The art of scribbling in a book

Many years ago, I came across an interesting article by Mortimer Adler entitled ‘How to Mark a Book’, which amounts to a useful summary of the art of active reading. He suggests there are three kinds of book owner:

The first has all the standard sets and best sellers – unread, untouched. (This deluded individual owns woodpulp and ink, not books.) The second has a great many books – a few of them read through, most of them dipped into, but all of them as clean and shiny as the day they were bought. (This person would probably like to make books his own, but is restrained by a false respect for their physical appearance.) The third has a few books or many – every one of them dog-eared and dilapidated, shaken and loosened by continual use, marked and scribbled in from front to back. (This man owns books.)

I probably fall between categories two and three: I have a great many books, all of them dipped into, many of them read through, and the important ones (or at least the ones that have most influenced my own thinking) marked and scribbled in throughout (though I hope I never reduce a book to the kind of mess Adler seems so proud of).

But why is marking up a book an important part of active reading? According to Adler,

First, it keeps you awake. (And I don’t mean merely conscious; I mean awake.) In the second place; reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The marked book is usually the thought-through book. Finally, writing helps you remember the thoughts you had, or the thoughts the author expressed.

He goes on to describe one way of marking books, which sounds like a slightly more complex version of my own approach. My own version of marginal notations is:

• Vertical line – important passage (2 lines indicates very important)
• * – quotable remark
• ! – surprising statement
• ? – something I don’t understand
• !? – doubtful statement
• × – statement I disagree with

And, of course, I make any additional notes necessary to explain the marks.

One idea of Adler’s that I keep meaning to add to my system is his use of the front and back flyleaves to create a summary and personal index of the book.

Finally, Adler replies to the objection that this kind of annotation will force you to read more slowly:

It probably will. That’s one of the reasons for doing it. Most of us have been taken in by the notion that speed of reading is a measure of our intelligence. . . . The sign of intelligence in reading is the ability to read different things differently according to their worth. In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through you – how many you can make your own. Few friends are better than a thousand acquaintances.

In other words, writing in your books is an aid to the art of slow reading.

The impossibility of theology

Nearly twenty years go, the journal First Things published an article in which several theologians discussed the topic of ‘Theology as Knowledge’. One of the contributors was the Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart. In the course of his piece, he presents the following picture of theology:

theology is actually a pitilessly demanding discipline concerning an immense, profoundly sophisticated legacy of hermeneutics, dialectics, and logic; it deals in minute detail with a vast variety of concrete historical data; over the centuries, it has incubated speculative systems of extraordinary rigor and intricacy, many of whose questions and methods continue to inform contemporary philosophy; and it does, when all is said and done, constitute the single intellectual, moral, spiritual, and cultural tradition uniting the classical, medieval, and early modern worlds. Even if one entirely avoids considering what metaphysical content one should attach to the word ‘God,’ one can still plausibly argue that theology is no more lacking in a substantial field of inquiry than are history, philosophy, the study of literature, or any of the other genuinely respectable university disciplines.

Moreover, theology requires far greater scholarly range. The properly trained Christian theologian should be a proficient linguist, with a mastery of several ancient and modern tongues, should have formation in the subtleties of the whole Christian dogmatic tradition, should possess a considerable knowledge of the liturgies, texts, and arguments produced in every period of the Church, should be a good historian, should have a thorough philosophical training, should possess considerable knowledge of the fine arts, should have an intelligent interest in such areas as law or economics, and so on. This is not to say that one cannot practice theology without all these attainments, but such an education remains the scholarly ideal of the guild. And . . . the absence or near-absence of theology from the general curriculum has done incalculable harm to students’ ability to understand their own fields. This is perhaps especially—or at least most obviously—true in the case of literary studies; but, in fact, it would be hard to name a discipline outside the hard sciences or mathematics that can be mastered adequately without some degree of theological literacy.

This is an impossibly high standard to meet and any theologian who thinks it is achievable is guilty of the most appalling hubris. In light of such a standard, even something as monumental as Barth’s Church Dogmatics can only be regarded as the stumblings of a relative beginner. In light of such a standard, theology can only be, as Barth put it ‘an act of repentant humility’ (God in Action, p. 44).

Ambrose of Milan on wealth and poverty

Some time ago, I posted a passage from John Chrysostom, which illustrated quite graphically his view that the only good reason for wealth was to be able to give to the poor. But his attitude to wealth was by no means an outlier among the Fathers. Here, for example, are some things Ambrose of Milan has to say about wealth in his De Nabuthae historia – On Naboth.

