The Givenness of Things

LIMITATION

There is an element of the arbitrary in our experience of life on earth — nonsymmetrical time, weak gravity, and the physical properties of matter that are artifacts of the scale at which we perceive. Out of such things is constructed a reality sufficient to our flourishing, even while we are immersed in a greater reality whose warp and woof are profoundly unlike anything we experience. I am drawn to Calvin’s description of this world as a theater, with the implication that a strong and particular intention is expressed in it, that its limits, its boundedness, are meant to let meaning be isolated out of the indecipherable weather of the universe at large. A flicker of energy in the great void may dissipate in those oceans, but a flicker of energy in the small space of a human brain interacts with a mind’s history, expresses and changes a human self. It can mean insight or delusion, and they in turn can mean compassion or hostility, with consequences well beyond that self. Old John Locke understood the power that comes with constraint. Having proposed that all thought or perception is based on four simple ideas, he said,

Nor let anyone think these [simple ideas] too narrow bounds for the capacious mind of man to expatiate in, which takes its flight further than the stars, and cannot be confined by the limits of the world; that extends its thoughts often even beyond the utmost expansion of Matter, and makes excursion into that incomprehensible Inane … Nor will it be so strange to think these few simple ideas sufficient to employ the quickest thought, or largest capacity; and to furnish the materials of all that various knowledge, and more various fancies and opinions of all mankind, if we consider how many words may be made out of the various composition of twenty-four letters …

Reading the thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries makes one aware of the detour the next centuries took away from the true path of modern thought. Locke would be interested to know what we can do with 0 and 1, what nature does with A, C, G, and T. Locke makes the point beautifully that our limits are entirely consistent with our transcending them, and so it is with limitation itself wherever it occurs in this strangely constructed world. In effect limitation could be understood as leverage, a highly efficient multiplier of possibility that creates and gives access to our largest capacities. This would no doubt seem a mighty paradox, if we were not so thoroughly accustomed to the truth of it.

Here is another paradox. Positivist assumptions and methods, which seem to bring stringent standards to bear on every question, actually obliterate the kind of boundaries that are necessary to meaningful inquiry into any but the most rudimentary questions. The great and ancient axiom that a negative cannot be proved has no standing with them, because it is at odds with a notion of proof that arises out of their model of reality and reinforces it. They can say, for example, that a historical Jesus did not exist. They can say that, though he may have existed, he did not teach the things attributed to him. They can say that the whole phenomenon of Christianity was the invention of St. Paul and had little or nothing to do with Jesus. The odd power of these assertions comes from the fact that they assume the possibility of proof and interpret the absence of proof as determining, a classic error. In fact we live in a world where there is seldom anything deserving the name “proof,” where we must be content with evidence. We read the Commentaries on the Gallic Wars as the work of Julius Caesar, but who can prove that he wrote it? He had a good many officers with him, no doubt some of them highly literate. A general who has undertaken such a vast campaign and set his political hopes on its outcome would hardly be blamed for signing his name to the work of a lieutenant. We attribute the Latin Vulgate to St. Jerome, but who can prove that it was not the work of Paula and Eustochium? If Anonymous was a woman, was not Pseudonymous her mother? It is absurd to pretend that such things can be known, or that their negative corollaries — the Vulgate was not the work of Jerome, Caesar did not write the Commentaries—should be treated as true or even meaningful on the basis of the fact that they cannot be proved false. Bertrand Russell and others have made just this critique of certain arguments for the existence of God, reasonably enough. There is an interesting insight to be had here — that a very great part of what we think we know is and can only be hypothesis. Most of our beliefs about the world are unscrutinized because not much is at stake. Shakespeare is paid the great compliment of being suspected of not being who we think he was, to the glory of the seventeenth Earl of Oxford. Moses has been called an Egyptian, a worshipper of the solar disk. But Jesus is unique in the energy that has been put into reducing or nullifying him by one means or another. This is understandable as a polemical strategy, but the fact is that it has had great impact on Christian thought for a century and more. It has put it awkwardly on the defensive — awkwardly, because it is difficult to make a reasonable response to an illogical challenge, especially when the intellectual high ground is uncritically conceded to the challenger.

