False Facts, True Myths

A Christian Epistemology

IN THE BEGINNING was Myth. Fact tried to speak plainly, but found itself wanting. The Beginning was small: so small, in fact, that it was really spaceless. It was a nothing-space, a square with no sides, a quark folded in on itself thousandfold, and then a hundred thousand times more; indeed folded as many times as there are atoms in the Himalayas. Naturally, then, to enter the Beginning, one had to crouch. But some bodies are harder than others; some more rigid, brittle, risking shattering altogether should they be forced into tight spaces. So Fact would have to wait. Myth, however, had long since drunk the potion that allowed it to shrink into the spaceless size, and so was able to step into the Beginning, to look around, and to wave back to Fact from behind the invisible mirror, to explain what it was like on the inside. Fact, however, could make little sense of it all: the kind waving looked like mad flailing, and the mouthed words looked like rabid frothing. The sideless mirror distorts these sorts of things, you see. So Fact concluded that Myth must be deluded, and insisted on clambering inside itself. But Fact had clearly forgotten that it had to wait: to wait until the explosive heat of the arche had cooled into still figures; even iced over into sheer immutability, from which universal laws might be abstracted: those firm, solid, metallic cogs that Fact liked to play with. But hold Fact too close to the sun and it begins to melt. And ours, I fear, is an Icarian age.

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IN the spirit of my previous pieces on Christian historicity and faith, I want to extend my thought a little further with regard to some of the fairly basic considerations that one has to make if one wishes to simultaneously a) be Christian in modernity and b) think critically. Historical study of religion—and in this specific case, of the life of Jesus of Nazareth—tends to reveal data that are generally, and perhaps unsurprisingly, taken to be the hemlock of many a religious faith. There is simply no honest appraisal of the data that allows us to avoid distinguishing the Jesus of history from the Jesus of theology: we cannot equate the two without suffering from benighted ignorance or militant dogmatism. This information is typically not readily available to Christian congregations, who are instead fed a feeble diet of selective, uncritical historical studies (if any), washed down with the threat of falling ‘outside the fold’ should one dare to look too closely at the evidence provided by history. Those who attempt to reflect on what we do know about the life of Jesus and its obvious incongruence with much of what is dictated by Church tradition are menaced by accusations of heresy, being cast out, expelled from the warm safety of the in-group that is their religious community.

Within better-read circles, the accusation that we dare to brave is generally that of ‘liberalism’; a catch-all condemnation suggesting that we have given up the faith for the world, or capitulated in our dedication to divine truth, should we attempt to take seriously the historical data that critical scholarship reveals. But I must be forgiven for a somewhat fatigued dismissiveness toward those who employ ‘liberal’ as a general theological pejorative, for the simple fact that it almost always betrays an ignorance of the reason people become liberals. It is in most cases not a matter of pure political persuasion—although I do appreciate this is on the rise in contemporary liberal Christianity—but, at least in the case of names such as Schleiermacher, Bultmann, Ritschl, Troeltsch, or Tillich, because these liberals engaged the historical data, and concluded that we cannot blindly equate the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth with the Jesus of Christianity. That they might be critiqued for this reason alone is a symptom of a certain unthinking chauvinism which derives more pride from falling within the vaguely demarcated borders of an ‘orthodoxy’ than actually attempting to reckon with the Truth itself.¹ Critical thinking, in many such camps, is applied until it hurts one’s feelings, and then suddenly we begin to settle for at times appallingly anemic arguments. The chasm that often holds between the ingenuity of theological innovation and the indigency of historical nous in many (brilliant) Christian minds continues to astound me. Thinkers who would otherwise engage in deeply sophisticated theology and apologia seem to revert to the most appallingly shoddy arguments when obliged to defend the indefensible. But one must be sympathetic, because not even the most facund rhetorician can fashion a good argument for the indefensible.

