paul j. griffiths

The male lover of the Song of Songs says to his female beloved that her lips are like a scarlet thread (4:3). This is among his many praises of her body, and it is, on the surface, a very ordinary erotic image. But the Song is a scriptural book, and in it the Lord speaks to his beloved — that is, to his Israel-Church, to Mary who bears his child, and to you, his quotidian and lukewarm lover. He kisses his beloveds’ lips with a passion, making them scarlet with the bloody, inflaming, pressure-heat of his own. With the kiss offered to humanity on the cross, the Lord extends the embrace given to Abraham to all. We Christians reciprocate this kiss most fully here below by drinking the blood-red wine of the eucharist. The stain of that wine on our lips is the mark of the Lord’s blood on our bodies; it is also the mark of his lips on ours, cleansing them with the purifying flame of his passion. In these kisses, our mundane kisses participate; our desires for our beloveds’ lips are what they are because of the Lord’s desire for our lips. The intensity of our desires for those human lips, and the fact that the kisses we give to and get from our lovers do not satisfy, while being nonetheless necessary and delightful, is a sign of this participation.

I’ve just read Bruce Marshall’s introduction and George Lindbeck’s afterword to the 25th-anniversary edition of The Nature of Doctrine (Louisville, 2009). Both are eminently lucid and helpful. Marshall’s introduction is especially good in its judicious depiction of the different trajectories of Thomist objection to Lindbeck’s use of Thomas; and Lindbeck’s comments on his analysis of interreligious relations in the original (1984) edition usefully clarify, without substantively changing, the analysis there given. This book is the most important English-language contribution to clarity of thought about what theology is and how to prepare oneself to do it since Newman. It’s a pleasure to have it to hand again in this fine edition — which includes, as well, what appears to be a complete Lindbeck bibliography.

I’ve been re-reading some of Augustine’s sermons in preparation for teaching a seminar on him at Duke Divinity School this fall semester. Its first meeting will be tomorrow (24 August 2009) (you can find the syllabus here). It’s evident that among Augustine’s principal purposes in preaching was to instruct those gathered before him in Christian doctrine — in the beautiful subtleties and lovely language and elegant particularities and conceptual exigencies of the Gospel as handed on by the Lord’s Church. Since most of his hearers would have been illiterate, and books (codices) ruinously expensive even for those who were not, the sermon would have been the principal means for such instruction. Without it, Christians would have known only what the liturgy could teach them, and while that is very far from nothing, there are precisions and particulars it cannot teach. Our situation is very much the same. Though books are, for us, cheap, and oceans of information about Christian doctrine can be had for nothing via the Internet, our congregations are, for the most part, utterly ignorant of what the Church teaches. They have, mostly, neither time nor inclination to learn. Our homilies, for the most part, do not remedy this (I speak now of what I hear in Catholic Churches). Instead, we are offered moral uplift or edifying stories or words of comfort. There’s nothing wrong with any of those. But it would be good if our priests had the time, the training, and the inclination to teach us by way of their homilies as if they believed that we might understand. I don’t mean to criticize our priests: they are few & overburdened and they need our prayers and our support rather than our criticism. But it is crucial for parishes and bishops to begin to think of the Sunday homily as something priests need time and space to prepare, and to do what is necessary to make that time and space available to them. It is crucial, too, that priests have the courage to teach and congregations the courage to listen. Congregations in North Africa in the early fifth century might often stand (yes, stand: there were no seats in churches) for ninety minutes to listen to a sermon from Augustine. We cannot manage to sit still in our air-conditioned North American churches for a fifteen-minute homily.

I’ve been reading Douglas Hedley’s Living Forms of the Imagination (London, 2008) in preparation for reviewing it. It’s full of good things: a delightful florilegium. But it is also an apologia for the importance of the imagination to the Christian life, and an attempt to recover the significance of the romantic poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, et al. — even, God help us, Shelley, a poet without whom the world would have been a better place) and the painters of the sublime (Caspar David Friedrich et al.) for Christian theology. But this can’t be right. I can’t see that it belongs to Christianity to seek the intensification of affect or of delight in images; the shiver of sublimity is pagan. Consider the difference between looking at this:

and this:

Contemplating the former will make you into a better pagan; contemplating the latter will deepen your participation in the triune Lord.

