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Theological Table-Talk
By Hugh T. Kerr

SIN, SEX, AND THE SOUL

Reading again, as a professor of theology is wont to do whether he wants to or not, Augustine's Confessions and the account of his youthful pear-stealing episode, some associations with our contemporary obsession with sex leaped out from the ancient text.

Written in the form of one long prayer, Augustine begins Book II with the words: "I will now call to mind my past foulness, and the carnal corruptions of my soul, not because I love them but that I may love Thee, O my God." Searchers for juicy revelations in the modern true confession vein will find little to excite them in what follows. The prime example of Augustine's teenage delinquency is the theft of some pears which he and his companions stole, ate, and threw to the pigs-because they had taken more than they could eat and the fruit wasn't very good anyway. This scarcely qualifies under the preface: "Behold with what companions I walked the streets of Babylon, in whose filth I rolled, as if in cinnamon and precious ointments!"

Augustine's point of course as he later reflected upon this otherwise prankish misdemeanor was not the inventory of his vices as if their excessive number or the vileness of their elaborated details were in themselves deplorable and sinful. "I had," he said, " a desire to commit robbery, and did so, compelled neither by hunger nor poverty but through a distaste for well-being and a lustiness or iniquity . . . Nor did I desire to enjoy what I pilfered, but the theft and sin itself." Four chapters later he concludes: "My enjoyment was not in those pears, it was in the crime itself."

The sin is magnified for Augustine not only because of his perverse pleasure but because of the corporate character of the act and the fun of "fellow-sinners." Over against this reflection upon the mysterious potency of sin, Augustine sees the miracle of grace.

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"Thou hast melted away my sin as it were ice," he prays, reverting as he so frequently does in the Confessions to the devotional format.

Augustine's soteriological reflection on the nature of the sinful act can hardly be said to lie behind contemporary preoccupation with, say, sex and violence. Here the detailed inventory, the clinical report, the "adult" and "mature" exposition, the empirical analysis, the quantitative measurement and extension of the acts in time and number and variety-these are the obvious and advertized trademarks of contemporary sex discussion. It is no accident that legal definitions of obscenity and pornography are harder to achieve in our day, or that there is a greater freedom and acceptance of themes once regarded as unspeakable. In too simple terms, Augustine's view of sin is predicated on his experience of forgiveness, whereas today there is plenty of sin but no grace.

This is "too simple" because certain aspects of our sex holiday are remarkably akin to Augustine's reflection on the pear-stealing-though we in our time are perhaps not so perceptive and devotional. Consider three lively examples in our midst: Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, Alberto Moravia's The Empty Canvas, Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita.

Leaving aside both the question of censorship and of good taste, these three current items have some interesting parallels not only among themselves but with Augustine's Confessions. They all speak of the ambivalence of sex and sin, and they all describe the ambiguity of self-understanding. The ambivalence is seen in the alternating fascination and defilement of sex and sin; the ambiguity emerges in the tension between the anticipation of creative freedom and the empty experience of unfulfillment.

Whatever can be said of Henry Miller's blunt and brutal book, it is an Augustinian threnody on the pleasurelessness of sin. Promising potency, uninhibited sex (even in the Paris of the 1930's) produces utter boredom. Moravia's Canvas is empty for more reasons than the blankness of Dino's artistic commitment and the vacuity of Cecilia's nymphomania. The monotonous rehearsal of sexual seances is terminated when the artist proposes marriage, only to discover that Cecilia can't make the date because of an earlier engagement to spend a fortnight with another partner. If it weren't so painful, it would be comical. But it certainly is very very empty, La Dolce Vita, now in your neighborhood movie house at popular prices, in

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repetitious episode after episode underscores perhaps best of all the ambivalence of sex and the ambiquity of self. The sweet life has gone sour.

In a perceptive essay on Augustine's autobiography, Roy W. Battenhouse (A Companion to the Study of Augustine, Oxford, 1955, p. 16) says of the Confessions: "It seeks self-knowledge, but only where such knowledge can fairly be found, within the light of a knowledge of God. This perspective means that the categories of sin and grace emerge as necessary dimensions for understanding a man's life. It means also that, because all life is acknowledged to be under the providence of God, no event can be dismissed as entirely accidental. The vision of the biographer therefore is profoundly historical in its scrutiny of process and of significant detail, yet theological in interpretation. Augustine's method is that of radical empiricism." So is the method of the other three items-radical empiricism; but what a difference in the similarity.

MIGRANT THEOLOGY

In more than one way ours is an uprooted generation. For many throughout the world the old roots of life, home, family, country, tradition, custom, even religion and language have been either destroyed or transplanted. Since World War II vast sections of humanity have been shifting about from one place to another, migrants in a mobile population explosion. The dual problem of migrant-immigrant requires attention and action from many sides-Church, state, sociological analysis, welfare groups, the United Nations.

