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November 3, 2004
Hello everyone,
There is nothing that can ruin the credibility of our witness faster than slander emerging from our lips. We don’t usually mean to hurt, yet not one of us is immune to the temptation to discuss the faults of another behind his back. And, while there may be a time to say “I’m not telling you anything I wouldn’t tell him to his face,” this rationale often serves as a subtle cover for behavior that is unbecoming for the ambassador of Christ. N.E. Norris could not have put it better: “If your lips would keep from slips, / Five things observe with care; / To whom you speak, of whom you speak, / And how, and when, and where.” In Ten Ways Your Outlook Enriches Your Life from Vibrant Life magazine, author Victor M. Parachin draws inspiration from Joseph Goldstein, who has discovered a connection between what we confess with our mouth and its correspondent effect on our thought life:
Writer Joseph Goldstein tells of an experiment he did that helped him better understand the power of our speech to impact the mind. He decided that for a period of three months he would not speak about any third person. “That is, I wouldn’t speak to someone about someone else.” Here is what came to light for him during that three-month experiment when he eradicated gossip from his life: “First, my mind became much less judgmental, because I wasn’t giving voice to the various judgments in my mind. . . . And as I judged others less, I found that I judged myself less as well. Second, I discovered in this experiment that about 90 percent of my speech was eliminated. This silence led to a lot more peace in my mind. It was astonishing to see so clearly how much of the time our talk is about other people.”
Perhaps we should not avoid speaking about others altogether. Certainly praising others behind their back is a virtue and is nearly certain to travel back to the source, often bringing healing on its wings. What is more, there is a time and a place where we need to forewarn a loved one or friend or be candid about a situation that needs to be resolved. But with these exceptions out of the way—and we’ll trust wisdom knows the difference—much of what we say about others is neither healing nor necessary. It is true that most of us do not have a huge problem with slander, but I would venture to say that we all, myself included, sometimes get careless in what we say about others and a gentle reminder from time to time is helpful in focusing our awareness. Just this evening, knowing that I was going to be writing on this topic, I checked myself from saying several things that would probably not have harmed anyone, but were nonetheless not entirely innocent either. Primarily, the thoughts I would have expressed, had I not had my own gentle reminder so fresh in mind, were feelings of mild dislike for the way a particular person views the world. My comments would have been tasteful—nothing outrageous or ugly—and yet I would have been shamed had the person heard my thoughts. Not only that, but I too have discovered a connection between the negative things I say about people and my growing dislike for them; conversely I have noticed that by seeking to treat someone kindly that I did not initially like, I have grown to truly love that person in Christ. I can only thank God for putting this topic in my mind and for helping me make effective use of it; I pray that He will do the same for your own life. He is gracious to us, kind, forgiving, and gentle and we should extend the same courtesy to others—even when they, like we ourselves, do not deserve it.
When we are battered, we tend to want to “batter back,” and when our wicks are smoldering, we often go around blowing out other people’s candles. Yet it was written of Christ that “A battered reed He will not break off, and a smoldering wick He will not snuff out.” It takes someone incredibly special—someone like Jesus—to see us for who we are and not confuse us with the ugliness we often display. When we stop for a moment and ponder the kind of incredible love that would love people just where they are and for who they are, the only response we can offer is to fall to our knees in surrender and gratitude. We love because He first loved us and love covers over a multitude of sins. What I have said gently, James—the man who nails me time and again with his talk of double-mindedness and doubt—makes abundantly clear in the well known third chapter of his treatise, verses three through twelve:
Now if we put the bits into the horses’ mouths so that they will obey us, we direct their entire body as well. Look at the ships also, though they are so great and are driven by strong winds, are still directed by a very small rudder wherever the inclination of the pilot desires. So also the tongue is a small part of the body, and yet it boasts of great things. See how great a forest is set aflame by such a small fire! And the tongue is a fire, the very world of iniquity; the tongue is set among our members as that which defiles the entire body, and sets on fire the course of our life, and is set on fire by hell. For every species of beasts and birds, of reptiles and creatures of the sea, is tamed and has been tamed by the human race. But no one can tame the tongue; it is a restless evil and full of deadly poison. With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in the likeness of God; from the same mouth come both blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not to be this way. Does a fountain send out from the same opening both fresh and bitter water? Can a fig tree, my brethren, produce olives, or a vine produce figs? Nor can salt water produce fresh.
