GETTING STARTED The Language & Truth of Faith
From Wellington Cathedral of St Paul
BECOMING A DIY BELIEVER/2
Rev Dr Raymond Pelly, Priest Associate raymond.pelly@clear.net.nz
Getting Started
The Language & Truth of Faith
Our hearts are restless [unquiet, disturbed, unnerved] until they find their rest [peace, fullness, trust, meaning] in you [Cor nostrum inquietum est, donec requiescat in te]. St.Augustine, Confessions
Lecturer 10 minutes into an Introduction to Theology. A student puts his hand up & says, I think you’re in the wrong place. We were expecting a seminar on how frogs reproduce.
Comment on some rather disconsolate looking Hindu gods by beat poet, Alan Ginsberg. They’re only present because they have forgotten [passive?] to forget to come [active/passive?].
Recap 1 Recall my definition of theology as involving knowing, acting, feeling i.e. the whole person. ‘Theology’ is the activity whereby (1) intentional reflection (theology, narrowly so called), (2) ethics or action, and (3) spirituality meet and interact creatively’. I then said that the purpose of this activity is to arrive at a Gospel that is life-changing or transformative.
Recap 2 I then went on to sketch some of the features of an authentic theology. ‘‘To get started in theology we have to realize that there can be truth-telling languages other than that of scientific rationalism. Charles Taylor puts it like this: ‘In certain domains love and self-giving enable us to understand what we would never grasp otherwise’…. ‘The insights in question’, I went on to say, ‘are at home in the languages of faith, art, ethics, inter-personal love, social justice and a sense of the holy or authentically sacred’.
I. Starting Points
Let’s now look at some starting points for faith grouped (loosely) around the faculties of knowing, acting, feeling. In this we shall soon discover that wherever we start – with knowing, for example – we shall soon find that the rest of us is involved – acting, feeling. And this pre-supposes that it is equally valid to start with feeling so long as we don’t neglect thinking and action. And so on. In this way, wholeness is integral to the journey of faith. Once we have laid out these approaches, we shall go on to reflect on the kinds of language involved in describing or doing justice to them.
A. Astonishment
Here is the account of the astonishment someone felt in the presence of an elm tree in a park.
“I notice a handsome elm. Now I find myself looking at it, focusing on it by design. Slowly it comes alive. I ‘decide’ to let it happen. Now I am really seeing the tree: what was a living object (it still is, I suppose) has become a presence . To me, of all people. Not (or at least not to the same extent) to the passers-by in the park. It appeals to me; it calls; it speaks . An encounter without words has begun. A little later I realize : for a few moments there I lost possession of myself. Touched to the quick by the tree’s presence to me, I extended my presence to it. I got ‘interested’ – swept up into - this tree. A case of theoria - contemplative self-abandon. My initial interest, conscious and intentional (but non-mutual ! ) as it began, has paid off : a tree has become, unbenknownst to itself, a treasured partner in my world (though in all likelihood not just in my world). Now a flight of fancy carries me into the whole sweep of cosmic evolution. I participate in it, consciously. I interpret. I recall Wordsworth’s Lucy Poems:
rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, with rocks, and stones, and trees.
Now I sense/think: ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ or ‘Bless the Lord, all things growing on the earth’. In less than a minute a tree has carried me from responsive contemplation to philosophic wonder to worshipful awe and intimacy. I believe. (Is that it?) My God. Goodness gracious. My goodness. My, my. YOU. Fire.
So here I am, after billions and billions of years of cosmic combination and decombination, in the mere nick of time, newly self-aware at the touch of a cosmic, infrahuman good, and lifting it up, along with my revived self, first to deeper awareness, then to thankfulness, then to the One Unseen. A living offering of praise and thanksgiving.”
