God is not a being, he is being.
Étienne Gilson
IN THE BEGINNING, God. . .
You ask how the Bible is going. Ever thought about it as the primary atheist text?!! So wrote L. on a postcard some time in the 1980s. (The postmark is smudged, and she has written neither address nor date.)
It reminds me, for some reason, of that classic 1922 essay by H. L. Mencken, ‘Memorial Service’, in which he listed all the dead gods of history. ‘Huitzilopochtli is as magnificently forgotten as Allen G. Thurman. Once the peer of Allah, Buddha and Wotan, he is now the peer of General Coxey, Richmond P. Hobson, Nat Petterson, Alton B. Parker, Adelina Patti, General Weyler and Tom Sharkey.’ After listing dozens of dead gods, Mencken wrote, ‘Ask the rector to lend you any good treatise on comparative religion; you will find them all listed. They were gods of the highest dignity – gods of civilized peoples – worshipped and believed in by millions. All were omnipotent, omniscient and immortal. And all are dead.’ (I think ‘any good treatise on comparative religion’ would probably question the sentence about their omnipotence; but it would have been a pity to spoil a magnificent sentence.) I wonder whether Mencken’s article helped to inspire Wallace Stevens’s ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’:
The death of one god is the death of all.
Let purple Phoebus lie in umber harvest,
Let Phoebus slumber and die in autumn umber,
Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was
A name for something that never could be named.
When I quoted this once on a card to L., she replied, ‘What is this but Justin Martyr’s First Apology in defence of Christians? No one can give a name to God, who is too great for words; if anyone dares to say it is possible to do so, he must be suffering from an incurable madness.’
In the beginning, there were many gods. Even in the Bible, even in the first five sacred books of the Jews, known as the Torah or the Pentateuch in the Greek version, the traces of these dead gods remain. One of the authors of Genesis has been identified by the letter J because the author worshipped a god called Yahweh (Jahweh, if you were a nineteenth-century German scholar, hence the letter J). Harold Bloom thinks this was a woman, living in the reign of King Solomon. Others think the J tradition of stories is much later – written down after the Babylonian exile of 597 BC.
Another strand of writing in Genesis names God not Yahweh, but Elohim, and this writer has been known as E. Whereas Yahweh originally was an anthropomorphic God who walked about his garden like a sheikh, spoke to his creatures, lost his temper, decided to scrap the whole of creation and start again, Elohim was a more mysterious God, who communicated with his creation by means of dreams, or messengers (angels).
Another writer whom we can discern at work in Genesis is P, the priestly source. Whereas for J the dominant figure in the story is Abraham, our Father in Faith, for P the hero was Moses, and it was through Moses that God was able to convey to his people the Ten Commandments, given during a theophany on Sinai. To these simple injunctions, P added a host of prescriptions, both of ritual observance and of such matters as diet, how to avoid corpse impurity, when it was permissible during the menstrual cycle for women to indulge in sexual intercourse, and so forth. Another author is the Deuteronomic author, possibly writing in the seventh century BC, whose hand has been detected not only in the Book of Deuteronomy, but in the working of the Laws given to Moses in the desert. These last two authors, P and D, imagined Moses, in the time of Rameses II (mid-thirteenth-century BC), establishing the liturgical and ritual arrangements of the supposed First Temple era (say 962–922 BC), the furnishing of the tabernacle with curtains and screens, for example, the weaving of finely wrought vestments and the burning of incense in elaborate lampstands. They do not explain, however, how Moses, even given his miraculous powers, found the material for these beautiful artefacts in the middle of the desert.
So the sacred books of the Law, which are the most important books in the synagogue, had an origin which was varied in time, place and authorship. They had their origins in a polytheistic world, where there were many gods. Even within primitive Judaism, there is the recognition that Yahweh’s people will be constantly tempted to worship gods other than him.
Bible scholarship would seem to be at variance with Jewish orthodoxy here – and probably with Christian orthodoxy. Whereas the orthodox or ‘fundamentalist’ view of the Torah is that it is God’s Word, pure and simple, the scholar would want to say that nothing is simple, and that even to identify the various words for God in the Pentateuch – the Lord, the Most High, and so on – is to muddle deities who in their origins were separate.
