Dryden: Religio Laici

To conclude my brief series on Dryden, here’s Religio Laici. My Selected Poems only has an extract from this of the first 167 lines. The poem is essentially an argument for Religion over Reason. It was, I suspect, quite a counter-cultural poem. It was the Age of Reason and the Church of England was spending (wasting?) a great deal of its time in dialogue with a rapidly changing culture and felt the need to show how religious truths could be proved by human reason. Dryden wasn’t impressed by this:

Dim, as the borrow'd beams of moon and stars
To lonely, weary, wand'ring travellers,
Is reason to the soul; and as on high
Those rolling fires discover but the sky,
Not light us here; so reason's glimmering ray
Was lent not to assure our doubtful way,
But guide us upward to a better day.
And as those nightly tapers disappear
When day's bright lord ascends our hemisphere
So pale grows reason at religion's sight;
So dies, and so dissolves in supernatural light

When I first read this, I assumed this was a conservative stance. He is, after all, defending religion against the claims of human knowledge, and there is, clearly, a conservative strain in his ideas. However, in doing so, he was arguing against the accepted mode of thinking in his day, even within the church. So Dryden is both conservative and radical and the poem may have been an attempt to find out what he really thought rather than a setting-down of prior certainties. Many people write poetry to find out what they think - it's as good a reason as any. These days, when I hear of an anti-Christianity book or poem being described as ‘radical’ or ‘daring’ or even (laughably) ‘blasphemous’, I wonder why a stance that accords perfectly with contemporary intellectual/media opinion is considered at all radical. Today, it is far more radical to offer intelligent reflections that stem from belief in God, however tenuous or questioning, than from disbelief.

In any case, those opening lines offer a superb extended metaphor and you don’t need to agree with Dryden’s conclusions to appreciate that. Dryden’s couplets often constitute complete phrases, so when he uses enjambment (i.e. when one line spills over into the next without a syntactical break), you really notice it. Here, he delays ‘Is reason to the soul’ until the third line after the slow second line, which gives the clincher maximum impact. There’s a lot for contemporary poets to learn from Dryden, and the clever manipulation of syntax would be one area worth taking a close look at.

Dryden had his own assumptions, probably held without much question. For example, on the subject of the Bible, he writes:

Whence, but from Heav'n, could men unskill'd in arts,
In several ages born, in several parts,
Weave such agreeing truths?

I know some people can still talk away more or less every set of contradictory verses in the Bible, but I prefer to live with the contradictions and find them fruitful to explore. That is, in itself, a way of thinking popular with my era, as I’m well aware. We all live with assumptions, consciously and unconsciously, and may be confronted with them in reading Dryden’s poem. That’s got to be a good thing.

The Scott Rennie Case

I took a bus into Edinburgh’s city centre and managed to get in to see the debate over Scott Rennie live at the General Assembly. The public gallery and the video-link hall were both packed full. The debate lasted four hours and was (mostly) of a high standard, I thought. It was a court case carried out without public broadcasting cameras, so I don't want to go into detail on speeches. Kirk votes to back gay minister, says the BBC headline – and it did, by 326 votes to 267. Scott Rennie’s call to Queen’s Cross Church and the ratification by Aberdeen Presbytery have been upheld. I don’t know Scott, but I’m glad for him and wish him well. It was the right decision.

But the motion passed was more complex than the BBC make it appear. The motion recognised that the church has not yet expressed a clear-cut view on matters of homosexuality and ministry, and the decision on Scott Rennie was expressly stated not to prejudice that debate, which was originally to take place afterwards tonight in terms of the motion issued by Lochcarron & Skye Presbytery:

“That this Church shall not accept for training, ordain, admit, readmit, induct or introduce to any ministry of the Church anyone involved in a sexual relationship outside of marriage between a man and a woman.”

However, due to the initial court case taking so long, it’s been postponed until Monday at 4pm.

In other words, the Church of Scotland General Assembly has decided that, under existing church legislation, the Presbytery of Aberdeen acted properly in upholding Scott Rennie’s call to Queen’s Cross Church. However, if the Overture issued by Lochcarron & Skye is passed on Monday, people engaged in sexual relationships, outside marriage between a man and woman, won’t be allowed to take up office as church ministers (in the future). So more or less everything is still at stake.

Live From The General Assembly

Those interested in following the Scott Rennie case at the Church of Scotland General Assembly (whether he, as a practising gay man, can retain his post as minister of Queen’s Cross Church) and the subsequent debate on sexuality, can watch it live from just after 6.30pm tonight. Whether it will be an edifying spectacle remains to be seen…

The BBC Report at the link states that "more than 400 Kirk ministers and almost 5,000 Church of Scotland members are said to have signed an online petition opposing the appointment." That 400 includes many retired ministers, and the 5,000 members belong to a Church denomination of over 600,000 members.

