But many that are first shall be last;
and the last shall be first.
That verse (Matthew 19:30) is a good example of chiasmus, a rhetorical figure that reverses the terms of the two clauses that make up a sentence, or a part of a sentence. Chiasmus is thus a linguistic twist or turn that you can use to express a crosswise mode of thought. “Chiasmus (ky-AZ-mus) means ‘a crossing,’ from the Greek letter chi, X, a cross. You ‘cross’ the terms of one clause by reversing their order in the next.”1
first shall be last
X
last shall be first
Another saying by Jesus, which makes a creative advance beyond the above pattern, is an evocation of beauty with its graceful crossings that express a theme of mutual immanence:
“That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us.”2
The basic idea of chiasmus is a contrast, or crossing, of concepts and, with sufficient ingenuity, a chiasmus can be expressed in a single word. For example, if we take the word “corpse,” and reverse the second and third letters, it turns into “cropse,” a new word that unites “corpse” and “crops.” One word has been made out of two, but without dissolving the contrast between the two terms. Yoked together as an antithetical pair, “corpse” and “crops” express the theme of death and resurrection, for crops are what arise in fields each new spring.
The ingenuity here is not mine, but belongs to James Joyce who created the word “cropse” for use in his book Finnegans Wake.3
With this generalized understanding of chiasmus, the hydrogen atom can be seen as a natural embodiment of chiasmus since it yokes together an antithetical pair: a positive proton and a negative electron. And what of light, both particle and wave, with each beam propagating by sheer reversal of field: + and –.
Light propagates by a crisscrossing, or should we say a double-crossing, of the two undulating fields. Because the fields oscillate at right angles to each other, and back and forth across the direction of wave propagation, light is a transverse wave. And so light does a lot of crisscrossing as it zips along at 300 million meters per second. It is somewhat staggering to try to imagine that in the one second that it takes light to travel 300 million meters, that in that same one second it also oscillates 600 trillion times.
When God said, “Let there be light,” the universe turned luminous with light making 600 trillion chiasmic crisscrossings per second. Is Christ “Crossing” in every cycle of light?
With this by way of introduction, the Way of Jesus can be seen as a path of many crossings. Noting that Jesus is a Hebrew name while Christ is Greek, when the early Christians christened Jesus as Jesus Christ, they achieved a chiasmic crossing of Hebrew and Greek. And so we have that and other crossings—
Incarnation: human and divine
Logos: the Word was made flesh
Last Supper: bread and wine, body and blood
Crucifixion: death and resurrection
Cross: where ends are beginnings
Substantial parts of early Christian teachings can be found in letters: the letters attributed to St. Paul that constitute 13 of the 27 books of the New Testament. However, in light of what we have just seen, much of Christian teaching can be found in one single letter—the Greek letter chi (X).4
alpha X omega
One further crossing:
The use of chiasmus pervades the writings of the New Testament5 in a unique form of parallelism. Indeed, the Bible as a whole shows that the concept of chiasmus evolved into structural forms of ever increasing beauty and complexity. For example, take note of the structure of 1 John 4:7-8:
Beloved, let us love one another.
A For love is of God
B and whoever loves is born of God and knows God
B’ He who does not love has not known God
A’ for God is love.
And from the book of Amos:
A Seek ye me, and ye shall live.
B But seek not after Bethel,
C Nor enter into Gilgal,
D And pass not to Beer-sheba:
C’ For Gilgal shall surely go into captivity,
B’ And Bethel shall come to naught.
A’ Seek Yahweh, and ye shall live.6
If you compare the first and last lines, and so on, you will see that the italicized words reflect parallel correspondences in this A-B-C-D-C’-B’-A’ chiasmus. A and A’ are what may be called “thought-rhymes,” as are B and B’, and C and C’.
Some chiasmic structures in the Bible are marvels of complexity. The Gospel of John is a good example. Not only are there, throughout John’s Gospel, many chiasmic units nested one within the other, but the book itself, as a whole, is a complex interlocking chiasmus.
On the following page, from the Gospel of John and for your contemplation, is the Bread of Life chiasmus. To see the beauty of structure, accurately formatted, you may need to reduce your font size.
A: “I am the bread of life.
B: Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died.
C: This is the bread which comes down from heaven,
D: that a man may eat of it and not die.
E: I am the living bread which came down from heaven;
F: if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever;
G: and the bread which I shall give for the life
the world is my flesh.”
H: The Jews disputed among themselves, saying,
“How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
I: So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly I say to you,
unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man
and drink his blood, you have no life in you;
H’: he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has
eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.
G’: For my flesh is food indeed,
and my blood is drink indeed.
F’: He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood
abides in me, and I in him.
E’: As the living Father sent me,
and I live because of the Father,
D’: so he who eats me will live because of me.
C’: This is the bread which came down from heaven,
B’: not such as the fathers ate and died;
A’: he who eats this bread will live forever.”
As in the foregoing examples, compare A and A’, B and B’, etc., and take note of all the parallel correspondences.
And . . .
Imagine, if you will, ripples on a still pond—but, in this case, they are rippling inwards rather than outwards. A and A’ form the outermost ripple, B and B’ the next, and so forth: moving, gathering momentum, undulating toward the center, with each antiphonal pair heightening our awareness, one after the other, until we reach the center, which is I, and resonate with its augmented meaning.
In a book devoted to the subject, I have explored the concept of chiasmus not only as a figure of speech but also, and more importantly, as a figure of thought, a figure of reality, and a figure of Deity. I have shown how the concept can be generalized beyond its literary meaning and that chiasmus is a powerful conceptual tool that enhances the poetics of perception.7
Notes
1. Sheridan Baker, The Complete Stylist, p. 326.
2. John 17:21.
3. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 55.
4. For the Christian chiasmic connections I am indebted to Philip Kuberski and his essay “Joycean Chaosmos and the Self-Organizing World,” especially his idea that “Christ’s story can be found in a Greek letter,” although it was my idea to pair it with Paul’s letters, thus enabling an epistolary pun and another crisscrossing of concepts.
5. In his book, The Shape of Biblical Language: Chiasmus in the Scriptures and Beyond, John Breck gives a detailed account, demonstrating “that virtually every apostolic author made extensive use of chiasmic patterns in composing his work.” The Old Testament paved the way for this, for it too contains a high density of chiasmic structures.
6. The two examples of Biblical chiasmus are from (1) Nils Lund, Chiasmus in the New Testament, p. 42, and (2) John Breck, Scripture in Tradition, p. 108.
7. Let There Be . . . Chi!: Chiasmic Structures in Thought and Reality, a Kindle EBook by Hyatt Carter.
HyC