The plague of italics: its causes, history, and remedy

 For a long time I have kept silent on this topic. But the word is like fire in my bones. I cannot be silent, I must speak. Too much is at stake. All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good bloggers to do nothing. My friends, there is a great evil at large in the world, and today I must raise my voice against it.

I refer to the use of italics in theological prose.

Now the italic was once man’s friend. It provided writers and their readers with a humble, homely service. You could use italics (1) for the title of a book or film (Gone with the Wind), or (2) for foreign words (mieux vaut prévenir que guérir), or (3) for algebraic expressions (n + 1), or (4) to show that a word is being used self-consciously as a word (“George Herbert uses the word stand to mean indecision”). Beyond those four uses, the italic had only one further legitimate use, and that was (5) to add emphasis to a word in special cases where a sentence would be unintelligible or confusing without it. This last use of italics is harder to define but easy to illustrate (“I only said I might murder you”; “the question is whether I’m in love with you”).

Now hear me, all you writers of the world! Hear me, you publishers and editors! Hear me O students and teachers! Beyond the five uses that I have just mentioned, there is no occasion for adding italics to your sentences.

No. Occasion.

If you would like to emphasise a certain word in your sentence, then you should construct the sentence in such a way that the emphasis falls where you want it to fall. That is why the Lord has given us the power to make sentences, so that we can get our point across with all the emphasis and precision that our hearts desire. But we have not been given this wonderful gift for the purpose of controlling our readers, or subjugating them, or micromanaging their responses, or shouting in their inner ear, or giving them migraines by constantly making their eyes shift between good Christian erect letters and lazy unrighteous slouching ones.

The overuse of italics has, today, reached plague proportions. Writers sprinkle their sentences with italics merely because they would like you to notice these particular words. But if I am reading the sentence, how could I fail to notice those particular words? Why, author, do you need to give me such emphatic and overbearing guidance? I am already reading your sentence; I am already committed to it; I am already willing to hear what you have to say.

Now I wish it were as easy as condemning the secular authors and praising the theologians for their chaste and lucid speech. But in this matter the children of the world are wiser than the children of light. Nowhere is the spread of italics more pervasive than in Christian theology. Nowhere else does one find such supercilious pedantry mixed with such despotic typographical authoritarianism. Nowhere else are authors so concerned to manage and control, word by italicised word, the reader’s responses to whatever is being said.

How did this plague of italics enter our sacred discourse? Those who like to claim that All Bad Things come from America will find no comfort here. For this infection has come, I am sorry to say, from the very heartland of our language, from Mother England herself.

I do not have time to write the full history here, so let me give it to you in brief. The virus was created in the theological laboratories of Great Britain’s most prestigious universities. The spread of the italic can be traced back to 1960s Oxford and Cambridge, and specifically to a generation of Catholic and Anglo-Catholic theologians influenced by Wittgenstein. The trouble began when these scholars started to cultivate an Anglicised imitation of Wittgenstein’s rather barbed, emphatic, italicised prose style.

If you have ever read a bit of Wittgenstein, you will know that an uncommonly extensive use of italics is one of the hallmarks of his German prose style. I have no objection to this since Wittgenstein was a genius; he was smarter than the rest of us put together; he changed the history of philosophy. If your ideas are as unique as Wittgenstein’s then please, by all means, go ahead and express them in a unique style. The problem is when the rest of us, mere mortals that we are, turn somebody else’s unique style into a meaningless affectation. It is bad for the language and, to that extent, bad for the soul.

In a thorough study of Wittgenstein’s use of italics, Gordon Baker observes its corrupting influence on later authors:

“Italics in [Wittgenstein’s] writings might be treated as the written counterpart of a well-known feature of his speech: he had the habit of putting very considerable stress on particular words or phrases. This mannerism proved infectious with some of his disciples. It has given much leverage for caricature and mockery (of him and them); as if a random exaggerated stress on such words as ‘this’ or ‘that’ might suffice by itself to create an aura of profundity” (Gordon Baker, “Italics in Wittgenstein,” in Wittgenstein’s Method, 225).

By a monstrous irony of history, some of the 1960s Wittgensteinian theologians banded together to form a Catholic Marxist group known as Slant. They had a journal by the same name. It had a lot of italics.

Now I won’t name names. And I happen to think that this particular circle of British Wittgensteinians produced some of the most worthwhile theology of the past fifty years. But their influence on the language of our discipline has been less than satisfactory. Their italicised affectation spread to their students and their students’ students, until eventually everyone was doing it – it’s all very biblical.

Let me show you some photographic evidence. These examples are chosen at random from theological books. They come from books on my own shelves, from authors I love and admire. (Love the sinner, hate the sin.) Let the reader decide if I am exaggerating the scale of the problem! Let the writer search his heart, and perhaps his books, in case I have used one as an example! Let publishers and editors beat their breasts – or, if that sounds too kinky, at least let them hang their heads!

Let us put a stop to all this, here and now! Let us make a vow, each one of us, never to italicise a word for emphasis unless the sentence would not make sense without it. Above all, let us agree never to italicise the words it is not true at the beginning of a sentence. No good will come of it!

If we don’t stop now, before long writers will start using bold-face to emphasise random bits of their text. Oh wait.

Procrastination as a way of life

Because I am an uncommonly lazy and disorganised person, I have made productive procrastination one of the rules of my life. Some members of the human race, I know it, are able to get things done simply by planning and discipline. I respect those people. I admire them from afar. I bless their creator for making them so well. Not that I blame God for making me into such a slovenly specimen of humanity. His ways are not our ways, and that is all right with me. But there came a point in my life when I saw that there were only two roads before me. Either I could achieve nothing for the rest of my days, or I could become a better procrastinator. A dismal crossroad, reader, but there you have it.

So I chose productive procrastination as my path in life. Don’t call it a bad habit; I prefer to think of it as a vocation. If you get really good at it, there is even a kind of poetry in it. That is what I’m striving for: procrastination as a work of art.

