paul j. griffiths

The Catholic offer to Anglicans last week suggests, to me, two beautiful possibilities.

The first is that there might be an Anglican Rite within the Catholic Church, as there are already many rites other than the Roman. The details of what this might be like are largely beyond my imagination, and the extent to which it is possible will depend on what the forthcoming Apostolic Constitution has to say. But the thought is appealing in many ways. It’s often said that the first thing Anglicans who have been received into the Catholic Church miss is English in the liturgy. This was certainly true for me, and even after thirteen years remains to some extent so. The English of the Roman Missal and the Liturgy of the Hours is, on the whole, not beautiful. These are matters of aesthetics, of course — important, but with a secondary significance.

The second thought is more important. It may be that the Holy Father’s initiative will find a response among a good number of Anglicans. If it does, it could be an important step in a new unification of Christians under Rome’s banner, the vexillum caritatis (Song of Songs 2:4) — and not just any Christians, but those who think of the Church as the world’s primary institutional reality and of theology as queen of the sciences. A unification of that sort is desperately needed.

The fundamentals of a Christian sorting of the world are clear enough. There are Christians: members of the body of Christ by baptism; there are Jews, inheritors of the eternally-valid Abrahamic covenant; and there are pagans, which is to say everyone else.

Are Muslims pagans? Probably not: they are too intimate with us for that, sharing with us as they do a considerable lexicon and common stock of narratives, and having exchanged ideas and blood (and violence) with us for more than thirteen hundred years. Are they Christian heretics? Perhaps. Most Christians from the seventh century until the sixteenth thought of them in this way, because of standard Islamic views about Jesus (a prophet, not the incarnate Lord; he did not die on the cross) and the triune Lord (not triune). Are Christianity and Islam different species of a single genus, namely ‘religion’? No. Neither Christians nor Muslims can easily accept this way of thinking about themselves. The classificatory question remains, for Christians, largely unanswered.

Whatever its answer, one thing is fairly clear. Muslims are genealogically intimate with us; we share with them much, and we have much to learn from them. I hope that this genealogical affinity can extend to an elective one: I hope, that is, that we Christians will increasingly choose to see Muslims as allies and affines against the deadening and bloody weight of late-capitalist democracy. It would be better, I think, for the Church to live under the constraints and difficulties of an Islamic state, violent and restrictive though these can be (as they are, for instance, in Saudi Arabia), than to return with ever more passion, as it is increasingly doing, the bodysnatching embrace of late-capitalist democracy.

Augustine writes in Book Four of his Confessions that he has, as a result of an unnamed boyhood friend’s death, become a great question or puzzle to himself (factus eram ipse mihi magna quaestio est, Confessiones iv.4.9). In writing this at the end of the fourth century, in his mid-forties, he is looking back three decades or so, recalling his pre-baptismal adolescent self. He repeats the same point (or almost the same) in Book Ten, lamenting that in the Lord’s eyes he remains a puzzle-question to himself, and that this fact constitutes his languor, his heavy sickness (Confessiones x.33.50). At that point he is writing about his own condition as a bishop, more than a decade after his baptism. It is a constant and deep theme in Augustine’s work, early and late, pre- and post-baptism, that we are opaque to ourselves, internally conflicted, unreliable guides to our own condition and motivation, very much not transparent to introspection. We therefore should not, here below, place much trust in our own self-understanding; we can and should confess this lack, and that is what he spends much of the Confessions doing, in eloquent and excitable Latin prose of an intensity that makes it almost poetic.

Poets and novelists are better at depicting what it is like to be a puzzle to oneself than philosophers and theologians. A recent example is to hand in J. M. Coetzee’s Summertime, published in the UK a few months ago and about to appear in the US. Coetzee is among the most important living writers of fiction in English — and indeed of English prose. He has won the Booker Prize twice, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. He is, so far as I can tell, not a Christian; but he is essential reading for Christians, or at least for those with Augustinian sensibilities. If you think that you are largely transparent to your own gaze, then Coetzee is not for you. But then neither is Augustine. Augustine would, if I can be permitted the thought-experiment, very much have liked Coetzee’s work, and especially his autobiographical work.

Summertime is the third volume of Coetzee’s quasi-autobiography. The first, Boyhood, appeared in 1997; and the second, Youth, in 2002. Summertime depicts Coetzee in roughly the decade of his thirties, which means, approximately, the 1970s: he was born in 1940, in South Africa. The Coetzee depicted — as often offstage as on — in these three volumes, and especially in Summertime, bears a complex relation to the real man, a truly Augustinian relation. The conceit of Summertime is that Coetzee is dead (so far as I know at the date of writing, he lives), and that someone (unnamed) is preparing a biography of him. To this end, the biographer interviews people who had known Coetzee, and much of the book consists of the record of these interviews. There are also brief entries from Coetzee’s own journals of the period; the reader is given no clue as to whether these entries really are what they are presented as; and no clue, likewise, as to whether those interviewed — former lovers, colleagues, relatives — are real people or fictions. The picture of a long-haired and bearded man in his thirties on the jacket flap likewise may or may not be Coetzee in his thirties.

