…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.

I’m officially adding an organ-powered silent to my bucket list.

Alex Ross:

Audiences tend to come away from theatre-organ screenings in a jubilant mood, and I think I know the reason. Here, passive consumption becomes active and creative: the performer reacts with individual spontaneity while summoning sounds of orchestral heft. The technological mastery of cinematic spectacle is humanized by the immediacy of live performance. You understand why an artist like Murnau considered silent film the perfect medium. ♦

Kevin Williamson:

Donald Trump is no kind of Christian—he is a toxic blend of atheist and idolator—but he knows that those in the pews are his most unshakeable supporters and that he is going to need all of the support he can get as his failure to deliver on his absurd economic promises becomes a more painful and undeniable fact of everyday life for millions of Americans watching the national debt skyrocket even faster than their grocery bills. Trump wants to pose as a crusader, coming to the aid of persecuted Christians—but only when doing so is a very low-cost proposition. It is not clear that the abuse of Christians in Nigeria is anything more than incidental to the general banditry and oppression of Lakurawa et al.—it takes too credulous a view of the fig leaf of “zakat” covering ordinary robbery—but there are places in the world where the active, brutal, ruthless repression of Christians is a real thing: In the so-called People’s Republic of China, for example—but Trump is far too low a coward to try to do anything about that, in much that same way the Russian shadow fleet is permitted to flout U.S. sanctions while Venezuelan boats are blown out of the war on unsupported drug-war pretexts that would not render the attacks any less illegal or immoral even if they were true. It is not the case that all bullies are cowards, but many bullies are cowards, and Trump is one of those, as are many of the men and women who serve him.

… Every time Putin murders a hospital ward full of expectant mothers, you can count on Donald Trump to out-Mahatma even Mohandas K. Gandhi himself in speaking of peace. But a carelessly executed and bloodthirsty crusade on the probably pretextual and certainly exaggerated assertion that the victims of ordinary banditry, terrible as their situation is, are Christian martyrs threatened by scary-looking, fez-wearing, black Muslims? Sign the Trumpkins up for that.

Matthew Crawford:

There is a cloud of lousiness that hangs over many products and services these days, as though the people responsible for making it, or doing it, weren’t too concerned about the result. Sometimes this can shade over from insouciance to real perversity. As my friend Matt Feeney put it to me about a year ago, “Capitalism seems to have moved into an actively misanthropic stage. Corporations don’t just hate their workers. They hate their customers.”

Tee hee. Yeah, it’s almost as though the people responsible aren’t concerned with the quality of the results…

Rachel Aviv:

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. In his journal, after a session with a patient with Tourette’s syndrome, Sacks describes the miracle of being “enabled to ‘feel’—that is, to imagine, with all the powers of my head and heart—how it felt to be another human being.” Empathy tends to be held up as a moral end point, as if it exists as its own little island of good work. And yet it is part of a longer transaction, and it is, fundamentally, a projection. A writer who imagines what it’s like to exist as another person must then translate that into his own idiom—a process that Sacks makes particularly literal.

By taking that process of translation literally, she means that Oliver Sacks often lied about his patients and very knowingly and deceptively inserted his own thoughts into the stories he wrote about them.

I haven’t thrown away his books yet, but honestly, I probably will.

Beyond what he called, in his own journals and letters, lies and falsification in his published work, it’s difficult not to conclude that, especially in the first half of his career, if Sacks was not a sociopath, he was darn uncomfortably close.

There’s plenty of space in that piece, and rightly, for sympathy toward Mr. Sacks. And the story of Sacks’ life will, I think, still show that he bore a heartfelt personal witness to many of his patients, who seemed genuinely to love and be loved by him. I hope his larger story continues to reflect that. But his books are now, for me anyway, utterly useless.

Sacks spoke of “animating” his patients, as if lending them some of his narrative energy. After living in the forgotten wards of hospitals, in a kind of narrative void, perhaps his patients felt that some inaccuracies were part of the exchange. Or maybe they thought, That’s just what writers do. Sacks established empathy as a quality every good doctor should possess, enshrining the ideal through his stories. But his case studies, and the genre they helped inspire, were never clear about what they exposed: the ease with which empathy can slide into something too creative, or invasive, or possessive. Therapists—and writers—inevitably see their subjects through the lens of their own lives, in ways that can be both generative and misleading.

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. As Aviv says in the first quote above, bearing witness might actually be incompatible with writing a story about it.

And I’ve been trying to add to this thought for the last few days with only partial success.

