The Rhetoric of God
The Rhetoric of God
Peter Spaulding
Her living room was carpeted with authentic seventies shag on which we used to build precarious Lincoln Log cabins when we were kids, while questions of the stability of the larger house itself hovered in the air around and above. The TV in the corner was perpetually news, an everlasting 60 Minutes, and the couches in the far corner were green with grooves perfect for running a childhood finger along. Everything was hazed with our Uncle’s mixture of Aspen cologne and cigarettes, a smell that has come to typify California for me.
The last conversation I had with my grandmother was in the living room of her old house, where my mother and her brothers had grown up. We’d just buried my other uncle, and the whole place held an awkward anxiety unlike we’d ever felt before as the metaphysical differences between all of our private ideas about the universe stretched and tensed, drawing out conversations into kinds of formality. We tiptoed around the soul.
She was looking back at me over her shoulder, to where we sat on the green couches, somehow displaying for the first time a new weakness that would never leave, and she was asking me what I’d decided to study. I said, “Paradise Lost,” and her only response after a pause was “Why?” I don’t remember if people laughed, but I’m confident it’s the last thing she ever said to me. She died four months after we buried her son.
But it’s a perennial question of extended family for English majors. Even though my grandmother was herself an English major and an English teacher for many years, she couldn’t understand why someone so genetically close to her could find interest in Milton’s presumptuous history of the cosmos.
*
I had a dream the other night that a demon fell from deep space in the form of a gargantuan meteor, burning in black and glowing the deep red of bleeding, burning flesh. The whole dream itself was little more than an image, but it was full of pretext and types.
There was a man, incredibly old and sun-worn dressed in rags, holding the doorframe of a very small hut made of petrified wood glowing pale in an evening sun. The hut was a gray blip in a short hillside of dark green under- and overgrowth. I’m not sure if the hut was built into the hill, but the green surrounded it, draping over the roof and siding. Perhaps this man was me. There was no motion of life to this dream-image either. The man just stood on the threshold, steadying himself with a gnarled hand on the doorframe, looking up, almost straight up, at the enormous orbed mound of pulsing dark and burnt-flesh red before him.
The only temptation I have to believe this man was myself was that I somehow knew, just from this image, that God had asked him to keep watch over the demon until he awakened, and I could feel his fear and reservation like it was my own.
*
Only in dreams and the age before we are capable of making memories can we see demons in the flesh, and the world is an old man. My daughter, who is two months old, will often gaze off into the space just over my left shoulder, her face slowly twisting into the archetypical mold of primordial fear. The wall behind me is always just taupe and engagement-photo strewn.
*
I can describe my love for old, epic poetry only by an illustration from my childhood.
On Sunday afternoons, in Manila, my parents would join another couple to play tennis on the campus of our international school. There is very little seasonal change in the weather of the Philippines, so, even though they played outdoors, it could happen more or less year-round. For whatever reason, I can only ever remember going with them—at an age before I could be left fully alone at home—by myself, even though we were close friends with the other couple’s kids, and my sisters must have been brought to campus also.
What’s really stuck with me about those Sunday afternoons, beyond the universal calm common to all Sunday afternoons, is the immense loneliness of being in a large, empty, public space which was usually full of people. I wandered down halls I spent most of my waking hours in, but they were completely alien in their silent, empty state. And sundown, which is itself the loneliest time of the day, painted that world in a foreign time too, bringing together my public and my private self in a kind of marriage.
I would walk onto the high school soccer field and feel the incredible size of the cement facade on the east-facing side. Cicadas overflowing some nearby tree would sing for only me.
This is the feeling I have in Paradise Lost and the Aeneid. I am surely completely alone in my office, in my chair, but I am entering a place people have walked and do walk in droves: a massive, open-air arena of some kind, vacant at sundown. It feels so public and so private, this walking under high arches.
Needless to say, I didn’t express it this way to my grandmother. I’m sure it’s a gift of some kind that I can’t remember the last thing I said in response to her.
*
It’s only after I woke up from the dream, however, that the material difficulty of my God-given task started to sink in. What will happen when the demon wakes up? How will I get the word out to God in time? What need does an omniscient God have of a messenger of that sort?
I am also struck with the peculiarity of the Hebrew God who, in his omniscience, omnipotence, and apparently keen interest in the human affairs of a particular race, chose a pillar of flame as a guide for a people leaving slavery. Why a gulf in the water? Why a cloud during the day? Why not just stop the vindictive Egyptian in his tracks the same way he hardened his heart? The God appears in super-nature that is not radically supernatural, but an exaggeration of nature, or nature missing one of its core attributes or laws (i.e. gravity, entropy). God is metaphorically related to his creation. I am like a fire, but I do not consume that on which I burn.
In this image of the burning bush, we see a synecdoche of general revelation. A fire that does not consume the thing on which it burns can burn on anything without consuming it. People could walk to the market in flames.
Natural theology, according to Peter Jensen, is most immediately concerned with “the existence of the divine,” apologetics or its opposite. This may be because “nature,” is often thought to be universal. Paul famously argues that God’s invisible qualities are “clearly seen” in what “has been made,”—the Greek word is poema—so mankind is without excuse. And, for example, Darwin’s response is almost the exact opposite: a real and honest look at nature reveals a metanarrative of brutal competition, not love. But natural theology for the Hebrews in the time they were writing their scriptures presupposed the existence of God, which allowed for them to see God and nature as having an already complementary relationship. Knowing nature always involved learning about God, and learning about God often happened—though not always—in the context of some kind of nature, often the above mentioned supernature.
Similarly, Milton thought that God was intimately connected to unfallen nature. Through the mouthpiece of the angel Raphael, he creates a synecdochic analogy of general revelation through the example of a flower:
“… from the root
Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves
More aery, last the bright consummate flower
Spirits odorous breathes: flowers and their fruit,
Man's nourishment, by gradual scale sublimed,
To vital spirits aspire, to animal,
To intellectual;” (5. 479-85)
Milton’s analogy is problematic from an orthodox Christian perspective and from any secular humanist view as well, but one of the general implications is similar to that of the burning bush: God has made nature so as to teach us something of himself. Nature is a tool for his reaching out to us, convincing us of himself. In the above passage, Raphael is describing what would have been unfallen man’s projection into spirituality—itself a wild assumption. But his main point is to instruct Adam and Eve about something central to divinity itself.
All of that doesn’t help me with my demon—I can’t emphasize enough how high up I am craning my neck to see the height of the meteor. The banality of the pastoral-scape around only serves to highlight the monstrosity before me: the meteor has created a mountain in the hill country, piling up miles of dirt and space-detritus into a heap of pulsing fire that appears to be consuming.
In my dream, I am an old man who can see the demon. Or maybe, as is the case with many other aspects of aging, the old return to the way of infancy in their ability to see what is not there. As cataracts cloud over the eye, we decide to see the aged also as demented, more disconnected than we are from what is real. And they reattain the ability to not remember, thereby keeping their secrets to themselves.
*
There are whole hosts of things that I can remember about my grandmother, even the minutiae of whole arguments and conversations, but not the last one. The rhetoric of God is nature’s subtle word, general revelation, and so we must be blinded to memory at life’s outset and end, sacred and evil bookends on life, as we approach or move away from something awfully spiritual. But I do not think she was senile at the end, and I do not think she saw what was not there. Except, of course, in her dreams.
Peter Spaulding
Writer & Editor
Peter is a PhD student at Marquette University and assistant editor at Renascence Journal
Photography by Markus Spiske