the races, inventors of languages, makers of laws and writers of songs for all peoples. In the post-diluvian patriarchs the earth’s kingdoms were at their fullest and most glorious; only the great apostasy of Babel prevented their creating the golden age of all humanity. Even so, men seeking the original truth which preceded the darkness which those who “illustrate illustrious virtue” wished to dispel would inevitably turn to the writings of those who had known that truth, and to their successors. It is the very similarities between the ancient writers which best confirms the constant presence of God’s revelation, even where the Bible preserves only a skeleton outline of things long past.

Confucian teaching and Solomon’s proverbs are quite congenial in many ways. The teaching on integrity, on the necessity of private virtue to the effective exercise of public virtue, sound very similar to Solomon’s words, when he says, “Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life. Put away from you a deceitful mouth, and put devious lips far from you” (Prov 4:23,24). In addition, the efficacy of public virtue is attested repeatedly; one well-known example follows:

When the righteous increase, the people rejoice, but when a wicked man rules, people groan. A man who loves wisdom makes his father glad, but he who keeps company with harlots wastes his wealth. The king gives stability to the land by justice, but a man who takes bribes overthrows it . . . The righteous is concerned for the rights of the poor, the wicked does not understand such concern . . . If a ruler pays attention to falsehood, all his ministers become wicked . . . If a king judges the poor with truth, His throne will be established forever . . . Where there is no vision, the people are unrestrained, but happy is he who keeps the law (Prov 29:2-18).

on Literature, Public-Personal

An Inchoate Apocalyptic Aesthetic

Here’s one from quite some time ago–my junior year at The Master’s College, in fact. I’m going to offer it in as near to its “student paper” form as possible. Some of the very sketchy analysis here formed the basis for both my pursuit of Nineteenth Century Poetry as a field and my eschatologically-oriented approach to H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction in my master’s thesis.

Yes, at this stage I reflexively lumped all “seems evolutionary” lines of reasoning in the “reject” basket, much like at this point in my thinking “seems Catholic” would have been a reason to reject something. We are shaped by many things before we are fully formed, friends!

 

Peter G. Epps
Victorian Age
Dr. Pilkey
5/7/98
Tennyson’s Forward Glance

In Memoriam A.H.H. opens on a note of bleary agnostic resignation, but ends on a nearly apocalyptic affirmation of the glory of God’s rule of creation. In so doing, Tennyson reflects the fact that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” but that “the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of a faith unfeigned.” Therefore, while his beginning and end both acknowledge the superiority of God and the rightness of his goals, the beginning reflects the fearful insipidity of those who have not come to a right knowledge of God. The conclusion, on the other hand, reflects a fuller understanding of and submission to God’s ability to guide the universe.

The opening lines state flatly Tennyson’s agnostic view of God’s work, where he speaks of a God “Whom we, that have not seen thy face,\by faith, and faith alone embrace,\Believing where we cannot prove.” Further, Tennyson seems able only to acknowledge that God’s arbitrary crushing of man is accompanied by a like arbitrary raising of him; he seems unable to sense any purpose in this. Fear is the key here; it is precisely a lack of faith that makes it so necessary to constantly affirm one’s faith. That which faith truly apperceives is already seen as certain; it is that which one doubts that one must attempt to consciously affirm by faith. It is this state, however, of fearing the consequences of either accepting or rejecting the truth, that allows the Spirit fertile ground to work in men’s lives. In Tennyson’s case, it seems that such a work occurred on some level.

Tennyson acknowledges the need of such a work when he says,

    We are fools and slight;
We mock thee when we do not fear:
But help thy foolish ones to bear;
Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light.

Forgive what seem'd my sin in me;
What seem'd my worth since I began;
For merit lives from man to man,
And not from man, O Lord, to thee.

The constant cry for forgiveness and the almost cringing tone is indicative of one who has not learned confidence in the love and promises of God, who still believes that God is too far beyond human thought to make any ethical standard applicable, or any final understanding possible.

