Poem: Westminster Abbey

*I'd like to thank this poem's first publisher, Dan Schneider, who has published it on the fantastic Cosmoetica.com.  I highly recommend both the site and Dan's own poetry to be found there.  I reproduce it here after putting some work into it, because I have never really been happy with it's first form.  I want to acknowledge my gratitude to him not only for publishing this in its first form, but also for writing what in my opinion is the best corpus of poetry I know of.

”know your feelings were already felt

before this cathedral became your world"

                                    --Dan Schneider, “Refrain of the RCA Building”

Westminster Abbey

This is no cathedral, merely a haunt for sinners,

Where they have cast their stones

Together, to form a heaven that held

Angels themselves, fast into architecture.

Is this hour the recline of God?  Some say

He rests in the transept of elements

Upon an exhaled prayer; others that no

Amount of silver mints a value worth                                                   

The pillars of a faith peasants began.                                                   

"Silver and gold I do not have, but such"                                                    

It was said, "as I have..."  Not to silver

Was it given to heal on heaven's high

Spires, towered in time turned back,

But to a boulder rolled off of the grave

Bearing the miracle behind.

Then is an abbey not miraculous, if                                           A Prayer Exhaled Is

Visible?  A body's a heavy dust,                                     

Gravel awaiting the wind,

                                                                                    Heavy with hands, offered to candelight,

                                                                                    Which cores me in this holy cavity.

                                                                                    And I assume this collar, not by weight

                                                                                    Of worth to wear it, nor to deny

                                                                                    How planets fall from a star's bright dress;

                                                                                    Rather to handle a past not made in my

                                                                                    Image.  It glows in the groove of the cross

                                                                                    Hung round my neck, where fire claims this room

                                                                                    I have mined for other meanings.  And the dross,                                                   

Is this not wondrous?  What if it were
Breathed upon?  What if                                              

England were cast into speech, its tenses                                                        

Woven in one said verb, wreathed in the vow

The dust is destined for and cannot escape?

Westminster, cloister of its own memory, more dead

Than living in its fray.  What future could purchase a past                                

Like this, and who be its pardon?

Here all will be pardoned, when the young stone falls

On perished arches, and rings the verdict

Buried beneath these bells, and beckons

The past to account for what was done with it—

                                                                                    Melts into a candle, all but consumed

                                                                                    By the cross and its fire, and seared

                                                                                    In the quarry of a torch-lit tomb,

                                   

                                                                                    This chancel, where secrets that never escaped my years

                                                                                    May lie, without knowledge or fear, of the small hell

                                                                                    In a candle, though men should fear.

                                                                                    Tremble, my soul, in its show and tell.

                                                                                    Gather and confess thy sins.  Return

                                                                                    'Til all is repented, each hidden sin bewailed,

                                                                                    Not one bloody word untold. Now and then be burned 

                                                                                    Out of me, until I fall in the midst of the burning,

                                                                                    Exnihilate, extinguished in the burn.

                                     

The past that never extinguishes, but carves                                           

Itself in tablets stretched high in the testament

Limestone fills with the frailty of its art,

Reaching at God by a means so much

Like kneeling.  Or if not, like Babel, the tongue

Fissured in the feint to flirt with godhead.

But this abbey is not for talking in. 

It is for pardon:  for the permission to

Elide in the already

Said, fixing a prayer in the wet mortar

Of one’s own tongue, the remembered English

Habit of harboring critique

In its own tale—as if a word could embody

What comes after it and ferry it

Pastward.

    It only remains to do

What must be done, what has been done, and is

Not done easily:  to trace the sentence etched in

This rock, and mark the martyrs fixed to its walls                                  

As they speak.  There appears Oscar, San Romero,

Rid of the cartridge that cored him, calling

Birds to sift the supper of his hand,

Bitter only to those who do not taste,                           

And invisible, but for the blood on the stone.               

Does it bleed then, the future into the past thought       

Settled, swaddled, made particular, like dust,

Always is?  Does it animate?  God knows

Time's whole conversion as if it were the fall

Of a sparrow's feather, or a single

Stone off the vastness of this construction,

So when Romero calls the birds, it is not simply                                   

A tremor in the towers turned out.

                                                                                    Your songs ring the chamber of my believing.

                                                                                    I call them, but they breathe the wind

                                                                                    Through old towers. They luminesce in the wings

                                                                                    This fire raises upward, with my hands

                                                                                    Ahold of a stone, drawn up in candles' fire

                                                                                    defining their silhouette:  perhaps my hands,                 

                                                                                    so near invisible, framed in fire, where

                                                                                    All is transformed into fragrant bread, and a bird

                                                                                    Conceives in wine and smoke:  rumor of prayer. 

