Im Anfange schuf Gott Himmel und Erde.
Au commencement, Dieu crea le ciel at la terre.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
"For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you
use the expression 'being'. We, however, who used to think we
understood it, have now become perplexed." (quoted by Heidegger,
"Sein und Zeit",1927, trans. 1962 as "Being and Time", on p.1
of Basil Blackwell, Oxford)
You read St Augustine's "City of God", Book XI, all 34 chapters.
You continue into Book XII, all 28 chapters. Have you now understood
creation ?
You read St Thomas Aquinas' "Summa Theologiae", volume 12 (1a. 84-89),
have you begun to comprehend human intelligence ?
At the beginning of "Being and Time", Heidegger wrote:
"Do we in our time have an answer to the question of what we really
mean by the word 'being' ? Not at all. So it is fitting that we should
raise anew the question of the meaning of Being. But are we nowadays
even perplexed at our inability to understand the expression 'Being' ?
Not at all. So first of all we must reawaken an understanding for the
meaning of this question. Our aim in the following treatise is to
work out the question of the meaning of Being and to do so concretely.
Our provisional aim is the Interpretation of time as the possible
horizon for any understanding whatsoever of Being."(Heidegger,1927)
In "The Joyful Science", Nietzsche wrote:
"For 'what is familiar is known': over that (the men of knowledge) are
of one accord. Even the most cautious among them think at any rate
that the familiar is easier to know than the strange; it is, for
example, a law of method to start out from the 'inner world', from the
'facts of consciousness' because they are the world more familiar to
us! Error of errors! The familiar is that to which we are accustomed;
and that to which we are accustomed is hardest to 'know', that is to
see as a problem, that is to see as strange, as distant, as 'outside
us'... The great assurance of the natural sciences in comparison
with psychology and critique of the elements of consciousness - unnatural
sciences, one might almost say - rests precisely on the fact that they
take the strange as their object: whilst it is something almost
contradictory and contrary to sense to want to take the non-strange
as an object as all." ("The Joyful Science",1887, p.355)
What is this that we see but cannot know, that exists all around us
yet of which we cannot (and may not) speak ? To question is to
perceive a problem, a difference, a dysfunction, to position an
alternative state of affairs and ask "why this and not that" ?
Is such a question even possible about creation ? What happens when
we read St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas ? Are we reading a science
or learning a method ? No, we are learning a language, and thus
entering into a system of differences, a structure of relations,
identities, orders and possibilities. A language is an algebra, a
topology, it enables us to dissect and reconstruct: does it then teach
us truth of its object ? Is there not a residue, a supplement outside
the text ? What is caught in the weave ? Do we catch too much, yet
still not enough ? But we move too fast, let us begin again.
A beginning, "the beginning", to think of the origin, the opening whereby
a revealing occurs, as a clearing in a forest, to reveal for the first
time... a 'being' ? Hume called 'miracle' that which was not reproducible,
thus the original opening into being is always a miraculous truth
(what the Greeks called the unconcealedness of beings, 'aletheia').
Can this word, 'beginning' call us to the truth of this disclosure ?
Immediately the multitude of possibilities begins to gather around, and
word upon word we seek to 'rub them out': is beginning some primal field ?
Is it a first cause ? Is it some inferred relation between successive
events ? (and what do we mean by 'relation', 'successive' and 'event' ?)
Language seeks to regiment and order Being, yet even so it yields truth.
"In the beginning God created...", the origin of the world, the origin of
a work of art, the origin of thought, the origin of questioning. To ask
of an origin is to seek an explanation, to expect satisfaction, yet after
that, have we satisfied thinking ?