Over the course of the work, however, Tennyson achieves a number of moments of clarity; the finest is in his epilogue. In closing, Tennyson speaks in glowing terms of a final marriage, one reserved for the end of time, which he sees typified in his sister’s marriage. The language is brilliant and full of hope, and the climax comes at the very last:

A soul shall draw from out the vast
And strike his being into bounds,

And, moved thro' life of lower phase,
Result in man, be born and think,
And act and love, a closer link
Betwixt us and the crowning race

Of those that, eye to eye, shall look
On knowledge; under whose command
Is Earth and Earth's, and in their hand
Is Nature like an open book;

No longer half-akin to brute,
For all we thought and loved and did,
And hoped, and suffer'd, is but seed
Of what in them is flower and fruit;

Whereof the man, that with me trod
This planet, was a noble type
Appearing ere the times were ripe,
That friend of mine who lives in God,

That God, which ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves.

Of course, it cannot be ignored that Tennyson is powerfully influenced by the growing evolutionary consensus of his day; nor can it be supposed that he had an unclouded vision of the future state. At the same time, there is a powerful image in these lines of the coming man—that which has been missing from the agnostic piety of the Christianity to which Tennyson weakly appealed in his opening lines. It is the same appeal as that which Nietzsche makes when he postulates Ubermensch, the same as the appeal of the Marxist utopian fantasies of the great socialist worker. It is the lost Christian hope of the race which God has spanned time and space to collect, of those whose faith has made them whole by their apprehension of the grace of God in Christ. In the end, it is the hope of the future Sons of God which Tennyson’s poetic fervor envisions; it is the Bride of Christ who meets the Lamb face to face for the first time who exclaims, “Worthy!” in his lines. Tennyson’s hope which subsumes his grief is the knowledge that somehow, in some way, God will raise men above their present pitiful state and make them one with His divine presence in their midst. Recognizing this, Tennyson shakes of his languor and exclaims, affirming in the feast his pleasure and the sense of Hallam’s final glorification.

“For by Him, and through Him and to Him are all things; to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.”

Quotables

A Blast from the Past

OK, so in going through old docs, I found a small document called “MISC.TXT” and had to see what I’d left in such an odd little file. What I found was a transcript of a bunch of material from some of my earliest journals (started in my middle teens). In fact, some of the material in those journals, including at least a few of the items that follows, were first jotted on school book covers or clipped for my bulletin boards and later transcribed at least twice.

Anyway, if you really want to know a few of the things I thought were pellucid utterances that got at the heart of reality in my angsty teen years, here you go. I spared you the bad poem from the top of the page. You’re welcome.

If we will not die for freedom, we will die of slavery.

The hour of departure has arrived,
and we go our ways–
I to die,
and you to live.
Which is better, God only knows.

The Apology of Socrates

The duty of government is to defend the freedom of all of its citizens by
enforcing justice.

There is a limit, however, at which tolerance ceases to be a virtue.

Edmund Burke

Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
for loan oft loses both itself and friend.

Shakespeare: Pollonius’ advice to Laertes; Hamlet

Depression is the hangover after a pity party.

So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
The youth replies, I can.

Emerson

The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a
favored few booted and spurred, by the grace of God.

Jefferson

Equal and exact justice to all men … freedom of religion, freedom of the
press, freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus; and trial
by juries impartially selected– these form the bright constellation which has
gone before us.

Jefferson

Yes, the un-cited ones are what I believe to by my own original apothegms. I shall probably rest uneasy in my grave, one day, until at least one of these has been popularly attributed to Churchill, Lincoln, Disraeli, la Rochefoucauld, or Talleyrand.

Credo, on Theology, Public-Personal

Timely Background Information

A lot of folks are not familiar with canon law, but knowing its background and grounding assumptions can really help you sift confusing matters:

THE OBLIGATIONS AND RIGHTS OF ALL THE CHRISTIAN FAITHFUL (Cann. 208 – 223)

Can. 208 From their rebirth in Christ, there exists among all the Christian faithful a true equality regarding dignity and action by which they all cooperate in the building up of the Body of Christ according to each one’s own condition and function.

Can. 209 §1. The Christian faithful, even in their own manner of acting, are always obliged to maintain communion with the Church.
§2. With great diligence they are to fulfill the duties which they owe to the universal Church and the particular church to which they belong according to the prescripts of the law.

Can. 210 All the Christian faithful must direct their efforts to lead a holy life and to promote the growth of the Church and its continual sanctification, according to their own condition.

Can. 211 All the Christian faithful have the duty and right to work so that the divine message of salvation more and more reaches all people in every age and in every land.

