How Ambiguity Reveals Different "Senses" in the Bible

Last night, reading the Book of Revelation, we reviewed the "four senses" in which scripture is traditionally interpreted: the literal, and three "spiritual" senses, the allegorical (typological), tropological (moral), and anagogical (the future). This article quoted the Catechism (No. 118):

The Catechism of the Catholic Church cites a medieval couplet which summarizes these four senses: Lettera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria, moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia. (The Letter speaks of deeds; Allegory to faith; the Moral how to act; Anagogy our destiny.)

Robert Sokolowski has some interesting things to say about how different meanings can be discerned in ambiguity. In Eucharistic Presence (at p. 156-57), he says, of the literary trope of ambiguity:

"Ambiguity as a literary form does not mean inexactness in expression. . . Rather, ambiguity as a trope is the deliberate expression of two meanings in one phrase. It is the use of one set of words that can be taken in two senses. . ." Sokolowski uses as an example, some lines from T.S. Eliot's Burnt Norton:

". . . as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness."

Sokolowski says the word "still" is triply ambiguous: "'Still' can be taken as an adjective, an adverb, or a conjunction. The phrase could say that the Chinese jar is motionless (still) and yet moves; it could say that the ancient jar moves even now (still); and it could say that despite its stillness the jar nevertheless (still) moves. It is the interplay of all these meanings that gives the lines their force."

Sokolowski cites examples in the Gospel of John 5:24-26, in which the word "life" is used to mean not only the life that Jesus communicates to believers, but also the life that his Father shares with him:

Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes in the one who sent me has eternal life and will not come to condemnation, but has passed from death to life.

25

Amen, amen, I say to you, the hour is coming and is now here when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.

26

For just as the Father has life in himself, so also he gave to his Son the possession of life in himself.

Jesus' mission from his Father is to share the life he possesses with us. "However, we can without straining read in the phrase another sense. We can hear an overtone to the dominant meaning. The second sense would refer to the eternal life that the Son has from the Father within the Holy Trinity. The obvious 'economic' sense of the statement is not without allusion to the 'immanent' trinitarian sense. "

Sokolowski goes on to say (p. 158) : "The literary ambiguities in the Fourth Gospel are possible because of the play of presentational dimensions that occurs in Christian belief. The simply worldly can be taken just as it is, but it can also be seen in an iconic way, as a manifestation of a dimension that transcends it. . . Such hints and ambiguities are not deficiencies but disclosures. . ."

In other words, the different senses in scripture's "ambiguities" make manifest to us not only the life that Jesus gives us, but also the eternal trinitarian life in which he participates. "The redemptive mission is profiled against the eternal procession. If the life Christ brings were not related to the life he has eternally from the father, the sense of our Redemption would be incompletely expressed." Ibid., p. 158.

Looking at it this way, we see that scriptural ambiguities "layer in" multiple truths and senses which must be unpacked for a fuller understanding of the God who created and loves us. The different senses do not lead us astray, and are not conflictual, but are part of scripture's richness and blessing.

Faithlessness and its Antidote

On the radio yesterday I listened to Ron Regan interview a researcher from Trinity College who recently issued a report finding that the number of "nones," those who report they belong to no religion, has increased by 10 percentage points since 1990.

Trinity sampled "more than fifty thousand Americans last year finding that seventy-six percent identified as Christians. That's a ten point decrease since 1990. The number claiming no religion has grown to fifteen percent of the population, behind only Catholics and Baptists." I heard on the radio that most "nones" are former Catholics. Not all become atheists, but all non-identify with the Catholic faith, the faith they grew up in or formerly espoused.

I think of lack of faith and despair as linked. Faith essentially believes in something "super" natural, i.e., that all does not end in natural death. Not to have faith is to believe that natural death ends everything, which is a form of despair (cutting off the air of hope).

