Words, words, words: F&T seven years on

Whoops! I started this blog on a whim, and it looks like it's been going for seven years now. Seven years! 

So I've just spent a few minutes glancing back over the archive – all those posts, all those opinions, all that writing. Looking back over it, I had a sinking feeling. 

Who wrote all those thousands of posts, and why? Why is this person so opinionated about everything, including things he knows nothing about? Why is he so quick to brag about the things he knows and so careful to conceal the things he doesn't? Why is he so dismissive of some people and so effusive towards others? And why does he write in this manner? All that pseudo-poetical posturing? All those dubious jumbles of metaphors? All those excitable outpourings of adjectives? Why is he never content just to state a thing plainly and be done with it? What is he trying to prove anyway? And to whom?

And why has he so painstakingly, so fastidiously concealed the real issues of his own life? His frustrations and disappointments, where are they? His anxieties, his doubts, his shame? His anger, especially with himself? The restlessness and hurt that he carries around with him – why has he disguised all that? What is he trying to bury under all those words? And who is he hiding from anyway? Only himself? 

Sifting through the rubble of words, I also noticed a few things I really liked. Some things were well said, and I'm glad somebody said them. Whoever wrote those bits, I rather like him. But I don't recognise him. I am trying to recall what might have motivated him to write like that on those rare occasions when he actually did write well. Was his thirst for affirmation so strong at those moments that it produced, of its own accord, something worthwhile? And even those best moments (I see now, embarrassed) are not half so good as they must have seemed when they were being written. All the excesses, the mistakes, the lack of discipline, the egotism – it's frightful to have to witness it.

But I'm making a mistake. I am talking about writing as if it were a thing in itself, a fixed object, a school exercise composed for an impartial examiner. When all along what this blog has brought me is friendship – the good and pleasant society of other people. 'Words, words, words' – they are very sociable things really. That's what good about them.

I remember now why I started writing here seven years ago. I was working in a tedious job, I went to a tedious church, I lived in a tedious city, and for the life of me I couldn't find anyone to talk to about the things that really interested me. One day on my lunch break I started writing, in the modest hope that someone might reply. I was like the castaway who rolls up his letter and puts it in a bottle and throws it away.

I wasn't disappointed either. Looking back over those 'posts' – all those letters in bottles adrift in cyberspace – the surprising thing is how many answers have come back, and how many friendships I've enjoyed as a result. The business of life is to acquire friends; and, as it turns out, a blog is one excellent way to go about it. It is surprising to think how big the cast of characters in my life has become, and how small it was before.

Forget about the writing, then. Perhaps it was all a mistake; no matter. I believe in the forgiveness of sins, otherwise I would never have the courage to write anything at all. 'We are beggars, that is true' – every paragraph proves it. And even if it was all a mistake, even if every word was wrong, I am glad for all of it when I think of all those friends I never would have had otherwise. (For instance: what could be more ridiculous than to go through life without knowing Kim Fabricius? What would be the point of a life like that?) I suppose that's what grace is all about. Not that your failures are erased, but that your worst mistakes become, by a mysterious providence, the source of all that is best and happiest in your life. You write badly, all the time, and as a result you get some friends.

So I roll up this note too, and shove it in a bottle for the waves. Why not? If I ever look back on these words one day, I suppose I'll be displeased and wish I'd never said it, or had said it better, or whatever. But perhaps someone, somewhere, will find it washed up on the shore. Perhaps they will open it. Perhaps they will answer: another friend!

The disappearance of friendship

I'm giving some talks this weekend on the theology of friendship. Today I talked about the disappearance of friendship, which I traced back to four modern cultural mythologies: the mythology of sex; the mythology of instinct; the mythology of the family; and the mythology of work. Here's a passage I quoted from Foucault on the modern disappearance of friendship:

Homosexuality became a problem … in the eighteenth century…. I think the reason it appears as a problem, as a social issue, at this time is that friendship had disappeared. As long as friendship was something important, was socially accepted, … it just didn’t matter. Once friendship disappeared as a culturally accepted relation, the issue arose: ‘What is going on between men?’ ... The disappearance of friendship as a social relation and the declaration of homosexuality as a social/political/medical problem are the same process. (Foucault, Ethics: Essential Works Volume 1, p. 171)

On theology and friendship

Thomas Mann once said that a writer is simply someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

I wonder if this insight could also be extended into theology. Theologians are people for whom the Christian faith is especially difficult, incomprehensible, infuriating. As a rule they are not especially talented or spiritually adept individuals. They are people whose minds have been hurt by God, and they are restlessly searching for – what? Healing perhaps, or catharsis? To expect so much from the study of theology would be futile or even dangerous. At any rate there is no lack of opportunities for theological catharsis: often our worship services seem calculated to remove the difficulty of believing, to make God easy and accessible, more a cure than a wasting sickness.

Perhaps then we should define theologians like this: They are people for whom even the Christian worship service does not provide adequate catharsis of the hurtfulness of God.

That is why, as a general rule, you should try to show kindness to theologians. Not because they are necessarily exemplary personalities. Not because they necessarily know what they're talking about. Not because they are necessarily people of great faith. Instead, you should show them kindness because their faith is so weak and so vulnerable; because they are burdened by the difficulty of God; because they are driven to think about God the way some people are driven to drink. You should take care of your theologians the way you would care for the widow and the orphan.

Jürgen Moltmann has somewhere remarked: "We are not theologians because we are particularly religious; we are theologians because in the face of this world we miss God."

This does not mean theology takes place under conditions of God's absence. We "miss God" in the world only because God is revealed in the world, only because God is so devastatingly near. It is in the company of an intimate friend that one experiences the true depths of loneliness. Theology springs from the joy and the loneliness of God's nearness.

