Download O GRAVE, WHERE IS THY VICTORY?

“O Grave, Where Is Thy Victory?”
Mark Taylor and the Art of Death
Jack Miles
GRAVE MATTERS
I am deeply honored by the invitation to join in conversation at the Clark Art
M E M O R Y, M E M O R I A l , M O U R N I N G
Institute with others who have been touched as I have been by a remarkable
book: Mark C. Taylor’s Grave Matters, with photographs by Dietrich Christian
Lammerts, a beautiful book that is now extended in its reach by an equally
An interdisciplinary
symposium organized by the
Sterling and Francine Clark Art
Institute in collaboration with
MASS MoCA and the Williams
College Museum of Art
remarkable exhibition at MASS MoCA. A pebble has been dropped in a
Berkshire pool, and we are following the ripples outward.
It was my original intention to present an academically ambitious
paper entitled “The Self-Disarmament of God as Evolutionary PreAdaptation.” However, Mark Taylor and I have been friends for thirty-five
Friday and Saturday,
November 8 and 9, 2002
years. That history and the personal character of the exhibition prompt me to
try something more modest and similarly personal. With your indulgence, I
should like to reminisce a bit about Mark Taylor, boy and man, and then read
just a brief excerpt from my paper, an exegesis of the most death-defying line
in the entire Bible, “O Grave, where is thy victory?”
I begin, then, with the biographical question: How does it happen that
this distinguished and often dauntingly abstract philosopher has ended up
lingering about art museums and cemeteries?
Mark and I met in the watershed year . He was then in training
for the Presbyterian ministry. I was a Jesuit seminarian en route to the Catholic
priesthood. He was pursuing a doctorate in the philosophy of religion at the
Harvard Divinity School. I was pursuing one in biblical studies through
Harvard’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. By the time
the two of us completed our degrees, neither of us was any longer an aspiring
clergyman; but our struggles with the church were less decisive, in the long
run, than our later, separate struggles with academe.
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Grave Matters
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For my part, I was interested in the Bible neither as full-blown
religious revelation nor as history but as literature. I wanted to consider it in
JACK MILES is author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book God: A Biography. He is currently
senior advisor to the president of the J. Paul Getty Trust.
the context not of ancient Israel but of the living Western literary canon.
Mark, in my retrospective estimation, was interested in Western thought not
as the classic conquest of ultimate truth but as a distinct species of aesthetic
experience. Each of us privately and perhaps half-unconsciously was attempting
to transform into art a subject not usually thought of as artistic. Each of us,
of course, good boys that we were, was also playing the graduate school game
according to the rules of the league. Yet there were clues aplenty to what lay
ahead.
In Mark’s case, the first clue was his early fascination with the finest
pure writer whom philosophy has produced since Plato—namely, Søren
Kierkegaard. Can there be such a thing as fictitious philosophy? Is not the
unwritten but unbreakable rule of philosophy that the philosopher—unlike,
say, the novelist—must always be who he is, speak his mind, and mean what
he says? Yes, this is indeed the rule, for all but the greatest. Plato broke it when
he invented the character Socrates. Kierkegaard broke it in the several consummately artful works he wrote pseudonymously. Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous
authorship—a phrase that became the title of Mark’s first book—is not simply
a set of disguises worn by a clever writer. Rather, this set of works constitutes
an experiment in the artistic creation of alternative selves, an exploration
pursued with a painful irony that, as it implies a self still struggling to be born,
becomes a poignant confession.
If Kierkegaard was a clue that Taylor would somehow, someday find
his way into the art gallery, a very different thinker—in fact an utterly antithetical
thinker—was a clue that he would find his way to the cemetery. Kierkegaard, a
Danish Lutheran, radicalized the dramatic religious individualism that, as
Taylor reminds us in Grave Matters, owes most to Martin Luther himself.
Protestantism, after Luther, eliminated purgatory, for purgatory made the
choice less stark and lowered the stakes. It put a safety net under the leap of
faith. This would not do. For reasons that do seem, at this late date, more
aesthetic than otherwise, the alternatives had to be sublimely stark. They had
to be heaven or hell, and you, O Christian Soul, you alone, must choose.
Either/Or Kierkegaard entitled the book that made him the saint and
the prophet of later, twentieth-century existentialism. G. F. W. Hegel, for his
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part, never wrote a book entitled Both/And, but he could have done so, for he
refused to see any two alternatives as ever mutually exclusive. Where
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Kierkegaard saw only heaven and hell, Hegel, representing the return of
repressed Catholicism to German Protestant thought, saw only purgatory.
