For proof that all theology is political one need look no further than the phenomenon of the complaint when its object is not social but not natural. God is the infinite author or ground of Being as totality. God is where the buck stops, the authority of the authorities, then one even they have to answer to, the boss of it all. If you want to complain about the way things are and it is something created and held up by some bunch of people, you can in principle complain to them, their representatives, or an avant-garde of some kind that push aside the party in power. If you want to take issues with something found in literature, you can write literary criticism (and you dont even need to bother about the author: writing when it is literature and not record-keeping is without authority). But if you want to complain about the damned weather this year in New York, God is your only recourse. He is the big Weather Man. And so when God has been evicted from society and culture, the world-rejecting melancholy of the man who says Denmark is a prison, and knows something is written in it, can only feel rotten, and cold, a kvetch. The pious know only prayer and wonder; I want to write an elegy for impiety on a winters day one week into calendrial spring, awaiting the music of its rites.
Posted on: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 23:10:21 +0000
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