"The world is not a mere collection of the countable or uncountable,
familiar and unfamiliar things that are just there. But neither is it
a merely imagined framework added to by our representation to the
sum of such given things. The world worlds, and is more fully in
being than the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believe
ourselves to be at home. World is never an object that stands before
us and can be seen. World is the ever-non-objective to which we are
subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse
keep us transported into Being. Wherever those decisions of our
history that relate to our very being are made, are taken up and
abandoned by us, go unrecognised and are rediscovered by new inquiry,
there the world worlds. A stone is worldless. Plant and animal
likewise have no world; but they belong to the covert throng of
a surrounding into which they are linked. The peasant woman, on the
other hand, has a world because she dwells in the overtness of beings,
of the things that are. Her equipment, in its reliability, gives to
this world a necessity and a nearness of its own. By the opening up
of a world, all things gain their lingering and hastening, their
remoteness and nearness, their scope and limits. In a world's worlding
is gathered that spaciousness out of which the protective grace of
the gods is granted or withheld. Even this doom of the god remaining
absent is a way in which world worlds." (Heidegger, "The Origin of
the Work of Art",1960, in "Poetry, Language, Thought", p.44, Harper
and Row)
So to speak of a creation, we speak uncertainly, hesitatingly, yet
ecstatically and rapturously of an ontology of supra-anthropological
being. We do not separate off 'world', 'universe', 'man', 'plant' as if
by some heroic act of the will we could wrench from their
existence some essence, then, godlike, reconstitute them back in
their living struggle of becoming. When we speak of creation we
recognise the dense entanglement of life with life, being with world,
and hope only to enter some opening of truth whereby we may be given
a language with which to think and meditate.
So in setting out we speculate the possibilities of an opening...
"Borrowing is the law... without borrowing nothing begins, there is
no proper reserve. Everything begins with the transfer of funds, and there
is interest in borrowing, it is even the primary interest. Borrowing
gives you a return, it produces surplus-value, it is the primary source
of all investment. One begins thus by speculating, betting on one value
to produce as though from nothing. And all these metaphors confirm, as
metaphors, the necessity of what they say." (Derrida, "La carte postale")
When we begin to speak of the world, begin to name it and
give it structure, we necessarily speak in a relation to Hegel,
that within nature is negativity, and that this negativity
reveals itself in change. Yet is this itself a suitable place
to start ? How may we position ourselves to even begin to speak ?
"What is nature ? It remains a problem. When we see nature's processes
and transformations we want to grasp its simple essence, to compel this
Proteus to cease its transformations and show itself to us and declare
itself to us; so that it may not present itself to us with a variety
of ever new forms, but in simpler fashion bring to our consciousness
in language what it is." (Hegel, "Philosophy of Nature")
What did God create ? When addressing the creation we address all that
exists, yet clearly God did not create everything that exists in the
beginning: every man, every child, every animal, every plant and rock,
for above all in the beginning God created change, a time-space potentiality,
with development and metamorphosis. He created past, present and future, all
with their own mode of appearing before us. When God declared the creation
good, it was not the matter itself, the material reality that was good,
because that material reality was created in time, hence it was constantly
changing and shifting. This creation was not simply beings of the order of
rocks and minerals, whose essence remains tied to their physical existence,
but living beings able to adapt and adjust, to conceptualise, plan, imagine
and create. Yet something happened within this changing and adapting that
fatally altered the nature of creation. What is it we are reading about
in the enigmatic account of The Fall ? Is it the birth of consciousness ?
The birth of desire ? The birth of labour ? When examining the exact wording
of God's punishments in The Fall it seems concerned with the roles of
man and woman: God says the pain of childbirth would be much increased,
are we to infer that childbirth and hence sexual relations occurred, or would
have occurred, in the garden ? God says woman's desire would be for her
husband, so did she not desire her husband in the garden ? Was orgasm achieved
by an act of will, as some theologians have concluded ? Further, the Christian
understanding of The Fall is far more Gnostic in its explanation, it says
at the Fall, human nature changed, whereas the Jewish conception is rather
of a change in circumstances, not in human nature. Can we say what the meaning
of The Fall is ?
One way of understanding the meaning of the Fall is to look at the other end
of history, the eschatological culmination of human history when God's rule
returns to the earth. There are many different accounts of what this will
be like in the Bible, and it destroys the complexity of the question to try
to unify these accounts into one. The book of Joel, for example, has a very
detailed description of God blessing his people Israel with a strong economy
(good harvests etc.) and destruction of her enemies (Egypt will be desolate
and Edom a desert waste). Jesus seems to keep this basic model in Matt 24-25,
where God enters history, but Jesus adds a time of trouble and persecution
prior to his return and emphasises that the time of this event is not known.
He gives a lot of detail of the actual end, but does not elaborate on the
actual rule of God except to say that the righteous would have eternal life
and the wicked would be punished. In Romans 8, Paul describes creation as
"groaning" for redemption, inferring that not just the people of God, but
the whole earth would be free from 'sin' (we get similar information from
Thessolonians II, only in the Revelation do we get some clues to the New
Earth). Hence after this brief overview of eschatology, we do not get any
significant information as to what exactly occurred at the Fall: what fell ?
reason, desire, consciousness, ethics, human nature, the natural world ?