Who among the wealthy does not make every effort to drive the poor person out of his plot? (1.1)

The earth was established for all, rich and poor. Nature, which begets everyone poor, knows no wealth. (1.2)

The silk wrappings woven with gold in which the corpse of a rich person is clothed are losses to the living, and no help to the dead. (1.3)

How pious your fasting would be if you assigned to the poor what you spend on banqueting. (2.5)

How many die that pleasure be prepared for you! . . . A man fell from the roof, while he was working on a store for your grain. (5.20)

Exactions by the rich are forcing the poor to sell their children into slavery. (5.21)

In response to Jesus’ story about the rich man who decides to build himself bigger granaries to store his wealth (Luke 12:16–20), Ambrose comments: ‘The right thing for this man to do would be to open his granaries to the poor.’ (6.29)

St Sergius of Radonezh

Sergius was born into a Boyar family living near Rostov in the second or third decade of the fourteenth century. They moved to Radonezh in 1328 after the Grand Duke of Moscow confiscated their properties. In 1337 he was tonsured a monk and ordained a priest. By 1340 he was living in seclusion deep in the forest. Gradually, his hermitage attracted others and people started coming to Sergius for spiritual advice. In time, the hermitage would become the Holy Trinity–St Sergius Lavra. Sergius died on 25 September 1392 and he was glorified as a saint some sixty years later.

Troparion, Tone 4

A zealot of good deeds and a true warrior of Christ warrior of Christ our God, you struggled greatly against the passions in this passing life; in songs and vigils and fasting you were an image and example to your disciples, thus the most Holy Spirit lived within you, and you were made beautiful by His working. Since you have great boldness before the Holy Trinity, remember the flock which you have wisely gathered, and do not forget to visit your children as you promised, venerable Sergius our father!

Kontakion, Tone 8

Bound by the love of Christ, O venerable one, and following Him with unwavering desire, you despised all carnal pleasures and you shone like the sun in your land. Therefore, Christ has enriched you with the gift of miracles. Remember us who venerate your most holy memory, and who call out to you: "Rejoice, Sergius, made wise by God!"

C.S. Lewis on the glory of the creature

The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously – no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner (They Asked for a Paper, London: Bles, 1962, p. 210)

This passage from C.S. Lewis has always struck me as a particularly powerful statement of the Christian vision of human nature. Every person is potentially a little brother or sister of Christ. Every aspect of creation contains within it traces that reveal it to be the handiwork of the Creator.

Writing as self-discovery

Some interesting words from Rowan Williams speaking at Heffers Bookshop in Cambridge back in 2008 (you can find a transcript of the entire talk here):

you only discover what you have to say in the doing of it. Saunders Lewis, the Welsh poet, used to quote somebody saying – a child saying – ‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say?’ and I have always resonated rather with that. And that means that for me in writing even a straightforward prose essay or a short book or a lecture, there is that awkward moment when, if you like, the engine is turning over a bit and you are wondering exactly at what point you are going to discover what the argument is. . . . Writing isn’t translating something in here onto the page. Writing is an act. . . . it is an action of self-discovery and an action of trying to put something into being . . .

That certainly resonates with me. In my experience, no matter how carefully I try to outline a story or an article or a lecture, there is something about the process of turning the outline into polished English that surprises. Only when the words stare back at me from the page (or the computer screen) do I really know what I think.

And even then it is not always clear. There have been occasions when I have given a talk and, during the question and answer session, someone has asked me something like ‘You said X, does this mean that you believe Y?’ And I have thought, ‘Gosh! I hadn’t realized that I believe that, but she is right! And that means . . .’

BBC Master Photographers: Ansel Adams

I have discovered a really interesting series that the BBC broadcast back in 1983. It consists of six interviews with some of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century – Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Andre Kertesz, Bill Brandt, Ansel Adams, Andreas Feininger, and Alfred Eisenstaedt. In the interviews, they discuss how they became interested in photography, their influences, their processes, insights, and aims. You can find the series on YouTube or on the Internet Archive.

So far, I have only watched the episode on Ansel Adams. He is, after all,  my all time favourite landscape photographer. But I am looking forward to working my way through the entire series.

To whet your appetite, here are some quotes from Ansel Adams.

The negative is the score; the print is the performance.

Adams was a musician before he became a photographer, so it was natural for him to express himself in musical metaphors. This really resonated with me. It implies that there are two equally important aspects to the photographic process. Translating into digital terms, the first is the composition of the photograph and the creation of the RAW file. But this is only the starting point. Equally important is the work of processing that file in Lightroom or Photoshop or whatever. As for Adams, it seems he was never satisfied with his ‘performance’ of his favourite images, which he would reprint from time to time in search of a fresh interpretation.

I never bracket. Bracketing is a sign of insecurity.

I was amused by this because bracketing seems to have become such an important part of digital photography. It seems that every photography book I own recommends taking three (or five or even seven) photos at slightly different exposures when faced with a scene with a high dynamic range. But Adams, working without the luxury of a digital camera and with only a handheld spot meter, learned to judge the correct exposure of a scene by eye. That, I think, should be the goal we aim for rather than relying too heavily on the camera to do the work for us. Of course, with digital processing techniques, it is possible to blend the bracketed images together to create a high dynamic range (HDR) image. (Personally, I’m not terribly keen on HDR photography – a lot of the time it seems to create surrealistic results.)

The painter’s approach is synthetic. The photographer’s approach is analytic.

I think what he is getting at is that the painter starts with a blank canvas and builds up something that represents or expresses his subject. By contrast, the photographer starts with the full messiness of the reality in front of them and extracts from that something that will make a striking image.

