'What is Truth?'

Towards a Theological Poetics

Andrew Shanks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415253253
• eBook ISBN: 9781136405488
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In a culture where institutional religion is in decline there is a pressing need for new theological strategies. Andrew Shanks argues for a fresh 'theological poetics', providing an eloquent first step towards meeting these needs and an alternative strategy for reconciling Christian theology with poetic truth.

Part I

First principles

1 Faith: poetry versus metaphysical opinion

I

Pilate then went back into his headquarters and summoned Jesus. ‘Are you the king of the Jews?’ he asked….

Jesus replied, ‘My kingdom does not belong to this world. If it did, my followers would be fighting to save me…. My kingly authority comes from elsewhere.’

‘You are a king, then?’ said Pilate.

Jesus answered, ‘“King” is your word. My task is to bear witness to the truth. For this was I born; for this I came into the world, and all who are not deaf to truth listen to my voice.’

Pilate said, ‘What is truth?’, and with those words went out again.

(John 18: 33–38)

‘What is truth; said jesting Pilate; And would not stay for an answer.’¹ But Christian theology is the discipline that stays where Pilate would not.

II

And so what then is truth, in the sense intended here?

In the fourth gospel Jesus’s conversation with Pilate follows shortly after his farewell discourse to his disciples at the last supper, during which he is represented as saying, ‘I am the truth’ (John 14: 6). The truth in question, it would appear, is a truth requiring not just that one assent to it, but that so far as possible one actually becomes identified with it. It is the truth of a certain form of self-identification – which Jesus symbolizes.

That is to say: it is a certain ordering of love. For are we not most deeply identified by what and how we love, and how we receive the love of others? The discussion that follows this momentous formulation, ‘I am the truth’, is all about love. As the evangelist poetically presents the scene, Jesus goes on to speak of his disciples’ love for himself; his own love for them (‘There is no greater love than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’); the mutual love between himself and ‘the Father’; his disciples’ vocation to ‘dwell in’ his love, and so to love one another.

Jesus ‘is’ the truth for Christian faith – not only truth’s herald, but the truth itself – by virtue of the way he thus comes to symbolize the love which ‘is’ God. What faith finds, and celebrates, in Jesus is a symbolic paradigm for the love which is truth.

There are of course a great many other very diverse phenomena which get given the name of ‘love’: impulses of affection deriving from all sorts of different need. But the only needs in question with regard to love at this level are, surely, those which derive from the desire for truth. The particular benefits to which such love is responding are the benefits of truth. If we rightly thank God for other benefits, it is because we want to be truthful about our general neediness. But faith is not properly conditional on any other benefit received. It is simply a response to the revelation of truth; a truth-producing love of truth; a voluntary opening up of oneself, in trust, to the truth of the beloved other person’s critical perception of oneself – and ultimately, thereby, to the truth of God’s judgement.

What faith finds, and celebrates, in Jesus is a symbolic paradigm for the truth which is love. That is to say: truth as an ideal quality of willing; a systematic discipline of the passions. Truth as pure honesty.

But in what sort of thinking does this truth come to expression? Surely it is in that particular form of thinking which works most directly with emotion. It is both a vivid evocation of emotion, and at the same time a critical affirmation of – or resistant wrestling with – what is evoked.

In the broadest sense, therefore, the truth which Jesus ‘is’ is first and foremost poetic.

For, after all, no other form of literature can be so direct or so evocatively vivid an articulation of love as is the finest love-poetry. After Jesus’s death (it seems to me) his truth is resurrected as an essentially poetic vindication of the love which is pure honesty.

III

There is however a rather widespread error, to the contrary, that religious faith is a form of metaphysical opinion.

The term ‘faith’ is persistently misused as though what it meant was any sort of ‘sacred’ metaphysical opinion adopted prior to, and clung to independently of, whatever rational justification there might be for it. So one hears people say that they reject faith because they do not want to commit themselves to believe anything except what they have good rational reason to believe. ‘Faith’ for such people is evidently just a term for arbitrary opinion, obstinately held.

And yes, I quite agree: one ought to be as critically rational as possible with one’s opinions.

Only – faith, in the true theological sense, is not a metaphysical opinion. Faith is what ‘saves’. But no metaphysical opinion, not even the most orthodox or the most enlightened, can ever save.

The confusion is, to be sure, quite readily understandable: faith is always conventionally associated with certain opinions; in each religious culture, a different set. Let us, though, be quite unequivocal. In itself, it contains no element of opinion at all.

