Modern Age, Winter/Spring 2013 (Vol. 55, Nos. 1-2) by Jed Donahue

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MODERN AGE A Quarterly Review

Q U A R T E R L Y

R E V I E W

Vol. 55, Nos. 1 & 2

Winter / Spring 2013

The Neoconservative Conundrum Jack Kerwick

Two Dialogues of Abraham with God Mordecai Roshwald

Leo Strauss and Benedict XVI on the Crisis of the West Nathan Schlueter

The Georgic Vision of Andrew Lytle Mark G. Malvasi

Winter / Spring 2013 • Volume 55, Numbers 1 & 2

The Poetry of Libido Dominandi James Matthew Wilson

Babi Yar

Dmitry Shlapentokh Poems by David Craig, Paul Ruffin, and James Matthew Wilson REVIEWS: The Cognitive Elite and America’s Future — Paul H. Lewis • The End of the Civic Era? — Virgil Nemoianu • Literature as Life Vocation — Aaron Urbanczyk • “We Don’t Do Uplift” — R. J. Stove • All’s Well That Ends Well? — Mark G. Malvasi • Original Sin and the Christian Response to Communism — D. G. Hart • Notes from the American Underground — Derek Turner

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Volume 55, Numbers 1 & 2, Winter/ Spring 2013, published quarterly under the auspices of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Inc. All editorial correspondence should be mailed to the editor at MODERN AGE, 5 Gateshead Drive, #205, Dunedin, FL 34698. Address all subscription correspondence to ISI, 3901 Centerville Road, Wilmington, DE 19807 (800-526-7022). Subscriptions: $30/1 year, $54/2 years; add $5/year for Canadian and foreign postage; $9.50/each back issue. Articles in this periodical do not necessarily represent the views of either the Institute or the editors. The editors are responsible for the selection and acceptance of articles; responsibility for opinions expressed and accuracy of facts in articles published rests solely with individual authors. The editors are not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts; unaccepted manuscripts will be returned if accompanied by a stamped return envelope. MODERN AGE is indexed by the Public Affairs Information Service, LA Periodicals Index, Historical Abstracts Social Sciences Index, and American History and Life. MODERN AGE reviews are listed in Book Review Index. Abstracts of political science articles regularly appear in International Political Science Abstracts, published by the International Political Science Association. MODERN AGE is available on microfilm and microfiche from National Archive Publishing Co., PO Box 998, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 (800-420-6272) or at www. napubco.com. Electronic subscriptions: EBSCO Publishing (800-653-2726) and Gale Group / Thomson Learning (www. galegroup.com). MODERN AGE is distributed to newsstands by Ingram Periodicals (800-627-6247). Copyright © 2013 by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Inc. All rights reserved. ISSN 0026-7457. U.S. Post Office Publication No. 356820.

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hy is the boom-and-bust cycle so persistent? Why did economists fail to predict the recent economic meltdown—or to pull us out of the crisis more quickly? And how can we prevent future calamities? Mainstream economics has no adequate answers for these pressing questions. In the powerful and eye-opening new book It Didn’t Have to Be This Way, Harry Veryser presents the proper alternative to government interventionist approaches: the Austrian School of economics. Too long unappreciated, the Austrian School reveals the crucial conditions for a successful economy and points the way to a free, prosperous, and humane society.

“I am blown away by how much ground Veryser covers in this important book, and how skillfully he covers it. . . . I strongly recommend it.” —THOMAS E. WOODS JR., bestselling author of Meltdown “I love every page of this book.” —MARK SKOUSEN, editor of Forecasts & Strategies “Veryser has written an excellent book not only on Austrian economics but also on a century and a half of economic history. . . . His careful analysis of the case for the gold standard is, in itself, outstanding scholarship.” —LEWIS E. LEHRMAN, cofounder of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, author of The True Gold Standard

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CONTENTS

winter /spring 2013 vol. 55, nos. 1 & 2

Conservatism and Religion

R. V. Young

The Neoconservatism Conundrum

Jack Kerwick

Two Dialogues of Abraham with God

Mordecai Roshwald

Leo Strauss and Benedict XVI on the Crisis of the West

Nathan Schlueter

Religion and the Foundation of Liberalism: The Case of the Mont Pelerin Society

J. Daniel Hammond Claire H. Hammond

Robert Drake, as I Knew Him

Jeffrey Folks

The Georgic Vision of Andrew Lytle

Mark G. Malvasi

Mr. Death Possum

David Craig

The Aged Astronomer Scribbles a Poem to Her The Aging Astronomer Writes to Her in October They Visit the Cyprus Tree

Paul Ruffin

ESSAYS

POETRY

At Bar Harbor Once, and Once . . . Innis Mór

James Matthew Wilson

REVIEW ESSAY 79

The Poetry of Libido Dominandi

James Matthew Wilson

REVIEWS 85

The Cognitive Elite and America’s Future Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 by Charles Murray

Paul H. Lewis

The End of the Civic Era? L’ âge du renoncement by Chantal Delsol

Virgil Nemoianu

Literature as Life Vocation: The Example of Austin Warren The Letters of Austin Warren, edited by George Panichas

“We Don’t Do Uplift”: Tony Judt’s Free Intelligence R. J. Stove The Memory Chalet by Tony Judt

101

All’s Well That Ends Well? Race and Liberty in America: The Essential Reader, edited by Jonathan Bean

104

Original Sin and the Christian Response to Communism God-Fearing and Free: A Spiritual History of America’s Cold War by Jason W. Stevens

107

Notes from the American Underground Under the Nihil by Andy Nowicki

Aaron Urbanczyk

Mark G. Malvasi

D. G. Hart

Derek Turner

COMMENTARY 111

Singing the Pieces Back in Place: The Life and Verse of Wilmer Hastings Mills (1969–2011) David Middleton

DOCUMENTATION 121

Babi Yar

Dmitry Shlapentokh

CONSERVATISM AND RELIGION

t a time when faithful believers of various confessions in the Judeo-Christian tradition are experiencing varying degrees of alienation in a society that seems to grow increasingly and more militantly secular with every week that passes, this issue of Modern Age features essays that highlight the relationship between conservatism and religion. In addition, two more essays examine the southern conservative tradition from a literary perspective—another vision very much at odds with the mutable materialistic culture of modernity. Also prominently featured in this issue is an account of one of the momentous events of the earlier twentieth century. In “Two Dialogues of Abraham with God,” Moshe Roshwald provocatively suggests that the first Patriarch of the three great monotheistic faiths engages in exchanges with God that are incompatible in their theological implications, if not diametrically opposed. Professor Roshwald finds in this scriptural discrepancy a contradiction in how Jews—and by implication Christians, their “younger brothers”—perceive both the human condition and the divine nature. Analogously, Daniel and Claire Hammond

recount the unease and eventual failure of the Mont Pelerin Society to accommodate religion in its program of resistance to political and economic collectivism. Nathan Schlueter handles much the same problem in his discussion of Leo Strauss and Pope Benedict XVI on “the Crisis of the West.” At first glance this seems an improbable pairing, but Professor Schlueter, while acknowledging the tension between the views of the two men, finds significant parallels as well. Jack Kerwick, who also adverts to Leo Strauss, is less sanguine about the reconciliation of neoconservatism and the older conservative tradition in his account of “The Neoconservative Conundrum.” In “The Georgic Vision of Andrew Lytle,” Mark Malvasi offers an apologia for the stance of one of the most important—although now lesser-known—figures of the Southern Agrarian movement of the first half of the twentieth century. The “Fugitive” tradition that sought to nurture dignified repose is no more at home in the rather frenetic world of digital sensationalism that dominates the early twenty-first century than are orthodox Christianity and Judaism. Professor Malvasi shows the value of Lytle’s vision and deplores 3

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the way it is misrepresented, when not simply ignored. Jeffrey Folks provides a careful account of the fiction of Robert Drake, who published frequently in Modern Age in previous decades. Professor Folks explains the personal context from which Drake’s stories emerged and calls attention to the differences between Drake and the “Fugitives,” thus demonstrating the variety of the southern literary tradition. In a Commentary piece, David Middleton pays tribute to the late Wilmer Mills, who also published in Modern Age and whose untimely death at the age of forty-one deprived southern letters of a poet of substantial achievement and even greater promise. Dmitry Shlapentokh offers “Documen tation” of his return to Russia and a visit to Babi Yar, the site of one of the many gruesome Nazi atrocities during World War II. He finds a disturbing indifference to the memory of this horrific event, on the part of the current Russian authorities and on the part of many ordinary citizens. It is our hope that pieces such as Professor Shlapentokh’s will remind us that both freedom and fundamental decency are under perpetual threat from forces that have not vanished but only changed their shape in our new century. James Matthew Wilson provides us within an insightful review-essay on two fascinating new volumes of verse by Catherine Savage Brosman (another Modern Age contributor) as well as a thoughtful poetic meditation of

his own. We also welcome two distinguished poets, David Craig and Paul Ruffin, to the pages of Modern Age. Finally, this issue offers reviews of books on a diverse array of political, historical, and literary topics. The sometimes convoluted relationship between politics and religion receives particular notice in Virgil Nemoianu’s review of a new book by the eminent and fascinating French philosopher Chantal Delsol, as well as in D. G. Hart’s account of a new study of the role of religion in the Cold War. I close on two notes, one regrettable, the other cause for satisfaction. In our previous issue quotation marks were omitted from a passage taken from Condorcet on page 24 of Alexander Rosenthal y Pubúl’s essay, “What Went Wrong in Europe”: “. . . the sun will shine only on free men who know no other master. . . .” Two more errata occur in Thomas B. Fowler’s essay, “The Global Warming Conundrum,” on page 45 in the first paragraph of the second column where 2.0 degrees centigrade becomes 20 degrees, and again in the second paragraph of the second column, where 1.0 is incorrectly given as 10 degrees. We regret these oversights but are pleased to observe that with this double issue, Modern Age is back on schedule and will resume its usual quarterly publication, with the summer 2013 issue appearing in July and the fall 2013 issue in October. —RVY

ESSAY

THE NEOCONSERVATIVE CONUNDRUM Jack Kerwick

uch has been written in relatively recent years about the enigmatic phenomenon known as “neoconservatism.” Despite the name, neoconservatism is not properly speaking a form of conservatism at all. Rather, it is an expression of modern rationalism that, as such, differs in kind from classical conservatism. Internal to each tradition of thought, as it has been articulated by its most illustrious representatives, is a cluster of enduring ideas regarding reason, morality, and the character of a modern state that is irreconcilably at odds with that which composes the other. Any study of neoconservatism must begin with Leo Strauss.1 In Natural Right and History, Strauss writes that “the need for natural right” is the same today as it has always been, for “to reject natural right is tantamount to saying that all right is positive right, and this means that what is right is determined exclusively by the legislators and the courts of the various countries.” In order to discriminate between

just and unjust laws, Strauss continues, we are in need of a standard that is more than just an “ideal” that has been “adopted by our society or our ‘civilization’ ” and that is “embodied in its way of life or its institutions,” for “if the principles are sufficiently justified by the fact that they are accepted by a society, the principles of cannibalism are as defensible or sound as those of civilized life.” That is, “if there is no standard” by which to evaluate “positive right” that is “higher than the ideal of our society, we are utterly unable to take a critical distance from that ideal.” The rejection of natural right, therefore, leads to “nihilism.” Actually, “it is identical with nihilism.” For Strauss, either we affirm natural right or “we realize that the principles of our actions have no support [other] than our blind choice.”2 Strauss identifies as the enemies of “natural right” those whom he describes as “historicists.” He also characterizes them as “eminent conservatives” who initially found their distinctive ideological voice while

Jack Kerwick holds his PhD in philosophy and teaches at several universities in the New Jersey and Pennsylvania areas. His work has appeared in such online publications as Townhall, American Thinker, Front Page Magazine, American Daily Herald, World Net Daily, and the New American. 5

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responding to “the natural rights doctrines that had prepared” the “cataclysm” of the French Revolution. Such conservatives or “historicists” appeared “to have realized somehow that the acceptance of any universal or abstract principles has necessarily a revolutionary, disturbing, [and] unsettling effect,” that such “recognition . . . tends to prevent men from wholeheartedly identifying themselves with, or accepting, the social order that fate has allotted them.”3 The most eminent of Strauss’s conservatives is Edmund Burke. Although Strauss offers a charitable, perceptive analysis of Burke’s powerful and sustained fight against the obsession with theory that drove the latter’s adversaries in the eighteenth century, and while to some extent he endorses it, linking Burke with the likes of Aristotle, who more than two millennia earlier cautioned against confusing the theoretical with the practical, he ultimately blames Burke for further facilitating modernity’s self-conceit. By Strauss’s lights, Burke is responsible for “a certain depreciation of reason.”4 The problem, as Strauss understands it, is that “Burke’s opposition to modern ‘rationalism’ shifts almost insensibly into an opposition to ‘rationalism’ as such.” Yet Burke’s critique “reveals itself least ambiguously in its most important practical consequence”: his conception of a constitution. That Burke holds reason itself in low esteem, Strauss contends, is proved by the fact that Burke “rejects the view that constitutions can be ‘made’ in favor of the view that they must ‘grow,’ ” and he rejects “in particular the view that the best social order can be or ought to be the work of an individual, of a wise ‘legislator’ or founder.”5 We will revisit Burke’s thought, and in greater detail, a little later. The point here is to grasp not so much Burke’s positions but rather Strauss’s. And the latter’s critique of 6

conservatism’s “patron saint” is particularly telling in this regard, for not only does it bring into sharp focus the stark contrast in philosophical temperament between these two thinkers; it also illuminates certain themes concerning rationality, ethics, and the character of a modern state that will distinguish the thought of Strauss’s ideological heirs. Among such heirs, no one is more prominent than Allan Bloom.

n his The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom writes of the United States that it “is one of the highest and most extreme achievements of the rational quest for the good life according to nature,” for “its political structure” relies upon “the use of the rational principles of natural right.” That is, the American “regime . . . promised untrammeled freedom to reason.” Bloom notes that “a powerful attachment” to the principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, which had historically been the chief objective of “the education of democratic man,” required a radical departure from “the kinds of attachments” demanded by “traditional communities.” Traditional societies have always relied upon “myth and passion,” “severe discipline and authority,” in order to instill in its members “an instinctive, unqualified, even fanatic patriotism.” In contrast, education in the United States had sought to inspire in its citizens a “reflected, rational, calm, even self-interested loyalty,” not to the country as such, but to its “form of government and its rational principles.” On this understanding of the American identity, “class, race, religion, national origin or culture all disappear or become dim when bathed in the light of natural rights, which give men common interests and make them truly brothers.”6 Bloom is concerned that “the West’s universal or intellectually imperialistic claims”

THE NEOCONSERVATIVE CONUNDRUM

are under attack by, among such other culprits, “historicism” and “cultural relativism.” In treating “the West” as but one more culture among others, “equality in the republic of cultures” may be achieved but only at the unacceptable cost of doing a great injustice to the West’s “cultural imperative,” its unique “needs.”7 Bloom finds all this lamentable, for it accounts not just for “the closing of the American mind” but also for the repeal of the Enlightenment project itself. “There is practically no contemporary regime that is not somehow a result of Enlightenment, and the best of modern regimes—liberal democracy—is entirely its product.” What Bloom—and, with him, most neoconservatives—regards as “liberal democracy” is understood as “the regime of equality and liberty, of the rights of man,” and “the regime of reason.” America, Bloom believes, is “liberal democracy” par excellence, for it is the first country in all of human history to have been founded upon “rational principles.” They knew that since “reciprocal recognition of rights needs little training, no philosophy, and abstracts from all differences of national character,” Americans “could be whatever they wanted to be as long as they recognized that the same applied to all other men and they were willing to support and defend the government that guaranteed that dispensation.”8 This is why, Bloom suggests, the only alternative to “liberal democracy”—“cultural relativism”—is war. He alludes to Nietzsche, a “cultural relativist” who saw that relativism means “war, great cruelty rather than great compassion.” War can achieve peace, but when this is the means by which it is realized, peace is never more than tenuous. “Liberal democracies,” on the other hand, need not resort to violence to coexist peacefully with one another. “Liberal democracies do not fight wars with one another, because they see the

same human nature and the same rights applicable everywhere and to everyone.” However, “cultures fight wars with one another.”9 Strauss and Bloom may have been among the most influential and able exponents of the theoretical vision that has since acquired the name “neoconservatism,” but the theory to which they gave systematic expression has long since passed into the popular domain. Douglas Murray explains how neoconservatism assumed flesh, as it were, in American politics. Murray identifies March 8, 1983, as the decisive moment when neoconservatism launched its way into the popular American imagination. It was on this date that President Ronald Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as “an evil empire.” Neoconservative notables like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, as well as many others, were ecstatic that Reagan unequivocally rejected the “moral relativism” in terms of which the conventional wisdom had insisted on understanding the Cold War for decades. Reagan’s speech was the absolute antithesis of the orthodoxy complained of by Strauss. The speech constituted a stand— a stand that neoconservatives encouraged and wanted repeated: clarification on democratic opposition to tyranny, and support for absolutes, in particular, and, unapologetically, the necessity and incomparability of freedom.

From the standpoint of neoconservatives, then, “democratic opposition to tyranny” is basically tantamount to an affirmation of “absolutes,” including and especially “the absolute value” of freedom. This speech of Reagan’s emboldened neoconservatives to pass “beyond a purely ‘anti-communist’ stand” and argue “for the encouragement and kindling of democracy across the globe.”10 Neoconservatism differs from traditional 7

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conservatism—“socially, economically, and philosophically.” Neoconservatives represent “revolutionary conservatism.” While neoconservatives have their views on domestic affairs, “in an era of global crises, it was on foreign policy that neoconservatives made their most distinctive and impassioned mark.” Murray thus summarizes the founding Statement of Principles of the Project for the New American Century. The signatories [of the statement] declared that the use of American power had been repeatedly shown over the previous century to be a force for good. For the next century America needed, among other things, to: increase its defense spending to enable it to carry out its global responsibilities; strengthen ties with its democratic allies; challenge regimes hostile to American interests and values; and “promote the cause of ‘political and economic freedom abroad.’ ”

Murray mentions that neoconservatives understood well that “corollaries of erasing tyrannies and spreading democracy were interventionism, nation-building, and many of the other difficulties that had long concerned traditional conservatives.”11 By quoting his post-9/11 West Point speech, Murray distinguishes George W. Bush as a neoconservative president. Some worry that it is somehow undiplomatic or impolite to speak the language of right and wrong. I disagree. Different circumstances require different methods, but not different moralities. Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place. . . . We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its name.

Murray approvingly quotes Norman Podhoretz’s description of “the Bush doctrine” as relying “on a repudiation of moral relativism and an entirely unapologetic assertion of the need for and the possibility of moral judgment in the realm of world affairs.”12

urray isn’t the only one who has popularized neoconservatism, which has become virtually synonymous with today’s “conservative movement.” Take, for example, nationally syndicated radio talk show host and CNN contributor William Bennett. Bennett, too, enthusiastically applauds President Bush for having “revive[d] the language of good and evil,” language that the entrenchment of “relativism” has inhibited us from appropriating. The “War on Terror,” not unlike World War II and the Cold War, is “a war about good and evil.”13 In previous times, Bennett asserts, children in this country were educated to appreciate “the superior goodness of the American way of life,”14 and they learned that American patriotism consisted of “our steadfast devotion to the ideals of freedom and equality.” American patriots, beginning with “the patriots of 1776 and 1787,” have always been devoted “to something quite new—a new nation conceived in a new way and dedicated to a self-evident truth that all men are created equal,” “a country tied together in loyalty to a principle” whose “universality . . . caught fire and inspired a diverse group of men, women, Northerners, Southerners,” and “even European nobility to make great sacrifices” for it.15 Neoconservatives, we now realize, tend to share in common the following beliefs. First, morality consists primarily of “self-evident” principles specifying “natural” or “human rights” that belong to all human beings just by virtue of their humanity. Second, because these principles are “self-evident,” they are

THE NEOCONSERVATIVE CONUNDRUM

rationally or intellectually accessible to all people in all places and at all times. Thus, according to the neoconservative, neither reason nor morality is encumbered by the parochial considerations thrown up by tradition, custom, or habit. Reason and morality are unitary phenomena that, as such, ultimately owe nothing to the contingencies of place and time. Third, since “liberal democracy” is the only kind of regime that embodies principles of “natural rights,” and since the United States is the “liberal democracy” extraordinaire, the first society in all of human history erected upon “the proposition that all men are created equal,” “liberal democracies” in general, and the United States in particular, have an obligation to advance “the human rights” of people everywhere. Finally, the only alternative to the “moral realism” of “natural rights” is “historicism” or “relativism.”

he eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish philosopher and parliamentarian Edmund Burke is widely regarded as “the patron saint” of modern conservatism. Burke formulated his conservative vision of society and politics piecemeal, as it were, in reaction to the conflagration of the French Revolution. Still, the circumstances of its emergence aside, there is to be detected in Burke’s writings a coherent political philosophy that many subsequent thinkers adopted as their own. Strauss’s allegations to the contrary aside, Burke never renounced reason; he renounced the dominant Enlightenment conception of Reason—what has since come to be identified with rationalism. Burke had no use for the notion, which figured prominently in the intellectual machinations of the philosophes, of a Reason unencumbered by tradition. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in

each man is small, and that the individuals would be better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages.

What Burke refers to as “the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages,” is tradition, the repository of precisely that “prejudice” that, “with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence.”16 Nor does Burke deny “natural rights.” Natural rights “may and do exist in total independence” of government, and “in much greater clearness, and in a much greater degree of abstract perfection,” he declares. Yet it is their “abstract perfection” that “is their practical defect,” for when “these metaphysic rights” are brought to bear upon the resolution of political disputes, “like rays of light which pierce into a dense medium,” they are “refracted from their straight line.” Given “the gross and complicated mass of human passions and concerns,” as well as the fact that “the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity,” it is “absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction.” Natural rights are “pretended rights.” They are “extremes” that, “in proportion as they are metaphysically true,” are “morally and politically false.” The problem with “the Rights of Man” is that “against these there can be no prescription.” Furthermore, they “admit no temperament, and no compromise.”17 For Burke, the only rights worth talking about are the product of “prescription,” the cultural “inheritance” of those to whom they belong. This more or less parochial construal of rights in terms of the imagery of an “inheritance,” Burke maintains, has at least two crucial advantages over its transhistorical competitor. The first is that “the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of 9

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conservation, and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement.” Also, this “image of a relation of blood” bolsters “the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason” by consolidating “the Constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties.” Burke says that by “adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections,” by “keeping inseparable, and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchers, and our altars,” we cultivate within ourselves “a sense of habitual native dignity,” and “our liberty becomes a noble freedom.”18 Burke’s rejection of both the unencumbered Intellect and the abstract morality of rights with which it is conjoined inform his rejection of the ideal constitution as Strauss and “the classics” conceived it. Recall, Strauss chastises Burke for maintaining that “the best constitution” is not “a contrivance of reason” but, rather, one that “has come into being without guiding reflection, continuously, slowly, not to say imperceptibly,” and over “a great length of time, and by a great variety of accidents.” It is not “ ‘formed upon a regular plan or with any unity of design’ but toward ‘the greatest variety of ends.’ ”19

ichael Oakeshott was a twentiethcentury successor to Burke, a conservative in the classical sense of this term. In his famous essay “Rationalism in Politics,” he writes that faith in “the superiority of the unencumbered intellect” rests upon an erroneous notion of knowledge.20 Oakeshott distinguishes two ideal types of knowledge: “technical” knowledge and “practical” or “traditional” knowledge. All knowledge involves both components, and each is inseparable from the other. The rationalist who believes in “the unencumbered intellect” wrongly assumes that all knowledge is “technical.” 10

The fundamental difference between these two sorts of knowledge is that technical knowledge consists of “rules which are, or may be, deliberately learned, remembered, and, as we say, put into practice.” The “chief characteristic” of technical knowledge is that it is susceptible to “precise formulation.” The logic of the syllogism, a cookbook, and the rules of scientific research are illustrations of technical knowledge. Technical knowledge is express excogitation. In contrast, however, practical knowledge defies explicit articulation. It “exists only in use, is not reflective and (unlike technique) cannot be formulated in rules.” This does not mean that practical knowledge is “esoteric”; quite the contrary, it can indeed be imparted, but “the method” by which it is disseminated “is not the method of formulated doctrine.”21 The technical knowledge of the rationalist conveys the impression of “certainty.” This is its appeal. It “seems to be a self-complete sort of knowledge because it seems to range between an identifiable initial point (where it breaks in upon sheer ignorance) and an identifiable terminal point, where it is complete, as in learning the rules of a game.” Moreover, “the application” of technical knowledge appears, “as nearly as possible, purely mechanical,” and its proponents suppose that it relies on nothing “not itself provided in the technique.”22 This, of course, is a fiction, for technical knowledge is never anything more than the abridgement of a practice, a tradition, and, as such, is dependent upon a prereflective, customary, or habitual manner of life. For instance, a cookbook (an instance of technical knowledge) can come about only at the hand of one who already knows how to cook. Activity always precedes the rules, principles, and ideals that are distilled from it; and these rules, principles, and ideals inescapably omit a substantial part of our knowledge, nuances that can only be imparted, not memorized.

THE NEOCONSERVATIVE CONUNDRUM

The rationalist’s conception of reason and knowledge informs his conception of morality. “The morality of the Rationalist is the morality of the self-conscious pursuit of moral ideals.” This being so, moral education consists in “the presentation and explanation of moral principles.”23 Oakeshott alludes to the Declaration of Independence as the quintessential expression of the political-moral vision of rationalism. Because American independence originates in an “express rejection of a tradition,” its architects had to “appeal to something which is itself thought not to depend upon tradition.” The tradition-transcendent standard to which they appealed was constituted by “principles” that “were not the product of civilization” but, rather, “natural, ‘written in the whole of the volume of human nature.’ ” These abstract principles of natural right, the Founders affirmed, “were to be discovered in nature by human reason, by a technique of inquiry available alike to all men and requiring no extraordinary intelligence in its use.” However, as Oakeshott is quick to point out, this was an illusion, “for the inspiration of Jefferson and the other founders of American independence was the ideology which Locke had distilled from the English political tradition.” It is of no surprise, Oakeshott adds, that the Declaration “should have become one of the sacred documents of the politics of Rationalism,” as well as “the inspiration and pattern of many later adventures in the rationalist reconstruction of society.”24 The neoconservative’s endorsement of rationalist models of reason and morality inform his commitment to a peculiar conception of the state. In Oakeshott’s terms, neoconservatives share with other rationalists a propensity to conceive the State as an “enterprise association.” On this model, citizens are partners or comrades joined together in collective pursuit of a common end.

In his essay “Talking Politics,” Oakeshott writes that from this perspective, a state is “an association of human beings related to one another in terms of their joint pursuit of some recognized substantive purpose.” The purpose is taken to be a premeditated ideal— like, say, Equality or Virtue—toward the realization of which all citizens must devote (at least) some of their resources. “What is here attributed to a state, or is said to be what a state may or should be made to become, is a well-known mode of association: that in which a Many becomes One in virtue of a common substantive engagement.”25 In an enterprise association, “the central feature is the uniting purpose” that relates citizens to each other, a purpose that “must be a substantive condition of things to be procured or an interest in such a condition of things to be promoted.” The rules that characterize a state conceived as an enterprise association lack any intrinsic value, for their “desirability lies in their propensity to promote, or at least not to hinder, the pursuit of the purpose.” Its government “is a managerial engagement.” The idea of the state as an enterprise association reveals itself not just in “grandiose constructions” of the kind associated with communism, say, but also “in temporary expedients to promote affluence or diminish poverty and in bursts of missionary zeal toward the world at large.”26

nlike neoconservatives, classical conservatives conceive of the state, not as an “enterprise association,” but, rather, as a “civil association.” The state has no supreme purpose or common good in the service of which citizens must be enlisted. The citizens of a civil association are united not in terms of a common substantive purpose that demands their devotion but in terms of law. The law is composed of “non-instrumental rules of conduct,” as Oakeshott writes, rules 11

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that do not “specify a practice or routine purporting to promote the achievement of a substantive purpose,” but “conditions to be subscribed to in choosing and acting,” formal conditions, not substantive actions. While the associates of a civil association “have a common concern,” they lack a “common substantive purpose.” Their common concern is that all members of the association will faithfully discharge “their obligations to observe the conditions prescribed in these non-instrumental rules of conduct.”27 For classical conservatives, civil association has no ends. The only ends that exist are those that each associate, each citizen, chooses to pursue. The laws that citizens are bound to observe do not tell them what to do; they tell them how they must do whatever it is they choose to do. It was my intention to show here that neoconservatism and classical conservatism differ from one another not just in degree but in kind. They are fundamentally incompatible

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

traditions of thought, for each affirms conceptions of reason, morality, and the state that the other denies. More specifically, neoconservatism, I have argued, is a form of rationalism, the intellectual tradition in response to which conservatism originally emerged. It is worth noting that as far as contemporary American politics are concerned, classical conservatism must be judged as having fallen upon particularly hard times. With the notable exception of Patrick J. Buchanan, it has been quite some time since it has had a popular voice. This isn’t to say that it is dead, but, for the most part, the conservative movement today is a neoconservative movement: the epistemological, ethical, and political philosophical suppositions constitutive of neoconservatism figure centrally, even if largely unconsciously, within the thought of the majority of self-declared “conservatives.” Whether this condition will last, whether classical conservatism will succeed in reversing its misfortunes, is left to be seen.

While there has always been some dispute over Strauss’s relationship with neoconservatism, even such stalwart neoconservatives as Douglas Murray readily concede that “Strauss is a useful and necessary point of entry for any investigation of neoconservatism.” See Murray’s Neoconservatism: Why We Need It (New York: Encounter Books, 2006), 2. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, 7th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 2, 3, 5, 6. Ibid., 13, 14. Ibid., 312. Ibid., 313. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 39, 27. Ibid., 39, 38, 193. Ibid., 259, 53. Ibid., 202. Murray, Neoconservatism, 59. Ibid., 38, 82, 82–82, 73. Ibid., 95. William J. Bennett, Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 45. Ibid., 47. Bennett, William J., ed. The Spirit of America (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 26. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in The Portable Edmund Burke, ed. Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 451–52. Not only did Burke not deny natural rights; he affirmed the existence of natural law. For Burke, natural rights are inseparable from and contingent upon a system of obligations that is the natural law. See Peter J. Stanlis’s groundbreaking Edmund Burke and the Natural Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958), 441–42, 443, 440. Ibid., 206, 207. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, 314. Michael Oakeshott, “Rationalism in Politics,” in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1962), 11. Ibid., 12, 14, emphases mine. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 31–33. Michael Oakeshott, “Talking Politics,” in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1962), 450–51. Ibid., 451, 452. Ibid., 454.

ESSAY

TWO DIALOGUES OF ABR AHAM WITH GOD Mordecai Roshwald

here are many tales about Abraham that include dialogues between him and an interlocutor. Such dialogues are often a fragment of a larger story, a depiction of an event. These dialogues may be between Abraham and another human being or an exchange between Abraham and God. Yet there are two dialogues in the latter category that stand out in their theological or philosophical significance, for they contradict each other and thus are incompatible. They cry out for comment and interpretation. Each of them expresses a different concept of the nature of the God-man relationship. Indeed, one of them, on the intended sacrifice of Isaac, or the aqeda (the Hebrew word for “binding”) of Isaac,1 assumes that man must obey divine demands blindly, even to the point of committing an atrocious crime. Another conveys the idea that man’s moral judgment can be formed and asserted in a free way and that God may be challenged by man, if the latter has reason to doubt the intrinsic value of the divine decision or deed. Thus, the two dialogues can be said to

conduct a hidden dialogue between two theological-philosophical approaches that seem irreconcilable. This tacit dialogue, in the last resort, amounts to the fundamental question, Is it absolute obedience to divine commandment or moral judgment that ought to guide human conduct? To put it bluntly: Does morality precede religion, or does religion precede morality? The ideal answer would be that the two questions are not in conflict with one another. Yet, at this juncture, one is reminded of the question of Socrates in Plato’s Euthyphro: “The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved by the gods?” Transposed to our problem, it amounts to asking, Does God follow what is right because it is right, or is it right because of God’s arbitrary choice? Morality and religion confront each: which of the two has precedence? As is well known, Platonic dialogues conclude either with a query, because the Socratic insistence on logical consistency cannot be

Mordecai Roshwald is professor emeritus of social science and humanities at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and the author of several books, including Modern Technology: The Promise and the Menace. 13

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satisfied by the interlocutor, or with a positive philosophical presentation of a major issue that forms a substantial component of Plato’s philosophy. Thus, apparently, the critical Socratic-Platonic approach and the constructive work of Plato produce a philosophical system and a distinctive picture of cohesive reality. In the case of the two tales of Abraham, the hidden arguments of the two dialogues are not explicitly stated. Yet they remain and are present in the mind of the devout reader. Indeed, they may become a provocative issue that turns into an incessant question mark, upsetting and even disturbing the reader. The two profoundly different dialogues may easily bring to mind dichotomous characterizations of Western civilization through the ages. It may have started with Philo Judaeus (20 BC–AD 50), who sought to link Judaic beliefs with Greek philosophy and had a great influence on Christianity. Some kind of synthesis of Judaism and Aristotelian philosophy was initiated by Maimonides (1135–1204) and discussed by other medieval thinkers and had its counterpart in Christianity. Shemuel David Luzzatto (1800–1865), an Italian rabbi and scholar, spoke of Atticismus and Abramismus, the first representing philosophy, arts, and science, the latter standing for religion and ethics. Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) spoke of Hebraism and Hellenism. Interestingly, Leo Strauss, professor of political philosophy at the University of Chicago, commented on Jerusalem and Athens as representatives of two different cultural orientations, and apparently some of his students saw it as a philosophical foundation for neoconservatism—which proved to be a mistake.

he two dialogues differ from each other, and not only in the theology or philosophy they represent, as the difference in the message affects the posture and the 14

conduct of each of the interlocutors. In the Sodom and Gomorrah dialogue, the main figure is Abraham, who responds to the divine decision to annihilate the sinful cities by challenging the divine decision on moral grounds, namely that some righteous people may perish there. God is almost passive and merely responds positively to Abraham’s concerns. In the binding of Isaac case, it is God who asks Abraham to sacrifice his son, and this time Abraham, far from questioning the divine decision, meekly proceeds to execute the command. The sequence of events leads to a happy ending of sorts, with God retaining the absolute power and judgment and Abraham reduced to a mere pawn in the hands of the Almighty. There is no Socratic consistency in the two dialogues. Abraham exhibits Socratic qualities in the case of Sodom, but they disappear in the case of the demanded sacrifice of Isaac, where God is not Socrates in search of truth, but an absolute ruler testing the obedience of his subject in a ruthless way. It is noteworthy that the dialogues, while dealing each with a monumental issue, confine their respective theologies or philosophies within the space of very short stories— a masterpiece of saying much in a clear and succinct manner, for which biblical Hebrew is noted. There is more to the two tales of Abraham that deserves attention, which justifies the following more detailed analysis of each.

hese two Abrahamic stories present two different—indeed contradictory— attitudes of the Patriarch to God’s intended actions or demands. It is this contradiction that has puzzled me and that, in my opinion, has never been satisfactorily resolved, impelling me to expand on each of the tales and the possible, or rather impossible, affinity of the two narratives.