The struggle between space and time

During one of my regular trawls through ancient files on my computer, I came across this paper. I wrote it in the late 1990s just as I was beginning my postdoctoral research on understandings of temporality in contemporary physics and theology. It received an airing at a meeting of the Tyndale Fellowship’s Christian doctrine study group, but it has never been published.

Having re-read it, I must confess that I am now rather critical of it. I would no longer accept Tillich’s sharp opposition between space and time (not least, of course, because of their intimate interconnection in contemporary physics). He defines paganism as a spatially-dominated religion / spirituality, but he goes on portray Christianity in straightforward opposition to this – a mere negative image of paganism. In other words, he is in danger of replacing an idolatry of space with an idolatry of time. The triune Creator of all things is the Lord of both space and time, so ultimately there should be no struggle between them.

The Struggle Between Time and Space: Reflections with Paul Tillich

Introduction

True religion concerns itself with the givenness of the timeless. An idolatrous religion is one in which time is substituted for eternity either past time, in the form of a rigid tradition, or future time, in the form of Progress towards Utopia. And both are Molochs, both demand human sacrifice on an enormous scale. . . . it is only by deliberately paying our attention and our primary allegiance to eternity that we can prevent time from turning our lives into a pointless of diabolical foolery. (Huxley 1965, 265f)

Thus Aldous Huxley in his book Time Must Have a Stop. And, to make quite clear who he is getting at, consider this statement from The Perennial Philosophy:

In the West, the mystics went some way towards liberating Christianity from its unfortunate servitude to historic fact . . . From the writings of Eckhart, Tauler and Ruysbroeck, of Boehme, William Law and the Quakers, it would be possible to extract a spiritualised and universalised Christianity, whose narratives should refer, not to history as it was, or as someone afterwards thought it ought to be, but to ‘processes forever unfolded in the heart of man.’ But unfortunately the influence of the mystics was never powerful enough to bring about a radical Mahayanist revolution in the West. In spite of them, Christianity has remained a religion in which the pure Perennial Philosophy has been overlaid, now more, now less, by an idolatrous preoccupation with events and things in time – events and things regarded not merely as useful means, but as ends, intrinsically sacred and indeed divine. (Huxley 1958, 63f).

As one of the first and still one of the most influential spokesmen of the New Age, Huxley represents a major challenge to Christianity in contemporary western culture. He stands for a spirituality or mysticism which is not tied to particular historic events. He accuses Christianity with its insistence on the centrality of certain historic events of idolatry; an idolatry which has left us an unparalleled legacy of intolerance, persecution and genocide.

I cite Huxley by way of an historical introduction to the topic of this paper. In the past, I have made frequent use of one of Paul Tillich’s shorter works against the ‘Christian’ manifestations of this kind of universalized timeless spirituality. Since I am about to embark on a major research project in which our temporal experience is the central unifying theme, it seemed good to me to begin my reflections by exploring that paper a little more critically than previously.

The paper in question is ‘The Struggle Between Time and Space’, first published in 1959 as part of the section ‘Basic Consideration’ in his Theology of Culture. In it he draws a stark contrast between the Judaeo-Christian traditions and spatially dominated religions; a contrast which has interesting parallels with his categorization of philosophy into ontological and cosmological traditions.

Time and Space in Tension

We interpret our experience of space and time in terms of mutually dependent but competing forces. Elsewhere Tillich speaks of time and space in Kantian terms as some of the categories of finitude: the forms in which the mind grasps and shapes reality. This is not to suggest that time and space are purely subjective. Rather, it is to remind us that consciousness is inextricably bound up with time and space. As Genevieve Lloyd notes,

Time envelops my consciousness. Within it I come to know that and who I am; and my sense of its continued onward movement frames my anticipation of death. Time, beyond doubt, is independent of me. And yet this all-enveloping time, within which I come to exist, and which will assuredly continue without me, becomes elusive if I try to conceive it without any reference to consciousness. Does it not depend, if not on me, at least on the presence of some thought? It seems no less true that time is ‘in’ consciousness than that consciousness is ‘in’ it. Most certainly time does not depend on me. And yet it is something in which I, as consciousness, surely have some stake. (Lloyd 1993, 1).

Here Tillich contents himself with asserting the mutual dependence of space and time. This is a point already established rather clearly by Einstein. We cannot define one without making implicit assumptions about the other.

But this immediately forces us to ask how they are related. In the introduction to the paper, Tillich cites different interpretations from different dimensions of life.

At the physical level, time is directionless. Newtonian mechanics is time-symmetrical. Classical relativity theory treats time as a misunderstood spatial dimension. Time is entirely dominated by space.

This changes as we move from the physical realm to that in which life processes begin to operate. There is scope for confusion here since Tillich’s phenomenological approach to the dimensions of existence does not correspond to popular usage. Thus he speaks inorganic and organic realms but the latter includes processes which are more commonly classified as physical. For example, he regards stellar evolution as such a process.

