Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation by Elaine Pagels
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Don’t Hold Your Breath for the End of the World

Many years ago - at least thirty but possibly as many as forty as far as I can recall with an ageing memory - I visited the cave on the island of Patmos where a certain John had his apocalyptic vision and wrote his account of it. The cave is now incorporated into a Greek Orthodox monastery and is curated by a group of rather surly and taciturn monks. Like most biblical landmarks it is simultaneously underwhelming and evocative. And so it is with the dense and often incoherent piece, the Book of Revelation, that was supposedly written there.

The Book of Revelation is liminal. It sits on several boundaries - in time, after the Good News of the gospels and explanatory letters to the emerging Christian cult, but before the establishment of Christian legitimacy; theologically it is on the edge of scriptural legitimacy in terms of authorship and continuity of tradition; and its content sits in no man’s land between surrealist reverie and mystical pronouncement. No one knows quite what it means. So it is typically interpreted tendentiously to prove a point, usually against one’s theological enemies.

But Pagels has identified another border represented by Revelation - that between the Jewish sect which considered Christ as the messiah of Israel and an entirely separate religion of Christianity. The writer of Revelation is most certainly a Jew; and according to Pagels’s exegesis he is a Jew who objects fundamentally to the presumption that Gentiles have equivalence to Jews in the matter of salvation, whether that salvation is material or spiritual. This puts Revelation in opposition to the Gospel of John, written at about the same time (but certainly not by the same John), which is pointedly anti-Semitic and is clearly meant for a group which no longer considers itself Jewish.

Pagels’s hypothesis is that the writer of Revelation is addressing a group of Jewish followers of Jesus who object specifically to the teaching of Paul of Tarsus. It was Paul who two generations previously had undermined Jewish exclusivity and the continuing relevance of Jewish tradition and liturgical practices. This generated a long-standing conflict among apostolic leaders that is smoothed over by the writer of The Acts of the Apostles but was likely never really resolved. Pagels’s reading provides a satisfying explanation for understanding some of the most difficult parts of the book, and opens an intriguing line of inquiry in early Christian history.

One of the most fascinating implications of Pagels’s analysis is the re-interpretation of the issue of the Parousia, or Second Coming of Christ. She makes a convincing case that one of the main concerns of the writer is to correct an obvious misconception of Paul that this event was to be expected imminently. Paul had stated that expectation explicitly about 15 years after the death of Jesus. Despite its non-occurrence, Paul’s expectation was repeated about 20 years later by the writer of the gospel of Mark (the first to be written) who expresses it in the purported words of Jesus. Writing 20 to 30 years after that, John considers that the Pauline expectation of an imminent end of the world is clearly a bust. It simply hadn’t happened.

So this imminent return of Christ is a not inconsiderable black eye for Pauline Christianity. But, as the writer of Revelation attempts to show, not necessarily for Jewish faith in the messiah. John first explains the need for the delay in the Second Coming. This will be a rather messy event he says. In order to ensure that the faithful are protected during the inevitable chaos and blood-letting of the transition to the Kingdom of God, it has been necessary to organise and deploy a heavenly host, an angelic cohort, which can ensure that believers are not mistakenly caught up in the slaughter. This has taken time. Apparently there are logistical constraints, even in Heaven.

Second, unseen by worldly eyes, the Parousia has already begun in a manner unanticipated by Paul. According to John, it is essential to understand that the Second Coming is a cosmic event not just an earthly one. It occurs in the spiritual as well as the material realm. Before it takes place on Earth, it must be completed in Heaven. That is, the demonic spiritual forces must be disposed of before the evil human forces can be neutralised. Christ is engaged as he writes in the conquest of his heavenly opponents.

When, then, can the visible triumph of Christ over the mundane army of evil be expected? In this John is more canny than either Paul or Mark’s Jesus. He doesn’t mention human lifespans. Rather, the relevant metric is that of the lifespan of the imperial regime, Rome itself, the whore of Babylon with its pseudo-Jewish clients. Before Rome passes away, the Lord will return in order to defeat it. So hang in there people. We can’t put a date on it; but we do know as long as Rome lasts, we can continue to expect the Lord’s arrival.

This conclusion may seem perverse. But it is actually a brilliant re-calibration of the ‘imminent’ Second Coming. We must still be alert. Christ has not been delayed so much as busy on the main front. He is still on his way. This is a message that finds its way comfortably into the New Testament canon, despite the lack of substantive commentary in Revelation on the life, death or resurrection of Jesus.

John provides a very handy explanation, therefore, about the obvious inaccuracies of Pauline teaching for Christians Jews. But longer term, through the symbolic interpretation of Rome as any civil government at all, he also allows the increasingly dominant group of Gentile Christians to gloss over these inaccuracies and push the Second Coming into an indefinite future. A win/win situation therefore - and a border wall even the most ardent Trumpist could be proud of.

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Crossing to Safety 
by 

Wallace Stegner, 

 

Terry Tempest Williams (Introduction), 

 

T.H. Watkins (Afterword)

 

A Lost World

Once upon a time there was an American Republican President named Eisenhower. Ike wasn’t a very smart man but he was not an evil man. He didn’t like the way the world was run, not even in his own country. But he remained calm in his politics and civil to his political opponents. He set an example. People felt safe around other people.

At that time there was a place called Vermont. It contained a smaller place called the Northeast Kingdom. There were no motorways then and this place wasn’t on the way to anywhere else. So if you were there, you meant to be there. It had quiet roads for children to walk along, forested hills that the same children could get lost among, and general stores that these children could count on for shady coolness when they found their way home. These smelled of smoke and sweet tobacco.

It is of course the smells that are most memorable but the least describable. Outside the general store, the repair crew works reeking tar into the cracks of the roadbed. The scent of the maples is only noticeable as you enter the stand of spruce, and theirs, only while coming back into the maples. The lake water smells of the rotting leaves on the bottom. I’m sure it’s possible to smell the ozone on the mountains if the wind isn’t blowing. Smell is the quickest sense to accept its environment as normal but also the one that makes the most dramatic effect when re-encountered.

It was a good time even if not the best of times. There was this disease called polio. Anyone could catch it, almost anywhere. Many did; everyone knew someone who knew someone who had it. Polio didn’t kill everyone it found, but it did a heck of a job killing their nervous system. Remember President Roosevelt? A bit smarter than Eisenhower but he could only stand up straight with steel braces on his legs. He caught polio in Canada, just over the border. Summertime wasn’t all fun and games. Sometimes it was dangerous. But it was never unexpected.

Of course the good old days for us were the new unpredictable days of the mid-twentieth century for most of the country folk roundabout. We, especially we children, were a problem. We made senseless noise; we had no predictable routines; we did nothing productive; we had no skills useful in the countryside; and we spoke out of turn. We lacked any hint of Methodist discipline or deference. We were therefore dealt with most harshly by the natives - with a stern scowl. Nevertheless “There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.”

Re-visiting that time and place is dangerous, not because it’s an idealised past which doesn’t measure up to scrutiny, but because it’s a forgotten past which suddenly re-emerges with the emotional force of death. This time is not 60 or 70 years ago; it is yesterday. And the chasm between yesterday and today is an entire life which has been expended. For good or ill, this life has dissipated and dispersed down that hole. The chasm demands to be filled with meaning. The content doesn’t matter that much. Tragedy, fulfilment, success, sacrifice, regret are really equivalent rubble. But only when the gap is filled can a crossing be made safely.

It is always surprising what the best fiction-writing raises from the psychic depths. Connections to others, and to oneself, abound in the most unlikely places during the most unlikely times.

The Four Books by Yan Lianke
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

No Soap Radio

According to Yan, Maoist China was an absurdist paradise. Based on the many other accounts of the period, there is no reason to doubt him. However, if China has been such a place, I find it difficult to accept that this was a passing cultural phase. There seems to be something anti-rational not just irrational in the collective psyche. Else why would it be necessary for someone like Yan to publicise the common practices that were and are well known. What is the point other than to remind the population of its absurdist core?