The life of Jesus is very well attested by the standards of antiquity. How he is to be understood is a question of another kind. The essential point is that the demand for proof as the positivists understand the word, if it were made rigorously and consistently, would be disappointed in the vast percentage of cases. This would by no means justify the conclusions that whatever cannot be proved is therefore meaningless or false. And it most emphatically would not legitimize the burgeoning of fundamentalist truth claims that are themselves totally unprovable and that flourish in contempt of evidence, as a slow walk past the religion shelves in any bookstore will demonstrate. I take what comfort I can from the fact that this kind of thinking is pandemic in contemporary society, and that members of Congress participate in it or defer to it. This is the coldest of all possible comfort. Be that as it may. In light of all this, I feel free to return to the traditional vocabulary of my faith.

* * *

Calvin said the world is a school that draws us on always to know more. It is true that this has been a large part of our business as a species. Christian tradition tells us that we have a history of error, and a predisposition to err not at all diminished by the endless grief we have caused ourselves. So let us say Christ entered the world as essential truth, cosmic truth mediated to us in a form presumably most accessible to us, a human presence, a human life. That he should have done so is an absolute statement of our value, which we have always done so much to obscure.

If I am justified in proposing that the human is intrinsic to infinite creation, then the finitude by which we are constrained is providential, adapted to our genius — for meaning, thought, the treasuring up of art and knowledge — all of them things cultures have called god-given or godlike. Here is an analogy. Old John Locke wrote this about the self:

I suppose nobody will make identity of persons to consist in the soul’s being united to the very same numerical particles of matter. For if that be necessary to identity, it will be impossible, in that constant flux of the particles of our bodies, that any man should be the same person two days, or two moments, together.

Richard Feynman, the great twentieth-century physicist, wrote this:

[Atoms in the brain] can remember what was going on in my mind a year ago — a mind which has long since been replaced. To note that the thing I call my individuality is only a pattern or dance, that is what it means when one discovers how long it takes for the atoms of the brain to be replaced by other atoms. The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance and then go out — there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday.

So the self would seem to be another arbitrary constraint. If there is at root no physical reason for individuality to be self-identical from one day to the next, then the self, like the world of our experience, is of great interest in the fact that it abides within and despite constant flux. There are times when selfhood feels like exasperating captivity, times when it feels alone with its ghosts, times when it feels confident in its particular resources, times when it is deeply disappointed with itself, distrustful of itself. Yet it is a constant in experience. And, within it, a history of life, a coherency of thought, a system of persisting loyalties, language, culture, habit, learnedness, even wisdom, accumulate and enrich themselves for all the world as if the self were a shelter from the storms of change. It isn’t, and it is. Vulnerable to influence of every kind, recidivist, intractable, through all its variations it is an indubitable presence. The wealth we can make of our capacities and perceptions we have entirely by grace of our selfhood. It is our part in the drama we all live out in this theater — of God’s glory, Calvin would say. But, unmodified by the language of theology, there is plain truth in the fact of its special character, as an enclosed place, so to speak, where what we say and do and feel, our birth and death, can be said to matter. Think how languages and cultures free and shape — and limit — expression and understanding. The pattern is so strongly recurrent that it ought not to be set aside simply because it does not reward interpretation in positivist terms.

We might turn to the mystery of a divine self. Certain attributes have always been ascribed to God and claimed by him — love, faithfulness, justice, compassion, all of these expressing but also certainly constraining an infinite power. The paradox of the Incarnation is already implicit in the divine nature. A boundless freedom is in effect limited by gracious intent toward our world and our kind. Calvin makes a beautiful integration of cosmic power with intimate solicitude. He says: “The whole world is preserved, and every part of it keeps its place, by the will and decree of Him, whose power, above and below, is everywhere diffused. Though we live on bread, we must not ascribe the support of life to the power of bread, but to the secret kindness, by which God imparts to bread the quality of nourishing our bodies.” Within the closed system of the world we are nourished, life sustaining life. Language like Calvin’s expresses the sense that, within this world, God is articulate in our terms, terms we share because he created us to share them. Kindness is uttered again in everything that nourishes. The attributes of the divine self are not merely theological, but present and intentional, as they would be if the bread were from Christ’s own hand. Calvin would say, And it is.

Christian theology must always be tested against its consequences for the interpretation of text. This is the vocabulary we have been given, to sound it as well as we can. I will turn to the Gospel of Mark. If my primary argument is that the experience we inhabit is an arbitrarily constructed, special reality relative to which God, Creator of the universe and whatever else besides, remains free, limited only by his own nature and will, then certain historical contingencies that are respected and sustained before the Incarnation can be put aside after it, without any negative reflection on the brilliance with which they also serve as carriers of sacred meaning. If I am correct that the genealogies in Matthew and Luke are both in some degree ironic, critiques of the assumptions that lie behind all genealogy, then there should be no surprise in the fact that laconic Mark altogether omits any mention of Jesus’ descent, and even of his parentage.

