CHAPTER 12
RUNNING AWAY
FROM SORROW
Pneumatology and Some
Modern Discontents
EPHRAIM RADNER
THE HOLY SPIRIT TEACHES US to die faithfully. Let me begin to unpack this unprepossessing claim with the aid of Schopenhauer’s distinction between “natural” and “artificial” education or teaching. It is a distinction that we can perhaps apply to pneumatic education as well and will open up my concerns.
Schopenhauer, as many of us know, was a great early nineteenth century German philosopher, the self-styled rival of Hegel. Unlike Hegel’s vision of an ever-developing and perfecting Spirit realizing itself through history, Schopenhauer saw reality as one big purposeless and impersonal movement of striving, undetermined “will.” Everything, human beings included, is an instance of this striving, and the press for survival, reproduction, and the rest is the particular form of this aimless drive that constitutes what “is.” Obviously, this is a rather bleak view of things, and Schopenhauer himself granted that to be the case. Human life, through this ceaseless press, is a concatenation of directionless suffering. But we can mitigate this, at least, by facing the facts and not constantly resisting them. Schopenhauer was one of the first Westerners to latch on to Eastern religions, and here aspects of early Hinduism and Buddhism come into play: go with the flow of things, and do not try to manipulate them according to some scheme that must, in any case, eventually be crushed by the brute power of the universal Will.
There is the carcass of an expansive pneumatology here, but that’s not my purpose in bringing Schopenhauer up. Rather, I am interested in his concern that young people, especially, be properly trained to live in this brutal world. They need to be educated.1 And education is, in the end, about learning the “truth.” This is, of course, a Christian concern too: we must come to know the world as it is; God as God is; and the world as God’s. How does this learning happen? Schopenhauer, who was not a Christian, railed against what he called “artificial” education, one that fills young people’s heads with “abstract ideas,” theories, principles, fantasies. These abstract ideas, Schopenhauer argued, constrain a young person’s mind to see reality a certain way that, when they actually encounter the world over time, proves simply false. The world is not subject to our theories; it is brute force on its way to nowhere. This is what young people need to learn, so that they can figure out how to navigate reality. Schopenhauer raged against reading novels, for instance, and we can easily suppose what he might think of the whole onslaught of other media narratives and claims now swirling about young people’s imaginations. “Anxiety” and “false confidence,” he says, are what “theoretical” education trains young people into. And that is a recipe for deepening pain because suffering will inevitably come and explode your pitiable expectations. Instead, with his somewhat Romantic notion of the peasant classes, Schopenhauer argued for the superiority of “natural” education, as he put it: just living and observing the world and people. Inductive learning with a vengeance, you might say. Only after time, a long time, of such observation might one figure something out—tentative, ad hoc, determined, who knows? But it will hardly resemble the world of earnest philosophers, calculating politicians, and glib moralists. What about day-dreaming theologians? Not theirs either. I will come back to this.
In any case, the Holy Spirit is a “natural”—a divinely natural—educator, not an artificial one. For the Holy Spirit teaches us to die faithfully, as I said. Above all! This chapter will, in a circuitous way, meditate on this claim. And the claim is not meant in a limited way, as if, among the many things the Holy Spirit does, there is also the interesting task of helping us to die faithfully. Or even that, what the Holy Spirit does is but a shadow of who the Holy Spirit is, his actions being a set of assignments after the accomplishment of which he can go home and do his own thing. It is more than this. The early twentieth-century Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig began his great work The Star of Redemption with the following sentence: “From Death . . . arises all knowledge of the All.”2 Rosenzweig understood, before Heidegger, the mysterious form of our opening to God as being located in our mortality. And I will be suggesting that the Holy Spirit is the very divine condition for a reality that places death and faith as the limit of creaturely existence, beyond which we ourselves cannot go, at least as we are currently framed.
The Holy Spirit is this very reality, divinely construed. To say “Holy Spirit” is to say that we are made by God to die and, in dying and moving to such a death, to turn in faith and hope and even love to the one who has so made us, the maker who remakes as well. That is the “whirl of the world,” anima mundi, the Spirit that sustains, that is at the root of all things. I am pointing to the need, as it were, to engage the economic-immanent relationship in terms of Spirit in a particular way. A little bit of Schopenhauer, but then something quite different.
Still, if the Spirit “animates” the world, then a little Schopenhaurian natural and inductive learning can be not only useful but also essential. What is a human life? What is a human death? The Spirit is itself when it is showing us just such lives and deaths.
