The Golden Ass

I am one of you and being one of you
Is being and knowing what I am and know.

Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,

Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set,
And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone

Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings
Like watery words awash; like meanings said

By repetitions of half meanings. Am I not,
Myself, only half of a figure of a sort,

A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man
Of the mind, an apparition apparelled in

Apparels of such lightest look that a turn
Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?

- from Angel Surrounded by Paysans, by Wallace Stevens

Silver Censure, c. 1400-1500, made in Germany, once belonging to Basel Cathedral

We’ve heard of literal readings of the bible. We’ve heard of “spiritual” or “theological” interpretations of the scriptures. Someone caught wind of such a thing as a “figurative” reading and was wondering what on earth that means. This is easy for me to identify, because I first learned it through the language of architecture. It’s not super new, complicated, or profound. But, one thing that's interesting to me about this is the way figures who appear in our built environment can teach us so much about textual interpretation. Hermeneutics is not and doesn’t have to be just a lesson in a text book.

Imagine the difference between a Gothic cathedral and a modern factory or skyscraper. Interestingly, new communities – or forms of community - gathered around both.

In the Gothic cathedral, figures appear before our senses. In fact, the entire edifice becomes a con-figuring. You begin to see heads, feet, eyes, mouths - generally various body parts in compositional relationship both with one and other and with the earth and heaven.

The body parts that especially being to bring figures into relief for us are either the ones that emerge out to us from the flat contours of the skin of the body or the ones that open orphically to our depths: brows, lips, and feet, or mouth and eyes. Things that tend to cast shadows down towards the earth from the light above. This becomes fairly clear in the image of the censure above.

As figures that appear before our senses illumined by light, they clearly are representative, pointing to something above or beyond themselves. Just because “figurative” reading isn’t necessarily in accordance with the rules of wooden literalism does not mean that there is no room for miracles, the supernatural, etc. In fact, miracles are actually a “figural” in breaking of or pointing to the kingdom.

In a Gothic Cathedral, the materiality of the stone itself, as well as its having been gathered elementally from an actual place, is important and bears upon our senses in ways that are foreign to modernity. This is "plain sense" reading of scriptures in favor of or over against “the spiritual” readings of, say, a literal dispensationalist. In a Gothic Cathedral, stone, even the very materiality of the stone itself, is not degraded but elevated – quite actually. The figures that appear in and through the silver thurible appear much more easily before us “in person” than in photography. In discipleship, bodily desires are not degraded and trashed but befriended and transformed.

Notably, this elevating – or resurrecting - of the material body only happens as part of the composition of a whole whose parts, if taken away, would both be degraded themselves and leave the beauty of the whole as something other than what it is. It's the community that Peter is referring to as the Temple of God rather than modern individualists. The censure is elevated as a microcosm of the cathedral rather than as an independently atomized molecule. The same goes for scriptural figures who are types to Christ.

This simultaneous importance of what is sensed and its appearing as a literary figuring into a larger (communal) narrative - a narrative that is not contained only in a book but in "the world" itself - is because the cathedral is a configuring of the union of heaven and earth. It's a figure of revelation in the person of Jesus standing upon the earth.

Tomorrow is Never, 1955, by Kay Sage

The modern factory or skyscraper, however, appears as a mechanical box or a representative graphic grid superimposed over a piece of paper - and definitively not upon a palimpsest but a blank slate. No body parts appear, either in figurative relationship with one another, or in relationship to heaven and earth. We only see anything more than that in older factories, like in Savannah, Georgia, as a holdover practice, as traces of ancient tradition. Modern cathedrals are composed only of doors and windows, stones and glass.

This is “wooden literalism,” where, for example, what might actually be rhetoric about hell - that makes sense as such in the presence of a community of actual human bodies with an imagination that guides us to living according to the words we hear and images we see that evoke bodily desires in and through time - can instead only be a highly technical propositional lecture about the doctrine of eternal conscious torment in a context dislocated from any particularities of time, place, or the human body.

So, though the materiality of modern “cathedrals” or of our “wooden literalism” is the entire and only point of them, said bodyliness hardly "matters" at all in any meaningful sense. Stone is not itself elevated but plastered onto a structural grid as a shiny mirage. The actual body that appears does so as a distant object of our gaze from above. Or, more accurately, the body appears only as a possibility, a concept, a half formed figure draped over by our dislocation from it.

In comparison with a modern “cathedral”, it becomes notable that any reflectivity or shiny, cosmetic splendor of the stone of a medieval sanctuary comes more from natural wear over time – like in Abbey du Thoronet, for example - than from human intention to immoderately and loudly reach and call towards the heavens like the Tower of Babylon. This Babylonian cosmetic line bought and worn by our modern “cathedrals” is “wooden literalism” that particularly serves our overly spiritualized readings of scripture that turn humanity and our ends into essentially disembodied spirits floating on clouds. This is a theology and method of interpretation that, in fact, wasn’t born until after the particularly modern “cathedrals” came onto the scene.