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One of the stories encapsulates the element of belief in Judaism; the other, the element of morality. Belief and morality may be compatible but are not necessarily so, as a philosopher of religion will have to conclude, whatever his confession, if any. Thus, the problem reaches beyond the pages of the Hebrew Bible and becomes universal. Our first tale appears in Genesis 18:17–33. The half chapter contains a remarkable story. It is set in the context of a wider tale dealing with the morally corrupt cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Because of the sins of the inhabitants of these cities, God—who is a God of justice and righteousness—decides to destroy the sinful cities, including their inhabitants. Prior to taking the action, however, He wishes to inform Abraham of the design. Abraham’s privileged standing is linked to the special role that his progeny will play in future history: “they shall keep the way of the Lord, to do justice and (right) judgment” (v. 19), which will set an example for all the nations of the earth. In other words, Abraham’s heirs will be selected as the model of a just and moral community. It is this relationship with Abraham and the historical destiny and duty of his descendants that impels God to share His designs with him. The divine resolve is clear and simple and transpires from the context, even if not explicitly stated. It is totally to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah with their inhabitants. The logic of the story is straightforward and overwhelming in its simplicity: the cities have grievously sinned, their citizens are evil people, and they deserve the ultimate punishment, which God is ready to mete out. If this argument seems irrefutable, Abraham’s reaction comes as a surprise. Instead of accepting God’s just decision, he raises a question: “Wilt thou annihilate the righteous with the wicked? Perhaps there are fifty righteous in the city; wilt thou destroy

(all) and not lift (the punishment) to the city for the sake of fifty righteous that are in its midst?” (18:23–24). And to make sure that God (and the reader) clearly understands his reasoning, Abraham amplifies the argument with an explicit moral exhortation: “Be it far from thee to do a thing like this, to kill the righteous with the wicked; that the righteous would be like the wicked, that be far from thee: Shall not the judge of the whole earth do (right) judgment?” (18:25). Clearly, the indignation of Abraham at such a possibility cannot be contained. Significantly, God does not rebuke Abra ham, as an earthly judge probably would, but agrees to refrain from destroying Sodom if fifty righteous are found in the city. (Apparently, the separation of the righteous from the wicked is not considered as a possibility.) As the dialogue proceeds, Abraham brings down the number of righteous for whose sake the city would be spared to ten. Interestingly, he does not try to bring the number down to one and prove himself to be the absolute winner in the debate; for his concern is saving the lives of concrete individuals. Nor is the dialogue intended to show Abraham’s bravado, for Abraham, while exhibiting what might be called chutzpah, actually is afraid of awaking God’s anger. Not only does he limit his haggling to ten individuals, but during the argument he also takes a self-effacing posture vis-à-vis the Almighty: “Oh let not the Lord be angry and I will speak” (v. 30), for “I am but dust and ashes” (v. 27). Abraham trembles with fear, yet courageously insists on his point of view and persists in his quest to save the lives of the innocent. Thus man is presented here not as a humble petitioner for God’s mercy but as a bold defender of the principle of justice. Abraham 15

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does not ask for God’s pity but for man’s right. The dialogue is between two beings, one almighty and the other “but dust and ashes”; both are moral judges, equals who speak the same language and implicitly are subject to the principles of ethics. This means that the moral imperatives are the ultimate authority over conduct— human or divine. Before such authority, both man and God have to bend their wills, and by such authority both have to abide. Abraham embraces such a position with his whole being. God confirms it by complying with Abraham’s demands, and finally by action, when he takes Lot and his family, the only righteous people, out of the city before destroying it. God the Almighty is unequivocally committed to justice and righteousness, and the doubts of Abraham about such unity of Might and Right are dispelled.

he second tale, as already mentioned, is found in Genesis 22:1–18. It opens with an explanatory statement of the narrator that “God tested Abraham” or “put Abraham to test,” a more precise translation of the Hebrew text than that offered by the King James version. As the following story evolves, the reader encounters an ingenious but ruthless and cruel trial, a veritable experimentum crucis, to which Abraham is subjected. For God addresses Abraham in these words: “Take thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest, Isaac, and go to the land of Moriah; and offer him there for holocaust on one of the mountains which I will indicate to thee” (v. 2). What is Abraham’s response to this demand to sacrifice his only beloved son on the altar of belief? Is it an outcry of disbelief and outrage? Does he revolt or express shock at the divine demand that he commit a murder, a murder of his son—clearly an innocent boy? Nothing of the sort! Abraham, who 16

argued passionately for the lives of possibly innocent people who were strangers to him, does not utter a word of protest, of doubt, let alone of indignation, at God’s demand of the life of a blameless child. Abraham says nothing. He rises early next morning, saddles his ass, and makes other preparations, including cleaving the wood for burning the offering, and sets off on the journey with Isaac and two helpers. On the third day, on spotting the place, Abraham leaves the helpers and the ass, loads the wood for the offering up of Isaac, takes the fire and the knife, and proceeds to the designated location. When Isaac asks where the sacrificial lamb is, Abraham responds with an evasive answer: “God will choose him the lamb for the holocaust, my son” (v. 8). Although the narrator does not explore Abraham’s state of mind, the crucible through which he passes, the reader cannot fail to realize it by following the details that the narrator presents. Each step in Abraham’s activity—preparing for the trip, taking the implements of slaughter and burning, responding to the innocent question of Isaac with an evasive answer, loading the wood on him—cries out to heaven with anguish. With anguish but not in protest! And perhaps not to heaven but merely to the reader. For the order came from heaven, and the obedient Abraham is left alone with his belief and his devotion to God, from whom he does not expect mercy. He blindly does His bidding. The belief and the obedience are absolute and supreme. In the name of belief, he is ready to do anything, a horrific crime in the eyes of others and the sacrifice of his very son. It is not the moral imperative that reigns supreme over man and God. It is man’s trust and belief in God that are the ultimate authority of human conduct. The conclusion of the story offers an unexpected relief. As Abraham is on the point of

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slaughtering his bound son, an angel of God stops him, saying, “Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou hast not spared thy son, thine only son from me” (18:12). A ram, incidentally caught in the thicket by his horns—a veritable aries ex machina—is substituted for Isaac and duly sacrificed, an apparent tribute to conventional ritual and worship. Yet the story is not satisfied with the conventional conclusion. It is followed up by what is intended to be a monumental moral, as the Lord swears to Abraham: “Because thou hast not spared thy son, thy only son, I will bless thee and multiply thy seed as the stars of heaven and as the sand on sea shore and thy seed shall take possession of the gate of his foes” (vv. 16–17). The reward for total, blind faith in God and unhesitating obedience to Him is, if one can put it that way, the sharing of power. Obey the Almighty and His might will rub off on you! Whereas, in the dialogue with God about Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham shares with God the sovereignty of Right; in the tale of the binding of Isaac, he gets a chunk of divine Might. Indeed, one could go a step further, although it would be a step beyond the tale itself, and suggest that by being ready to commit a moral outrage, Abraham was allowed to enter the realm of Power or Might, where morality is thrown to the wind.

he story of the binding of Isaac, Aqedat Yitzhaq as it is usually referred to in Hebrew, if taken as an independent religious message and judged in its own terms, raises questions as to why the ram was introduced into the tale and why it had to be slaughtered? If God’s intent was to test Abraham’s unconditional belief, as the story proclaims, the goal was achieved the moment Abraham raised his knife-wielding hand to slaughter his son. Why add the essentially irrelevant,

and even confusing element, of providing a meal for the deity—apparently not as tasty as human flesh but satisfactory! Was this a tribute to the prevalent belief—clearly preIsraelite—that gods had to be fed because of their enormous appetite, which preferred human children as pièce de résistance? Whatever the explanation may be, and it cannot be satisfactory to a religious person of our times, the inconsistency has largely passed unnoticed or has been conveniently ignored. Moreover—and this is even more surprising—the contradiction between the two tales of Abraham has not aroused a profound soul searching among Jews and Christians, as one might expect. The issue is avoided rather than forced. Abraham and his alter ego do not seem to be aware that they confront a crisis of identity. To add yet another curiosity, it is noteworthy that, of the two tales, it is the story of the binding of Isaac that seems to be preferred in the Jewish postbiblical rabbinic tradition. This is not explicitly declared, but one cannot ignore the fact that Abraham’s blind devotion is extolled in prayer, notably on Yom Kippur, when his readiness to commit the ultimate sacrifice is used for a claim of divine compassion for the contrite sinners addressing God on this holy day. As a matter of fact, the relevant passage from Genesis is read every day as part of the morning prayer. One need hardly be reminded that for Christians the story of Abraham’s near sacrifice is much more important than for Jews, for it is viewed as a prefiguration of the sacrifice of Jesus for the sake of the salvation of believers through future ages. This is not merely a biblical tale—important as such may be; it is a central dogma of the Christian creed. Alas, the treatment of Abraham’s absolute and total obedience to the divine demand can be seen by Kierkegaard as a primary and total impulse that overrides 17

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all rational and emotional considerations. When Kierkegaard asserts Credo, quia absurdum est, he points out that only absurd action can prove belief, for if there is a rational explanation and justification of action, belief is not necessary. This, to be sure, is a mystical response. One might as well argue that a flying camel exists because such a phenomenon is absurd. Mystical experience remains a mystery, which cannot be comprehended or argued rationally. Returning to Judaism, does it regard the story of the binding of Isaac as dominant? Has the blind belief in the commandment of God been endorsed vis-à-vis the injunctions of righteousness and compassion of the Torah itself? Has Judaism discarded the rigorous prohibition of child sacrifices and the death penalty for offenders, as well as the passionate outcries of the prophets against the horrific practice even during the reign of some kings of Judah? The answer is no, an unequivocal no. The prohibition of and the outrage at human sacrifices remain firm and uncompromising. “Thou shalt not kill” is not subject to compromise. The sacrifice of children, as practiced by other peoples in the region, is specifically singled out: “Whoever it be of the sons of Israel or of the stranger who liveth in Israel, that giveth his descendant unto Moloch, he shall be put to death.” Still, despite the vigorous condemnation of the worship and cult of the Canaanites, the horrid practices apparently spread and even were followed by some people in Jerusalem during the reign of some kings of Judah. In the words of Jeremiah, which sum up the situation in plain but vigorous words: “They built the sanctuaries of Baal in the valley of Ben-Hinnom, to transfer their sons and their daughters (by fire) to Moloch, which I commanded them not and which occurred 18

not to me.” Indeed, when one reads the historic references to the worship of Moloch in Jerusalem, the Aqeda may suddenly appear in gory colors. To be sure, Isaac was not sacrificed, and it has even been argued that the story conveys and symbolizes the historic transition from child sacrifice to its abolition. Thus, the tale of the binding of Isaac remains a testimony to total religious devotion—apparently ignoring the potential horror to which it might have led had not God dispatched His angel in time to prevent it. Abraham’s faith and trust in God remains worthy of admiration. God’s interference in time to prevent the consummation of faith in sacrifice proved the righteousness and compassion of God.

he two tales of Abraham are of great interest not only to the readers and admirers of the Bible. They are of importance for the understanding of Judaism and, perhaps to a lesser degree, Christianity, and even monotheistic religions as such. Indeed, they may also be relevant to situations in which religious belief is substituted for by an ardent ideology, a secular religion, one kind of ism or another—a matter that can be pursued by selecting certain trends in history in the past two or three centuries. It can be suggested, and I assume, that monotheistic beliefs perceive God as almighty as well as just and compassionate. But what if He were one or the other—either almighty or just and compassionate? Whom would we address? The question would be rejected by a theologian as silly and irrelevant. The fact is, he would argue, that He is both, and the suggestion that He might be either the one or the other is itself a heresy. And so the average believer stops raising the question—at least when he or she addresses a rabbi or a priest. Yet individuals, or the community, when

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addressing a prayer to God, especially when under the stress of an impending calamity, turn almost instinctively to the powerful and almighty, and their belief becomes more ardent as the danger increases. They are not inclined to turn to God the righteous, either because such a God knows what He has to do (pace the doubts of Abraham in the first tale), or because the petitioners feel that they deserve the punishment, or for some psychological reason. The problem persists and is not theoretically or theologically resolved. Although it does not dominate the prayer, which, in Judaism, foremost praises the Lord for His wise and righteous management of the universe and for His kind and compassionate concern for His people, there are widespread manifestations of behavior that reveal an attempt to secure God’s help by resorting to means that border on superstition and magic. There is the symbolic sacrifice of a chicken, sent to the slaughterer on the eve of Yom Kippur, after a ritual that makes it the redeeming offering for the family. This seems an attempt to influence the Almighty the way it was done in antiquity, by making the animal pay for human sins, and which contains a magical element. Yet, should the question be asked as to which of the two is more important, or even decisive, in the internal conflict between Right and Might, Judaism’s reply, inferred from two millennia of reflection and declared opinions, seems to be decisively in favor of the God of righteousness and mercy, namely Right. And so the two Gods in one, God and His alter ego, exist in the mind of the believer, despite the inner contradiction of the theological positions. One sees the dichotomy but ignores it. One adjusts one’s inarticulate perception of God to the needs of the day or the hour and leaves the concern about the

true nature of God to those few who have the penchant and the time to reflect on the big issues that confront humanity. The ethical commitment of Judaism—in its religion and even in its quasi-religious and often non-religious positions and manifestations—remains the main characteristic of the Israelite-Judaean culture. And if other religions act similarly, they may well be following Judaism’s example. Such contribution to Western civilization may be the true meaning of the divine prediction that because of the pursuit of righteousness and justice by Abraham’s descendants, “all the peoples of the earth shall be blessed through him.”

he history of the coexistence of ethics and power, of might and righteousness, or at least of the expectation of such coexistence, has not been confined to the IsraeliteJewish belief. It has been an ageless situation preoccupying the best religious minds in Europe throughout centuries. As late as the mid-nineteenth century, the Danish theologian-philosopher Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) spoke of the “leap of faith,” that is, blind commitment to religious belief. It is such irrational trust that is the ultimate proof of genuine piety. Of course, once the belief is blind, any demand God allegedly has on man may be justified, and a Pandora’s Box of abuse of power, human power, is opened. Thus, if the early Christians were ready to sacrifice their lives for their belief, as soon as Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the church did not hesitate to use its might to persecute the followers of other religions and to exterminate heretics. Power, as the saying goes, corrupts. The rulers of the church, living in spiritual proximity to the Almighty, started to feel mighty themselves and acted accordingly. The excesses of the believers during the Crusades are well 19

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known. Some of the popes of the Renaissance did not hide their militant disposition and their political skills. When the struggle between the Catholic Church and the Protestant believers started, at one point the principalities in Germany agreed on a new clearly formulated religious policy: Cuius regio, eius religio. It was the ruling monarch of each state who could decide which variety of Christianity to accept for his principality. The distinction between the might of religion and the secular might of princes was wiped out. It was Might, in whichever garb, that ruled. Was this unholy alliance of religion and state, were these growing manifestations of the unrestrained rule of Might originating in blind belief, the consequences of religious belief? Was religion the root of this evil, as it manifested itself again in another creed at the beginning of the twenty-first century? The answer to this question-assertion is no. A leap of faith may occur in other domains of human ideas and institutions. Thus the leaders of the French Revolution, which proclaimed the ethical slogans Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, did not hesitate to kill innocent people in the Reign of Terror for the sake of political power. Robespierre, who enjoyed the reputation of being incorruptible, excelled in this performance. Indeed, he was not a thief; he was merely a killer. This manifestation of republicanism was not the only case of blind religiosity outside the sphere of religion. Other cases followed. Nationalism often assumed religious fervor, with masses ready to sacrifice their lives—originally for political freedom. This was often followed by suppression of other nationalities and occasionally developed into imperialistic schemes. Nationalism may have been an old sentiment, but it reappeared with great vigor in the nineteenth century and greatly affected its fortunes and misfortunes. 20

Need one be reminded of other isms: fascism, communism etc.? Each of these proclaimed new beliefs, new ideals, new eternal values. But each relied on blind faith as well, and the latter tended to be increasingly dominant.

hy do ideas, ideals, even genuine ethical demands, often degenerate into terrible perversions of their own selves? Why is a cogent ethical quest so often followed by a blind belief? Why is the latter allowed to ride roughshod over the former? One possible reason for the readiness, or even eagerness, to make the leap of faith (religious or ideological) is frustration with the efforts to comprehend the human condition and man’s relationship with reality or destiny through rational exploration. For whatever the results of such exploration, it leaves problems and situations that resist a systematic inquiry. The notion of a righteous and compassionate deity leaves the visible iniquities and the suffering of the innocent inexplicable. They must be due to some other forces than those of the good God, or perhaps to reasons that man is incapable of understanding. To overcome such destructive doubts, people may choose to trust God blindly—that is to say, without asking questions. But then some believers may feel that certain small acts they do on their own initiative, such as when Orthodox Jews kiss the Mezuzah, may secure their contact with the incomprehensible and thus prove helpful in the restricted territory of extradoctrinal belief. Or perhaps people resort to nonreligious and irrational ways to affect God or Destiny by a magical or quasi-magical rite in order to calm their own doubts, to allay the creeping sense of disbelief. Such a threat, to which many a believer may be occasionally exposed, is countered with an act of superstition (a

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small leap of faith) that, though addressed to God, is meant for the sneaking forces of evil. Then one can think of the hypnotic and gratifying emotion of behaving like the others, like everybody else. The sense of peace of mind and satisfaction one feels in joining a crowd, literally and metaphorically, in being able to substitute the personal pronoun I with the collective We is not an extraordinary situation. It may hide even in the hearts of ardent individualists who find relief from the never-ending quest to resolve intricate moral questions as they surface in personal

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and public life, by embracing religion, or another pseudo-religion such as nationalism or other ism, and declare in word and action, “We believe!” People want answers, full and unshakable answers. Total belief can offer such answers better than an ethically controlled religion. So can various ideologies—mostly of more recent vintage. Where there is a demand, the supply of commodities follows. And so the business of life goes on. But so does the search for the true and the right.

Genesis 30:17–33. Plato, Euthyphro 9–10 (Benjamin Jowett translation). Leviticus 20:2. Jeremiah 32:35. Genesis 18:18–19.

ESSAY

LEO STR AUSS AND BENEDICT XVI ON THE CRISIS OF THE WEST Nathan Schlueter

hen time has stretched far enough away from the present to put the influence of historical events in their right perspective, Benedict XVI’s Regensburg lecture may turn out to be one of the most important events of the twenty-first century. The lecture gained international attention for its candid but controversial treatment of Islam. But the core of the speech consists of a warning to the West against internal threats, in particular the danger of the West abandoning reason as a guide to moral and political life. That warning involves an argument about the nature of reason, especially as it relates to modern science on the one hand, and revelation on the other. Benedict concludes the lecture not with a directly evangelical exhortation, as one might expect from a pope—as one almost certainly would have expected from his immediate predecessor— but with a philosophical and political one. And for its support he quotes not Scripture but a Platonic dialogue. The object of his

exhortation can be put into one phrase: “The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur” (62).1 In all these respects, the Regensburg lecture has similarities to the twentieth-century political philosopher Leo Strauss. And those similarities may not be fortuitous. Benedict has long been interested in moral and political philosophy and has been a member of the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences since 1993. Moreover, as Fr. James Schall points out in his superb study of the lecture, Benedict seems to know Strauss’s work. If in fact the influence is real, we have good reason to ask where, how, and especially why Benedict XVI departs from Strauss.

he first and most obvious parallel between Strauss and Benedict is their history: both are native Germans who experienced firsthand the evils of twentieth-century totalitarianism, especially Nazism. Both bring to that experience a religious tradition

Nathan Schlueter is associate professor of philosophy at Hillsdale College. 22

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grounded in a transpolitical authority, which therefore is always in some tension with political power. The “Jewish Question,” in some sense, is also the “Catholic Question.”2 This experience profoundly shapes their mutual interest in and care for politics as a necessary and good activity, though one that is limited and ordered by transpolitical realities. Second, both Strauss and Benedict maintain that the West is in crisis, and they generally agree on the nature of that crisis. For Strauss, “the crisis of the West” is the result of a “rationalistic culture” (by which Strauss means “modern culture”) that has lost “its faith in reason’s ability to validate its highest aims.” This loss is exemplified in the two most influential modern intellectual movements of our time, positivism and historicism. Positivism (sometimes called “scientism”) is characterized by “the belief that scientific knowledge, that is, the kind of knowledge possessed or aspired to by modern science, is the highest form of human knowledge.” To positivism we owe the “fact-value distinction,” the contention that only empirical facts established by a rigorous scientific method constitute valid knowledge. Therefore, “scientific knowledge cannot validate value judgments.”3 Historicism is characterized by the belief that “principles of evaluation together with the categories of understanding are historically variable; they change from epoch to epoch; hence it is impossible to answer the question of right or wrong or of the best social order in a universally valid manner, in a manner valid for all historical epochs.”4 Both nihilism and existentialism are manifestations of radical historicism. Like Strauss, Benedict writes of the crisis of the West in both philosophical and political terms. Consistent with Strauss, and with liberalism more generally, he holds that reason is the ground of political life: “Politics is

the realm of reason—not of a merely technological, calculating reason, but of moral reason, since the goal of the state, and hence the ultimate goal of all politics, has a moral nature, namely, peace and justice.”5 A crisis of reason will also therefore be a political crisis. In fact, Benedict identifies a “crisis of political reason, which is a crisis of politics as such.” Again, like Strauss, he attributes this crisis to “the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically falsifiable” (56), which therefore relegates moral and political knowledge to the realm of radical subjectivity. The result of this tendency in the Western world to believe that “only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid” is that politics, “which is the realm of reason,” now cut adrift from reason, becomes subject to totalitarian myths like progressivism or scientism.6 Third, both Strauss and Benedict give an account of the modern crisis in terms of a historical narrative of modernity. Both trace the crisis of the West to a predictable, if unnecessary, degeneration from an original philosophical break with the premodern tradition, and both generally associate that break with the aspirations of the Enlightenment. In other words, both Strauss and Benedict argue that the fathers of the Enlightenment, wittingly or not, sowed the seeds of their own destruction. For Strauss, the radical break with premodern thought begins with Machiavelli and then proceeds through three stages, or “waves,” corresponding to early liberalism (Hobbes and Locke), progressivism / socialism / communism (Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx), and fascism / Nazism (Nietzsche, Heidegger).7 Without contradicting Strauss’s schema, Benedict instead emphasizes three stages in a “program of dehellenization” of Christianity (31), beginning with the Reformation, continuing into the liberal theology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and finding 23

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its culmination in the complete capitulation of Christianity to cultural relativism. This different perspective, this alternate schema, points to one of the critical differences between Strauss and Benedict, which I shall treat presently. Fourth, it does not follow from their critique of the Enlightenment that Strauss and Benedict reject the Enlightenment and its politics tout court. Indeed both seem partial to that distinctively modern regime, liberal democracy. “Wisdom requires unhesitating loyalty to a decent constitution and even to the cause of constitutionalism,” Strauss declares, and this evidently means liberal democracy. Indeed, he provocatively suggests at the conclusion of his essay on the three waves of modernity, and somewhat in tension with his previous argument in that essay, that “liberal democracy, in contradistinction to communism and fascism, derives powerful support from a way of thinking which cannot be called modern at all: the premodern thought of our western tradition.” And he seems to have had in mind here American liberalism in particular. He forthrightly declares in the introduction to his later work Thoughts on Machiavelli that the “United States may be said to be the only country in the world which was founded in explicit opposition to Machiavellian principles.”8 Similarly, in the Regensburg lecture Benedict makes clear that his critique of the Enlightenment has nothing to do with “putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age.” He forthrightly states that the “positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly” (54). And, like his predecessor Pope John Paul II, Benedict speaks fondly of the American Founding, drawing attention to its moral, rational, and religious elements. 24

Fifth, both Strauss and Benedict hold that the key to surviving the crisis of the West is a recovery of the right understanding of reason, found principally in the premodern philosophical and scientific tradition of the West.9 Both therefore reject and criticize the hegemony of modern science, which unjustifiably arrogates all claims of rationality exclusively to itself, when in fact it constitutes a narrowing of reason. That narrowing involves four related elements: (1) a new subject for science (nature as homogeneous matter in motion subject to deterministic mechanical laws, rather than nature as intelligible and teleological); (2) a new object of science (“objective knowledge,” that which stands alone, outside of and apart from the knower, rather than “knowledge” as a true universal and impartial relation between the knower and reality); (3) a new approach to science (a new critical empirico-mathematical method that screens out human perception and evaluation); and (4) a new purpose of science (to conquer nature “for the relief of man’s estate”). The “objectivism” of modern science achieves its greater certainty not from any better insight into reality but from a methodological reduction of reality to categories deliberately made by human beings for the purpose of further human control. The end of this road is, to quote Francis Bacon, “the triumph of art over nature” (victoria cursus artis super naturam); human knowing becomes indistinguishable from human making. This new conception of reason therefore has the radical capacity to turn on itself, undermining its own foundations as well as those things that rest on these foundations, most especially politics. As Strauss writes, “The more we cultivate reason, the more we cultivate nihilism: the less we are able to be loyal members of society. The inescapable practical consequence of nihilism is fanatical obscurantism.”10

LEO STRAUSS AND BENEDICT XVI ON THE CRISIS OF THE WEST

In response, Strauss seeks to bring out the ways in which modern reason, in the form of modern science, rests upon premises that it refuses to examine and that it cannot justify. This is most evident in the modern social sciences, which by assuming—without demonstrating—the distinction between rationally knowable “facts” and subjective “values” are not only incapable of making the most basic distinction between just and unjust regimes but cannot even justify their own value.11 At the same time, Strauss shows how a truly rational philosophy emerges from the value judgments that are inescapably if implicitly involved in the most practical questions of political life. In short, a social science modeled on the physical sciences simply cannot give an adequate account of the phenomenon it seeks to understand. Strauss found the point most compellingly illustrated in classical political philosophy, especially in the dialogues of Plato, and therefore he called for a return to the study of classical political philosophy and for a recovery of “classical political rationalism” as opposed to modern political rationalism.12 Like Strauss, Benedict in the Regensburg lecture criticizes “the modern self-limitation of reason” (40), which holds that “only the kind of certainty resulting from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements can be considered scientific.” This is particularly fateful for “the human sciences,” which “attempt to conform themselves to this canon of scientificity” (45), for by doing so they exclude “the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics” (48). As a result, “man himself . . . ends up being reduced” (48), and “disturbing pathologies of religion and reason” (49) appear and are fostered. Again, like Strauss, Benedict attempts to show how modern science itself presupposes without being able to demonstrate by its own

methodological criteria “the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structure of nature” (59). In this way modern science “bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its own methodology” (59). These are questions that call for rational examination and justification as much as any other scientific inquiry, and thus a larger notion of reason is required. Benedict writes that the “West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby” (62). According to Benedict, “the modern concept of reason is based, to put it briefly, on a synthesis between Platonism (Cartesianism) and empiricism, a synthesis confirmed by the success of technology” (40). By “Platonism (Cartesianism),” Benedict means the scientific confidence in the mathematical structure of matter (41). Against this “Platonism,” Benedict appeals to Plato himself, in particular Plato’s Phaedo, in a way Strauss might admire. The Phaedo relates the last day of Socrates’s life, and its subject is death. In the quoted passage, Socrates is warning Phaedo against the misology—the hatred of arguments—that can result from seeing arguments constantly refuted. Such a person “would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer a great loss” (61). Benedict’s reference indirectly but unmistakably points to a further claim at the same place in the dialogue: “Hatred of arguments and hatred of human beings come about in the same way.”13 Misology leads to misanthropy. In this way Benedict draws the careful reader’s attention to the principal subject of his remarks, the relationship between hatred of reason and violence against human beings, while at the same time deepening the argument immeasurably by connecting it to the fear of death. 25

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Sixth and finally, both Strauss and Benedict agree that this larger notion of reason necessarily involves an engagement with revelation. They both argue that biblical morality and Greek philosophy “agree in regard to what we may call, and we do call in fact, morality.”14 Moreover, both view the engagement of reason and revelation, Jerusalem and Athens, as the key source of the vitality of the West. Nevertheless, despite this similarity, they conceive the relationship between reason and revelation in terms that are fundamentally different. This, as one might expect, is the crucial difference between them.

he core difference between Strauss and Benedict can be stated simply: whereas Strauss argues that reason and revelation are necessarily opposed to one another, Benedict regards them as complementary and integral, though not identical. While simply stated, this difference contains many deep and profound ideas that have direct political consequences. Although Strauss consistently drives a wedge between reason and revelation, he is not, as in modern rationalism, outright hostile to the claims of revelation. Indeed, he positively affirms that it is allied with classical philosophy against modern science. What reason and revelation, as opposed to modern science, share is the conviction that there is a transhuman order and therefore a limit to, and a guide for, human freedom. And as we have already seen, Strauss also affirms a basic agreement between biblical morality and Greek philosophy. At the same, however, Strauss continually draws the reader’s attention to what he calls a “radical conflict” between biblical morality and Greek philosophy. “Greek philosophy” for Strauss means “a way of life based on free insight, on human wisdom, alone.” Revelation, on the other hand, is 26

“righteousness in obedience to the divinely established order.” Here in a nutshell is the decisive difference between reason and revelation: “Greek philosophy is the life of autonomous understanding,” whereas revelation “is the life of obedient love.”15 Strauss consistently contrasts the way of understanding and the way of obedience. In his interpretation of the Fall, he declares that “the desire for, the striving for, knowledge is forbidden. Man is not meant to be a theoretical, a knowing, a contemplating being; man is meant to live in a childlike obedience.”16 The priority of obedience to understanding in the way of revelation is the necessary consequence of a personal, omnipotent Creator God. “Divine omnipotence is absolutely incompatible with Greek philosophy in any form.”17 The principal reason for this is what we might call the “Euthyphro problem,” after the Platonic dialogue by this name, which Strauss characterized as the contradiction between the sovereignty of a personal god (or gods), who as such must be the maker of ideas like justice and right, and the sovereignty of the ideas, which, insofar as they bind such a god, must be above him.18 In this critical respect, therefore, all revelation for Strauss, whether biblical monotheism or pagan polytheism, necessarily involves a voluntaristic God who commands obedience, making philosophy not only impious but impossible. Consistent with this argument, Strauss often points out that the notion of “nature,” understood as the necessary and intelligible order of the whole, is foreign to the Bible, and he provocatively renders the divine name of Exodus 3:14 as the voluntaristic “I shall be what I shall be,” rather than the essentialist “I am who I am.”19 What is the motive for obedience to such a whimsical or arbitrary god or gods? Strauss suggests that, “humanly speaking, the unity of fear and pity, combined with

LEO STRAUSS AND BENEDICT XVI ON THE CRISIS OF THE WEST

the phenomenon of guilt, might seem to be the root of religion. God, the king or judge, is the object of fear; and God, the father of all men, makes all men brothers and thus hallows pity.” In contrast, “the philosopher lives above fear and trembling as well as above hope, and the beginning of his wisdom is not, as in the Bible, the fear of God, but rather the sense of wonder.” Strauss develops his thesis by pointing out that “a slight bias in favor of laughing and against weeping seems to be essential to philosophy.”20 That is, whereas revelation operates in a tragic mode, philosophy is essentially comic, and he does not conceal which form of drama he regards as the highest, if not the sweetest to behold.21 It should now be clearer why Strauss claimed that the antagonism between reason and revelation is “the core, the nerve, of Western intellectual history.” For according to Strauss, while philosophy cannot accept the claims of revelation without destroying itself, neither can it refute the possibility of revelation without a complete knowledge of the whole. This it does not, and perhaps cannot, achieve. It follows that “philosophy itself is possibly not the right way of life. It is not necessarily the right way of life, not evidently the right way of life, because this possibility of revelation exists. But what then does the choice of philosophy mean under these conditions? In this case, the choice of philosophy is based on faith.”22 Nor for similar reasons can revelation refute philosophy. Once one understands Strauss’s account of revelation, one is struck by the fact that it is precisely this account of revelation that Benedict is opposing in the Regensburg Lecture. His rationale can be seen in the controversial illustration he uses to emphasize his point. At issue between the Byzantine emperor and the educated Persian is whether “not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature” (13). According to Muslim teaching, the answer

is no: “God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any categories of rationality” (14). Citing both Theodore Khoury and “the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez,” Benedict writes that “Ibn Hazm went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practice idolatry” (15). What about suicide bombings, totalitarian dictatorships, death camps, and war? Although Benedict begins his lecture with Islam, it becomes clear in his subsequent remarks that his principal object is the Christian West, and especially the dangerous nominalist and voluntarist elements in modern Christianity driving it in the direction of Islam. The practical consequence of rejecting logos-centered Christianity, he suggests, is the substitution of violent willfulness for reason as the correct guide to moral and political life. If Western civilization goes the way of Islam, this would indeed be its end. It should now be clear why Benedict emphasizes three stages of the dehellenization of Christianity. For Benedict, this process of dehellenization is equally if not more fateful to the future of the West than the corrosive influence of Machiavelli and his successors. That process, though anticipated in some places in the late Middle Ages, really begins with “the postulates of the Reformation,” in particular the doctrine of sola scriptura, which severed Christianity from its historical identity and abandoned metaphysics as alien to authentic Christianity: This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazm and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God’s transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, 27

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our sense of the true and the good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions. (26)

One cannot help noticing here the strong affinities between the postulates of the Reformation and Strauss’s account of revelation: the voluntarist deity, the depreciation of philosophy and of nature, the elevation of text over live tradition, the virtue of blind obedience, and the emphases on fear and guilt. Thus Reformation theology tends to reinforce Strauss’s account of reason and revelation and to undermine the real openness of revelation to the claims of reason. In fact, Strauss never explains why revelation listens to reason at all. His own account of the dynamic vitality of Western civilization therefore seems untenable. Philosophy will always listen to the arguments of revelation, for that is what philosophy does, but why would revelation, understood as blind obedience to a voluntarist deity, ever listen to the arguments of philosophy? Again, while philosophy may be incapable of refuting revelation, revelation can always refute philosophy with force and violence. There simply cannot be a stable equilibrium between reason and revelation, so understood. The dynamic tension Strauss describes can only occur between a philosophy open to the claims of revelation and a revelation open to the claims of philosophy. Such a revelation is most clearly found in the logos-centered Christianity of the patristic and medieval periods, yet this alternative seems to be excluded or absorbed by Strauss’s reason / revelation and ancient / modern dichotomies. Given the necessity of such a tertium quid for a workable dynamic between reason and revelation, Strauss’s reluctance to treat medieval Christian philosophy, as opposed 28

to Jewish and Islamic philosophy, is striking. This is especially true given that fact that Strauss clearly acknowledges the considerable differences between them. “Revelation as understood by Jews and Muslims has the character of Law (torah, shari’a) rather than faith,” Strauss writes. For this reason, he argues, Christianity “has more in common with philosophy.”23 Certainly the integration of philosophy into Christianity presented its own problems, such as the subjection of philosophy to “ecclesiastical supervision.”24 And again, on the side of Strauss and of philosophy more generally, there remains “the Euthyphro problem,” as treated above. On the side of Christianity, there is the danger that the Transcendent God will be reduced to human rational concepts and systems, as one finds in the philosophy of Hegel, in the historicalcritical method, and in liberal Christianity more generally. The way out of these dilemmas, as Benedict makes clear in the Regensburg lecture, is the concept of “the analogy of being,” a formula that “only began to be an explicit part of Christian reflection after the rediscovery and translation of Aristotle’s texts in the 11th and 12th century” but that is implicit in the very heart of the Christian self-understanding. When we recall that Karl Barth, the most influential Protestant theologian of the twentieth century and himself a leading deHellenizer of Christianity, called the analogy of being “the invention of the Antichrist,” we can begin to understand the weighty issues involved.25 Benedict’s articulation of the analogy of being is the critical passage of the Regensburg lecture: The faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our

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created reason there exists a real analogy, in which—as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated—unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language. God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love, as Saint Paul says, “transcends” knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos. Consequently, Christian worship is, again to quote Paul . . . worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1). (27)

It is difficult to overstate what this little concept, derived from a creationist metaphysics, achieves in both theory and practice. By distinguishing and relating two fundamental orders of existence and knowledge, the analogy of being avoids a monism that either resolves the plurality of being and knowing exclusively in God (theopanism), or God into the created order (pantheism).26 Creation, radically dependent on God and yet not substantially God, has its own integrity and is governed by laws of secondary causality, which express and reflect the Divine Logos. By avoiding a strict monism, it also preserves and even certifies a relative autonomy and space for the exercise of other human activities, such as art, science, philosophy, and politics, without falling into a strict dualism that would hermetically seal off these activities from their larger metaphysical context. Within the analogy of being, philosophy and mysticism, science and piety, patriotism and religious devotion,

universal and particular duties, can coexist in an intelligible, ordered harmony, rather than mutually exclusive “worldviews.” Benedict insists, therefore, that “the encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance” but was “an intrinsic necessity” (19). The groundwork for understanding this encounter is laid in the Old Testament, when God reveals Himself as “I AM.” Contrary to Strauss, Benedict argues that this passage “already presents a challenge to the notion of myth, to which Socrates’s attempt to vanquish and transcend myth stands in close analogy” (20). But this encounter is consummated in the New Testament. According to Benedict, “John thus spoke the final word on the Biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of Biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist” (18). It is precisely for this reason that “not to act ‘with logos’ is contrary to God’s nature” (24). As Being Itself, God does not possess, rather God is all the perfections of being— unity, truth, goodness, and beauty—that human beings can truly know only by analogy through the created order, but never exhaustively, as they are in God. This is the way out of the Euthyphro problem: once one understands the metaphysics of creation and the analogy of being, one can also see the necessity for the substantial unity of intellect and will in God, of the gratuity of creation, and of divine omnipotence understood as infinite only within the order of metaphysical and logical possibility. Thus, according to Benedict, there is a “necessary correlation between reason and faith, reason and religion, which are called to purify and heal one another. They need each other, and they must acknowledge one another’s validity.”27 It is this dynamic relation 29

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between reason and revelation, preserved by the analogy of being, and not the “radical conflict” between them, that is the true vital center of the West and the key to its survival.

s one might expect, the theoretical differences between Strauss and Benedict on the relationship between reason and revelation have important consequences for how they think about politics and morality. Both Strauss and Benedict are interested in protecting and preserving a decent political order that is grounded in reason and open to the claims of revelation. Strauss’s proposed remedy to modern relativism is “classic natural right,” the standard of right provided by nature and discoverable by reason. At a first glance this appears to be a promising path, for it proposes that politics can be ordered by something higher than itself that human beings can know and agree upon. But Strauss’s description of natural right shares some of the same problems as his description of revelation. According to Strauss, classic natural right is closely related to classical political philosophy. In brief, politics originates in ordinary disputes about justice; classical political philosophy is the sustained attempt to ascend dialectically from the many conflicting political opinions about justice to knowledge of what is right by nature. In so doing, it discovers three things. First, “There is a universally valid hierarchy of ends, but there are no universally valid rules of action.” In support of this claim, Strauss places emphasis on Aristotle’s laconic remark in the Nicomachean Ethics that “among us there is something that is by nature even though everything is changeable.” From this, Strauss concludes that “sometimes (in extreme emergency situations) it is just to deviate even from the most general principles of natural right.”28 There is not space here to treat in depth 30

the problems involved in this conception of natural right, except to point out that it entails a form of consequentialism that is in direct conflict with natural law reasoning. Although Strauss sometimes classifies natural law reasoning in the category of classic natural right doctrine, he is also quite critical of it. That criticism is bound up once again with his understanding of revelation. Put most simply, the natural law, unlike natural right, implies a law giver (i.e. God) and therefore also involves “a life of obedience” enforced by external sanctions, rather than a life of virtue ordered by natural inclinations for intelligible goods.29 As in his treatment of revelation, so here again Strauss seems reticent to engage natural law teaching in its most compelling or challenging light. Instead, by incorporating the obedience / reason dichotomy into his treatment of the natural law, he seems to separate God from logos, Divine Providence from intelligible goods, and the font of the natural law (God) from its expression in the intelligent inclination in human beings toward the good, all of which are unified principles in the natural law theory of St. Thomas Aquinas. The second thing classic natural right teaches, according to Strauss, is that the hierarchy of ends is ultimately determined by the life of philosophy, or “the life of autonomous understanding.” On the most basic level, this means “seeing with one’s own eyes, as distinguished from hearsay; it means observing for oneself.”30 The philosopher “refuses assent to anything which is not evident to him.”31 But, according to Strauss, what kind of evidence is required, and how much evidence, for valid philosophic assent? And how is a non-self-referential judgment of the requisite evidence philosophically justified without avoiding an infinite regress? As one might guess from what has been said above, Strauss argues against the critical move

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in philosophy as exemplified by Descartes, Hume, and Kant by showing the dependence of science and philosophy on prescientific opinions about the whole. But what does philosophy discover in its dialectical examination of political opinion? And what prevents philosophy, even as he conceives of it, from sliding into a skepticism equivalent to that found in Descartes and Hume? Strauss in fact seems to anticipate such a slide: “Because it is essentially a quest, because it is not able ever to become wisdom (as distinguished from philosophy), philosophy finds that the problems are always more evident than the solutions. All solutions are questionable.”32 The conviction that “all solutions are questionable” is obviously a rather precarious ground for supporting the commitments required for political life, and so, as we might expect, Strauss holds that just as there is an insoluble antagonism between philosophy and revelation, so “there is a fundamental disproportion between philosophy and the city.” Reason and politics are incommensurable, for politics necessarily is a “closed society” that depends for its existence upon a “noble delusion.” Furthermore, these two ways of life involve “two entirely different roots” of the moral life, such that Strauss wonders whether the philosophical conception of morality (as opposed to “citizen morality”) “does not transcend the dimension of morality in the politically relevant sense of this term.”33 Somewhat paradoxically, what begins as an inside-out approach to understanding politics (classical political philosophy) ends up as something like the outside-in understanding of politics that Strauss so roundly condemns in the social sciences. Strauss’s third principle of natural right is prudence. Despite their radical differences, philosophical life and political life are in some sense dependent on one another. Philosophers obviously need the city not

only for the leisure it provides but also for the occasions political life offers for philosophical inquiry. The political order requires a kind of wisdom if it is to be just. The precarious reconciliation of philosophy and politics therefore requires prudence. But given Strauss’s open-ended account of philosophy in which “all solutions are questionable,” and his suggestion that the philosophical conception of morality transcends “the dimension of morality in the politically relevant sense,” it is very difficult to see exactly what it is in philosophy that can provide real guidance to political life. Philosophy so conceived might even be regarded as the very enemy of political life. Strauss himself declares that “civil life requires the dilution of natural right by merely conventional right. Natural right would act as dynamite for civil society.”34 From this view of reason, the natural goodness of politics, as opposed to the necessity of politics, is questionable. Like Strauss, Benedict argues that it is in the nature of political life to be grounded in a reality outside itself, known by reason. He too approaches that reality from within the experience of political life, but unlike Strauss he argues for a political reason that stays within political experience, steadily working from the inside out. Accordingly, there is a distinction but not necessarily a radical separation between philosophy and politics, and between citizen and philosophical morality. Plato’s “lie” is noble because it expresses and is at the service of a deeper truth: reason provides a real ground, beyond biological necessity or noble illusions, for the particular attachments human beings have to one another, to the associations they form to further those attachments, and to the costs they will pay to protect them. Benedict is not unaware of the theoretical possibility of an “outside-in” view of politics, but he maintains that the “evidential 31

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quality” of such a view will always remain insufficient, especially for political life.35 As he puts it, “Metaphysical and moral reason comes into action only in historical context. At one and the same time, it depends on this context and transcends it.”36 Benedict’s concern is not merely speculative. Modern liberalism begins in the confidence that pure reason—reason detached from history, tradition, and revelation—can provide a sufficient ground for morality and politics, but in truth it is parasitical upon the Christian culture it seeks to replace and eventually consumes. Sounding much like Alasdair MacIntyre, Benedict describes this process in the following way: But what seemed a compelling, Godgiven insight of reason retained its evidential character only for as long as the entire culture, the entire existential context, bore the imprint of the Christian consensus. The moral dimension lost its evidential quality with the crumbling of the fundamental Christian consensus. All that remained was a naked reason that refused to learn from any historical reality but was willing to listen only to its own self.37

One should notice Benedict’s careful use of terms like “pure insight of reason” and “naked reason,” rather than reason simply. His strategy is to recover and make credible other forms of valid reasoning that have been unreasonably excluded from modern discourse and that also seem to be excluded from Strauss’s own account of philosophy.

ccording to Strauss, philosophy is the quest for “autonomous understanding.” But understanding requires a basic humility before the object of understanding, a desire to apprehend it on its own terms rather than 32

one’s own. This seems to be the very opposite of autonomy. Reason as conformity to reality requires a kind of detachment from the autonomous self. As Strauss argues, and as his writings ably show, philosophy is fundamentally Erotic.38 Eros opens the soul to the whole and is therefore characterized by an acknowledgment of one’s neediness and dependency, one’s capacity to be wounded by wonder. But this seems to conflict with a desire for autonomy, which is protective and will take in reality only on its own terms. It is not clear how Strauss reconciles these two conflicting desires in his portrait of philosophy, yet his treatment of revelation suggests that in the end Eros gives way to autonomy. Benedict, on the other hand, seems to give Eros the upper hand when in the Regensburg lecture he calls for “the courage to engage the whole breadth of reason.” Love is the subject of his first encyclical, and he spends the first portion of it defending a Logos-directed Eros. An Erotic conception of philosophy, as opposed to an autonomous one, finds in the mysterious experiences of love, beauty, injustice, suffering, wonder, and death invitations to knowledge of a whole that is plausibly commensurate with these experiences. Without denying the value of exacting care, precision, honesty, valid evidence, and argument in the pursuit of wisdom and truth, Erotic philosophy refuses to allow these to obstruct the kind of wisdom that can be gained only by suffering, trust, faith, and obedience. Erotic philosophy thus places intimacy with reality (intellectus / noesis) above demonstrative knowledge (ratio / dianoia). With Aristotle and Aquinas it holds that “the slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge obtained of lesser things.”39 It presents reason as credible because it is responsive to the whole range of human experience and human longing.