[Frans Josef van Beeck. Trinitarian Theology as Participation. In The Trinity, ed. Stephen Davis et al., OUP, 1999, p.297]
As a reflection on that, consider the following:
Dietrich Bonhoeffer on PRIDE “The discussion … poses the problem of the self turned in upon itself, seeking to place itself in the truth, individualistically isolated, adopting a mastering attitude to the world through its knowing – in short, making the self God, a putting human companions, nature, and God under its power” – a manifestation of the current sin of pride … ? “human beings in their existentiality are always ‘in relation to’ something beyond themselves”. … In Bonhoeffer the question is precisely how one can be free for others in a genuine mutuality of love and service, how the dominating and overpowering ego can be freed from itself into an authentic sociality”
[Extracts from a review by Jean Bethke Elshtain of Clifford J. Green’s Bonhoeffer. A Theology of Sociality, Revised Edition, Eerdman’s., 1999, 392pp; in International Bonhoeffer Society, Newsletter, English Language Section, Number 76, June 2001, p.18]
B. Imagination, Feeling
Here are some words by Joy Cowley that make the point.
‘There are times when I have cried out, “God, give me back my heart of stone and a ladder that I can climb up to my head and live there with doors and windows shut on feeling. God, God, I’m tired of all the hurt. For a little while, let me live a second-hand life. Let me tread the path of other people’s ideas. Just let me drop this awesome responsibility you have given me to, to grow through love and pain”. Then I remember what it’s like to exist with a heart of stone. How cold and dead I felt inside, and how divided the world was when viewed without love in my heart. Remembering, I pour myself before God and whisper into His waiting, “My God, there is no going back. It has to be a soft heart, one that is always vulnerable to the love and wounding which is life, which is growth, which is You”.
Or, Julian of Norwich who, in contemplating the suffering body of the crucified Christ, is, like C.S.Lewis, ‘surprised by joy’.
‘And I watched with all my might for the moment when Christ would expire, and I expected to see his body quite dead; but I did not see him so, and just at the moment when by appearances it seemed to me that life could last no longer, and that the revelation of his end must be near, suddenly as I looked at the same cross, he changed to an appearance of joy. The change in his blessed appearance changed mine, and I was as glad and as joyful as I could possibly be. And then cheerfully our Lord suggested to my mind: Where is there now any instant of your pain or of your grief?’
In this extract, notice three things: the change in perception from suffering to joy; the way in which Christ’s joy is transferred or gifted to Mother Julian; and the underlying metaphysic [= the way things are; what’s what] that the reason Christ shares our sufferings is that we might share his joy. As she puts it, ‘The reason why he suffers is because in his goodness he wishes to make us heirs with him of his joy’
[Revelations of Divine Love, XXI]
C. Ethical Outrage
Briefly, Jack Cousins, who became the General Secretary of the Transport & General Workers Union, the largest in Britain, effectively began his career as a Trade’s Union leader in Café in Nottingham, UK. There he saw a young woman with her baby. What outraged him about what he saw was that the baby was wrapped in newspaper and that the mother was feeding the baby on a bottle of warm water that she had just begged from the Café owner. What kind of a society is it, asked Cousins, that reduces people to that? This was during the Depression [compare contemporary ‘recessions’ and worldwide poverty]. In this connection we might recall God’s insistent question to Jeremiah, ‘Jeremiah, what do you see?’ [1:11; compare, Amos 7:8, ‘Amos, what do you see?’]
This emphasis on ‘seeing’ brings back to me an Exhibition of Award Winning Photos 2010 that I saw last week in Sydney. One sequence showed a young man being stoned in Somalia. First he is buried up to his chest, his hands pinned so he can’t defend himself. His head is then swathed in a white bandage, before a group of men pick up sizeable rocks to hurl at his head. The final picture shows the head bowed, the bandage soaked in blood. This was his punishment for being convicted of adultery – with which we might contrast Christ’s reaction to ‘the woman caught in the act of adultery’. ‘Let he (or she) without sin, cast the first stone’ [John 8;7]. We only see pictures like the one I have described in an exhibition because they are too shocking to be printed in a newspaper or shown on television. But the point here is that faith can start in ethical outrage, in facing up to some part of contemporary reality, however small.
