The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought

PSALM EIGHT

ONE EASTER I went with my grandfather to a small Presbyterian church in northern Idaho, where I heard a sermon on the discrepancies in the gospel accounts of the resurrection. I was a young child with neither the habit nor the expectation of understanding, as the word is normally used, most of what went on around me. Yet I remember that sermon, and I believe in some degree I took its meaning.

As an older child in another church and town, on no special occasion, I heard the Eighth Psalm read, and kept for myself a few words from it, because they heartened certain intuitions of mine — “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars … What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels…” I quote the King James Version because those were the words I heard and remembered. The thought never entered my mind that the language could be taken to exclude me, perhaps because my experience of it was the religious one, of words in some exceptional sense addressed precisely to me.

I can imagine myself that primal Easter, restive at my grandfather’s elbow, pushing my nickels and dimes of collection money into the tips of my gloves to make toad fingers, struggling with the urge to swing my legs, memorably forbidden to remove my hat, aware that I should not sigh. In those days boredom for me was a misery and a passion, and anticipation a pleasure so sharp I could not tell it from dread. So of course I hated holidays. For these and other reasons my entire experience of being in the world was slightly galled and antagonized. Quotidian events, dawn and evening for example, I found almost unbearable. I remember exasperating the kindly intentions of elders with moodiness and weepiness I could not explain. I do not remember childhood as happy but as filled and overfilled with an intensity of experience that made happiness a matter of little interest. I can only imagine that other versions of me, realer than that poor present self forever being discarded in their favor, larger than me and impatient with my immaturity and my awkwardness, simply wanted out. Metamorphosis is an unsentimental business, and I was a long time in the thick of it, knees scraped, clothes awry, nerves strained and wearied.

I doubt I concealed my restlessness, or much of it, and I doubt my grandfather knew the hour was anything but tedium for me. He would not have known, because no one knew, that I was becoming a pious child, seriously eager to hear whatever I might be told. What this meant precisely, and why it was true, I can only speculate. But it seems to me I felt God as a presence before I had a name for him, and long before I knew words like “faith” or “belief.” I was aware to the point of alarm of a vast energy of intention, all around me, barely restrained, and I thought everyone else must be aware of it. For that reason I found the majestic terrains of my childhood, to which my ancestors had brought their ornate Victorian appreciation at daunting cost in life and limb, very disturbing, and I averted my gaze as I could from all those luminist splendors. I was coaxed to admire, and I would not, admiration seeming so poor a thing in the circumstances. Only in church did I hear experience like mine acknowledged, in all those strange narratives, read and expounded and, for all that, opaque as figures of angels painted on gold.

This is of course to employ language a child would never use. Then again, I describe experience outside the constraints of understanding that asserted themselves in me as I grew into this strange culture and century, and which oblige me to use language as little mine as mine is the language of that child. I describe the distantly remembered emotions of a girl long vanished — I am sure if I met her on the street I would not recognize her. In another time and place she and I might have grown up together, and she would have been able to speak for herself. Asked if I romanticize or exaggerate the world she saw and felt, she would reply, She does not touch the hem of it.

All the old writers on the subject remark that in every age and nation people have had the idea of a god of some sort. So my archaic self might have been nothing other than a latter-day pagan whose intuitions were not altogether at odds with, as it happened, Presbyterianism, and so were simply polished to that shape. Or it might have been that I was a mystic by vocation and, despite Presbyterianism, suffered atrophy of my gift in a life where I found little use for it. For all I know I am a mystic now, and simply too close to the phenomenon to have a clear view of it. In any case I began as a pagan and have ended as one, though only in the sense that I have never felt secure in the possession of the ideas and loyalties that are dearest to me. I am a Saxon in a basilica, refusing to admire so that anyone can see me, thrown back on impassivity as my only notion of decorum. I am surely wrong if I blame history for this sense I have of tenuous claim, wrong to invoke the notion of blame at all. Interloper though I may be, I enjoy the thief’s privilege of pleasure in the simple preciousness of things that are not my own. I enjoy it far too much to attempt to regularize my situation. In my childhood, when the presence of God seemed everywhere and I seemed to myself a mote of exception, improbable as a flaw in the sun, the very sweetness of the experience lay in that stinging thought — not me, not like me, not mine.