LEO STRAUSS AND BENEDICT XVI ON THE CRISIS OF THE WEST

It is worth recalling that Plato’s greatest dialogue on the subject of reason and politics, The Republic, begins with a severe treatment of Greek mythology but ends with a myth, albeit one that has been purged of the “mythical” (i.e. fantastical) elements found in Greek religious myth. Plato thus points to the possibility of a rational myth. Christianity, too, while claiming to be grounded in the Logos, continues to be both history and myth. The mere fact that revelation involves a story, or an authority, does not preclude the possibility of its being true, a point Strauss and most of

his students seem to deny.40 Seeing how this possibility might be so is a task worthy of the most courageous, and Erotic, philosophy.

he purpose of this essay has not been to exhaust, much less resolve, these difficult questions, but merely to open an inquiry into them. Of this goal, both Pope Benedict and Leo Strauss, despite their differences, would approve. As both might agree, keeping these questions alive, pursuing them with humility and rigor, is a necessary path to resolving the crisis of the West.

References for the Regensburg Lecture are to the paragraph numbers in the text printed in James V. Schall, The Regensburg Lecture (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2007). 2 See Leo Strauss, preface to the English translation of Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), 1–31. 3 Leo Strauss, “The Three Waves of Modernity,” in An Introduction to Political Philosophy, ed. Hilail Gilden (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 82; Leo Strauss, “What Is Political Philosophy,” in What Is Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 23; Strauss, Introduction, 82. 4 Strauss, Introduction, 82. 5 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Values in a Time of Upheaval (Chestnut Ridge, NY: Crossroad Publishing, 2006), 24. 6 Values, 27; Ibid., 24–26. 7 See Strauss, Introduction, 81–98, and Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), especially chap. 5. 8 Strauss, Introduction, 98, 345; and Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984 [1958]), 13. 9 See Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. Thomas Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 215–16. 10 Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620), 1.17, quoted in Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, sec. 16; Strauss, Natural Right and History, 6. 11 Strauss, Rebirth, 19. See also Strauss, Introduction, 14. 12 See Strauss, Rebirth. See also Strauss, Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968). 13 Plato, Phaedo, trans. Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, Eric Salem (Newburyport, MA: Focus Classical Library, 1998), 89D. 14 Strauss, Rebirth, 246 15 Ibid., 214, 246. 16 Strauss, Rebirth, 257. 17 Ibid., 252, 257 (see also 266). 18 Ibid., 202, 252, 257 (see also 266). 19 Ibid., 246. 20 Ibid., 206, 250; 251. 21 Does Strauss confuse the comic form with laughter? As Dante makes clear, Christianity is ultimately closer to comedy than tragedy. 22 Strauss, Rebirth, 269–70. 23 Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 9, 19. 24 Ibid., 21. 25 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 1, bk. 1, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clarke, 1975), xiii. For an insightful treatment of the analogy of being in Karl Bath and Hans urs von Balthasar, see Edward T. Oakes, Pattern of Redemption (Lexington, NY: Continuum Publishing, 1994). 26 See Oakes, Pattern, 59. 27 Ratzinger, Values, 43. 28 Strauss, Natural Right and History, 162; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1134b20–30; Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 140. 29 Strauss, Studies, 141. 30 Strauss, Rebirth, 255. 31 Ibid., 255, 259. 32 Ibid., 260. 33 Strauss, Introduction, 329; Strauss, Rebirth, 159 (see also 256); Strauss, Natural Right and History, 149–152. 34 Strauss, Natural Right and History, 153. 35 See Ratzinger, Values, 68. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 65. 38 Strauss, Rebirth, 150–68. 39. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I, a. 1, q. 5, ad 1, citing Aristotle, De Animalibus, ix. 40. See especially Thomas L. Pangle, Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham (Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), and Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, trans. Marcus Brainard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). The latter book includes in its appendices two especially important lectures of Strauss. One exception is Leon Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

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ESSAY

RELIGION AND THE FOUNDATION OF LIBER ALISM The Case of the Mont Pelerin Society J. Daniel Hammond and Claire H. Hammond To deny that the end justifies the means is indirectly to assert that the end in question is not the ultimate end, that the ultimate end is itself the use of proper means. —Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom When we say economism, we mean one of the forms of social rationalism. . . . We mean the incorrigible mania of making the means the end, of thinking only of bread and never of those other things of which the Gospel speaks. —Wilhelm Röpke, A Humane Economy

he Mont Pelerin Society (MPS), the brainchild of F. A. Hayek, was an attempt to reclaim and reenergize liberalism in light of the intellectual onslaughts of socialism, communism, and Nazism in the first part of the twentieth century. But in April 1947, as Hayek and his fellow conferees departed the inaugural meeting of the society for their homes in Europe and America, they were united more in their sense of impending crisis from growing worldwide nationalism and state control than in a shared understanding of the moral and philosophical foundations of liberalism. The program of the Mont Pelerin meeting

included five sessions on economic issues such as monetary reform, trade unions, and agricultural policy; two sessions on postwar Europe; and two on historiography and politics. There was one session on liberalism and Christianity, and four on the purpose and organization of the nascent MPS. The last five sessions proved to be contentious. In retrospect this is not surprising, as these discussions went to the very nature and purpose of a liberal association such as the MPS and of a liberal political order. The question of the nature and purpose of liberalism was not settled at the first MPS meeting, and we suspect that it remains unsettled today.

J. Daniel Hammond and Claire H. Hammond are professors of economics at Wake Forest University. They edited Making Chicago Price Theory: Friedman-Stigler Correspondence 1945–1957. 35

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After Hayek made opening remarks, a committee composed of himself, Walter Eucken, H. D. Gideonse, Henry Hazlitt, Carl Iverson, and John Jewkes1 prepared a document stating organizational aims for the permanent body. The document failed to gain sufficient support for adoption, and Lionel Robbins was asked to write a second draft. Robbins’s version was adopted and remained the society’s only official statement of aims for the organization. There has never been an official MPS statement of a liberal creed. The MPS began as and remains an organization committed to inquiry and discussion “among minds inspired by certain ideals and broad conceptions held in common, to contribute to the preservation and improvement of the free society.”2 What were the ideals and broad conceptions held in common? Our thesis is that the original MPS members held less in common as to what they were in favor of and why than on what they were opposed to. While there was agreement that liberalism was important, there was not agreement on the foundations of a liberal order or on the fundamental reasons for its importance. Those assembled at Mont Pelerin were united in opposition to communism and socialism. They were united in favor of personal liberty and the prosperity that would result from competitive capitalism. But they were not of one mind about the purpose that liberalism serves—the end to which a liberal order is directed. For that matter, they were not united on the purpose of prosperity. In terms of the means and ends statements in our epigraphs, Friedman’s comes closer than Röpke’s in representing a de facto Mont Pelerin credo. Röpke’s statement is indicative of the fact that exploration of the foundations and ultimate purpose of a liberal order leads into metaphysical and religious territory. The 1947 Mont Pelerin conferees were 36

not prepared to go there. To illustrate the hazards of metaphysics and religion we will examine the two versions of the statement of aims that were considered at Mont Pelerin, along with contemporaneous writings of Hayek and three other charter members of the MPS. Our selection of the three— Wilhelm Röpke, Frank H. Knight, and Milton Friedman—is based on their views of the roles of religion (ends) and of science (means) in the task of rebuilding liberalism. Hayek is the most important of the three, because the meeting was his brainchild. Röpke, Knight, and Friedman are not as important as individuals for our purposes as they are as types of viewpoints in the early MPS.

n his History of the Mont Pelerin Society, Max Hartwell suggests that the reason the statement of aims drafted by the committee fell short of adoption may have been that it was either too uncompromising and overly specific or too long and diffuse (Hartwell, 40). The committee’s version, however, is not longer by much than Robbins’s second draft, and at first glance is not substantially different in content. We begin with a look at Robbins’s statement of aims, the one that was adopted. It opens by identifying “the crisis of our times”: Central values of civilization are in danger. Over large stretches of the earth’s surface the essential conditions of human dignity and freedom have already disappeared. In others they are under constant menace from the development of current tendencies of policy. The position of the individual and the voluntary group are progressively undermined by extensions of arbitrary power. Even the most precious possession of Western Man, freedom of thought and

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expression, is threatened by the spread of creeds which, claiming the privilege of tolerance when in the position of a minority, seek only to establish a position of power in which they can suppress and obliterate all views but their own. (Hartwell, 41)

Robbins’s statement identifies causes of the crisis: “the growth of a view of history which denies all absolute moral standards”; “the growth of theories which question the desirability of the rule of law”; and “a decline of belief in private property and the competitive market” (Hartwell, 41). Having identified the crisis and its causes, the statement lists areas in which further study is needed to counter illiberal ideology: 1. Analysis and explanation of the nature of the present crisis so as to bring home to others its essential moral and economic origins. 2. Redefinition of the functions of the state so as to distinguish more clearly between the totalitarian and the liberal order. 3. Methods of reestablishing the rule of law and of assuring its development in such a manner that individuals and groups are not in a position to encroach upon the freedom of others and private rights are not allowed to become a basis of predatory power. 4. The possibility of establishing minimum standards by means not inimical to initiative and the functioning of the market. 5. Methods of combating the misuse of history for the furtherance of creeds hostile to liberty. 6. The problem of the creation of an inter national order conducive to the safeguarding of peace and liberty and permitting the establishment of harmonious

international economic relations. (Hartwell, 41–42) Following this list of areas for further study the statement concludes with a disclaimer of interest in establishing a liberal orthodoxy or in aligning with any particular political party. Where Robbins’s statement begins with a description of the “crisis of our times,” the first draft, the one that was not adopted, opens with a statement of purpose for the assembly “to discuss the foundations for the preservation of a free society” and lists a set of ten convictions shared by those present: 1. Individual freedom can be preserved only in a society in which an effective competitive market is the main agency for the direction of economic activity. 2. The freedom of the consumer in choosing what he shall buy, the freedom of the producer in choosing what he shall make, and the freedom of the worker in choosing his occupation and his place of employment are essential not merely for the sake of freedom itself, but for efficiency in production. 3. All rational men believe in planning for the future. But this involves the right of each individual to plan his own life. 4. The decline in competitive markets and the movement toward totalitarian control of society are not inevitable. They are the result mainly of mistaken beliefs about the appropriate means for securing a free and prosperous society and of the policies based on these beliefs. 5. The preservation of an effective competitive order depends upon a proper legal and institutional framework. 6. As far as possible government activity should be limited by the rule of law. Government action can be made predictable only when it is bound by fixed rules. 37

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7. The changes in current opinion which are responsible for the trend toward totalitarianism are not confined to economic doctrines. They are part of a movement of ideas which find expression also in the field of morals and philosophy and in the interpretation of history. Those who wish to resist the encroachments on individual liberty must direct their attention to these wide areas as well as to those in the strictly economic field. 8. Any free society presupposes, in particular, a widely accepted moral code. The principles of this moral code should govern collective no less than private action. 9. Among the most dangerous of the intellectual errors which lead to the destruction of a free society is the historical fatalism which believes in our power to discover laws of historical development which we must obey, and the historical relativism which denies all absolute moral standards and tends to justify any political means by the purposes at which it aims. 10. Political pressures have brought new and serious threats to the freedom of thought and science. Complete intellectual freedom is so essential to the fulfillment of all our aims that no consideration of social expediency must ever be allowed to impair it. (Hartwell, 49–50) Much of Robbins’s draft is simply a rearrangement of the contents of the statement drafted by the committee. He took several items from the list of ten “shared convictions” and placed them in preamble paragraphs before the list of six “areas for study.” This rearrangement, truncation of the list, and conversion of “shared convictions” to “areas for study” may be what led Hartwell to suggest that the Robbins draft was less uncompromising and specific. The first six 38

of the ten “shared convictions” in the first draft concerned economic and legal issues. They were followed by four moral and philosophical convictions. Robbins also changed the opening sentence of the statement from “a group of students of society met at Mont Pelerin . . . to discuss the foundations for the preservation of a free society” to “a group of economists, historians, philosophers and other students of public affairs from Europe and the United States met at Mont Pelerin . . . to discuss the crisis of our times.” This is perhaps indicative of a shift in emphasis from questions of philosophical and moral foundations of liberalism to the more practical and strategic question of how to preserve the liberal order in a time of crisis. In his opening remarks at the Mont Pelerin conference, before the two statements of aims were drafted, Hayek stressed the importance of discussion among people from diverse professional fields and places who held in common the values at the core of true liberalism: The basic conviction which has guided me in my efforts is that, if the ideals which I believe unite us, and for which, in spite of so much abuse of the term, there is still no better name than liberal, are to have any chance of revival, a great intellectual task must be performed. This task involves both purging liberal theory of certain accidental accretions which have become attached to it in the course of time, and also facing up to some real problems which an over-simplified liberalism has shirked or which have become apparent only since it has turned into a somewhat stationary and rigid creed.3

He proposed three topics that might have generated discussion of fundamental principles: the relation between “free enterprise”

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and a competitive order; the interpretation and teaching of history; and the relationship between liberalism and Christianity. Two additional topics concerned practical applications of liberal principles: the future of Germany and prospects for a European federation. Beyond these suggestions, Hayek left the bulk of the program to be determined during the ten conference days. It turned out that the mix of sessions at Mont Pelerin was weighted toward economics, reflecting the greater number of economists than historians and political philosophers who were in attendance. There were five sessions on economic topics, one on historiography and political education, and one session on liberalism and Christianity. Hayek’s interest in having a session on liberalism and Christianity came from his perception that German resistance to Hitler was concentrated among Catholics, and furthermore that in Europe and in America liberalism had become associated with an extreme and aggressive atheistic rationalism. The mixture of liberalism with atheistic rationalism led some nonreligious liberals to embrace “scientific” socialism and nationalism. Hayek also thought that in Europe more so than in America, the association of liberalism with atheism repelled some religious believers who might have been liberals. These people were likely to find intellectual and spiritual succor in reactionary conservative groups.4 Hayek told the audience that “I am convinced that unless this breach between true liberal and religious convictions can be healed there is no hope for a revival of liberal forces” (Hayek, “Opening Address,” 155). In the mid-1940s, as Hayek conceived the plan to bring liberals together, he thought Europeans had lost their civilization. They had done so through intellectual and moral apostasy. Historians, for example, sought to

turn history into a value-free scientific enterprise but in practice let history become the servant of nationalistic pride and prejudices. Hayek wrote in The Road to Serfdom5 of the prophetic vision of Julien Benda’s Trahison des Clercs6 (published in the United States as The Treason of the Intellectuals). He quoted Benda concerning the superstition of science held to be competent in all domains, including that of morality; a superstition which, I repeat, is an acquisition of the nineteenth century. It remains to discover whether those who brandish this doctrine believe in it or whether they simply want to give the prestige of a scientific appearance to passions of their hearts, which they perfectly know are nothing but passions. It is to be noted that the dogma that history is obedient to scientific laws is preached especially by partisans of arbitrary authority. (Hayek, 191)

Hayek found an example of the treason of the intellectuals in J. G. Crowther’s The Social Relations of Science,7 in which, according to Hayek, there is a “hatred of almost everything which distinguishes Western civilization since the Renaissance, . . . combined with an approval of the methods of Inquisition” (Hayek, 1944, 192). “This view,” wrote Hayek, “is, of course, practically indistinguishable from the views which led the Nazis to the persecution of men of science, the burning of scientific books, and the systematic eradication of the intelligentsia of the subjected people” (Hayek, 1944, 164). In 1944, the same year that The Road to Serfdom was published, Hayek read a paper on “Historians and the Future of Europe” to the Political Society at King’s College, Cambridge. His thesis was that the future 39

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of Europe hinged on the future of postwar Germany, and that Germany’s future depended on whether historians (by which he meant students of society past or present) served the cause of truth or the cause of nationalistic passions: The best we can hope, and all we from the outside can usefully work for, is that the history which is to influence the course of German opinions will be written in a sincere effort to find out the truth, subservient to no authority, no nation, race or class. History must above all cease to be an instrument of national policy. The most difficult thing to re-create in Germany will be the belief in the existence of an objective truth, of the possibility of a history which is not written in the service of a particular interest.8

Germans had been tragically disserved by historians who thought it outside their province to make moral judgments, who restricted their efforts to “explanation.” “It was these scientific historians as much as their political colleagues who inculcated the Germans with the belief that political acts cannot be measured by moral standards, and even that the ends justify the means” (Hayek, “Historians and the Future of Europe,” 141). Hayek offered Lord John Acton as the model historian, in contrast to the practitioner of “scientific history.” He saw Acton as the last of the great “Whig historians” who understood that moral values are not incompatible with pursuit of the truth. A program to unite Germans with Englishmen in moral and political values conducive to a liberal society, thought Hayek, might be built around the person of Acton—an Acton Society. Acton was attractive for this purpose because he was an Englishman who was educated and trained in Germany 40

and because he was a devout Catholic, but a Catholic who did not hesitate to criticize the church: More important even it is that among the real opposition to Hitler in Germany the Catholics have played such an important part that no organization which, without being itself Roman Catholic, is not at least of such a character as to make it possible for a devout Catholic to collaborate, can hope to gain influence among the great middle groups upon which the success of its efforts will so much depend. (Hayek, “Historians and the Future of Europe,” 143)

Hayek suggested that if one were to identify a liberal society with individuals other than Acton, the Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt and Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville would fit the bill. These three, according to Hayek, “continued the tradition of the great political philosopher who, as Acton said, ‘at his best was England at its best’—Edmund Burke” (“Historians and the Future of Europe,” 144). To illustrate Acton’s commitment to truth and moral standards, Hayek quoted from his letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton9 (1887) that includes the famous line about the corrupting influence of power: If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you super-add the tendency or certainty of corruption by

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authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which the negation of Catholicism and the negation of Liberalism meet and keep high festival. . . . The inflexible integrity of the moral code is to me, the secret of the authority, the dignity, the utility of history.” (“Historians and the Future of Europe,” 145)

The Mont Pelerin conference session on liberalism and Christianity was chaired by economist Walter Eucken, with opening remarks by American agnostic and anti-Catholic Frank H. Knight, also an economist. The records of this session are not available. Hartwell reports, however, that two decades later, in planning for the 1967 meeting at Vichy, France, Bruno Leoni and Arthur Shenfield were keen to have a session on the relationship between religion and liberty.10 (Neither Leoni nor Shenfield had attended the Mont Pelerin meeting in 1947.) The society had avoided this topic, notes Hartwell, “since Knight had so vigorously debunked religion at the 1947 meeting.”11 With attention to their other writings, however, we can identify the types of arguments that would have been aired in the 1947 session. Clearly, Hayek was of the opinion that liberalism needed to be rebuilt from the ground up in order to present an effective counter to the intellectual currents that had brought Western civilization to the “crisis of our times.” The new liberalism would have to be built on sound moral and philosophical underpinnings. Liberalism had historically been based on Christian humanism. Although Hayek was a religious skeptic, he understood Christianity’s role in the formation of a culture of liberalism, and he understood the inadequacy of science as a replacement for religion in support of liberal institutions.

Other liberals who shared Hayek’s concern over the moral and philosophical foundations of liberalism viewed Christianity as being essential to the endeavor. Eucken, who chaired the session, thought Christianity was compatible with competitive capitalism. Economist William A. Orton had been invited to Mont Pelerin but declined because of teaching responsibilities.12 His 1945 book, The Liberal Tradition: A Study of the Social and Spiritual Conditions of Freedom, gives an extensive analysis of what he considered the necessary connection between liberalism and Christianity.13 Economist Wilhelm Röpke held views similar to Orton’s with respect to the need for liberalism to recover its Christian humanism. Frank Knight agreed that moral and philosophical foundations were necessary. Knight also shared Hayek’s understanding of the inadequacy of science to replace religion as the basis of liberalism. However, Knight was a religious skeptic whose understanding of the role of religion in Western civilization was much darker than Röpke’s (or Orton’s) and darker than Hayek’s as well. So, if we were to place the various views on the importance of Christian religious values to liberalism on a spectrum, Frank Knight would be at one extreme, with Röpke on the other. In between would be someone like Milton Friedman. He represents the role of the liberal as social scientist; someone who is neutral if not indifferent to the question of religion and liberalism. Not being of a particularly philosophical bent, Friedman saw the hope for liberalism in better social science and social science education.

ilhelm Röpke was, with Walter Eucken, one of the founders of the German Ordoliberalism. Röpke was the second president of the MPS, replacing Hayek in 1960. He resigned from the society 41

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in December 1961, citing ill health, but he was also in the middle of a bitter internal dispute known as the Hunold Affair.14 Röpke wrote several books on the crisis of European civilization in the years just before and after the first Mont Pelerin meeting. The first chapter of Röpke’s A Humane Economy is a retrospective on the problems addressed in several of these works.15 Röpke had some difficulty identifying his political ideology. What his ideology was not was clearer to him than what it was. Along with his Mont Pelerin compatriots, Röpke was certain that he was not a socialist. But he did not think his opposition to socialism necessarily made him a liberal. He asked, “Where does a man of my kind take his stand if he is to attack socialism because he believes it to be wrong?” (Röpke, Humane Economy, 3). He concluded that he was a liberal with regard to social technique—believing in free cooperation through private property and markets and opposing central planning. That is, he favored a liberal economic order. But the reason for this preference was not that a liberal economic order was more productive than central planning. Röpke’s preference was based on humanistic principles of social philosophy that he believed were more important than material productivity. He thought a liberal market order was compatible and socialism incompatible with these principles. But these same humanistic principles left Röpke less than fully comfortable being identified as a liberal: The true reason [for my preference for a liberal economic order] lies deeper, in those levels where each man’s social philosophy is rooted. And here I am not at all sure that I do not belong to the conservative rather than the liberal camp, in so far as I dissociate myself from certain 42

principles of social philosophy which, over long stretches of the history of thought, rested on common foundations with liberalism and socialism, or at least accompanied them. I have in mind such “isms” as utilitarianism, progressivism, secularism, rationalism, optimism, and what Eric Voegelin aptly calls “immanentism” or “social gnosticism.” (Röpke, Humane Economy, 3–4)

The “isms” shared by socialism and certain strands of liberalism were antithetical to Röpke’s humanism. He thought they tended toward totalitarianism. The key historical manifestation of liberalism become totalitarianism was the Jacobinism of the French Revolution. Röpke viewed this type of venture in mass democracy as the enemy of humanism: As far as I myself am concerned, what I reject in socialism is a philosophy which, any “liberal” phraseology it may use notwithstanding, places too little emphasis on man, his nature, and his personality and which, at least in its enthusiasm for anything that may be described as organization, concentration, management, and administrative machinery, makes light of the danger that all this may lead to the sacrifice of freedom in the plain and tragic sense exemplified by the totalitarian state. My picture of man is fashioned by the spiritual heritage of classical and Christian tradition. I see in man the likeness of God; I am profoundly convinced that it is an appalling sin to reduce man to a means (even in the name of highsounding phrases) and that each man’s soul is something unique, irreplaceable, priceless, in comparison with which all other things are as naught. I am attached to a humanism which regards man as the

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child and image of God, but not as God himself, to be idolized as he is by the hubris of a false and atheist humanism. These, I believe, are the reasons why I so greatly distrust all forms of collectivism. (Röpke, Humane Economy, 4–5)

So, for Röpke, a liberal economic order was not an end in itself but a means to a higher end—“a higher order of things which is not ruled by supply and demand, free prices, and competition”—the realm of human nature fashioned by God in His image (Röpke, Humane Economy, 6). The cure for the crisis of modern civilization would not be found in any system or set of institutions. For the crisis was not a crisis of social mechanisms but of the human soul: This brings me to the very center of my convictions, which, I hope, I share with many others. I have always been reluctant to talk about it because I am not one to air my religious views in public, but let me say it here quite plainly: the ultimate source of our civilization’s disease is the spiritual and religious crisis which has overtaken all of us and which each must master for himself. Above all, man is Homo religiosus, and yet we have, for the past century, made the desperate attempt to get along without God, and in the place of God we have set up the cult of man, his profane or even ungodly science and art, his technical achievements, and his State. We may be certain that some day the whole world will come to see, in a blinding flash, what is now clear to only a few, namely, that this desperate attempt has created a situation in which man cannot live at all for any length of time, in spite of television and speedways and holiday trips and comfortable apartments. We seem to have proved the

existence of God in yet another way: by the practical consequences of His presumed non-existence. (Röpke, Humane Economy, 8)

Röpke may have thought that solutions to the crisis were not to be found in institutional change, but he did not think that institutions were without importance. Institutions could have effects on the human soul. He worried specifically that modern industrial and urban life contributed to a presumption that it was within man’s power to make and alter anything, including himself. Cut off from nature and human nature, modern man substituted in the place of God social religions—socialism, communism, and nationalism. Röpke’s Humane Economy includes a chapter on “the conditions and limits of the market.” The danger for economists, a danger shared with other specialists, was narrowing their vision to the confines of their discipline and treating all of social life as nothing more than a web of market exchanges. By falling prey to social rationalism, economists would, unknowingly perhaps, ally themselves with the socialists. The antidote for this was selfrestraint, keeping uppermost in one’s mind that markets are always embedded in social structures and moral and spiritual settings. Among the social structures that can fall out of sight not only for socialist planners but also for “circular-flow technicians” is the important role of private property. Private property is essential to a healthy society not just because it allows exchange to occur, but for a deeper purpose: The true role of ownership can be appreciated only if we look upon it as representative of something far beyond what is visible and measurable. Ownership illustrates that the market economy is 43

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a form of economic order belonging to a particular philosophy of life and to a particular social and moral universe. . . . In all honesty, we have to admit that the market economy has a bourgeois foundation. This needs to be stressed all the more because the romantic and socialist reaction against everything bourgeois has, for generations past, been astonishingly successful in turning the concept into a parody of itself from which it is very difficult to get away. . . . This implies the existence of a society in which certain fundamentals are respected and color the whole network of social relations: individual effort and responsibility, absolute norms and values, independence based on ownership, prudence and daring, calculating and saving, responsibility for planning one’s own life, proper coherence with the community, family feeling, a sense of tradition and the succession of generations combined with an open-minded view of the past and the future, proper tension between the individual and community, firm moral discipline, respect for the value of money, the courage to grapple on one’s own with life and its uncertainties, a sense of the natural order of things, and a firm scale of values. Whoever turns up his nose at these things or suspects them of being “reactionary” may in all seriousness be asked what scale of values and what ideals he intends to defend against Communism without having to borrow from it. (Röpke, Humane Economy, 98)

So, for Röpke, the most important role of a liberal economic order was to serve as a means to the higher, nonmaterial end of fulfilling man’s God-given potential as a human being.

rank Knight, University of Chicago price theorist and historian of economics, believed passionately that liberalism and religion were incompatible. Knight was raised in a conservative Disciples of Christ family in rural Illinois and attended two Disciples of Christ colleges. But Knight rejected his family’s Christian faith as a young boy.16 His opposition to organized religion became as strong as his commitment to liberalism. The core principle of liberalism for him was free discussion. For discussion to be free there must not be an imbalance of power between parties to the discussion and there must not be any premise imposed on the discussion from the beginning. Everything regarding the issue at hand must be open to the application of reason. Liberalism, for Knight, boils down to the free use of reason by individuals regarding all matters. This is why Knight thought liberalism was incompatible with religion. Religion is based on authority, ultimately on the authority of God, and proximately on the authority of those to whom God delegates His authority—that is, priests and ministers. Knight did not believe in God. Therefore he believed that every god and the religion of every god were nothing more than human constructs. Since in any religion some questions have already been answered, and therefore closed, religion is inherently illiberal. The more universal the religion and the more omnipotent and omniscient the god, the less room there is for the liberal ideal of free discussion among equals. Knight thought that all religions were backward looking, their adherents looking back to revealed truth and to an ideal state in the past. Liberalism, on the other hand, looks ahead in the never-ending pursuit of truth. Where religion is inherently conservative and retrogressive, liberalism is progressive. Liberals also view history as progressive, with potential for progress stretching

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indefinitely into the future. The mechanism for progress is pursuit of truth via free and open discussion and problem solving: The religious mode of belief is defined by the fact that the critical attitude toward serious matters is sinful. This view of truth means in practice that for any individual, whether priest or ordinary citizen, truth is a matter of cultural inheritance. . . . In our own tradition, intolerance is integral to religious belief, as it must be, to some degree, in a religion claiming universality. In the liberal view of life, all this is of course reversed. To begin with, liberalism repudiates the idea that any truth is final or absolute; all concrete beliefs are in varying degree subject to reinterpretation, revision and eventual rejection and replacement, in the light of new knowledge or insight. Truth is an ideal rather than a reality, something never possessed but to be approached by criticism and critically directed effort. . . . The liberal view makes truth inherently dynamic and progressive.17

We do not have a record of Knight’s remarks in the session on liberalism and Christianity at the Mont Pelerin meeting. But there may be a proxy for these remarks in his 1947 review of William A. Orton’s The Liberal Tradition.18 Orton, an Englishman and Anglo-Catholic who taught at Smith College, wrote in response to Hayek’s invitation that he agreed with the idea of using Lord Acton as the base for the liberal initiative. He suggested two topics for discussion at the conference: the relation between liberalism and democracy, especially with regard to American ideas of democracy, and the conflict between free-trade internationalism and the restoration of rural life in England,

Hungary, and other European countries. The latter issue, he suggested, was a conflict between economic and cultural criteria of the good life.19 Orton’s book was a historically oriented effort to identify the fundamental principles of liberalism, written largely in response to the twentieth century’s rise of nationalism and two world wars (the same issues giving rise to the Mont Pelerin meeting). Orton suggested that the core of liberalism was in the classical Greek (Aristotelian) and Christian synthesis that produced the idea of free individual persons within community: Liberty without community, community without liberty, each is subhuman. The core of the liberal creed (it was the supreme insight of the Greeks) is that in a true community the members are truly free. Community is a working consensus of free minds and free wills in which the individual lives spontaneously, taking and giving much or little, but of his own accord: as in true family, a true friendship, a true cooperation. (Orton, Liberal Tradition, 19)

Orton found the source of genuine community in Christian precepts of natural law and the Incarnation, and in particular in the universalism of Catholic Christianity: For between power and authority there is the same sort of distinction as was later to be recognized between possession and property. While power may reside in persons or groups of persons, authority does not. Persons may temporarily be able, rightly or wrongly, to coerce other persons; but authority does not inhere in human beings. . . . So rulers and leaders of men, desiring a stable basis for social order, are impelled to seek the sanction 45

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of something beyond the act of will, beyond local considerations of interest or expediency. For a thousand years all Europe sought that sanction in the Catholic church; and in those parts of the world which eventually rejected that authority, appeal was made to one of two—as it were, fragmentary—substitutes: either to state establishments that retained a church but dropped the catholicity, or to declarations of rights that retained the catholicity (in theory at least) but dropped the church. Each had its limitations; and the two halves failed to make a whole. (Orton, Liberal Tradition, 59–60)

Whereas Orton identified the core of liberalism in universal Catholic Christianity, and its breakup a threat to liberalism, Knight saw universal Catholic Christianity as totalitarian and its breakup as liberating: What history seems to show is that the multiplication of fanaticisms was the only way in which Europe could free itself from the Semitic-Asiatic tradition of one sole creed and church for salvation, hence naturally to be maintained and propagated without regard to means or cost. Why anyone should want to go back—to the Dark Age, the Crusades, the days of schism and councils and Inquisition, or the Reformation and wars of religion—is a mystery indeed. (Knight, “Short Cuts to Justice and Happiness,” 200–201)

Knight came close to suggesting that Orton was himself a totalitarian wolf dressed up in sheep’s clothing of “Christian liberalism”: What he is finally advocating, the only position which makes sense out of 46

his general argument, is a world-wide church-state or superchurch-superstate, instructing and commanding every individual and every voluntary, cultural, institutional, political, or other group as to the right thing to do and to think whether in the name of God or the folk or the workers. Just let everyone, from Spitzenbergen to Tierra del Fuego, join the author’s church, and bring up his children under the direction of its priests, in unquestioning “faith,” loyalty, and obedience, and all the world’s problems will be solved. It might be as simple as that—or as forcing all to join up who proved too selfish, opinionated, or obstinate to do so voluntarily. However, for reasons that perhaps are not too hard to guess, the author does not state this argument explicitly. (Knight, “Short Cuts to Justice and Happiness,” 205)

Compare this assessment by Knight of a purported “fellow liberal” with the passage from the Mont Pelerin statement of aims as adopted: The position of the individual and the voluntary group are progressively undermined by extensions of arbitrary power. Even the most precious possession of Western Man, freedom of thought and expression, is threatened by the spread of creeds which, claiming the privilege of tolerance when in the position of a minority, seek only to establish a position of power in which they can suppress and obliterate all views but their own.” (Hartwell, History of the Mont Pelerin Society, 41)

To Frank Knight, anyone who sought liberal values in organized religion was sorely misguided. Christianity, no less than

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Nazism and communism, tended to suppress all views but its own once it rose to a position of power. This brings to the foreground one of the stumbling blocks to discussion of the foundational issues—whether one believed or did not believe in God and God’s revelation to man. For Orton, as a believer, the distinction between authority and power was essential. Authority rested with God. For Knight, a religious skeptic, claims of authority stopped at man and were thus diminished to mere power.