If the writer of Mark was John Mark, in Rome with Peter, he might have been writing for Gentile hearers who would not care much about blood ties to Abraham and David, and might even be misled or alienated by the mention of them. In any case, the conventions Matthew and Luke test and transform, changing the question of the meaning of the Messiah’s origins, Mark passes over entirely. That his Gospel was addressed to Gentiles is suggested by the explanations of Jewish practices that occur in it. In 1 Timothy, Paul cautions against those who “occupy themselves with myths and endless genealogies which promote speculations rather than the divine training that is in faith.” Paul says, “The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and sincere faith.” These defining attributes of those who identify with the God of the Bible are not new. They depart from earlier tradition in the degree to which they are freestanding, sufficient by themselves. They define and constrain without appeal to the historical identity of a people, the community to which Paul writes being newly created, self-selected, heterogeneous, polyglot. The writer of Mark, whoever he was, might simply have felt that the case for Jesus was strongest if Jesus himself, his healing and preaching and his Passion, were made the sole focus of the Gospel, with the story of his baptism and his acclamation by John and by the voice from heaven to establish his identity.

It is in order to find a broader base of interpretation that I discuss the three Synoptic Gospels together, no more than touching on any of them, but taking there to have been a community behind them, and a brief but striking and unfolding history as well. Never assuming anything as tactile as the dependence of one document on another, I do assume that the major business of the early church was to tell a sacred narrative again and again, to ponder it, to refine it to its essence, and that this would be as true for apostles and evangelists among themselves as it would be when they spoke in congregations. This is to say that refinement is no doubt to be expected even in very early writings. Paul’s epistles are sufficient to make the point.

Whether or not Mark was the first Gospel to be written, I assume there was conversation and correspondence among the leaders of the congregations and a sharing of experience among them that would yield differences in approach to the work of making their good news accessible and faithful to its meaning as they understood it. A hypothetical Mark might say, If the Holy Spirit is carrying the Gospel into the whole world, then why recite these genealogies even to dismiss them? If the Annunciation sounds to pagans like stories they have heard all their lives, why start there, when the very life of Christ can justify every claim made for his birth? I venture my hypothesis on the grounds that the Gospel of Mark is impressively strong and self-consistent, not crude or tentative or fragmentary.

* * *

All three Gospels contain some account of Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness. Matthew deals with it in eleven verses, Luke in thirteen, Mark in only two. In each case, the testing of Jesus comes after his baptism by John. Matthew and Luke have made the case for Jesus’ divinity or his identity as Messiah and dealt with arguments against it that would arise among people who were aware of the nature of the expectation within Israel. Mark begins with the baptism, profoundly meaningful in itself but no part of the expectation. He omits the teaching of John reported in the other Gospels, which is in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets, and retains only his acclamation of Jesus as the Christ.

If the birth narratives and the genealogies of Matthew and Luke establish who Jesus is not — that is, not the inheritor of an identity foreseen and defined in the expectations of his people — and if at the same time they establish who he is — that is, the Son of God — then a question arises very naturally: How does such a being live in the world? If his divine nature is granted, what shape and content will it impart to his singular, mortal life? The Adversary taunts Jesus the Son of God with the fact of his own power. He need not be hungry; he could instantly seize all earthly station and wealth; he need not die. Jesus answers, “It is written,” quoting Deuteronomy in response to every temptation the Devil offers. According to the Gospels the devils are knowing, and here we have, in effect, the testimony of Satan that Jesus possesses the power and authority he has also put aside, that his humanity is both real and a chosen restraint. This dialogue between the Devil and the Son of God might be thought of, so soon after the spectacle of his baptism, as a cosmic rather than a historic moment in which Jesus assumes, so to speak, the full panoply of the mortal condition. Milton’s Paradise Regained is simply a retelling of the Temptation, reasonably enough.

I have spent too many years reading manuscripts not to wonder from whose point of view this story in Matthew and Luke is told. Jesus had no disciples, no companions, during those forty days. I think of the story as a sort of epitome of Jesus’ teaching about himself, explicit and implicit. It has a folkloric quality that is not typical of Gospel narrative. I think it should be thought of as a kind of midrash. By “midrash” I mean a proposed interpretation of a text or a tradition that takes the form of narrative. That this passage is interpretation seems to me to be supported by the fact that no speech is attributed to Jesus except the language of the Torah, and these might very probably be laws he was heard to quote. In other words, presumption is avoided. There is no invention of Jesus, as there is of Satan.

