The Priest 
by 

Thomas M. Disch

 

BlackOxford's review 

Dec 30, 2018  ·  edit

really liked it

bookshelves: church, american 

“Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief.”

The tragedy of the believer who loses his belief - especially a priest - is a lonely one. Only he cares. Other believers are appalled; and the rest of the world is amused by or indifferent to his suffering. Which makes the loss of faith an even deeper tragedy. There is no one from whom to solicit sympathy. Nowhere to find solace. Hypocrisy is compulsory in such a situation: “We preach one thing in public, but in the confessional it’s another story.”

So the lapsed of faith are likely to do some strange things in their isolated despair. They turn to others who have given up or been forced out of some previous life - like a tattooist who was formerly a corporate CPA, or UFO cultists who double as paedophilic-hunters - as an anchor in an unknown world. That such a move represents yet more faith in something equally unknown and equally implausible doesn’t really rise to the level of consciousness. Hence more tragedy can be expected.

Faith, as well as tattoos, have an unexpected effect. They soon “get to be in charge. They ride us.” They are not worn, but wear their bearer. When the spiritual marks of faith on the soul are opposed to the inked marks of the tattoo on the skin, the elements of a cosmic drama are in place to tear a person to pieces. This drama is particularly interesting when the one being ridden to death is a twin, whose DNA, therefore, is not strictly his own.

It could all be a Gnostic re-enactment of a flawed universe except that in The Priest evil is in the spirit and salvation is in the flesh. The Church, with its “gonzo theology,” officially represses and punishes, historically with the death penalty, human folly but unofficially engages in whatever perversion it can rationalise, that is, more or less everything done by its agents. The after-life is where things get straightened out. But that’s hardly a threat to believers whose primary belief is that they can cook the books at the last minute. 

Quite a deal this: favours for faith (or faith in favours, which is functionally equivalent) one might say. In fact just this has been said since the beginning of Christianity. The idea rarely takes hold all at once. As they say, it’s a process: “... do what we say, and the belief will come. We will own you. Not all of you, all at once. But piece by piece, in increments.”Eventually faith will be seen as an irresistible bargain. Amor et quod vis fac, Love and do as you like. A mobster’s code, this business of spiritual forgiveness for material wrongs. It keeps the bosses and. made-men in business and the party rolls on. Anyone talks and they’re out.

Getting out alive is the problem. Faith comes with a pledge of omertà, meaning not just silence but self-reliance. Real men do their own dirty work. The bad news is that it’s not possible to buy one’s way out: “We don’t want your money, Father. We want your soul,”is the way the bad guys of the alternative faith put it. The fact that they believe in extra-terrestrials rather than incorporeal spirits is really not that big a shift in metaphysics. But it does lead from the ecclesial frying pan to the alien fire.

Even worse, it turns out that hell is right here in River City, in this “Chartres of suburbia, the Notre Dame of Middle America, the Mont-St-Michel of fifties Catholicism when the spirit of the nation and of the Church were at their most congruent.” More generally, hell exists wherever and whenever the Church has been successfully peddling its supernatural superiority over the merely material world. “Hell’s cruelest punishment is just to be ourselves.” Pretensions of transcendence constitute the reality of evil in a society that would be much better off without them. “Their world is their prison.” Fortunately, such spiritual arrogance, when left to itself, politically combusts from within through claustrophobia and sheer bitchiness. 

Disch wrote The Priest in 1994, well before the truth of sexual abuse in the Church became widely known. Disch parodies himself as “... a fervent exCatholic of the sort that keeps tabs on every scandal concerning the Church and has to comment on all of them.” But I doubt that even he believed that paedophilia and institutional intransigence about it would be continuing and apparently incorrigible problems a quarter of a century later. 

Or perhaps he did understand the depth of the problem when he has a senior cleric attest the standard doctrine of the Church: “It’s in the nature of the Church that it can’t change.” Thus the real tragedy of the believer and his institutions: Religious belief inhibits learning... anything, except about itself. Ad majorem gloriam dei.

 

The Public Burning 
by 

Robert Coover, 

 

William H. Gass (Introduction)

 

This Is a Job for Uncle Sam!

A very exciting way to write history, at least political history, which is simultaneously personal and public, psychological and strategic, irrationally rational and therefore so dense with meaning it defies conventional narrative. As Richard Nixon says in The Public Burning, “... just as a nation has neither friends nor enemies, only interests, so there are no enduring loyalties in politics except where they are tied up in personal interests.” And personal interests are about as complicated as it gets. They ensure that “Politics is the only game played with real blood.”

In American democratic politics “Issues are everything, even when they’re meaningless.” Trump has his Wall, Nixon had Reds Under Our Beds. Both are symbols of tribal affiliation rather than threats to the Republic. This is what democracy is built upon: emotive symbols. So, indeed, as Nixon knew so longingly, “isn’t that a hell of a thing—that the fate of a great country can depend on camera angles?” He eventually got his angles right when he shifted his focus from Commies to Black people as the main threat to the Nation. Trump has simply enlarged this anti-constituency by including Latinos and Muslims. He like Nixon is clearly ignorant; but in one sense “they have learned too much, have built up ways of looking at the world that block off natural human instincts.”

The Public Burning is a permanent reminder, a literary monument, to just how strange the political culture of the United States is. While its focus is the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 for the crime of treason, its subject is the pervasive and apparently permanent disfunction of American democracy. It is a chronicle only marginally of a likely injustice. More importantly it is an analysis of how America really works, which is largely on the basis of personalities, and the competition among these personalities in all aspects of American life. The Prologue makes it clear that there is a psychotic thread connecting George Washington to Donald Trump. This thread is a sentiment of persistent, radical resentment.