The core principle of productive procrastination is simple: have many tasks before you, never just one, and always choose an easier task when you feel like procrastinating. When I am meant to be writing a book, I squander my time writing a learned journal article. When I am meant to be writing journal articles, I write blog posts. When I feel that I should write another blog post, I work on my novel. When I am meant to be preparing lectures, I read ancient literature. When I should be grading papers I work on improving my lectures. By the end of each year I am surprised to see how many things I have been able to achieve, even though everything I did all year felt like a diversion. That is one of the benefits of productive procrastination: you can work every day of your life without ever feeling as though you’re working. Even as infernal a thing as writing a journal article can feel like fun when you’re meant to be writing a book.

Here is the procrastination formula, in case you don’t already know it. For every necessary task (T) there is an easier alternative (P). The completion of T requires a certain quantity of psychological energy (e). Whenever you choose P instead of T, there is a remainder of psychological energy (r), since the energy required for P is always less than the energy required for T. The remainder of psychological energy can be calculated as r = eT–eP.

Unproductive procrastination occurs whenever P involves Facebook, video games, watching funny videos on YouTube, or, in its deepest and most devastating form, downloading entire seasons of Game of Thrones. Productive procrastination occurs whenever P involves writing, reading, creating art, renovating the home, or some other method of enlarging the sum of human good.

The disadvantage of productive procrastination (I admit it) is that T is incomplete. The advantage is that something else, P, has been achieved, and that this has happened without using up the quantity of energy that was brought to the task (since it was the energy required for T, not the energy required for P, that was used to complete P). Ideally, this means that r can be used to make some progress on T, even though r will never be enough to complete T, or to complete it in the way that had been envisaged.

I don’t claim that this is a perfect system. I don’t claim that it’s as good as the system of those non-procrastinators who simply plan what they are going to do and then do it in an orderly fashion. But let us forget about those people: none of them are reading this blog anyway, unless they have scheduled the time for it. Right at this moment the non-procrastinators of the world are doing something that the rest of us know so little about: they are working – actually working! – on T.

I have written these things while I was supposed to be repairing the guinea pig hutch. But look! I still have some energy left (r). I will take that energy and do a quick job on the hutch. It won’t be perfect but it will be good enough – if the guinea pigs are still there, if they have not run off by now, if they have not gone away or been found by foxes or eaten by birds.

In praise of short sentences

One of the themes of my life this year has been the short sentence. Early in the year an experienced editor brought to my attention the virtues of the short sentence. I took his words to heart. I have been trying to use a greater variety of sentence types in my writing, and I have particularly been labouring to achieve good short sentences. It is harder than it sounds.

I have also begun to notice that many college students could improve their writing dramatically merely by setting their sights on shorter sentences. Many students have somehow got the assumption that scholarly writing requires a certain tone of voice. I don’t know where this assumption comes from. I am inclined to blame it on the rhetorical posturing of well-meaning but fundamentally inept high school English teachers – the kind of teacher who promotes “critique” and “decoding” of “texts” instead of explanation and clarity of ideas. I do not blame these teachers. I hope they will still be allowed into heaven. I know they are only doing what they’re told. At any rate, whatever the source of this malaise, the symptoms are evident in the tendency of students to obfuscate simple ideas through a complexification of syntax, a multiplication of imprecise verbs instead of the selection of the one strong verb, and a deliberate substitution of polysyllabic words whose meanings are often vague and slippery for smaller ones whose meanings are plain and solid. It is all very anti-working-class. The student’s shame of his uneducated parents and their drab suburban home is transferred to a (deeper and more scandalous) shame of plain speech. Nothing good will come of this.

So I have been encouraging students to aim for shorter sentences that say exactly what you want to say, not for longer sentences that sound the way you would like to sound. And – physician, heal thyself – I’ve been trying to do it too.

I have also been noticing short sentences when I read. Sometimes I have underlined a sentence simply because it is so short and good. One of the theological geniuses of the short sentence is Tertullian. Some of Tertullian’s most impressive (and humorous) rhetorical effects are achieved with short sentences. In his treatise on the Trinity Against Praxeas, he cites a list of biblical texts used by his opponents, and then responds drily with a two-word sentence: “Legimus omnia” – “We’ve read all that.” What a sentence! Sharp as a sniper’s shot. The whole of Tertullian’s little treatise on the Roman toga (De Pallio) is abuzz with similar short-sentence effects, humorous and biting and precise.

A modern genius of the short theological sentence is the congregationalist writer P. T. Forsyth. He uses potent bursts of staccato sentences. Like the following: “To lead the democracy the Church must be free of the democracy. The Church is not a democracy. It is certainly not the democracy on its religious side. That is but Hooker up to date. It is latter-day Erastianism. What is the difference? Democracy will acknowledge no authority but what it creates whereas the Church has no authority but what creates it. It is an infinite difference…. The Church is not the indiscriminate champion of the democracy but its benefactor, its faithful friend and prophet. It is not its tribune but its conscience. The Church is not there in the first instance to represent democracy, but to represent God to the democracy. It is not there to speak for it, but to speak to it” (The Church and the Sacraments, p. 118).

What a difference it would make to contemporary theological writing if we had more of this! At the end of his treatise on the toga, Tertullian avows his preference for the philosopher’s cloak over the Roman toga with the short exclamation: “Gaude pallium et exsulta!” – “Rejoice, O cloak, and exult!” I will paraphrase the great North African, in praise of short sentences: Rejoice, O short sentence, and triumph!

How fiction differs from film: the problem of time

For the nth time in my life, I have begun to write a children's novel. All my previous attempts have ended in failure, mostly due to certain technical problems that I have been unable to solve. One of these is the problem of representing time.

The peculiar genius of cinema is its capacity to portray the passing of time directly. One can see this with special vividness in films where the action unfolds in real time – films like Rope (1948), Bicycle Thieves (1948), High Noon (1952), and 12 Angry Men (1957). The ability of film to record time is one reason why some of the greatest directors – Hitchcock, Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Scorsese, among others – saw the long-take shot as having an essential importance, as if cinema achieves its full effect when it shows time unfolding in a single shot.

Even a scene depicting boredom can be captivating onscreen. One of the most beautiful scenes in Journey to Italy (1954) shows a married couple driving in a car across Italy, utterly bored with each other's company. The camera shows the passing of houses, fields, and street signs. It shows the sullen boredom on the faces of Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders. But it is not boring to watch. We are watching the passing of time, and that is marvellous to behold.

