Negative theology.

"Do you believe in G-d?"

I was recently excoriated, as sometimes happens, for describing myself as religious―how could I have fallen into such self-involved mysticism? How could this have happened? Indignation vied with contempt for a few minutes before the subject, and conversation, were dropped. (Unclean, unclean! A whole generation of my peers has codified its very own secular leshon hara.)

The new atheism just isn't designed for confrontation with religious intellectuals. It asks the wrong questions, it's too confined by its own discourse to engage the sacred in meaningful terms; its enthusiasts just aren't equipped―as far as I've experienced―with the literary or contemplative background to approach people like myself, sitting on top of my column here in the dregs of time.

Still, though, the argument put me to thinking about that great conversation-at-midnight question of our century―I wonder how many people would find it strange, if they really thought about it? I mean the question itself as well as its strange relationship to history. Think of it―it began very objectively, almost empirically: "Why did Sarah laugh?" It was a question of power, an old transitional monotheism of the omnipotent struggling to define itself against the warring dominions of heathen cult. I think it's very easy to lose the revolutionary force of Bereshit 18:14 in the smallness of Abraham's concerns: for some time now I've been searching out the point at which G-d first reveals himself to Abraham as more than a personal divinity, and though I don't think this the point at which our ancestor realizes that he must be more than a henotheist―if that ever comes; it may not come at all until Moses―I think HaShem might be intimating exactly that, just in passing, an offhand remark that Abraham accepts in silent perplexity. After all, his god is striding off to destroy a city; under the circumstances you can't judge him too severely for being distracted from novel theological questions. So it begins as something quite different, a question of confidence rather than faith in the 20th century sense: the Jahwist author wonders whether we're confident in this alien presence and his mightiness.

Then of course it changes dramatically: now we have the missionary question put to half-reconstructed pagans, "do you believe in my god, all three of him, though you didn't before?" You hope this is closer to Elijah and his barrels of water than to another misguided species of henotheism―"your gods exist, but they're demons; only this god is omnipotent"―but this is wishful thinking, isn't it? Europe was littered with idols in everything but name until the Reformation.

But now Christianity had covered Europe like a settling snow; we entered an age of religious monoculture, of heterodoxy and heretics in a land where everyone takes the same god as a given stretching onward toward apocalypse. The 20th century question of faith would have been meaningless to these peasants and potentates: the question was never existential but doctrinal, and accusations of atheism were more than a little disingenuous.

Suddenly it occurred to mankind that there might not be a god at all. The rest is a long history of widespread banalities and the secluded palace of the mandarins: we acquired the Enlightenment, and when Gibbon writes of pagan antiquity that

the various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful (ch. 2, p. 22),

I wonder if he isn't speaking rather more of his own age than Trajan's. But yes, by the philosophers indeed: don't think I'm sneering at them. Their tendency was toward the Stoics' almost-monotheism or else the rigorous materialism of their rivals; if you put theology in the hands of intellectuals it almost always seems to tend one way or the other. Small, wonder, though―Kohelet is right; of making many books there is no end, and much study is weariness of the flesh. Over and over again we pile book on top of book in our scramble toward G-d, turn back, see that we've built a ziggurat, and privately despair.

Or at least I do.

But now we've come to the 21st century where the question has become well and truly existential, very much like asking whether someone believes there's life on other planets. I look back over the different ways we've asked that unusual question―first exultant, next suspiciously, then as an inquisitor, finally with caliper in hand―and I wonder whether you can really ask that question of a monotheist, or as a monotheist.

Is it meaningful to ask whether you, such as you are, acknowledge the existence of―can we even call him a being? better to resort to a naked relative pronoun―that which cannot be described except in negative terms, which is so different from us on an ontological level that to use the verb "exists" is to abuse the language? Omnipotence and omnibenevolence: what is all this in the face of a god without qualities? Omniscience and simplicity: these I understand. But you can't wash good or action clean of their human context, or at least clean enough to really apply them to our one G-d; and omnipresence is beyond my ability to question. Perhaps it's a misuse of language, perhaps not―at this instant, at least, I simply don't know.

My negative theology:

I am afraid that I will solve these problems with either mysticism―with a theology of sentiment―or resignation.