This resentment seems to be centred on the fact that there exists any government at all. Government is an inimical force in America because it is so political. And it is so political because it is so rightly mistrusted. Nixon again: “Here is a political truth: Deviousness wins votes. Dishonesty is often the best policy.” The Right wants the abolition of government; the Left its transformation into something else. This is the American Way. One’s opponents, therefore, are not only to be beaten but to be crushed - merely because they want to govern at all. Schadenfreude is the underlying emotion. No matter who loses, America wins. “Enlightenment or no, we still had our roots in the Dark Ages,” muses the President manqué.

There is a widespread calumny that America has the best politicians money can buy. Trump is proof that this is patent nonsense. There are many better politicians for sale in the USA than he. And it has probably always been so. Coover‘s take on Eisenhower, for example, shows how remarkably similar at least Republican Presidents have been in terms of brain power: “Uncle Sam [Eisenhower, as his contemporary incarnation] needed vacuity for an easy passage [to the presidency]... and as for reading, more than a page and he went blind.” Eisenhower’s (public) Puritanism is the flip-side of Trump’s (private) Hedonism on the political coin. It is not difficult to replace ‘Uncle Sam’ with Ford, Reagan, ‘W’ Bush, or Trump, not to mention Harding, Hoover, or Taft (well, maybe not him) for the passage to read as sensibly. The idea that the election of Trump and his obvious appeal to the American people is an aberration, a hiccup that will be corrected, is clearly a hopeful urban myth with no factual basis whatsoever.

Put another way: Donald Trump is neither an exception nor an error. He is, it is true, tasteless, openly mendacious, crude, vengeful, and capricious. But these are incidental personality traits. His fundamental character is a precise reflection of America: instinctively violent when resisted; suspicious of everything, especially its own people; self-deluding about its motivations; blasphemously self-assured about its role in the world; and willing to sacrifice itself for an ideology it is in fact inadequately educated to understand. The ‘checks and balances’ of the Constitution may be far less important to controlling American power than the competitive free for all on which the system is premised. So, for example, despite his rather more civilised behaviour than Trump, “Eisenhower’s relationship with Congressional Republicans was so fragile, we couldn’t afford to antagonize them in any way” It’s that old pioneer spirit that makes everyone so skittish, especially around friends.

America has always been this way. If, as the Evangelicals believe, Trump is an instrument of the divine despite his flaws, it can only be to hold a mirror up to the country, to reveal what they actually are. This is the real value of his tweets which have revealed fully for the first time the banality of the society he leads as well as that of the leader. Granted, the likelihood of such a revelatory recognition is low. But that’s where books like The Public Burning become important. Among other things, it documents the historical continuity of popular insanity in American democracy and its manipulation by government and business. 

Coover re-casts America’s Uncle Sam, that old Yankee Peddler, the eternal Spirit of One Nation Under God, as Slick Sam, the fast-talking huckster who sells nationalistic snake oil to a willing populace through the likes of Hearst and Luce and Fox. I think that’s just about right. Says Ike: “A lousy situation, but dese, as the man says, are de conditions dat prevail!”

Postscript: An academic sociological perspective ‘confirming’ Coover’s fiction as an interpretation of American politics can be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Small Fry: A Memoir by Lisa Brennan-Jobs
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A Land Apart

What a Jerk. Steve Jobs was clearly in that elite group of psychos which includes Trump, Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk. Bullies, liars, pathologically egocentric, litigious bastards one and all. And any taste they have is restricted to their mouths.

Whether or not the world at large is a better place because of Steve Jobs is open to debate. But the immediate world of those around him was hell. Dumps his first partner (actually she dumps him); denies paternity of the child; pays peanuts in child support; apparently stays in contact mainly to gloat. You get the picture.

No doubt the house cleaner/aspiring painter ex is more than a bit flakey. And the child didn’t benefit much from her mother’s ineptness with relationships and employment. Stability was not a virtue the little duo was blessed with. But hey you’d think after his first few hundred million bucks Jobs might have settled them in someplace cozy. Not a chance. Although to be fair, he did help with the rent.

As we all know California is a place and a society apart. Perhaps it always has been since the time when the first inhabitants trailed in from Asia. It seems to me that this myopic biography is as much about the strangeness of California as a culture as it is about what is really only a footnote in Jobs’s life. It’s context to that life rather than content.

The genre to which this book could be assigned is something like Detritus of the Rich and Famous - a melange of random memoir, light gossip, and relational failure. Marginally interesting for the enthusiast but hardly more revelatory than what’s already available about a seriously neurotic and seriously distasteful Titan of business.

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The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters 
by 

Elaine Pagels

 

The Secret Sharer

Paul of Tarsus, that Moses of the Christian religion, is a persistent intellectual pain for many, including me. He is contradictory, opaque, and elusive. It’s incredible that a world religion is based on his frequently incoherent ramblings about a man he’d never met. But Pagels book goes a long way to dispersing the Pauline conceptual mist and suggesting why he was so successful.

One of the earliest crises in Christianity, the Gnostic Controversies, occurred about a century after Paul wrote his very influential letters to the congregations he founded throughout the Roman Empire. A group of Christian heretics (so subsequently determined) began using a somewhat older and distinctly un-Jewish theological approach called Gnosticism to interpret the traditions and writings about Jesus. For Christianity, a religion grounded in ideas, Gnosticism, an established cult of ideas, presented an obvious threat.

Gnosticism had several strands but all of these converged on a view of the physical world as a creation of an evil Demiurge. Within this world, the spirits of human beings had become trapped. The mission, as it were, of Gnosticism was to provide the secret knowledge, the inside dope, which would allow these spirits to escape their material emprisonment. Since this view was radically opposed to the idea put forth in the book of Genesis that God found the world ‘good,’ a number of the so-called Fathers of the Church spent a great deal of time attacking Gnosticism as an un-scriptural and erroneous interpretation.