We look at Genesis 1-2 and try to seek its meaning. Yet in reading it
we have already positioned it in order to pose certain questions and
demand certain answers. We read of an Adam, we already know of a Second
Adam; we read of a Garden, we know too of a New Garden. Heidegger spoke
of thinking thus:
"Useful is the letting-lie-before-us, so the taking-to-heart, too:
beings in being." (Heidegger, "What is called Thinking ?")
Can we let creation lie-before-us, or do we pose the question of creation
in such a way that we may quickly 'answer' it and so by-pass the task of
thought ? Questioning and answering give no time to thinking, we do not
take-to-heart that which has received its answer and so is finished with
being considered worthy of thought. Nevertheless let us set out even if
the path of thought is never clear. What is creation ? What is it that
perplexes us about the Earth and Man, what is questionable and worthy
of thought ?
In The Fall, God places curses on the man and the woman. These are of
interest as they reveal what the garden had that was taken away. God
curses the serpent, he curses the woman and he curses the man. We are
interested in the curses concerning the man and the woman:
"To the woman he said, 'I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing;
with pain will you give birth to children. Your desire shall be for your
husband, and he will rule over you.'
"To Adam he said, 'Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree
about which I commanded you, 'you shall not eat of it', Cursed is the
ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the
days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and
you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow will
you eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were
taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return." (Gen 3:16-19,NIV)
Thus we see painful childbirth and servitude for the woman and painful
labour and death for the man. This episode is especially interesting as
it is one of the great divisions of Genesis (the others are the division
between the good people and the wicked, the division between clean and
unclean animals, the division of language and the division of nations).
As the Bible is written under the division of Babel, it is written in
a particular language not understandable to those who do not speak that
language, similarly it is written under the division of man and woman,
where woman is now no longer a central character in the cosmic drama.
Within the Bible we discover a male God, with a male son, male angels
and a male devil, then all the central characters are men: Cain and Abel,
Noah and his sons, Abraham, Lot, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Joshua,
Samuel, Job, Saul, David, Jonathan, Solomon, Elijah, Elisha, and all the
prophets are male; going onto the New Testament Jesus is male, all his
disciples are male, Paul is male, indeed all the books of the New
Testament are written by men and generally all the stories are about
men (the kings, the shepherds, Herod, the centurion, Lazarus, the
scribes and Pharisees, Pilate, the thieves on the cross etc.). Any women
that achieve any importance either play secondary roles to their husbands
or represent evil and temptation, e.g. Eve, Bathsheba and Jezebel. Is it any
wonder at the misogynism of the church Fathers (Tertullian called
women "the devil's gateway", for example), or the general misogynism
of all the great Christians: Augustine said that women were not made
in the image of God, Thomas Aquinas and his numerous commentators and
disciples have defined women as misbegotten males, Martin Luther remarked
that God created Adam lord over all living creatures but Eve spoiled it
all, John Knox composed a "First Blast of the Trumpet against the
Monstrous Regiment of Women", Pope Pius XII summarised official Catholic
views on women when he wrote "the mother who complains because a new
child presses against her bosom seeking nourishment at her breast is
foolish, ignorant of herself, and unhappy", Pope Paul VI said "true
women's liberation does not lie in formalistic or materialistic equality
with the other sex but in the recognition of that specific thing in the
feminine personality - the vocation of a woman to become a mother".
Even the "modern" theologians are the same, Karl Barth proclaimed that
woman is ontologically subordinate to man as her "head", Dietrich
Bonhoeffer insisted that women should be subject to their husbands,
Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that "a rationalistic feminism is undoubtedly
inclined to transgress inexorable bounds set by nature", Teilhard de
Chardin's writings are replete with spiritualised androcentrism and so
on.
This systematic exclusion of woman is to be seen in all aspects of life.
Look at the great artists: Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci,
Michelangelo, Totian, Bruegel, Bosch, Holbein, Hogarth, Reynolds,
Gainsborough, Rubens, Vermeer, Caravaggio, Blake, Turner, Constable,
Delacroix, Monet, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, van Gough, Lawry, Picasso,
Dali, Pollock, Hopper, Lichtenstein, Warhol etc. - all men. Look at
the great philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Berkeley,
Locke, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Russell, Wittgenstein, Heidegger,
Sartre, Derrida, etc. - all men. Look at the great composers: J.S. Bach,
Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Scriabin, Schoenberg, Stravinshy etc.
