Heaven in ordinary: George Herbert's poetics

In Atlanta today I presented a paper titled "Heaven in ordinary: George Herbert's poetics", as part of a panel responding to Regina Schwartz's book, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World (Stanford UP 2008). My paper tried to respond to Schwartz's apophatic reading of George Herbert – here's an excerpt:

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Now if I asked you, what is George Herbert’s most characteristic way of talking about God, I wonder what you’d immediately think of? Story or narrative? Positive doctrinal statement? Negation? No, surely the first thing that comes to mind is Herbert’s conceits (a technical term for extended, elaborate metaphors). He takes a small, seemingly insignificant item from everyday life – something from around the home – and turns it into a delicate picture of God’s activity, God’s involvement.

In one of his poems, the Sundays of our lives are likened to beads threaded on a string, adorning us and making us beautiful for God. In another poem, Christ’s graveclothes in the empty tomb (he loves writing about clothes) are a handkerchief with which to dry our tears when we’re sad and grieving:

Arise, Arise;
And with his burial-linen dry thine eyes:
Christ left his grave-clothes, that we might, when grief
Draws tears, or blood, not want an handkerchief.

In ‘Holy Scriptures’ (I), Herbert compares the flat pages of scripture to God’s gracious condescension to the littleness of humanity. He says of scripture:

heav’n lies flat in thee,
Subject to ev’ry mounters bended knee.

Again, a homely picture based on a very simple, childlike observation: God’s word comes to us ‘flat’, and that means we can climb up to God by bending ourselves down low. With even the smallest effort, we can mount up to heaven, since it lies flat in holy scripture. A rather different picture from the mystical ascent of apophatic theology!

In another poem, ‘Jesu’, the human heart is like a children’s word puzzle: the letters are broken apart by affliction and scattered across the floor. When pieced back together, they spell both ‘I ease you’ (when the letters are spelled out individually: I-ES-U), and ‘JESU’ (when the letters are read all together). It’s a playful conceit, a little parable of God’s loving involvement with our lives – and with our language. (There’s a similar word-game in the poem ‘Colossians 3:3’, where the biblical text, my life is hid with Christ in God, is literally hidden in the lines of the poem, just as God’s work is hidden in the ordinary story of our lives.)

For a somewhat weirder conceit, consider ‘The Bag’. Here, the wound in Christ’s side is compared to a postman’s bag – if we want to ‘send or write’ anything to God, we can put our letters in this bag, the hole in Christ’s side, and like a reliable postman Christ will deliver our mail to God. He takes good care of our letters, placing them – here the conceit gets even stranger – placing them close to his heart:

If ye have any thing to send or write,
I have no bag, but here is room:
Unto my Fathers hands and sight,
Believe me, it shall safely come.
That I shall mind, what you impart;
Look, you may put it very near my heart.

Again, this is serious reflection on the way God becomes involved in human language. In Schwartz’s terms, we might even call this ‘language theory’, or poetics. But it takes the form not of positive theology or of negative theology, but of what Herbert himself calls ‘plainness’. Something like parable: a simple, rather humorous observation of daily life in an English village.

I won’t go on multiplying examples, since you can find these kinds of conceits on virtually every page of Herbert. It is his most characteristic speech-act, quite distinct from either apophatic or cataphatic strategies. Like the Jesus of the synoptic Gospels, Herbert can speak about God without so much as mentioning the word ‘God’. His poetry gives the impression that we can find God pretty much anywhere, that we can speak of God in virtually any language, especially the language of ‘plainness’, simplicity, the ordinary. ‘Heaven in ordinary’, as Herbert calls it – that is his language theory.

In which Stanley Hauerwas improves his grammar

Over at Halden’s blog, we’ve been discussing English grammar (in response to some silly sausage who disapproves of gender-neutral language). This led Halden to post the following anecdote about Hauerwas’ use of grammar:

Stanley Hauerwas was at Harvard to deliver a lecture and, being there early and still needing to do some preparation, he set out to find the library. Not finding it, he stopped a student and asked him, “Excuse me, where’s the library at?”

Incredulous, the student responded, “Sir, at Harvard we don’t end our sentences with a preposition.”

Stanley paused for a moment and then rephrased his question in a more grammatically appropriate manner: “Where’s the library at, asshole?”

