Love and Loss

Tennyson’s doubt is in many ways very contemporary. Like us, he was stunned and exhilarated by the pace of technological change. The power of experimental and observational science to explain the natural world seemed to make God somewhat surplus to requirements. The traditional concept of God was, so it seemed, redundant. The rationalistic philosophy of the age, when applied to biblical studies and to theology more generally, did much to erode confidence in a verbal revelation of God given in a propositional form.

But this did not, then as now, lead to a decline in religious belief as such. Rather, it sought out new forms. If religious faith could not be established by reason, perhaps experience might provide an alternative channel to the divine. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, theologians began to emphasise the more mystical and experiential aspects of Christian faith. Religious dogmas were not to be taken as direct descriptions of realities but rather as metaphors for encounters with the divine. Though people like Tennyson did not feel that they could any longer accept Christian orthodoxy, they were reluctant to pursue pure atheism. There was inside them a deep conviction that there was something transcendent. Not that they could name it, or give it a face – they could only grope towards it in the dark.

And then there was the experience of love and loss. Perhaps the Victorians in their time, before the wide acceptance of Darwinian views, were more ready to sanctify these powerful feelings. They seemed to come from some extra-phenomenal source; to be an intimation of immortality. We are more ready to see the pains and joys of human fellowship as demanded of us by our biological selves than as evidence of a holiness beyond us. Nevertheless, the popular sense of the ‘spiritual’ remains in many people, and permeates these moments at which heart is most evidently exposed. It is in our most intimate relationships that we feel most connected to the truth about who we are as individuals and most certain about our steps into the world; and we have the gratifying experience of being able to provide this for others. The reciprocity of human relationships take us beyond ourselves to ourselves.

Death remained the final, impermeable barrier. Poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries like John Donne certainly feared death as the curtailment of love and the rotting of the human body. Death was a demonic, personified figure who stalked his victims. Donne needs to draw on all the resources of his Christian faith to repudiate it in ‘Death be not proud’. But the grieving of the nineteenth century wails in a different key – one that we moderns more readily recognise. The loss is not felt as the result of being tyrannised by a sinister force. It is now a brute fact in a remorseless universe which is governed only by a God who remains unmoved at the plight of the creatures who experience it. To face death or to grieve is not be part of a dramatic struggle in which Mordor has temporarily got the upper hand. It is at least possible to express anger against that force. Death for a Tennyson and for we his twenty-first century descendants is sad and bewildering. It flaps its wings in the face of our confidence in human technological mastery of the world.

I falter where I firmly trod: Tennyson and doubt

Alfred Tennyson was indeed a striking young man, over six feet tall and powerfully built. The mass of his somewhat unkempt black hair was set upon a noble head. His face carried an intense expression of melacholy.

The son of a gloomy Lincolnshire clergyman, he arrived at Cambridge in 1827 already an accomplished and precocious poet. The Somersby rectory had been a dysfunctional household to say the least, with the eleven children largely left to amuse themselves by wandering around the local marshes and fens. If Tennyson was shy at first, his prodigious ability and intensity of personality soon attracted others; and he found some companionship in an intellectual society known as ‘The Apostles’.

In Tennyson’s second year at Cambridge, another young man arrived at the University who would become the kind of intimate friend that his childhood had lacked. His name was Arthur Hallam, the son of a leading historian and scholar, and in his own way remarkably gifted. In the cynicism of the times in which we live, we have lost the ability to talk about the power and the depth of friendship without hinting at some sexual overtone.

There was no hint of anything erotic in the relationship between the two men. That would be to miss just how profound the intimacy of their friendship became as a friendship. Indeed, Hallam became engaged to Tennyson’s sister Emily. They shared not in an amorous passion, but in the delights of intellectual discovery and in the vigorous discussion of any topic they could think of. They shared with one another their difficulty they found at maintaining religious belief and yet the sense of loss they felt in not believing. Criticism of the text of the Bible and scientific discoveries about the age of the earth had appeared to challenge the faith of many of the best minds at Cambridge; and Tennyson and Hallam were no different. Certainly nothing in Tennyson’s upbringing at the rectory would have commended Christian faith to him as anything but a burden to be borne.

The summer of 1833 began with Hallam spending time at the Tennyson home in rural Lincolnshire, in the English midlands. These were memorable weeks – a sweet time that Tennyson would always remember with some sense of pain because they were never to be repeated. In August, Hallam’s father took him on a journey to the European continent. On Sept 15th, Henry Hallam returned to his hotel in Vienna only to discover his son in an armchair, dead of a cerebral haemorrhage.