Can. 212 §1. Conscious of their own responsibility, the Christian faithful are bound to follow with Christian obedience those things which the sacred pastors, inasmuch as they represent Christ, declare as teachers of the faith or establish as rulers of the Church.
§2. The Christian faithful are free to make known to the pastors of the Church their needs, especially spiritual ones, and their desires.
§3. According to the knowledge, competence, and prestige which they possess, they have the right and even at times the duty to manifest to the sacred pastors their opinion on matters which pertain to the good of the Church and to make their opinion known to the rest of the Christian faithful, without prejudice to the integrity of faith and morals, with reverence toward their pastors, and attentive to common advantage and the dignity of persons.

Can. 213 The Christian faithful have the right to receive assistance from the sacred pastors out of the spiritual goods of the Church, especially the word of God and the sacraments.

Can. 214 The Christian faithful have the right to worship God according to the prescripts of their own rite approved by the legitimate pastors of the Church and to follow their own form of spiritual life so long as it is consonant with the doctrine of the Church.

Can. 215 The Christian faithful are at liberty freely to found and direct associations for purposes of charity or piety or for the promotion of the Christian vocation in the world and to hold meetings for the common pursuit of these purposes.

Can. 216 Since they participate in the mission of the Church, all the Christian faithful have the right to promote or sustain apostolic action even by their own undertakings, according to their own state and condition. Nevertheless, no undertaking is to claim the name Catholic without the consent of competent ecclesiastical authority.

Can. 217 Since they are called by baptism to lead a life in keeping with the teaching of the gospel, the Christian faithful have the right to a Christian education by which they are to be instructed properly to strive for the maturity of the human person and at the same time to know and live the mystery of salvation.

Can. 218 Those engaged in the sacred disciplines have a just freedom of inquiry and of expressing their opinion prudently on those matters in which they possess expertise, while observing the submission due to the magisterium of the Church.

Can. 219 All the Christian faithful have the right to be free from any kind of coercion in choosing a state of life.

(source: http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG1104/__PU.HTM)

on Literature, Public-Personal

From my First Published Article

In my first year in graduate school at Baylor University, I had the pleasure of taking a seminar in Robert & Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry with Dr. Mairi Rennie, of Oxford, visiting head of the Armstrong Browning Library.  Based on her suggestions, I extended and finished my seminar paper, which was published in Studies in Browning and His Circle the following year.

I’ve selected an excerpt which I am pleased with, in its working with texts and the insight it helps to establish (one I capitalize on later in the paper), and also—quite intentionally—one that reflects my prejudice, at the time, about “Romanism.”  I will point out that what I say in this excerpt is definitely true of Robert Browning’s attitude toward the Catholic Church:  he was reputedly a vehement anti-Catholic through much of his life, and had been reared in a radical dissenting sect (developing such an infatuation with the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley in adolescence that he declared himself an atheist for a couple years).  You will not fail to notice, though, that at the time I originally wrote this I reflexively adopted the same perspective.  I am most grateful that I have been afforded the time and gracious opportunity to thoroughly reverse that attitude!

Here, then, an excerpt from “Tipping the Scales:  Contextual Clues in Bishop Blougram’s Apology”:

“Healthy vehemence.”  The first issue in unravelling Blougram is, of course, its dramatic form.  Whether Browning’s use of the dramatic form is intended to insure an ultimate relativity of perspective or to engage the reader in an active, rather than passive, process of understanding, its immediate effect is to obscure whatever “truths” the poem may convey behind the limited and possibly suspect viewpoint of an artificial character.  The speaker’s coloring of the facts of experience will, of course, depend on his reactions to that experience.  It is especially interesting, then, that the narrator of the epilogue in Blougram characterizes Gigadibs’ final reaction to his dinner with Blougram as “healthy vehemence.”  The idea of “health” becomes a key reason to believe that it is the later Gigadibs of the epilogue, not the early Gigadibs seen through Blougram’s eyes, nor Blougram himself, that is the intended protagonist of Blougram.

The image of “health” recurs in a later poem of Browning’s, “Confessions.”  In this brief poem, a dying man recounts the view of life he derives from the memory of a secret love affair carried on in his youth.  The ending, “How sad and bad and mad it was– / But then, how it was sweet!” is a typical Browning affirmation of the beauties of love when acted on courageously.  The most intriguing image in the poem, however, comes in a passing phrase uttered by the speaker:  “is the curtain blue / Or green to a healthy eye?”  The speaker then gives his own perspective:  “To mine . . . Blue.”  The question and answer provide a key example of Browning’s use of literary and Biblical contexts.

