Jesus-Fiction // 1.28.18

My last semester of college I took a course on St. Thomas Aquinus with Peter Kreeft, an intensive which I was largely not present for, either mentally or physically, depending on the day. When I did involve myself, I tended to enjoy the subject matter, and, while I likely entirely missed the point (perhaps to learn Thomism from an experienced Thomist), I did amuse myself by raising my hand at various times to offer some contradiction or another.

I remember reciting my reductio ad absurdum to Anselm's ontological argument for God's existence—the proof states that if God is defined as the greatest being one could conceive of, and it is greater to exist than to not, then poof, God exists, or something like that (Just as Pascal's Wager and its synopsis are vastly different, so also Anselm's proof and my poor-faith rendering)—I objected that obviously the greatest thing I could conceive of was that God might be a dragon, ipso ergo, God is a dragon, poof.

I know now I was violently misunderstanding Anselm's argument, and also God, and no longer believe my objection the spark of genius I once considered it. I still, however, think Anselm's formulation ridiculous, as are all arguments toward the existence or non-existence of God. As they should be, I imagine. Just as Douglas Adams's Babel fish disappeared God in a puff of logic, so does (I imagine) any outer proof of God diminish the exigent need for that inner path through which God is so often found, not as concept but as creator, parent, companion, friend.

A possible objection to this inner method comes from W. Norris Clarke's The One and the Many: "This Inner path reaches God as my ultimate Good and Goal, but not immediately as the Source of all being, the full notion of God. Hence it must be completed by the Cosmic Path to be philosophically adequate, though an individual may be satisfied by the Inner Path alone."

I have two replies in different directions: first, Clarke is allowing a non-metaphysician their belief in God, but only for a moment, then immediately reverts to his natural mode, supposing that the one who can suppose God from an inner journey is then incapable of extrapolating God to the rest of the universe without coming to Clarke for Thomistic training to remedy this terrible lack. My second objection is simply that he is not accounting for the solipsists, who need only God and their own selves, and will be alright without other people, especially the metaphysicians, except for amusement, to frustrate those not-others with their ardent cosmic loneliness.

All this, of course, is not what I intended to write about, but instead another remark of Kreeft's, whose end in saying so I cannot remember nor divine: that it is impossible to write good fiction about Jesus. I raised my hand and brought up Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ, and was promptly waved off. I can't come up with any good Thomist reason why it would be necessarily true that Jesus fiction is always bad, and I'm pretty sure I enjoyed The Last Temptation. I've not yet read Christopher Moore's Lamb, nor Phillip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, though both have come highly recommended to me.

But recently I've come across two attempts, one is Guy Davenport's "And" published in A Table of Green Fields, and the second is the photo above, a prose poem by James Tate sent to me by Niall Power (by the way, Fall Risk has been published).

It is unfortunate that Kreeft is unable to enjoy good Jesus-fiction. I suspect he also might not enjoy this bit of Kreeft-fiction, a piece from my senior project, the one that sparked all the rest of the project, and one I still enjoy:
Peter Kreeft

The professor who can’t deliver a joke to save his life, so he polls the class, “Have I told you the one about the philosopher and the zoo?” and if the class does not respond with an affirmation, he call on his TA to tell the joke, because the TA knows all his jokes, and is actually funny.