In historical-critical interpretation, reading of scripture is not itself sacramental, is not itself the embodying of the narrative told in said scripture (microcosmically, like a thurible / censure). The factory or skyscraper appears either as pure representations of the products produced that point to their value according to their master the market, or as purely the pragma(tic) brute mud of a machine's immanence. Modern “cathedrals” correspond to either the massive mountain of textual scholarship that exists on its own conceptual plane or to the human author's singular intentions on which that conceptual system relies.

Historical critical reading requires and is dependent upon this kind of speculative distance from the "original autographs" that no one has ever seen, like an engineer's calculations in relation to a factory or skyscraper that doesn't yet exist, with the end product of a building that appears to the senses as a big hunk of existentially novel - and necessarily novel and new - Nothing and Void. Such newness is a large burden to bear for us modern writers or producers of Anything. This process of modern production of artifacts of meaning is unlike a medieval architect, who crafted in relation to an existing model - as in reference to discipleship / succession - with the end product being a type of the one that came before.

This whole piece to this point is an extended analogy between cathedrals and textual interpretation. The information here is nothing new or groundbreaking to many. What's interesting to me about this analogy, however, is that it points to the worlds of difference between figurative and historical-critical reading. I’m also interested that, by the very fact of its being an analogy, it thereby plays with the difference between figurative and historical-critical reading.

Who Do You Choose To Disciple You?

Who are the figures or persons who come to mind as the historical catalysts or teachers of these different ways of reading scriptures or building buildings? In one time and place, they were people working on projects in situ. Now, however, they are historical figures who are built into the narrative of how we live and who thus represent to us elements of life in our world that we treasure. Darby and Scofield, Origen and Augustine? Louis Sullivan, Dankmar Adler and William Le Baron Jenny? The architects of medieval cathedrals come known to us anonymously, explicitly know only for representing something figuratively beyond and above them selves. History itself can appear either in figurative relief or, rather, as a set of technical propositions made of mechanical beams of engineered joints.

One might now be inclined to ask: does this analogical set of relationships between ancient and modern cathedrals and methods of textual interpretation have bearing on the way we live our lives? Why and how do the figures of ancient or modern theologians or architects speak to us about how to live? Is this analogy anything other than a thought experiment? As my friend Peter Bell said it:

“Can we live our lives as sacramental representatives of a larger narrative rather than as historical/critical minions of the material creations of our own hands (and machines)? Do we have this choice (without going back to work at the literal medieval cathedral)? If so, how?”

I would like to suggest that the whole “point” of the analogy here is to explore and reveal how that’s precisely what we’re all doing anyway. We’re all making that choice every day, and we don’t have to literally “go back” and work in an actual medieval cathedral to do it. Even those who live and die by historical critical interpretation or by a world of mechanical beams suspended in tension from one another live as embodied figurative representatives of a larger story. As a nurse, I quarantined myself into a classroom for years to get my license, but I actually learned to practice nursing as part of a historical community providing medical care through time - with the guidance of nursing and other medical figures ever before me along my way. We’re all being discipled into a story. The only question is, which one?

People have referred to factories or skyscrapers as "modern Cathedrals" for a reason. If we read the scriptures "figuratively," then why would we not read a factory "figuratively", as well? I had nursing figures ever before me, and factory workers have their figures ever before them, also. As modern "secularists," we are actually embodying a liturgy, a "larger narrative." We just tend not to think of it that way, because that very narrative was originally articulated in explicit contradiction to and rejection of the ancient way. So, we all embody the story of a giant, supposedly rationalized market. That's the reality of our situation. It’s perhaps like a monster, like Godzilla or King Kong. That's a figure.

If we're called to follow in the footsteps of the person or figure of Jesus, then, accepting the reality of our situation, how are we - or can we be - elementally formed (so to speak) towards the building of a different kind of Cathedral? How are we formed with the gifts of the Spirit rather than by monstrous or Babylonian desires that shape us in accordance with the market / consumerism? As disciples, we tend to quarantine ourselves to the text in a classroom to study a mountain of historical textual criticism to then apply that information to the brute mud of our behavior, but we actually learn to embody or to begin to make appear the figure of Jesus in the world by practicing his way as members of his historical community in the world (the "mountain" is figurative in this sentence, btw). What figures do we hold before us as we practice this "Way" of Christ?

* Note: I took both of the above photos during my trip to New York City in September, 2018. I believe I took both at The MET, but the surrealist painting may have been at MOMA.