Fictions of God

By Dr. Frank England

Fiction and theology share an attempt to articulate what it means to be human. They both include narrative accounts of virtue and vice, moral worth and moral failure. Through the themes of courtesy, brutality, silence, sound, and divine absence, the sacred nature and character of being human is explored in novels by Anita Brookner, Chuck Palahniuk, Anne Michaels, Richard Powers, and Iris Murdoch.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Jun 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781532696763

Dr. Frank England

Frank England, who holds degrees in theology, literary theory, and art history, is an honorary research associate at the University of Cape Town.

Book preview

Introduction

Truthful Human Fictions

The endeavor to live a truthful life requires an acknowledgment of one’s past. But one’s past is a complex labyrinth of sharded memories and scattered fragments of the known, the unknown, and the unwanted. As unsettling as this may be, if one is to live with some degree of integrity, of honest self-answering, then revisiting one’s own history is unavoidable. But it does entail risk. Therefore, quite understandably, there may be considerable reluctance to quarry shafts long buried even in the cause of providing some degree of meaning to one’s own life, of offering some recognizable sense of its intelligibility. Indeed, the task of tracing the trajectory of who one is and how one has reached this point—this present moment of one’s presence—is onerous. And yet it may be claimed that, not only may it be worthwhile, it also may well be essential to one’s own human project of self-integrity—of living a life that is truthful to others as also to oneself.

However, to narrate one’s autobiography in the cause of self-referential fidelity; in fact, to be its first-person narrator-focalizer—that is, both the voice that tells and the eyes that see—does not merely involve the recounting and imaging of events. Rather, it may be said to comprise both telling, and also interrogating what one tells; both providing an account that attempts to reflect one’s past, and simultaneously testing the veracity of the account. When embarking upon such a project, one discovers, somewhat disconcertingly and not, probably, infrequently, that one’s archive of memories has been edited so as to convey a rather untarnished and publicly approved self-image. Thus one’s own story, more usually, is purposefully selective and primarily (although not always) told to one’s own advantage. But if one’s endeavor to revisit the past is for the purposes of shaping a future story that strives for greater transparency and authenticity, then this book suggests that some assistance may be found by turning to fictional others in novels because they may provide constructive, even crucially relevant, if also lacerating, instruction. For the fictions of others may well confront one with oneself in the lives of others, even though these self-reflecting portraits often may appear before one in undesirable colors and in poses unwelcome, possibly even repellent. In this sense, fiction may enable one to read oneself in the words of the fictional lives of others, and to image oneself in the actions of fiction’s characters, so as to learn about oneself—and, more especially, about one’s failures to learn about oneself. Perhaps, significantly, one may find in these fictional others that reflect back images of oneself—whether indictingly grievous or aspirationally hopeful—the motivation to ask about one’s need to change. And if so, then fiction may be said to extend an invitation to its readers to revisit their own stories in the cause of shaping them—that is, of fashioning themselves—by empowering them to mold more truthful future narratives.

It is proposed that, amongst so many lessons that one may be required to learn and relearn on the path of self-formation, the endeavor to recover a form of civility, and thus to acquire or re-acquire the virtue of courtesy, may be of some importance to the forging of harmonious human relations that are accepting of others within their own pasts of hurt, of duties, of ineradicable limitations, even when understanding them is—and, in a sense, always must be—somewhat beyond one’s grasp, as may be observed in The Bay of Angels by Anita Brookner (2001). For it is from this sense of courteous interactional acknowledgement—the upholding of the dignity of another and other persons—that one may be encouraged to wait before them, and to listen to them and their silences before, or instead of, wanting them, even compelling them, to speak, a lesson instructively and poetically rendered in Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels (1996). To be aware that the silences of others, as indeed their speech, reside within material bodies of etched scars of the past, of failing flesh in the present, and of an inescapable dusty future is to consent to the singular and shared human condition—and this necessity to recognize one’s common human materiality is depicted with a bold and stark directness in Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk (1996). For it may be claimed that it only is in the mutual recognition that the other too shares an ineradicable material humanity that the honest vision of others, as of oneself, as contingent beings and fleeting guests in a created world may be said to begin. And it is the devastating result of failing to look at others with compassionate disinterest—that is, without self-interest—as fellow human persons similarly gifted with life and yet condemned to its consequences that is portrayed so graphically in The Time of the Angels by Iris Murdoch (1966). But not only must one look at others, one also must listen to them in their own halting and fluent attempts to sound themselves in a range of tonal moods and modes that, possibly, are near perfectly pitched by Richard Powers in his novel, Orfeo (2014).

