Beauty of The Word Enfleshed

Unnumbered: Finding Beauty, Finding God

I only recall ever once throwing a book in disgust. It was Nabokov’s Lectures on Russian Literature. The offending passage was his review of Dostoevsky – in particular, Crime and Punishment. Though a brilliant writer, he gives remarkably terrible reading advice. He writes:

Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed – then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood.

Nabokov gets this wrong. Unity and beauty exist in the works of Dostoevsky and other great writers. The reader may bring her perspective, opinions, and experiences to the reading of a text, but the meaning exists apart from the individual reader. If I am the source of all meaning, then reading is nothing more than a mindless amusement. The world is greater than me and imbued with meaning; it is because of this that I read. There is no need for the contribution of my blood. The blood of meaning and beauty already has been spilled.

Although logos is common, the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own, writes Heraclitus.  This is not only Nabokov’s mistake – it is the mistake of modern man. It is tragic to read as if one had a wisdom all his own, choosing chaos over logos. Roughly six centuries after Heraclitus, John would write, In the beginning was the logos, and the logos was with God, and the logos was God. What is logos? The word has multiple meanings with technical and non-technical uses. Heraclitus used it to mean the organizing principle of the universe. English translations of John 1:1 render logos as “Word”. It can be translated as word, wisdom, reason, and proportion. It is daunting to try and wrap one’s mind around such a word. Perhaps the important thing to know is that the same logos that formed the world forms the heart.

In The City of God, Augustine describes the Trinity thus: God the Father is; the Son knows that He is; the Spirit rejoices in his being and his knowledge of it. The same Logos - through whom and by whom the world was spoken into being – is wisdom and the bestower of intelligence. Perhaps there is a fine line between analysis and destruction in studying literature.  I posit that the line dividing the two is humility. Beauty humbles. The way to find beauty in a work of great literature is to find something larger than oneself and to be changed. With a posture of humility, we encounter the word and are changed. This formation is a part of the work we have been given.

Elizabeth Jennings, a lesser-known British poet, offers an alternative approach to Nabokov - one that meets words with humility, recognizing a logos of which she is a partaker, not a creator. The latter half of her poem “An Act of the Imagination” reads:

                       Yes, I always need

Herbert’s sonnet ‘Prayer’ say, or that great 
Giotto painting for 
My heart to leap to God. I want to meet
Him in my own poems, God as metaphor

And rising up. I watch a lucid sky
And see a silver cloud
And Christ’s behind it; this is part of faith,

Hear the Great Hours sung and let faith be loud
With the best imagining we have.
This is how I approach
My God-made-Man. Thus I learn to love
And yes, like Thomas, know Christ through a touch.

Through her poetry, through metaphor, through the singing of the hours, Jennings meets God, not herself. When wisdom becomes word, form is given to thought. It is a type of incarnation – thought enfleshed. Just like any literature, a poem is not a specimen; it is a marriage of thought to form. As we approach literature, the beauty is in the discovery, not the destruction.

As partakers in the logos, we see only in part - through a glass, darkly. Even incarnate, the logos could not be seen in his fullness. It was only to Peter, James, and John that Jesus revealed himself in his splendor on the Mount of Transfiguration. Even then, it was a fleeting moment of glory. The synoptic gospels write that he was revealed in splendor with clothes dazzling white and a face that shone like the sun. There is no indication in the texts even then that he was seen in fullness. He was revealed yet hidden.

Literature contains moments of transfiguration – moments when we encounter beauty less dimly. One of these moments is the very moment in Crime and Punishment with which Nabokov takes issue. The protagonist, Raskolnikov, has committed a violent murder. His redemptive arc centers around his budding friendship with Sonya, a young woman forced into prostitution to feed her family. Heavy with guilt and psychosis, Raskolnikov spins increasingly out of control; yet he is drawn to the inner beauty of Sonya’s faith. He visits her in her room and demands that she read Scripture to him as she had once read to the woman he murdered.

She opens the Bible to the Gospel of John and begins to read by candlelight about the raising of Lazarus.

The candle-end had long been burning out in the bent candlestick, casting a dim light in this destitute room upon the murderer and the harlot strangely come together over the reading of the eternal book.

Nabokov claims that this sentence is unequaled in sheer stupidity. He is blind to transfiguration. The candlestick is bent; the dim light has nearly burnt out. But the Gospel shines eternal. Sonya herself is bent and burnt. But Christ spills forth from her, and in her love is transfiguration. The moment of transfiguration is a moment of healing – seeing and knowing as Christ sees and knows. Eventually, through Sonya, Raskolnikov finds a logos larger than himself and is changed. To the charge of “spilling Jesus all over the place,” Dostoevsky is guilty. And my greatest aspiration is to be guilty of the same.

This is the third post in a series on beauty and the Trinity. Click here to read Part 1 and Part 2.