Theology Noir
As a microcosmos, every man has a history: an Alpha and an Omega, an origin and a destiny. But men dwell in space as well as time. Every man thus also bears within himself a bright heaven and a fathomless abyss. These compass points are hidden from view, but at their crux stands each “universal self” in the here and now as an incarnate question.
The Forge of Lies
“Pulling back the veil is a risky venture, even for a maverick such as you.” Smoke curled through Simeon’s nostrils as he spoke. The perfect devil.
“It’s not for us to storm the veil. God makes Himself invisible in order that He might shine in Man. That is why there are two veils, the past and the future.”
The past is invisible, known only by its memorials. The future is also invisible, known only by its promises. In between is the continual, eternal ephēmeros, the “slit screen” of existence. Past and future are concealed by two temporal “veils,” curtains which give us two further steps in the dominion pattern: Division and Conquest.
One’s experience of reality is thus an itinerant “tabernacle” that travels with us through life’s holy mission. On a band of darkness, it is the visible rainbow at whose center is the brightness of the human consciousness. This “house of perception” moves like a tent for the sun on the line of time (Psalm 19:4), and it is primarily ethical in nature. Our continuous now is the “day” of human action, a binary tension between the do or do not inherent in every sphere of human activity.
This spectrum of personal perception is a microcosm of one’s own personal history, which is in turn a microcosm of familial, tribal, and national histories. Each nested “house” is flanked by the invisibles, having its own dyad of veils. Beyond these we cannot see except through reliance upon the testimony of God and/or the testimony of men who speak on His behalf.
“Or claim to speak on His behalf.” Simeon took a final, deep drag and stubbed out his cigar. “This reminds me of something George Steiner said concerning the nature of existence. It’s in his Grammars of Creation. I have it here somewhere.”
He surveyed his library, an entity whose burgeoning tendrils seemed unobstructed by any responsible supervision, and continued, “Steiner contemplates beginnings and endings in the context of acts of creation, both human and divine. His prose has a sort of Baroque eloquence, so I don’t mind at all that he tends to repeat himself. He’s like port and cigars after a fine meal — something that should not be hurried, nor perhaps even can be, and something that you always look forward to doing again. Here it is.”
He flipped through a few pages and read aloud:
The magnetic fields around “creation” are exceptionally charged and manifold. No religion lacks a creation-myth. Religion could be defined as a narrative reply to the question of “why there is not nothing,” as the structured endeavor to demonstrate that this question cannot elude the contrary presence within itself of the verb “to be.” We have no stories of continuous creation, of undifferentiated eternity. There would, in a strict sense, be no story to be told. It is the postulate of a “singularity,” of a beginning in and of time which necessitates the concept of creation. Is this postulate incised in human mentality? Is it impossible for us, at the level of intuitive immediacy, to imagine, to apprehend substantive meaning, existence without origination?1George Steiner, Grammars of Creation, 17-18.
Skimming over a few more pages, he commented:
“After dealing with ancient concepts of creation, and the horror of a ‘ravening vacuum’ (the abyss), he gets into the definition of art as acts of ‘re-creation.’”
The mirror held up to the world and to the life of human consciousness is a “making mirror”… Has any painter invented a new color? Even the most anarchic (the word means “un-begun”) of twentieth-century surrealist or non-objective artifacts re-combine, dis-order deliberately in space or in time, shapes, materials, acoustic elements selected from what is available to our sensory perception. No art form, it can be argued, comes out of nothing. Always, it comes after. Modernism can be defined as an exasperation with this cruel fact of posteriority. Ezra Pound bids poets and artists “make it new.” An oedipal revolt against the “father” — in this case the given world — is as vital in aesthetic modernity as it is in psychoanalytical theory and deconstructive play.2Steiner, 23-24.
“A rebellion against being,” I offered.
“Certainly, but you already know all of that. As for what you don’t know, I suspect that the canny observations of the brightest philosophers were already extant — at least in potential — in that wretched Bible Matrix of yours. You just haven’t seen them yet.”
“Doesn’t that prove it to be of divine origin?”
“No, it doesn’t prove it. But it does give me nightmares. Anyhow, that was just necessary background for the bit that I really wanted to read to you — something related to those two veils in your omnipresent schema.”
Perhaps it is not sleep, as the tag has it, which is brother to death, but art, and music in particular. Essentially expressive of vitality, of the life-force and wonder of creation, the work of art is attended by a twofold shadow: that of its own possible or preferable inexistence, and that of its disappearance. Unlike science, art, and I suspect, the metaphysical system with its claims to truth, are at the exact synapse where being at its most vivid — another adjective which incorporates “life” — joins with extinction… Kafka to Milena: “No one sings as purely as those who are in the deepest depths of hell: what we think is the song of angels is their song.” Is this the only song which must be?3Steiner, 30.
“Pagans of all stripes revel in the joy and power of music,” I said, “but it is a gift stolen from heaven. There is no music in hell.”
Simeon closed the book. “Then what does Kafka mean?”
“The purest songs are sung by the suffering saints.”
“Yes. Kafka’s preceding line is, ‘I am dirty, Milena, endlessly dirty, that is why I make such a fuss about cleanliness.’
It’s almost Levitical. He’s aware that true sanitation carries the sting of death. So much modern Christian music fails to purge the soul because it is bereft of shadows. As the first Francis Bacon said, ‘In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present.’”