Jesus also has something to say about careless words, recorded in the twelfth chapter of Matthew:
Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad; for the tree is known by its fruit. You brood of vipers, how can you, being evil, speak what is good? For the mouth speaks out of that which fills the heart. The good man brings out of his good treasure what is good; and the evil man brings out of his evil treasure what is evil. But I tell you that every careless word that people speak, they shall give an accounting for it in the day of judgment. For by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.
We also find that the Apostle Paul has something to say of the kind of speech that should come out of our lips in his epistle to the Ephesians. In chapter five, verses three and four, he writes that any “immorality or any impurity or greed must not even be named among you, as is proper among saints; and there must be no filthiness and silly talk, or coarse jesting, which are not fitting, but rather the giving of thanks.” And, if you are at all like me, there are times in which giving thanks seems the most counter-intuitive, illogical thing that anyone could suggest. It seems disingenuous to offer thanks when I feel like death glazed over. But our words have a power such that we often talk our way into believing, all the more reason why a mentor commented recently during a dark time that I had it backward: “Rather than doubting your faith and believing your doubts, you should doubt your doubts and believe your faith.” Now such a statement can be far easier for me to say than do, but it does reveal something of the power of our tongue. As James reminds us, life and death are in the power of the tongue; all life begins in the Body and spreads outward. Yet we are so often unaware of the impact we have, particularly when we are feeling negative and cynical. During such times, we may reach a point where we not only fail to control our tongues but our actions as well. How many times have we said of someone acting childish, “If she could only see herself!”
In my Aesthetics class this semester, we are reading Arthur C. Danto’s 1981 effort The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art. The reading is admittedly somewhat difficult, but there is quite a bit in the book that is truly thought provoking, particularly given that Danto is well versed in literature as well as philosophy. In the first chapter, along with our idea of “If she could only see herself,” he talks of the conception of the mirror image:
Sartre illustrates [that our exterior informs our interior] vividly with the character of a voyeur, who is initially merely a gaze, so to speak, feasting itself on forbidden sights through a keyhole, when suddenly it hears approaching footsteps and recognizes itself as seen, that it, suddenly, has an external identity, that of a voyeur, in the eyes of an Other. Moral considerations to the side, the philosophical structure of the discovery is impressive: I come to know that I am an object simultaneously with coming to know that another is subject: that those eyes are not just pretty bits of color, but are looking at me: I discover I have an outside in a way logically inseparable from my discovery that others have an inside. It is a complex recognition, all the more so, I suppose, in the case of Narcissus who, for the first time in the mirror of the stream in Thespia, sees what others saw, his own face and form, by which time what he had seen was what he fell in love with. Since the gaze in which he was trapped into objecthood was his own gaze, given back to him through the mediation of a reflecting surface, he was servant to his own master and no doubt died in what Sartre speaks of as a “futile passion,” which is to become a self-conscious thing whose outside and inside are one. (Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 10—emphasis in original)
In this brief paragraph alone, Danto has packed a powerful wallop. Our identity is to great degree defined by what we see reflected back to us in the gaze of another. And considering the fact that the gaze works both ways, we hold real power over others. We also are faced with a world of options and we do well to become aware of ourselves as actors and not merely reactors. For some of us, we see only our outsides and our insides no matter where we look: we cannot see past our own noses like the myth of Narcissus who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool and wilted away of (what was for all practical purposes) unrequited love until he turned into a flower. We can become enslaved to what the mirror of another’s eyes tell us about ourselves, forever trying to change our outsides to appear attractive to the mirror. Or we can see the outsides of others and choose to mock them, though we will have learned little about what our outsides (as reflected in their eyes) tell us about our insides. But it is also possible for us to look into the mirror of another and see ourselves more clearly, and then, having done so, reflect this self-awareness back out in the form of compassion and empathy the way our Lord did. What would it have been like to have looked into the mirror of His eyes? Some would have melted in His gaze, others, like the demons he exorcised, would have shrank back in fear, exposed to the very black of their souls.