*

Hmmm. I just read in today's Scotsman newspaper that the Church has chosen not to show this particular debate on its live stream because "the Assembly is meeting as a court." Well it's true that, in Scotland, the proceedings of a court can't be televised. I can see the reasons why court proceedings ought to be held in private.

*

Latest news from the Church of Scotland website:

"Referred case: On Saturday evening the General Assembly will be exercising judicial functions, and like other British courts do not broadcast these publicly. Therefore there will be no webcast or Twitter updates of the Referred Case.

The webcast broadcast will re-commence with the beginning of the Overture from the Presbytery of Lochcarron-Skye. The timing of this event will be dependant on the length of the preceding material. We will annouce the re-starting of the webcast on Twitter on the General Assembly Updates page."

I guess this might read like double-dutch. Basically, the 'referred case' is a complaint made by certain individuals from the Presbytery of Aberdeen who feel that the Presbytery acted improperly in allowing Queens Cross Church to call Scott Rennie to be their minister. This is the court case, and will be in private.

However, the Lochcarron-Skye overture will debate the issue of whether churches will be able to call ministers in a gay relationship (or indeed in any sexual relationship outside of heterosexual marriage). The overture states:

“That this Church shall not accept for training, ordain, admit, readmit, induct or introduce to any ministry of the Church anyone involved in a sexual relationship outside of marriage between a man and a woman.”

That debate will be live on the stream, using the link above. I suspect the outcome will be to delay having to make a decision for a few years...

Gay Clergy

There’s a fair bit of concern over the latest controversy to hit the Church of Scotland – the issue whether Scott Rennie, an openly gay minister, should be allowed to take up his new post at Queens Cross Parish Church in Aberdeen. Will it split the church? The Scottish Kirk, while it has made mistakes in the past (who hasn’t?), has generally been fairly liberal and inclusive. The identity of that church is up for grabs. Those who want the church to operate on a narrow theological basis and exclude those who commit specific sins they particularly disapprove of are making their push. On Saturday 23rd May, the Church’s General Assembly (top decision-making body) will debate the matter.

But more than that, this controversy is about a person. Scott Rennie was minister of Brechin Cathedral for nine years. For several of these years, he has been in an openly gay relationship, and no one thought to protest. By all accounts, he was good at his job and well liked by everyone. He applied for the post at Queen’s Cross and was accepted in a vote by a healthy 86% of the congregation there. The Presbytery of Aberdeen sustained the appointment by 60 votes to 24. The petition to the General Assembly seeks to overturn these decisions. If carried, it will, in effect, exclude gay clergy from applying for church-minister posts. They will either have to conceal their relationships and live a lie, remain celibate for their entire lives, or give up their vocation.

The stress Scott already has gone through must have been considerable. If the petition to the General Assembly is passed, it will leave him not only without a job but with the sense that he, as an individual, has been rejected by the very organisation he has given so much of his life to. The human cost of all this appears irrelevant to those opposing him. Truth, they say, is more important than any sense of compassion for a human being. They mean their sense of truth, of course, their prejudices and fears, their opinions. They claim the Bible is ‘clear on these matters’ but it is clear only to them. The Bible suggests that menstruating women should be placed outside the camp for a number of days. It also says that people should not eat meat with blood in it. I presume that people who profess to take the Bible literally take those commands to heart as well!

The passages that are often cited from the New Testament concerning sexual practice are deeply ambiguous. Their exact meaning is unclear and the context even less clear. In some cases, it’s unlikely that they refer to homosexuality at all. In other cases, they certainly don’t refer to committed, loving relationships. Rather than living with ambiguity, fundamentalists always want to nail things down, which always means (somewhat ironically) nailing down anyone who gets in their way.

It’s intriguing, to say the least, that Jesus himself had nothing to say on the matter. Clearly, he didn’t consider the issue important enough to pronounce on, which simply begs the question why the matter has become of such central importance for the conservative wing of the church. Why this ’sin’ as opposed to all the others? The fundamentalist wing of the church seems strangely obsessed with it. Why? And why get so hot and bothered over what people do in the privacy of their bedrooms and, simultaneously, remain virtually silent on the fact that two-thirds of the world’s population live in poverty, that millions of children die every year of easily cured diseases like diarrhoea? Aren’t these sins more worth getting obsessed about?

The truth is that, while fundamentalists claim their liberal colleagues are ‘selective’ over which verses of the Bible they choose to take account of, the fundamentalists are every bit as selective, if not more so. The difference is that they are blind to their own prejudices. They don’t even realise it. That’s what makes them impossible to argue with. I only hope the General Assembly sees sense on 23rd May and allows Scott Rennie to take up his post and – in doing that – stands up for an inclusive church and an inclusive Scotland. I have a degree of confidence that they will indeed do that and I hope my confidence is not misplaced.