The paranoia which feeds this cognitive dissonance most likely arises from a perfectly valid personal intuition: that to have one’s beliefs about such a lofty and far-reaching topic as Ultimate Reality come under threat from the dusting brush of an archaeologist is a rather bathetic predicament. It is a contrast of near Pythonesque comedy: the suggestion that the glorious systematics of Aquinas’ oeuvre, or the profound inner reflections of Augustine’s texts might suddenly topple into astounding irrelevance at the discovery of a decrepit book at the rear of an antique library, or a sand-swept papyri bundle in a Lebanese cave. This has always been a precarious balancing act in Christian theology: remarkable and undeniably brilliant philosophical innovations seem to rest upon a very particular and, as modernity has seen, alarmingly fragile set of foundational historical convictions, which risk having the whole edifice tumble like Jericho at a singular contradiction. It is this strange feature of the religion which I want to consider here, again with a refusal to pull punches in order to maternally safeguard the prior, precious convictions of orthodoxy. (I recall someone saying something about the truth setting us free. The name escapes me).

What I hopefully delineated in those earlier two pieces was that we cannot simply equate whatever we Christians mean by ‘faith’ (pistis/fides) with what the historian means by ‘history’. That is, if X is said to have occurred in year Y at location Z, the debate over whether or not we think this is the case is a historical debate, one that must (in the vein of Husserl) ‘bracket’ all theological or religious interest in the topic. This does not preclude that event—irrespective of the outcome of that historical debate—from bearing immense religious significance, and being the determinate substance on which a faith is founded. It is simply to say that cognitive assent to a propositional claim—in this case, the claim that X has ‘occurred’, that it ‘was the case’—is not religious faith. This (rather basic) principle achieves two things for us off the bat: first, it ensures to a greater degree the integrity of historical studies by diminishing the number of Christians whose thumbs have flushed completely white from pressing down so firmly on their investigative scales. We are now free to, hypothetically, discover some pre-100 AD, altered edition of the Gospel of Matthew in a circumspect cave without the interference of certain neurotic authorities.² We can be good historians and try to unearth the history of an event with as little in the way of dogmatic bias as we can muster, with no regard for the ramifications these discoveries might hold for established orthodoxies or canons. Second, it obliges us to formulate a more sophisticated conception of the relation between historical events and religious faith. We see more keenly that even if we were absolutely correct in our historical assessment of the Jesus event, we would not be speaking in any meaningful sense of ‘religion’ or ‘faith’ unless we made a transition away from the literal content of that occurrence; unless we began to speak of its theological resonances, its spiritual implications, its ethical injunctions. That is, no event—whether natural or supernatural—can serve as a religious event unto itself: we are obliged to approach it as such in order to reveal that depth within it, and can do this to a greater or lesser extent. Indeed, on this principle we become a great deal more sceptical of those who claim to be engaged in ‘religion’ and yet seem to reduce that religion to nothing but a set of cognitive, axiomatic propositions protected with an impassioned, acerbic ferocity. Simply having cognitive access to a supernatural, even revelatory historical event, or the tradition which seeks to live out that event in a religious manner, does not guarantee that one thereby relates to it religiously, and so actually ‘does’ religion in any substantial manner. To be religious, we require a deeper reflection on what it means to move toward ‘God’, ‘the Truth’, ‘Ultimate Reality’, or whatsoever designation one has for the final object of religious thought and life.

There was another important element in those previous pieces: in appropriately separating faithful belief and historical study, we by no means allow for a subordination of the former to the latter. Quite the opposite. After all, when we have established what historical study is—a compendium of recordable facts, at best a pursuit of the now ossified trace of a once dynamic thing—we discover in review that we are looking something that obviously does not represent life. We do not live like this: no human being could possibly be understood as the enumeration of mere quanta concerning the material events of their lives. Human beings are to be fallen in love with, to be hated and despised, feared and revered, wondered at and dwelt upon. This by its very nature implies a certain endlessness to the depth of life’s mystery: it is precisely the kind of conceptual closure promised by a mere ‘fact’ or ‘datum’ that represents an abstraction antithetical to actual experience. A person is never merely an artifact comprehensible by pure description, a fossil whose reality is nothing but the measurable imprint it leaves in the record of another’s cognition. We as conscious beings are always already participating in higher degrees of reality through the mental life: through language, semantics, reason, art, relationships, ethics, and much else we are constantly transcending the narrow, arid ambit of a purely historical study and the apparatus it must by nature employ. It is quite impossible to say that we ultimately ‘know’ someone alive today, even our own spouses:³ thus it is ridiculous to say we can know someone who lived two millennia ago, whose concerns, habits, and perspectives now stand so far removed from us as to almost have vanished from culture completely.

I am obviously drawing heavily upon Henri Bergson here. Bergson’s most brilliant contribution is in his prescient reminder—during an age of logical positivism and common-sense realism—that life is absolutely not a mere totality of quantifiable, inert material units. Bergson admonishes this line of thinking apropos the free will debates: there, we abstract some notion of the past and subsequently pontificate on whether these clearly delineated parts—subject, choices, decision, desiderata, etc.—allow for the magical insertion of ‘freedom’ as an extraneous feature. That this is impossible, and that we always end up with determinism once this picture is painted, is indication that we have gone wrong in our method; that we have made a leap across a qualitative crevasse, transitioning from one category to another by moving from organic freedom to cadaverous objects.⁴

In this vein, I do not believe that we as Christians (which is to say, as religious, approaching these events with faith) should be looking to ground our relationship to Jesus in the scholarly attempts to reconstruct the ‘historical Jesus’ as a coherent collage. Much like the hard sciences, it is vital to ensure that historical study has its own purview, its own sandpit to play in, from which it can provide all the data that is valuable to us as historians. This is not a diminishment, only clarification of its ken (again, Bergson insisted on the practical value of abstraction—only lamented its incontinent overuse).⁵ Historical study is true to the extent that it plays its own game, and sticks to its own rules. But we cannot forget that when we represent a historical event, we are doing only that: creating a representation. A qualitative divide still resides between it and its referent. To say that we have exhausted the realm of ‘history’ by means of historical study is the same as saying that we have actually experienced Niagara Falls because we have seen it in a particularly lucid photograph. As is so common in modernity, the third-person, detatched, ‘objective’ detail of a list of material facts is presumed to be an exhaustive account of life. It is just a shame that, for all its copious minutiae, it makes a slight omission: namely, life itself.

We are thus provoked to a change of epistemology. After all, if we have made our due clarifications apportioning to each magisterium their appropriate purview, we should feel free to—as religious people—wave a kind goodbye to any ‘methodology of the abstract’ (if you will), such as hard sciences, mathematics, or historical study, wishing them well but acknowledging that they cannot possibly be (without any major additions or alterations) the realm where religious truth is ultimately discovered. That will have to involve a dissolution of all that subjects the world to an illusory fixity, and allow for a ‘quickening’ of the frigidity of atomic units in order to open them onto their true difference, their ceaseless mutability as experienced in our durée, our conscious subjectivity. As one scholar of Bergson puts it:

But if we let go of these spatial and visual images, what do we perceive? If we make the effort, if we listen carefully, it is possible to hear a series of overlapping sounds in which each pulsation is qualitatively unique, and yet is also intrinsically connected to the other pulsations of sound, sounds that have no definite and fixed spatial location, sounds that are both outside and inside us, simultaneously, sounds that have no clear-cut boundaries—sounds that are a continuous, interconnected, yet ever changing, whole.⁶

We must seek in religion to become attentive not to a set of facts, but to the truth of life itself: to listen ‘to the uninterrupted humming of life’s depths’.⁷ In so doing, once we clarify that abstract, third-person data cannot possibly report anything more than preliminary, utile but ultimately deeply limited simulacra of life, and that the true substance of what life is invariably escapes the delimiting boundaries of axiom or logic, then we are moved to a vital asseveration: myth can be and very often is ‘truer’ than fact.

As outrageous as this may sound, I insist it’s far less controversial than first glance suggests. After all, if we have admitted of a transcendence which always exceeds any conceptual delimitations (which we must in order to avoid occluding lived experience), then by definition we must look beyond them. Concepts must become ‘gestures’ toward a truth they cannot possess, and the ordered precision of element-based thinking—again, of mathematics, of classical logic, even (forgive my bias) of analytic philosophy, all of which function in total dependence on the law of identity and non-contradiction—must ultimately concede their inadequacy to speak to anything truer to durée, anything that moves beyond spatialised, geometric abstraction in order to engage life proper. So rather than A = A, we have A = A, B, C, ad infinitum, because all signifiers profess their insufficiency to articulate the impossible by passing that buck to all other signifiers, and so on it goes incessantly. When we begin to imbue our philosophy with things like metaphors, symbols, or wordplay, then we begin to transition toward this kind of interconnected openness, which is symptomatic of a sensitivity to transcendence: not to the end of destabilising or problematising our ability to speak truthfully, but to its abundant proliferation.

The reader can be assured of my sobriety here.⁸ I at no point (as I have signalled from the outset) believe this involves a discarding, let alone repudiation, of the strictures of ‘fact-based’ abstraction. It would be nothing short of chaos were we to suggest that anyone can spin off into wild mythologising at the slightest prompt, claiming that the inner ‘truth’ of Juniper the cat eating her breakfast, or the Fall of Rome, or Trent’s corner taken quickly are nothing at all to do with their actual happening, and that the demarcations by which we separate them are somehow irrelevant. As mystics of all stripes have insisted, we may cautiously take leave of but never entirely abandon the surface ‘letter’ of Scripture, what it simply says on the page, what our readings ad litteram reveal. Without these palisades we would spiral into an anarchical whirlpool of private practice and belief, shifting at the whims of personal velleity, and the contemplative path would become ultimately indistinct from late stage capitalist consumerism.

That being said, it is also obviously the case that we must indeed be willing to ask ourselves what the ‘inner meaning’ or ‘truth’ of all literal events really are, and be prepared to acknowledge that, almost by necessity, they will involve a motion away from what literally occurred. It is here that we are presented with the appropriateness of myth and, more broadly, art. That is, after all, precisely what art critics or scholars do: look inside a painting, or a drama, or a composition, and draw out for the audience exactly what the ‘truth’ or ‘meaning’ of this creation might be. It would be absurd to say that King Lear has no relevance whatsoever beyond the mere mechanical interrelation of material objects: props, curtains, and the sound of certain booming or weeping thespians echoing tremulously in ears of the Globe’s standing audience. Michelangelo’s David is materially nothing but a hunk of marble adorned by some choice chiselling, yet its beauty utterly outstrips such a meagre, menial description. The very aim of art is to conjure in us evocations and resonances that transcend the particular elements involved, and so speak to something greater: whether beauty, sublimity, a certain mood, a moral-political exhortation, catharsis, or even mind-numbing escapism.

Further, I see no persuasive reason why this same attitude cannot, indeed, should not, be applied to real life. After all, much art takes the form of roman à clef which really does nothing other than replicate lived experience. Are we to say that the creative work deserves a plethora of interpretive acumen, rewarding original and deft insights in the English classroom, whilst the other—cordoned off as the ‘real world’—is to be rigidly exempt from such analytic consideration? Why is it that we would have free license to link Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man to themes of modernity and technological alienation, but fail to do so when we endure our own insufferable jobs, or stand shadowed by edifices in our own cities which far outsize the Crystal Palace that originally inspired suspicion in that author? Indeed, if this division did really hold then what would the point be of political works of art, which expressly want to have us recognise those artistic patterns, images, and narratives in real-world events? How would we even begin to classify the likes of Brecht’s plays, with their Verfremdungseffekt jolting the audience back into the real world with a blunt and uncouth prompt to political action, shattering all theatric etiquette by punching an irreparable hole in the fourth wall?

And even if we were (somehow) to attempt to hold onto this elusive membrane between art and world, we would clearly be doing so in contradiction of how we really live. Our minds are constantly at work analysing the events of our lives as they unfold, calculating to the best of our limited ability which actions might produce the desired effects, all by merit of being implicated within an economy of intentional and rational deliberation. This is just as passive as it is active: when we see a husband yelling at his wife we may suddenly recall our own father’s mistreatment of our mother; when an old song plays at the coffee shop we perceive our childhood in pellucid nostalgia; when the winter weather greys and the night hastens to four o’clock our mood falls in line in dutiful pathetic fallacy. These literary interpretations—these ‘readings’ of life—leap from us, cut through us, without any need to deliberately don a critical cap. Everything in the world is a symbol abounding in association, to which we are capable of opening ourselves if only we pay sufficiently close attention. We are always already ‘reading’ the world, trying to discern in it not merely the bland detail of ‘what happened’ (though, once more, this always has a place) but rather the deeper and immeasurably richer subject of ‘what it means’.

Fact functions exceedingly well within its own realm, and myth performs fairly poorly when judged according to that metric: hence my real preference for Richard Dawkins over any old creationist. But it would be thoroughly ridiculous to make such a judgment, because this is never the function of myth, if indeed ‘function’ is an appropriate word at all. A truly artistic disposition toward the world would involve, without neglecting the value of fact, an appreciation that myth’s richness (and ultimate priority) is derived not from any historicity or concision in its claims, but quite the opposite: from its profuse, prodigious, and delightfully elusive suggestiveness. As with all good things, this has a universal horizon: Schelling is at his most Romantic—and, dare I say, his most religious—when he construes ‘the Universe in the form of art, and the philosophy of art [as] the science of the All in the form or potence of art’.⁹

So how does one ‘read’ the literal-historical events of Jesus’ life? How does one construe Jesus ‘in the form of art’? Well, if by this we mean turning our attention from abstract historical facts to the inner ‘meaning’ of those events, then we approach the gospel accounts in complete intolerance of any literalism: not only because it is obviously wrong, but because it risks disastrously attenuating the full ambit of what we might find as readers; thoroughly mutilating our hermeneutic capacities. Rather, in light of the foregoing, my contention would be that the generally accepted historical advantage of the Synoptics over John does nothing to speak of an advantage in their revelation of the truth. I think it reasonable to say that what we see in John—with all its grand theological speculations, its prevenient predictions, its garrulous discourses placed in the mouth of an otherwise fairly laconic Prophet—is an attempt to grapple with the truth of what those earliest Christians saw, and to do so by means of a blatant and even happy revelry in myth. At its most extreme, I think it even necessary to say that in order to extricate the truth from an event, including or perhaps especially the life of Jesus, we may well have to mythologise it.

This throws us directly into theology and tradition. Or, more generally, it provides us a helpful paradigm for reflecting on what the relevance of theology and tradition might be in relation to the historical events of Jesus’ life, pushing us to an attitude that prioritises the apophatic over the cataphatic, the open horizon over the closed border: in short, that is, our theological and doctrinal concepts become artistic. After all, in John there is no question of neatly separating what is ‘mythologised’ from what is ‘theologised’. The two are not distinguishable categories in that gospel, because John’s author sees, just the same as the authors of Gnostic texts such as the Gospel of Thomas or The Wisdom of Jesus the Christ, the innovation of new discourses to be the formulation of a truer, ‘inner’ sagacity, the esoteric doctrine that was not to be grasped by those more exoterically oriented: the classic division between ‘what he said’ and ‘what he really meant’.¹⁰

The typical Christian posture toward these sorts of apocrypha has been one of haughty rightness: these documents are replete with ridiculous, unbelievable tales and logia whilst our gospels are obviously historical. But scholarship has revealed a) that the canonical gospels also want for historicity in places and b) that the competition between alternative ‘Jesus traditions’ in the earliest movements after his death was just as much a battle of ideology as it was a battle of inheritance. After all, the canonical gospels belong to the ancient genre of bios, which means they never intended to record Jesus’ life as would a contemporary biographer. These were writers imbued with kerygmatic resolve; looking to win converts, to spread urgent news in advance of the world’s imminent end. I vaguely recall someone rightly saying that the gospels are closer in genre to The Communist Manifesto than they are to any contemporary biography on Napoleon Bonaparte or Steven Gerrard. The idea that we could easily measure out the value of competing gospels and sort them into apocrypha and canon based on historicity alone is a false one. Naturally, maintaining the authority of an authentic Jesus would have been a concern for those establishing early canons, but this was always deeply tied to the content of the documents, and so texts were scrutinised according to the worldviews of those assessing them. The difficulty, of course, is that the people of Mediterranean antiquity did not all have consonant worldviews, and thus it is hard to see a Stoic or Neoplatonist accepting a Gnostic text as ‘true to Jesus’—irrespective of whether it actually was. The impulse would be to reject it on account of Jesus being portrayed as saying something one thinks to be clearly wrong. We do exactly the same now, of course: when we hear of Jesus murdering fellow children in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas we impulsively deride it as unhistorical, but only because it contradicts our present convictions of what Jesus was like, based on the texts we do accept. I wonder how we would react were it suddenly revealed that Infancy was a gospel penned earlier than Mark or Q.

But I do not lament this. The myths we accept about Jesus are driven by theological affiliation, precisely because we take him to be a figure overflowing with transcendence, a symbol of immense excess, an artistic entity par excellence who provokes a multitude of readings and thus must always call upon a ‘mytho-theology’ for reflection. Although this can make arduous work for the critical historian, this messy interweaving of symbol is the sign of a salubrious religious life, and represents the way in which the existence of one Nazarene Jew might actually become the foundation of a faith: rather than, once more, merely a locus of truculently guarded historical convictions. After all, what do we Christians do in our liturgies and traditions if not just this? Catholics emphasise ‘Stations’ of the cross: as a purely historical event, this does not perfectly correspond to the contingent procession of a beaten, emaciated rustic as he stumbles helplessly through the hot, heckling streets of Jerusalem. Yet we make the whole affair frightfully poetic: we take time to meditate on what each station might represent, to pray before carefully carved icons or other deft depictions of the fourteen stages. That is, we build a religion around what is otherwise historical; clearly embellishing and freely mythologising, putting Jesus in this pose in one painting, giving his face this tender sorrow in the next, all for a devotional effect. Again, we return to the conviction that myth speaks to something ‘higher’ than mere fact, that it reflects a universal truth that cannot be contained in those limited strictures. The entirety of church and thus Christian life gyrates about these subtle or large mytho-theologisations: sacraments such as the Eucharist and baptism are first and foremost anamnesis of gospel events; the ecclesiastical calendar similarly organises itself according to gospel narrative. In all things we are drawn into the pattern of a life that does not profess its importance in perfect historicity, but rather abounds in mythological associations that look to repeat, to reformulate, to see anew what this life means rather than what it merely was.

Plenty more writing is needed to substantiate what I’m suggesting here, of course. But I might close with a fleeting intimation of what this could mean for a doctrinal sine qua non like the incarnation. Just as I said before with regard to the claim that ‘Jesus is God’, the suggestion that the incarnation could be expressed in purely historical terms, even whilst being a notion thoroughly grounded in history, is simply false. But if our world is embroiled in this Enlightenment hermeneutic—especially in our late modern hour, with the increased mastery (Gestell, in Heidegger’s nomenclature)¹¹ of technology over nature, and the constant measurement of humans in terms of their productive value—then I do not think it is impossible to suggest that the incarnation, at least as humanity has thus far received and conceived it, is not yet real; not yet clearly seen. So long as we engage the world as though it were a set of discrete, static objects, rather than the ever-mutable, unified durée of our subjective experience, we remain in something of a dream, a hazy māyā from which we are yet to fully awake. Similarly, so long as we (as indicated in Mt. 25:35-46) fail to ‘read’ the world in such a way as to see the visage of Christ in all people and all things, to see all aspects of creation totally absorbed into the pattern and form of God’s love, then in a real sense we have not yet seen Christ properly. There is precedent for this in Maximus the Confessor, whom Jordan Daniel Wood has recently shown to have held creation and incarnation to be one¹² whilst also believing that the world as it is now is ‘not yet creation’.¹³

To say that incarnation as we understand it presently is not yet the full nine yards is not to make any claim of insufficiency on the part of God’s revelation, of course, only on human ability to grasp what we have been shown. But if we Christians think that what we see in Christ is the complete revelation of God, then we have to see this as a piercing cockerel crow in the middle of our slumber; something that, as we have not yet fully awoken, we cannot fully understand, and so cannot expect to see as fully explicated in the terms and mediums we have at present, especially historical reconstruction. This would be my primary argument both in light of this piece, in terms of how we can understand the incarnation without reducing it to history (because what would this be but assimilating the alarm into the logic of the dream, domesticating it—against its very purpose—to soothe our slumber some more?), and also against Christian exclusivists, who again use the logic of the dream in order to draw conclusions about the waking world; who try to set Jesus Christ against other religions in order to negate or preclude them, without yet knowing what Jesus Christ actually means for the ‘all’ in which we are told he will become manifest, what God at last overflowing in history will actually mean for the relations between faiths.¹⁴

This falls in line with Hart’s thesis in Tradition and Apocalypse. I do not think that orthodoxy’s end has to resemble its beginning, at least on the surface of things. It cannot be, for historical and metaphysical reasons, an attempt to establish perfect symmetry or constancy; at least not without forcing the religion into a Procrustean bed, limiting its diversity to a singular metanarrative. So, if to know the Son fully is to know him as ‘all in all’, then this is something that will necessarily alter and develop onward from the original and specific event of his incarnational arrival in history (but by no means as a negation or even a Hegelian ‘sublation’ of that specificity; only a true growth, as Jesus explicitly says in his mustard seed analogy (Mk. 4:30-32)). Wood suggests with Maximus that ‘All of us… are “perpetually fleeing” paradise, always making Adam fall. In our naïveté we encounter phenomena and imagine them to be what they are not—sufficient in themselves’.¹⁵ It is a misreading of reality that leads to sin; the attempt to make it sufficient unto itself, believing that we are capable of enclosing it within the horizon of the conceptual, freezing it down to those atomic units which (such is the primary narrative of modernity) might make us masters of nature and world, finally replacing slain God with triumphant man.

I think it perfectly plausible, then—indeed, even necessary for religious coherence—to understand Christianity as a continual process of discovering the meaning of Jesus Christ, of continually rereading him in and through the lens of each epoch, a perpetual ressourcement which returns us to the ‘texts’ of our religion (which includes everything from Jesus’ person to the socio-historical milieu to, well, the actual texts themselves). Tradition may thus be envisaged as less like a treasure trove about which the Church lays curled like a miserly dragon, and more like the kind of repeated, and so constantly reinvigorated, production of Shakespeare, Sophocles, or Goethe throughout the ages. Antigone emanates from the concerns and vantages of Athenian antiquity: Anouilh’s reproduction in occupied Paris inevitably results in an injection of overwhelming novelty that in turn reveals a plethora of profound, original valences—precisely as it makes a return to old material. Similarly, not just orthodoxy at large but even every particular Christian life may well be understood as a re-production of Christ’s own in a new idiom, a discovery of Godhood in a personal journey to divinisation, not accessible to generations past or even present because of the sheer singularity of every human life. It is this which allows the Christ-event to reverberate about the annals of history, to unfold in ever new forms as God reveals himself afresh in each age, a continous re-announcement because we do not yet see Him ‘face to face’ (1 Cor. 13:12), given—evidently—we still toil under the very same darkness that originally ‘comprehended him not’ (Jn. 1:5). And, just as any attempt to unveil the truth of an artwork in literary criticism is by nature inexhaustive, so too is this reverberation limitless, realising an infinite diversity with creation finally deified, the divine light entirely unclouded. Even in that restoration, following Gregory of Nyssa, we persist in endless new sightings, immersions in ever greater depths of beauty, revelling in joyful gratitude as we are ‘transformed from glory to glory’.¹⁶

In sum, I think that Christian tradition’s self-understanding must be one that sees itself in the process of waking up. Of slowly dispelling māyā; of reacting, through the heavy turning of the centuries, to that bizarre cockerel crow that shook us long ago in the figure of that crucified prophet, whom we only later (in a slight nudge toward arousal) came to see as perfect divinity in perfect humility. Certainly, I think the preponderance of the Church’s history has unfortunately been a process of turning over and returning to slumber: even slapping that loud cruciform alarm on its head a few times to try and silence it. It has wanted to and arguably succeeded in carrying on with the dream, business as usual, the same old imperialism and colonialism and brutal dominion that it originally so disdained in the Rome that once persecuted it. But we know that sleep is not a perfectly mediated process, with all things unfolding toward their end in neat dialectical symmetry. Within sleep one jolts and starts, stops and freezes, sometimes hastily regresses into unconsciousness. But history also might, at any moment, burst awake in a cold sweat, suddenly struck with a clarity glimpsed through one baffling character of its dream, horrified at the nightmares that plagued its mind as it overslept; thankful at last to see clearly again.

1. Not that I agree with all that such thinkers say, by any means. A great deal of their readings have already aged horribly. Only that if your first response to a consideration of historical data is to brandish the smear of ‘liberal’, then it is best you take some time for self-reflection.

2. John Dominic Crossan, ‘Our Faces in Deep Wells: A Future for Historical Jesus Research’, in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, eds. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), 308.

3. Ibid., 293. On this page Crossan insists on ‘retiring’ the scholarly pursuit for the ‘real Jesus’. This is absolutely right, as long as we know that we are vacating that space for Christians.

4. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will : An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F.L. Pogson (New York: Routledge, 2013).

5. G. William Barnard, Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson (New York: State University of New York Press, 2011), 72.

6. Barnard, Living Consciousness, 11.

7. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), 176.

8. Not that I would take accusations of inebration as anything other than complimentary. And by ‘reader’ I almost certainly mean Ebtsam here, who may well have had a heart attack reading these paragraphs.

9. F. W. J. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, trans. Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 16.

10. ‘The temptation to stretch the concept to include the writer’s notion of what the apostle or the Lord would say in the given circumstances was all but irresistible…. It would appear that the practice in the first instance was to attribute the words purporting to come from Jesus to the risen Lord, speaking to his church by his spirit…. This is the intention of most if not all of the pseudonymous writings. It is true that the Synoptic Gospels may not be altogether blameless in this respect’. (A. Q. Morton and J. McLeman, The Genesis of John (Edinburgh: The Saint Andrew Press, 1980), 150-1).

11. See Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (London: Harper Perennial, 1977).

12. Jordan Daniel Wood, The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022), 56.

13. Ibid., 168.

14. And, as I’ve argued here, I think this is something that will inevitably develop toward the horizon of something at least akin to religious pluralism. The nature of God as transcendent of and immanent in all things simply precludes exclusivistic division. Mystical union is precisely that: unifying.

15. Wood, Whole Mystery, 167.

16. See Jean Daniélou, S.J., From Glory to Glory: Texts from Gregory of Nyssa’s Mystical Writings, trans. Herbert Musurillo, S.J. (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995), 52.