A Big-Enough God by Sara Maitland

Author:Sara Maitland
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466881549
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

3 Artful theology

When I originally gave the lectures on which this book is based, I placed this chapter on ‘culture’ – or ideology, or art – before the one on personhood. It seemed important to stress how profoundly I believe that personhood is created, is constructed within culture; that in a real sense representation, and especially language, precedes personhood; or, more properly, that there is a real chicken-and-egg situation at work. Popular works on evolution tend to simplify this too much. Somehow you have a sense that there was Mrs Naked Ape:1 feeling too warm in her fur coat, she looks in her evolutionary catalogue and sends off for a nice smooth skin. Later, fed up with the kids fighting all day long, and no longer having nit-picking and fur-grooming as a way of communicating affection and care, she decides that she needs a new means of communication and sends in an order for the language package – which arrives, pre-programmed for regional difference. Of course we know it is not like that, but still we act and talk as though ‘human nature’ – the self – was a discrete, pre-ordained entity to which ever more sophisticated updatings were added. Whereas, as I have argued, the self is always in the process of construction both within the human lifespan and over the evolutionary aeons; ‘the self’, to repeat Rowan Williams’s beautiful phrase, ‘is – one might say – what the past is doing now’.2 The self is constructed within culture, within ideology, and has no separate ontological reality.

However I have decided to reverse the order, not because I think that the former scheme was wrong but because I have identified a different pattern of thought which makes the first two and the last two chapters ‘go together’. In the previous two chapters I have tried to look at what we might learn of God by looking at the state-of-the-art descriptions of what God has revealed in the created order. Now I want to move on and look at what we might learn of God by looking at the creatures’ acts of creation – what is it to be a creator? A shift in thinking as it were, from noun to verb.

To be a person is to be a creator. We are all creative, whether we choose to be or not. We all create, by which I mean we all work on the material available and so produce something new; we do it constantly and inevitably. The daily act of eating, digesting and defecating is, as Freud was at pains to point out, a creative act. To make a sentence by combining the words in our vocabulary, in accordance with our understanding of the rules of grammar (rules which Noam Chomsky has suggested are innate), is a creative act. Far from being an amazing mystery, and a complicated and glorious vocation, it is difficult to imagine a human being so malfunctioning that they do not perform a creative act in the course of any given day.

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