But the orthodox, of either Jewish or Christian persuasion, would in a sense be right? Whatever the origins of the various stories in the first five books of the Bible, readers are not the same as archaeologists. To identify the ‘God’ who walked in the Garden of Eden with the ‘God’ who appeared to Jacob in a dream, when the angels ascended and descended a ladder set up between heaven and earth, is not to confuse, but to develop. The Bible is not the uncooked ingredients which scholars can identify when they establish, by the process known as Form Criticism, which bits were written by P, which by J and so on. The Bible as we have it today is a whole book, a ragout whose ingredients have been bubbling together for hundreds of years.
However much L. and I disagreed over the years, she had taught me one thing from the beginning about the Bible, and that was the truth so well enunciated by her mentor – the Canadian critic Northrop Frye:
The Bible is held together by an inner core of mythical and metaphorical structure: mythical in the story it tells of the redemption of man from between the beginning and the end of time; metaphorical in the way that its imagery is juxtaposed to form an ‘apocalyptic’ picture of a cosmos constructed according to the categories of human creative energy (i.e. the animal world appears as pastoral, the mineral world as urban etc.. . .). This poetic unity is there: how it got there will doubtless always be something of a mystery. . . We can only call it a mystery of canonicity, and let it go for the time being, holding in the meantime to our central principle: the Bible is not a work of literature, but its literal meaning is its mythical and metaphorical meaning.
She had also taught me, though I kept forgetting it, that the Biblical conception of God is unlike the polytheistic sense of ‘Gods’. The dead gods listed by H. L. Mencken are like the false idols so constantly mocked in the Bible. They are all proper nouns. The true God is a Verb. The concept of Yahweh, the Great I AM, is closer to Goethe’s ‘Das Werdende, das ewig wirkt und lebt’ (‘That which is passing into new being works eternally and lives’) than it is like the concept of an entity. That is why conversations about whether God ‘exists’ are always nonsensical.
The Book of the People! The authentic Bible is not the shards, the bits which textual scholarship might, with greater or lesser degrees of plausibility, unearth (interesting as the process of investigation is). The authentic Bible, the living Bible, is the collection of different authors which were fused into the redaction now known as the Pentateuch or the Torah. Whatever the raw material was, and however raw it was, the Bible as we know it, and as it has influenced life and literature ever since, is a product of the Axial Age, that pivotal period in human history which at its outset saw the emergence of the great Hebrew prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel, which saw the arrival of the Lord Buddha, and which also towards its close saw the coming of Plato and the Greek tragedians.
Just as Plato banished the legendary gods and goddesses of Homeric mythology for what they were – myths – so the Bible, that atheist text, as L. called it, banished all Yahweh’s rivals. In origin, this might appear to be symptomatic of what so many people, myself included, find so repellent about the Religions of the Book – Judaism, Christianity and Islam all three. In the Bible, Yahweh insists upon his people destroying other people, taking their land, desecrating their sacred buildings and shrines. After Yahweh has led the people through the Sea of Reeds, and the pursuing Egyptians’ chariots have stuck in the mud, and the waters have closed over the heads of the Egyptians, Moses sings a blood-curdling song. It is probably one of the oldest passages in the Bible:
Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods?
Who is like you, majestic in holiness,
awesome in splendour, doing wonders?
You stretched out your right hand,
the earth swallowed them.
In your steadfast love you led the people whom you redeemed;
you guided them by your strength to your holy abode.
The peoples heard, they trembled;
pangs seized the inhabitants of Philistia.
Then the chiefs of Edom were dismayed;
trembling seized the leaders of Moab;
all the inhabitants of Canaan melted away.
Terror and dread fell upon them;
by the might of your arm, they became still as a stone
until your people, O Lord, passed by. . .
