episode 18 transcript
Elise:
My guest today is Natalie Carnes. Natalie is a constructive theologian who considers how Christian doctrine might help us navigate the complexities of modern life. She is a prolific writer, elegantly engaging with topics such as beauty, images and iconoclasm, gender, embodied experience, and childhood. Her books include Beauty: A Theological Engagement with Gregory of Nyssa; Image and Presence: A Christological Reflection on Iconoclasm and Iconophilia; and her most recent book published in April of this year, Motherhood: A Confession. Natalie is an associate professor of theology in the religion department at Baylor university, and she is an affiliate faculty member in women's and gender studies.
Natalie, welcome to our podcast.
Natalie:
Thank you, Elise. I'm really happy to be here.
Elise:
So the Beatrice Institute claims friendship with all who pursue the true, the beautiful and the good, and your own work across your corpus engages with beauty. So I think we should just go for it from the beginning—what is beauty?
Natalie:
Oh, good. You're starting with the easy questions! Well, in the Christian tradition, one of the most important ways of capturing beauty's significance is as a name for God. Beauty is one of the ways that Christians have named and approached God over the centuries. And that was the tradition that I was most interested in entering into with my first book, beauty in theological ambiguity with Gregory of Nyssa, who's a fourth-century theologian who was in that tradition of naming God as Beauty. And I was interested there in exploring, what does that name for God have to do with our own experiences of the beautiful and what does that mean for where we perceive beauty and what the significance is?
Elise:
Right. So how did you find your way to beauty as a theological concept? Was it Gregory's writing or was it something, as you mentioned, in our contemporary lives that drew you into that idea?
Natalie:
Well, kind of both. I mean, I had a backwards education as an undergraduate in that I began my education with a lot of postmodern theory and critical theory and hermeneutics. And then by my senior year, I finally read Plato for the first time. And somewhere in between those two poles of my education in undergraduate, I read Gregory of Nyssa.
I was reading Gregory, as I said, at the same time that I was reading Stanley Cavell, and I was reading a bunch of others interested also in aesthetics. And I noticed this really interesting resonance in how both sets of thinkers, both Gregory and other ancient thinkers as well as postmodern thinkers, spoke of beauty and aesthetics in ways that were similar but also strangely different. And the way that Gregory spoke about beauty in his texts that I first encountered, The Life of Moses, was as something that calls to you, and summons you, and has this personality, really, that beauty was a person to him. It just struck me.
And I remember my teacher at that point had us, each week, we had to write among other things a set of questions that were provoked in us by the text. And so one of the questions I wrote was just a very simple question. What does Gregory mean by beauty? And he picked up that question in lecture. And he was like, well, you know what, in some ways, this is just the question. And those kinds of experiences can be very formative for undergraduates. It was for me. So I decided, well, if he thinks this is an important question, I'm just going to stay with it. And the questions sort of just sat with me for a while, as I went and pursued further graduate work, and I ended up coming back to it to think, well, what is this that Gregory means about beauty, and how does this fit and not fit with the way that I've been reading about beauty in these other texts, and with my own encounters with beauty. Because I've also been interested in theology and the arts, and for part of my graduate period, I worked in a museum.
And so I was interested in really thinking all of these things together.
Elise:
That's fantastic. I mean, that's really interdisciplinary work. And I also think what you say about a question calling you is, in so many ways, the Christian vocation, that we're called to quest and journey into something that's fundamentally unknowable. We're always asking these questions. I also appreciate your engagement with postmodernism, because my own experience in graduate school, I had a cohort of friends, we all showed up in a grad program, we all happened to be Christian, but we were all really interested in theory. So we tried to bring these things together, and there was a real turn with Cavell and with thinkers like Zizek and Badiou to bring these ideas of Christianity and postmodern theory together. And I have to confess beauty, though, for me, was until very recently, and in fact, until I read your work, not something that I ever thought I was interested in. And part of the reason is in literary studies (and I taught for a while at an art and design college), beauty is not on the menu. It is not a critical category that anybody is interested in interrogating. And why not? Why are we so down on beauty, how did it get a bad rap?
Natalie:
Yeah. That's, that's a great question. I think that there were a number of things. There were, especially in the 20th century, there were the sociologists like Bourdieu pointing out the ways that our perceptions of beauty are so bound up with class, there was the infamous example of the Nazis and their own sort of pursuits of beauty and supports of the arts.
And so this recognition that beauty can be caught up in all kinds of moral depravity. There's also just the way that beauty became caught up with consumption and the way that womanhood is marketed to women in terms of a particular way that they want to look, such that “beauty” names sections of drug stores and magazines that tell you how to look.
