Link to BU's review http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/04/fiction2
Barry Unsworth reviewed John: A Novel in The Guardian Saturday 4 October 2008. He gave it a good wrap, saying that there is much to be admired; the writing is unfailingly resourceful; and that it is a shrewd and subtle examination of the role of spectacle in the quest for power; as well as an eloquent and moving statement of the power of love. Reviews don't come much more positive than that. I'm drawing attention to what BU says is good about the novel because he also makes some very substantial criticisms, to most of which I feel the urge to respond.
BU's third paragraph
Among those who might read this book there will be a good number in the same situation as myself, heirs to Christian sensibility but without belief in the doctrine, impressed by the dramatic but more than sceptical of the miraculous. For the purposes of the novel, John is not required to recall the miracles; the story is wonderful enough without them. Obviously the author chose to make him do so. But in matters such as this, the reader too should have some choice, and here he is given none. There is an exact coincidence of viewpoint between the character who remembers and the person who provides him with the words. There is no element of sorely needed questioning, no space for the doubt that forms so large a part of human rationality. Might not the saint's memories be confused? After all, he is 100 years old. The rebel disciple, Matthias, might have provided a counter-voice. He does suggest at one point that this might not be the same John who was once in the presence of Jesus, but he is discounted from the start, portrayed as manipulative, cold-hearted, hungry for power; deeply wicked, in fact. It is difficult to believe that he could ever have had the fervour and devotion to follow John in the first place. He undergoes no course of disaffection or disappointment; there is no process of scrutiny.
…impressed by the dramatic but more than sceptical of the miraculous.
… in matters such as this, the reader too should have some choice, and here he is given none.
There is actually only one miracle in this book, the account of which is so subtle that it might not be recognised as a miracle. In the very last scene, John is in a state of ecstasy in which he "sees" the future of the church – one detail of which is Papias, his right hand man, and two others, healed of the disease that first appeared on Patmos, which John's prayers and touch failed to heal. There is account after account of sincere efforts to effect miracles, all of which fail. There is also an account of a fraudulent miracle which "works" for those who did not witness it but want to believe it. And there is the account of how Matthias, the perpetrator of the fraud, having caught the disease, attempts to heal himself. We are not told the outcome. But how could one not wonder about it? The reader is given no choice? Here's a two that I can see. The book affirms that it is wise to be more than sceptical of the miraculous – Papias and the others recovered naturally. Did Matthias recover? We don't know, because we've been given a choice about a second possibility. Papias and the two who remained on Patmos were miraculously cured, not by John but by their own faith – a point that is made over and over in the Gospels about how people are cured, miraculously or otherwise! Was Matthias also cured? What do you think? So much for not being given a choice.
Perhaps BU was distracted from this choice by the irritation of being told about Jesus turning water into wine and curing lepers etc. I assume that these are the kind of things he feels did not need to be included and about which he wishes he had a choice. If so, I would offer the following points for consideration. Firstly, whenever these phenomena are referred to, they are always expressed as the thoughts and words of John or his disciples – never as events that the author says happened. This is a book about what made John persevere. How could such things not be included? Did they really happen? That is the choice the reader has. The observable event in this book is John's perseverance. John's explanation includes miraculous cures and transformations, but to think that such things constitute the whole of John's explanation misses the point. These very things are called into question by the events of the book. The book is, in part, about how faith when misunderstood is expressed as beliefs that invariably fail. Far from there being … an exact coincidence of viewpoint between the character who remembers and the person who provides him with the words … the author is providing an … element of …questioning … space for the doubt that forms so large a part of human rationality. The very manner in which the story is told – every effort to replicate such events fails – implies the question that BU asks next, Might not the saint's memories be confused? After all, he is 100 years old. I have two things to say about this. I'll make the weakest argument first.