II Reflection on A,B,C
(i) Any or all of the above may provoke the question, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ One answer would be: This a question that cannot be answered. All we can say is that universe exists, that it is meaningless, that nothingness is the basic truth about everything. Another, the response of belief, is to say, Hang on mate, isn’t there more to it than that? Wherever I start – in my thinking, feeling, acting – I seem progressively to discover what I can only call love. I don’t really know anything about people or things unless I (in some way) love or respect them; my deepest feelings – which I often repress – are to do with love; and as I take in the injustices and sufferings of the world, I have a similar reaction. What if we loved one another? I know what you mean by ‘emptiness/nothingness’, but doesn’t something like love leach through it all? Here, if we’re fortunate, we might stumble across a statement of faith that addresses this very question of why there is something rather than nothing. For example, Dante refers to God as ‘the love that moves the stars and all the other planets’. Or think of the opening greeting in one of our Liturgies where God is named as, ‘The love at our beginning and without end, in our midst and with us’. Is this the kind of world that the world is – God’s world? This still means that 2+2=4, that object hit the floor if we drop them, that people are subject to mortality & so forth. But it does mean that the world is experienced as fullness, rather than nothingness, as loved, rather than as existing by pure chance, as meaningful, not meaningless. God’s world? We are poised to make the leap of faith.
(ii) Now theologians reflect about this ‘yes’ of faith and try to give it a rationale. Here is one example, that of Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-74). He makes the astounding claim that everything we think – about what is true, beautiful or good – has already been thought in the mind of God; and that this precisely is what makes human knowledge so wonderful; that it always points beyond itself to God who is its origin and destiny. Here’s how he puts it:
‘We cannot perfectly possess this [divine] way of knowing in the present life, but there arises here and now in us in a certain sharing in, and likeness to, the divine knowledge, to the extent that through faith implanted in us we firmly grasp the primary Truth itself for its own sake. And as God, by the very fact that he knows himself, knows all other things as well in his way, namely by simple intuition without any reasoning process, so may we, from the things we accept by faith in our firm grasping of the primary Truth, come to know other things in our way, namely by drawing conclusions from principles’
[Faith, Reason and Theology, Questions I-IV, Commentary on Boethius’ De Trinitate, 2:2]
Mark McKintosh comments: ‘Thomas is saying here that just as a good physicist, knowing the fundamental principles of, say, quantum mechanics, is able to interpret the data of an experiment and draw conclusions about it, so a theologian [or a believer] holding the beliefs of Christian faith, as fundamental principles, is able by means of them to interpret the data of reality and move to a deeper understanding of things’
[Divine Teaching, An Introduction to Christian Theology, Blackwell Publishing, 2008, p.39]
We could sum up our findings (so far), again in McKintosh’s words like this:
‘1. Christians believe that because God is the Creator of everything that exists, God cannot be one of those things; God is, rather, the reason why there is anything at all rather than simply nothing.
2. But all human language and ideas derive from our dealings with precisely those things that do exist; our language is very naturally conditioned by creatureliness.
3. Therefore whatever we say or think about God is going to be either (a) an inadequate concept that we foolishly mistake for the reality, and so a form of idolatry, or (b) an inadequate concept that we humbly employ as a pointer toward the divine reality, one which infinitely exceeds the grasp of our language, and is thus a form of analogy.’ [Same book, p.32]
III. Strategies for Talking about God
I’m going to comment briefly on three: analogy, metaphor, and the use of the imagination generally. The ground rule in all this is, as Mark McKintosh says, that while as humans (in the image of God) we are compelled to use human language, concepts and images to speak of God, we should never confuse these with God in God-self. Thus the task of religious language is to talk of God, but in such a way that upholds (rather than trivializes) the mystery of God. Or, to put it another way, for all the likeness of our speech about God (of whatever sort) to God, there is always an ever greater unlikeness. In theology, as in the Christian life generally, humility is everything.