A five-year ban on the word "trinitarian"

Following David’s post on annoying theological words, here’s my nomination for the Most Annoying Word (MAW) in contemporary theology:

Trinitarian \ˌtri-nə-'ter-ē-ən\
adj. Relating to a devout but vague fondness for the importance of the number three; the need to incorporate all theological statements within a balanced and inclusive schema; the formal bureaucratic procedure of ensuring that the Spirit does not feel marginalised or excluded. Examples: the real problem with his work is that it is not adequately trinitarian; the book’s focus on christology should be supplemented by a broader trinitarian description of the economy of salvation; Barth’s theology is not fully trinitarian, since it remains hampered by an underdeveloped pneumatology.

Now I like the Trinity as much as the next person, and I happen to think the Nicene Creed is the best thing ever written. But I think the use of the word “trinitarian” in much contemporary theology – as a generic slogan, applied willy-nilly on any occasion – has become an obstacle to real theological thinking.

It’s interesting to note that the English term “Trinitarian” was first used, in the 16th and 17th centuries, as a pejorative description of anti-trinitarians; the heretics were dubbed “Trinitarians”! Then, by the early 18th century, anti-trinitarianism had become so pervasive that orthodox writers were now described as “Trinitarians.” The word’s checkered history already reveals its proper functions and limitations: it has some usefulness as a party slogan, but it’s not so useful as an instrument of serious thought.

Although the late Colin Gunton played a tremendous role in the revival of systematic theology, I suspect his own ubiquitous deployment of the term “trinitarian” has had some unfortunate side-effects in contemporary theology. Worst of all, Gunton was also responsible for coining the unsightly and unseemly adverb “trinitarianly,” which has subsequently made inroads into theological discourse. (Admittedly, there were a few earlier uses of this adverb, but these were mercifully forgotten – the earliest I’ve found is by the American Presbyterian theologian W. G. T. Shedd, who used the word in 1863 to disparage Roman Catholic dogma: the Catholic Church, he growled, is “trinitarianly orthodox” even though it “remorselessly mutilates” and “annihilates” the doctrine of atonement.) As a result of Colin Gunton’s work, the word “trinitarianly” has now (like the word “trinitarian” before it) passed over into a positive slogan rather than a pejorative one.

Throughout his works, Gunton speaks – and these are just a few adverbial examples – of “a God conceived trinitarianly,” of “creation trinitarianly conceived,” of “revelation trinitarianly conceived,” of “trinitarianly conceived agency,” of “glory conceived trinitarianly,” of “immutability trinitarianly construed,” and (it gets worse) of the tendency to define God’s essence “pre- and extra-trinitarianly.” Unfortunately, more than a few theologians have now started using the word in the same way, in spite of its ungainliness, its un-Englishness, and its tendency towards triviality.

Now I don’t mean any disrespect to the memory of Colin Gunton; and I certainly wouldn’t want to be accused of thinking “untrinitarianly.” But here’s my proposal: let’s have a five-year ban on the word “trinitarian.” Perhaps if we avoided using the word so easily and so cheaply, we could concentrate more on thinking the Trinity, and on finding fresh, arresting, non-sloganeering language to describe the reality of God.

Oh, and here’s my second proposal: the next time you hear the word “trinitarianly,” you should reach for your revolver. Or if you’re lucky enough to be someone who edits theology manuscripts, you could just reach for your red pen instead.

Hearing God

This morning, I overheard this conversation between my two daughters (aged 5 and 3):

Older sister: You know, we can never hear God.
Younger sister: Yes we can!
Older sister: No, we can never hear him.
Younger sister: But I hear God every time I say the word God. You watch: God. See, I just heard “God”!

I don’t know about you, but I was impressed – there’s an entire theory of language here which deftly and elegantly resolves the hotly debated question of whether human beings can hear God. Perhaps my little daughter has been reading the pre-Socratics – it was Zeno who said, “If you say cart, a cart passes through your mouth.”

Five quotes on language

“We live in our language like blind men walking on the edge of an abyss.” —Gershom Scholem to Franz Rosenzweig, 26 December 1926.

“Language is the language of Being as clouds are the clouds of the sky. In what it says, thought leaves inconspicuous furrows in language. They are even more inconspicuous than the furrows that the farmer, slow of step, draws through the field.” —Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Pathmarks (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), p. 276.

“The origin lies at a place of inevitable loss, the point where the truth of things corresponded to a truthful discourse, the site of a fleeting articulation that discourse has obscured and finally lost.” —Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 143.

“The Wittgensteinian definition of the mystic as the appearing of what cannot be said is literally a definition of the gag. And every great philosophical text is the gag exhibiting language itself, being-in-language itself as a gigantic loss of memory, as an incurable speech defect.” —Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2000), p. 60.

“In the beginning was the Speech.” —John 1:1.