The spiritual revolution shall be marginal
A plea for ambiguity
As revenge for having been drawn into the David Brooks psychodrama conjured up by
to promote his excellent new magazine ARC,1 I was planning on inflicting on all my long-suffering readers a sermon on the doctrine of universalism. Fortunately for everyone involved, friend-of-the-blog and actual Quaker (albeit of the agnostic kind) guided me in a hopefully more productive direction.2Mark and I clearly approach the concept of religion very differently: he is guided by knowledge (“If there were a Jeopardy! category called “Obscure Protestant Denominations,” I’d crush it.”) and I am more guided by gnosis (old habits die hard)3. Mark is fixated on whether or not Brooks has been baptised; I just can’t picture St. Peter standing at the Pearly Gates demanding to see whether a soul’s paperwork is in order. Is this the difference between a Jewish and a Christian(ish) view of the world? Perhaps, but I wouldn’t want to be so categorical.
Please note that I’m not trying to convert anyone. Indeed, I remain resolutely unconverted myself.4 I’m simply asking for a little less hostility directed towards those of us who are not so firmly embedded in a single well-defined tradition: those of us who exist on the margins, who move between worlds (which is not always as glamorous as it sounds). Mark’s fulminations against the bumbling Brooks strike me as a tad excessive:
The problem, however, is that he is not writing as a mere Christian; often, he is writing as a conflicted Jew. And in doing so, he keeps getting Judaism very wrong. The more Brooks writes, the more it becomes clear that he is not particularly interested in Judaism, except as some sort of nostalgia trip, familial obligation, or cover for his own discomfort at having left it behind. He should stop writing about Judaism, now.
Mark views Brooks as standing on a bridge between Judaism and Christianity and is anxious for him to pick a side, dismissing mystagogic attempts to transcend this binary and arguing that we are better off sticking with the simple folk wisdom (some might say prejudice) of the man on the street:
Thinkers like Michaelson and Magid, with their professional (and personal) interests in syncretism, mysticism, and so forth, have ways of explaining how someone can be Jewish and Christian, and much more besides, at the same time. But try asking your average jamoke on the street, “Can you be Jewish and Christian at the same time?,” and he’ll answer, “What are you smoking?” Because it’s the kind of strange, counterintuitive, obviously wrong thought that only an intellectual can have. The intellectual can take a plain insight—that the two religions have diverged, have separate theologies, have separate practices, and live as distinct communities—and have one thought about it too many.
I don’t dispute that the average yokel likes to put people in neat categories: you are either a Jew or a Christian, either a man or a woman, either with us or against us. I can’t speak for Brooks, but I sometimes feel like I’m standing on another bridge entirely: on one side there are diverging theologies and practices and on the other side lies the truly numinous.5
The “Jewish mystic” Simone Weil (as Brooks refers to her, either playfully or out of ignorance) argues in her essay Forms of the implicit love of God that our concepts of God cannot be God, indeed our concepts of God come between us and God, need to come between us, otherwise we would be obliterated.
The deeper reason why I want Mark to reconsider his characterisation of Weil as “Catholic-curious, but never baptized” is to suggest a more ambitious target than the increasingly flabby David Brooks. Nevertheless, I think it is worth reflecting on what makes Brooks such a dependable lolcow: is it simply the sanctimonious quality of much of his writing coupled with the more ignominious aspects of his personal life?6 But should it matter whether his journey of faith was kickstarted by less-than-saintly personal conduct? Need I remind readers why St. Paul was on the road to Damascus in the first place?7
The numinous, like the erotic, is notoriously difficult to put into words. But just because it is almost impossible to write good sex (sorry Garth), it doesn’t mean it is impossible to have good sex. But when it comes to matters spiritual or sensual, it is easy to get the ick when you become privy to a fantasy that you don’t share. I’ve been pondering why a certain type of media consumer appears to be more tolerant of Becca Rothfeld’s temperamental religiosity than of Brooks’s polytheistic exploits and the best explanation that I could come up with is this repurposing of an old piece of misogynist misinformation:
Yes, that’s an actual quote from Brooks. Personally, I prefer the term “spiritually polyamorous”.8
All you need is love (redux)
In response to the Luciferian insinuation that the alienness of the Other may precludes us from knowing whether we have any moral obligations towards them, allow me to share (at the risk of spoiling the ending to The Invisible College: Part Deux), a passage from Toni Morrison’s Paradise which gestures towards an understanding of love that, although needlessly anti-nature, otherwise sounds promising:
There is nothing in nature like it. Not in robins or bison or in the banging tails of your hunting dogs and not in blossoms or suckling foal. Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God. You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn – by practice and careful contemplations – the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it. Which is to say you have to earn God. You have to practice God. You have to think God-carefully. And if you are a good and diligent student you may secure the right to show love. Love is not a gift. It is a diploma. A diploma conferring certain privileges: the privilege of expressing love and the privilege of receiving it. How do you know you have graduated? You don’t. What you do know is that you are human and therefore educable, and therefore capable of learning how to learn, and therefore interesting to God, who is interested only in Himself which is to say He is interested only in love.