ilton Friedman represents what the MPS was to become, an organization concerned with economic and political means to a liberal order, but not with the philosophical and religious principles on which such an order would be grounded. Friedman was one of four editors of the collection of Frank Knight’s papers published as The Ethics of Competition in 1935.20 But Friedman’s professional focus before Mont Pelerin was far removed from Knight’s and Röpke’s concerns with the history of economics and social philosophy. Friedman’s interests were technical economics and statistics. There is no evidence that he had an articulated political philosophy prior to 1947. His view of both economics and statistics was that they were sciences, with science conceived in a loosely positivistic manner. The role of the economic or statistical scientist was to provide technical expertise for solving social problems. Other than helping Homer Jones, George Stigler, and Alan Wallis edit The Ethics of Competition, Friedman published nothing that would indicate an affinity for classical liberalism until he collaborated with George Stigler on Roofs or Ceilings? The Current Housing Problem.21 He and Stigler wrote this piece while together at the University of Minnesota in the spring of 1946, a year

before the Mont Pelerin meeting. Stigler had written his doctoral dissertation under Knight’s direction. It is likely that the formation of Friedman’s liberal ideology began in the office he shared with Stigler at Minnesota, and was nurtured by his experience at Mont Pelerin with Stigler, Knight, and his brother-in-law, Aaron Director. Friedman’s invitation to the Mont Pelerin meeting was most likely due to Director, a close friend of Hayek.22 Friedman was religious during his childhood until shortly after his bar mitzvah.23 As a teenager he abandoned the Jewish faith and appears to have lived the rest of his life without any religion. But in contrast with Frank Knight, Friedman’s childhood within a religious community left no emotional wounds.24 He seems to have been neither appreciative nor wary of religion’s effects on society. When Friedman sailed to Europe for the Mont Pelerin meeting, he was an economic and statistical scientist. Afterward he retained his core identity as a scientist. But he became a scientist with a classical liberal ideology. Unlike Röpke, whose liberalism was grounded in classical philosophy and religion, Friedman’s was cut from the cloth of economics. His was in the traditions of the Benthamites and the Manchester school—traditions that stressed the virtues of markets, free trade, and small and decentralized government. That Friedman had no animus toward religion can be seen in his half-century-long advocacy for education vouchers. He wrote in 1955 that he understood the concern expressed by supporters of public education that widespread enrollment in parochial schools might impede formation of common values across religious groups: But it is by no means clear either that it is valid or that the denationalizing of 47

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education would have the effects suggested. On grounds of principle, it conflicts with the preservation of freedom itself; indeed, this conflict was a major factor retarding the development of state education in England. How [to] draw a line between providing for the common social values required for a stable society on the one hand, and indoctrination inhibiting freedom of thought and belief on the other? Here is another of those vague boundaries that it is easier to mention than to define.25

Twenty years later, in 1975, Friedman defended the right of citizens to use funds received from government for religious purposes, including religious schooling: Under the G.I. Bill, veterans are free to attend Catholic or other religious colleges, and, so far as I know, no FirstAmendment issue has ever been raised. Recipients of Social Security and welfare payments are free to contribute to churches from their government subsidies, with no First Amendment question being asked. Indeed, I believe that the penalty now imposed on parents who do not send their children to public schools produces a real violation of the spirit of the First Amendment, whatever lawyers and judges may decide about the letter. The penalty abridges the religious freedom of parents who do not accept the liberal humanistic religion of the public schools, yet, because of the penalty, are impelled to send their children to public schools.26

Rose Friedman says of her husband that after he lost his faith he became “fanatically antireligious” (Friedman and Friedman, Two Lucky People, 23). But if this was so, it was 48

entirely a personal matter for Friedman. The written evidence is that he viewed religion as a private matter, neither essential nor hostile to the formation of communities of free persons.

he preponderance of MPS sessions focused on economics rather than on history, religion, culture, and political philosophy continued beyond the 1947 meeting. At the second meeting, in 1949, Walter Eucken chaired a session on “the proletarianized society,” with Röpke as the speaker. The other sessions were more strictly economic: “trade unionism and the price system,” “labor and management,” “the demand for social security,” “the unemployed and the unemployable,” and “the relation of the state to education and research.” Through the 1950s the sessions not strictly on economics tended to be chaired and manned by a group of people that included Röpke, Eucken, H. D. Gideonse, and Alexander Rüstow.27 Gideonse chaired a session on “cultural and ideological aspects of capitalism and socialism” at the 1950 meeting in Bloemendaal, the Netherlands, with Röpke making a presentation on “progressive ideologies.” In another 1950 session, Gideonse presented on “the moral basis of academic freedom,” and in 1957 he chaired a session on “the meaning of liberty and the philosophical basis of liberalism.” In 1953 Röpke presented a talk on “social presuppositions of the market economy.” He and Rüstow presented on “front-lines of freedom” and “human rights or human duties” at the 1960 meeting in Kassel, Germany. Most of the presentations in the 1950s, however, were on topics such as “monetary and fiscal policy,” “the nature and functions of profits,” “progressive taxation,” “trade union legislation,” and “inflation.” This kept discussions on a somewhat superficial and material level. Economic science

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could be brought to bear on questions of the price system and the effects of public policies but not on foundational questions about rights and obligations, community, culture, and morals. Science could not resolve the question of what it meant to be a liberal or why being a liberal mattered, beyond the material benefits from rule of law and free markets. Yet the philosophical questions that economics could not answer continued to hang over the MPS. Hayek himself was hard pressed to identify his personal ideology in regard to the categories on offer by the intellectual world in the mid-twentieth century. In the conventional nomenclature, he was not a socialist, for sure, but he was also not a progressive. He said at Mont Pelerin that for better or worse he was a liberal, but he was aware that this label placed him among unwanted company. He certainly did not say, “I am a Christian.” Hayek grappled with this problem of identifying and naming the political philosophy he had hoped the group assembled at Mont Pelerin would embrace in his 1957 presidential address to the society. His title was “Why I Am Not a Conservative.” Hayek explained that the essential attribute of adherents of his philosophy was to be a friend of freedom. In the current political milieu, those who were friends of freedom found themselves allied with conservatives. Thus Hayek’s felt need to distinguish his creed from conservatism. Friends of freedom were forward-looking optimists; conservatives were backwardlooking pessimists. Friends of freedom were wary of authority; conservatives were fond of it. Friends of freedom were people of principle; conservatives were opportunists. Friends of freedom were internationalists; conservatives tended to be nationalists. For Hayek, even the label “liberal” had been tainted through its adoption by American radicals and socialists. Neither they nor

most people who thought of themselves as progressives were friends of freedom. “What I should want is a word which describes the party of life, the party that favors free growth and spontaneous evolution. But I have racked my brain unsuccessfully to find a descriptive term which commends itself.”28 He regarded the liberalism of the eighteenthcentury English Whigs and James Madison, primary author of the U.S. Constitution, as the apogee of his favored type of liberalism. “Whiggism is historically the correct name for the ideas in which I believe. The more I learn about the evolution of ideas, the more I have become aware that I am simply an unrepentant Old Whig—with the stress on the ‘old’ ” (Hayek, “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” 409). Wilhelm Röpke, as president of the MPS, delivered opening remarks at the Turin, Italy, meeting in September 1961, less than a month after East Berlin was sealed off from the West by the Soviets and GDR. Röpke referred to the communist threat there, and in Italy where it appeared that communists might come to power through democratic election, as satanic, an adjective one does not come across frequently in the social sciences. He asked, somewhat rhetorically, how Europe could have gotten in such a situation: It may dawn upon us now that we may live to see once more confirmed a great truth of human history, namely that suicide, not murder, is the normal form of death of a cultural system. It is not the strength of the barbarians but the weakness, moral and intellectual, of the civilized which is usually their undoing.29

Röpke urged that the main task of the MPS was to combat moral and intellectual confusion and a failure of will in Western 49

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democracies. He could not claim with confidence that the society had been true to this task. It is clear that Röpke was criticizing the society’s heavy reliance on social science in rebuilding liberalism: Let us get to work, not in the ivory tower of scientific aloofness and relativism, but keeping in mind that we are menaced by an avalanche which would bury also science itself. . . . And let us avoid the mental disease of so many intellectuals who have forgotten another word of wisdom, also due to [Georg Christoph] Lichtenbeg: “One has to believe in certain ultimate values because it would be absurd not to believe in them.”30

Our examination of the ideas that were brought to Mont Pelerin by a selection of those assembled in 1947 reveals a clash of intellectual cultures. There was unity in opposition of the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, and unity in commitment to personal freedom. But there was no common underlying philosophy on which could be built a party of freedom. Whatever hopes Hayek entertained prior to Mont Pelerin for an organized political force for freedom, his “party of life” remained largely unrealized. Economic science became the lingua franca of the MPS. And economic science, no less than biological science or physical science, is neither friend nor enemy of freedom. It is merely a tool.

Thanks to Roger Backhouse, Angus Burgin, Sam Gregg, Kevin Jung, Tiago Mata, Steve Medema, and participants in HISRECO 2008 for comments on an earlier draft. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21

Eucken, professor of economics, University of Freiburg; Gideonse, president, Brooklyn College; Hazlett, American journalist; Iverson, professor of economics, University of Copenhagen; Jewkes, professor of economics, University of Oxford. R. M. Hartwell, A History of the Mont Pelerin Society (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995) , 42. F. A. Hayek, “Opening Address to a Conference at Mont Pelerin,” in Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1967 [1947]), 149. For example, Action Française. F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1944). J. Benda, La Trahison des Clercs (Paris: B. Grasset, 1927). J. G. Crowther, The Social Relations of Science (New York, Macmillan, 1941). F. A. Hayek. “Historians and the Future of Europe,” in Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967 [1944]), 140. Mandell Creighton was an Anglican clergyman and bishop. In 1884 he was elected to the newly created Dixie Professorship of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Cambridge. Leoni, Italian legal theorist; Shenfield, British economist and barrister. Hartwell, History, 148. The liberty and religion session that Leoni and Shenfield proposed did not make the program for Vichy. Shenfield gave a paper on “Fundamental Constitutional Problems” in a session on the same topic. Leoni was elected president at Vichy but was murdered two months afterward by a disgruntled employee. Orton was among the charter members of the MPS upon incorporation. See Hartwell, History, 51. W. A. Orton, The Liberal Tradition: A Study of the Social and Spiritual Conditions of Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1945). Hartwell, History, chap. 6. Wilhelm Röpke, A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market (Indianapolis: The Liberty Fund, 1971 [1960]); Civitas Humana: A Humane Order of Society, trans. C.S. Fox (London: William Hodge, 1944); Mass und Mitte (ErlenbachZurich: Rentsch, 1950); The Social Crisis of Our Time, trans. Annette and Peter S. Jacobsohn (London: William Hodge, 1950); and International Order and Economic Integration, trans. Gwen E. Trinks, Joyce Taylor, and Ciceley Käufer (Erlenbach-Zurich: Rentsch, 1954). On Knight’s religious background, see J. M. Buchanan, “Frank H. Knight: 1885–1972,” in Remembering the University of Chicago: Teachers, Scientists, and Scholars, ed. E. Shils (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), and R. Emmett, “The Religion of a Skeptic: Frank H. Knight on Ethics, Spirituality and Religion During His Iowa Years,” mimeo, 2007. F. H. Knight and T. W. Merriam, The Economic Order and Religion (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1945), 59. F. H. Knight, “Short Cuts to Justice and Happiness,” Ethics 57 (April 1947): 199–205. W. A. Orton, “Letter to F. A. Hayek,” Hayek Papers, 1947, Stanford, CA, Hoover Institution. F. H. Knight, The Ethics of Competition, and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935). M. Friedman and G. J. Stigler, Roofs or Ceilings? The Current Housing Problem (Irvington-on-the-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Research, 1946).

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Stigler wrote to Friedman in late 1946, “A junket to Switzerland in April is contemplated, to save liberalism. I assume you & Aaron would go. If this comes off, (1) train Aaron on bridge, and (2) let’s find a fourth liberal; and teach him.” J. D. Hammond and C. H. Hammond, eds. Making Chicago Price Theory: Friedman-Stigler Correspondence 1945–1957 (Abington, UK, and New York: Routledge., 2006), 49. 23 J. D. Hammond, “Transcendental Commitments of Economists: Friedman, Knight, and Nef,” mimeo, 2007. 24 On Friedman’s religious background, see Hammond, Making Chicago Price Theory, and M. Friedman and R. D. Friedman, Two Lucky People: Memoirs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 25 M. Friedman, “The Role of Government in Education,” in Economics and the Public Interest, ed. R.A. Solo (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 128–29. 26 M. Friedman, “Selling Schooling Like Groceries: The Voucher Idea,” New York Times Magazine, September 23, 1975, www. edchoice.org/The-Friedmans/The-Friedmans-on-School-Choice/Selling-School-like-Groceries—The-Voucher-Idea.aspx. 27 Rüstow, German sociologist and economist 28 F. A. Hayek, “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” in The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 408. 29 Wilhelm Röpke, “Opening Speech at the Turin Meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society,” Mont Pelerin Quarterly 3 (1962): 8 30 Ibid., 10.

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ROBERT DR AKE, AS I KNEW HIM Jeffrey Folks

n 1960, Robert Drake was one among a promising new generation of southern writers that included William Styron, Flannery O’Connor, and Ernest Gaines, all of whom were born between 1925 and 1933. Encouraged by the examples of William Faulkner and Richard Wright but determined to explore new voices of their own, this generation went on to create a body of work that reflected the region’s social and economic transition. The evolving mores of the South are clearly evident in the work of all these writers. Although usually regarded as a minor figure, Drake produced a significant body of work, which has drawn wide praise from a select readership including Austin Warren, James H. Justus, and Malcolm Jack, among others. Over a period of fifty years Drake published nine collections of short stories, a family memoir, three volumes of criticism, and a large number of occasional essays. Among his more interesting books is The Home Place, a memoir of the Drake family and of his home town of Ripley, Tennessee.

Drake’s correspondence, which fills fourteen boxes of his papers in Vanderbilt University’s Special Collections, reflects his sense of vocation as a man of letters. The collection includes significant correspondence with the leading writers and critics of his time, including Cleanth Brooks, Donald Davidson, Russell Kirk, Andrew Lytle, Flannery and Regina O’Connor, Allen Tate, Eudora Welty, and Tom Wolfe. Drake’s fiction, essays, reviews, and correspondence testify to the breadth of his interests, and they reveal the deep humanity of a man who was devoted to what he viewed as a waning civilization under attack by the dehumanizing forces of modernity. Like that of his agrarian mentor, Donald Davidson, Drake’s writing focused on the small-town and rural South of an earlier era, and he questioned the value of many modern innovations. Unlike Davidson, however, Drake did not make his attachment to the past his moral compass. Despite the fact that his paternal grandfather had fought in the Civil War and was inordinately proud of

Jeffrey Folks is the author of Heartland of the Imagination: Conservative Values in American Literature from Poe to O’Connor to Haruf, among many other books, and a regular contributor to Modern Age. 52

ROBERT DRAKE, AS I KNEW HIM

having done so, Drake showed little interest in “the War,” in slavery, or in any aspect of history that predated his childhood. Indeed, Drake’s Woodville (the fictional town based on Ripley that is the main setting of his stories) is a milieu in which the past plays a muted role. As Miss Evelyn puts it in “On the Side Porch,” “the main thing about the past . . . was that it reminded you that the world didn’t begin and end with just you.”1 This commonsensical way of thinking about the past is a far cry from Allen Tate’s elegiac depiction of a Civil War graveyard in “Ode to the Confederate Dead” or William Faulkner’s celebrated line in Requiem for a Nun, “the past . . . is not even past.” Drake was not writing about history per se but about a way of life, however distant it now seems, that he experienced as present and normative. As he put it in the “Foreword” to My Sweetheart’s House, a brief essay subtitled “My Own House of Fiction”: “I write out of the world I was born into and still inhabit (at least spiritually).”2 As such, Drake’s “house of fiction” constituted a problem both artistic and moral in nature: the problem of how to convey that “present,” the most important and in a sense the only meaningful experience of Drake’s lifetime, to an audience for whom both the manners and values of Woodville must seem alien and unimportant, if not distasteful. In this way Drake took on a difficult task as a writer, and his task was all the more difficult because he did not fit into any of the conventional molds. He did not cling to the past, but the past afforded him a model— the best model, he believed—of a cohesive social order superior to the present anarchy of competing cultures and self-constructed identities. In this respect, his view of the world was similar to that of the British philosopher Roger Scruton and to the American scientist-moralist David Gelernter, whose

elegiac book 1939: The Lost World of the Fair resembles Drake’s effort to recover a lost era in The Home Place. Like that of Scruton and Gelernter, Drake’s traditionalism was not rooted in ideology but in a clear-sighted understanding of precisely what has been lost as American culture became insufferably self-conscious and alienated. Like that of Gelernter, Drake’s writing is a plea for the recovery of a more humane and responsible social order. Like Scruton, he believed that the less hurried life of the village or small town, closer to nature and unfolding on a human scale, approximated the ideal.

n contrast to the more considerate manners of the fictional Woodville, life in the metropolis of Atlanta (one of Drake’s favorite examples, perhaps because he had so often attended the convention of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association there) seemed to him weirdly out of joint. I am quite certain that Drake shared Miss Evelyn Hennings’s “idea of hell”: “an enormous cocktail party in the Atlanta airport” (Survivors, 97). Such an event was hellish because among those thousands of strangers (nearly a quarter million who pass through Hartsfield-Jackson every day), there was no opportunity for a “real talk”—the sort of earnest conversation that, as I came to understand, was surely the greatest pleasure of Drake’s own life. In his craving for human contact, Drake was seeking not just to preserve a way of life but, as he saw it, to preserve life itself. In the face of an increasingly alienated social condition, Drake, who remained unmarried, forged a purposeful existence centered on his writing, teaching, and personal associations (associations not just among those who were academics but among a wide-ranging acquaintance that included members of his church, friends who shared his interest in 53

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swimming, and renowned coaches such as Johnny Majors). His sense of the richness of such a life is evident in “Mrs. Edney and the Person of Porlock,” a story in which Drake recounts the lessons, not all of them academic in nature, that he learned from his beloved high school English teacher, Mrs. Edney (Vada Hobson Edney). Along with a love of poetry and a general broadening of the mind, Mrs. Edney teaches by her example of self-sacrifice and generosity of spirit. As one who could have taught at the college level but chose to remain at Woodville High School, “she went out of her way . . . to do things she didn’t really have to” (Amazing Grace, 77).3 She was an outstanding example, in other words, of a faithful life of service. As Drake put it in regard to his beloved “Auntee” (his mother’s cousin, Mrs. Helen Campbell), another of the nurturing elderly women who appear in his fiction, “she was always on the side of life” (Survivors, 107). Hers was a commitment to what Psalm 98 calls the lifting up of “a joyful noise to the Lord,” which was the highest form of praise Drake could bestow. In a related story, Drake writes a moving account of the unconditional love he received from Auntee during his childhood. When this remarkable elderly woman hugs and comforts him, declaring her complete support, it is “as if it were all a great wonder, some sort of miracle” (Survivors, 105). For Drake, those moments of total acceptance were memorable because they were so very rare. Drake clung to memories of Mrs. Edney and Auntee—and to that of his parents—because his experience also included much that was painful and disturbing. Indeed, I believe that Drake wrote so movingly about the miracle of love for the very reason that he was constantly burdened by a sense of living within a fallen world in which self-interest and pride overwhelm the joyful possibilities of life. He often 54

complained to me about the pettiness and spitefulness of colleagues and associates, and of those who, as he put it, “simply do not know how to do.” That phrase implied an expectation that human beings should have been taught “how to behave” as a normal part of their upbringing, that they should behave in a more considerate manner, that they should control their brutish impulses, and that they should recognize that life has an ultimate purpose, which is to live joyfully as part of a loving community and gratefully in relationship to God. Given the universal presence of the Old Adam, the biblical figure of man as a fallen creature, what else was there to redeem life but knowing how to do? In this respect Drake’s moral imagination resembles that of Eudora Welty, a writer whom he particularly admired. It is also similar in many ways to that of Jane Austen. Like Welty and Austen, Drake was fascinated by the human potential for both good and evil. It is particularly noteworthy that this great struggle for life played out against the backdrop of the otherwise quite ordinary middle-class society of Woodville, a small southern town with little to distinguish it from others. As in Austen’s fiction, however, a seemingly unexceptional moment in a quite ordinary existence can be the occasion for a moral decision of the greatest importance. As James H. Justus puts it, “what makes [Drake’s stories] memorable is a finely traced depiction of unremarkable people going about doing what unremarkable people do.”4 As with Welty and Austen, that depiction encompasses everything from the small triumphs and joys of domestic life to the bitterness of loss and even the occasional suicide. Yet, in some sense at least, what transpires in Drake’s depiction of the provincial South is anything but “unremarkable.” That is the crucial fact that young Robert recognizes in

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the story “Amazing Grace” when he is corrected by his father for wanting to “eat and run” during a church social. “That would be just plain ordinary,” his father says (Amazing Grace, 45), and neither Robert nor any of his relations or childhood associates conceive of themselves or their way of life as that. If anything, they are “alive” and “whole” in a manner that is increasingly less common within modern America. Their intricate, mannered relations are based on deep concern for others and an underlying recognition of the necessity of a stable moral order as a bulwark against the destructive forces of pettiness and self-interest. That is another lesson of the boy’s experience of dinner on the grounds: “that we had to take some of everything so as not to hurt anybody’s feelings” (Amazing Grace, 44). As the boy learns, the social rituals of his culture constitute part of a framework of understanding—what Alasdair MacIntyre would call an intact “rationality”—that ennobles life, even amid lifelong poverty, human failings, and the recognition that all of it must end in death. Many commentators, from Frank Lawrence Owsley to Andrew Lytle, have studied this same culture and arrived at a similar conclusion. In The Plain Folk of the Old South (1949), Owsley documented the importance of the yeoman farmer class in antebellum times. The yeoman farmers were independent landowners, distinct from both the large planters and the dependent tenant class, and as such they constituted an educated middle class. From the perspective of the national culture today, the southern plain folk might well be viewed as impoverished, provincial, and even backward, but that judgment fails to take into account their complex social and moral culture. In Southerners and Europeans: Essays in a Time of Disorder (1988), Lytle explores the

moral basis of this culture in greater depth. For Lytle, as for Drake, this middle-class society was, above all, nurturing in the manner in which established customs and beliefs were preserved and passed down. Within this society, the young were taught the virtues of self-respect, consideration for others, and faith in the goodness of life. Underlying much of the yeoman culture was a collective memory of centuries of repression under European feudalism. Having escaped this captivity, and having survived the crucible of frontier existence and civil war in America, the plain folk of the South were a proud and rugged people. It is hardly surprising that Drake began the preface of his collection Survivors and Others with the admission, “All my life, I realize now, I have been surrounded with survivors” (x). Like many of his stories, Drake’s “Amazing Grace” details the author’s sudden realization that it is the people among whom he has lived, not the faraway elites of Europe whom he dreams of joining, who are the chosen ones intended for God’s grace. In the story, the hymn’s reference to the Lord’s determination to “save a wretch like me” puzzles the twelve-year-old boy, especially as he looks around the congregation in the Salem community and notices a group of poor, disfigured, and aged congregants who indeed seem to match the description of “wretches.” But with the help of his father’s loving direction, young Robert comes to realize that “there was something sweet about being a wretch” (Amazing Grace, 47), and that those among whom he lived, most especially his own father, were the kindest and most decent people in the world. To be found, one must be lost: that is the knowledge that his father, with tears of joy in his eyes, passes on to the boy when he offers his profession of love at the end of the story. And in their provincial and hardscrabble existence, the plain folk of 55

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Woodville had always been lost, as far as the greater world was concerned.

hat made Drake’s writing distinctive was the author’s refusal to surrender this hopeful vision of America in the face of changes that threatened to transform the nation into a less democratic and less humane culture. His vision of America is tied to an ideal of liberty that can be traced to debates among the nation’s Founders over federalism and states’ rights. As inscribed in the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, not prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Drake never spoke to me about such lofty matters as the Constitution, but his worldview was shaped by a civilization in which “powers . . . reserved to the States respectively, or to the people,” played a central role. Much of Drake’s critique of modern-day America—and he could indeed be critical—constituted a reflection on the growing power of the centralized state and of its agents within the cultural and educational spheres. Drake was scathingly critical, for example, of “professionalized” university administration as it has come to exist. Of one university press director who was rumored to have been removed as a result of her haughty mistreatment of a prominent donor’s wife, Drake told me emphatically that she had no sense of how to perform her job. No wonder Drake was a lonely man, one who characterized his beloved avocation of swimming as “the camaraderie of solitude”:5 he saw himself as a member of a saving remnant surrounded on all sides by barbarians inhabiting a society that was hardly recognizable to him. Perhaps for that reason, my long talks with him always seemed to devolve into therapy sessions in which he complained bitterly and 56

at length about the indifference of critics toward his work. “I just want to be included,” he would sigh. He should have been included alongside Welty, O’Connor, and others whom he admired so much. He should have been regarded as an important if not a major southern writer. Why was he not? Perhaps it was because, in an age that valued experimentation above all, he was guilty of the cardinal sin of appearing to be, and in his case actually being, impossibly oldfashioned. There was nothing experimental about his writing technique or transgressive about his moral perspective. What he enjoyed above all was the sense of comfortable familiarity: acceptance among what he called “home folks,” social consensus, moderation, and acknowledgment of the latent understandings that are the basis of any functioning civilization. What he valued, in other words, was order, reasonableness, and effort. He was a lot closer to Samuel Johnson or Austen than to Faulkner or Joyce. Indeed, in his final collection, What Will You Do for an Encore? and Other Stories, Drake revealed that he liked to think of Saturday evenings on Ripley’s town square “in terms of Dr. Johnson’s description of the ‘high tide’ of London life along the Strand.”6 A comparison of Ripley, with its several thousand residents, to eighteenth-century London might seem unlikely, but for Drake, as for Johnson, “noise, laughter, life” (Encore, 9) was the measure of things. Indeed, despite his personal setbacks, there was an intact sense of optimism and hopefulness in his outlook, and there was moral clarity as well: a conviction that human nature could be clearly understood and represented in art because it did not change. No wonder he was largely ignored. Unlike most of his postmodern contemporaries, whose sense of good and evil was blurred by relativism, Drake was forever

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writing and speaking of “the Old Adam,” the atavistic impulses that he believed determined much of human behavior. Because of the imperfection of human beings, he believed, there must be unchanging rules of conduct, and in Drake’s view, Christianity, with its ethics of self-restraint and love, was surely the best guide. That is not to say that Drake regarded religious belief as a “solution” to human fallibility: it was at best an amelioration. The Old Adam would always be with us, making life painfully unpleasant and at times impossible. The relatively high number of suicides in his fiction testifies to the force of evil operating even in the seemingly idyllic hamlets of which he wrote and to the inability of religion, rules, or mores to counter the corrosive effects of selfishness and pride. In the final analysis, Drake’s perspective was much the same as that of his ancestors and neighbors in Ripley, people whose lives were not that far removed from the implacable cruelty of the southern frontier. Like his people, Drake was of necessity a stoic, though his stoicism was softened by an abiding faith in grace. A line from “Fairy Tale,” one of the stories in Survivors and Others, captures the delicate ambivalence of his feelings quite well: “Maybe that’s what small towns were all about finally: you learned how to put up with people” (179). “Putting up” with people can be construed as either a burden or an opportunity, and Drake’s fiction copiously registers both meanings. In his personal life as well, Drake underwent a great deal of suffering, of which the most painful instance was surely the institutionalization of his mother following a mental breakdown that occurred during his early teens. This was a subject so terrible that it never really entered into our conversations, though Drake did address the topic in his writing, albeit briefly, in several of his later books. In a moving section of

The Home Place entitled simply “My Father and Mother,” Drake notes that following his father’s death, his mother “went into a decline from which she never really recovered.”7 Unlike the Drake men, who seemed always to get through life undefeated if not unscathed, his mother experienced “real agony” (62). Toward the end of the book, he returns to the topic in “A Christmas Visit,” a recounting of a visit to his mother in a nursing home. There she lives, not unpleasantly but surrounded by “a wall of impassivity” (151). In What Will You Do for an Encore? and Other Stories, Drake revealed more of how his mother’s illness affected his teenage years. When she is institutionalized in Memphis during the early stage of her disease, Drake is relieved when it is decided he should not accompany his father to visit her. “I didn’t want to see her any more in the state she had been in when she left home—not her old self, not the mother I knew.” Still in his midteens, Drake learned “what illness could do to people . . . isolate them from all those they loved, wrap them entirely in themselves, cut them off from the world about them so they became immured in a kind of living death” (Encore, 22). It is a moving account and testimony to the fact that, even in his final years, the agonizing memory of his mother’s mental illness was still fresh in his mind. Drake spent his entire life shaping and reshaping his experience, and in his stories the autobiographical “Drake” persona evolves and matures. Even at the end, he was still exploring his experience by fashioning new versions of his Woodville days and of the young man he had been.

is mother’s sudden decline was a tragedy that unsettled Drake’s youthful confidence in the beneficent nature of creation, and his entire writing career can be 57

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viewed as an effort to defend and reconfirm the purposefulness and goodness of life as he had known it before his mother’s illness. In one of his finest stores, “On the Side Porch,” Drake presents what is, in effect, a “vindication” of that world as he introduces the reader to Evelyn Henning, a lifelong resident of the small town of Barfield (six miles from the fictional Woodville). Miss Henning has spent much of her life on the side and front porches of her home, observing and conversing with her fellow townspeople. For those “benighted souls” (Survivors, 96) who simply fail to understand the importance of this activity, she has only scorn. They are part of the growing body of humanity that no longer makes the effort “to reach out to other people or get in touch with anybody else about anything” (Survivors, 97). Yet it is this personal connection with others that constitutes Miss Evelyn’s reason for living. Those who don’t “take the trouble and make the effort” (Survivors, 97), though they think they have more important things to do, are merely being selfish. This sentiment sums up a great deal of Robert Drake’s attitude toward life as well as his conviction that modern existence has lost its way. As Miss Evelyn exclaims (with author Drake wryly savoring every syllable of her pronouncement), “[W]e have in our own time seen the end of the seated dinner” (Survivors, 98). Again, it is because most now fail to understand what is important or, worse yet, are simply unwilling to make the effort. In contrast to so many ostensibly more prominent individuals who figure in the narrator’s life, self-important souls who hustle their way through without ever stopping to watch and listen, Miss Evelyn has a truer vocation: she calls herself “a bringer-together of people” and “a sort of facilitator” (Survivors, 97); for his part, the narrator simply refers to her as “a great joy-giver” (Survivors, 98). This 58

vocation centers on taking the time to take pleasure in people, and for Miss Evelyn this task involves turning her back on a great deal of what others believe to be important. She occupies an older home that has been lovingly restored and maintained, not a “new house” in the suburbs “fit for nothing but to watch television in” (Survivors, 99). There is no television playing in Miss Evelyn’s home, nor any of the other electronic devices that now consume so much of our time. Like Miss Evelyn, Drake was a person who took his time with others. Our luncheons together often ran past two hours, and even then, Drake was usually reluctant to leave. It was as if, as long as he could linger in the company of a sympathetic companion, he could fend off the morbid thoughts that shadowed his otherwise hopeful conception of existence. Like his Aunt Janie, the neglected diabetic relation who spent her brief life engrossed in selfless activity as a palliative against her sense of “emptiness and not meaning anything to all the people around her” (Amazing Grace, 64), Drake often communicated to me his sense of frustration with the reception accorded his writing and with a more general sense of life’s inadequacy and incompleteness. Like the child in his stories who is compelled to root out the deeper meaning of events and to see that they do have a meaning (that they arrive somewhere, he would have said), Drake seemed to be struggling against a nagging fear that perhaps there exists no underlying telos after all. This abyss of meaninglessness opened up before him like the frightening ravine through which the L&N railway tracks ran, straight through the center of Woodville, and his remedy was always talk, whether the talk he overheard as a child, the therapeutic talk he conducted with friends like myself, or the talk he carried on over the course of a half century in his writing.

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All that talk was a buttress against the unimaginable horror of life’s not amounting to anything: against the deaths of his aging relations, his mother’s mental illness, and the shabbiness and insignificance that many would read into his provincial background; but there was a limit to what talk could do. As much as he enjoyed a real talk, Drake preserved a certain formality and distance. As he wrote in “Over the Mountains,” a story recounting the suicide of a young man named Jim, “despite the floods of talk that surrounded you on every side, your life was often full of the things you couldn’t say, not to anybody in this world” (Encore, 100). Reading that passage gives me chills even now since I have to wonder how much torment he concealed even from his closest friends. As he wrote in the same story: “You didn’t say all you thought, you didn’t tell all you knew, and shame was often king of the universe” (Encore, 100). It is a sad admission, but one I know to be true. Under these pressures, Drake was understandably exasperated, angry, and even desperate to the point of tears. As he revealed in “By Thy Good Pleasure,” an account of his father’s death and funeral, his father’s love “was the only love I had ever known that had accepted me fully, completely, and without asking any questions” (Amazing Grace, 114). I don’t know if in later life he found some approximation of this unconditional love, but I rather doubt it. In what may be a selfrevelatory and perhaps even prophetic tale, “Mr. Marcus and the Overhead Bridge,” Drake writes of an eccentric Woodville resident, Mr. Marcus Bascomb, who had been educated at an Ivy League university and at Oxford and spent his years studying among writers and artists abroad, but who had returned suddenly one night to his home town and committed suicide by jumping from the overhead bridge.

Having reflected on the suicide for several days, the narrator wonders “whether Mr. Marcus had known all along that, when he finally ran out of places to go, Woodville— and the overhead bridge—would be right there waiting for him” (Amazing Grace, 108). The narrator identifies the cause of Mr. Marcus’s despair as the unhappiness of a man who “has always been afraid to let himself get mixed up in anything enough to love some particular person or some particular place” (Amazing Grace, 107). I suspect that when he wrote these words, Drake was thinking of himself as well as the fictional character he so closely resembled, and, ironically, in one sense he would share Mr. Marcus’s fate. In 1999 Robert Drake suffered a debilitating stroke, after which he was placed in the care of relatives in west Tennessee. He died two years later, never having regained his full faculties.

ight up to the end Drake remained, in several senses of the word, disillusioned with both the tendencies of literary fashion and the general direction of modern culture. But it was not really that Drake had become disillusioned: having grown up within the conservative Protestant culture of rural West Tennessee and having never forsaken its teachings, Drake had never been anything but disillusioned with the moral nature of human beings. He could almost laugh at, and certainly he could endure, whatever life threw at him because like the many survivors in his stories he had imbibed stoicism from earliest childhood. Nothing in life was supposed to be easy: that was the message Drake learned from his parents, whose relative poverty and late-life marriage were burdens that they accepted and bore ungrudgingly. It was also the message of the Protestant religious culture in which he was raised. The Methodist hymns that helped shape his temperament included not just “Amazing 59

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Grace,” which he borrowed as the title of his best-known story, but also such well-known titles as “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” “How Great Thou Art,” “Nearer My God, to Thee,” “Rock of Ages,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” and “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” All these hymns testify to the fact that men are born with a heavy cross to bear, but they also insist that Christ’s love makes the journey bearable. As Drake wrote toward the end of his life, “even now it still brings tears to my eyes, to think of grace so freely given and so freely received” (Encore, 58). Despite the crosses he had to bear, Drake never lost sight of the Good News at the heart of his religious tradition.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

When it happened, I was very much shocked and surprised to hear that Robert Drake had suffered a debilitating stroke. I had always thought of him not just as a survivor, like the many old maids and widows in his stories, but as a man whose fierce self-sufficiency would not allow him to fall prey to the ravages of time. In his later years, in fact, Drake took great pleasure in physical fitness, and he appeared to be in excellent health right up to the time of his stroke. When word arrived of his death, I remember reading the brief e-mail and thinking, not without some relief, now he is home. In many ways, he had never left.

Robert Drake, Survivors and Others (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1987), 100. Further citations will be given parenthetically in the text. Robert Drake, My Sweetheart’s House: Memories, Fictions (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1993), xii. Further citations will be given parenthetically in the text. Robert Drake, Amazing Grace, 25th anniversary ed. (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1990), 77. Further citations will be given parenthetically in the text. James H. Justus, “Foreword,” Amazing Grace, 25th anniversary ed. (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1990), viii. James A. Perkins, “Remembering Robert Drake (1930–2001),” Modern Age 44, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 238. Robert Drake, What Will You Do for an Encore? and Other Stories (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1996), 9. Further citations will be given parenthetically in the text. Robert Drake, The Home Place: A Memory and a Celebration (Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1980), 62. Further citations will be given parenthetically in the text.