The question concerning “blue or green” is a reference to the literal coloring of perception caused by jaundice.  More specifically, it echoes the line “all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye” from Pope’s Essay on Criticism.  A glance at the passage in which this line appears reveals the exquisite craftsmanship of the allusion:  Pope is defending the truly original poet against overzealous critics, and says,

Yet shun their fault, who, scandalously nice,
Will needs mistake an author into vice;
All seems infected that the infected spy,
As all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye.

The plea, of course, applies equally well to the words of the dying man, whose description of the forbidden love affair gives the reader no real reason to believe it was an immoral encounter, and to Browning himself, whose critics persistently misread him.  The important statement, however, for both the dying man and (by implication from Pope’s context) the poet, is “To mine, it serves for the old June weather / Blue above lane and wall.”  The yellow cast of jaundiced perception would make the curtain appear green, but the speaker’s vision is healthy:  he sees blue.  It is those who censure him that are “infected” and “jaundiced.”

The charge of infected perception invokes a familiar Biblical context as well.  Paul, defending the believer’s liberty against external laws, says, “Unto the pure all things are pure: but unto them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure.”  As is the case with Pope’s attack on “scandalously nice” critics, so Paul’s warning about fastidious religionists reverts the charge of immorality on those who do not have a fundamentally healthy perspective.  In this context, the dying man speaking to his minister (“reverend sir”) is able to level a substantial critique against superficial moralisms; not only are they the product of a “jaundiced eye,” but they reflect a heart that is “defiled and unbelieving.”

The identification of “healthy vehemence” with spiritual and mental clarity also occurs in Browning’s paradigmatic religious poem, Christmas Eve.  In the poem, the speaker moves through four major viewpoints:  the Zionist chapel, his own initial position, Roman Catholicism, and higher criticism.  In the end, the speaker rejects the mere dogma of Romanism and the mere data of criticism in favor of the most vehement expression of love for God, that of the Zionist chapel.  The transformation of the speaker’s perspective, though, is not a mere intellectual assent or mystical abnegation of self:  it is a healing.  While the speaker “cannot bid / the world admit [God] stooped to heal / My soul,” he is certain that (like Paul and Mary Magdalene) “he named my name”; like the woman in Matthew 9:20-22, he leaps out to seize “the hem of the vesture” for healing and springs “at a passionate bound” back into the chapel.  Having been healed, he is now able to make the affirmation “I choose here!”

The image of health in Blougram, then, should be taken as a serious indication of perspective.  Indeed, Blougram himself argues from the premise that health equates with affirmation when he asserts that the early Gigadibs’ skepticism must force him to “keep [his] bed, / Abstain from healthy acts that prove [him] a man” in order to avoid making any assumptions.  The argument is sound as far as it goes; Gigadibs’ apparent refusal to have any faith if he can’t have all faith is inconsistent with his own actions.  Blougram is more consistent:  he avoids such “healthy acts” as those represented by Napoleon and Shakespeare because he prefers to dine, / Sleep, read and chat in quiet.”  However, as the later Gigadibs’ reaction of “sudden healthy vehemence” illustrates, Blougram’s self-justification undermines itself by demonstrating that he suffers from a “jaundiced eye” because he is “defiled and unbelieving.”

on Theology, Public-Personal

Learning by Contraries

So let me dig back to 1999 for the first bit of Past Scholarship to post, here.

I will not be posting any links for this paper, and you won’t find it on any of my profiles or on my site (though if you search the Internet Archive you can find a *reference* to it).  I deliberately expurgated this document once I had matured enough to realize just how badly I had wandered into rank heresy in the middle of my explorations and controversies as I finished college.  This paper was originally titled “The Origin of Original Sin,” and was an attack on the Reformed understanding of Total Depravity that, in a terrible fit of overzealous argumentation, attempted to both attack that view as “too Catholic” and to demonstrate that there had been a swerve away from the true teaching that led to Augustine’s view of the subject.

