March 31, 2023
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good, says Paul in 1 Thessalonians 5:21. If it really is Paul. Most scholars say that it is, while casting a good deal of doubt on 2 Thessalonians, which strikes many as a repetitive copy of the first letter. But in fact there is no way to prove definitively the authorship of either letter. The “evidence” is stylistic and interpretive. Beyond that, we are left with arguments such as, “Well, Paul’s name is on them, and no one in the early Church doubted them.” Yet are Christians supposed to seek after proof? Doubting Thomas is gently chided for demanding law-court style proof before he would believe in Christ’s Resurrection: he insisted on being able to see and touch the wounds in Christ’s hands and feet (John 20: 24-29), prompting Jesus to say, “blessed are they who have not seen, and yet who have believed.”
Oh, but Christians have very much hankered after proof, which is not to be condescending about Christians, because we all do. For C.S. Lewis, the very reason to believe is that Christianity is not a mere “myth”—a word that means “story.” Myths are just-so stories set in illo tempore, as Mircea Eliade liked to say: “in that time,” that time being actually the primordial no-time of the beginning, the pleroma or fullness, as the Gnostics called it. In other words, once upon a time. But in Christianity, says Lewis, myth becomes history. Christ actually, historically lived, died—and resurrected. Not a dream, not an imaginary story, as DC comics used to say. Not a parable but a fact. It sounds very mature and adult to say that your religion, unlike the others, is grounded in history, in other words in the real world. We have graduated from the naïve tales told to children to factual narratives for adults.
Lewis’s attitude is, well, historical. In the medieval fourfold method of interpreting Scripture, the other levels of meaning are grounded upon the first, literal level. Literal means according to the letter, according to the actual words, but in practice “literal” meant according to what the words were presumed to point to out in the world of empirical historical action. On the literal level, Dante’s example of fourfold interpretation, “When Israel went out of Egypt,” a line from Psalm 114, means that there was a historical Israel that departed from Egypt. The other meanings were “figurative,” in other words metaphorical, figures of speech. The Exodus figuratively can include Christ’s redemption of humanity, its typological New Testament counterpart; it can include Baptism, whose symbolism is an individualized version of the Exodus. But the symbolic or figurative was always subordinated to the factual and historical.
But what does it mean to say that the Gospel account is factual and historical? What proves it? The first evidence is eyewitness accounts: those who actually followed Jesus through his life and death, the original witnesses, were always given special status in early Christianity. It is a tribute to Paul’s charisma that he was able to establish a status for himself equal to an original follower like Peter, for Paul did not know Jesus in the flesh but spoke with him in a vision on the road to Damascus. But eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable: courts of law treat them very cautiously. In this context, I can never resist repeating one of my favorite jokes, from Monty Python’s Life of Brian. During the Sermon on the Mount, the crew is standing in the very back row and cannot hear very well, so when Jesus says “Blessed are the peacemakers,” they think he said “Blessed are the cheesemakers.” I find this hilarious not because it is absurdly exaggerated but because it is not: this is exactly the kind of thing that happens to both oral and written accounts in the process of transmission over time.
Then there is the problem that the Gospel accounts are not eyewitness accounts, although they are doubtless based on them in some way, but were written considerably after the fact. The earliest of them, Mark, is usually dated around 70 CE. We have four accounts of Jesus, and they vary drastically. I have discussed this in more detail in The Productions of Time, but the Sermon on the Mount is a good example: in Luke, Jesus gives the same sermon on a plain. Matthew puts Jesus on a mount in order to make a typological parallel with the mountain, Horeb or Sinai (the Old Testament is contradictory as well), on which Moses received the Law. The Gospels are shaped by their individual thematic agendas: they are not attempts to document historical events that their authors were not present for anyway. Despite this, the itch for proof persists, and, like most itches, gets itchier the more it is scratched. In Old Testament scholarship, there has long been a tension between two positions. On the one hand, there is the view that much of Israel’s history never actually happened. We are not just talking about Adam and Eve: there is considerable doubt that the Exodus, the central event of the Old Testament, ever happened, at least as a single event—more likely is a slow drifting of immigrants into the Promised Land. On the other are, or at least were, scholars like William Foxwell Albright, who haunted archeological digs in hopes of proving that as many scriptural events as possible at least could have had a historical basis.
