Book Review

Philip McCosker

God and Mystery: experience through metaphor and drama

Where can we experience God? In this stimulating if at times frustrating book, David Brown, Van Mildert Professor of Divinity at Durham University, wants to open our senses to experience the God who continues to impinge on all of life. The last of a trilogy of books which look at religious experience in culture and the arts, this volume considers our experience of the divine in two broad areas: metaphor and drama.

Brown's background premise is that we have falsely ring-fenced the contexts in which we look for experience of God. He argues that we lead compartmentalised lives and only seek God when we're engaged in something explicitly "religious". He wants to reclaim areas of life which have been falsely closed up in little boxes labelled "secular", so that we can see that God is present everywhere, seeking to address us at all times and prepared to use any means available. So, for instance, in the first volume of the trilogy, he argued for the revelatory powers of town planning, architecture and gardening.

Brown is surely right to explode the dichotomy between the sacred and the secular: God cannot be kept corralled in a pen. But, oddly, the way he frames his argument seems in many ways to reinforce the very dichotomy he wishes to eliminate. Looking for God's revelation in "secular" areas can just as easily promote the division he is seeking to remove.

In the first part he looks at metaphor, arguing that language functions sacramentally

and that God can be found in and through words. Words are not simply media, or signs pointing to something else: they can themselves manifest God's presence. He usefully emphasises the messiness of words, and of metaphors in particular. Brown deplores biblical translations and liturgical texts which simplify and root out such linguistic messiness in favour of texts which are simple and clear, yet ultimately patronising. Mystery and explanation are not exclusive. We must pay attention to the failures of language: they too are instructive. Eliminating linguistic failures risks evacuating the mysterious divine presence. Ambiguities must not be ironed out, and metaphors must be engaged with on their own terms, not ours. Oddly enough, given his general argument, Brown by and large uses specifically religious poetry and hymnody to make his case.

The second half of the book considers drama. As before, Brown is keen to emphasise that religious drama does not occur in isolation from so-called "secular" drama but, rather, borrows and builds on it. Worship occurs in a wider context than might be imagined and worshippers lose out if that background is lost or ignored. Brown argues that ritual is an integral part of the human and animal condition. Different theories of drama are explored and Brown favours those that dislocate us from our unquestioned ideological assumptions, as for instance in the work of Bertolt Brecht.

In his chapter on music, Brown argues that the development of music has privileged vertical harmony and horizontal metrics as well as melody and rhythm. He wants to emphasise that God can be in music and that music can have a homiletic role. We must avoid any prescriptive narrowing of the kinds of music we think might be religious; instead, we must engage with the riotous variety which is the playground of the Spirit.

In considering drama, Brown's argument is by now unsurprising: we need to be freer with liturgical drama, being aware that everything communicates something including, for instance, even the kind of clothes we wear. Symbolisms need to be preserved, explored and engaged. Finally, in a chapter on church architecture, the set of the drama is considered. Here again mystery must be given full rein and explanatory, patronising utilitarian architecture must be kept at bay. We are to enjoy Christ's presence rather than explain it. Although in his conclusion Brown concedes that we must remember to entertain the possibility of divine absence, the body of the book is geared to his sense of the world replete with the divine, God "as the water which fills the sponge of the world".

Brown's diagnosis of the contemporary scene is certainly dour, but is it accurate? He seems to ignore many instances of people seeking spiritual experience outside the normal "religious" contexts: interest in new age spirituality, for instance, or those who would say "I'm not religious but I am spiritual". Think too of those who are led to commit extreme acts of violence in daily life as part of their spiritual quest. There is no shortage of people claiming religious experience outside of church. In this sense Brown's analysis appears not a little parochial.

The text provokes many questions. Much is pinned on the notion "experience" but the concept is never analysed: what does "experience" of the divine actually mean? If experience of God is as readily available as Brown suggests, what are the criteria we can use to identify it? This is a question which seems all the more significant today. The suggestion that a classical Greek play, the Hindu celebration of Diwali and the celebration of the Eucharist all provide "essentially kindred" experience of the divine surely raises many questions and insufficiently explores many others. When the world is saturated with superficial experience of every instantly available kind, should the Church be encouraged down a similar track?

Brown's observations are frequently striking and often sharp. We lurch from the first gay kiss in the television soap opera EastEnders to the symbolism of different cuts of jeans. It seems uncharitable of Brown, however, to dismiss so curtly the work of scholars who have tried to offer similar arguments to Brown's - of Hans Urs von Balthasar ("seriously deficient"), Hans Frei ("the same"), Nicholas Boyle, Catherine Pickstock ("too cerebral"), he remarks, "I do not want to be constantly waylaid into given responses to them." Nevertheless this book is beautifully written, always thought-provoking, and displays vast, quirkily juxtapositioned erudition.

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