CHAPTER 1
Edna or the Song of Songs MYSTICAL THEOLOGY
Rabbi Akiba said: `Had the Torah not been given, the Song of Songs would have sufficed to guide the world.'
When I innocently and joyfully conveyed to Sister Edna that I was planning to write about her, the vehemence of her response took me utterly by surprise. She claimed that she would be ruined with her community, a closed community, which would feel that their trust in giving her permission to pursue her work on the Song of Songs had been betrayed. She wrote to me, `What we are all committed to is a life of prayer in hiddenness. Against that I count my work on the Song as nothing'. And since then my love of her and my sense of the truth have been in deep travail.
My more or less immediate response was to point out to Edna that she represents to me the St Bernard of my Paradiso. In Dante's Divine Comedy St Bernard is to be found at a higher terrace in Paradise than St Thomas Aquinas; for, to Dante, St Bernard expresses the love of God, while St Thomas expresses the knowledge of God. St Bernard also wrote a commentary on the Song of Songs in the form of eighty-six sermons. The symbolic analogy with Edna seems precise; while her whole life-story closely parallels and modernises the dilemmas and the goodness of St Augustine. It was the desire to communicate her radiant goodness that gave birth to this whole work in which I am engaged.
Edna replied to my reference to St Bernard with alacrity: `If I am your St Bernard that should make this easy. Bernard was really tough. Do you know the story of how, when he was preaching on one occasion, a blackbird flew into his face and, taking it by its wings, he tore it in two, commenting, "that is the last time you will fly in the face of God's word"?'
The violence of this threat to me opens up a surprisingly fruitful didactic.
In his De Laudibus Virginis Matris (On the Praise of the Virgin Mother, Migne Patrologia, vol. clxxxii, col. 56), St Bernard described the sacramental relation of the visible to the invisible world: `full of supernal mysteries, abounding each in its special sweetness, if the eye that beholds be attentive'. This applies to the mystery of the blackbird as well, to the mystery of Edna's hiddenness, and to the mystery of St Bernard.
St Bernard was the most adamant and powerful man: he began preaching the Second Crusade in the Cathedral at Vezelay on Palm Sunday 1146; he silenced Abelard's anticipation of the rediscovery of Aristotelian logic; he opposed (unsuccessfully) Suger's plans for the first Gothic Cathedral, at St Denis, north of Paris, when Suger, who had accompanied the King, Louis VII, to Vezelay to hear St Bernard preach the Crusade, returned inspired more by the potentialities of Vezelay's architectural form for an urban and regal setting than by the call for the Crusade.
Bernard's combination of political power and spiritual humbleness, his combination even of the pride of preaching and the solitary devastation of prayer, are not mutually reproducing dialectical contraries that, in a superficially wise way, might be referred to a soul out of touch with its different strata. Let us leave it for the moment as the mystery of Bernard's visibility and his hiddenness.
How could St Bernard, the Mellifluous Doctor, be sure though, how can we know, whether it is not the blackbird who, with special sweetness, sings the Word of God?
I first met Sister Edna when waiting outside the Oxford Playhouse for a coach arranged for Jonathan Webber's first Frank Green lecture on `The Future of Auschwitz', which was taking place late one afternoon in January 1992 at Yarnton Manor, the sixteenth-century manor house currently occupied by the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies. Edna cut a striking figure and presence. Acknowledged by many people as they arrived, she strode from person to person, lofty in height, wearing a habit that could have come straight out of a Counter-Reformation painting: thick woollen material in Vandyke brown, swirling to the ground, surmounted by a white coif covering the hair and ears, the bleached rope around the waist with the piece hanging towards the knees bearing the three widely spaced prominent knots symbolising the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.
I sat next to Edna on the bus and told her I had just published a book on Kierkegaard (The Broken Middle). She had read Kierkegaard's aesthetic and religious authorship. From the beginning I liked Edna's combination of keen intellectual presence and unfathomable piety: she relishes expressing unfashionable opinions as dogmatic truths, and, if challenged, will reason out her position without inhibition.
From the first we had Kierkegaard between us. Now, Love's Work is a profoundly Kierkegaardian work: it allows one to pass unnoticed. It deploys sensual, intellectual and literary eros, companions of pain, passion and plain curiosity, in order to pass beyond the preoccupation with endless loss to the silence of grace. Miss Marple is the code-name for this movement from loss to grace: Miss Marple is both exactly what she appears to be — a fiery, nosy, old lady — and something transcendent, someone who notices everything yet is not noticed herself. As a result she is not a `person' in the psychological sense: she has no individual pathos, no desire to win the affection of others in order to assuage her own difficulty. She represents Nemesis — justice. Transcendentally, she is a `person' in Polanyi's definition: `To be a person is to be in the image of another Truth and to receive it and grow into it.' This Truth is the unpredictable outcome of the passion and pain of the characters in each murder mystery.