I am afraid to find G-d in the logos because this is a philosopher's heresy, a bounding of the incommensurate, idolatry in iconoclasm.

I am unable to believe in the literal truth of scripture because it manifestly isn't, but suspicious of the double-mindedness by which I hold it to be true without being truth: that 20th century willingness to discard the exclusion of the middle makes me queasy.

I am suspicious that I can formulate the thought the study of religion is the study of literature, but the reverse is not true: inevitably the disjunction will fall away; I'll conflate the books I love with the G-d my soul cries out to worship.

There is a god; he is one; and from this nothing follows. The use of language unravels into nonsense; reason is inadequate but feeling is idolatry. Every form of belief is idolatry. But this can't be true―οὐκ ἔστ᾽ ἔτυμος λόγος οὗτος. My spouse accused me of "sublimated, postmodern Judaism" the other day―well, what else can I possibly have? Where can I go from here? I am totally unequipped to wrestle with the angel.

I mentioned Stylite saints in passing and this led me to Tennyson's "St. Simeon Stylites," which you can find here along with a very engaging and humane critical essay by USC's J. R. Kincaid as well as the arresting photograph included above, which I found unattributed on a blog unworthy of mention: I wonder what it is? A reenactment? A 19th century emulator? Very mysterious.

Electric cabinets of unreal curiosities.

Michael Gilleland of Laudator Temporis Acti recently mentioned his collection of asyndetic privative adjectives, a philological curio cabinet at this point not only marvelously expansive but—apparently—still growing. Bless G-d, said I, a collection, really? On the internet! Well, the whole notion transported me, as Noel Coward sang of the unleashed matron—

hot flushes of delight suffused her,

—changing my whole demeanor. Well, well, well. Here we are in the dregs of time, to be sure, but this is a really charming way to wait for the barbarians, isn't it? I can't explain the charm of this kind of Alexandrian hobbyism, but I spent a happy hour looking through that arbitrary and charming word-cabinet and was glad.

Partially I think it's a symptom of that nameless, quasi-postmodern delight in imaginary collections: I think of the preposterous and lovely books in Prospero's library according to the 1991 Peter Greenaway film or Borges' imaginary compendia. The endless, trackless, authorless noise of Web 2.0 gives us an opportunity to realize little fragments of this ur-fantasy, doesn't it? I mean, imagine.

This is a compendium of all the asyndetic privative adjective-series in Greek, Latin, English and Sanskrit.

This is an anthology of 124 spurious fragments from Ennius' Annales, and arbitrary corruptions of them.

This is a collection of the last lines of verse published by every English poet 1914-1934, hyperlinked to deleted lines in the variorum of Tennyson's Idylls.

This, interpolated into the Homeric hymns, is a hidden cabinet of Theocritean hapax legomena.

This is a gallery of 400 famous images that include a eunuch.

It's only a half-formed thought, but I wonder if this fascination with fantastic pedantry might have something to do with the out-of-control vastness of the 21st century logos. There's so much written, so much available for recension, so much lost both through evanescence and human limitation—I think some of us must come to carry around the fantasy of stumbling over something immeasurably rare and immoderately specialized, some literary cabinet of curiosities that reflects the eternal-lifetime of abstraction we want but can never have.

Ankh ankh, en mitak:
Yewk er heh en heh
Aha en heh.

Live life, thou shalt not die:
Thou shalt exist for millions
of millions of years,
For millions of millions of years.

Well, it's the old longing, from Amenhotep to transhumanism. The text is from one of the best passages in one of Philip Glass' better operas, by the way.

Beyond genre.