- all men. We could of course go on, but this situation clearly demands
an explanation. To some extent this causes us to examine what we mean
by the term 'great' (as Germaine Greer in 'The obstacle race' argues)
and certainly there are many great women through the ages who are only
now being taken seriously and the meaning of their work examined, yet
the basic lesson is that women were not given the opportunity or the
encouragement, and that this stifling of human expression is unforgivable.
Yet not only do we have a Church run by men, with its theology written by
men, using a Holy Book centred around men, perhaps if this was as far as
the misogamy went we would have achieved a rallying point, but unfortunately
these are mere symptoms of a society (or series of societies and cultures)
that denies women any rights, systematically excludes them from any learning
or education whereby they may realise their potential, forces them to
be totally dependent upon their husband for every necessity, forces them
by propaganda, bullying and any other force necessary to fall into set
roles of living for the total convenience of men and if they ever try to
challenge or change any of this they are told this living hell is 'natural'
and 'ordained by God'. Now, finally after thousands of years of slavery,
woman is beginning to escape from the chains that bound her, and dragged
screaming to its senses the church itself gradually begins to address the
questions: what is woman ? what does woman want ?
First of all they will try to deny that the Church ever was sexist. What
about Queen Esther ? What about Mary ? Doesn't Paul say "in Christ there
are no male or female" ? And we don't really mean God is male, and
Jesus said the angels are neither male nor female (and 'God is not a
man', Num 23:19) but of course this misses the point. It would be
very surprising indeed in a book the size of the Bible if at some point
or other a woman wasn't portrayed in a fairly favourable light, but
the whole cut of the argument is the general exclusion of women being
addressed in their own right, does it ever actually say that women will
be saved, for example ? And take the story of the thieves on the cross
for example, it is naturally assumed that they are male (I can't see
any reference to their gender: Matt 27:44, Mk 15:32, Lk 23:39), clearly
it is men whom the Bible is primarily addressed to.
A second alternative is to attempt to justify this appalling state of
affairs. Apologists for the exploitation and repression of women close
their eyes to the symptoms of this sickness: rape, anxiety, depression,
violence, injustice - all the life-destroying evils Christianity should
oppose - and say that whatever the appearance, women should be subject
to man's whims, moods and tempers, that it is somehow right that women
should be kept in mental chains, denied the opportunity to show their
worth, to fulfil their potential. Today it is clear that women may be every
bit as resourceful, practical, wise, hardworking, intelligent, loving,
witty, talented, and generally HUMAN as man has shown himself to be,
so why should they be treated as menial servants only fit to do boring,
monotonous housework and bring up the kids ? Why should they be systematically
denied access to education and roles that allow them to express themselves ?
These questionings of the force within creation of the unrealised feminine
are worthy of serious reflection, because they undo our preconceptions
about everything. Despite the seemingly omnipresent application of
this principle of the exclusion of women, there are some passages that
offer hope of a better way. We mentioned earlier the relation between
salvation and creation, between the New Creation and the Old. In the
New Testament, side by side with those very passages that marginalise and
exclude women, we read that Christ is the new Adam, we read "if anyone
is in Christ, he (sic) is a new creation" (2 Cor 5:17), and especially
Hebrews 4 "there remains then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for
anyone who enters God's rest also rests from his (sic) own work, just as
God did from his" (Heb 4:9). All these passages make clear that the
new-being, the salvation existence, takes us back to before the Fall.
Romans 5:12-21 is especially interesting, as it removes any responsibility
for the Fall from Eve, placing it squarely on Adam, and declares this
curse of the Fall to have been removed by Christ.
We know that the division of Babel required the work of the Church in
undoing that division and communicating the Word to all languages; so
the task remains of undoing the division of labour between male and
female, the division of rights, the division of choices and the division
of opportunity, where the men get everything and the women get nothing.
It is difficult to say what will happen when the fetters of sexism fall
from the church, the return to Eden, the promise of entry into that rest
at last complete. We must forget that sickly dominance of man over woman, for
who can justify the domination of one human being over another ? It is
a vile oppression that in reality keeps both men and women in chains.
