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On Schubert’s Winterreise (Part 2 of 2)

2012-05-29T13:50:30+00:00

Read part 1 here.

In light of the failure of Winterreise’s premise to be ultimately convincing (as discussed in the last post), more practical-minded folk might easily view it as quintessentially immature and even comically or loathsomely self-pitying at base. It might be tempting to conclude that anyone who would find him/herself compelled by Winterreise simply needs to grow up. But this, I think, is to be blind both to the story from which it borrows capital[1] as well as to the legitimate beauty with which Winterreise expresses its concepts through vocabulary and syntax which thrive on a sense of both meaning and purpose. After all, not only is the Gospel a story of exile at more dimensions than Winterreise, but it provides a foundation for objective tragedy and its intelligibility in a way that Winterreise cannot. The beauties of Winterreise, I think, are beauties concomitant to the Gospel. And where Winterreise is particularly strong is in portraying the psychological realities of a broken world with striking perceptivity and emotional vividness. This is captivating in itself, as grief and loss and their effects upon us are things we can all identify with. But the appeal goes deeper still: because Winterreise makes itself sympathetic to our experience in an area in which we most long for sympathy, it has the ability to appeal at a deeply personal level. And, as Nietzsche and others have lamented about humanity, very often the way to our mind is through our heart: we believe in what has claimed our heart, and then we look for evidence to support what we have already decided to believe.

I do not think it is too strong to say that this is a danger of good art: in captivating our hearts, it can sneak many existential assumptions through the back door, so to speak, leading us to embrace them in a way that bypasses critical reason. And like the fateful “whisper” in the eighth song of Winterreise, the unquestioned whispers we receive can powerfully shape our outlook and govern the course of our lives. It is important, then, to recognize that Winterreise not merely chronicles the human experience but proposes an explanation and outlook. And this proposition is of such a nature that, having circumvented critical reason, it not merely allows but entices us to embrace it, through its appeal to alluring and deep-seated self-pitying impulses that arise from the still-deeper impulse to be our own lord and master. This it unites, firstly, with the captivating story of a world groaning and, secondly, with a keen sense of the tragic. And both of these—the groaning of creation and a sense of tragedy—owe their existence and compelling nature to the necessity of underlying hope, so divorcing them from the idea of hope is a bit like taking a fish out of water. But at first this conceptual threesome—self-lordship, a sense of the tragic, and the groaning of creation—is a perfect formula: the more we exalt ourselves as the tragic hero-lord of our lives, the more tragic our existential plight is felt to become; the whole “romantic” experience intensifies and is lent credibility by the story of creation groaning that we see actually unfolding all around us: it affords us both humanizing intensity and a sense of security, for a time.

But because tragic hero-dom necessarily denies the very hope that fuels its constituent ideas, it can deliver neither the ultimate meaning nor even the ultimate experience it would seem to promise; and so, drug-like, it satisfies us less and less as we crave it more and more, until at last we become spread thin, withered and callous like Tolkien’s Gollum. But amidst it all, the one thing that is unthinkable is the prospect of ceasing to propel our own tragic exile. The “mature” solution of returning to and submitting to God may be the religious answer, but it’s certainly not romantic (to the tragic hero’s mind): there is immediately the gripping fear of surrendering the “soulish” experience upon which one has thrived in exchange for a terrifyingly drab and claustrophobic existence of tidy obedience. This, of course, assumes that the story in which we would participate by submitting to God is un-“romantic” (“romantic” in the sense of having the ability to captivate the heart and imagination with soul-swelling richness) or at least less “romantic” than the story we have built for ourselves on His capital. But a still-deeper issue is that, if ultimate experience has become our functional god, it is extremely unlikely in practice that we will surrender it for anything at all, even for an admittedly preferable story/experience that can thrive only when it is not our god. The idol is one of status, not so much content: the dreaded thing is not exchanging our current experience for one that is different (even if surpassingly better); rather, what is dreaded is the idea that the surpassingly better experience can only exist as such when it is not our first love and the object of our ultimate allegiance. But of course God demands no less: as a matter of axiom, not mere stipulation, full participation in the Gospel story in which God is God necessarily entails the surrender of all functional gods. We have come to the place where the only way to reach the heights is first to go down, where the path to hope is by way of the surrendering of all our hopes and our very selves to the One who asks, in effect, “Do you love me more than these?” (Jn. 21:15)

When our answer is “no,” we will perpetuate our self-exile of evaporating romanticism even if in the end it burns like hell itself: the agony may be hateful to us, but more hateful still is the prospect of relinquishing our attempts at self-propulsion, that sliver of illusory hope we hold tightly in our clenched fist. After all, we fundamentally, existentially, need hope, and I am persuaded that we guard it more dearly than our lives: when God is not our hope, we would rather cling violently to hope in ourselves or our impotent idols than surrender it to God Himself, even if it should mean the agony of eternal separation from the Source of all that is good and pleasant and wholesome and true.