This line of reasoning—and its challenge—has pressed itself on me recently in the discovery of a modern theologian I had not known before, Ulrich Simon. Since, in the perspective of inquiry I am suggesting, biography is always a pneumatic affair—the Spirit shows itself in showing us the world as it is—let me tell you something about Simon. For if biography and thus memory are pneumatic affairs, the task of not forgetting is perhaps a special pneumatic virtue above all. I came across Simon when I found his name in a list of Jewish-Christian theologians, a category I had been rummaging around in. I began to look into his writings. Born in 1913 in Berlin, he died in 1997 in Britain, having moved there at the age of twenty, became an Anglican priest, and then taught theology at Kings College, London, for thirty-five years. Simon was not a great theologian, but he was remarkable, and through this pneumatic reality that is a particular life, a real life, his experiential insights are unique and deserve reflection. What follows, then, is a little something about Ulrich Simon.3
Simon’s Jewish family, like many German Jews of the time, was “assimilated”—that is to say, it had given up particular Jewish practices and melded into the general Christian forms of life given in the surrounding environment. Although his father would attend synagogue twice a year, Simon went to the vaguely Christian schools every cultured German did in his context. Indeed, German high culture is what formed him. His father, James Simon, was a fine musician—a performer and a composer who knew everyone famous from the era. Young Ulrich grew up amid the celebrities of a now vanished world of art and ideas: Klemperer, Kleiber, Walter, and Horowitz all crossed the Simon home’s threshold, along with literary luminaries like Thomas Mann and Max Scheler, joining in parties or small recitals. Down the street lived the Bonhoeffer family, and Ulrich remembered their warm home with fleeting images of welcome and benevolence. Ulrich’s father, James, however, was not much of a success for all his connections. In the economic crisis after World War I, the family was driven into horrendous penury, like so many thousands of other Germans. Ulrich later recounted wandering about in the winter through the rural outskirts of Berlin with his mother and being sent into farms, past vicious dogs, a gaunt child capable of eliciting sympathy, to beg for potatoes or eggs from peasants.
Meanwhile, Germany had begun its confused but energized descent into political chaos and finally hell. Ulrich managed to get back to school, to learn his philosophy, read his literature, and even begin to wonder about God, with figures like Harnack and Barth pushing into his young consciousness. Everything fell apart, of course. In the early ’30s, the family understood its precarious position, their quasi-Christianized and German veneer mocked and then stripped off by political passions whipped up by the suddenly powerful forces of fascism that saw non-Aryan ethnicity, particularly Jewish ethnicity, as ineradicably filthy. Ulrich’s father, in any case, was barely making a living as it was. The family scattered. Ulrich was sent to England, his older brother had left for the Soviet Union, and his parents went in two directions, his mother to Switzerland, his father to Holland. Cut off from his family, Ulrich made his way, with help from groups assisting refugees, through British school and then, drawn to the Christian faith in a deep way, he entered the Anglican ministry, first working in parochial settings, then returning to graduate school and a career teaching theology, marrying, and raising a family.
In a way, it was a smooth life. But of course, it was nothing of the kind. Though his mother was finally able to join him, Ulrich mostly struggled on his own for many years. He lived and ministered amid the rubble and dead bodies of the Blitz. And when the war was over, after much difficulty he discovered that his brother had been killed several years before in Stalinist purges and that his father, rounded up in Holland, had disappeared in the German camps, first in the strange musical culture of the Theresienstadt concentration camp—part of a lively group of prisoners who gave concerts and lectures to one another—and then finally to Auschwitz. The last sight survivors had of Ulrich’s father, apparently, was of him sitting on a suitcase at the train station, waiting to be taken away to his end, scribbling out some notes on a sheet of music paper, oblivious of the sad winds swirling around him. Most of James Simon’s music is completely lost, although there is a small collection of unpublished pieces, mostly from the ’30s in manuscript, that he sent to a friend in New York before he was arrested, and that is preserved in the Leo Baeck Institute. One can hear a couple of performances of the few existing works, including a moving “Lament for Cello,” clearly drawn out from a deep biblical well—it is on a Dutch internet site devoted to “forbidden music” from World War II, the fluttering detritus of mostly murdered Jewish and resistance composers.4
Ulrich Simon, the theologian, had to try to make sense of all this. His 1978 quasi-autobiography, Standing in Judgment, 1913–1963: An Interpretation of History, from which I extracted these signposts, is an attempt to do so. In this book, he is mostly interested in ideas, failed ones: Chesterton’s and Belloc’s blindness and antisemitism; the cowardice of most religious leaders in the face of cultural and political madness and rot; the indulgent silliness of what emerged in the ’60s among Christian writers—he doesn’t hesitate to call them sentimental Gnostics trying to play footsie with a rapidly atheizing culture and so on. His heroes (Bonhoeffer, Barth, and others) had the virtues of not being fooled about the world and its peoples. Simon’s bitterness and anger are directed most forcefully at “appeasing” Christianity, obviously in its political forms before World War II, but more broadly still at the whole attempt to make the world seem morally livable on its own terms. What were these people thinking? he wonders.