In his classic study on the art of cinema, Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky argued that time is in fact the medium of film. The whole artistry of film, he believed, lies in the way it shows things passing through time. The director carves a film from a "lump of time". "Time [is] the very foundation of cinema: as sound is in music, colour in painting, character in drama."

With the novel, things are very different. Fiction cannot portray time directly. Events in a novel cannot unfold in real time. The novel cannot show what the passing of time looks like. Of course, the ability of fiction to portray human consciousness depends on time as a condition. But the novel is sculpted out of consciousness, not out of time. Time is hidden behind the action of the plot.

This distinction between film and fiction might sound philosophical. But it has helped me to find a solution to a technical problem that I have faced whenever I have tried to write fiction. In my attempts to write novels, I kept trying to achieve cinematic effects. If the character is going on a journey, I would describe the journey. If the character is waiting for something, I would describe the waiting. If things were developing, I would try to describe the process. The results are deadening. Process and movement are the stuff of film, but not the stuff of fiction. (Obviously there are exceptions. A novel like Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is a work of genius precisely in the way it seems to record the passing of time. A novel like this is the exception that proves the rule. Anyway, for present purposes I'm not concerned with works of genius. I'm just trying to figure out some basic techniques for creating an ordinary run-of-the-mill novel.)

It was only recently that this difference between film and fiction became clear to me, in part because I've been watching a lot of early movies from the 1920s and 30s. So I decided to try another children's novel. I've planned this novel simply as a series of scenes plotted along a timeline. I am deliberately trying to pack everything into these scenes and to leave out everything between the scenes. I have renounced (or am trying to renounce) the attempt to describe process, development, and the passage of time. 

The approach I'm trying here is also modelled partly on the theatre, where the gaps between scenes are largely responsible for the creation of suspense. Shakespeare never shows anybody going on a journey: they have either arrived or they are about to set out; or, often enough, you hear about the journey indirectly during another scene. All the action is crammed into a sequence of more or less static scenes, while the passage of time (including all sorts of major developments in character and plot) occurs between the scenes.

I don't know if I'll achieve better results this time. My earlier attempts at novels have all sunk beneath the weight of their own insufferable boredom and indigence. This one is called The Island of Lost Cats. It is modelled on a detective story. It involves a boy, his cousin named Jack, and an island on which all the cats have mysteriously disappeared. 

On daily writing routines: or, What to switch on and what to switch off

I've learned a lot about writing by observing people who write in cafes.

There is a place I used to go in California that always seemed to be full of writers – students, professors, novelists, writers of screenplays and children's books and humanitarian reports. It was a popular spot and the coffee was good. Over a few months I myself drafted two whole books at that cafe (it must have been the quality of the coffee); though I discarded both books after I'd finished them (it must have been the quantity of the coffee.)

In that particular establishment, I took great interest in studying the routines of the writers who came through the door. Ninety percent of them followed exactly the same pattern, which I will now describe for you as carefully as I can:

1. Writer orders coffee.
2. Writer finds a suitable table in the cafe. Some deliberations regarding lighting, position of chair (facing towards or away from window), distance from other tables, power socket requirements, etc.
3. Writer opens laptop or Moleskine notebook. 
4. Writer checks phone.
5. Sends message or email or performs facebook thingy on phone.
6. Repeats steps 4 and 5 for the next 90 minutes.
7. Sheepishly places phone in pocket: closes laptop or Moleskine notebook: shuffles out the door: very dejected: will probably drink alone tonight.

After making a careful study of this pattern, I discovered that there is a certain mysterious correlation between internet access and a writer's happiness. The more you have of one, the less you have of the other. The less you have of one, the more you have of the other.

I don't use cafes much anymore. But I'm working on a writing project at the moment, using the following daily routine. Feel free to borrow any of these steps if you find them helpful:

1. Get up at the same time every day a couple of hours before dawn. (In my case the timing is critical because of The Children.)
2. Switch on lights in kitchen. 
3. Switch on coffee machine.
4. Switch off wireless router. 
5. Switch off phone.
6. Sit down at kitchen table. Drink coffee. Write 770 words. (Or whatever your daily limit is: I find I can manage 770 words without too much fear or exhaustion. 800 would be impossible.)
7. Once I've reached my word length I reward myself with a small tick in my diary. If I miss a day, a condemnatory cross is placed in the diary. (The ticks make you Happy. A whole row of ticks at the end of the week makes you Very Happy.) 
8. When you are finished, reverse steps 2 through 5, switching off what you had switched on and switching on what you had switched off. And do it all to the glory of God.

A note on writing: inspiration and asceticism

An odd thing about writing. Normally I begin to write after some particular idea has occurred to me in a moment of inspiration – let us call this idea x. So I sit down to write. I start building up a picture as a backdrop to x. Sometimes I begin with x and sometimes I end with it. It is either the theme which I am developing or the goal towards which I want to lead the reader. Ideally, readers will feel they are discovering x all by themselves. As I am writing, things start to develop in unexpected ways. A certain emphasis emerges which I hadn't anticipated. Certain things turn out to be dull when put to paper, so I find myself gravitating away from those things and towards other things, more solid and interesting.

Then when I have finished a draft I go back and edit it. I find the weak generic verbs and replace them with stronger ones. I delete most of the adjectives (adjectives being a particular weakness of mine). I look for places where I have used two nouns or two verbs instead of one (since nothing enfeebles a sentence more than indecision over nouns and verbs). I delete digressions, anything that might distract from the effect that I am trying to achieve.

Last of all – here is the odd thing – just when I think it is finished, I discover a glaring weakness that I had not noticed before. It is x. There it is, standing there like a bit of old scaffolding, once necessary but now quite useless. It draws attention to itself. It obscures the view. It does not belong here anymore. Here comes the hardest part. Here comes the decision that will determine whether the writing is any good or whether it is another mediocrity. Often for sentimental reasons I cannot bear to get rid of x. This is a spiritual failing and it produces failed writing. Sentimentalism can be useful at the start of the writing process, but ruthlessness is necessary at the end. It takes courage to delete poor x, beloved x. But I have to do it. I have to expunge it, every last trace of it, not only killing it but burying it too. Nobody but me should know that x ever existed. Only then is my job done.

