Now and then, a review appears in which the reviewer has really dived deeply into the book and had the experience of thinking the way it thinks. It is both exhilarating and humbling to see such a review.
Here is one such. It is by Hugh Waters, Head of Theology at Downside School and will appear in The Downside Review early in 2024. This is the link to the publisher’s page, but with the permission of both the publisher and the writer you are able to read it on this blog.
I hope this review encourages you to get the book if you haven’t already got it, or to read it thoroughly if you have. I find there is a class of books which I buy but don’t dare open because they might make me think too much. If this is the kind of thing that happens to you, treat this review as an encouragement!
If you want to get the book, follow this link.
The Creed in Slow Motion, by Martin Kochanski, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 2022. ISBN 9781399801546
‘The three great sciences are mathematics, physics and theology. Between them they cover the whole spectrum. Mathematics is about nothing, physics is about something, and theology is about everything’ (page 27). This marvellous book by a mathematician and philosopher is punctuated by such arresting and witty thoughts as these; indeed, there are so many and these are so thought-provoking that it is difficult for a brief review to do the book justice. Here are a couple of others: in discussing the personal nature of God as Father, distinguishing between the two kinds of entity that are a WHO or a WHAT, Kochanski mentions ‘the injustice that other people feel about being treated as units of labour, units of consumption or units of diversity comes from being a WHO but treated as if they were a WHAT’ (page 32). In this one sentence three different ways of being in ‘the world’ are lanced, in a way that is both simple and profound. Or again when talking about miracles and the Maccabees, similarly, ‘Compatible Christians live in a multicultural society – which is to say, one whose culture consists in not having a culture. They arrange their lives “just like the Greeks” and they disguise their baptism to avoid upsetting people – or even, since they have internalised the multicultural values, to avoid upsetting themselves’ (page 129). Kochanski knows the temptation to be a compatible Christian, but given the Incarnation and the Resurrection, he argues that this is not really a Christian position at all. Martin Kochanski was one of the first recipients of the Old Gregorian Medal at Downside School Prize Day in 2015, and he delivered another arresting thought on that occasion too, with reference to his comprehensive and great value app ‘Universalis’, which comprises all the liturgical prayers and readings of the Church’s year – although he made this into a universal piece of advice – which ran something like this: ‘If you are in position to do something worthwhile, then just go ahead and do it. There may be something that only you can do, and if so, just do it’. In this book Kochanski does something that no one else has done since Monsignor Ronald Knox’s book of the same name in the 1940’s which were talks to a girls’ school in the middle of the Second World War. However, this is nothing like Knox’s book, although perhaps for the more able and older Catholic students there will be a mine of stimulus; but you would have to be quite adult, or interested in being adult in your faith, to make the most of the serious playfulness at work here.
Although he claims to be doing ‘low theology’, only someone who is deep in the heart of ‘the Catholic thing’ could have written this book. You would have to be a thoroughly convinced believer to write: ‘Just believing that God exists is an act of the pure detached mind. It is easy and has no direct consequences’ (page 15). All the so-called preambula fidei which so exercise the philosophers of religion are thus waved away, perhaps far too abruptly given the intellectual as well as moral difficulties many people have with the realm of faith; but Kochanski is surely right to suggest that to really believe in God is rare and hard, with real consequences. Moreover, as he takes us through the Creed he combats various views that you do encounter; these include various heresies, dualism and scientism, and here of course he has a particular bite given his intellectual pedigree.
It would seem as though the purpose of this whole enterprise hangs upon an insightful comment on the commandment to ‘Love the Lord your God…with all your mind’, which Kochanski points out is added by Christ to the traditional Jewish commandment from Deuteronomy 6. And this is crucial, for it allows for the whole realm of what some would dismiss as dogma. Dogma is simply the capturing in language of deep truths about the nature of God, Christ and the Church – perhaps one of the first statements is that of Peter declaring Jesus to be the Christ – but it is a form of loving God with the mind.
There are three parts to the book: Being, Act and Life, each covering one of the persons of the Trinity and the lines of the Creed; each chapter covers a line of the Nicene Creed, and they are all full of punchy ideas and thought-provoking phrases, short, easy to read and broken up into relevant headings. It is a good book to dip into and read gradually. Another feature is a number of little parables as Kochanski calls them; the parable of the cube, the parable of the shadows, the parable of the scissors, the parable of the signpost. These are employed in an original way too. The parable of the cube suggests that there are two different ways to talk about the sides of a cube, with either four sides looked at head on or with a more complex number of faces, corners and edges looked at in another way. The parable of the shadows suggests that shadows are important indications of a higher kind of life (which the many aspects of a cube could also hint at); the scissors refers to the boundary of logic when trying to talk about God – ‘fingertip logic’ on the boundary of what can be understood but not wholly grasped, and the signpost reminds us that the whole of reality is not here. All of these draw you in to think more deeply about the Creed.
There are only a couple of issues where it seems to me that Kochanski says too little: suffering and death. He explicitly says that it is not right to talk about the Crucifixion; ‘The Crucifixion is something one can say nothing whatever about’ he declares in a gnomic Wittgensteinian manner. Death is so big that it is untameable and unpindownable, but words just keep it at arm’s length, ‘which makes for a nice, safe, comfortable life’ (page 152). It is not possible to box up death he says, for it is in the box with me. However, the sanitisation and ignoring of the reality of death is actually a real problem and is a good part of growing secularism: questions of identity, futility, immortality and purpose revolve around it. Surely raising a conversation that too few people ever have is necessary, even if it is true that death must be encountered to fully participate in the conversation. Kochanski’s reticence reminds me of the final words of the Tractatus, suggesting that some things simply cannot be talked about; Aquinas, though, would surely say a good deal more.
‘The Crucifixion really needs to be encountered more than it needs to be talked about’. However, Jesus did come to die at the hands of men; and a lot more could be said about this, as thinkers like René Girard and others have illuminated. The dynamics of human community, Jesus as scapegoat: these are profound insights too and would add to the commentary. More could also be said about the relationship of sanctity to suffering, something so easily forgotten today when suffering is so much more to be avoided than sin, which flies in the face of most of the history of the Church. This is not merely being too Greek, or insufficiently Hebrew. There is also more to be said about the contrast between this life as a horizon compared to the belief in the life of the world to come. But one can see from the punchy scintillating insights in this book why Kochanski would want to hang on to this life so much: his description of the response after confronting people at a dinner party with a definitely dated future end of the world from an asteroid strike shows a mischievous sense of humour with his depiction of the ‘already dead’ in the face of the Second Coming; and as he also says, ‘If we spend the only life we will ever live helping the poor and the sick, it will be because they too are in the only life they will ever live’ (page 235).
With unusual single-mindedness and in a way that manages to be both idiosyncratic and universal, Kochanski has done a great service in this book in helping understand and live a more Christian life – a task he says on his part is the prophetic calling of baptism, but that may also be priestly and indeed kingly and certainly it should make anyone who has ears to hear think about what these may mean in their own case. The list of what it might mean to be kingly in the light of baptism is one of the most original, simple and profound insights in the book and should be read by anyone who claims to be a Christian; as he points out, theologians have done rather little work on our kingship, and he is right, it needs to be done. His seven brief points are all well made: they are on page 208 of this fine book, and would make a book in themselves as part of a rule for the Christian life.
The Creed in Slow Motion 