As many of you will know was quite inevitable, I ended up having to start my criticism of what I mistakenly viewed as “corruption” in Church teaching with Justin Martyr, who was just barely too young to have known the last of Jesus’ own Apostles; and I more-or-less implicated almost all of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church that I knew of in the “corruption.”  Somewhere in that process, someone less steeped in an anti-Catholic tradition might have realized that an interpretation of the development of Christian doctrine that supposed the Church was almost wholly overtaken in serious error on chief points of faith well before the canon of Scripture was thoroughly stabilized–before the Trinity and the relationship of Christ’s human and divine natures could be clearly defined–proved far, far too much.

In fact, eventually I came to see that this was too audacious–and, finally, that it was self-refuting. My return to a concern for confessional orthodoxy from this brief but intense period of error and excess took only a couple of years; my ability to move away from the dilemma of choosing one error or another on these matters, however, took longer to develop. My doctoral dissertation, completed in 2009, contains in part an extended meditation on original sin that is the recantation of these errors and the completion of the process of understanding that began with this Spring 1999 Independent Study and the deep dive into the Fathers that it occasioned.

Concilio_Trento_Museo_Buonconsiglio.jpg

I’ve carefully chosen an excerpt that does show my interaction with Scripture and my discomfort with what I understood of Reformed theology (which at that point was mostly American conservative evangelicalism overtaken by Dordtian Calvinism, the “TULIP” variety). I have quite deliberately avoided passages which contain obvious heresies, because there is simply no point in letting those arguments surface.

Here, then, a brief selection from “The Origin of Original Sin,” a polemical historical theology work of 100+ pages completed for an Independent Study course with Dr. Brian Morley at The Master’s College:

Chapter six of Genesis records the corruption of the antediluvian civilization. As humanity multiplied and those who walked with God (“sons of God”) intermarried with others, “the LORD said, ‘My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh'” (3). God here identifies the fact that sinful humanity is rapidly effacing the influence of His Spirit.[An alternate reading clarifies the action here: “the LORD said, “My Spirit shall not rule in man forever, in his going astray he is flesh” (NAS Gen 3:3 note) (emphasis added).] In keeping with His promise of an ultimate defeat for the serpent and a Redeemer for man, God averted the disaster of an total suppression of truth by destroying all humanity except righteous Noah, who “found favor in the eyes of the LORD” (8). By the time God spoke to Noah, He had allowed sin to run to its extremity: verse five records that “the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” Had Noah not been “a righteous man, blameless in his time,” the entirety of creation would have been annihilated (6-9). This passage provides dramatic testimony to the universal sinfulness of mankind, and for the pervasive effects of Adam’s sin. Once again, however, it must be noted that nothing in the passage implies that the sins of the antediluvian world were an inevitable result of Adam’s sin. In fact, Enoch and Noah are identified, without prelude, as persons who “walked with God” (5:22, 6:9). Later Scripture testimony will clarify that even these men did sin, and that it was “by faith” that they were righteous (Heb 11:5-7). For now, it is sufficient to realize that their righteousness and daily walk with God are recorded about them as facts in their own right long before theories of imputation became popular.

In chapter fifteen of Genesis, the Lord (through Moses) records a simple statement which forms the cornerstone of Biblical soteriology. Paul and James center their demonstrations of man’s responsibility in salvation on the declaration that Abraham “believed in the LORD; and He reckoned it to him as righteousness” (6). While Paul’s use of this verse in the Epistle to the Romans has made it a primary source of imputation theory, it should be noted that here, in its actual context, it is simply a statement of fact. God accounted Abraham’s faith as righteousness. Paul quotes this in the course of a proof that justification is by faith, apart from works of the Law. James quotes it in the course of a demonstration that faith is not passive but active in man—and that true faith produces a moral change which does eventuate in right action. In light of the teaching that the reckoning here is an artificial process, God recording Christ’s merit in the place of Abraham’s, it should be observed that there is no reason to believe that a just and truthful God keeps a double set of books. If God accounts faith in His promises as righteousness, that accounting must be intrinsically true; any difficulties in interpretation of later teaching must not be allowed to vitiate this premise.