This, as I understand it, is the writing process: inspiration plus asceticism. An inspired idea is not worth the paper it's written on unless it is subjected to a merciless asceticism.

On books written for students: a polemic

In times past there were two kinds of books that scholars could write: books for other scholars and books for the general public. But now a third type of book has insinuated its way into our minds and hearts: books written for students. In the past several years it has become fashionable for authors to write books for students, and for publishers to publish them. It may even have become fashionable – who knows? – for students to read them. 

Just look at the endorsements on the back cover of the latest theology paperback: "an essential book for undergraduate courses" – "a landmark work that will be required reading for graduate courses in the field" – "now all new students will have a sure guide to the terrain!" – and so on.

This is a bad state of affairs – bad for writers, bad for publishers, bad most of all for students and the discipline – and I must raise my voice against it. 

Can you imagine signing up for a university course on Shakespeare, only to discover that you are expected to read summaries, introductions, cleverly worded journal articles – everything, in short, except Shakespeare? Or a course in biology in which the students spend so much time reading introductory literature on microscopes that they never actually get to look into one? It is the same with students who pay good money for the opportunity to study the Christian tradition, and end up squandering their time reading about the views of various theologians without actually getting to encounter a real theologian at close range.

Now introductory survey books are a fine thing. I have read, or started reading, some of them myself. But who are they for? The answer, which ought to be obvious, is that they are for the general public. Anyone interested in Shakespeare can pick up an accessible introduction to his plays: that is why such books are written. But a student who enrolls in a university course on Shakespeare should protest vehemently if they found they were expected to read the same introductory material. The reason you go to university is to study the thing itself – Shakespeare's plays – under the guidance of an expert in the field.

It is the same with theology. It is an excellent thing that an interested member of the public may learn about Christianity simply by reading a good scholarly survey. But if that person subsequently showed up at seminary or divinity school, they would (or should) be scandalised to discover that their teachers wanted them to spend their time reading introductory books. The teacher's job is to help students engage with the tradition for themselves. That's the difference between spending $10 on a paperback and spending $10,000 on an education. It's the difference between reading a book in the comfort of your own armchair and submitting yourself to the rigours of an academic curriculum.

In the discipline of theology, the primary sources are not only scriptural texts but also those texts and lives which have proved generative of subsequent traditions of reflection and debate. Thus Irenaeus and Origen and Augustine are primary sources; Aquinas and Calvin are primary sources; Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila are primary sources; the life of St Antony and the life of St Francis are primary sources.

There is a bizarre assumption that primary sources are for the experts while students need the easier, more accessible stuff of secondary literature. But the truth is exactly the reverse. Anybody can read Augustine's Confessions or Julian of Norwich's Revelations – but it takes an expert to appreciate a judicious scholarly survey. That is why publishers struggle to sell copies of their Introductions and Guides, while Augustine and Julian of Norwich have never gone out of print, and never will until the end of the world.

This is not to say that primary sources have to be old books. If you are studying liberation theology, then some of the works of Gutiérrez are primary sources, since these works have generated a tradition of reflection and debate. If you are studying feminist theology then the works of Mary Daly and Rosemary Radford Ruether are primary sources. If you are studying political theology then not only Augustine and Calvin but also Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr might be read as primary sources. But not an introductory survey of liberation theology or feminist theology or political theology.

Does this leave our publishers with nothing to publish? Our aspiring authors with nothing to write about? By no means! Those of us who write should commit ourselves to the two main types of books outlined above: books for other scholars and books for the general public. But please, for the love of God, let us leave our students out of it.

Now I know publishers need to market their books to a wide readership, and I know there is Money to be made from textbooks. But writing for undergraduates is not only bad for the long-term health of the discipline, it's also a mug's game as far as writers are concerned. To write well, it is necessary to have a certain audience in view together with an aspiration to move that audience in some way: perhaps to persuade your scholarly peers to see things differently, perhaps to engage the interest of non-experts, or whatever. If you are aspiring to write for a captive audience – a student readership, required by force to read your book – then the quality of your writing will tend to measure up to the size of your aspiration. That is to say, you will end up writing a boring and tedious book that nobody would ever read without being forced into it. How much better to enlarge our aspirations, to envisage a wider audience of non-captive readers who might just enjoy learning all this stuff – if only we can keep them turning the pages. That, in my opinion, is what publishers ought to be looking for and encouraging in their authors, alongside their primary (and always necessary) commitment to publishing books for the scholarly community.

But as far as publishing books for students is concerned, we ought to be concentrating on finding the best ways of putting the primary sources into their hands. And here is where our publishers could actually be doing a lot more. In fact, at a time when the market seems to be flooded with Guides to This and Introductions to That, there is a surprising scarcity of exactly the kinds of books students really need. There seem to me to be three categories of books required here:

1. First, the anthology. It is only stating the obvious to say that anthologies are one of the most convenient ways of putting primary sources into the hands of students. There are some excellent anthologies around, but not nearly as many as you'd think. Wiley-Blackwell has tended to corner the market, with books like Alister McGrath's Christian Theology Reader, David Ford's Modern Theologians Reader, Samuel Wells' Christian Ethics reader, and Gene Rogers' Theology and Sexuality: Classic and Contemporary Readings. There are some from other publishers, such as Oliver and Joan O'Donovan's political theology sourcebook (Eerdmans) and Bryan Stone's new Reader in Ecclesiology (Ashgate), but they are few and far between. Given the range, diversity, and complexity of the Christian tradition, you'd expect to find a lot more options here, even at the most basic introductory level. And Gene Rogers' Holy Spirit: Classic and Contemporary Readings shows that the anthology doesn't have to be a dull chronological business, but can be a creative and provocative work in its own right, in which traditional texts are framed from the outset by contemporary questions and perspectives.