What he stresses is the emergence of directionality (or, more properly, asymmetry) in time with the emergence of irreversibility. The precise level of complexity at which this occurs is less important than the fact of its occurrence. Nevertheless, our experience of time in this dimension remains under the dominance of space. He explains it thus,

The life-process cannot be reversed, but it can be repeated. Each individual life repeats the law of birth and death, of growth and decay. The direction of time is deprived of its power by the circular motion of continuous repetition. The circle, this most expressive symbol of the predominance of space, is not overcome in the realm of life. (Tillich 1959, 31)

For Tillich, the victory of time over space does not become possible until the emergence of historical experience. It is only as we see and interpret the world historically that we are able to break out of the vicious circle of growth and decay. Only then is genuine novelty possible.

The Gods of Space

The next stage in the argument begins with a definition of paganism as ‘the elevation of a special space to ultimate value and dignity’ (Tillich 1959, 31). Space here is to be understood more broadly than merely geographical location. In his Systematic Theology, he argues that the fundamental character of a spatial concept is ‘beside-otherness.’ Thus the definition includes the divinization of such things as blood and race, clan, tribe or family. He reminds a post-war audience, ‘We know how powerful the gods are who give ultimate dignity and value to a special race and to a special community of blood’ (Tillich 1959, 32).

His definition does not sound much like the popular understanding of paganism. For example, the anthropologist and neo-pagan Margot Adler offers the following definition: ‘I use Pagan to mean a member of a polytheistic nature religion’ (Adler 1986, 10). However, polytheism is an immediate corollary of Tillich’s definition since it implies a deity bound to a particular place or people over against other places and peoples.

Thus he relates modern nationalism to the re-emergence of a secularized polytheism with the weakening of Christian dominance in European culture: ‘Modern nationalism is the actual form in which space is ruling over time, in which polytheism is a daily reality’ (Tillich 1959, 33). This is a dangerously over-simplified assertion. The West African theologian Lamin Sanneh argues that the true root of much African nationalism was not polytheism, still less the impact of Enlightenment ideals. Rather, it was the translation of the Bible into local languages and dialects with the implied positive evaluation of their cultures that was responsible. Tillich himself admits that there is a legitimate place for a sense of national community. What he is opposing is its absolutization as, for example, in Nazism.

When a particular space is absolutized, not only must time be subservient to it but so also must all other spaces: ‘The god of one country struggles with the god of the other country, for every spatial god is imperialistic by his very character of being a god’ (Tillich 1959, 32).

By this reckoning it is the dominance of space over time rather than an idolatrous fascination with temporal events that underlies so much of the violence of which Aldous Huxley complained. Arguably this was one of the effects of the emergence of Christendom: the identification of the Church with a particular space and the implicit identification of God as the god of that space. Tillich does not make this point directly but he does present Protestantism as a protest against the spatialization of Christianity.

Existence under the dominance of space is tragic. Temporal experience is interpreted in cyclical terms. Thus there is no real change. There is nothing new under the sun. Given time, a Great Year, the stars will return to their present position in the heavens and the cycle will begin again. This is the ultimate in temporal democracy: there is no beginning, no end, no point in time which stands out as more important or more meaningful. All are equal and therefore equally meaningless.

Where is salvation to be found under such a regime? Certainly not in an historical event! If time is cyclical, salvation will not be found anywhere on the circumference of the circle. Rather it will be sought elsewhere, ‘at the still point of the turning world.’ Tillich suggests that a spatially dominated religion will lead inexorably to mysticism, that its adherents will take refuge in a non-spatial and atemporal spiritual realm. But, he points out,

Mysticism is no real escape from the predominance of space. It extinguishes time and space, but in so doing, it maintains the basic presupposition that time cannot create something entirely new, that everything in time is subject to the circle of birth and death, and that no new creature can arise. Therefore, salvation is beyond time, it is always independent of any stage of time. It is the eternal present above every temporal present. (Tillich 1959, 34)

A point which Tillich does not pick up is that such a mystical flight from temporality is implicitly a flight from finitude and, hence, creaturehood. If, as Tillich suggests, mysticism ‘is the most subtle form of denying history’, it is also the must subtle form of seeking to be like God.

Another point worth making relates to the intimate connection between consciousness and temporality. What are we to make of a finite consciousness detached from space and time? Is not the negation of time also the negation of consciousness? Tillich comments that ‘In the abyss of the Eternal One, of Atman–Brahman, of the Pure Nothing, of Nirvana, or whatever the names of this nameless one may be, all individual gods and their spaces disappear’ (Tillich 1959, 35). But so to does all individual consciousness: the droplet of Atman is reabsorbed into the ocean of Brahman. And Brahman cannot be self-aware without ceasing to be Brahman. It is only in a state of multiplicity that we can be aware of unity.

A corollary of this loss of personal identity in a timeless mystical experience is the transcendence or loss of personal relatedness. In such a state there are no others to whom I might relate. More generally relatedness entails communication and it is not clear to me that atemporal communication is a coherent concept.

I would also want to say, with John MacMurray, that time is the form of action. Inaction is the goal of the mystic who seeks to escape from time. Moral action will bind the would-be mystic to the wheel of life as surely as immoral. Paganism as defined by Tillich completely undercuts morality and justice.