Thus one of the proper goals of theology is not so much spiritual catharsis or intellectual mastery – clearing up every difficulty so that one can sleep at night – as the cultivation of theological friendships. Friendship sustains the difficulty of thinking about God. I warm myself by the fire of a friend's loneliness. God is near, and so we are lonely for God. Friendship is the small room in which we share together the loneliness and the joy of God's nearness.

George Herbert: prayer, language, silence

At the Sarah Coakley symposium next week, I'll be giving a paper on "Prayer as Theological Method". It's partly on the relation between prayer and theology in Augustine's De Trinitate, and partly on the way poetry exemplifies this relation between prayer and theological language. Here's an excerpt from the section on prayer.

George Herbert’s much-loved sonnet, ‘Prayer’ (I), portrays this tendency of language to be overwhelmed by the divine plenitude:

Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age,
Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;

Engine against th’ Almightie, sinner’s towre,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-daies world transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear;

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bels beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud,
The land of spices; something understood.

The whole poem comes rushing out as a single breathless exhilarating sentence, piling image upon image in a kind of rhapsodic abandon. The images are startling, contradictory, incapable of conceptual reduction. Prayer is as gentle as breath or the fragrance of spices, yet it is also a violent ‘engine against th’ Almightie’, a battering ram with which the Christian lays siege against God. It is as soothing as ‘a kinde of tune’, yet it’s a tune that strikes ‘fear’ into the heart of all creation. It is exotic, strange, inexplicable – the Milky Way, the bird of paradise, the land of spices – yet also as homely and familiar as dressing in one’s Sunday best. Yes, prayer is heaven, but it is ‘heaven in ordinarie’. It maps out the contours of the inner self – ‘the soul in paraphrase’, ‘the souls bloud’ – but also reaches ‘beyond the stars’. It’s like a ship’s sounding line, not dropped into the sea but cast up into the sky, a ‘plummet sounding heav’n’. Similarly, it is ‘reversed thunder’: Jove’s thunder is turned back on himself, a bolt shooting up from earth to heaven.

These dizzying spatial images stretch the imagination beyond its furthest limits. The stage on which prayer takes place is infinitely vast. Yet juxtaposed with this immensity is the image of prayer as ‘the soul in paraphrase’, a tiny abridgement of all the depths and complexities of a human story. Indeed prayer is an hour-long abridgement of the whole ‘six daies world’ – an image that at once evokes the huge dimensions of prayer and its minute scale. It is a gigantic mystery that sounds the most profound depths, yet so small you can fit it in your pocket: like a whale drawn on the back of a matchbox.

In the final stanza, all the senses are engaged. Prayer is soft and supple to touch; it tastes like manna; it is the vision of a star-filled sky; it smells like the land of spices; it sounds like the distant peal of bells (either earth’s bells heard in heaven, or heavenly bells heard on earth: Herbert is tantalisingly ambiguous). This explosion of sensual imagery doesn’t serve conceptual clarity. What would church bells sound like if they echoed from another galaxy? What does an exotic country smell like, a country you’ve never visited? Come to think of it, what exactly does heavenly manna taste like? If these images teach us something about prayer, it is primarily by destabilising our understanding, driving us to the brink of an unspeakable mystery.

And so the whole great cascade of imagery is finally resolved in just two words, ‘something understood’. I say resolved, since traditionally the sonnet introduces a resolution after the volta, or turn: the sestet in the Italian sonnet, or the final couplet in the Shakespearian sonnet. In Herbert’s poem one anticipates a resolution, but it never seems to arrive – until it suddenly interrupts the final line in a way that is startling, abrupt, unexpected. Just as prayer abridges all history into an hour, so the whole poem is condensed into these closing words. What is prayer? It is ‘something understood’. These are the only words in the poem that are not wrapped up in some imagery: here there is neither concept nor imagery, only a quiet understanding.

The real purpose of all the conflicting images was simply to clear this space – not, in fact, a space for understanding (as though the poem were trying to ‘explain’ prayer), but a space for prayer itself. As talk-about-prayer passes over into praying, something is understood that language can never capture. In fourteen lines we have plumbed heaven and earth, feasted and made war, spanned all the farthest reaches of time and space. But now – as so often in Herbert – we find ourselves kneeling alone in the dusky light of a little country church, listening softly to that profound yet homely silence. Here at last, where understanding ceases, prayer is understood.

Certainly, then, there is something akin to an apophatic moment. The moment of silent understanding, however, occurs not in opposition to the clumsy limitation of language, but within it. It is Herbert’s first thirteen-and-a-half lines that create the experience of the poem’s close. It’s not as though there were first of all a sheer wordless experience of prayer, which is subsequently described in words. Rather the poetic language itself creates the conditions for an experience of silence. Wordless prayer is a possibility within language. Contemplative silence is the calm eye at the centre of the roiling storm of language.

To put it another way, Herbert’s poem is not about the poverty of human language, but about the inexhaustible riches of prayer. Prayer is too much – too much for language, too much even for poetry. More than anywhere else in Herbert’s poetry, we catch a glimpse here of language straining against its own possibilities – not as one struggles against a straitjacket, but as a horse champs at the bit before a race, straining because there is too much to say. Silence is not the phenomenon that ensues when language reaches its limit, much less some primordial pre-linguistic abyss from which language subsequently emerges. In the company of a close friend, I sometimes find myself reduced to silence. Not because the relationship is wordless (nothing is more verbose than friendship), but because in friendship one can never say enough; the real goal of friendship is to talk your way into silence. This is just what Herbert portrays in so many of his poetic conversations with God. One can never say enough to God. And so, in its fullness, language ripens into silence. Language is outrun by its own resources, it spills over into the baffled joy of contemplation.