Discover more from "Listening to the Essence of Things": musings on life
Praying with Seagulls
A reflection on language, creation and 'decreation' (Simone Weil), among other things
I said I would write about Hélène Cixous in this post, but I’ve been distracted. She will come later. This is how my research develops—not as a highway to knowledge but as a rambling stroll through hidden paths that may or may not be leading somewhere.
Beneath the surface of all that I’m writing, there are places and encounters that have guided my reading and shaped my ideas. To write about the earth and its peoples as ‘our common home’, one must try to fully inhabit these changing, challenging, living environments. The library or the study is the laboratory where these raw materials are processed, but these are sterile environments in which to seek inspiration.
During the seven years of this current research project, my domestic environment has changed several times—an urban flat on the second floor of a city centre block in Bristol, a houseboat on the tidal Thames, and now a small wooden bungalow behind the dunes that sweep onto the wide, wild beaches of Camber Sands. All these places shape my reflections that come later with regard to the significance of time and space.
This morning I shook off my mid-winter apathy, resisted the urge to turn on the electric blanket and haul my laptop into bed, and went for a walk over the windswept dunes onto the beach, the icy drizzle needling my face. I watched the gulls soaring and crying above the dunes, and reflected on how conditioned we are to see nature through the lens of functionality and utility. Buffeted by the wind as I gazed at those joyous spirals of bodies in flight, I found myself asking, why do they do that? It must be to strengthen their wings, or some other rational, evolutionary explanation. It’s not scientific to believe that non-human creatures behave in ways that serve no purpose other than to express the sheer joy of existing, of being alive.
I thought of Tertullian, who wrote in his treatise On Prayer that
The whole creation prays. Cattle and wild beasts pray, and bend their knees, and in coming forth from their stalls and lairs look up to heaven, their mouth not idle, making the spirit move in their own fashion. Moreover the birds taking flight lift themselves up to heaven and instead of hands spread out the cross of their wings, while saying something which may be supposed to be a prayer.
At times such as these, I push through the questions drummed into me by scientific rationalism to what Paul Ricoeur calls ‘a second naïveté’.
The gulls are praying, and they are teaching us that we pray most truly when we pray most naturally, most spontaneously, from the core of our being in ecstatic cries of joy or groans of desolation. Thomas Merton tells us what it might mean to respond to this invitation to pray as the birds and the beasts pray:
What is serious to us is often very trivial in the sight of God. What in God might appear to us as play is perhaps what He Himself takes most seriously. At any rate the Lord plays and diverts Himself in the garden of His creation, and if we could let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear His call and follow Him in His mysterious, cosmic dance. …
We do not have to go very far to catch echoes of that game, and of that dancing. When we are alone on a starlit night; when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children; when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet Basho we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash—at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the newness, the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyse them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in th emidst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not.
Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join the general dance. (Seeds of Contemplation, p. 230)
But can we really pray from the core of our being? I think that’s the one place we cannot pray from, because when we go in search of that inner core, we begin peeling the onion and find that there is no authentic ‘I’ at the heart of things. Authenticity is what awaits us on the other side. In this life, we must make it our project, by seeking to become the person we are not, the person we yearn to become beyond all acquisitions, achievements, successes, and failures. For a Christian, that is the impossible and potentially life-destroying desire to become the distillation of love, for love is a demanding, exhausting discipline. It has many deceptive counterfeits that lure us along pathways of sentimentality, romanticism, craving, fantasy, and lust – yes, that’s a word that we need to reclaim through reinterpretation and reflection on what it might mean. Love’s rewards are hard-won, not trinkets of fun, happiness, and optimism which of course can make our days and nights sparkle—there’s nothing wrong with bling so long as we know that it’s bling. But joy is more than happiness, delight is richer than fun, diamonds are harder than bling, and hope is deeper than optimism. I’m running ahead of myself now, so let me go back to where I started.
This morning’s winter walk was a preamble to my latest reflection, though quite how relevant it is to what follows is for you to decide.
Beyond good and evil?
To begin again. Our knowledge of nature has been corrupted by mastery and the will to power, but we cannot go back to the beginning. Our ways of knowing and acting in the world are wounded by original sin. (Lust, original sin—I’m not shying away from those old theological shibboleths!) The disordering of our relationships with one another and with the rest of creation can be traced back to the mythical beginning of dualism in Genesis 3, when the human acquired the knowledge of good and evil, and with it blame, alienation, and the anticipation of death. (It’s not all about sex, whatever they tell us, though sex has something to do with it.) But this original sin of dualism finds virulent new expression in the rise of modernity, with its severing of the rational subject from his natural milieu, the drive to achieve technological mastery over nature, and the privileging of scientific rationalism over all other ways of knowing. I’ve said I don’t want to write about gender politics, but when I refer to the modern subject I shall always use the masculine (there are many masculine women who assume the cloak of individualistic subjectivity), and when I refer to his other, I shall use the feminine (there are many men who are relational, nurturing, emotional, tender in loving and caring.) Let me use these stereotypes for the time being. They must be interrogated later.