To be continued…

Tommy Dixon seems like a good writer who is living a life I admit some jealousy of. So I’m not knocking him when I say that I was not particularly moved to reflection by his latest piece on American Christmas Etc. — held back by caveats and whatnot, and, frankly, I don’t mind the borrowedness of it all.

Still, when he says in a footnote that “if you think about it, it’s a strange way to spend your time: walking around in brightly lit unfamiliar rooms, staring at objects made overseas you could or couldn’t buy and probably don’t need,” (caveat: O, reason not the need!) I hear precisely what Wendell Berry called “dumbfoundment / of the living flesh in the order of spending / and wasting.”

Honestly, I’ve been lucky dipping the shit out of Wendell Berry lately and he’s (unsurprisingly) batting a thousand. The bulk of the short poem that line comes from consists of a series of “remembers,” and it includes one of my favorite simple-big lines: “Remember the great sphere of the small / wren’s song.”

Remember the small
secret creases of the earth—the grassy,
the wooded, and the rocky—that the water
has made, finding its way. Remember
the voices of the water flowing. Remember
the water flowing under the shadows
of the trees, of the tall grasses, of the stones.
Remember the water striders walking over
the surface of the water as it flowed.
Remember the great sphere of the small
wren’s song, through which the water flowed
and the light fell. Remember, and come to rest
in light’s ordinary miracle.

A friend of mine who is, like me, considering entering the Catholic Church recently expressed one of the reasons he demurs. He has talked with some local Catholic folks, both laymen and priests I believe, in his area and found what he describes as a lack of concern for (again, what he describes as) a troubling prevalence of non-Christian ideologies (Christian nationalism, antisemitism, anti-liberalism, etc.). My Catholic experience — my experience with Catholics — is nowhere near wide enough to confirm or deny this. But after my chat with a conservative Catholic acquaintance on Friday, I did get a taste of it. 

I had heard a week or two ago that this person got into a heated debate with another acquaintance, one who several of her closer friends describe as “very liberal.” Now, I call myself liberal all the time, by I almost always mean something very close to classical liberalism. The ground people tend to occupy when they call themselves liberal (and yes, people use that term to describe themselves in real life all the time), that is not ground I consider stable, comfortable — or, frankly, even friendly much of the time. Sure, I’m classically liberal(ish), but as I like to say to some lifelong Republican folks back home, to both happily and bitterly annoy the shit out them, I am also one of the last conservatives in almost any room I find myself in.

So when I ended up in the quicksand of political discussion and current affairs with this conservative Catholic of about my age, I expected I might find some overlap.

She was having none of it. And the conversation that unfolded, to the very awkward silence of four other people in the room whose politics I know nothing about, was one of the sadder experiences in recent memory. 

It started with a common enough line I’ve heard my whole life: “I don’t know how anyone could ever vote for a Democrat. Ever.” To which I said, “I certainly share the sentiment, but it’s definitely not that simple when your other option is a lying con artist who, to pick just one issue, is currently mass murdering civilians in the Caribbean.” Things quickly and systemically unraveled from there.

“I don’t think Trump lies at all.”

“I think if they work for a drug cartel, then they deserve it. They should be killed.”

“I don’t care if they haven’t proven anything, I trust them that they’re killing criminals.”

“If you do anything for a drug cartel, if you’re transporting drugs at all, then I think you’re a murderer and rapists and you deserve to die.”

These are only highlights, and they are not even slight exaggerations. And no matter how many times I tried to find common ground, she balked. No friends left or center I suppose.

And I would not even bother writing this down now at all if I did not have a much better, saner, sadder, lamenting and truthful voice to insert than my own:

The year begins with war.
Our bombs fall day and night,
Hour after hour, by death
Abroad appeasing wrath,
Folly, and greed at home.
Upon our giddy tower
We’d oversway the world.
Our hate comes down to kill
Those whom we do not see,
For we have given up
Our sight to those in power
And to machines, and now
Are blind to all the world.
This is a nation where
No lovely thing can last.
We trample, gouge, and blast;
The People leave the land;
The land flows to the sea.
Fine men and Women die,
The fine old houses fall,
The fine old trees come down:
Highway and shopping mall
Still guarantee the right
And liberty to be
A peaceful murderer,
A murderous worshipper,
A slender glutton, Forgiving
No enemy, forgiven
By none, we live the death
Of liberty, become
What we have feared to be.

—Wendell Berry, 1991

Mr. Berry, 1990:

Austin Kleon