In the end, then, Winterreise (quite unwittingly, I think) forms a striking parallel to Biblical imagery warning of the dangers of ultimately rejecting God: the protagonist not merely puts himself in death’s way but desires and asks to go to his tragic end, even as that willful choice is not separable from the sovereign decree that is sensed to resound throughout the cycle’s narrative space; yet the outcome is indeed tragic and could only be defined as such in light of a good and personal Ultimate Reality who “[has] no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked would turn from his way and live.” Ezekiel (33:11).^[2]

Art has the wonderful ability to bring concepts to our senses in a way that can help us to experientially understand what might otherwise have remained at the level of merely intellectual tenets. Winterreise vividly illustrates what should be the startling reality of the willingness with which humanity will go to almost incredible lengths to avoid God, choosing anguish and death over surrendering one’s idols of pleasure, pride, or control to the One who has promised not only mercy but an open-armed welcome and radical generosity to all who will come to Him. To be fair, though, Winterreise somewhat downplays these lengths by portraying the anguish of tragic hero-dom at the point at which it still thrives on the energy and beauty of hope and is thus at its most “romantic,” before the drug has shown its demonic colors. That is how Winterreise appeals to us. But, from another angle, the very fact of this appeal helps to clarify an emotional-level understanding of God’s justness and rightness in judgment, which remains emotionally confusing or objectionable to so many people when the question of judgment is approached as a matter of head-knowledge and not viewed holistically. And this is how Winterreise clarifies the matter for us: it is impossible to be compelled by the content of Winterreise and simultaneously object to the idea that the world should be made in such a way that death and despair (however romantic or unromantic they may be) must be the inevitable end of placing one’s hope in anything that cannot save us from the death and despair that threaten to engulf us in a world that is both imbued with a sense of meaning and (according to that sense of meaning) broken and groaning. Therefore, while Winterreise’s protagonist may claim to deny God, the cycle as a whole does not ultimately call God’s justice or even His goodness into question at any meaningful level. The danger of Winterreise is not so much that it impugns the character of God; the danger is that it entices us to see our own tragic-hero experience as so much more desirable and worthy of devotion than God that we would endure ultimate exile and death in order not to surrender it.

But as to that lingering fear that God’s story might be less vast, robust, and captivating than one which we would construct for ourselves: if there can still be any doubt, take a look at the mountains, the rivers, the mists on the open fields; walk through the woods in winter, and walk through again in spring; look through a telescope and look through a microscope; look at philosophy and mythology; look at God’s covenantal story unfolding in the Hebrew Scriptures; and see it all coming into focus in the most wonderful and radical way in Jesus Christ: look from the night sky to the manger, look at the cross, and look at the empty tomb; look deeply, see what you see, and decide for yourself whether or not this is a story that would be worth risking or even losing everything for the hope of sharing in it.

[1] to use a most convenient term of Cornelius Van Til’s

[2] How is this desire compatible with God’s decreeing banishment to the hell that necessarily characterizes existence away from His presence? God has decreed that evil, sin, death and all that is a corruption of His good creation should be banished from His presence. This, I think, seems good and eminently reasonable to us. I think it is moreover reasonable to us that the decision of what is to be banished should take the form of a verdict, the end proclamation of a procedure of justice, as opposed to the Kafkaesque scenario of a decision made who-knows-how as if behind closed doors. From this vantage point, we can probably agree that it is a good thing that God judges the world (despite our negative connotations of the term “judgment” that tend to come from the loathsomeness resulting when the judge’s chair is usurped in haughty pretense by one who is not the judge; but that means that the one judgment about whose right we should feel at peace is that of God himself, the Source of all justice.) But if we are honest, we continually fall far short of the perfect goodness which must be of God, and we routinely engage in evils subtle and not-so-subtle which are so serious, as Jonathan Edwards has pointed out, because of the greatness of the One whose nature they violate: though God’s judgment is a good thing, His just verdict would not be favorable for us. But in Christ, God has gone to unthinkable ends to bear in Himself the fullness of the sin and corruption of all who would (by grace) put their hope in the only One who is able to save them: God absorbing the judgment of God on our behalf. Should any prefer to hope in something else that cannot save (as we have seen, an illusory hope in which we will nonetheless continue unrepentant irrespective of whatever agonies may necessarily ensue), God grants us the dignity of honoring that decision and judging us according to the non-savior in which we have chosen to place our hope, though in such a case the just verdict is, by virtue of God’s own nature, tragic. But if we are so unbelievably stubborn in our idolatrous pursuits, how can any be moved to put their hope in God and so be saved? “With man this is impossible, but with God, all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26, ESV).