Yesterday (15 August 2009) was the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin — the feast, that is, commemorating Mary’s bodily assumption into heaven. Pope Pius XII promulgated this feast on All Saints’ Day 1950, in the Apostolic Constitution Munificentissimus Deus. In that text, Pius XII wrote that the Dogma of the Assumption is the correlate and implication of the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception, which had been formulated and promulgated by Pius IX in 1854. Just as Mary was conceived immaculately (without taint of sin), and herself conceived Jesus virginally (without sexual intercourse), so her body is received into heaven with flesh uncorrupted. The dogmatic formulation carefully does not say whether Mary died, using instead the formula “having completed her earthly life.” The day is one of obligatory attendance at mass for Catholics, though in the US this obligation is remitted if the day falls on a Saturday or a Monday, as it did this year. If you did go to mass on the day, you will have heard readings from Revelation 11 and 12, in which there is a description of a woman “clothed with the sun, the moon beneath her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” whom Christians have for a long time identified with Mary. This identification is most powerful, perhaps, in the visual arts, and among my favorite renderings is that by Diego Velazquez, painted in 1618-1619, and now housed in London’s National Gallery. In this painting she is simultaneously a Spanish peasant girl and the queen of heaven, which is just as it should be. Looking at the painting with the dogma and its proper theological construal in mind, is to want to be embraced by Mary and to embrace her — which is also just as it should be. Power is in weakness and beauty is in poverty.

On Thursday last (13 August 2009) I received my first, pre-publication, copy of my new book, Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar. It looks good: Catholic University Press of America, its publishers, have done a fine job. I especially like the typeface. I think the book is good: it is, anyway, the kind of book I’d like to read (I suppose all authors write the books they would like to read). But I respond to its physical appearance with a kind of postpartum gloom. So this is it? All that work for a few pages between covers? On, at once, to the next thing — the need for divertissement as insatiable as ever.

I had the privilege yesterday (10 August 2009) of serving on a selection panel for the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Fellowships Program in Religious Studies — the first time I’ve done this for at least a decade. Our panel considered 38 applications for the support of a wide variety of projects, and did so with what seemed to me fairness and good humor. One thing struck me forcibly as I was reading the applications: there were none in theology, though there were plenty of a historical or textual kind on materials belonging to particular traditions of theological reasoning. I checked the Endowment’s guidelines, and among them is the claim that it cannot support “projects that seek to promote a particular political, philosophical, religious, or ideological point of view.” It has that guideline, I suppose, because it is a federally-funded agency. But it doesn’t take more than a moment’s thought to see that such a guideline is not capable of a coherent interpretation. What would a proposal that didn’t seek to promote a particular view in any of these spheres be like? Wordless, I should think. I also doubt that the Endowment attempts to enforce it. Would it rule out an application that proposed to argue that counterfactuals are without truth-value? It would be so much better if the Endowment were to encourage applications in all spheres of humanistic endeavor. Nevertheless, the Endowment is a good thing, and a high proportion of the applications we discussed will result in good and useful work, whether funded by the Endowment or not.

Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration. Bonum est nos hic esse — it is good for us to be here, with Jesus, transfigured. In the Officium Lectionis for today, there is an extract from a transfiguration homily by Anastasius of Sinai. He there writes:

Certe unusquisque nostrum cum Deum in se habeat et sit in divinam eius imaginem transfiguratus, cum laetitia exclamet: bonum est nos hic esse, ubi omnia sunt lucida, ubi gaudium est et beatitudo et iucunditas, ubi omne in corde tranquilla sunt et serena et dulcia, ubi Deus conspicitur; ubi mansionem ipse cum patre facit et adveniens ait, Hodie salus domui huic facta est; ubi cum Christo thesauri exstant et cumulantur bonorum aeternorum; ubi primitiae et imagines futurorum saeculorum velut in speculo describuntur.