Most of what is known about the Gnostics is available only from these Church Fathers since their attack was successful and most of the original Gnostic writing was destroyed. However the mid-twentieth century discovery of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts, largely Gnostic, provoked a re-consideration of the history and real substance of the entire second century dispute.

The issue around which Pagels centres her analysis is fascinating. In their attack on the Gnostics the Church Fathers relied heavily on the letters of Paul to argue against their opponents. Strangely, however, the Gnostics also used Paul extensively to support their case. Before Nag Hammadi it appeared that the Gnostics were merely being tendentious and the orthodox interpretation of the Fathers obvious.

But by examining each of the Pauline letters in terms of a more complete knowledge of the Gnostic position, Pagels makes a compelling case that Paul had been heavily influenced by Gnostic thought. In fact many of the apparent contradictions and confusions contained in these documents are the result of Paul addressing two audiences simultaneously: the psychics, or Christ-followers uninitiated into the sacred Gnostic mysteries; and the pneumatics, those relatively few elect who were spiritually prepared to understand the esoteric truths about what salvation really meant.

Pagels detailed scholarship in tracing the elements of this Pauline ‘double-speak’ is impressive and impressively explanatory. For me it goes a considerable way toward suggesting definitions for what Paul actually meant in his use of terms like ‘faith’ and ‘salvation.’ The fact that these suggestions are very different from what has been passed down through orthodox theology is, to say the least, interesting.

Postscript: For more on the Pauline idea of faith and other links, see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Riffing on Christian Faith

At some point I’ll do a review on Harris’s book (with which I have some serious disagreements). But for now I’ll just use it as inspiration and excuse for a rant about Christianity. Said rant is not about the patently poetic content and its derivatives of the Christian Faith (I am listening to the incomparable Vespers of Rachmaninov as I write). The birth, death, bodily resurrection, and eventual return of the Son of God can be held harmless. But the far more insidious and destructive Christian idea of faith itself cannot.

To only slightly simplify: Judaism consists of rules for behaviour; Islam of submissive obedience; Buddhism is a life-practice; Hinduism, a mythological imagination; and Confucianism a suggestive aphoristic wisdom. Only Christianity, by its own definition, is a matter of faith. But through Christianity's insistence, all these others have come to be called 'faiths,' and considered as if they were competitors for something Christianity calls belief. So Christianity, uniquely, has missionaries whose intention is to instil faith, correct belief, among those unfortunates among whom it is lacking. Nulla salus extra Ecclesiam, There is no salvation outside the Church, is a doctrine that celebrates the two Christian inventions: salvation and faith, which can be used interchangeably as the need arises.

Although Christianity has its many rituals and credal expressions, every Christian knows that these are not the thing called faith. Anyone can perform the ritual or say he creed. But authentic faith is far more basic, more existential. It is an orientation, an attitude perhaps, toward the world. An attitude of... well faith. Press a Christian hard enough and he or she will be forced to admit that this faith they have is an elemental thing. It can't be defined, divided or described in terms of behaviour, or propositions, or rules, or even psychology. Faith is a unique category of existence, they will contend, which can only be considered from inside that existence by those who live within it. Faith is a condition of the soul.

Rituals and creeds may be shared, therefore; they are a source of solidarity. But faith is entirely a personal matter. Only an individual knows about his or her faith and, according to some, not even them. Doctrinally in Christianity there is no clear sign, either external or internal, of the one who lives in faith. Consequently, for those who take the matter seriously, faith is a source of constant worry. If those without it are doomed, how could it be otherwise. So the aspiring Christian, and all must be aspiring to be considered Christian, must be constantly mindful, not of one’s behaviour but of the state of one's faithfulness. One must suspect and inspect oneself continuously for the signs of faith. This drove Martin Luther, among many others, mad.

As Sam Harris says, therefore, Christianity is the "perfection of Narcissism." It is the radical liberal economics of the soul. What matters is individual salvation. And the way salvation is to be achieved is not how one behaves externally with the rest of the world, but how one is internally with God. At most the rest of the world is a mirror upon which the Christian projects his own image in order to assess the quality of his faith - ceaselessly, remorselessly, and ultimately fruitlessly. Fruitlessly because even he has no clear idea what faith itself might be. Faith is what is absent, 'hope for things unseen' as the Pauline formula has it. Christianity creates the need which it claims only it can fill, and then calls its failure ‘longing for God’ and declares that proof of the universality of the need. With an advertising campaign this effective is it any wonder Max Weber pointed to Christianity as the matrix of capitalism?

Faith is therefore terrifying. And it's logical consequence is terrorism. It is Christianity's insistence upon the equivalence of faith and religion which has infected Islam and Buddhism with the germ of terror (it is at this point that Harris and I part company; he may be unaware that Sri Lankan Buddhist monks invented the modern suicide killer, one of whom, Somarama Thero, appropriately became a Christian shortly before his death). The novelty of Christianity was never in the tenets of its faith but in the idea of faith itself. Stories of virginal births, suffering gods, gods in human form, for example, are common in ancient civilisations. What is distinctive about Christianity is that the elements of these stories became matters of faith not rituals of communal solidarity. Mere acceptance, tolerance, of such content and its ritual are insufficient proof of faith. Real faith is extreme faith, total faith, or it is nothing. As another Christian doctrine has it: Error has no rights. And for Christians right is might. This is the reason many Christian theologians branded Islam a ‘Christian heresy.’ It came dangerously close to the territory of faith, and not just geographically.

So, emulating the theological lead of the religious genius St. Paul, the first Christian apologists attacked their religious enemies not on the basis of morality, about how people should treat one another, but by insisting on the ‘irrationality’ of their beliefs. As if beliefs did not carry their own rationality. Not having beliefs in the Christian sense was somewhat confusing for these opponents therefore. But the Jews and the emperor-worshippers and the Mithraists and eventually the Muslims soon got into the swing of this faith thing. Christianity transformed religion from interesting, creative, inspiring, diverse poetry about things beyond reason, into a debate about beliefs, then into a commercial competition, and ultimately into repressive violence about faith.