Thus, what is faith? I go back to what I said above: faith, surely, is a community-building or community-transformative appropriation of the very deepest poetic truth.

In other words: it is the appropriation of that particular form of poetic truth which has the greatest power to serve as an authoritative basis for, or influence on, community life. It is poetic truth appropriated as sacred insight – and hence as that which ‘saves’. Faith, in this sense, cannot properly be called a form of ‘opinion’ for the simple reason that an ‘opinion’ is a prosaic thing.

Opinions are either correct or incorrect. And by ‘metaphysics’ here what I mean is the onto-theological science which distinguishes false opinion from true knowledge only in the sense that true ‘knowledge’ is a name for correct opinion.

But the truth that belongs to the poetry of faith is not exactly a matter of correctness. Far rather, it is the truth of a true challenge: to imagine more, to feel more, to think more – in short, to love more. And so to be inwardly changed. Changed, in the sense of saved.

Faith, as an appropriation of poetic truth, is not a metaphysical opinion about God; it is an encounter with God, in the experience of that sort of challenge. Nor does it depend on any metaphysical opinion. All it depends on is a basic initial willingness to take religious tradition seriously. Credo ut intelligam: I opt for faith in order that I may understand. I open my mind, in other words, to the potential poetic truth of religious tradition so as to be troubled by it, prodded by it, inspired by it. Authentic faith – the faith that saves – is not a mind-settling and emotionally reassuring metaphysical opinion. (As people evidently suppose when they say, ‘How I envy you your faith!’) Quite to the contrary. In principle, it is precisely the poetic dissolution of any merely mind-settling or reassuring opinion – to open up the way for transformative grace.

IV

This elementary distinction between faith and religious opinion is, indeed, no new insight. It has always been implicit in all good theology, and is already rendered perfectly explicit in mediaeval scholasticism.² And yet – maybe, even so, it is still partly the theologians’ fault that the confusion still persists, in practice; at any rate, within Christendom. For of course the church has always also been so fiercely obsessed with the importance of ‘correct’ metaphysical opinion. In my view this essentially needs to be seen as a very deep-seated corporate neurosis, in the first instance deriving from the formative experience of persecution suffered by the very earliest Christian communities within the Roman Empire.

The trouble is, in that context the institutional church originally took shape very much as an armature, designed for protection against the pressures of persecution. Already almost from the very outset, in ethnic and cultural terms, a pluralistic community, the church nevertheless needed to cultivate strict unity, in resistance to the divide-and-destroy pressures of a hostile environment. Such unity could not come direct from a shared commitment to faith, purely and simply as such, since faith, purely and simply as such, is far too much a matter of pure inwardness. For the purposes of external armature there was in fact no other real option but to insist on a closely prescribed, carefully policed uniformity of metaphysical opinion. But – alas! – habits learnt so early in a tradition’s development are very difficult then to unlearn; even long after the original justification for them has disappeared, as is the case with Christianity today.

My basic aim in what follows is to try to make some contribution to the, in my view, urgently needed systematic disentangling of faith from its resultant long-term entanglement in metaphysics. The more that faith is entangled in metaphysics, and the supposed ‘correctness’ of ‘correct’ opinion is given effective precedence over poetic truth, the less free access there is allowed to genuinely fresh poetic stimuli at the level of religious practice. For lack of this, faith starts to wilt like a flower without water. That, I think, is the real epidemic problem now. What is therefore required – I want to argue – by way of remedy, is a theology whose whole initial focus is on the sheer freshness of the very freshest, that is, the most profoundly original religious poetry, in its distinctive challenge to faith.

Everything, for theology, depends upon its being so far as possible opened up, as a discipline, to the re-energizing power of great, strange, wild poetry – in testimony to the truth which is love.

2 Confessions of a traitorous clerc

I

What follows is an essay in theology. One might define theology as the intellectual discipline of faith, which systematically interprets history as a field of divine revelation: an attempt to analyse the history framing, or rendering possible, the poetic truth which faith, with its various community-building or community-transformative projects, appropriates.

Theology is a particular species of response, in other words, to the power which certain historical experiences, properly attended to, have to transform one’s whole sense of moral priorities: one’s perception of one’s own vocation, and of the world as an arena for that vocation.

But what if the innermost moral of the most deeply significant – because most deeply traumatic – historical experience were precisely such as to outlaw a theological type of response, and compel us to shift over to some other level of thought? This would indeed be the most radical possible sort of argument against faith, and therefore against theology in general. For it would be an attack on theology right at the heart of its own territory.

