Back in the good ol' days when the Land of Unlikeness was just a twinkle in our eyes and wasn't called the Land of Unlikeness (last week), Aron and I toyed with calling it something like St. Bede's Blog. But in the end, Auden won out, and here we are.
Over at the the Disseminary they've come up with Theology Cards, like the one displayed here, and a Theology Game, apparently good for teaching Early Church History. Screw book club, I'm playing THE THEOLOGY GAME!!
A wonderful essay, delivered by the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Faculties of Trinity and Wycliff College at U of Toronto, can be found here. Thanks to Scott and the Faith and Theology blog (where, incidentally, there is also a lively debate about biblical inerrancy occuring just today!) for pointing me toward it originally. The essay is called "The Bible: Reading and Hearing" and is his attemt at a "renewed theological grasp of scripture. It is fitting, then, that in so seeking, he consults my former advisor, Kevin Vanhoozer, and his recent opus, The Drama of Doctrine. Williams raises a couple interesting and helpful points, that I thought I'd raise here, briefly.
First, Williams stresses that the test of any good theology of scripture is the primacy it gives scripture over everything else. This is a basic building block of being Christian. Moreover, this attests to the public nature of scripture; the reading of scripture is a public event. Listening and responsiveness to a unique and identifiable communicative act are the basic characteristics of the Christian, rather than self-generation or self-expression. Hence our understanding of the church as ekklesia. "From one (crucially important) point of view, the celebration of the Eucharist is that representation, the moment when all are equally and unequivocally designated as guests, responding to invitation."
Second, the bible addresses us in two ways: (i) as "one with" a specific audience of address in the text, as in exhortatory passages; and (ii) texts that, while not addressing a specific audience, suggest a "movement" or change, as in parables. In either case, we need "the capacity to read/hear enough to sense the directedness of a text. Fragmentary reading is highly risky to the extent that it abstracts from what various hermeneutical theorists (Ricoeur above all) have thought of as the world ‘in front of the text’ – the specific needs that shape the movement and emphasis of the text itself." Williams is concerned both by readers who too quickly draw polemical conclusions from passages, and readers who fail to draw any sort of conclusion about what the text is saying to us, the present audience that should be identifying with the original audience.
"I want to stress that what I am trying to define as a strictly theological reading of Scripture, a reading in which the present community is made contemporary with the world in front of the text, is bound to give priority to the question that the text specifically puts and to ask how the movement, the transition, worked for within the text is to be realised in the contemporary reading community."
Williams is not here advocating some arbitrary identification of our world with the text's. Rather, "the effects of the text" actually work to establish a connection with the reader by analogy with the "world in front of the text": "...the connections between elements of scriptural text, the connections that constitute what I have here been calling its ‘movement’, will be uncovered in the reader’s world as still effecting the same movement and making the same overall demands."
To fully realize this connection, the theologically sensitive reader understands the dual character of the text, as being an already completed work, but also a work that requires constant rereading and interpretation. "To identify a written text as sacred is to claim that the continuous possibility of re-reading, the impossibility of reading for the last time, is a continuous openness to the intention of God to communicate." There is an invitation, a Eucharistic invitation even, to reread, reinterpret, and respond to the claims the text makes on us, furthering the basic aspect (attitude) of the Christian mentioned above.
The last thing I wanted to note is Williams' reflection on the Resurrection in this context. Following the Eucharistic (responsive) aspect of reading scripture, Williams states that to properly hold our theologies of Eucharist and Scripture together, we need a proper Pneumatology, as the spirit is the "binder-togetherer" (to borrow a phrase from Orson Scott Card) of God and the Church. This requires, however, a robust notion of Christ's Resurrection. The scripture is an invitation by God through the Son to all to join him in fellowship. But, "If it is not the present vehicle of God speaking in the risen Christ, it is a record only of God speaking to others. For it to be an address that works directly upon self and community now, it must be given to us as the continuation of the same act, the re-presenting and re-enacting of the same scriptural reality of invitation and the creation of a people defined by justice, mutual service and the liberty to relate to God as Father and faithful partner." Resurrection as an ontological reality is the key to a theologically sound Eucharist and reading of scripture. Without it, the message of the scripture and the preforming of the Eucharist are simply remembrances of things past.
Williams' essay here represents to me a solid step toward clarifying a distinctly Anglican and (surprise) orthodox contribution to Theological Hermeneutics. I only wish he'd expand this into book form. It will be interesting to see how and if other Anglicans respond to this theology of scripture and the ontological affirmation he gives to the ressurrection and its association to the message.
