Thursday, November 17, 2016

I need to remember what I cannot comprehend

Books 11-13 of Augustine's Confessions are a meditation on the nature of time and God's work of Creation, and are often left out of modern editions. In the preface to his 1983 translation, E.M. Blaiklock writes,
Book Ten seemed to provide a natural conclusion satisfying to a modern reader. ...The mystical ponderings of the last three books are... quite detachable, and it is even a little difficult to probe the writer's purpose in placing them thus. They seem laboured [sic] in their striving for linkage, and are rather the utterance of the Bishop of Hippo than of the embattled man striving Godwards. We have taken leave to omit them.
Still, Maria Boulding did not omit them in her 1997 translation, and so our congregation's reading group, being fastidious completists, chose her edition of the Confessions from the Vintage Spiritual Classics series. We've been working through those mystical ponderings, and I think I can respectfully disagree with Blaiklock. Throughout the autobiographical Books 1-10, Augustine (prefiguring Proust's Remembrance of Things Past) wrestles with the nature of memory and time before, and as created by, God. A Scripturally-saturated mind such as Augustine's would naturally end up with the days of creation and the text of Genesis 1-2.

Reading between Blaiklock's lines, he seems to be saying that Books 11-13 make rather tough sledding, and with that I can heartily agree. Nonetheless, I recognized myself in this sentence from Book 12.
On reading or hearing the scriptural words some people think of God in the guise of a man, or as some huge being possessed of immense power, who arrived at a sudden new decision to make heaven and earth outside himself, as though located at a distance from him, and made them like two vast solid structures, above and below, within which everything would be contained.
Unintentionally, I create mental images while reading Genesis 1-2, and those images render the events in terms which I can understand. Augustine chastises my hubris by reminding me that what I imagine is almost certainly not exactly what occurred.

I would be the first to argue that the Genesis 1-2 account of Creation is a straightforward historical narrative and is written to be as comprehensible as possible to the average reader or hearer. Nonetheless, I need to remember it records much I simply cannot comprehend, such as the existence of light without prior physical source, or an earth without form and void (once one realizes that a jumbled mass has a form, even if a chaotic one, and is certainly not void), or the relationship of the divine decrees to the simplicity of God's person. As chapter 1 of the Westminster Confession of Faith states, the Scriptures are clear, but sometimes they speak clearly of things which are incomprehensible to us poor creatures.

Augustine's mystical ponderings may be labored and overlong, but they form useful instruction in intellectual humility.

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

A Canticle for Leibowitz

A Canticle for Leibowitz is Walter Miller's 1960 retelling of Western history through the lens of the monastic movement, but set in the American West after an apocalyptic nuclear war in the late 20th century. I read it after my Hindu neighbor insisted on loaning me his copy after we got into a discussion of comic books and science fiction during a Diwali party his family was hosting; such is ordinary life for a conservative presbyterian pastor these days.

As the Wikipedia notes, Canticle is widely recognized as a literary masterpiece, even being the stuff of dissertations and such. It's categorized as science fiction (since it spans the 27th to the 38th centuries), but as I note above, it's not really science fiction so much as an attempt to dramatize the role of the Church and persons religious in the development of the West during the first two millennia of Christendom. Much of the plot, such as it is, of Canticle's three sections focuses on the preservation of books and, later, development of the learning contained therein. But if that were all Canticle is, it would be little more than a presaging of Thomas Cahill's lamentably oversimplified How the Irish Saved Civilization.

Instead, Miller shows how the Church laid the foundation for Western civilization by insisting on the doctrine of the imago dei, man made in the image of God. In Canticle's first section, "Fiat Homo," the Church insists that those grotesquely mutated by nuclear fallout nonetheless are fully human and must be treated as such. In its second section, "Fiat Lux," an all-too unpleasantly human abbot boldly declares abominable a secular philosopher's suggestion that the men of their day are some kind of lesser, man-created beings precisely because that would make them something other than a reflection of God himself. While the third section, "Fiat Voluntas Lux," builds to another nuclear war, its centerpiece conflict is a debate between an abbot and a government official over euthanasia for the those in horrible suffering. According to Miller, mankind perennially and perversely denies his own humanity by refusing to value actual human beings and their lives; the Church and her members must bear witness against this dehumanization and insist that learning be founded on a Christian humanism.

As Miller tells the tale, it seems the Church is always on the losing side of the argument, but nonetheless her humanistic values work their way into civilization's warp and woof. I think he's right, and it's a fact worth remembering in these dark days for the citizens of the former American Republic. The Great State of Colorado, in which I consider it a privilege to live, just ratified a measure allowing for "assisted suicide" (one of the currently favored euphemisms for "euthanasia"). Our nation's misbegotten electoral college has permitted election to the office of President a man who aggressively dehumanizes all, individually and collectively, with the temerity to displease him. Humanism itself has fallen upon such hard times that the very notion is associated primarily with aggressive secularity, not the imago dei, and Christians shut down at its very mention. From my vantage point, all signs are that we have lost the argument.

In these dark days, A Canticle for Leibowitz helpfully reminds us that the Church's simple duty is to bear witness to the truth of God's Word, which against all common sense teaches us that man is made in the image of God to such an extent that God himself could become a man. Church history teaches us that we will lose many, many arguments, but because of God's grace and Spirit the Church will continue to bear humanity through the ashes of the destruction mankind repetitively and continually wreaks upon himself.