{"id":4825,"date":"2020-11-02T14:56:34","date_gmt":"2020-11-02T14:56:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/learn.elca.org\/jle\/?p=4825"},"modified":"2020-11-02T14:56:34","modified_gmt":"2020-11-02T14:56:34","slug":"ronald-f-thiemann-the-humble-sublime-secularity-and-the-politics-of-belief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/learn.elca.org\/jle\/ronald-f-thiemann-the-humble-sublime-secularity-and-the-politics-of-belief\/","title":{"rendered":"Ronald F. Thiemann, The Humble Sublime: Secularity and the Politics of Belief"},"content":{"rendered":"

[1] Ronald F. Thiemann died of pancreatic cancer November 29, 2012, at the age of 66.\u00a0 The Humble Sublime,<\/em>\u00a0accepted for publication on the day of his funeral, was published November 30, 2013.\u00a0 It includes a brief but rich factual biography composed by four of his Harvard colleagues.\u00a0 In the Foreword, his daughter, Laura\u00a0Theimann\u00a0Scales, adds further biographical insights and honors his determination to complete this book (ten years in the planning) under what he himself termed \u201cthe deadline of mortality,\u201d with valor \u201cin the midst of grief at the cruel march of his disease\u201d (xiii).\u00a0 From her vantage point in the Department of English at Stonehill College, she writes hopefully of the value of her father\u2019s work for literary studies, while also noting, \u201cAlthough this book represents the wide scope of his literary and cultural interests, it is nevertheless deeply informed by his Lutheranism, and he writes, more so than in his other books, self-consciously as a Lutheran theologian\u201d (xi).<\/p>\n

[2] After Thiemann\u2019s own eight-page introduction, the book opens with a chapter titled \u201cSacramental Realism: The Humble Sublime.\u201d\u00a0 Within the conceptual framework established there, he then devotes a chapter each (chapters 2 through 5) to four literary writers whose works, in his view, exemplify sacramental realism: Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), Langston Hughes (1902-1967), George Orwell (1903-1950), and Albert Camus (1913-1960). \u00a0His introductory remarks suggest that he viewed chapter 5 as the concluding chapter, noting that that chapter is constructed \u201cso as to bring together again the literary and the theological at the end of the book\u201d (5).\u00a0 The published volume, however, includes a sixth chapter, \u201cConclusion,\u201d written by Mara Willard (Boston College) and Paul\u00a0Dafydd\u00a0Jones (University of Virginia), two of his former doctoral students.\u00a0 The book thus ends as it opens\u2014with the living who remember and pay tribute.<\/p>\n

[3] Thiemann\u2019s adversary in the book is contemporary philosopher and cultural analyst Charles Taylor.\u00a0 Thiemann\u2019s analysis of what is commonly called \u201cthe secular\u201d is very different from Taylor\u2019s narrative of disenchantment, and his more generous \u201cpost-secular\u201d assessment arises from a deep (and deeply Lutheran) objection to Taylor\u2019s genealogy of the modern Western \u201csocial imaginary\u201d (Taylor\u2019s term for any cultural constellation of fundamental, unexamined beliefs about reality).<\/p>\n

