Sorry everyone it has been awhile. Facebook seems to offer the buzz of a discussion without having to write anything!
In the meantime, I am trying to get my thoughts around a new long-term project on Theological Anthropology. I thought I'd sketch it out here.
It seems to me that one of the things about the doctrine of Creation - of which Theological Anthropology is a subset - is that it has a brief to be more eclectic than the Doctrine of God. That is, because the object of its study is available to all and visible to all it has to see itself as integretive rather than comprehensive - dialogical rather than monological.
Literature is grand laboratory of the human soul. The great genres of Western literature all have within them an implicit (sometimes explicit) 'doctrine of human being' (just as all political theories do). My thought is to analyse and describe these anthropological perspectives and then offer a theological response. Each of the genres will contain insights into the human condition that can be affirmed by the biblical theologian, as well as those that can be critiqued.
So, the book is an invitation to a process rather than a proposition defended (at present).
Outine:
1. Introduction
2. Epic
3. Tragedy
4. Comedy
5. Romance
6. Saga
7. Gospel
At the moment I am imagining either choosing a representative sample of the genre and interacting with it, or perhaps a more general account of the genre (harder to do of course). One of the complicating factors will to observe the way in which the Christian tradition has impacted the genres in question, and whether this has brought out a different anthropology. So, does Paradise Lost differ markedly from its pagan forebears? Or does it adopt its anthropological assumptions?
The theological questions we will have to put to any anthropological account are:
1) where do human beings come from? (origins)
2) what are they on earth to do? (purpose)
3) what is their particular gift?
3) what is stopping them from doing it? (sin/fall)
4) how do they relate to that which transcends them? (worship)
5) what is their destiny, and how will they get there?
6) who are they? (identity)
Why do I do it this way? Well to be frank, I am better at reading texts than just putting down propositions. Reading the texts generates questions at a level of subtlety that isn't there if you just go, 'so, what is a biblical doctrine of the human person'?
14 comments:
Wow, that sounds absolutely terrific: hurry up and write it, please!
My only reservation is with the 6 questions you've listed at the end - are they just a rough sample of the kinds of questions you might explore? It would be disappointing if you arbitrarily posed those same questions to each of the texts/genres. (This gave me a cold shiver: it reminded me of James Sire's popular book on worldview, which tried to investigate various religious worldviews by posing an identical set of questions to each one - so that whatever is most distinctive immediately vanishes!)
The great virtue of your inductive approach is that it would allow the different texts/genres to generate their own peculiar questions and categories. The whole structure of anthropology (and so the Six Big Questions) would be quite different between, say, Paradise Lost and Midsummer Night's Dream.
(For the same reason, I'd vote for sticking with a specific representative text for each genre, instead of a general account. In a project like this, surely generalities will be a temptation rather than a virtue.)
Of course I'm not telling you anything you don't know already! I'm just voicing my enthusiasm for what sounds like a wonderful project.
One last idea: why not add something a bit more "lowbrow" to the mix as well - e.g. fantasy or fairy tales. If you do, the ghost of GK Chesterton will smile on you. (And of course most contemporary readers know a lot more about genres like sci fi and fantasy than the classical genres like epic and tragedy.)
Thanks Ben - you've put heaps of wind in my sails.
Would you have any suggestions for which Epic/Romance/Tragedy etc I should work with?
I don't know about specific texts... too many great ones to choose from.
But one option could be to work with pairs of texts - an older, "classic" representation of the genre, coupled with a modern/contemporary interpretation of the same genre. E.g. for epic: Milton + Joyce or Melville; or for tragedy: King Lear + Bolaño's 2666.
That might help to accentuate the distinctiveness of the genre, as well as to uncover some of the striking ways that representations of humanness have changed over time.
More pragmatically, it might also help you to avoid picking only texts from the 17th century! (Which would, let's face it, be almost unavoidable if you just went for the best representative of each genre. One false step, and you'll end up with a monograph on Shakespeare...)
If you wanted to, you could even throw a couple of films into the mix: for instance, Kubrick's "2001: Space Odyssey" or Malick's "Tree of Life" are clearly attempts at transposing the epic tradition into the language of cinema. And "The Godfather" would be one of the (surprisingly few) attempts at transposing tragedy to film. (The way Charlie Chaplin fuses both comedy and tragedy in film is extraordinary, perhaps unequalled in cinema - but now I'm just getting carried away.)
I am thinking of starting with the Iliad. That's one mighty epic. And you get to talk about violence.
I'd second Ben's proposals to add some contemporary “genre fiction” to the mix, and to add film. You might want to consider some of the more complex/ambitious new television of the past 15 years — such as something from HBO.
Lots of people read genre fiction, and it often wears its anthropology on its sleeve, so there would be a temptation to make cheap or generalising points, but the idea of taking two examples might pay some dividends here. For example, in either fantasy or sci-fi (since she writes in both), choosing a more conventional practitioner and playing them off against early Ursula Le Guin would be interesting: much of the apparatus of the genre would be common, but the anthropology would be quite different (and ULG is anthropologically informed). I specify “early” because the earlier books have no agenda, and would give a better contrast ...
Films and better TV can do interesting things with genre, and this suprisingness could be fruitful for the project. The Godfather has already been mentioned along these lines, but even a confection such as Alias (which I didn't watch) is nontrivial: a soap opera in drag as a spy thriller, as one critic observed. Something like Big Love (which I did watch) or The Sopranos of course has even more to offer.
or, throw genre away and just do whoever you find most anthropologically interesting.