ESSAY

THE GEORGIC VISION OF ANDREW LYTLE Mark G. Malvasi

ust as contemporaries dismissed the Southern Agrarian cause as unrealistic and quixotic, so later critics, however sympathetic, have portrayed the Agrarians’ conception of the South as a literary fancy devoid of reality or substance. Louis D. Rubin Jr. wrote that Agrarianism “can best be considered as an extended metaphor . . . the vision of poets,” which “held much imaginative appeal to Southerners and many non-Southerners as well.”1 Although commending the Agrarians’ reassessment of American society, Thomas L. Connelly also believed that they had “in their initial efforts . . . oversimplified the issue.” Threatened with a loss of identity and unable to find in “sawdust religion and cross burning” an emotional release for their hatreds and fears, which included communism, liberalism, science, foreigners, and blacks, the Agrarians maligned the idea of progress and championed a South of country towns, small farms, and independent yeomen. If only the cancer of modernity could be removed from southern life, all would again be well. It was in

approving such facile diagnoses and spurious cures that the Agrarians exposed their fundamental confusion about the impasse that the South had reached by the 1930s. “Promoting measures to make the farmer self-sufficient and to restore his individualism may have had virtue,” Connelly allowed, “but not to hungry tenants.”2 The Agrarians’ prescription left blacks, sharecroppers, and workers perpetually downtrodden, with little hope of ever achieving better lives. Scholars less friendly to the Agrarians than were Rubin and Connelly have derided them as misguided utopians who, resenting the triumph of the factory and the corporation, yearned to reestablish a preindustrial economy based on subsistence agriculture and who, opposing the efficacy of the modern nation-state, championed political sectionalism. The Agrarians were, in addition, neurotic xenophobes and hysterical racists.3 Haunted by an absurd fear of change and diversity, they entertained the unreasonable hope of sustaining an organic, unitary, homogeneous, agrarian society of white,

Mark G. Malvasi is Isaac Newton Vaughan Professor of History at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. His new book, The Finder and Other Poems, will be published later this year. 61

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yeoman farmers. The frightful “myth” they had inflamed consigned its victims to lives of poverty and grief. The obvious impracticality of such endeavors branded the Agrarians as reactionary idealists determined to revive the past and hinder the progress of man.4 These interpretations are misleading. The Agrarians distrusted a political and economic system they believed left human beings impoverished, oppressed, and desolate. Moreover, their apology for the South, though not in all save a few instances an effort to reconstitute the historic milieu of southern life, was more than a metaphor. It shaped and buttressed their rebuke of the present, offering a political, moral, and spiritual alternative to the dreary and agonizing condition of the modern world. “Our idea,” commented Andrew Lytle, “was not just to keep farmers on the land. Nor were we addressing only Southerners. . . . Our idea was to keep other professions and livelihoods sensitive to the agrarian way of life so that the institutions, the form and intent, and the ultimate meaning of a traditional and conservative society could set the tone and values for everything else. We wanted a society not only of farmers but also of agrarian teachers, agrarian businessmen, even agrarian bankers.”5 Such judgments did not utopians make. On the contrary, the Agrarians spurned the crusade for perfection indispensable to utopian movements. In this respect, Lytle’s thought was decidedly anti-utopian. Thomas More, Lytle acknowledged, was an exception among utopian writers. He had used his Utopia to reprove the policies of his sovereign and the attitudes and practices of his contemporaries.6 A more representative statement of utopian purpose was Tommaso Campanella’s La Città del Sole (City of the Sun). Published in 1602, eighty-six years after More’s volume, City of the Sun afterward exerted great influence on Condorcet, Diderot, Robespierre, Saint Simon, Fourier, and others in that company 62

of totalitarian revolutionaries who sought not only to change the face of government but also to transform the nature of man. Ironically, Campanella was himself something of an agrarian, having been born into a family of Calabrian peasants. Unlike Lytle’s yeoman farmers, Campanella imagined a heaven on earth arrived at by wholly secular means. Before he could realize his ambitions, he reasoned that a buona razza, a good race, had to be made ready, New Men and New Women worthy of the New World that they were poised to enter. In Campanella’s ideal city, a constant willingness to sacrifice for the commonwealth was the prerequisite of citizenship. As in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Soviet Russia, government officials rewarded the heroes of work and war in elaborate public ceremonies. Labor was a necessary evil, and those who shouldered the burden merited special recognition. Soldiers, too, were due singular esteem, for war was integral to spreading the totalitarian system around the world, so much so that for Campanella war became a sacred ritual over which officer-priests held sway. It was, however, the principal duty of the state not to exalt but to discipline the citizens, who, in turn, were obliged to be entirely subservient. No person, institution, or agency could be permitted to compete for their devotion. To that end, families were abolished, women were made communal property, and citizens worshiped at the altar of government. Spies alerted the ruling council to any act of insubordination or resistance that threatened the social and political order so that such treason, and those who perpetrated it, could be eliminated. A People’s Court condemned outlaws but not before inducing them to admit their guilt and welcome their punishment as the execution of justice. Crime and sin were identical, and anyone who committed an

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offense against the state was mercilessly put to death. The foremost duty of the ruler, whom Campanella, in a sardonic parody of Christianity, designated “Il Sole” (The Sun), was to purge the consciences of the people. To renovate the world, to master human nature, to bring about the brotherhood of man, demanded nothing less than absolute obedience to the state. Tommaso Campanella’s seventeenth-century dream became Andrew Lytle’s twentieth-century nightmare. Much of the confusion about the Agrarians’ perspective originates from the belief that they wrote in the pastoral tradition. As Rubin observes, the Agrarians came squarely out of an old American tradition, . . . that of pastoral; they were invoking the humane virtues of a simpler, more elemental, nonacquisitive existence, as a needed rebuke to the acquisitive, essentially materialistic compulsions of a society that from the outset was very much engaged in seeking wealth, power, and plenty on a continent whose prolific natural resources and vast acres of usable land, forests, and rivers were there for the taking.

Mark Lucas concurs, describing Lytle’s image of the farm as “a pastoral exaggeration of the good life on the land.”7 According to Thomas Connelly’s interpretation, the Agrarians “viewed the South, the Tennessee Valley in particular, as a Southern Eden.”8 But the Agrarians, and none more so than Lytle, abjured the pastoral tradition. For Lytle, the image of America as an earthly paradise was false; the New World had faltered in its redemptive mission. “When we remember the high expectations held universally by the founders of the American Union for a more perfect order of society,” he

protested, “and then consider the state of life in this country today, it is bound to appear to reasonable people that somehow the experiment has proved abortive, and that in some way a great commonwealth has gone wrong.”9 The pastoral hope that America constituted a holy nation immune to the wages of sin and the ravages of time had, Lytle objected, undone the venerable convictions of human impotence and depravity. That unwarranted annulment had made the redemption from history and the regeneration of man the very ethos of America to which all Americans were induced to give unconditional, indeed evangelical, assent. Together these ideas became providential and assumed the form of revealed truth. As a consequence, Lytle charged, the main impetus of American thought had long been utopian. In America, the idea of utopia, which for Thomas More had been an unattainable “no place,” became confused with a community immanent in history, a prophetic intuition of the future to which Americans alone belonged as no other people ever has or can. The land of opportunity and possibility, America was always in the making and Americans were forever departing one paradise to enter another that was new and improved. Lytle dissented. He recognized that it seemed traitorous, perhaps even heretical, to malign such self-evident truths. Was not America, after all, the most radiant beacon to shine forth in all the long, dark, sorrowful history of the world? It was dangerously misguided to think so. This misconception arose from the Gnosticism that had conditioned the American mind and dominated the American character. The Gnostic imagination, according to Lytle, disdained the stubborn realities of history in order to confirm the old lie that men, through their own agency, could alter the terms of existence. “We are caught between two conflicting 63

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world views,” Lytle confirmed, “which operate within and without our society.” The predominant “Faustian view” deceived men into imagining that they could “know the final secrets of matter.” Assuming the inevitability of secular progress, American Gnostics, who espoused “laissez faire in economics . . . faction in politics, social welfare in religion, relativism in history, [and] pragmatism in philosophy,” had anticipated the fulfillment of millennial perfection in the United States.10 The rational, egalitarian, and beneficent social, economic, and political order had rescued mankind from the uncertainties of history and the vicissitudes of nature; America constituted a perfect society of perfect men. America, Lytle demurred, was not the City of God, the embodiment among nations of innocence and purity. History had compromised, if not discredited, the transcendent meaning and moral authority of America, fracturing the Christian drama and plunging Western civilization into an abyss of blood and darkness. Fully implicated in the spiritual estrangement, isolation, and degeneracy of modern man, America, Lytle concluded, had endangered “our common European inheritance,” which he and his fellow Agrarians now aspired to rescue.11 Like other twentieth-century writers, from T. S. Eliot to Flannery O’Connor to Walker Percy, Lytle struggled to formulate an alternate vision of order and meaning, which drew together the remnants of Christendom. Distinguishing between the temporal and the eternal, Lytle contested the assurance that men could be as the gods and that heaven could be made immanent on earth. No social or political realm, no human construct or arrangement, could replace the divine and the sacred. Human beings were finite and fallible, prone to error and to sin. If there were to be redemption, men could 64

be saved only by grace, which operates in and through history, but which emanates from beyond time. All human declarations, whether of independence or truth, were thus, in Lytle’s estimate, partial and circumstantial. Only the Gnostics in their rebellious arrogance could believe differently, for, as Lytle affirmed, “the mind which tries to reach knowledge only through the sensibility is satanic. To take the part for the whole, or to use it as an end in itself, creates a false illusion about nature and human nature. . . . It . . . obscures the truth and elicits the memory of that universal gray fog encompassing chaos and its silent lull.”12 Without the intuition of a divine order, modern men had assumed that the human will was invincible and human power absolute. But no one had the last word or exercised final judgment. History went on and on. Man could not see the whole of it. God alone knew how it would end. Neither pastoral nor utopian, Lytle’s outlook was instead georgic and Christian. The literary antecedents to his version of Agrarianism were Hesiod’s Works and Days, Virgil’s Georgics, and the Old Testament. In fundamental ways, the georgic is at odds with the pastoral. According to the pastoral imagination, the natural world is idyllic, an Arcadian paradise, a gentle sylvan realm of beauty and peace. Georgic thought, by contrast, depicts nature as austere, cruel, and unforgiving, careless of human needs and desires. Originating with the Greek poet Hesiod (ca. 700 BC), the georgic tradition, wherein “the gods keep men’s food concealed,” is the ancient, pre-Christian equivalent of the Fall, which, among other misfortunes, brought a curse upon the land and condemned Adam and his progeny “in toil” to “eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. In

THE GEORGIC VISION OF ANDREW LYTLE

the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken” (Gen. 3:17–19).13 For both the georgic and Judeo-Christian myths, labor was a curse, although essential if humanity were to survive; but such inescapable hardships also engendered the impetus to duty, forbearance, and piety. Farming occasioned a hard but virtuous life. In the georgic worlds of Hesiod, Virgil, and Lytle, the weather is capricious, uncooperative, and often inclement. Nature, by turns, afflicts mankind with blistering heat and numbing cold, with violent storms and fierce droughts. Birds devour the seed before it has a chance to sprout; weeds strangle the crops; insects spoil the grain; epidemics kill the herds of sheep, goats, and cattle. Blight, pestilence, and famine lay waste to all that, through skill, intelligence, and fortitude, human hands have painstakingly built. “Countless troubles roam among men,” Hesiod mourns, “full of ills is the earth, and full the sea.”14 “So,” Virgil assents, “fate decrees that everything tumble into a worse state and slide swiftly backwards.”15 Notwithstanding the most assiduous human effort, nature remains intractable and order fragile, stealing always toward a chaos that men are powerless to reverse. Work, arduous, unremitting toil, alone keeps men from utter devastation, and even such vigilance does not ensure a beneficial outcome. That awareness, Lytle conjectured, would be the demise of progressive, scientific agriculture. When the farmer “bought the various machines . . . he was told that he might regulate, or get ahead of, nature. He finds to his sorrow that he is still unable to control the elements. . . . Science can put the crops in, but it can’t bring them out of the ground. Hails may cut them down in June; winds may damage them; and a rainy season can let the grass take them. Droughts still

may freeze and crack the soil.” The banks, mortgage companies, and corporations that seized the farmers’ lands when they defaulted on their loan payments were thus also bound to fail. What, after all, Lytle asked, did businessmen, eager to secure an immediate profit, know of agrarian life? Of what use were their statistical analyses and financial projections “before droughts, floods, the boll weevil, hails and rainy seasons?”16 Nature is, and will forever remain, superior to man. Human beings, though, are not fully subject to the arbitrary dominance of nature. They have the means to offset their native deficiencies and have to learn to endure, however formidable, the uncertainties and misfortunes that beset them. Labor is their saving grace, enabling men to convert the wilderness into the fields and pastures from which to draw sustenance and into the households and communities from which civilization arose and grew. “Labor omnia vicit,” wrote Virgil. “Labor has conquered all things.”17 Cultivated landscapes rather than pristine wilds constitute the georgic ideal of beauty. But as with any human accomplishment, the mastery of nature is temporary, contingent, and incomplete. Work done today must always be repeated tomorrow. Yet, for Lytle, as for Hesiod and especially for Virgil, farming is a heroic activity and the farm the mainstay of civil society.18 There is no Golden Age, no Garden of Eden, no land of milk and honey, in which delights of the senses are free for the taking and men live in timeless, unhurried innocence. Since Pandora released evil into the world (Works and Days), since Jupiter vanquished Saturn and established a new order (Georgics), since the Fall, men have had to work, and never cease working, for their keep. Remarkably, despite these constraints upon their lives, they have often found pleasure, and even joy, in their exertions. Therein lay the peculiar worth 65

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and importance of farmers. Uncommonly prudent, frugal, discerning, vigilant, conservative, and wise, farmers accept their burdens and setbacks with an imperturbable composure, making the most of what God and their own labor have furnished them. Better than most they know the inconstancy of nature, and so respect its power to negate months, even years, of toil in a single moment. As men of pious humility, farmers, at the same time, rejoice in the bounty of nature if, as Lytle ruefully observes, nature happens to be generous for a season. As men have increasingly lost sight of themselves and grown forgetful of their nature, the historic patience, modesty, and restraint of those who labor in the earth becomes as vital to nourishing the spirit as the crops they harvest are to feeding the body. Achieving only a provisional ascendancy over nature, farmers understand that all efforts to conquer and subdue it and to bend it to their will, all promises of utopia, end by revealing human impotence and folly. In their recurrent struggles with nature, farmers attain their dignity. Conscious that they are protagonists in the vast, transcendent drama of creation, death, and rebirth, farmers never lose faith in God, for, as Lytle notes, they encounter “constantly and immediately . . . a mysterious and powerful presence, which [they] may use but which [they] may never reduce entirely to [their] will and desires.”19 Farmers thereby also develop a sense of tragedy. They understand from hard experience how often men “eat their meat in sorrow” and how effortlessly they could “lose . . . all that is dear.” The world, as Lytle put it, is “not all teatty,” and nature sets the terms of the engagement. If men dare to tread beyond the confines that nature has imposed, if they violate their covenant with God, even “an agrarian . . . will be lost.”20 Among those who have endured this sorrowful destiny, Cain is the archetype. 66

Recounting the myth of the Fall, Lytle speculates that Adam, after his eviction, cherished the memory of the Garden. He and Eve were wayfarers now, bound to wander throughout creation without a home. Yet Adam’s recollections fortified and sustained him, and he began to clear and cultivate the earth, intent to emulate God and, as much as possible, to restore Eden. God at once apprehended Adam’s designs. “To make a crop and not to mind too much the sweat and work,” Lytle comments, “was not exactly carrying out the curse.”21 Jealous and angry, God elected to punish Adam a second time, and so visited the sins of the father upon the sons. Like Adam, Cain was a farmer, while his younger brother, Abel, became a shepherd. In His resentment of, and outrage at, Adam’s act of defiance, God set brother against brother in what Lytle described as “mindless competition.”22 God had made man in His image and had endowed him with imagination, language, and power over the rest of creation. But man’s was a delegated power, and this limitation Adam had ignored, either through unfortunate happenstance or willful disregard. By permitting Adam to name the beasts, God had given him the power of life and death over them. He and his descendants could legitimately kill animals should the need arise to do so. God had not given it to Adam to name the flora, nor had Cain named his brother.23 Well on their way to regenerating a portion of the world they had lost, Cain and Abel made separate offerings of thanksgiving. God welcomed Abel’s tribute but rejected the sacrifice of Cain, for, according to Lytle, Cain had sought not to glorify Him but to overshadow his brother and to celebrate the fruit that, by his own labor, he had brought forth from the ground. Exalting himself beyond his proper station, Cain repeated the arrogant sin of his parents who thought they could

THE GEORGIC VISION OF ANDREW LYTLE

live as the gods. Disheartened and insulted at God’s disapproval, he lured his brother into the fields, and there he killed him.24 The very ground that Cain had tilled with such diligence and care now cursed his name. Exiled from his farmland, Cain became a fugitive, condemned like his parents to roam without solace or rest. Cain feared that God, in banishing him from His presence, had also subjected him to violence. “My punishment is greater than I can bear,” Cain objected. “Whoever finds me will slay me” (Gen. 4:13–14). Touched by Cain’s anguished plight, God showed mercy, fixing a protective mark upon him. Cain survived and went to dwell east of Eden in the land of Nod, where his offspring instituted culture in the form of the arts and crafts, in ancillary imitation of God. Cain’s issue peopled the earth, and, Lytle concludes, “life . . . therefore took its design from Cain.”25 The abiding curse that he bore meant that the ground, which he had drenched in Abel’s blood, would yield its abundant gifts only with reluctance, and at times would deprive men of their use. Such is the lot of the farmer, who knows better than other men the consequence of arrogating to himself infinite power, which by right belongs only to God. Those who live in traditional societies have accepted the curse, recognizing that in a fallen world life is predicated on death. Whether man or beast, all have to eat to survive, and to eat means to kill. The devout and God-fearing have, however, ennobled, and even sanctified, this unpalatable necessity in ceremony and ritual, which teaches a common respect for nature and its endowment. The American Indians, for example, that “most religious and conservative of peoples,” engaged in no indiscriminate slaughter. Refraining from even an inconsequential offense against nature, they first apologized to, and then sought the consent of, their

prey before they killed it. Europeans taught the Indians to “make war on nature.”26 The agrarian life, in Lytle’s judgment, instills this same moderation, restraint, and discipline. Properly speaking, Lytle did not advance an ideal of civilization, since his protagonists, the independent yeoman farmers, do not live in cities. His was, rather, an ideal of piety toward man, nature, and God. He saw the limited application of reason, science, and technology as an admissible kind of progress, for he did not wish humanity to live forever mired in primitive superstition and fear. The use of reason, science, and technology to clarify the implacable is perilous if men go too far, as they always do, and resume their obsession with living as the gods.

ytle’s Agrarianism was no pastoral reverie but a lucid and eloquent restatement of the georgic tradition that linked the moral value of farming to virtuous citizenship and moral order. Bound to the soil and exposed to the importunities of nature, farmers shun radical nostrums in favor of the tried and true. Theirs is, after all, a momentous and solemn responsibility: to care for the land and to husband the resources on which all life depends. The moderation, self-reliance, freedom, and independence that they personify—qualities nurtured in the seasonal round of planting and harvesting—also anchor republican government. When, for whatever reason, small freeholders are dispossessed of their land, as happened in the United States during the 1930s or in Rome during Virgil’s time, discord and chaos follow. The people are hungry and wretched, the countryside neglected and unkempt. The economy languishes; the state falters. Without the citadel of the small farm and the farmers’ staunch ethic of commitment, fidelity, temperance, and restraint, the commonwealth, defiled by greed and luxury, rent by foreign wars and 67

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civil strife, falls into anarchy, as Virgil beheld in the decline of Rome: Here the good and evil have changed places: so many wars in the world, so many forms of wickedness, no honor for the plow, farmers conscripted, the mournful fields untilled, and curved pruning hooks are beaten into unbending swords.27

2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27

As Virgil had identified the political and moral disintegration of the Roman republic with the neglect of agriculture, so Lytle ascribed the disarray into which the United States had fallen to the abandonment of the small farm, the agrarian way of life, and the farmers’ tragic awareness of the limits that nature had imposed on human will and desire.

Louis D. Rubin Jr., introduction to Harper’s Torchbook edition of I’ ll Take My Stand (1962), reprinted in I’ ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), xxviii, xxxi. In the introduction he wrote for the 1977 edition of I’ ll Take My Stand, Rubin qualified his argument in two important ways while retaining the essentials of his original conclusion. First, he pointed out that not every contributor was aware of “the metaphoric element.” Some, such as Donald Davidson, Frank Owsley, Herman C. Nixon, and Robert Penn Warren, envisioned the Agrarian program “as a literal and practical program, a specific course of action” (xvi). Second, Rubin noted that although “stressing the ‘metaphoric’ element . . . helped to prevent the anachronistic application of the racial attitudes of the 1960s to the unexamined assumptions of the 1920s, it also had the unfortunate effect of failing to give proper emphasis to the striking ‘practicality’ of another aspect of the Agrarian symposium”: the critique of the dangers that industrialism and capitalism posed to the spiritual welfare of modern man (xvii–xviii). Thomas Lawrence Connelly, “The Vanderbilt Agrarians: Time and Place in Southern Tradition,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 32, no. 1 (March 1963): 27, 31, 33. Richard H. King, A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1930–1955 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), see especially, 51–53. Alexander Karanikas, Tillers of Myth: Southern Agrarians as Social and Literary Critics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966). For a critique of Karanikas’s thesis, see Edward S. Shapiro’s review in Southern Humanities Review 1 (1967): 199–202. Andrew Nelson Lytle, From Eden to Babylon: The Social and Political Essays of Andrew Nelson Lytle, ed. M. E. Bradford (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1990), 240–41. Ibid., 224. Rubin, introduction to I’ ll Take My Stand, xv; Mark Lucas, The Southern Vision of Andrew Lytle, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 16. See also Emily S. Bingham and Thomas A. Underwood, eds., The Southern Agrarians and the New Deal: Essays after I’ ll Take My Stand (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 7, 8, 19. The classic study of the pastoral tradition in American literature is Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). On the differences between the georgic and the pastoral, and on the development of the georgic mode in seventeenth-century English literature, see Anthony Low, The Georgic Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). Connelly, “The Vanderbilt Agrarians,” 28. See also Robert B. Heilman, “The South Falls In,” in Allen Tate, ed., A Southern Vanguard (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1947), 122–35. Lytle, From Eden to Babylon, 3. Andrew Lytle, Southerners and Europeans: Essays in a Time of Disorder (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 63. Lytle, From Eden to Babylon, 185. Lytle, Southerners and Europeans, 8, 15. Hesiod, Works and Days, trans. by M. L. West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 38. Ibid., 40. Virgil, Georgics, bk. 1, lines 199–200, trans. by Janet Lembke (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 9. Lytle, From Eden to Babylon, 29, 32. The Latin text is from H. Ruston Fairclough, ed., Virgil, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), bk. 1, lines 145–46. The Georgics contain numerous puns on the word cultus, meaning “tilled,” “cultivated,” and “civilized.” See Low, Georgic Revolution, 8–9. Lytle, From Eden to Babylon, 42. Ibid., 187–88, 31. Ibid., 212. See also, 174–75. Ibid., 211. Ibid., 172–73. Ibid., 198. Unlike Lytle, Genesis gives no reason for God’s acknowledgment of Abel’s and refusal of Cain’s offerings. As in Genesis, Virgil had also introduced into the Georgics primordial crimes that forever altered the human condition: Laomedon’s “false promise to the gods [Apollo and Poseidon] at Troy” (bk. 1, lines 501–4) and “an ungodly people” devouring the “slaughtered steers” (bk. 2, lines 536–38). Ibid., 214. Ibid., 176. Virgil, Georgics, bk. 1, lines 505–8, p. 19.

POETRY

MR. DEATH David Craig

I, too, get to go through it—the shuck and mill, like Moses, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Little Sister Amen, every duck, ostrich quill. Will there be paintings scrawled, the faded remains of a “St. Francis slept here”? I think there’ll be an old couch or two, Tommy Dorsey records. The rug won’t be much, but I’m going barefoot. I’ll bring what I need of my friends and family as I deal with the tug of memory, the sparrows as they churn up around me. The sigh you won’t hear will be my goodbye: my hand on the clear knob I won’t want to turn, when everyone I knew will tell me: “Fly.”

David Craig has published sixteen books of poetry and fiction and teaches at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. 69

POETRY

POSSUM

White-faced, in spare fur, he stood hunched over his paws, in the middle of the country road. His bob, nearly imperceptible as he lifted his maw, the blood and spittle that ran along the teeth line he could not, with gravity, altogether close. I saw him struggle, dying in the worst, the only possible way: a de-petaled rose. I watched for a while, got out of the car. I sat near his end, as close as my squeamishness could dare. Mr. Death, here is thy sting: you sit close by as well, off stage, like some huge oblivious bear, close enough to us to be a palpable threat, but unconcerned, your chin lolling along your fat chest, caught in the busy flies above your head, your own preserve. I want to ask you, Guest, “Why don’t we cut cards or something?” But you are a bear and won’t talk. A whiff of honey, a sun bright enough to make you squint; that’s as far as you will go. Possums and people die, each in time, with his bluff. And a person, if he is blessed, might get to see

POETRY: DAVID CRAIG

it beforehand, the walnut hard casing of his bier, the packed dirt he grows betweenâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;both leaf and root, this vegetable kingdom. There is no mercy here, just green, for as far as the human eye can see.

POETRY

THE AGED ASTRONOMER SCRIBBLES A POEM TO HER Paul Ruffin

How many planets to make a universe? How many suns to light them? How much energy to keep them alive? Who knows and who cares? WE are the stuff of stars and planets, atom and molecule, for one shining moment in all the pilgrimage of time fused into what we are, what we have become, and sharing our bodies and souls in the pulse that governs all things. It is magic, it is wonder, it is real, and nothing in the panorama of space, which stretches far beyond the glass eyes we have ground to study it, nothing in all that cold and dark, with scattered balls of flaming gas and smouldering ruins of stars, black and gray and green planetsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; none of it matters so much as the depths of your eyes, the touch of your skin, the sound of your voice, the warm liquid joy of you.

Paul Ruffin is Distinguished Professor of English at Sam Houston State University, where he edits the Texas Review and directs Texas Review Press. He is also a prolific author of fiction and nonfiction. 72

POETRY

THE AGING ASTRONOMER WRITES TO HER IN OCTOBER

In a whirl of wonder you have snatched me out of smooth and easy orbit. Where flame and the need for flame lay dormant, flaring now and again, as always, I was fast freezing into a sleepy and permanent planet out beyond the reach of the farthest stretch of heat. Now, every molecule is aglow, every atom charged with you, every deep and unknown spring liberated by you into full flow. I am more alive than I can ever recall, more aware of the taste of the air, the shimmer of color of the world at dawn, the eerie silver gloss of irises beneath the moon, the feel of mud and moss and stone, the nightly sound of owls on this hill, the smell of you on my hands and my lips, and I know love now as it must surely have been meant to be known. I am yours and you are mine, and slowly the paths through this space and time that we share will be one, fused forever, our atoms blended into one fiery ball, and we will know what it means to be Holy.

POETRY

THEY VISIT THE CYPRESS TREE

You would think, given the violence still in evidence here, that these children would not giggle and waggle their tongues, swept up in vibrations beyond this sad place where four died one moonless night. Friends of the dead, they have come to see the savaged earth where wheels plowed and the tree that caught the car and formed it to its trunk like a loversâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; union, so odd in that consummation: machine and tree, and trapped between them the dead. They are thinking of a world beyond all this, where death is abstract and distant. They do not comprehend that kingdom where their friends have gone nor sense the depth of despair in their parentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; shimmering eyes as they study dark stains in the dust and pieces of plastic and chrome. The scarred cypress, which must have been shaken to its roots, starts its early healing, its branches embracing the wind and the sky.

POETRY

AT BAR HARBOR ONCE, AND ONCE . . . Innis mór James Matthew Wilson

We scrambled up the craterous outcrop That ruptured like an isle in the gray sands Spread thin around Cille inne Bay. A sop Of drying kelp lay tangled in red strands, Half-covering a shallow pool, inside Which a few snails would slink till the next tide. Some other aged and rough concentric shells Hung on a thread of weeds as necklaces hang. The mussels and the salt Atlantic swell Lapping away at Innis mór then rang Of my first time gone musseling in Bar Harbor: Snatching the stony things in childish labor, Not knowing such as these and snails were meant To boil in the gray and white-flecked pot Later that night, for dinner. Shells—once sent Adrift on every patterned current or shot With all the indifference of lead by waves Breaking against this putty shore—are saved,

James Matthew Wilson’s books include Four Verse Letters, Timothy Steele: A Critical Introduction, and The Violent and Abyssal (forthcoming). 75

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Or stranded, really, in a salted pool No more the ocean for its having come From there. Such shells are signs for how it feels To be on Aran or in Maine. They sum Almost to the same place for one like me, Who visits with scarce responsibility, For whom the taste of salt mist on the tongue Is a sure sign that I am far from home. These sharded terraces of lime are long From the flat lands I know, though I would know This dark splintering water in its full And endless siege on the Dùn Aengus shoals. These sediments, these thickening shells, must seem For all their subtle mouths and creeping shifts Proof that no matter where I go, my being’s Inflexibly one. This isle may be a gift Of sorts, but I can’t grasp it whole or take Just what I need without a sundering break. Nor can its crooked paths be measured out As if all were mere property of the mind. My coming here makes me a part of it, My sailing makes each cut wave partly mine, To set against that “awful” sun-bright day When I dug mussels with my family.

POETRY: JAMES MATTHEW WILSON

As much I think I’ve known for many years, Perhaps, though without knowing what that fact meant; But I don’t have the words to make appear This place as it is, or more than fake its accent. However permeable the line between The self and outward place, desire to be Some idealized or dreamed-up character And the cramped, cracked and drifting vessels we (Driven on by that same desire’s stir) Manage to make of self and history— Some outer boundary holds us in its law Limiting us as a mussel by its maw. Some children calling out in Irish came Tearing past us, and splashed on through the veins Of water inward pulsing with the tame Advance of hooded waves; this shrinking plain Grown slick and silver, studded by their heels. Such was I on the day of that plucked meal, Before the cagey shells yawned up their meat. I wouldn’t sit down to that plate again, Or wish my aging mind were less discrete, Permeated by currents never spent Upon the ribbed and rising sand or broke Speechless upon the northern shore’s black rocks.

MODERN AGE WINTER /SPRING 2013

I wouldn’t, in fact, attempt a greater change Than any patient person could attempt: To map this crescent isle and, stuttering, gage How close our words and thoughts are—or how inept— Till, through a plain and patient sort of trying, A few words might report the real descrying Of angled light that hooks off this pool’s mirror And skips across the waves’ large-muscled toil, To catch it as it is ; and catch the bare Knuckled hills whose inch-deep crust of soil Was deepened, made sufficient to till wheat By the first immigrants, who in their sweat Slow-piled sand and seaweed on the rocks, Year after year, till some stayed covered; then, They planted, by the fistful, their first crops, And in a tottering way survived on them. They too, at first, were strangers to this sand, And took it as their own with needful hands.

REVIEW ESSAY

THE POETRY OF LIBIDO DOMINANDI Catharine Savage Brosman, Breakwater (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2009) and Trees in a Park (Thibodaux, LA: Chicory Bloom Press, 2010)

James Matthew Wilson

odern love is wretched. Since the days of Boccaccio’s guffawing demand for the emancipation of sexual love in the Decameron, it has steadily become the condition and the good to which all social and spiritual orders must conform. So ubiquitous, indeed, is this imperative to emancipation that it has found expression in such ostensibly opposed phenomena as the scientistic banalization of love at the hands of the early advocates of birth control and eugenics, and in the cultic idolization of it in the naturalized religions of late Romantics such as the novelists D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller. These features of modern life, in turn, have been spread and codified in the ethical agnosticism of our public realm in regard to such matters as fornication, adultery, and divorce, and in the elevation of “sexual orientation,” “erotic partnerships,” and “sexual fulfillment” to rights that must be recognized and approved juridically or even, in some cases, state subsidized (as they are in “jolly” old England).

We live in an age that has seen former Episcopal bishop Shelby Spong attempt to wean Christians from belief in a God in whom Spong no longer thinks they can believe and reground it on an absolutist, indiscriminate imperative founded on Genesis 2:18: “The LORD GOD said: ‘It is not good for the man to be alone.’ ” We no longer need to love God and then do what we will; we must simply do whatever it takes to find a little erotic companionship—whether that entails abandoning the bedside of one’s dying wife, looking among the members of one’s own sex, or searching beyond the frontiers of one’s own species (a “lifestyle” option the Spanish government now promotes in school textbooks). The critic of modernity may look upon this spectacle with uncertainty, wondering whether the libido ubiquitous in modern life is a mere species of the more general libido dominandi, the desire to dominate and control that we see in the home, market, and

James Matthew Wilson’s books include Four Verse Letters, Timothy Steele: A Critical Introduction, and The Violent and Abyssal (forthcoming). 79

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state alike; or, to the contrary, if the desire to become, in Descartes’s words, the “masters and possessors of nature” through state and technology might be a mere instrumental good intended to facilitate the total liberation of sexuality from nature and ethics.1 Whatever one may conclude on this question, we may say for certain that the arts, which have throughout history taken romantic and sexual love for a theme, can no longer do so unreflectively if they are not merely to function as slave labor for this endless modern project of emancipation. And so it is at once refreshing and troubling to come across Catharine Savage Brosman’s stunning new collection of poems, Breakwater: a book set amid the absurd ruins of the sexual revolution; a book in many ways beholden to it; and a book that offers with poignancy and ambivalence reflection on the world we have forged in our desires’ latest heat. As other writers on Breakwater have noted, the reader is advised to begin the book at the end, with Brosman’s “Lightning in the Heart: A Postface in Prose.” Here Brosman offers a narrative that serves as background for many of the poems in the collection. We learn that Brosman had married Patric Savage in her first youth but that the marriage soon failed. She confesses uncertainty as to the reason, but we gather it had much to do with their respective career ambitions (he took a job in California, she was beginning a promising academic career) and her related unwillingness to bear a child. They divorced; she remarried, had a daughter, and eventually divorced again. Entering her eighth decade in the now familiar role of the retired divorcee free for travel and the safe affections of friendship, Brosman is unexpectedly contacted by Patric via e-mail. A jolt of sudden, renewed love enters her heart, and an electronic correspondence is born. We learn that Patric, too, had remarried 80

under unhappy circumstances. That marriage endured, but his second wife now lies debilitated by a severe stroke and under his exhausting and constant care. Patric and Brosman reunite in Houston, where he has spent his career, and she soon resettles there, in the same condominium building where he lives. Their romance blossoms alongside Patric’s continued care of his wife; when the latter passes away, he and Brosman marry. What are we to make of this life story? It contains the elements of shame and misfortune: divorces and estrangements, the subordination of family life to career, and the related trumping of marital bonds by romantic desire. Brosman—as its protagonist, and as the poetry editor of the leading magazine of cultural conservatism, Chronicles—repeatedly confesses her discomfort and shame before the decisions she has made in her life even as she recognizes with the reader their sad typicality. To most living Americans, her story bespeaks the familiar concessions of a broken society; to those of us born into the culture of prurience but refusing its terms, her tale appears no less familiar but more disconcerting. But Brosman is not just troubled but moved: it is she who has been struck by this lost-and-found love and who feels obliged to answer to its law. She has retailed this story to many friends and “of the dozens of people . . . including professional-grade Catholics, ordinary Catholics, a devout Anglo-Catholic,” and so on, “all have applauded, recognizing, doubtless, that the law was made for man and not man for the law; put differently, abstraction must yield to the concrete, the universal to the particular.” If her account entirely persuaded, this passage would not need to have been included. Indeed Brosman’s ambivalence threads through her narrative: she senses something is not right, but the present is a product of the irrevocable choices of the past even as

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it cannot be reduced to penance for past errors. In Brosman’s case, shame before her past must yield to the goods to which that shame is bound, such as the life and love of her daughter, her enduring friendship with her second husband even after their divorce, and her second shot at a first marriage. At moments in this “prose postface,” Brosman seems to take comfort in a world that judges romantic misadventures less harshly than she naturally does: the narrative is excessive in details regarding the technological specifics of her relationship with Patric. It makes one feel a bit awkward to hear her relate the inane if ubiquitous difficulties of wireless Internet connections, or to protest her near “luddite” opinion on modern technology while explaining all the places she has toted her laptop. Describing their life after the reunion, but before the death of Patric’s wife, Brosman writes, “In the hours remaining at the end of each day, we share dinner in my place, listen to music, talk, look at art books, and (readers will wonder) make love; today’s mores and literary conventions permit me to add that our lovemaking is exquisite.” An apologetic discomfort before relenting to “today’s mores” is the fulcrum about which Brosman’s narrative turns. If these circumstances make for uncertain reading in prose, it provides tremendous occasion for lyric beauty and intellectual exploration in the poems themselves. Indeed, Brosman’s ambivalent position as a modern lover with a conscience resistant to the very drive-to-emancipation to which her life has succumbed has led her to write one of the most intelligently unified, elegantly composed, and morally compelling books of poems I have read in years. Her poems not only distill in finely wrought recollections the materials of her life; they also elevate them for inspection in such a way that she can at once do justice to her reborn love and the more

dubious genealogy of “secular love” to which Boccaccio gave birth. The closing lines of the title poem locate her in just these circumstances. Having admired “two blue herons” on a breakwater, she turns back upon herself: In love, beside the man who was my husband long ago, I gaze with them, scanning the stream. Strange: my middle decades—Dante’s tangled wood—appear a foreign thing, lived by someone else. Yet that was I. Now, having passed the breakwater, we’ve landed on this island of our age, two Robinsons, conjoined, and canopied by trees whose million leaves murmur love of light and lucid shade, and paint the bayou in great shimmering mottles, figuring happiness.

Already, the mystery of estrangement and identity before one’s past has taken poetic form. Brosman always writes in well-turned verses, with a clear interest in finding those forms in which her familiar but jeweled discursive style can most readily recline. In Breakwater, she frequently composes in English quatrains, but, above all, in longlined blank iambics. English is no stranger to loose iambics, in which the poet freely substitutes and adds extra syllables. Brosman, however, is quite rigorous in maintaining the integrity of her meter; she makes refreshingly little use of metrical substitutions, preferring the flexibility found in varying her lines from iambic pentameter (traditional blank verse) to lines of octo- and nona-syllabics. I 81

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have never quite seen this before and would speculate that her typical verse forms—again pentameter quatrains and various long-lined blank iambics—owe something to her long familiarity, as a professor of modern French literature, with the traditional alexandrine or the long, loose lines of Paul Claudel. The resultant style is a fitting concord of masterful craft and an authoritative discursive voice that exercises the rule of verse in the virtue of art. The poems themselves unfold with all the momentum of a complex tale of love. Part 1 recounts the lead-up to and fulfillment of her renewed life with Patric. These poems seek to capture the excitement and anticipation of love but also to grapple with the disbelief such late-life romance may stir in others. “To Former Students, Who Would Be Skeptical,” composed in the heroic couplets and public style of the Augustan Age, captures this awkwardness nicely: . . . I’m distracted, dreamy, quite unfit to play my role as you’ll remember it. So can you guess? “Good gracious, heavens above— but yes . . . our old professor is in love!”

This section concludes with a moment of wholeness, a resolution of all prior ambivalence, in her wedding poem. But we then move beyond the terrain of Brosman’s imperfect but real happiness. Part 2 comprises a number of short narrative and lyric poems that grapple with the historical and ethical implications of the love Brosman has described. The narratives constitute some of the most conceptually rich material in the volume, although their syntax is uninventive and at times grows tedious like the prose of a medieval chronicle. The first four such narratives speak of old relatives and acquaintances, as Brosman seeks 82

to contextualize romantic love as almost invariably born of unfortunate choices and unforeseeable circumstances: Aunt Flora, the spinster, who lived a life of loneliness; Louise, the pianist who sacrificed romantic love for the love of art; “Lieutenant Fran,” the army nurse whose true love is killed but who eventually marries and has a family; and, finally, the story of a promising young student who learns French, marries a Frenchman, but dies young—whatever promise she had left unfulfilled. These are painful narratives, not so much apologetics for the strange curves Brosman’s life has taken as they are an exemplum by which to understand it: What then do we owe destiny? We are its wheat and chaff, its tracks and random leavings. Fran remarked that life had dealt a decent hand; instead, she was its strange accomplishment, a star ablaze amidst expanding dust.