The New Testament does not even have the benefit of archeology. The quest for the historical Jesus, as it is called, in such enterprises as the Jesus Seminar, necessarily proceeds by means of textual analyses that certify certain Gospel passages as authentic while excluding others. Jesus almost certainly said or did this, but not this or this. But these pronouncements are based on assumptions that, if you poke into it, are, to my mind, fairly questionable.
Thus the "Jesus of history” is what deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida calls a transcendental signified: something that a certain signifier or set of signifiers is supposed to point to and be grounded upon, but which turns out to be a kind of ghost. Like all ghosts, it refuses to go away, yet refuses to be quite present either. Which is why the phrase “literal meaning” is accurate after all. The language of the Bible is supposed to point beyond itself to certain historical facts that are its foundation and guarantee, but in fact, to make the obvious pun, all we have are the signifiers themselves, the words of Scripture. This has become more and more obvious and undeniable, which is why the backlash that we call literalism or fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon, and not just in the context of the Bible. Literalism proclaims an absolute certainty that hides a deep insecurity. Scripture is made absolutely sacrosanct and unquestionable—it is made, frankly, into an idol. Fundamentalism claims it is defending the historical truth of the Bible, right down to the story of Adam and Eve. But all it can actually point to is a text, a few chapters of Genesis, against the bones and fossils and other physical proof of the evolutionists. The most it can claim is that the devil planted the fossils. The text is the historical proof, and does not need backing up by the kind of empirical evidence a scientist or historian demands. The fact that this is a weak position gives rise to anxieties that are disguised by fanaticism, a fanaticism that doth protest too much.
A second line of defense is to claim that the “facts” lying behind Scripture are real but not provable. Blind faith then becomes a kind of supreme virtue. The greater the improbability or outright impossibility of the events, the greater the virtue in believing in them. The early Church Father Tertullian famously said, “I believe because it is absurd.” A less radical move was the “demythologization” of the Bible advocated by the scholar Rudolf Bultmann. The idea was that the Jesus of history had been kidnapped by “mythology”—here we go again. The outlines of the Gospel story have much in common with the myths of “dying god figures” in non-Christian religions, particularly the so-called Mystery Religions popular around the time of Christ. To demythologize the Gospels is to remove those impossible and mythological elements, and what is left will be the actual message of Christianity. The problem is that this means removing the central event of the Gospels, the Resurrection. In fact, as Bultmann’s critics pointed out, a demythologized Bible would not be a Scripture but a kind of moral philosophy.
That is indeed the third line of defense, usually called liberal. The whole Bible is to be taken non-literally, as the Catholic Church now takes the story of Adam and Eve—as a pre-scientific parable, not as descriptive truth. This makes Jesus into a kind of moral sage, like Confucius, and the Bible into a kind of self-help book. It may sound like a pathetic, desperate stance, but some very intelligent and admirable people have held it, Shelley for example. And it has the virtue of escaping the burden of proof.
I can feel the force of the objection to this kind of liberalism, one that used to be made by, among other people, my own father. If the Bible is not literally true, then it’s fiction. And if it’s fiction, it’s a fairy tale, comfort food for those who are desperate to hold on to some kind of religious solace even though they are really closet secularists, perhaps closeted even from themselves. In Alice Munro’s brilliant short story “Pictures of the Ice,” a ne-er-do-well named Brent is saved from his alcoholism by the care and devotion of a liberal minister named Austin, “until Brent decided he would not drink anymore, he had been put in touch with God. Austin said that Brent meant by that that he had been put in touch with the fullness of his own life and the power of his inmost self. Brent said it was not for one minute himself; it was God” (144). This is an uncomfortable moment because Austin is a sympathetic character, whereas we watch Brent make religion into a new kind of drug to get high on and at the same time excuse his sociopathic behavior. At the same time, Brent has hold of a truth, even if he uses it for his own narcissistic purposes: as Rudolf Otto said in The Idea of the Holy (1917, 1923), contact with God is a numinous experience, the sense of brushing up against a mysterium tremendum, a sublime Other, something that cannot be reduced to the self, however deep. Yet Brent betrays whatever genuine intuition of the spiritual that he had, perverting his “conversion” into a power drive: “he got past Austin’s careful quiet kind of religion in no time and cut Austin out with the people in his own church who wanted a stricter, more ferocious kind of Christianity” (142). I am reminded of my former father-in-law, who got out of the Methodist ministry after 23 years, partly because his parishioners were dissatisfied that he did not give more hellfire-and-brimstone sermons. Mind you, these were not ignorant rednecks: the church was in an affluent suburb. Evocatively, my former father-in-law went, like Austin, from religion into alcoholism rehabilitation. But the problem remains: are we stuck with a choice, spiritually speaking, between alcoholic bingeing and weak tea?