The God of Time

Having explored some of the implications of the absolutization of particular spaces, Tillich turns to Abram’s abandonment of country, race and family in response to the call of God (Gn 12:1). The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is not a god of space but a God who identifies himself with a promise of future fulfilment rather than a present reality. When God reveals himself to Moses he names himself as Yahweh, ‘I am’: a name which resists identification with a particular space. Eventually the Israelites build a temple in which to worship this God but they do not envisage it as God’s dwelling place. No space can contain this God. On the contrary, according to the vision of Isaiah, ‘the train of his robe filled the temple’ (Is 6:1).

A later biblical vision, that of St John, again presents God in temporal rather than spatial terms. For example, ‘“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.”’ (Rev. 1:8).

Also relevant to this fundamental distinction between the Judaeo-Christian outlook and paganism are some words of Abraham Heschel. Commenting on God’s blessing of the Sabbath in Genesis 2:3, he says

There is no reference in the record of creation to any object in space that would be endowed with the quality of holiness.

This is a radical departure from accustomed religious thinking. The mythical mind would expect that, after heaven and earth have been established, God would create a holy place – a holy mountain or a holy spring – whereupon a sanctuary is to be established. Yet it seems as if to the Bible it is holiness in time, the Sabbath, which comes first. . . . It was only after the people had succumbed to the temptation of worshipping a thing, a golden calf, that the erection of a Tabernacle, of holiness in space, was commanded. . . . Time was hallowed by God; space, the Tabernacle, was consecrated by Moses. (Heschel 1951, 9f)

Tillich himself focusses on the prophetic tradition. The prophet pronounces the separation of God from His nation. Unlike the gods of space, the God of time is not dependent upon his people. Thus Yahweh may judge Israel; is able to destroy his people without himself being destroyed.

Gods of space are mutually limiting and competitive. By contrast, the God of time is not conditioned by any particular space. He is ‘exclusively God, unconditioned and unlimited by anything other than Himself’ (Tillich 1959, 32).

For Tillich, the crucial difference between the dominance of space and the dominance of time is the directionality of time. Under the dominance of space, time is meaningless: mere passage; the cycle of birth and death; nothing is new under the sun and all events are mere vanity. By contrast, when directionality becomes crucial to our interpretation of events we give them meaning; historical meaning. The tragic circle of space is opened out. History has a beginning, a direction and an end (a telos rather than a mere terminus). According to Tillich, ‘Time is fulfilled in history, and history is fulfilled in the universal Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of justice and peace’ (Tillich 1959, 37).

‘The God of time is the God of history’ (Tillich 1959, 37). But this must be universal history because its God is not limited by spatial concepts:

In Abraham all nations shall be blessed, all nations shall adore on Mount Zion, the suffering of the elected nation has saving power for all nations. The miracle of Pentecost overcomes the cleavage between the languages. In Christ, the cosmos, the universe is saved and united. (Tillich 1959, 37)

The universalism of faith in the God of history is essential to Tillich. It alone can provide the bedrock for genuine social justice. As I have pointed out, ahistorical mysticism is inherently amoral. Similarly, Tillich argues that less subtle forms of polytheism are inherently unjust:

The gods of space necessarily destroy justice. The unlimited claim of every spatial god unavoidably clashes with the unlimited claim of any other spatial god. The will to power of the one group cannot give justice to another group. (Tillich 1959, 38)

This has ecclesiological implications which Tillich outlines in a brief conclusion entitled ‘Time and Judaism’. The Church is called to be a community of time rather than of particular spaces. Thus, ‘The assembly of God . . . is the end of all religious nationalism and tribalism’ (Tillich 1959, 39). We are called to be a contradiction of all expressions of the gods of space, e.g., will to power, imperialism, injustice, racism, tragedy.

The Problem of Universal History

So far so good. But Tillich’s argument is not without its difficulties.

To begin with, his affirmation of universal history becomes problematic in the face of postmodernism’s ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives’ (Lyotard cited by Harvey 1990, 45). Are not all meta-narratives (including universal histories) either repressive or illusionary?

The acid of postmodernism’s hermeneutic of suspicion seeks to dissolve universal history into many local histories. But with local histories come local forms of justice and local rationalities. A local history is a history that is conditioned by a particular space. But how are these local histories to be related? Without something to relativize and, hence, to relate them the inevitable result must surely be fragmentation and conflict of the kind predicted by Tillich and celebrated by postmodernity. Thus it is tempting to characterize postmodernity as the re-emergence of the gods of space.

On the other hand, it is surely right to take seriously postmodern warnings about universal claims. All too often they are the illegitimate claims of local histories being pressed as part of a strategy to impose the god of one space upon another. By definition there can be only one legitimate universal history: the final interpretation (or judgment) of creation by the Lord of history.

However, it is not at all clear to me that this is Tillich’s understanding of history in the preceding.

The Lord of History: Detached or Involved?

