Book Review: Penguins and Golden Calves
Jul. 21st, 2018 07:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archer“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.
no subject
Date: 2018-07-21 12:09 pm (UTC)I think some churches are created to be windows like that, that they're built to help people grasp something intimate--the actual physical architecture of them.
(Not that I think they have that effect all the time or on all people etc.... typical caveats apply)
Madeleine L'Engle has been a good spiritual teacher, for me.
no subject
Date: 2018-07-22 01:34 am (UTC)It strikes me that "words are all we have" may be a misleading sentiment, although being a word-oriented person I just nodded along the first time I read it. There is also architecture, art, music - which can all be ways to try to communicate incommunicable things - although they are perhaps inevitably less precise than words.
Although in this instant that might make them more communicative, because they don't give that illusion of precision that words do. It's hard to elude the inherent mysteriousness of a rose window.
no subject
Date: 2018-07-21 03:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-07-22 01:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-07-22 10:22 pm (UTC)Anyway, I particularly like his take on the whole "being present in the moment" meme that's so prevalent in yoga philosophy; he talks a bit about "representational reality", which is where many of us (especially those of us who're prone to anxiety) spend so much of our time. The problem, of course, being that our mental representation of reality is incomplete and error-ridden because it's colored by our experiences and assumptions. And so often in life we're reacting to that reality rather than what's actually in front of us. I feel like that really ties in to what L'Engle says about ideas becoming idols.
Also I'm beginning to feel like L'Engle's philosophy works would be worth reading. She and C.S. Lewis...
no subject
Date: 2018-07-24 02:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-07-24 02:31 am (UTC)Man, I would sign up for that book group in a heartbeat. I’d even carve out some time in my week to do the reading, haha.
On reading the Bible
Date: 2018-07-24 12:19 pm (UTC)I don't know your religious background. Whatever it may be, if you (can) approach the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament as an utterly new set of documents, I think it's greatly to your advantage. Most North Americans, I think, read the Bible through one doctrinal lens or another, even if it's the lens of how they hear fundalits understand it, and that flattens a lot of things out.
If you can read it fresh, you find so many strangenesses, and are led to the wonderment of why this was written, what the writers were making of what they wrote, in the context of what they knew and read. And the scriptures very often reexamine previous scriptures- fun for writers of palimpsest.
As if you'd asked, which I know you didn't, I'll make a few recommendations.
1. I would recommend audioreading for a first or early iteration. As with War and Peace, there are huge advantages to swallowing in major gulps. And for me, at any rate, audio reading brought out phrases that get reconsidered and turned over again and again.
2. You indicate a particular interest in the New Testament. You could start with that, or you could give yourself a version of the background Jesus's Aramaic-speaking contemporaries had by reading the Hebrew Bible first. Each has advantages. I'm a fool for the Hebrew Bible.
3. If you want to start with New Testament: Paul's letters are the oldest extant New Testament writings, and there would be something to be said for seeing how he handles what he understands of a figure he never met, before getting traditional narratives of that figure's life. On the other hand they are very hard reading in a large number of ways, and merit scholarly help.*
4. If you want to start with New Testament: Consider starting with Mark, the earliest-written of the extant gospels, short, dynamic, dramatic, and mysterious.
* I hate study Bibles and all references that patly explain What That Means, with a long-smoldering hate.