The need for proof and the seeming impossibility of finding it is, if anything, even more pervasive in the secular arena. Some people are saying that we live in a post-truth society, meaning that we live within an environment, largely digital, of appearances whose authenticity we have no means of proving. We live in a world constituted by social media, Fox News, gaslighting, phishing, scamming, deepfake. I have just had my first experience with the new plagiarism: two student essays almost certainly written by AI. I am not shaken by it, as some academics claim to be. The fakery was pathetically easy to identify: suddenly I am reading a prose style light years beyond that of ordinary student prose, including that of the students’ previous writing. In this way, the AI’s are less effective than the old paper mills that used to sell pre-written essays, which usually were careful to include slight verbally clumsy touches to suggest authenticity. It is frustrating that I did not feel I could risk an outright accusation of plagiarism, however. When you accuse someone of academic dishonesty, conviction for which will go on their record, you have to have proof positive, not just “This is too good for you to have written it.” With traditional plagiarism, that meant you had to go on a hunt for the originals from which the student, or the paper mill, had lifted material, and show an exact or nearly exact match. But the new twist is that, with an AI-generated text, there is no original: the AI has generated a new text.
The plagiarism-detecting programs are also AI’s, so it is the battle of the AI’s, but the best the detection program can come up with is a probability that the essay was not written by a human being. Not only that, but a quick check of the Internet tells me that such programs are far from perfect. Like Covid tests, they can give false positives, at least 10% of the time from what I read. In short, the program does me no good: it tells me what I already know, that it is overwhelmingly probable that this is not the students’ own work. But it cannot give me the one thing I need, which is proof. It is not the end of the world as we know it: I gave the two students D’s on the perfectly justifiable ground that they did not do the assignment, which was to do a close reading of a literary text, analyzing crucial quoted passages for clues to a deeper meaning. AI essays are all paraphrase, and do not quote; they are glib, sophisticated blah-blah written from an altitude 30,000 feet above the actual text. Catching dishonest students has always been imperfect: in the old days, if you could not find the sources they plundered, you had to let them get away with it, dropping heavy hints however that you were on to them. But the point is the admittedly startling ability of the AI’s to mimic real critical prose, and the impossibility of proof that what I am reading is false or genuine.
The crisis about provable reality actually began long before the digital revolution. In its original form, it is the crisis of modern philosophy, that began when Descartes doubted all external reality as possibly only an illusion generated by a malevolent demon. Kant tried to get beyond that impasse by proving…oops, by arguing that we can never know reality, what he called the “thing in itself.” The mind constructs the appearances we take for reality through its a priori categories of organization, such as space, time, and causality. Whether reality itself has such characteristics we can never know: all we can know are the mind’s constructs. But all that means is that we are our own Cartesian demon, possibly deceiving ourselves. Reality is what Kant called the noumenal, an algebraic X about which we cannot even speak, with a curious resemblance to the God of medieval negative theology, who is beyond the power of our minds to comprehend: all we can say is what he is not.
With his usual intuitiveness, Shakespeare seems to have foreseen the coming epistemological crisis. I am presently both teaching Hamlet and discussing it on the Expanding Eyes podcast. In a fascinating way, the play has changed since I last taught it. The Romantics saw Hamlet as a symbol of alienated, solipsistic consciousness, his nauseated view of the world a kind of early existentialism. But a work of literature acquires new meanings from the preoccupations and perspective of successive phases of society, and Hamlet right now seems uncannily to predict the world of shifting post-truth appearances we are living in. It is a critical commonplace that the opening lines of the play act as an overture suggesting the themes developed in the story that follows. The first words of the play are a highly nervous “Who’s there?” spoken by a sentry in the dark. The question could be asked about almost every character in the play except perhaps Horatio. Everyone seems to be playing some kind of double part: Hamlet is not just being neurotic in his disgust at an almost universal hypocrisy. The word “hypocrite” originally referred to an actor on the Greek stage, and Hamlet is full of actors: professional actors putting on a play within a play as well as the more usual type of hypocrites, such as Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, who pretend to be Hamlet’s friends while they are spying on him for Claudius. Indeed, everyone is spying on Hamlet, including his own girlfriend, albeit unwillingly. Hamlet himself is acting, pretending to be mad—unless of course he is really mad and playing mad is one of his symptoms. There is, in fact, no way to tell. The Ghost claims to be a redeemed spirit from Purgatory, but he may be a damned spirit acting a part. Claudius is of course acting, and we are not ever sure whether Gertrude is acting or not. Hamlet claims to hate Ophelia, unless he is merely pretending. Later, he suddenly claims to love her better than anyone else does. We have no idea whether he is insincere, or if the term even is relevant to this play. And none of it is resolved, except by the expedient of littering the stage with bodies in Act 5, like a child tired of a game swiping the pieces off the board.