Chapter 1

The Courtesy of God

The Bay of Angels by Anita Brookner (2001)

In 1342 or 1343 ,

¹

in Norwich, then the second largest city in England, the earliest known woman writer of English

²

was born. Nameless, but named Julian, this remarkable woman, whom Denys Turner

³

recently and appropriately titled, quite simply, theologian, became an anchoress at the Church of St Julian, whose patron could itself be attributed to one of many saints called Julian. Perhaps most commendable is the proposal that the Church was named after St Julian the Hospitaller, the patron saint of ferrymen because the ferry would cross the River Wensum

⁴

close to the site of the Church.

⁵

Julian of Norwich died in 1416 or 1417, at the age of between seventy-three and seventy-five—an unexpectedly long life in troubled times of ruinous inconstancies. Some six or seven years after her birth, the plague known as Black Death scythed the European population by between a third and a half during 1348 and 1349.

⁶

This mortiferous plague, which was carried by ship from Gascony, had disembarked in Dorset, in August, 1348, reached London by November of the same year and, by January of the following year, it had arrived in Norwich.

⁷

No person, no family, was untouched by disease and by death. In the wake of the plague, the ill-fortune continued with the frequent occurrence of murrains of cattle and inadequate harvests during the ensuing years.

⁸

Whilst the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had witnessed agricultural expansion, urban growth, extended local market networks with regular town and regional fairs, and wider trade links and exports, particularly, of wool, to Europe, it also resulted in an awareness by domestic labor of its power, with the subsequent formation of profession and trade guilds. Following the catastrophe of the plague and the vicissitudes of natural havoc in the mid to late 1300s, inevitably, wealth had declined, labor had become scarce, and wages rose considerably. Therefore, [a]s early as June of 1349, Parliament issued the Ordinance of Laborers in an attempt to fix ... wages, which were to return to the levels before the plague. Two years later, in 1351, a new Statute reinforce[d] price controls,

⁹

and then, during the 1370s, an addition to the Statute again suppressed wages,

¹⁰

followed by a 1388 parliamentary decree that compelled urban dwellers to assist in the fields at harvest.

¹¹

When an earlier punitive new tax of one shilling was imposed on all men and women over the age of sixteen,

¹²

labor exercised its power, which triggered the Peasants’ Revolt during June and July of 1381.

This realization of worker power was not without its sacred parallels. After John Wyclif (c. 1330—1384) had defended the monarchy against the imposition of a papal taxation in 1374, he, together with various scholars, began to dispute the extent of clerical authority, especially with regard to the Sacrament of Confession, which fairly recently had been enforced by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. They contested the absence of lay judgement in issues ecclesiastical and theological, and they questioned the practice of venerating sacred images. Their cause, known as Lollardism, swiftly was condemned by the pope in 1377, and by the English Church at Blackfriars Council in 1382. However, these concerns were not without more widespread interest and support, and an increasingly educated parochial clergy examined and discussed them within local parishes and outside the schoolrooms and the palaces of the prelates. These causes were vehemently opposed by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, at the forefront of which was the aptly named pugnacious Bishop of Norwich, Henry Dispenser. From 1385, the arrest and imprisonment of Lollards was authorized. In 1399, following Henry IV’s accession to the throne, the death sentence could be imposed.

¹³

Julian, then in her late fifties, would have heard the screams from the tortured bodies of the condemned as they were burned to death in the Lollard Pit in Norwich, which was just out of sight from her cell attached to St Julian’s Church. It was there that the anchoress prayed, meditated, and engaged her own increasingly educated and acute theological mind upon sixteen revelations that had been shown to her when I was thrittye wintere alde and a halfe (Vis. 2. 1; Rev. 3. 1).

¹⁴

On the fourth night after having fallen ill, she received the last rites, but languished for two further days. On the subsequent night,

¹⁵

she, and those who watched at her bedside, expected her imminent death, and the person my curette

¹⁶

was called to be atte mine endinge (Vis. 2. 20), who

sette the crosse before my face, and saide: "Doughter, I have brought the the image of thy savioure. Look thereopon, and comforthe the therewith in reverence of him that diede for the and me (Vis.

2

.

20

–

23

; Rev.

3

.

17

–

20

).

She felt her physical life ebbing, and when sothelye to hafe bene atte the pointe of dede ... sodenynlye alle my paine was awaye from me and I was alle hole (Vis. 2. 36–37). Julian, whilst looking at the crucifix, saw the head of the figure begin to bleed (Vis. 3. 10; Rev. 4. 1). This showing marked the beginning of the visions, which, in the three complete manuscripts—one from the fifteenth century of the earlier Vision,

¹⁷

and two from the seventeenth century of the longer Revelations

¹⁸

—occurred either on the 8th or on the 13th of May of 1373.

