The Poetics of John the Baptist

“Truly, I say to you, among those born of women there has arisen no one greater than John the Baptist” (Matt 11:11 RSV). So spoke the master himself, and yet, I can think of a few. That is, when I stop to think of the greatest of saints, many others easily crowd in front of poor John the Baptist—doctors, fathers, apostles, the blessed virgin herself—so that it is actually hard to see why his cousin Jesus made so much of him. We should admit that part of this is cultural: as Sergei Bulgakov saw a hundred years ago, Western Christianity has tended to downplay the Baptist’s significance over the last few centuries, diminishing what was once a great cultus, and still is in the East: there has been, “in Catholic consciousness,” an “indifference to the Forerunner” and “an obscuring of his role,” in favor of St. Joseph. While there is no reason to regret the place the foster father has come to occupy, Bulgakov is right to suggest that a restored appreciation of John the Baptist’s unique contribution is in order. On behalf of that restoration, I want to suggest that the life and work of the Forerunner, especially as presented in the gospel of John, greatly illuminates the poetic character of Christian life—indeed of all life. Placing himself as a finite gateway to the Infinite, he indicates the unique way all of us relate—creatively—to the Logos, giving a new and dignified place to literary mediation. John the Baptist lights up the character of creaturely mediation—and therefore literature—as such.

The Lamp and the Sun

According to the Johannine prologue, in the Word himself “was life, and the life was the light of men” (1:4). Christ’s own light is primary—indeed, is everything—and yet, almost immediately, the evangelist turns aside to the importance of the Baptist’s marturia: his witness, or testimony. “Sent from God . . . he came for testimony, to bear witness to the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness to the light” (1:6-8). His witness, the evangelist later makes clear, is itself a kind of light: “he was a burning and shining lamp” (5:35). The distinction between “lamp” (luchnos) and “light” (phôs) is clarifying here, but still, the obvious question demands our attention: why is a smaller lamp necessary when we have the light of the world? Or to put it differently, why does the narrative of the prologue turn aside so immediately from Jesus to John? The asymmetry of the two is staggering: why focus on a light, when one has the light?

Certainly, a doctrine of participation will help answer the question. If there is only one light of the world—one phôs—then the Baptist’s luchnos must participate in that phôs, and find its life, source, and substance there. But the peculiarity remains: why a light before the light?

Augustine has a more brilliant answer, worked out in his Homilies on the Gospel of John. There, he ruminates on the fact that the omnipresent God, creator of the world, has always been spiritually present to it, just as the sun has always been there in the sky. But we, finite creatures and sinners that we are, somehow just cannot quite see that which is so close to us. Thus, for Augustine, “there is need that you [creatures] have some means whereby you may see that which never departs from you” (2.8). For humans, there is need of a vantage outside of ourselves, a human testifier who can point us toward the light we already feel at some level to be there. “From a human being God seeks testimony, and God has a human as a witness,” for this is what we need in our weakness. Per lucernam quaerimus diem: “by a lamp, we seek the day” (2.8). John’s marturia, then, is a beautiful condescension to our level. We need gradual acclimation.

The Stranger in Our Midst

Now, if we return to the evangelist’s text, the Forerunner’s mediation becomes still more clear. The Pharissees around him ask the same question we have asked: “why are you baptizing, if you are [not] the Christ?” (1:25). Why put forth a light when there is the light? His response is instructive: because “among you stands one whom you do not know” (1:26). The Messiah, the object of all desire, is present, but unknown. Somehow, the eyes of those round about, eyes that burn to see the One, cannot quite notice him there.

Surely part of it is familiarity. “He was in the world,” the prologue states, “and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not. He came to his own home [ta idia], and his own people [hoi idioi] received him not” (1:10-11). He is familiar to us as our maker—like an idiom to a native speaker—so we think we know him. Simone Weil wrote that God can be felt through all created things, “as clearly as our hand feels the substance of paper through the pen holder and the nib.” But how many writers are actually awake to that texture? John the Baptist shows that we don’t know the stranger among us, opening the eyes of our hearts to the mysterious presence that has always already been there.

A Voice in the Wilderness

The next question is how we could possibly have failed to notice this luminous stranger. And how does John the Baptist’s witness enable us to do so? John’s most famous line, quoted from Isaiah, Chapter 40, helps clarify: “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness [en tê erêmô], make straight the way of the Lord” (1:23). The suggestion is that we need John’s “voice,” his phônê, both because of our problematic conditions, and because of the difficulty of the path toward God.

"painted desert" by Meghan Rutherford is licensed under CC BY 2.0

The wilderness is the wasteland of human nature and culture, what Auden called “the deserts of the heart.” Biblically, there is no mentioning a path through the wilderness without thought of the children of Israel’s forty years in the desert. They lived in close proximity to the Almighty and he fed them miraculously day by day, yet they were marvelously ungrateful, yearning for the fleshpots of Egypt and slipping into idolatry with ludicrous ease. It is that barbarous callousness and persistent moral weakness that defines the wilderness John speaks out into. “The quickest of us,” as George Eliot put it, “walk about well wadded with stupidity,” and much worse than stupidity. The first century needed the Baptist’s piercing voice for the same reason that we do today: because the desert years of our pilgrimage are ongoing, and it is hard to hear amid the dull, recalcitrant grumblings of the flesh.