Although he wrote about a number of topics, in the end it is “tragedy” that, in a way, orders his mature focus. Simon wrote a short book on the topic entitled Pity and Terror: Christianity and Tragedy,5 but the theme winds its way through all of his last works. Simon is not the most supple thinker here, and as I said, his work as a whole does not rise to the level of greatness. He tends to write in short rapid bursts, densely and without elaboration and sometimes without visible coherence, as if ideas and impressions flow out of his imagination and simply fall upon the page in succession, leaving readers to pick their way through the littered field. In a way, however, this makes his writing all the more descriptive of his own frame of mind, a kind of unintegrated search for “something”—the divine thread, as if it weren’t at all obvious. Tragedy, in any case, has been a topic of much debate and study over the last few decades, especially in literary scholarship and has received some substantive theological reflection, in particular in the work of Donald MacKinnon and, most recently, following him quite closely, of Rowan Williams.6 Simon was, in this case, part of a growing movement of thought.
Most writers today agree that it is difficult to pin down exactly the “what” of tragedy, and that Aristotle’s classic definitions are of limited usefulness as one passes through the self-styled tragic works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries or of German or Spanish baroque drama or French classical plays and on and on. That there is no “best” answer and approach to tragedy, even definitionally, is perhaps intrinsic to the elements that tragedy engages: not just human suffering but suffering bound up with forces—whether divine or natural—beyond a human being’s control, the struggle with which constantly defies simple moral analysis. Simon grappled with a steady fixture of modern analysis of tragedy, linked in part with the seminal work of the critic George Steiner:7 Can there be such a thing, he wondered, as “Christian” or even “biblical” tragedy? Is Samson a tragic figure? What of Jacob? And, most especially, Jesus Christ? Does the resurrection, the resolving act of the creator God of Judeo-Christianity, simply vacate the problem that informs a tragic view of the world, as it seemed to do for one thousand years before the literary innovations of early modernity? Did Christianity, as Simon partially accepts, demote tragedy as an accurate descriptor of the world, both out of a profound insight and with profound negative costs?
For both MacKinnon and Williams, tragedy involves aspects of suffering and moral questioning that are, as they say, “intractable” or “nonnegotiable.” The world will not give away its burdens, and individuals cannot escape them, however much and however nobly they resist. But unlike Steiner, who is not quite an atheist, Williams cannot agree that the world is constituted by a tragedy that could ever be characterized as “absolute.” There is, after all, the resurrection! And Simon agrees, but he somehow cannot put it all together. In an earlier book, one of the first Christian books ever written on the topic, entitled A Theology of Auschwitz from 1967, Simon battles with the two sides of the experience of the tragic: suffering and the morally destructive realities of evil that are immovably real.8 Yet, in his reading, they are all really and concretely taken up in the passion of Jesus such that this immovability is somehow transformed into the passage into and, as a result, of the transcendent truth and goodness of God. Auschwitz only makes sense, Simon seems to say, through the real existence of not just resisters but faithful resisters, such as Bonhoeffer, whose grasp of or by the transcendent God effectively transfigures the reality of Auschwitz.
Simon’s book on Auschwitz, however innovative, had little influence and has been quickly forgotten. Around the same time as it appeared, another book by the Jewish rabbi Richard Rubenstein came out, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism, whose overt argument for the “death” of any traditional notion of God caught on and to this day has kept hold of public attention.9 Rubenstein’s argument that the Holocaust “killed off,” in a way, any potent vision of God’s existence seemed much clearer than Simon’s ambiguous swimming about in the waters of the tragic, which, intrinsically, reaches out for some grasp of divine absolutes in the form of Christ. The contrast between Simon’s perplexing survival and the utter loss of his beautiful father, family, and home—standing in the midst of incalculably extending rubble—is simply hard to maintain as a place of life.