On Schubert’s Winterreise (Part 1 of 2)

2012-05-25T13:00:58+00:00

Winterreise, meaning “winter journey” in German, is a song cycle by Franz Schubert to a text by Wilhelm Müller[i] that arguably stands at the zenith of the Western art-song literature. Against the backdrop of unrequited love, it describes a young man’s journey through a winter land-/psyche-scape. His basic awareness is emotional rather than rational: he is propelled restlessly ever onward by the grief of his loss, though in his confused state he initially lacks a forward goal, being driven aimlessly as it were from behind through a series of scenes that each represent an aspect of himself or his past. But in the eighth of the twenty-four songs—that is, at the one-third point of the cycle—a change becomes visible: there have previously been vaguely morbid reflections on the frozenness and deadness of the winter landscape and a reference to the protagonist’s tears being “taken in” by the brook,[ii] but these have all merely been images floating in a semi-conscious background; but here for the first time there is the suggestion, as if whispered by an outside voice, that from the moment the protagonist set eyes on the girl he had loved, he was doomed. The text, translated, reads: “…and ah, two maiden-eyes glowed. Then you were done for, friend.”[iii]

In the wake of this intimation, the idea begins simmering in the background that death is the only desirable course in this wintry world; the whisper introduces a goal that will shape the protagonist’s outlook and govern the remainder of the cycle. At the beginning, the protagonist had observed the confusing ways of the world and understood that “God has made it so.” But now the assumptions begin to shift subtly until we find ourselves in the impossible agony of a world in which, as Nietzsche would say decades later, “God is dead” (though the song cycle never explicitly voices the concept as such). But one might ask at this point whether hope has been abandoned because God is believed dead, or whether God is seen as if dead so that the path of abandoned hope (which is really a sort of thinly-veiled, albeit twisted, hope in oneself) can be pursued.

But who is this God (or god) that is dead? The second third of the cycle concludes (song 16) with these words: “[I] look for a single leaf, hang my hope on it; if the wind plays with my leaf, everything in me trembles. Ah, and if the leaf falls to the ground, my hope falls with it; I myself fall with it to the ground, weep at my hope’s grave.”[iv] This is a simple but profound diagnosis of the protagonist’s plight: he is becoming aware that we necessarily place a sense of ultimate meaning on something and look to that something for ultimate hope; but yet the thing in which he has placed ultimate hope (romantic love)—indeed everything which he sees “under the sun”—is as incapable of bearing that impossible weight of ultimate hope as a leaf in autumn which the slightest wind alone would blow to the ground. The god that is dead is not the ultimate, absolute Almighty God but rather the protagonist’s functional god of romantic hopes. In fact, I think we may conclude that the existence or non-existence of the LORD is a moot point in the protagonist’s mind as far as his sense of hope or hopelessness is concerned, since the LORD is not the god on which he has hung his hopes: his sense of hope stands or falls on the potency of his functional god, and when this god crumbles under the weight of ultimate expectations, the protagonist’s hope dies. Hence his morbid obsession: when hope dies, all that remains is death. And moreover, if we retain a framework of assumed meaning and purpose while denying the only possible Source of meaning and purpose, then by necessity death (in some form or another) not only becomes our ultimate reality but also, if we are consistent, the ultimate meaning and purpose of our lives, as happens to the young man in Winterreise. And thus the final third of the cycle becomes permeated with a sense of being driven by fate or necessity to willfully pursue death: “I see a signpost standing unmoved before my gaze; I must take a road from which none ever returned.”[v] Shortly after, the protagonist declares, “If there is no God on earth, we ourselves are gods!”[vi] Yet in the song that immediately follows, which concludes the cycle, this self-proclaimed god finally meets the longed-for death-figure and asks to go with him.