By the standards of my generation, all my life I have gone to church with a kind of persistence, as I do to this day. Once recently I found myself traveling all night to be home in time for church, and it occurred to me to consider in what spirit or out of what need I would do such a thing. My tradition does not encourage the idea that God would find any merit in it. I go to church for my own gratification, which is intense, though it had never occurred to me before to try to describe it to myself.

The essence of it, certainly, is the Bible, toward which I do not feel in any degree proprietary, with which after long and sometimes assiduous attention I am not familiar. I believe the entire hypertrophic bookishness of my life arose directly out of my exposure, among modest Protestant solemnities of music and flowers, to the language of Scripture. Therefore, I know many other books very well and I flatter myself that I understand them — even books by people like Augustine and Calvin. But I do not understand the Bible. I study theology as one would watch a solar eclipse in a shadow. In church, the devout old custom persists of merely repeating verses, one or another luminous fragment, a hymn before and a hymn afterward. By grace of my abiding ignorance, it is always new to me. I am never not instructed.

I have shifted allegiances the doctrinal and demographic inch that separates Presbyterians from Congregationalists, but for all purposes I am where I ought to be, as sociologists calculate, and I should feel right at home. I will concede only that the sensation of exclusion is more poignant to me in these precincts than in others, being after all these years so very familiar. The people around me every Sunday are as reserved and attentive as I am, like very respectful guests, in a church they own, sustain, and entirely govern.

From time to time, on the strength of the text, the minister will conclude something brave and absolute — You must forgive, or, If you think you have anything because you deserve it, you have forgotten the grace of God, or, No history or prospect of failure can excuse you from the obligation to try to do good. These are moments that do not occur in other settings, and I am so far unregenerate that they never cease to impress me deeply. And it touches me that this honorable art of preaching is carried forward when there is so little regard for it among us now. But the most persuasive and forthright explication of that text is still theology. For me, at least, the text itself always remains almost entirely elusive. So I must come back to hear it again; in the old phrase, to have it opened for me again.

The four gospels do not agree in their accounts of the discovery of the empty tomb on the morning of the resurrection. The sermon I heard with my grandfather established that fact with the forensic concern for textual detail some ministers reserve for grand occasions. This would account for the great restlessness which, as I recall, nearly overthrew my better self.

As it happens, Matthew reports that, apparently “with Mary Magdalene and the other Mary” watching, “behold, there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it. His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow: And for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became as dead men. And the angel answered and said unto the women, Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified. He is not here: for he is risen, as he said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay.”

In Mark’s account, “Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James, and Salome” came to the tomb at the rising of the sun with spices to anoint the body. “And they said among themselves, Who shall roll us the stone away from the door of the sepulchre? And when they looked, they saw that the stone was rolled away: for it was very great. And entering into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted. And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him.”

According to Luke, women who had come with Jesus from Galilee prepared spices and ointments and came to the tomb to find the stone rolled back. “And they entered in, and found not the body of the Lord Jesus. And it came to pass, as they were much perplexed thereabout, behold, two men stood next to them in shining garments: And as they were afraid, and bowed down their faces to the earth, they said unto them, Why seek ye the living among the dead?” The disciples with whom, unrecognized, Jesus walks to Emmaus, tell him the women described “a vision of angels.”

In the Gospel of John, Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb early in the morning, sees the stone rolled back, and runs to tell the disciples that the body of Jesus has been removed. Peter and another disciple, presumably John himself, run to the sepulchre, and Simon Peter “went into the sepulchre, and seeth the linen clothes lie, and the napkin, that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself … But Mary stood at the sepulchre weeping: and as she wept, she stooped down, and looked into the sepulchre, and seeth two angels in white sitting, the one at the head and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain. And they say unto her, Woman, why weepest thou?”