His going into the wilderness, as Mark agrees that he did do, is a very human act. Fasting and solitude are extraordinarily human experiences. In accepting them, “driven by the Spirit,” Mark says, Jesus is following the discipline of the prophets. So, taking those forty days as its frame, the midrash, if it is one, establishes and elaborates a meaning already implicit in his time in the wilderness. It has great relevance to questions the disciples must have asked themselves — Why did he sometimes suffer hunger or thirst? Why did he not calm the world’s turbulence as he did the sea’s, with a rebuke? Why did he have to die? And, what enlightenment could come to him by fasting in the wilderness, he being the Son of God? The answer is that he chose to relate to reality in the way of a pious man, honoring God, and at the same time honoring the laws of Moses by accepting the obedience that identified him as a Jew, a son of Abraham. More than all this is the fact that in this passage he dismisses the promises of power and preeminence that were thought to have been made to biblical kings and to the Christ — of which this Satan is clearly well aware, and the writers of Matthew and Luke and the audience they addressed were aware also. Instead Jesus identifies with generic “man”—“Man does not live by bread alone.” Presumably nearly every word the tempter says is true. Jesus could indeed have done any of the things Satan proposes — except, no doubt, to worship him. Then again, to have done any of these things would have been to abandon his meaning and intent. So an old-fashioned theological question arises, whether God could indeed act against his own nature, which in the Christian narrative is expressed in this embrace of servanthood. Clearly, if God cannot act against his own nature, then his nature is expressed in Christ. “And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.” So a profound theological assertion is made here.

These mysteries were perhaps raised and answered more directly when they were new. What could it mean to say that God might be tempted to act like God, to assert the power that is intrinsic to his nature? “Though he was in the form of God, [he] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” This encounter with the Devil refers beyond itself to a very great question — If God is God, why does he permit evil and suffering and death? The response of the Christian narrative, that God has not exempted himself from these things, is not an answer to the question. It is, however, a vision of the nature of God that is the fullest assurance one could imagine of his loyalty to humankind and his love and respect for it. There is much that is thrilling and telling in the thought that true divinity can assume the place of a human being and yet remain an ordinary man to every mortal eye.

In any case, never mentioning the phrase, this story of the Temptation gives content to Jesus’ self-characterization as a, and the, Son of Man. Luke’s telling of it differs from Matthew’s in the order though not the substance of the temptations. The laws or instructions of Moses by which Jesus defines the place he will take in the world are the same in both. It seems reasonable to suppose these laws are the mnemonic that stabilizes the story, since it would seem to have less claim to authority than teaching attributed to Jesus directly. Luke does draw an available conclusion from Satan’s offering Jesus the glory and authority of all the kingdoms of the world. “For it has been delivered to me,” says the Devil, “and I give it to whom I will.”

What in all this might my hypothetical Mark have thought it best to exclude? As a form of reasoning, midrash would have been alien to Gentile hearers. It may bear some resemblance to the “myths” or “fables” Paul warns against in 1 Timothy. And even if it had currency among the holiest and profoundest Christian teachers in Jerusalem, it is not and does not offer itself as witness. Like the genealogies, which are also theological statements, not witness, it does seem to address the doubts of the skeptical. Granting miracles and healings, why was Jesus not more godlike? The character he takes on in this story is indeed his character in life. The Temple authorities might have questioned his piety and his humility. But by the standards of the great prophets, say, he led a mild and quiet life, invisible to the world until his thirtieth year. Why should this have been true? Why no grandeur, why no show of power? How could he have been vulnerable to death? The story of the Temptation means that he chose to live within the limits of humanity — thus are the skeptics answered. In Mark we have a forceful Christ who seems to be moving always, impatiently, toward Jerusalem and his culminating death. It is as if Mark would say, with all emphasis, that Jesus did not suffer death but sought it. No need to rationalize apparent weakness when the Crucifixion was an act of divine power, both in the Son who passed through death and in the Father who transformed creation by means of this death. I do not intend by this Trinitarian language to create a distinction between the will and act of Christ on one hand and of God on the other, or to invoke the idea of expiatory sacrifice, Christ dying to mollify God. The Christ of Mark reminds me of the Old English poem “The Dream of the Rood.” In it the poet, speaking in the person of the cross, sees “the Lord of men, hasting with mighty, steadfast heart,” to mount the cross. He says, “The Hero young — He was Almighty God.”