What is striking to me about this ending is that both music and text seem to intend to create (through subtle and sophisticated means) a sense of tragedy with undertones of emotional confusion in connection with the protagonist’s willful embracing of death. This is striking because we associate godhood with both sovereign freedom and the self-deriving determination of what is good. Thus if the “god” is constrained to a tragic end in which his own will is complicit, that creates a powerful sense of fate or absolute existential necessity. And in my opinion, this is vital to the emotional impact of the cycle.

But this thing which creates the most fundamental impact of the cycle is also its own undoing to a degree. The very sense that the ending is tragic hinges on the assumption of an ontologically greater good by which the tragedy is seen as tragic—otherwise it could not strike us as tragic. Thus to the extent that Winterreise seeks to attach ultimate existential weight to its tragic statement, it is self-contradictory. This can be avoided either by denying the sincerity of some aspect or another of the statement (which in this case I don’t believe to be interpretively plausible) or by viewing the protagonist’s exile as self-impelled. But the difficulty is that if there indeed is a God, an ultimate “Good” in light of which alone tragedy can be tragedy, especially if there are claims that such a God has revealed Himself in a promise of redemption, then self-impelled exile fails, for me, to be ultimately convincing. Of course, there is something to be said for suspending disbelief in approaching art; but it seems that suspending disbelief in one premise is always for the purpose of lending greater credibility to another premise that is more structurally fundamental. Credibility at the heart of artistic communication is essential (at least in the artistic paradigm we are dealing with here): so if the heart of the matter is what we must suspend disbelief in, the whole structure ultimately falls.

[i] The entire text with links to translations can be found here (N.B. The translations of text fragments given in the essay are my own).

[ii] In another of Müller’s cycles set by Schubert, Die Schöne Müllerin, the protagonist drowns himself in a brook, so the appearance of this motif in Winterreise may be a veiled reference to death.

[iii] “Und ach, zwei Mädchenaugen glühten.—

Da war’s gescheh’n um dich, Gesell!”

[iv] Schau nach dem einen Blatte,

Hänge meine Hoffnung dran;

Spielt der Wind mit meinem Blatte,

Zitt’r’ ich, was ich zittern kann.

Ach, und fällt das Blatt zu Boden,

Fällt mit ihm die Hoffnung ab;

Fall’ ich selber mit zu Boden,

Wein’ auf meiner Hoffnung Grab.

[v] Einen Weiser seh’ ich stehen

Unverrückt vor meinem Blick;

Eine Straße muß ich gehen,

Die noch keiner ging zurück.

[vi] Will kein Gott auf Erfden sein,

Sind wir selber Götter!

Creating Unity with Social Success

2012-05-24T18:18:35+00:00

The key to being comfortable in your own skin...

Stephen Um speaks on social anxities and a three fold expression of unity.

Philippians 2:1-13 ESV

So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Whole sermon download. Preached at Citylife Presbyterian Church Boston, 5/20/12.

“Farther Away” - Jonathan Franzen (Book Review)

2012-05-23T13:00:20+00:00

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen was the first "serious", contemporary novel I ever read of my own volition. I was 16 and was so proud when I bought it that I would bring it to school with me and be sure to make it visible on my desk in English classes with hopes that my teachers would comment on it. To my memory, they never did, but the book had an immense impact on me. I was so thrilled by the fact that I was reading a book meant for old, smart adults, but that I was still picking up on some of the things that made it great. What an amazing experience for a young person to first feel the thrill of being moved and enriched by a novel.

To this day, The Corrections is one of only 3 or 4 books I've ever read twice. It is a testament to Franzen's talents that he can write a novel that spoke powerfully to me as a 16 year old and as a 27 year old (and if its winning of the National Book Award is any indication, older readers as well). He writes incredibly wise, funny and insightful books, but in a language so simple it can be easy to not even notice the weight of what he is doing.

Franzen's newest release, Farther Away is a collection of essays published from 1998-2012 that includes book reviews, lectures, biographical pieces and shorter experimental work. There is very little to criticize in this book. The essays are so smart, funny, heart-felt and honest that even topics that might not be of interest to many readers, such as bird watching or Chinese industrialization, end up moving and enlightening in surprising ways.