Now, at the end of modernity and confronted with the looming threat of an environmental catastrophe, we need to find new ways of knowing and interpreting nature and our place within it. This means repairing the house of language around us one word at a time, for we cannot start again from scratch with no linguistic home. Language is our shelter and our dwelling place (Heidegger will feature when I elaborate upon this), but we need new ways of sheltering within language if we are to discover new ways of living within creation.
This quest for a transformation of language is at the heart of Pope Francis’s project. He invites us into a space of dialogue and encounter, capable of accommodating disagreement and conflict in the quest for ‘a reconciled diversity’, in an idiom that is affective, expressive, and inspires us to act by arousing our love and desire for the living world around us and our neighbour in need. My dear friend, environmentalist Mary Colwell, calls Laudato Si’ ‘a poem to the world’. She appeals to environmentalists to ‘only use words that are used in poems, because actually, love of the earth is all about love—it’s all about our emotional response to what’s around us, to what we’re part of’.
In Querida Amazonia, Francis writes that ‘poets, contemplatives and prophets, help free us from the technocratic and consumerist paradigm that destroys nature and robs us of a truly dignified existence. … Poetry helps give voice to a painful sensation shared by many of us today.’ (#47 and 48) In a quote that might enrage doctrinal purists, he cites Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes: ‘Only poetry, with its humble voice, will be able to save this world.’ (#46) These appeals to the language of poetry invite theologians to find a style that can speak again of beauty and goodness in the creativity of words. That’s why Francis is my primary interlocuter in this dialogue, though it includes many other sources that have inspired and informed my linguistic quest.
In exploring the possibilities of language and its role in the formation of consciousness through the dynamics of desire and dread, we must grope our way through tunnels of meaning, to a new encounter with silence. In his 1948 book, The World of Silence, Max Picard writes that ‘There is an incline from silence to language, to the truth of the word.’ (p.18) But before we reach that incline, we must make an arduous journey down the incline from language to silence. In the beginning was the word. Our conscious lives begin not in silence but in language, and we have no immediate access to the silence that constitutes the truth of the word. We can only seek this by a dedicated endeavour to rid ourselves of all that clutters and distracts us, in order to listen anew to ‘that roar which lies on the other side of silence’, (George Eliot). Only then might we begin to speak anew, and to speak truthfully, for as Hélène Cixous reminds us, the quest for truth is always a question of death.
There is no return to innocence, but can we learn to unknow the knowledge that divides and rules, that brings death and not life? Can we go beyond good and evil, to a language that situates all hope in radical love, and all harm in avoidable or gratuitous suffering? I doubt it, which is why there is no path to transformation that does not lead through a repeated process of failure, repentance, reconciliation, and rebirth. The path to love is arduous. When we find that it has led us to a rose garden or a quiet pond where lilies bloom and tiny fish shimmer in the sunlight, we should allow ourselves to rest and be thankful, gathering our strength for the glaciers and precipices ahead, but we should not confuse that romantic interlude with love.
To change our way of speaking about the world as a way of changing our way of being in the world, is to cultivate a transformed anthropology. It is to unmask the ‘tyrannical anthropocentrism’ (Laudato Si’ [LS] #68) that is destroying ourselves and our world, to rid ourselves of that ‘Promethean vision of mastery over the world’ (LS #116) which arrived on the doorstep of history with the coming of modernity. (Honestly Pope Francis, can you not see that women philosophers, theologians, and ecologists have been writing about these issues for half a century? Really, it’s time to expand your bibliography and to invite women into this dialogue you keep talking about! Be selective though. Try to avoid progressive liberal feminists because they’ll only irritate you and they don’t speak for all women, even though they tend to sound as if they do.)
We cannot uncreate what has been, nor can we reverse history. But we can learn from it, not only from its mistakes but from the wisdom that has been abandoned in a futuristic ideology that sees history only from the perspective of a forward-moving progressive trajectory. That’s why much of this book will be drawing on early and medieval sources in the Christian tradition. From the perspective of Catholic intellectual, cultural, and liturgical traditions, the medieval is not a bygone era but part of the unfolding tapestry of life that constitutes Catholicism’s way of being in the world. But I’m digressing again, which is the main reason why I have so many unfinished writing projects.
Decreation
We cannot uncreate, and neither can we create ex nihilo, but might we learn from Simone Weil’s elusive idea of ‘decreation’? She discusses this in the context of the transubstantiated host, as a stripping away of all perceptions and preconceptions, all outward forms, a burrowing through to the bare bones of existence, where what is presents itself to us in all its unadorned, uninterpreted mode of being. No material condition, no physical decay or blemish, can change the isness of this unseen presence, because at the heart of all that is there is an objective reality that is not susceptible to or changeable by human perceptions and interpretations. I don’t think this is Platonic, for its end point is not a transcendent realm of ideas but a recognition of the mysterious absence at the heart of matter. In the act of creation, God withdraws from all perception. When we seek to follow this path of deformation, all we encounter is a divine abdication as the condition of all that exists.
