John Milbank's poetry: the mercurial wood

For my own education and edification, I’m currently re-reading all of John Milbank’s works (some I’m just reading for the first time, e.g. The Suspended Middle and his doctoral dissertation on Vico). So anyway, I was surprised and delighted to discover that Milbank has also published a volume of poems, entitled The Mercurial Wood: Sites, Tales, Qualities (Salzburg: University of Salzburg, 1997), xiv + 69 pp. (Unfortunately, copies are very hard to find – I had to borrow it from the library.)

Nothing pleases me more than a theologian who also writes poetry. (In fact, two of my favourite contemporary poets are also theologians: Rowan Williams and Kevin Hart.) Even if Milbank is a better theologian than he is a poet, this is still a very nice collection, with moments of real beauty and insight. Take, for instance, the depiction of the liberating power of Christ’s beauty in “November: The First Advent”:

        True Siren, Whose voice
        Searing my ears,
        Slipped also my contracted bonds.^[1]

Or take the beautiful evocation of the gift, in “Outremer: An Allegory of Rudel”:

        That is my end, a total gift
        To her, at last. Ripened
        Yet beyond the sun,
        And past the final sea,
        Besides, besides,
        In this return
        I give, am given,
        Learnt at last.^[2]

But perhaps the most striking feature of Milbank’s poetry is its depiction of the relation between nature, time, and eternity. Under the sway of time, “nature’s thickets”^[3] are dark, decayed, twisted. The bones and dust of time pile high, “Like the ruins of a school, / Scrawled across the night.”^[4] Nature is threatened by a hidden, seething “war without blows” – “The world is turning in a catastrophe.”^[5]

And yet there is always “a remainder / not chaos,” which can be glimpsed “behind things.”^[6] If you look intently, you can perceive “the gateway / Where the Spring slips through.”^[7] Behind and beneath nature’s thickets, there are sudden, startling appearances of a primal harmony, “something superadded”^[8] – a lost innocence which is also the promise of eternal newness, creation’s long-awaited childhood.

One of the central images of Milbank’s poetry is thus that of spring – a spring which draws near from the future, full of promise yet “all unknown.”^[9]

        And there stretch trees across the country,
        Like a scattered, shattered henge,
        Waiting the night of snow,
        While Spring waits for them.^[10]

Here, strikingly, it is not the barren wintry trees that wait for spring – it is within their power only to “wait the night of snow” – but it is spring which waits for them, drawing them gently yet irresistibly, all “green and shoot and bud.”^[11] The new spring which waits for creation, then, is nothing other than the primal harmony of eternity itself – an eternal love which transforms nature only by fulfilling it:

        But our last year’s forever changed
        In retrospect: eternal love,
        The creeping time of almost there
        And all unknown.^[12]

Although this eternal love remains yet “unknown,” it pierces through creation in moments of startling, anticipatory revelation. Its strange otherness is nothing else than the world’s bringing-to-fulfillment – or rather, the world’s return to a forgotten childhood of perfect peace. Thus, in what I take to be Milbank’s finest lines, we read of such an epiphany “In the Roseland”:

        By night a black-stone setting
        For the three elusive silvers
        Named water, moon and sky.
        These tongues she offers to my tongue,

        Till lapping mouth to mouth we sing,
        Of twinings and of twinings back,
        Ways out to headlands as the one way home,
        While eyes are launched to undrowned dreaming.^[13]

This extraordinary image – “lapping mouth to mouth we sing” – evokes a return to innocence, to harmony, to peace as the truth of creation and the secret beneath all things. We are lonely; but nature presses her mouth to ours in a kiss of peace. We are far from home; but the mystery of eternity gathers us up in a song of peace, and shows us “the one way home.”

NOTES

[1] “November: The First Advent,” p. 41.

[2] “Outremer: An Allegory of Rudel,” pp. 31-32.

[3] “Rufford Old Hall,” p. 16.

[4] “Chalk-Downland: The White Dance,” p. 50.

[5] “Just after Fleetwood,” p. 6.

[6] “Wilmington Long Man,” p. 20.

[7] “At Duck’s Down Evening,” p. 49.

[8] “Ode to Grey,” p. 59.

[9] “November: The First Advent,” p. 40.

[10] “Tree by Night,” p. 63.

[11] “The Mercurial Wood,” p. 3.

[12] “November: The First Advent,” p. 40.

[13] “In the Roseland,” p. 27.

A few things

• Halden on liturgical time (i.e. real time).
• Talal Asad on the history of secular criticism.
• Matthew Taunton on Žižek on violence.
• Jim Wests points to a hilarious review of a hilarious book.
  
• And, if you read Spanish, Carolina lists five reasons why she likes F&T. (Thanks, Carolina!)

Notes on a theology of boredom

Note: I was thinking of writing a proper essay on this topic, but I got bored with it, so I’ve posted a sketch here instead.

