…I have been thinking a lot lately about, not just the shortfalls of writing, but the… — I’ve struggled to find the right word here, but it’s very close to corruption, the at least nearly built-in corrupting capacity of writing.
Describing the Fall in Genesis, Paul Kingsnorth says, “Our mind is filled with questions, the gears inside it begin to whir and turn … A portcullis of words descends between us and the other creatures in the garden, and we can never go home again.… We chose knowledge over communion; we chose power over humility.”
In an interview with Russel Moore, he puts it this way:
Writing is perhaps the original technology, language is the original technology. The minute you have a language like the one we’re communicating with, you’re subtly abstracting the world and turning reality into words and symbols. So it may be that the minute that humans can develop abstract language, and certainly when they later were going to write it down, they’ve already distanced themselves in some dangerous way from the natural world.
Tara Isabell Burton, one of the many on my list of bad reviewers of Kingsnorth, points out the obvious: “And yet we had language in the garden—Adam names the animals in Genesis 2:20. Christ himself is understood, in standard Christian theology, as the incarnate Word.” She also adds that “Genesis 1 reminds us that human beings are to be understood in the image and likeness of God: an image and likeness that traditionally has been associated, from Irenaeus to Augustine to Luther to Herder to Pannenberg, with our intellectual and creative capacities.”
What an impressive list of names!
I’m no theologian, nor even an especially wide reader of theologians, but I’m fairly certain there is a long history of admitting that, really, we have no idea what precisely is meant by the term imago Dei. In “standard Christian theology,” we understand that we are made in the image and likeness of God. That’s it. “Traditionally,” anything more is quite contestable. Within the tradition, association of that image and likeness (these are two different Hebrew words, but almost certainly used synonymously in the creation narrative) with our “intellectual and creative capacities” has a long history, but it is one strand of interpretation, and even a cursory reading reveals it to be a pretty weak and very complicated one.
Irenaeus, to take one of Burton’s examples, had a much wider “body, soul, and spirit” understanding of the imago Dei. In his Against Heresies, Irenaeus wrote,
Now God shall be glorified in His handiwork, fitting it so as to be conformable to, and modelled after, His own Son. For by the hands of the Father, that is, by the Son and the Holy Spirit, man, and not [merely] a part of man, was made in the likeness of God. Now the soul and the spirit are certainly a part of the man, but certainly not the man; for the perfect man consists in the commingling and the union of the soul receiving the spirit of the Father, and the admixture of that fleshly nature which was moulded after the image of God.
Irenaeus may have also associated it with the intellect — though, mainly understood as the quality of a rational soul and morally free agent capable of knowing God — and he may have attempted to differentiate between “image” and “likeness” and their pre-and post-Fall and eschatological status, but it’s hardly a thing you’d flippantly highlight as standard or traditional theology when it so clearly is always-has-been-always-will-be contested theology.
Again, I’m no theologian, but I also think a look at the theology of any of the names Burton appeals to, including the very post-Enlightenment Herder, would almost infinitely complicate her hand-waving summary. In any case, we don’t know — have never known — what the image of God is because the Bible does not say.
(Kingsnorth’s book “is just a bit too simplistic” Burton’s subtitle reads. In my estimation, one of them is being “a bit too simplistic” — and it ain’t Kingsnorth. In fact, it’s more than a little ironic that one would casually assume “traditional” association of man’s God-image with our intellectual capacities. Take just one further point: Regardless of one’s view of the Fall, you’d be hard-pressed to find many theological views that would not see human intellect as being corrupted by it. Yet, as Karl Barth puts it, “neither in the rest of the Old Testament nor in the New is there any trace of the abrogation of this ideal state, or of the partial or complete destruction of the imago Dei.” Whatever the image and likeness of God is, the Bible doesn’t seem to associate the Fall with a loss of that image or likeness. Nor does it, or its writers, seem interested at all in defining that God-image for us. So it’s “traditional association with our intellectual and creative capacities” is dubious and, yes, simplistic.)
Regardless, Kingsnorth has not said anything about the image of God. He is entertaining a theological thought experiment — not a very wild one in my view — where somewhere in early human prehistory language creates an abstraction and division between us and the world, and between us and God. And any normal person, from Mom to Dad to Steve to Ashley to Joe, who has tried to follow the intense intellectual arch of a Pannenberg (whose imago Dei is found not in something called our “intellect” but in an “openness to the world”) will know that Kingsnorth has a very good point: the creative intellect of great theologians can very quickly abstract you from the world. There’s a very good, very healthy reason that most people don’t have or want the Summa Theologica sitting on their shelves. In fact, it’s tempting to wonder how much more love and attention there might be in the world if all such endeavors would start where Aquinas’s ended: “All I have written is so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.”
In something of an uncomfortable way, Burton seems to me to be demonstrating Kingsnorth’s point. Dumbed down, disorienting, and deceptively graspable theology — and anthropology — results from this kind of writing. Lazy is the summary, and lazy the dismissal.
