Mirrors and Mosaics:

A Response to “Why Can’t I See God in My Mirror?” by Jim Schwartz
 
 
 

     As I reflected on the issues Jim Schwartz raises in “Why Can’t I See God in My Mirror?” a passage in Milton’s “Areopagitica” sprang to mind.  Like postmodernists, Milton pictures knowledge as fragmented. Like Jim, Milton believes that including many voices yields a more complete truth. Although Milton did not imagine a community of speakers as diverse as the one we are here to consider, I thought the passage would be particularly apt because—as I remembered it—its central image was a shattered mirror.
     So, I pulled out “Areopagitica” and read: “Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on” (741).  But deceivers “took the Virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces and scattered them to the four winds” (742). Since then, Milton declares, Truth’s friends search the world, gathering up her mangled limbs: “We have not yet found them all, … nor ever shall do till her Master’s second coming. He shall bring together every joint and member, and shall mold them into an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection” (742).
     Clearly my middle-aged mind had mangled the passage in an odd way. The mutilated body of a woman had been transformed into fragments of a shattered mirror. If I had been working on another topic I would scarcely have noticed the slip, since the mirror is a common image in discourses about knowledge and wisdom. But, in the midst of reading articles on the challenges of multiculturalism, the particular form of this lapse caught my attention.
     Here I stand, a product of Houghton College’s liberal arts education, which, if it has not made me “able to leap tall buildings in a single bound,” has made me conscious of and grateful for much in the Western cultural heritage. My training enables me to place Milton’s female image of truth in the paradoxical context of a tradition that often imagines wisdom as a woman even while it denigrates actual women for the subjective, relational, and narrative quality of their thought. My education also makes me fully aware that the “body of a woman” here is only metaphoric. Even so, my mind revolted from the image of a mutilated female body and substituted a mirror.
    If you think that I am overreacting, I highly recommend that you read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—a text that clearly reflects a college-aged woman’s response to Miltonic metaphors of the knowledge-quest as the reconstruction of a body from mutilated fragments.  Metaphors and stories are not neutral; they shape our perceptions of reality. Although I am assimilated into masculine culture completely enough to have received a Ph.D., something in me still finds the metaphor of a woman’s mutilated body horrifying rather than erotic or apt. To embrace Western culture as my own, I must rewrite the cultural text in ways that neutralize its attitudes toward women.
     Looking over Milton’s shoulder into his great fragment of the mirror, I find it too small and jagged to contain the whole of truth. So, I concur with Jim’s concern for justice and his call to multicultural awareness. The mirror of the individual self or a single cultural group—even a dominant one-- is too small to reflect creation’s image fully, let alone God’s.  Some of us are still hoping to tilt and turn our tiny piece of the mirror, so others can be reflected in it. But however unified our piece of truth may feel, if we glance at its edges we begin see that the other pieces do exist.
     As we become aware of edges, gaps, and fragments, we sometimes engage in  polarized either/or arguments that picture a choice between coherent Western culture and an unintelligible Babel of multicultural voices.  Yet anyone who has looked at ruins of a Roman mosaic or at Picasso’s Guernica knows that we can make powerful sense of fragmented images. Close study of Western culture reveals that its cherished verities are constructed from many pieces. For me, then, the question is not whether we will construct a mosaic, but how. In a world of multiplicity, how do we begin to make a faithful mosaic of the pieces available to us? I think the call to do so is, as Jim has hinted, less postmodern than it is simply Biblical. We are called together as one living body through a Gospel that embraces all tongues, all nations, all human beings, even as its followers scramble to reconstruct the barriers between themselves and others.
    As scholar servants we are called to construct a mirror of wisdom faithful to that Gospel and to as much of reality as we can see in its glass darkly. But we face some challenges.  Since we piece the truth together as we have been taught, it is difficult to see beyond the frameworks others construct for us.  In a museum once I saw a floor from Roman Britain made of hundreds of tiny tiles arranged into a clear border design and central image of a man’s face. As I read the exhibit label I learned that scholars think the face was meant to represent Christ. I was deeply touched by the thought of a Christian artist, centuries before, leaving this visible testimony. Would I have read that face as Christ’s without the coaching of the archaeologist?  I doubt it.
    Constructing a cultural heritage is much like interpreting that mosaic. As we study fragments, we often need help to decipher them. For convenience, interpreters often present the “cultural heritage” as a fairly monolithic, roughly linear, largely progressive whole.  If I stand far enough back from a mosaic, the lines between the tiles vanish and the picture seems solid. But as I move closer, I find that the picture depends on all the pieces. In much the same way, a faithful mosaic of culture depends on acknowledging complexity and on recognizing that multiplicity does not necessarily mean chaos.
    As we include more pieces, we are often hampered by the very rhetoric of inclusion. Jeffrey A. Milligan suggests that “the concept of inclusion …rests upon the categorization of individuals into groups … [using] the same categories that were previously constructed to exclude certain groups of people” (2-3 of 6).  Often the result, as Milligan suggests, “reifies the categories it uses by treating them as if they were accurate descriptions of reality rather than contingent social constructions” (3 of 6). Think, for instance, about labeling women and people of color as “minorities.”  While people of color might literally be in the minority on this campus, women are not. A term like “minority” accurately describes women here only if students and staff members somehow do not “count.”  In the academic world,  Bernice Resnick Sandler suggests, the presence of courses in subjects like women’s studies “challenges the implicit and sometimes explicit criticism that the study of two-thirds of the human race—women and people of color—is nothing more than a ‘politicization’ of knowledge, a catering to ‘special interests’” (50). This perception depends on a sense that one third of the human race counts more than the rest.
