Catherine Pickstock is one of the standard-bearers for the radical orthodoxy movement that I’ve been mulling over, so when I saw After Writing I had to try. Unfortunately, it may be one of the denser books that I’ve read in the last year or so. Essentially, Pickstock argues (as far as I can tell) that language is essentially liturgical and that this allows us to find a way past some of the deadly implications of modern linguistics: its privileging of the written over the oral, its spatialization of time, and its essential necrophilia or desire for absence and the void. She attempts to show the vitally important nature of liturgy in a premodern context through a careful reading of the Roman Rite. (Incidentally, I would be interested to read her analysis of other ancient liturgies, such as liturgy of St Basil but that might make the book even denser.) I’m unable to comment much on this because I’m not sure I understood it at all. Still, I mark it for rereading in a year or so, and hopefully by then it will be more understandable.
What I would really like to talk about is The Warhol, a museum in Pittsburgh devoted to Andy Warhol. While I lack the vocabulary to talk about art intelligently, it still struck me. I visited it for a second time last Friday and was amazed again by Warhol’s artistry and the level to which his vision seems to encompass America.
On the superficial level, Warhol was obsessed with commercializing his work and playing off ideas of commercial art. He came from the world of advertising art and this continued to feed into his silkscreen art, his photography and his videography. He seemed to be obsessed with including themes of price tags, dollar signs, or commercial paraphernalia in his work. He even habitually worked with large corporations, doing “arty” versions of the same advertising that he started out with (cf. the ‘art car’).
Not only was Warhol obsessed with money, he was also obsessed with celebrity. This perhaps goes without saying but we only need to look at his portraits of Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis to see it clearly. Even in his personal life, we see a drive to be famous – to be in the scene and to be seen in the scene.
Warhol was also pretty obviously entranced with the ideas of death, decay, industry, mechanical reproduction and the future. In other words, he was a typical 20th century American intellectual. In the midst of this, however, he preserves an odd sort of joy and piety.
When you’re wandering in the museum, in the middle of a floor devoted to dollar signs, skulls, and weapons, you can happen across his Silver Clouds installation.It comes as such a relief that I couldn’t help but laugh. Here is a joyful and fanciful celebration. You are even allowed to participate in it – shoving the clouds this way and that, or playing with them as you would any other balloon. Its hard to imagine that this and Warhol’s Elvises could come from the same place.
Likewise unexpected is the religious theme in some of Warhol’s works. He did a famous series on the Last Supper in which he shows some really sharp theological chops. The Last Supper (Be a Somebody with a Body) for example, connects the incarnation with the eucharist and with the civil rights struggle in a fantastic way. To say that Christ had a body is to give the flesh value and that necessarily includes the flesh of all people made imago dei. Also, since even the very taking on of flesh by the divine is a mystery, how can we empty out the meaning of the eucharist into a merely symbolic representation. In this and other paintings, Warhol’s catholic roots seem to be clear. I would really love a good book on religion in Warhol’s work: the only one I was able to find in the Warhol’s book store was going for $132, which is a bit steep for me at the moment.
So, Warhol seems to embody 20th century America. Obsessed with death, money, celebrity, industry and the future and yet displaying a continued exuberence and piety, if only by reflex. If I was sharper and understood Pickstock’s book more, I might call Warhol a pitch-perfect example of the problems of the modern experiment. His work seems to display a driving need and thirst for something deeper with only glimpses of what that deeper thing is. Warhol points to the need for is a properly doxological and liturgical language and anthropology just as much as Pickstock does.
The Belhar Confession in itself is glorious and I appreciate this book (and my father 
for drawing it to my attention. Most of it is completely unobjectionable and necessary to hear: it uses trinitarian langauge to focus on the necessity of church unity and God’s love of justice. Naude points out one particular bone of contention where the confession claims that God “is in a special way the God of the destitute, the poor and the wronged.” (Art. 4.1) The end of this paragraph is actually a fantastic place to point people for it lists all of the ways that God is, scripturally speaking, a God of the oppressed in a special way. The language that is used seems to go precisely the right distance in affirming the truth while remaining limited enough to allow those with misgivings for a broader liberationist theology to agree with it.