[Exodus 15:11–16]
Those of us who grew up reading the Bible often, and regularly, sometimes overlook the sheer underlying violence of the monotheistic idea. As we played with our Noah’s Ark, and arranged our wooden Mrs Noah next to the pairs of wooden animals, we failed to notice that these lucky dolls were the survivors of a major act of genocide, in which a petulant God had decided that he did not love the human race any longer, and would therefore destroy it by flood. There are many flood myths and legends in the anthropology of the world. But the Biblical one, as edited in the two versions given in Genesis, one by P and one by J, are both exclusive and destructive. It is hard to see how monotheism, in this setting, can be anything else. God’s people are saved, spared in the Ark, which for later, Christian generations, became an emblem of the Church. Everyone else, by virtue of not being loved by God, by virtue of worshipping the wrong God, is drowned.
This is the dark side of monotheism. Far from being apologetic about it, the opening books of the Bible, in their monotheistic redactions (of polytheistic texts), whoop with blood-curdling hatred of non-orthodox or non-Yahweh-worshipping neighbours.
The Bible is quite honest about this. On the other hand, the Bible does not stop with the stories of destruction and conquest with which the first six of its books (the Pentateuch and Joshua) are concerned. It also contains the most sublime stories, suggestive of the possibility that men and women are not solely earth-bound creatures. In our dreams, prayers, imagination, we can discover links between the temporal and the eternal.
Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran. He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place. And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And the Lord stood beside him and said, ‘I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you. . .’ Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it!’ And he was afraid, and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’ [Genesis 28:10–17]
This is such a deep story, about the dawning religious imagination of the human race. No wonder that in such glories as the west front of Bath Abbey, carvers and glass-makers so often depicted Jacob’s Ladder.
Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it. . . It is the Bible’s genius constantly to surprise and remind us of the possibility of finding ourselves in a spot from which angels have ascended and descended.
The close textual criticism of the Bible will at first make us feel the book coming, as it were, apart in our hands, and with it anything even resembling a religious faith. Here, in this story of Jacob’s Dream, for example, we find various elements at work, which are not completely apparent in the amalgam which constitutes the present text of Genesis. The original of the folk-tale clearly has Jacob arriving at the holy place at nightfall. It is already a famous holy place, but because of the dark he does not recognize where he is. E, who shies away from direct human encounters with God, makes Jacob experience the holiness of the site by a revelation of angels. Later, when Jacob wakes up, J makes Yahweh speak to him directly. But as it survives to us in our translated Bibles, it is a story which encapsulates religious experience on the deepest level; it is about the human failure to grasp ‘the many splendoured thing’, it is about the visionary and imaginative possibilities in human life which much of the time we hold at bay.
But at that phase of my life, during that conversation with L., I was still in righteous hate with the Bible.
—I just hate the way the Bible, for millions of people around the world, remains a work of unique authority. Damn it, it’s a poem, a collection of myths! You can’t live a poem! And you just can’t force other people to live in a poem.
—Many people have, said L.
—But you know what I am talking about! They open the Bible – a collection of texts written thousands of years ago. . .
—Perhaps many hundreds. . .
—And expect other people – this is my quarrel with it – they expect other people to live their lives in a particular way because of their crazy way of interpreting the Bible.
—What are you talking about?
—I am talking about the support given by American evangelicals to the State of Israel, because they believe ‘the Bible says’ the land belongs to the Jews – as far up as the River Euphrates! Does that mean these people would encourage an invasion of Iraq?
We were arguing in the earlier part of the 1990s, before that invasion had in fact taken place. I ranted on:
—I am talking about the teaching of science in schools: on the one hand, you have reasonable science teachers trying to teach children geology, biology, etc., and on the other hand, you have these crazies telling the schools they must teach the children that the world only dates back to 4004 BC. And why?
—Because, said L. quietly, Archbishop Ussher, a patient fellow evidently, in the seventeenth century, went through the whole Bible and counted back all the generations in the Bible, from So-and-so begat So-and-so until he got back as far as Adam and Eve, and if you added up all the begats and begats and all the years in between, you got to somewhere like October 4004, which was when the Creation happened, shortly followed by the Fall of Man.
—But you are saying that, L., with an ironic smile on your face, and I am talking about people – millions of people on this planet – who actually believe that; who think the Bible teaches them that science is baloney, that gay people are going to hell, that. . .
—I know, I know.
