The intersection of writing and action
Introduction post 2 of 10
Good morning! Today’s post from the book series’s introduction suggests the hybrid nature of a “political devotion,” leading to a reflection on the cross. “The intersection” is the second of ten introductory devotions. To access the other posts that make up the introduction to Political Devotions, click its subtitle’s post number: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10.
What would a political devotional be like?
John Dickinson’s letters about the Townshend Acts contributed to the pamphlet debate leading up to the Revolutionary War.1 John Milton laid aside his Latin poetry—left Italy to return to England, in fact—to contribute to the pamphlet debate leading up to the English Civil War.2 Walter Benjamin wrote to his fellow Germans in the form of fragments—“aphorisms, jokes, dream protocols; cityscapes, landscapes, and mindscapes”3 that served as a kind of resistance to Germany’s totalizing politics4—in newspapers and magazines in the years leading up to the Third Reich. In his eventual book collecting many of these installments, Benjamin seemed to defend his—as well as Dickinson’s and Milton’s—minuteman-like fragments:
Significant literary work can only come into being in a strict alternation between action and writing; it must nurture the inconspicuous forms that better fit its influence in active communities than does the pretentious, universal gesture of the book—in leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards. Only this prompt language shows itself actively equal to the moment.5
Dickinson’s letters resemble Benjamin’s “strict alternation between action and writing”: his letters’ pre-revolutionary rhetorical situation—their audience and purpose, their critical context—makes them speech acts.
In Western religious practice, devotional entries may be said to do something similar to pamphlets, to traffic at the intersection of writing and action. A day’s devotion purports to apply to the devotee’s “moment,” not from any insight into the times but because each day is a moment, a potential crisis, at least in the medical sense of “crisis” as a turning point. I’ve often wondered if the devotional tenor of the Gettysburg Address—its concentration on themes of dedication and devotion, its pith, its apperception of crisis—had something to do with Lincoln’s resort to The Believer’s Daily Treasure.6
I conceive of a political devotional entry as a cross between timelessness and crisis. But perhaps a political devotion resembles more the cross Paul finds between the world and himself, his fresh engagement with the world springing from his deathlike disengagement from the world: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live . . .”7 Paul hears his echo in John: the same writer who wrote the disengaging “Love not the world” also wrote the engaging “For God so loved the world.”8 Jesus, in a final private struggle, refuses all the world’s kingdoms.9 But in his first bit of public business, he announces the coming of God’s kingdom.10 We refuse the world to choose the world. Any crisis the world faces crosses with what we’re prepared to do.
This is the second of ten posts that make up the book series’s introduction. Click here to read the next introductory post.
Wood, American Revolution, 405-6.
Beer, Milton, 111-28. The historian Anna Beer points out that Milton resisted the temptation to become a priest or a lawyer, two politically influential positions in seventeenth-century England. Instead, Milton wrote pamphlets: “Neither priest nor lawyer, however, John Milton almost single- handedly created the identity of the writer as political activist, of writing as a political vocation.” Beer, 121.
Jennings, “Introduction to One-Way Street,” 1.
Marcus, “Preface to One-Way Street,” xvii.
Benjamin, “One-Way Street (Selection),” 61.
Elmore, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, 242.
Galatians 2:20 KJV.
John 3:16 KJV and 1 John 2:15 KJV.
Luke 4:5-8.
Mark 1:14-15.