So it began to be a kind of frivolous category, something that doesn't take you into the serious things of the world but can be a distraction from them, and even worse, be a cover for our worst moral impulses. And meanwhile, that meant that in the arts, in as much as they're interested in exploring the sort of deep experiences and problems and issues and conversations with the world, beauty wasn't really part of that. It was seen as sentimental at best. I think it just lost its depth. It became a very superficial category.
Elise:
Right. And as superficial, really brittle. It couldn't stand up to much critical inquiry. And you said a lot of things, the association with women, with consumerism, with class. And I want to slowly unpack all of those things. And maybe one way to get into it, you said that you worked in a museum, and I'm fascinated by that, because I'm also wondering, do you see a way in which artists and saints are on a continuum, and how we might think about them similarly but also with productive difference?
Natalie:
Oh, Elise, that is such a big question. It's one that I thought about it a little bit when I was writing the beauty book, and it's one that I've been returning to lately in work I've been doing. Because I do think that there's really important resonances but also differences in the work that saints and artists do. One of the things that artists are doing is, in the way that they're making their art, they're devoting themselves to this object that's apart from their own ego. And in that sort of devotion to the good of the object and to what it is, what kinds of demands this artwork is making on them, art becomes a kind of ascetic practice that has similarities to the ascetic practices that saints undergo. And one of the things that I've been thinking about recently is how the emergence of art and the Christian tradition and the emergence of asceticism kind of came together. And you can see the way both are yoked in this interesting logic of witness. You see it, for example, in Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians and the Galatians, presenting himself as this icon of Christ crucified through the text.
And then you have, other hagiographers and iconographers who then also pick up on this idea of icons as witnesses to Christ, and hagiography sort of presents both the text and the saint as an ascetic object that mediates Christ’s presence. And then you see this even more with the life of Francis and the sort of art that it generated immediately after his life and in the middle ages.
So today, obviously, that idea of art as witness doesn't work in the same kind of way, because our object of most art is not Christ or God, but there's still—you see echoes and vestiges of this in art-making today. And you also, interestingly, see art as witness re-cropping up through certain poets.
I think of Carolyn Forché, who wrote this poetry during El Salvador, during the period leading up to the civil war and the late seventies, and then she curated a couple of volumes on poetry of witness. And I think, what is art doing there? Well, there's this realization that what art can do is not make, not witness to something over there such that you, the person consuming the art or beholding the art is like the judge, but art is a kind of evidence of deep violence or suffering that's happening. Such that, you, the beholder of the art are not the judge: you're the witness. Your active reading, your active beholding is an act of witness to what it is that's happening there. So anyway, this is a very long-winded way of saying I think there's a way that art witnesses deep human realities in a way that reportage, for example, doesn't capture in the same way.
Elise:
Right. And when you say that we as the viewer can participate as witnesses—correct me if you think that I'm wrong here—but in a way, this might provide a way out of this bind we seem to be in right now. So we have these artifacts produced by people, in most cases men, who it's now been revealed were abusive in many ways. So just to take one example, what are we supposed to do with the films that Harvey Weinstein produced? Are we supposed to chuck them and be done with them? And the other side of the argument is, well, if we got rid of everything that was ever produced by a sinner, we'd have nothing. But both seem to miss the point. What do you think about that?
Natalie:
What do you think the point is?
Elise:
I think the point involves this issue of witnessing, about a kind of response to a work of art that can engage it and reveal the violence inherent in it, as you said, and make meaning from that, that doesn't have to use it as a shroud or a cover for what happened, that the engagement and the recognition can be intertwined. Is that viable?
Natalie:
Yes. I think that part of the problem with the polarity that you've just outlined of “Chuck, it all. Don't worry about it” is that it's a way of looking for a single answer to this problem. But I think that these situations of what do we do with the art of monstrous men, which is the title of an article by Claire Dederer in the Paris Review, a fascinating article, is that it calls for more fine-grain analysis.
So, things to consider, for example, Harvey Weinstein is one example. Woody Allen is another, Woody Allen's work. The way that he makes films, it makes his own personality difficult to actually separate, his own biography difficult to separate from the films. He's constantly putting himself for avatars of himself in his films, and sort of dramatizing also relationships of older men with younger women.
And the art that is produced by men who are still alive, who still benefit from our consumption and the prestige of their art seems different than men who died 300 years ago. Men who are maybe dead, like let's say in theology, John Howard Yoder, but whose victims are very much alive also present a different case, and that needs to be attended to, and I think Yoder could probably be given a rest for a good long while.
So those kinds of things need to be taken to consideration. And whether there's been a full reckoning. So maybe there's a figure that's long dead, maybe he no longer has any victims that are still alive, but there hasn't been quite a reckoning with the full, horrible reality of what this person was part of and perpetrating. And so that person probably needs to be given a rest so that that reckoning can happen before we move on with appreciating, beholding that person's art. So I don't have a rubric for it, but I do think that there's a series of criteria and more fine-grain analysis that these situations call for rather than “Chuck them all” and “It's all okay.”