Reading The Four Books, I was reminded of the 1950’s New York City practical joke craze ‘No Soap Radio.’ Two collaborators engage in the telling of a meaningless funny story in the presence of a third person. The story concludes with an equally meaningless punchline, like ‘no soap radio’, at which point the collaborators laugh hysterically. In almost all cases, the dupe joins in the hilarity. The two collaborators then stop laughing and with deadpan faces ask the third what he finds so funny.

No Soap Radio is a trivial demonstration of the sociological impetus to conform. We all have it to some degree unless we’re been forcibly housed in a mental facility. In a capitalist society, most of of us work for the equivalent of the paper blossoms handed out in the Maoist Re-Ed camps Yan describes so relentlessly. When we get enough of them we, like the camps’ inmates, get promotion, better food, improved accommodation, and, if were really fortunate, we hit the jackpot and can retire. We might even play the lottery, which doesn’t make statistical sense but that doesn’t matter if there’s even a tiny chance to escape from the rat race.

The difference in China is that no matter how many times the No Soap Radio, bait and switch joke is played, everyone behaves as if they’ve never encountered it before. They know the contradiction in which they are living even as they know the absurdity of the observation that “The Yellow River reversed course and began flowing westward.” Yet they continue to act like the comic strip character Charlie Brown when Lucy promises not to knock the football over as he attempts to kick it - for the hundredth time. The ball is always knocked over. What keeps these people in the game? Doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different outcome is the definition of insanity.

In the Western capitalist world, even in the most brutal parts of it, if the odds of promotion (much less survival) were anything as low as those those portrayed by Yan, insurrection, or at least conspiracy to such, would be a certainty. Even the Warsaw ghetto had its uprising, Watts its riots, South Africa its Transition and England’s its Peasants Revolt - all in the context of an overwhelmingly pervasive ideology. What is it, one is bound to ask, that is so uniquely powerful in Chinese culture that prevents rebellious action against even a local leader who lacks both arms and available military support?

It’s as if the residents of Re-Ed Camp Ninety-Nine fear being considered un-Chinese more than they fear being starved or beaten or simply subject to administrative idiocy. Not that they particularly like each other. They inform and spy on and persecute other inmates as a matter of course, mostly because it is an enjoyable break from the daily routine. Any show of human concern for another is suspect and reported. The inmates, almost all professionals with advanced education, are willing to admit to any and all ideological imperfections, not because they will otherwise be tortured, but because they otherwise will contribute less to the national enterprise than they could have done.

The society in which the camps are embedded appears equally insane in a very specific sense: Reality is entirely symbolic; there is nothing behind any representation. So targets for grain and steel production are what is real, not the amount of grain or steel that finds its way to the warehouse. Incredible estimates are not lies but signs of good intention; the more incredible the estimate, the more earnest the intention. One is expected not merely to accept leadership from incompetents, but to also praise leaders most energetically precisely when they are most incompetent.

It seems to me that few of these sociological traits are the result of camp life alone, no matter how brutal such life was. Whatever kept that sociology in existence, it wasn’t force of arms, or electric fences, or systematic violence. Something the inmates brought with them and which they shared while never speaking of it has to be the key. But neither Yan, nor any other writer about China during Mao or after, seems able to define what that cultural substance or spirit is (It certainly isn’t the spirit of Sisyphus which Yan interprets as a sort of self-punishment to secretly spite the god of punishment) . It is invisible to those inside the culture, and entirely opaque to those outside. All we can hear is the equivalent of No Soap Radio as the Chinese stare at us with deadpan faces. Is there a joke we’re missing or a joke that never was?

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The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception by Emmanuel Carrère
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Crème de la Crime

Jean-Claude Romand killed his wife, two children and his mother and father in a French village not far from Geneva in 1993. Six years later Emmanuel Carrère finished a book about the murders. This is all we know for sure: the dead bodies, the book and the chronology of two sets of events. And therein lies the mystery posed by Carrère.

Is the book fact or fiction? Carrère makes it purposely ambiguous by telling the reader that his ambitions to write a psychological assessment of Romand were thwarted early on by Romand’s unreponsiveness. So he wrote the present book instead. As with Truman Capote’s non-fiction novel, In Cold Blood, actual events are supplemented by conjectures and conjunctions. The boundaries aren’t clear so that all but the general outlines of the story are in that Borgesian territory in which fictions pose with factual passports and vice versa. The reader is never certain of the literary nationality of any statement. Alien spies could be lurking anywhere.

The implications of Carrère’s technique are clear: Any attempt to understand, to explain, to analyse the behaviour of Jean-Claude Romand inevitably involves fiction. The newspaper accounts of the killings, the forensic medical reports, the psychiatric diagnoses, and even the first person statements of Romand are all fiction in their own way. Carrere‘s book is a sort of meta-fiction which brings all the details together. If he adds a few details here and there, it’s only to make things flow more smoothly. The rest is incomprehensible without the touch of an accomplished story teller. N'est-ce pas?

And besides, isn’t such meta-fiction precisely what constituted the life of Jean-Claude Romand. He lived an apparently conventional life, the facts of which - wife, children, house, social involvement - were visible and verifiable to his family, neighbours, and friends. These existential truths were supplemented with other hearsay reports by Romand - about career, travel, qualifications, responsibilities - which were further transmitted by mutual acquaintances until they were part of a shared communal reality. Romand had only to supply some minor narrative connections in the form of tactical name-dropping and the occasional trinket from some foreign place (obtained in cosmopolitan Geneva) to complete his entirely bogus biography.

Meaning requires narrative, which demands a point of view, which cannot by definition be factual. Ergo, meaning is an imposition of fiction on the world of pure existence. It’s that simple and that complicated. Meaning can’t be found in events - educational background, family history, economic class, emotional profile or childhood behaviour - or in other minds, or for that matter in one’s own mind since it doesn’t exist as a thing until it is communicated, at which point it is in nobody’s mind and everyone’s simultaneously. Refusal to recognise this mystery causes a great deal of trouble. Whatever Romand did only has meaning after the fact, which really doesn’t help to explain why he did it except as a fiction that makes everyone involved, including Romand, feel safer.

Carrère recognises the paradox of his undertaking. He is whistling in the dark for the rest of us. Whatever insights he or the others who have been appalled by Romand’s actions come up with are actually sterile. They are not about the facts of the case, much less truth. The point of his book, as well as all the underlying material which he uses to construct it, is to promote the idea that the world is an orderly place, that it can be trusted even if there are the occasional dangers. Part of this trust is the feeling that we can learn things - like how to spot potential homicidal maniacs - which might expand the realm of order in our lives.

In short, Romand’s was a haute bourgeois crime, a sort of crème de la crime. And it demanded therefore a suitably haute bourgeois exposition. Carrère both does and does not supply it. Teflon was never so slippery.

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The Divine Invasion by Philip K. Dick


Lest God Forget

One of the central issues in Christian theology is the way in which the divine and the human can plausibly be combined in Christ. Once it was decided dogmatically that Christ was divine, the theological discussion turned to his two ’natures’ existing in one person. The resolution of this then raised the question of whether the two natures implied two ‘wills’. The controversy subsequently cascades into a series of doctrines and heresies. Monotheism was supposed to simplify things. Christianity is nothing if not intellectually complex.

So lots of theological loose ends about Christ, even today. And there are at least two aspects of Christianity’s inherent complexity that have never been fully explored. The first is the reason why YHWH of the Old Testament would find it necessary to send himself in physical form to live as a human being. He had after all been present in his emanation as Sophia, or Wisdom, and participating in human life for some time (as Dick casually notes). The rather slapdash theory of the Atonement, that the sacrifice of Christ was necessary because of the immensity of evil in the world, is an obvious divine own goal. It was after all God who created the evil. And he tried to wipe it out with the flood once before and failed. So this strategy of upping the bet smacks of some desperation. No, Atonement doesn’t hack it.