Ann Astell, quoting Weil herself and J.P. Little, writes:
As J.P. Little explains, ‘At its most basic level, [decreation] is our response to our creation by God, a reflection of the act of creation itself’ which, Weil believed, involved ‘an act, not of expansion on God’s part, but of abdication.’ This doctrine of creation brings out the immense importance of the physical and material to make space for it. ‘God permitted the existence of things distinct from himself and worth infinitely less than himself,’ Weil writes: ‘By this creative act he denied himself, as Christ has told us to deny ourselves.’ (Eating Beauty, p. 231, quoting Waiting for God, p. 63)
Whew!
Decreation is a form of deconstruction, but unlike the deconstructive endeavour, it knows that there is at the heart of existence an undeconstructible, impenetrable mystery that resists interpretation or conceptualisation. It just is, but in defiance of Kant and maybe of Wittgenstein, we do not have to resist its magnetic attraction towards unplumbed oceanic depths. Decreation dismantles all that clutters the unbridgeable abyss between the linguistic self and the wounded love that calls to us from the far side of creation. Please, scholars who have studied Weil more than I have, correct me if I’m misinterpreting her here. This is how I read her.
Weil is a harsh ascetic. She makes me want to run away, to find refuge in a more sentimental and romantic view of life. But she is a thinker for our times, a thinker who confronts us with the abyss, and who asks us to birth a new politics out of the depths. This involves attentiveness, the courage to face those who have fallen through all the safety nets that make us recognisably human, and to ask of the most afflicted of creatures, ‘who art thou?’ For those who see a Christian prophecy in the words of Isaiah, this is to recognise that the face of Christ is most recognisable in those who are dehumanised by affliction, those of whom the prophet says:
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. (Is. 53: 2-3)
This is far from a Christian aesthetic that would drape the crucified body in the trappings of tenderness and vulnerability, or that would crown it with the glory of divinity. Some medieval pietàs draw us into the aesthetics of abjection, where we are confronted with the agony of the crucifixion as Weil asks us to see it—as the love of God expressed in the furthest distance that separates God from God: ‘God created by love, for love. … This infinite distance between God and God—the supreme tearing, agony that no other has approached, marvel of love—is the crucifixion. Nothing could be further from God than the One who was made a curse.’ (p. 36)
If I read her correctly, Weil seems to suggest that creation comes into being through this rupture in God:
‘This tearing apart, through which supreme love is the link of the supreme union, resonates perpetually across the universe to the depths of silence, like two notes separated and merging, like a pure and heartbreaking harmony. This is the Word of God. The whole entire creation is only a vibration. When human music in its greatest purity pierces our souls, this is what we hear through it. When we have learned to hear the silence, this is what we grasp through it even more distinctly. (Awaiting God, p. 36)
I draw back from the brink here, because I resist any suggestion that affliction is something we should seek for any living being, including ourselves. Perhaps Weil is not suggesting that—we may be asked to endure conditions we do not desire or seek to emulate, as a multitude of people experience every day in our violent world. But while Weil is a wise guide towards the path that skirts the edge of the abyss, she went too close to the edge and I for one have no desire to emulate her quasi-suicidal plunge. Therein lies the path to a form of Christian masochism that has sadism as its partner in crime.
But whether we will it or not, the afflicted are among us and might become any one of us, and we are always tempted to turn away from them lest they contaminate us. Weil challenges that turning away and demands that we see the deformation of creation in the depths of affliction, and respond with radical love.
I must come back to those themes of affliction and dereliction, but I do so in the context of a book that is primarily about hope, resilience, and joy. I do not believe that we are moved to act through guilt and despair, but nor do I think we should seek refuge in romanticism or liberal optimism about the consequences of the times in which we find ourselves. Rather, through the rediscovery of neglected practices of virtue and disciplined desire, I believe that we can find different ways of being and belonging, not as masters of the universe but as creatures whose lives are woven into a wondrous creation, endowed with an awesome capacity for creativity or destruction, upon which the future flourishing of our species depends.
In what follows, I move on to consider Roman Guardini’s influence on Pope Francis’s creation-centred theology. The next post was written in a continuous outpouring with this one, but I’ll put it up later. When I get going, the writing flows too fast to contain, but also perhaps too fast for my readers to keep up with. I’m more grateful than I can say if you’ve read this far! Please comment, question, challenge. This is very much work in process – an invitation to dialogue.
I am amazed at your breath of knowledge and interest and discernment in walking the narrow path in an age that tries to entice us away from the hard work of love. Neither denying the depth of mystery and suffering in life nor accepting a faux sentimental acceptance that we make our joy leads us to the real co-creative work of love. You are clear that the complexity of bringing the word to voice, ever mindful that these are guesses - hits and misses, is the work toward the authentic. I love your sense of humor. I laughed out loud twice I can’t wait for the book
This is my second attempt to make a post. The system seems very complicated!
I have read your post twice now and have benefited from learning about your sources and reading your thoughts.
Although there are practical explanations for birds circling on thermals I have always found seeing this to be an uplifting experience. It seems to me to be an expression of joy which which has often taken me to a deeper place. The call of the Curlew has had a similar effect on me since childhood. I have just discovered that in Protestant circles that is something called Ornitheology.