2. Second, the student edition. It was once common – and, in some humanities disciplines, still is – for publishers to produce special study editions of important works. Typically these include scholarly introductions, bibliographies for further reading, footnotes to help students understand the main text, and perhaps discussion questions at the end. Often headings and sub-headings are also introduced to help reveal the internal structure of the work. The Popular Patristics Series (SVS Press), Classics of Western Spirituality (Paulist Press), and the Works of Saint Augustine (New City Press) are excellent examples of this kind of publishing; and of course Penguin Classics has long published a handful of important Christian texts in this style. (These series are all marketed to the general public, but they are also ideal as student editions.) Another notable example is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works series by Fortress Press. But there is really not much else to speak of in theology. In some cases, simply inserting headings and sub-headings into a text would do wonders for the text's teachability. An obvious example: the whole of Barth's Church Dogmatics ought to be published with headings, sub-headings, sub-sub-headings, etc, with a separate table of contents in which students can take in the complex structure of each volume, chapter, and paragraph. (I have an edition of Thomas Aquinas's Summa with a big fold-out table like this, where you can see the whole plan of the work all at once.) To anticipate the objections of purists: there is nothing unseemly about interpolating headings into classic works. We've been doing it for centuries – where do you think Bible chapters come from, or Shakespeare's five acts? It is a tried and true way of helping readers to comprehend, study, and discuss difficult books.

3. Third, the study guide. This is less important than the first two categories, but there is still a legitimate place for separately published guides to primary sources. The aim of such books is to help students to understand a work's background, its internal structure, perhaps its reception, and some of the main scholarly debates surrounding it. There should be a strong component of discussion questions. Most importantly, such books are of use only if they are extremely concise, and if they point students back constantly to the primary source. The danger of such study guides – just think of CliffsNotes and SparkNotes – is that they easily become another substitute for reading the work itself. The longer a study guide becomes, the greater the risk: so keep it short and simple. In the best case such guides can be a valuable stimulus to the students' own engagement with the text, and can help them to stay focused on the big questions raised by the text. This kind of publishing is all but nonexistent in theology, though I've seen a couple of examples recently, both by Wipf & Stock: Jason Byassee's guide to Augustine's Confessions, and Kenneth Oakes' companion to Barth's Romans.

A final word to teachers. When it comes to assigning texts for student reading, every book has an opportunity cost. No matter how wise, wide-ranging, and benevolent the latest Dummy's Guide to Christology might be, a student who spends nine hours reading it could have spent those same nine hours reading Athanasius, Cyril, Rosemary Ruether, or whoever else you believe has a generative importance in the tradition.

But shouldn't we be suspicious of the power dynamics involved in identifying any specific body of texts as authoritative? Yes! I don't mean to suggest that we should all try to agree on a fixed canon of theological texts. But I do think every teacher of the discipline is responsible to decide on a kind of functional canon of primary sources for the purposes of their curriculum. Once you've decided what the primary sources are, you should try to ensure that every course or subject involves a direct encounter with those sources.

It is disempowering if students only ever get to hear other people's views about the tradition, without ever having the opportunity to engage it directly for themselves. If you want to cultivate a highly critical stance towards "canonical" Christian sources, that's fine. But the best way to do it is to help your students to read those sources for themselves. No matter how much critically informed secondary literature your students might read, you'll still be giving them mediated access to the tradition instead of helping them to engage it head-on for themselves. An education in which everything is mediated through expert opinion is ultimately disempowering, and only reinstates the authority of the expert without cultivating genuine intellectual freedom or independence.

Origen and the problem of writing

Origen was the church's first professional writer; but in his day Christianity was not yet a literary religion. Jerome lists 800 books by Origen, but a more accurate list by Eusebius details 2,000 books (most of them now lost). Origen's patron Ambrose of Alexandria commissioned most of these books and put a huge staff of scribes and copyists at Origen's disposal.

When Origen was asked to respond to Celsus, a pagan writer who had attacked Christianity in a book called True Doctrine, Origen observed that a written response was not really appropriate for the Christian faith. "Now Jesus is always being falsely accused," Origen says in the preface to Contra Celsum. "He is still silent in face of this and does not answer with his voice; but he makes his defence in the lives of his genuine disciples, for their lives cry out the real facts and defeat all false charges." The only real apologetics is the life of Christ's followers, not written arguments. Indeed Origen suggests that producing a written defence of the faith might actually diminish the vitality of the Christian community: "I would therefore go so far as to say that the defence which you ask me to compose will weaken the force of the defence that is in the mere facts, and detract from the power of Jesus."

He goes on to write the book anyway, a big doorstopper of a book, 500 pages in the English translation. But his bad conscience – his need to apologise for the act of writing – is revealing.

When he got to the fifth book of his massive Commentary on the Gospel of John – he had completed four books so far, and had only got through a few verses – Origen paused to reflect on the words of Ecclesiastes: "My son, beware of making many books" (Ecclesiastes 12.12). He admits that he seems to have transgressed this command, and he explores this problem at length before resuming the commentary.

In the first place, Origen notes that "none of the saints has produced numerous compositions and set out his understanding in many books." Even Moses left only five books, and Paul was content to dash off a few lines when the occasion demanded. As for John, Origen poignantly observes that he "has left one Gospel while confessing that he could compose so many that the world could not contain them."

Origen is distressed by the sheer quantity of all that he has written compared to the prophets, apostles, and saints. "I get dizzy as though I were suffering vertigo, lest perhaps by obeying you [Ambrose] I have disobeyed God and have not imitated the saints." And he quotes another seemingly damning Wisdom saying: "In a multitude of words you will not escape sin" (Proverbs 10.19).

Yet Origen ventures a defence of his prodigious literary output. He notes that the perfect Word of God is not "a multitude of words" but one single Word. A person who contradicts this Word is being loquacious; he says too much, and sins in what he says. But a person who speaks truthfully always speaks the one simple Word, "even if he says everything so as to leave out nothing." You could talk forever and still be saying just one Word; and you could speak a pithy falsehood and be condemned for multiplying words. Truth is simple, falsehoods are multiple. As an example of the simplicity of truth, Origen notes that there are not four Gospels in scripture; rather "there is truly one gospel through the four."

The conclusion is that it's quality that counts, not quantity. If Origen can set forth the truth in his many writings then he will be speaking only one word. But if he speaks contrary to the truth in even one place, he will have written "many books."

The whole procedure is a striking example of Origen's spiritual exegesis, an attempt to press beneath the literal sense of the prohibition against "making many books" and to yield up its theological meaning. Only after securing this exegetical conclusion does Origen also mention the obvious practical exigency: the heretics are busy writing "many books" (literally, and in a spiritual sense!), and somebody has to answer them "on behalf of the teaching of the church." Otherwise the inquisitive and the vulnerable will be led astray.