The minister who drew my attention to this mystery, a plump old man in a white vestment as I remember him, must have asked how it came about or what it could mean that this essential moment was described differently in every report of it. What I recall of the sermon would have been offered as an answer to that question. He dwelt on the other figures at the tomb, not the women or the disciples but the figures described as angels in three accounts and, in one, as a young man in a long white garment. He asked what it would mean if all the descriptions were in fact of one or two young men, followers of Jesus who had simply stayed the night by the tomb or arrived there before the women in the morning. Or if the one young man was in fact an angel. The Bible, he said, was full of proof that angels could pass for men, which must certainly mean that men could pass for angels. He concluded that, insofar as a young man is seen under the aspect of joy and kindness and holiness, he is properly seen as an angel, because that is a vision of his immortal nature. And that insofar as the joy and kindness and holiness of angels are addressed to human beings, angels are like us and at one with us, at their most beautiful when they express attributes most beautiful in us. That such a confusion could have occurred is central to the meaning of the resurrection, because it reminds us what we are. Amen, he said, having blessed my life with a lovely thing to ponder.

The families of both my parents settled and established themselves in the northern mountains, where there is a special sweetness in the light and grace in the vegetation, and as well a particular tenderness in the contact of light and vegetation. We used to hunt for wild strawberries in places in the woods where there had once been fires. These meadows, which for decades or centuries would hardly have felt more sunlight than the floor of the sea, were avid for it. Because of the altitude, or the damp, or the kind of grass that grew in such places, they were radiant, smoldering, gold with transparency, accepting light altogether. Thousands of florets for which I would never learn names, so tiny even a child had to kneel to see them at all, squandered intricacy and opulence on avid little bees, the bees cherished, the flowers cherished, the light cherished, visibly, audibly, palpably.

John Calvin says that when a seed falls into the ground it is cherished there, by which he means that everything the seed contains by way of expectation is foreseen and honored. One might as well say the earth invades the seed, seizes it as occasion to compose itself in some brief shape. Groundwater in a sleeve of tissue, flaunting improbable fragrances and iridescences as the things of this strange world are so inclined to do. So a thriving place is full of intention, a sufficiency awaiting expectation, teasing hope beyond itself.

To find in the sober woods these little Orients of delectation was like hearing a tale of opulent grace poured out on modest need or of miracle astonishing despair, a parable brilliant with strangeness, cryptic with wisdom, disturbing as a tender intention full of the frightening mercy of foreknowledge. God will wipe away all tears, the dead will rise, meant to me then, Little girl, you will mourn and you will die. Perhaps that was some great part of the difference I felt between the world and myself, that while it was a thousand ways true that it knew me as I could not know myself — my old relatives remembered people with my voice or my eyes and how they lived and how their lives ended — I hoarded the notion of this singular self in this singular moment, as if such things could exist, and shrugged away intention and anticipation and cherishing, knowing they meant that even I never was my own.

I knew my grandfather for many years, but I am not sure I ever knew him well. He seemed stern to me and I was very shy of him. I had heard sad stories about him as a boy and a young man, and when I was with him I always thought of them, and I was cautious, as if the injuries might still be tender.

It may be that I did know my grandfather very well because I thought of him as a boy and a young man, and explained his silence to myself in such terms. My memory of him allows me to interpret the dignity of his shrinking height and stooping back as an effort of composure of the kind people make when the shock of cruelty is still new to them, when resignation is still a novel labor. I interpret the memory of his polished shoes and his habit of gardening in his oldest suit and his worst necktie as evidence that I sensed in him diligent pride in the face of sadness not otherwise to be borne. Perhaps he himself could not have told me how near the truth I was.