Later in part 2 we encounter another set of narratives, recounting the infamous marital misadventures of Madeline and André Gide (of whom Brosman is a distinguished scholar), of D. H. Lawrence discovering the “blood religions” of American Indians, and of the Jewish modernist poet and radical Mina Loy. The inclusion of these narratives probes deeper the fortunes and function of eros in the modern age. If the stories of Aunt Flora and others serve the volume chiefly to suggest the agony of love’s absolute demands upon us in circumstances of radical contingency and unwonted reversals, these accounts of modernist artists suggest at once how deliberate was the project of love’s becoming, like Mina Loy, “a law unto herself,” and how devastating the consequences.

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The disintegrating homosexual hedonism of Gide excuses itself as a necessary spiritual impulse, though it destroys the one who was “loved by him in soul / from childhood; never bodily, though.” After initial doubts, Lawrence becomes “mesmerized” by the Hopi Indians, finding in primitive ritual the deep foundation of life in the sexual passions. Loy, who asserts a feminist demand for autonomy, finds herself searching desperately after a man who is literally swept from her by the forces of nature. In each of these cases, we find Brosman suggesting the deeper genealogy of her circumstances. The twentieth-century cry for sexual emancipation was an act of rebellion against a bourgeois culture that seemed so mannered and materialist that it had lost any capacity for human passion. The almost tragic figures of Lawrence and Gide were thus supposed to appear as sacrificial reminders of the good we had lost. As it turned out, of course, the desires of a supposedly “repressive” materialism and an “unrestrained” romantic sexuality did not simply comport well with one another—they were fundamentally one, and desire became an absolute and commercially respectable little god. Brosman’s poem “Desire” captures the thrill and dangerous willfulness of him: He bends to show his mastery, and shame with her consent the body wholly bared, submitted to a will she cannot name, which violates her own but must be shared. Withdrawing to himself, he hears the sense of being magnified in heavy breath, with knowledge, consciousness of knowledge, thence

in mirrored destiny to knowing death.

Part 3 begins by pushing these explorations of desire to a historical limit: the German army torching the libraries at Louvain during the First World War, which serves as a vivid instance of libido dominandi, as if the world must now be understood entirely in terms of a will to power and destruction. After this, perhaps the best, narrative poem in the volume, however, Brosman emerges from the historical inferno and turns back to the life one must live, in spite of the greater or lesser sins of the past. Several of the poems seek to recover an appreciative repose before the present things of this world: I watch the sparrows cluster, calmer now, communal, offering their part of the evening peace. I’ll stay here in contingency, lifting a glass to human imperfection, as God unseen walks in the garden still, scattering grace.

The most impressive poems in part 3 may also be the most perfectly realized poems in the volume: three meditations on ecclesial art, including two on the Church SaintSéverin, and on the Christ Pantocrator altarpiece in the Duomo of Monreale. With their explicitly Christian subject matter, these poems reestablish an absolute scale of evaluation (after the fashion of the “professionalgrade Catholics” in her prose narrative) that serves as a necessary complement to the appreciative acceptance of contingency and grace in the other poems. Here Brosman extends the example of her own impressive but imperfectly lived life to our entire culture. She takes us from ambivalence and excuse making to a quiet lament before those 83

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marmoreal signifiers of the divine. Writing of Saint-Séverin, she observes, With Notre-Dame, the Sacré-Coeur, and all the rest, obscure or famous—Trinity, Saint-Julian-the-Poor, Saint-Roch, Saint-Paul—it’s just another Paris church to see. For we have come too late, I think— the call to holiness will miss this century; in recent years there’s been another Fall, with gilded fruit of power on the tree. But tourists go in anyhow, and weave wide-eyed through narthex, chapels, transcepts, apse and look as though they wished they could believe, acknowledging the truth of human lapse by what proclaims it visibly, alone: the weightlessness of ransom wrought in stone.

This wrought-in-stone sonnet adds much weight to Brosman’s already formidable volume—one that manages a sustained meditation on the central question of our age, the claims and humiliations of love, in the ethical language our age would simultaneously like to believe in and like to forget. In Brosman’s chapbook, Trees in a Park, we encounter poems that have evidently been written since the completion of Breakwater. They exhibit a meditative repose that, while certainly not absent in the earlier collection, appears sustained from poem to poem both 1

in terms of method and subject. Befitting its title, this short collection takes trees, birds, and vegetables for explicit subject—each of which is submitted to the kind of ontological investigation modern poetry since Stevens and Ponge has made familiar. What distinguishes Brosman’s poems from others is not so much her deliberately domestic scenery—the New Formalist poets, such as Timothy Steele, have rendered this almost normative. Rather, Brosman conjoins an easeful, suave—sometimes, frankly, meandering—voice with a compact allusiveness and wit that recovers some of the genius of the Metaphysicals of the seventeenth century. “Watermelon” begins, for instance, with the appropriate “long incision down the rind, / a crack, a breaking of the heart.” But as the “pinkish water fills the plate,” we are slowly led to the observation that “even holy things arise / from greenery,” which in turn takes us to the Cross of Christ: until the world made whole again should raise its leafy, flowering head, and we become through others’ pain, like him, the first fruits of the dead. The intent of the chapbook is appropriately less than that of the longer collection, and yet the genius of Brosman’s craft shines forth more steadily for being less obviously at the service of a great and troubling theme. The two volumes together demonstrate that, at this late date in her career, Brosman is producing some of her most accomplished work—work that merits the attention not only of those interested in one of the few obviously masterful voices in contemporary American letters but also of those looking for a means by which to grapple with the life of love in these wretched days of an unhallowed century.

E. Michael Jones’s Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2005) impressively resolves much of this ambiguity in a devastating critique of modern administered society.

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THE COGNITIVE ELITE AND AMERICA’S FUTURE Paul H. Lewis Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 by Charles Murray (New York: Crown Forum, 2012)

ear the end of their controversial bestseller, The Bell Curve, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray summarized their thoughts about intelligence and class structure in contemporary American society with gloomy predictions about the future. Our increasingly high-tech and worldwide economy, where competition is fierce and huge sums of capital are at stake, will require business and government to recruit the highest IQs. The brainiest individuals (the “cognitive elite”), coming mainly from elite universities, will then command enormous salaries and perquisites. Those will allow them to merge with the already affluent strata to form a new upper class. With their educational backgrounds and their intellectual tastes, members of the “cognitive elite” will seek out the company of their peers, becoming more and more isolated from the Paul H. Lewis is a retired professor of political science from Tulane University. He now lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

rest of society. The downside of this hightech, global-reaching meritocracy, however, will be the “deteriorating quality of life for people at the bottom end of the cognitive ability distribution.” In short, the poorly educated and / or not-so-bright among us will lose their unskilled or semiskilled jobs to low-wage Third World workers or to technological innovation. American society will polarize. Herrnstein died shortly before The Bell Curve appeared, in 1994, but Murray has followed it up with this new book, Coming Apart, which elaborates on their forebodings. Basing his work on two longitudinal studies, the Current Population Survey and the General Social Survey, Murray concludes that by 2010 America had indeed polarized. The “cognitive elite” now included the topmost individuals in the political, financial, and media worlds plus senior military officers, high-level civil servants, business executives just below the CEO rank, and the most prestigious people in the liberal professions. Their incomes placed them in the richest 20 percent of all households. Most of them were graduates from elite colleges that acted as “sorting mechanisms” for entry into the new upper class. Moreover, this new upper class tended to be increasingly isolated, culturally and physically, from the rest of society. More intellectual and cosmopolitan than their fellow Americans, they lived in locales where they and their children intermingled only with people like themselves. And they were more likely to marry people of the same high IQ level and educational background: a practice Murray calls “homogamy.” 85

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To present a composite portrait of the new upper class and its lifestyle, Murray uses a fictional neighborhood called Belmont, which is loosely based on a real affluent suburb of Boston. The people of Murray’s Belmont still adhere, more or less, to the old civic virtues that built America. They are industrious: both men and women practice their professions and work longer hours than most people do, although their schedules are often quite flexible, and many of them work at home. They enjoy their work because it gives them a sense of accomplishment and often requires foreign travel. The elite have greater job security, too, because their talents are not easily replaceable. On the other hand, the new upper class is not as religious, philanthropic, or civicminded as American elites—even the socalled Robber Barons—used to be. Nor, given the recent examples of malfeasance on Wall Street, or at Enron and WorldCom, does the new upper class seem to believe that “honesty pays.” Still, people in the new elite are usually married and are less likely to divorce. Most of them tell interviewers that extramarital sex is always wrong, and indeed single mothers and cohabiting couples are relatively infrequent within this class. A very high percentage of married people in the elite said that they were happy in their “homogamous” marriages. The bottom 30 percent of the social spectrum lives in Murray’s fictional neighborhood of Fishtown, which also has a real-life counterpart in a poor part of Philadelphia. From the very beginning of Coming Apart, Murray emphasizes that the poverty and dismal lifestyle of Fishtown are not the products of racial or ethnic minorities. His study is confined to America’s white, non-Hispanic population. In the case of Fishtown, these are people of relatively low IQ, with only a high school education or less, and no skills 86

beyond what are needed for blue collar or low-level white collar employment. The inhabitants of Fishtown are not your traditional poor but pious lower classes. Religious belief and church attendance are even rarer there than they are in Belmont. Murray suggests that this may make conditions in Fishtown more hopeless because, traditionally, active involvement in church affairs was a training ground for acquiring civic skills. The loss of such “social capital” and the decline of religious scruples open the way to dysfunctional behavior. In the past fifty years the divorce rate has risen sharply, and so has the incidence of illegitimate births. Cohabitation and single motherhood are common. Of those who are married, only slightly more than half said they were happy. About a fourth of Fishtown’s inhabitants between the ages of 30 and 49 have never married. The decay of religion also probably accounts for Fishtown’s disproportionate contribution to the prison population. And many of those who are not in jail are nevertheless on parole or probation. The work ethic has eroded, too. More people are on welfare, and more who could work are claiming physical disability. Unemployment and part-time employment rates have risen, but those affected prefer to watch television rather than look for a job. Murray, going back to an even earlier work of his, Losing Ground (1984), blames the welfare state for allowing people to “game the system” and live without working. No doubt there is much truth in that charge, but it also is true that in our age of increasing technology and globalization, there is less demand in this country for unskilled labor. Still, Murray insists there are jobs to be had for those willing to look for them, as shown by the great increase in illegal immigration. He fails to mention, however, that the underground economy pays Third World wages.

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Do these trends pose a serious problem for America? Murray believes they do. He argues that American exceptionalism was based on four fundamental virtues: stable marriages and families, religiosity, honesty, and industriousness. They combined to create a democratic society characterized by civic involvement, neighborliness, social mobility, and a sense of personal responsibility toward others. The erosion of these virtues presages a social breakdown. Increasing dishonesty and vulgarity in both public and private contemporary life are symptoms that the disease is already pretty far along. Can anything be done to reverse this decline? Like a good social scientist, Murray would look to the elite for leadership. Unfortunately, despite its wealth, intelligence, and power, the new upper class is “hollow at the core” and lacks the self-confidence to lead. Raised on multiculturalism and relativism, it is nonjudgmental. You must not call people lazy who don’t want to work, and children born out of wedlock are not to be called illegitimate. Criminals are not responsible for their behavior: it is “society’s fault.” Promiscuity, cohabitation, and homosexuality are just sexual preferences. Not only does the upper class fail to lead society, but the vulgarities of lower-class life are gradually seeping upward with the spread of “popular culture,” resulting in the “proletarianization of the dominant minority.” In The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray predicted that politicians and intellectuals would eventually come to realize that a dull-witted underclass is biologically condemned to a subculture of crime, addiction, family disorganization, child abuse, and unavailability for work. No amount of social engineering, however vigorous or comprehensive, can change that. They were forced to conclude that the only alternative is to contain those people with stricter policing,

more incarceration, and more social workers to make sure that children are not left to starve. Herrnstein and Murray called this vision of the future “the Custodial State” and predicted it would be run by a highly centralized government to keep local elected officials from pandering to the denizens of the inner city. In Coming Apart, Murray explains how he thinks the cognitive elite will finally abandon its nonjudgmentalism and apply firmer leadership to the task of restoring America’s “founding virtues.” He believes that the gradual implosion of the European welfare state will pose a timely warning to America and that genetic research and advances in the field of evolutionary psychology will provide scientific proof of the indispensable role of the traditional family for the raising of children. As the welfare state disintegrates, people will be forced to assume more responsibility for themselves and their families, and they will discover that they feel better about themselves as they do so. To inspire and reinforce these trends, Murray expresses his hopes for the coming of a new “Great Awakening”—the fourth in America’s history—that would reinvigorate religion and generate more “social capital.” Taken together, these changes would give America’s ruling elites the scientific and moral certainty to stand behind those in Fishtown who want to improve their community and help them make their lumpenproletariat neighbors behave. According to Murray, in Fishtown “there remains a core of civic virtue and involvement that could make headway against [its] problems if the people trying to do the right things get the reinforcement they need—not in the form of government assistance but in the validation of the values they continue to uphold.” The reaffirmation of traditional American values must begin at the top before 87

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spreading downward. But will this really happen? And will the Custodial State—if it arrives—really be compatible with traditional American values?

THE END OF THE CIVIC ER A? Virgil Nemoianu L’ âge du renoncement by Chantal Delsol (Paris: Cerf, 2011)

hantal Delsol (or Delsol-Millon) is known for at least two reasons. The first is that political philosophers of the feminine gender are less than abundant, fewer in Europe than even in North America, where they are not frequent. The second is that she has a kind of sturdy, almost flamboyant courage in confronting the massive troops of political correctness. Her theoretical foundations are unquestionably solid. Thus her two studies on the concept and the practice of subsidiarity are still the best that have been written on the topic (1991, 1993). Likewise her study of modern political philosophies (1991) is in my opinion just about the best introduction to the typology of political doctrines in the twentieth century written so far. Several years ago Chantal Delsol was elected a member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, which, short of the Académie Virgil Nemoianu is William J. Byron Distinguished Professor of Literature and Ordinary Professor of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America. 88

Francaise, is the most prestigious French intellectual institution. Delsol is a well-known and respected columnist in France, and several of her books may be read as expanded commentaries on the political situation and events in the past several decades. Three of these have been published in English by ISI (under the titles Icarus Fallen, The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century, and Unjust Justice); and she has lectured several times in the United States (Georgetown, Catholic University, Faith and Reason Institute, etc.). Chantal Delsol can be placed ideologically in the continuation of Tocqueville, Max Weber, Pierre Boutang, perhaps also Gustave Thibon and others, therefore in the zone of liberal conservatism. For all these reasons, many of us will be somewhat surprised at least by the opening of her new book. The first chapter of this work bluntly asserts that we have entered a radically new historical age, that we are experiencing not just a new movement and phase but rather a seismic transition of the kind that has been encountered in human history only two or three times before. Moreover, the author argues, this change is a regression, an abandonment, a “renouncement.” Now let us stop here for a moment and remember that such a theory is not unique. Two decades or so ago Francis Fukuyama in The End of History (1992) spoke of the end of man, in the tradition of Hegel and the idiom of Nietzsche. (He later admitted he was wrong.) Earlier, Karl Jaspers in Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (1949) had tried to set up the “Achsenzeit” (axial time) as a pivotal turning point or age in historical evolution. Jaspers believed that around 500 BC (a couple of centuries earlier and a couple of centuries later) we witness a coincidence of great thinkers: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras in Greece, the great prophets

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of Judaea, Buddha, Confucius, and others in the East, all of them leading to an awakening and emergence of human self-consciousness. Interestingly, a more recent thinker such as Charles Taylor seems to grant serious attention to this hypothesis. The most relevant from the point of view of Delsol would be Ernst Jünger’s “An der Zeitmauer” (1957), a very important essay in the philosophy of history; she does not cite it, although she is otherwise aware of other works by Jünger in the 1950s to the 1970s. (A French translation appeared in 1994; I do not believe we have a translation in English.) I say that it is the most relevant because, in a somewhat more visionary than empirical register, Jünger expresses a transformational theory that is quite close to that now put forward by Delsol. Back to our book, however: according to Chantal Delsol, a whole age of monotheistic religion is coming to an end, after five hundred years or so of gradual decline. We will return, she believes, to the modes of “wisdom,” by which she understands a combination of Stoicism, Epicureanism, Confucianism, and, yes, pragmatism. In fact, she turns repeatedly to the academic visit of John Dewey in 1919–21 to China (Delsol erroneously writes 1907–9), where some kind of mutual theoretical embrace was supposed to have taken place. That Dewey was enthusiastic about Chinese intellectual life and in turn was enthusiastically received by Chinese academics is beyond any doubt. This new age begins, according to her, slowly around 1500 and reaches its completion and victory in our days. Truth is being replaced by “wisdom,” God by nature; the primacy of ethics over religion becomes absolute; the “royal status of man” (a term she uses repeatedly) is abandoned; “why” is replaced by “how” (the instrumental, utilitarian, and practical have precedence in both

theory and practice); the whole architecture of meanings and values that had prevailed for 2,500 years or so crumbles. Consensus seeking is increasingly used instead of democratic debate, the foundations of prevailing public worldviews are now frequently “myths” (by which Delsol understands statements that are neither true nor false). Sacrality does not disappear; it just abandons transcendence and finds itself located in a global immanence, both pantheistic and syncretic, labeled by Delsol “oceanic mysticism.” The search for truth and progress (not only under the sign of religion but even under the sign of various ideologies or philosophies) is in a marked decline; modest and local satisfactions seem preferable. Human dignity tends to give place to actual human superfluity. To use the terminology of Oakeshott, the fragile but important balance between universitas and societas seems definitively broken. This regressive movement toward apathy is not due to some kind of objective and inevitable historical determinism of the kind assumed by Hegel and most post-Hegelians. Nor does the author attribute it to any “conspiratorial” activities. Rather it is the outcome of the very hubris of the prevailing precedent system of values or of its components. Truth had been profaned by the despotisms of Reason; salvation was corrupted by millenarian totalitarianism; patriotism was turned into nationalism, and so on. It should be said that here more insistence on clarity would have helped. The examples of hubris adduced are encountered mostly in the past few centuries, whereas the general process of regression is supposed to have begun already around 1500. This is not necessarily an incapacitating contradiction in Delsol’s argument; we can easily accept that adversities might have emerged at any (early) point, but they would have gained overwhelming force because of the faults and the 89

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exaggerations of the principal value system as manifested later. A more patient explanation of the mechanism, however, might have been more convincing. Most of the above-enumerated signs of abandonment and renunciation had been noticed and described by numerous intellectual commentators (if anything, one could add to, lengthen, and strengthen Delsol’s list), but seldom have I seen such a coherent depiction: relativism and indolent resignation on the ideal level and the practical consequences thereof in human life and behavior. The tone of Chantal Delsol in these early chapters is interesting: nostalgic and elegiac, with light regret and even lighter irony, hiding perhaps a layer of genuine sadness. To give a small sample (in my translation): “Let us remember that with us Christianity had been for almost twenty centuries the compass of human life; it inspired its world vision, it sent out hope, it triggered the idea of progress; it invented modern democracy on the foundation of monastic practices; it promoted the division of governmental institutions and the establishment of legal institutions, separate branches of government and the rule of law; it indirectly gave rise to human rights; it implanted the certainty of individual dignity. All arts and letters are rooted in it. Everyday morals no less than governmental morals used to appeal to it.” Yet this melancholy tone changes in the last two or three chapters. At this point the author begins to unveil what appear to be the threatening implications of a radical change in the existential horizons of the Western world, or perhaps of the human species as a whole. The cornerstone of Delsol’s suspicions and doubts appears to be the replacement of democracy by the search for consensus. She compares the latter to what she calls palabres, that is, the kind of discussions more often encountered in archaic, tribal, clan-type 90

communities, which are quests for unanimous agreement. By contrast, democracy was and ought to be, she believes, a robust wrestling between competing philosophies or political standpoints. Such natural rivalry is now fading, she suggests. Who and what replace serious debate? It is precisely the technical / managerial subject matter of the current public discussions (the emphasis on the “how”) that increasingly eliminates first some individuals and groups but then even common sense and natural reason themselves from genuine and substantial participation. Decisions are increasingly reserved for “specialists,” for a thinner and thinner category “in the know”; leadership is transferred and deputized. The author cites the unabashed statement of a major French public figure about a decision of national interest: “The essential is not whether you agree or disagree with me, but whether you have fully understood what I said.” In one emphatic section, Delsol declares that relativistic nihilism is only and can only be a transitional, limited stage, soon to be replaced by authoritarianism. More generally, Delsol believes that we now witness the beginnings of an authoritarian-technocratic system of governance. Perhaps one concealed reason, we are told, is that there is a deep mistrust in the “simplistic” conservative instincts of the masses. (Personally, I am here reminded of a French historian’s observation that after 1815 the disastrous error of the Bourbons was not granting universal suffrage immediately, which would have consolidated and ensured their throne.) Likewise, culture with its sophisticated grammar of meanings (a complex “cosmos”) is being deconstructed in order to permit the full flowering of a pacifist syncretism, steered by the “wisdoms” emitted by the “specialists.” (Surprisingly, Delsol does not include in her definition of the new elites

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“the chattering classes” of the media.) The passivity and indifference of most citizens result in a waning of dynamism and hope and a multiplication of dark, even apocalyptic scenarios, incessantly brooded over. Even while I agree broadly with Delsol’s analyses, I have to demur on a few points. Her work is clearly parochial. It is a largely correct depiction of the sociocultural environment of western Europe but not of the world. Thus we know well that, while all or most of the symptoms adduced can be recognized in North America, they are not (or not yet) prevalent there; the dice have not been rolled, conflicting forces are at play, the future is still in the balance. Likewise the “roll-back of religion” is evident in western Europe but not in eastern Europe, and even less in the Southern Hemisphere. Anybody familiar with the research and the studies of Philip Jenkins will immediately respond and object with abundant arguments and evidence: Christianity grows dramatically and ripens substantially; it does not decline over the largest parts of the globe. One may additionally look at the condition of Islam and Hinduism, neither of which finds itself in ruins. (Delsol herself mentions in passing samples of diverging views: considered critical positions by the Singapore leader Lee Kuan-Yew, whom many describe as a genuinely Aristotelian leader, well-known essays by Solzhenitsyn and Zinoviev, the Islamic critiques of the West, and the very remarkable alternative declaration of universal human rights composed by Russian Orthodox intellectuals and clergy and hardly known in the West.) Delsol’s last chapter is highly interesting. It evokes some options for those dissatisfied with the heavy-handed regime change and regime instauration that she posits. Inside the modified horizons, despite an emphasis on the individual person, Delsol recognizes

(like so many others) the establishment of an increasingly matriarchal system and the marginalization of heroic, virile, or enterprising virtues. Once association and solidarity as institutional modes tend to disappear, “piracy” (of the individual or of small gangs) begins to flourish. Short of this open adoption of antisocial behavior and values, the better endowed opt toward a “Thebaide” solution, after the name of the southern Egyptian desert province where in the third and fourth centuries solitaries and hermits, individually or in small groups. invented the conditions for early monasticism. Alternatively, Ernst Jünger’s “Waldgang” had delineated (symbolically) a resort to and retreat in “the forest” as a valid existential option. Those of us who have spent some of our lives under communist oppression can immediately recognize the credibility of such a mode of life. (To become again personal and subjective: I was particularly glad to discover here a parallel with the idea of an archipelago of external and internal fortifications as outlined in my own book Postmodernism and Cultural Identities.) Despite everything, Chantal Delsol’s essay remains a text of pessimism and disenchantment. In my opinion this is precisely the reason it should be read and become an object of reflection. (An English translation would be highly welcome.) No, I do not believe that she has projected for us a certain and necessary outline of the future. I do take in earnest her scenario, however: I admit its possibility, and I consider it as a warning that thoughtful persons should meditate on and keep in mind.

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LITER ATURE AS LIFE VOCATION: THE EXAMPLE OF AUSTIN WARREN Aaron Urbanczyk The Letters of Austin Warren, edited by George Panichas (Macon, GA: Mercer UP, 2011)

“I

t is a rare pleasure unreservedly to recommend a book.” Thus wrote Austin Warren, eminent modern literary theorist and critic, while reviewing a collection of essays on American literature of which he wholeheartedly approved. The same must be said, with equal enthusiasm and approval, of the late George Panichas’s edition of The Letters of Austin Warren. It is a rare delight, especially in this age of virtual communication, to sample the letters of a truly great epistolary artist. Austin Warren was a man of immense erudition and a master stylist; his Letters ranks among the very best volumes of correspondence in the English language. Yet perhaps this collection’s greatest contribution is its power of example and memory. In The Letters of Austin Warren, the reader is introduced anew to a figure hardly recognized today, especially in university circles: the humanist and man of letters. This learned teacher and scholar, from his place in the university, has a sacred public duty: with patience and humility he must teach, guide, correct, illuminate, and elevate those within Aaron Urbanczyk is dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Aquinas College in Nashville, Tennessee. 92

his charge. Austin Warren’s letters, which span the entirety of his adult life, document a brilliant literary mind persisting in this lofty vocation. Austin Warren (1899–1986) is ranked among the most influential literary scholars of his era. He was Irving Babbitt’s MA student at Harvard. After completing his doctorate at Princeton, Warren taught successively at Boston University, the University of Iowa (where he began a lifelong friendship with the comparativist René Wellek), and the University of Michigan, where he taught mostly graduate students for twenty years prior to his retirement in 1968. Warren is best remembered for his landmark book, coauthored with Wellek, Theory of Literature (1949), which is one of the most influential and enduring treatises of literary theory of the twentieth century. Much like his friend Wellek, Warren resists easy placement in a school of literary criticism. He always felt himself influenced by Babbitt’s “New Humanistic” vision of literature, and as he matured professionally he became very sympathetic to the New Criticism (Warren was friends with many of the southern New Critics). Warren had a lifelong commitment to analyzing literature as a distinct form with its own scaffold of inherent meanings. As a man of letters, he was a model of breadth, erudition, and exploratory scholarship. By modern professional standards, he was quite a paradox. As a scholar he was narrowly regional in one regard: he always considered himself a citizen of New England and a “New England regionalist” (he is an authority on early American colonial literature). Yet in another regard he was very much a comparative literature scholar: he wrote widely on English and European authors and frequently taught comparative literature during his tenure at Michigan. Warren humorously reflects upon the breadth of his interests in

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a letter to one of his former students: “Iowa hired me as a ‘New Humanist’ while I had meanwhile become a ‘New Critic.’ Michigan hired me as an ‘American Literature man’ though I had turned into a literary theorist and a Comparativist.” One of the greatest pleasures of perusing Warren’s Letters is coming to realize how intimately and substantially connected he was with the great literary minds of his generation. Acquaintances and friends among his correspondents include T. S. Eliot, Paul Elmer More, Kenneth Burke, R. P. Blackmur, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, Andrew Lytle, and George Panichas. Warren’s cultivation of such correspondents was no mere careerist networking: he sought out among his contemporaries those with whom he could seek insight and wisdom. It is interesting to note that after establishing a familiar correspondence with a select number of his peers, Warren began addressing letters to them in a most curious fashion. Instead of beginning letters with conventional salutations of endearment and friendship, Warren began his letters with the fraternal greeting “Brother.” His later letters to Ransom, Tate, Brooks, Lytle, and Hyatt H. Waggoner often began with “Brother John,” “Brother Allen,” “Brother Cleanth,” and so on. This curiosity is particularly telling, because these correspondents are for the most part not Warren’s most intimate and personal (his letters to his lifelong friend Wallace Fowlie, the French literature critic; his former student Sherman Paul; and the literary critic George Panichas, among others, stand out for their insight into Warren’s personality and interior life). His sense of fraternal connection with these “Brothers” grew out of a feeling of deep solidarity with fellow scholars, critics, and artists who sought to illumine great texts through

their critical writings. Warren’s epistolary brethren were to a man scholars who sought to mediate the insights of aesthetic expression for the benefit of culture and human society. In calling this select group his “Brothers,” one perceives how lofty Warren’s conception of the teacher, scholar, and critic was. Learned persons exist to convey insight and wisdom with eloquence and generosity; such are the requirements for entrance into the fraternal society of the man of letters as Austin Warren rightly perceived it. Warren seemed to live for the written exchange of ideas and cherished encountering through letters individuals who, like himself, thought deeply about humanistic study. In a letter to his friend in retirement Hyatt Waggoner (noted Hawthorne scholar and professor of American literature at Brown), Warren remarked how he preferred the exchange of letters with his friends to actual physical meetings: “It is notable, and strange, that you and I, who live so near each other, correspond by letter as well as by telephone and conversational visits. . . . In many ways, you and I, like Emily Dickinson, prefer to communicate through the written word, not by the relatively crude encounter of personality in which accidents, as distinguished from essences, unavoidably play so considerable a part.” Even in his most personal letters, Warren always gravitated toward the discussion of ideas, the life of the mind, and the transcendent. With his most cherished correspondents he would discuss the principles of literary theory, the office of the university professor, philosophy, and, most prominently, religion. Warren thought and wrote about religion incessantly, although he was himself more of a “seeker” than a believer. He cites the Bible ubiquitously, and his written idiom bears an inescapably biblical imprint. A few years before his death, Warren wrote Waggoner a 93

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letter discussing religion and the meaning of human existence that concludes with the following line, a line that perhaps best typifies the themes and motives of his lifelong devotion to epistolary exchanges: “I reach out for some permanence, a permanence beyond change.” While he sought out epistolary fellowship with his peers, Warren was no less ardent and enthusiastic a correspondent with his former students, many of whom pursued academic careers themselves. It is impossible not to be touched, indeed inspired, by Warren’s generosity in his lifelong commitment to mentoring his students and junior colleagues through the exchange of letters. Warren had a keen interest in the type of example they would be as teachers, scholars, and human beings. He eagerly read their scholarship, offering encouragement and constructive criticism; wrote on their behalf to help them obtain academic positions; urged them to be generous and authentic with their students; and also took a personal interest in their spiritual and emotional well-being. His long and intimate correspondence with his Iowa student Sherman Paul (who became a prominent scholar himself) is a powerful testimony to Warren’s pastoral care for his “literary flock” of students. In a letter to Paul, Warren encourages his former student (at the letter’s writing an experienced college professor) to embrace the office of university professor as one of high dignity and spiritual importance: “We have been the spiritual (not just intellectual) parents of many, so many. We have been priests and pastors, as, I think, all good professors whom you & I respect must be.” Warren’s use of the pastoral and religious idiom in discussing the professoriate is no idle metaphor; for him it is a literal depiction of the office. What exactly is it that a teacher and critic of literature does? Like a pastor 94

he mediates the text to his students in the congregation of the classroom; and like the theologian, he amplifies the text’s meaning through written commentary and analysis. For Warren, teaching and scholarly writing were intimately linked and the natural cycle of the man of letters; to do one seemed hardly possible without the ballast of the other. In a letter to another former student, Nathan Lyons, Warren enlarges upon his understanding of the professorial vocation in terms of his own life. Warren refers to himself as a man whose concern was acting as a mediator between the sacred texts of literature and the existential needs of the students. That simple office still seems to me the proper concern of the teacher of literature—that, and . . . the production by the teacher of writing of his own of some sort, in some mode. I believe . . . that one must write, and publish, to confront his own peers . . . but I believe still more that a man’s writing, out of his own center, is the teacher’s, the rabbi’s, own therapy and his own “working out his salvation, with fear and trembling.”

Warren’s message—that the university exists to train the soul as well as the body, that the literature professor is pastor and priest in service of the sacred as well as conveyer of information—could hardly be more timely. The field of literary studies has quite literally lost its center; it no longer understands why a text is valuable, what texts should be taught, and to what purpose. Warren reminds us that the literature professor must exercise humility before great texts and not seek to subdue them in the name of some fashionable ideology. Further, teaching literary texts in the classroom isn’t for the sake of social engineering as much as for

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the elevating of hearts and minds. Warren was closely aligned with the formalism of the New Critics, but like his New Critic “Brothers,” his critical formalism was itself the vehicle whereby the critic, teacher, and student could experience literature as powerfully transformative for human lives. Further, the religious idiom in Warren’s letters, always used to illuminate the role of the scholar and teacher, is particularly significant due to the fact that for most of his adult life, Warren was personally agnostic. For many years he clung to the form and practice of Episcopalianism, but he always considered himself a “seeker” after religious certitude, a certitude he never felt he possessed in this life. It is thus doubly significant that Warren retained the theological metaphor in his articulation of the professorial office: he had no narrowly sectarian purpose for doing so; he simply believed the teaching of literature to be inherently transcendent and better explained in the language of religious praxis than secular educational theory. Finally, in Warren’s view, the academic, the literary man, must write. It is patently clear that Warren did not intend “writing” as merely the production of scholarship for the sake of reputation and career promotion. For Warren, writing was the great complement to the life of study and teaching. Warren literally believed it was impossible to know himself, his own mind and thoughts, the depth of his being and the significance of his own views, without the act of writing. Well into his retirement, Warren wrote to Hyatt Waggoner that “the word writing carries for me an intense and serious freight: it means nothing less than self-confrontation and reality-confrontation.” This fact was as true of his letters as of his prolific scholarly writings, and in some regards shines through more in his correspondence. Warren loved his epistolary

friendships because such exchanges, which often endured for many years, were profoundly incarnational: two minds, seeking to share their depths, took on the body of language and text, and in this miraculous exchange both parties found consolation, illumination, and wisdom. Through a long life with considerable hardships, including the untimely death of his first wife, a series of mental breakdowns in midcareer, and the partial loss of one of his limbs in retirement, Warren continued to reach out to his epistolary friends unflaggingly for sustenance. Warren once wrote a friend that “it is one of my lifetime missions to try and perpetuate . . . the practice of the art of letter-writing,” and he was fond of referring to the “epistolary art” as “one of the measures and hallmarks of civilization.” The Letters of Austin Warren amply demonstrates that Warren was an “epistolary artist” of the highest order. With its publication, The Letters now joins a lengthy bibliography of Warren’s writings. Warren was the author not only of his celebrated Theory of Literature; he published two volumes of essays during his life, and another was published posthumously (Rage for Order, Connections, and In Continuity: The Last Essays of Austin Warren). He wrote two major books on New England literary figures, New England Saints and The New England Conscience, a book on Richard Crashaw, and an autobiography titled Becoming What One Is (published posthumously). Further, his uncollected essays and reviews are too numerous to recount. Yet one might venture that Warren’s Letters is his most precious literary legacy, and the one from which the republic of letters might take the most inspiration. In the conclusion of his autobiography, Warren wrote the following: “The spiritual center and motivation of highest usefulness in one’s profession is the finding of one’s vocation.” The Letters of Austin 95

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Warren is the chronicle of a teacher, scholar, and man of letters finding his vocation. His letters show Warren to be a man who pursued the truth, loved his friends honestly and loyally, poured himself out for his students, and cherished his correspondents, urging them to seek after permanence as he always did. It is sincerely hoped that The Letters of Austin Warren finds its readership and that men such as he was do not altogether disappear from the groves of academe.

“WE DON'T DO UPLIFT”: TONY JUDT’S FREE INTELLIGENCE R. J. Stove The Memory Chalet by Tony Judt (New York: Penguin, 2010)

hese days, as Christopher Hitchens’s heroically embarrassing career confirmed anew, any sordid Dionysian demagogue with a laptop and a grievance can find himself hailed by some dubiously literate well-wishers as “a modern Orwell.” In nine cases out of ten, his worldview, far from having the slightest resemblance to that of 1984’s author—or indeed being burdened by intellectual coherence of any kind—is merely a more loquacious updating of Marlon Brando’s fateful grunt in The Wild One: R. J. Stove lives in Melbourne, Australia, and is the author of César Franck: His Life and Times. 96

Bewildered Teenage Girl: What are you rebelling against? Brando: What’ve you got?

Nonetheless, as theologians assure us, a desire cannot exist without the possibility of its being satisfied, and the very fact that so many bogus neo-Orwells infest the current literary scene is no reason to deny the good work of genuine ones. And of the genuine ones, none was more cultivated, more conscious of his literary responsibilities, more humane, or less likely to play the Cher Maître than Tony Judt, who died (still only sixtytwo) after some of the most hideous physical and mental sufferings that mortal man can undergo. Calling The Memory Chalet a worthy memorial to a life valorously borne fails to hint at even half its significance. That the materials included in this posthumously issued work could have been committed to paper at all counts as nothing short of a miracle, from a man who himself refused to believe in miracles. What besieged Judt over his last two years, and finally killed him, was Lou Gehrig’s Disease: or, to give it its scientific name, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). It is a progressive neurodegenerative condition for which predisposing genetic factors can, but need not, be operating (no such factors appear to have occurred in Judt’s case), and geographical factors can, but need not, be operating also (it is found with baffling frequency in, would you believe, Guam). No diet, however healthy, and no exercise schedule, however demanding, will stave off ALS if it strikes. There can be only ever an outside chance of alleviating the early symptoms. A cure remains impossible. For the victim, the outcome must be so unremittingly nightmarish that only a Dante could do it full justice, but Judt, in his detached and wry style, gives an idea:

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First you can no longer write independently, requiring either an assistant or a machine in order to record your thoughts. Then your legs fail and you cannot take in new experiences, except at the cost of such logistical complexity that the mere fact of mobility becomes the object of attention rather than the benefits that mobility itself can confer. Next you begin to lose your voice . . . quite literally in that the diaphragm muscles can no longer pump sufficient air across your vocal cords to furnish them with the variety of pressure required to express meaningful sound. By this point you are almost certainly quadriplegic and condemned to long hours of silent immobility, whether or not in the presence of others. For someone wishing to remain a communicator of words and concepts, this poses an unusual challenge.

This challenge, for an amazingly long period, Judt surmounted. Paralyzed below the neck from October 2009, he managed to deliver soon afterward—at New York University’s Skirbeck Hall, decked out with a breathing tube that he described sardonically as “facial Tupperware”—a speech lasting one hundred minutes. His lecture’s text almost gloried in his incapacity either for tolerating, or for dispensing, sentimental bilge. To the audience of two thousand, marveling at his heroism and doubtless longing for him to make contact with his Inner Oprah, he peremptorily explained: “I’m English. We don’t do uplift.” Only in August 2010 did the man described by London’s Guardian newspaper as possessing, even in extremis, “the liveliest mind in New York” surrender to that easeful death with which, by then, he must have been far more than half in love.