One passage frequently used to bolster the Reformed view of original sin is a statement from the book of Job that “man is born for trouble, as sparks fly upward” (5:7). Indeed, this passage does appear to bear on this view of man and God. Eliphaz claims to have heard in a vision, “Can mankind be just before God? Can a man be pure before his Maker?” (4:17) The ensuing revelation portrays God as arbitrary and beyond all moral standards, and man as too lowly to understand God’s purposes. Eliphaz continues in this vein on his own, arguing that suffering is universal and that God reduces man to helplessness before He will help him. Job is given no solution except to hope that God will finish inflicting pain on him and begin to bless him again. That this is all in accord with the Reformed view of man’s total inability and God’s absolute and arbitrary sovereignty must be admitted; that it is truth must be denied, based on the context. This is a recording of a false teaching arrived at on the basis of a vision that is at best a delusion; quite probably, it is in fact a demonic deception. Eliphaz relates the source of his insight as follows:

Now a word was brought to me stealthily, And my ear received a whisper of it. Amid disquieting thoughts from the visions of the night, When deep sleep falls on men, Dread came upon me, and trembling, And made all my bones shake. Then a spirit passed by my face; The hair of my flesh bristled up. It stood still, but I could not discern its appearance; A form was before my eyes; There was silence, then I heard a voice (4:12-16) (emphasis added).

Certainly, if one were to read this in a neutral context one would not class this as at all related to divine revelation; while God has used visions, there is no record of God revealing doctrine through nightmares! Some would appeal to the fact that Isaiah was troubled and trembled at the presence of God (Is 6:5). This can be readily dismissed, however; Eliphaz and his two friends are denounced as false teachers in the forty-second chapter of Job, where God says,

My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends, because you have not spoken of Me what is right as my servant Job has . . . and My servant Job will pray for you . . . that I may not do with you [according to your] folly, because you have not spoken of Me what is right (7, 8).

Whatever the source of Eliphaz’s vision, it was not divine. The teaching he expounds so clearly, of the helplessness of man before the arbitrary sovereignty of God, is identified as falsehood by God Himself.

Public-Personal

Launching a new series of posts

I’m going to start putting out posts that are segments of my scholarly work from the past twenty years or so, including even a few snippets from undergrad papers.  It occurs to me that one result of the pace of life I’ve lived, and the number of places I’ve been, is that almost no one in my everyday life has any significant exposure to what I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to study, learn, and teach.  When I sketch in what has changed in my thinking, or try to explain my hesitation about someone else’s approach to an idea or situation, I have noticed that I often find myself ransacking the loose ends of two decades of thought looking for a thread to pull–but that is why I have written, and why I write.  To create a record.

So I’ll put these out there, and I’ll make one of my rare uses of the “Tag” feature on the blog to mark these as Past Scholarship.  Where possible, I’ll link to resources or major sources of research (I apologize that documentation may be incomplete in some cases, particularly where I gave a talk and may not have written a proper Works Cited page–nothing that could not be firmed up for publication in a more formal setting).  I hope you’ll enjoy–and criticize.

Quotables, Reflections

We Rest On Thee

Some years ago, I had the chance to be in a production of the reader’s theatre play Bridge of Blood, and this set of words for the “Finlandia Hymn” portion of Sibelius’s wonderful composition continues to be pretty powerful with me.

Here’s the playwright’s own contextualization of his use of the song, from notes for a production of the play at Cedarville University:

Poetry, Quotables

W. H. Auden on the relationship between being a poet and teaching

No, I never have. If I had to “teach poetry,” which, thank God, I don’t, I would concentrate on prosody, rhetoric, philology, and learning poems by heart. I may be quite wrong, but I don’t see what can be learned except purely technical things—what a sonnet is, something about prosody. If you did have a poetic academy, the subjects should be quite different—natural history, history, theology, all kinds of other things. When I’ve been at colleges, I’ve always insisted on giving ordinary academic courses—on the eighteenth century, or Romanticism. True, it’s wonderful what the colleges have done as patrons of the artists. But the artists should agree not to have anything to do with contemporary literature. If they take academic positions, they should do academic work, and the further they get away from the kind of thing that directly affects what they’re writing, the better. They should teach the eighteenth century or something that won’t interfere with their work and yet earn them a living. To teach creative writing—I think that’s dangerous. The only possibility I can conceive of is an apprentice system like those they had in the Renaissance—where a poet who was very busy got students to finish his poems for him. Then you’d really be teaching, and you’d be responsible, of course, since the results would go out under the poet’s name.

(source: Paris Review – The Art of Poetry No. 17, W. H. Auden)