All this is why T.S. Eliot pronounced the play an incoherent failure. Yet it is a remarkable anticipation of contemporary politics. Is the MAGA mob really convinced that Trump actually won the 2020 election, are they in on the con, as some argue, and merely pretending in order to trigger the libs? There is no proof one way or the other. Do they really believe that Black Lives Matter was a violent uprising of the criminal element, or merely pretending it in order to disguise their racism? Do people really believe the wild conspiracy theory of QAnon? I have written about paranoia in another newsletter, and paranoia is the product of an environment of shifting appearances in which almost anything might be true. Journalists love the word “unhinged” for such beliefs, but a hinge is a fastener, and the real fear is that there is no solid reality for the mind to be securely hinged to. The image in the title of philosopher Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) shows up in Hamlet, where Hamlet instructs the Players that the purpose of art is to hold a mirror up to nature, to reflect reality. The premise of Rorty’s highly influential book is that the mirror metaphor is worn out. We no longer have faith that art, or any other form of thought, faithfully reflects, and therefore proves, an external reality. Elsinore Castle is a hall of mirrors, in which any individual mirror reflects not reality but another mirror. What Rorty calls “truth of correspondence” is dead: the criterion of truth can no longer be correspondence to an external reality. Rorty and those like him call themselves anti-foundationalists. There is no rock on which reality is solidly founded, only the shifting sands of appearances. Rorty believes we can no longer speak of “truth”: we can only have a “conversation” in which we compare perspectives.
Another philosopher and social theorist whose work revolves around the lack of proof is Jean Baudrillard, who argued, especially in Simulacra and Simulation (1981) that in the postmodern world, reality does not exist, only “simulacra.” Usually, social images function as models related to and telling us something about the reality that they model, as a map is a model of a territory. A simulacrum, by contrast, does not model a reality beyond itself. In fact, Baudrillard speaks of the “precession of the simulacra,” in which the simulacra come first, and bring a reality into existence, a reality, however, that is not a foundation but a mere appearance. Baudrillard finds this process ominous, as well he might. The precession of the simulacra occurs in advertising, in public relations, in what used to be called political theatre. Baudrillard was not the only one to be fascinated by the first Persian Gulf war, which was essentially a media event staged by the United States on television news. In rigidly controlled news footage, the public never saw an actual war, only the fireworks show of a “shock and awe” bombing campaign. The U.S. government had learned its lesson in Vietnam, where horrifying images on the nightly news helped create pressure to end the war.
Baudrillard was also not the only intellectual to find Disneyworld representative of all that is wrong with American life. I do not share the opinion, but he saw the simulacra of Disneyworld as attempting to create a bubble world, a simulation that would nevertheless be taken by the American public as real, as a sentimentalized and carefully edited representation of the American way of life. He connected it with a satire by Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” which takes off from a passage in Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno, in which a map has been created on a 1:1 scale: that is, the map is exactly the same size as the territory. Map and territory become one. There is a good deal in this of the usual French intellectual contempt for the American bourgeois, but there is more to it as well. Why is the right-wing governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, obsessed with attacking Disneyworld, of all things? Precisely because Disneyworld is not playing along with the right-wing desire to keep up the illusion of a sanitized and sentimentalized America that never truly existed but whose “foundation” is the world of the American middle class as it was supposed to have been in the 1950's. However, Disney is not cooperating: it is "woke." That is, it is updating its simulacra along liberal lines, eliminating racist references, having a Black Little Mermaid, refusing to keep up the image of a white-dominated, male-dominated, heterosexual-dominated, capitalist-dominated world. Given how influential Disney is, that angers a segment of the population, and DeSantis knows it and is playing to it. Disneyworld is not a random target.