Why this creeping fall of faith? I assume Rieff would have found it understandable given his view that a vanguard of nihilists are mounting a pressing attack on Judeo-Christian culture (the second culture he calls it), and its belief in a sacred self, "that identity which is to each his own, never having been before and never again to be. . ." Rieff (p. 102 of My Life Among the Deathworks). The sacred self has an identity only in relation to God (Not I/ I), for we are constituted in our identity (our "I") by our acceptance of responsibility to obey an Authority above us (a "Not I"), and by the guilt arising in the relation when we fail so to obey. Obedience to ourselves alone is untethered to Authority and takes us around in a circle of solipsism, going nowhere.

This attack on the sacred self has been proceeding apace for a century and more . and is becoming more vocal and trenchant. (Ron Regan is a confessed atheist himself and obviously wants to "spread the good news" about his anti-faith in discussing the growing faithlessness.)

How does one counter-attack? Interestingly enough, Rieff (p. 103 of My Life Among the Deathworks quotes Gerard Manley Hopkins (who faced the same "shatterings" of attacks in his lifetime, as the 20th Century loomed (1888)):

"Whatever the shatterings Hopkins felt threatened his and other sacred selves, perhaps precisely because of that threat, he composed the greatest passage on the God-relation of identity since Galatians 2:20. Despair shatters itself against the hard truth of Hopkins's sense of identity.

'I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This, Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond.'" From Hopkins, "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire.")

"Whatever the Jack, joke, mortal trash of our lives may be, our predicative relational identity, Not I/I supplies the resistant hardness of sacred self Hopkins blazons in every one's honor, each Not I/I an "immortal diamond." When I read Hopkins, as when I hear a Bach Mass, I am an honorary Christian."

As I read Rieff, and Hopkins, only Christ has broken the yoke of death, and so only Christ provides the antidote to the death rattle emitted by our cultural "betters." Only "in" Christ do we see in our matchwood and potsherd, the "immortal diamond" that "in truth" we are, the antidote to faithlessness and despair.

But who is voicing this loud and clear? Well, I know Rieff is, a Jew, and an honored "honorary Christian."

Putting His Arms Around a Child . . .

From yesterday's gospel reading:

"Taking a child, he placed it in the their midst,
and putting his arms around it, he said to them,
“Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me;
and whoever receives me,
receives not me but the One who sent me.”

I don't know if the Chicago Tribune follows the liturgical calendar,
but yesterday's front page story fit the gospel reading perfectly.

Christ's antidote to the general squabble for power and status was perfectly captured in this story of a family "surviving on faith" and yet opening their arms to children from Africa.
Keeping our eyes and ears open, we can find words of encouragement all around us, I believe!

What strikes me especially is Jesus' statement that in receiving a child, we receive Him. Is it possible that the powerlessness and total reliance a child has, and our embrace of the child in that light, is how we should embrace Christ? We think of Christ as the "Almighty" - why would he have any need of OUR assistance? It's the other way around. But isn't Jesus saying, "In embracing a child you embrace me, for I am powerless for you and rely on you." To me, this is a wholly new way of seeing Christ, i.e., as being in need of, or at least asking for, our embrace, our compassion and aid. But it makes sense if we are Christ's eyes and ears and hands on this earth. Our compassion for our neighbor bespeaks our compassion for Jesus, in his plight, until he comes in glory.

Molly Bloom Must Be a Saint!

I confess that my eyebrows went up when I read Fr. Barron's reference to Joyce in his Preface. The reason is that Philip Rieff, who I have been reading recently, cites Joyce as an artist of "deathworks," works of art that are the artist's vehicle to attack Judeo-Christian culture. (Oh, by the way, wasn't Ulysses the subject of a major obscenity trial?)

And so my question would be how to interpret Molly Bloom's "wonderfully rambling" stream of consciousness. It may be that Thomas Aquinas can say yes to all of his experience because he is a saint, and has closed down completely his "openness" to the possibility of personal evil. But as far as I am concerned the rest of us mere mortals are not in that exalted position. I wouldn't think Molly Bloom was either, but that I don't know.

For the unwashed masses, of which I count myself a member, I would suggest, on the authority of Rieff, that Bloom's (Joyce's?) attitude is exactly the opposite of what we should "embrace." Her attitude is a modern day heresy. Here's why (as I read Rieff).