His gardening was uncanny. The flourishing he set in motion brought admirers from other counties. I remember once following him down a row of irises, not sure whether I was invited, whether the irises were being shown to me. He would hold one blossom and another in the tips of his fingers, at arm’s length, and tilt his face up and back to look at them. It was an old man’s method of scrutiny, but to me it seemed as if he were revealing prodigy or sleight, the way a magician opens his hand to reveal a dove. I looked carefully at every blossom he appeared to commend to me, noting how they were made of cell and capillary, whisker and freckle, frail skin tented on white bone, and how they were chill to the touch, and how they curled on themselves like smoke, and how, till the life was wrung out of it, each one accomplished a small grandeur of form.

In those mountains there is a great constant silence surrounding any brief local silence, and one is always aware of it. When I was a child it seemed to me sometimes it might be emptiness that would tease my soul out of my body, with some intention too huge even to notice my fragile flesh. I knew that the mountains and the lakes and the woods brought people’s lives to disastrous conclusions, often too frightening to repeat in the hearing of children. There were people whose loss could hardly be borne no matter the years that passed, and whose names were spoken rarely, and then softly, with rue and grief — Steven and Lewis and the precious Virgie, a woman or girl I have mourned my whole life in the absence of all particulars, just for the way they said her name. I lived so as to be missed with bitterness, and I learned to be good at the things they praised, preparing and refining their regret. I poured myself into the vessel of their memories, which are mine now. I save all those people in myself by regretting the loss of them in the very way they taught me.

Oddly, perhaps, in the circumstances, no one so far as I remember ever spoke to me of heaven. Certainly no one ever spoke to me of hell. Though absentmindedly they sometimes murmured hymns to themselves, among my kindred religion was rarely mentioned. I believe I ascribed this fact to the power of it, since it was characteristic of them to be silent about things that in any way moved them. It never occurred to me to wonder if they were devout, nor have I any great reason to wonder, looking back. Religion was simply among the burdened silences I pondered and glossed, feeling no need to inquire, assuming an intimacy with the thoughts of those around me which may well have been entirely real.

Among my family, my training in the right conduct of life seemed to assume that left to myself I would rather not break a commandment, and to bend its coercive energies to improving my grammar. The patient old women who taught me Presbyterianism taught in parables. God spoke to Moses from a burning bush, Pharaoh dreamed a dream of famine, Jesus said, Take up your bed and walk. We drew or colored pictures of these events, which were, I think, never explained to us. No intrusion on the strangeness of these tales was ever made. It was as if some old relative had walked me down to the lake knowing an imperious whim of heaven had made it a sea of gold and glass, and had said, This is a fine evening, and walked me home again. I am convinced it was all this reticence, in effect this esotericism, which enthralled me.

Surely it is not true to say that the gospel stories were written in the hope that they would be believed; rather that, by the time they were written down, they were the cherished possession of the early church and had taken forms many had already found to be persuasive, and also beautiful and moving. It seems wrong to suggest that in their accounts of the resurrection the intent of the writers is to persuade their readers and hearers of the truth of an incredible event, simply because there is so much evidence that resurrection would not have been considered incredible. The prophet Elijah had brought a child back from the dead. He himself ascended into heaven without dying, and his return was awaited in Jesus’ time. John the Baptist was believed to be Elijah. Jesus was believed to be Elijah. Herod thought Jesus was John the Baptist back from the dead. Jesus restored to life Lazarus and the temple official’s daughter. Before the resurrection of Lazarus, his sister Martha dutifully misinterprets Jesus’ assurance that he will live again to refer to a general resurrection of the dead. The Sadducees are described as those “who do not believe in the resurrection,” a phrase which surely implies that the idea was abroad independently of Jesus. At the moment Jesus died, graves are said to have opened and the dead to have walked in the streets.

In the world the Gospels describe there seems to be no skepticism about miracles as such, only about the authenticity or origins of particular miracles. Indeed, where in the premodern world would one find such skepticism? The restoration of the dead to life is not only anticipated but reported, with, if anything, less astonishment than the healing of those born blind or lame.

