THE CITY From Democracy in America, Vol. 1, Part 1, Chap. V, published in 1835, by Alexis de Tocqueville, having recently returned from the United States. What good does it do me, after all , if an everwatchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish ? There are some nations in Europe whose inhabita nts think of themselves in a sense as colonists, indifferent to the fate of the place they live in. The greatest changes occur in their country without their cooperation —they are unconcerned with the fortunes of their village, the safety of their streets, the fate of their church and its vestry. They think that such things have nothing to do with them, that they belong to a powerful stranger called the government. They enjoy these goods as tenants, without a sense of ownership. They are so divorced from the ir own interests that even when their own security and that of their children is finally compromised, they do not seek to avert the danger themselves but cross their arms and wait for the nation as a whole to come to their aid. They submit, it is true, to the whims of a clerk, but no sooner is force removed than they are glad to defy the law as a defeated enemy. Thus one finds them ever wavering between servitude and license. When a nation has reached this point, it must either change its laws and mores or perish, for the well of public virtue has run dry: in such a place one no longer finds citizens but only subjects .
A publication of Houston Baptist University
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THE CITY Publisher Robert Sloan Advisory Editors Franc is J. Beckwith Adam Bellow Paul J. Bonicelli Joseph Bottum Wilfred Mc Clay John Mark Reynol ds Editor in Chief Benjam in Domenech Books Editor Micah Mattix Writer at Large Hunter Baker Contributing Editors Matthew Lee Anderson Ryan T. Anderson Matthew Boyleston David Capes Victoria Gardner Coates Christopher Hammons Anthony Joseph Joseph M. Knippenberg Louis Markos Peter Meilaender Dan McLaughl in Paul D. Miller Matthew J. Mill iner Russell Moore Robert Stac ey Joshua Trevino THE C ITY Volume V, Issue 3 Copyright 2013 Houston Baptist University. All rights reserved by original authors except as noted. Letters and submissions to this journal are welcomed. Cover photo by Terry Alexander. Email us at thecity@hbu.edu, and visit us online at civitate.org.
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T he Rol e of th e Fa i thfu l Owen Strachan on Sacrificial Witness Wilfred McClay on Politics in a Fallen World R.J. Snell on Protestant Prejudice Paul D. Miller on Arguing Against Post -Modernism Christopher Hammons on God & the Constitution
4 13 21 31 40
F ea tu r es A Conversation with Camille Paglia Louis Markos presents A-Z with C.S. Lewis
50 63
Boo k s & Cu l tur e Jordan Ballor on Makers & Takers Peter Augustine Lawler on American Heresies Collin Garbarino on J.K. Rowling’s Vacant Fiction Micah Mattix on A.E. Stalling’s Poetry
83 87 97 100
A R epu b li c of L etter s Hunter Baker
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Poetry by George David Clark & John Poch The Word by Saint Augustine
3
49,103 116
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Owen Strachan
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ietrich Bonhoeffer awaited his fate. Like a lobster in the kettle, he and his German Christian friends had found themselves increasingly on the wrong side of the Nazi government. Bonhoeffer’s own dissatisfaction with the Nazis reached a boiling point, and he famously attempted to assassinate the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler. The plan went awry, and Bonhoeffer was captured, never to be released. From prison, awaiting his execution, he wrote with striking language of the moral equivocation of his people: We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical. Are we still of any use? Fast forward seventy years to our day. America, too, is in upheaval. Our conflict is not militaristic in nature. We are a nation divided by ideas, riven by beliefs. This is a strange moment, decried by both the political left and right: why are we so divided? Among those who claim the name evangelical, there are two major options in play right now. Everyone agrees that the culture has shifted away from Protestant ideals. Some react to this shift by cheering it. Rachel Held Evans, a gifted writer, voices the mind of many when 4
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she writes, following the passing of a marriage amendment in North Carolina: My generation is tired of the culture wars. We are tired of fighting, tired of vain efforts to advance the Kingdom through politics and power, tired of drawing lines in the sand, tired of being known for what we are against, not what we are for. She continues: Young Christians are ready for peace. We are ready to lay down our arms. We are ready to stop waging war and start washing feet. And if we cannot find that sort of peace within the Church, I fear we will look for it elsewhere. The tone here is striking. The questions are real and must not glance off of us. How do we conform to Scripture, speaking against homosexuality (contra Held Evans), and yet genuinely show love to gays and lesbians? How should we frame our public testimony? These are important matters that we must not miss. While Held Evans raises these questions, she offers at best a vague way forward. To return to Bonhoeffer, this starry-eyed language is really by nature cynical. Those who would divest themselves from courageous biblical proclamation are, perhaps unwittingly, playing the cynic. For them, God’s truth is not powerful; it is not efficacious; it is not ultimately gracious. In reality, it is held over the barrel, hostage to the whim of a generation. What is at play here is really this: courage, or lack thereof. Many today do not wish to sacrifice on behalf of Christ. Having grown up in low-cost circles, places where perhaps many people were at least culturally Christian, some of the so-called “Millennial” generation is finding that the gospel of Christ and the body of ethics it animates is a reproach. So: God must be reworked. The message of salvation through judgment that propelled the historic church to preach and act and love must be reworked into a declaration of God’s absolute and total love without concern for his holiness. This means, if we’re putting boots on the ground, that God is the great Acceptor of All. 5
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Like a boyfriend in a pop song, God becomes the One Who Is So Sublimely Loving That He Would Never Ask You to Change. All this is an end-around. It leaves us with a weakened church, a comatose gospel, and a message not of salvific transformation but earthly approbation. Like the mainline Protestants of a century ago, the moral arc of this “post-partisan” Christianity is long, and it bends toward the culture. In the end, it is lost there.