Since each one of us has God in himself and is being transfigured into his divine image, each of us should exclaim joyfully, It is good for us to be here, where everything is light-filled, where there is joy and gladness and delight, where everything in our hearts is tranquil, serene, and still, and where God is evident; where, too, that very [Christ] takes up residence with the Father, saying as he comes in, Today salvation has come to this house. This is also where with Christ there are treasure-houses piled with eternal goods, and where we see in a mirror the first-fruits and the images of the age to come.

The rhetoric requires a bit of work to be made palatable to late-modern tastes. But the essential and gorgeous point is that we too are being transfigured, and that we already have, unmerited, vastly more than we need. Bonum est nos hic esse.

Spare-time reading this week has been Miri Rubin’s big book on Mary, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (Yale UP, 2009). It’s broadscope big-picture history, careful haute vulgarisation — theology mentioned a lot but never used, and a little too much stratospheric-necessary-truth padding (“Mary was shaped in many different ways as Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire and beyond …,” p. 88). Rubin’s intellectual energy is admirable (she’s read a lot of books), as is her care with the evidence (so far as I can judge); and I suppose it’s important to attempt this sort of grand synthesis. She provides a useful gateway to particular mariological subtopics, too: extensive notes. But I would have liked something with a harder critical/theoretical edge, whether properly theological or quite the other thing. There’s none of that here. In the end, for Rubin, Mary is about maternality, which is not exactly a surprising conclusion.

I’ve been reading Georges Bernanos’ Monsieur Ouine (1946) in William Bush’s English translation published in 2000 by the University of Nebraska Press. The novel has Bernanos’ trademarks: the world devastated by sin and yet shot through with grace; the Church apparently powerless and yet the only consistent speaker of truth about its own powerlessness; the obsession with France (understandable for a Frenchman, I suppose); and the consistently terrifying depictions of evil’s lack and what that lack means for us and the world we inhabit. Bernanos makes Graham Greene’s understanding of evil seem superficial: if Augustine had written novels, this is what they would be like. This novel has a murder, a lynching, a double suicide, the implied seduction of a teenage boy by a man — all depicted so delicately and so sidewise and so intensely that I found myself often looking away from the page in disbelief that what I’d just read was there. Monsieur Ouine (Mr. Yes/No) himself, for whom the novel is named, is the most convincing depiction in literature of a man who is almost not there — which is to say, almost completely evil.

There are some especially interesting things in this novel. Consider this, on priests and the decay of the present age:

With the decline or disappearance of other powers, the priest, even though appearing so intimately integrated into the life of society, has become a more singular and unclassifiable being than any of those old magicians the ancient world used to keep locked up like sacred animals in the depths of its temples, existing in the intimacy of the gods alone. Priests moreover are all the more singular and unclassifiable in that they do not recognize themselves as such and are nearly always dupes of the most gross outward appearance — whether of the irony of some or the servile deference of others. But that contradiction by nature more political than religious and used far too long to nurture clerical pride, does, through the growing feeling of their loneliness and to the extent that it is gradually transformed into hostile indifference, throw them unarmed into the heart of social conflicts they naively pride themselves on being able to resolve by using texts. But, then, what does it matter? The hour is coming when, on the ruins of the old Christian order, a new order will be born that will indeed be an order of the world, the order of the Prince of this World, of that prince whose kingdom is of this world. And the hard law of necessity, stronger than any illusions, will then remove the very object for clerical pride so long maintained simply by conventions outlasting any belief. And the footsteps of beggars shall cause the earth to tremble once again.

Well, yes. And perhaps we’re closer to that condition now than when Bernanos was writing these words, probably in exile in Brazil during the dark, late days of the Second World War.