Where I might have trouble with the Belhar (that Naude didn’t point out) is that it seems to specifically condemn any church not attempting to actively interface with society. There are many ways of attempting to reform society and I’m far from convinced that a pietistic withdrawal from the secular deserves to be condemned in the same way that a corrupt collusion with the social structures of the day does. The confession’s language seems to rule that everyone who wishes to withdraw is outside of christian orthodoxy by saying that they reject “any doctrine which is unwilling to resist such an ideology [that legitimates injustice] in the name of the gospel.” (Art 4.3) As long as resistance isn’t understood as having to happen in a secular political sphere, then this seems correct. The Church in its existence as a social and political body can have a tremendous influence. But if we understand it as requiring the Church to actively resist using a politics that is based on principles antithetical to it then I would have some serious trouble with it.
Although Naude and the Belhar Confession come from a different theological tradition than I do they still have important things to say to the church in America today about race, inequality, injustice and church unity. The applications Naude did make the contemporary situation were very Africa-focused and it would be interesting to apply the same material he did as an American. I would find it very encouraging to read these words in the testimony of my own church. It is worth reading in its entirety, should you have the time.
My illustrious father has been very curious about the title of this reading log and I’ve been, thus far, unwilling to enlighten him. One of his good guesses has been that it refers to something that is often called the “Fourth Confession” – the Belhar Confession which is often added to the Three Formulae of Unity. This confession, written by the Colored South African church, is a powerful cry for visible church unity and justice and against an apartheid distortion of the gospel. Neither Calendar nor Clock is a series of reflections by Peit Naude on how the Belhar fits in with Christian orthodoxy, with the contemporary situation and with the modern world. Reading this book, I’m struck by distinctions between our particular traditions, which seem quite close.
Naude comes from a Barthian and continental reformed tradition and his theoretical stance on confession derives closely from that. One of the questions he asks (in chapter 3 “The confessional character of the Belhar Confession”) is whether or not Barth would sign the confession. Through comparison with the Barmen Declaration he determines that he would. But the fact that he thought the question worth asking puts him in sharp contrast with the Presbyterian anti-Barthians that I’ve been learning from (and whom I recently visited at Westminster Theological Seminary).
Similarly drawing a contrast with my recent theological homies was genealogical tracing of apartheid’s theological underpinning to Kuyperian neo-Calvinism and Scottish Presbyterian pietism. These strike a little close to home but we cannot deny the history. In fact, part of a courageous appropriation of Kuyperianism requires confronting these unsavory elements in the tradition and explaining how they went wrong within the social theory of neo-Calvinism.
I’m not sure if these distinctions were more than superficial but they gave a nice bit of dissonance to Naude’s argument. Calling out our mentors for their faults and praising our demons for their virtues is a good exercise in moral vision.
Hm. And I find I’ve not actually talked about the Confession at all. I’ll save that bit for tomorrow.
I find a focus on Lewis as the premier Christian thinker of the 20th century tiresome. There is far more riches than him for us to explore and he tends to be vaguely platonist in unhelpful ways. Tolkien was the better novelist, Chesterton the better essayist, Eliot the better poet. That being said, because of his focus on the Narnia stories, Jacobs is able to bring out Lewis’ apologetic work in a new and enlightening way in The Narnian.
This biography does bear marks of being written quickly and under deadline – we have the repetition of several loose concepts such as Lewis’ desire for a small illness and convalescence and his love for “adult male laughter.” As far as I can tell, these concepts are repeated mainly because Jacobs finds them so revealing of Lewis’ character that they bear emphasis. Color points are healthy for a biography but these seem to lie tangential to the main narrative. This seems to speak to weak editing, and the speed with which the book was originally composed.
This telling of Lewis’ life is interesting mainly because of Jacobs’ focus on Narnia and the space trilogy as a telling of a story from a Christian mind. This Jacobs sees as Lewis’ primary apologetic work rather than Mere Christianity or The Problem of Pain. It is apologetics as out-telling the atheistic story rather than out-arguing their thesis. We can see this supported in Lewis’ various essays defending the role of myth and story in moral education – as teaching the reader to feel correctly and practice virtue. In this frame of mind, Lewis is a part of what the radical orthodox, Biblical theologians and presuppositionalist apologists call for when they demand a compelling telling of the Christian story.