The rumor of wings accrues in the ear of believing:

The words pecked out of his hand will allay

The cracked rhyme, of his world and his day.

So called birds return to their making

Home in the hand of a saint.  And again—                                         

That is the habit of the particular,                                                         

That pretense to permanence.  The abbey endures

Not only to witness the apathy

Wrung out of such beautiful

Fashioning; but to breathe in the whence of these towers,

Raised earth, dirt sculpted, miraculous and seen

To be so.  Wondrous, how the dead have endured

In the etching of them, and how this breath

Has thrilled their witness into the living                                                

Speech. And how they are bound to utterance

No vision catches all of.  Were they without

Sin, who cast enormity past that

Which thought promises, forth in sequential   

Defining?  These annotations—

Do they read in the body

Of England’s endurance?  A tower is

A tower; the breath that fills it names it,

The breath of a prayer exhaled, O Lord,

Refashioned in this writerly purview                                                    

Which is not stone; how then can it rise to you?

New Testament Scholarship as Historical Jesus Study

Chester Beatty Manuscript (P46):
Ireland gets back in the historical Jesus World Cup?

Chris Keith and Anthony LeDonne have gathered an impressive array scholars to evaluate the supposed "criteria of authenticity" that have governed historical Jesus scholarship over the last several generations.

In a stunning introduction, LeDonne retouches an argument that has gained some steam in recent years:  namely, that the various criteria are themselves dependent for their credibility on Form criticism as the explanatory paradigm for the formation of the Gospel texts.

Form criticism aims to make the Gospels intelligible via a comparative analysis of the "forms" that make up the Gospel texts.  This method makes prima facie sense as the Gospels do appear to be composed of stories whose similarities and differences suggest they might be profitably juxtaposed.  In the Gospels, there appear to be "miracle stories," "controversy stories," etc..., and comparing them has brought what seemed to be wisdom into Gospels study.  But just here problems arise.  Form criticism may bring wisdom into the field, but not the kind of wisdom it was intended for.  Form criticism was intended as a way to use the literary genres of the Gospel stories against each other and come up with a literary theory of Gospels, so that one could then distill out the literary elements and deliver the Jesus behind the Gospels.  Confidence that this is possible has dwindled significantly since Bultmann's powerful defenses of the method.  The Jesus that the Gospels deliver is literary all the way down.  Whatever history they deliver cannot be divorced from literary presentation.  There is no Jesus behind the text.

The irony of this fact, so LeDonne argues anyway, is that many of the very people who have challenged the old dominance of Form criticism have even so insisted on the viability of the criteria of authenticity that were used to distinguish literature from history in the first place.  LeDonne cites Dibelius on the question:  "Since the Evangelists merely framed and combined these materials, the tradition can be lifted without difficulty out of the text of the Gospels" (36).  Form critics would attempt to figure out which parts of the gospel traditions reflected the interests of the authors; the criteria were used for just that purpose.  But if that goal is no longer envisioned as likely or possible, what use have these various evaluative techniques?

So much for LeDonne's introduction.  It might seem to follow that the authors are pessimistic about the possibilities of historical Jesus work, but they are not.  They are in broad agreement, however, that historiography will need to change.  There will have to be an exploration of not of some Jesus behind those texts but of the Jesus that caused the texts.  One will have to do historical Jesus work much as one examines a crater in order to speak intelligently about the meteor that caused it.  Although this means that sources will have to be examined differently, it also means that the range of possible sources increases significantly.  Historical Jesus scholars have at their disposal not merely the Gospel traditions and the handful of extrabiblical references but all of early Christianity as a treasure trove of sources.  The revival of the Pauline corpus and the rest of the New Testament as sources, not to mention second-century Christian literature, must be considered especially among the many things that make this revision of historical method exciting for the student of the New Testament.  It may be that all of New Testament scholarship has something to say about the Jesus of history, then, as the question whence ecclesia assumes its proper priority in historical examination.  And since their faith in Christ was the prime motive for the early church's preservation of its own history, the move to bracket out the Christ of faith may one day be seen as the impediment to good history that it always was.