The blow this struck to Tennyson was overwhelming. His grandson, Sir Charles Tennyson, would later write:

The sudden extinction of his friend, with all his infinite capacity for affection and his brilliant promise, struck at the very roots of his will to live. Could it really be that all this great spiritual treasure was annihilated: that all human love and all man’s spiritual effort are but a momentary ripple on the ocean of eternity? Was the world wholly without purpose and man an irresponsible toy for the gigantic forces of Nature? If so, what value could there be in life?

If you have ever had a chance to walk about a Victorian graveyard you will be struck by the openness and even sentimentality with which they regarded death. We are not unlike them, in that terrible griefs affect us too. But we have less experience of them, and fewer words with which to express our loss. We are not given to the public elaboration of our feelings – we do not feel that anyone would be interested in our thoughts about the brevity of life and the nearness of our mortality.

But Tennyson was to make an art form of grieving. He was too sorrowed to attend the funeral, and did not visit Hallam’s tomb until after he was married. But he could not stop his pen:
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hapless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
Death in Life, the days that are no more.

The poem which made Tennyson’s career as a poet, In Memoriam A.H.H., is a lengthy reflection on the death of his friend which did not appear for seventeen further years. It is a poem of grief at the loss of a dear friend. But it also a poem about the pain of losing faith. Tennyson was one of the great doubters of his age. His was still very much a Christianised society, and in general traditionally orthodox Christian views held sway. However, developments in astronomy and geology had seemed to contradict Biblical cosmology as it had been traditionally understood. The world was not new, but rather very, very ancient. The universe was far more vast than had been previously imagined. It seemed less and less that humankind occupied anything like a significant place in that universe. If humankind felt small, and lonely, there was at the same time an optimism about human technological progress. This was the age of the industrial revolution, of the steam engine and the factory. People still wanted to believe, but wanted to do so in all sincerity given what they now knew about the world. Was there a way forward for them?
Added to this for Tennyson was the personal existential crisis occasioned by the loss of his friend. It seemed to be exactly the kind of random occurrence that would characterise a heartless universe. And yet, he was not ready to give up on faith entirely. Here’s a passage from In Memoriam:

I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world's altar-stairs
That slope thro' darkness up to God,

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.

All that is happening and all that has happened to him has led to uncertainty. His feet now ‘falter’, where once before he had been confident of his footfall upon the ground of faith. His ‘weight of cares’ – primarily his deep sense of loss for his friend – causes him to fall upon the ‘world’s altar-stairs’. The picture reminds me of the burden Christian carries in John Bunyan’s great Christian classic Pilgrim’s Progress. Only this burden is not the poet’s sin, but rather his ‘weight of cares’. The path to God (a stairway to heaven?) is shrouded in darkness. He is not yet ready to declare that this is a road to nowhere, to cite the Talking Heads. But all he can do is reach out his ‘lame hands of faith, and grope’. He can have no certainty about what he is reaching for, but only in the end a faint trust. The ‘dust and chaff’ that gathers suggests the dust to which Adam is told he will return in Genesis 3 on account of the curse. It is a mark of mortality and an intimation of death. The poet calls, not to a personal God who reveals himself in the traditional and Biblical sense, but rather to ‘what I feel is Lord of all’. Who or what is this dark divinity, shrouded in mystery and unknowability? He hopes for a hand to reach out to meet his groping arm, but with no confidence, however much he wishes it. What is the ‘larger hope’? He doesn’t quite know, other than to say that hope is, perhaps inexplicably, part of his experience too.

Tennyson became famous through this poem because its themes of grief, loss and doubt resonated deeply with his Victorian contemporaries. The twentieth century poet T.S. Eliot wrote of In Memoriam: 'It is not religious because of the quality of its faith, but because of the quality of its doubt.’ It was profound in the honesty with which it faced the most difficult and personal questions of all – to do with love and death.

Tennyson was unshaken in his conviction that his friend had lived on in some form; and he never

rejected belief in the existence of God. One of his last poems was the famous ‘Crossing the Bar’, an expression of hope at life’s end:

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.

But despite believing in the immortality of the soul and in his ‘Pilot’, it could never be said that he was an orthodox Christian believer in any sense. That conviction had long been shaken loose from him in his sorrows.

The atheists are right

My piece at Anglican Media this week

Seeking Common Ground

In debating the issue of same-sex marriage on Facebook recently, a journalist friend of mine stated that he had not found any ‘convincing non-religious arguments’ that would prevent a change to the marriage act.

