Yesterday marked Trinity Sunday in the Anglican church calendar. On this first Sunday after Pentecost, the Church pays special attention to the marvel of the Trinity: “one God in trinity and the trinity in unity, neither blending their persons nor dividing their essence”, as the ancient creed of Athanasius states. Of course, the Trinity is one of the great mysteries at the heart of the Christian faith, and as such, every Sunday is a Trinity Sunday. Every Sunday—and every ordinary day—we ought to remember the promise of Christianity: that our Triune God, Father, Son, and Spirit, works through time and space and history to draw human souls into the abundant, over-flowing divine life. This is the marvel of the faith, that through the Incarnation, the Cross, the Resurrection, the will of the Father and the work of the Spirit, mankind enters into the all-good and all-generous love of the Persons for each other. It seems appropriate, then, to often remind ourselves Who our God is and how we encounter this great mystery of Three-in-One.
My priest gave us three words to meditate on: transcendence, immanence, and numinous. Transcendent: beyond our limits, unfathomable, “out there”. Immanent: here, now, known. Numinous: the in-breaking of the transcendent into the immanent. The “out there”; here. The unfathomable; known. The “beyond our limits” entering into our small now.
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Sometimes God’s people experience the numinous in moments of special revelation, at a burning bush or on a mountain. But if we believe, as Hopkins does, that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God”, then we are, at every corner, in danger of coming face to face with the immortal God. Not only in creeds and doctrinal comments, but in constellations and coreopsis and the dark water in the depths of a swimming hole. All creation streams from the Trinity’s overabundant love, unmeasurable universes and atomic infinities spilling out as God makes a cosmos to share in the all and the beyond and the too much of His divinity. All creation mirrors this divine life and declares its glory to forgetful man. And in the heavy air before the thunderstorm, fear and awe strike us, prickling the hair on our necks, and we smell the flattened grass and flooded streets before the deluge hits. We hear the still, small voice of the numinous. Infinite God; here, right now, in this moment.
I’m almost finished with John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, the next book in my quest to learn how to write novels. It’s a wonderful read, both as a writer and someone who just enjoys hearing people talk about art with wisdom, insight, and a good dose of snark. I love Gardner’s book because he balances practical technique and a rich philosophy of what art is for. Although he appreciates postmodern, absurdist, and deconstructionist novels, he says that we call those works “metafiction” because they don’t have the same goal as fiction. Metafiction twists fiction in order to comment on its conventions, or on society, or on its author. But fiction, Gardner says, never focuses on itself. A great literary work makes us forget that we are even reading a story; rather, fiction aims to say something about the world.
About the world, not about the author. Gardner writes: “If the assembly of made-up materials in a fiction creates a portrait of the artist, the importance of the portrait is not that it tells us what the artist looks like but that it provides us with a focus, an aperture, a medium (as in a séance) for seeing things beyond and more important than the artist. In the artist’s recreation of the world we are enabled to see the world.” In a work of fiction, then, we have two windows: first, there is the novel itself, which aims to disappear so that the reader can enter into its dream world. Secondly, there is the personality of the author, shaped by his experiences and memories, Bradbury’s “texture of life.”
The author cannot dissolve his personality, nor should he try to—for Gardner also says that no two writers tell a story the same way, and that is one of the delights of art. But when we read a book, the author’s personality is of second interest. I love reading Jane Austen novels because of her humor, her levity, her knack for getting people’s quirks on paper. But Austen isn’t concerned with self-expression. (In fact, talking about oneself nonstop shows poor character in most of her novels, as seen with Mrs. Bennet or Sir Walter Eliot.) Rather, Austen has something to say about the world: about marriage, and English society, and the types of people we meet. So she says it, and we listen.
Between these two things—the nuts and bolts of the written word that the novel seeks to conceal and the personality of the writer, never dissolved, but muffled—a tertium quid quickens. This is the dream world, the profluence of story in which we lose ourselves as readers. (For more on profluence and narrative parallax, see my previous post.) But although the writer works to make this dream believable, “in the artist’s recreation of the world we are enabled to see in the world.” What does the writer care about, creating another world or saying something about the real one? Both. And if he has done his work well, he will do both, drawing the reader into a story that follows its own cosmic logic and yet reveals the “eternal verities” of life. Transcendent, yet immanent; the numinous in story. Creation echoing creation, in the threefold dynamic of author, written word, and reader. In art as well as in creation, therefore, we hear echoes of that unfathomable mystery: Trinity in unity and unity in Trinity, the chord that plays throughout the cosmos.