As I have been discussing this biography with friends, it became apparent that Jacobs also emphasizes (together with the necessity of story) the importance of intellectual community in Lewis’ life. This community is a group of friends who are oriented toward a goal and who have a particular set of productive agreements and disagreements that can push individual members to greater heights than if they were working individually. The best example of this in Lewis’ case was the Inklings but we can see it in most of his other friendships. I find this particularly worth reflection as I think about graduate study. The community where I find myself will have a significant influence on my development as a thinker and the details of that influence are impossible to fully know in advance. Further reason to trust God.
Reading a book from an utterly foreign culture is always an experience. Particularly when, as is usually necessary, you need to read in translation. By definition imperfect, translation often just helps the reader impose her own definitions on to the text.
So, when I’m reading Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North, I can’t really tell if my impressions of his poetry (that it is spare and elegiac) are correct, or if they are merely the result of me performing an orientalizing reading of his poetry. For all I know, in his context and in his original language, Basho wrote boisterious peasant-poetry (C.S. Lewis makes some of these points about classical Greek and Roman writers being translated in Renaissance England in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century). If this is the first significant amount of haiku I’ve read, how can I understand it at all without diving into the depths of Japanese literature and culture? I should start reading with something complicated and only come up for air when I’ve reached someplace interesting. Orientation happens best after complete confusion.
Unfortunately, I don’t really have time or inclination to delve into the depths of Japanese poetry. But, just because I don’t know doesn’t, of course, stop me from making an aesthetic judgment. Has ignorance stopped me before?
Basho does strike me as writing spare and simple poetry, with an economy of words and a (relative) freedom of syntax that enables him to describe nature and friendship well. Haiku strikes a balance between liberty and restriction that seems relatively original in the western (or at least English) literary tradition. He has a very finely wrought tool in the form that he uses and he uses it masterfully. Unfortunately, a lot of his skill is disguised through the extingencies of translation. This isn’t the translator’s fault but rather is just due to the nature of language and translation itself.
It all makes me even more leery than usual about reading scripture and the care with which that needs to be done. I’m reading in 2 Kings right now and am increasingly struck by how much background and scholarship is necessary to understand what the author is doing and to get any edification out of it. Luckily, this scholarship and study seems personally worth it.
I’m currently reading Alan Jacobs’ biography of C.S. Lewis, The Narnian, when it struck me that Lewis’ concept of Joy is oddly similar to Lacan’s concept of Desire (as I understand it). It is a desire for something that, by definition, cannot be fulfilled. When Lewis feels that delicious sense of Northernness in “I heard a voice, that cried,/ ‘Balder the Beautiful / Is dead, is dead!’” that Northernness acts as an objet petit a for him. He doesn’t seek the North itself, but rather the longing for it. The desire becomes self-perpetuating. I would need to read Lacan himself to flesh this out more, but there seems to be something possibly valuable in that similarity. This may be a way to approach a Christian reading of Lacan or a productively psychoanalytic reading of Lewis.
Or, I may simply not know whereof I speak. I just bounced off of a book of essays on theology and the political from a Lacanian position because far too little was actually making sense to me. I’ve got a lot of ground to cover to make it there, and for the moment, I’m just not feeling the mental energy to work through Zizek, Milbank and Pickstock. I’ll read more Jacobs (and a novel or two) and it’ll come back.
This is a book that you need to read on a beach, while the weather is fantastically pleasant and you have friends and family around. Otherwise, it will get inside your head and mess you up.
Plath describes depression with the clarity of someone who has experienced it and suicide as someone who has seriously contemplated it. We follow Esther’s worsening mental state and feel more and more trapped in the airless world that she describes.
Esther’s depression seems have a dual cause. It stems from both her own particular personality and from her social condition as a woman in the 1950s. She feels disconnected from everyone (she fails to confide in anyone through the whole story) which seems to stem from both her personality and the lack of possible comrades. Even in the New York interlude, she can’t find an intellectual companion. This lack is because of a society in which women are funneled into motherhood or secretarial jobs. Most of the women in Esther’s position have already reconciled themselves to their fate, but Esther isn’t adjusted to this form of society. This only serves to heighten her isolation. Learning shorthand is as horrifying a thought as marrying Buddy.
Esther’s society clearly drives her to despair, but she also has deep rooted personal issues that would have existed regardless of society – if nothing else, we can see this in her relationship with her mother. Unfortunately, it’s been a little long since I read the book for me to pontificate knowledgeably about that.