I somehow doubt that Ron DeSantis has read Baudrillard, but the Wachowski siblings have. The Matrix (1999) depicts a world of simulacra that have replaced reality, and Neo has a hollow copy of Simulacra and Simulation in which he keeps cash and computer files—it is itself a simulacrum, ha. Baudrillard has said that the Wachowskis got his work wrong, but then no French intellectual of his time would have had anything good to say about American popular culture.
The desire for proof is personal as well as religious and sociopolitical—as Shakespeare once again knew. The great literary work about the conflict between the need to trust and the need for proof is Othello. It is so easy to judge Othello from a detached distance: of course it is monstrous that he distrusts the totally admirable Desdemona, and even more monstrous that he trusts the demonically evil Iago, all because of personal insecurities that he has repressed. Nevertheless, it is necessary to play devil’s advocate here. Othello’s insecurities are justified in the eyes of worldly wisdom, then and now. The world says that a 50-year-old Black man has no business marrying a 16-year-old white woman who is, in addition, from an affluent family while he is from the wrong side of the tracks. It can never work. Once Iago begins working on him, Othello begins wondering what Desdemona could possibly see in him, and comes to the same conclusion that many if not most of my students do, that she is merely an immature teenager and will probably outgrow her infatuation eventually, and, besides, age-difference marriages are icky. By worldly standards, he is merely being prudent in looking for proof that she is what she appears to be. He sees her paying attention to young, white, good-looking Michael Cassio, and then feels suspicious when she pleads with him to reinstate Cassio after Cassio has been disciplined. He asks her to produce as proof the handkerchief he gave her as a gift, and she cannot, because it has been stolen from her by Iago’s wife. Eventually the poor woman is reduced to showing as proof the bloody sheets from their wedding night.
Yet after all, what should you do in love? Should you just believe and never ask for proof? Just trust, and never check out their credentials online? How do you know you are not being scammed? It happens all the time. Scammers produce a fake identity and a whole fake life history that is sometimes astonishingly detailed and convincing. They ask for trust, and they often get it, from people who afterward look like naïve fools. Iago is the voice that says, don’t be a dupe. Check it out. Ask for “ocular proof.” If Othello had continued to trust, he would have risked the fate of the victims in the two great comedies of his friend Ben Jonson, Volpone and The Alchemist. Jonson was fascinated by con artists, seeing them, as they saw themselves, as artists, illusionists. A recent film very much in the Jonsonian spirit was American Hustle (2013), based on the Abscam sting operation of the late 1970’s, in which the FBI employed an international con artist and his girlfriend to convict a whole raft of corrupt public figures, including 7 members of Congress and the mayor of Camden, New Jersey. We are fascinated by such scamming and often admire the scammers. They are, like Shakespeare’s Prospero, magicians.
Are we condemned, then, to live in a world without proof, in a world of simulacra? This ominous possibility is the reason that literature, literary criticism, and philosophy have been so deeply ironic and skeptical for well over a century. The imagination is the home of human life, but does that mean that we are trapped in the imaginary, in a labyrinth of shifting phantasms, none of which we can believe in “literally”? The most famous speech on the imagination, that of Duke Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, condemns the lunatic (or religious visionary), the lover, and the poet for taking the images of the imagination literally. That is what a child does. Recently, going to the mall for a movie, I found myself in a large crowd of small children waiting for an appearance of the Easter Bunny. You have to be very young to believe that someone in a rabbit costume is truly the Easter Bunny. At the other end of the year, there is Santa Claus. Both figures are simulacra, models that model no reality but rather create their own reality. The comic relief in A Midsummer Nights’ Dream is provided by the “rude mechanicals,” uneducated lower-class figures who are childlike enough to worry that the audience for the play they are putting on is as naïve as they are and so might take a guy in a lion costume to be a real lion. But Shakespeare hints that all dramatic productions are simulacra: “The best of this type are but shadows,” as Theseus puts it.