[4] Even as early as\u00a0Sources of the Self,<\/em>\u00a0Taylor argued that \u201cthe reformers\u2019 doctrine of salvation by grace alone rejects any notion of mediating between the sacred and profane\u201d (19) and thus sets in motion the denial of the sacred that leaves modernity with an impoverished sense of reality and a denuded conception of the self.[1]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0Thiemann thinks Taylor\u2019s position is only \u201cslightly more nuanced\u201d (19) in\u00a0A Secular Age<\/em>\u00a0where Taylor pointedly asserts that \u201call branches of Reform push toward disenchantment\u201d and \u201cthe eventual creation of a humanist alternative to faith.\u201d[2]<\/a>\u00a0 Thiemann affirms Taylor\u2019s argument that \u201ca fundamental shift in Western culture begins earlier than the Reformation with the aesthetic, political, and spiritual changes that take place in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries\u201d (21), but he faults Taylor for \u201ccaricaturing\u201d and \u201ctrivializing\u201d the intention and influence of the mendicant friars (24) whose ministry and devotion, according to Taylor, initiated the desacralizing process that would eventually completely separate the human (or natural) from the divine.\u00a0 Luther, of course, was, in Taylor\u2019s view, even more to blame than the Augustinian friars.\u00a0 Against Taylor\u2019s description of the reformers\u2019 theology as anti-sacramental and \u201cexcarnational\u201d (rather than incarnational), Thiemann affirms that \u201cLuther\u2019s Christology and his Eucharistic theology function . . . to \u2018sacralize\u2019 the everyday\u201d (31).\u00a0 Thiemann forcefully argues that Luther did not abolish the sacramental; rather, he radically changed our understanding of it.\u00a0 Thiemann suggests that whereas Taylor subscribes to a kind of\u00a0supernaturalist\u00a0dualism (\u201ctranscendence for Taylor requires a separate spiritual sphere, one clearly demarcated from the worldly context within which most Christians\u2014both lay and clerical\u2014live their lives\u201d [28]), Luther subscribes to a truly \u201cincarnational logic\u201d that \u201cresists a simple separation of divine and human, spirit and flesh, sacred and secular by focusing on the deep interpenetration of those apparent opposites\u201d (41).\u00a0 Far from evacuating a putatively autonomous world of God and God\u2019s grace by subverting the sacramental church as an alternative source of hope in a dark world, Luther embeds God in the very darkness of the mundane.\u00a0 Luther is a realist, and his realism is sacramental.\u00a0 The reality we know\u2014unsentimentalized, ragged, ambiguous, and riven with waste, suffering, and loss\u2014bears always and everywhere the \u201ctraces\u201d of divine grace\u00a0sub\u00a0contrario,<\/em>\u00a0where we are least likely to look for it:<\/p>\n

\u201cIf God can bring life out of death, if God can turn an instrument of political execution into a means of salvation, if God can turn disciples\u2019 sorrow into joy by becoming known \u2018in the breaking of the bread,\u2019 then the believer can look into the face of evil and still see the redeeming grace of a merciful God.\u00a0 Through faith, believers\u2019 eyes are opened to see what is hidden in the ordinary events of everyday life, even when that life is shot through with suffering, death, and destruction.\u00a0 The ability not to look aside from suffering but to see within it a hidden grace, a secret mercy, or an arcane truth\u2014this is the wisdom of sacramental realism.\u201d [37-38]<\/p>\n

In developing his alternative to Taylor, Thiemann\u2019s conceptual allies are Erich Auerbach (1892-1957), who along with Luther is pivotal to Thiemann\u2019s treatment of \u201csacramental realism\u201d in chapter 1, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), who Thiemann incorporates into his last chapter to consolidate his arguments about both the grace-bearing character of the ordinary world and the ethics of responsibility.<\/p>\n

[5] Auerbach, a Jewish German philologist and literary critic who was dismissed from his position at Marburg in 1936, is best known for his extraordinarily influential 1946 book\u00a0Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.[3]<\/strong><\/b><\/a><\/em>\u00a0 From the argument of\u00a0Mimesis,<\/em>\u00a0Thiemann derives the construct of \u201cthe humble sublime.\u201d\u00a0 According to Auerbach, the\u00a0sermo<\/em>\u00a0humilitatis\u00a0<\/em>(lowly writing style) characterized all Christian writings on all subjects from the very beginning\u2014in distinctive contrast to classical writers who were scrupulously careful to match sublime rhetoric with sublime subjects and a low style with everyday topics.\u00a0 Christian convictions concerning the incarnation, together with the gospel stories of the humble origins and life of the Messiah, worked against any such conventions, resulting in style that at once insisted on, exhibited, and created the humble sublime.\u00a0 Thiemann joins this to Luther\u2019s Eucharistic theology: \u201cGod\u2019s presence is always, according to the reformers, hidden \u2018in, with, and under\u2019 mundane and human realities like the flesh of Christ and the words, water, bread, and wine of sacramental ritual\u201d (3).\u00a0 Auerbach traces a history of literary realism (from\u00a0The Song of Roland<\/em>\u00a0to\u00a0To<\/em>\u00a0the Lighthouse<\/em>), showing, as Thiemann puts it, that \u201ceven the most apparently secular stories\u201d exemplify the humble sublime in works that \u201cdepict the strange depths of ordinary\u00a0objets, the curious inseparability of the ordinary and the sublime, and background beneath the surface of the everyday\u201d (5).\u00a0 By this means, Thiemann slides imperceptibly from Auerbach\u2019s argument that writing informed by the Christian worldview exhibits these traits into advancing his own position that\u00a0all<\/em>\u00a0realistic portrayals of ordinary, particular lives\u2014however \u201csecular\u201d they may look or may have been intended to be\u2014must \u201c[hide] forms of the mysterious, uncanny, unexpected, and sublime \u2018in, with, and under\u2019 the mundane\u201d (5).\u00a0 Thus literature becomes freighted with precisely that dimension of\u00a0sacrality\u00a0that Taylor alleges to have been lost.\u00a0 Readers may legitimately wonder, though, whether this turns all realist authors into anonymous Lutherans.<\/p>\n