We know that old age does not necessarily bring on dementia. We all know, or know of, people who "had all of their marbles" deep into old age until they died. We also know that people who have lived an active life that involves critical assessment of and engagement with people and events actually grow in acuity and wisdom. On these grounds alone, the answer to BU's question could quite credibly be No. One of the reasons that a person such as just described prospers into old age is that they have realised, to a degree greater than most, the wholeness of being that is every person's raison d'etre. If the claims of Christianity about Jesus are correct and he really is "The Truth"1, then there is every reason to accept that John's engagement with Jesus set him on a journey of ever deepening integrity; and that his age, far from being an impediment to lucidity, accounts for the extraordinary insights of his Gospel. That is not to say that his having encountered Jesus necessarily accounts for his extraordinary attainment to wholeness. Peter and Judas were both on the same journey.
Secondly, we have to ask about the nature of John's memories? Are they memories of "the facts" or memories of "The Truth"? It is often said that the time it took to write the Gospels guaranteed that "the facts" were mis-remembered. The exact opposite case can be made, however. It took quite some time before the significance of "the facts" could be grasped and re-membered. This is what I mean by the difference between "the facts" and "The Truth", and that is what is demonstrated in John: A Novel. Eighty years after his encounter with Jesus, John is still waiting for Jesus to come again in the way that he (John) expected. On (almost) the very last page of the book he finally gets the fullness of "The Truth", and it is soooooooooooo inexplicable in terms of even his most recent expectations, that it can be expressed only in language that that exceeds – even confounds – "normal" expectations.
Does this mean that the miracles in the Gospels are just metaphors? It would be enough if they were! But are they more – did they actually happen?2 That's the choice that the book puts before the reader. There are at least three answers. Yes; No; and I don't know. The first two answers reflect the mind-set of belief3 – it either happened or it didn't; the third could also reflect the mind-set of belief, albeit in the form of sincere doubt about both Yes and No; or it could be something else altogether. It could be a disposition which doesn't need to know the answer to that question because it knows the only thing it really needs to know: that the existence of Jesus means something that is profoundly felt in a way that, in time, the most extraordinary things seem possible – incarnation, resurrection, parousia – and yes, miracles. Might the saint's memories be confused? Absolutely! Matthias was certain of it and is the prosecutor of the Yes case. Papias is equally certain and puts the case for No. It is John himself who, by the time this story commences, is the eloquent embodiment of I don't know. He is so troubled right from the beginning of the book that at one point he confesses to a senior disciple that he is near the point of despair, and yet is careful to ensure that this does not become known to anyone that may not know how to deal with it. John is indeed confused – why are my expectations being frustrated – right through to what looks like being a bitter end, when finally, ready to die, feeling as though he'd failed (as Jesus felt He'd failed), John "sees" the reality that was always waiting for his own expectations to get out of the way. BU's question actually leaps off just about every page of the story. The question that I would ask is, What could possibly account for the eventual success of the Johannine community.
The rebel disciple, Matthias, might have provided a counter-voice.
I find this the hardest sentences in BU's review to understand. Perhaps because I am not a writer I am ignorant of some specialist technical meaning of the word Voice. I say this because in view of the prominent and nearly definitive role that Matthias plays in this story, Voice must mean something other than "Point of view". Before going on to say what I think BU might mean by voice, let me deal with the prominence of Matthias' point of view in this book. Matthias humiliates John in the first two chapters by demanding an answer to questions that have long been shredding John's composure. Matthias secretly gathers half the company to his own cause and promotes belief in the One as an alternative to John's witness to Jesus. Matthias concocts a fraudulent miracle. He damages his own body as "evidence" of his having been chosen to replace not only John but Jesus as the one who witnesses to the One. He has a fraudulent document made claiming that the real John the Apostle is already dead. He tries desperately to seduce John's right hand man into belief in the One and temporarily succeeds in shattering the younger man's confidence in John. Matthias' ambition drives the whole narrative. But that, apparently, is not Voice. If it is not Matthias' point of view that constitutes the Voice that BU would like to have heard, is it his rationale for his position? Would BU like to have heard a reasoned argument for belief in the One as an alternative to fidelity to Jesus?