On that note, finish Infinite Jest! It is far better on a second read through, and then do it for your book!
Ok, theres my vote
I love this idea. It makes sense that if you are to write a biblical doctrine on the human person that you use what people cultivate as a lens to understand them. It reminded me of the last few chapters of Schaeffer's How then should we live and Escape from reason. He uses art in a similar way you speak of literature. As I studied a little of art I was always drawn to his books.
The lowbrow suggestion is certainly worth considering, even targeting Australian works. it draws a certain distinctiveness to the Australian shaped view of anthropology as a product of our history.
At this point the conversation is largely out of my depth so let me just encourage you to push this through. My gut feeling is that as Christians we lack an coherent understanding of our identity in Christ as opposed to ours identity in .... (fill in the blank) Anything that draws out these differences/lies and shines the light on the truth is a great project. Very excited.
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Michael,
Sounds like a fabulous project; although I don't know that the doctrine of creation can be set as you've suggested: as more eclectic than the Doctrine of God, or as being integrative rather than comprehensive. If these poles determine your analysis, then I think that other than the polarities might be considered. For example, I don't think that the doctrine of creation is up for grabs in the eclectic manner you suggest here. The scriptures set it as definitive and determinative of the identity of God and the parameters of our relational setting. Therefore I think that some of your themes may need to be set in a less individualistic, atomistic manner, and more in terms of the cluster of relationships which make the setting and sense of questions 1 and 6, particularly, but all hang off question 4.
I think Calvin brought creation and his doctrine of God into a close coupled arrangement, and indeed, it would be hard to see anything else in the scriptures, I would think; God provides the creation as his chief identifying element, and his credential for our worship of him; collecting other perspectives in an integrative manner seems at odds with this.
However, it will be interesting to read your handling of literature in this context, particularly as most, particularly more modern works, seem to share with ancient pagan creation myths (and encapsulate it in the modern myth to which they implicitly refer and give credence to: the idea of evolution) a conception of the totality of the material world, the 'given-ness' of the cosmos as a complete basis for our life and the reality in which we are embedded and the capturing of any conceptualisation of the divine as a comparative trivialitiy that is expressed in some sort of man-glorifying way as either unknowable or not worth really knowing, being merely some sort of cultural fabrication borne of ignorance and a folorn protest at the ultimate lonliness of persons in a cosmos which is essentially impersonal.
However, knowing your acceptance that the idea of evolution is genuinely explanatory, and this cannot be prevented from being explanatory at all levels, I would fear that your project will more than tip its hat to the nostrums of materialism/naturalism and capture God to a human intellectual-aesthetic (not to say political) construction and remove him from his place as creator, in real terms. I would hope that it holds up the teleological barrenness that literature leaves man in when it denies God as real, or God as creator as he discloses in the early chapters of Genesis, then unfolds to provide the contraverting frame for the news of the new creation.
I touch on some of these issues in my blog:
http://anglicanoriginsdiscussion.blogspot.com/2011/12/de-godding-creation.html
Is it with more directly writing a chapter on the nature of authorship? This seems to be related to using a genre to explain/express an anthropological view.
The novel that immediately comes to my mind is The Architect of Human Souls. Though I can't remember much of the detail!
Watcher wrote: “knowing your acceptance that the idea of evolution is genuinely explanatory, and this cannot be prevented from being explanatory at all levels” — again with this idea!
It's not clear to whom these opinions are being ascribed (is Michael supposed to believe all of this, or only the first part?) but may I be allowed to raise a voice of protest, as a scientist, against the second part?
Evolution is explanatory. It does not follow from this that it is “explanatory at all levels”: this is an additional thought, and a thought too far in my opinion (and that of many others).
Perhaps for some people, or within some forms of discourse, acceptance of the first thought will carry with it acceptance of the second thought, but so what?
It seems to be impossible to prevent journalists from referring to the hypothetical Higgs Boson as the “God Particle”. Avoiding the term does not stop them; muttering darkly that Leon Lederman has a lot to answer for, does not stop them; if my colleagues and I stand on our authority as particle physicists and state that the name is frivolous, misleading, and unhelpful, this does not stop them either. No doubt, if it turns out that there is one or more fundamental Higgs Field(s) and we find their quanta, the newspapers (and certain biologists — whoops, I'm sorry, how silly of me, I mean physicists) will scream that we have found the God Particle; and if we progressively rule out this scenario, we will likewise hear, “scientists prove that the God Particle does not exist”.
No doubt this says much about our present cultural moment, about the media, and about the potential for certain loose talk to run amok. But what does it tell us about the particle physics as such? And what does it tell us about God? A whole lot of nothing in either case.
Le Kelly Hermes
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wow it does sound like a very interesting and hard-work project! I will be very interested in reading it.
while i was reading the genre you were proposing i would say not to forget "fantasy" and/or "children literature" writing for children should tell us much more about our human condition and "condition-to-be". Children are like steminal cells of our being human. Children are... mmmhhhh do u speak Italian at all? sorry just kidding but I wish I could write better in English as the words might sound different to what I really mean.
Anyway, take care and God bless you your project, I'll definitively keep reading your blog.
ciao from Italy
br. Freddy OFM
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