For lovers of fiction, it is great fun to read Franzen's literary criticism, which makes up a large portion of the book. Whether it's appropriate or not, Franzen seems to think of himself as one of our culture's last remaining defenders fiction, and he goes to great lengths to give readers his thoughts on some great, forgotten novels and plenty of eloquent reasoning as to what makes them great and worth our time. By the time readers turn the last page of "Farther Away", their Amazon wish list will have grown.

As I mentioned, he is also a very funny writer when he wants to be. From an essay on how much Franzen dislikes discussing his literary influences: "According to Mr. Harold Bloom, whose clever theory of literary influence helped him make a career of distinguishing 'weak' writers from 'strong' writers, I wouldn't even be conscious of the degree to which I was still laboring in E.M. Forster's shadow. Only Harold Bloom would be fully conscious of that."

And also, from an essay on China that includes a trip to the golf course "If you want to feel radiantly white, male, and leisured, you can hardly do better than to trouble an ethnically diverse crowd of working people to step around your golf bags during morning rush hour."

Franzen is a complex and often frustrating individual. He often comes across as cantankerous and self-absorbed in interviews and some of his writing. In "Farther Away", however, the reader is exposed to a much more nuanced and thoughtful individual than his anti-Twitter and Kindle rants might indicate.

There IS plenty of ranting in here, but it is almost always couched in a genuine concern for society and its successes. In the opening essay, a transcription of Franzen's 2011 commencement speech at Kenyon College, he laments the narcissism implicit in Facebook by saying "To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors". He riffs on the insufficiency of the culture of 'liking' the social network promotes, imploring readers and listeners to love, not like. And loving is hard, he says,

"There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of... What love is really about is a bottomless empathy, born out of the heart's revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way it keeps the focus on the self, on the self's own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with their struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of yourself."

A later essay entitled "I Just Called To Say I Love You" also features an apparently cranky rant against cell phone users' need to loudly exclaim "I love you" to end their public phone conversations. Franzen postulates that this is in part a result of September 11 and the knowledge that loved ones could be taken from suddenly and every call could be the last, but the essay ends with the author remembering the power of his father's wordless love, that never featured the three words, but did contain a lifetime of actions to let a son know the love was there.

Love is on his mind throughout most of the book, most powerfully so in two essays dedicated to his close friend David Foster Wallace who Franzen remembers he "fell in love with at first sight." Wallace committed suicide in 2008 and "Farther Away" includes Franzen's beautiful remarks from Wallace's funeral as well the title essay that is a 40 page clinic in nonfiction writing that spans travelogue, literary criticism and the author wrestling with his feelings about his friend killing himself. I can think of few pieces of writing I've felt more in awe of.

Throughout, Franzen's rendering of "love" eschews the petty and shallow. Love is seen to be difficult, sacrificial, yet essential and rewarding. In his Kenyon speech he gets to the heart of the matter: without surrender, there is no true love. To describe love in this way—as particular, difficult, sacrificial, something that calls for the giving away of one's self—is to come dangerously close to articulating the kind of love that the Christian scriptures claim is at the heart of the gospel. Readers who find themselves compelled by the Bible's unique portrait of a self-giving God will readily hear such echoes throughout Farther Away.

Much like when I first read The Corrections, I finished Farther Away and felt inspired. Highly recommended.

Stephen Um on Weekly Sermon Prep at TGC

2012-05-22T14:55:38+00:00

The Gospel Coalition has a post from Stephen Um on what an ordinary week of sermon preparation looks like in his experience. Here's one of the takeaways:

Consistently Find Your Identity in Christ, Not in Your Preaching.

The gospel you preach must define you. You need to taste it to know that it is good. What else will sustain you through your first 100 sermons, which are not likely to be very good? You must keep preaching the gospel to your own heart so that you do not get your identity from preaching. You cannot rise or fall on evaluations of your performance. If you feel good when people complement your sermons but feel terrible when you think you've dropped the ball, preaching itself may be functioning as an idol.

Read the whole thing here.

The Heart as an Idol Factory: Then and Now

2012-05-18T14:48:23+00:00

Stephen Um and Richard Lints on the idols of our hearts. What is your functional diety? Are you worshiping that which deserves it? Watch and hear as Stephen Um and Richard Lints discuss and define the nature of idolatry then and now.