Second, there are further attributes of Christ aside from his general nature and will which are as yet unexplained. In particular his memory seems to be an obvious theological sticking point. According to the Gospel of John, Christ was in on the creation. And according to the Apostle Paul, he was the vehicle of creation who was meant to give the whole caboodle to his Father at some future point. But in the other gospels, Jesus seems to have forgotten entirely about the rather pivotal role in the history of the universe. A lapse that no one before Dick seems to have noticed.

Dick has connected these two missing links, as it were, in this marvellous tale of the Re-Incarnation, the first attempt (or second, counting the flood) having failed rather obviously in not ridding the world of evil. The perennial question is ‘why?’ What went wrong such that things have since his appearance been as screwed up as they ever have been? And what’s all this business that Paul was pushing about an imminent second coming? Why not get the job done in one visit? We’d expect as much from the plumber; why not God who also charges premium rates?

Dick’s theological hypothesis is that YHWH is, or is becoming, a bit forgetful. It could be that divine dementia threatens. The strain on the sacred cerebrum is undoubtedly intense, if not infinite. A bit of occupational therapy and determination of whatever the correct heavenly dosage of Haldol was for YHWH apparently took a bit longer than Paul expected.

This situation is problematic, according to Dick’s hypothesis, because the universe only exists to the extent that it is a memory in the mind of God. If that memory is in jeapordy there is a clear rationale for otherwise drastic action. This is theological creativity at its best and certainly superior to the bulk 0f professional theological thought. This concept represents much more than Einstein’s metaphor for the laws of nature as the buried thoughts of God. Einstein didn’t mean it; Dick does. It is the world’s existence as God’s active memory which is at stake. If God forgets, even momentarily, the whole thing pops out of existence as suddenly as it popped in. Suck on that for a bit of relativity, Albert.

Hence the real role of Christ entering into creation - to make sure that God keeps us all in mind, and therefore in existence. The Old Testament divine emanation of Sophia (aka the Holy Spirit to Christians, and Pallas Athena/Diana to interested pagans) is inadequate for the job because he/she/it has no memory, only eternal thoughts. The Spirit just has to carry out instructions; history is demarcated to other members of the Trinity. And who knows but that there are many matters on the divine agenda more important than the continuing existence of the universe. Memory is a specialised job calling for very specific talents. Only one man for the job, obviously.

So Paul the Apostle was indeed correct; Christ’s mission was to save the world, quite literally. But although Paul remembered, Christ forgot. Both his eternal past and his intended future got a bit blurry, suggesting, perhaps, an inherited divine genetic defect. Or perhaps the job takes practice (accounting, therefore, for the second coming). Fortunately YHWH’s memory did not completely fail him (or us) in the interval between the Roman massacre of the final Jewish stronghold of Masada (when YHWH was forced into exile in a distant star system) and the present day (or rather the present day of the future when star travel has become technologically feasible).

Dick’s cinematic revival has more or less the same cast of characters as the original stage-production - the pregnant virgin, the stand-in father, the same prophet from the original cast, Elijah (a bit older but once you’re past 4000 who’d notice); as well as a chorus of worshipping followers and evil assassins. The Christian-Islamic Church (Elijah is a saint for both) is no help of course, aligned as it is with the global Communist Party as The Adversary, that is to say Satan, of old.

So the dramatic tension builds with clear biblical gravitas. Can the invading forces re-establish the power of YHWH in the evil zone? Will YHWH resist the temptation to nod off during the crucial scene? Can the new Emanuel remember his lines? On the more serious side, would it really be so hard for Christ just to forget the bad bits that keep recurring to YHWH and keep the rest (Just sayin’)? There’s at least as much action as Star Trek and much more theological wit.

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Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Lessons in Metaphysics for Recovering Idealists

The conventional translation of the name Ishmael from Hebrew is ‘God hears’. But there is an equally plausible alternative: ‘Man is God’.* This could well be Daniel Quinn’s satirical intent. First called Goliath, then renamed Ishmael, but acting like Socrates, Quinn’s central character is a gorilla who teaches his idealistically minded, now middle-aged, seeker that God is precisely what Man is not. And he does this expertly.

The term ‘metaphysics’ in understandably confusing to most people. It does after all refer to that which is beyond rational knowledge. Esoteric philosophy and religious mysticism are probably the first things that come to mind. But metaphysics is neither esoteric nor mystical. Rather, it is the very straightforward stories we tell ourselves about how things have come to be as they are. In fact these stories are so straightforward, so obvious, and so universally accepted that they are effectively invisible - unless one happens to have a Socratically adept non-human primate at hand.

The way to discover what the metaphysics of any culture are was perfected by Immanuel Kant in the late 18th century. He called it ‘transcendental deduction’, another intimidating term but something far simpler than it sounds. In fact we do it all the time, particularly when we’re confronted with events that are somehow disturbing or traumatic. Why, for example, does a terrorist act the way he does? Why do very wealthy people put so much effort into increasing their wealth? What is the real reason for a couples’ divorce?

These are questions which seek a certain type of answer, namely: What must be true - in terms of motives, reasoning, or factual circumstances - for people to act the way they do. The trick in transcendental deduction is to take into account everything we know about the behaviour or the situation in question, progressively removing those motives, reasons, and facts which are not necessary to explain what’s going on. This takes skill but it is not magic. In fact according to Quinn, gorillas are not bad at it al all.

Ishmael’s transcendental deduction of modern culture is eye-opening, even if one doesn’t agree entirely with the implications he draws from it. Here’s one metaphysical revelation, for example: The debate between Evolutionists and Creationists is completely meaningless and merely distracts from a universal presumption of modern culture that is taken as true without question. According to both secularists and religionists, mankind is the most important result of creation - for the former because Homo sapiens is the most advanced rung on the ladder of evolution; for the latter because he has been assigned the role of master of creation in holy scripture. Any other difference in their respective views are mere quibbles.

This presumption of human dominance over the Earth, all its contents, and its other inhabitants is the beginning of the metaphysical story which Ishmael elicits. There is also a middle and end to this story that are likewise uncovered in a similar well-paced dialogue. Quinn never let’s Ishmael miss a step in his progression back through the ‘obvious’ presumptions that we take for granted about the world; nor as he moves forward into the unfortunate implications of these presumptions which increasingly appear as disasters, for ourselves as well as the rest of the planet.

Although Quinn is clearly making a cultural point, his principal message is very personal: What any one of us might think of as doing good, may very well be contributing to the substantial reduction not just of human well-being but also of life on Earth. Tempering exuberant idealism could be an essential modern virtue. Not being God demands caution as well as hard work. This doesn’t mean thinking smaller but bigger, with rather wider metaphysical horizons than we’ve allowed ourselves to have.

* Ishmael = איש = ישמעאל or ish = man; אֵל or el = deity

Postscript: I don’t think I’ve encountered reviews more polarised on Goodreads than for this book. Most ratings are either 5’s or 1’s, very few in between. I suspect there are two reasons for this. Some folk find the Socratic method annoying, either because it proceeds at a pace they find tedious or because they really can’t follow the step by step development involved. Others, I think, balk at the central theme of the book, namely the dangers of cultural idealism. This latter group is the ‘hard market’ for the book, I suppose, and simply doesn’t want to consider much less understand what Quinn is suggesting.

Further postscript 23Feb18: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/03/t...

