The Infinite Room

Magritte NoToBeReproduced

Is it possible for a book of contemplative theology to be neo noir?

INTRODUCTION to Dark Sayings: Essays for the Eyes of the Heart

In some ways, this collection of essays does resemble a detective novel: there are mysteries to solve, it always seems to be night-time, conventional methods are ignored, and nothing is what it appears to be.

The Bible demonstrates that all good theology is not only a story, it is a movie, and not only a movie, but a movie deliberately designed to perplex, surprise, and unsettle us.

We can easily identify classic film noir by the constant opposition of light and shadow, its oblique camera angles, and its disruptive compositional balance of frames and scenes, the way characters are placed in awkward and unconventional positions within a particular shot, for example. But besides these technical cinematic characteristics, there are a number of themes that characterize film noir, such as the inversion of traditional values and the corresponding moral ambivalence… the feeling of alienation, paranoia, and cynicism; the presence of crime and violence; and the disorientation of the viewer, which is in large part accomplished by the filming techniques mentioned above.11 Mark T. Conrad (editor), The Philosophy of Film Noir, 2.

darksayings-coverHowever, while the anxiety, alienation, romance, and dark wit (hopefully) remain, this book reserves noir’s hard-boiled cynicism and nihilism for the foibles of those who rebel against God. For the Christian writer-director, the darkness is only a device employed to bring the reader to the light. The deliberate ambiguities are only temporary cowls that eventually will be stripped away. Like the Bible, which, if we are honest, is a very dark book, these dark sayings, in their fundamental mindset and ultimate trajectory, are unshakably optimistic.

The “shadow” is a psychological term for everything we cannot see in ourselves. Clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson tells us that, in light of the Jungian practice of shadow work, growing in maturity includes developing a consciousness of one’s “inner psychopath.”2Jordan Peterson, 2017 Maps of Meaning 11: The Flood and the Tower and 2017 Personality 08: Carl Jung and the Lion King (lectures). As the testing of Adam teaches us, a truly good person is not one who is harmless, but one who, like Solomon, has learned to bear the sword in the cause of righteousness. Each individual must come to terms with his own Adamic “blind spot” (Matthew 7:3-5), his personal capacity for evil.

A commitment to truth is always a fight, which is why cowards often disguise their cowardice as morality. Shadow work strips away the personas, the veils of hypocrisy which we wear to dissociate ourselves from primitive desires, the “monsters from the Id.” According to Peterson, a persona is “the mask you wear to convince yourself and the world that you’re not a terrible monster so that when you face the mirror you don’t have to run away screaming.”3Jordan Peterson, August 2017 Patreon Q&A.

The problem with Jung and Peterson is that the mirrors of modern psychology are only broken shards, fragments of a moral framework bequeathed to us by our Christian heritage. The Word of God is the only true mirror.

For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing. (James 1:23-24).

Thus, reading the Bible is itself a form of shadow work, and a good work of theology should be a house of mirrors. The architectural aspect of this process is almost always understated, by academics and laypeople alike. The features of God’s Temple are expressions of His character, but God works in iterations, in fractals.4See “The Bible is a Fractal” in Michael Bull, Reading the Bible in 3D. The cruciform shape and interactive elements of the Sanctuary of God inform every sphere of being. The cubic Holy of Holies behind the Temple veil was a golden tesseract,5In geometry, the tesseract is the four-dimensional analog of the cube; the tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the square. Just as the surface of the cube consists of six square faces, the hypersurface of the tesseract consists of eight cubical cells. The tesseract is one of the six convex regular 4-polytopes. a construct of parallel “mirrors” in which every side is exposed, a multi-layered dream, the spring of boundless possibilities, a symbol of the hidden mind of God, an eternal light that was quite literally dressed in an ephemeral darkness. Welcome to The Infinite Room.

So much for the exploration of the arcane. What makes this book neo-noir? It is the fact that the claustrophobic corridors and stairwells, the smoky offices with drawn blinds, and the rain-washed streets of the Dark City of our current theological zeitgeist might suddenly dissolve, leaving you dangling in space above the earth, or deposited in the primeval past or far distant future. The present writer is an imp who deals with shadows internal and external, from the hidden things of the human heart to the hidden things of God. Let him take you from the valley of the shadow of death to the court of heaven, from a dark desert highway to a wing of the Temple, from the unfathomable shades of the ego to the outer reaches of the universe. After all, what could go wrong?

Lend yourself to this holy terror, and he will endeavor — though will not guarantee — to have you delivered safely home before dawn.

Michael Bull
Katoomba, January 2018

I will open my mouth in a parable;
I will utter dark sayings from of old,
things that we have heard and known,
that our fathers have told us.

(Psalm 78:2)

ART: Not to be reproduced, Rene Magritte (1937)

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References

1. 1 Mark T. Conrad (editor), The Philosophy of Film Noir, 2.
2. Jordan Peterson, 2017 Maps of Meaning 11: The Flood and the Tower and 2017 Personality 08: Carl Jung and the Lion King (lectures).
3. Jordan Peterson, August 2017 Patreon Q&A.
4. See “The Bible is a Fractal” in Michael Bull, Reading the Bible in 3D.
5. In geometry, the tesseract is the four-dimensional analog of the cube; the tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the square. Just as the surface of the cube consists of six square faces, the hypersurface of the tesseract consists of eight cubical cells. The tesseract is one of the six convex regular 4-polytopes.

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