There is a Facebook Cause Group which you can join in support of Scott Rennie.

And this is an interesting and personal reflection by Stephen Glenn on the subject of church and sexuality.

God and Christopher

I haven’t read Christopher Hitchens’s book – yet another book attempting to discredit religion and argue that there is no God (is anyone bored yet?) – but I did enjoy John Crace’s treatment of it in The Digested Read. Very funny!

'The purpose of this book is not to prove God doesn't exist; it is to prove I am cleverer than Richard Dawkins.'

Heh heh.

Business or God

Recently, I discovered that ex-Talking Head and now-music legend, David Byrne, has a blog, and a very interesting one it is too. I am a fan, and the band for which I used to play guitar and sax and write songs, Pure Television, did several Talking Heads covers - Psycho Killer, Heaven, and Take me to the River, which, though an Al Green song, we tried to play in the TH way.

In a recent entry, he is in Savannah, Georgia, and he writes:

I went into the convenience store by the gas station to get a beer to nurse in the room. The door to the chiller wouldn’t open and the sullen-faced young black man behind the counter said, “No beer on Sunday”. OK. As we walked across the street to the hotel Malu asked me why no beer on Sunday and I explained that it was a religious law. That the church didn’t want people drinking on Sundays and the church still meddles in the affairs of the country in general sufficiently that they can cause such laws to be passed. We get used to it. She looked at me in shock, incredulous that some mysterious entity we have nothing to do with could be dictating aspects of our lives. I told her in NY liquor stores only recently began to be open on Sundays. Business beats God in NYC.

Isn’t it true that business, in this respect, might also make us just as “incredulous that some mysterious entity we have nothing to do with could be dictating aspects of our lives”? After all, opening shops and selling alcohol seven days a week is just as much an ideological act as closing down for a day, a deliberate (and, in many cases, recent) change in tradition.

I’m not arguing for the reintroduction of a Sabbath Day. I wish DB had been able to get his beer and I might well have felt like one myself on a hot day in Savannah, Georgia. But it's true that people now organise part of their lives around Sunday shopping in my home city. It must be one of the busiest days of the week in Tescos. Business or God? We always seem to place ourselves at the mercy of something.

God, the Via Negativa, and Beyond

Todd Swift, of Eyewear, makes some very interesting observations about being in search of God.

Most dialogue about God at the moment is on the basis that God, if he/she exists, should answer our questions and conform to our methods of exploration. And if he/she doesn’t, then the Deity must either be a human delusion or simply (and for some, sadly) inaccessible to those who can’t ‘make themselves’ have faith. Questions are then aimed at those expressing faith, questions which originate with these assumptions.

But Eyewear takes a different approach to faith:

God is the despite, is the still, is the just about, is the almost - may even be simply the perhaps, or it could be. God is the barest sliver of hope, when all hope is gone. As such, it is a via negativa, and one's faith can only be fully sounded when the instrument one plays is beyond need, is denuded of the self - when one mourns not for one's own self, but for a greater love of another.

This made me think of a passage from one of the letters that theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, wrote from the Tegel prison in Berlin in 1944 before being sent to Buchenwald and then Flossenberg, where he was hanged for his involvement in the bomb plot to kill Hitler. Bonhoeffer tried to find a way of expressing faith in an inhuman time, and the instrument he is playing is certainly “beyond need”:

Religious people speak of God when human perception is (often just from laziness) at an end, or human resources fail: it is in fact always the Deus ex machina they call to their aid, either for the so-called solving of insoluble problems or as support in human failure – always, that is to say, helping out human weakness or on the borders of human existence.

Of necessity, that can only go on until men can, by their own strength, push these borders a little further, so that God becomes superfluous as a Deus ex machina. I have come to be doubtful even about talking of “borders of human existence.”

Is even death today, since men are scarcely afraid of it any more, and sin, which they scarcely understand any more, still a genuine borderline? It always seems to me that in talking thus we are only seeking frantically to make room for God. I should like to speak of God not on the borders of life but at its centre, not in weakness but in strength, not, therefore, in man’s suffering and death, but in his life and prosperity.

On the borders it seems to me better to hold our peace and leave the problem unsolved. Belief in the resurrection is not the solution of the problem of death. The “beyond” of God is not the beyond of our perceptive facilities. Epistemological theory has nothing to do with the transcendence of God. God is the “beyond” in the midst of our life.

And it’s worth remembering what “life” he is placing God in the midst of. In that existence, God is also, I think, “the despite, the still, the just about, the almost… the barest sliver of hope, when all hope is gone.”