History, for him, is a process of creation by way of purgative destruction,
ending only when all the infernal as well as all the celestial possibilities are
simultaneously actualized. For Hegel, there can be no such thing as God in our
usual sense of that word but also no such thing as Man. Reality is not either/or
but neither/nor because it is both/and. And as there is ultimately neither God
nor Man, so also there is neither life nor death. Hegel enabled Taylor, in ways
that shine out from the closing pages of Grave Matters, to imagine—and
imagine is a word I want to stress—the purgatory of his own life, and his
family’s life, framed in a larger historical process that turned the temporary
losses into ultimate gains. Hegel brings Taylor to the cemetery because it is
there that he sees concretely expressed the truth that what is perfectly
inevitable must be inevitably perfect.
Within the broad field of religious studies, Mark Taylor is fabled as the
theologian who brought deconstructionism into theology by creating what he
has called “atheology.” In this third phase of his career, he turned from pure to
a kind of applied Hegelianism. Jacques Derrida himself has referred to deconstructionism as a long footnote to Hegel. But the footnote brought something
that the main text sorely lacked—namely, the spirit of play, and thereby, once
again, the artistic dimension. Deconstructionism enabled Taylor to bring
Kierkegaard’s artfulness and Hegel’s implacability together in a vision of secular
religiosity that has clearly spoken loudest to artists and architects of philosophical
temperament. Their number is never large, but their achievement is never small.
Taylor’s deconstructionist move may have been an obvious one, but it
was one of those obvious moves that only seem so in retrospect. Dominant for
so long in German thought, Hegel had been omnipresent for generations in
Protestant theology. The ground would seem to have been well prepared, then,
for theological deconstructionism. The problem was that the antic mood of
deconstructionism could not have been more remote from the usual mood of
theology departments. It took a thinker willing, at the outset, to traffic in
moods and sentiments and to adopt a style of studied ambivalence—a latterday Kierkegaard, we might well say—to make this intellectual introduction.
The French neologism déconstruction has always seemed to me a faux
ami when translated by the English deconstruction, for deconstruction, a word
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already in existence in English and not coined for this special purpose, implies
transitivity, while déconstruction does not. Déconstruction is not about disassem-
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bly—it is misleading to speak of “deconstructing” a movement or an idea—but
rather about disintegration. It is a thanatopsis of thought, an aesthetic vision of
the mortality of ideas. Bodies decompose, it says, and ideas do so as well: they
break down into their component parts and live on in some other form.
Deconstruction is hostile to literary ambition, at least to author-centered literary ambition, but Taylor was drawn to it for just this reason. He has
nothing personal against writers, being one himself; but as an atheologian, he is
alert to disguised religion and to literary ambition as an instance thereof.
Shakespeare writes in a sonnet:
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall time’s best jewel from time’s chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand shall hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty shall forbid?
O none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.1
The closing sentiment is pagan rather than Christian. It is the classic Ars longa,
vita brevis. But the old boast lives on in those who, perhaps rarely thinking of
themselves as either pagan or Christian, nonetheless imagine that they find
their life’s meaning in their work. Never more nihilist than here, Taylor says no
to such claims of meaning: Black ink simply does not shine that bright.
Drawing on this dark phase of his career near the end of Grave Matters, Taylor
quotes Maurice Blanchot on human existence, including all human achievement,
as an antechamber to oblivion. Taylor, as playful as Kierkegaard but as severe,
would have us say to our work no less than to ourselves, “You will be forgotten.”
Thinking of the Old First Church Cemetery in Bennington, where
Robert Frost is buried, I find myself thinking of Mark Taylor as, among other
things, a Yankee born into a family that has long since stopped counting how
many generations back it began bedding down on the west side of the Atlantic.
And thinking of Yankees and of rural New England, I think of a little poem of
Robert Frost’s, a schoolroom favorite for its lilting couplets and its lack of complicating enjambment:
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
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Her early leaf ’s a flower
But only so an hour.
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Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay. 2
Hegel would have approved that poem. But its last word, stay, puts me in mind
of a similar word at the turning point between despair and hope in a quite
antithetical poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. “Spare!” Hopkins writes:
I dó know such a place,
Where whatever’s prized and passes of us, everything that’s
fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and
swiftly away with . . . done with, soon done with, and yet dearly
and dangerously sweet
Of us . . .
Never fleets móre, fastened with the tenderest truth
To its own best being and its loveliness of youth. . . .3
Kierkegaard would approve of that poem.
