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Book Review: Penguins and Golden Calves
Jul. 21st, 2018 07:29 am“Ultimately words are useless, and yet, penultimately, they are all we have.”
So muses Madeleine L’Engle in her book Penguins and Golden Calves: Icons and Idols in Antarctica and Other Unexpected Places, which is a meditation on words, on the nature of communication, on the infinity and ultimately unknowable mystery of God; or, as L’Engle quotes from St. Augustine, “If you think you understand, it isn’t God.”
It is of course paradoxical to use words to try to communicate the ultimate futility of words, and this review will undoubtedly offer an even more fractured and incomplete view of the subject that L’Engle does - so it’s worth reading the book if you want to consider the subject at more length. But the image that really stuck with me comes when L’Engle is describing icons (and a word can be an icon just as much as a picture can) - that an icon is a window, a way to help us grasp something infinite and therefore larger than our finite understanding.
And an icon (word or picture) turns into an idol when we lose sight of the fact that it is just a window, an approximation, a larger thing reduced to a size that we can try to comprehend - and begin to believe that we’ve got an exact understanding of the thing-in-itself.
L’Engle discusses this with reference to Christian denominations, particularly with regard to what she calls “fundalits”: fundamentalist literalists, who try to take the Bible “literally,” although, inevitably, any such literalism must be selective.
For instance, in fundalit circles (and perhaps Christian circles more widely?) there’s the idea that you should be able to joyfully praise God at any time - even if, say, your three-year-old daughter is slowly dying of an agonizing cancer. And yet, as L’Engle points out, if you actually read the Psalms, they’re full of “outraged bellowings of self-pity and anger.” If we’re taking the Bible literally, then it’s A-okay to raise your fists to the sky and scream “Why did you allow this to happen, God? You are the actual worst!”
Even Jesus cried out on the cross. Does “be better than Jesus” really seem like an achievable goal?
Another illuminating aspect of this book: L’Engle discusses the parables, and points out that many of them are meant to describe humanity’s relationship with God - and therefore don’t necessarily track directly onto how humans should treat each other, because the Christian God is infinite and humans just aren’t. The parable of the vineyard is an illustration of God’s grace, not a commentary on fair labor practices.
She also comments that the Protestant tradition in particular tends to ignore the context of the parables: Jesus tells these parables to specific people at specific times during his ministry, and that affects their meaning - and plucking them out of context often changes or even contradicts what they meant in context.
I thought this was fascinating but I just don’t know the New Testament well enough to really dig into it. Maybe I should finally read the Bible, after all. (For a non-believer I spend a lot of time reading about the Bible anyway.)
***
A couple of other notes: at one point L’Engle comments, “I also believe we need a word between acquaintance and friend,” and I couldn’t agree more. It turns out that L’Engle and her friend Luci Shaw actually wrote a book about friendship, which I clearly need to read.
And also: despite the title, there is not much about Antarctica in general or penguins in particular in Penguins and Golden Calves. You can read it for just about anything else, but don’t read it for Antarctica.
So muses Madeleine L’Engle in her book Penguins and Golden Calves: Icons and Idols in Antarctica and Other Unexpected Places, which is a meditation on words, on the nature of communication, on the infinity and ultimately unknowable mystery of God; or, as L’Engle quotes from St. Augustine, “If you think you understand, it isn’t God.”
It is of course paradoxical to use words to try to communicate the ultimate futility of words, and this review will undoubtedly offer an even more fractured and incomplete view of the subject that L’Engle does - so it’s worth reading the book if you want to consider the subject at more length. But the image that really stuck with me comes when L’Engle is describing icons (and a word can be an icon just as much as a picture can) - that an icon is a window, a way to help us grasp something infinite and therefore larger than our finite understanding.
And an icon (word or picture) turns into an idol when we lose sight of the fact that it is just a window, an approximation, a larger thing reduced to a size that we can try to comprehend - and begin to believe that we’ve got an exact understanding of the thing-in-itself.
L’Engle discusses this with reference to Christian denominations, particularly with regard to what she calls “fundalits”: fundamentalist literalists, who try to take the Bible “literally,” although, inevitably, any such literalism must be selective.
For instance, in fundalit circles (and perhaps Christian circles more widely?) there’s the idea that you should be able to joyfully praise God at any time - even if, say, your three-year-old daughter is slowly dying of an agonizing cancer. And yet, as L’Engle points out, if you actually read the Psalms, they’re full of “outraged bellowings of self-pity and anger.” If we’re taking the Bible literally, then it’s A-okay to raise your fists to the sky and scream “Why did you allow this to happen, God? You are the actual worst!”
Even Jesus cried out on the cross. Does “be better than Jesus” really seem like an achievable goal?
Another illuminating aspect of this book: L’Engle discusses the parables, and points out that many of them are meant to describe humanity’s relationship with God - and therefore don’t necessarily track directly onto how humans should treat each other, because the Christian God is infinite and humans just aren’t. The parable of the vineyard is an illustration of God’s grace, not a commentary on fair labor practices.
She also comments that the Protestant tradition in particular tends to ignore the context of the parables: Jesus tells these parables to specific people at specific times during his ministry, and that affects their meaning - and plucking them out of context often changes or even contradicts what they meant in context.
I thought this was fascinating but I just don’t know the New Testament well enough to really dig into it. Maybe I should finally read the Bible, after all. (For a non-believer I spend a lot of time reading about the Bible anyway.)
***
A couple of other notes: at one point L’Engle comments, “I also believe we need a word between acquaintance and friend,” and I couldn’t agree more. It turns out that L’Engle and her friend Luci Shaw actually wrote a book about friendship, which I clearly need to read.
And also: despite the title, there is not much about Antarctica in general or penguins in particular in Penguins and Golden Calves. You can read it for just about anything else, but don’t read it for Antarctica.