Which really gets at one of my biggest and, frankly, across the board gripes with all the “there’s nothing new here” reviewers of Paul Kingsnorth — and especially the “Wellll, I wouldn’t go that far” dissociating safe-distancers and subtle, unwitting, annoying perpetuators of the status quo. Lazy, boring, and annoying is their dismissal. (BlaaaAAh!, would be my wordless summary.)
Let me partially concede an obvious point, although I think it’s important that I don’t fully concede it. All of this has required language: Kingsnorth needs language, Burton needs language, theologians from Augustine to Aquinas to Pannenberg need language, etc., etc. All of them are reading, all of them are writing. (So am I, you may have noticed.) And the kind of language we’re all using could, in theory, be a neutral medium of communication and creativity, ready for glory or disgrace. (Kingsnorth doesn’t, as far as I can tell, offer a hard distinction between language and the written word, which is fine, I think, for the kind of thing he’s wondering about.) But as many of us have learned so well from folks like Neil postman, mediums ain’t neutral.
In fact, Postman would, I’m quite sure, have a jolly good chat with Kingsnorth on exactly this subject. In the first chapter of his Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman quotes Ernst Cassirer:
Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man’s symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself. He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of [an] artificial medium.
As well as Northrop Frye:
[T]he critics of the god Thoth, the inventor of writing,… did not realize that the written word is far more powerful than simply a reminder: it re-creates the past in the present, and gives us, not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of the summoned-up hallucination.
That sounds pretty darn conversant with Kingsnorth to me. Give me a Neil Postman, and not one of his lazy academic “fans,” who can actually engage with what Kingsnorth is saying. There’s paradox here that these guys have an appreciation for. Postman, I think, loved the written word. And I’m guessing Kingsnorth does too. But Postman would not have balked at the power — even the portcullis-like power — of language.
That’s what I mean by not fully conceding the point, and it’s why I’m annoyed by lazy dismissals. You will miss the significance of what Kingsnorth is saying if you try to make language neutral to your experience of the world, and you will certainly miss it if you use pathetically referenced bible passages to excuse a shrug.
I have no idea what precisely the Fall was (I doubt it was something punctiliar at all) and I don’t know what the imago Dei is (I doubt, also, that is one thing, but tend to think of it as relational — God’s attention and affection toward us in the world, and the infinite relational stuff that follows). I do think there is something significant, and significantly missed, in Burton’s reference to Christ as the incarnate Word (you know, that “standard Christian theology” business), something that would help her, and us, understand Kingsnorth’s point.
We are what we are — glorious, fallen, intelligent, stupid, emotional, stoical, relational, solitary, and language-saturated animals. The question to ask is, In what direction are we, are they, are you using language? Burton — again, dumbly in my view — reminds us that Christ is the incarnate Word, as though that pointer solves the issue. Keeping in mind that “Word” is a (less than adequate) translation of Logos, which, like the image language in Genesis, is a borrowed term, it’s also something we are not told anything about. What we are told is that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
The direction is from “word” to incarnation; we have a tendency to go from the incarnate to the word. And the point to take seriously is that language tends in that separating, knowledge-over-communion direction. (Think of the ways that Adam and Eve talked themselves into eating the fruit; think of God intervening to confuse language at the Tower of Babel; and think of the reversal of that confusion finding its one and only true fulfillment in the incarnating Word.)
The astonishing thing for us humans is not that we are gifted with language and creativity but that we might imitate our Creator, taking our intellectual, creative, language-animal, tower- and head-in-the-clouds selves and incarnating them by attending, with real loving attention, to the world and the people around us.
And yes, that attention can certainly involve words — if we can keep them from distracting and abstracting us.
I feel no need to defend Kingsnorth to the hilt. But what I do think, quite strenuously, is that you will get so much more to chew on in your real, human, embodied life if you take him seriously. And you’ll get much less wishy-washy nonsense if you ignore the simplistic winkers at the status quo who review him.
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In a previous post that basically got this one rolling, I quoted Rachel Aviv from her article on Oliver Sacks’s private writings, which revealed a wild lack of honesty in his published words:
Sacks once told a reporter that he hoped to be remembered as someone who “bore witness”—a term often used within medicine to describe the act of accompanying patients in their most vulnerable moments, rather than turning away. To bear witness is to recognize and respond to suffering that would otherwise go unseen. But perhaps bearing witness is incompatible with writing a story about it.
Something is lost — a witness deceptively born — when life is converted to words. Sacks did it extremely dishonestly, but the essential problem with language is one I think Aviv would appreciate. And it’s a point worth keeping in mind — even as we, sometimes quite gloriously*, use words.
This will all be heavy on mind in the coming year.
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*Everyone knows that Wendell Berry’s novels were also not affected by the Fall. Rest assured, Jeremy, if you are reading this 🙂 But seriously, Berry’s use of language is incarnating word-flow par excellence, as any reader of his can attest.