The uneasiness I feel about Tillich’s approach has, I think, a good deal to do with his understanding of the relationship between history and its Lord.

Tillich’s God remains curiously detached from history. There is no incarnation in the orthodox sense since he explicitly warns that ‘the assertion that God is manifest in a personal life-process as a saving participant in the human predicament . . . is practically impossible to protect . . . from superstitious connotations’ (Tillich 1957, 94). Instead of incarnation we have interpretation: we perceive Jesus to be Christ for us. Tillich’s God is a philosophical abstraction.

By contrast, the Christian God is intimately involved in history as a participant as well as Lord. The traditional ways of designating God bear witness to this: the one who brought Israel out of Egypt; the one who raised Jesus Christ from the dead; etc.

Which Eternity?

For Tillich, time is a form of finite being. Therefore, God cannot be conditioned by time: God is eternal. But there are various ways of understanding eternity as Tillich himself makes clear. The paper which forms the backbone of these reflections may be interpreted as an attack on one of the options.

Tillich rightly rejects the eternity of timelessness or the eternity of escape as Carl Raschke calls it. This is the time-denying space-dominated eternity of the mystics described above. In an earlier work he cites the eternity of simultaneity as no more than a variation on this basic theme since ‘Simultaneity would erase the different modes of time; but time without modes is timelessness’ (Tillich 1951, 274).

Following Hegel, he also rejects the concept of eternity as everlasting time. If God were eternal in this sense he would, indeed, be subject to a superior power: that of infinite temporality. Thus he characterises it as ‘idolatry in the most refined sense’ (Tillich 1951, 275).

Tillich’s preferred option is the eternal now (nunc aeternum) because of the predominance of the present in temporal experience. However, two common interpretations of the eternal present relate it to the timelessness Tillich wishes to reject. It is not simultaneity nor is it the negation of past and future. The future is open but anticipated (and, therefore, governed) by God from the vantage point of the eternal present. In governing the future God also recreates the past. Thus Tillich says,

The creativity which leads into the future also transforms the past. If eternity is conceived in terms of creativity, the eternal includes past and future without absorbing their special character as modes of time. (Tillich 1951, 276)

But how does the eternal now relate to the existential now? For Tillich, it is the true source and goal of the existential now. He suggests the following diagram:

a curve which comes from above, moves down as well as ahead, reaches the deepest point of which is the nunc existentiale, the “existential now,” and returns in an analogous way to that from which it came, going ahead as well as going up. This curve can be drawn in every moment of experienced time, and it can also be seen as the diagram for temporality as a whole. It implies the creation of the temporal, the beginning of time, and the return of the temporal to the eternal, the end of time. But the end of time is not conceived in terms of a definite moment either in the past or in the future. Beginning from and ending in the eternal are not matters of a determinable moment in physical time but rather a process going on in every moment, as does the divine creation. There is always creation and consummation, beginning and end. (Tillich 1963, 449)

But there are difficulties even with this revision of the eternal now. The very concept of a present has become problematic in the light of relativity theory. Additionally, postmodern critiques of the ideal of self-presence raise questions about the interpretation of temporal experience which Tillich simply takes for granted. Furthermore the, admittedly fragmentary, account outlined above raises questions about the relationship of the eternal present to finite existence. The sole point of contact appears to be the existential now – not a moment in physical time but my present experience. One is left with the suspicion that the whole sophisticated edifice may reduce to nothing more than a way of affirming the significance of my temporal experience in the face of the very clear ambiguities of temporal experience.

By way of conclusion, it is worth noting that Tillich has overlooked at least two other types of eternity. Raschke calls these the eternity of beginnings and the eternity of endings. The former is the past-oriented source of social and cosmic order highlighted by Eliade in the myth of sacred beginnings. Typically, this roots the cycle of birth and death in the structure of eternity itself.

Finally, there is the eternity of endings: an eternity which lies beyond history as the fulfilment of history.

References

Adler, M 1986: Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today, revised edn (Boston: Beacon Press)

Harvey, D 1990: The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell)

Heschel, A 1951: The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York: The Noonday Press, 1993)

Huxley, A 1946: The Perennial Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1958)

Huxley, A 1965: Time Must Have a Stop (New York: Harper & Row)

Lloyd, G 1993: Being in Time: Selves and narrators in philosophy and literature (London: Routledge)

Tillich, P 1951: Systematic Theology, Vol 1: Reason and Revelation, Being and God (London: SCM, 1978)

Tillich, P 1957: Systematic Theology, Vol 2: Existence and the Christ (London: SCM, 1978)

Tillich, P 1959: ‘The Struggle Between Time and Space’ in Theology of Culture (New York: Oxford UP, 1964), 30–39.

Tillich, P 1963: Systematic Theology, Vol 3: Life and the Spirit, History and the Kingdom of God (Welwyn: James Nisbet, 1964)

The Winnieagram: A parody

Some years ago, I attended an enneagram workshop because I was working on a book about personality types and spirituality (God’s Diverse People). I’m afraid my experiences that weekend simply confirmed my suspicions that that approach to personality types simply did not cohere with my worldview.