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A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Youthful Condescension

Movie scripts. That’s all you get nowadays. Movie scripts. That’s where the money is of course. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It used to be you could rely on a good somber Nordic tragedy, something dark and brooding, something that would stick with you all winter. None of this sentimental pap, the old saws about pensioned off widowers who only have themselves and their silly routines to worry about. Not that old people aren’t funny, and not just funny ha ha. Actually they’re hysterical. But that doesn’t mean they’re emotionally crippled or demented or need some sort of redemption. Who says nobody looks forward to retirement? Are you kidding? Sleeping in, no deadlines, horrid workmates and endless tedious meetings a thing of the past. This is as close to heaven as you’re ever going to get... if you’re lucky. So why write about an old man (well middle-aged actually at 59, a kid really) as if he were a child lost at the zoo? Why? I’ll tell you why: So he can have his soul saved by a too-sweet-to-be-wholesome Japanese family. That’s why. Pure sentimentality. It’s good box office. But It was never meant to be like this. Time was when movies were films and books were literature. Films made you laugh and cry and throw up lunch; literature made you consider and think and connect things. It’s all mixed up now. Who knows what writers write for anymore - for an ‘awwwwh’ and a lump in the throat it looks like. And don’t get me started on the way they use kids - the biggest-brown-eyes-you’ve-ever-seen ploy. That was old before they had talkies. Child exploitation I call it. And yeah sure I lost my wife not too long ago. It was tough for a while. But you think anyone my age is a novice at this loss and suffering thing? Get over yourself. How many people my age still have their parents? No one I know. Most have lost a sibling or two. Some have lost children, and not just to death. There are worse things than death that today’s snowflakes know nothing about, like drug addictions, and mental handicaps, and wasting illness, like decades of physical suffering by folks you’ve loved, and like, yeah dementia. You’re the amateur, mate. I’ve been round the block. I can take it on the chin without making myself a misery for other people, or even for myself. So all’s I can say is it wasn’t supposed to be like this. But it is like this and I’m OK with that. So knock it off with your feel good movie scripts.

Postscript 12/01/20: Reality is apparently catching up with my comments: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/they-ma...

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Pavane by Keith Roberts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Christendom Chronicles

I don’t think it’s right to comment on Keith Roberts’s Pavane without comparing it to its near contemporary, Kingsley Amis’s The Alteration. Pavane is probably a better written book all round but both books present a remarkably consistent counter-factual view of a 20th century Christendom which might have existed if the Protestant Reformation had never taken place (The Alteration) or was suppressed (Pavane).

Both books are also profoundly pessimistic about European political and economic life under a regime of a united Church and State. In my comments on The Alteration, I suggested that Amis is rather prescient in his presentation of this modern Christendom as the subliminal goal of the European Community (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Roberts, it appears, may have been equally canny about the political tectonics of the time. Constraints on freedom of expression, trade, technological innovation, and science are themes which he uses as well as Amis.

But it is the general medievalist sentiment and tone in Amis and Roberts that alerted me to something else about these books. They make literary reference not just to European politics of the day, but to an English movement which has its aesthetic as well as its political roots in the early nineteenth century. This movement has operated under a variety of names - The Oxford Movement, Christian Socialism, Distributism, and most recently, Radical Orthodoxy.

While never reaching the cohesive strength of a political party, these cultural strands have had a persistent influence on English intellectual, artistic, and cultural life. The Oxford Movement, for example, set about ‘re-capturing’ the liturgical and ornamental richness of the medieval Catholic Church that had been lost during the Reformation. Nineteenth century Christian Socialism sought to redress the effects of the Industrial Revolution through the re-establishment of medieval forms of social obligation. Distributism, a form of Christian Socialism invented by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, suggested an incredibly radical redistribution of wealth and the establishment of guilds that would have effectively returned the country to a pre-capitalist economic condition.

Caricature of GK Chesterton with a contemporary motto of Distributism


At about the time Roberts and Amis were being published, a new form of this movement was emerging. Its current name is Radical Orthodoxy. This version of the movement is unusual because it is explicitly theological and very post-modernist. The essential historical proposition of Radical Orthodoxy is that certain nefarious medieval philosophers (most notably the Oxford Franciscan, Duns Scotus) threw a conceptual spanner into the works of European thought.

Scotus, so it is claimed, fraudulently undermined the Christian Platonism which had formed the foundation of the Christian Church/State polity for a thousand years. Simultaneously he allowed the distinction between philosophy and theology to infect both patterns of thought and academic organisation. Scotus, therefore, is the arch-demon of cultural relativism as well as the cause of secular governmental institutions which are hollowed out versions of their medieval forebears.

Radical Orthodoxy, like previous manifestations of this very English cultural phenomenon, is academically prominent but prefers to keep its political head below the parapet. It might not be apparent to the mass of the electorate, therefore, that the so-called Red Tories are significantly influenced by Radical Orthodoxy. David Cameron’s Big Society, for example, were a set of policies developed and advanced by the movement’s more political activists.

I suppose the point I want to make with this exposition is that the ‘Christendom Chronicles’ of Roberts and Amis are not only interesting as historical comments on mid-twentieth century European politics. They are also relevant today as a satirical critique of a live and persistent political tendency in Britain. This tendency is conservative but only in the sense that it looks to the (rather ancient) past for inspiration. It is in fact, as the name of its most recent manifestation suggests, rather extreme. Roberts and Amis indicate just how extreme.

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Quarantine 
by 

Jim Crace

 

Alone But Never Lonely

Quarantine is Crace’s very appropriate term for Jesus’s forty days seclusion in the wilderness shortly after his baptism in the Jordan River. According to all of the synoptic gospels, he is ‘approved’ by God in his earthly mission at that ceremony. Forty days in the life of an individual (or forty years in the life of a people) is an important biblical poetical trope, which Crace appreciates as exactly what it is: a period of fundamental transformation in the nature of one’s being. The literary context of the forty days is important in order to understand Crace’s interpretation of the story.

Forty days as a spiritually significant period first appears in the book of Genesis. It is the period of persistent rain which wipes out the creation that has disappointed YHWH. It appears that YHWH was banking on a bit of high-speed natural selection. Noah’s family were spared his (later regretted) purge but had to undergo a double dose of purification - forty days of rain and forty days of drying out. One can only speculate about the ethical quality of human beings if the original gene pool had survived intact.

Although several of the patriarchs only marry at forty years of age, suggesting a period of maturation rather than purification, the cultural significance of forty years is established clearly by Israel’s wandering in the desert of Sinai after their escape from Egypt. During this period they are fed on the miraculously provided ‘manna,’ perhaps signifying the necessity for preparing to enter the promised land. Noah’s purification affected all of humanity; the desert wandering was an entirely Jewish affair.

While the Jewish nation was being held captive in Egypt, Moses spends forty days on the mountain of Horeb conferring with YHWH, the results of which are freedom and the tablets of the law. There may have been some spiritual purification or preparation involved but this is not reported in the biblical text. Rather Moses’s experience is purely revelatory. Legends suggest some sort of conference with the divine presence but its character is unknown. One further reference to forty days, also at the mountain of Horeb, is made regarding the time of penance by the prophet Elijah.

Finally there are three more uses of the period of forty years - the first for the time required to purify pagan lands before they can be settled by Israel; the second is the period of captivity of the Israelites by the Philistines as a punishment for disobedience; the last is as a period of punishment declared by the prophet Ezekiel on the land of Egypt.

So, as in much of biblical literature, Jesus’s sojourn in the wilderness doesn’t have an historically fixed significance. It is open to a variety of interpretations, of which Crace’s seems as informed and valid as many others. The New Testament story is clearly important and transmitted with variations through at least several of the Christ-following traditions. But it’s connotations run from radical purging, to spiritual renewal, to preparation for divine revelation, to the imposition of suffering as punishment. 

It’s safe to assume that all these possibilities were known to the early transmitters of Christian tradition, and used to establish Jesus as the new Noah, the new ‘bread of life’, the new Moses, the prophet announcing a new Israel, and the messiah who was to undergo sacrificial punishment for the sins of Israel and the rest of the world. The forty days, therefore, designating a time of transformation, is of central importance in Christianity.

The use of the term ‘quarantine’ adds a new dimension to the forty days experience. While you’re in a state of disease, you are prevented from infecting others; but you may not make it out alive yourself. Quarantine represents a kind of existential threat which Crace’s Jesus is aware of: “He'd put his trust in god, as young men do. He would encounter god or die, that was the nose and tail of it. That's why he'd come.” Whatever happened at the Jordan was enough to inspire this idealistic and potentially deadly pilgrimage, but it wasn’t enough to convince Jesus that he knew what he was doing.

Jesus shares his quarantine with six others, four volunteers like himself and a hapless couple, she heavily pregnant and he an abusive monster. This group doesn’t conform with biblical prototypes which apply either to individuals or national groups. The randomness of this small collective is noteworthy as an innovative departure by Crace. It allows a social interaction among strangers into the depths of the forty days experience, whatever that experience entails.