How does the Holy Spirit enter into any of this? In two ways for now: First, the Spirit, as it turns out, is Simon’s theological category of choice to deploy in describing this strange place of standing in the midst of tragedy. Second, to the degree that Simon’s usage not only makes argumentative sense but in fact illuminates his own struggle, there is something for us to glean here, pneumatically in particular.
At the end of his autobiography, Simon turns to the figure of Samson, which Milton had made so central to his much debated poem Samson Agonistes. The Israelite judge dies in the ruins of the Philistine palace he pulls down upon himself and his enemies, and he does so, no one doubts, in some form of “triumph.” It is not, however, a victory, Simon notes, achieved through some “deus ex machina” who whisks Samson away from danger. Rather, the hero’s “tragic history owes . . . everything to the spirit inside the man, who exchanges life for death, so that death may cease its hold on life.”10 Simon then argues that the “future . . . must assume the supremacy of the Spirit,” just in the way it builds upon and transcends tragedy.11 This is it: the Holy Spirit is the revelation within the tragic of the transcendent God, who has taken the reality of tragedy—intractable, immovable—to himself in Christ, but who goes and exists beyond it. The Holy Spirit holds together, somehow, this divine truth of tragic hope, keeps it from being wishful thinking, foolishness, fantasy; even while keeping it strictly within the bounds of faith in the unseen.
I want to be clear in my presentation: Simon intuited rather than explained this somehow. He rarely makes an open pneumatological argument. He is constantly dodging back and forth on the page, letting his literary notes and vignettes pile up without often an obvious current and direction. But the intuition is there, and it is an intuition that many other theologians have rarely achieved. His deeper insistence is that one must always say “this and this”: this difficult and often crushing reality of human life and this God. Both and. What marks the pneumatic character of existence is that “this” life—such as it is from 1913 Berlin through winding and often dead-ended byways of Moscow, Zurich, Amsterdam, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and London—is ordered to and by “this God,” who has followed the order of his making. The pneumatic character of “this and this,” then, does not indicate so much an ontological break in human existence, between horror and light or struggle and redemption, but simply the apprehending rather than fracturing reality of God. The difference is important: only God holds it all together. Only God.
I dwell at length on this now obscure theologian, Ulrich Simon, because the Holy Spirit is, straightforwardly but in explicit theological terms, about human lives like his, lived in this way and oriented to this straddling of contrasts. It is not about the abstracted categories of the systematicians. The theological challenge of tragedy, into which lives like Simon’s are embedded, is to speak of living with contingent vulnerability not so much as something real but as something that the acknowledgement of and faith in God does not simply wave away to the side of things. The challenge of any theological claim to the truth of the “transcendent” God is that this God be able to offer a framework for, not an alternative to, the realities of life as it is lived by many. Such a divine framework must provide a hope that is foundational to yet never expropriative of existence as it is received. My simple argument is that a proper theology of the Holy Spirit, then, is one that provides both the descriptive object and its character expressed in Job’s exclamation of thanks, “The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21).12 It is a thanks concretized in the first part of his praise, “naked came I out of my mother’s womb; naked shall I return thither.” Yet “blessed be the name of the Lord.”
I have recently written about pneumatology as an early modern invention, beginning in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, that then only developed over the past 300 years into the contemporary technical theological discipline related to the Holy Spirit that we know today.13 For a long time pneumatology, so-called, was a “science” that dealt with universal physical properties, vapors, and ether; mental or psychological arenas of divine illumination or craven fantasies; powers that could move across space and time; metaphysical patterns of invulnerability; the march of history; the embrace of infinity; and the experience of cosmic union. In all of this—examined at Scottish universities, within the laboratories of Anglican and Methodist adepts, or in the surgeries of Continental and then American armies, in the public spaces of futuristic oracles—the Holy Spirit was often mentioned, but in ways that thoroughly confused it with the hopes for some humanly grasped “spirit” somehow connected to God, from vacuums to electricity to simple and deep perception and human transfiguration. Only by the 1970s did something called pneumatology get established in our divinity faculties, tied exclusively to the third person of the Trinity. But by this point, the theologians—mostly subconsciously—had swept up all these previous elements into the Trinitarian toolbox, along with the existential presuppositions that fueled their appearance in the first place.
