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Cover of a Case for a Mirror with Courteous Scenes. 14th Century. The State Hermitage Museum, Inventory Number Ф-2317
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Likewise Margaret Barker writes of how “in traditional
Christian art, both angels and saints have haloes; they reflect the glory they
have seen…”[3]
In Hugh of St. Victor, rather than an explicit gesture
towards the mirror, there is a more implicit rhetorical patterning that works
according to the logic of reflection, in the sense that angels provide him with
an opportunity to reflect on and
think through those difficulties that we humans experience when we try to think
of God.
If we then find ourselves reading through a hall of mirrors,
it would seem that the phenomenon of the mirror itself calls for our reflection
and study. On the one hand the mirror donates the world back to the world in
uttermost clarity, but bent to the wrong purpose, the mirror itself can be bent
to deception—smoke and mirrors, after all, and with them: nausea, vertigo, the sickness
of a spiritual duplicity wherein I discover I have believed too readily in an
illusion—
I want to write of this difficulty: how to reconcile my own
capacities of deceptive self-projection with the power of a God who radiates
his glory through an infinite act of refraction?
reflection: where it is never certain whether I am seeing
merely myself or whether something truly other has broken into the horizon of
vision.
mirror and the drama
of projective atheism
mirror: what appears there is precisely my own face—but not
myself. It is the image I throw out, the image I bestow on the inanimate, yet my
reflection lacks all that is me: freedom of movement, interiority of thought,
warmth of skin. In throwing myself outwards—in finding my own image—I’ve
nonetheless reduced myself, so that I’m now alone with an appearance that looks
like me but can’t approximate my capacities. As Ludwig Feuerbach writes in The Essence of Christianity,
Man cannot get beyond his true nature. He may indeed by means of the imagination conceive individuals of another so-called higher kind, but he can never get loose from his species, his nature; the conditions of being, the positive final predicates which he gives to these other individuals, are always determinations or qualities drawn from his own nature—qualities in which he in truth only images and projects himself…. Thus, in and through God, man has in view himself alone.[4]
This is the mirror in its most empty, most draining, most
atheistic sense. We project a God who must save us so that we can avoid the harrowing act of
attempting to steal divinity back to ourselves in order to save ourselves. Again,
Feuerbach: “pleasanter to make one’s salvation dependent on a person than on
the force of one’s own spontaneity.”[5]
Can Feuerbach’s vision ever be reconciled to the life of
faith? Perhaps not wholesale, but Feuerbach is not without his devotional uses,[6]
especially if we use his writings to draw our attention to the way we live this
projective atheism: even those of us who are believers, because we love our own
face more than we love the living God. I needn’t absorb Feuerbach wholesale,
though he does bring me to admit that the object of devotion is bound by pre-conception:
I allow the appearance of God only under my own terms.
But to say that God appears to me only under the bounds of my
conception doesn’t exclude the possibility of a real theophany. Here I break with
Feuerbach and turn to Dionysius, who writes that “the Word of God artlessly
makes use of poetic representations of sacred things…out of regard to our intelligence…moulding
the inspired writings for it” [6.5]. It is precisely my preconceptions that
God takes into account when he appears; therein,
emergence and shedding forth of light,
a light of which I can’t conceive but which I receive.
Only then does conception become possible,
when barrenness admits its bondage and binding.
Then what is in me and of me is no longer my own.