[6] While Thiemann gives attention to the visual arts (the book includes several relevant color plates), imaginative literature becomes his primary focus as he turns to four authors who, along with Bonhoeffer, attest to the sacramental character of reality.\u00a0 Notably none of the literary figures, with the possible exception of Akhmatova, would typically be considered religious. \u00a0Hughes\u2019 relation to Christianity is, by his own account, that of someone \u201coutside the tent.\u201d \u00a0Orwell and Camus are widely regarded as atheists.\u00a0 Thiemann\u2019s response to any objection on these grounds is that \u201csacramental spirituality always assumes the absence of God\u201d (111), but to assume the hiddenness of God is not quite the same thing as to assume the absence of God.\u00a0 Perhaps aware of this, he does insist in his last chapter, where he characterizes the human condition as \u201ca situation of precarious vulnerability\u201d (175), that \u201cthe vulnerable God is present precisely under\u00a0the sign<\/em>\u00a0of God\u2019s absence\u201d (174, italics added).<\/p>\n

[7] Also notably, the important work of all of them is clustered in the mid twentieth century, and all of them are presented by Thiemann as figures whose writing \u201cfunctions to develop social and cultural critiques of the oppressive power of the tyrannical regimes under which they live and work\u201d (5).\u00a0\u00a0It thus becomes clear that Thiemann is not solely developing a\u00a0theo-poetics, but is also using this discussion of literature to generate an ethics\u2014what he names variously \u201can ethic of limits\u201d (168), \u201ca politics of resistance\u201d (238), and, more often, \u201can ethic of responsibility\u201d (169 and\u00a0passim<\/em>).\u00a0\u00a0Akhmatova\u2019s work was banned as seditious by the Soviet government from 1922 until the 1940s.\u00a0\u00a0Forbidden to write, she composed poems in the medium of memory and taught them orally to friends, hoping that no one would betray her.\u00a0\u00a0Langston Hughes and George Orwell, who respectively focused on making visible the \u201chidden lives\u201d (79) of African Americans and the English working poor, engaged social issues of race and class through texts meant to collapse the alienating social barriers between readers and the lives depicted\u2014lives whose pains and joys are demonstrably not so different from the readers\u2019 own.\u00a0\u00a0Thiemann seems deeply committed to the view that social change must begin with changing the views of individuals.\u00a0\u00a0At the same time, neither Hughes nor Orwell considered empathy sufficient.\u00a0\u00a0Literary art in their hands became a way of making injustice, inequality, and moral constriction palpably real to the well-placed, comfortable, and complacent.\u00a0\u00a0Hughes\u2019 poems and Orwell\u2019s narratives \u201c[serve] a moral and political purpose\u201d (133).\u00a0\u00a0Thiemann seems convinced that where empathy is established, \u201ccritique, resistance, and transformative action\u201d will follow (81).\u00a0\u00a0Sometimes it does, but often it does not\u2014as Hitler\u2019s Germany, Stalin\u2019s Russia, American racism, and Camus\u2019 fictional city of Oran make abundantly clear.\u00a0\u00a0Camus, of course, was involved in the French resistance to German occupation, and his treatise\u00a0The Rebel<\/em>\u00a0outlines, in Thiemann\u2019s view, nothing less than a \u201chumanist rebellion\u201d (the refusal on the part of the oppressed to allow continued domination\u201d [157]) and a \u201crevolutionary politics\u201d (154).<\/p>\n