Each member of the quarantined party has a unique issue: a Jewish matron, possibly infertile; an elderly Jewish stonemason hoping for a miracle cancer-cure; a Bedouin shepherd, apparently mad; a handsome blond foreigner seeking holy wisdom rather than god; the couple which had been abandoned by their caravanserai, she longing for freedom, he for wealth and power; and of course Jesus, whose encounter with god was dependent in his mind on the endurance of physical punishment. For him “Triumph over hardship was their proof of holiness.”

Crace creates an interesting spiritual logic for Jesus’s presence in the wilderness. For Jesus, god is the creator and guarantor of orderliness in the universe. His choice is to believe in cosmic-order rather than pandemonium. The wilderness with its harsh climate, its absence of edible plant-life and its general inhospitableness to life is God’s work yet to be completed. He just hasn’t got to it yet. It is “the edge of god's unfinished universe.” There Jesus could observe the divine creative process in action. This would be the sign he was looking for - his participation in the new creation. He wanted his god tangible.

Jesus’s intention is to isolate himself even within the isolation ward of his companions. He, like Moses and Elijah, wants alone-time with god. But his colleagues have different ideas. None of them has any interest in this tangible divinity nonsense. All they want are improvements in their situations not any sort of Sinaitic epiphany. So they annoy him, meddle in his solitude, harass him with trivial concerns, and interrupt his planned ritual. 

In short, Crace’s Jesus is a religious snob who has no time for the worries and mundane concerns of the hoi pilloi, a type that would later be ridiculed as Pharasaic simply because they were punctilious in their observance of the law. But this is how he had been raised in a traditional Jewish household. These are the things that made him what he was - a devout servant of the Almighty who was keen to attract his favour - and what he hoped to become - a renowned preacher and interpreter of the law. Something considerably more than a village tradesman’s son.

They were a superstitious lot, Jesus forty days companions. When it suited, they had an eye for miracles and ‘angel births’ of unmarried mothers, the potency of dreams to shape reality, the demonic source of illness. He learns these things from them. But these are incidental to his real transformation, which has principally to do with his discovery that god, to the extent he exists, is present in them; that they are the source of his own re-creation; that without them his beliefs and ritual practices are useless, merely distracting self-delusions.

I think Crace’s intuition about the forty days is correct: Its power is profoundly transformative. In particular, its outcome cannot be anticipated. What is changed is an appreciation of what it means to exist as a person. The combination of isolation, physical hardship and an attitude of openness to change in the status quo produces not just change but changed expectations - about ourselves as well as about the world in general. 

It is Jesus’s acceptance of the experiences of the others who are part of his forty days experience that is the catalyst for his new life in public. He ultimately knows himself, not the wilderness, to be the object of continuing creation; and the means of that continuing creation is other people, even the bad, crazy, and troubled ones, especially the bad, crazy, and troubled ones. This conclusion and the religious life it implies is as much a surprise to him as it is to his family and acquaintances. His forty days includes all previous biblical experiences as well - from Noah to Ezekiel, from purification to penance. In this sense at least Crace’s Jesus has become the entirety of the law and the prophets.

The Alteration by Kingsley Amis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Brexit Prophesied

If the Protestant Reformation had never occurred, many other unfortunate events might have been avoided: The Thirty Years War In Central Europe, The Glorious Revolution in England, The Jacobite Rebellion in Scotland, dozens of relatively minor but bloody conflicts around the world, and, who knows, perhaps even the French and American Revolutions, and the two World Wars. If the Christian Church had stayed united, then, would the world have been a better place today?

Not bloody likely according to Amis. The world might have been more peaceful but at the cost of systematically oppressive corruption. The Industrial Revolution would have been stifled at the steampunk stage because of clerical bureaucracy. Science would been taught a salutary lesson by Galileo’s defeat and rightly considered an inherently heretical undertaking. Electricity might well be classified as a superstition and suppressed. The teaching of evolution might indeed have merited the death penalty.

And, perhaps most significantly, the Church, by virtue of its role in the endorsement and consecration of the monarchy by divine right, would continue to participate intimately in human governance. In fact the Church would likely have retained its traditional partnership status as the eyes and ears of government in every parish in every civilised land. The populace wouldn’t stand for such pervasive surveillance (and its expense) except as a necessary part of its eternal salvation. The offices of county councils must be modest to demonstrate appropriate official penny-pinching. But cathedrals must of course rise majestically and ornately from exactly the same tax base.

The Alteration of the title is a euphemism for the quaint medieval custom, preferred by popes and princes of the church, of surgery to remove the hormone-producing glands of young boys. The purpose, of course, was godly - the preservation of musical talents given by God to the lad that would otherwise be lost in adolescence. The matter was not considered lightly given the consequences. Removal of the designated organs was certainly irreversible; but the ultimate professional success was not ensured. There was an ample repertoire for the castrati voice; but even within a limited market there was also intense competition. Much to consider and debate therefore.

The European Union was created by the Treaty of Masstricht in 1993, two years before Kingsley Amis died but seventeen years after Alteration was written. The book, therefore, could not have been meant, of course, as an allegory of the return of Christendom by the back door. Surely Amis was not making a pointed political commentary relevant to affairs of the day.

Or could it that he was doing exactly that? Perhaps Amis was sufficiently culturally prescient that he could sense the real impetus behind European integration, namely the restoration of an international spiritual bond through a parallel political force which penetrated deeply into each country? It has occurred to more than one historical commentator that the EU more than resembles a rather better-functioning Holy Roman Empire after all.

And the crucial decision about the hapless English lad - whether or not to have his bits lopped? It would of course be even more far-fetched to suggest that Amis had anticipated the existential agony of Brexit. Except that the real reason for the vote to leave the EU was the feeling of emasculation in the country. The national potency had been eliminated, many felt, by the progressive erosion of sovereignty. The heirs of Englishness were in jeopardy!

Amis hints at the English attitude toward authority, especially ecclesiastical authority, when he gives, the family chaplain’s response to the senior churchman suggesting the boy’s mutilation:

“Lyall felt he could not say which of two things was harder to put up with, the Abbot's conversational style, with its bland coherence and assumption of severely limited cogitative powers in the hearer, or his recurrent look of pleased surprise as each fresh piece of evidence of his wisdom or moral worth turned up, but between them they were likely to implant in certain minds a hardy seed of revolt.”

Exactly, that lingering seed which sprouted into Brexit.

Of course it could all be bollocks, as it were.

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The Rules of Seeing by Joe Heap
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There’s an App for That

The first and last computer programming I ever attempted was on an IBM 1401 sometime around 1965. The 1401 was the Model T Ford of computers. We were told that the new technology would soon change the world, so we all had to learn to drive it (plus ça change...). My thought was if this is the vehicle for a new world, I’m destined to be a passenger or roadkill, but certainly not a driver. And so it has turned out.

FORTRAN was the computer language du jour, a code of very precise, extremely narrow instructions were required to add 2 + 2 (no meta-instructions or OOP’s in FORTRAN, just lots of DO-LOOPS). The point of my education was apparently meant to demonstrate just how complex even the simplest calculations actually were. There were no off-the-shelf apps from Apple or Google. Through normal human development the complex logical structure of everyday tasks had been hidden beneath a layer of unthinking quotidian routine and our job was to reveal that structure. Who knew? Who wanted to know?

My experience of modern technology is how I imagine one of the two of Heap’s protagonists, Nova, who, blind from birth, is suddenly able to see. Her 1401 compiler is herself which doesn’t have the software to make sense of the new visual data. Every detail of the experience has to be learned by rote in an ocular ‘language’ which is as apparently artificial as FORTRAN. Her programming is in sound, smell and touch; and it all works well. Just as my with experience of the 1401, her sight feels to her too difficult to pursue. It is frustrating, nauseating, and perhaps not worth the effort.