Plagues and Politics: Exodus 1

The mistake of Egypt's new king (Exod. 1:8), common enough to be a cliche, is to think that the powers of life and death, of creation and annihilation, actually do rest in his hands.  OT scholars have often noted the echo between the "swarming" of Israel in Egypt (וַֽיִּשְׁרְצ֛וּ—Exod. 1:7) and the original imperatives of the creation (Gen. 1:20, 7:21, 8:17, 9:7).  In their fruitfulness in Egypt, Israel demonstrates the blessing of God, the rich, fertile, good word of the creator.  They "swarm" Egypt (cf. שִׁרְצ֥וּ—Gen. 9:7) as a witness against of provision in the face of famine and the threat of annihilation.

Pharaoh forgets, as powers so often do, that he is a created being.  His attempt to stifle the swarm of Israelites is a reach for the creator's power.  But God is not mocked.  In a contrapasso of which Dante would have been proud, Pharaoh stifles the swarm only to have repeated swarms overwhelm his parody of sovereignty.  He takes the powers of creation in his hand, but God quickly disabuses him of the notion that his sovereignty stretches that far.  A swarm of frogs, a swarm of locusts, a swarm of hail:  creation doing its thing, doing it well, and doing a lot of it.  

The enslavement of Israel is Pharaoh's rebellion against his containment in a world that he has not made for himself.  It is a rage against the thorns and thistles, a bid to overcome the struggle between humans and the earth by placing other human beings in between them.  Humans were built to mediate the divine will into the creation and to gather up the creation in praise to their creator.  And in attempting to do with other humans that which only God can do with them, Pharaoh reveals the tight and tacit connection between bourgeois culture and idolatry of oneself.  The plagues, then, are an act of mercy, in which God's wild creation gathers and shows its allegiance to God and god alone.  And as an act of worship, the plagues are a mercy for Pharaoh, a forced anamnesis to restore him to his place in the earth, his place as the earth.  Creation declares the glory of God, and this declaration is irreducibly political, since there is no more beautiful political act than to remind each other that we are dust.  The Hebrews swarm as those who receive and bear the blessing of a good creator.  But the Egyptians have swarmed as well, and the plague that God rallies creation to heal is Pharaoh's blindness to this stark fact.  

Bishop and Statesman: a Dysfunctional Family Relation

In one of the initial moves of The Desire of the Nations (DN), Oliver O'Donovan performs a deft double kick against 1) the modern arrogance that tried to cordon politics off from theology while forgetting that all of its political concepts were dependent on a theological imaginaion and 2) a politcal theology whose suspicion of that separation is but a derivative of the modern suspicion of theology.  For there to be any move forward (from 1996), these two enemies would have to find it within themselves to see each other as fellows, friends, and even relations.

This is because the attempt to overcome the enlightened separation involves a kind of absolutizing of struggle among political arrangments for the right to claim transcendence.  Each new polis must understand itself as the fruition of a historical process that ends in each new world order.  The referees who kicked the Bishop off the field in order to render a society's coming to judgment intelligible (demythologizing or unmasking the Bishop as just another politician) can themselves be similarly unmasked:

"The Enlightenment consensus itself, with its attempt to establish a pure ethics (whether theological or rational) in light of which all political dynamisms can be seen through, can itself be seen through.  Criticism can be turned back upon the critic ad infinitum.  For criticism too is the strategy of some actor within the socio-historical polyphony, the representative speech of some historical grouping" (9).

What is needed is for Bishop and statesman, theology and politics, to reconcile in the embrace of wayward child with forgiving father (a la Luke 15).  The modern state is the creation of the church, and never is this quite as clear as when it effects schism between father and son.  The state's moral profligacy and confusion bespeak a deep forgetfulness as to the origin of the riches it possesses.  And yet the church, unlike the father in the parable, stingy with its treasures at various points in history, holding them back from the world as a way to make itself both father and son, both bestower of the kingship of God as a rule of life for the world and direct distributor of that rule.  The rebellion of the son, in this arrangement, is not entirely the son's fault, as it is in Luke 15.  When the fathers exasperate their children (Eph. 6:4), any number of wayward backlashes may occur.  The power and ruthlessness of modern states are matched only by their amnesia, and the resultant confusion as to any means of judgmental integrity is exactly what one would expect when the father gives stone instead of bread.

It was through the rebellion of Absalom that God finally crushed the pride of David.  This is a way of saying that even if O'Donovan's attempt to remind the son where his riches came from is as salutary as it seems to be, none of this assures that the father will be as generous as he ought.  In the divided polis of the contemporary age, it may seem trite to suggest that the lack of neighborhood is a fault of love for neighbor; but this is precisely what seems to me to be the case.