In his book Charisma, Rieff claims that the path to spirituality is not a "Yes," but a "No," in fact, a string of nos extending throughout our lives. (Yeses are yesses to nos!) We are not Dionysians whose spirituality is the ecstacy of orgy -- an experience of all possibilities in sexual life and in life in general. For mere mortals like me, spirituality (and I would say Christian spirituality) is more an experience of purgatory, a succession of Nos (to instinct), the closing down of possibilities, the turning away from power (see my previous post). It cannot be a string of unconditional Yeses to "experience." (I remember in the 1960's and early 1970's friends saying they felt life had to be "experienced" -- mostly as a rationalization to smoke dope!)

Again, according to Rieff, modern heresy holds the opposite. At its extreme, it rejects not only the interdictory commands of the decalogue, but the very notion of commands, since the absolute commander, God, is either dead or has abandoned his post. Freedom is precisely found in saying Yes to instincts and desires (to the "life force!", the "energies"), since to say No on the basis of "guilt-producing rules" promulgated by some ancient and outmoded "god" is irrational, repressive and therefore positively unhealthy. There are many artists this day whose art advocates this view. (I think of "Madonna" for example.) These are artists we should avoid or expose for the damage they do to us mere mortals.

The real purpose of art (according to Rieff) is more than Fr. Barron's conveying "understanding;" it is to convey saving guilt. Think: "You must change your life." (Archaic Torso of Apollo, Rilke). True art, says Rieff, shows us our "true better," known by God, knowable by us, and when known by us, known as what we ought to be but are not. This knowledge is "true, oppositional, accusative, and personal." It is moral (not scientific) knowledge, and in its being known by us it prickles us with guilt, which is a sense of indebtedness to those whom we feel, deeply, we do not enough resemble (including our true, better, self).

"The great arts of a high culture are conveyances of this saving, renunciatory sense of what we are not but, stimulated by those arts, yet hope to be. All true works of art point out directions of renunciatory self-transformation." (Charisma, pp. 36-37). The purpose of true art is to "shut down possibilities," not open them up. Judging from this standard, many modern artists do not produce true art, despite all they may contribute to our "understanding" of the modern condition.

In this way of thinking, Molly Bloom's string of Yes's shows us the wrong "way" (cf.Ps.1). (Joyce may have left the message ambivalent, but isn't that too a defect in his art?) Thomas Aquinas might have been "unable to sin" -- and likewise Molly Bloom, confined to a sickbed -- but we surely aren't!

May I lastly suggest that too much spiritual reading, in striving to accommodate (and even celebrate) our Yeses, blunts Christ's crucial call, which is to "deny yourself, pick up your cross and follow me." Seems to me, saying Yes to Christ's call starts with saying No.

At Saturday's Meeting

At our Saturday meeting we considered how James Joyce “has a distinctive take on things … which flow finally from Jesus of Nazareth” as contended by Fr. Barron in the opening paragraph. The book contains the following references to Joyce.

p. 20 “ … we turn to the artists of our time to understand the human condition … the multivalent and disquietingly off-centered inner monologues of Joyce’s characters ….

p. 76 “I can't help but see a link between this more classical Christian ideal of freedom and the wonderfully rambling monologue of Molly Bloom at the close of Joyce's Ulysses. The word that returns like a mantra in Molly's stream of consciousness, that echoes almost comically through the entire speech, and that brings the monologue and the novel as a whole to a close is "yes": “... and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so that he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes." As she arranges imaginatively around the whole of her experience and affirms all of it, Molly, though physically confined to her bed, is supremely free, since she is able to say only "yes," drawing to her breast the whole of life. In this she is like the God of Thomas Aquinas who is "unable" to sin... consistently, almost compulsively, affirms, drawing to her breasts the energy of existence."

I’m not familiar with Joyce’s works and look to Mike Casey to explain to us how Fr. Barron's thesis might or might not be the case.