    In this context, we may hear Jim’s call for inclusion this way, “We [that is men] need to commit ourselves to ensuring that they [women and people of color] have a voice” (13). We may even hear it in a way that assumes that “they” do not have a voice and are passively or angrily waiting for us to give them one. When we construe it this way, we tend to include women and people of color as tokens. The role of the token is exceedingly awkward. I have been invited to present a response to a paper that calls for justice and inclusion for women. How can I possibly be objective when I am an interested party? And if I am not objective, will  my  voice be heard by an academic audience that values objectivity?  As I sat down to write, I heard Virginia Woolf whispering, “It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death” (108).
    So I face a paradox. I am invited to speak as a woman. And yet, if I do so, at worst I may end up like Milton’s Truth, at best I may be heard only as a “minority voice” speaking from the margins of what really counts. Even if you can think of me—more accurately—as a member of an “underrepresented population,” my voice may be muffled by the cotton batting of my group identity.
     In thinking about others we depend on a “generalized other”--our internalized sense of that sort of person based on our experience. The broader and more diverse our experience of others is, the more accurate our “generalized other” becomes (Houser 5 of 13).   Here is one place where our need for diversity becomes visible.  As Henry Adams observed of his experience as an undergraduate at Harvard in the 1850’s “boys that have been brought up together under like conditions have nothing to offer each other” (56).
    While we need diversity to develop a truly adequate sense of the generalized other, simply bringing men and women together in the same classroom is not enough. Mary Shelley and I will not hear the voices of Western men in quite the same way men do, though we expend much energy acquiring the language and thought patterns of a predominantly masculine culture. Jim is right to ask,  “If we claim that women have the same opportunities as do men, and then we only reward them if they act like men, have we done them justice?”(12).
     Imagine a world where little girls eagerly read books with male protagonists but little boys generally scorn books with female protagonists. Imagine a world where little girls play at being astronauts and cowboys, but little boys do not play at parenting because such play is boring or worse, “sissy.” By the time these children come to college, the women will be primed to receive masculine culture, but female experience will be largely invisible to the men. In this world women will succeed to the extent that  they  practice patterns of speech and behavior that mark them as “assimilated” to masculine ways of knowing and communicating. In this world, whose generalized other will be more complete? Whose sense of reality will govern their relations?
     James Baldwin once said: “The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.  The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself…. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally want is a citizenry which will obey the rules of society” (4).
     Over a quarter of a century ago on this campus, I began to be conscious. Even then, my consciousness was deeply double since I found whole strands of thought and experience simply absent from the Western texts we read. “We think back through our mothers if we are women,” Virginia Woolf declared (79). What does it mean for our daughters’ cultural heritage if their cultural mothers are missing, silenced, ridiculed, or reduced to the metaphor of a woman’s body mutilated and pieced together by wise men?
     But, you may protest, there are practical considerations and logistic obstacles. Of course there are. Recent CCCU-sponsored studies suggest that women students at Christian colleges may actually lose ground in measures of self-confidence and “voice” as they study with us. Then, too, even as women students remain the majority at Houghton, the number of full-time tenure-track women faculty members declines. We frame the problem this way: “Women are leaving because their husbands can not find jobs here.” We do not say: “Faculty members are leaving because their spouses can not find jobs.”  Why? What we really mean is that husbands can not find jobs in their fields that pay well, while this institution depends on the gifts and talents of women who are not working in their fields or at jobs commensurate with their training or for salaries that a man would accept. Our framing of this issue depends on an imbalance of expectations that we simply accept as natural.
    Some of these women studied at institutions like ours, where we claim to encourage all of our students to answer God’s calling, develop their gifts, and find a voice for witness in the world. But what we claim we want for all our students is in tension with what the evangelical community currently expects and even needs from its women.  What we preach is at odds with what we practice, for the maintenance of this institution and its constituent communities may depend in very practical ways on the sacrifice of women’s gifts. Do we really want to risk changes in our curriculum and pedagogy that would encourage women to see themselves as fully and powerfully members of God’s kingdom?
    Traditional curricula largely frame the world in polarities such as objective and subjective, rational and intuitive, logical and emotional, making it clear that to be objective, rational, and logical is to be right. Yet we might just as easily picture the field of our knowing as a mosaic of objective and subjective realities existing in dialectical tension with the others (Houser  4 of 13) and best reflected by an education that balances experience and abstraction. Neil O. Houser recommends an environment that is both “emotionally safe and intellectually sound” (7 of 13).  In the safe classroom, he suggests, a student should be able to risk relating experiences or expressing points of view that differ from those of peers or teacher without being made to feel “stupid.”  At the same time,  Houser suggests, to be intellectually sound “publicly shared experience and perspectives” need to be  “carefully examined” (7 of 13).
     Such a classroom might not obey the rules of academic society as it is now constituted. And academic society, like any other, “really, ideally want[s] citizenry that will simply obey the rules of the society.” But, as James Baldwin reminds us, “If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish” (4).
 
 

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