—You know, next year in Jerusalem they are going to celebrate the three thousandth anniversary of the foundation of the city by King David. Now, archaeologists have been working in the Middle East for years and they have not found any trace of the City of Zion, founded by King David, nor of the beautiful temple built by his son Solomon. They are legendary characters, not figures in history. Yet the world leaders will solemnly send representatives to endorse this. . . this myth! It’s like. . . it’s like. . .
Because I was spluttering, L. supplied my need.
—It’s like the leaders of the European Union trying to decide whether Turkey should join, and doing so on the basis of reading the Iliad. Whereas we think the Iliad is – albeit a masterpiece – ‘just a poem’. And you are saying the Bible is ‘just a poem’ and should not be used to decide real issues, like the borders of modern countries in the Middle East, or how to teach science, or whether gays are going to hell.
—Correct.
—Of course, on one level I agree with you.
L. took a drag on her cigarette.
—Of course, it drives me nuts, she said, when people use phrases like ‘The Bible says’ or ‘The Bible teaches’ and then use the sacred scrolls as a megaphone through which they can shout their own opinions!
We did not often meet at this period. I was working as a busy journalist and writer in London. L. had a series of jobs, seldom in London, as a supply teacher in British secondary schools (high schools): that is, she never had tenure in a school, but she stood in for teachers who were absent. If a school needed an English teacher for two terms, she would go for two terms; if for only two weeks, likewise. The provisional nature of the work evidently suited her. She wanted to live without attachments, without possessions. She never owned a house or a car or seemed rooted in any particular location. Every now and then she would disappear from my life for a year or two. Sometimes I would learn she had been abroad – a period of study leave, or some scholarship, at an American or European university; a spell in a religious house. I was only dimly aware of her periodic bouts of mental illness – clearly these were not something she wanted to discuss with me. They remained ‘off limits’. Most of my inner life was sealed off from her, and even more of hers was sealed off from me. She troubled me, because I knew from the beginning that she was one of those God-stricken people, in love with God, unable to get him out of her system. I found this fact tragic and infuriating and fascinating. I envied it. I knew that because she was God-stricken she was able to read with a particularly heightened imaginative awareness all manner of old texts. Not simply the Bible, but the Christian poetry of Dante and Spenser and Blake made more sense to her than they did to me.
Sometimes I asked her about her book ‘How to Read the Bible’, which she had been ‘writing’ ever since I first met her in 1970. Sometimes we would revert to the dialogue of which I have just provided a short snatch, and which continued between us for some thirty-three years.
—You see, the reason I don’t agree with you is that you, too, are being a kind of fundamentalist, she would say. —And also, the fundamentalists you so much dislike are right, and you are wrong. The Bible is a book, or collection of books, which does make a demand, which has changed the way whole societies and cultures have thought. To this extent it is different in kind from the Iliad.
—You mean, it’s more like Mao’s Little Red Book, or Das Kapital.
—In a sense, maybe. Only with a difference. . . yes, that’s it! This difference. They are the works of one author influencing the many. The Bible is the work of the many. You know those mysterious words in Yeats’s ‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931’ – ‘what poets name / The book of the people’.
—He wasn’t talking about the Bible.
—I know he wasn’t; but the Bible is not only the work of many hands; and not only has it passed through many different redactors to turn into the single volume we today call ‘The Bible’. It has gone on being the Book of the People. Different readers have changed it, not always by literary means. They have taken the Bible and their reading of it has changed the world.
—Or refused to let it change. I mean, look at the Anglican Communion to which I once thought I belonged! Because of the gross homophobia of a few ‘fundamentalists’, these forty million or so human beings are having the most ridiculous quarrel about homosexuality. In the past, okay, people believed that homosexuality was a sort of mental disease which could be cured. Doctors believed that, not just Bible-bashers. But now, medicine, science, common sense all show that if you are gay, there is nothing whatsoever you can do about it. Yet these people, rather than having a sensible discussion about it, insist on opening their Bibles and finding the few, the very few texts in which homosexuality is mentioned. . .
—But this is in a way all part of what I want to write about, said L. dreamily.
—What, Anglican gays? Spare us!
She paused and lit up once more.