Two recently published pamphlets on this subject are available and worth serious study: (1) In a Strange Land, A Report of a World Conference on Problems of International Migration and the Responsibility of the Churches, held at Leysin, Switzerland, June 11-16, 1961 published by the Division of inter-Church Aid and Services of Refugees, World Council of Churches; and (2) Churches and Immigrants, A Sociological Study of the Mutual Effect of Religion and Immigration Adjustment, by J. J. Mol, published by the Research Group for European Migration Problems (both pamphlets may be secured by writing to W. C. C. offices, either 17 Route

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de Malagnou, Geneva, Switzerland, or 475 Riverside Drive, New York 27, N. Y.).

The amount of material already published on this subject is impressive and slightly overpowering. We isolate for brief comment one essay from the first item, an article by Professor Pieter de Jong of Saskatoon, Canada, on "Migration in Biblical Perspective-Toward a Theology of Migration."

Beginning with Abraham who left home and kindred to go out into an unknown frontier, Professor de Jong notes that "this emigration is not just an accidental event at the beginning of the story of Israel. It is the characterization of the People of God in Old and New Testament. They are people who have been called out of this world (ekklesia) and are traveling to a new land . . . The story of Abraham is the story of faith all through the Bible from the beginning to the end."

A quick journey through the Bible with this in mind discloses the pivotal significance of the following: the Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all of whom were strangers in the land, the Egyptian Bondage, the Exodus and wilderness wandering, the Exile and Diaspora, the Son of Man who had no place to lay his head and who was a stranger to his own family and people and at times even to his disciples. Furthermore, though it may seem odd in our suburban domesticated Church life, the New Testament describes the Church as the pilgrim people of God who are never at home in this world.

It is out of such Biblical considerations that the Churches' responsibility for refugees, migrants, displaced persons, and mobile populations should stem. "Every migrant-whether he knows it or not-is a parable of faith. He has given up what lies behind, his homeland, his kindred, his friends. He goes through an uprooting experience which turns his life upside down . . . Faith is being on the move.

If it is possible and meaningful to speak of a Biblical theology of migration expressive of a faith on the move, may it not also be possible and desirable, though Professor de Jong does not suggest this in his article, to speak of theology itself as migrant? If theological reflection stems from a pilgrim people, from faith on the move, is not this a viable-that is, on-the-way-approach to methodology, structure, definition, affirmation, and so on? If the Churches must be aware of the migrant problem, or better-migrant persons, per-

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haps in our mobile world theology too should partake of faith-on-the-move. Who will write us an essay on that problem?

A DIMENSION OF THE INEFFABLE

The following three quotations might be excerpted from a sermon by an especially alert and analytical preacher or from an article by a theologian in a journal such as this, commenting on the present state of man, morals, and mores:

"To confront the limits of the human condition is . . . a profound mystical experience. It is precisely this experience of the ineffability, the emptiness, the nothingness at the basis of the universe that forms the content of Eastern as well as Christian mystical experience. . . .

"In facing man's inability ever to comprehend the meaning of the universe, in recognizing the Godhead's total transcendence, His total otherness from all we can understand with our senses, the great mystics experienced a sense of exhilaration and liberation. This exhilaration also springs from the recognition that the language and logic of cognitive thought cannot do justice to the ultimate nature of reality. . . .

"There are enormous pressures in our world that seek to induce mankind to bear the loss of [the old] faith and moral certainties by being drugged into oblivion-by mass entertainment, shallow material satisfactions, pseudo-explanations of reality, and cheap ideologies. At the end of that road lies Huxley's Brave New World of senseless euphoric automata. Today, when death and old age are increasingly concealed behind euphemisms and comforting baby talk, and life is threatened with being smothered in the mass consumption of hypnotic mechanized vulgarity, the need to confront man with the reality of his situation is greater than ever."

These polemic and didactic remarks do not come from a preacher or a theologian but from a drama critic. They form part of the peroration of a remarkable concluding chapter to an absolutely fascinating book which preachers and theologians very much ought to read. The book and the author: The Theatre of the Absurd, by Martin Esslin (Anchor paperback, Doubleday and Co., Garden City, New York, 1961, pp. 364, $1.45).

Hungarian by birth, Martin Esslin has lived in Vienna and Brussels, and is now the Assistant Director of the Radio Drama Department of the B.B.C. in London. His entertaining and in-

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formative book analyzes playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, and fourteen more "parallels and proselytes." Before and after these particular chapters, there are discussions about the meaning, history, and significance of the absurd. The word is technical, as it was originally so used in music, and does not mean ridiculous so much as out-of-harmony, illogical, senseless, meaningless. In an essay on Kafka, Ionesco wrote: "Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose. . . . Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless."