Miss Marple is what Kierkegaard calls a knight of faith, as distinct from what we mostly are most of the time — knights of resignation. The knight of resignation is recognisable: she cherishes her misfortunes, remaining loyal and dedicated to the mists of memories. She clearly lives companioned by ghosts: family, friends, loves and lovers. The knight of faith, by contrast, moves behind this all-too-human stoicism: she lets her lost ones go, whether injured or injurious, and turns her attention to the astonishing nature of what is normally expected until she becomes both invisible, hidden, and quite ordinarily visible.
As the sublime in the pedestrian, the knight of faith simply appears as whatever she is: she returns to her vocation beyond the endless anxiety of the test of salvation.
On the bus Edna told me in turn about her work in Rabbinics: how she had spent two years studying Hebrew and Talmud at the Leo Baeck Reform Seminary in London. I understood then that Edna and I had something else profoundly in common: a refusal to adopt or affirm the opposition between law and love which has so marred the development of Christian theology. By characterising Judaism as the Pharisiacal religion of law and claiming a monopoly on the liturgical, pastoral and doctrinal notion of love, Christianity not only maligns Judaism but damages itself. For both ecclesiastically and dogmatically any religion will be operating implicitly with a notion of law. The result of the disavowal of this inevitability of law is that the Church, both the Early Church and the post-Reformation Protestant Church, become equally blind to the often inverse relation between the kerygmatic proclamation of love and the actualities of the law — to the ways in which the Church may itself be undermining its own institutes and institutions.
I understood from the outset that Edna's passion for the Song of Songs was inseparable from her insight into Talmud Torah, the learning of the law: that here was someone whose mystical theology was inseparable from attention to divine and human law, to the workings of the world.
A year later, in February 1993, I invited Edna to my inaugural lecture as Professor of Social and Political Thought at Warwick University: `Athens and Jerusalem — A Tale of Three Cities'. She wanted to attend but permission was refused by her Mother Superior. The weekend after the inaugural I was briefly unwell, and then at the end of term I discovered that I might be seriously ill. Edna wrote to me expressing her concern but also suggesting in her bracing way that `God is requiring you to go further.'
In Autumn 1994, Edna sent me an unpublished paper on the Song of Songs in which she concentrates on the soul (Hebrew: nefesh). She is familiar with the whole range of Hebrew commentary on the Song of Songs but her ambition extends beyond that: she wants to identify the intellectual and spiritual reasons why the modern world cannot hear this mystery of the soul, and hence commonly reduces the meaning of the Song to the measure of its own idea of the mechanical or the psychological or the appetitive soul. This reduction she attributes to Descartes, to Freud, to the secular and humanistic ethos of the modern world. I search for the way to say that this is an inadequate understanding of modern thought: that modernity is Protestant, not humanistic; it is founded on Luther's `bondage of the will' not on Erasmus's `freedom of the will', on heteronomy not on autonomy. Kant not Descartes, Kant in all his Pietism, is the source for both the modern world's destruction of the traditional metaphysical and spiritual nature of the soul (die Seele) and the reinsinuation of the `soul' (das Gemüt) in all its divine precipitation and aspiration. After Kant, it is Hegel and Nietzsche who seek to reinvent the classical preoccupation with the soul, the city and the sacred for the modern world. In short, Edna's intellectual history is thin. I think I can bring her into the modern perspective by introducing her to Kant as the invention of the modern, critical spirit in philosophy, the philosophy of freedom, and as a Pietist, a reformer of the Reformation.
And I turn to Edna for help: I need help in my state of bliss. For I am well practised in the arts of resignation and in the prayer that they provoke. O God, take away this pain, this punishment — prayer in adversity. Yet I have no liturgy for thanksgiving, for praise, for consummation; for my well-being, love-ability, or for a new sensation; a constant awareness of existence, alone or in the company of others, imbued with a silly palpability, a beauty at once tactile and visual — as if on each intake of breath one were immersing one's hands in the deep folds of some fine material saturated with glorious colour. How to give this beauty back? I ask Edna if I can see her in order to try and speak to her about my condition of doxological terror. The withdrawal of the abyss, the overwhelming plenitude of every moment, leaves me more vulnerable than the busy tumult of distress: I have nothing to clutch, nothing to point to as my burden, nothing from which to beg alleviation. My soul is naked: it has lost its scaffolding of regret and remorse or even repentance: it is turned: and the unexpected result is the sensation and the envelope of invisible and visible beauty. This does not make me ecstatic, unreal, unworldly: it returns me to the vocation of the everyday — to Miss Marple's sense of quotidian justice — but it needed some response, some way of singing its mystery so that I can concentrate as ever on any fellowship or fickleness which presents itself.