—This problem you mention is besetting the Protestant world. You despise them for setting so much store by the word of God, as they see the Bible. But think back! Think back to Martin Luther. He translated the Bible into German, at breakneck speed, because he believed that any ploughboy should be as free as the Pope to study and interpret God’s word. And after that – POW! From this one exciting act of Luther’s sprang the whole modern world outlook. Not just Protestantism, but the scientific outlook, and the Enlightenment. After the German ploughboy had been given his copy of the Bible, no one needed ‘authorities’ any more, telling them what to think. Here was a book – read it and make up your own mind. But human beings don’t really want to make up their own minds – not many of them, not for long. So the Protestants made the Bible into a sort of Pope, an infallible source – and that’s where your ‘fundamentalists’ come from. Meanwhile, the spirit of freedom which Luther unleashed in the sixteenth century, the spirit of inquiry, began to undermine the very freedom felt by the ploughboy. Because by the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century, the heirs of Luther, the German Lutherans, had started to undermine the Bible itself. They investigated how the various books came into being. They dissected it. They found that much of what had been seen as history was myth; much of what had been believed as literal was figurative. . .
—So, since the German Biblical scholars of the nineteenth century, we can just chuck the Bible – certainly not regard it as infallible?
—Why would you want to chuck it, just because it isn’t infallible? You see, this is what is so strange about this modern, growing hatred of the Bible and Christianity, she said calmly. —Here’s the book which has been our book – as a civilization, our book – for nearly two thousand years, and for the first time ever in history, the intelligent world has taken leave of it. And because they do not read the Bible, because they do not read it over and over again as their forebears did, and live in it, these anti-Godders and secularists have forgotten, totally, what the experience of reading the Bible is actually like. You are doing it yourself now, boiling the Bible down to a few matters like sex, or the Middle East or science. . .
—They are quite big matters.
—Possibly. But there are also other matters. Who we are, what we are. . .
—You can decide those matters without reading the Bible.
—Of course you can. I am certainly not saying otherwise. But we are missing out when we do so. Also – this is another thing I want to write about, if I ever start the book – is how many of us think we are living outside the world of the Bible, merely because we no longer read it. . . ‘Transparent man in a translated world’.
—That’s rather good. What is it?
She gave me one of her infuriating smiles.
On another occasion, she said:
—The people came first, and the Book came next. The Bible was created by people, and it was handed on by people, and the shape it took was determined by people.
Sometimes, when I had the courtesy to reply to L.’s letters, she would try to articulate what she had been writing. Sometimes she would even send me draft pages. These, from the same period, are from a typescript, across which she has written: ‘poss. opening?’
Follow pattern of Bible itself with three broad categories – the Torah, the Prophecies, the Writings. Then explore some of the Writings in more depth – Job, Psalms. By now it should be clear what we are doing. It’s not a work of polemic, and it’s not really a ‘How to Read the Bible’ book, either.
Luther’s achievement was to encourage the growth of a literate world, our world. But the more literate we became, the more the world came to regard the Bible as a book and only as a book. There have in fact been many ways of ‘reading the Bible’. The great cathedral builders were reading the Bible, so were the medieval sculptors and glass-makers and the actors in the mystery plays. Similarly, the abolitionists in the eighteenth century who began the anti-slavery campaigns were inspired by Scripture, but they were not just ‘inspired’ – plenty of people had used the Bible to justify slavery. The campaigners revivified the Biblical sense of Prophecy. This has happened in our own time. 1968 was a year of prophets, and of prophets being slain. ‘Rejoice and be glad – for your reward is great in heaven – for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.’
All this is a way of reading. You don’t just read when you are sitting still and letting your eyes run over a page. You read as you live, you live as you read. When the New Testament came to be written down, it told the story of what it had to say by endless recraftings and rewritings of the Bible. Until it in turn became the Bible. . .
Some such thoughts, anyway!
But begin as the Bible begins. Begin with God, and with the Biblical idea(s) of God.
The utter destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 remains one of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ moments of history. Not only would Judaism never be the same, but human history would never be the same either. The terrible details of the siege of the city, the wholesale slaughter, the starvation of the inhabitants, the hatred visited upon the Jews by the Romans, are all told by the Jewish historian Josephus (37 BC?–AD 100), who bought his freedom by changing sides and was able to live out his days in Rome, writing two works of history: the unforgettable account of the Roman rape of his country, The Jewish War, and the more diffuse The Antiquities of the Jews.