Beliefs, as matters of faith, become truths which are immutable and must be fought for. This is obvious to all who ‘live in faith.’ Such truths destroy the possibility not just of learning but also of negotiation. They, therefore, undermine both politics and science. Today’s single-issue Evangelicals are from the same intellectual tribe that destroyed the great Library of Alexandria, outlawed the Socratic Academy, masterminded several crusades, massacred the Jews in great numbers, condemned Galileo, fought doggedly against constitutional democracy as a heresy, and persistently protected paedophiles in its ranks, among many other well-known activities. All in the name of faith. This concept of faith, we now know, has another, more precise name: Ideology, the absolute devotion to unchallengeable presumptions about the world, the principle use of which is the suppression of human freedom by those who claim to have it against those whom, they claim, don’t.

¡Felíz Navidad! y’all. As they say at that border wall of Christian love.

Postscript: For more on the Christian idea of faith, see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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The Finder by Colin Harrison
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Buildings & Boobs

Below the marble foyers and plush offices of mid-town Manhattan are of course the sewers: Two worlds. One world is visible, impressive, ornamental and confident; but that’s only a façade for what lies beneath. It is the hidden world of the sewers which is essential, not the marble foyers. If the visible weren’t properly maintained, there might be complaints. If the invisible stopped working, life itself becomes impossible.

As it is with buildings, so is it with people. Those above don’t think at all about those below. And this provides great opportunity. One man’s trash is another man’s inside information. Hence the real contradictions of modern high-tech capitalism: “CorpServe's clients were paying it extra money to more efficiently steal the very information they most wanted destroyed.”

It is women, of course, who inhabit and maintain the nether regions of buildings and the lower reaches of society. They are, as it were, the plumbing that connects upper and lower. Women have made advances in society but not where it counts in New York City, that place “Where blood gets turned into money!.” The reason? “The permanent government of New York City, the true and lasting power, is found in the quietly firm handshake between the banking and real estate industries.” Those handshakes are almost exclusively among men. This is a world of marginalised women, “A corporate world so close they could reach out and touch it with their cherry-colored fingernails. Yet given the stratifications of American society, it is a world they are unlikely ever to know from within.”

Women exist in that government for the two things which Harrison makes very clear: sex and the removal, medical examination and cleansing of excrement. But don’t believe him, just ask Trump (who gets a mention as the ‘great American trickster’ in this book of 2008 which aptly captures his two interests: buildings and boobs). Otherwise “they are faceless, nameless, and invisible.” They live in a parallel universe, something like Red Hook in Brooklyn, which has nothing to do with the high-tech paperless office but through which that office is connected to the moral excrement as well as to the money it creates. What goes around, comes around, as it were. When the plumbing starts backing up, everyone eventually notices. A blessing really. There may be some justice after all.

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The Changeling by Kenzaburō Ōe
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Passing the Turing Test

Kenzaburō Ōe reveals the frantic chaos below the swan-like public composure of Japanese society. In The Changeling, his target is the intense culture of the cosmopolitan Japanese intellectual - political, commercial, sometimes sordid and bizarre, and not infrequently violent. If the title means anything, it probably refers to Japan itself in its intellectual transformation since the mid-nineteenth century..

The rambling fictional memoir uses the conceit of a conversation with the protagonist’s (Kogito = Cogito?) recently dead brother-in-law via a set of cassette tapes he had made over years of separation, possibly estrangement. While listening, Kogito simply pauses the tape and responds as if the man were speaking. Like Proust’s madeleine, the tapes provoke buried memories in Kogito, mostly about the duties of an artist and their unpleasant consequences.

The somewhat self-conscious literary allusions range from Rimbaud to Maurice Sendak to the Gospel of Mark as Kogito’s reminiscences bounce from his home in the forests of Shikoku, to Berlin, Chicago and Brazil. Strange anecdotes, like the unaccountable arrival of a large turtle in the post and its gruesome slaughter, to the antics of a post-war right wing suicide cult, are strewn about randomly. Some of the references to contemporary events - like the assassination of JFK - are well-known, but many are specific to Japan and therefore probably unintelligible to non-Japanese.

I get the impression that Ōe is conducting a sort of inverse Turing Test with himself. Instead of interrogating a machine to determine if it conforms to intuitive standards of human responsiveness, Kogito allows himself to be interrogated by the the machine in order to discover what he is. The poem ‘Adieu’ by Rimbaud is a running theme throughout. At one point the brother-in-law reflects on this poem, perhaps stating the point of the book: “Ha! I have to bury my imagination and my memories! What an end to a splendid career as an artist and storyteller! And later he adds, Well, I shall ask forgiveness for having lived on lies. And that’s that.”

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Knowledge of God and the Service of God According to the Teaching of the Reformation: Recalling the Scottish Confession of 1560 by Karl Barth
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Very Strange Faith of Our Fathers

Christian thinking about things divine is based primarily not on the recorded words of Jesus or the observations of those who knew him, but on the writings of St. Paul who never met the man. On the face of it, these Pauline writings are certainly innovative; but they are also frequently confusing and contradictory, particularly on the subject which Paul identifies as the distinguishing character of what became known as Christianity: Faith.

Although central to Christian identity, the Pauline idea of faith itself received little sustained attention until the 5th century when Augustine of Hippo made it a focus of his theology. Augustine started a line of thinking that was picked up by Luther and Calvin during the Reformation of the 16th century*, assimilated by the Dane, Soren Kierkegaard, in the 19th century, and passed along to the most influential theologian of the 20th century: the Swiss Protestant Reformed pastor, Karl Barth.