Why Cities Matter (Book Cover Unveil)

2012-05-17T05:01:41+00:00

Yesterday, Justin Buzzard gave us a glimpse of the cover of the book that he and Stephen Um just finished writing together. Needless to say, we're extremely excited to tell you about it, and you'll be hearing quite a bit in the coming months about Why Cities Matter. One exciting fact, which is hard to make out in this small picture, is that it includes a foreword by Tim Keller. Many thanks to the team at Crossway for all that they've done and plan to do for this book and the cause of the gospel in the world's cities.

God’s Ridiculous Generosity

2012-05-16T14:49:33+00:00

Stephen Um addresses God's Ridiculous Generosity. We see that God's generosity is costly and is so much greater than what we could ever ask for. "Our dreams and aspirations are not to big but too small."

Hear the whole sermon here.

“For the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. 2 After agreeing with the laborers for a denarius a day, he sent them into his vineyard.a] a day, he sent them into his vineyard. 3 And going out about the third hour he saw others standing idle in the marketplace, 4 and to them he said, ‘You go into the vineyard too, and whatever is right I will give you.’ 5 So they went. Going out again about the sixth hour and the ninth hour, he did the same.6 And about the eleventh hour he went out and found others standing. And he said to them, ‘Why do you stand here idle all day?’ 7 They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You go into the vineyard too.’ 8 And when evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Call the laborers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last, up to the first.’ 9 And when those hired about the eleventh hour came, each of them received a denarius. 10 Now when those hired first came, they thought they would receive more, but each of them also received a denarius. 11 And on receiving it they grumbled at the master of the house, 12 saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ 13 But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a denarius? 14 Take what belongs to you and go. I choose to give to this last worker as I give to you. 15 Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Ordo you begrudge my generosity?’ 16 So the last will be first, and the first last.” (Matthew 20:1-16)

A Lonesome Ministry

2012-05-15T15:10:04+00:00

Loneliness has been on my mind since meeting with a Harvard senior the other day. While reflecting with her back over her time at Harvard, I asked her what some of the biggest challenges of life at Harvard were. She answered that many relationships were simply about the mutual goods that the two parties could offer each other, and so it was hard to find many friends who took a genuine interest in the other person as a person. Some people, she thought, never really found meaningful relationships during their time – though thankfully she had! She saw loneliness as a rampant problem. Though I already knew it was a huge problem, it is always fascinating and a little frightening to hear students speak to the experience of it directly.

When I thought about loneliness, my mind wandered back to an essay of Marilynne Robinson's that I had read a few weeks back. In that piece she holds forth that old ideal of the American west: lonesomeness.

The peculiarities of my early education are one way in which being from the West has set me apart. A man in Alabama asked me how I felt the West was different from the East and the South, and I replied that in the West "lonesome" is a word with strongly positive connotations.[1]

It strikes me that much about loneliness and lonesomeness is similar. Yet they are exceedingly different. Loneliness is born out of an inability to connect with others. Sometimes that inability is due to our own bad habits of relating; sometimes it stems from a situation that is completely foreign and inscrutable. Hence, one can be lonely in the middle of a crowd or in a bustling metropolis or on the top-ranking college campus. Cities and college campuses might just be some of the loneliest places in the world.

Lonesomeness, by contrast, is a pursuit. It is a purposeful exile – in order to find something, learn something, or even to clear one's head. Perhaps there's something temperamental about it. (My wife is a verbal processor, but I need time to my thoughts to come to a conclusion.) Perhaps it is the critical distance we gain from standing outside of a situation for a while. Perhaps it is simply the time and the quiet that give us room to think – room to think Robert Frost's "long, long thoughts of youth."[2] I, for one, wish I had more lonesomeness in my life.

Perhaps there's something to be learned here about a healthy spiritual life. Loneliness is spiritually deadening. The Christian faith – like most human action – thrives in community, and all the more because the Spirit – the Lord and Giver of Life – is active in it. And yet the church is often noise, busy, and unreflective. My own work in college ministry is better off for the clarity I gain when I have time away from students and weekly schedule. It is a luxury of my job, I know. I wish more Christians could pursue lonesome time, especially pastors.

[1] Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 88.

[2] Robert Frost, “The Later Minstrel” in Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays (New York: Library Classics of the United States, 1995), 511.