He was not only popular in late antiquity. He was also the most popular author of the English-speaking eighteenth century. Persecuted Protestantism identified with persecuted Judaism, and if the early colonists in America arrived with any books apart from the Bible, they would as like as not be the works of Josephus. In my Penguin copy of The Jewish War, I have just found a note from L.
Am reading Josephus again –
The ‘again’ was somehow rather annoying!
And thinking about the destruction of the Temple. For the Bible book.
A hundred years before the army of Titus destroyed the city, Pompey invaded it, and violated the Temple by entering the Holy of Holies. I want somehow to work this into the beginning, entering a temple, and getting right in there, to its core, to find the God. In any other temple in the ancient world – when you had gotten past the outside abattoir, and the butchers slaughtering the animals, and the priests or the prostitutes, or both! – you’d have come to the really holy bit: the statue of many-dugged Artemis, or Herakles, or whoever. But in Jerusalem, the great Temple built by Herod had a Sanctuary which had no statue – no God in a sense. THE BIBLE IS THE FIRST ATHEIST TEXT – that’s what many people do not realize.
P.S. – I read your intemperate anti-religion pamphlet. Hmmm.
In time – after quite a bit of time – I began to see what L. was saying. As the anti-God ‘debate’ in the West (or was the debate only happening in the bookstores and television studios of the West?) gathered momentum, the Bible’s role in the story seemed ever more crude, with the fundamentalists on both sides failing to see what it actually said – and, literally, ‘where it was coming from’.
L.’s book about the Bible – which in those days I still believed was on the verge of completion – was going to be a reading of the Bible from beginning to end. But it was not only going to be an expository work. She was going to explore the way in which the Bible impacted upon history, and upon human lives at different periods; on how the readers of the sacred texts had in various ways altered it.
I know from the letters she wrote at this period that she liked the work of some of the modern ‘atheists’ while disliking the shriller voices of the others. At the root of much of the quarrel were some quite extraordinarily crude ideas about God.
When L. wrote in capitals, ‘THE BIBLE IS THE FIRST ATHEIST TEXT’, she was drawing on the bafflement felt by pagans who invaded the Jerusalem Temple, and by many modern unbelievers about the Biblical picture of God.
—They are right to reject these bad arguments for God. They are right to say these Gods do not exist. What they do not realize is that. . .
—I am of their number, L.! (We were sitting on a bench in Battersea Park, looking at the river.)
—You think you are, because you have been totally disillusioned by the Bible and by Christianity. But you will come through that.
—How do you know?
—In order to come to the truth, you have to discard falsehood, that is the central story of the Bible. There’s a poem called ‘Les Plus Belles Pages’. Unlike the long discursive poems, you can grasp it quite quickly. It is not the best of Stevens, but it is characteristic. One notes the pretentiousness – why is the title in French? It is perhaps more notes towards a poem than the finished thing.
She then recited it.
The milkman came in the moonlight and the moonlight Was less than moonlight. Nothing exists by itself.
The moonlight seemed to.
Two people, three horses, an ox
And the sun, the waves together in the sea. [In this line you get the music, the way the best of Stevens sings, said L.]
The moonlight and Aquinas seemed to. He spoke, Kept speaking, of God. I changed the word to man.
The automaton, in logic self-contained,
Existed by itself. Or did the saint survive?
Did several spirits assume a single shape?
Theology after breakfast sticks to the eye.
The last line is another side of Stevens which can irritate – the smart-ass, the epigram which does not quite come off.
In this poem, he projects on to Aquinas his own mindset. (‘He spoke, / Kept speaking, of God.’) Stevens was one of the most eloquent exponents of modern atheism. (The jury seems to be out about whether, in his last days, he converted to Catholicism. As often happens on these occasions, a hospital chaplain claimed one thing and Stevens’s daughter an irate other thing.) In the best of his poems, he sees his function as a remaking of language itself, of understanding how we can speak about experience and hope to describe the thing-in-itself. The exercise is an obstacle course which will lead to perpetual unravelling.