We can only get out of what seems a dead end by questioning the assumptions that it is based on. We are speaking of models, and we have to find a better model. The ordinary model is of an objective reality “out there” perceived by a subjective consciousness or ego “in here.” Within the framework of that model, there is no way the subject or ego can ever prove that the objective world it seems to perceive is either real or illusory. But the entire argument of The Productions of Time rests upon the assertion that we are capable of another type of perception, one that turns the ego’s alienated experience inside out and identifies the subject with the object. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is about romantic love, and raises the question: what is this curious frenzy, this kind of madness that seizes people? The Freudian answer, the power of sexual desire, is inadequate. Something is driving through sexual desire, using it as a vehicle to an end far beyond reproduction. That something is the drive to identify, to experience self and other as two and yet one. It is to take the words of the marriage ceremony, that two shall become one flesh…literally. Normally, we are locked in the prisons of our separate selves, drawn to another person yet wondering what is going on inside their head, wishing for some kind of proof to allay our fear and distrust. Romantic love as experienced oscillates between intensity and relaxation. At its most intense, it is an experience of actual fusion, symbolized by orgasm, when two selves melt together. It subsides, however, into an ongoing feeling of deep and constant connection, for which Midsummer Night’s Dream has a beautiful metaphor: two cherries on one bough. We are two, yet one.
Similarly, in religion, the need to have proof, whether the proof of empirical evidence or of institutional authority, is always accompanied by doubt, which invariably gives rise to heresy-hunting, because the very existence of another way of believing calls my own into doubt, and is therefore threatening. But proof is demanded precisely to the degree that there is no actual spiritual experience. That is what proof is: a substitute, a compensation for a lack. And spiritual experience is, exactly like romantic experience, a form of identification of self and other. The self, other people, nature, and God are potentially united in a total identity, expressed in I Corinthians 15:28 as the experience of God as “all in all.” The intense version of this identification is the mystical experience, in which the self melts like a drop of water into the ocean, an experience likened by mystical writers to orgasm. Bernini portrays this moment in his famous sculpture “St. Theresa in Ecstasy,” in which the saint is receiving the stigmata from an angel who is a discreet stand-in for God himself. “Ecstasy” is in fact the Renaissance term for orgasm, as in John Donne’s poem “The Extasie,” which consists of after-orgasm thoughts of a lover about the two-in-one of love. As the drop-of-water metaphor implies, another name for this unity is the oceanic, subject of a previous newsletter. The more relaxed form of spiritual awareness is simply of a deep connection of all things to all other things that is, as Keats said, both truth and beauty. It needs no proof because it is here and now, eternity born into time. The verbal unit expressing this state of identification is the metaphor, A is B. Northrop Frye’s three books on the Bible read the Bible literally—but the proper definition of “literally” is “according to the words themselves.” In other words, the language of the Bible is not historical, theological, or even moral. It is metaphorical and mythical, for myths are metaphorical narratives. Through its language, the Bible decreates the fallen world, revealing an apocalyptic one—the world “apocalypse” means revelation—a world of total identification in both time and space, a vision Frye calls interpenetration. It is a map coterminous with its territory, a map that recreates its territory in its own image, the ideal form of which Baudrillard’s simulacra are an ironic parody.
Let us not become inflated, however. The subject-object world of the alienated ego does not go away, or, to put it religiously, we continue to live in a fallen world and exist as a fallen self. There is no wishful-thinking escape from struggle with doubt, and there remains the pragmatic need for skepticism and proof. Otherwise there is no way to distinguish between a lover and a scammer, a true leader from a cult leader, true vision from narcissistic delusion. All of the ironies remain in place, and someone who feels no doubt is a dangerous fanatic. All I am saying is that some kind of dialectic, some Jacob’s-angel struggle, goes on between our imaginative sense of connection and unity and our profane sense of alienation and threat. We doubt our certainties—but then we go on to doubt our doubts. Prove all things: maybe that is what the author of 1 Thessalonians meant, whether Paul or someone who had identified with Paul metaphorically with such intensity that he became Paul when he wrote. The history of scripture is in fact full of such identifications: pseudepigrapha, they call them, people writing under another name. Is there such a thing as a benign scam? For it is benign advice, as I see it, balancing the two contradictory tasks. We must doubt, we must try to prove. Yet also we must affirm something. We must believe in something; a total lack of faith is impossible. Without some kind of faith that “this is real,” we cannot walk across the room, let alone upon the water. It all sounds very complicated, but actually we must become again as little children, believing in something literally, and waking to find the presents under the tree.
Reference
Munro, Alice. “Pictures of the Ice.” In Friend of My Youth. Vintage, 1990. 137-55.