Creature and Creator in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”

2012-05-10T13:30:52+00:00

Often, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein Halloween-inspired brings to mind images of a hulking figure with green skin and bolts protruding from its neck, lurching down a hallway with arms propped forward, communicating in primal grunts and seeking to destroy all in sight. In truth, Frankenstein is an all-too-human story that speaks to the longings and desires found in every heart. Shelly uses the fantastical characters of Victor Frankenstein and the monster to which he gives life to craft a story that asks and answers questions about meaning and existence. These are questions that most men and women ask themselves but leave unanswered. By telling a tale of creator and creation Shelly seeks to answer the age old question: Is there a purpose in life? Frankenstein is not Shelly’s attempt at a retelling of Genesis 1 and 2, rather she cleverly does the opposite and crafts an extraordinary ‘what if’ story that asks and answers these questions: What if we had no creator? Or worse yet, what if our creator had no plan for us? By playing devil’s advocate Shelly reveals the need that we all have for an intimate creator.

What if we had no creator?

A popular misconception with Shelly’s work is that Frankenstein is often believed to be the monster, and it’s here that people begin to head in the wrong direction, missing the heart of Shelly’s work. In truth, Victor Frankenstein is the creator of the monster, and is the opposite of a monster by all appearances. He is a man of means and education with the purpose and determination to create life from nothing. Driven to the point of obsession, he ultimately achieves this with the creation of the monster, and it’s in this drive to do the impossible (along with the ensuing results) that raises and answers the question, What if we had no creator?

Victor Frankenstein seems admirable because he isn’t seeking to accomplish this task in the hope of fame, or to arrogantly prove his naysayers wrong. Rather, he seeks to build the monster because he excels at science and, in turn, is driven to do great things with his gifts. He is a man who takes control of his own life and gives himself purpose, not just any purpose, but one that would seem impossible. This type of drive and dedication has a noble quality to it. In a generation where people are famous for merely being famous, how can one not commend a person for pursuing excellence and achievement merely out of personal drive and determination? There is a certain purity in Frankenstein’s obsession that is to be admired, but it’s in Frankenstein’s accomplishment, the creation of the creature, that we begin to see that this paragon of the independent man has its own flaws. Almost instantaneously, from the moment his creation is given life, the cracks in Frankenstein’s attempt to give himself purpose become apparent. We hear this in his response to accomplishing what was thought imposisble: “...now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart” (Shelley, Volume One, VII).

It seems almost absurd to think that Frankenstein can have this change of heart so suddenly. While the monster is lifeless he sees it as beautiful, but upon giving it life he sees it in a new way, in a way that stirs up terror and disgust. The monster was fashioned by Frankenstein’s own hand, so it is impossible to think that its grotesque appearance would cause this change in Frankenstein’s heart only upon its gaining breath. The question we can’t help but ask is, Why? Why is Frankenstein suddenly disturbed by his creation? What, in this moment, makes the monster a creature to be feared and hated?

The answer is that nothing changed in what was in front of Frankenstein, the monster looked no different, it wasn’t a beautiful creature when inanimate, but once alive fearful. Rather, the change that occurred was within the heart of Victor Frankenstein. While having purpose, the desire and drive to create life, Frankenstein was blind to the simple fact that what he was making was actually an abomination. Creating purpose in life worked because Frankenstein was able to blind himself from the fact that what he was creating was something that in fact disgusted him, and it was only when he finally accomplished his purpose that he was able to step back and see what he actually achieved.

Frankenstein sought to define himself. Once he achieved this self-definition, he found it to be completely empty. For many, the realization merely results in a restlessness of the heart and leads to a setting of new goals. As children we experienced this every time we went to the toy store with our parents, always finding some toy that we needed. We would kick and scream until our parents relented and purchased the toy, only to lose interest a few weeks later. The cycle continued, without fail, each time we returned to the toy store. Though we have moved on from childish things like toys, this same unachievable attempt at meaning and satisfaction lies in our hearts. Which of us hasn’t thought, “If only I got that job,” or that we could find ultimate purpose in the arms of a significant other? In Frankenstein’s case he sought to make himself God by creating life. The only difference between Frankenstein and us is that when we fail at our attempts to be our own God, we usually look for new ways to become God. Victor Frankenstein, on the other hand, saw the futility in this. For most, the dissatisfaction and emptiness found in our attempts at giving ourselves purpose leads to new attempts at self-definition. At his moment of achievement, Frankenstein saw that his self-deification project was failing miserably, and he was overwhelmed by the horror of his attempt to become God. The shallowness of giving oneself meaning, of becoming one’s own God, became apparent to Frankenstein. He wanted a God. He got a monster.

What if our creator didn’t have a plan for us?