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he foregoing leads us to a sobering conclusion: if we lose sight of the potency of Christ’s sacrifice and become cynical toward grace, we ourselves will lay down a sacrificial witness. Such is where we find ourselves today, at least if we comprehend the broader evangelical movement. Some believe that this shift is in fact our best strategy—our only strategy. I want to suggest a second way. This is the way of the historic church. Following the ascension of Christ and the apostolic spread of the gospel, Christians suffered tremendously under the Roman persecutions from the first through fourth centuries. In the midst of this whirl of opposition, Christians testified to the ethics created by the gospel in the public square. In the Didache, for example, the early church made clear at the turn of the first century that abortion, the killing of innocents, and pedophilia (all common cultural practices) were evil and must not be practiced: The second commandment of the Teaching: “Do not murder; do not commit adultery”; do not corrupt boys; do not fornicate; “do not steal”; do not practice magic; do not go in for sorcery; do not murder a child by abortion or kill a newborn infant. “Do not covet your neighbor’s property; do not commit perjury; do not bear false witness”; do not slander; do not bear grudges. The early Christians, apologists and ethicists like Justin Martyr, wished not merely to tweak the ethical fabric, but to see souls and lives transformed. The vital morality of the Christians stood out for what it represented: a call to salvation, a summons to a better world. We see this kind of attitude in a slave girl, Blandina, from Lyon, France who by virtue of her sincere faith was captured along with her master and dragged into the town amphitheater to be killed: 6
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But Blandina was suspended on a stake, and exposed to be devoured by the wild beasts who should attack her. And because she appeared as if hanging on a cross, and because of her earnest prayers, she inspired the combatants with great zeal. … And, after the scourging, after the wild beasts, after the roasting seat, she was finally enclosed in a net, and thrown before a bull. And having been tossed about by the animal, but feeling none of the things which were happening to her, on account of her hope and firm hold upon what had been entrusted to her, and her communion with Christ, she also was sacrificed. And the heathen themselves confessed that never among them had a woman endured so many and such terrible tortures. Martyrdoms like Blandina’s ended up reversing the plans of the Roman emperors. In an era far more pagan, far more hostile than our own—Christianity in Blandina’s age was illegal!—they gave their lives for the cause. Their blood, as Tertullian famously said, was “seed” for the church. The moral tradition of the broader Christian movement has many other exemplars of note. It was an unknown man named Telemachus whose physical protest of the gladiatorial games (the ancient equivalent of our own ultra-violent sports today) in 404 ended the same, according to the historian Theodoret: [W]hen the abominable spectacle was being exhibited, he went himself into the stadium, and, stepping down into the arena, endeavoured to stop the men who were wielding their weapons against one another. The spectators of the slaughter were indignant, and inspired by the mad fury of the demon who delights in those bloody deeds, stoned the peacemaker to death. When the admirable emperor was informed of this he numbered Telemachus in the array of victorious martyrs, and put an end to that impious spectacle. What the Didache, Justin Martyr, Blandina and Telemachus practiced, Augustine established as a matter of theory. His “wise man” or “wise judge” was to bring the ethics of the city of God to bear on the city of man, as he said in the City of God: If such darkness shrouds social life, will a wise judge take his seat on the bench or no? Beyond question he will. For human society, which he thinks it a wickedness to abandon, constrains him and compels him to this duty. 7
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Augustine’s wise judge is something of a corollary to Plato’s philosopher-king. I wonder, though, if we might broaden the point, and argue that every Christian is a kind of moral ruler in this world of darkness. We are a “kingdom of priests,” (1 Peter 2:9; Exodus 19:6) and a crucial part of this identity is extending the kingdom, the spiritual and moral reign and rule of God, over all the earth, including our own little corner of it.