Edna invites me to spend an afternoon at the convent: we have tea and cake in a small modern room at the front of the building. First, we discuss her work; and then she advises me to read the Halleluyah Psalms, starting from the end of the Psalter, reading backwards, preferably in the Latin Vulgate and then in Coverdale's English, the English of the Book of Common Prayer. Edna believes that the Latin is mystical, capturing in essence the spirit of the Hebrew. I find Latin easy, so I take the Vulgate to bed with me, and particularly enjoy Psalm 148, Caelum et terra laudent Dominum, where even the worms are exhorted to praise God.
Laudate Dominum de caelis
Laudate eum in excelsis ...
Laudate Dominum de Terra ...
Bestia, et universa pecora,
Serpentes, et volucres, pennatae;
O praise the Lord of heaven him in the height ...
Praise the Lord upon earth ...
Beasts and all cattle: worms and feathered fowls;
Alleluia
Imperceptibly, the terror eases off as the repetitions of glory take up their abode in my hidden soul.
Two weeks later I spend a tremendous day with Howard in London: first at the Poussin exhibition at the Royal Academy, where over a hundred canvases are on display. Each painting, pagan or Christian, is dominated by its centrepiece of sacramental, cerulean blue — Marian blue, but the blue belongs equally to Aphrodite or Flora — promiscuous, unblushing blue. Then on to the Barbican for the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of The Tempest, with David Troughton playing Caliban. I fall for Caliban — like Frankenstein's monster, he is initially loveable, appealing not appalling, the excess flesh as fluent as Ariel's advertised grace. On the last train from Euston to Coventry, though, I feel I am surrounded by crazed creatures from Caliban's commonwealth, and stagger to the first-class compartment.
Relaxing my customary caution, I have eaten too much Chinese food, and am uncertain about whether I can keep it down. As I sit on the pink chequered seats surrounded by endless empty ones, the train straining against its reluctant rhythms, I begin to chant Edna's name as a prayer-word: over and over again —
Think of Sister Edna.
Think of Sister Edna.
Think of Sister Edna.
Think of Sister Edna.
The beat of the train takes up your name.
Gradually, as I sit bolt upright, the nausea abates, and this work comes to me. I will write a Paradiso which will be a series of descants on friends and family who have somehow passed beyond purgatory, who have dwelt in the abyss, in hell, and have undergone purgation. I will write about goodness and its fruits: under the names of Edna and Haríklia. And now the train lopes balmily homeward.
My model for Edna is the life of St Augustine: but not for the obvious reason that St Augustine led a dissolute life until he was converted; it is rather the continuities — the integrity and the brokenness — of the whole life which is relevant. St Augustine introduced the abyss, the dark night of the soul, into the Latin tradition, in the dispute with Pelagius over liberty and grace, in the Latin movement from the light of the Transfiguration to the solitude and abandonment of the night of Gethsemane. It is this Gnostic remnant in the life of St Augustine that has re-emerged, as it always does in the modern — including the post-modern — world.
In his Confessions, St Augustine sheds his Manichaeism — the form of Gnosticism he preached as a young man. At the same period he turns from human friendship to divine friendship, from the ethics of the city to the confessional intensity of the God relationship. He will return as Bishop of Hippo to exercise doctrinal and ecclesiastical power. The individualism expressed equally by his youthful wantonness, by the intimate Confessions, by St Augustine's effectiveness as the founder of the definitive theology of the Latin tradition, and by his institutional power, have left us ever open to the Gnostic temptation. To put it mystically, St Augustine's account of the third person of the Trinity in his great work De Trinitate, the Holy Ghost, the Spirit, who is the mediator of holiness — enabling us not only to perceive the change of the Transfiguration but also to communicate what we know — is insipid by comparison with his great evocations of the Father and the Son. To put it in literary terms, the lack of irony in St Augustine's œuvre indicates a troubled contrast between his appearance and his hiddenness, his power and his powerlessness.
Now, to invoke irony may seem anachronistic. Surely irony is the vehicle of modern romanticism or post-modern scepticism: a way of advancing a view without risking any commitment to it, a play of signifiers without any theory of being, knowledge or love? Irony has an older pedigree than this: I mean to refer to Socratic irony, to biblical irony and to their fusing in Kierkegaardian irony — that is, respectively, to philosophical irony, to narrative irony and to the irony of hiddenness and erotic self-revelation. St Augustine appears in his disappearance: this is the meaning of the Confessions. St Teresa's Autobiography somehow goes further: her mystical experiences, her charismas of levitation and tears, are juxtaposed with her institution-building, her organisational and managerial skills, her tremendous worldly power, in a way that enlarges our rational powers as it approaches the actuality of eternal life, keeping her soul hidden. As for Kierkegaard, he conceals his soul so well in the thirty-odd books of his authorship that it has not been caught to this day, when even the best Kierkegaard scholars attribute to 'Søren Kierkegaard' the carefully crafted views communicated by his aesthetic, philosophical, psychological and edifying pseudonyms: Johannes de Silentio, Constantine Constantinus, Johannes Climacus, anti-Climacus.