Elise:
That's great. And in speaking of fine-grain analysis and trying to attend to other voices, you really lift up Macrina, who is Gregory’s sister, in your work. And you're just good generally about showing the women who were doing the work when it's usually the men that we end up reading in the classroom. Can you tell us a little bit about Macrina?
Natalie:
She's very cool. she was the oldest of nine or ten brothers and sisters, and it was a family that was pretty remarkable in fourth-century Cappadocia. Gregory of Nyssa was her little brother and so was Basil the Great, and she is also the subject of two of Gregory Nyssa’s texts. She takes the Socrates figure in his texts The Life of Macrina and On the Soul and the Resurrection.
And she's, in those texts, she's sort of on her death bed, and she is still the didaskalos, she's still the teacher. She's teaching Gregory of Nyssa, she's exhorting him, she's ministering to him. And he's reflecting on her whole life, as she is approaching death. And there's just really interesting things that come up in there.
Like Basil, as the oldest male, gets sent away to Athens. He's like a star on the educational scene, and he comes back kind of like puffed up, and she gives him a dressing down and sort of points him back to humility and sort of renarrates for him the place of his intellectual learning and his spiritual life. And that moment is one of my favorite moments in the Life of the Macrina.
And one of the things I think is interesting is that there was, a couple of decades ago though, this linguistic turn in historical studies and in the humanities in general, where it raised the question of, well, do we even have access to Macrina, and to these women, because Macrina didn't write any of this. Gregory of Nyssa wrote it. Is she just a construction in Gregory of Nyssa’s writing? How do we have access to the person apart from this construction?
But I think anyone who reads these texts can also feel the way that Macrina has this presence that is sort of impinging on Gregory of Nyssa, that she's sort of exceeding whatever writerly intentions Gregory brings to the text. I mean, Gregory just puts himself in the place of pupil, and his place in itself is the place of mentee, as he sort of elevates Macrina and tries to receive the teaching and the exhortations that she's giving him.
Elise:
Yeah, she's fabulous. And you're right. There is kind of an excessiveness to her presence in the text that seems accessible, and words are really important in Gregory's formulation of Macrina. And there's a complicated way in which words as means by which we represent becomes entangled with ideas of beauty and horror, and beauty and ugliness, and beauty and poverty. I think that you are someone who looks at these things head on. So how do we think about beauty in conjunction with these categories of horror, ugliness, poverty? What are we supposed to do with that?
Natalie:
That's a really big question, but I think central to Christian approaches of beauty has to be going to the place where the fullness of the one who is beauty is revealed to us, which is on the cross. And if the cross is where Christ reveals God to us, who God is, then what exactly is being revealed—I don't think what's being revealed is that violence is beautiful, but it's that beauty is revealed, and remains beauty even in the most violent parts of our world. And so where should we seek beauty? Well, if we're trying to seek beauty by turning away from violence, by turning away from horror, by turning away from affliction, then we're going to be in danger of finding not beauty but some very superficial diminishment of what beauty is, that beauty is found near the sufferings of the world because we have a God who is beauty. And that beauty is constantly going out. That God goes out in the Trinity, Father to Son, Son to Spirit, Spirit to Father. God goes out in creation, creating what is not God. God goes out in the incarnation by a greater intimacy with humanity. God goes out in the cross. God is found today in the face of the suffering, the hungry, the stranger, the imprisoned. And so if we're looking for beauty, then we've got to follow the God who goes out. Who's constantly going out of God's self. So looking for beauty as a kind of a refuge from the most difficult realities of the world is going to lead us into problematic and diminished understandings.
Elise:
And it also seems as we imitate the God who goes out, the God who acts, we then also avoid that kind of narcissistic hand-wringing that is, you know, Oh, woe is me. This is so bad. Or, I feel so badly about this, in kind of a self-flagellation that maybe registers to us. I like this term “slacktivism,” where, you know, you make the social media post of your support, but then there's no action behind it.
And this model of incarnation and beauty that is revealed in the horror gets us out of this, I think. I want to read a sentence from your book on beauty, because it did kind of stop me in my tracks, and I think it can help us move our own conversation into the next part. But you write, “For Gregory, true language about the sufferer must move, for the reality of the suffer is not exhausted by detailing her maladies.”
And part of the reason I was stopped by this, that language, “true language about the sufferer must move,” reminded me of a preface that Toni Morrison wrote to a later edition of The Bluest Eye. And if people don't know that novel, it centers around a small Black girl, Pecola, who believes that to be beautiful she must have blue eyes. And it's not even that she thinks she would be more beautiful or a different kind of beautiful. She believes she's fundamentally ugly because she is Black. And in that preface Morrison said that she considered that novel a failure, because people felt really bad for Pecola and they thought, “Oh gee, isn't it such a shame that this young girl would grow up thinking this,” and then her words are, “But they were not moved.” And I think it is consonant with everything that you have said here. And talking about affliction makes me think of course of Simone Weill, and that attention to affliction, she calls it a miracle, that it's really hard. Is this something that you're thinking through in our contemporary moment? What are the stakes of actually being attentive to affliction and having a discourse of beauty alongside that?