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f we can compress our historical survey, we see that the Christian moral tradition stretches on. We think many centuries later of the Puritan Samuel Sewall, who decried the horrific evil of slavery, an evil that too few of his contemporaries recognized as such. “Manstealing,” he said, was “an atrocious crime which would introduce amongst the English settlers people who would remain forever restive and alien.” A century later, William Wilberforce led the twentyyear fight to end the British slave trade. Days before his death in 1833, he witnessed the abolition of slavery in the British colonies. The effect of Wilberforce’s life and work nearly defies description. Few have been so powerfully used of God to help the marginalized, the victimized, the weak. Wilberforce himself recognized courage as the essential ingredient of such a life: Let true Christians then, with becoming earnestness, strive in all things to recommend their profession, and to put to silence the vain scoffs of ignorant objectors. Let them boldly assert the cause of Christ in an age when so many, who bear the name of Christians, are ashamed of Him. Wilberforce’s career overlaps with a movement that is known as the benevolent empire. The theology of Jonathan Edwards included a hugely influential and largely unknown idea called “disinterested benevolence” that helped spawn this movement in which countless Christians, imbued with a love for God and his gospel, gave their time and money to what were called “benevolent societies.” It was the followers of Edwards, called the “New Divinity,” who provided a great deal of energy to the abolitionist cause in America. Theology, then as now, had a direct bearing on practice. The benevolent empire created Sunday schools, hospitals, orphanages, and much more even as the church continued to speak out against immorality and unnecessary suffering. Following the death 8
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of Alexander Hamilton, Eliphalet Nott, a prominent New York pastor, preached a sermon on II Samuel 1:19, “How the mighty have fallen,” about the tragedy. His sermon, which became a classic of American rhetoric, helped to contribute to the passing of anti-dueling laws in countless states in the early nineteenth-century. This trend continued into the twentieth century. Bonhoeffer, Reinhold Niebuhr, H. Richard Niebuhr, and Martin Luther King, Jr. all electrified the conscience through their distinctive calls to an ethical way of life, and both Bonhoeffer and King paid the ultimate price for their convictions. They opposed tremendous evil, yet were themselves treated as such. This is a profound irony. To liberate is to be treated as a tyrant. To love is to be received as one who hates. Yet we must speak up because, as Stanley Hauerwas has said, we are the true culture. To use theologian Kevin Vanhoozer’s language, we speak reality and wisdom in a world of un-reality and folly. I am reminded of a momentous line in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Franzen voices the thoughts of a character who sees his wife and children slipping into selfishness and isolation. This man, Gary, reflects that if he does not speak up, something will be lost in his family, something that can never be regained. This is a powerful insight. It accords with James Q. Wilson’s famous assertion that “mankind has a moral sense.” Yet not all will act by it. We are those who must speak up, for what we see what has been lost, and beyond this, what can be regained.
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he pundits are right. Some today do want a “new way to be Christian,” to use Brian Maclaren’s phrase. Those in this camp want to shift their focus from hard-edged issues to “a softer, less partisan way.” One writer, Jonathan Merritt, has suggested that “this cultural change could be the very thing our faith needs to survive.” The kind of thinking described here is finding an audience, it is true. Just as liberal Protestantism resonated with some in the early twentieth century, so this “softer” Christianity has its cheerleaders today. But this is not the only option we have. There is a second movement afoot; if we may amend C. S. Lewis, the spirit of Wilberforce is on the move. This movement sees that love in its essence is not shorn of conviction. It is instead a summons to joyful transformation. 9
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Now is the moment for a new Christian conservatism, or what we could describe as a “new social witness.” This movement breaks with the kind of thinking quoted above, even as it refuses to be seen as the religious wing of a given party. It is, however, grounded in the public witness of Christians offered in the past half century, and it is grateful for the sacrifices made by those who have gone before. This movement does not consider the church a PAC, nor America the new Israel. Its tone is charitable and courageous, because this movement derives ultimate confidence and identity not from the city of man, but from the city of God. This movement sees itself as an agent of the kingdom, a force for righteousness created by the gospel of God’s grace in Christ. It views the church as the most important establishment on earth, and seeks the theologically driven spiritual upbuilding of local churches as a matter of first priority. This new social witness believes that the fundamental unit of society is the family. The marriage of one man and one woman is the bedrock of this living institution. Marriage does not merely create optimal environments for human flourishing, but is in fact a picture of the gospel, of the love Christ has for his church. Homosexuality is a denial of this reality and a pathway to suffering, both for adults and for children. The new social witness has good news for those of this ilk—and all others besides. It dares to be the most hopeful movement of any on the earth, for it has tasted the possibilities of forgiveness, newness of