[For the beginnings of this conversation see here and here. The next installment in this thread is Esolen on Christ's Wounds, Dostoyevsky:]
Anthony Esolen continues his dialogue with David Hart:
I'm a great admirer of David Hart’s work, and have actually used to good effect his brilliant article, Christ and Nothing, to bring at least one young prodigal back to sanity and the Church. So I'm in the odd position of arguing with someone whom I consider a great comrade in the current unpleasantness, if it be no presumption in a sergeant to look for comrades. But since I'm no philosopher or theologian, I've probably slipped on a patch or two of rhetoric.
What worries me (and, if I read him right, what worries Bill Luse) is that assertion that suffering is of no ultimate significance. Now it seems to me that the words "suffering" and "significance" can be read in more than one way. If by "significance" we mean ontological significance—that suffering adds to the created nature that God has endowed us with—then of course we must reject the proposition.Suffering is a privation of a good that we ought to possess, as sickness is a privation of health and not a thing-in-itself. But "significance" can mean, literally, the property of being a sign of something else. In this sense, suffering—even considered as a privation of good, simply—can possess significance, if by the will of God it is a sign of something else, in this case a sign of Christ. God did not need suffering, to establish such a sign; in that sense, suffering in itself has no meaning. But God also did not need the medieval pelican, to establish a sign of the self-sacrificing Christ; pelicans in themselves bear no such significance. Attributively, by the will of God, they do bear such significance, and one of the medieval mystics, I think Richard of Saint Victor, supposed that God created the pelican precisely so that it would serve us as a sign of Christ. And maybe "attributively" is too weak a word to use, since it implies a mere notional, linguistic significance, rather than a cogent and irresistible pointing. When, for instance, Christ said, "When I was hungry, you fed me; when I was thirsty, you gave me to drink," he was identifying the sufferings of mankind with his own. This was more than external, "forensic" imputation. Thus the suffering of human beings has meaning because it points to Christ who suffers, and because in fact it is Christ who suffers.
David may be growing impatient with me here—all this must strike him as quite elementary, as his own reference to Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov struck me. I'm trying to work out my own thought; I don't intend to be condescending. He may say that such significance is not "ultimate." And here I think we need to look at that word "suffering." In one sense it is a mere privation, or it is a removal of some good that ought to be there. But suppose we consider it in the same light as we consider the word "emptying." That word even more strongly than "suffering" suggests privation; surely emptying, in itself, can possess no significance. When we empty ourselves of obedience we sin—and that sin is better described as a failure to act, an impotence, than as an act in itself. It can thus have no ultimate meaning, or even any meaning in itself at all. But the emptying that Christ assumed for our sake is the ultimate act of grace, and perhaps had better be described as a filling: not of Himself, but of us, with Himself. Now he need not have conquered death by dying; but he chose to do so, and, more than that, he willed that "dying" be the means of our regeneration, and, as I think we are allowed to hope, of our being raised to a glory beyond that with which the sinless Adam had been endowed. In Heaven, Christ will be, and is, and has ever been, Priest and King and Sacrifice: and He has willed that our deaths here be a shadowing forth, a sign, of what He is, the Son from all eternity filling Himself with Divinity (words are failing me here) by emptying Himself in obedience to the Father.
And that seems to me to be the hope offered by Dostoyevsky. It isn't that Marcel's suffering and death, in themselves, signify; but they are no longer suffering and death in themselves, or, better, we now have it revealed to us that no human suffering or death is or ever was merely suffering and death, because Christ is He who suffered, and because Christ is He who was obedient unto death. Death is, through the power and wisdom of God, not what we thought it was, the cessation of bodily function: "Except a corn of wheat fall to the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." The terrible questions Ivan poses about the suffering of the innocent child are played out in the book itself, with Ivan nearly oblivious to the drama. When the real—and persecuted—lad dies, he has already become, through God's grace, a sign of Christ, because in fact Christ was suffering in him, and the boys who form a band around Alyosha are a brotherhood, an apostolate, remembering in love the one whom they had helped to pierce. When Kolya, the leader, asks Alyosha whether, in the resurrection, they will see their friend again, and all be together, Alyosha responds that they shall—and he can say so with confidence, because the promise is that we shall see Christ, and be one in Christ.
Maybe what I'm saying is too obvious, and I'm missing a distinction between "meaning" and "ultimate meaning." I can't drive from my head the marks upon the glorified Christ. They are signs. He didn't need them. But he chose them; they are therefore His; and I hope one day, doubter that I have been, to ask to probe them, like the patron of the hardheaded, Thomas. I trust they will still be there.