Barth was arguably the first thinker to take Paul entirely seriously, contradictions and all. For Barth, these contradictions are not mistakes, or mysteries to be reconciled. They are the essence, the core, of Christianity. They are what distinguishes Christianity from any other religion. Indeed, Barth has claimed that Christianity does not belong in the category of religion at all. It is sui generis, that is, a mode of being that is unique in human existence. He gives a name to the kind of theology that Paul presents: Dialectical. For him the contradictions of this theology are its most important elements.

The Knowledge of God and the Service of God is composed from Barth’s Gifford lectures at the University of Aberdeen in 1936/37. These lectures are a summary of his enormous, and enormously influential, 14 volume Church Dogmatics. Arguably, nothing approaching this work had been published since Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theoligicae in the 13th century. And not even Aquinas treated the matter of Pauline faith as thoroughly as Barth.

Their sheer scope and complexity prohibits an adequate review of Barth’s ideas, even in the condensed form of The Knowledge of God and the Service of God. Nevertheless it seems to me appropriate to state some of his headline conclusions in order to demonstrate just how radical - and patently anti-human and irrational - the Pauline idea of faith actually is. I suggest keeping in mind that these ideas, which Barth brings to their logical conclusion, are the basis for what has come to be called European civilization. For me, this is hardly an endorsement of either the purported civilization or Paul’s theology.

Faith Has Nothing To Do With Belief

According to Barth, as it was to Paul, Augustine, and Calvin, human beings are inherently corrupt, not just in what they do, but also in how they think. To think means to use language to articulate things called beliefs. These are man-made artifacts and are inherently erroneous. The concept of belief is therefore un-Christian and must not be confused with faith, which he takes to be almost a sort of Islamic submission to the divine.

Faith Is Something That Happens... Or Not

There is no alternative here but to quote Barth: “Faith is not an art. Faith is not an achievement. Faith is not a good work of which some may boast while others can excuse themselves with a shrug of the shoulders for not being capable of it. It is a decisive insight of faith itself that all of us are incapable of faith in ourselves, whether we think of its preparation, beginning, continuation, or completion.” This is about as close as one can get to pinning Barth down about the matter. In this obscurity he is certainly emulating Paul. But then again he has already established the unreliability of words, and human communication more generally.

Through Faith, There Is No Truth

Barth appears as a radical post-modernist, which he is in many ways. Once again it is necessary to give a short citation: "The gospel is not a truth among other truths. Rather, it sets a question mark against all truths." This is congruent with Barth’s view of the un-reformable corruption of human reason. Thought must always be suspect. Therefore any conclusions arrived at through thought - truths - are unreliable. The fact that Barth arrives at this truth through his own dialectical reasoning might give one pause for thought; but not Barth. The very attempt to know God through thought is for him impiety.

Scripture Is an Unreliable Guide To Faith

For Barth, divine revelation must not be confused with the ‘forms’ through which it appears. “The Bible is God's Word…” says Barth, “so far as God speaks through it.” But it is unclear when God is speaking and when human beings are creating misleading words about The Word. Trying to sift through scripture to determine what is ‘authentic’ and what merely human arrogance is an impertinent as well as an hopeless task. As fallible human beings we are simply un-equipped to do this, just as the scriptural authors were un-equipped to censor themselves. In his dialectical thought, scripture obscures the Word of God as much as it reveals it.

There Is No Way To Distinguish Revelation From Religious Hearsay

Not only is scripture somewhat iffy as a guidebook to faith, but the “decisive insight of faith” which might be experienced by an individual could as well be a delusion. In effect it’s not clear whether it’s the divine or the devil calling out for recognition. In a sense this is encouraging since the point of view calls for humility on the part of any Christian. After all he or she can’t ever be certain of their spiritual condition. On the other hand, in typical dialectical fashion, such a presumption makes faith the equivalent of uncertainty. One does get the sense that the result of Barth’s dialectic is not the possibility of a creative synthesis, but the inevitability of +1 and -1 totaling 0.

There are many more, dare one say it, unexpected conclusions which emerge from Barth’s Pauline theology. They have been the focus of academic discussion and practical pastoral development for almost a century. Barth’s consistent theme throughout is the “impossible possibility” of knowing anything about God at all. Based on Paul’s logic of faith, Barth has demonstrated for all who want to see, how that logic leads not to confidence, trust, and certainly not to faith in divine providence but inevitably to human hopelessness.

To be clear: I have no problem with dialectics. Seriously considering radically opposed alternatives can lead to creative insight. And I do in fact agree with Barth that there are some things which are beyond the capacity of human intelligence. “What is the purpose of the universe?” is a question, for example, which will never be answered. That doesn’t imply that the question is meaningless - some wonderful poetry has been produced in response to it. But the unanswerability does suggest that when one has only irrational nonsense to contribute, one holds one’s dialectical tongue.

Barth’s theology is not one of slaves who might hope for un-merited favour from the slave-master as described by Nietzsche. Nor does it imply any sort of ethical mutual concern which might have divine sanction as suggested by the liberal Social Gospellers.** It is a theology of the bus stop in which one is required to wait patiently for the Number 14 which was in fact taken out of service last week. As my grand-daughter would say: It is crazy-making. Nothing more is really necessary to demonstrate the vacuous nature of Pauline Christianity than where it has ended up - whether one has faith or not.

*For more on the controversy about faith during the Reformation see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

** For more on Barthian ethics, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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Erasmus in the Footsteps of Paul by Greta Kroeker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Password to Paradise

Religious faith, like time, is one of those things that becomes more elusive the more it is examined. Faith is associated with belief, with trust, with loyalty, with commitment, with various confident psychological states, among many other ideas, emotions, and attitudes of mind. But it is none of these things. Faith as it has come to be used in religious terms is an elemental component of Christianity invented by St. Paul. It is a concept found neither in Paul’s native Judaism nor in the synoptic gospels or reported words of Jesus. Rather faith is Paul’s interpretation of religion itself in light of what he had been told of Jesus by others. This interpretation is centred upon his novel and highly influential theory of salvation and its linked concept of grace. The world has not been the same since.