In Stevens’s generation, ‘Aquinas’ was a word which did not so much stand for the thirteenth-century philosopher, as for the use made of Aquinas’s philosophy in the twentieth century. In his lifetime, Aquinas was viewed with some suspicion by many in the Church, because, as you will discover if you dig into the millions of words which he left behind him, he regarded the philosopher’s task as to question everything. Absolutely everything.
The neo-Thomists of the twentieth century wanted to make Aquinas into the justification, exemplum, for a philosophical defence of religion. Although Aquinas rejected, for example, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin, he was made into a Doctor of the Church by the nineteenth-century Popes, and in the twentieth century, Roman Catholic priests were made – after the so-called Modernist crisis in the first decade of the twentieth century – to declare that God’s existence could be proved. The most classic list of proofs is that of Aquinas.
It is important to remember, however, when reading either these proofs or the millions of other Aquinas discourses, that he seldom wrote anything. He was an inspired lecturer – in Paris, in the Dominican schools of Italy and France. Although, on the shelf, Aquinas looks like the vastest, bulkiest, bookiest contrast to Socrates, who never wrote a line, he was in fact much more Socratic than, say, the philosophers of the eighteenth century who were trying to get the questions of knowledge, for instance, and how we may be said to know anything at all, all sewn up.
The eighteenth century had no difficulty in deconstructing Aquinas’s ideas – developed from Aristotle – of causation: that there must be a God to have caused everything to start. But the idea is only ‘theology after breakfast’ if you think that Aquinas is using the word ‘God’ as a lazy word for ‘Cause’. He never did so. For him, who, as Stevens said, ‘spoke, / Kept speaking of God’, the word is in fact untranslatable, and in some ways unusable.
Stevens, and modern atheism, thinks he – it – is rejecting ‘religion’ when he – it – rejects ‘God’. In fact, nothing could be closer to orthodoxy. Nothing could be closer to the Bible.
Kierkegaard’s ‘God does not exist, he is eternal’ would have been totally endorsed by Aquinas, as it is endorsed by the Bible.
Love requires the right ‘moment’. This is as true of reading as of personal relationships. You can try to form a bond with an author at the wrong time. This happened with me and Wallace Stevens, when my daughter was at the University of Yale as a graduate student and, spending a few nights at an hotel near the green in New Haven, I had tried to read Stevens’s ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’.
I read it over and over again and felt I was now conscious of what it must be like to have a stroke, or cerebral haemorrhage, after which, although one could hear words being spoken, they no longer quite denoted anything. I struggled to make sense, since the sentences very nearly did so, and then glided off again into a hypnotic but ultimately incomprehensible music of mere words.
The eye’s plain version is a thing apart,
The vulgate of experience. Of this,
A few words, an and yet, and yet, and yet—
As part of the never-ending meditation,
Part of the question that is a giant himself:
Or what is this house composed if not of the sun.
In the end, I gave up, and years were to pass before Stevens and I found our right ‘moment’. By then, my daughter E. had been awarded her doctorate, moved universities, and was teaching at U. Penn. Snooty New Yorker friends expressed sympathy, either pretending that they had never been to Philadelphia, or that they had been there once for a conference or to visit some far-flung family member.
I did not see what they were talking about. The university where E. teaches, and where Ezra Pound was once (deservedly?) thrown into a pond, is a charming campus. Down in the old part of the town, there is street after street of eighteenth-century buildings. There are good art galleries and museums, and two fine rivers. . . And there was my beloved firstborn and her family. Good enough for me.
There can be something agitating about the demand of famous ‘sights’. It was a relief, after a few visits to Philadelphia, to realize that the Liberty Bell and the various museums and galleries were, as it were, under my belt; and that in all subsequent visits, in the vacant hours, I could do what I like best in cities, which is simply wandering aimlessly. I try to do it as much as I can in London. But at home, we all scutter about, never leaving quite enough time between engagements; whereas in strange cities, there is always time to kill. When in Philadelphia, I like strolling down from Rittenhouse Square, where I generally stay, right through the Georgian part of the town, to the swift-moving Delaware, the fastest, widest river, apart from the Danube, I have ever seen. On warm days, we have sat there sketching or – when my youngest child was even younger – made expeditions over the water to the New Jersey Aquarium.