Simone Weil, steeped in the mystical tradition of
Catholicism, confesses both this conceptual barrenness and the divine fertility
in her essay “Atheism as a Purification”:
A case of contradictories which are true. God exists: God not exist. Where is the problem? I am quite sure that there is a God in the sense that I am quite sure my love is not illusory. I am quite sure that there is not a God in the sense that I am quite sure nothing real can be anything like what I am able to conceive when I pronounce this word. But that which I cannot conceive is not an illusion.[7]
Yet Weil echoes an idea that can be found in Dionysius himself, as Eric D. Perl writes,
But Dionysius’ Neoplatonic negative theology transcends atheism no less than it does theism. To be sure, Dionysius is not a theist, since theism, as ordinarily understood, involves the claim that God exists (whatever qualifications may then be added concerning the ‘mode’ of his existence); and many misunderstandings have arisen from attempts to interpret Dionysius and other Neoplatonists theistically and thus not to take with full seriousness their insistence that the One or God is beyond being and is not anything at all, that no common term whatever can embrace both God and his products. But neither is Dionysius an atheist, for on his principles it is no more correct to deny that God exists, to say ‘God is not’ or ‘There is no God’ is still to consider God as some (putative) being, and then to deny that there is such a being, as when we say ‘There is no tenth planet’ or ‘There are no unicorns.’ This still treats God as some distinct conceptual object and so fails to truly intend God at all.[8]
mirror and the reflective
reception of an elsewhere light
So I go back to the mirror.
Because if I stand there long enough, I realize that I am
not all that appears. After all, there is this other surface—the mirror—objectively
before me, in no way the product of my projection. What’s more, it widens a
field of vision, otherwise unavailable to me. If I look long enough, I see that
light—sourced from elsewhere, from above, from the window in the corner—I see
that light is
being thrown on me
and I am the surface of its appearance. If the mirror can
act as a solipsistic trap for the ricocheting of my own projections, it nevertheless
has this other potential which requires the sudden transformation of my gaze:
only once I have allowed this larger world of pure otherness to break forth on me
is projection interrupted by reception.
And here we have the second role that Dionysius attributes
to the “representations of sacred things,” these mirrors all around us: in them
we perceive not only a likeness of form suitable to “our capacity” but we also
discover that in the mirror what is revealed is “conceal[ed].”[9]
Which is to say revelation preserves the otherness of what
it reveals: revelation is the proclamation of otherness itself.
mirror: I see a light that is neither cast from me nor from
the glass itself:
an elsewhere light that enables sight itself:
God’s otherness preserved in my gaze
though because the eye is filled with light
and it is in me, I see it without
me. Shudder of theophany: “through his goodness” my own
personhood at every moment “brought into being” so that I can see that I am not
God and God is not me:
the integrity of our difference preserved, only then does “participation”
in the divine life become possible, because communion is predicated on
difference regarded under the terms of love.[10]
And then, looking into the mirror and seeing not myself, I
pray with the seraphim: “Lord, to be fed with the food of thy fair face.”[11]
[2] Dionysius
the Areopagite, On the Heavenly Hierarchy, ed. Roger Pearse (Ipswich,
UK: Tertullian.org, 2004), III.2,
http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/areopagite_13_heavenly_hierarchy.htm.
[3] Margaret
Barker, Temple Mysticism: An Introduction (London: Society for Promoting
Christian Knowledge, 2011), 75.
[4] Emphasis
added. Ludwig
Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. Marian Evans, Second
Edition, vol. Volume XV, The English and Foreign Philosophical Library (London:
Trübner & Co., Ludgate Hill, 1881), 11, 30,
https://libcom.org/files/The%20Essence%20of%20Christianity.pdf.
[5] Feuerbach, Volume
XV:140.
[6] On
the devotional possibilities of certain atheistic philosophies, see Merold
Westphal, Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism
(W.B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1993).
[6.5] Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Heavenly Hierarchy, II.1.
[6.5] Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Heavenly Hierarchy, II.1.
[7] Simone
Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr
(London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 114.
[8] Eric
D. Perl, Theophany: The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite
(Albany: Statue University of New York Press, 2007), 15.
[9] Dionysius
the Areopagite, On the Heavenly Hierarchy, II.2.
[10] Dionysius the
Areopagite, IV.1.
[11] Richard
Beadle and Pamela M. King, eds., “The Barkers: The Fall of the Angels,” in York
Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling, Oxford World Classics
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), l. 76.
