The Good Wine: Reading John from the Center

by Bruno Barnhart

Book by Barnhart, Bruno

Genres: Christianity

Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

Reviews

[Dean Summers · Rating 4 out of 5]

In The Good Wine, Bruno Barnhart presents a chiastic reading of the Gospel according to John. “Chiastic” refers to a kind of pattern found in, for example, stories, songs, and rhetoric. The simplest chiastic pattern is A1-B- A2, where A1 represents a certain thematic element, B represents a new element, and A2 represents a third element with A1 and A2 in balance and centered on B. In music, you might hear “Do-Re-Do.” Bruno Barnhart (1931-2015) was, from 1964 onward, a Christian monk of the New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, California. He was that monastery’s Prior for eighteen years (1969-1987).

Guided by the work of Peter F. Ellis and that of J. Gerhard, Barnhart hears in the Gospel of John a complex chiastic pattern of twenty-one literary units centered on the episode of Jesus walking on water, an episode that calls to mind the opening lines of the Hebrew Bible: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

The twenty-one literary units identified by Barnhart correspond somewhat, and only somewhat, to the twenty-one chapters of the Gospel of John. The pattern he hears is in five measures: Ti-La-So-Fa-Mi / La-So-Fa-Mi / Re-Do-Re / Mi-Fa-So-La / Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti. (Denoting the pattern musically is my idea. Barnhart depicts the pattern graphically in the form of a mandala.) Within the chiastic pattern, Barnhart hears an added layer of resonance whereby each set of literary units links to a particular day of creation as described in Genesis 1. He hears Do linking to Day One, Re to Day Two, Mi to Day Three, and so on.

The Good Wine is written in three parts. In Part 1, Barnhart discusses his purpose, method, and terminology. Part 2 is his chiastic reading of the Gospel of John with analysis, commentary, and Lectio Divina (a way of encountering God through a reading of sacred scripture that includes meditation, prayer, and contemplation). In Part 3, he presents bonus material that includes a consideration of the Gospel of John as a Christian Passover haggadah (a story written to be read in celebration of some special occasion). As bonus material, Barnhart also includes a demonstration of how a chiastic reading of the Gospel of John can serve as the basis for baptismal instruction in the seven weeks leading up to Easter. Those two items from Part 3 are, as they say, worth the price of the book!

Barnhart makes a compelling case for hearing a chiastic pattern in the Gospel of John that centers on the episode of Jesus walking on water, and he provides ample evidence for hearing throughout the Gospel of John echoes from Genesis 1. However, Barnhart’s delineation of the literary units in John seems, in a few instances, forced. And I find his attempt to link each and every literary unit to a particular day of creation more creative than convincing.

Still, Barnhart is definitely onto something. I’m especially intrigued by his observation that all four of the “La” episodes in John feature women as main characters: Jesus’ mother at a wedding in Cana, where Jesus turns water into wine; a woman in Samaria who meets Jesus when she comes alone to draw water from a well; Mary of Bethany, when she anoints Jesus with costly perfume; Mary Magdalene, when she encounters Jesus soon after he is raised from the dead. And, with Barnhart’s help, Jesus’ words to Nicodemus in John 3:5 finally make sense. When Jesus says, “Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God,” he is referring to the opening lines of the Hebrew Bible, and he is speaking of a new beginning.

Aside from all that, A Good Wine is also a dogged attempt to read the Gospel of John from a Gnostic perspective, as an incarnation of a perennial philosophy associated by enthusiasts with Vedanta and Zen. A favorite word of Barnhart’s is “unitive,” an adjective that he often presses into service as a noun, “the unitive.” For Barnhart, “the unitive” is a stand-in for a whole constellation of words, including “beginning, end, life, love, grace, truth, word, faith, atonement, community, world, heaven, God.” By collapsing an entire constellation of familiar words into a cold, abstract singularity, Barnhart can more easily channel our thinking toward his own idea of what he’d like John to be talking about and what he’d like John to be saying about it.

In that regard, Barnhart has a lot to say about Hagia Sophia. In the prologue to the Gospel of John, the logos of God, the word of God, is described in language that sounds very much like language in ancient Jewish and Christian literature that describes the wisdom of God—often personified as Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom. For Barnhart, that thread of association is sufficient to allow him to turn his book on the Gospel of John into a meditation on Hagia Sophia—despite the fact that the word “wisdom” (sophia in Greek) occurs in the Gospel of John not at all.

All the while lauding Hagia Sophia, Barnhart says very little about Jesus—which is odd in a book about a book that’s all about Jesus! The very most important thing Barnhart says about Jesus is tucked away in his endnotes:

Attempts to reconcile or integrate the Christian (e.g. Johannine) unitive vision with other unitive perspectives [such as Vedanta or Zen] must face the peculiar union of inclusiveness and particularity which is the core of Christianity . . . The paradox is condensed in the prologue’s affirmation, “The Word became flesh [John 1:14]—the divine Source of the universe came into this world newly and uniquely in the one very concrete and specific human person who is Jesus of Nazareth . . . (the “scandal of particularity”) . . . An understanding of the Johannine Unitive which did not confront this concrete incarnational challenge would be partial and delusive [p. 466, continued from note 2 of Part 3, Chapter 8, p. 465, Barnhart’s italics, square brackets mine, round brackets his].

A book-length expansion of that endnote would have been more pertinent to the Gospel of John than an extended meditation on Hagia Sophia. Even so, Barnhart helps us hear a chiastic pattern in the Gospel of John, which is certainly there, though evidently it is more free-form than he attempts to prove. He focuses our attention on the centrality of the episode of Jesus walking on water. He calls us to listen for a recurring resonance with Genesis 1. He underscores the importance of women in John’s narrative. He demonstrates that the Gospel of John serves well as a Christian Passover haggadah, and that it can be read effectively as baptismal instruction. He shows how, through Lectio Divina, we can receive the Gospel of John as a living word from the Source of life and love. Even his attempt to read the Gospel of John from a Gnostic perspective is valuable in that it serves to test a hypothesis that surfaces perennially.