Although faith is a self-designated distinguishing characteristic of Christianity, it is apparent that even Paul had difficulty in communicating what he meant by it. The doctrines of faith, grace and salvation as definitive explanations of Pauline writings emerged only gradually during centuries subsequent to his writing under the careful monitoring by the Church.* Controversy was permitted about these subjects but only to the extent that such controversy did not question the authority of the Church in settling disagreements. The Protestant Reformation of the 16th century attacked just this authority, specifically concerning the established doctrines of faith, grace and salvation.

Erasmus was someone who might be called a loyal reformer. While aware of the corrupt political and spiritual state of the Church, he also feared its destruction if reform was not carried out from within. He is particularly known for his intellectual attacks against Martin Luther, which attacks form the central focus of Kroeker’s monograph. Kroeker traces the evolution of Erasmus’s so-called ‘annotations’ of the gospels and Pauline epistles in order to demonstrate his increasing exegetical and theological sophistication. What she incidentally shows, however, is how fragile the central concept of faith becomes when it is released from the circular doctrinal supervision of Church authority.

(view spoiler)[This fragility is most clear in Erasmus’s annotations on Paul’s epistle to the Romans, the most extensive exposition of his theory of faith.** In the first portion of these annotations, Kroeker summarises the diverse uses to which Erasmus puts the term faith (fides in Latin; πίστις = pistis in Greek) in his attempt to understand Paul:

One who believes the words of another is said to have confidence [fides] in him; one who makes a solemn promise is said to give a pledge [fides]; and one who binds himself in obligation to another is said to plight his faith [fides]. One who performs what he has promised, however, is said to fulfill his trust [fides]. One who is not believed lacks our trust [fides] – [we have] no faith [fides] in the appearances [he puts on]. One who does not adhere to an agreement breaks faith [fides]; from this one speaks of the perfidious [perfidus] and perfidy [perfidia]. A person who causes another not to be believed diminishes the latter’s credibility [fides]. He who does the opposite, inspires confidence [fides]. We lose confidence [fides] in one who fails to be responsible for an obligation assumed; we gain confidence [fides] in one who has carefully done what he could. and we hand over for security [fides] what we entrust [fidei committimus] to someone. One who comes into ownership without deception is said to be the bona fide purchaser for value; one who does otherwise, [takes possession] in bad faith [fides] – also faithful [fidelis] – who runs affairs conscientiously. In latin, therefore, fides belongs sometimes to one who promises, sometimes to one who fulfils a promise, sometimes to one who believes, sometimes to one who is believed; sometimes it is a general term, as when we say ‘there is no faith [fides] left in the world,’ meaning that no one fulfils what he promises, and that no one trusts [fidere] another ... In latin, the incredulous person is one who distrusts [diffidit]; for ‘credulous’ and ‘credulity’ have a negative connotation, though ‘to give credence’ [credere ‘to believe’] is ambiguous. He believes [credit] who relies [fidit], and he entrusts [credit] his wife to another who gives her into his charge.

After surveying the relation between faith and belief, he then in methodical fashion moves on to the connection between faith and trust, especially through his consideration of Romans 3:22, 4:21–4, 8:15, and 10:12:

Now we speak in a positive way of trusting [fidens] and of trust [fiducia], which resides only in the believer [in credente]; in a positive way likewise [we use the infinitives] to entrust [confidere] and to trust [fidere]; but self-confident [confidens] and boldness [confidentia] have a negative connotation. But sacred literature frequently uses these words loosely, for it often uses fides [faith] for fiducia [trust] in God almost in the sense of hope; sometimes for the belief or conviction by which we assent to the things handed down to us about God – by which even the demons believe. sometimes the word faith [fides] embraces all these meanings: that assent to the truth both of the historical record and of the promises, and the trust [fiducia] that arises from his omnipotent goodness, not without the hope, that is, the expectation, of the promises. so far, indeed, does not speak of the faith [fides] of human beings.

In the last part of the annotations, Erasmus chose to underscore the fact that in Romans 1:17, faith brings one to trust in the promises of God:

However, one also speaks of the faith [fides] of God, a faith he manifests in his promises; hence God is said to be trustworthy [fidus] or faithful [fidelis], that is, πιστóς, because he does not deceive. But a man is said to be faithful [fidelis] who believes the one who makes a promise. This is not characteristic latin use, and yet sacred literature frequently speaks in this way. For in latin a steward is called faithful [fidelis]; faithless [infidelis], however, is used in the scriptures (but not in [secular] latin) of one who does not believe. The Greek ἄπιστoς [unbelieving] or ἀπειθής [not to be persuaded] is better. sometimes [the scriptures] speak of the faith of God [fides dei] by which we trust [fidimus] in him rather than in man; it is said to be ‘of God’ not only because it is directed towards him, but also because it is given by him; sometimes [the scriptures speak of the faith] of both [God and man], as in ‘the righteous shall live by faith [fides] – of God who does not deceive in what he has promised, and also of man who trusts [fidit] in God.’ To both belongs the phrase used here, ‘from faith [fides] to faith [fides].’ For just as God at appointed times began to reveal his nature and to fulfill his promises, so man’s knowledge of and trust [fiducia] in God grew by stages. Few believed the prophets until the lord displayed before their eyes what they had promised. again, from what we have seen, and now see, our faith [fides] is strengthened concerning the things that were predicted about his final coming.