In Milan Kundera’s short novel, Identity (1998), the character Jean-Marc describes a visit to his dying grandfather. He hears a peculiar sound coming from the dying man’s mouth, “one sound, an ‘ahhhh’ that broke off only when he had to take a breath.” This “ahhhh” is not the sound of pain or of attempted communication; as Jean-Marc listens, he realises that the sound signifies an essential truth about human beings: “this [sound] is existence as such confronting time as such; and that confrontation … is named boredom” (p. 74). A bleak picture of our being-in-time, to be sure! One is reminded here of Heidegger’s massive analysis of boredom, where the strange indifference of “profound boredom” was identified as “the totality of that which is.”

So what might a theologian have to say about boredom? On the whole, theologians have harboured dark thoughts about boredom, and have tended to classify it either as somehow sinful or at least as a consequence of sin. In Either/Or, Kierkegaard famously remarked that “boredom is the root of all evil” (his argument is delightful: “The gods were bored, so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, and so Eve was created” – and so on). Jacques Ellul’s work, Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective (1969), identifies boredom – so “gloomy, dull, and joyless” – as one of the defining perversions of modern social life (p. 121). Ellul’s view here is close to that of Karl Barth, who similarly described “the signature of modern man” as neither serenity nor rebellion, but simply an “utter weariness and boredom.” In Barth’s view, “man is bored with himself,” and as a result “everything has become a burden to him” (Church Dogmatics III/2, p. 117).

More recently, Graham Neville has offered a theological analysis of boredom in his book, Free Time: Towards a Theology of Leisure (2004). Neville advances the depressing thesis that “the nature of boredom … corresponds to the monastic sin of accidie or sloth” (p. 100), and so he urges us to overcome boredom, or at least to allow the sinful passivity of boredom to be sublated by the more constructive passivity of “wonder.” Neville’s all-too-obvious identification of boredom with the medieval sin of sloth is anachronistic, however, since the word/concept of “boredom” had no existence prior to the 18th century – as Patricia Meyer Spacks observes in her brilliant genealogy of boredom: “If people felt bored before the late eighteenth century, they didn’t know it” (Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind, p. 14).

So if we withhold for a moment the judgment that boredom is sin, we might find a more constructive way to reflect on this peculiar state of mind. I’m inclined to think that the Italian philosopher Giorgo Agamben (who looks suitably bored in this photo) has pointed the way forwards here. In an essay entitled “In This Exile” (published in Means Without End, pp. 121-42), Agamben speaks of “the essential inoperability of humankind,” that is, the fact that human beings “cannot be defined by any proper operation,” so that our humanness can never be exhausted by any particular identity or task. In this connection, Agamben speaks of “humankind’s creative semi-indifference to any task.”

Here, the “semi-indifference” of boredom is linked to an essential theological truth about human beings: we are not reducible to our work; we always exceed any given task. Or as Agamben puts it elsewhere, boredom discloses the essence of a “simply living being” (see his essay, “Profound Boredom,” in The Open: Man and Animal, p. 70). Between our work and our being there lies a gap – and boredom names this gap.

This theme of a gap between being and work has never been more beautifully articulated than in Andrew Marvell’s 1653 poem, “Bermudas”. The poem depicts an unfallen Paradise – and it ends with the lines:

Thus sang they, in the English boat,
An holy and a cheerful note;
And all the way, to guide their chime,
With falling oars they kept the time.

The image here of prelapsarian labour is simple, but astonishingly powerful. They are rowing to keep time in their song, not vice versa! They are really working – but they exceed their work, and the labour itself is simply a needless embellishment, a fitting but absolutely non-necessary improvisation of their existence. Or to put it more simply, their work is pure praise: the rowing of the oars simply forms the background rhythm of their song. In Agamben’s terminology, the rower in this poem is a “being-without-work” – he really works, but his work is superfluous, since he utterly exceeds it.

But if Agamben rightly insists that human beings are irreducible to their work, he fails to note the (today more important) point that humans also exceed their leisure and enjoyment. If boredom names the gap between our being and our work, it also names the gap between being and enjoyment. At least in the affluent West, most of us would accept that life cannot finally be boiled down to work; the more sinister and more beguiling threat today is the reduction of life to enjoyment.

As Slavoj Žižek has frequently observed, late-capitalist existence is structured by an obscene and threatening superego imperative: enjoy! (see for example The Universal Exception, pp. 331-35). In its own way, this capitalist law of enjoyment also seeks to close the gap between our being and our works, except that here, our true and proper “work” – the work which the law demands of us! – is enjoyment itself. (The true horror of The Matrix of course lies precisely here: when Neo swallows the red pill, he discovers that all human existence has been secretly transformed into a monstrous technological production of enjoyment; it is “pure,” immediate experience, no longer mediated even by life – or rather, it is pure human enjoyment at the expense of humanity.)