I originally wrote an essay-length reflection and then remembered that this is a comment on a blog. Suffice it to say, your post was very thought provoking! You point to two different possibilities of reflection: either we (all creatures, however angelic or brutish) reflect God, or he reflects us (human beings in particular) and is nothing more than our own reflection. To paint in broad-brush strokes, the former view is the Christian, the latter the Feuerbachian.
ReplyDeleteYour discussion of Feuerbach brought to my mind the York Mystery Play about the fall of the angels. If there is any devotional use to Feuerbach, it is this: that we musn’t make gods of our projections of ourselves. This act of idolatry is Lucifer’s error in the play. “And I so seemly in sight myself now I see, / For like a lord am I left to lend in this light” (lines 51-52). Lucifer looks within and he likes it. So much does he like it, in fact, that he thinks it mete to set himself, in all his wonder, upon the heights of heaven.
But I must now take umbrage with Feuerbach. He says that human beings worship God precisely because it is “pleasanter to make one’s salvation dependent on a person than on the force of one’s own spontaneity.” What is Lucifer doing if not trusting on the force of his own spontaneity? Such an exercise must be known by its fruits: “This is a dungeon of dole that I am to dight.” (98)
How, then, should we adjudicate between the claim that God is merely a projection of human nature and the claim that we are his image-bearers? The question is a big one (hence my originally much longer comment), but I must confess that my intuition is this: by their fruits you shall know them. We must first look to those who were influenced by Feuerbach’s view that we need only to admit that we have been worshiping human personality the whole time - Marx and Nietzsche - and the societal (political) ramifications of their influence. Then we must turn our eyes to those who recognize “the integrity of our difference being preserved”, who recognize that we are not God and that we can have no greater prayer than “Lord, to be fed with the food of thy fair face”. Is it the case that those who have rejected the worship of God as such in favor of a worship of human personality have saved us from a deluded weakness? Or is it the case that the light of God is really refracted through every one of us, and most brilliantly in those whom we call saints?
-TvB
Thrilled by your use of the image of a courtship mirror - these objects are so fascinating, because mirrors were so rare in the period: to give one to a woman was often to give her her own beauty as a gift, to possess her image as apart from her being and then give it away. If mirrors are, in the time of many of your referenced writings, these foreign objects, cloudy, concave or convex, never flat, rarely giving a true image: how do we deal with the implicit distortion of reflection? Must we contend with the flaws of the material of reflection as well as our own flaws of observation?
ReplyDeleteMore per your spiritual discussions -- Weil's point seems so incredibly human, that, whilst we are unable to comprehend our own capacity for love, but are confident of its existence - and thus label it divine - and yet we are so limited in our capacities as to fail to entirely understand 'God' as real in the same way as the rest of our lived experiences. While this last point suggests the obvious - that God's reality is different than the material reality in which most of our experiences occur - I think the broader point in Weil is that the lack of ability to conceive of this 'real' image of God is, perhaps, what points most to His existence. I use 'image' specifically here because I think this is perhaps where the language of reflection is most useful - that we are unable to conceive God as 'real' in the practical or material sense, but can feel Him in through memory, love, and the edges of experience. Perhaps only comparable (though much smaller scale) struggle is our own failure to conceive of ourselves and others - to fully understand each other as beings each possessed of internal lives, and ourselves as beings united in soul and body. The very problem in mirrors is that it forces the self to encounter this harmony between soul and body, which is so dissonant from our lived experiences when we look away - perhaps this forced experience of reflection on unity is a moment in which mirrors make us to touch God.
Reflecting on your reflection: you show beautifully how much our ability to think in terms of image and likeness depends on images, not argument. The image of the mirror with its images of lovers reflecting each other. I wonder that you did not play more with this love imagery! This seems to me to be the thing most missing in Feuerbach and his followers: the sense that God's reflection in us is one of not just of likeness, but of love, the beloved seeing Godself in the soul made in God's image. The whole of scripture is a love song of God for his creatures. How is it that Feuerbach et al cannot hear that song? RLFB
ReplyDelete