‘Non-religious arguments’: it sounds like a reasonable requirement for any public discussion, doesn’t it? The argument goes something like this. I am certainly free to hold views based on entirely religious reasons; but when I step into the public square, I must shed these and speak in an entirely non-religious way if I am to convince. I might believe that left-handed people ought to be banned from public transport because an angel told me, but in seeking to convince others of this view I need to leave the angels behind and argue on an angel-free basis. Otherwise I am simply attempting to ‘impose my views on others’.

Former British PM Tony Blair encountered this resistance to public religious speech a number of times. He was once told by his spin doctor Alastair Campbell, when he was about to talk about his Christian faith in an interview with Vanity Fair, that ‘we don’t do God’. Later, when Blair said that he was ultimately answerable to God for commanding the invasion of Iraq, he was met with a withering barrage of attacks from media pundits who were alarmed that this might mean a somehow unjustifiable intrusion of the religious into the political at the highest level.

The alarmed reaction that Blair experienced is not because these ‘religious’ reasons are not convincing to many people. Plainly, religious reasons do have an enormous power to convince many people, even in the UK and Australia. Evoking the ‘image of God’, for example, is an extremely powerful component in an argument for social equality. It was heard frequently on the lips of Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the years of apartheid. When the leaders of the mainline churches speak, it is evident that they are given a hearing – if not always by the media, then certainly by the wider public. They can in fact openly appeal to the Bible or to theological ideas as part of their public utterances. If they want to get their point across to many people they need not, it seems, have one way of speaking in the cloister and another in the plaza .

It is not then because of lack of effectiveness that there is an appeal to trade only in ‘non-religious’ reasoning. Rather the opposite: the fear is that these religious arguments are all too effective. But it seems as if religious arguments are not open to the kind of scrutiny that non-religious ones are. They cannot convince the non-religious, and so they are imposed (if they can be) by majorities, or by noisy minorities. Secularists want to object that even if these reasons are compelling to lots of people they are illegitimately used as public reasons.

I think three particular questions are worth putting in response to the claim that public reasons ought always to be ‘non-religious’. First: is it in fact the case that the line between ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’ is as easy to determine as it sounds? An argument based on a passage of the Bible, for example, sounds as if it is obviously going to fall into the ‘religious’ (and therefore illegitimate) camp. But you could easily make a case that the Bible has an historic moral authority in Western culture, government and law quite apart from any sense that it is the revealed Word of God, as orthodox Christians hold. For example, an appeal to Jesus’ teaching to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ would be entirely acceptable to most people in a public debate. Would such an appeal amount to a ‘non-religious’ reason? Or is it ‘religious’?

Conversely, when a politician makes an appeal to ‘Australian values’ or to ‘the ANZAC spirit’, are these not ‘religious’ claims? When they speak in this way, they draw on a mythology about the past that is not subject to quantification or contradiction in an economic or scientific sense. They are appealing to a sense of civic piety that is arguably every bit as religious as the public utterances of a bishop. In fact, the original meaning of the word ‘religious’, which comes from the Latin word religare (‘to bind, fasten’), had everything to do with the sorts of public duties and civic values of Rome to which the citizenry were bound. ‘Religion’ in this sense is very much part of the public space.

Second: are ‘religious’ arguments so hermetically-sealed that they are not in fact open to challenge and counter-claim from those who do not share them? In many cases, the secular commentator feels quite happy to intervene in religious discourse. As an example we could cite the judgement frequently offered in the media that there are ‘fundamentalist’ Muslims or Christians, and that this is a bad form of religion. From a secular standpoint commentators feel that it is legitimate to criticise the wearing of the burqa or female circumcision (for example).
What’s more, arguments that religious people put forward are not usually as simplistic as ‘an angel told me’, despite the way in which they are often portrayed. Each of the Christian denominations, for example, is in possession of extensive traditions of reasoning from their foundational principles and dogmas – reasoning which is in principle available to be understood and debated by others, especially when it is used to make arguments in favour of this or that public policy. That is not to say that there won’t be significant and passionate disagreement on what constitutes a valid argument, but an argument is better than silence.

If the first two questions were an appeal to secularists to relax a bit about ‘religious’ reasoning into public debate, the third question is one for the Christian church: is it not the case that we owe our neighbours a ‘reason for the hope that is within you?’ (1 Peter 3:15). In other words: in public debate, victory isn’t everything. We could simply say: it is not worth discussing the matter, since enough people accept our point of view without explanation in any case. This is how a lot of politics gets done, unfortunately. I think this would be an unacceptable abuse of the public space. Secularists may not agree with the reasons that we put forward, but it honours the sanctity (if I may use such theological language!) of the process of public debate about our common life if we at least seek to persuade those with whom we disagree.