For behind pneumatology’s early modern development was the deep press of bewilderment and pained amazement at a world and society that had simply expanded beyond the breaking point: new peoples, vast distances, divided churches, uncontrollable wars, and now the ever-communicated realities of disease and its dissolving powers. Spirit was to be the gateway out of or at least the resolving tonic within such a world. But to this degree, the Holy Spirit—even as its pneumatological elaboration was often bound up with the intolerable experiences of suffering and confusion—was an almost deliberate way to run away from tragedy. The notion was, of course, that God could not be found in such a place as this, where the scope of challenge and with it suffering had exceeded human calculation and easy manipulation. There was nowhere to run to, so the Spirit offered the means to run away in another direction altogether. Modern pneumatology, such as it has been bequeathed us in its specifically theological form, trades on these dynamics, however much it is often clothed in the tropes of orthodoxy.
Why is this wrong? Why should the Holy Spirit not be the means by which to escape this fallen world? There is a simple theological answer: if the Holy Spirit is our exit strategy, the human experience of “intolerability” becomes literally apotheosized. Since the universal Spirit, in modern perspective, is precisely that by which pneumatic forms have populated the world as a whole, Christian and non-Christian, to imagine the Spirit as the moving walkway through the door that leads away from this life is to imagine the whole world as it is now, as the place God would have us curse, silently or aloud, for the sake of knowing God.
To be sure, the intolerability of the world that modern pneumatology trades upon is rarely consciously asserted. Its masks include the blind Pollyannas, the crude dispensationalists, and the master-commandants ruling over their progressivist minions in the work of social amelioration. All of these flourish in a world divided from the Spirit’s establishing force. Simon was right that sentimentalized Gnosticism is one form of this era’s religious orientations, but so is the grim insistence on constructivist fantasies that give rise to the kinds of Orwellian dystopias that populate the so-called “globalized” civilization, where benignity and benevolence become the tyrants meant to tame our creatureliness. To all is common the repeated refrain that “this is not our world; we are meant for something better.” If this is what Paul meant when he rejected a resurrectionless existence as “pitiable” (1 Cor 15:19), then I have misunderstood him. For Paul’s worries were not about the world but were aimed at those who did not know “the power of God,” in Jesus’s terms (Mark 12:24)—the God who, after all, made and governs this world, not another. Hence, just this world, intolerable as it might seem for some, is the realm of the Spirit purely and utterly.
Let me return to the category of tragedy. Whatever its proper literary definition, I would agree with recent theologians like MacKinnon and Williams that a central aspect of the tragic is its facing into the “intractability” of worldly burdens. There are simply things we cannot run from or make right: when your spouse gets incurable cancer, when you hit a pedestrian while driving under the influence, when every choice you are offered, like Bonhoeffer, violates your conscience. Just here we need to rethink, among other things, our notions of the Holy Spirit. There is in fact an area of contemporary study known as intractability theory, bound up mostly with computational science and logic—what kinds of problems are solvable given the time and space of computational limits, even imagined ones.14 And this goes to that fascinating, if sometimes frightening, border of science that lies between psychology and computers, located in the workings of the human brain: there are things, even within our own selves and thoughts, that we are incapable of explaining, let alone even setting straight. The point, more broadly, is this: some things simply cannot be solved. Applied to the lived world of social relations and interior perception rather than logic, the unsolvable, the intractable, and the inevitable turn out to embrace much of our experience. Why don’t we teach people about any of this?
For, truth to tell, we are all simply stuck with much that constitutes our lives and the lives of others: ability and disability, disease and contingent strength, mental illness, personalities and their limits, when and where one is born, with whom one is raised in terms of parents and siblings and others. I, along with everyone else, at some point or another and probably at numerous points, will have to face the almost overwhelming reality of something I simply cannot fix, resolve, or change. Every person will have to learn to live with this basic existential aporia, or else exhaust themselves in futile rebellion, or disappear into a life of willful fantasy.
The philosopher and mathematician Leibniz, inventor with Newton of the “infinitesimal” calculus, may have thought these intractables were all divinely explainable, precisely in real, if complexly transcendent, computational terms.15 But just this hope turned out only to be a kind metaphysical transposition of intractability: the best of all possible worlds, in God’s terms—as he labeled the framework of his theodicy—still seemed not only filled with terrors, but inescapably so. Whatever Leibniz really thought he was doing—and I think he was far more savvy than Voltaire, his bitterest critic, could grasp, and perhaps less mathematically reductive than some today believe—I emphasize the prime “intractable” that stands as the base of his system. That is, of course, God himself: the world is the “best of all possible words” because we cannot, by definition, get away from God, nor can we comprehend him who is the inescapable, immovable, unresolvable, limit upon all limitations. To be sure, there is a category difference that may subvert the analogy: God is not intractable in the way that human stupidity, malice, and mortality may be. Yet if contingency and finitude, as well the vulnerability that derives from these, are intractable aspects of human existence, what makes these constraints the fundamental elements of tragedy, at least for Christians, is their bondedness to, even genetic linkage to, God’s own being as our creator. Because God has made us, we are limited, and this fact cannot be gotten around, but it must somehow in the end be faced. MacKinnon called tragedy a kind of “negative natural theology” in that it unveils the irreducible difficulty of God but nonetheless displays this absolute intractability as a divine revelation.