Dan and I are reading Volume 5 right now of A Theological Aesthetics, and we're going to be posting often on our reading and subsequent discussions. We just looked at his section on Nicholas of Cusa, who he definitely respects as being kind of a super-Catholic--I say this because Cusa, like Pico, was obsessed with explaining all phenomena and all religion in terms of the catholic faith. Kudos to Cusa says Hans. Apparently Cusa was down with the analogia entis as well, which Hans likes, but what we gleaned this past week was that the analogy may be a little too tight with Cusa, as Hans accuses him of preparing the ground (eventually) for Idealism, which equals loss of feeling for eros, and an inability to see eros and God in the same picture. Every metaphor must limp it seems. I agree here, we must be careful about tightening these comparisons too much. The analogy must grow in both directions. Advice I take seriously as I critique Carl Jung's notion of quaternity for my thesis, definitely an example of too clean a symbol. Wrapping up an analogy should always falter at the last step (between the 3 and the 4) like Bjork says in Dancer in the Dark, where she hoped the penultimate song would never end.
Read More......The Passion of Joan of Arc, by Carl Dreyer (1928). Another dumb signifier, this one in a silent film, and perhaps one of the very first, for it seems like in order to be able to identify one we must have a sense of individuality, we must be ripped away from the church.
We see this played out on Joan's face during this intense film. She is placed between the church and God, and she learns that this the only place where she may take the sacrament, this is the only place where she is delivered, even if at the end she knows she is delivered by none other than Death. This is the desert of the real, something Simone Weil also touched on, something which the existence of the Catholic Church will always send looming up. It is true that we must always ask ourselves why we are not Catholics, and the answer should always set us somewhere outside of the domain of salvation, in between salvation and God. It occurred to me that, however deserted this place is, Mary must be there, an Ark herself, a tabernacle of grace. We see schizophrenia being created as the wily priests use her absolute faith in their cloth and absolute loyalty to the vision God has sent her. She defies Descartes by affirming that it was an angel and not a devil which appeared to her, but she does not escape being tortured by the representatives of this doubt. Is she pure because she does not know this doubt? Perhaps, but she must die and the church must function as the vehicle of this act, which ultimately is one of enjoyment, which at the end spreads to the crowds and the soldiers (British, I think) who cut them down with maces. Most crucial, and what sets Joan apart from the crowd, is that she at one point signs the abjuration, denies that the visions came from God, but then abjures this act as well. She is now in a desert beyond all human reach, for she cannot even trust her own insane loyalty. And this is where death, I don't know how the film manages this, death comes to appear welcoming. We feel that it is a consummation, a love feast. But only she has won it for herself.
I just watched the movie Being There, starring Peter Sellers. It's a real fantastic movie, one of the most profound statements on death, language, and TV that I've seen in a long time. The story revolves around this gardener whose name is Chance Gardner, who has grown up in an estate that he's never been allowed to leave. His only source of knowledge of the outside world has come through TV, which he watches constantly, while eating, sleeping, and talking to people. The movie opens with the death of his boss, the owner of the estate, and Chance is simply dumped out on the means streets of DC, completely out of place, an autistic baby man.
By the end of the movie the movers and shakers our great capital want him to run for president of the United States of America. How did this happen? I don't want to go into the details because what I'm really interested in is the relations to language, image, and The Other. In Lacan, the master signifier, while truly ruling the world of discourse, is primordially dumb, both in the sense that it’s most powerful when it's silent, and that it is in essence ridiculous, absurd, stupid, meaningless. The master signifier is not a word, but it is the Word. And it is not only the Word that determines our lives (perhaps a phrase that we misunderstood when we were three years old) but the Word that created the universe. How absurd that at the end of analysis we see that our desire is compelled by a misunderstanding, by a slip of the tongue, and that tongue was not even ours--we can't even claim the mistake as our own. Like at the end of The Death of Ivan Ilyich where everyone gathers around the bedside of the pitiful dying Ivan, and when they see the end has come, say "it is over." But Ivan Ilyich hears in his eternal fall, "Death is over." His ear fails him as he gains the ranks of the blessed.