Danto has a few more thoughts to share with us, however, before we close the book and set it back upon the shelf. This time, he wants to tell us of Hamlet, that immortal play of Shakespeare whose title takes after the central character: Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. For those who don’t know or don’t remember the tale, Prince Hamlet’s dead father visits him and asks him to avenge his wrongful death. It seems that Hamlet’s uncle Claudius has conspired with the queen (mother of Hamlet and wife to the ghastly specter) to murder Hamlet’s father and marry his mother. Thus, Hamlet’s father wants Hamlet to avenge his wrongful death. Yet Hamlet is reluctant to do so, not necessarily because he doesn’t believe his father, but simply because Shakespeare wanted to keep all those literary critics in the twenty-first century arguing with one another, for he had heard the maxim that bad PR is good PR. (You can smile now; I was merely ensuring that you were awake.) At one point in the play, the character Hamlet stages a play within Shakespeare’s play and invites the illegitimate King Claudius to attend in order to feel him out and find out for certain if he has done as his father intimated. The events of this mock play, entitled Death of Gonzago, replicate the very acts that King Claudius has committed against Hamlet’s father with Hamlet’s mother. Danto continues:
Whatever the case, it is the function of the mirror as a mode of self-recognition that Hamlet certainly has in mind when, through the Death of Gonzago he seeks to catch the conscience of the King. Claudius’ recognitions are even more complex than Narcissus’, since he is perhaps the only member of the audience who realizes that the play is a mirror, replicating specific historical occurrences that are his own acts. So he knows that his actions are objects in the consciousness of an Other—Hamlet himself—and at the critical moment perceives that Hamlet knows that Claudius knows that Hamlet knows the shameful truths. (Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 11—emphasis in original)
We see the same thing happen to King David when, after committing adultry with Bathsheba and murdering her faithful husband Uriah, the prophet Nathan confronts him with the story of the rich man who sacrifices the poor man’s lamb for dinner. At that instant, David knew that God knew that David knew that God knew the shameful truth. And that is the way of the conviction of God; we are always seen by an Other even when He remains unseen. Indeed, King Claudius’ conscience burned at the discovery and the guilt ate away at his soul. He longed to confess his guilt and have the burden off his chest, which is the only proper response a man can have. That is, after all, the way we were hardwired by our Creator, who Himself longs to have us confess our sins to Him so that He can blot them out and deliver us from them. But what happens when we are blind to our thoughts; what happens when culture shares in a collective illusion where no self-awareness comes about because inside and outside are both culturally constrained?
[The renowned 14th century Italian painter] Giotto’s contemporaries were astonished at the realism he was able to achieve, and even [16th century Italian biographer, writer, architect, and painter Giorgio] Vasari, between Giotto and whom the entire Renaissance occurred, chose to praise one of Giotto’s paintings, of a man drinking water, as “portrayed with such marvelous effect, that one would believe him to be a living person drinking.” This would have been a conventional form of praise [for many artists today would not find it a compliment], but it is not one we would be tempted upon gazing at Giotto. What would have been transparent to Giotto’s contemporaries, almost like a glass they were seeing through to sacred reality, has become opaque to us, and we are instantly conscious of something invisible to them but precious to us—Giotto’s style—which the transparency theorist might explain away due to the fact that Giotto lived during a time when exact delineation of outward things was underdeveloped. What I call “style” must have been less what Giotto saw than the way he saw it, and invisible for that reason. It must have been a way of seeing shared by a sufficiently large group of citizens of the artworld of his time, or they could not have praised Giotto in terms of the sort Vasari employs. (Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 162–163)
In sum, Giotto’s contemporaries were blind to the fact that his paintings were not as utterly transparent and realistic as they supposed. Danto gives some parallel examples from the world of theater as well, which all we must do in order to understand is consider our own reaction to old movies. Haven’t we all had the experience of watching a film where the props, the hairstyles, the clothing, and many other elements of the film now look dated? During the time the film was current, however, it would not have looked dated at all; conversely, if people of that time could have somehow seen a film from the future, whatever else they thought of it, they surely would not conclude that it was transparently natural. Danto follows his theatrical examples with a theoretical description in which he divides the world into the pour soi and the pour autrui, two French phrases which literally mean “for oneself” and “for others.” In essence, it is an ornate way to speak of the interior and exterior that has already been occupying our discourse.