Had fidelity to Jesus not resulted in the emergence and consolidation of the Christian church as the single most influential institution in Europe and Asia Minor for the next thousand years and more; had it's competitors4, for which belief in the One is the nominal representative in this book, flowered into a major cultural phenomenon, not necessarily one that became dominant, but one that provided a truly insightful philosophical movement such as the Greek and Roman schools of philosophy, it would have been interesting to hear a sustained argument from Matthias. But none of the alternatives to fidelity to Jesus that tried to compete with Christianity in the first 300 years came to anything – not because the Christian church persecuted the alternatives. It was the Christian church that was persecuted for almost the whole of that time. The alternatives failed because they had nothing philosophically sustainable to say. So there is no interesting argument that could be made by Matthias. Lacking a core that was capable of nurturing a viable community, salvation through knowledge could never be more than a self serving belief – never a confessional faith – never more than a cultic ghetto where power rather than integrity was the goal. Anyone opting for such a belief could not be cultivating anything other than deception and therefore on the way to a life of evil. In this story, Matthias could not have been portrayed as other than manipulative, cold-hearted, hungry for power; deeply wicked, in fact.
It is difficult to believe that he could ever have had the fervour and devotion to follow John in the first place.
My goodness! Can BU be serious? Has he never had anything to do with the clergy, and even some in monastic life? How many stories are there in literature (and real life) of people who start out throwing themselves into a cause and ending up being its implacable enemy? Didn't Jim Jones start out as an exemplary campaigner for social justice? Anyone uncertain that people in cloisters could pursue self-serving and destructive agendas might read Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth. Sure, it's fiction, but it's entirely plausible simply because it draws on so much well documented historical material. And if that's not enough to establish that Matthias could have had the fervour and devotion to be a disciple, the ultimate example is Judas. And the sobering thing about that is that it was Jesus who chose Judas and not the other way around. Matthias is all too believable.
He undergoes no course of disaffection or disappointment, there is no process of scrutiny.
The short answer to this is that all of this has happened before the story of this book begins. To insist that it would have been preferable to see this development is simply another way of saying that the book that was written is not the book one would have preferred to read.
Finally, to return to the second paragraph of BU's review, he says this –
He remembers how he dropped the nets and followed; he remembers the amazing impact of the messianic personality; the grief as he stood with the others below the crucified form. He also remembers, with the same clarity and authorial validation, the changing of the water into wine, the feeding of the 5,000, the raising of Lazarus. And with this we have changed terrain - we have crossed over from the dramatic to the miraculous.
I may be wrong about this, but it seems clear that the He of this passage is John. For this reason the last sentence in the passage makes no sense to me at all, because it looks like a criticism. But how can John be criticised for crossing from the dramatic to the miraculous? This is a story about John's journey. In John's mind the miraculous is the definitive mark of his journey. If the He in this passage were Niall Williams, on the other hand, I would get the point. But that, surely, could not be BU's intention. The plain sense of the sentence simply does not permit it. Yet in the same passage BU says He also remembers, with the same clarity and authorial validation … Again it is clear that He is John. And again, there is no problem that John would remember with clarity and authorial validation. This is his story! That being the case what is BU saying? One has to wonder if he is playing a game of sleghit of hand here. Is he conflating John with NW so that the fault that would exist, if it were NW remembering with authorial validation and crossing from the dramatic to the miraculous, attaches itself to John in the reader'mind?