This vision puts aside some very disturbing interpretations of the Crucifixion that have had the effect of transforming an act of infinite mercy and grace into a piece of pure vindictiveness. Realist or positivist readings and the concessions made to them have much aggravated this effect. The wider the difference between Christ and God is taken to be, the more inevitably this invidious understanding will follow. The trouble here, and trouble of every kind, conceptually speaking, comes from the fact that Jesus was indeed a man, flesh and blood, living in mortal time. As a man he was as vulnerable as we all are.

If he was a carpenter, we may imagine that his hands were calloused and sinewed with the long practice of difficult skills, and that they would have shown the marks of injury long before his Crucifixion. Perhaps Calvin was right, that his appearance was much marred by poverty and hardship. This would have been true of generic humankind at any time in history. So also for the Son of Man, perhaps. Reluctance to accept this view of him can only arise from the difficulty of relinquishing our biases against those who have no comeliness that we should look at them, who are held in no estimation. Yet if God did become a human being, then it seems reasonable to suppose that the word “human” must be understood in the largest sense. Our ancient habit of celebrating the glory of God has tended to obscure the fact that, in the Incarnation, it was not glory he chose, except as it is inherent in all humanity. This again raises the question: What is man? Jesus’ role, according to the ancient hymn, is not only humble relative to his divine nature, but humble among men, death on a cross being the great fact and proof. To put the matter another way, in what human form can the divine be wholly present without violating the conditions of human existence? A very ordinary life, it would seem. Isn’t this carpenter the son of Joseph? Jesus’ humanity is indeed the stone of stumbling. If he is truly man and truly God, he is the profoundest praise of humankind the cosmos could utter — in the very fact that he could and would walk among us, feeling the heat of the day, and — bearing the suffering for our oldest crime — be rejected and killed by us, as the unvalued were and are. This is another meaning of the prayer “They know not what they do.”

On the other hand, if the irrefutable truth (irrefutable in terms of the testimony of the Gospels) that Jesus of Nazareth was a man is modified, as it often is, to mean that Jesus of Nazareth was only a man, then the chasm between God and humankind opens in the minds of the faithful despite the Incarnation and all that followed, and the great gesture is refused. The pagans of Mark’s time and ours might understandably reject the Gospel out of hand, given Jesus’ hunger and thirst, sorrow, suffering, death, and all the rest that meant he was one of us. The knife edge, belief and disbelief ready to be rationalized in exactly the same terms, is very much a subject of the Synoptics, although we have the Epistles to assure us that it was not their innovation. What would tip the balance toward accepting the truth of the Gospel? What would make the Incarnation with all it implies credible, even necessary? Reverence toward humankind. The hardest question Jesus puts to us is really whether we believe in Man.

Son of Adam, Son of God. How is this to be understood?

“Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.” This is the bare, forked animal, unaccommodated man, the one creature that must find, contrive, create the minimal circumstances of existence, unhelped by instinct or by adaptation. This is humankind as anomalous presence on earth, singularly vulnerable to deprivation. Calvin remarks, charmingly, “It is strange that Christ should say, that he had not a foot of earth on which he could lay his head, while there were many godly and benevolent persons, who would willingly receive him into their houses.” He says Jesus is simply warning the scribe that he could not expect more than “a precarious subsistence.”

This is no doubt true, and it is also consistent with the idea that the saying is proverbial, therefore not precisely suited to Jesus’ situation. It does suit the situation of those who hunger and thirst and are naked and sick and in prison — many of us actually and all of us potentially — those with whom Jesus specifically identifies the Son of Man in the parable of the great judgment. Let us say, tentatively, that for Matthew the phrase is defined in this proverb.

Yet we are told twice in Matthew and once in Mark that human faith could move a mountain. These are sayings of Jesus, and who am I to venture the word “hyperbole”? A general regime of forgiveness, like the reign of love imagined by Chrysostom, could have unforeseen benefits, more epochal than the moving of mountains. It might revoke, or have precluded, the infernal possibilities we have created for ourselves, which would be a momentous transformation of our circumstance. There seem to be assurances here of a great unrealized power in humankind, not power of a Promethean sort but one aligned with the spirit of God, in faith and in forgiveness. Our sacred dignity and our extreme vulnerability are the basis of a profound ethical obligation to weigh our actions in the scales of grace, not by our corrupted notions of justice and retribution. This is consistent with the return of the Son of Man as apocalyptic judge in Matthew 25, a parable that brilliantly unifies the ordinary with the prophetic meaning of the phrase. I consider it consistent also with an intended transformation of humanity’s conception of itself, an intent to persuade us to believe in our ontological worthiness to be in relationship with God.