[And the most recent exchange is Hart by the Numbers:]
David Hart continues his conversation with Anthony Esolen:
First, if I seem to be growing impatient, it has more to do with a number of communications I have received that have not been posted for general perusal; one in particular, from a pompous Calvinist who as far as I can tell is an inadvertent Moloch worshiper, put me in an especially foul mood; so excuse me. I am an admirer of Esolen's work; until his rendering of Tasso appeared I thought I could not possibly enjoy any translation as much as the old Fairfax version, with which I fell in love when I was twelve. I plan to order all three volumes of his Dante when my next check for an article comes.Second, let us defend the created goodness of the noble pelican, one of God's grandest achievements. While I agree in principle with Esolen's remarks, I insist on this distinction: the pelican is the good creature of God, possessed of its own proper essence and nature, and as such is an analogy of the divine in its very being, whether posteriorly appropriated as a symbol of Christ or not; evil, suffering, and death—being privations—can signify God's love only through an act of divine subversion, conquest, and economy. And, then again, this is a distinction of more than passing importance.
Third, one can become lost in a thicket of pieties if one is not careful, and so miss the obvious. Here I think I have quite a good grasp on what Dostoyevsky is doing in the chapter "Rebellion"—among other things, he is making Ivan, unwittingly, an apologist for a true vision of God's goodness over against the sort of sickly Teutonized idealism that had corrupted the "religious movement" in Russia in his day, a vision that later Zosima will carry into its true depth. It is not, however, quite the vision that Esolen suggests, I think; but here more clarity would be necessary for me to judge. What is essential—and this is all I ever meant to say—is to distinguish between two understandings of God's power over creation. In one—a deist understanding—the world was created from eternity to be an intricate machinery of good and evil, darkness and light, exquisitely balanced between felicity and moral gravity, wherein death and suffering constitute necessary elements of God's creative purposes, without which he could not bring his purposes to fruition, and wherein every event is part of a perfectly coherent scheme of cosmic and spiritual harmony. In the other—the Christian understanding—God creates us for union with himself, requiring no passage through evil to realize the good in us and to divinize us, but we fall away into the damnable absurdity of sin, death, and hell, from which God then rescues us; while indeed God, in the economy of salvation, makes even death obedient to his saving purposes, he does so as the one who on the last day will judge and damn the meaningless brutality and absurdity of fallen existence, and—far from disclosing the inherent rationality and moral necessity of death—will conquer it utterly on behalf of its victims. Yes, God uses suffering and death for the good; but, no, in themselves they are contrary to the nature of the world, in enmity to God's goodness, and "meaningless" (that is, they do not possess that ontological or moral necessity that either a deist or a semi-Hegelian theologian would assign them).
Fourth—and this seems to be the sticking point—it is simply wrong to say that the scars of sin and redemption make the glory of union with God greater than they otherwise would have been. This is a tempting belief, but one that must end in absurdity. Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine (and Thomas) are wonderful curatives of this particular error. If God is the supereminent fullness of all actuality and all goodness and all love, then the kenosis of God in Christ is nothing in addition to what would have been communicated to us had we not fallen; nor is the good lacking in anything necessary to manifest itself in and to creatures. It is metaphysically and doctrinally necessary to insist upon this; not to do so compromises both God's transcendence and goodness. But that would take many many pages to unfold.
And Esolen replys:
Thank you for your reply—and for being a fan of Tasso, who does not exactly pack the stadium seats.We agree on everything until that fourth point. I too find the Deist calculator-god as revolting as Johnson did when he lashed out against the idea in Pope's Essay on Man, and in the work of the prelate Jenyns—if memory serves me. That's the splendidly dour vision of Marcus Aurelius. It is haunted by Truth, but it's an abyss of despair.
On that fourth point, though: I understand that if God communicates His fullness to a creature, there is nothing beyond that to be communicated. But the creature receives the fullness according to its capacity. Is there a way to believe that the redeemed creature is a new creation with a wholly new, not simply restored, capacity for such blessedness? Again, God would not have required the sin-and-redemption to re-create man; but could he not have willed that it be so for sinful man? Maybe I've been teaching Paradise Lost for too long, and trying to meet the typical student's objection, that Satan does seem to have achieved a kind of victory after all. If you're not worn out by the Molochites, I'd appreciate hearing how you would respond.
David B. Hart is an Eastern Orthodox theologian and author of The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Eerdmans, 2003). Anthony Esolen is Professor of English at Providence College. He has translated Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata (Johns Hopkins Press) and Dante's Divine Comedy (Modern Library).
Posted by Clifton at January 6, 2005 06:15 AM | TrackBack