paul j. griffiths

Nicholson Baker’s latest novel The Anthologist (Simon & Schuster, 2009) has all his tics: obsessive interest in the particulars of creatures (inchworms, poems, flesh, food, words, metrical form), and a narrator whose interest in those particulars transfixes him, pins him to the fabric of the cosmos as its helpless observer. How can this narrator not be Baker? And how can the reader not love him and thereby the world he helps us to see with greater clarity and depth? This is the man who has written the best essay (the only essay?) on the loss entailed by the mass destruction of card-indexes performed by libraries, their supposed custodians (later incorporated into his book Double Fold). And this is also the man who has written at length about the possibilities for sexual adventure (no, let’s not mince words: predation) brought about by the ability to stop time (The Fermata). Well, of course it’s easy not to love him: I suspect most women don’t enjoy reading him. And the intensity of the Baker-gaze, its omnivorousness, is disturbing. Are there things, real things, actual occurrences, that ought not be gazed on or depicted? But in this book what Baker gazes on, most of the time, is poetry: something worth looking at. For Christians, he is best read as a contemplative of the particularities of the cosmos; and as such very much worth reading. [a Salon interview with Baker || a Baker fanpage || an LA Times piece about Baker, 9/09]

Many of my fellow-Christians are, or say they are, pacifists. They mean many different things by this; and some of them appear to have rather little idea about what they mean. Many other Christians are, they say, emphatically not pacifists, and they are as divided about what it means not to be a pacifist as their opposite numbers are about what it is to be one. Matters are almost as confused when it comes to violence. What is it? When, if ever, should Christians endorse or advocate or pursue or perform it? People seem happy to argue these questions in a deep conceptual fog about what counts as violence.

Here are some principles on which we all might agree.

1. Christians love peace, first and last: the first garden was peaceful and the last heaven will be. That’s the grammar of Christian thought. ‘Peaceful’ here means (at least) that in paradise and in heaven no one damages anyone else, physically or otherwise, and no one wants to.
2. But, we are fallen. Which means that peace no longer obtains, which means in turn that each of us wants to damage others, physically and in other ways, and that each of us does so. Hence, at the physical level, murder, war, rape, torture, and quotidian beatings.
3. Christians know that the condition mentioned in (2) is not the way it’s supposed to be; also not the way it once was and, one day, not the way it will be.
4. We Christians also know that we should act in response to and furtherance of beauty-truth-goodness, and not by calculation of effect. (Controversial this; but true and right nevertheless.)
5. And so, we ought never act in such a way as to intend physical damage. That would be ugly, a repetition of the fall, a deepening of damage.
6. But, sometimes, acting in response to and furtherance of what’s beautiful-good-true brings physical damage in its train, as rain can bring flood and sun drought. Sometimes, too, we can know this to be the case: disarming the man with the gun may break his arm; preventing the wife-beater from continuing to beat may hurt him; and so on. [This is a version of the principle of double effect.]
7. In such cases, we should nonetheless act as beauty demands, thrumming & dancing thereby in response to the Lord, but at the same time wrapped in dark clouds of repentant mourning for the inevitable post-lapsum imbrication with violence of what we do in the Lord’s service. What we renounce as Christians is not actions that in fact produce physical damage, but actions intending that outcome.
8. Pacifism, then? No. Renunciation of violence-as-physical-damage? Also no. What we seek is peace, which is both prevenient and among the last things; what we know is that our seeking of it will unavoidably contribute to damage. Hence, mourning, lament, penitence. The Christian soldier has to be a good mourner for what he is and does.

At least some of the time, it seems like something to you to be you. Your experience, that is, often has a savor: sweet, sour, agonizing, boring, anticipatory, regretful, sated, delighted … and so on. This, I expect, we share with other animals. Their experience too, at least some of the time, has a taste or a feel, though the range of such seemings is, for them, probably more limited. I doubt that your cat or your goldfish can be nostalgically regretful or delighted at the misfortune of another, for instance.

We humans can do something that (probably) no other animal can: we can be spectators of ourselves having experiences, aware of ourselves as experiencers of this or that, the audience at our own inner and very private theater. Sometimes, we comment on this fact about ourselves: “If my thought-dreams could be seen/They’d probably put my head inside a guillotine” is, among other things, a comment on the importance of keeping the theater private.

What should Christians think about the inner theater? That it is an artifact of the fall, and that in heaven, when we know as we are known, it will cease. This also means that now, here below, we should not foster it or cling to it. The liturgy’s function is, in part, gradually to bring down the curtain upon it. To be a spectator at your inner theater is to enter a private inner world and to delight in being there; the world toward which we move has no privacy. In it, in the life of the world to come, we are transparent to ourselves and to others and most especially to the Lord. Anticipations of this here below are rare but real: we pass through them as a fish does through water.

Suppose you’re a quietist about political outcomes. You’ll have strong political views, passions even: you’ll eagerly support some political proposals, and just as eagerly oppose others. But you’ll do those things without concern about outcome. You’ll do them, instead, out of love: the weight of your loves will move you irresistibly into some particular political embrace. And to love a political proposal is an act different in every interesting way from caring about the outcome of loving it.