In Victor Frankenstein we find a man who attempts to give himself meaning in life but is ultimately destroyed by the pursuit of said meaning. Victor Frankenstein is not only a victim of his pursuit; he is also a fickle creator whose care and interest in his creation is not much different than that of a small child. He is a creator who creates and then abandons. In turn, we see in the discarded creature a being created for no other reason than the whim of a fickle creator. As we look closer at the experience of Frankenstein’s creation we are forced to ask, What if our creator does not have a plan for us?

Upon his creation the monster flees and seeks, much like Frankenstein, to find meaning in his life. Rather than having grandiose dreams of achievement like his creator, the monster seeks meaning in more humble things. He seeks companionship, hoping that finding others who embrace him will give him reason for his existence. Unfortunately, he fails to find anyone to embrace him. In the novel, his ghastly appearance makes it impossible for others to accept him.

Some would argue that the monster’s inability to find acceptance is unrealistic. Surely not all are so small-minded as to be unable to see beyond an individual’s physical appearance. However, the monster’s inability to find purpose and meaning is not a result of his physical appearance alone. It is intrinsically tied to the capricious creator who, out of lack of concern or care for his creation, leaves it in a state where meaning is impossible to find. The monster realizes this and ultimately seeks out his maker to create him a companion. The result is that he is spurned by Frankenstein once again. The monster is left to face an existential problem that is rooted in the one who created him.

The monster learns the same truth that Victor Frankenstein found. It is impossible to self-create an ultimately fulfilling purpose for one’s own life. Having no other available options, the monster lashes out in an attempt to give himself a sense of purpose. He becomes the very opposite of his creator. He fashions himself the destroyer of the creator, deciding that if he has a creator that has abandoned him, then his purpose will be that of vengeance—to destroy all that Frankenstein holds dear. We see that the monster ultimately finds this to be unfulfilling. Once his purpose is completed and Frankenstein is dead, he has no lasting peace. Lacking this ultimate consolation, he chooses to end his existence, burning himself on a funeral pyre. In this he acts much like Frankenstein did when originally giving the monster life. The difference is that the monster is not under the illusion that his actions will provide fulfillment and self-definition.

If we reject the notion of a loving God, of one who calls us and demands our lives, then we are left to be like either Victor Frankenstein or the monster. If we believe that we have a creator who is fickle and has no plan for us, we are left to strive and fail to give ourselves meaning, much like Victor Frankenstein, or, like the monster, to find a short-lived substitute-meaning in hating and destroying the creator. At the heart of every man and woman is this struggle. Is there another option? How might this struggle be resolved?

The Intimate Creator

Through the process of elimination, it would seem that Shelly is opening up space for the kind of creator who creates with purpose. Though Shelly gives us no direction, we meet such an intimate Creator in another book: the Christian scriptures. There, we find an intimate creator and supplier of purpose who is the very opposite of failed-creators of Frankenstein. Shelly showed us individuals too fickle or flawed to be creators of purpose and meaning. In stark contrast, the God of the Bible is one without shortcomings or flaws, and is anything but fickle.

In fact, in the scriptures we find a God who created with great care and at great cost. He is seen to be a God who gives great meaning and purpose to his creation. When we were created we were not horrible or terrifying, but rather entrusted the imago dei. However, when sin entered the world through our own choosing, we became not unlike the monster at his birth: reprehensible to our Creator. By sin, we were made far more horrifying than any monster’s physical appearance. In light of this, God had every right to abandon us. But, rather then reject us or seek to destroy us like Frankenstein did with his creation, God chose a different option. He chose to redeem us.

It is in our redemption that we see the depths of the intimacy of this Creator. For when he created us he walked among us in the Garden, and after the fall he continued to lead us, but moreover at the cross he paid the price of our deformity, our sin. While owing nothing to us he chose at great cost to himself to pay our ransom, restoring the beauty and righteousness that we ourselves had traded in for the ugliness of sin. There was no waving of a magic wand that cured us. It was the life and death of his Son, Jesus Christ, which took away our sin and made us new creations. In this, he showed himself to be the ultimate intimate creator and redeemer for which we are all looking.

As our Creator, God calls us to be a part of his story, and this is where our meaning is found. There is great comfort to be found in the knowledge that meaning and purpose do not have to be derived from our own small stories. To have the smallest of roles in God’s story means to be a part of the ultimate story, one that holds ultimate, ongoing, eternal significance.