I’m slow to make comparisons among religions, or comparisons of religious with non-religious culture (the sort of thing that gets done positively under the rubric of a theology of correlation) — as a thorough-going citizen of one theological realm, I don’t suppose I know another well enough to say, “your karma is just like my judgment” or some other such equation.
On the other hand — and I think I can say this without lapsing into self-contradictory correlation — when last month, Steve explored his progress toward a novel by way of three weekly conversations with John Updike and Philip Roth, I felt uncannily as though he had set out to illustrate the theological notion of the communion of saints.
Very often, Christians regard the church tradition as (on one hand) the leaden weight of credulous half-wits who saddled us with a load of rubbish that it’s our job to offload as quickly and as fecklessly as possibly, or (on the other hand) as the whole intricate crystalline repository of liturgical, dogmatic, ethical, and hermeneutical truth, the entirety of the beauty of holiness, arrived at by 451 CE and unaugmented ever since except by way of purification and refinement. Most who don’t hold to either of these models absolutely adopt one or the other by turns, depending on whether we’re supporting or decrying some aspect of church life.
What, however, if we undertake our conversation with the tradition in a spirit (a Spirit) of mutuality — of deferential but not submissive mutuality, since a true mutuality recognizes the excellence of the saints’ vision but does not forgo the possibility that contemporary theological reflection may recognize something that our forebears have missed — if we dare to converse with the saints, and have the honest humility to grant them the wisdom to correct us in that conversation, then we have to hold a much richer and more nuanced sense of tradition.
We can never simply reproduce what the saints (and the canonical authors) bequeath to us; the future of rock’n’roll depends not on developing ever more skillful tribute bands to repeat ad infinitum the Beatles’ greatest hits, nor can S. recast and rewrite Rabbit, Run and The Human Stain (or The Ursine Stain, I guess). “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change!” The heart of the matter involves learning to recognize which changes appropriately perpetuate the legacy of the saints, and which changes constitute our discordantly foisting our own priorities onto the forerunners who defined the grammar and vocabulary of our contemporary discourses.
It might sound like S. conversing with Updike and Roth, trying to persuade them that his novel about lobsters, bears, and cowboys has potential.
Posted by AKMA at June 28, 2004 07:33 AM | TrackBack"deferential but not submissive mutuality" feels right to me. It seems easier to achieve submission than deference, though: it's been a long slog to convince myself that the canonical authors I've been beaten over the head with for so long (read: Updike, Roth) have something to tell me despite my sense that I already know what they have to say. There's more to Updike than the clichés I defensively poke fun at, likewise Roth. I'd venture the same guess, but cautiously, regarding Biblical scholarship.
Harold Bloom calls it the anxiety of influence, but maybe there's an arrogance of influence, too--a stubborn refusal to hear things worth hearing for fear of admitting that our own voices are not yet complete or wholly our own. And a stubborn insistence that bears, lobsters and cowboys make excellent characters.
Posted by: steve at June 29, 2004 01:24 PM