Art and Humanity

G.K. Chesterton devotes the first section of his treatise The Everlasting Man to what makes people special.

He begins with a simple image: cave paintings. Through images like the one below, he asks us to reimagine the caveman. Far from being a savage, the caveman was an artist.

Why does this matter? It’s telling that images like this one are what we have of our ancient ancestors. For all the speculation about how cavemen lived their lives, we only have their art.

It would be an odd thing if we found a horse’s artistic rendering of a person. Art is not only a sign of humanity. It’s a sign we are made in God’s image.

What’s true for painting is true for literature.

Reflections on Newbigin’s The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

Lesslie Newbigin’s The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (1989) accounts for the embattled state of Christian missions in the last 50 years. As a longtime missionary to India, Newbigin sees how the gospel’s call has been relativized, and he wants to give an account of the gospel that lets the pluralist culture see itself even as he presents Christ as “the way, the truth, and the life.”

Because Newbigin keeps talking about the importance of the Christian message as a STORY, I have been paying attention to his analysis of our contemporary culture in the light of this covenantal literature project.

In Chapter 6, Newbigin talks about Revelation and History, giving a detailed account of how Christianity’s historical commitments change its witness. A Buddhist, for instance, could be told that Gautama never existed. It wouldn’t necessarily matter. A Christian’s faith, however, is premised on the historical death, burial, and resurrection of Christ.

With this divide between world religions, Newbigin introduces a distinction between two kinds of truth: the truth of a historical fact (i.e., something that happened in history) and the truth related through, say, a story that could have been portrayed some other way (e.g., the truth contained in the parable of the Prodigal Son). Newbigin rightly insists that Christians cannot make the truth claims about Jesus into symbolic truths separate from historical ones.

I add this, though, per the work of James Jordan. The Bible encourages us to see actual historical facts as both true in their “this really happened”ness and symbolically and topologically significant in the manner of a parable. Christ’s resurrection is a historical fact, yes. But it is also rich in symbolism and fulfills the typology (repeated patterns of action) God had revealed in history and in his word.

Both kinds of truth rather than either/or.

As for the discipline of history and its relationship to the Christian faith, Newbigin has thoughts. So do I. I’ll detail them tomorrow.

Augustine vs. Augustine

Any Christian consideration of literature has to reckon with Augustine. Namely, we have to reckon with Augustine’s contradictory stance on pagan literature.

On the one hand, Augustine decries it. His Confessions opens with him weeping over how he wept for The Aeneid’s Dido instead of for himself. Virgil’s epic deceived him, and he wishes he’d never read it.

On the other hand, Augustine says that when pagan literature contains truth, we should claim it. Like the Israelites taking the gold out of Egypt, Christians should put pagan riches to better use. He includes literature as one of the jewels we might lawfully make off with.

In his investigation of this conundrum, Donald Williams says that Augustine’s mixed reception of literature is a starting place but not a definitive statement on how Christians should take literature.

It is not fiction itself that Augustine objects to. He knows Christ told parables. Nor is it rhetorical elegance. His own work testifies to his approval of that.

Like Tertullian, then, Augustine’s opprobrium is for non-Christian literature. He mitigates that with his comment about Egyptian gold. Implicitly, he agrees that the Bible isn’t literature. It’s something else.

So that prompts me to ask the question: why am I interested in talking about the Bible as literature?

A tentative answer is that the features in the Bible I think we must embrace–especially in preparation for reading and understanding non-sacred work–are symbols (repeated images) and types (repeated patterns of action). These features are more the domain of literary writing than scientific writing, and I think the Bible is too rich in these features to downplay them. Maybe “literary” is the wrong adjective. Still, the symbolic and typological features of scripture are what I’m trying to describe and use as the foundation for a Christian study of literature.

Litteratura vs. Scriptura

In his essay “What is Literature?” Rene Wellek provides a historical survey of the term. The most interesting fact, from my perspective?

We have to go to Tertullian and Cassian in the second century A.D. to find the term [‘litteratura‘] used for a body of writing. They contrast secular, pagan writing, litteratura, with scriptura, the Bible, the sacred writ.

Rene Wellek

Tertullian and Cassian, two early church fathers, categorically distinguish the Bible from literature. In their estimation, literature is writing that isn’t sacred. It could include fictional prose, poetry, mythology, or history. What matters most is that God did not inspire it.

Two observations:

  1. The initial distinction between literature and the Bible came not from secular critics but from the Christian fathers.
  2. The larger context for the quotation from Tertullian’s work makes clear that he fears literature’s corrupting power. The sentence Wellek quotes (“Si doctrinam saecularis litteraturae ut stultitiae apud deum deputatum, aspernamur” – “we despise the teaching of secular literature as being foolishness in God’s eyes”) makes clear that Tertullian wants Christians to stay away from literature. I’ll need to read Tertullian’s essay. on “Spectacles.”

Religious Poetry

In the editorial introduction to a book called George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets (1978), Mario Di Cesare discusses how he put the book together. His talking points are revealing.

First, Di Cesare finds the title “metaphysical” for the five poets less convincing than “the school of Herbert.” The book only puts Herbert’s name in the title, and he is an explicitly Christian poet. His one poetic work, The Temple, is built around the visual and liturgical patterns of the church.

Second, Di Cesare decides to include “secular poems” (his own words) for Marvell and Herrick, despite the book’s title. Why? This book may be the only text students have for these poets, and the “secular” poems he’s chosen are of “great merit.”