That is to say, our unsolicited births and our inescapable deaths, with all their attendant challenges to love and loss, are themselves divine revelations, the earthly intractables that ascend and descend to the Great Intractable, such that the exclamation “The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” is an apocalyptic truth, giving form to the praise of something like Psalm 139 (“Whither shall I go from thy Spirit?” v. 7). And if the Holy Spirit—the Spirit of truth, as Jesus calls him (John 14:17; 15:26; 16:13)—somehow suffuses the world’s existence as modern pneumatology tends to emphasize, then the Holy Spirit is not only “the Spirit of life” (as the creed insists) but also in a real way the Spirit of death, of dying. He is the Spirit, that is, of just this life that comes and goes from the hand of God. “Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?” (Eccl 3:21), asks Solomon the Preacher. The Christian knows that this spirit (his or her own), through the Holy Spirit, goes, finally, to the Father, and for whatever final revelation there may be of him who made us from nothing. “It is appointed for men to die once, and after that comes judgement” (Heb 9:27). But the passage from one to the other, from death to the appearance of God, is the same for man and beast both: “As the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath [or ruach]; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast” (Eccl 3:19). With St. Paul, the Preacher here might well say, “And I think that I too have the Spirit of God” (1 Cor. 7:40). Is not the book of Ecclesiastes a pneumatic text, telling us about the truth that “suffuses” all things?
To die, then, is a pneumatic event, just as to be born, which ought to place the Holy Spirit at the center of Christian tragedy, where I believe he is. Whether Jesus himself is rightly considered a tragic figure—and few critics, either religious or literary, except the most kenotically driven, would say he is—Jesus’s followers most certainly are. That includes the apostles; that includes Christians of today. Caught within the intractability not only of this world’s press but of our own divinely granted bodies and souls and their constraining networks of difficult relations, we Christians, quite frankly, struggle. Paul talks repeatedly of “toiling” and “striving” (cf. Col. 1:29; 1 Tim 4:10; 6:12; 2 Tim 4:7), with its rooted sense of the agōn, and Hebrews grounds this in the endurance of suffering (Heb. 10:32; 12:4), with blood and martyrdom literally standing as its summit and end. The struggle, the literal “agony” of the Christian’s life, is ingredient to its character. One strains ahead, as Paul puts it; one “endures,” as Jesus puts it (Mark 13:13); and one does this “to the end,” the final place where, of course, all is “finished,” as Christ describes his last breath (John 19:30), as a kind of “fulfilment.”
On the one hand, this side of existence that runs into the “end” is one that every human being is fixed within, believer or not. What the Christian does, following Jesus, however, is not to escape it but to hope in face of it. It is this hope alone that stands as the bridge to the other side of “finishedness,” to the vision of God’s intractable life and power that we can only intuit at this time. Chapter 1 of 1 Peter lays it all out well: suffering now for the sake of one whom we do not now see, we endure by faith in the hope of his revelation. We do this, furthermore, precisely as grass that withers in a day, in the shadow of a living Word that abides forever. Paul is right: if there is no resurrection, we Christians, of all people, are to be most pitied. But why? Not because we have suffered, for in this we are no different than all creatures. Rather, because we have hoped in vain. And to the world, who sees no more than we, nothing could be more tragic than straining after the invisible.
