An article of mine went up over at Plough last week, as part of their “The Enemy” issue. The whole issue should be a brilliant collection of thoughts, including work by Zena Hitz and Ben Crosby; I’m really excited about how my contribution turned out.
Here’s what I’ve been thinking about hatred, the ostensible joy of having an enemy, and yes, snail slime: https://www.plough.com/en/topics/life/forgiveness/hating-sinners
Snails are relevant to the question due to Psalm 58, where the poet prays:
6 O God, break the teeth in their mouths;
tear out the fangs of the young lions, O Lord!
7 Let them vanish like water that runs away;
like grass let them be trodden down[b] and wither.
8 Let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime;
like the untimely birth that never sees the sun.
9 Sooner than your pots can feel the heat of thorns,
whether green or ablaze, may he sweep them away!
10 The righteous will rejoice when they see vengeance done;
they will bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked.
11 People will say, ‘Surely there is a reward for the righteous;
surely there is a God who judges on earth.’
The snails are somewhat the least of the poet’s worries, but you start to get the point, right? I love the expression “hating someone’s guts,” because it gets to the intensity of how the bowels are involved in this dynamic, both the twisting feeling of your own as you contemplate someone else’s hatred, and what you might wish for the bowels of someone else.
Over the past year, I’ve been spending a fair amount of time at daily mass, book of common prayer version, over at my local cathedral St. John the Divine, which is happily across the park and up some stairs from me. The Psalms are a permanent fixture of the liturgy, an interesting choice, to say the least. Usually, the text of the psalms is somewhat lost in whatever musical setting is being used, though, despite the best enunciation efforts of the choir of course. But in daily mass, there’s no music, and you read part of the psalm yourself; and if you go every day you eventually read them all. So it came to my notice, and not too slowly, that there’s a fair amount of discussion in the Psalms of what you would like to happen to the wicked, and specifically your enemy. The wishes are usually not good. But they are vivid, and you remember them.
When Caitrin K. asked me to work on something for the issue, I had these images on my mind, and wanted to know: What is the inevitable aesthetic satisfaction of reading these poetic wishes, and what is the pity and the fear of them? Imagining real enemies, or alas, simply recalling to mind real enemies past and present, is no joke. So why not only read these prayers, but make them part of our daily prayers as well?
Truly, I know not. One reason I prefer working at philosophy to theology is that once I start thinking about the latter, I feel as though I immediately enter the realm of mysticism, pure and simple. Like Wittgenstein at the end of the Tractatus, it feels like the rest is or ought to be silence. And I also felt overwhelmed by centuries of talk on this subject, talk I certainly don’t know all that much about. It came down to a timely intervention of encouragement from friends, such that I began to feel like saying minimally, at least, just what I was thinking about the subject just at that time, and no more.
But one puzzle that still keeps me up at night is the relation between “natural man,” the passion for revenge, and what Christ’s redemption has done or has not to the feelings on display in my beloved Greeks. Do we still want enemies in the exact same way as the Psalmist, or for that matter, in the same way as Aeschylus describes? Or has something shifted—or rather, not that anything necessarily has changed, but has something been infused, or added on, to what is possible for creation? Though to be sure, even Solomon’s wisdom encompasses this much: in a dream, he prays to be able to discern good from evil, and God in the dream as if in wonder replies, “you have not prayed for the life of your enemies . . . I now do according to your word,” and so the wisdom is granted.
I keep coming back to Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments, which I read for the first time last summer, in pursuit of a single possible footnote to another thought entirely. There’s a part where he talks about the “new wineskins” of post-redemption humanity, his image implying that, if God had infused himself into our old natures simply, our old natures would simply have burst: you can’t put new wine in old wineskins, as the saying goes, the fermentation of the wine is too much for them. “what must happen,” K writes, “when God implants himself in human weakness, unless man becomes a new vessel and a new creature!” The desire for revenge does actually make you feel like you might burst; but what if instead of bursting, one simply expands?
To me, I see the human waffling deeply between one sense of what is natural, and a natural-ness that is phenomenologically apparent, right there to and for the senses, that seems to be ever so slightly more. More what, I can’t say. But to me it seems that this more-ness places even the miraculous within the every-daily-human. How? I do not know. But it makes the following seem not exactly beyond our grasp, anno domini:
To put the ear back on, to un-wither the grass, to collect the slime and give it back to the snail: what if these paradoxes, beyond us but perhaps not quite beyond, are now what it means to be human, more than any other way?