a. Analogy
Once we have ‘got started’ (see above), how do we find language to express what we have experienced? To understand what is meant by ‘analogy’, we have to grasp two things. First, that a word like ‘love’ takes on different meanings in different contexts. If I say, ‘I love my children’, love has a meaning that is appropriate to that context. But if I say, ‘I love my wife’, that means something different. Yet for all the differences in the two uses of the word ‘love’, there is a commonality (or overlapping) of meaning in both cases. Second, language – here the language of love – can have what is called an ‘overplus’ or ‘excess’ of meaning. ‘Love’, in other words, is a very fecund word that is adaptable to many contexts. Or, we could say it always points beyond itself to greater and deeper instances of what we mean by love. It poses the question: is the cosmos itself the context where we have to talk about ‘a greater love’? And is this ‘greater love’ God? But once again, as we ratchet up the meaning and reference of ‘love’, doesn’t it start to crack, break or fall apart under the strain it is subjected to in this ultimate context – i.e. the sheer mystery of God? Yet we don’t want to fall into the opposite trap of saying that God is so mysterious, so transcendent, that there is nothing at all we can say about God. That would be agnosticism (its opposite being ‘know-all–ism’ or fundamentalism). In this debate – traditionally between language that is ‘univocal’ and language that is ‘equivocal’ - the doctrine of analogy tries to steer a middle way.
b. Metaphor (and Myth)
This is a huge subject, one about which I’m only going to say something brief.
Metaphor and myth are often lumped together to mean one of two things: either that what has been said is untrue; for example, that pigs can fly; or that metaphor is simply a colourful or decorative kind of language that is secondary to literal or empirically grounded language (like science).
Since the 1930’s this view has increasingly been challenged. Now the story is that metaphor – whereby language or imagery is transferred (or carried across) from one familiar context to another that is new, surprising or shocking – can be uniquely truth telling or innovative. For example, if we say ‘Man is a wolf’, we take all the meanings associated with ‘wolf’ (predatory, hunts in packs, & etc.), and transfer them into the domain ‘man’. In the process we come up with a new and challenging description of what it means to be a man. This does not mean that ‘man’ is literally a ‘wolf’ (with grey fur, yellow eyes, and a bushy tail), but that ‘man’ has wolf characteristics. And we’re left asking, is that really what men are like? But behind that question there stands another. What is the nature of reality? What are men really like? In this way, metaphor, and similarly myth, help us ‘to think outside the square’, to think & act & feel in ways that are not necessarily bound by precedent or pre-existing categories. In fact it breaks them, opens them up. It is, in other words, the way we go ‘beyond’ what we had previously understood. The supreme example of this is the resurrection which breaks up (or open) all the familiar categories in which we think [ e.g. time, space, quality, quantity, stuff, person, spirit & etc.] up to & including humanity’s received notions about death. Here the set of meanings associated with ‘life’ (here the life of God) is transferred into the domain of death – with new and surprising results.
What this truth-telling – or, reality-naming - understanding of metaphor means for theology comes out in this quote from Sarah Coakley.
‘Metaphors of [a] creative sort can … often be seen to encode ‘literal’ meanings. If I say, for instance, that ‘Christ is a rock’, I clearly don’t mean this ‘literally’ (it is a metaphor); but I do mean (literally) that Christ is reliable, unchanging & etc. ‘
[Article, ‘Persons’ in the ‘Social’ Doctrine of the Trinity. In: The Trinity. Ed. Stephen Davis et al. OUP, 1999, p.138.]