Nova has been programmed for sound not vision. Kate, the second protagonist, has been programmed for subservience to male power. Kate can’t see the abuse, just a diffuse vision of fear. Like Nova (and me) Kate lacks the software skills to make her experiences with her husband comprehensible. The only thing she knows for certain is dread; and the logic of her programming is to look to the source of her abuse to protect her from what she dreads.

Both Nova and Kate confront a similar problem. Neither can think her way out of her condition. Nor can anyone else give them the secret (to them) knowledge of their situation. Each has to learn a new mode of existence, a new logic of survival, from the fundamentals on up. Perhaps there’s mileage in some mutual assistance. The story flows somewhat predictably from this set-up.

The real interest in the book are the eponymous rules of seeing rather than the characters or the story-line. These rules constitute the software that sighted people never think about. To have these rules made explicit is fascinating, among other reasons because they are so complex and so ambiguous. Yet almost all sighted people learn them even more readily than they learn their native language. It is obviously a natural human skill but codifying this skill into its component parts is a very unnatural skill - much like programming a 1401.

Some of the rules are straightforward: Things further away appear smaller than things which are closer. But the simplicity and consistency of even this rule is undermined by the issue of how big a thing should appear to someone who has never seen it before.

Other rules are maddening: A glass window is both transparent and reflective. What could this possibly mean to someone who has never experienced either transparency or reflection much less both phenomena simultaneously?

There are dozens, hundreds of such rules. Some of which contradict each other. Others of which are conditional upon which rules which have already been applied: The less ambient light, the darker colours will appear; therefore if there is low light re-calibrate your colour spectrum so that the apple you’re looking at stays red (this of course also presumes you have learned the rules for red as distinguished from orange and brown).

This learning to see through the implicit rules of seeing is like learning a language through grammatical rules as an adult (a really tough one like Finnish or Ancient Greek with their complex syntax, combined with Hebrew with its ambiguous tenses; comparatively speaking, FORTRAN is baby-talk). Only learning to see is even more difficult because there are no textbooks which lay out visual syntax nor are there dictionaries which clearly define basic shapes and colours much less the pragmatics of facial expressions.

A physiological process like seeing, therefore, is difficult to re-programme. An emotional process, which combines physiology and social interactions - like survival in an abusive relationship - has an even greater level of difficulty in unlearning and learning the rules of successful relating. The real value of Rules of Seeing is in the mutually revealing metaphors of physical and emotional blindness. In this it is a remarkably eye-opening book, and far more enjoyable than my 1401 experience.

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Tower of Babylon by Ted Chiang
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Re-Thinking the Covenant

Chiang‘s interpretation of the well known biblical myth of the Tower is innovative, interesting, and... well, inspired. It is also acutely theological and reveals Chiang’s familiarity with some lesser known biblical material.

The tower story is contained in Chapter 11 of the book of Genesis. It is derived from similar Semitic myths current in the Middle East. Ostensibly it is an explanation for the existence of the diversity of human language. This has always struck me as a trivial waste of biblical space. It seems that Chiang thinks the same way.

The real point of the myth has to do with the potency of collective human effort. This is clear from the reason given for YHWH’s throwing those working on the tower into mutual incomprehensibility: “And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” [Genesis 11:6].

Why YHWH should be so concerned about the cooperative abilities of humanity is not stated directly in the biblical text. In order to rationalise the divine action, a sort of meta-myth about human impertinence and arrogance in attempting to reach God has emerged as the implicit standard. Men were getting too big for their breeches and had to be taught a lesson.

But like much of what is compiled in the Hebrew Scriptures, it is context that is the most important element in interpretation. And the important context here occurs several chapters previously. After YHWH has destroyed life on Earth with the exception of Noah, his family and his animals, he apparently has some severe divine remorse. YHWH promises never to do the watery death thing again. And he also lays down seven rules of behaviour - no murder, no adultery, no lying, no stealing etc. These overlap with the later Ten Commandments but, since Abraham and his Israelite descendants are as yet only in the distant future, the rules apply to all of humanity not just to Jews.

This arrangement is known as the Covenant of Noah, and is the first of many other covenants which are proclaimed by YHWH with humanity. This idea of covenant is extremely fluid in biblical literature. It takes on content relevant to the changing circumstances at hand. But the concept always involves the self-restraint of YHWH and the imposition of rules. Most importantly the violation of rules may result in divine punishment but no degree of transgression will void the covenant itself.

Because of its ambiguities, the relation of the covenant might be considered ephemeral, hard to discern among the apparently important events of daily life. The reality of the covenantal relation is, therefore, often made explicit by YHWH and by Israel in a 'concrete' object as a symbol of the reality created and maintained in the covenant by Israel jointly with YHWH and to which both Israel and YHWH submit.

Various physical and ritual symbols are used throughout the Hebrew Scriptures as a reminder of the continuing existence of the covenant: a heap of stones, the Sabbath, the altar of the Temple, a tamarisk tree, the sun and the moon, the stone which Jacob used for a pillow, and a monumental stone slab or stele. All have a simple function: to ensure that the covenant is remembered as a fundamental fact of reality.

The Tower of the biblical myth is perhaps the grandest of these cultural reminders. This is clearly how Chiang interprets it. The workers, assembled from many foreign places, share not just a language but a devotion to YHWH. The tower itself is being built to honour him. It is the physical representation of the spiritual search for YHWH that is implicit in its changing content. Humanity is attempting to reach YHWH not out of arrogance but as a matter of devotion.

Of course, human understanding cannot reach to the exalted heights of YHWH’s existence. But only when their search stops is the covenant in jeopardy. In their continuing physical and intellectual quest for the ultimate reality human beings can put themselves in awkward and life-threatening situations. No matter what happens, however, YHWH can be relied upon not to break his covenant promise - never again will he use water against them, nor let them use it against themselves.

Oh, and there are also some interesting meditations on the philosophy and poetry of science. Don’t miss it.

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The Book of Ebenezer Le Page 
by 

G.B. Edwards, 

 

John Fowles (Introduction)

 

Cosmopolitan Provincialism

I have never been to the Isle of Guernsey. But I did live for some time on the Isle of Man, another of those territorial anomalies of British history which are subject to the English Crown but not to the English Parliament. It seems to me that The Book of Ebenezer Le Page is easily applicable more broadly to this sort of island culture. 

The unusual national status of places like Guernsey and Man promotes an ambiguity in the relationship with England that alternates between fearful resentment and profound affection.* The ways in which these conflicting emotions are rationalised can be interesting. On Guernsey it involves historical interpretations expressed succinctly by Ebenezer: “I remember A.D. 1066, because that was the year we conquered England.” The Isle of Man prefers to point out that its Tynwald is older by several centuries than the Parliament of Westminster and has been considerably more stable. One is led inevitably to remember the wonderful Peter Sellers film, The Mouse That Roared.

By definition places like Guernsey and Man are insular. Even after decades of incomers in the form of either tourists or tax-dodgers, they remain eccentric and suspicious of the mores of the outside world. Both places have a feel (I infer the Guernsey culture from Edwards) of a culture a half century behind the rest of Britain (Many former colonials settle on Man for just this reason - its more or less the Britain they left in their youth). They can appear backward, not just resistant to change - as in the Isle of Man’s resistance to gay rights and preference for capital punishment. As John Fowles points out in his introduction, “This inability to forget the old, this querulousness over the new, is what makes Ebenezer Le Page such a convincing portrayal of a much more universal mentality than the matter of the book might at first sight suggest”

Yet in the manner of Melville’s Nantucket in Moby Dick, these islands, because they are islands and therefore dependent on sea-faring, contain a remarkably well-travelled and cosmopolitan (male) population (the occasional importation of females resulting from male excursions kept the gene pool reasonably healthy one presumes). The combination of insularity and world-weariness produces, I think, a sort of benign cynicism which is the unique identifier of the native culture. They’ve seen it all before, even if it hasn’t ever been seen on the island. This can present itself as ignorant arrogance. But while it may be a sort of defensive arrogance, it is not entirely ignorant. There is a real and justifiable feeling of safety and of being truly home which may be unique to these micro-societies.