Origen says that he has offered this defence "for myself" as well as "for those who are able to speak and write." He is assuaging his own troubled conscience, but he is also spelling out an exegetical rationale for a literary Christian culture, a culture in which writers can "make many books" while cleaving to the one simple Word.

By the late fourth century such a literary Christian culture could be taken for granted. Nothing could more vividly illustrate the changes Christianity had undergone than a remark from Athanasius, an Egyptian theologian writing around the middle of the fourth century. In a letter written during one of his many exiles (if only Athanasius had a dollar for every time he was exiled!) he apologises for the brevity of his previous 50-page letter. "I thought what I wrote was ever so brief, and I accused myself of great lethargy for not being able to write as much as is humanly possible against those who are impious toward the Holy Spirit" (Letters to Serapion, 2.1.1).

"I accused myself of great lethargy": Athanasius has a guilty conscience too. He feels bad for not having written enough.

By the fifth century Christianity has produced a writer like Augustine. One finds him in a provincial town in North Africa, an ageing bishop carefully overseeing the maintenance of the vast library of his own works. Augustine devotes the end of his life to itemising each book chronologically; he makes revisions and corrections; he collaborates with his librarian Possidius, taking every pain to ensure the preservation of his works for posterity. If some earlier Christians had happened to be writers, Augustine is an author. He writes not simply to refute heresy or to respond to this or that local problem; he writes because he is an author. He writes for his contemporaries, and for those not yet born. He thinks of himself essentially as a man of letters. His identity is bound up with the production of literature. In a letter of 412, Augustine had remarked: "I try to be one of those who write by making progress and make progress by writing" (Epistle 143.2). And in his De Trinitate Augustine describes writing as a path of discovery, a way of seeking the face of God.

In the same period, one finds an author like the Roman poet Prudentius, for whom writing is not a tactical necessity but a spiritual vocation in its own right. In the preface to his collection of poems, Prudentius writes:

When I write or speak of these things,
how I wish to break free from the chains of my body
to the place where my nimble tongue's last sound carries me!

[Haec dum scribo vel eloquor
vinclis o utinam corporis emicem
liber quo tulerit lingua sono mobilia ultimo!]

Augustine writes to make progress; he writes to seek God. Prudentius writes to transcend the world of the flesh; he writes to be saved. Writing has become something quite different here, something Origen could never have imagined. It has become part of the apparatus of spiritual life, a means of purgation and transformation. Writing has become a vocation and a spiritual discipline. Writers have become authors. With Prudentius and Augustine, the transformation of Christianity into a literary culture is complete.

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!

On buying an unwanted book

When I was forced to play team sports as a boy, I would wait in diminishing hope while all the other boys were chosen one by one. In the end there would be two of us left, me and the kid with coke-bottle glasses who couldn't tie his own shoelaces and who was known to burst into tears if he was knocked down or if he lost the ball. For long agonising seconds the two hairy-legged captains would size us up, before, finally, one of them would turn to the other and pronounce the cruel verdict: "You can have them." (I cannot lie: this happened even when my own best friend was one of the team captains.)

Yes, my friends, I know what it is to be unwanted. I suppose that's why Calvinism has always appealed to me, and why I was forever bringing home stray kittens as a boy. It is also why I sympathise with the unwanted book, the book nobody else will buy or read, the book that might have languished in embarrassed silence until the end of the world, and still remained unchosen. It is part of Christian belief in the resurrection to assert that nothing is ultimately unwanted, nothing finally lost or forgotten. When the last trump sounds and the sea gives up its dead, whatever was forgotten will be raised up and kept forever in the presence of him in whom Memory and Love are one.

So sometimes when I'm rummaging in the back corners of a used bookstore, I will choose a book just because it looks lonely, neglected, and forgotten. I find myself treating the book with special respect, handling it gently, patiently studying the printing and binding, admiring the typeface, before finally taking it to a special place – my favourite cafe, or the shade of a big tree – where I can read it slowly and in secret. Like one of those orphaned kittens, I love the book even more on account of its rejection by the world. By reading the unwanted book, I give my silent witness to the coming day when all the books are opened and everything is remembered and whatever was last becomes first.

On Monday I acquired a book in this way and for this purpose, while I was poking around in one of my favourite Sydney bookstores. It is a grubby little pamphlet called Plain Words: A Guide to the Use of English, by Sir Ernest Gowers. It was published in 1948 in London by the charmingly named publisher, His Majesty's Stationery Office. It is set in a sober yet energetic Roman typeface. It cost me $3.50, though in 1948 it could be purchased directly from H. M. Stationery Office for 2s. 0d. net. The first sentence is so plain and workmanlike as to be almost beautiful: "This book was written at the invitation of the Treasury." It was written to advise civil servants and other government bureaucrats on the use of English in their official documents and correspondence. 

Admittedly, when I Googled the book I soon discovered that it is neither unwanted nor forgotten: in fact it was a huge success, and a greatly expanded version is still in print today. In fact, the whole thing is freely available online. There is even a recent biography of this unassuming civil servant. But you'll appreciate that none of this mitigates my own special reasons for acquiring and reading the lonely little 1948 pamphlet. 

And even if Sir Ernest addresses himself to His Majesty's civil servants, I found his advice very relevant to contemporary scholarly writing. So in the next week or so I'll try to do a series of posts on writing tips, based on Gowers' advice about how to choose the right words and avoid the wrong ones. As someone has said: comrades, if we cannot all be artists and geniuses, let us at least strive to be literate!

Great first sentences

Let me be honest with you for once. Almost nothing in the world gives me greater joy than a book with a good first sentence. I was discussing this with my eight-year-old daughter tonight, and we started rummaging among our bookshelves, looking for our favourite first sentences. For my money, the best first sentence ever written is the opening of Melville’s Moby-Dick. ‘Call me Ishmael.’