It seems to me that the intent of the gospel writers is not to make the resurrection seem somehow plausible or credible — this could hardly be done without diminishing its impressiveness as miracle — but instead to heighten its singularity, when, as event, it would seem by no means unexampled. I believe it is usual to say that the resurrection established who Jesus was and what his presence meant. Perhaps it is truer to say the opposite, that who Jesus was established what his resurrection meant, that he seized upon a narrative familiar or even pervasive and wholly transformed it.

When, in the Gospel of John, weeping Mary Magdalene stoops to look into the tomb and sees the angels, they ask her, “Woman, why weepest thou?” The text creates the dreamy impression that the two angels speak together. Then she turns and sees a man standing behind her, Jesus, whom she mistakes for a gardener. He speaks the same words as the angels did, “Woman, why weepest thou?” and he asks, “Whom seekest thou?” Does he see and hear the angels, too? Or does he know her thoughts? Or was it his voice she heard in the first place? Mary herself would not have known. Jesus seems to be teasing her toward delight and recognition, ready to enjoy her surprise, in something like the ordinary manner of a friend. The narrative asserts that he is a figure of unutterable holiness, only pausing to speak to Mary before he ascends to heaven, yet it is his very ordinariness that disguises him from her. Splendor is very well for youths and angels, but when Jesus takes up again for a little while the life he had wept to leave, it is the life of a plain man.

If Jesus was not a messiah after the manner of David, neither was he a spiritual leader after the manner of Elijah, though his resurrection, if it were not insistently interpreted in the light of his life and teaching, might well have encouraged that association, which was clearly very available to his followers. The great difference is simply embrace. Elijah’s ascent expressed God’s love toward him. Jesus’ resurrection expressed God’s love toward humankind. Jesus tells Mary, “Go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.”

This moment is surely full of implication. Imagine Jesus as an ordinary man, the sort to fall prey to the penalty of crucifixion, by means of which Roman law terrified the humble by depriving offenders of their dignity together with their lives. Then if, after his ordeal, Jesus had gathered around himself just the composure of an ordinary man, so that he could be mistaken for someone going about his work, that would seem like miracle and grandeur, that would be an astonishing beauty. It seems to me that the narrative, in its most dazzling vision of holiness, commends to us beauty of an altogether higher order than spectacle, that being mere commonplace, ineffable humanity.

“What is man that thou art mindful of him?” A question is more spacious than a statement, far better suited to expressing wonder. The method of the Psalmist is exuberant. He offers the heavens to our consideration, than which nothing vaster can be imagined, then diminishes them in relation to God by describing them as the work, not of his will or even of his hands, but of his fingers. There is a wonderful implication that the great moon and the innumerable stars are astonishing not for the vastnesses they fill so sparsely and illuminate so slightly, but because God should delight in making anything so small and fine as the heavens and their adornments, in every way exceeding them as he does. I have always imagined the trace of a gesture of conjuration or display left in the clouds of stars curling on themselves like smoke.

The strategy of the Psalmist is to close the infinite distance between God and humankind by confounding all notions of scale. If the great heavens are the work of God’s fingers, what is small and mortal man? The poem answers its own question this way: Man is crowned with honor and glory. He is in a singular sense what God has made him, because of the dignity God has conferred upon him, splendor of a higher order, like that of angels. The Hebrew Scriptures everywhere concede: yes, foolish; yes, guilty; yes, weak; yes, sad and bewildered. Yes, resistant to cherishing and rebellious against expectation. And yes, forever insecure at best in his vaunted dominion over creation. Then how is this dignity manifest? Surely in that God is mindful of man, in that he “visits” him — this is after all the major assertion of the whole literature. “What is man?” is asked in awe — that God should be intrigued or enchanted by him, or loyal to him. Any sufficient answer would go some way toward answering “What is God?” I think anxieties about anthropomorphism are substantially inappropriate in a tradition whose main work has been to assert and ponder human theomorphism.