Natalie:
Oh, absolutely. I mean, this problem, Gregory is addressing that. He's talking about maladies and his famine sermons, and he's trying to hold together in those sermons both the way these people are who are afflicted by famine, both the way that they are images of God, and the ways that starvation and the indifference of others has dehumanized them in ways that are real. And he's trying to hold together that the ways that they've been dehumanized with their beauty at the same time with the way that they image God. And so it's a very rhetorically powerful sermon, but he's also within the sermon very aware of the way that words and art can lead to a kind of spectaclization or reification rather than that movement. So one of the things that makes him most appalled is the way that the afflicted in order to grab the attention of those with resources, they sing these songs about their maladies, and turning their very bodies and their lives into receptacles for the entertainment and emotionality of the listeners, to try to provoke them to offer help. And he finds this just repulsive. And yet he in his sermons is also detailing their maladies, but he's doing it as he's prodding and provoking and trying to, with his words, move his audience into acts of mercy, and where he finally ends up locating beauty is where those who are racked with hunger meet those who are bloated with greed and an act of mercy and mutual healing of the greed and of the hunger.
I think another person who's also really good on this very issue you're talking about. Slacktivism, although you wouldn't have known that word is Augustine, who in his Confessions talks about going to the theater, and like you see something really sad, and then you feel sad about it, and then you feel this kind of moral pleasure with yourself for your capacity to feel sorrow at the right things. He's like, but that's not, that's not mercy. That's not actual love for those in need, because mercy resolves in a kind of activity of care and there's no activity of care there. There's just a kind of feeling. There's just a spectacle visitation.
And it's something that I think a lot about. I don't think that there's a way of ever protecting yourself against that, right? Because it's always going to be a kind of danger, because feeling sorrow is an important part of the movement of mercy. The problem is when we think that it's the entire part or when we sort of stop with it. The feeling of sorrow is supposed to be a provocation to action, an invitation to action. It's not the fullness of mercy. And to the extent that we let it be, or we remain satisfied with it, we end up training ourselves into a false mercy, which is one of Augustine’s critiques of theater.
Elise:
Thank you. That's a really beautiful articulation of some really complicated ideas. And it also puts me in mind of a lot of writing that our Black sisters and brothers are putting right now, saying that on one hand, videos of police brutality help show the reality of black experience in America, but they are also creating a spectacle, creating a spectacle of Black suffering that is detrimental.
And you mentioned that we're training, that we've got to be training our site in different ways, in different capacities. And one image that you've written about that might help us train our site, you can tell me what you think, is Our Lady Mother of Ferguson and all those killed by gun violence. You write about this in your most recent book. Can you describe how this icon came to be created, and then for our listeners, recreate it imagistically for us?
Natalie:
Yes. it was created by Mark Dukes. It's called Our Lady Mother of Ferguson and it's for all victims of gun violence. She is an interpretation of Maria orans, which is a series of icons in which Mary stands in the orans posture, the praying posture, with her hands raised palms up and Christ is in her womb.
And you can sort of see Christ in her womb in these traditional images by, there's a circle that sort of lets you see little Christ in her womb. And in this image you have, Mary is a Black mother. and her womb is sort of opened with a circle of gold. And there's a silhouette of a figure also with his hands up, in a gesture that evokes both the gesture of prayer that she's making with the palms up, but also evokes the “hands up, don't shoot” gesture at the same time. The figure is entirely silhouetted except for the heart, which is in red. And it's encircled with thorns and sort of radiating a kind of light from it. And one more important thing—I mean, there's a lot of interesting things about the figure, but one important, more important thing is that the circle is also the circle of the sites of a gun so that you, as the viewer, looking at this image are implicated in the sight of a gun trained on this child.
Elise:
And thus being implicated. We have to change. We have to allow that to work on us, in a very particular way, especially as white people. And how would you suggest that we bring more images such as this one into our conversation as Christians? Because I don't know that everyone always thinks that these images that so clearly referenced contemporary moments, that they want to see them. And whether we think that that's unfortunate or not, it's an argument that's out there. So how can we convince people that meditating on these images is as productive, as much a part of our quest toward God, as meditating on some of the most traditional iconography, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, just to think of one example off the top of my head.
Natalie:
I mean, this is part of, I think, a larger way that we try to shield ourselves from the claims of Christianity by making it something of the past. We do this, not just with images, but also with theological claims so that there's always a temptation to look to the past and sort of seal Christianity off, like, this is the moment when we stop making claims. After Vatican II was when everything went wrong. After Vatican II, you know, that's when Christianity lost itself.