[8] Thiemann incorporates the later work of Bonhoeffer[4]<\/a>\u00a0into the chapter discussing Camus not only on the grounds that both risked their lives in acts of political resistance and both were convinced that human life must be \u201clived in full recognition of the fundamental vulnerability of human existence\u201d (173), but also because, as he reads them, both \u201cbelieve that the virtues of the responsible life\u2014faith, hope, happiness, and love\u2014are born of the deepest forms of human intersubjectivity\u201d (183).\u00a0 The ethics of responsibility is thus to be contrasted with approaches to ethics that, being \u201cknowledge-based,\u201d treat moral persons as \u201cautonomous agent responsible only to themselves and their principles of ethical deliberation\u201d (175).\u00a0 One might worry that both Bonhoeffer and Thiemann paint with rather a broad brush in suggesting that such approaches to ethics risk idolatry in seeking \u201cto establish [human creatures] as the origin and deliberator of all things good and evil\u201d (175).\u00a0 More intriguing is the observation that it is not virtue but \u201cbondage,\u201d as it shows itself in the moral life, that produces \u201can ethic of self-sacrifice and self-abnegation, both of which render the agent incapable of discerning new possibilities and taking more radical ethical action\u201d (178-79).\u00a0 The marks of an ethic of responsibility that is not \u201cself-deluding\u201d (175) are these:\u00a0 it will be concrete rather than abstract, intensely aware of human limitations, committed to \u201csolidarity with the humiliated,\u201d collaboratively social in its orientation and exercise, creative in discerning new and better social arrangements (and acting disruptively to bring them about), and capable of \u201canswering\u201d flexibly to the immediate situation, which is always particular and always new. \u00a0What saves this from a sort of intuitionist relativity in Bonhoeffer\u2019s work is his emphasis on the will of God, and Thiemann quotes this passage from\u00a0Ethics:<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe will of God may lie very deeply concealed beneath a great number of available possibilities.\u00a0 The will of God is not a system of rules which is established from the outset; it is something new and different in each different situation in life, and for this reason human beings must ever anew examine what the will of God may be.\u00a0 The heart, the understanding, observation, and experience must all collaborate in this task.\u201d[5]<\/a><\/p>\n

Ethicists who work across the boundaries of the disciplines of theology, literature, and moral reflection could make a significant contribution by looking at particular literary and imaginative texts to see how this particular complex collaboration of heart, understanding, observation, and experience yields or fails to yield reliable insight into \u201cwhat the will of God may be.\u201d\u00a0 Thiemann has, of course, undertaken to do just that, but in a way he makes his job too easy by choosing moral issues on which we have such a broad social and moral consensus. The more compelling question that now presents itself is whether literature can help us toward the necessary collaborative task of examination in situations in which the will of God is still \u201cvery deeply concealed.\u201d<\/p>\n

[9]\u00a0The Humble Sublime\u00a0<\/em>has not yet received the notice that it deserves\u2014perhaps because it is available only in hard cover and at an unfortunate price ($112 and up, depending on the vendor).\u00a0 Theologians, ethicists, and lay people with a particular interest in the Lutheran tradition, especially those not already familiar with Thiemann\u2019s earlier essays on \u201cSacramental Realism,\u201d[6]<\/a>\u00a0will find both the history and the theology thoughtful and resourceful. \u00a0Ethicists will find this rendering of responsibility ethics, though uneven, provocative\u2014particularly as this book offers the final contribution of a figure whose earlier works have established his credentials in the conversation about the weight, function, and boundaries of religious convictions of \u201cpublic theology\u201d in Western democracies.\u00a0 Readers who intuitively find religious resonance in even some very \u201csecular\u201d literary works will find in Thiemann\u2019s book an intriguing account of the reasons for that.\u00a0 Thiemann has also provided a powerful argument for the value of turning to literature to enrich and deepen our religious lives in a time when the language and tropes of a fading cultural configuration of faith seem too often flat, worn, predictable, and uninspiring.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

