Real Presences 4 comments

By Brian Volck

“Receiving it, you apprehend how near
the Holy bides. You cannot know how far.”
                                      —Scott Cairns

If recent posts suggest I’ve been on a Richard Wilbur kick, it’s only because Wilbur’s poetry offers rich reflection on questions I’m pondering. Here’s a passage from his poem, “Lying”:

In the strict sense, of course,
We invent nothing, merely bearing witness
To what each morning brings again to light:
Gold crosses, cornices, astonishment
Of panes, the turbine-vent which natural law
Spins on the grill-end of the diner’s roof,
Then grass and grackles or, at the end of town
In sheen-swept pastureland, the horse’s neck
Clothed with its usual thunder, and the stones
Beginning now to tug their shadows in
And track the air with glitter. All these things
Are there before us; there before we look Or fail to look....

Through a series of carefully observed particularities, Wilbur hopes to persuade the reader that Creation is real, not deceptive maya, and the truth is present, waiting to be honored with our own attentive presence.

For centuries, the West confidently went further, insisting on an invisible presence behind the visible. On the first page of his painfully luminous assessment of language and art, Real Presences, George Steiner asserts, “any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God’s presence.”

You can almost hear Steiner mutter under his breath, “Take that, Modernity,” but I think there’s some of that in Wilbur’s poem, too, softened by Wilbur’s self-deprecating congeniality. For all of Modernity’s claims to realism, of valuing the material to the ideal, it’s shot through with abstractions to the detriment of the particular.

IMAGE Editor, Greg Wolfe, recently offered an interesting reflection on presence and abstraction at dot.Commonweal. His post generated several comments, many of which miss Greg’s point (blog comboxes are particularly inhospitable to a hermeneutic of generosity).

While I refrained from comment on the website, his essay piqued my interest.

The starting point of the Commonweal post was Ross Douthat’s New York Times review of Karen Armstrong’s new book, The Case for God. As Greg points out, Douthat’s argument is interesting not only for its virtues, but also where it goes astray.

Reading Douthat’s mostly incisive review, I noted a few problems myself. It may sound like a theological quibble, but Douthat conflates transubstantiation with Real Presence (Lutherans and Orthodox, for example, acknowledge the latter but not the former). He also could have strengthened his argument by citing the inherent ambivalence in the word “Orthodoxy,” (which is often assumed to mean only “right belief” or “right opinion” but also means “right worship” or “right praise”) but this approach could also score points for Armstrong.

Douthat is, I think, correct when he claims that “liberal religion” often parasitizes “more dogmatic forms of faith,” picking and choosing from what’s out there to fit an agenda, but the same is true of “conservative religion,” which more often than not “conserves” idealized forms of the past, removed from particulars of time and place.

Perhaps Douthat is attempting to correct a perceived imbalance in Armstrong’s account of an unknowable God. If so, that’s admirable. A long tradition of apophatic theologians would agree with Armstrong that God is essentially unknowable, but would insist there’s a particular and profoundly orthodox way of unknowing that nonetheless leads to God. This, however, is an argument I’m not sure I’m qualified to enter.

Kudos, then, to Greg for shifting the debate to one of presence vs. abstraction, concluding, “Problems arise when the encounter is forgotten and the presence is lost, when all that is left are fragments, abstractions, mere discourse (i.e., conservatism and liberalism.)”

Judaism is a religion of presences and particulars: The Shekhinah, The Chosen People, The Promised Land. Christianity centers less on ethnicity and geography than on the particularity of the Incarnation: The Word made flesh in the man, Jesus of Nazareth. These are the non-negotiables the Enlightenment rejected in favor of Universals.

Next time you bump into a Universal, be sure to send me an exact description.

Better yet, offer me a metaphor. “Odd,” Wilbur continues later in the poem quoted above, “that a thing is most like itself when likened.” The aim of metaphor, of likening this one to another, is not abstraction but fidelity.

Wendell Berry has much to say about the dangers of abstraction. It’s not an overstatement to indentify Berry’s overarching concern in his large body of work as a love for the particular and the local over the abstract and the general. In Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against a Modern Superstition, a book-length rebuttal of E. O. Wilson’s Consilience, he says what all the science I have ever learned failed to teach me:

We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.

This love which Berry insists we bring to that small part of Creation we know and are present to is why fidelity and precision in our language is not merely an aesthetic matter. If there is, indeed, a real presence in the things we lovingly receive, then standing by our words is a political, moral, and religious act as well.

In living out the words we stand by, word becomes flesh—our flesh.