If we say, ‘Christ is reliable, unchanging’, we are saying something real about him, albeit in an analogous way - see above.
c. Imagination; Ways of Seeing
Two things to finish up with. A young American researcher into the language and games of children, writes this:
‘The ability to think about stories and pretend games is supported by …[a]… cognitive mechanism, which I call the what-if mechanism (WIM). This mechanism, as its name suggests, is a cognitive apparatus that allows us to ask “What if …?” to explore realities that do not currently exist in reality. We do this in our imaginations, setting up scenarios and letting them play out, and we do this with the help of authors and filmmakers, as we follow their explorations of the possibilities they have set up. What if I could turn invisible? What if there existed a ring of power, and that ring were to fall into the hands of a hobbit? What if a proud young woman named Scarlett O’Hara had lived in the American South at the time of the Civil War … All our forays outside reality are supported by this mechanism, whether we are listening to stories, playing pretend games, daydreaming, imagining the future, or trying to work out what could have happened in the past. In all these cases, we need to create a representation of something outside reality.’
[Deena Skolnick Weisberg, The Vital Importance of Imagination. In: What’s Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science. Original Essays from A New Generation of Scientists. Ed. Max Brockman, Vintage Books, New York, 2009, pp. 149-150]
From this we could get the idea that ‘reality’ is in fact an elastic concept; that the point of imaginative language can be to extend or deepen what we mean by ‘reality’ in the first place.
Another researcher in the same volume, Lena Boroditsky, writes an essay entitled, How Does Our Language Shape the Way we Think? Here’s one of her examples.
“Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like ‘right’, or ‘left’, ‘forward’, and ‘back’, which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms – north, south, east, and west - to define space. This is done at all scales, which means you might say things like ‘There’s an ant on your south-east leg’ or ‘Move the cup to the north-northwest a little bit’. One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is ‘Where are you going?’ and the answer should be something like ‘South-southeast, in the middle distance’. If you don’t know which way you are facing, you can’t even get past ‘Hello’.” [Same publication, pp. 120-121]
This might provoke the question: Does our language about God provide the co-ordinates by which we orient ourselves and live our lives? Or, do we think and talk about everything subjectively, solely in terms of how everything looks in relation to ourselves as the centre of the picture?
Summary
In getting started, we might find ourselves – whether this be our feeling, acting or thinking selves – thrown into crisis when something radically new or challenging gets to us via any or all of these challenges. The next thing that happens is that we shall be reaching for language that does justice to what is going on for us. This language will be ‘reality-stretching’ or imaginative; and will be couched in analogies, metaphors, myths, new ways of seeing & etc.. This language will be transformative in so far as it draws us into the life of God. In the process, we shall discover just how much of the language of the Bible (and Christian Tradition generally) is of this sort.
One Final Quote: ‘The beautiful in nature (and … in art) demands and rewards attention to something grasped as entirely external and indifferent to the greedy ego. We cannot acquire and assimilate the beautiful. It is in this … sense transcendent, and may provide our first and possibly our most persisting image (experience) of transcendence. ‘Falling in love’, a violent process – love is abnegation, abjection, slavery – is for many people the most extraordinary and most revealing experience of their lives, whereby the centre of significance is suddenly ripped out of the self, and the dreamy ego is shocked into awareness of an entirely separate reality’.
[Iris Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun, Oxford, 1977, p.36]
Appendix 1. An example of a powerful metaphor. A French actress, Karen Bach [aka Lancaume], heroine of the controversial film Baisse moi / Screw me, is put in the position of having to have rather violent sex (a rape scene) on camera with a well-known porno star. Her reflection on that experience is to say that she regards her vagina as like an old car in a back street that is repeatedly broken into – with the consequence that she never leaves anything valuable in it. This metaphor, I suggest, grabs you by the throat & tells you more about how this person feels than any other type of language possibly could. Metaphor is thus both imaginative & truth-telling; that while metaphor is not literal language – her vagina is clearly not a vehicle – nevertheless the transfer of meaning to do with ‘an old car repeatedly broken into’ into the area of her sexuality, encodes or discloses what can only be called literal or, better, truth-telling meanings i.e. her agonizing sense of being violated & alienated from herself by her professional career.
[For this example, See, Guardian Weekly, 20-26 July, 2000, p.26]