“The Blues of all ages are a contemplation of light in the midst of darkness, life in the midst of death, righteousness in the midst of tyranny. Once darkness is expunged there is nowhere for light to dwell. The world as God has created it requires the abyss. The heavenly host needs the firmament. God’s firstborn was begotten by breaking the waters of the sea. The Psalms not only open our souls to receive the dew of heaven but also draw up the fountains of the deep. Noah’s priestly sword divides the waters and keeps them at bay.”
“Nicely put, but you’re no Steiner.” Simeon winked and returned his book to its shambles.
“So, you’re suggesting that Steiner’s twofold shadow — the questions which forever circumscribe any created work concerning its origin and destiny — corresponds to the veils that surround human perception in history?”
“Since you believe Man is a work of God,” Simeon pitched, “His Temple of Solomon, why not?”
“In that case, existence — time and space — cannot be understood outside of the imperative of dominion, and dominion necessarily entails some kind of trial.”
“…for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me. I don’t despise your fictional deity as some do. As gods go, He is delightfully crafty, the first of many Jewish inventions to bless and curse the world. Hebrew literature split the atom long before those Jewish brights traipsed into the Mexican desert. To us over all others was given a superior knowledge of good and evil. Steiner once said that a Jew is ‘someone who, when reading a book, pencil in hand, is convinced he will write a better one.’”
“The Torah runs in your veins. Contemplation of Moses always gives rise to Psalms and Proverbs — the eloquence of David and the science of Solomon. A writer marked by the ink horn of the Lord rises with a ready quill.”
“You wax eloquent under the influence of alcohol.”
“Port, maybe. If I drink beer I’m inclined to preach! But back to the point. Aside from the Testing of Adam, the prime example of the matrix pattern is Israel’s identity-defining journey from Egypt to Canaan. It perfectly illustrates Steiner’s twofold shadow.”
GENESIS (Creation / Initiation)
Israel is called from among the nations
EXODUS (Division / Delegation)
Israel is cut from the nations (blood then water)
Israel is presented to God through mediators
NUMBERS (Testing / Purification)
Israel is threshed. The idolaters are cut off
DEUTERONOMY (Maturity / Transformation)
Israel is assembled. Moses repeats the Law
JOSHUA (Conquest / Vindication)
The nations are cut off from the Land (water then blood)
JUDGES (Glorification / Representation)
When Israel’s priestly mediation among the nations fails, God raises up wise rulers
Israel’s trek from slavery to Sabbath is a perfect type of the Tabernacle of Perception because it realized the abstract pattern in history and geography. The twin veils in this case were the Red Sea and the River Jordan.
Typologically these were the waters below and the waters above. Egypt relied upon water from the ground, but Canaan relied upon water from the sky. In its entirety, the nation’s journey through this parched, natural and cultural abyss was a death-and-resurrection, and each of the passages through water was also a death-and-resurrection. God works in fractals.
The point here is that both Egypt (as the past) and Canaan (as the future) were invisible to the wanderers. The new, uncircumcised generation of Israelites had to rely upon the testimony of their forebears for any knowledge of Egypt. All Israelites, including Moses and Joshua, had to rely upon the promises of God for their hope in the possession of Canaan. Because, in this territory between the veils, the truth concerning origin and destiny exists only in testimony, it is the domain of the fiery serpent, the forge of lies. As the original false prophet, the devil rewrites the past in order to steal the future. As in Eden, he is a servant seeking to appropriate the inheritance of the firstborn son. In the wisdom of God the Father, the evil one is given this limited arena because Testing brings godly wisdom to the Son.
If the past and the future are never in question, the one being tested dwells in the security of that knowledge. This is true for individuals, families, nations, and entire cultures. As Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn said, “To destroy a people you must first sever their roots.”
“That reminds me of a Milan Kundera quote,” remarked Simeon. “His relationship to Communism was a bit more complicated than Solzhenitsyn’s.”
The first step in liquidating a people … is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.4Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 159.
“Yes, and so-called progressives seem intent on setting us adrift from the physical order,” I said. “The biological sexes, the biological family, children and grandchildren, our cultural history and its memorials — all reminders of earthly Succession — these are the new anathemas in the abolition of Western Man. The transhumanist idol has replaced the Transcendence of God. Everything we have received must be remanufactured in the image of the Self.”
“Sadly, this self-loathing translates into self harm, a cultural autoimmunity,” Simeon replied. “In the harsh light of the claims of Islam, even atheists are waking up to the cultural treason of the neo-Marxists. For many nonbelievers, our Judæo-Christian heritage is suddenly the jilted lover longed for after its departure.”
“The getting of wisdom. Unfortunately for you sympathetic unbelievers, even your so-called archetypal myths and principles are a MacGuffin that is no match for the motivating power of a false god that is truly believed in. The authority to take dominion is derived from Creation as a deliberate act of God. Darwin bequeaths nothing but might is right, that is, the religion of power.”
“I concede that point. Secularism has only a pretense of regard for the future, whereas faith is inherently futureoriented. Inheriting any promises requires procreation. Ironically, Darwinism itself wins the Darwin Award.”
“But Darwinism did offer dominion — through science and technology. Modernism’s promises seem empty now.”
“Yes, and postmodernists lament the ‘ravening vacuum’ that exists in its wake. Many of them are more conscious of the current danger than are most Christian academics. Did you happen to read that copy of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation I sent to you?”
“Not yet. Who has time to read when there is so much writing to be done?”
“Your work will become inbred if you keep on like that. You are fortunate to have so many well-read friends.”