One thing did emerge from that weekend: I wrote a little parody of the enneagram based on Winnie-the-Pooh. And, since I’m feeling a bit frivolous at the moment, I’ve decided to post it on my blog.

The Winnieagram: An Introduction

Ursinian scholarship has advanced rapidly since the publication in 1979 of Frederick Crews’ seminal The Pooh Perplex. One has only to think of Benjamin Hoff’s The Tao of Pooh (1982) and The Te of Piglet (1992) to realize that Winnie-the-Pooh is no mere children’s classic but rather a text that encapsulates a wealth of human wisdom. That insight has been fruitfully applied to theology (in Christopher Idle’s influential sequence of papers ‘An Ongoing Theology of Winnie the Pooh’) and philosophy (notably in John Tyerman Williams’s Pooh and the Philosophers (1995)). However, as far as the author is aware, no one has previously noted Winnie the Pooh’s crucial role in the history of psychology. And yet there can be little doubt that Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner deserve to be treated as seminal psychology texts on a par with Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life or Jung’s Symbols of Transformation. The present paper seeks to address in a modest way this unfortunate lacuna in Ursinian studies.

The task of giving a detailed exposition of the wealth of psychological insight to be gleaned from Winnie the Pooh and his friends is beyond the scope of a single paper. Instead, I propose to outline a typology of human personality inspired by the Ursinian tradition. Known as the Winnieagram, the history of this typology is shrouded in mystery. However, the clear dependence of other psychological typologies (such as the classical Hellenistic doctrine of temperaments and the Sufi-inspired Enneagram) upon the Winnieagram bears witness to its ancient origins.

One tradition traces the usual graphical representation of the Winnieagram (an eight-pointed star arranged around a ninth central point) to the layout of a Neolithic stone circle that once stood at the heart of what is now the Hundred Acre Wood. Sadly, all traces of this circle have long since vanished, and it is now quite impossible to confirm this suggestion. An alternative history, favoured by the neo-theosophical school of Ursinian Studies, relies upon the hypothesis that Winnie the Pooh is, in fact, a Himalayan brown bear (Ursus arctos). Thus, they argue, Winnie the Pooh’s psychological insights may traced to Tibet, that home of so much mystical wisdom.

The Eight Types

The Winnieagram is based upon a set of eight distinct personality (or, ‘Poohsonality’) types, which derive their names from the characters that represent them in the books.

Pooh

Pooh types are sociable, down-to-earth and caring. Like Winnie the Pooh, they allow their feelings to guide their actions. This sometimes has disastrous consequences (as, for example, when Pooh decided that Eeyore needed a house to protect him from the snow). They tend to be materialistic with an overdeveloped sensitivity to their own physical well-being (a trait well illustrated by Pooh’s constant awareness of the state of his stomach).

Piglet

Piglet types are quiet, reliable and faithful. They tend to be followers rather than leaders. However, they are capable of great acts of courage and self-sacrifice (it was Piglet who went for Christopher Robin when a flood threatened the Hundred Acre Wood; and it was Piglet who gave up his own home when Owl’s was blown down). They are also people of deep faith – as witness: ‘If Christopher Robin’s coming’, said Piglet, ‘I don’t mind anything.’ and ‘It’s Christopher Robin,’ said Piglet. ‘He’ll know what to do.’ (In both citations, Christopher Robin is clearly symbolic of the divine.)

Theirs is a future-oriented spirituality as revealed by the following dialogue:

‘When you wake up in the morning, Pooh, what’s the first thing you say to yourself?’

‘What’s for breakfast?’, said Pooh. ‘What do you say, Piglet?’

‘I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?’ said Piglet.

Tigger

Tigger types are the archetypal creative personalities. This is illustrated in the Pooh corpus by Tigger’s experimental approach to language in such phrases as ‘Worraworraworraworraworra!’ They tend to be bouncy and manic-depressive, characteristics that combine with their native creativity to make them appear larger than life. Or, as Pooh puts it

Whatever his weight

in pounds, shillings, and ounces.

He always seems bigger

because of his bounces.

Rabbit

Rabbits are unusually complex. They are very conscious of their connectedness to others (they tend to think in terms of friends and relations) and yet are also aware of their own uniqueness. They are more intellectual than most (in the Hundred Acre Wood only Owl and Rabbit can read) but combine this with much common sense. This combination marks them out as natural leaders, able to see clearly what needs to be done and how to achieve that goal and able also to direct others to that end. As you would expect, it was Rabbit who took the lead in the unbouncing of Tigger.

Kanga

Kanga is the only explicitly female character in the Hundred Acre Wood (the author hopes, in a future paper, to explore fully the implications of this fact for an Ursinian perspective on sexuality). She thus represents the essentially maternal type of person. Kanga types tend to be enthusiasts for rules and regulations. They can also be fiercely protective of those in their care. At times, this combination can make them seem rather authoritarian. Many Kanga types find their way into the caring professions (particularly social work and the priesthood).

Roo

For every Kanga there must be a Roo. Roo types are the necessary complement for Kanga types – they are the type Kanga exists to serve. The Roo type tends to be childlike, dependent on others, and irresponsible. He or she exists entirely for present experience.