1. What is truth? (Pontius Pilate, Jerusalem ~33 AD)
– truth is any action, thought or disposition that deepens the integrity of people and incrases the sustainability of their relationships with oneanither and their environemnt – which, ultimately, is the whole of what exists! (Paul Smith, Mullumbimby, 2009 AD)
Light travels at 299 792 458 m / s. Louis XIV was the King of France from 14 May 1643 to 1 September 1715. Both of these statements are factually correct. But neither is the truth. Truth is a quality of being that for now we can think of only in human terms. It relates to the integrity of persons and the sustainability of their relationships with one another and their environment – which, ultimately, is the whole of what exists. Is it possible that, somewhere in the whole of human history, which includes the future as well as the present and the past, a person could exist with such depth of integrity, and have such an impact on other people's sense of wholeness and their relationships with one another, that she or he would come to be known as the one who showed us the truth of who we really are – "The Truth" for short. Were such a person to exist, would the fact that some people – even a lot of people – declare him to be "The Truth" make it so? How would someone not in a direct face to face relationship with such a person, or with the people who know or knew him, test the veracity of such a claim?
2. In his novel King Jesus, published in 1946, Robert Graves gives a startling account of the wedding feast at Canna in which Jesus does not turn water into wine but transforms a situation of serious social disgrace into a triumph of compassion over custom. When his mother draws his attention to the fact that the hosts have run out of wine he orders the stone jars filled with water and invites the steward to serve him some of the water as though it were wine. He does what we would think of these days as a wine buff performance, heavily fortified, if I can put it that way, with humour. Verily! This is the true wine that Adam drank in Eden! Ably assisted by the Master of ceremonies who croons, Indeed! I have never tasted sugh good wine! This is done, not to ridicule, but to relieve the whole party of the burden of judgment, by getting them all to join in, and to recognise and rise above the derision they would otherwise have felt in their hearts for their hosts.
This kind of plausible re-imagining might be applied to all of the miracles, and if done with sufficient forensic insight might even recover the historical Jesus. But even if it did, we would still have to explain why such events became the miracles of the Gospels. A simple explanation would be that the disciples really did see Jesus alive some time after he died on the cross. That would certainly colour the way they spoke about events in the life of Jesus and even determine which events were selected to explain their experience of his resurrection. The Gospels are not accounts of the life of Jesus – documentaries reporting facts – but confessions of faith in something new under the sun. In the light of that experience, miracles … well yeah, of course. Why are you asking?
3. We readily accept that there is a difference between belief and knowledge. But what is faith? The intuitive answer is that faith is an instance of belief. But I want to suggest that faith is actually a form of knowledge. I can believe something that is true, but that true belief would not be knowledge unless it were properly justified. A false belief can never be properly justified and cannot be knowledge. A true belief that is falsified by a single instance is not necessarily a false belief. If I believe that all metal bars expand when heated, the discovery of a metal bar that does not expand when heated simply necessitates a couple of minor adjustments – drop one word and add another – for my belief to remain true – metal bars usually expand when heated. Faith is expressed as belief that undergoes adjustments over time. But unlike the belief about metal bars which can properly be justified and become knowledge by systematic empirical experimentation, faith is knowledge before it is a belief; it is existential knowledge which comes to be expressed as belief that changes over time. Faith withstands the most serious challenge to belief and is thereby properly justified as knowledge. I can believe or disbelieve in miracles and be right or wrong depending on whether do or don't occur; but I can never know that miracles do or don't occur. Faith, on the other hand, which is usually thought of as believing, is firstly a radical un-belief – faith is un-convinced that things are as they seem. It is when faith attempts to answer the question, if what seems real is not real, what is real? that it expresses itself as belief which changes over time. You know… death is not the end of existence – that sort of thing … But what does not change is what faith knows to be true – things are not as they seem; existence is more than we observe.
4. I should be clear about who I am referring to – the Gnostics, in particular the so called Christian Gnostics. Gnosticism sees humans as divine beings trapped in a material world created by an imperfect god; and holds that salvation comes not through conforming with the will of that god, but through esoteric knowledge that reminds humanity of their true origin within a superior Godhead, thus being able to escape materiality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06592a.htm
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