Overcome with emotion?

In October 2004, my mother-in-law died of breast cancer at the age of 62, not much more than a year after being diagnosed. Being the only member of the family experienced at public speaking – and indeed, at running funerals - I was quite willing to take on the duties of giving the eulogy at the funeral service when I was asked to by my father-in-law. In addition, since I was Jackie’s son-in-law and not directly related to her, I could be expected and indeed expected myself to maintain my composure in the delivery of the task in a suitably controlled tone, allowing the mourners to grieve in quiet privacy.

The tears, then, took me quite by surprise. I was not far into retelling Jackie’s life story – from her childhood in London to her arrival in Australia in the 1960s and her conversion to faith in Christ. At some point in this narrative, I was quite overcome by the occasion. My voice quavered; I could feel myself flushing red; and my face contorted itself. I could barely continue to read, because I couldn’t see the page in front of me. What words I could get out were squeezed out through my throat, and I found myself gasping for breath in between watery sobs. Afterwards my six year old son said to me ‘your face was all screwed up, Dad’.

I retell this story not because I am hoping to elicit sympathy but rather because of its ordinariness as an episode of the human emotions at work. The strong emotion seemed to come to me in a way that I couldn’t predict. It was as if there were a force outside of me working on me and causing me to lose self-control of my body in a way that was understandable but still within Anglo-Saxon culture somewhat shameful, especially for men. I am not normally conscious of doing things with my body that I don’t directly will. Yet in this moment, normal operations seemed to be suspended and the emotion took control of me.

It is an ordinary episode, but no less complicated for being so. It illustrates how troublesome emotions are in thinking cohesively about human being. This difficulty pans out in three overlapping ways, to do with agency, the body and reason.

The first difficulty is best explained by asking: in what sense was I an agent of my own sobs? Can I really speak in this way, of an emotion controlling me, since the emotion could not be anyone else’s? The sobs certainly emanated from my mouth and in my voice. They happened to and in my body. But I was not intending or willing to sob; in fact, I was willing the opposite. Yet I sobbed, and not some demon that had entered me, or some ventriloquist pretending to be me.
Second, at the moment of intense emotion, the human being seems to become almost alienated from his own body. Because these emotions are exhibited in such an obviously visceral fashion and yet carry with them unwanted consequences such as the stigma of cultural shame, the human subject may feel that ‘I’ am other from my physical body. There must be then a purer, non-physical form of ‘me’ – to which perhaps I can ascend once I am free of the untrustworthiness of my flesh. Even a more honourably perceived emotion like the feeling of loss shares enough in common with the more base desires of our bodies – feelings like hunger, sexual desire, need for sleep – that in experiencing it we still frequently experience this otherness from our bodies. Indeed, if I am to speak of some ‘higher’ set of emotions, where do I ‘feel’ them if not in my body?

Third, my perception of myself as a primarily rational creature is disturbed by the experience of strong emotion. But this is because of a hidden assumption that ‘reason’ and ‘emotion’ are discrete centres of my person, with reason the more nearly ‘spiritual’ or more distinctly human of the two. Yet my strong emotion was in fact tied to rational propositions about the occasion. I did not feel at all the same way about the funeral, at which I had ministered, for a woman in her early forties who had committed suicide even though the circumstances were arguably more tragic. I knew Jacky as my friend and mother-in-law, and as my wife’s mother and the granny of my own children. I could calculate what her loss would mean for us. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I felt about it.

These difficulties are enough to engender a philosophical, psychological and anthropological discussion of the emotions, such as philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum provides in her masterful work Upheavals of Thought – The Intelligence of the Emotions. The task of a theological anthropology, however, is to begin analysing questions like this in the light of a particular context, namely God. For a Christian anthropology, that context is framed by the themes of the creation of man and woman in the image of God on the one hand and the presence of sin in human life on the other. These two themes are set in tension with one another not just in the Biblical story, but in the existence of every human person. To what degree is this or that feature of my humanity reflect my likeness as a creature made in the divine image to the creator? Or is it in some way a result of that disorder of personhood that stems from my participation in human fallen-ness? But Christian anthropology will also speak of a destiny for human beings. The two themes of theological anthropology have their resolution however in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Theological anthropology, like all properly Christian theology, must speak an evangelical word, in which the image of God humankind is redeemed and perfected. It has, in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, a pattern to which human creatures will one day be conformed (Rom 8:29).