Suppose, too, that you believe in the convertibility of the transcendentals: that what is true is beautiful and what is beautiful is good and what is good is true. (All good Catholics should believe this.) Then, your political loves will, you will think, be responsive to what is beautiful; and you will advocate what you advocate politically because it is beautiful, and oppose what you oppose because it is ugly. So also, mutatis mutandis, for truth/falsity and good/evil.

Faced, then, with a proposal to reform healthcare in the USA, you will advocate what you advocate and oppose what you oppose not because of calculations about outcome, but because of beauty. On this ground, everything is clear: access to healthcare is a right, a condition for human flourishing; a system that makes access contingent upon features extraneous to being human — such as having paid work — is ugly. Attempts to redress the ugliness by insurance compound it: insurance is part of the ugliness, not part of the beauty. The proper solution, the one to advocate with passion, is universal free access. That is the starting point.

This is not an argument. It is a picture.

A florilegium is a bunch of flowers — a word-posy. Here are three blooms, each encountered today, presented without comment for you to sniff and enjoy:

1. “Tota vita christiani boni, sanctum desiderium est. Quod autem desideras, nondum vides; sed desiderando capax efficeris, ut cum venerit quod videas, implearis” (Augustine, In Epistolam Ioannis ad Parthos, from 4.6) — which, being translated, is: “A good Christian’s whole life is holy desire. What you desire you don’t yet see. But by desiring it you are made such that when what you ought to want will have come, you can be filled by it.”
2. “The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology.” Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005; first published in German in 1922), p. 36.
3. “Grace found that she could always dismiss a disturbing thought by wrapping it in a platitude.” Janet Frame, Towards Another Summer (Berkeley, California: Counterpoint Press, 2009), p. 101.

When the Song of Songs’ lover says to his beloved, O my beloved, you are completely beautiful/there is no stain in you (4:7), his words are, precisely, figures of Christ’s words to the Church: he (the Song’s lover) is preparing to present his beloved to himself as the immaculata — giving her to herself as such by his love for and embrace of her, and in that way giving her as gift also to the world. One way to receive that gift is to read of its giving in the Song’s words. These verses, properly illuminated by reading them as scriptural words, have application not only to the Lord’s Israel-Church as such, immaculate and shining, burnished and pure, her lips dripping honeycomb as she opens them to the Lord’s kisses, but also to baptized Christian readers of the Song. In baptism you were made immaculate, stainless: the Church preserves this idea in the baptismal liturgy, representing it both verbally and by the dressing of the newly-baptized in the unstained white garments proper to those who are immaculate. If you are baptized, you have not, I take it, preserved your stainlessness since your baptism: your white garments are by now wrinkled and spotted and deeply (but not ineradicably) stained. But you once were stainless, like the Song’s beloved, and like the Church. And this is not the only application to you: the Lord’s praise of the Song’s beloved as completely beautiful and stainless (5:2) belongs to his delight in and desire for her; and that delight and desire applies to you, too, although of course in a derived and participated way. You can, then, take the words of these verses of the Song to heart as addressed directly to you. Even that is not all. Your own addresses to your beloved and his or hers to you participate in and figure those of the Lord to his beloved. Knowing that, seeing it, illuminates the sheer excess of your own delight in and desire for your beloved. That is as it is in its goodness and beauty (it is of course not only that, but also shattered and corrupt, violent and manipulative) because the Lord’s delight in and desire for you is as it is. In this, as in all things, you image, to the extent that you are undamaged, the Lord himself.

We Christians have from the beginning thought it good to translate our Scriptures. One important result of this is that we have no scriptural text: we have, instead, versions. Every book of the canon exists in many versions — Hebrew, Greek, Latin Syriac, English, Spanish, Telugu, Japanese, Swahili, and so on. For Catholics, some versions are authorized locally to be read (and chanted) liturgically. The worldwide list of such versions is long, and each version found on that list is Scripture exactly in the sense that when we read and hear it in the context of a liturgical celebration we read and hear the word of the Lord — which is exactly what we say after having read it: “The Word of the Lord.” But what are these versions versions of? They are all (it seems to me) authoritative versions of what the Lord says to his people. That must be so if we call each and any of them verbum Dei. But the versions differ among themselves in many ways: lexically, syntactically, semantically, in register and tone and diction, and so on. This variation, I should think, is not a problem for the Church but an opportunity. Thinking through in what that opportunity consists requires a theology of the versions, something which the Church has not yet fully developed.

Time is a gift, but one whose texture makes accepting it almost impossible. We are catechized into thinking it linear and capable of being ordered, constrained, and used; and we are encouraged to enter it and remain in it Janus-faced, looking back with nostalgic regret or disappointed agony, and forward with fear-laced hopelessness, certain only of loss and decay and betrayal. Our days & nights, lived like this, are like weavers’ shuttles: the fabric of our lives is worn thin by them, until we die. The liturgy orders time differently, and remakes us if we can learn to let it. The liturgical life empties time of its power by transfiguring it into a repetitive stammer, each of whose repetitions confesses its own inadequacy differently, and in so doing glories in what it is. No longer linear, no longer Janus-faced, time becomes the circular Psalm-chant, the Sanctus sung in choir without beginning or end. The time of narrative, of development from this to that, of one damn thing after another, is in this way rendered into a tableau in which the Prodigal’s departure and return are together iconically present.