[By the way, my only note on Noah Kumin’s preliminary notes on God is that God is not like love; God is love. Everything else is make-belief.]9
The real source of my concern, however, lies in Dr. Pistelli’s film criticism of late. I certainly prefer his alternate ending to not-my-kind-of-porn film Babygirl, but I am left confused by his judgement that it is a “very good movie” that “more than makes up for the loathsome Substance” despite describing the film’s underlying ethos as follows:
For Babygirl, this means feminism can only be preserved in the boardroom if there is fascism in the bedroom. Especially if the boardroom is pledged, as it is in the film, to robotics and automation. Sexual fascism then becomes synonymous with humanity itself.
A mostly joyless sexual fascism, I might add. Does Dr. Pistelli’s favourable judgement suggest a sense of heteronostalgia for anything that portrays, not love, necessarily, or passion, really, or lust, or desire, or hatred, or ambivalence, but at the very least a mutual satisfaction that an itch has been scratched between the producers of the large and small gametes?
On the topic of scratching an itch, I’ve been meaning to protest that “we” didn’t all find the film Queer “outdated in its fetishism of gay tragedy”. What do you think scholars will be debating at the Blake Smith Institute for Advanced Gay Studies? Fetishism of (gay) tragedy will always be in fashion.
The film’s true symbolic importance lies in the (not quite successful) transformation of Burrough’s progessively nightmarish novella into “a Luca Guadagnino love story”. The very pervy, but at the same time very Catholic director carefully excised the pagan delirium of child sex trafficking, casting Lee’s heartwarming self-affirmation in a rather more forgiving light:
I might well have destroyed myself, ending an existence which seemed to offer nothing but grotesque misery and humiliation. Nobler, I thought, to die a man than live on, a sex monster. It was a wise old queen—Bobo, we called her—who taught me that I had a duty to live and to bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love. Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink.
Talking of ephebophiles, I feel it is my duty as a global citizen of the imaginary gay community to start reading friend-of-the-blog David Session’s series on Michel Foucault’s L’histoire de la sexualité, but I can’t exactly say that I am looking forward to the experience. I do in fact own a copy of volume one, but I could never muster la volonté de savoir.10 Whenever I think of Foucault, I can’t help but recall a question Murdoch wrote on a student’s essay on Kant: but what about love?11
I won’t rehash old arguments, so for background see the original David Brooks piece which Mark critiqued, my initial intemperate response and Mark’s response to my and other responses. Over at ARC, you can find six critiques of Mark’s critique: from a baptised Jew and Episcopal priest, the rabbi of the Fire Island Synagogue, the president and CEO of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, a Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies, a rabbi who “finds inspiration form Buddhism, earth-based spirituality, psychedelics, and mythic/mystical Judaism” and the director of the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning. To all this highfalutin theologising, Mark responds that his real gripe is with Brooks’s bad writing.
Naturally, all views expressed in this post and any errors, factual or moral, are my own.
I am publishing this post before diving into what is sure to be a treasure trove of gnostic insights from friend-of-the-blog
.Since these matters are so important to Mark, I’ll disclose that I was assigned Christian at birth (ACAB), or, more precisely, a few days after birth, when I was baptised in the Dutch Reformed Church wearing a frilly white gown (one of the rare forms of genderbending encouraged by that particular Christian community). I was however never confirmed in the Church: I dutifully completed all my Sunday school lessons, but I couldn’t in good conscience stand in front of the whole congregation and attest to believing in all of that (even though most of my friends did so mainly to appease their parents).