There are clear differences between the two islands. Guernsey exports its cows; Man its cats. Guernsey was occupied by Nazi Germany during the Second World War; Man was the site of a large prisoner of war camp for German soldiers. Guernsey produced seamen; Man largely supplied Caribbean pirates.** But these differences in fact only serve to publicise them globally in larger type than their size would otherwise warrant with the effect of confirming their great significance to a population which might otherwise become rather bored with itself. There is a self-sustaining mythology which is as compelling as it is un-factual.

The Isle of Man is considerably larger than Guernsey; and the latter much more densely settled. But the local distinctions are equally intense in both places. The 60,000 or so inhabitants of Guernsey speak a patois of English and French which is studiously recorded by Edwards. Yet even in such a small area, there are two officially recognised regional variants that are kept alive and prized by the natives. Such behaviour suggests that the human instinct to tribal organization really does end in those one knows, at least by sight.

On Man there is an invisible boundary which runs across the island from Peel in the West to Douglas in the East, and dividing the 80,000 inhabitants roughly in two. South of this line the predominant native family names are of Scandinavian origin (the ancient designation of the island is Sodor, the Vikings’ Southern Islands). In the North the names are more the distinctive Manx Q-names (a linguistic transformation of the Celtic ‘Mc’ or ‘Mac’ prefixes). The ancient tribes persist.***

The psychological effects of these local peculiarities are significant. For example I lived in the North of Man in the village of Bride. Once a week I would drive the 20 miles or so to the airport at Ronaldsway in the South. In line with the cosmopolitan attitudes of most of my neighbours this commute to London was not considered unusual. But upon due consideration of my routine, one expressed the shared sentiment of them all when he said, “You mean you commute every week, all the way to the airport?” 

Not having been born on Man, I had no traumatic reaction to leaving. It remains a pleasant personal memory of beautiful countryside and marvellous seascapes (on a good day from the summit of Snaefell it is possible to see the Scottish Mull 0f Galloway, the English Pennines, Welsh Snowdonia, and the Irish Mountains of Mourne - the omphalos one might say of the British Isles). Edwards on the other hand was born on Guernsey (distant from England and peripheral to France; perhaps, therefore, like a cut British fingernail on the carpet of Europe). He left it in young adulthood and never returned. He must have been obsessed with the place his entire life to have spent his last years doing little but writing about it. 

Any romantic sentimentality about the Isle of Man I might be subject to is immediately dissipated when I recall the question my wife raised early one Sunday morning: Well, Michael, should drive around the island clockwise or counterclockwise today?”“

*The problem of Manx piracy in the 18th century provoked Britain to threaten forcible annexation, a threat that would have been carried out but for the distracting matter of the American Revolution. But there is always the Queen, God bless and keep her! Ultimately both Guernsey and Man are representative legacies of a Norse culture of rape and pillage. The Conqueror may have settled down somewhat but the Viking blood still coursed in his veins. And the current monarch is his heir and his legacy to these islands.

** My house was called Nassau, a neighbour’s was Antigua; Dominica and Aruba were a mile or two down the road. Each name, by local legend, indicating the source of the funding for the original homesteads. And the business involved wasn’t in sugar or exotic vegetables, but rather booty. At least that’s the legend.

*** This business of tribal differences in small island places is evident in other parts of the British Isles as well. One thinks of the Outer Hebrides. Barra is Catholic and has been so even through the Reformation. Its near neighbour of South Uist is also Catholic. But the tiny strip of land called Benbecula (little more than an airstrip) on the causeway between South Uist and North Uist is effectively a hard border between Scottish Calvinists and Roman Catholics. Barrier islands as well as good fences apparently make good neighbours.

The Shattering of Loneliness: On Christian Remembrance by Erik Varden
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Faith in Faith

When Pandora’s Box in the ancient Greek myth was opened, all the evils that we experience in the world escaped and had humanity at their mercy. But something important remained in the Box, whether as divine compensation or practical remedy is open to interpretation. This residue was hope, the human ability to have expectations despite the trials and traps encountered in life. The central point of the story, therefore, seems to be not that the world has become evil through the hapless action of opening the Box, but rather that human beings have a way of dealing with those evils.

This Greek appreciation of hope as not just a virtue but also a skill for human survival and well-being was all but lost with the arrival of the Christian religion in the world. Paul of Tarsus, a cosmopolitan Jew of the Diaspora had a revelation. This revelation was not simply that a certain Jesus of Nazareth was the messiah - an opinion which Paul felt had been justified by certain Hebrew Scriptures. Even more significant than Jesus, whom Paul had never met, was the revelation of the paramount importance of the human attitude, virtue, or capacity that he called faith.

For Paul, it is faith, not the Greek (or for that matter the Jewish) idea of hope on which the fate of humanity depended entirely. Nothing in the Scriptures supported this view in the least. In fact, the Hebrew Scriptures are chock full of cases in which disobedient doing rather than inadequate believing provokes divine displeasure from Adam & Eve onward (Lot’s wife is an extensively analyzed example in Varden’s Chapter 3 which blatantly contradicts the doctrine of faith which he is trying to establish). So Paul simply asserted his idea of faith with no further justification.

The Pauline idea of faith caused profound theological problems during his lifetime, throughout the entire history of Christianity, and into the present day (right into Varden’s Chapter 2). Faith, according to the doctrines of all Christian sects is not something that can be achieved by good works, or prayerful techniques, or by simply living an ethical life. Faith is an unaccountable gift from God which is given without reason, that is to say arbitrarily, to some people but not others. Since faith is the only attribute necessary and sufficient for salvation, the question of who has it and who doesn’t is obviously central to one’s existence as a Christian. Strict Calvinists and Jansenist Catholics are among the many groups for whom Pauline faith, not Jesus, is the paramount religious doctrine.

It is with this background that I read The Shattering of Loneliness, which is in large part a first person account of faith - what it is, how it is experienced, and what it has meant to one’s life. I am sure that Varden’s account of faith has many unique features determined by his history and life-circumstances. But I am also confident that his story is typical in its essentials as what is generally termed a conversion. In fact I have a suspicion that Varden’s story is not merely an instance of the reception of Pauline faith; it is in fact an enactment of the Pauline script of faith, a script which sought to replace the Greek myth of hope but which doesn’t do nearly as good a job at promoting human well-being.

My suspicion is based on several things recounted in his book. Varden, like many of us, is, through either nature or nurture, a spiritual seeker in the specific sense that he noticed the presence of evil in the world around him and it bothered him. He has encountered the worst evil second-hand through anecdotes and reading about Nazi occupied Norway. But he is aware that the problem of evil is much more pervasive than any particular set of circumstances. For him, evil is the central human issue.

Varden makes this explicit. Evil, in good Christian theological tradition, is an absence, an inadequacy which creates a very personal problem for him:

“I crave a completion no created thing can give. I walk this earth as yearning incarnate. I am at home, yet a stranger, homesick for a homeland I recall but have not seen.”

I suspect that both psychological attributes - the moral sensitivity to one’s environment and the urge to do something about either it or oneself - are common among those undergoing the conversion experience. Certainly it had been the case with St. Paul himself who had been an enthusiastic follower and enforcer of Jewish law before being knocked from his horse on the road to Damascus.

Varden’s ‘peak experience’ (the modern jargon seems appropriate in the context) occurred while listening to Mahler’s Second, or Resurrection, Symphony in which Mahler sets some German folk poems and songs. One of these, The Boy’s Magic Horn, Varden found arresting, particularly the verses:

“Have faith, heart, have faith: nothing will be lost to you.
What you have longed for is yours, yes, yours; yours is what you have loved and fought for.
Have faith: you were not born in vain. You have not lived or suffered in vain.”

Varden’s response was immediate: “At these words, something burst. The repeated insistence, ‘not in vain, not in vain’, was irresistible. It was not just that I wanted to believe it. I knew it was true.”

