A Theology of Nonsense by Gabelman Josephine;Milbank John;

Author:Gabelman, Josephine;Milbank, John; [Gabelman, Josephine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, General
ISBN: 9781532601897
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2016-09-08T07:00:00+00:00

Constructive Disturbance

Behold the kingdom of God is in the midst of you

Luke 17:21

When we think of political anarchy, we tend to imagine an ideology that breaks, defies, or deconstructs, and would not normally perhaps conceive of a restorative or reconstructive dimension to anarchy. While it is clear that the type of sociopolitical disturbance discussed above is indeed a vital anarchic component, Berdyaev advances the idea that Christian anarchy also transforms and restores the world it has deconstructed. “The new aeon,” he observes, “does not simply belong to the other world, to the other side of the grave, it is not something entirely different. It is also our world enlightened and transfigured and which has become creatively free.”440 Although this might appear to be an unlikely aspect of anarchy, Marshall has indicated that anarchy is not simply the moment of defiance, but the ongoing “condition of a people living.” Anarchy does break, but for Berdyaev it is in order to rebuild; it is defiant, but so that it can reclaim; it intentionally unsettles, but always with the desire to transform.

This process of disturbing in order to recreate has something in common with Tolkien’s description of fairy-tales, which he believes follows the pattern of “escape, recovery and consolation.”441 In her essay, “Apologetics and the Imagination: Making Strange” Alison Milbank discusses the first two aspects of Tolkien’s three-fold definition, explaining: “Escape speaks to our desire to burst the limits of our ordinary experience. [. . .] The second function, recovery, returns us to our own world but seen in a new way.”442 This pattern of disturbing the ordinary in order to accomplish its creative re-vision, as we will see, is a close echo of Berdyaev’s account of Christian anarchy, which, having “burst the limits” of the conventional, then seeks to restore and reveal the holy within the everyday.

Tolkien’s model—in particular the aspect of recovery—can also help to convey the effect of the end of the Alice stories upon the reader’s imagination. We have discussed how the Alice narratives both culminate in revolt. Without wanting to undercut this violent climax it would be misleading to leave the discussion there, since in neither book is the end of Alice’s adventures the close of the story. The aim of recovery, Tolkien concludes, is to free the mundane “from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity.”443 In a similar way, Carroll closes both stories by appealing to dream and memory, which, as before, disturbs the world of sense, but this time in order to awaken an appreciation of the marvelous within the commonplace, rather than simply overturning or undermining its governing principles. We might allude to Coleridge’s description of Wordsworth’s poetry as representative of literature’s transformative potential, and endeavor to find out if Carroll’s nonsense has the same ability: “to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural.”444

In the first book, Alice wakes from the dream-world and relays the dream to her sister. This affects the sister’s experience of the real world, which becomes oddly enchanted by Alice’s tale.

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