The Memory Chalet takes the form of essays that can be read in almost any order but that taken as a whole provide a remarkably complete picture of Judt’s development. If he had never written a word on history, sociology, or politics, he would still be worth reading about by virtue of his oddball nurture. Yet probably the oddball nurture itself contributed to the merits of his writing. It certainly ensured his own permanent position among what he calls, in this book, “edge people”: people who cannot be pigeonholed in terms of identity politics (one of Judt’s abiding detestations), people so culturally variegated that they could not be power maniacs even if they wanted to be. He notes: “I suppose I should seek comfort in the familiar insult of ‘rootless cosmopolitan.’ But . . . far from being rootless, I am all too well rooted in a variety of contrasting heritages.” Neither Judt’s Belgian Jewish father nor his Eastern European Jewish mother had the smallest concern, even dietary, for creedal dictates. It is notable, and somehow characteristic, that young Tony lived on food as boring and flavorless as that of any postwar English Gentile. (Years after the United Kingdom’s statutory rationing ended, foreign nutriment remained so inconceivable that one producer at the Panorama television program devised for April Fool’s Day 1957 a hoax documentary about spaghetti farming, in the serene confidence that the British masses would believe every word of it. They did. Many viewers telephoned the BBC to ask where they could obtain spaghetti bushes for their own gardens.) With his parents Judt spoke, at home, both English and French, as if such bilingualism were the most natural thing in the world for a lower-middle-class boy in South London. Judt acquired other foreign languages at his nondescript, unglamorous, secular high school (Emanuel College) in the nick of 97

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time—from 1959 to 1965, before Education Secretary Tony Crosland proclaimed: “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every [expletive deleted] grammar school in England. And Wales. And Northern Ireland.” This Carthaginian peace Crosland imposed, ensuring that Judt’s narrative of Emmanuel College portrays an England now unimaginably distant. No Boy’s Own Paper wistfulness attaches to Judt’s account of his adolescent education. Most children at Emanuel in 1959 had never seen a black, Chinese, or Indian immigrant, with the result that they concentrated their ethnic abhorrence upon the one minority visible each day in the playground: himself. “Frequent low-level anti-Jewish slurs and name-calling,” Judt sighs, “were not particularly frowned upon.” There were, admittedly, consolations of a rather boorish kind. Judt’s profile of the schoolteacher who first taught him German, Joe Craddock, displays beneath the outward exasperation an underlying fondness. Although in verbal terms Craddock was an insufferable sadist—he inspired such fear with his tongue that he never needed to administer corporal punishment, not that any boys would have dared complain about him even if he had—he obtained results, and was, in his cruel fashion, a man of honor: Joe would be impossible today . . . he was infamously politically incorrect even by the standards of his age. Understanding full well that the only credible challenge to his monopoly of our attention would be the attractions of the opposite sex, he was brutally dismissive of nascent libidos: “If ye want te play with girls, don’t waste my time! You can ’ave ’em any time; but this is yer only chance to learn this language and you can’t do both.”

Nowadays, almost no one is even taught German. The consensus appears to be that the young mind can handle but one language at a time, preferably the easiest. In American high schools, no less than in Britain’s egregiously underperforming comprehensive schools, students are urged to believe that they have done well—or at least the best they could. Teachers are discouraged from distinguishing among their charges; it is simply not done to do as Joe did and praise first-rate work while damning the lesser performers.

From King’s College, Cambridge, Judt took away a lasting esteem not for his professors, who appear to have left almost no mark upon an intellect already well stocked, but for the “bedders.” What is, or was, a “bedder”? Judt reveals: “Bedders, like scouts [their Oxford equivalent], were [ladies] expected to prepare a fire (in the days of open-hearth heating), clean the young gentlemen’s rooms, make their beds and change their linen, undertake minor shopping expeditions on their behalf, and generally provide them with the services to which they had presumably become accustomed in the course of their upbringing.” When the undergraduate hidalgo had overimbibed, and (upon returning to his rooms) could articulate his Weltschmerz only by profuse emissions of projectile vomit, there the bedder would be, cleaning up the consequent mess without a syllable of reproach. It will surprise no one familiar with English mores to learn that (a) the bedders derived mostly from a working-class background, which cut them off, however great their aptitude, from any chance of higher schooling, and (b) this background made them authentic social conservatives long after the Cantabridgian student demographic had come to be dominated by spoilt

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Maoists from Eton. In short, the Cambridge dialectic of bedder versus student resembled that of a female Jeeves versus a latter-day (and newly noxious) Wooster. We need simply contemplate the current British reign of that grotesque, cartoonish man-child “Dave” Cameron to realize that, from this contest, Wooster emerged victorious. Not that Judt labors this point, or any other point. Just as Orwell deserves honor not only for Animal Farm but also for his miscellaneous musings on common toads, Edwardian murders, and naughty postcards, so Judt deserves honor for the compulsive readability he brings to other nonpolitical subjects. Example: Citroën cars. Who can make Citroën cars an object of fascination for those among us devoid of even a driving license? Answer: Judt can. His father became something of a Citroën obsessive, this at a time when British roads (which included no motorways before 1958) lacked not only an abundance of foreign cars but an abundance of cars tout court. Men born before World War I were well into middle age before cars were available to most Europeans. . . . I see him [Judt senior] now as a frustrated man: trapped in an unhappy marriage and doing work which bored and perhaps even humiliated him. Cars—cars to race, cars to discuss, cars to tinker with, and cars to take him home to Europe— were his community. Not caring much for pubs or drink, and with no workmates, he turned the Citroën car into an all-purpose companion and visiting card—culminating in his election to the presidency of the Citroën Car Club of Great Britain. What other men sought and found in alcohol and mistresses, my father sublimated into his love affair with a car company—which no doubt

accounts for my mother’s instinctive hostility to the whole business.

The reviewer’s temptation, as readers will by now have gathered, is to quote without end from Judt’s accounts. Such as his recollections of kibbutz living—“Muscular Judaism”—which at first he cherished. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young and dilettantish fornicators living off the Israeli taxpayer’s teat was very heaven. (Judt notes the resemblance between kibbutz socializing and the polyamorous collectives from nineteenth-century America, of which the Oneida Community ranks among the most disreputable.) Then, alas for Judt’s Middle East future, his fellow kibbutzniks learned the appalling news that he planned to study history at Cambridge. They might have countenanced him leaving Israel to attempt a degree in, say, electrical engineering (though even for that they would have expected Judt to wait until he was twenty-five). Wanting a history degree they viewed as treason. For all their strategic discussions’ pretentiousness, they felt toward the life of the mind not mere indifference but a truculent, visceral scorn. Allowing himself no anger, only sorrow, Judt reflects: Visiting Kibbutz Machanayim [in 1969 with a girlfriend] I encountered “Uri,” a fellow orange-picker of earlier days. Without bothering to acknowledge me, much less trouble himself with the usual greetings, Uri passed in front of us, pausing only to demand: “Ma ata oseah kan?” (“What are you doing here?”) . . . I was lost to the cause and thus effectively “dead.”

After Cambridge, he studied—by invitation—at Paris’s École Normale Supérieure. He retains no illusions, assuming he ever had them, about the chief problem of 99

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French intellectual life: its frequent reluctance to engage in what dimmer minds are apt to call the reality-based community. At one point he cites a French expert who, having witnessed England’s first locomotive engine, reported back to King Louis-Philippe: “The thing is impossible. It cannot work.” “Now there,” Judt observes, “was a French intellectual.” Still, Judt is too erudite to feel for French culture the ordinary emotion of AngloSaxon empiricist contempt, most of which comprises mere elaborate rephrasings of “The wogs begin at Calais.” Judt quotes Raymond Aron—no fantasist he—as saying of his own École years: “I have never met so many intelligent men gathered in such a small space.” A civilization that produces so intimidating a cerebral elite as Aron and his rivals cannot altogether be dismissed, except by those whose entire attitude to serious nonutilitarian scholarship is that of kibbutzniks and of Pol Pot, not to mention of tabloid editors in our own day. (During the 1980s, Judt solved his obligatory midlife crisis by teaching himself to read, write, and speak Czech. How many other fortyish Englishmen could have managed a comparable feat of self-discipline?) The one lacuna in Judt’s mental equipment is, appropriately enough, the one lacuna in Orwell’s. That eloquent absence Evelyn Waugh diagnosed when praising Orwell’s journalism: He [Orwell] has an unusually high moral sense and respect for justice and truth, but he seems never to have been touched at any point by a conception of religious thought and life. . . . He frequently brings his argument to the point when having, with great acuteness, seen the falsity and internal contradiction of the humanist view of life, there seems no alternative but the acceptance of a revealed religion, and then stops short. 100

This policy on Judt’s part becomes first obvious, and then inescapable, when one reads his few references to his own private life and the implications that such multiple marriages as his would have for standards more generally. More alarming is the casual remark Judt drops near The Memory Chalet’s end: “At Cambridge, cool and worldly, I helped a friend arrange an abortion for his girl.” He never again addresses this topic, which does not seem to have troubled him in the longer term. But the moral deadness these words bespeak can hardly be overlooked in retrospect. Would Judt have been equally “cool and worldly” about smothering an infant in its cradle? Did his conscience ever visit him with the faintest realization that by abetting an abortion he had abetted a murder? Nevertheless, Judt went on to experience such diabolical tortures of body and spirit that he could well be said to have done all his time in purgatory well before his funeral. Meanwhile, there is his body of authorial work as a whole to be considered, and for its insights—not least those in The Memory Chalet—we need to exhibit our gratitude. When biographer Philip Ziegler grew increasingly despondent at the misdeeds of his subject Lord Mountbatten, he resorted to placing on his desk a note that read: “Remember that, in spite of everything, he was a great man.” A variant of this would fit Judt. Ultimately, though, there can be no satisfactory conclusion to a study of Judt outside Orwell’s own words (he meant them for Dickens): “a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry—in other words . . . a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.” Amen.

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ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL? Mark G. Malvasi Race and Liberty in America: The Essential Reader, edited by Jonathan Bean (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009) In association with the Independent Institute

o study the past requires a sense of tragedy and perhaps a belief in original sin, “the imagination of disaster,” Henry James called it. The enchantment of Jonathan Bean’s Race and Liberty in America, on the contrary, derives from the “sunny faith” that within fifty years the United States will achieve “ ‘one country, one liberty, one law, for all people without regard to race’ ” (298, 312). Ignored, maligned, or forgotten, classical liberals—“the invisible men and women of the long civil rights movement”—become in these pages the neglected heroes of American history. Undeterred by opposition, defeat, betrayal, and the staggering odds against success, classical liberals have maintained their commitments to limited, constitutional government, free markets, equality before the law, individual rights, racial justice, and a Christian social order. After much trial, hardship, and disappointment, they are sure to prevail. Skepticism may be forgiven. Whatever the merits of Bean’s analysis, the documents he has assembled and his commentary about them constitute not so much Mark G. Malvasi is Isaac Newton Vaughan Professor of History at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. His new book, The Finder and Other Poems, will be published later this year.

a history of the classical liberal tradition and the civil rights movement as a morality play that admits little ambiguity and moves inexorably toward a happy ending. Professor Bean is right to challenge the view that race is a biological reality. Even the most apparently immutable racial characteristics, he shows, can be altered by one act of miscegenation. If there is no biological support for racial difference, then there is no biological defense of racial inequality. Race is not a fact of nature; it is the product of history, an ideological construct that has taught men what physical attributes to notice and what meaning to attach to them. It is no dreamy romanticism to insist as Bean does that there is but one race. Yet, although the “race ‘essence’ is unreal,” Bean also observes that the consequences of racism have been real enough. “If race is a fiction,” he writes, “then it is a fiction worth disposing with because it has done far more harm than good” (308). In the name of compassion, benevolence, and justice, those whom Bean identifies variously as “left-wing” or “diversity” liberals have kept alive the idea of race, determined to wield it as an instrument of their own power. Bean again makes a good point, as far as it goes. Modern liberalism of the sort that he decries offers a legacy of unsolved, and perhaps unsolvable, problems. It might not be too much to say that, in a clinical sense, liberalism has often been iatrogenic, its remedies not worsening but causing the diseases it has then set out to cure. Since the 1930s, left-wing liberals have fashioned an assortment of makeshift strategies to increase spending on social services and to organize the disadvantaged to pressure government to improve their lot. These schemes have not culminated in any meaningful redistribution of wealth and power, but they have realigned the social, political, and economic system to emphasize the importance 101

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of the group and to require the continual intervention of the state to establish and maintain social and political equilibrium. The consequence has been that the United States is now governed by a new, unwritten constitution that differs markedly from the original. The power of government is no longer an evil to be restrained but now is essential for the operation of society. Each disadvantaged interest group, modern liberals contend, must have equal access to that power and the opportunities it engenders to overcome discrimination and to realize the American Dream. Thus, Professor Bean concludes, “diversity” has become “the shibboleth of our age” (309). The program of liberal reform, including much of the legislation enacted in response to the civil rights movement, did not inaugurate the “color-blind society” that Bean still hopes to effect. Ironically, race mattered more than ever, and blacks were defined and judged not as individuals but as members of a group with specific grievances and liabilities that needed to be rectified if justice were to prevail. Government regulations, judicial decisions, and court orders, which consistently set lower standards for blacks, make it impossible to dismiss Bean’s assertion that left-wing liberals regard blacks as inferior to whites. Writing from the perspective of classical liberalism, Bean categorically rejects affirmative action or, as he calls it, “affirmative discrimination,” policy that accords rights to groups rather than to individuals. He appreciates that such initiatives have signaled a departure from the Constitution, which focused on the individual citizen, as well as from the early civil rights movement, which championed legal equality for all. Bean’s examination of race and racial policy distills the intellectual, political, and moral struggle that has long troubled liberalism in the United States. The question that 102

underlies and animates this internecine conflict is, Do citizens have the right to protect their freedom and their property from government interference, or does the state have the obligation to elevate the oppressed even if it means discriminating in their favor? The shift away from individual and toward group rights, which for Bean has posed a grave threat to liberty, began not with the advent of modern liberalism in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries but before the Civil War with, for example, the proposal to reserve the western territories for whites only. The war itself accomplished an even greater transformation in the understanding of liberty—a transformation that Bean fails to acknowledge. Classical liberals embrace what Isaiah Berlin defined as “Negative Liberty,” the two main components of which are freedom from governmental interference and fear of concentrated power. “Positive Liberty,” by contrast, resolves, or merely extinguishes, the tension between liberty and power, applying the latter to advance and sustain the former.1 The Bill of Rights limited the authority of the national government; the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, like those that followed, extended it. In so doing, they revolutionized the political, legal, and constitutional history of the United States. Professor Bean cannot easily situate the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction within the framework of classical liberalism, and his efforts to do so are awkward and unpersuasive. It was, after all, pro-slavery Southerners who espoused the concept of “Negative Liberty” to enjoin the national government from impeding the rights of individual citizens. Bean disregards the Southern vindication of limited government and individual freedom and, at the same time, minimizes the consolidation of power that took place during and after

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the war. “While the Republican Party was more ‘statist’ . . . with regard to the tariff and other issues (for example, Prohibition),” he affirms, “it was less statist with regard to race. . . . In fact, most Republicans desired a speedy reestablishment of federalism” (8–9). The evidence does not support this conclusion. In the end, Bean is compelled to forsake it and to argue instead that slavery, segregation, disfranchisement, and violence were more statist, or at least more damaging, than was the passage of constitutional amendments intended to relieve these oppressive conditions. I emphatically agree that the national government had a political and moral obligation to intercede on behalf of the former slaves. I just as emphatically disagree that such an action reflected the principles of classical liberalism or that the application of those principles could have solved the problem of race. By the time of the Civil War, Northerners had come to regard the South as economically backward, politically corrupt, and morally degenerate, but they shared with their Southern antagonists the conviction that private property was sacrosanct. The devotion to property rights, which is fundamental to classical liberalism, arrested the development of an independent community of free blacks in the postwar South. Neither the Radical Republicans nor Northern businessmen could tolerate the confiscation and redistribution of private property, even if it did belong to those whom they considered rebels and traitors. As a consequence, they rejected Thaddeus Stevens’s program of land distribution and debt relief that would have secured the economic welfare and the political rights of both free blacks and landless whites. Poverty and racism soon eroded nearly all the freedmen had gained. Acquiescence in a racial dictatorship is hardly what Bean had in mind when he

commended the Republicans’ lack of statism in their engagement with the race question. “There is no real instinct to protect those who can already protect themselves,” remarked George Santayana.2 But what is to become of those who cannot? Are they, like the freedmen, to be abandoned to their fate in a heartless world? For Professor Bean, government itself is the problem. In his compelling denunciations of affirmative action, the welfare state, and the inept bureaucracy that mismanages them, he reveals that modern liberalism has destroyed the capacity of government to perform its legitimate and necessary functions. “Individual freedom from government control” is thus the solution he proposes. Competitive individualism and unrestrained enterprise, and the freedom of movement, opportunity, and choice, are, in Bean’s analysis, natural rights, “neither ‘progressive’ nor ‘conservative,’ neither left nor right” (2). They are, like classical liberalism itself, politically neutral and equally accessible to everyone. Yet, the liberal vision of America, whether in its classical or modern expression, has always been predicated on continued economic prosperity and upward social mobility, which made tolerable the unjust distribution of wealth and power. In an age of long-term, if not permanent, stagnation and decline, with the palliatives of welfare no longer available to reinforce the system, the liberal “philosophy of individualism” (2) condemns millions of Americans, black and white, to chronic unemployment, inadequate health care, unrelenting poverty, abandonment in old age, and miserable lives. What then are we to do about all those “lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows” whose existence is now without purpose, meaning, or hope?3 No easy or obvious answers emerge. For all their prudent warnings about the dangers of governmental power, conservatives have too often been 103

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racist and xenophobic. Notwithstanding the idiocies of affirmative action and the welfare state, modern liberalism has saved countless black, Latino, poor, working- and middle-class Americans from disaster. Leftwing liberals have nonetheless articulated no coherent philosophy of reform; have occasioned no bold redistribution of wealth and power; have themselves ignored, tolerated, or encouraged racism and xenophobia; and have promoted mass consumption to temper or obscure persistent social and racial injustice. Classical liberals, meanwhile, despite their admirable endorsement of individual freedom, have been too quick to expose helpless men and women to the anarchy of the market, to ignore the social relations of power that disguise exploitation, to assume that success equals merit, and to consign those who fail to the scrap heap. Perhaps the cardinal virtue of Race and Liberty in America is Professor Bean’s resolve to persuade Americans that they still have choices and that the choices they make still matter. His optimism about the future and the efficacy of classical liberalism seems unwarranted, but optimism is preferable to despair even though both may cloud judgment and distort reality. The American people are not doomed forever to navigate between ideologies that now spawn only political bickering and cant. They can abjure the legacy of racism and xenophobia that tarnishes their history. They can confront the unjust distribution of wealth and power that burdens all citizens and that sentences the poorest to the wretched lives that have made necessary an inane and barbarous welfare system. They can demand that the economy operate for the benefit of those who toil in it and that excellence in work brings a fair reward. Whether the American people and their leaders have the political will and moral intelligence to redirect the government and 104

the nation toward a more ethical and sane way of life remains to be seen. It is more certain that failure to do so would constitute a tragedy of enduring moment. 1 2 3

Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 118–72. George Santayana, Life of Reason, or the Phases of Human Progress (New York: Scribner, 1905–6 ), 38. T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Collected Poems (New York, San Diego, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 5.

ORIGINAL SIN AND THE CHRISTIAN RESPONSE TO COMMUNISM D. G. Hart God-Fearing and Free: A Spiritual History of America’s Cold War by Jason W. Stevens (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010)

enry P. Van Dusen’s 1951 book, God in Education: A Tract for the Times, sits inactively on the shelves of many libraries across the United States where it has not been deaccessioned altogether. It is no longer interesting to many patrons. When Scribner’s published the book by Union Theological Seminary’s president—the man who was technically Reinhold Niebuhr’s D. G. Hart is visiting professor of history at Hillsdale College and author, most recently, of From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism.

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boss—the publisher must have thought that the author’s theological content would supply timeless truths necessary to draw readers beyond Van Dusen’s era. The author feared the effects of secularism on American higher education, which were simply a symptom of the nation’s spiritual decline. So pronounced was the United States’ plight that Van Dusen had no trouble finding political and military leaders to second his concern. In his foreword, Van Dusen quoted General Douglas MacArthur, who asserted that the West was facing a malaise that was “basically theological.” Van Dusen also cited John Foster Dulles, former senator from New York and soon to be secretary of state, who argued that America needed to recover its religious roots for an adequate public morality. Readers unfamiliar with the workings of American Presbyterianism would not have noticed the lengthy ties between Van Dusen and Dulles. The connection between these prominent figures in America’s Protestant establishment went back at least to 1922, when Van Dusen refused to affirm the virgin birth of Christ during ordination exams in the northern Presbyterian Church, a refusal that nurtured fundamentalists’ suspicions. Dulles, then a prominent New York attorney and active layman in the church, provided legal counsel to Van Dusen during formal church proceedings. Dulles had also risen to defend the most prominent of New York’s modernists, Harry Emerson Fosdick. Also lost on readers ignorant of the ties between Van Dusen and Dulles was the irony of liberal Protestants on the theological left during the 1920s winding up on the cultural and political right three decades later. Part of Protestant liberalism’s point in the 1920s had been to recognize that divine revelation was not the only source of truth and moral guidance: that science, history, and human consciousness also illuminated human

existence. But by the 1950s, liberals like Van Dusen, with the assistance of Dulles, were arguing for a return to divine truth to remedy America’s woes. They had seen, presumably, where human experience could go without divine assistance. Van Dusen goes unmentioned in Jason W. Stevens’s spiritual history of the Cold War, God-Fearing and Free, but if he had cited the Union president, he would have had no trouble detecting the irony of Van Dusen’s apparent reversal. Stevens’s subject is the religious turn that took place in American culture at the same time as the postwar revival. In the nation’s movies and novels, in the discourse of public intellectuals— and not simply among America’s Protestant preachers and theologians—writers, professors, and foreign policy analysts resorted to theological tropes to explain the United States’ new responsibilities as a superpower engaged in a Cold War with Soviet communism. The doctrine that American intellectuals found most congenial was original sin. As Stevens portrays the period from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, the United States renounced its earlier ideals of innocence in favor of original sin. This dose of realism provided ballast for the hard work of combating communism. Of course, the nation’s leading catechist in this doctrine was one of Van Dusen’s professors, Reinhold Niebuhr. The recent widespread invocation of Niebuhr during America’s war in Iraq and its related conflict with terrorism has demonstrated how useful the Union professor’s arguments can be for conducting the dirty work of modern warfare. His realism assists the prosecution of war without falling into the errors of self-righteous idealism or innocent pacifism. Stevens’s account is less history than cultural archaeology. His excavation of the 105

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postwar mood as embodied in various cultural expressions from roughly 1945 to 1965 is masterful. His narrative, such as it is, is less so. He argues that the Cold War doctrine of original sin replaced progressive, secular, and rational models for government and society. In Stevens’s own words, “Theologians, statesmen, psychologists, intellectuals, and writers sought grounds, where possible, to cooperate in dispelling American democracy’s guiltfree illusions so that the country might ‘more realistically’ act upon honest self-knowledge” (25). With the watch words of “contrition” and “vigilance,” the era’s churches and theologians shored up democracy against “any lurking possibility of corruption that might undercut the nation’s greater war with evil.” Consequently, while a return to religion might lead to Woodrow Wilson’s sanctimonious idealism, in the 1950s original sin became a way to admit the sinfulness of war and politics while combating the greater sins of communism and totalitarianism. Two virtues stand out in Stevens’s exploration of the politics, religion, and culture of the Cold War era. The first is his close reading in a wide range of expressions. From Dulles and George Kennan on U.S. foreign policy and Niebuhr and Billy Graham on spiritual truths to Theodore Adorno and Richard Hofstadter on anticommunism’s authoritarianism and James Baldwin and Flannery O’Connor on social justice among whites and blacks, Stevens provides an impressive commentary on the dominant themes and genres of 1950s American culture without forcing his subjects into the mold of his argument. The second virtue is the book’s less-thanreverential treatment of Niebuhr, who for this writer has enjoyed more of a following than is deserved. For Stevens, despite all the talk of realism and hand-wringing stemming from original sin, Niebuhr wound up providing 106

the theological rationale for Dulles’s hawkish foreign policy. In this respect Stevens sees important parallels between Niebuhr and Graham. Although the social ethicist regarded Graham’s revivalist faith as simplistic, Niebuhr’s neo-orthodox theology and Graham’s neo-evangelicalism functioned within public discourse in significantly similar ways. According to Stevens: Both tried to position themselves as theologically conservative voices with respect to both modernism and fundamentalism. Both tied the rise of totalitarianism to forms of human pride, the denial of sin, and the pretenses of modern philosophies (naturalism, idealism, and bourgeois liberalism). Both sought to be prophets respectful of the Judgment, Atonement, and Christic grace transcending American power, even as they restored to the nation a portion of its exceptional, or elect, status. Most importantly, Niebuhr and Graham each enlisted different portions of the American public for aims that postwar policy-makers acknowledged could have no popular support if presented only as pertaining to national interests. . . . Instead of seeing Niebuhr as Graham’s foe, we should see both Niebuhr and Graham more clearly as torn halves of the same flag. (42)

Less persuasive is Stevens in addressing the significance of this theological turn during the Cold War for current understandings of the United States’ war on terror or its presence in the Middle East. In the epilogue the author explores the New Left critique of Cold War realism and finds much truth in the Left’s complaint that a recognition of society’s immorality was frequently a means to avoid the genuine guilt in America’s imperialistic fight against communism. Stevens

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even says that the New Left’s faults, which were many, did not include utopianism. If anything, he argues, America needs more utopianism and less self-satisfied realism. This may explain why at the very end he encourages the Left, which he believes is right to reject the Religious Right for baptizing the Republican Party and the Iraq War, not to throw out the baby of evangelical religion with the bathwater of George W. Bush. Stevens appeals specifically to the “evangelical legacy of social reform, including abolition and progressivism” (320). As attractive as progressive evangelicals, whether in the era of Charles Finney or Josiah Strong, may be to contemporary Americans, Stevens does not solve a fundamental dilemma—namely, that progressive evangelicalism cultivated the likes of Henry Van Dusen, Reinhold Niebuhr, and their secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. In point of fact, Niebuhr’s realism may have been the most modest and restrained of American Protestant efforts to justify the United States’ status as a redeemer nation. What Stevens fails to consider is whether Americans might have been better off to pass over theology and metaphysics on the way to readings in political theory and international relations for considerations of the United States’ foreign policy. After all, questions of guilt and innocence when it comes to war are much less conducive to responsible conduct by elected and appointed officials than those of order, stability, and justice (of the Aristotelian sort). If Stevens had spent more time reflecting on what Thucydides rather than Jesus has to teach about statecraft, he might have seen that Niebuhr’s major mistake was to shift the category of morality from persons (moral man) to institutions (immoral society). In which case, the way to recover a constrained foreign policy is not to aim for innocence or idealism but prudence.

NOTES FROM THE AMERICAN UNDERGROUND Derek Turner Under the Nihil by Andy Nowicki (San Francisco: CounterCurrents Publishing, 2011)

erhaps Andy Nowicki ought to be a little worried. The Savannah-based Catholic novelist is developing something of a habit of chronicling crazed men who are always on the verge of doing something utterly appalling. In The Columbine Pilgrim, he gave us the unforgettable Tony Meander, a whining wretch who seeks to exorcise a whole life of inadequacies by becoming sickly obsessed with the Columbine killers and eventually replicating their actions on the tormentors of his own youth. Now he has served up for simultaneous execration and empathy another stunted soul who similarly seeks “revenge” for a lifetime of real or perceived slights. Sometimes these characters are a shade too convincing for comfort, as if some Dostoyevskian doppelgänger is crouched gibbering behind the thin veil of the narrative about to burst through into the real-life headlines. Nowicki would appreciate the comparison because the Russian’s Notes from the Underground has been a formative influence. That work’s first lines might have been uttered by any of Nowicki’s pimply protagonists: “I am a sick man. . . . I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.” But as in Derek Turner is editor of the Quarterly Review. 107

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Dostoyevsky, in even the most unsparing of Nowicki’s writings can be detected a deep well of compassion—for everyone trapped by modernity, a multitude of mostly First World souls swimming sadly in circles in a superficial space. Even the apparently “evil” have some depth, some breadth, some redeeming feature that makes us understand, even if we can never excuse. In the most self-aggrandizing tirades of Nowicki’s most appalling creations, there is some germ of grace, a suggestion that, whatever verdict is pronounced upon him by us, there is also a higher court. The man pressed Under the Nihil is unnamed, but he is a former seminarian, drawn to the priesthood more as a means of escape from reality than out of genuine vocation. The sense of having “a calling, instead of just a falling” soothes his seething personality for a time, and he even starts to imagine he might have a proclivity for pastoral work. He also has genuine, traditionalist moral scruples. Once he dreams he is an aborted fetus, and this Goya-like imagining conveys powerfully the truly terrible and squalid reality of what the world euphemizes as “lifestyle choice.” But he is eventually rejected as a priest by the “Vat 2 Old Guard alte Kämpfer” on the grounds of psychological unfitness. They may well be correct that he would not have made much of a priest, but it means that the single plank that might have arrested his lifelong, Luciferian hurtle to earth has been torn from under his feet. Then an equally anonymous, if better manicured, government agent comes to see him in the hospital and offers a deal—they will pay him generously if he will consent to be a guinea pig in the trial of a secret drug called the Nihil. The Nihil is an experimental mind-altering substance supposed to remove inhibition and make American troops as heedless of death as the Islamist terrorists, 108

and therefore more fearsome and effective. The government man tells him, with seeming frankness, that the side effects are utterly unknown and that even his most intimate activity will be monitored. Indifferent to the pabulum of patriotism and uncaring about either money or the future, the narrator agrees out of sheer curiosity. So he takes the Fed’s dollar and begins a long game of wits with the government mannequin-monster, whose Bostonian Brahman demeanor overlays a moral void in which expediency is everything. We soon see that he is no better—and no wiser—than the “mad” narrator, and a faithful representative of his government, which, notwithstanding its PC Pecksniffian protestations, is at least as nihilistic as the protagonist. It may even be more so, because it is composed of onedimensional “Men of Fact,” whereas the protagonist at least senses the existence of other universes, even if he cannot quite get them into focus. Yet nihilism is ubiquitous, and the government is itself a prisoner of a Zeitgeist without any Geist. The doped-up, wired-up protagonist strikes up acquaintance with a divorcee mother and her bored and sullen daughter and treats them with atrocious heartlessness. Yet howsoever more conventional and “respectable” than he is, they have no more heart than he does, and less depth. In some unsullied segment of their beings, they know this and hate themselves and their world—like the Blackberryscanning mothers he observes sitting in a park “secretly hoping for a disaster or a calamity to give their coddled existences meaning, purpose, and direction.” The author is plainly genuinely sympathetic toward these women, and for all who haplessly, hopelessly play the stacked cards tossed to them by the Eumenides: “all of the great, unwashed, un–Ivy League

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educated, un-patrician, un-handsome, unsmiling, doomed, damned folks out in the hellblasted realm.” The Nihil is really a placebo, because most inhibitions have already been removed in the decivilizing West. Even the taboo against killing has weakened; recalcitrant countries are legitimate targets for drone-borne “democracy,” and fetuses are fit-for-flushing clinical waste. The most notable exception is the fear of dying, perhaps the strongest of all instincts. This fear has if anything become stronger in the modern West, partly because of growing disbelief in any possibility of any afterlife but also—asserts Nowicki—because the contemporary West is, quite simply, not worth dying for. All that was transcendent and traditional having been or being taken out of our equation, increasingly all that is left is consumption and the “freedom” to be automata allowed only the semblance of individuation, like the “tramp-stamp” tattoo on the belly of the “pseudo-nonconformist” daughter in Nihil. We are longer lived and better fed than humans have ever been before, yet our culture drips with discontent—as if we were healthy but bored zoo animals pacing up and down in our enclosures, remembering dimly some bigger place. As the protagonist declares savagely as he prepares himself to die in what he hopes will

be a truly world-shaking son et lumière: “I kneel before nothing. I am the logical conclusion of all this ‘liberty.’ Liberty is death.” Nowicki’s character’s manifesto is incoherent and Unabomber extreme, existing in a thankfully little-visited conceptual territory where “ultra-left” meets and melds with “ultra-right” in shared rejection of bourgeois morality. But what if that no-longer-serviceable bourgeois morality becomes finally separated from its original metaphysical underpinning, as the author worries it will (if it has not already)? What then can prevent a plummeting descent every bit as calamitous as that of Nowicki’s seared seraph? We speak facilely of “the clash of civilizations,” but behind that genuine geopolitical gulf there is also the looming likelihood of a clash within our civilization. Implicit in Under the Nihil is the idea that we need somehow to reinvest our culture with substance, by celebrating rather than apologizing for our folkish, classical, and Christian antecedents and the extraordinary historical achievements that have arisen from that heritage. We are not nothings, but somethings—somewhere men and women, heirs of a great estate to which we owe allegiance. Nowicki bookends Nihil neatly with the same timeless demand from the clearly not completely mad King Lear: “Nothing will come of nothing; speak again.”

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SINGING THE PIECES BACK IN PLACE The Life and Verse of Wilmer Hastings Mills (1969–2011) David Middleton

ilmer Hastings Mills died at the age of forty-one on his family’s farm in Zachary, Louisiana, July 25, 2011, after a brief battle with cancer of the liver. He is survived by his wife, Kathryn Oliver Mills, a professor of French at the University of the South, and his two children: Benjamin and Phoebe-Agnès. Mills earned a BA in English from the University of the South (Sewanee, Tennessee) in 1992 and an MA in theology from the School of Theology at Sewanee in 2005. Born in Baton Rouge on October 1, 1969, Mills grew up on farmland that had been worked by members of the Mills family since the original Spanish Land Grant of the 1790s. Thus, Mills knew the agrarian way of life from direct experience and could do many things besides the writing of verse. At one time or another Mills worked as “a carpenter, furniture maker, sawmill operator, artisan bread baker, white oak

basket weaver, farmer, and a white water raft guide.”1 Mills was also a talented watercolorist, guitar player, songwriter, and a superb poetry-writing teacher, serving as Kenan Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Moreover, he single-handedly rebuilt for his family a dilapidated bungalow in Sewanee that the local fire department had planned to burn as part of a fire-response exercise. This house was the subject of a feature story in Southern Living.2 Truly Wilmer Mills was a man of many talents. Mills published a chapbook of verse, Right as Rain, on Aralia Press in 1999. This was followed by his first full-length collection, Light for the Orphans, which appeared in 2002 on Story Line Press as a winner in the Story Line First Books Series. Mills’s poetry was also published in many of America’s finest quarterlies and journals. These include the Hudson Review, Modern Age, the New

David Middleton is poetry editor of Modern Age. 111

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Criterion, Poetry, the Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, and the Southern Review. Mills’s verse has been praised by some of America’s most distinguished poets, including Donald Justice and Richard Wilbur. At the time of his death, Mills had just completed a second full-length collection, Arriving on Time. He also left behind a number of uncollected and unpublished individual poems as well as other book-length gatherings of his verse. A volume of new and selected poems or a volume of collected poems is to be hoped for in due course as Kathryn Mills begins her work as literary executor. Fortunately, in several interviews, an autobiographical essay, and a personal letter to the current writer, Wilmer Mills discussed his development as an agrarian and a traditional metrical poet and has put on record a number of important statements about poetics. It should also be noted that Mills was a deeply religious person who was raised as a conservative Presbyterian. His faith and his art were always at one.

to hear Robert Penn Warren read his poetry at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana, as the first speaker in the Marie Fletcher Lecture Series in American Literature. Mills recalled “seeing that oak of a man stand up in front of grown people and read poems” and said that

To this Mills added: “The end of the Audubon poem reads, ‘Tell me a story of deep delight,’ and this may be utter silliness but I have taken that as an exhortation as if given to me personally as a charge. It is my motto as a writer. I met Warren that night. He asked me where I was from. When I told him north of Baton Rouge, south of St. Francisville in an area called The Plains he said, ‘there are good people there.’ ”5 Another major influence on Wilmer Mills was Robert Frost. As Mills has stated, “Frost and Warren both had an explosive impact on me, even though I could tell they were not in the same vein, like two oak trees of the same genus but of different species. Warren inspired me to look for the acorn in myself. Frost made it grow.”6 Mills suggests that Warren showed him how to write of rural

ills spent much of his childhood in Brazil, where his parents were agricultural missionaries. This experience made a deep impression. Back in Louisiana, Mills was bored in school and so took to writing down poetic images and phrases about rural life on pieces of paper that his mother later found in the pockets of his clothes in the laundry and saved. At the time, Mills did not think of these fragments either as poetry or as suitable subjects for poetry, yet he has stated that they “caused me to assume, at the worst, that there existed other territories of thought, places to which I was called, or even entitled, at best, like a young mallard on his first migration.”3 Mills’s “youthful epiphany”4 as a poet came in April 1985, when his mother, Betsy, took a somewhat reluctant fifteen-year-old 112

Warren’s poem “Audubon: A Vision” particularly moved me. The painter, John James Audubon, had lived and painted birds only minutes from my family’s land in Louisiana. I had grown up hearing the name and knew that my ancestors would have almost certainly had dealings with him. The last section of Warren’s poem about him made me want to be a poet: “Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a boy, stood // By a dirt road, in first dark, and heard / The great geese hoot northward. // I could not see them, there being no moon / And the stars sparse. I heard them. // I did not know what was happening in my heart.”