Deuteronomy Chapter 34:1-8

And Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is opposite Jericho. And the LORD showed him all the land, Gilead as far as Dan, all Naphtali, the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, all the land of Judah as far as the Western Sea, the Negeb, and the Plain, that is, the valley of Jericho the city of palm trees, as far as Zoar. And the LORD said to him, "This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, 'I will give it to your descendants.' I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not go over there." So Moses the servant of the LORD died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the LORD, and he buried him in the valley in the land of Moab opposite Beth-pe’or; but no man knows the place of his burial to this day. Moses was a hundred and twenty years old when he died; his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated. And the people of Israel wept for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days; then the days of weeping and mourning for Moses were ended.


“his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated”

I confessed one Saturday morning to my Cursillo group reunion that I was disturbed by a recent tendency that I had to become angry or upset, even discouraged, when confronted with the news of the day or certain people's behavior. I was upset that I was assuming an attitude of anger at the world as opposed to maintaining a sense of awe of the world.

My world was in a turmoil. An economic turmoil because markets had crashed, retirement fund values had shrunk, the cost of living was on its way up. Bombarded every day by stock market quotes every 10 minutes, the number of jobs lost last month, and a shrinking GDP, it was difficult to maintain a lighthearted attitude.

My world is in a political turmoil. I was constantly informed of the new proposed health-care reform, being told the horror stories about “death panels”, about losing the ability to choose my own doctor, of not being able to obtain the latest, cutting edge treatments. I heard stories about people requiring medical treatments they couldn't afford and had no insurance coverage to pay for them.

My world is in an emotional turmoil. Every day I wake up and a different body part is malfunctioning. I'd like to reduce the amount of time that I work at my job, but, we're in an economic recession and my employer is making increasing demands on my time in an effort to reduce costs and keep the company afloat.

So with all these concerns swirling around in my head I found myself sitting on August 12 at a Wednesday morning Mass listening to those words from Deuteronomy. "His eye was not dim nor his natural forces abated." At age 120. What was his secret? How was his world brightened? How did he maintain an enthusiastic and awe filled spirit?

After all, he did his people the favor of freeing them from slavery, he led them to a new land, it took him 40 years. All the while his people grumbled and complained about how hard life was. They did nothing but worry about where their next meal was coming from. They gave up on God and created their own idols to worship. Only once did he exhibit a lack of faith and for this he was forbidden to enter the promised land. How much more could have been heaped upon Moses? Yet when he died his eye was not dim and his vigor unabated.

Of course, we all know that it was easier for Moses. He had direct access to God, saw him face to face. We don't have that resource to keep our spirit alive and invigorated. But we do have hope. We can keep our eye, not on our political, economic, emotional turmoil's, but on the Lord. Our faith tells us that we can rely on him to provide the light to keep the eye of our heart bright. We can rely on his Spirit to enlighten us and provide our bodies with the energy needed to maintain our vigor.

So with these goals in mind, to take the focus off our turmoil, to keep our eye on the Lord, we begin another year of exploring our Christian spirituality. Our meetings may be a distraction from the very important tasks that we need to carry out on a Saturday morning, but, it is a way to look toward the light.

How do you know you are "Spiritual"?

From Philip Rieff's Charisma (at p. 21):

Spirituality, as Kierkegaard knew, is a way of opting out of the fight to be a man of power. It is to "live as though dead," i.e., without power. But spirituality so threatens ordinary men, who want their fill of things, to conquer and digest, that they demand "the death of the man of spirit," or rush upon him "to put him to death." This is how it came about, concluded Kierkegaard, that Christ was crucified. There are two kinds of death-dealing: God's and man's. When the spirit strikes, it kills the assertion of the body, self-assertions. When the body strikes, it kills the assertion of the spirit, God's assertion.

So spirituality is a turning away from possibility, not "going for it," not grasping, thrusting, wresting, seizing, overpowering, possessing, controlling, taking, using, wanting. Since "power corrupts" one finds the spiritual man in the act of running the other way. I run alot, but usually in the wrong direction.