But back to the movie, where we must take into account the name of our Gardener, that is, Chance. The master signifier is arbitrary, aleatory, pure chance, pure gamble, as is the Word--why does God speak to Israel, to Abraham, and Moses? Why does he choose the dunce, Peter, and all those greedy and cowardly tax collector types? We cannot know but we must believe, like Adam in Paradise Lost, which makes us end up sounding pious and ignorant, a label that we will never completely shake. . . . We should notice too that his last name is problematic as well—we never know if people call him Gardner because he is one or because that’s his name. Does not the Master Signifier name hold all the confusion that is related to trying to distinguish a name from a proper name, trying to distinguish Adam from Man, Jesus from the archetype laid down by Joshua.
As Chance finds himself in the middle of big money and big politics in Washington all of a sudden we realize people are calling him Chauncey; they have misheard him, there was some confusion, and he doesn't take any pains to clear it up. Is it Chance or Chauncey? Is he a gardener, or is Gardner simply his name? In avoiding the signifier Chance are they betraying their disavowal of the arbitrary nature of the Word, the kind of fear we feel when we read that, "God hardened the heart of Pharaoah"? How could heaven and hell be so arbitrary? But beyond that, how could Christians accept such an arbitrary God? Pascal said that we must simply wager on the truth of God's reveleation! Gambling? with God? Its ridiculous. Could even be a fraud.
How does the film represent this? By showing that everything Chance does he learned from TV, the ultimate source of dumb (even with all that talking!) if there ever was one. He shakes hands like prime ministers do, he kisses like fake lovers, he does yoga and aerobics simply because he sees it on the screen—and everyone says that he is the most authentic, the most real, person they have ever met. He is the only one who doesn’t lie in Washington, and yet everything he does comes from that buzzing talking box. Now this isn’t completely true because we must remember that he is one who works in the garden, and who knows the life and death of trees and shrubs. He becomes famous overnight for saying on a talk show that economics must be like gardening, having a time to grow and a time to die. We should also note that he is illiterate.
The women adore him, want to sleep with him, the men idolize him (some of them also want to sleep with him, especially when he tells them he just “likes to watch [TV!]”). He gets adopted by an extremely rich “king maker” and his wife: Ben and Eve. Ben is dying and Chance sees what everyone else does, but doesn’t mince words. He simply looks at Ben and says, “You’re dying, aren’t you?” Which makes Ben trust him with all his being and soul. So the master signifier, the Word, is not only dumb, but it makes friends with death. It sees death as simply another episode on television, a child’s view of death, mixed with an unassuming resurrection (watch Ponette). And we love nothing more than those who are close to death. And those like Yeltsin we can love only after they are dead.
When Eve, who is falling in love with him, attempts to kiss him, he can’t take his eyes off the TV, luckily enough there is a love scene at the moment on the screen and so he can imitate that with Eve and have a moment of “sexual relationship”--but the channel changes and his body goes limp. He says to her “I like to watch”; she is confused, but then falls to the floor, writhing. Is she masturbating? Is she coming? It's hard to tell. Chance is not really interested, as he’s attempting to imitate the yoga posture on TV at that moment. The next morning she says to him that because he did not take her, did not take advantage of her, she was finally able to take advantage of herself, and she was opened, purged, renewed. Is this a sexual relationship? I would say yes, a Lacanian, non-sexual relationship, relationship. They are truly in love because they give to each other what they do not have. He, as the final Word, has no desire, and thus cannot not desire her, cannot make love to her. But he has given her desire back to herself, and she finally sees her own self-love. Is she just a narcissist? Perhaps, but she has finally seen herself as one. Will they ever make love again? Will he become the president? These questions are absurd, which is why the final scene in the movie shows him walking on water, while Ben’s funeral goes on behind him. Here the narrative breaks down, well, the movie is over for one, but our ability to look into the future of these characters is nullified, for they have no future. Their exposure to the Word has un-sutured their lives, and they have become like mad Peters, walking on water in spite of themselves.
Welcome to The Land of Unlikeness. We are a group of Catholic Anglicans working together to explore Anglicanism's unique voice in the world today. We have been formed by sacramental and daily worship. We are orthodox and catholic in our outlook, and we tread boldly into politics, psychoanalysis, theater, film, science, literature, pop culture, and (especially) theology. We welcome your comments, criticism and praise.
Contributors
A.D.
A.D. is a musician and Ph.D. candidate in Philadelphia. He is thinking and writing about Lacan and Theology.
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D.W. McClain
DWM, a sometime resident of Philadelphia, and is pursuing a PhD in Theology at the Catholic University of Philadelphia. He occasionally finds time to watch tv and film and is eagerly anticipating the day when he can afford the entire Criterion Collection.
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DWM's shared rss aggregate.