The Forerunner identifies Christ, even in these conditions, by making straight his path. But here, there is another curiosity: John makes the path straight by re-routing it through himself. His hearers cannot perceive God among them, but his vox clamantis, a creaturely sense experience, can make itself a path, becoming a mediator. Paradoxically, the straight path, then, is not the direct path—from me to God—but the indirect, mediated one. John cries out because we desert dwellers need to approach through him. In the moral, psychological, spiritual murk of our hearts, the Baptist’s cry, his own voiced heart, becomes a lens through which we can begin to see. Contrary to our intuitions, the indirect path through him is more direct. In a basic sense, the Forerunner is an off-road vehicle.

Before and After

Deepening the paradox, the evangelist indicates that it is John’s very finitude that makes him a good mediator and path-straightener. Wonder at his testimony leads the “priests and Levites” to ask him, “who are you?” (1:19). Astonishment at his “burning and shining lamp” raises the question of identity: is this the One? But he denies that he is the Christ: “I am not he” (Acts 13:25). The very limits of his goodness point beyond him to the unlimited source. Somehow, being a light but not the light opens up the path to the light.

This is the mystery behind the Baptist’s enigmatic line, “He who comes after me ranks before me, for he was before me” (John 1:15). His marturia works because its acknowledged finitude gestures toward the Infinite, an always-already “before.”

Augustine makes this point foundational in the Confessions, where the whole creation—every living thing—points with its very form and being beyond itself to the Creator. Surrounded imaginatively by all created things, Augustine attends to them one by one, almost like Adam at the naming of the animals: “Tell me of my God,” he bids them, “You are not he, but tell me something of him.” And each finite creature repeats a version of the same message: Ipse fecit nos—“He made us.” In Augustine’s imagining, every created thing follows the path of John the Baptist, preparing the way of the Lord, and doing so with the “voice” of its whole self. With marvelous pithiness, he captures the experience of this voice: Interrogatio mea, intentio mea; et responsio eorum, species eorum: “My questioning was my attentiveness, and their response, their beauty” (10.6.9). The finite lamp of the created species, its dynamic form or beauty, opens out into the all-encompassing sun of the Creator.

The Increase of the Bridegroom

The final characteristic of the Forerunner’s marturia is his insistence on receding into the background—and especially for our study of literature. “He must increase,” says John, “but I must decrease” (John 3:30). Importantly, his withdrawal from the foreground is not felt as a loss, but an occasion for joy: Christ the Word is the bridegroom, and John’s hearers are the bride. Now that the Forerunner has accomplished his task, “he who has the bride is the bridegroom; the friend of the bridegroom”—John himself, standing by—“rejoices greatly in the bridegroom’s voice” (3:29-30). Here it is precisely his joy at the light of the world, the lover of souls, that has made John a good mediator, his voice ever directed at the One who is worth all his singing.

So much for John’s witness. It only remains to reflect on what it means for the rest of us now. The first and more obvious conclusion we may draw has already been implied: that every Christian is a forerunner of the Lord, and thus John’s path must be our own. No hearer of the Word is to hide her light under a basket, but to place it on a lampstand (Matt 5:15), as one more “burning and shining lamp.” The shape of John’s participation in the divine Logos, and his mediation of it to the world—this is meant to indicate the shape of all our lives.

But we may go further. John’s witness says something essential about the way our creaturely words and deeds work more broadly. Just as the revelation of the Logos himself necessarily clarifies philosophical conceptions of reason and speech, so may the figure of John the Baptist clarify the way creaturely logoi function in general. When we want to say something—anything—we are trying to bear witness creatively, by the form and beauty of our words, to the reality that we see: the thing that is present, but not understood. As the poet Robert Browning put it a century and a half ago, when we make images of things, visually, or in words or gestures, we enable others to see them afresh:

For, don't you mark? we're made so that we love

First when we see them painted, things we have passed

Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;

. . . . Art was given for that;

God uses us to help each other so,

Lending our minds out. (“Fra Lippo Lippi” 300-306)

Not just John the Baptist, not just Christian testimonies, but all art, all human communication, is pointing beyond itself toward its object, serving something bigger and prior, in a creaturely way, then “decreasing.” The mystery of art is the humble power of its indirect path to the real.

At the same time, though it decrease, the witness will never disappear. Like the Forerunner, whom Jesus holds forever in memory, artistic marturia—the witness of human logos—continues to stand in a position of asymmetrical reciprocity vis-à-vis its object. A Gaugin landscape, a portrait by Sargent: they open up terrains and faces in general, and no one would say that they supercede those terrains and faces, but they also continue to remain themselves. As the first chapters of John’s gospel show, there is something precious and human about the way the lamp prepares the way for the sun. The finite opens out into the Infinite, but is suffered to retain its own voice among the chorus within that Infinite. The friend of the Bridegroom ever points with all the light of his being, her being, its being, to the nuptial mystery of all things, caught up in the heart of the Three-in-One.

And so, I am finally arguing that the evangelist’s picture of John the Baptist, by letting in light on the character of creaturely logos, helps explain and justify the place of art and literature in our lives. If the advent of the Word personalizes and enfleshes reason, then the (slightly earlier) advent of the Forerunner gives special dignity to the work of mediation. The indirect path of art, through the image to the object: this is a privileged path, and paradoxically the straightest path.