When, in the Gospel of John, Jesus says to Mary Magdalene, “Woman, why weepest thou?” he is using, so scholarship tells me, a term of great respect and deference. Elsewhere he addresses his mother as “woman.” I know of no other historical moment in which this word is an honorific. Of course Jesus, however he is understood, whatever powers are ascribed to him, could only use the words he found ready for use, and this must mean that over generations the culture in which he was to live his life had been preparing a certain improbable consensus about the meaning of this one word, which, in the narrative, is the first one he speaks in the new world of his restored life.

How much speculation should detail such as this be asked to bear? It is as true of these old texts as it is of anything that we do not really know what they are. I would suggest their peculiarities reflect problems of art, more than they do discrepant memory or uncertain transmission. I would suggest that they attempt to preserve a sense of Jesus’ presence, that they are evocation and portraiture first of all, meant to achieve likeness rather than precision, in the manner of art. The Old Testament is full of characterization, of great Moses, especially. But in those narratives the nature of the hero and the nature of God are separate mysteries, the second vastly overshadowing the first. In the Jesus narratives they are the same mystery, so attention dwells on him in a manner entirely unique in Scripture.

The agreement among the varying accounts is profound, more strikingly so because they differ in their particulars. For example, in all the varying accounts of his encounters with his followers after the resurrection, Jesus is concealed from them by his ordinariness — as, for that matter, he had been in life. In every instance he is among them on terms of friendship, once even making a fire and cooking supper for them. If, let us say, memories were transposed to provide eloquent detail, or even if some details were invented, it would be in the service of creating a likeness, not a history, and discrepancies would matter not at all.

To say that literal representation is different from portraiture is to make a distinction like this: Jesus, even in the interval before his ascent into heaven, did in fact address a woman with courtesy and deference. Or, it would have been like Jesus, even in the interval before his ascent into heaven, to address a woman with courtesy and deference. A statement of the second kind could easily be truer, and is certainly more meaningful, than a statement of the first kind.

How to describe the powerful old life of Scripture? As a pious child, Jesus must at some time have heard the words, “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” and also the psalm that begins “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” These narratives seize their occasion. They flourished in the perception and memory of those near Jesus, and in the stories they told about him. They were clearly in his mind. More is meant by prophecy, and more by fulfillment, than that narratives shape and recur. But without them there would be neither prophecy nor fulfillment.

“Woman,” Jesus, when he had lived and died, said or would have said, using a word perhaps not used so gently since Adam was a gardener — “Woman, why weepest thou?” Mary Magdalene could hear this as the question of a kindly stranger, but it means, in fact, There is no more cause for weeping. It means, perhaps, God will wipe away all tears. “Who seekest thou?” a question of the same kind, means, She need not look farther. To Jesus, or to the writer whose account renders what he took to be implicit in the moment, these questions might be wider altogether, full of awe. How did sorrow enter the world? What would be the nature of comfort or of restitution? The scene we are given answers its own questions, and does not answer them at all. Here is Jesus, by great miracle an ordinary man, except that he carries in his body the marks of mortal injury. From whatever cosmic grandeur the moment claims for him, he speaks to the friend of his humanity with joy and kindness but also with deference, honoring her. When Mary looks at Jesus, knowing who he is, what does she see? A more amazing question — when Jesus looks at Mary, and whenever he has looked at her, what does he see? We are told that, in the days before death and sorrow, God walked of an evening in the garden he had made, that he saw his likeness in the gardeners, that he spoke with them. What can these strange stories mean? After so much time and event and so much revelation, the mystery is only compounded.

So I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us. The eternal as an idea is much less preposterous than time, and this very fact should seize our attention. In certain contexts the improbable is called the miraculous.

What is eternal must always be complete, if my understanding is correct. So it is possible to imagine that time was created in order that there might be narrative — event, sequence and causation, ignorance and error, retribution, atonement. A word, a phrase, a story falls on rich or stony ground and flourishes as it can, possibility in a sleeve of limitation. Certainly time is the occasion for our strangely mixed nature, in every moment differently compounded, so that often we surprise ourselves, and always scarcely know ourselves, and exist in relation to experience, if we attend to it and if its plainness does not disguise it from us, as if we were visited by revelation.