But the interesting thing about Christian history is, that's more often the argument of heretics, people who originate heresy, than of the people who end up being declared saints, or fathers of the church, doctors of the church. So, you know, if you look at some of the major heresies, like Arius, the first major heresiarch, right. That. He was trying to prevent Christianity from saying that Christ was homoousios with the Father, of the same substance as the Father. That was a new thing to be said, that wasn't something that Christians had always said about God, that was a new and quite radical, and to some blasphemous thing, that Christians were saying. Similar issue with Nestorianism, which is the heresy that arose over the controversy of whether Mary could be called Theotokos, the mother of God. Nestorius was the one going for the solution of compromise, of like, “Look, let's just say Mary was the mother of Christ. We can all agree on that. Right? We don't need to say this kind of crazy thing that she's the mother of God.” And he ended up being declared a heresiarch because it was important to the unity of Christ that we can say, “God was born of the Virgin Mary, and that God died on the cross.” Then that's how we can also say that God saved us by the cross.
So, I think the scary thing about Christianity is that the Holy spirit doesn’t stop at a certain point, but the Holy spirit continues to work through the Church, making claims on us, calling us to believe new things, and that this attempt to only look at traditional images can also be an attempt to shield ourselves from the ways that the Holy spirit is making claims on us to change our lives here and now.
Elise:
Right, right. Thank you again. You reference in many of your works womanist theology, and this might be a new term for some of our listeners. So can you give a brief definition of womanist theology and then maybe, given our moment right now, we're all trying to reckon with the systemic racial injustice in the United States and how to act more justly in the future, so are there womanist theologians that we should be reading right now and paying attention to?
Natalie:
Yes. So womanist theology began with the critique that Black women were making in feminist theology, which is, “Look, feminist theologians: You have recognized the ways in which theology has been covertly sexist.” By taking into consideration the experiences and bodies of men without recognizing that and thinking you were speaking on a universal voice, you've pointed at the ways that women have been excluded from that, but in your own theologizing and feminist theology, you have been inattentive to the ways that your theology is informed, not by women's experience, but by white women's experience. And let us point you to the ways that the history of white women is implicated in violence and oppression towards Black women. So some of the first voices, Jacquelyn Grant, Delores Williams, Katie Cannon, they carve out this new field of womanist theology, and it's continued to be a really vibrant field of thought, but especially in the last several years the field has just exploded with all of this new energy and these amazing voices.
You have people who have been doing this for years, like Emilie Townes and Karen Baker-Fletcher and M. Shawn Copeland. And you also have a number of new voices. Amey Adkins-Jones and Kelly Brown Douglas, who are writing in a way that brings theological categories and Black women's experience together to illumine the theological and social realities of our time.
Elise:
And while we're thinking about what it means as a woman to confront tradition and to rethink it in some ways, that's really what your most recent book, Motherhood, is attempting to do. And I have to say one of the things of the many things I was so impressed by in this book—and I'm going to gush for a moment, because it's one of my new favorite books—but you took in Augustine, and I'll let you say more about why Augustine in a moment, but you took him in so entirely. I see how grounded you are in his thinking and even in his style, in his rhetorical style, but what comes out is entirely your own. It's truly beautiful. And I'm saying that very seriously, given our conversation piece. So can you explain for us what brought you to this project, and why did you choose a structure as he did?
Natalie:
Yes. Thank you. Well, for a while, I'd been wanting to write a work of theological anthropology centered on children. In part because I'd gone through this religious education program that was influenced by Maria Montessori. And she has this really interesting and important conviction that children and adults are two poles of humanity. And it's a simple observation but for me was really powerful, because we tend to think of children as mini adults, right? Or that they're like human beings who haven't quite gotten to their end yet; our end is to be adults. And Maria Montessori was sort of like, “No, children aren't just inadequate adults. Children represent their own pole of humanity.” And I thought, well, that's obviously true. She has all of these ways of pointing to how children are differently oriented in the world. And if that's true, we really need to take that more seriously in theological anthropology, right? That we need to be doing theological anthropology that's attentive to this whole other pole of humanity and what it reveals about who we are.
And so I wrote a little bit on this. I wrote an article, and some of my friends, my children's friends’ moms were like, “Oh, well, can, can we read that article?” Because my kids go to a Montessori school, so they're interested. And I was like, I don't think you want this academic article that's engaging contemporary work and systematic theology. But then I thought, why not write something that's for women like this, who are so thoughtful about their own sort of motherhood and their place in the world and their life with their children? Why not raise something for them? And at the same time, I've been teaching Augustine's Confessions every semester. So it's been in my head, but it was, eventually, it was my husband who was sort of like, don't just be in conversation with Augustine—why don't you more explicitly model after him. And so that led to that project of trying to write in conversation with and modeling Augustine's Confessions. But of course, because the story was different, then the form ended up being different as well. I mean, in the beginning I had this intuition that the story would be different because the central dramas were different.