There seem to interesting parallels between Plath’s description of depression here and the classic definition of poverty. Poverty, as I have often heard it defined, is a lack of options. It is more truly a lack of power than a lack of money. That is exactly the position of a woman in Esther’s world. And it is exactly what she feels as the novel continues: her suffocating lack of options, in areas of her life ranging from sex to occupation. By means of contraception, Esther establishes more control over her life before the novel concludes but many of the structural problems with her life persist as she enters the interview room to be released from the mental hospital. Because of this, the end is deeply ambiguous. Though Esther feels momentarily better, at any point the bell jar could descend again and trap her in a self-destroying cycle because none of her structural problems have been dealt with.
Like I said, not cheery reading.
Here is a letter I wrote to the editor of Geneva’s student newspaper, The Cabinet about the school recent decision to sue the federal government.
Dear Master Favand,
As a recent alumnus, I’m disappointed to hear of Geneva’s lawsuit against the HHS mandate to provide contraception as a part of health insurance compensation. It is exciting that the school is taking a political stand on something but this is not something we ought to fight.
The abortifacient mifepristone is not covered in this, but rather contraceptives such as IUDs and Plan B. While scientific evidence is mixed (it depends, as far as I can tell, on who you listen to), the balance suggests that none of these drugs destroy eggs that are already implanted. No embryos are destroyed. Even if, as in Plan B, contraception is taken after sex, it still acts by impeding the fertilization of the egg by the sperm. As far as I know, the RPCNA and, by extension, Geneva College does not have a moral problem with contraception.
Even assuming that it does, or that true abortifacient drugs were covered by this regulation, the college is still not being forced to pay for something that violates its principles. At worst, it is forced to pay an insurance policy that may, if a woman chooses, cover contraceptives. Following the administration’s argument, it would seem that the college reserves the right to withhold compensation that may be spent on immoral activities. In other words, Geneva thinks it should be able to stop me from spending my salary at a strip club.
More than all of this, though, I feel as though the college needs to be able to have an open debate on abortion and contraception. And this open debate needs to be robust: one in which everyone from Planned Parenthood and Emily’s List to the NRLC and the RPCNA can participate. This is an issue about which faithful Christians can disagree. One side or another may be wrong, but we ought not foreclose on debate by assuming a unanimity of belief on the part of the college community. This is not a core belief (such as those in the Apostle’s Creed) but rather a moral judgment that deserves an open argument.
In Christ,
Greg Williams, History 2011
On reflection, and hearing more about the suit, I’ve realized that it may be more of an issue of religious liberty and Geneva’s identity,* and not quite as much a dispute about whether specific drugs ought to be considered as abortion-inducing. While I stand by what I argued in the letter, it seems as though this gives a much richer range for argument.
Is Geneva a religious institution, in the same way that a church is? And if so, does it have the same rights and obligations that Christ’s church does? If it is a church-like religious organization, that needs to regulate what it does better (in terms of preaching of the word, sacraments, and discipline), otherwise it is a false church.
If we do not want to go that far, we need to have a more robust idea of what a Christian institution (that isn’t the Church) should look like and what rights it should have. A reworking of the classic Reformation three marks of the true church may prove helpful, as may a revisiting of Kuyperian sphere sovereignty theory (ignoring for the moment my distaste for neo-calvinism). Until we have that identity issue straight, arguing about religious liberty for the college is a little silly.
In other words, we have an ecclesiology but not an academiology. Until we have both, we are standing on rights that have not yet been established.
*In the article above, President Smith bases his argument on individual rights of conscience. This seems weak because the moral nature of a collective (such as a college) is different than the agglomerated moral nature of individuals. This is the guiding assumption of the concept of the covenant (as I understand it) as well as the traditional RP doctrine of national confessionalism.
Terry Eagleton has a special place in my heart. I think his Reason, Faith and Revolution is one of the better reactions to new atheism – and it is written by an English marxist. He is hugely entertaining in the sense that Chesterton is entertaining: witty yet profound.
So, I was excited to start his study on ethics Trouble with Strangers, only to be completely bemused. In this, he channels a more academic spirit, and uses Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to look at major social and ethical thinkers since the 18th century. This was also a lot of fun, but in an entirely different way.