¹⁹

In his early book, entitled The Wound of Knowledge, Rowan Williams

²⁰

writes:

The female recluse, Julian of Norwich, stands as a particularly significant figure among the English spiritual writers: she is a theologian of extraordinary intuitive resource . . . She is as far as anyone could be from the image of a God intrinsically hostile to the human creation or jealous of its flourishing; her trinitarian models are designed to anchor this awareness of sustaining pity and self-gift in the being of God . . . [and] she deserves to stand with the greatest theological prophets of the Church’s history.

In an address delivered twenty-five years later, and subsequently published in his book, Holy Living, in 2017, Rowan Williams

²¹

considers Julian to be engaged in writing an anti-theology, a way of interrogating theological thought that reversed contemporary—and, indeed, still prevailing—Christian beliefs. In a context in which the wrath of God seamlessly might be—and was—read into the genocidal annihilation during the mid-fourteenth century,

²²

and God’s capricious anger might be—and was—interpreted where there was illness;

²³

and also in the desultory events of sudden and ruinous loss of livelihood, Julian refused to employ a binary framework that set up humanity as the cause of divine fury and as the victims of God’s displeasure. Rather, she constantly looked back to humanity, as it were, as integrated with the sacred, and not at sinful humanity in contrast to a holy and sanitized deity.

At the center of so much theological controversy, both then and continuing to this day, is how this recalcitrant, disobedient, and fickle humanity may find a way back into divine presence, if that is its origin. The more commonly held ecclesiastical conviction has been that some activity of God appears to be required because if not, then humanity can rescue itself from divine disapproval and condemnation, and, if this may be so, then God does not seem to be necessary at all. Traditionally, it has been taught that God is angry about human disobedience, of which the story of the Fall in Genesis tells, and therefore some way of placating the anger of God must be found—some means of paying the price for this inaugural and continuing human tergiversation called sin. But Julian, pursuing what Rowan Williams has called an anti-theology, reverses the matter. If God is the God that Julian believes in, then this God cannot be angry—anger cannot have any place in God. Rather, the active engagement of the divine in the creation is through relationship, a relational presence of God in the world in a human person, and in human persons. Sin, therefore, may be understood as human limitation, as the embedded and ineradicable state of humanity’s own condition, and as an estrangement from a fulfillment which, being human, one indeed is able—but able only—to imagine and envision, but not to enact in any final sense oneself. And precisely because, if one can do something but not everything to rectify one’s terminally fractured—in theological terms, sinful—nature, then sinne is behovely—it is necessarily present—says Julian, simply because one is human and unable to redeem oneself; but it only is necessary, she continues, in her most cited words, in order that alle shalle be wele, and alle shalle be wele, and alle maner of thinge shalle be wel (Rev. 27. 9–11). What is required, Julian perceives, is a shift from being locked into a self who, quite simply, cannot be the human that, in its own imagination, it knows it ought to be; a shift to an openness towards relational otherness, as an offer of human promise and, ultimately, of the hope of human completion. Singularly present within Julian’s understanding of what facilitates the excellence of human-divine relations—and will enable that final state, when alle shall be wele, to be reached—is courtesy.

²⁴

It is used repeatedly in her writings, primarily of her relationship with her Lord and his relationship with her, and it is the non-negotiable form in which they interact in the presence of one another. But courteous relations also apply to the manner in which the Person of God the Father relates to the Person of God the Son, especially as explored by Julian in the longest chapter—Chapter 51—of the Revelations. At the end of the previous chapter, Julian cries out for an explanation and understanding (Rev. 50. 31–33), which leads to a parable about a lord and a servant, and which begins:

And then oure curteyse lorde answered in shewing, full mistely,

²⁵

by a wonderful example of a lorde that hath a servant, and gave me sight to my understanding . . . (Rev.

51

.

1

–

2

).

²⁶

During the ensuing Renaissance, the term courtesy either designated a category of books about social conduct and, when found within them, referred to constraints of behavior that were required of, and also improved, one’s position in society; or it was aligned more closely to a moral quality. Thus, nearly two-hundred years after Julian, when Spenser penned The Faerie Queene (1590), although the term was interchangeable with other terms about behavioral forms expected within public circles, nevertheless, his definition in Book VI of courtesy as of all goodly manners . . . the ground,/And roote of ciuill conuersation points, precisely, to the conversational decorum essential to social relations.

²⁷

To relate with a civility in order that others—and, not infrequently, a significant other—may be included in turn-taking exchanges requires courteous restraint so as to resist encapsulating, or even trapping, the other’s life into a conformity of one’s own image of them. For without this discipline, one, quite literally, may be tempted to prevent them from speaking or, at least, to censor their speech, before it enters those regions of danger or personal threat that one may oneself prefer them not to enter. For if they do, then not only may one become somewhat unsettled because they would be fracturing the image one has of them