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Well, this has happened to me before, but my good intentions about writing regularly have been frustrated by a busy schedule and by other much less intellectually stimulating leisure activities (e.g. I’m currently watching the surprisingly good Nickelodian show Avatar: The Last Airbender and please don’t give me grief about it!).

As a token (more to myself than anyone else) of my resolve to write on at least a semi-regular basis, I thought I’d write briefly about a poem which has, in this time of transition and uncertainty, become important to me:

WHEN will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocrite
To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?

O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
He comes to brood and sit.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Peace.”

You can’t beat Hopkins for the shear beauty of his language. The first line of this poem, for instance, perfectly evokes the motion of a wooddove’s wings with its series of gentle w’s and soft vowel sounds. The beauty of the language however is matched by the beauty of Hopkins’ reflection on and desire for peace.

“I’ll not play hypocrite / to own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes”

Hopkins is unwilling to lie to himself, to pretend as though his situation is worse than it is. He has known peace, he is not utterly forsaken nor is he without hope. His complaint, however, is real.

“but  / that piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows / alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?”

Again, this is language to savor with a meaning to ponder. Hopkins’ complaint is that the peace he has known is not pure. It comes and goes, it allows wars, it even permits its own demise.  What good is a peace that remains peaceable even at the cost of its own extinction? What consolation can God give for this terrible deprivation? What will God give instead of peace?

“And so he does leave Patience exquisite, / that plumes to Peace thereafter.”

All that can be done in the absence of peace is exactly what God provides for – to wait for its return.  Not to make rash demands.  Not to set off to wrest peace for oneself from the teeth of some conflict. Not to deceive oneself about the absence of peace. But to simply and patiently wait.

“And when Peace here does house / He comes with work to do, He does not come to coo, / He comes to brood and sit.”

When I first read these lines they knocked me back on my heels. When God does at long last grant the peace for which we’ve waited patiently, he grants it not simply for our enjoyment or entertainment, and certainly not so that we might somehow live without burdens, duties, or trouble. Rather, when peace comes to us, it comes with work to do – it comes to give birth to something new and beautiful in us.

As I continue to walk through a time of transition, I feel encouraged by this thought: That pure peace is not to be had this side of the Resurrection and that, therefore, I can give myself to patience. To patience and to the hope for a peaceable-birth of something new within me – some new life, some new possibility, some new dream that will lead me, inexorably, away from the peace which gave birth to it and back into the conflict and struggle through which all dreams must be brought into the waking world. I look forward to this work of Peace in me.

In the meantime, I will build a nest.

Posted in Poetry, Theology

As promised, I intend to offer some thoughts on the first half of Reinhold Niebuhr’s work, The Nature and Destiny of Man. That book (which had its genesis as Niebuhr’s Gifford Lectures) is divided into roughly two equal sections, the first of which is on the nature of humankind.

Perhaps the best way into Niebuhr’s theological anthropology is through the duality of finitude and freedom which he believes to be so important to an accurate appraisal of human nature. For Niebuhr, the Christian view of humankind is unique in its ability to hold these two realities in balanced tension with one another.

Human beings are finite – that is we are creatures with limited mental and physical capacities which we ultimately cannot transgress no matter how much we may wish to or how ardently we believe we can. Niebuhr repudiated the boundless optimism of the Enlightenment, with its belief in the essentially infinite potential for progress in the human race.  (I believe he would likely laugh at the current transhumanist incarnation of this belief as a form of self-parody.) Our finitude and creatureliness also mean that the structure of our lives is already determined to a significant, but not final degree. That is, we have certain biological urges and certain mental structures and capacities from birth which are simply givens for us and with which we must learn to deal. Niebuhr, then, would not fully endorse the notion that existence precedes essence. (Though Niebuhr’s thought would thus fail to meet Sartre’s definition of existentialism, it draws deeply from the wells of Kierkegaard’s thought and can rightly be called existentialist in another sense – as will hopefully be seen in coming posts.)

Though finite, however, human beings are also free. Our freedom is unique in both kind and magnitude and is derived from our capacity for self transcendence. The fact of our self-transcendence is illustrated in an interesting way by Niebuhr: Though I am finite and am subject to limitations, I am aware of this fact.  Even more incredibly, I am capable of “seeing” beyond my limitations so as to gain a kind of knowledge about how I, as a creature, am situated in the wider world. That is, I can imagine myself from a cosmic and even a meta-cosmic perspective and examine my relation not only to other creatures and to myself but also to the cosmos as a whole. Still more amazing is the fact that I can observe myself observing myself and examine my thoughts for flaws or wonder at my motives in those thoughts.  I can repeat this process ad infinitum. What this means, however, is that I am never capable of discovering the seat of my identity and consciousness. For as soon as I think I have found the source and ground of my self and I begin to examine that source, I realize that it cannot possibly be the source since it is now the object of my thought and what is the object of my thought cannot also be the subject which is thinking. Thus the quest for self-possession – for the discovery of the source and ground of the “I” that I am – is doomed to failure from the first, because each time I believe I have found it, I, in the very act of contemplating it, transcend the potential source, proving that “I” am somewhere and something else. The possibility for infinite regression in this process leads, then, to the absurd but unavoidable conclusion that my self actually does transcend itself and its world and that it has a ground which it cannot transcend and, for that very reason, cannot discover through the exercise of its own faculties.

The following quote captures this important feature of Niebuhr’s thought succinctly and with great beauty:

The rational capacity of surveying the world, of forming general concepts and analyzing the order of the world is thus but one aspect of what Christianity knows as “spirit.” The self knows the world, insofar as it knows the world, because it stands outside both itself and the world, which means that it cannot understand itself except as it is understood from beyond itself and the world. This essential homelessness of the human spirit is the ground of all religion; for the self which stands outside itself and the world cannot find the meaning of life in itself or the world. (14)

Precisely because we are self-transcendent, then, we cannot be self-reliant when it comes to the great human quest for meaning. Rather, the only possible source of meaning for a self-transcendent creature would be that which it could not transcend. Such a being would be identifiable neither with the cosmos nor with the human self, both of which human beings transcend in their spiritual capacities, but would have to be the “unconditioned ground of existence” itself.

If, at this point, Niebuhr’s theological language seems far from the language of scripture and if his definition of God seems too anthropocentric (derived entirely from a logical process which begins with an examination of human existence) – I agree with you. Thankfully, however, Niebuhr himself knows that “unconditioned ground of existence” is an inadequate definition of God and that his examination of human existence, within the framework of finitude and freedom will only be helpful once its brought into conversation with orthodox (indeed, for Niebuhr, Augustinian) theological categories. Once that conversation is begun, however, this existentialist anthropology becomes highly helpful and suggestive. In future blog posts I will examine how Niebuhr brings these two streams of thought together.

For now I will simply close by pointing out the importance of the small phrase in the second sentence of the quote above: “insofar as it knows the world.” Niebuhr obviously has a very high opinion of the human capacity for self-transcendence, but he never leaves behind the importance of acknowledging our limitations. Our ability to imaginatively transcend the boundaries of our finitude and examine ourselves from the outside must not be allowed, says Niebuhr, to fool us into thinking that we are more than we are nor to overestimate the accuracy of our knowledge of the world and of ourselves. We are both body and spirit (and never one without the other). We are both finite and free (free in, not despite our finitude). How this is possible is a paradox, yet I can’t help but see the necessity of affirming both these realities as laid out by Niebuhr.

Thanks for reading this long and somewhat boring post.  Where Niebuhr goes with this material is highly exciting and interesting and I hope to take you along for that ride!

Posted in Theology