The absurdists do not argue or philosophize about the metaphysical anguish of modern man, they simply present raw slices of his life. This they try to do by externalizing on the stage what is internal and psychological. Hence there is no plot to speak of, for as in a fantasy or dream the important things are images rather than events. And because the old traditional supports for faith and morality seem less substantial than they once were if not altogether illusory, the play has neither beginning nor ending, neither purpose nor point. And since the breakdown of communication is one of the obvious trademarks of modern man's rootless existence, the dramatist plays with words and language and grammar, his dialogues are often monologues, and his characters cross-talk like vaudeville comedians, uttering nonsense and babbling about nothing. For in the theatre of the absurd, as Beckett quotes from Democritus, "Nothing is more real than nothing."

Esslin's book not only provides a critique to all this, but he observes that this contemporary wave has an ancient and honorable history. The notion of the absurd, of nonsense, of language experimentation goes back to the mimus or mime who coexisted with classical drama and provided a popular spectacle of dancing, singing, juggling, and clowning. From this it is but a step to the Italian commedia dell'arte, to Shakespeare's clowns and jesters, Punch and Judy, nursery rhymes, Lewis Carroll, the Keystone Cops, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, W. C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, etc., etc.

One reason, as Esslin observes, why there is so much criticism and confusion about the theatre of the absurd today is that we expect a play to follow conventional and traditional structures of plot, character, and verbal articulation. But when Beckett's Waiting for

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Godot was presented with fear and trembling some years ago to the prisoners at San Quentin, the directors and actors were astonished and delighted to discover how readily and easily the inmates understood the playwright. After all who knows more about waiting than prisoners, about the illusion of hope, the meaninglessness of verbal communication?

At the present time a Festival of the Theatre of the Absurd is being run in New York at the Cherry Lane Theatre. But for those who find off Broadway too far off geographically, if not otherwise, note may be mad-, of the little known fact that most of the current plays are available in paperbacks at reasonable prices. As a starter, write to: Grove Press, Inc., 64 University Place, New York 3, N.Y.

There may not be much redemption voiced in these plays. But anyone who uses words and tries to communicate by language today (such as the preacher and theologian with whom we began) would do well to reflect on what the absurdists are saying and how. As Esslin puts it: "Euphemisms and circumlocutions fill the press or resound from the pulpits. And advertising, by its constant use of superlatives, has succeeded in devaluing language to a point where it is a generally accepted axiom that most of the words one sees displayed on billboards or in colored pages of magazine advertising are as meaningless as the jingles of television commercials. A yawning gulf has opened between language and reality."

LECTURE ALMANAC

A word may be noted about the program of theological lectures and conferences in connection -with the sesquicentennial celebrations of Princeton Theological Seminary. Not many American academic institutions have such a long and controversial history. Anniversaries, however, should not only look backward but more significantly use the past to chart a future.

The 1812 Design for Princeton Seminary, a sort of charter for theological education, makes archaic reading in 1962, but occasional phrases reflect the theological climate of 150 years ago and still speak dialectically today. For example, the purpose of theological education is, among other things so we read, "to unite in those who shall sustain the ministerial office, religion and literature; that piety of the

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heart, which is the fruit only of the renewing and sanctifying grace of God, with solid learning: believing that religion without learning, or learning without religion, in the ministers of the Gospel, must ultimately prove injurious to the Church."

Beginning Easter Monday, April 23, 1962, there will be held on the Seminary Campus, in the University Chapel, and at McCarter Theatre a fourteen-month series of lectures, convocations, departmental conferences, and musical and dramatic presentations. James S. Stewart of Edinburgh will deliver the Stone Lectures, April 23-27, and during the same week, D. T. Niles of Ceylon and W. A. Visser 't Hooft of Geneva will speak on the Unity and Mission of the Church. Karl Barth, making his first visit to America, will deliver six Warfield lectures the week of April 29-May 4. In November, Paul L. Lehmann, John A. Mackay, and Kenneth J. Foreman share a special week of lectures. Throughout the academic year, more or less every month, there will be departmental conferences on current topics of theological concern to which distinguished scholars and visitors will be invited. A complete schedule with names and dates is available by writing Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, N. J.

While this kind of program is offered only once in 150 years, there are many lectureships, conferences, special convocations, panels, open committee discussions, summer schools, council meetings, alliances and assemblies at which one or more addresses of special importance to the theological world are scheduled. The full story of this extra-curriculum makes an impressive illustration of extension education, theological style. Much is written about the need for refresher courses for ministers and pastors, There is much more being done along this line than most realize, Any pulpit-tired preacher who wants a week or two of mental calisthenics has only himself to blame if he doesn't take advantage of what is available here and there across the country.