In this late capitalist setting, the only absolute prohibition is indifference or boredom – or rather, the consumer-ideology itself generates boredom precisely in order to forbid it and alleviate it. The machinery of late capitalism thus functions like the medicine mentioned by Hegel: it is a wounding-and-healing poison which paradoxically “heals the wound which it itself is” (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, III, 55). We are always bored, and always being (forcibly) rescued from our boredom.

So just as a society which reduces life to social utility will prohibit boredom vis-à-vis work, so too a society which reduces life to enjoyment will prohibit boredom vis-à-vis leisure. If, at times, a truly radical resistance can only take the form of passivity and non-participation, then is it possible that boredom itself might be a crucial site of resistance today? As human beings, we are always in excess: we exceed our tasks, and we exceed our enjoyment. There is always a gap between my “works” – what I do, what I enjoy, which market niche I identify with – and my humanity. To be bored – without immediately seeking to transform that boredom into either productivity on the one hand or enjoyment on the other – is to hold open this gap, and to resist participating in its insidious closure.

To face both work and enjoyment with what Agamben calls a “creative semi-indifference” is, today, the gesture of the human being who stands before God and is recognised by God – the human being who is no longer under the law (neither the law of works nor the law of enjoyment), but under grace.

This human being – the human being under grace – is the one whose work and play can never be taken too seriously, since they are merely creative embellishments, non-necessary improvisations, which contribute to the harmony and peace of a life of praise. Like Marvell’s rowers, both our work and our play can thus find their true meaning only as they serve the modest role of “keeping the time” in our song:

And all the way, to guide their chime,
With falling oars they kept the time.

Theology in the 1960s

No question about it: there was some pretty wild stuff happening in German theology back in the 1960s. This morning I was thumbing through Dietrich Ritschl’s 1967 book, Memory and Hope: An Inquiry Concerning the Presence of Christ. It’s not a bad book actually, but you have to feel sorry for Ritschl when he makes the casual remark in his preface: “My manuscript was almost completed when two important new works came to my attention: Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope and Eberhard Jüngel’s God’s Being Is in Becoming.”

A bit like completing your definitive study on contemporary Irish literature, just as James Joyce publishes Ulysses.

Human agency according to Augustine, Paul, and Lou Martyn

In his extraordinary book on the history of Christian spirituality, The Wound of Knowledge, Rowan Williams describes Augustine’s understanding of human agency:

“Augustine is less concerned than almost any of the Greek Fathers with freedom…. The human subject is indeed a mystery; no one could be more painfully and eloquently aware of this than Augustine. But the mysteriousness and unpredictability have more to do with the forces that act on the subject…. Augustine’s undiminished appeal to a post-Freudian generation has much to do with this aspect of his thought. He confronts and accepts the unpalatable truth that rationality is not the most important factor in human experience, that the human subject is a point in a vast structure of forces whose operation is tantalisingly obscure to the reason. Human reality is acted upon at least as much as acting” (pp. 82-83).

This reminds me of a provocative SBL paper in November by the great Paul scholar, J. Louis Martyn (he was in a session with Douglas Campbell and Susan Eastman, with responses from Darrell Guder and Telford Work). Martyn presented Paul’s understanding of human agency along these lines: the human agent has no subjective autonomy and no moral competence to choose her own path. She is under the sway of inscrutable cosmic powers – and will remain so except for the militant, apocalyptic interruption of a divine agent who vanquishes the enslaving powers and creates a new moral subject.

Further, according to Martyn (much to the displeasure of his respondent, Telford Work!), Paul’s apocalyptic conception of human agency is a deliberate critique of the “classic moral drama” which underlies much of the Old Testament, e.g. in Deuteronomy, where “morally competent” agents are said to stand at a crossroad between two possible choices.

For Paul, there is no crossroad, no moral competence, no “choose this day.” To be sure, there is a real alternative: slavery or freedom! But this alternative doesn’t lie in our power or depend on our agency. This means that God’s action cannot be said to “help” us or “enable” us – the divine action is a unilateral liberation which constitutes us as new agents.

After his paper, Martyn was asked: “Why are you so uncomfortable with the word ‘enable’?” He replied: “I’m not uncomfortable with it. It’s just wrong.”

The problem with primal harmony

“Plain experience and common sense inform us that no abstract Person can have made us as we are … without also wishing to delete us and start over (Gen. 8:21; Zeph. 1:2). Therefore, the existence of cruel and arbitrary nature, together with the universality of human sin, prevents us from beginning the theological enterprise with any concept of God that is distinct from revelation. All theologies of a cosmic harmonic principle shipwreck on the truths of tragedy, catastrophe, and injustice.”

—Paul F. M. Zahl, A Short Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), p. 7.

Note: This is an unusual book. It includes some strangely arresting passages (such as the one quoted above), together with some strangely banal passages, such as this one (which is so bad that it is memorable): “The risen Christ has expanded to reach the frontiers of all human experience. Because he is nowhere in particular, he is everywhere in general” (p. 49).