Returning to my troublesome emotions, then: was this event God’s will for creatureliness in me? If God has no ‘body, parts or passions’, and yet my emotions are an irreducibly physical component of me, ought I in seeking to be more like him look to some future beyond or without my body? Or must I think of myself dualistically, as most of the Christian tradition has done, having a distinct ‘soul’ for the purer emotions like joy and hope as well as a body for my appetites like hunger and thirst? Has ‘reason’, or the ‘rational soul’ a more exalted seat in me? What would an account of the human emotions look like in the light of the resurrection of the dead? In what sense can the three problematic aspects of human emotion – to do with agency, body and reason – be addressed from a theological perspective?

How to destroy a human being

In 2004 a series of images seeped out into the world’s media that seemed to emerge from the pit of hell itself. Abu Ghraib prison had been known, under the rule of Saddam Hussein, as the closed door behind which the very worst of his terrors was carried out. By now in the hands of the conquering US military, it was evident that the means and methods of prisoner treatment had not significantly changed. The pictures revealed that a programme of torture, rape, abuse and humiliation was part of the experience of daily life at Abu Ghraib under US control.
It is the unselfconsciousness of the images that is perhaps what is so disturbing about them. They look like a series of holiday snaps – the toothy grins and thumbs-up gestures of the US guards point to the camaraderie they were evidently feeling in their shared experience. They seem utterly detached from the prisoners whom, by complete contrast, lie prone and passive or cringe in terror. They recoil from the lunges of dogs. They stand masturbating while a female guard watches and points. They lie in naked pyramids of flesh. They hang by their chained wrists from the bars of their cells. In one image, a hooded Iraqi prisoner stands elevated on a box with his arms outstretched. His fingers are attached by metal clips to wires. He is clearly under the impression that the wires are electrified, and that he is about to experience extreme pain and possibly death.

Torture is usually the most secret of acts, usually concealed from the world by the thickness of prison walls. Torturers do not like to put their work on their public record. Though posing the prisoners for photographs as if they were some tourist attraction seemed to be part of the torture itself, it was also a naïve mistake. It revealed what was meant to be kept hidden. Here finally we could catch a glimpse of the torturers craft from the inside. It made the world witnesses to their work, and led to the shame and imprisonment of the perpetrators – if not those who ordered them to carry out a ‘hard’ interrogation.

There was also in the revelation of the photographs in the western media the shocking realisation that the torturers were not operating at the behest of a Saddam or a Mugabe or a Pinochet, but were the representatives of a modern, liberal western democracy. The self-image of westerners as enlightened and reasonable people was shattered. In fact, democracies have not ever ceased to deploy torture as a method. In his book Torture and Democray, US-Iranian political scientist Darius Rejali shows how even modern democracies have used torture – those regimes that describe themselves as humane and supportive of human rights. The terrible secret at the heart of democratic regimes is that even in the name of humanity we led to destroy the human – an act that is ultimately self-destructive. As the Vatican foreign minister Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo said: ‘The torture? A more serious blow to the United States than September 11, 2001 attacks. Except that the blow was not inflicted by terrorists but by Americans against themselves.’ Attempts to isolate the prison guards Lynndie England and Charles Graner from the military hierarchy and to depict them as uneducated and Southern were a predictable response from the media and the judiciary to the possibility of a general complicity in the acts that were depicted in the photographs.

As the Abu Ghraib photographs reveal, in torture bodily pain is only one aspect of the process and interrogation for information is only one of the goals. In fact, torture involves the deconstruction and dismemberment of the human person – which is both its overriding purpose and its means. In his remarkable book Torture and Eucharist US theologian Cavanaugh cites the case study of Arturo, a torture victim of the Pinochet regime in Chile. Arturo told his therapist: ‘I feel as though I were not myself’ (p. 41).

Thus, in torture we can observe in a chilling way a kind of negative anthropology: the torturer has to tacitly acknowledge what a human being is, in order to pull him apart. Evil speaks a kind of truth - in order to undo it, it has to acknowledge it. In torture we have a perverse revelation of the human in the attempt to make her disappear. The horror of torture shows us how vulnerable a human is, too: that our bodily life places us in the path of circumstances that may separate us from ourselves.

Is Ned Flanders a Violent Man?

For Australian readers, my piece 'Is Ned Flanders a Violent Man?' has been published in Quadrant magazine.