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southern life, while Frost’s stricter meter gave him the best means to do so: “I wanted to write about characters with the uncooked energy of Warren but felt a visceral need to do so in the formal manner of Frost.”7 In his mature verse, Mills adheres generally to regular meter but allows himself variations and a deliberate roughness that recall Warren. As Mills has said, he likes to write formal verse that pulls a little “toward” free verse.8 Just as his mother once kept those wadded up fragments found in his clothes, so Mills later kept a small notebook about him: “I’m a linguistic bower bird. I collect words, bits of conversation, road signs, etymologies, etc.”9 From these bits, Mills said, poems “come to me as sonic excitement clicking in the syllables.”10 But such bits must be shaped into lines, like furrows in a field, and Mills notes that the word verse is rooted in the Latin versus, which refers to turning a plow at the end of a row. Thus, the poet is a plowman of words and also a “verse-wright” who builds his poems from parts.11 In his poetry classes, Mills urged his students to write formal verse, to pay attention to music in language, and to “think in lines.”12 Furthermore, Mills challenged them to write about subjects other than adolescent self-centeredness: “I teach them to get out of their own heads, to stop thinking that poetry is a soapbox for self-expression. Poetry is about expressing the dictionary [emphasis added]. Once they catch on, they realize that words are more intelligent than people are, and that words do a much better job of expressing their feelings and thoughts. Let good language do the work. So I teach students to look at what they see right in front of them and to say what they see in the most compelling language. Poets should make sense and make it sing.”13

aking sense by seeing clearly the life in front of him is the goal of Light for the Orphans. The light of the title is cast both on the poet as an orphan of the farm (sections 2 and 3) and also on the many characters (sections 1 and 4) whose stories are told in short narrative poems. These characters are all orphans of modernity who, though isolated within and maimed by the contemporary postagrarian world, still struggle to maintain and to assert their human worth either through dignified suffering or heroic action or by some kind of artistic affirmation.14 The singer who is the subject of “The Last Castrato” (d. 1924) is both orphan and artist, the two kinds of characters that make up sections 1 and 4 of this book. The castrato sings from The Tempest and “. . . only knows / That he was singled out and set apart, / An orphan of himself who testifies / Of sea change into something rich and strange / Like any artist, or the art itself / That says, ‘Remember me. Remember me’ ”(16).15 In “Confessions of a Steeplejack” (d. 1978), the speaker sees his life-threatening job as both a worldly art and a holy vocation and dislikes the materials used to make and decorate contemporary churches—“cinderblock and wafer board” and an “imitation cupola to hold / A speaker for the imitation bells” (19). In contrast, the steeplejack was a principled artisan “Who dangled from the lightning rod of faith / As if his work had been a holy calling” (20). In “Wind Chimes for Gladys,” a father purchases a set of chimes—porcelain birds with broken wings—for his young daughter. After her death, the father listens for her name in the music of the chimes, hoping “those wingless chimes” might with “Their brittle clinks of carousel / And carillon spell out her name” (22). Later, climbing a silo for a better view, he yearns to hear her voice in the winds that lift hot air balloons at a festival in nearby Baton Rouge, but the balloons 113

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sink in silence. Yet then, as if by miracle, the wingless porcelain birds give way to a natural sign that hints at providential grace: “My boot heel struck the silo roof / And startled all the cattle near me / And the pasture lifted white / With egret wings” (23). These characters—the castrato, the steeplejack, and the father who has lost a daughter—represent a much wider range of other orphans of modernity: a disgruntled piano tuner’s wife who gets revenge on a neglectful husband, a school bus driver who is haunted by an accident with a train in which schoolchildren died, a young deer hunter who can never forget his father’s suicide, a troubled dowser whose father died by water in a hurricane, a shoeshine man who never speaks but who writes of a single poignant moment of fantasized romance with “the lady with the Spanish boots” (90). One of the best and most representative poems about these orphans is “The Whirligig Man’s Invention.” This man, who as a child was taken to a field for a beating, searches in later years for redemptive healing by decorating that field with generatorpowered whirligigs whose flashlights shine when the wind blows the whirligigs around. Although oblivious motorists drive past near the field, the whirligig man keeps faith that his strange invention can somehow makes things right: “The drivers speed to vinyl siding, bound / To hide in lives that say, I will not look. / I will not see. // He’ll always wave, then look / The other way to his clapping pasture wired / For wind, its light elapsing, where he, inspired / And almost lost in some delight with pain / Has found a meaning, lucid and insane, / An ugly-loveliness that sets him free, / Lit up for neighbors who in turn may see” (92). The central sections (2 and 3) of Light for the Orphans describe the poet as an orphan of the farm. The poems focus on the poet’s 114

childhood and young manhood on the farm, his relatives (mother, father, grandfathers), and his difficult decision to break a twohundred-year-old tradition of Mills farming the fields of their Spanish land grant. In part, the poet leaves for a new life in his cabin home in Tennessee because of his calling to be a poet but also because of a dislike of noisy, modern mechanized farming and the realization that his family farm, already surrounded by urban sprawl and pressured by contemporary economic trends, cannot long survive and that a return to preindustrial farming is all but impossible. “Morning Song,” whose interlinking rhymes musically reinforce the subject, finds the poet’s mother, Betsy Mills, happily humming a song as she bakes amid other sounds that indicate domestic harmony—“The house becomes her instrument” (37). Such maternal music, heard for years by her children, sets the tone of traditional family life: So here we listen for the household sounds Of home, ice water pouring from a jar, Forks, knives, the flour sifter’s rhythmic rounds. Each tone recalls our childhood’s symphony Of clanks and bangs that softened into notes We later learned to read. The melody Our mother hums this morning swells and floats Across the room, and after breakfast, when We go our different ways, she rests, then starts Her kitchen-orchestrations all again With movements we come home to learn by heart. (37–38)

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“Rain,” a sequence of six short poems, shows the young Wilmer Mills helping his grandfather plow rows. When the plowing ends in rain, the poet stays behind in the barn gazing at the grandfather’s tools and supplies that make up that ever necessary world of tilling the ground to eat and live: “I smell his saddles where they hang on rope / To keep packrats from chewing up their seats. / Sweet horse feed, hay, Bag Balm, and leather soap / Instill this barn with memories of when he taught / Me how to work the plows his father bought / To plant his lettuce, mustard greens, and beets” (41). In “Cutting Hay,” whose long lines match the subject of the poem, the poet, home for a time from college, joins his father mowing in circles on their tractors, always moving toward the center point. The old relationship between agriculture and culture—the farmer’s turning his plow back and forth down rows (or in rings) and the poet’s turning of ringing lines of poetry—becomes clear near the end of the poem: . . . Tonight, my father’s hay will lie In grassy rings against the ground like some perennial design From prehistoric times when tribes dug ditches in the shapes of gods. Tomorrow, we will bail them up, coiling their unintended art To feed his winter cows this year. But now the day is spent and we Head back. White egrets pattern home to marshes farther south, and when Our tractors stop beneath the shed I hear their wings above the trees. (46–47)

When Mills must return to college in Ten nessee, the departure from the farm is almost

as unbearable as it is, for him, inevitable. He must leave but, in a deeper sense, can never leave: I tried to go before sunrise, Not wanting to see the fields. Too beautiful. Their frost In chalices of spider web. But peach light lifts behind far pines As I roll over the cattle gaps. These are my father’s pastures. I’m twenty and I have to look at them. They told me and they told me What the issue is. I know it now: Rye grass unraveling in steam; A culvert where the cowponds drain; The water flowing from its source. (“Leaving Home,” 51–52)

In “A Codex for Killing,” a storm passes over Mills’s Tennessee mountain cabin. Rain “writhing” through the grass reminds the poet of nearby churches where snakehandling occurs in order to confirm Mark 16:18—quoted here as the epigraph: “They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them.” The poet meditates on chaos and creation, right and wrong, trying to discern his human duty to know and accept God’s plan for the world. He thinks of “. . . Noah’s nightmarejob: / To gather pairs of all the snakes / In Paradise-gone-mad, the ones / He would have killed if word had not / Come down to bring them two by two” (63). But here and now, in “Yahweh’s chaos” (64), the poet attempts, unsuccessfully, to keep his garden from flooding, perhaps due to the sin of pride, “As if I’d tried to kill the worm / Of 115

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ruin by attacking mud” (64). In the end, he knows that he must learn to leave the world, with its entanglements of good and evil, to the Creator thereof: “But if I learn to let things go, / Especially my tendency / To strangle what I cannot tame, / If I can trust in Yahweh’s order / When it seems to slither by, / Will that submission offer peace? / That has to be what Noah did, / His fingers streaming with the flood, / Reminding him of when he caught / A pair of rattle snakes and felt them / Sliding through his hands like rain” (65–66). Light for the Orphans was acclaimed as an extraordinary first book. Donald Justice praised the orphan narratives, while Richard Wilbur noted the poem’s “striking phrases and happy accuracies” and found in Mills’s verse “pain and darkness” but also “a continual relief and gaiety as the right words are found.”16 Austin MacRae commended Mills for giving “a voice to others” and not being narcissistically self-centered. MacRae called Mills “a deeply spiritual poet” who unselfishly “speaks to universal human experience” and predicted that Mills’s verse would last, “For, in the end, unselfish works of art stand the test of time.”17 And the current writer, as a fellow conservative formalist poet and fellow Louisianian, concluded as follows in 2003: “Light for the Orphans [is] one of the most powerful and promising first books by any poet, Louisianian or otherwise, that this reviewer has ever seen. The rural Protestant culture of north and central (i.e., nonAcadian) Louisiana has for many years been waiting for a major poet to plow its rows into verses. In Wilmer Mills, that land has at long last found its plowman-poet and through him its . . . authentic, and deeply rooted voice.”18

ine years after the publication of Light for the Orphans, Wilmer Mills prepared a new manuscript for submission, Arriving 116

on Time, a manuscript the current reviewer was privileged to read and critique, at Mills’s request, in the spring of 2011. This second full-length collection contains not only new poems written in the Southern Agrarian tradition but also poems on family life, especially his love for his wife and children and his role as a father, as well as powerful meditative poems on the ultimate philosophical, even theological significance of a poet’s metaphors and analogies and on the mysterious relationship between time, eternity, and providence. The poet is seen as the Linker whose post-Edenic role is that of “singing the pieces back in place” (“Recordari-Song”—a poem to his daughter about memory). Since Arriving on Time is unpublished, my detailed comments on this impressive new and, sadly, now posthumous—or perhaps on a new and selected or a collected poems—collection will be saved for a later occasion.

n May of 2011, during gall bladder surgery, doctors discovered that Wilmer Mills was suffering from cancer of the liver. Some weeks later, when further medical treatment held out little hope, Mills asked to be taken from Chattanooga to his family’s farm in Zachary. As he said, “I want to go home before I go home.” There, he was given a few precious weeks with his family and friends. He died at home in the afternoon of Monday, July 25, at the age of forty-one. His obituary stated that Wil was a Renaissance man who pursued all things Godly, true and beautiful, and who shared those things as well as himself generously with others. . . . He is respected as one of the foremost poets of his generation. . . . Wil also painted . . . wrote and performed music, worked as a carpenter and sawyer, wove white oak baskets from trees he felled himself,

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renovated two log cabins, built his own house . . . made furniture, grew gardens and baked bread in a wood-fired bread oven he made himself. The name of his bread oven was ‘Companis,’ the Latin root word for ‘companion,’ which means ‘with bread.’ Breaking bread at the Lord’s Table as well as with family and friends was at the core of Wil’s life.19

Mills’s funeral was held on Saturday, July 30, at the Plains Presbyterian Church in Zachary, Louisiana. The poet’s faith and his agrarian life were brought together in the recitation of Psalm 23 and the singing of Richard Wilbur’s “A Christmas Hymn” about the Nativity, a hymn also sung at Wil and Kathryn’s wedding. On the plain pine coffin was inscribed, in accordance with his wishes, a translation of “Entry” (“Eingang”), a poem by Clemens Brentano (1778–1842) read to him by his father-in-law, poet Raymond Oliver, during Mills’s last days. In his homily, Pastor Joseph Novenson remarked that these lines sum up much of human life: “O star and flower, / Flesh and spirit, / Love and suffering, / Time and eternity.”20 Thus both in this service and on the coffin itself were united poetic words, the Word, and wood— three things at the core of Mills’s being. Mills was buried near the church and his family's farm. He had written of the farm and cemetery in his poem “A Dirge for Leaving”: “. . . Bed rows turned / In a tiller’s wake, sod of family plots, / They draw me here. . . .” (48). And in “A Christmas Card,” the poet, coming home for Christmas from Tennessee, confesses that, despite being in one sense an orphan of the farm, such homecomings will never end: “Ecstatic sadness, dirge and song. / They draw me back. I won’t be long” (69). In an August 8 message to friends and family who had followed the progress of her son’s illness up until his death, Betsy Mills wrote:

Wil loved fresh figs. He and his family usually visited us in August, missing the July fig season. One of Wil’s unpublished manuscripts is entitled Arriving on Time. For the past month, Wil would walk into the kitchen around 7:30 a.m. and sit in an old family rocker to eat a bowl of oatmeal and another of fresh peeled figs. He delighted in watching the early light come through the multipaned kitchen window over the sink. His gaze was absorbent, his blue eyes wide in anticipation as the rays moved over the well-known pots, plates, and counter tops. One morning I remarked to him that God had seen to it that he had arrived on time for fresh figs. Wil was his own prophet.

Mrs. Mills added that her son was “a poet of time who lived with one foot in Chronos Time but with eyes seeing Kairos.” She also urged us all to “encourage and support poets, writers, and artists who struggle to give us visions we need to hear and see.”21

etsy Mills speaks of her son as having been a poet with a prophetic voice. That comment brings to mind statements Mills made in the letter of April 9, 2003, in answer to questions the current writer had while writing his book review of Light for the Orphans. Speaking of being the first Mills since the 1790s not to farm his family’s land, Mills wrote: “I’m the end of the line. This is why I left Louisiana. I saw no future for me there. Now I have lived just long enough to sense the pull of its soil, even the soil in the cemetery where I will be buried. That means something to me. It ought to be an agrarian principle that one should not live too far away from the place where one will be buried.”22 But death must not have the final word. 117

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Mills once commented on the deep interrelationship between farming, words, and wood: “The loss of farming to me is so similar to the loss of traditional techniques and methods in writing and painting. In fact, they both started to go out of fashion at the same time. To tell the story with meter is like farming with the mule and the plow. In some ways, I’m plowing the verse rather than the ground.”23 Mills also referred to a linguistic revelation in his high school years that “forever changed my life.” This discovery was that the Indo-European root deru is the root word for both Tree and Truth, deru thus being a metaphor for Mills’s future life as a worker both in “tree-wood and truthwords” as carpenter and poet.24 These vocations, Mills believes, are deeply linked. In what amounts to a personal and poetic creed, Mills has said of the making of furniture and verse that both involve a similar cognitive process that wants to understand how things fit together. I write verse because I want to make connections like a furniture maker who uses certain types of joinery and techniques to fit pieces of wood together. I work wood because I have a sense that it, too, is a type of language or style of rhetoric that has its own grammar and syntax. Both of these linguistic processes affect my thought patterns in the sense that working with Tree and Truth in this way I do tend to value fixity and meaning. The critics of traditional technique and even meaning itself (the two are usually two sides of the same coin) don’t want to admit that it is precisely a tree’s ability to hold its ground, that is, its limitation, which allows it to sway so beautifully without falling down. The same is true of the use of language. Being rooted in structure that has kept thoughts from 118

becoming meaningless for thousands of years is precisely what helps words continue making sense so that they can then sway like trees and mean other things as well, and therefore be even more meaningful. The very idea of free verse is a covert if not overt attack on this assumption. My goal when I get out of bed every day in furniture and verse is to make sense. I can’t do it without patterns and shapes any more than water can have any human usefulness without some kind of physically limiting container. In other words the tools we use and the thoughts that accompany them are inseparable.25

In his uncollected poem “TREOW: An Etymology,” Mills speaks of the profound kinship between wood, words, and truth: The English language is a living thing Which over time has had the sense to ring Its rhyme and reason with the symmetry Of roots and branches in a family tree. That’s no coincidence. The distant kin Of certain pithy terms claim origin From ancient trees that no one understood Until the first codex had come from wood And there were clerics who could read and teach From books that got their letters from the beech. But long before the folio and poem Had been pressed together in a tome, Before the logs were kept on tablets hewn

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Of oak or elm, before the druid’s rune, There grew a seedling noun that ramified The words for Tree and True and then it died. Its sound was solid, Deru, finely grooved And grained to mean: “That which cannot be moved.”26

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

This same quality of immovability informs Mills’s strongest poems, poems that ring true with those rare qualities of simplicity, depth, and wisdom so often found in the very best poets of this or any other time. Wilmer Hastings Mills will always be remembered as a poet who, in a postlapsarian and now a postagrarian world, devoted himself to doing what poetry could do by “Singing the pieces back in place.”

Wilmer Mills biographical statement sent to David Middleton on April 9, 2003. Karin Glendenning, “Little House on the Mountain: Wilmer Mills Creates a Home for His Family,” Chattanooga Times Free Press, December 28, 2002, E1, E3; Wilmer Mills, “Farming Versus Poetry: The Making of a Rebel,” poetrynet.org/month. archives/mills/index.htm. Leanne Martin, “Christians in the Arts,” an interview with Wilmer Mills, May 11, 2009, christiansinthearts.blogspot. com/2009/05/wilmer-mills-poet.html. Ibid., 1. Ibid., 2–3. Ibid., 3. Mills, “Farming Versus Poetry,” 4. Ibid., 6. Martin, “Christians in the Arts,” 1. Ibid. Mills, “Farming Versus Poetry,” 5, 6. Martin, “Christians in the Arts,” 1; Travis Smith, “Thinking in Lines,” interview with Wilmer Mills, Cellar Door 36, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 1. Martin, “Christians in the Arts,” 2. David Middleton, “Wilmer Mills’ Light for the Orphans,” review of Light for the Orphans, Louisiana Literature 20, no. 2 (Fall/ Winter 2003): 115–21, to which some of the comments in this section are indebted. Wilmer Mills, Light for the Orphans (Ashland, OR: Story Line Press, 2002), 16; all quotations from poems in this collection will be cited hereafter by page number or numbers in parentheses. Donald Justice and Richard Wilbur, comments on Light for the Orphans, back cover. Austin MacRae, “The Poet as Orphan,” online review of Light for the Orphans, Expansive Poetry (May 2003): 1, 3, www. expansivepoetryonline.com/journal/rev052003.html. Middleton, “Wilmer Mills’ Light for the Orphans,” 121. Wilmer Hastings Mills, obituary, The Advocate (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), July 27, 2011, 12A. A Service of Worship in Memoriam: Wilmer Hastings Mills (October 1, 1969–July 25, 2011), July 30, 2011, Plains Presbyterian Church, Plains, Louisiana, 5. Betsy Mills, e-mail to Wilmer Mills’s family and friends, August 8, 2011. Wilmer Mills, letter to author, April 9, 2003; quoted from with prior permission of Wilmer Mills, given in 2003. Alan Bostick, “Plowboy Poet,” The Tennessean, October 6, 2002, 14. Wilmer Mills, letter to author, April 9, 2003. Ibid. Wilmer Mills, “TREOW: An Etymology,” Literary Imagination: The Review of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics 4, no. 2 (2002): 263; this and the preceding two paragraphs are adapted from Middleton, “Wilmer Mills’ Light for the Orphans,” 120–21.

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DOCUMENTATION

BABI YAR

Dmitry Shlapentokh

had not been in Ukraine for thirty-two years. I was born there, in that part of the world, as were the ancestors of the vast majority of Ashkenazi Jews. My ancestors have been the subjects of various kaisers, emperors, and tsars. According to Russian chronicles, once some Jews approached Vladimir, the prince of Kiev, the city where I was born and the capital of mighty Kievan Russia (Rus’), and asked him if he would convert to Judaism. Vladimir asked, “Where is your motherland?” “Our motherland is in Jerusalem.” “But why are you here?” “For the sins of our ancestors the mighty Lord has scattered us all over the world.” Vladimir responded that he would like to live and die in his own land and sent them away. The collapse of empires, emigration, and wars have scattered my own family all over the globe. Some of them still live in Russia, and on a return visit I decided to visit Kiev, although not entirely for sentimental reasons. I had received a grant from my university and

thought to explore the Ukrainian archives. I was curious to see what had happened to this part of the USSR after the collapse of the empire. I also wanted to revisit some of the ancient monuments that tell the history of the region. If I had decided to visit the city earlier, it would certainly have been for another reason: I would have been able to visit with the numerous relatives of my maternal grandmother who live there. She had a huge number of sisters and brothers and seemed to bring forth a new son or daughter every nine months. If I had visited earlier, I might have seen many of them, but time takes its toll. Most of my younger relatives, with or without family, were scattered throughout the world. They had emigrated to Israel, the United States, Germany, and who knows where. The elder folks were rapidly dying out. What I would find today would be their tombs, and there is no reason to visit Kiev just for this. I arrived during the holidays, when the archives were closed, so I decided to do

Dmitry Shlapentokh is associate professor of history at Indiana University. Among his many books are The Proto-Totalitarian State: Punishment and Control in Absolutist Regimes, The French Revolution in Russian Intellectual Life: 1865–1906, and Societal Breakdown and the Rise of the Early Modern State in Europe. 121

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some sightseeing. The Sofia Cathedral is perhaps the most important monument visitors can see in Kiev. Built in the eleventh century as a copy of the Sofia Cathedral in Constantinople, it seems to be the only cathedral in Europe where frescos from the eleventh century have been preserved, not only their fragments but almost in their entirety. From the outside it is an imposing structure, with its great blue and white tower topped by a golden cupola. Inside I stopped in front of the huge fresco of the Virgin Mary Oranta, who stands erect, palms outward, as if she were blessing visitors. Her image was shaped from thousands of tiny pieces of smalta, calciferous glass melted in a special way. She has been placed inside a space of gold that glitters, and though it is very dim inside the cathedral, she seems to be illuminated by some twinkling light source. I then remembered that the sarcophagus containing the remains of the founder of the cathedral, Yaroslav the Wise, was here. I observed attentively the big white coffin that had been made from a single slab of marble. I have always been interested in sarcophagi of all types, but especially Egyptian ones, which are great pieces of art covered with an intricate web of pictures that promise those placed inside eternal life. I spotted the custodian nearby, a middle-aged woman about the same age as I, and asked her if anyone had ever opened the sarcophagus before the Soviet era. She told me that no one had done this, except possibly the Mongols, who had taken the city in the thirteenth century. It was most likely they had opened it and stolen the valuables inside. I asked if anyone ever prayed for Yaroslav and the others who had found their final resting place inside the cathedral. She stated this was impossible, mostly because of the New Ukrainian Church, which had split with Moscow, a move 122

that had received the complete blessing of Yushchenko, the Western-oriented president. “This individual, this Philistine, who pretends to be the leader of the Ukrainian Church is a satanic person. He is driving all of us—Orthodox Christians—to the West, to spirits foreign to us. It will drive us to perdition.” I gazed up at the cupola where the God Pantokrator seemed to be looking at me with stern open eyes. Since it was lunchtime, and I was interested in her viewpoint, we continued our conversation outside on one of the benches. This is a special place. The cathedral is not only one of the most beautiful in all of Kiev; it is also considered sacred. It was the cradle of East Slavic Christianity, the bosom of Abraham. All his children—Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian—should come to this place to resurrect the dead and unite East European Orthodox Slavdom. “Resurrection is impossible,” the custodian said. Her eyes had a strange glint as she continued. “There is only one way out, the last judgment, fire and brimstone.” We were now entering into one of those fascinating types of conversation that usually can be found only in this part of the world. “Why is resurrection impossible? As an Orthodox Christian, you should believe in resurrection. You know there was a Russian philosopher, Nikolai Fedorov, who believed that the goal of humanity should be to resurrect the dead.” “It will never be so,” she said. “Why? Because it contradicts Christian doctrine?” “No, I simply feel that this would not work. My heart tells me so. Yes, I am a Christian—when I started to believe it was a spiritual revelation—but I am unable to discard everything I was taught before. I am a graduate of medical school and studied the human body for quite some time. However,

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I shall confess I was a rather naïve girl.” Here she paused to smile at me in self-effacing way, as if she were asking me to forgive her for something. “I suppose you think it strange for a medical student to be naïve. It seems I was attractive when I was young. Boys liked me. But for a long time I did not understand what they wanted from me.” Here there was another pause followed by that same smile, a seeking for forgiveness. She went on, “And later in my life, there was a certain psychological transformation. If I had gone to the doctor, he most likely would have found the cause for this. I don’t understand why Fedorov’s system would not work, but I think it does not.” The next day I went to the city archives. By that time, the files I had ordered had arrived. After spending several hours reading, I ventured outside to eat with an Armenian who worked in the archives and had spent the past twenty-five years in Ukraine. We found a comfortable place to have our lunch in a nearby park. I told him that I had recently been in Turkey for a conference and one of the speakers, a retired diplomat, had blasted Armenia “for accusing us of crimes we did not commit.” “What do you expect from them?” he exploded. “These are the people who have taken land that did not belong to them and created nothing. The instinct for killing us is in their blood. Many Armenians believe in authority and willingly marched to their own death at the hands of these beasts.” As a Jew, I feel a kind of bond with Armenians. This goes back to the Soviet era when our fates were often similar. I asked about the approach to Jews in Ukraine, which has been notoriously anti-Semitic since time immemorial. “Everything is the same,” he said. “And it shall always be so.” “Look around,” I said. “There are many signs of appreciation for Jews, for example,

there are Jewish artifacts in the museums. The president even attended synagogue.” “All of this is for appearance’s sake. Something like you have in America for minorities. For academics and government officials to be black, or a member of some minority, is a great advantage. As for the rest, the majority, business is the same as always. And this is also the case with the Ukrainian approach. The elite want to be civilized Europeans, and they are obsessed with the desire to become part of the European Union. And who would accept some anti-Semitic racist? It would be like inviting someone who is not toilet trained to a fashionable party. So today they cozy up to the Jews; but if you look at the bottom, at the masses . . .” While he rambled on, I looked around the park. I spotted a midsize monument off in the distance. Although I couldn’t be sure because of my aging eyesight, it looked like one of those monuments extolling the virtue of children that I had so often seen during my childhood. Soviet parks, including those in Kiev, were often decorated with plaster monstrosities, often images of young pioneers—the members of the Young Communist League. Their creation had provided justification for the employment of local artists and supposedly instilled an appreciation for art among Soviet youth. The youth were often portrayed as trumpeters, and their silent trumpeting announced some great victory for the Soviet cause, another triumph in the quest for social justice and peace. Nothing has changed, I thought. The monuments only seem to be better designed and made of sturdier materials. The monuments of my youth were cheap and easily fell apart in the harsh weather, revealing the iron bones beneath the plaster. Since I was curious, I excused myself and moved closer for a better look. The children of this 123

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monument were not trumpeters. Instead, they were small boys and girls, and one of the boys was wearing a yarmulke. Beneath there was a description that stated that thousands of children had been killed here. Their ethnicity—or, as Russians usually state, “nationality”—was not mentioned. I walked back to my Armenian friend. “The Babi Yar is near here?” I asked. He nodded. The Babi Yar, a ravine, is where in 1941 the Germans had killed around one hundred thousand Ukrainian Jews, in one of the most brutal examples of the “final solution” to the Jewish question. After World War II, with the rise of official Soviet antiSemitism and Stalin’s desire to send Soviet Jews in the Far East to populate the “Jewish Authority Region,” the place did not even exist in official memory. Later, during the Khrushchev regime, the event was finally acknowledged as part of German brutality in the territory of the USSR, and the monument was erected. Still, the official line was that the victims of the atrocity were people of all ethnic backgrounds. Only after the collapse of the USSR did officials acknowledge that the victims had been mostly Jewish. By that time, Babi Yar had become one of the most well-known places in Kiev, a site that was almost an obligatory visit for official delegations and tourists, especially those, of course, from Israel and the United States. “Is it indeed the Babi Yar?” I asked my Armenian friend. “Yes, you can walk on the bones.” “Yes, yes,” added a young girl, and her boyfriend who were sitting on a bench near us. The girl was beautiful—well-shaped, leggy, and sexily dressed. There are more beautiful girls per square mile in Ukraine than any other part of the former Soviet Union; definitely more than there are in Europe and America. The girl assertively 124

took the hand of her boyfriend and engaged in a long kiss and then turned to me. “You should definitely see the monument. It is an interesting landmark, but I don’t know how to get there.” My Armenian friend was of no help. I spent my childhood in Kiev before moving away to Russia, only occasionally returning. The last time I was here was in 1974, maybe even earlier. I had always liked the landmarks, and when I visited Kiev, I always became a bit of a tourist. Yet I had never seen Babi Yar. Maybe because it wasn’t old enough, at least in comparison to the ancient cathedrals, or maybe because it was that a visit to any World War II landmark was associated with official Soviet rituals and therefore boring and to be avoided. Or perhaps it was because Babi Yar was related to Jews, and every Jew in the Soviet Union of my youth had tried to forget that he was Jewish. But I needed to see it—right now. Back in the archives I asked one of the clerks how to get to the monument. Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to see a middle-aged woman who told me, “Don’t go there. There were no executions there. I’ll show you the place.” This is always a risky venture. During my travels, I have come across many natives who supposedly are eager to assist a helpless traveler from the West. These natives, however, are hardly altruistic Samaritans. I have found that they usually ask for money or some other benefit. But as I determined that she did not know that I came from the United States because of my native Russian, I decided to take the risk. “Thousands of innocents were killed— God bless their souls,” she said, as we moved away from the long park road to a footpath that was barely visible. It was clear as we moved through the thicket that I would never be able to find the place on my own.

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The trees and bushes looked as if they had not been tended in years. We started up a hill, actually breaking through tall grass and shrubbery. Suddenly, there was an awful smell, and I asked my guide about it. She pointed to a heap of garbage that had either been dumped here by city residents or possibly by visitors to the park. I saw a large group of people, and I thought that it was possibly another group of visitors who had decided to visit the place of the executions. No, it was a group of teenagers, talking loudly and drinking beer. “Why has no one built a monument here, the place the executions actually took place?” I asked. My guide stopped to catch her breath. “Well, a monument must be visited by numerous delegations. And such a place must be accessible to cars. You see that here there is too much dirt and shrubbery. It would take much time and effort to clean, and besides this place—the place where the killing actually took place—is too horrible. One could easily imagine the process; the visibility of death would be too unsettling. The tourists, and especially the representatives of official delegations, do not want to be disturbed. They come to a foreign country to see pretty young girls in native costumes dance rather than an image of death and destruction.” She began to pray passionately. I looked at her, trying to detect if she had some Jewish features. “Are you Jewish?” I asked. “No, I am half French and half Greek. I am Orthodox and Ukrainian in spirit. I left Russia to be here in my land with my husband who is pure Ukrainian.” It was extremely strange for a Ukrainian to have such a passionate love for Jews, unless she was married to one. She possibly felt some guilt, as I have been told that many Jews in Babi Yar were killed by Ukrainians.

We finally reached the top and she pointed out the place. Yes, the killing ground should be here. The edge of the ravine dipped down fifty to one hundred meters, and the whole thing was covered by jungle, seemingly flourishing on the remains of the dead bodies beneath. At the time of the war, the bottom had been swampland. It had been logical to stand the victims on the edge and shoot so that they would fall into the swamp. No huge grave site needed to be dug. “Did they know their fate?” I wanted to know. “No, many believed they were being led to a better place.” Indeed, this was quite likely the case with many. During World War I, the Germans and Austrians treated Jews nicely, much better than did the Russians and Ukrainians. My maternal grandmother even dated Austrian officers during World War I and destroyed their love correspondence only in the beginning of World War II. Russians suspected that many Jews were in active collaboration with the Germans, not without grounds. Thus, Russians were very suspicious of Jews as potential German helpers. Moreover, the German troops were quite likely wellgroomed, polite chaps—nice shepherds to their piglets. Logically, then, one could assume that the piglets hardly suspected the shepherds of foul play. They seemed to care for them so selflessly with such devotion: grooming, feeding, and washing them, etc.—a sort of “quiet American” behavior. The edge of the ravine had no monument but instead was covered with wild grasses and flowers. There were two simple metal crosses, though, and looking at them I suddenly remembered that the family of my grandmother’s sister had been killed here. This was not just somebody else’s grave, a historical artifact; it was a graveyard with personal meaning. As we moved downward, 125

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I could easily imagine women and children dying in this spot. But at the same time, I felt that something kept me from seeing it as it had really been. This picture of incompleteness strangely disturbed me. The last day of my visit to Kiev was to be dedicated to visiting the cemetery where my maternal relatives were buried. I was to go with my cousin who had decided to take me there with his mother, the wife of my late uncle. My cousin has the big fat mighty body of a sumo wrestler. He eats like a pig and smokes like a chimney and wears a huge cross around his neck. The point here is that my uncle was completely assimilated. He had married a Ukrainian village girl. He drank and ate pork as his fellow workers did in the factory where he worked. After his death, at approximately my age, his son married a Ukrainian girl; all his children had married Ukrainians and Russians. In any case, by Jewish law, he was not a Jew. The trip to the cemetery was a long ride, and during the journey he told me that one of the most important Hasidic rabbis was buried in Uman. The grave was in the plot of a retired Soviet militiaman. The place had become full of pious Jewish pilgrims and tourists, so the Jews had asked the militiaman to sell the place to them, but he had refused and made a lot of money. We approached the cemetery and my cousin’s cell phone rang. “You know, buddy,” he said into the phone, “I’m at the cemetery. It’s not convenient to talk business. Call later.” Then he turned to me. “I hate cemeteries. Mother loves them. They give her a sense of comfort. I don’t know why.” To get to our family’s graves in the car was difficult. There was a shortage of space, with the graves jammed closely to each other. And each new resident arrived demanding space. I entered the big family plot, much bigger than I had imagined, definitely much bigger than 126

it had been the last time I visited thirty-five or forty years ago. That time, my grandmother had escorted me to acquaint me with the family dead. But at that time, even though both my grandmother and I had been much younger, we did not visit all the graves, possibly because we did not have a car. So it was that this was the first time I saw this particular grave. He died in World War II, in its last year, 1945. I never had the chance to meet him, because he died before I was born. I move to another grave of a man I remember well, as my grandmother had shown me his picture during our visit. He was killed in the first months of the war, when almost a half million Soviet troops had been surrounded near Kiev. How he died no one knew. His grave, as was the previous one, was empty, merely a symbol. His home I remember, and I know that his daughter is living in Israel. And there was the grave of a boy who drowned in the Black Sea. And another who died shortly before I was born; it seems he had eaten some food that had stuck in his throat. There were many other names I could not remember, nor could I place them in the hierarchical order of the family. The fact that I could not remember them doomed them to their final destruction, to complete annihilation. In fact, all I saw was complete annihilation around me. This was an abandoned cemetery, a dying cemetery, a Jewish cemetery. Most of those who should have been there to take care of the graves had emigrated, scattered, died out themselves in other lands. The dead then were defenseless, and vigorous, pitiless life took advantage of them. Huge trees with mighty limbs sprang from the graves. Their branches were filled with green leaves as transparent as precious gems. From their tops birds chirped and sang love songs, and insects buzzed around them. The living had no compassion, no memory of the

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dead, especially if the dead were ordinary folk, among the countless billions who have populated the earth. We determined that we should visit the tomb of my grandmother’s younger sister Mania. It took some trouble to get to her grave, which was submerged in the rampant shrubbery. The fallen trunks of trees had crushed the gravestones here and there. Some trees rose through the stones, splitting them. Stones from old graves were everywhere. Although this part of the cemetery seemed abandoned, my grandmother’s younger sister’s face was clear on her slab. Kievan Jews were apparently oblivious to the Jewish tradition that prohibited putting pictures or flowers on graves. Her face was young and kind, and at that moment I felt an overwhelming sense of love for her. I felt that the dead were powerless, defenseless, and I needed to do something to make their rest comfortable, to prove to them that I loved them. I began to clear the debris from their graves, and the more I tugged and pulled at the fallen branches, the more I felt that these dead, these dry bones, loved me too. I felt that their love for me might be stronger than that of the living. I felt that I could give myself over completely to them because they loved me and would never betray me. And that someday they would rise and greet each other, greet me at some great party. At the party would be all those whom I never knew and whose countless graves were scattered all over the globe. I grew weary of plucking the bushes and looked around. There were a countless number of graves. There was the grave of a fifteenyear-old who died when I was only two. And here the grave of a baby boy. And here one of an elderly man. And why shouldn’t they be invited? Yes, the great feast should include all of them. In fact, the great feast should include all the living and dead.

My cousin had been watching me as I tried to clear the brush. “Do not try to clean up this mess,” he told me and his mother. “Most likely the cemetery will not survive. The big prerevolutionary Jewish cemetery was destroyed completely and a big housing project was built over it. And we have to hurry; we need to see the grave of my grandfather Valodia.” We got into the car and made our way to our last stop. It was a large grave, in which had been placed my grand-grandmother— she died when I was nine years old—my uncle and my grandfather. It was said that my grandfather participated in the Civil War and served in the secret police during the Great Purges of the 1930s. “My mother told me that he did not participate in all of these events,” I said to my cousin. “Of course he did. Life was tough. You needed to participate in such business if you worked in NKVD at that time. And we should all be grateful that he had taken grandmother out of Kiev. Otherwise, she would have ended up at Babi Yar and neither of us would have been born.” I pointed out several portraits of young women whose graves had 1941 marked as the year of death. “Do you think they died at Babi Yar?” I said. “Most likely.” There is a big cemetery near Kiev, thirty to forty kilometers away, where the hundreds of thousands are buried, victims of the Red Terror. And here, suddenly, the picture of Babi Yar became clear to me. Those who died at Babi Yar were people from all walks of life. They were possibly members of the secret police and their wives and children. There were here members of the Soviet bureaucracy, quite a few were Jews, as was one of my relatives who had received a spacious apartment in 1938–39—the time of the Great Purges. He shot himself rather than be taken by the Germans. It was the enormous number of 127

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Jews who had been eager to take advantage of the social advancement that the Soviet system afforded. It was Jewish workers and their families. It was old and young from all walks of life. Finally, we arrived back home. I asked Stasia why no one cleaned the Babi Yar— the ravine. After all, not all those buried there had been Jews. There were thousands of others, possibly hundreds of thousands. There had been a prison camp nearby, and people were shot and died there, all types of people: Russian prisoners of war, peasants, Ukrainian nationalists, and common criminals. And all these corpses had been dumped into the same pit. The brush and trees could be cut down and the bones reburied. My cousin told me that, not only was it not possible to divide the Jewish bones from those of the non-Jews—there were hardly any bones left. In the 1960s there had been a great storm that had carried mud and bones to Kurinevka, one of the regions of the city. The mud had been cleaned up and possibly dumped all over the city’s dump.

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My knowledge of Judaism is extremely sketchy. I know only a few words of the prayers that my great-grandmother had taught me. But I know that the prayers should be collective. And here in Babi Yar, before the German or Ukrainian guards discharged their machine guns, those taken there—so different from each other, those who hated each other or had been indifferent to each other—all of a sudden, in the twinkling of a moment, may have come together in death. Their deaths may have been a collective experience, a moment of prayer. This experience, our mortality, could be the cause for unity of the billions of the living and dead. The validity of this truth is confirmed every second; it is repeated in the books and treatises of those whom humans call geniuses. And yet even though this is true, somehow, it has never been fully understood and appreciated. This is precisely why Babi Yar is doomed to be repeated over and over, possibly to the end of the human race.