Nothing would be more uncharacteristic of Mark Taylor than to make
belief and unbelief, including belief and unbelief in immortality, mutually
exclusive. Does he stand with Kierkegaard or with Hegel, with Hopkins or
with Frost? With Frost, you might think, but I say: neither/nor, both/and. The
artist in him fights death by rubbing tombstones and carrying dirt home from
graves. Nothing could be more appropriate than for this part of his work to be
celebrated in an art museum, for the art museum, as an institution, begins with
the impulse to collect—that is to say, with an act of passionate resistance to the
natural tendency of all things to disperse. Yet the philosopher in him, the
unflinching nihilist, wants the message of this very exhibit to be, against the
factual reality of his own striving, that dispersal is inevitable and collection futile.
Through the years, as Mark Taylor and I have grown up and begun to
grow old, as he has learned about my heart disease and I about his diabetes,
each of us has managed to bring an artistic component to the fore in an intellectual metier more commonly pursued with a bland indifference to art. Those
who know Mark’s work as a philosopher of architecture, of cyberspace, of edusterling & francine
clark art institute
cation, and of money know that in singling out the aspects I have singled out
in these few pages, I have offered nothing close to a summary of his career. I
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offer no more than what I promised earlier: a clue to how an earnest divinity
school student, more interested at the start in goodness than in beauty, in truth
than in art, found his way by degrees to making a kind of art out of death itself.
In homage to this achievement, let me now keep the rest of my promise
and offer you an exegesis of a verse that many of you, I venture to say, have
heard in Handel’s Messiah more often than you have ever read it in the Bible.
There, as we shall see, it occurs twice in radically different contexts. The line is
“O Grave, where is thy victory?” I link it to a sentence early in Grave Matters,
where Taylor writes of the early Christian belief that the sleep of death could
be temporary: “In the Early Christian tradition, which has been so important
for shaping the space and determining the significance of cemeteries and graves
in the West, the cemetery was seen as a temporary resting place where the dead
awaited resurrection.”4 It is of this resurrection that I now speak.
The dissident Jews who founded Christianity at a time of extreme peril for
their nation did not found a wholly new religion with a new central myth and
a new God. Instead, they took the God-story they had inherited and gave its
plot a revisionist conclusion by turning its divine protagonist from a warrior
into a pacifist. The Lamb of God, executed by the empire he was expected to
overthrow, the empire that by the terms of received Jewish myth he surely
would have overthrown, is a defeat in historical terms. God wins a cosmic
victory, to be sure, but the substitution of cosmic for historic victory makes for
a decidedly revisionist tale. Two examples of contrasting texts from the Old
Testament and the New Testament must suffice to suggest the character of the
revision.
In  Kings , Ahaziah, King of Samaria, suffers an accident and sends
to inquire of the god Baalzebub whether he will recover. Yahweh, God of
Israel, is offended by this act of homage to a rival god and sends his prophet
Elijah to rebuke the king. A confrontation ensues between Elijah and a captain
in the king’s army: “But Elijah answered the captain of fifty: ‘If I am a man of
God, let fire come down from heaven and consume you and your fifty.’ Then
the fire of God came down from heaven and consumed him and his fifty. ”
( Kings :). 5
This is ordinarily how Yahweh wins when challenged. In Luke :–,
however, this strategy undergoes the mentioned revision. Jesus’ disciples, James
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and John, facing religious opponents (in Samaria, just to make the contrast
impossible to miss) ask their master: “‘Lord, do you want us to bid fire come
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down from heaven and consume them as Elijah did?’ But he turned and
rebuked them, and he said, ‘You do not know what manner of Spirit you are
of; for the Son of Man came not to destroy men’s lives but to save them.’”
To save them from what, exactly? Perhaps to save them from a mistake.
This highly self-conscious and highly literary juxtaposition of two instances of
religious rivalry and two different responses to it suggests a comparably selfconscious determination to proclaim that violence—perhaps particularly in the
name of religion—can be lethally maladaptive. Do thus, Jesus says, and men’s
lives will not be saved but destroyed.
A second, more striking example of the same revision involves a
famous line from Saint Paul: “O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is
thy victory?” A fuller citation, in the King James Version familiar to many
from Handel’s Messiah would be:
Behold, I tell you a mystery:
We shall not all sleep,
But we shall all be changed
In a moment,
In the twinkling of an eye,
At the last trumpet.
The trumpet shall sound,
And the dead shall be raised incorruptible,
And we shall be changed.
For this corruptible
Must put on incorruption
And this mortal must put on immortality.
Then shall be brought to pass
The saying that is written:
Death is swallowed up in victory.
O Death, where is thy sting?