For so long this ugliness has entered into our very prayer and
worship, somehow debasing and defiling our whispered words of love,
and now we wish to be free of it. Now let this stain pass from us, and
let woman contribute her noble, mystical, wild and soaring freedom into
the dynamics of this new creation.
We shall now attempt to put this argument into a systematic anthropological
ontology to theorise precisely what we have analysed.
We have established and reaffirmed our commitment to God the creator. The
Christian is for the world, for the creation and for the creator. This
commitment to creation is not some infantile sentimental feeling for
certain beautiful scenes and the rest of the time complete rejection
anything to do with 'the world'. It is a Gnostic heresy that says the world
is evil, and that we are strangers in the world, "this world is not my
home I'm just a-passing through" is a Gnostic hymn. Christians must affirm
the basic, original goodness of the world and in that same affirmation
declare our utter revulsion at the corruption and pollution of it.
Now we recognise that being for the world, in spite of its corruption,
is a form of existence that is part of the Fall, and yet an authentic
mode of existence. Yet there remains the fact that there is an unfallen
mode of existence, and that although this cannot define itself in terms
of a fallen creation it too remains an authentic way of being. Thus we
posit two authentic modes of authentic Christian existence: the holy life
and the ethical life. The holy life is an entry into Eden, it responds
negatively to the world but in reality only to the evil world, and thus
at a deeper level it positive to the world as creation. The ethical life
is concerned with the fallen world, can see the potential and good in it,
but of course is only an authentic mode of existence within the fallen
creation. The ethical life is positive to the world in the first instance,
yet in seeking to heal evil and protect the good, at a deeper level is
negative to this current world and works for the world to come.
"Therefore God again set a certain day, calling it Today... for anyone
who enters God's rest also rests from his own work, just as God did
from his" (Heb 4:7-10) What is the significance of the Fall on Time ?
Could Time fall ? Could Time as well as Matter be somehow subject to
sin ? We cannot speak of Time in the sense in which Einstein or Sakarov
speak of time, that there are different times in different parts of
space, that certain parts of space are subject to different times - black
holes etc. - for this leads to questions about the horizon of the Fall-
this planet, this universe ? - and by implication would force us to show
that hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen constitute the objective 'fallen
matter' in some way, and that there is some 'fallen nature' in the
brain's neurons etc. When we speak of time and space, we speak about time
and space for us, not necessarily existential time and space, or individual
time and space but socially and culturally (and psychologically) defined
time and space.
The meaning of the Sabbath is bound up with the meaning of Fallen Time.
When we examine time disclosed within the discourse of western metaphysics,
(see Derrida's "Ousia and Gramme", e.g. "its execution directed at the
question of the meaning of Being, the "destruction" of classical ontology
first had to shake the 'vulgar concept' of time... traditional
ontology... can be destroyed only by repeating and interrogating its
relation to the problem of time") we see time represented as circular,
its experience is one of repetition: the seasons, months, weeks, years
all turn round and round, yielding only more of the same. In the 19th and
20th centuries Hegelianism and Marxism seemed to return to the concept of
linear time, yet closer inspection revealed that it is linear only up to the
present, only up to this point in history, the future still holds nothing
new. We must beware then of seeing the Sabbath as just another festival,
just another paradigm of pagan circular time. Certainly as part of the
fall, we cannot avoid living in the world and experiencing in catagories
provided by this fallen world, yet the time of the entry into the Sabbath
is not in terms of fallen time, for the Sabbath is holy time, whose essence
we can neither will nor create. "Remember" the Sabbath; this is how we
may know its holiness, by re-membering (and this is not the Egyptian
re-membering of Osiris by Isis, but enacted independently of the will)
and 'keeping' whereby this rest exists in objective holiness not something
that must continually be re-created but like a flame we must 'keep' in
being by remberance. Thus the nature of the Sabbath is not dependent upon
man but given by God, whose being we understand only through symbols.