NOTES:<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a>\u00a0Charles Taylor,\u00a0Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity<\/em>\u00a0(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).\u00a0 The focus of Thiemann\u2019s criticism is chapter 13, \u201cGod Loveth Adverbs,\u201d particularly pp. 216-17.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a>\u00a0Charles Taylor,\u00a0A Secular Age<\/em>\u00a0(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 266. 77.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a>\u00a0Erich Auerbach,\u00a0Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature,\u00a0<\/em>trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953).\u00a0\u00a0Mimesis\u00a0<\/em>was originally published in German in 1946, having been written between May 1942 and April 1945 while Auerbach was living bereft as an exile in Istanbul.\u00a0 Thiemann also draws upon two other works by Auerbach:\u00a0Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin\u00a0Antiquicty\u00a0and in the Middle Ages,<\/em>\u00a0trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton University Press, 1965); and\u00a0Dante: Poet of the Secular World,\u00a0<\/em>trans. Ralph Mannheim (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961).<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a>\u00a0Thiemann relies primarily on Bonhoeffer\u2019s\u00a0Ethics<\/em>, trans. Neville Horton Smith (New York: Touchstone, 1995). and\u00a0Letters and Papers from Prison,\u00a0<\/em>trans. Reginald Fuller, et al. (London: Macmillan, 1971).<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a>\u00a0Bonhoeffer,\u00a0Ethics,\u00a0<\/em>41; quoted\u00a0Humble Sublime,<\/em>\u00a0185.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a>\u00a0Ronald Thiemann, \u201cSacramental Realism: Relocating the Sacred,\u201d in\u00a0Reforming Reformation,<\/em>\u00a0ed. Thomas F. Mayer (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012); Ronald Thiemann, \u201cSacramental Realism: Martin Luther at the Dawn of Modernity,\u201d in\u00a0Lutherrenasissance<\/em>\u00a0Past and Present,\u00a0<\/em>ed. Christine Helmer and Bo Kristian Holm (Vanderhoeck\u00a0& Ruprecht, 2015).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[1] Ronald F. Thiemann died of pancreatic cancer November 29, 2012, at the age of 66.\u00a0 The Humble Sublime,\u00a0accepted for publication on the day of his funeral, was published November 30, 2013.\u00a0 It includes a brief but rich factual biography composed by four of his Harvard colleagues.\u00a0 In the Foreword, his daughter, Laura\u00a0Theimann\u00a0Scales, adds further […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRonald F. Thiemann, The Humble Sublime: Secularity and the Politics of Belief - Journal of Lutheran Ethics<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/learn.elca.org\/jle\/ronald-f-thiemann-the-humble-sublime-secularity-and-the-politics-of-belief\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ronald F. Thiemann, The Humble Sublime: Secularity and the Politics of Belief - Journal of Lutheran Ethics\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"[1] Ronald F. Thiemann died of pancreatic cancer November 29, 2012, at the age of 66.\u00a0 The Humble Sublime,\u00a0accepted for publication on the day of his funeral, was published November 30, 2013.\u00a0 It includes a brief but rich factual biography composed by four of his Harvard colleagues.\u00a0 In the Foreword, his daughter, Laura\u00a0Theimann\u00a0Scales, adds further […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/learn.elca.org\/jle\/ronald-f-thiemann-the-humble-sublime-secularity-and-the-politics-of-belief\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Journal of Lutheran Ethics\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2020-11-02T14:56:34+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/learn.elca.org\/jle\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2021\/01\/Journal_of_Lutheran_Ethics_Logo.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"250\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"250\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Denise Rector\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Denise Rector\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"13 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/learn.elca.org\/jle\/ronald-f-thiemann-the-humble-sublime-secularity-and-the-politics-of-belief\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/learn.elca.org\/jle\/ronald-f-thiemann-the-humble-sublime-secularity-and-the-politics-of-belief\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Denise Rector\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/learn.elca.org\/jle\/#\/schema\/person\/1d1a38a7727af6291bbff14ba363351c\"},\"headline\":\"Ronald F. 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