O Grave, where is thy victory?
The sting of death is sin,
And the strength of sin is in the law.
But thanks be to God,
Who giveth us the victory
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Through our Lord Jesus Christ. ( Cor. :–)
If the entire Bible, Old Testament and New together, were to be
reduced to just one word, that word, in my opinion, would be victory. But the
nature of the victory in the Old Testament and in the New Testament differs
crucially. In Paul’s vision of resurrection to immortality, the victory will not be
won until time—that is, history—has ended. When the trumpet sounds to
end history, Christians who have bound themselves to Christ sacramentally in
his self-martyrdom will find themselves bound to him as well in his glorious
resurrection. Their victory and God’s will be over death itself rather than over
any one death-dealing human enemy. God will have achieved this victory for
them not by defeating his human enemies but by allowing himself to be
defeated by them and then triumphing impersonally over the defeat itself
rather than personally over the enemies who inflicted the defeat. Were it not
so, then Christ’s resurrection would be trivial—nothing more than a triumph
over Pontius Pilate.
The one personal element that does remain in this victory is itself
cosmic rather than historic. It is God’s come-from-behind win over the Devil.
The restoration of human immortality—a gift that God took back when he
cursed Adam and Eve—is God’s final, definitive victory over and recovery
from Satan, whose deception led to the curse that wrecked the world of which
God had once said, but could say no longer, “It is good.”
Lost in all the excitement of Paul’s language is the plain fact that until
Christ came, God had endlessly promised imminent victory over human enemies rather than ultimate victory over Satan as the original merchant of death.
The paired apostrophes at the climax of Paul’s prose poem—“O death, where
is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”—are lines from the prophet Hosea
that boil to the surface of Paul’s Jewish memory at just this peak moment. Paul
doesn’t have them verbatim. What Hosea actually said was, at least in the text
that has come down to us: “O Death, where are thy plagues? O Grave, where
is thy scourge?” (Hosea :). But as God spoke these lines to Hosea, they
were not a promise but a threat. We might better catch their sense if we
translated “O Death, bring on thy plagues! O Grave, lay on thy scourge!”
The lines come near the end of a poem in which God is seething with
fury and prepared to tear Israel limb from limb for daring to sin against him.
“I will destroy you, O Israel,” he says in the Revised Standard Version, “Who
can help you? Where now is your king, to save you?” (:). The Children of
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Israel are doomed to a ghastly death:
I will fall upon them like a bear robbed of her cubs,
I will tear open their breast,
And there I will devour them like a lion,
as a wild beast would rend them.
Because she has rebelled against her God,
they shall fall by the sword,
Their little ones shall be dashed in pieces
and their pregnant women ripped open. (:8, ).
That God can speak this way of his own people Israel is not the point.
The point is that his response to their offense, as on earlier and later occasions to
their enemies’ offenses, is mass execution. Death itself, note well, is not God’s
enemy but God’s weapon. Thus, Paul—far from merely quoting Hosea out of
context when he makes “O Death . . . O Grave . . .” part of a vision of immortality—quotes him in a diametrically reversed context. It is this reversal that
makes Paul’s moment of ecstatic exegesis a microcosm for the larger change I
speak of, by which death itself does indeed become God’s enemy and does
indeed cease to be his weapon. God lays down his sword. Death is no longer his
weapon. He has disarmed himself.
As Taylor explains in his essay, Christianity literally domesticated death
by placing the corpse of a martyr in the domus, or house of worship. The altar, he
correctly notes, has the shape of a coffin. And the image above the altar typically
is that of the supreme martyr, God himself, dying on his cross. His resurrection
may have been accomplished, and ours may be assured, but dying, for everyone,
and even, it seems for him, remains inevitable. The grave still wins a victory,
then, even in this vision, but it does not win the war.
This paper was to be presented at the symposium “Grave Matters: Memory, Memorial, Mourning” on
November , , in conjunction with the exhibition Grave Matters at MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum
of Contemporary Art). For citation, please reference http://www.clarkart.edu/clark_symposium/miles.pdf
1. William Shakespeare, “Sonnet ,” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New
Haven: Yale University Press, ), .
2. Robert Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” in New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace
Notes (New York: Henry Holt and Company, ), .
3. Gerard Manley Hopkins, excerpts from “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo,” in The
Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, th ed., ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie (New
York: Oxford University Press, ), .
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4. Mark C. Taylor, Grave Matters (London: Reaktion Books, ), –.
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5. Unless otherwise noted, all biblical translations are my own.
Grave Matters
©  Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute
Text © Jack Miles
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