Even liberal Christians like Tara Isabella Burton still put a lot of emphasis on Christianity being true in a sense that other spiritual improvisations are not:
To turn the ten commandments into Twelve Simple Rules is to cede what Christianity has, and Remixed religion doesn’t: the chance that it might be actually true.
I can think of plenty of reasons to prefer both the Old and New Testaments to Jordan Peterson’s new book other than “the chance that it might be actually true”, whatever that may mean. As an eminent theologian once said: “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
I got this bridge image from a 1985 quotation from Damaris Parker-Rhodes collected in Quaker Faith and Practices:
I personally believe that there is a quality in the bareness of Christian Quakerism, which may act as a bridge between the past and the future, allowing space for Friends to dare to search within… To be a Quaker is by no means to say goodbye to myth, ritual and symbol, but rather to find myself set free to discover them as the very essence of the way I now experience… Quakers are bridge people. I remain on that bridge, part of my roots reaching back into the Christian past and part stretching forward into the future where new symbols are being born.
There is a longstanding universalist tradition within Quakerism (which is not to say it is the only tradition). QFP also contains a passage from 1693, written by William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania famous for maintaining friendly relations with the Lenape people (at least for as long as he lived):
The humble, meek, merciful, just, pious, and devout souls are everywhere of one religion; and when death has taken off the mask they will know one another, though the divers liveries they wear here makes them strangers.
Mark even misses out on some of the juiciest details: did you know that his first wife converted to Judaism for him and raised their children Jewish before he ran off with a younger shiksa and found Jesus in the process?
Given the state of Biblical literacy, I may indeed need to remind readers that Paul (then called Saul) was on his way to persecute some Christians when he saw the Light (Acts 9).
This is an adaptation of a concept put forth in an exciting new book of which I am currently writing a top secret review.
Not that there is anything wrong with make-belief!
This is a lie. A previous self had evidently read at least part of the book with some enthusiasm:
Call me a bitter old queen, but what seemed like blinding insight at the time now appears to me to be a pretty banal set of observations.
If I can get my canards in a row, I would still like to bring Jean Genet in conversation with Simone Weil on the question of how to resist fascism without internalising it.
Thanks for paying attention, and the thoughtful reply. I don't mean to tell other people what to write, but it's interesting that none of my Christian (or syncretic, or whatever) critics dealt with the ways in which Brooks misprised Jewish sources, or traded on certain Jewish stereotypes. My piece was not all, or even mostly, about him "picking a side"; it was about his dealing with Judaism as respectfully as, say, I'd try to deal with any minority tradition I was saying a lot about (queer culture, black culture, etc). I guess I understand why that's not the meat of my argument for Christians; but I was trying to explain why that column was offensive to many /Jews/, and that seems not to have been interesting to many (you included, right?). In a small way, that indifference goes to the heart of my critique of Brooks: he is doing what people do to Jews, which is use our tradition as a prop (in his case on his way to Xy, or something else; in the case of many of my Xian critics, as a way to discuss what interests them more, be it mysticism or syncretism, or whatever).
"Good" because I thought it was intelligently scripted, sympathetically acted, stylish but not overwhelmingly stylized, engaged with present-day problems in a mostly nuanced and honest way. Not because I think its ethos is ethically praiseworthy...but its ethos may be a truth of the present, whether "we" ethically praise it or not, and the film sharply discloses this truth in keeping with its avowed descent from the Ibsenite tell-it-like-it-is realist theater. My proposed ending would have had the effect of calling the ethos more obviously into question.
Sometimes my "we" is a pedagogue's gambit I developed teaching in an art school in the period of high wokeness. I would introduce a text by doing the woke critique myself, as if "we" all obviously agreed about that, and then inviting the students to say something or anything *else* about the text, so that the easiest 2013-Tumblr-level political critique—e.g., you must never fetishize gay tragedy—wouldn't be the first thing out of their mouths.
(I also meant to note that Babygirl and Queer taken together are in accord with the male half of Simon Magnus's answer to the Tiresias question inasmuch as both have a moment where a male character asks his sex partner just to hold him. I'd call that masculonostalgia, both hetero- and homo-, for, if not love, then what "we" might call tenderness.)