The allusions throughout this discussion express the extent to which I am concerned by structural analogies between periods and persons. Each has a kind of interior and an exterior, a pour soi and a pour autrui. The interior is simply the way the world is given. The exterior is simply the way the former becomes an object to a later or another consciousness. While we see the world as we do, we do not see it as a way of seeing the world: we simply see the world. Our consciousness of the world is not part of what we are conscious of. Later perhaps, when we have changed, we come to see the way we saw the world as having an identity separate from what we saw, giving a kind of global coloration to the contents of consciousness. (Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 163—emphasis in original)
Even with the mirror of someone else’s eyes, how can we accurately measure ourselves and be assured that what we are seeing is timeless and will not pass away? Certainly this is where the life of faith enters in. In our world, for example, we no longer speak of “rulers” but rather “leaders,” a change C.S. Lewis cites in The Great Divide as reflective of a significant (if subtle) shift in our contemporary focus toward progress. And, for that matter, we must allow that technology and much of what we know about the world has progressed—and continues to progress—significantly; we must admit that latest often is best, at least in this regard. But for all this forward looking, we are no more assured of seeing the world clearly than we ever were. Could it be that progress, conquest, and discovery—bigger, better, newer, faster—are part of the invisible way in which we see our world? After all, when our eyeballs are looking outward, we can’t see our eyeballs looking outward: the mechanism by which we see has been rendered invisible in the act of seeing. If we were to visit an optometrist, however, the diagnosis might be decisively different: we just might discover that we haven’t been seeing as clearly as we thought.
Civilization has indeed come a very long way in a very short time. Good things came together to help us get where we are: for example, we could not have done it without cooperation with one another. Yet left to our own devices, we will always fall short for we are mere men and God is God. Perhaps we can clone it, but we sure didn’t create it—and we definitely can’t give it any lasting meaning. Yet all this is transformed in the hands of the Master.
There is much that can be gleaned by a study of psychology or philosophy, but it can never supplant the knowledge of God. Once we lived only in the world of men and we fell prey to its shifting transience. But now we have been translated into the Kingdom of Light, sons and daughters of the Living God. We bear His image, and, if for no other reason, this is surely grounds for curbing our tongues and treating one another respectfully. Remember what we said earlier: “It takes someone incredibly special—someone like Jesus—to see us for who we are and not confuse us with the ugliness we often display.” If we could grasp the full significance of this fact, our comments might then change in timbre, passing from accusation to affirmation, death to life: “If only she could see herself . . . as Christ sees her.” Let us then not only refrain from slander, but let us speak words of light and love as well. We shall then tangibly bear the mark of eternity, the spark of Divine radiance reflecting pour soi and pour autrui, a standard of eternal excellence, never dimming, never waning, ever saving, everlasting from age to age.
God bless,
Eric
“Behold, my Servant Whom I have chosen; my Beloved in Whom my soul is well-pleased; I will put my Spirit upon Him, and He shall proclaim justice to the Gentiles. He will not quarrel, nor cry out; nor will anyone hear His voice in the streets. A battered reed He will not break off, and a smoldering wick He will not snuff out, until He leads justice to victory. And in His name the Gentiles will hope.”
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