Thus it is correct to speak of the sacrament of the Sabbath, its objective
holiness confers grace through its spiritual effacy, but only if we clarify
this to be the Sabbath of Hebrews 4, which we shall call the Sabbath of the
unconscious, in contradistinction to the conscious Sabbath, whose entry
by an act of the will is barred by "cherubim and a flaming sword flashing
back and forth" (Gen 3:24). We reject the sacrament of the mass, of orders,
of baptism, because these are human actions within the human activity of
religion, the church does not mediate the objective acts of God; at baptism
there is no indelible mark on the soul; at mass (or communion) there is
no reception of grace for these are signs of remembrance and commemoration,
they express faith and typify spiritual realities but they do not cause
(in the Aristotelian sense) objective acts of God. This separation between
God and man is passed over on entry into the Sabbath-rest, for it is
a sanctifying time ("I gave them my Sabbaths as a sign between me and them;
so that they may know that I am the Lord and sanctify them", Ezek 20:12)
and further a time of collective sanctification, not for the individual
soul. For this reason we cannot side with either Luther or Roman Catholicism
as both err in their belief in an individual soul, the Sabbath points to
collective sanctification, for God works in the world not on some eternal
soul, the salvation and healing work of God is on his creation, not in
some inner recess of the psyche. St Augustine sees the Sabbath as pointing
forward to the rule of God on earth ('City of God', book XXII, chapter 30)
to a time in which the earth is set free by an act of God, not through acts
of men.
Thus we may return to the question of the Holy Life, for it is lived in
holy time, within the Sabbath rest, not working in the world, but a life
that fulfils the promise 'ye shall become as angels', not marrying nor
enjoying the pleasures of creation. The Ethical Life, on the other hand,
lives in the world, like David and Solomon: enjoying, living, loving,
helping, befriending, working, grieving, dancing, eating, rebuking,
fighting for a just social order, fighting for the poor, the destitute and
the oppressed, siding with the stranger and the outsider.
The creation of man was not primarily for worshipping God, this was the
purpose of the angels, but man is to live in the world, part of a community,
tending the earth, naming (see Heidegger's "Building, Dwelling, Thinking")
and expressing. Thus both the ethical life and the holy life are brought
together in the artist, who is from neither the past (before the Fall) or
the present (within the Fall) but rather the future (beyond the Fall), living
in the world but seeing it as God' creation, it is not a calling in this
fallen world as such, but reflects the duality of the horizon of our facticity,
we are in the world and in creation, and the lord of this world is not lord
of creation, how then do we separate the world from creation ? The ethical
life is being-in-the-world, a life of healing and tending to the ravages of
sin. but this is not possible if the ethical life does not simultaneously
see itself as being-in-creation, and thus the end of the world is not seen
as identical with the end of creation.
The holy life sees the world as creation, because it is a life not defined
in any way by the Fall, and thus does not preach, does not judge, does not
'act' and thus seems useless, but of course all these responses would be
impossible if sin did not exist, and we maintain that there exists a 'rest'
in man's nature, a part of his nature, not defined by sin, and thus not
defined by the Fall, man is between good and evil, heaven and hell, and
contains the possibility of both. But since man's essential way of being
was defined before the Fall, man has a way of being, a possible way of being,
that does not define itself in terms of a response to sin, and that way of
being is the Holy Life. The continuation of this life to some extent is the
work of the artist, not the 'religious' person, because the artist has no
part in sin and redemption as such and is thus able to live a life as God
meant without the Fall: "poetically man dwells", to quote Heidegger.
So we have established that man became distanced from himself (in the sense
of the gender role established in Eden) and from God in the Fall, and that
Christ came to break down that distancing, to remove the curse of the Fall.
The Fall introduced "lostness" into the world, exclusion from the garden
is a loss of dwelling space (see again Heidegger's "Building Dwelling
Thinking" and "Poetically man dwells"). This lostness may be characterised
as a repression in the sense that it is a spiritual distance between man
and his dwelling, the self and the other, the being of man and the being of
God, and that this distance is not exclusion or forgetting but a force keeping
this exclusion from consciousness and thus able to represent itself to
consciousness only in other forms. This is why the concern with the
individual is both important and irrelevant, for the signifier 'individual'
points to the desire for a presence before the subject, a measurement and
accounting of the world to make it an object of consciousness, a desire for
power over and against the world by the 'individual' and the religious
counterparts to this: salvation of the 'individual' soul etc., division
of the world into saved and unsaved individual souls, the power and rights
of the saved souls over the unsaved etc. This repression of distance is
formed in the symbol of the individual as the negation of a repression
(see Freud's "Negation") for separating the individual from the social
group is like taking a fish from water or a brain from the skull. We turn
from lostness to the group and the organisation of the group is rendered
demonic or authentic within the parameters of the law. God judges the group
(Sodom, Edom, Egypt etc.) and even the most evil of individuals is not
separable from the group whose dynamics gave form to the various drives
of the 'individual' moment.