Augustine's Confessions, his drama is for his divided will to become whole. So it's a drama of two wills becoming one, whereas parenthood, the central drama as I've experienced it, is one will struggling, over time, learning how to become, how to birth this other will into existence and give it the space and the nurture that it needs to become separate from you.
And that leads to a different kind of orientation in the world, which then meant that the form of the writing was different. The form of writing had to be slightly different too, because we live in a different time, and Augustine's writing is so beautiful, but I don't think anyone could write that today. It feels too, maybe “staged” is the wrong word, but it's almost too florid. It's too much for us now. Having gone through ages of irony and sarcasm and things like that, I don't think we can quite receive it in the same way. So it's actually the book that I've written most quickly but then spent the most time revising. I think I spent much more time revising it than I actually spent writing it.
Elise:
That's fascinating. And I actually have a lot of questions for you about writing this book, but I'd love it if we could hear you read from the book, because I think for our listeners having a sense of your style, precisely these things that you're discussing the excerpt is from your chapter on suffering. You're trying to work through, really, layers of when do you allow your daughter to suffer? When do you protect her from suffering? But then you're also thinking about the fraught relationship between women and suffering, and how to give her a right understanding of suffering so that she is not victimized or falls into abuse.
But then also thinking about the fact that she is a white girl, and that she also stands at risk of being insensitive to other suffering, or consciously or unconsciously perpetuating other suffering. And you put all of this into conversation with a God who suffers. Would you mind reading from that chapter, please?
Natalie:
Absolutely.
The way you love a human being, daughter, is the way Christ loves her: all the way through suffering. For Christ suffers, not to eradicate the possibility of our suffering here and now, but to show us the way suffering accompanies love in this world, and the way love survives such suffering as love, rather than turning into violence. My attempts to give too much to you, to take away your pain, or to absorb the suffering of the world so that you will not see it—these can be attempts at playing God in a way that God does not even play God. God does not clear the world of suffering for us. God wants us to survive suffering without being defeated by it; this is what I want to help you do, too.
For women, as for all of us, agency and empowerment come not in denying suffering, nor in embracing it, but in a hope that risks devastation, in a nearness to suffering that is funded by faith that suffering is not the final word. The cross extends the hope that is so near despair because it is willing to pass through the possibility of despair. To suffer the way of love is to be willing to suffer, and to suffer the way of love as a parent is also to be willing to let you suffer. I think of Moses’s mother, who, after hearing that the Pharaoh wanted to kill all boys under two, fashioned a basket for her son and sent him down the stream to Pharaoh's daughter. It is an act of hope that seems, like the cross, so near despair. Can I imagine putting you in a basket and sending you across the river, on the possibility that a stranger would have mercy on you and draw you from the water? Can I imagine saying good-bye to you forever, giving up all influence on your life, because I wanted you to live? This hope that you were floating toward life could not be prized away from the melancholy realization that life with me would be short, that you were not safe in my home. Moses's mother must be one of the most courageous people in Scripture. Her love was so strong, so unsentimental, so creative. How did she prepare herself to suffer that uncertainty, to suffer the possibility of her child’s suffering and death?
Elise:
What did it take to write that?
Natalie:
I was writing that in the midst of going to marches for women and for Black Lives Matter. And for my community, going through its own reckoning with a lynching and its past. There was the 100-year anniversary of the lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco a few years ago. I was sort of in the midst of thinking about, how do I raise this daughter well, where I have this impulse to protect her. And as a woman, I know the particular vulnerabilities that she's going to face. I know the ways that people will reduce her to her body and to a violent desire for that body. I know that very well because Waco was going through its, in Baylor, going through its reckoning with sexual violence, also on campus at the same time. And I was teaching feminist theology. And so my class was filled with students, which I didn't expect, who were in that class not because there were looking for a class on theology as much as because they were looking for a class on feminism as a way of healing from different incidents of sexual violence.
It was striking to me how many of them were suffering from that and how much that marked the class, marked their ability to participate, marked the kinds of conversations that we had. So I was seeing all of this on the one hand and sort of projecting, what is it going to be like to watch this small thing grow up into the world? What kind of world am I sending her into? And then also seeing the way that fear of violence can be another occasion for perpetrating violence. And this is unfortunately the story of white women in the South, especially. That this story of the lynching of Jesse Washington, like the stories of so many lynchings, are bound up with a kind of pretext of chivalry invoked at some kind of indignation of what was done or supposedly done toward a white woman. And, while we don't have those kinds of lynchings anymore, we do have ways of trying to protect our children that end up disadvantaging other children, particularly protecting white, privileged children. By, for example, we have failing public schools, so we can either choose to try to send our children there and work to make the system better, or we can say, “I'm not going to subject my child to that kind of school day. And so I'm going to send them to a better school.” And then what happens to the children who don't have the privilege of being able to live like that?