On other days, I walk beside the Schuylkill, forgetting, always, how it is pronounced, and aware, always, of how extraordinarily different it is from the Delaware: the one river seemingly possessed by might and force; the other gentle, meandering pastoral. But this day, there was no need to do anything; and, the family not expecting me for some hours, I wandered about. The walk to the river and back, which normally seems to eat time, today was accomplished double-quick. Not wanting to return to my hotel room to watch the bewildering variety of television programmes, I strolled into Barnes & Noble on Rittenhouse Square.
In the poetry section, there was L. Tall, trousered, stick thin, her dark hair now flecked a little with grey, she showed absolutely no surprise at my appearance. Though more than two years had passed since we had last met in England, it was almost as if she had made an appointment to meet me in the literature department of the bookstore.
When I think of her, in any setting, it is always holding a book very close to her face and wiggling it about, as if a light shaking would get the words into better focus. She was doing so now, with the Library of America edition of Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poetry and Prose.
Never one for small talk, she started to recite,
—The poem is the cry of its occasion,
Part of the res itself and not about it.
The poet speaks the poem as it is. . .
—I suppose, she said, that the deliberate appeal to Kant there is a bit clunking, but he’s interesting, isn’t he? I think I could get him into my Bible book.
—I tried him once and could not get on.
—Oh, I’ll buy you this book. She spoke as if this would make good my deficient understanding of the poet. —You can buy me some coffee.
In those days, the presence of coffee-bars in American bookstores was a novelty for English visitors. While I fetched the foaming cups, L. was saying:
—Men, as Stevens says in the very title of one of his short poems, are ‘Made out of Words’.
L. had already bought me the book. She was in mid-sentence.
—In another short poem, ‘The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm’, he depicts a quiet evening in which someone is in a house, reading. Without crassly spelling out the strangeness of reading itself, the poem. . . conveys this strangeness.
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm. . .
—What has that got to do with the Bible? I asked gently.
—Everything has to do with the Bible! L. laughed —Language especially. Language is always a code. Poets, the great poets, are able to wash words and make us feel they are being used for the first time. Samuel Johnson’s advice – ‘clear your mind of cant’ – is only partially possible. To any statement, however apparently anodyne, we bring the associations of the words themselves. Naked experience, without language, is impossible, and almost all language is soaked for us in quotation, in midrash.
She lifted a cup to her lips as if she was about to drink, and then – a habit which had struck, and irritated, me on our very first meeting when I was aged eighteen – she put it down again, still speaking, not having drunk. (She had done exactly the same with the ginger-beer shandy in the Museum Tavern.)
—The Bible is doing two things, almost at once: it is stripping down images, and it is reaffirming images. But mainly stripping. The ban on idolatry. The making of the Golden Calf in the Wilderness. The setting up of the Golden Image by Nebuchadnezzar – all rejected. If only the people taking part in this God Debate at the moment. . .
—Which people?
—Some of your friends. You even wrote. . . she smiled. . . that intemperate pamphlet. You see, what I want to write about the Bible is a book which follows the three main patterns of the Book: Torah, Prophets, Writings. . . In its way the Bible is an experiment with language. How can you escape language, how can you live outside the mythology of language. . . So, although Stevens thought he was escaping the Lutheran inheritance, maybe he was in fact following it. He spent his whole life trying to write out the experience of having Lutheran ancestors, trying to unpick, or undo the rigidity of the Bible-reading forebears – whom he admired but had to escape. What he managed to do in the process of his flight was create some of the most wonderful poetry of the twentieth century.
Later in the day, I asked my daughter whether she had run into L. The question occasioned mirth.
—The tall mad-woman! She’s coming to my seminar on Tragedy. She won’t concentrate on the text. Last week the rest of us were trying to discuss Philoctetes, the poor man with the bleeding feet. Your friend took us on a long journey around the Book of Job, Samson Agonistes, the Crucifixion and Bonhoeffer – who said he could only worship a god who was a Suffering God. . .
I agreed with my daughter that such diversions would have put the duller students off their stride. Inwardly, however, I smiled. Attagirl.