Here are some of my other favourites from fiction:

• Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’
• Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina: ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’
• Charles Dickens, David Copperfield: ‘Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.’
• J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye: ‘If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.’
• Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude: ‘Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.’
• Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier: ‘This is the saddest story I have ever heard.’
• Peter Carey, Bliss: ‘Harry Joy was to die three times, but it was his first death which was to have the greatest effect on him, and it is this first death which we shall now witness.’
• James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: ‘Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo….’
• James Joyce, ‘A Painful Case’ (in Dubliners): ‘He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense.’ (OK, I’m cheating: that is actually from the second paragraph of the story – but it’s one my favourite sentences of all time, so I couldn’t help including it.)
• Jorge Luis Borges is a great first-sentence writer. His story ‘The Library of Babel’ starts like this: ‘The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite number of hexagonal galleries.’ And another story, ‘The Lottery in Babylon’, begins: ‘Like all men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave.’
• Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear it Away: ‘Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.’
• Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories: ‘There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name.’
• Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell: ‘Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians. They met upon the third Wednesday of every month and reach other long, dull papers upon the history of English magic.’ (I know, it's two sentences – but it's damn good!)
• David Lodge, Changing Places: ‘High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour.’
• Anita Brookner, The Debut: ‘Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.’

Scholars are not usually very good at giving their books a delightful first sentence (since most scholars believe boredom is a sign of intellectual seriousness). But there are some notable exceptions – for instance, C. S. Lewis begins his great book A Preface to Paradise Lost with these words: ‘The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is – what it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used.’ And another literary critic, James Wood, begins The Broken Estate: ‘The real is the atlas of fiction, over which all novelists thirst.’

As a rule, theologians are hopeless at this sort of thing (as James K. A. Smith observes in a recent post). But again there are, thank God, some exceptions. I’m thinking for instance of John Milbank, who has some artful and memorable opening sentences. Theology and Social Theory famously begins: ‘Once, there was no secular.’ And The Word Made Strange: ‘Today, theology is tragically too important.’ Stanley Hauerwas also has a good opening line to his recent memoir, Hannah's Child – evoking the tradition of the novel, he begins: ‘I did not intend to be “Stanley Hauerwas”.’

Karl Barth is of course legendary for his artful prefaces (he is, as a matter of fact, one of the real masters of the preface genre). His finest moments always come later in the prefaces, but he still has some cracking good first lines:

• CD I/2: 'It is not we who can sustain the Church, nor was it our forefathers, nor will it be our descendants.'
• CD IV/2: 'I am sorry to have disappointed those (perhaps not a few) who had counted on taking this continuation of the Church Dogmatics with them on their summer or autumn holidays.'

And then there is the incomparable G. K. Chesterton, who begins his autobiography with this marvellous sentence: ‘Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgement, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge. I do not allege any significance in the relation of the two buildings; and I indignantly deny that the church was chosen because it needed the whole water-power of West London to turn me into a Christian.’ (OK, technically that was two sentences: but who’s counting?)

Anyway, my daughter also chose her own favourites from various children’s novels:

• J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan: ‘All children, except one, grow up.’
• Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol: ‘Marley was dead: to begin with.’
• Kate Forsyth, The Puzzle Ring: ‘Hannah Rose Brown was not quite thirteen years old when she discovered her family was cursed.’
• Tony Davis, Roland Wright, Future Knight: ‘These days it is considered rude to chop a man’s arm off with a battleaxe, even when you don’t like him.’
• J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’
• C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: ‘There was a boy called Eustance Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.’

Which makes me think that we theologians could learn quite a lot from children's fiction.

Faith in the World essay prize

Any aspiring theologians in your home? People who annoy you with hard questions and get bored easily by bad sermons? This week Rowan Williams launched the Faith in the World writing prize, which invites young people, aged 13-21, to submit an essay exploring faith in our world.

On writing: thirteen theses

1. Writing and the fall. Angels have no need of writing – though Goethe’s Mephistopheles is a writer. Jesus left behind no writings; nor did the Buddha. ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick.’ Writing is for the fallen, for the soul cast out of paradise and lonely to return. When our first parents took the apple, God killed an animal and clothed them. Words are the bloody skins stitched together to cover our mysterious theological shame. In the shadows behind every book lie the skinned remains of some dead thing; its smell lingers in the library and in the writer’s study.

2. Kinds of writing. There are four kinds of writing: bad, mediocre, good, and great. The difference between bad writing and mediocre writing is discipline. The difference between mediocre writing and good writing is editing. The difference between good writing and great writing is miracle.

3. Writing and editing. T. S. Eliot once observed that good writers do not necessarily write better than others, but are better critics and editors. Good writers cull the overpopulated paragraphs of their work. Like a farmer protecting the livestock, the writer lovingly separates whatever is sickly and infirm – and then loads the gun.

4. Writing and discipline. The self has a tendency to leak and dribble. Left to itself, it loses all definition, becomes a shapeless puddle. Writing, like ritual, is a cast into which the self is poured. Writing is care of the self. ‘He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem’ (Milton). A book is a few seconds of inspiration plus a few years – or a lifetime – of discipline. You cannot have a campfire without the first spark, but the spark is useless without the slow labour of gathering wood, building the fire, and maintaining it when it begins to die.

5. Writing and patience. Annie Dillard notes that some people can write quickly – just as some people lift cars, eat cats, or enter weeklong sled-dog races: ‘There is no call to take human extremes as norms.’ A person who could write a page every day would be one of the most prolific writers in the world – even if half those pages had to be thrown away. Writing is slow because truth is shy. You can’t get close to truth all at once, but only by a protracted exchange of fumbling gestures, awkward silences, and tentative questions and replies. The patience of the writer is the moral complement to the shyness of truth.

6. Writing and jealousy. Like cleaning your ears or picking your nose, writing is something best done in private. All writing is solitary. Even collaborative efforts are stitched together from smaller, lonelier units. All sorts of things – in fact, most of the things that really matter – must be excluded in order to write. Like a drawn bowstring, the writer draws back from the world in order to pierce it more forcefully. The selfishness of the writer is jealousy for truth.

7. Writing and kenosis. To the extent that the writer is not merely selfish but jealous, writing becomes a practice of true selflessness. The novelist creates a character through generosity and kenosis: he withholds his own agenda, silencing his own voice to make room for the voice of the character. Writers erase themselves to let something else be.