So, I was starting to see in my daily life the way that all of our ordinary decisions can add up to ways of trying to either expose our children to suffering that children shouldn't be exposed to or protect them from suffering in a way that more deeply exposes other children to suffering and also is terrible for their own soul, to be insulated from the suffering of the world in this kind of complete way. And part of what it is as a parent that I find so difficult is that you're constantly trying to negotiate, “What kind of suffering do I need to ask my child to suffer and what kind is not appropriate?” And that's not a question that you ever answer once and for all, because at each stage, there’s more and more.
And I think that question can be a way of holding your children away from racism. And I think one of the really interesting things about the moment that we're in now is that a lot of people have pointed out the way that racist thought and white supremacy, it takes root in the imagination very young. So I've seen a lot of resources going around the internet right now, social media, that are “here's anti-racist resources for children at a very young age, and here's ways of trying to expose them.” And so I'm really grateful for people who are helping all of us introduce our children to difficult conversations at an appropriate age.
Elise:
I wonder too, if you think, from writing this book, that having more conversation about a God who mothers, about Mother God and describing God's love as a mothering love— actually I found a quote from your first book, Beauty, in which you say to locate the self in a journey of mother-becoming. So I loved the arc of your thinking, the consistency and the precision of it. Do you think we should be talking more about God as mother? And what can that give us, in this moment?
Natalie:
Absolutely. I think one of the features of our theological language, our images, is that they're constantly in danger of sedimenting and desiccating, so that we forget what they're doing is taking us into a reality that always exceeds them. And one of the things that happens then is that our language about God using “he” and “father” and masculinist language exclusively leads us to actually think that God is male. So I always recommend, even to my intro to theology students, just as an exercise in exorcising our imaginations of idolatries (because of course we know God is not literally male, because God is spirit; God is neither male nor female), try not using pronouns. When you speak about God, try introducing another set of images. So one of the ways that the mothering of God is important is because in the general Christian imagination, it's been kind of lost as a way of approaching God. And so it can be a way of reminding us first that God is beyond male or female or our understandings of what male and female, masculinity, femininity, what our constructions of what these things entail.
The other thing is that it's obliquely throughout Scripture. I mean, you have not very many explicit images of God as a mother, though they are there, but you have the image of rebirth, of course, being central to the Christian story. And how are we reborn? Who are we reborn into? Well, God is our new mother of our new childhood, and that's dramatized in baptism, and some baptismal fonts are in early Christianity were even in the shape of the womb to sort of dramatize the way that we're being reborn in the womb of God into a new childhood. I think that these images are there and drawing them out is really important.
Elise:
Well, you point out too that your daughters came to you as Christ comes to you, which is another really powerful moment from the book. And I think this gets back to what you said about thinking about children as children, in theologically rich ways that don't instrumentalize them as metaphors or see them simply as little creatures on their way to adulthood. That's really powerful.
And I want to ask too, you have to be front and center in this book. You're present in your first two books, in the language of the academy—those are your scholarly monographs. This is spiritual memoir, so there's issues of genre here, but you're doing something that is at once really theologically old and also very much every writer's concern, and that's “point of view.” Who's the I, who's the you? There's always first person, second person, but there's a third person too. And I wonder, do you have a theology of writing? Do you think that the Trinity is involved in writing in any way?
Natalie:
I don't have a theology of writing, but I see that we have a world filled with vestiges of the Trinity. One of the triadic aspects of the book Motherhood that I'm exploring was one of the shifts is that Augustine is addressing his Confessions to God. God is the “you” in the Confessions. But in the first part of my book, the “you” is not God, the “you” is my daughter. I'm addressing myself to my daughter.
But in the turning towards the second half, what I try to explore a bit is the way the “you” of my daughter also can turn towards the “you” of God, and that to address myself to my daughter is also in some way to address myself to God. And that is for me less a theology of the Trinity and more theology of creation. That God is the creator of all things; the world was created from nothing, ex nihilo. And so the whole world is sustained by God and given to us by God, which is deeply important to Augustine's theology. And that means that to address ourselves to any part of creation can be a way of indirectly addressing ourselves to God. And of course that can turn in more generative and destructive ways, but that was the triadic relationship I was interested in exploring in the book was this way that all creation can give us God. But then for Augustine also, the other side of that is all creation can become an idol that also separates us from God. And we need God to find God in creation. So there's probably some theology of the Trinity that you could work out from there.
Elise:
Maybe that's your next book.
Natalie:
Sure, there we go. Start the outline.