Third, Di Cesare calls his notion of religion “broad and accommodating.” By this, he means that he doesn’t think a poem is bad because it’s got religion in it, nor does he think a poem is necessarily good because it’s religious. He calls both opinions “pitfalls.”

Fourth, and here’s the main point, Di Cesare calls “imagination” a “natural human faculty, not dependent on man’s belief.” This is problematic, as illustrated by how he describes the historical context of the poems in his own edition. “Since religion was a major element in the ordinary lives of these five poets, any disjunction between religion and other forms of human activity…would be quite artificial.”

What’s missing here is an admission that Herbert et al. would not have seen this blending of religion and other forms of human activity as something they chose to do…but simply as the way the world works. Herbert et al. were not pluralists. Di Cesare’s claim that imagination is “natural” nor “dependent on man’s beliefs” is not something Di Cesare’s selected poets would have agreed with.

And there lies the rub. One can’t be natural about religious (or any) poetry. Or again. To be natural is itself a religious approach.

“What is Literature?”

As I begin to write lessons for the Covenantal Literature curriculum, I keep returning to the question, “What is literature?”

It’s a subject of immense importance for a Christian understanding of literature. Is “literature” merely imaginative or fictional writing? If we say that the Bible is “literature,” what are we saying about its content?

In his book on biblical literature, critic Robert Alter asks these three questions:

In what sense can we, with our fundamentally secular assumptions about literary expression, speak of the Bible as literature?

If literature involves a powerful component of imaginative free play, can there be any real place for so anarchic, perhaps even subversive, an impulse in a body of texts as spiritually intent and as ideologically freighted as the Bible?

Is there any discernible methodological priority or complementarity between a literary approach and historical or text-critical approaches to the Bible?

Robert Alter, The World of Biblical Literature

Notice that Alter admits bringing “secular assumptions” to the text.

Such assumptions are ultimately self-defeating and explain why literature as an academic discipline has floundered. As an academic discipline, literature was meant to provide some coherent way of approaching symbols and types after the discrediting of the Bible. The move to consider the “Bible as literature” is just an extension of this bait-and-switch.

The Bible is literature, of course, and must inform how we define and study literature. If the Bible does not oppose “literary” writing with non-fiction, then we must not either.

There is much here to investigate.

Covenantal Symbols in Psalm 37

I read Psalm 37 for my devotions this morning. I knew it best for the promise of its fourth verse: if we delight in the Lord, He’ll give us the desires of our hearts.

A closer reading of the Psalm reveals specific declarations about ethics and succession. Those two covenantal points are connected with specific symbols.

Four quick observations:

  1. Disobedient people are compared to plants that wither or get mowed down (v. 1).
  2. Negative sanctions are associated with weapons. The evil man stabs himself in the heart with his own sword and has his arrows broken (v. 15).
  3. Ethical people are associated with the sun and light (v. 6).
  4. Inheritance/succession gets symbolized by earth/land (v. 9, 11, 22, 29, 34).

Representation

W.J.T. Mitchell’s article on “Representation” in Critical Terms for Literary Study begins with this observation.

Man, for many philosophers both ancient and modern, is the “representational animal,” homo symbolicum, the creature whose distinctive character is the creation and manipulation of signs—things that “stand for” or “take the place of” some­thing else.

For Christians, human beings are made imago Dei. Before they symbolize, they are symbols: representations or images of God.

This theological context helps clarify what’s missing from Mitchell’s next statement.

[R]epresentation has been the foundational concept in aes­thetics (the general theory of the arts) and semiotics (the general theory of signs). In the modern era (i.e., in the last three hundred years) it has also become a crucial concept in political theory.

Representation is a foundational concept in Christian theology, and the importance of Christ and the Bible to western aesthetics, semiotics, and political theory is no less crucial.

Mitchell concludes with a sober assessment of representation’s limitations.

Every representation exacts some cost, in the form of lost immediacy, presence, or truth, in the form of a gap between intention and realization, origi­nal and copy.

To which loss we should reply, by what standard? Presuppositions matter. The critic’s metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical commitments will affect that measurement.

Values and Language

From the introduction to the University of Chicago Press’s Critical Terms for Literary Study:

Theory isn’t difficult out of spite. It is difficult because it has proceeded on the premise that language itself ought to be its focus of attention; that ordinary language is an embodiment of an extremely powerful and usually unquestioned system of values and beliefs; and that using ordinary language catches you up in that system.

Thomas McGalaughlin

To which the covenantal reader says, “Amen!” Language is not neutral. It represents a host of metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical presuppositions.

But why does literary theory matter?

[F]reedom from terminology is not the goal. A more modest and attainable goal is learning to negotiate the complexities of life in language.

Thomas McGlaughlin

The goal of covenantal literature is not just negotiating with words, but reckoning with The Word.

The editors of Critical Terms want literary critics to be aware. Similarly, covenantal readers should be self-conscious and consistent. Of course, these parallel tracks will never converge.

A covenantal and self-conscious unpacking of terms like “representation” or “author” or “ethics” or “desire” demands a Critical Terms for Covenantal Study.

BRC: Murder on the Orient Express

Murder on the Orient Express – Agatha Christie

Take the English cozy murder mystery and set it on a train, while having the justice-meting detective let the guilty go free because he decides the murder itself was justice. That’s what Christie does with this classic Hercule Poirot mystery. Christie’s detective is an expert at reading human nature, and the novel tests and plays on the reader’s ability to read detective fiction. The book is oddly secular. The murderers aren’t acting in the stead of God; they’re working in the stead of the State. Covenantally, the book is about SANCTIONS (as is most crime fiction).

RECOMMENDED as a follow-up to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd