Modern radical theology
From David Lodge’s novel Paradise News. The protagonist is a theologian who was once a believer but is not any more.
‘He sat at his desk and took out his notes on a book about process theology he was reviewing for Eschatological Review. The God of process theology, he read, is the cosmic lover. “His transcendence is in His sheer faithfulness to Himself in love, in His inexhaustibility as lover, and in his capacity for endless adaptation to circumstances in which his Love may be active.” Really? Who says? The theologian says. And who cares, apart from other theologians? Not the people choosing their holidays from the travel agent’s brochures…It often seemed to Bernard that the discourse of much modern radical theology was just as implausible and unfounded as the orthodxy it had replaced, but nobody had noticed because nobody had read it except those with a professional stake in its continuation.’ [p 29]
That’s good, isn’t it? The quoted bit sounds exactly like Terry Eagleton drivelling away about his left foot and Chekhov and toasters, and the commentary sounds exactly like – well, me, asking how the hell Terry Eagleton knows all that about ‘God’ and what it’s supposed to mean anyway.
And the good news is that now somebody has noticed, lots of people have, because Terry Eagleton and Karen Armstrong and Madeleine Bunting and other windbags have been telling us about it.
A bit more, later on. He’s musing on the Penny Catechism and reciting it to himself then gets creative.
‘When did you cease to believe in this God?
Perhaps when I was still training for the priesthood. Certainly when I was teaching at St Ethelbert’s. I can’t remember, exactly.
You can’t remember?
Who remembers when they stopped believing in Father Christmas? It’s not usually a specific moment – catching a parent in the act of putting your presents at the end of the bed. It’s an intuition, a conclusion you draw at a certain age, or stage of growth, and you don’t immediately admit it, or force the question, is there a Father Christmas? into the open, because secretly you shrink from the negative answer – in a way, you would prefer to go on believing in Father Christmas…
Are you equating belief in God with belief in Father Christmas?
No, of course not. It’s just an analogy. We lose faith in a cherished idea long before we admit it to ourselves. Some people never admit it.’ [p 47]
Quite.
*adds Lodge’s book to his Amazon wish list*
David Lodge is quite an ally in the fight against fashionable nonesense. His novel _Small World: An Academic Romance_ is a wonderful send-up of English professors and literary criticism in the form of an Arthurian legend.
I am so envious that you are reading Paradise News because I forgot that I wanted to read it. Maybe I’m envious that you didn’t forget that you wanted to read it. Reading David Lodge novels kept me from losing my sanity in graduate school at Euphoric State University. Hahahahahahahaha!!!
I would never equate belief in Father Christmas/Santa Claus with belief in God. As fictional characters go, Father Christmas is a lovely fellow – bringing prezzies to children and flying around with cute furry animals with the occasional glowing nose. Father Christmas would never do anything so crass as ordering one desert tribe to slaughter the members of another tribe and take their land and women, or declaring half the human race to be chattel to the other half.
Yes, belief in Father Christmas must eventually be put away with other childish things, but ought to be discarded reluctantly, with fond memories and perhaps a twinge of regret, as a favored toy or game. Belief in the overwhelming majority of gods that humans have ever invented ought to be cast out with extreme prejudice as appalling moral filth, unfit for human minds.
Of course, the “God” of process theology leaves behind all that nastiness: But what is left? Words, words, words. No on believes in the “God” of modern theologians, least of all the theologians themselves. Their “God” isn’t something one believes in, it something one talks about – endlessly and obscurely, in circles and whorls but never straight lines. Such a “God” is not an object of worship or belief, but a purely grammatical object; while capable of occupying the space of a noun in sentences, it is a reference without a referent, a symbol signifying nothing,
And now I’ve gone and waxed poetic. What am I supposed to do with a shiny, slick poetic?
The idea that Santa does not exist is a naive unsophisticated view that asks the wrong question. We should instead say that he is the condition for the coming into being of presents.
Yes, I agree with Ken. The puerile swaggering of people on this site who don’t know any Clausian theory beyond the vulgar truisms parroted by second raters in the senior common room is pathetic. The idea that a devotion to Santa Claus constitutes a ‘belief’ is nonsense. Santa is not an explanatory device in competition with other theories, more or less contested, as to the appearance of solsticial gifts, but rather a way of being, a relational mode that, through the creation of a powerful mythos, allows the gift receiver, in the act of receiving, to position him or herself in an infinitely rich ambivalence of love-experienced-as-owning. This relational mode has a depth and signifcance that is far beyond the idea of ‘knowledge’ that two-a-penny rationalists and champions of ‘enlightenment’ seem so proud of but which, on closer observation, looks more like as a simple mechanism for the mystifcation of social difference. To ask if you ‘believe’ in Santa Clause, or if Santa ‘exists’, then, is laughably crude. Ask any six-year-old and see.
Ken and John, why is it after reading your comments that I want to scrub myself in bleach and take a course in epistemology?
I should give a mention to G. Erudite and insightful as ever. I aspire to be so.
Very clear John, and definitely a step up from the now rather dated “lunatic, liar, or jolly old elf” argument.
now rather dated “lunatic, liar, or jolly old elf” argument. What’s this? A modern theologian attacking C.S. Lewis. What assaulting language. What violation of the common volksgendanken (made us word that pretends to mean folk thought), what attack on all that we hold to be true, good, and otherwise keeps pesky women in their spot. I tell you this militant process theology is worse than atheism. Except the Dawkinsian variety.
Of course Santa Clause is just a heresy anyway: as everyone in the Netherlands knows, it’s Sinterklaas who brings the presents. And he lives in Spain, not on the North Pole. Much smarter fellow than your Santa.
I’m not so sure that I’d consider David Lodge an ally. He is a an all-purpose satirist, which usually entails being a rather conservative person who dislikes anything that violates that seems to be common sense. As we all know, common sense also has limitations. I’m not at all comfortable with his commonsense, but ultimately unreasoned, dismissal of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology in Thinks. Those fields may have their excesses, but Helen Reed (the sympathetic character) is given the final word of them in a way that’s unconvincing and suggests to me that Lodge is really just another dogmatist. Making the representative of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, Ralph Messenger, a bastard who essentially seems to be rationalising his own lack of (conservative) morality does not convince me of the evils of cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, or even polyamory. Whatever the weaknesses of those ideas, they deserve a more plausible critique than Lodge offers – he just seems to throw his hands in the air and say, “Of course all this stuff is stupid and amusing.” This is just anti-intellectual.
I guess that a process theologian might be equally unconvinced if process theology is treated similarly.
Ken and John are quite right. Our thinking will never mature and deepen if we insist on treating Santa as a literal person with a sleigh, as some fundamentalist Clausists still do – along with the shrill, militant ‘New Aclausists’.
The two factions have locked their opposing dogmas into an unholy embrace that obscures from us the higher truth: that Santa, properly understood as the spirit of giving, the liking for sherry and mince pies, and the cooperation with reindeer and elves, is a very real principle that can animate and enrich all of our lives.
You’re all wrong.
Being a Claustrian is about ritual – decorating the tree, leaving sherry and mince pies by the chimney, and so on. It was only with the advent of the enlightenment that people started to associate these traditional rituals with belief in propositions such as “Santa exists.”
John M, that was good.
I’m with Russell on the David Lodge question – I thought Thinks was pretty bad, and Therapy not much better. Then again I like Changing Places; Small World; Nice Work – but – not without reservations. (Just for one thing he manages to make Philip Swallow’s ‘subject,’ Hazlitt, sound stodgy and boring and old fashioned, which is absurd. Everybody should be so stodgy and old fashioned!)
But – the theology stuff jumped off the page at me.
So, we’ve decided that we like Lodge when he satirizes the things we don’t like, but we don’t like him when he satirizes the things we like. Sounds about right.
snerk!
There’s a bit more to it, I think. There is a certain shallowness to him – what Russell means by common sense, I think. This was consistent with doing really funny satire when he was young – but he seems to have lost that particular talent with age (as Kingsley Amis never quite matched his own brilliant first satire, Lucky Jim), and he doesn’t think sharply enough to replace it. I think the theology stuff is very good, and apt, but it’s rather isolated – most of PN is an enjoyable read but not up to those bits.
I will be monitoring all your expressed views on Santa (sherry and mince pies Be Upon Him) for the slightest hint of heresy.
The bits about tourism in Paradise News are pretty good and it is a lively read. Lodge is uneven as a novelist, as he flips from satire to straightforward psychologising. The family secret plot of P News is hackneyed but the love story between the virginal hero and the experienced woman is rather touching. He’s not nearly as harsh a satirist as Malcolm Bradbury, for instance.
I’m astonished that G finds S Claus a positive figure, when you consider he keeps elves working all year round in what would be a sweat shop if it wasn’t based in the Arctic.
Nonsense, KB! Santa Claus is himself “a jolly old elf” – one always depicted wearing red, you’ll note. I’m quite certain Father Christmas is a duly elected representative of the elf proletariat collective, who labor not in alienated service to the capitalistic profit motive, but rather from devotion to the ideas and ideals of a world united in peace and good will, our glorious (and historically inevitable) Communist destiny.
(Who hasn’t seen a picture of Marx and imagined him in a Santa suit?)
:-)
Only blind PREJUDICE stops the militant New Scroogeists from seeing that Santa Claus (Presents be upon his head) can explain where presents come from and what gives annual MEANING to children’s lives.
The New Scroogeist claim to explain who pays for the presents is a NON-OVERLAPPING MAGISTERIUM and just another faith. The MONETARISM of this belief strips the universe of its majestic PURPOSE and mystery.
Hahahaha
I’m hot and sweaty and limp but laughng feebly all the same.
Having read all the above comments I find that the whole lot of you are seriously in defamation of my religion. Santa Claus (Peace Go With Him & His Reindeers) is one of the most important of the gods in my polytheistic pantheon (which also has reindeer stabling out the back). Though not omniscient, having to visit department stores to ask us all what we want from him, He is none the less about the biggest, toughest and most powerful of all my gods.
I’m going to the cops to complain.
Santa Clause should be had up for slavery of elves and reindeer, whom he employs respectively to make toys in the workshop and pull his sleigh.
You know, St Nicholas was notorious for his generosity; such as giving presents to the less well-off. He presented the three impoverished daughters of a pious Christian with dowries so that they would not have to become prostitutes. Well, if he gave money to young women today, in that fashion, there would be many serious questions asked by folk.
Re Paradise News by David Lodge. See Process Thought:
http://www.wordtrade.com/religion/christianity/processthoughtR.htm
Santa Claus and Ganesh should get together and just systematically sit on everyone who doesn’t respect them. (Jesus and Mo reference)
Santa Claus?! Blasphemers!! Everyone knows it’s the Hogfather…
“as Kingsley Amis never quite matched his own brilliant first satire, Lucky Jim”
Pah! Girl 20 and Tkae a Girl Like you are both better. End of argument.
Your lame attempts to defend Comrade Claus would be laughable if they were not so suspiciously counter-revolutionary, Comrade G. Comrade Claus is a bourgeois expropriator of the proletarian elves’ labour and his one day distribution of goods to the wider commonality is an ostentatious attempt to gain the modern alienated commodity known as “celebrity”.
Comrade Claus is being submitted to interrogation prior to his further re-education in an appropriate location. Our comrade interrogators have been zealous. So far they have elicited “Ho! Ho! Ho! Merry Christmas!” from the bourgeois lackey Claus.
Agree with John Meredith re Amis, and would also throw in a word for I Want it Now. Lucky Jim is lumpish compared to those three, though the description of a hangover is a great piece of writing:-
The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again… His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.”
Let’s not forget the Anti-Death League which is just about the strangest thing he wrote (and which, together with The Old Devils and You Can’t Have Both should squelch any idea of homophobia in his writing, Eagleton you malicious buffoon) with the bonus of an excellent poem. And I like The Green man which is starange too, very funny, good on god (again) and quite frightening (I am thinking of the tiny hallucinated bird)even if it does fizzle out a bit. And The Changeling speaks up for the enlightenment nicely too, doesn’t it (not so funny, though)?
The Changeling – is that The Alteration?
KA does have a lot of sympathetic gay characters – Jake’s friend in Jake’s Thing, Bunty in The Folk who live on the hill, and the neighbour in Difficulties with Girls. Definitely not homophobic.
Yes, sorry, the Alteration. The Changeling is something else entirely.
*heh*
Where do you send Santa Claus for re-education? South to Siberia?
Hmmmmmmmm.
It’s not that I don’t like any of the later K Amises – I do. But none of them stick the way LJ does. I don’t think of phrases out of them the way I think of ‘he was confident that by doing so he would cause a deep dangerous flush to something something his face.’ Or the bit about imagining stuffing Neddy feet first into a toilet and then pulling the chain once, twice, and again.
Read the letters though? The youthful ones to Larkin (youthful meaning well into their thirties) are killers.
The truth about Santa:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JIz7I5yzwQ
Thanks, Windy! That’s wonderfully dark stuff, there.
Anywhere in the tropics. Imagine what it’s like under sunny skies and among the coconut palms wearing a long sleeved suit, fur trimmed hat, and beard. Those kinds of conditions are real learning enablers, I tell you.
OB – I’ve read the letters, which are funny & clever & exuberant. You can see him turn someone like his father-in-law (a harmless old guy really) into a mythical monster.
Ah but you didn’t know his father-in-law! If he really was like Neddy Welch…he’s bound to have been very irritating.
But that’s what I love about Amis – the rage at trivial irritants. There’s a kind of poetry in it.
Amis – the Poet of Irritation. That’s why his memoirs are stuffed full of encounters with people who didn’t buy their round, or gave him very small drinks. The apocalyptic horror at small things that piss you off a bit.
Edmund Wilson said that Take a Girl Like You was a kind of poem. There are two voices, Jenny’s, which is shrewd, observant and ingenuous, and Patrick’s, which is clever, irritated (of course) and frightened.
Well that plus the fact that he wanted very large drinks all the time! To him a very small drink obviously really was a cause for apocalyptic horror. That frightful George Steiner fella, who failed to provide a river of whiskey when Amis came to call.