Elise:
No, that was so helpful in many ways. I think of you as a writer's theologian, because your sentences have meaning, they have rhythm, and it's clear to me that you really love language and also that you know many languages. And also, it seems very important to you that the theological work that you do works itself out at the level of the sentence.
And I really don't read a lot of that. And I imagine that that's an enormous commitment. So did you find in writing Motherhood that having to shift your focus a bit and make yourself the subject in a way that isn't required of us, of academics—we can have our interests, we can have our subjects, but we don't ever really get to be implicated, to use a term that we've been talking about this entire time. Was it hard to be implicated in your own writing?
Natalie:
Yes. I mean, I was always aware of the way that this could just be a huge embarrassment and embarrassment at multiple levels. Embarrassment because I'm exposing parts of myself that I'm ashamed of, but also embarrassing because I could be deceived and I could be writing all of this as a cover. And then that's an even deeper source of shame.
So yes, but I also think that that kind of vulnerability to the text was something that I was wanting to model, not just as a form of writing, but really as a form of reading. And that's something I'm really interested in exploring right now for the future of feminist theology. How do we move forward with these texts that are so infected with misogyny and patriarchy? We have these texts in Christianity and they're beautiful, but pretty much all of them are misogynist. And so what do we do, what do feminist theologians do with that? And feminist theology was sort of built with strategies pulled from two major modes of engagement. One is critique, which is various strategies that involve exposing the structures of domination within a text. And one is avoidance, which is different ways of avoiding either particularly patriarchal texts or the most patriarchal aspects of attacks in order to avoid amplifying those voices.
And these have been really important strategies for feminist theology, because they've enabled us to see and avoid reproducing structures of domination on the one hand and to establish new, more generative conversations to women on the other. And I think that that's really important work that I want to build on by asking, how can feminists read the patriarchal tradition as our own and as feminists, right?
So we can engage the text, not shy with those patriarchal texts, but also not have to then meet ourselves as outsiders. Because Augustine is making women, frankly, outsiders to his texts. I mean, both in the way that female flesh is sort of figured as a problem and as sinful, as his problem with sin throughout the Confessions. And also in the way that the first introduction of women, the nurses and the mothers, who have these unthinking attachments to debates, and they can't see the way that their greedy nursing is evidence of original sin, but Augustine, as a man at a critical distance can see it. In subtle ways women, and not so subtle ways, women get figured as outsiders too, with his texts. So with feminist theologians, the mode of reading that's a mode of critique, they make that more obvious, but they also reinforce feminists and women as outsiders to this text. So, now that all of this important work is done, I'm interested in, well, how do we move it forward?
How do we claim these texts our own and as feminists, and so make feminism internal to the Christian tradition. And I think what's required to do that is this kind of vulnerability to the text that enables us to repair the text in such a way that the text can then repair us. And it can speak meaningfully back to us. And if it can't speak meaningfully back to us, either the text just isn't worth it, which isn't maybe true, or it means that our repair is not yet complete.
Elise:
So you were referencing the ways that your next series of projects are really going to be doing this work of reparative reading, trying to see can these texts be repaired or what are the ways that we have not yet learned to repair them. So do you have a particular project in mind going forward to do this work?
Natalie:
Well, I'm interested in a project that's first going to do a more attentive study of different feminist theological reading practices and see what it is that they've been able to accomplish. And then I want to start looking at what I see as new forms of feminist theological writing emerging with Janet Martin Soskice's creative nonfiction Sisters of Sinai, Elizabeth Johnson's Creation and the Cross, written in the form of an Anselmian dialogue, and four different feminist theologians writing novels. What is it that they're doing there? What is it they're accomplishing? What kind of relationships to the Christian tradition are they renegotiating with these new forms of writing? And then as far as what texts that I might want to go back to with modes of attunement, I'm not sure exactly, but I've been thinking a lot about Mariology recently, and thinking about different texts on Mary that I might end up going back to. But I guess I see the Motherhood book as this kind of intuitive work of feminist theology, that I now want to do the more theological nuts-and-bolts of method and things, and what's going on there. And then what resources do we have for moving forward and new and generative ways as feminist theologians?
Elise:
That's so exciting. And I can't wait to see what comes of this. As I said, I loved Motherhood, but I really like this idea that it can be “both and”; it can be both this intuitive project and you can do the categorical work that theology requires. This conversation has been really enlightening for me, really comforting for me in many ways, and I really appreciated it. As I said earlier, I've long admired your work, but it's not too often that I get to talk with someone about their work. So thank you. Thank you for your time.
Natalie:
Thank you, Elise. And thank you for these really thoughtful and engaged questions. I appreciate the way that you've been able to set up a deep and meaningful conversation for us.
Elise:
Well, you're welcome. I hope you'll come back when you write the next book.
Natalie:
That's right.
Elise:
Thanks, Natalie.
Natalie:
Thank you, Elise.