I want to emphasize the direction I am indicating here. I am not trying to encourage, as a strand of especially Old Testament scholarship has in the past few years, that we rediscover the centrality of “lament,” for instance, as a vehicle of divine revelation and response. Nor even, on a more metaphysical level, that we should take Romans 8 as the defining lens for pneumatic reality, such that the Spirit’s groaning with the world says all there is to say. It says something, but not enough. A more traditional pneumatic charism, the so-called “gift of tears,” certainly underscores the important role lament and creational yearning may have in understanding the Spirit and living with the Spirit. But even in this case of “tears,” the charism’s originating monastic ascetic category of penthos, often translated as “compunction,” indicates that pneumatic mourning is tied as much to the sorrow of repentance as to anything.16 And repentance, in turn presses in the direction of faith, not simply of sorrowful dissatisfaction. My point, then, is broader than valorizing lament as a Christian category. Instead, what I am trying to indicate is how we must not oppose the Spirit to the world of created existence and struggle. Because of the Spirit’s creation of this world, this world’s struggling existence as pneumatic truth and revelation is ultimately the only way that faithful witness can be pursued or enabled. Only because the world’s struggle is the Spirit’s self-giving is “faith” a reality of creaturely blessing. Only dying in faith can reveal that and what the Holy Spirit is, at least for us human beings.
I began this essay by asserting that “the Holy Spirit teaches us to die faithfully.” That faith, of course, is not simply a sorrowing or a yearning. Nor, for that matter, does sorrow and yearning constitute the “tragic” in a specifically Christian perspective. As St. Peter writes in his first epistle, a faith that faces into death, or a faithful death simply, is one filled with holiness, with love, with grace, with a sustaining power, and even with joy, though of a particular kind, which Peter calls an “joy unspeakable,” a chara aneclaletos (1 Peter 1:8). St. Peter’s outline provides all the traditional elements of pneumatic anointing, whether according to the charismata or the virtues. But what keeps these elements in Peter’s description honest, if you will, is the fact that the Holy Spirit takes them all—his listeners and their pneumatically charged existences—to their deaths, consigning their ultimate value to a resurrection that has not yet come, nor that we can yet conceive clearly. The epistle of 1 Peter, after all, is a call to martyrdom, which is nothing else than a faithful death crystallized as such.
This was Ulrich Simon’s insistence in his Theology of Auschwitz. His heroes, as it were, were people like Walter Rathenau, a courageous political leader in post–World War I Germany who was gunned down by antisemitic protofascists; Edith Stein, the Jewish philosopher and convert to the Christian conventual life who died at Auschwitz; and Bonhoeffer, of course. They were indeed tragic heroes, whose existences could not escape the intractable assaults of their times, their neighbors, or their coreligionists even. Their resistance, to keep to the plot of tragedy, was given in the fact that they lived and died in hope—faithfully. To quote 1 Peter again, “Wherefore let them that suffer according to the will of God commit the keeping of their souls [to him] in well doing, as unto a faithful Creator” (1 Pet 4:19). Just this, this faithful hope, transformed their Christian (and Jewish) tragedy into a witness to the transcendent good of God in the face of all chaos and evil, even and especially in their dying, “The Spirit seals their transitory lot with the stamp of eternal purpose,” Simon wrote.17
As Simon laid out in his book on Auschwitz, the form of this pneumatic “seal”—the faithful death that transfigured all existence, all creation, all relationships between Creator and creature, or at least revealed their truth utterly—was Jesus Christ. Just this death in faith, a pneumatic death, in a substantive sense, given over to God, is that of Jesus’s final self-commendation, etched in the Psalms and announced in the Scriptures: “How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God!” (Heb 9:14 NIV). From this perspective, the Spirit gives us a saving death, the consummation of faithful death, the death of Christ, as the great education to life.
But this education, the pneumatic education of the faithful death of Christ, is etched in the shape of the natural world. It is only because the world is God’s that we are his also even in our deaths. There is no relation to God apart from this world, just as it comes to us, a world in which Christ dies faithfully. But this world, given to us, is our relation to God, not to something else or something less. And the constitution of this gift of the world is the Holy Spirit, who, as Augustine most emphatically insisted, is “Gift” itself. There is no world or life without the Holy Spirit, but conversely, from the subjective vantage of the creature, there is no Holy Spirit without the world. The conjunction is what is redemptively creative, and thus hopeful. To be born, to breathe and grow, to weaken and finally die in just the way the world is so constituted, that is, as creatures of God’s gracious creation, to be spiritually taught—this is faith. In this teaching, all the charismata and beatitudes we rightly identify with the Holy Spirit—wisdom, meekness, courage, poverty of spirit, gentleness, joy, charity—inductively form the breath of such a movement from birth to death, not as something extraneous to the world, but as that which most fully expresses the world as God’s. Such a pneumatically educated life must, and does in fact, include children, the elderly, the peaceably protected, but also—perhaps most pointedly, and most commonly too, as Simon suggested—the brutally dispossessed and stymied, for whom, in all cases, the commending of one’s life to a “faithful creator” displays the cosmic stamp of God’s goodness, the Christic stamp, which marks created being as just that, God’s making, the very meaning of the “natural.”