The thinker who has perhaps most interestingly developed a philosophical argument of this sort, it seems to me, is Julien Benda.

II

Benda’s chief concern was not with the criticism of theology, as such. He belonged to that generation of French intellectuals whose thinking was largely formed by the experience of the Dreyfus Affair. In his youth he was an enthusiastic Dreyfusard; and in all his subsequent work he is preoccupied with devising strategies to combat the various impulses which were eventually to feed into the politics of fascism, Nazism and Bolshevism. So he became a leading critic of the emergent propaganda culture of twentieth-century mass democracy – essentially for its sheer propaganda-quality.

At the same time, though, he draws moral lessons from that struggle which are absolutely inimical to theology.

As a theologian, of course, I think that Benda is wrong. He was always one of the world’s great oversimplifiers: a crude thinker, often perhaps a downright silly one.¹ He has largely now been forgotten. And yet such thinkers – with their obstinate collisions against muddled common sense – can sometimes help clarify issues even when they are quite wrong.

Indeed, if Benda had not existed I guess that for my present purposes I would have had to invent him. He was, after all, responding to a set of historical experiences which remain of the most profound concern to any contemporary theology. Moreover, the anti-theological crudity of his response also seems to me to draw to the surface some of the very deepest traditional prejudices of mainstream Western philosophy in general.

Thus, what interested Benda first and foremost was the role of those he called ‘les clercs’. By this he meant free-spirited intellectuals of every sort, but he preferred to use the antique term ‘clerc’, harking back to the mediaeval past when nearly all intellectuals were Christian priests, because he wanted to insist upon a sacred vocation, analogous to that traditionally ascribed to the Christian clergy. In so far as he is remembered at all, it will no doubt always be above all for his little book, first published in 1927, La trahison des clercs (The Treason of the Clercs).² And rightly so. But the theme encapsulated in that title actually runs right through his writings: he is for ever like a prophet calling back the chosen people – in this case les clercs – to the vocation which all too many of them have betrayed.

So how are we to understand this charge of ‘treason’?

The crucial first step in Benda’s argument, in fact, already appears in an essay of sixteen years earlier, entitled Mon Premier Testament.³ Mon Premier Testament is framed as a systematic unmasking of the way in which, as he sees it, people’s political and religious ideas arise out of their emotional needs. It culminates in a fundamental contrast between two opposing types of emotional need: on the one hand what he calls ‘the need for pathos’ and, on the other, ‘the need for ease’.

The need for pathos is ‘the need which some people feel for a racing pulse, quick breathing, impetuous gesticulation’. Wherever one encounters ethical doctrines presented in terms of tumultuous drama – whatever the actual form such drama may take – there the need for pathos is at work. It is, in Benda’s hostile presentation, the desire to be morally horrified, alarmed, filled with righteous indignation and scorn, for the sake of the pleasurable stimulus this provides; and so to have the further delicious thrill of feeling summoned to heroism. It demands morally authoritative identity-defining narratives full of abrupt transitions, sudden reversals of fortune, revolutions – in short, a morality consistently packaged to be as exciting as possible.

The need for ease is the opposite in each particular. Physiologically, it is the felt need ‘for a slow pulse, gentle breathing, flowing movement’. It generates a taste, both aesthetic and moral, for all that is quieting, calming, conducive to a mild benevolence and meditative detachment.

There is in Benda’s thought a strong apparent contradiction between substance and form. He writes with a polemical ferocity full of pathos – and yet it is all directed, precisely, against the cultural products of the need for pathos. The need for ease, not the need for pathos – he argues – is the true need of Reason: issuing as it does in a detached impartiality of insight. Its cultural products are much rarer and less conspicuous than those of the need for pathos. Yet this is the need to which the true clerc must cling. In order for ideas to have any impact on a wider ‘lay’ public they must satisfy the need for pathos: there is no scope for propaganda in any ethos determined by the need for ease. However, the rise of modern mass democracy has brought with it all sorts of new temptation for the clercs, to seek a share of power by betraying their vocation and collaborating in various propaganda-strategies designed to exploit the ‘laity’s’ need for pathos. That is the basic corruption Benda is denouncing in La trahison des clercs. It is not that he is opposed to mass democracy as such. On the contrary, so long as it is reasonably liberal he approves of it. Only, he is insistent that the true clerc should conscientiously abstain from ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• PART I First principles
• PART II Case studies
• PART III Conclusion
• Appendix 1 Albion versus Leviathan
• Appendix 2 Salvation history and romanticism
• Notes
• Index