8. Writing and death. The biggest difference between today's writing and the writing of the past is that writers are no longer put to death. Writers nowadays could never dream of having to die for what they have written. Even if writerly execution was not always common, the possibility of death was implicit in every act of writing. The zone within which writers worked was marked out by this juridical possibility. But in the West today there is no writing for which a person could conceivably be executed. This alters the whole nature of scholarly inquiry. It is also partly responsible for the bloodless mediocrity of most contemporary writing.

9. Writing and life. The widespread notion that life is more important than writing – as though writing were something I do when I’m not really living – owes much to this modern abrogation of the threat of death. To distinguish between writing and living betrays a deep misunderstanding not only of what it means to write but also of what it means to live. My happiest childhood memories are of sitting alone writing stories: was I writing, or living? The division is not only false but also heretical, since for Christians (as for others) the secret of life is disclosed in a canon of writings. Yet this heretical distinction is perpetrated whenever Christians expect their writers to leave aside their labour with words in order to do something more ‘practical’. St Paul describes his letter to the Galatians not as a secondary description of the reality of the gospel, but as gospel itself, God’s own personal speaking in the world. If there is any distinction between life and writing, it is only that writing is (or can be) a particularly intensified form of living. The same sunlight falls across the café window and the magnifying lens: the only difference is the smoke.

10. Writing and truth. The purpose of writing, says Wendell Berry, is ‘to keep our language capable of telling the truth’. All the daily problems, obstacles, and difficulties of writing – even the most pedantic labours over syntax and punctuation – are reducible to the problem of truth. All writing is lying, as Samuel Beckett often observed. But writers want to lie their way into the truth, to vaccinate themselves against falsehood by injecting it right into the bloodstream. The real business of writing is the identification of difficulties, problems, and falsehoods. This is why suicide is especially prevalent among writers: problem-detection is a disheartening line of work. Like a sad clown forced to go on smiling, the writer continues using words even in face of the immense unspoken sadness of truth.

11. Writing and thought. I write not because I know but because I want to know. Among scholars today, there is no error more pervasive than writerly Docetism. The Docetic heresy divides idea from style; it is the belief that one can have clear thoughts regardless of the clarity of their expression, or that one first has an idea which is subsequently communicated through the neutral medium of prose. But between idea and form there is a mystical union of natures; to write well is to think well. Language is not the external adornment of thought. It is thought itself, the blood and tissue of the idea.

12. Writing and God. Did the Hebrew prophets write in order to record their experiences of God? Did those experiences not rather occur in the act of writing itself? Would it have made any sense for them to distinguish the revelation of Yahweh from the stuff of language? Did they not find the face of Yahweh pressed suddenly against their outstretched fingertips as they groped their way blindly through the doorway into the dark house of language? The tightly knotted bond between God and language is the secret truth of all writing. According to the Zohar, one binds oneself to God by learning to write God’s Name, since the Name of God is the being of God. Writing and religion alike bubble up from this hidden primeval fountain of theological magic.

13. The end of writing. According to Gershom Scholem, some Jewish mystics taught that on the last day God will annul the Torah: all the letters will stay the same, but God will rearrange them into a completely different combination, a new-yet-identical script. This is the ecstatic telos of all writing. It is the promise for which writing waits: to be simultaneously deciphered and erased, transposed from human words into tongues of angels, burned up but not consumed in the violent conflagration of the Word.

Walter Benjamin: 13 theses on writing

One of my favourite accounts of writing is Walter Benjamin's "The Writer's Technique in Thirteen Theses", from his 1928 book One-Way Street; published in Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926 (Harvard UP 1996), 458-59. Here are his thirteen theses in full:

I. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.

II. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this régime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.

III. In your working conditions, avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an étude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.

IV. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.

V. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

VI. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.

VII. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.

VIII. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.

IX. Nulla dies sine linea [“no day without a line”: Pliny] — but there may well be weeks.

X. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.

XI. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.

XII. Stages of composition: idea — style — writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration; style fetters the idea; writing pays off style.

XIII. The work is the death mask of its conception.

Rowan Williams: writing as discovery

Rowan Williams, discussing the process of writing:

"Something which will be familiar to anybody who has ever tried to do serious writing ... is the sense in which you only discover what you have to say in the doing of it. Saunders Lewis, the Welsh poet, used to quote somebody saying – a child saying – 'How do I know what I think until I see what I say?' and I have always resonated rather with that. And that means that for me in writing even a straight forward prose essay or a short book or a lecture, there is that awkward moment when ... the engine is turning over a bit and you are wondering exactly at what point you are going to discover what the argument is. That's a warning really about the first four pages of everything I have ever written!

"Writing isn't translating something in here onto the page. Writing is an act. If it were just transference, no doubt you could plug in the electrodes and something would neatly type up what was going on inside your head.... Writing is an act, it is an action of self-discovery and an action of trying to put something into being."

Flannery O'Connor on writers

Some timeless wisdom from Flannery O'Connor, on creative writing courses: "Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them" (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, 84).

People are drawn to creative writing courses because of an urge to express themselves, to unburden themselves of their deepest feelings. But self-expression is the deadly enemy of fiction. It is a thick bog in which the capacity for fictional imagination is captured and drowned: thus the need for universities to exercise preemptive stifling.

If self-expression attracts people to fiction-writing while simultaneously killing off the object of study, might there be any rough equivalents in theological study? Does our own discipline need a bit of preemptive stifling once in a while?

Isaiah Berlin on writing

Since we've had a bit of an Isaiah Berlin theme lately, I thought I'd continue the sporadic series on writing with some of Berlin's observations about writing. Thanks to Kim Fabricius for sending me the following two quotes from Michael Ignatieff's intellectual biography, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (Vintage 2000):

"The problem was that Isaiah hated writing. As he confessed to a friend, spoken words vanish and no responsibility lingers; and one is freed from these embarrassing witnesses of one's momentary states'. Writing meant taking responsibility, and he avoided responsibility of any kind" (pp. 175-76).

And, pricelessly: "If anything, his self-doubt as an intellectual had grown with the years. As he confessed to a correspondent in 1963, 'I have not the slightest faith in anything I write myself. It is exactly like money – if you make it yourself, it seems a forgery'" (p. 262).

Of course while Berlin did not like writing, he was a famously gifted conversationalist and extempore lecturer; someone once described him as the world's greatest talker. If you're interested, you can see a great example of this in his videotaped conversation with Stuart Hampshire.