What I find most significant about his report is, first, that this belief which has overcome him has no immediate content. It is a sort of ‘oceanic’ feeling of excited repose, of being suddenly complete and connected with the universe. It is not about Jesus, nor God, nor any divine presence in the world. It is solely an intense experience of... well something finally responding to his spiritual emptiness. So this emptiness was no longer ‘in vain;’ it had a reason in the feeling of completion. Simultaneously, he experiences this contentless revelation as ‘the truth.’ The truth concerning what is not immediately clear, even to him. What is clear is that he has an intense drive, which he calls faith, and which must be satisfied (contrasting accounts of a similar musical experiences but ones not interpreted in terms of religious faith my be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6...).

He then continues, “... at that moment, my consciousness changed... I was aware of not being alone... I could no more doubt the truth of what I had found than I could doubt that I existed. The sense of it has never left me.” He diagnoses himself as having had a spiritual metanoia, a fundamental change which he equates to an ontological shift, that is, an alteration in his mode of being. This then, much like the story Paul tells of himself on the road to Damascus, is the first substantive belief as contents of his faith - he exists differently now than he had before, or at least that he realised before.

This new state of existence is not merely new, it is objectively better. Varden reports in fact that he has been given a “privileged insight, provoked by the music, I had found my deep intuitions confirmed.” He has been given something, a privilege, which not everyone else has; and whatever his incipient beliefs about the world have been before his experience are now confirmed. He is validated, vindicated by his revelation. He could now understand the music in a very different manner. It too had become ‘truth’ as a second component of his faith. He has become inherently superior, not only to what he was, but also to others who have not received the grace of faith. But there is more. His faith-experience had shown to be true things that he he had suspected all along. And what was that?

The insight that had been validated was in fact his long-standing suspicion that the world was a very inhospitable place and that what he had been reading had in fact been: “the chronicle of man’s presumption against man, [which] corresponded to the world as it was, the world I inhabited. Its reality had seeped into me. I saw before me as a suffering mass overshadowed by death.” It is highly significant, it seems to me, that Varden is overcome not by the inherent goodness and splendour of the created world as recounted in the book of Genesis (which Varden does not mention), but by the very gnostic view of creation as irreparably evil. This is the third component of his faith; yet he has yet to reach anything approaching the divine.

There is an interesting inversion which Varden, like many of his co-religionists , adopts at this point in a strategy of transparently faux humility. The proximate cause of much human misery is the power exercised by others. So Varden is keen to abjure such power by insisting on the fundamental insignificance of human beings. They are merely dust and they have no real power. All power is God’s alone. It is God who freed Israel from Pharoah; and it is God who delivers humanity from its oppressed state. Only by renouncing individual pretensions to power can the world be healed.

However, Varden also makes it clear that by renouncing power, power is acquired by the faithful believer. The faithful becomes agents of divine power. The paradox is obvious to all but the faithful: God, not his servants, is accountable. Individual minions are simply following divine orders, as interpreted by either themselves or by their churchy superiors. Power is not a abjured, but rather given a seal of approval, an imprimatur, which simultaneously justifies its use by those who claim to be worth nothing, and diverts human attention from those exercising power to an abstract and remote divine entity. To the extent made necessary by circumstances, evil is thus transformed into the pursuit of good - Gnosticism by the back door it might be said. I don’t think this is a pose. It is a real article of faith. One might call it faith in faith, the fundamental principle of Christianity and the contents of the Christian equivalent of Pandora’s Box, the tool for coping with evil. It is this faith in faith which makes the Christian religion so impenetrable as well as do dangerous.*

There is much more which flows from Varden’s experience that could be used to extend the analysis (See the postscript below for an outline of some further material), but the above is sufficient I think to make some meaningful suggestions. My overall conclusion is that Varden’s story is straight out of St. Paul’s playbook. It’s not a distortion of Varden’s narrative to appreciate that he has a point for point experience of Pauline conversion. Such an event would have quite literally been impossible for ancient Greeks and Hebrews. Paul’s story has become a model for ‘how to do it’ and has become assimilated, no doubt largely unconsciously, into personal explanations for what such experiences mean over millennia. There is a vocabulary and a sequence which is almost standardised.

Further, this idea of Pauline faith shows itself in Varden’s descriptions as exactly what it is: a very powerful psychological urge which initially has no clear object. Faith exists before the object of faith has even been encountered. This is the case with Varden. It was also the case with Paul who spent several years contemplating what his experience required of him before he went on the road spreading not so much the good news of Jesus (of whom he says almost nothing) but the good news of faith. Faith, in other words, appears to create its own object. The drive of faith is to find something with sufficient content to satisfy the need it creates. The ultimate consumer product perhaps. The fact that faith in faith destroys every principle of epistemology and thus inhibits distinguishing the Good News from fake news is dramatically illustrated by American Evangelicals.

It is certainly possible to argue that hope can as easily produce similar self-serving nonsense to that created by faith. Business, political and academic idealists do it continually. Just as faith is directed toward an abstraction called the divine, hope is equally directed to an unspecified abstraction called the future. And indeed this latter abstraction is often stuffed with as much self-serving, delusional, wishful idiocy as that of faith. Much obsessive idealism can be classified as faith in hope. However the difference is that hope has not be divinised by the Christian Church. Although it is considered a ‘theological virtue’ (a subtle slur on Greek thought which ignores the bottom of Pandora’s Box), it does not have the doctrinal status of Pauline faith. And hope is much easier to discuss, compromise about, and combine than the quite rigid matter of faith in faith.

Finally, Varden’s memoir demonstrates the more or less total victory of Pauline faith over Greek hope. It is not an exaggeration to note that Varden’s faith in the divine is inversely proportional to hope in his fellows. Faith is a personal capacity; Hope is a communal trait. The world for Varden is lost, literally hopeless. Just as for Paul, there is no ‘us’ except those who share faith. Faith not hope defines community. Varden’s faith not only relieves him of the pressures of dealing with the things that are wrong in the world, it also creates, quite literally, an alternative reality in which his new being exists. There exists already in the minds of the faithful a “new heaven and a new earth”. Christian faithfulness is a tribal mark. Hopefulness designates an open community and demands a bit more courage.

* The practical consequences of this paradox of faith in faith are visible most notably among Varden’s own monastic brethren. Monks tale a strict vow of personal poeverty. But their monastic establishments - priories, abbeys, churches, schools etc. - do not. Historically, these establishments have grown wealthy and powerful, in large measure because of the enforced poverty of their members, thereby encouraging less than abstemious monastic life-styles. This has provoked a need for periodic ‘reform’ of monastic groups, of which Varden’s Cistercians are but one example.

[For more on the Pauline concept of faith, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
For more on a positive theology of hope, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...]

Postscript: Varden’s concern about ‘loneliness’ is, if I am correct in my analysis, one of the great ironies of Christian culture. Christ was lonely, Paul was lonely, Augustine was lonely, Luther was lonely, more recently Karl Barth was lonely. Pope Francis seems particularly lonely at the moment. Vox clamans in deserto, a voice crying in the wilderness, as the Gospel of Matthew quotes the prophet Isaiah. Christianity destroys natural community with intent (cf. Mark 10:29). Perhaps loneliness is an inherent characteristic of a religion which insists on the absolute importance of something called personal faith of which the person concerned can never be certain. I offer it as a thought rather than a conclusion.

What Varden means by ‘Remembrance’ is also another euphemism for ‘having faith in faith.’ It’s use in the text is solely to explain the relevance of things ‘remembered’ in Christian doctrines of faith - the Resurrection, The Real Presence, The Holy Trinity, Miracle-working, etc. His underlying message is clear: if you are a victim of loneliness, it is likely because you do not appreciate these sorts of doctrinal realities. The cure for your loneliness is your participation in a community which professes these doctrines (even if neither you nor they understand fully what these doctrines mean). Your willingness to make the required doctrinal professions will assure you of the good-fellowship of any number of other believers. And, who knows, God might just share some of his saving grace with you along the way - a variant on Pascale’s Wager in which the currency is emotion rather than ready money. This of course is another speculative offering rather than a conclusion.

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