(hide spoiler)]

I quote this section at length in order to suggest two things: 1) Whatever Paul meant by his central concept of faith is not just imprecise, it is also a usage in both Latin and Greek which is highly innovative. 2) And even a highly educated and highly motivated believer like Erasmus has great difficulty in figuring out what he really means. It is at this point that Erasmus’s humanism butts up uncomfortably to his desire to toe the doctrinal line, which is ultimately what he does. The doctrines may be meaningless in the sense that their content is merely linguistic, but they are a signal of unity. So he, like many others balks at any serious criticism.

One tentative but plausible conclusion from Erasmus’s analyses is that this central concept of Christianity is not so much a ‘thing’ in today’s jargon, that is, an ontological entity, as it is a tribal symbol. Faith refers to nothing on Earth or in Heaven... except itself. Having faith, professing faith, believing (on, in, or through), and belief itself, are symbolic terms of communication identifying members of the tribe to each other.

Repeating and attesting publicly to creeds and various approved religious phrases, then, is the sole content of faith. Functionally faith is the worship of words;***religious authority is the monopolistic dictatorship over words, a sort of spiritual Académie française (but more effective). Not knowing what the words in creeds and religious phrases mean in this context is in fact an advantage since delving too deeply into the ‘substance’ of faith is more likely to uncover confusion and disagreement. This is the reason for centuries-long prohibition of the translation of scripture into spoken languages, not to mention the equally long-standing preference for Latin (or for archaic Greek or ancient Slavonic, among others depending on the demographic).

Based on the historical and continuing fragmentation of Christian cults over the centuries, this is precisely what happens when religious authority is ignored in Christianity: The words take on new, often contradictory meanings - following, indeed, in the footsteps of the religion’s founder, Paul. Avoiding heresy and mutual anathema is a matter of avoiding the devils that are inherent in the detail. Paul never supplied these essential details. His idea of faith is meant, it appears therefore, to be an imprecise idea which permits inclusion in the Christian community simply by claiming to have it. A password to paradise. Clever; one can understand Paul’s reputation as a religious genius.

* It is interesting to note that the early Christian Fathers had very little to say about the idea of Pauline faith. Not until Augustine in the 5th century C.E. did Paul’s theory of faith receive any sustained attention. Faith appears to have been taken as a self-evident spiritual activity and a discovery unique to Christianity, and therefore was unopposed as a principle in the Jewish and wider religious world, which apparently didn’t know what to make of the idea. It was used routinely, however, to distinguish Christianity from Judaism and to attack so-called ‘Judaizers’ within the Church who suggested that ethical behaviour, such as that catalogued in the Sermon on the Mount, should be considered paramount. Augustine’s opponent in the ongoing debate about faith was the British monk Pelagius who had the temerity to suggest that doing good deeds, by becoming habitual, might make a person a better Christian. Augustine was having none of that based on Romans. Somehow a Pelagian version of goodness has re-emerged during the 20th century in the form of Christian Virtue Ethics; but that’s another story.

** The situation becomes even more problematic when the concepts of faith from other scriptural sources are compared with that contained in Romans. The Epistle to the Hebrews, for example, historically mis-attributed to Paul, presents a very different account of the term.

*** This worship of words is, of course, made explicit in the Gospel of John, which starts with “In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God. And the Word was God.” This was written approximately 70 years after the Epistle to the Romans and is clearly heavily influenced by Paul’s idea.

Postscript: For more on the cultural legacy of Pauline Christianity see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
And for a practical guide to resistance to the Pauline tactic of language dominance, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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Lost Empress by Sergio de la Pava
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Gazing Down the Plughole

It takes an exceptional talent to sustain comedic prose in so many distinct voices for over 600 pages. It also takes real dedication to persist in reading those 600 pages. The witty ripostes, the sarcastic asides, the pithy literary allusions by commercial geniuses, medicos with nous, and self-aware but larcenous offenders eventually are normalized so that the reader is thrown back to the story - which frankly ain’t that great.

A misogynistic cast of corporate types try to keep the sassy protagonist out of her family inheritance of managing an NFL football team. This is the central gyre into which everything else is eventually sucked. Meanwhile lots of NYC types, mostly felonious or incompetent, buzz around adding local colour and guided tours of cultural centres like Paterson, New Jersey and Rikers Island. It’s entertaining but is it art?

Of course it’s art. “Humanity’s best unnecessary invention is art.” And Lost Empress is entirely unnecessary. So I take it back. The story is irrelevant. What matters are the various stories that make up something different - not necessarily more than, just different - from the whole.

The book is a literary toy - with lots of moving parts. The whole doesn’t do anything productive. The point though is to watch the moving parts, which are fascinating. Each part spins or blinks or pulsates perfectly. That they engage with each other is incidental except that in total they form a ‘thing’.

The thing in question can be described as Sophisticated Street Trash. Urbanely clever in a detached sort of knowing, disregarding regard, the genre isn’t intended to evoke anything but the satisfaction of recognition. It’s a big inside joke shared round: Too bad, how sad, never mind. Nothing to see here but the usual absurdity. It’s a tough job but...

No, no, that’s not fair. From his perch above the fray, de la Pava has created a tribute to the dignity of human stupidity. Or is it the stupidity of human dignity? His book sends everything up - including itself - so perhaps it’s both. I love it.

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Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel by Rebecca Goldstein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Gödel’s Riposte to Augustine

I find an unexpected comfort in Gödel’s Proof of Incompleteness in mathematics - essentially that we have no good reason to believe that even arithmetic has a solid logical foundation. To me the implication is that no matter how much we learn, we will still be wrong. Not because we don’t know everything, but because what we do know is fundamentally uncertain. We are not unsure only about mathematics. Physics for example will always exhibit paradoxes like those of quantum theory. People unaccountably will always do things which are bad for them. And my socks will continue to disappear in the dryer. There is, in other words, a fundamental continuity, a necessary humility, in life that will never be interrupted by the latest technology from Apple or Trump’s most recent tweet.

