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“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. sterling & francine clark art institute Grave Matters 1 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 sterling & francine clark art institute 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 Grave Matters 2 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 sterling & francine clark art institute already in existence in English and not coined for this special purpose, implies transitivity, while déconstruction does not. Déconstruction is not about disassem- Grave Matters 3 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. sterling & francine clark art institute Her early leaf ’s a flower But only so an hour. Grave Matters 4 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 Grave Matters 5 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 sterling & francine clark art institute 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 Grave Matters 6 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 sterling & francine clark art institute Grave Matters 7 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 sterling & francine clark art institute Grave Matters 8 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, ), . sterling & francine 4. Mark C. Taylor, Grave Matters (London: Reaktion Books, ), –. clark art institute 5. Unless otherwise noted, all biblical translations are my own. Grave Matters © Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute Text © Jack Miles 9