Jacques Lacan was a French revisionist Freudian. Unfortunately, I don’t know anything more about his biography. He has three big ideas, and one bigger one. The three big ideas are the concepts of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real; and the bigger one is the concept of desire. Eagleton uses Lacan’s trifold view of reality to drive his analysis of people like Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard and Derrida. That being said, I find it almost impossible to understand what he means by the imaginary, symbolic and real, so I thought I’d try to explain it. Explaining usually helps me understand. I just think about it as passing the confusion on.
The imaginary is the elementary stage, which doesn’t, of course, mean that it is useless or unnecessary in a mature conception of reality. In the imaginary, the self expands to encompass the whole world. In this stage, we think of ourselves as representative and just like everyone else. At the most immature or most narcissitic level, we have trouble thinking anything outside of ourselves exists. In Freudian terms, this is the Oedipal stage: where the infant possesses the mother entirely.
The symbolic happens when the father figure is introduced into the primal scene. This separates the mother and infant, and causes the infant to learn language to negotiate a social structure. We need to be able to see this as both a positive and a negative: the imaginary is cozy, but it is not civilization because there fundamentally doesn’t exist anything outside of the self. By the imposition of language and law, we can have society, but we pay deep psychic wounds for society. (This is, as far as I know, a deeply Freudian concept. He has a tragic concept of the world, and no real idea of how this can be fixed.)
The real is the trickiest concept, to me at least. The real is the point at which language breaks down, where law cannot cover. The symbolic order cannot cover the real – it is the Kierkegaardian or Nietzschean idea of the absolute. That being said, the real is transcendent in a profoundly comforting way as well. It lies outside of our experience entirely and at the deepest root of our existence.
In Lacanian thought, as far as I can suss out, the ethical imperative is to seek the real by seeking your desire beyond all limits. Seeking your desire is in itself desirable. As the song goes, “life is the journey, not the destination.” That makes it sound unbearably egotistical, which it isn’t. Still, I’m a little fuzzy on exactly what it is: Eagleton doesn’t go into a great amount of detail and I’ve not managed to read any Lacan myself. McCartney Library doesn’t have any books by him, so I’m forced to reconstruct backwards.
What I love about this three-fold vision is that it gives us a powerful way to view Christ’s incarnation. Though I’m not sure that Lacan intends this, Eagleton mentions it in passing.
Christ became like us, on a fundamental level. He is human, he was tempted. He suffered and died. And he was resurrected. This is a significant link to the imaginary level of humanity. More than this, as we grow in sanctification, we are to grow in being like Christ. After all, we are Christ’s body: we are all one self.
In the symbolic mode, Christ is the logos of God. He brought a message, and fulfilled a covenant. Language and law-talk pervade the gospels. Even, in a sense, a Trinitarian understanding of God could, maybe, perform the same function spiritually that the Oedipal encounter does socially. It opens up space for society, rather than having the individual lose himself in the divine.
As both God and man, Christ embodies the real. He is both truly like us and deeply different. He is transcendent, and yet our brother. And, by seeking after him, we can follow our desire, and the keep following it. We can embrace the real and continue seeking after our desire. In this way, we can reach true life.
So, is Lacan Christian? No, not really at all. But he might give an interesting way of looking at the incarnation. To be honest, not having read the original, I don’t know. But, I’m curious to try to find out in the next few years.
I overspoke when I claimed that Geneva’s ideology is completely determined by neocalvinism, though I do tend to believe that it is overdetermined by the Dutch. A great example to the contrary is in the book-list for a history class this term on “Modern Christian Intellectuals,” in which the students read Chesterton, Day, Neibuhr, Ellul, Cone and several other big names. Of these, the only real calvinist is Ellul, and he is about as unKuyperian as one could imagine.
So, there is a fantastic diversity that can exist on the edges of the college – however it tends to stay on the edges. It lurks in the library rather than speaks in chapel. And that’s a shame because the narrowness of integration and vocation-speak can become suffocating.
Of course, neo-calvinism (or any other tradition) isn’t reducible to its most easily grasped features, but in a undergraduate context it seems as though these features tend to receive undue amounts of airtime. Imagine an institution devoted to working within a tradition, developing and cultivating it in response to the needs of a particular community and in dialogue with the outside world. That is what I would like to experience, and that is why I want to study historical theology at a Christian school.