Goldstein appreciates the cultural import of Gödel’s Proof. In an age rocked by the counter-intuitive implications of things like Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics, which present paradoxes that seem resolvable by further thought, the Incompleteness Theorem is even more of a scandal. It exists in logic not in observation. It will remain in force no matter what else we learn about the world. As Goldstein says, “Gödel’s theorems, then, appear to be that rarest of rare creatures: mathematical truths that also address themselves—however ambiguously and controversially—to the central question of the humanities: what is involved in our being human?”

Incompleteness is a leveller. It applies to the deepest thinker, the wealthiest entrepreneur, the most powerful politician, as well as to any random cog in the modern economic machine and to those who have been rejected by it. It is the modern form of the ancient Christian doctrine of Original Sin, formulated so forcefully by the great saint, Augustine of Hippo.

Just as Original Sin, Incompleteness affects us all. We inherit it, not through our genes, but through our memes. Incompleteness comes packaged in language itself. To engage the world through language is to enter the domain of Incompleteness, and therefore of profound doubt. And just as Augustine said in his religious idiom, Godel has restated the situation in his: There is no escape. The user of language is trapped and is incapable of extricating himself from an existence of rational error - about himself as well as the world around him.

But unlike Augustine, Gödel doesn’t presume he has a solution. Augustine withholds his assent to radical doubt, which he neutralises through ‘faith.’ Clearly Augustine cannot stomach the intellectual humiliation of not having a way forward, of not mitigating the debilitating effects of the human condition. Like many before him and since, Augustine fills the intellectual vacuum with the magic of a divine saviour, the guarantor of the ultimate rationality of human and other life on Earth. For Augustine Christ is the deus ex machina who is capable of correcting, literally remaking, flawed human nature into something reliable. And if other people don’t ‘get it,’ he feels entirely justified in literally throwing them to the lions.

Augustine, of course, merely demonstrates the extent to which the basic human flaw can make us crazy. That his need for and presumption of a beneficent saviour is part of his Original Sin is something which doesn’t occur to him. His solution is actually the greatest delusion produced by his fundamental insight. He neurotically invents in order to avoid his own logic, and then projects his neurosis onto the world as a defect which must be eliminated. He is the first Christian terrorist.

Gödel has no such delusion and therefore accepts the bleakness of our prospects. What Godel allows us to see, however, is that mathematics is a genre of poetry with its own arbitrary, but still rather satisfying, conventions. It is something to be done for its own sake, not because it leads anywhere else (the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies of which Godel, along with Albert Einstein, was a founding member was created on the principle of “the usefulness of useless knowledge”).

Prospects, bleak or not, - whether spiritual or material - have nothing to do with the matter, therefore. Mathematics, like the rest of poetry, is important in the continuous present. It doesn’t save us but it passes the time rather pleasantly. Gödel was no materialist or relativist, however. For my money he was more spiritual than Augustine, as well as more committed to the idea of truth. He knew there was something permanently beyond human reach. As a committed Platonist, he considered this to be the abstract realm of numbers, which exist quite independently of human thought about them.

Numbers for Gödel are eternal and impassive, that is, there is nothing we can do to affect their existence. They call to us from elsewhere, much like Augustine’s God. The principle difference however is that numbers make no absolute demands and pass no judgments. They exist for our comfort and edification not for remaking us as something we’re not. And very few have felt compelled to use violence to defend number theory.

Goldstein makes an apposite observation: “Paranoia isn’t the abandonment of rationality. Rather, it is rationality run amuck, the inventive search for explanations turned relentless.” Augustine is an example of rationality run amok. This certainly is the heart of Gödel’s riposte to Augustine’s and all other religious arrogance.

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Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Real But Not Really

Seemingly trivial events have profoundly decisive consequences: A thirteen year old gets a little drunk and thereby becomes a terrorist. A young woman attends a party and falls for the terrorist. A boy’s mother makes a misstep while doing the laundry in a jungle river and drowns; the boy is launched into an entirely alien world of the woman who longs for the terrorist. This is the hopeless desolation of a sort of Thomas Hardy country in Peru. Hapless tragedy with a Spanish accent. No one comes out whole.

“No one knew how bad it would get.” Not the man, the woman, the boy, or the entire Peruvian nation as they slid imperceptibly into the irreversible chaos of civil war. The continuity of existence was simply lost. Even the names of de-populating towns and villages were legally erased. The old languages are no longer spoken. Identity consists solely of distorted fragments of unreliable memory.

But memory itself is dangerous. After all “the country was now in the process of forgetting the war ever happened at all.” Official policy is to forget. It is necessary to forget in order to renew memory. And even the boy realizes the risks of remembering: “Happiness, he’d decided, was a kind of amnesia.” Should one even seek the lost and disappeared? After ten years, surely the people we knew are gone even if their bodies have survived.

Everyone has a list of their missing relatives, friends, and colleagues. Lost City Radio is a program for finding missing people, for matching the seekers with the sought. But what does that mean? Is it as simple as matching lists? “How do you tell them it’s a show? Lost City Radio is real, but not real.” Other than acting as a focus for nostalgic longing, it only raises hopes for the impossible. The past is not only past; it never happened the way it’s remembered. The lists are of people not identities.

The truth is that the war has created a universal restlessness - about identity as well as place. No one wants to be where, or who, they are. Those in the jungle and mountains long for escape to the city. Those already in the peripheral slums of the city want to escape to the relative luxury of its center. Those in the center want to escape the fear of losing everything. And perhaps the missing want to stay that way. Identity is a dangerous thing; it can carry unwanted baggage.. Torture tends to make identity memorable but only uncomfortably so.

Memory, like history itself, is indeed real but not real. This is an incurable sadness.

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