I ran into a flash of perspicuity while reading Oswyn Murray's "Symposium and Genre in the Poetry of Horace," (1985, JRS 75: 39-50) a prefatory note to his thoughts on Roman reception of Greek sympotic verse--after all, it's a radical translation; imagine a hipster learning the tea ceremony. Murray writes,

Thus the genre is born of historical circumstances as they transform human needs; literature can be seen from this point of view as a form of ritual, a response to the human desire for regularities and for the communication of shared experience. As an expression of the mentality of a particular society the genre is therefore of fundamental importance to the cultural historian. But literature as ritual is a conservative force; whether by feat of oral memory or through the permanence of the written word, it becomes difficult to forget what has been created; most societies live in a universe of discarded mental forms. So alongside the living genre we must expect to find the dead genre, surviving as artistic form without context, as memory pattern. (40)

When classicists talk about genre they tend to have in mind a system of classification so stupendously exacting that I'm surprised the Germans didn't invent it first, and forty years after Cairns genre criticism has taken a fairly firm hold in the profession--although, bless G-d, not entirely without dissent. In my MA program this sort of thing was particularly admired, and trying to play to those expectations led me into some real absurdities--I think I once caused myself to discuss a couplet in the Heroides per the generic reference of its hexameter and pentameter, respectively. (I know, I know. They weren't impressed either.)

"A universe of discarded mental forms," though, really? It made me thrill. I like the concept of culture as accreted language, networks of concepts united by allusion and buried collocation--invisible hyperlinks.

What's the difference between a living genre and a dead one? Think of the pastoral--as far as we can tell, Theocritus practically invented it; three centuries later, Vergil write his Eclogues. Was it a living genre for him? What about for Milton? Is imitation, I mean self-conscious revival, the same thing as inhabitation? I'm thinking of Borges' story about the man rewriting Don Quixote word by word--my intuition says no, but my intuition also can't brush aside genre or the enormous, insurmountable, pestering ontological problems that hang onto it if we keep it around.

What's really remarkable is that the great genres of ancient literature seem to have been flashes in the pan--epic definitely died with Homer as an unselfconscious thing, Greek lyric seems to have been largely sui generis and seems even more so when you look at its lurchingly uncomfortable Roman revival--quodsi me lyricis vatibus inseres, indeed. Tragedy had a pretty sorry time between Aeschylus and Shakespeare and it's absurd to even talk about unselfconsciousness in pastoral. All of Roman literature is mediated by the gleeful preciosity of Alexandria, and it took Don Quixote to give Europe a literary form independent from antiquity.

It's remarkable too that Western culture has produced exactly three viable epics, the last two being explosions of angelic genius that blew an exhausted genre up to new elevations and burnt all further possibility of development to a crisp--8th century to 19 BC is quite a wait, but it took us til 1667 to end epic forever with an apple and a snake. (We'll see about Kazantzakis. Indications are not good--Ἐχθαίρω τὸ ποίημα τὸ κυκλικόν). At the same time, we've managed about a hundred really deathless novels in the last two hundred years; that's definitely a genre. Poetry, though--I wouldn't want to be the guy writing that dissertation.

Dr. Behrenboim:

My name is Meriwell Topher, and I would like to express interest in your adjunct position. I am 49 years old and ABD. Please refer to the contents of the enclosed semitruck, where you will find my unfinished dissertation Anglophone Verse Genre in the 20th Century, its Origins, Typology and Limits.

Please consider my unique talents and experience. I have not eaten in four days.

Sincerely,
M. Topher, M. A. (1982)

Do you feel elucidated? I don't. On my reading list--

E. Auerbach, Mimesis
G. Williams, Tradition and Originality in Roman Poetry;
G. Williams again, Change and Decline

Postscriptum 4 April. In my enthusiasm--and on reflection--I callously passed over the Divine Comedy in my sneer about viable epics. Although I'm not sure we can call it an epic--it's certainly epic length, and certainly masterful, but I think the subject material and handling are all wrong--how about this: if you want to count it as an epic, let's agree that I said "four." If not, not.

Four aphorisms.

By the end of the year an old friend of mine will be wandering Indochina with a business card that reads "Joachim Heldenberg: Adjustments." He's the kind of man I want at the cultural keel--mercurial, daring, a little heroic, a man who could nudge our society when it isn't looking. If blogging has anything to do with really disseminating real ideas, let me be honest--he should be writing here, not me.

Ah, well. We'll say that Shams writes the poem. So--four words from a friend I love:

1. Metaphysics is creative.
2. Metaphysics is not a discovery; it is an invention.
3. Metaphysics is aesthetics run through rhetoric.
4. It is permissible to engage in metaphysics with a teleological goal fashioned a priori.