Owl

Owls are the most intellectual of the types. They are somewhat aloof and, in their conversation, may fly over the heads of others.

Eeyore

Eeyore represents the need of every human being for solitude and quiet reflection. However, taken to extremes he becomes the archetypal recluse and misanthrope. Eeyore types tend to be cynical and pessimistic. They often have intellectual pretensions, but this is merely a thin veneer over a deep anti-intellectualism. For example, Eeyore’s response to his discovery that Rabbit could read was as follows:

‘Clever’, said Eeyore scornfully, putting a foot heavily on his three sticks. ‘Education!’ said Eeyore bitterly, jumping on his six sticks. ‘What is learning?’ asked Eeyore as he kicked his twelve sticks in the air. ‘A thing Rabbit knows! Ha!’

Christopher Robin and Personal Growth

The eight ‘Poohsonalities’ are essentially eight different ways in which we respond to the problems and challenges of everyday life. To the extent that we tend to rely on one of these responses to the exclusion of others, we become unbalanced, less than fully human.

The most positive aspect of the Winnieagram is its strong affirmation that every one of us contains all of these ‘Poohsonalities’. Inside every Tigger there is an Eeyore struggling to get out (and vice versa). As we exercise our neglected ‘Poohsonalities’, we become more balanced, better integrated individuals. And the end result of this process? In addition to the individual ‘Poohsonalities’, the Pooh corpus also gives us a picture of the well-integrated, fully rounded human being – that picture is Christopher Robin.

In common with Jung, the Pooh corpus sees a deeper significance in this individuated self. Here the self is identified as Christopher, literally the Christ bearer. Similarly, Jung identifies the archetype of the self as the divine image in the human psyche. However, the process of individuation is fraught with difficulties. Jung and Pooh agree that anyone who embarks on the process confronts a wide range of dangers. In the Pooh corpus, these dangers are represented by a variety of metaphors, ranging from Pooh’s often frustrated searches for ‘hunny’ to the disastrous heffalump hunt. As the outcome of the latter reveals, in such circumstances only the guidance of someone who has already reached the Christopher Robin state can enable the individual to move forward (escape from the heffalump trap). Thus, just as Jung insisted that analysis of the unconscious should not attempted without the assistance of a qualified depth psychologist, so Ursinian psychology stresses that development towards the Christopher Robin state requires the guidance of an accredited Winnieagram counsellor.

A Note on Pooh and Sexism

Some critics have accused the Pooh corpus of being incorrigibly sexist (see, for example, Germaine Bear’s Pooh and Patriarchy). However, in spite of the great erudition and scholarship shown by Ms Bear and her colleagues, I find their arguments unsatisfactory and essentially superficial, based as they are upon the predominance of the masculine pronoun in Milne’s books.

Against this it is sufficient to point out that, while formally addressed as males (excepting, of course, Kanga), all the characters are in fact soft toys. As is well known, soft toys do not, as a rule, display sexual differentiation. They are, therefore, better thought of as androgynous and their social relations, as portrayed in the Pooh corpus, clearly transcend the sexual politics of patriarchy and matriarchy. This Ursinian androgyny again highlights the psychological significance of the Pooh corpus, anticipating as it does Jung’s insights into the androgynous nature of the fully individuated self (see, for example, his Mysterium Coniunctionis).

Another possible line of argument would be to accept the view of some radical feminists that men and women are essentially two different species. If this is granted, then sexism may be understood as a special case of speciesism. And, as Tyerman Williams has pointed out, a charge of speciesism cannot be sustained against Winnie the Pooh.

In praise of reading aloud

Recently, I found myself thinking about my tendency to read aloud. When the opportunity arises, I read aloud for enjoyment. But I also read aloud while reading the Bible, praying with a prayer book, or working on my novel. From time to time in my copy-editing days, I even found myself reading aloud when editing or proofreading.

This flies in the face of years of conditioning to believe in the superiority of silent reading. The moral superiority of silent reading is drummed into us from our schooldays onwards – the silent pupil is the good pupil; the silent reader is the good library user. Its intellectual superiority is reinforced by all those jokes about people’s lips moving. And its practical superiority is extolled by any number of books on effective studying, which equate efficient reading with fast reading and fast reading with silent reading.

Reading aloud is, of course, a slower way of reading. And, for me, that is its chief virtue. It creates a reading experience that is quite different from fast reading. It forces me to slow down sufficiently to give every bit of the text the attention it deserves. By helping me resist the temptation to skim over the text – a temptation created by too many years in academia – slow reading helps me to get more out of the text.

I find myself with a strange ally in defence of slow reading. According to Friedrich Nietzsche:

let us say it slowly . . . we are friends of the lento, I and my book. I have not been a philologist in vain – perhaps I am one yet: a teacher of slow reading. . . . Philology itself, perhaps, will not ‘get things done’ so hurriedly: it teaches how to read well: i.e. slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with the mental doors ajar, with delicate fingers and eyes (from the preface to Daybreak)