Even so, within the group we find some satisfaction for our lostness, love
is not alien to this fallen world, but the condition of its witness to the
creator. The glory of this human creation may yet shine and glimmer. Passage
to God is only through this creaturely existence - love, kindness and mercy.
The break in the closure of creaturely existence was made objectively by
Christ, but knowing God cannot be expressed fully in language. To 'know'
God is not to have him present in a conceptual idea in the mind, to know
God is to move within his being. Conceiving of God is not like conceiving
of a simple idea or essence, like one could think of a chair or a person,
but rather like thinking of a country or a city or a planet. There is no
'end' to God, hence even when one thinks of a planet, while it is impossible
to bring to mind every detail and feature of the planet, still one is
imagining the outline, what it 'looks' like, and even if one thinks of
a city, perhaps we think of the city centre, or an aerial view of the city,
still there is no 'right' way to hold it in the mind. Trying to think of
God is like trying to hold in your mind every single part of a symphony,
or every detail and character from Shakespeare's plays, all that appears
is a part, a detail, an instance, never the whole, and so one can only
speak of 'knowing' God in the sense that you are still 'within' him, still
walking through the forest of God, not knowing what will appear in the
next clearing, or through that break in the branches high above.
So to say the poet reveals the new creation or reveals God, is not to
imagine we run thoughtlessly from the beauty of creation into a new and
better creation, rather the essential relation of man within creation
is constantly being understood and reunderstood. We circle constantly
in our understanding of creation and the creator, we cannot 'just' know
about God, we understand God in the world by our religious knowledge of
God and we understand God in the Bible by our knowledge of him in creation,
the two movements constantly complementing each other, each circle moving
deeper into his fullness, his depth and holiness. To dwell poetically is
to enter into this bottomless ocean, submerged in the kindness and purity
of God's revelation, being pulled deeper and deeper down by the swell and
tug of the fullness of his existence. We see the new earth when we stop
comprehending the earth as a biological machine or as a food factory or
even for pleasurable aesthetic experience and see it as our home with
God, radiating his love as our dwelling and our home.
Another aspect of creation can only be understood in relation to the law.
Creation defines man's ur-being, his primal being, his being in the garden
before the fall, the ontology of anthropology, yet the law defines man's
fallen modes of being. The law is thus a safeguard against gnosticism which
tries to remove being-in-the-world as the essence of man, and to move his
essence into some eternal beyond, the law holds man to his humanness; man
cannot withdraw from the world, but finds himself only in the world, man
ceases to be man apart from creation, and he only realises himself within
it. The task of the law is to keep man in his humanness, defining the
parameters of religious, ethical, political and all other forms of life.
Yet poetic being is not defined in this manner, it exists by grace apart
from the demands of the law, because it is ur-being. There is no law that
commands us to experience the world as creation, to feel the depth of
existence, to express ourselves in art and beauty, these are part of God's
primal creation (i.e. his new creation) which are glimpses of our at-homeness,
poetic being is our Sabbath rest.
Note on the use of the feminine with reference to God
We have shown that the return to our original being-together and
being-with-others is to see the division of gender roles as a consequence
of the Fall and hence the 'rest' we enter into takes us away from this
curse. Yet much religious language has been established within this split
of gender-division, and the question arises, should we address God in the
feminine ?
The moral answer is probably yes, when we realise we have sinned we try to
make amends, yet I would pause and offer a few points for consideration.
It possibly seems very contrived to call God 'she', and few people would
feel comfortable doing so. A good example, however, is Mother Julian of
Norwich (1342-1416) who in "Revelations of Divine Love" chapters 58 to 63
emphasises the motherhood of God revealed in our Lord, 'Mother Jesus' is
often mentioned and although it has a scriptural warrant in referring to
God as Mother (Isaiah 49:1,15, 66:13, Matt 23:37) and some of the medievals
developed the idea (St Anselm and St Bernard) it still sounds strange to
most Christians. Hence I would argue that use of Mother God or 'She' as
God is only warranted when it 'feels' natural to the believer and is a
natural expression of how the believer wants to express him or her self.
© John Mann 1981