Those things don’t matter. What matters (as well as the prose, which is sharp enough to separate bones from marrow) is how these distancing and framing techniques yield an Augustinian past. They yield it as a series of interlocking puzzles, of overlapping and partly contradictory tableaux: Coetzee and his cousin in a brokendown pickup in the Karoo; Coetzee writing spurned love-letters to an exiled Brazilian ballerina; Coetzee going to a rugby match with his prematurely old father; Coetzee having an affair with a married South African woman and trying to persuade her to make love to the rhythms of a piece of music by Schubert. Taken together these provide a composite and blurry picture of a man seen through the eyes of others. He is not seen by those who recall him as a very nice man: not compassionate, especially; not a very good lover; self-absorbed but at the same time insufficiently involved in his own life; acting, stiffly (he can’t dance, the Brazilian ballerina observes), according to a series of carefully-scripted scenarios. This kind of autobiography is nonlinear, internally complex, and suffused with unreliability — Coetzee-the-author takes trouble to point out the unreliability both of those being interviewed and of the interviewer rendering what they tell him.

The life (Coetzee’s?) in the autobiography by J. M. Coetzee is opaque, not susceptible to a narrative line, incapable of yielding a clear picture, available only to readers prepared to acknowledge that their lives are, formally speaking, like that too: unavailable to themselves. Augustine’s depiction of his past is in every significant respect like this. That is why it is the greatest hagiography the Christian tradition has yet yielded. The Lord, of course, has your life in mind in all its particulars; but you are not him, and your task, like Augustine’s, like Coetzee’s, is not narratively to unify your past and thereby to gaze at a phantasm; neither is it to introspect in search of your glassy essence, pristine and unscratched and thereby to look at an idol; it is rather to lament the half-understood imperfection and disorder of the fragments of the life that is yours, and in so doing to offer it to the only one who can give it unity and translucence. Augustine did this. Coetzee shows what it is to understand a life in this way without yet offering it. Christians should thank him for that.

Catholics often worry about depiction. Are there limits on what may be depicted (or represented), whether visually or verbally? Should we be careful not to look at (or read) depictions of a certain sort, or depictions of certain kinds of thing? There is a tangled web of issues here, about which Catholics in the US have often been vocal and politically active. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops, for example, provides ratings of current movies as an aid to Catholics in thinking about what they might or might not want to see. These ratings are based in considerable part upon what a movie depicts: the more it shows sexual activity, or nudity, or violence, the closer it moves toward the Conference’s lowest rating (O, for morally offensive). The ratings also pay attention to other matters, such as the tone of the movie, whether what is depicted seems to be approved or not, and what the intentions of the makers appear to have been. But attention to what is depicted, rather than how or for what purpose or with what degree of visual beauty, seems to be the main factor.

There is a historical story here, too: we Catholics were among the principal forces behind the establishment of the National League of Decency (originally the Catholic League of Decency, founded in 1933), a group instrumental in establishing the Motion Picture Production Code, which effectively constrained what might be depicted in Hollywood movies from 1934-1968. The Code, like the current rating system of the US Catholic Bishops, was concerned mostly with what might be depicted in movies, and very little with how or for what purpose.

I’m prompted to think about the question of depiction by having yesterday looked at an exhibition at Duke University’s Perkins Library of photographs by Jennette Williams. The photographs will shortly be published in book form by Duke University Press, as The Bathers. The photographs are of women, many naked and some partly clothed, in steam-baths in Budapest and Istanbul. Many of the images are posed in conscious echo of paintings by Ingres, Renoir, and others; and they (both the women and the images of them) are saturated in the beauty of the physical. The images are, to me, more sensual than erotic, though certainly not without erotic overtones. I am delighted that Ms. Williams made them, that the women she photographed participated willingly in that making, and that they (images and women) can now be contemplated.

And yet I suspect that many Catholics, and perhaps the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, might be less delighted. It is certainly true that depicting or representing the naked human body has been something more pleasing to, and frequently done by pagans than Christians or Jews or Muslims. Why? Why should or might a Catholic be made uneasy by such depictions? Does it not follow from the goodness of the created order in its physicality that nothing in it should be barred in principle from depiction? I think, with only slight reservations, that it does. Anything that is, to the degree that it is, is good; and anything that is good may rightly be represented, depicted, and contemplated. This includes human nakedness, human sexual activity of all kinds, birth, and death. It includes, too, anything of which human beings are capable, including the infliction of pain upon others, and including the most horrible acts of violence and mutilation imaginable. If this were not so — if such things were excluded in principle from depiction — then, for example neither the Iliad nor the Canterbury Tales nor Gargantua & Pantagruel could any longer be read. As soon as that conclusion is reached, it’s clear that the argument has gone wrong somewhere.

What governs the propriety of a depiction, then, is not what it depicts but rather a vast and endlessly complex range of variables, including but by no means limited to: the intentions of the maker; the condition of those looking at the image; the relation of those being depicted to the image (if it includes people); and the degree of beauty belonging to the depiction. Attention to those matters would produce a more nuanced and more defensible Catholic response to the interesting questions surrounding depiction than a single-minded focus upon the content of depictions.

While you’re thinking about those questions, I recommend that you look at Jennette Williams’ bathers.

Two theses:

1. Being a member of Christ’s body and being educated have nothing to do with one another. Witness the fact that the vast majority of Christians have been illiterate and without any of the other particular skills valued and taught by our schools, colleges, and universities. They were, and are, in the Lord’s eyes, none the worse for these lacks; many among them are saints.
2. The Church, broadly construed, has a deep and abiding interest in the intellectual life, and in the formation of some among its members as scholars and thinkers. Witness the fact that it honors its intellectual exemplars as doctores ecclesiae, and that those teachers are among the most accomplished and subtle thinkers and writers to grace the human race.

Among the important tasks in thinking about Christianity and education is to hold these theses together, for they are both true.