My worry is that modern pneumatology, by contrast, has developed into an “artificial education” for Christians. It is a theoretical extravaganza that ends up listing all the mistakes of existence that it purports can be rectified, cancelled out, and forgotten: sex, vulnerability, weakness, stymiedness, dispossession, death itself. The artificial education of Christians leads to a similar defeat as Schopenhauer’s atheistic version: anxiety, false confidence, crashing disappointments, and despair. The same concern drove Simon’s protest on behalf of tragedy in the face of the theologian’s facile sentimentalizing of created existence, dancing around the eucharistic table holding hands and mouthing banal songs (as he put it).18 Instead, the body and blood of our Lord is properly consumed in following his path through the world. It is a path, the form of which the Gospels trace in quiet detail, all the way to his death and self-commendation in faith. Where he has gone, we will go. But one goes this way, the way of faith, in descriptive honesty and remembered exactitude. Of all the sciences, the most pneumatically endowed is history. For there, in the infinite complexity and possibility of the world’s stored reality, lies the stuff of God’s making, his incarnation, and his redemption. Only the Spirit could leave Ulrich Simon with the rescued image of his father, sitting on a suitcase at the Theresienstadt train station, creating music only God would ever hear. Such a faith as this.
NOTES
1. Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Education,” in Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, trans. E. F. J. Payne, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 627–33.
2. Franz Rosenzweig, “Vom Tode, von der Furcht des Todes, hebt alles Erkennen des All an,” in Der Stern der Erlösung (Frankfurt: Kauffmann, 1921), 7. Cf. The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1971).
3. The details of his life are drawn mostly from Ulrich Simon, Sitting in Judgement, 1913–1963: An Interpretation of History (London: SPCK, 1978).
4. Biography, references, and links at https://www.forbiddenmusicregained.org/search/composer/id/102025; the “Lament” can be found at https://www.forbiddenmusicregained.org/search/composition/id/102050.
5. Ulrich Simon, Pity and Terror: Christianity and Tragedy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989).
6. Among numerous writings, see D. M. MacKinnon, “Theology and Tragedy,” Religious Studies 2, no. 2 (April 1967), 163–69; MacKinnon, “Atonement and Tragedy,” in Borderlands of Theology (London: Lutterworth Press, 1968), 97–104; Rowan Williams, The Tragic Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). For recent rethinking of some of these questions and their presuppositions, see the collection, The Transformations of Tragedy: Christian influences from Early Modern to Modern, ed. Fionnuala O’Neill Tonning, Erik Tonning, and Joylon Mitchell (Leiden: Brill, 2019).
7. See George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber and Faber, 1961); Steiner, “A Note on Absolute Tragedy,” Journal of Literature & Theology 4, no. 2 (1990): 147–56; Steiner, “Tragedy, Pure and Simple,” in Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek Theatre and Beyond, ed. M. Silk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 534–46; and Steiner, “ ‘Tragedy,’ Reconsidered,” New Literary History 35, no. 1 (2004): 1–15. On Steiner and MacKinnon as common learners, see Graham Ward, “Tragedy as Subclause: George Steiner’s dialogue with Donald MacKinnon,” Heythrop Journal 34 (1993): 274–87.
8. Ulrich Simon, A Theology of Auschwitz: The Christian Faith and the Problem of Evil (London: Gollancz, 1967).
9. Richard Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966).
10. Simon, Pity and Terror, 161.
11. Simon, Pity and Terror, 161.
12. Here and elsewhere my biblical quotations are from the King James Version.
13. Ephraim Radner, A Profound Ignorance: Modern Pneumatology and its Anti-Modern Redemption (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2019).
14. The “classic” textbook on this is M. R. Garey, M. and D. S. Johnson, Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1979).
15. Cf. the mathematician Gregory Chaitin’s conclusion, based on his reading of Leibniz, that “God is a computer programmer” in his essay, “Leibniz, Information, Math & Physics,” in Thinking about Gödel and Turing: Essays on Complexity, 1970–2007, ed. Gregory J. Chaitin (Singapore: World Scientific, 2007), 235.
16. Irénée Hausherr, Penthos: The Doctrine of Compunction in the Christian East (1944; repr., Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1982).
17. Simon, Theology of Auschwitz, 83.
18. Simon, Pity and Terror, 137.