life, and change. It cannot, therefore, demonize those who disagree with it, but rather must reach out to them in truth and grace. Though diverse and far-reaching, this movement does not buy into doctrinal vagueness. It strives in humility to learn from a wide range of figures even as it promotes the great discovery of the Protestant reformers, the saving of sinners by grace alone, as the article by which the church, and we ourselves, stand or fall. The new social witness is full of vibrancy and life and youthfulness. Young people have not retreated from it but are in fact propelling it. It is a direct challenge to the narrative referenced above that suggests that young Christians are laying down issues of the most urgent significance. On the contrary, it is steadfastly committed to maintaining, in continuity with the church over the ages, a winsome yet unapologetically bold witness on the greatest cultural and societal matters: 10
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abortion, homosexuality, traditional marriage, religious liberty, and more. Contrary to the thought offered by programs calling for a “secular faith” or anti-Constantinianism, this movement cannot help but love its neighbor and be “salt and light” according to the Sermon on the Mount. It grounds its identity in the preaching of the gospel, yet it cannot help but act on behalf of others, whether spiritually or physically weak. This movement offers no arbitrary distinction between individual and societal health, private and public uplift. The new Christian conservatism is eager to roll up its sleeves, figure out tough issues, shape them for public understanding, and advocate them all the way to the end. This movement is aware of major voices today who argue, with the late Christopher Hitchens, that religion “poisons everything.” In point of fact, it is the Christian moral framework that has changed the world, over and over again, for the better. Though Christians have never been perfect, they have in monumental ways affected the world for good, whether through the outlawing of the gladiatorial games, the abolition of the global slave trade, the building of countless hospitals and mercy ministries, the triumph of the civil rights movement, and the defense of the unborn. Believers should not be shy about these victories; neither are they aware of similar humanitarian efforts on the parts of, say, the Enlightenment philosophes, or the New Atheists. They should never be afraid to call the bluff of these groups, who excoriate the church for its role in the world while refusing to own the consequences of their own statism, cynicism, and upwardly mobile nihilism.
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he call to courage, to conviction, to the gospel, to gospelcreated ethics, to the life of testimony, is not an imposition, a burden, or a scandal to this movement. It is a privilege. It is a movement borne not of cynicism or fear but of hope. It dares to believe that there is a young Wilberforce out there who will act with what theologian R. Albert Mohler, Jr. has called “gospel shrewdness.” This figure will not rest, but will see the fight against abortion through to the end. We hope for similar champions to arise and take on other matters of major cultural import—sex trafficking, the uplift of the poor, the rescue of the weak around the world—even as we 11
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realize that ultimate victory may only come when humanity’s curse is overturned. Is there momentum for this second way? I believe there is. What is needed, after all, is not for the super-beings among us to lead us. We close with a final word from Bonhoeffer, whose call for sacrificial witness resonates in our modern age: What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, and straightforward men. Will our inward power of resistance be strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves remorseless enough, for us to find our way back to simplicity and straightforwardness? The answer to this question is simple: we will. But as we await the day when we may by God truly find our way back, we are reminded that our call is not to capitulate. Our call is to witness, and indeed, to sacrifice.
Owen Strachan is assistant professor of Christian theology and c hurch history at Boyce College. A graduate of Bowdoin College, he has written for The Atlantic and First Things and is working on a book, Bold Faith, on evangelical engagement in the public square. 12
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Wilfred McClay
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he United States has just staggered to the conclusion of an almost unendurably lengthy, heated, fractious, and relentlessly negative presidential election campaign season. Despite the billions of dollars spent and high-stakes tone of much of the rhetoric, little was decided in the outcome. But it would be hard not to conclude that the texture of our democratic life came through it unenhanced, and perhaps even damaged. The ignorant sloganeering, the emotional manipulation, the crass appeals to self-interestedness, the oversimplified issues, the triumph of image over substance, the role of money (and fraud) in shaping the outcomes—all these sordid details have made our ideals seem heartbreakingly distant and perhaps made us fear that our democracy has become hopelessly debased. There is no way of knowing what the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr would have to say about it all, had he been present to observe and comment. But it’s unlikely he would have been much surprised by this general state of affairs. Some considerable part of our disappointment, he would explain, stems from self-overestimation, and from overly optimistic assumptions about human nature. We assume we are better people than we seem to be, and we assume that our politics should therefore be an endlessly uplifting pursuit, full of joy and inspiration and self-actualization rather than endless wrangling, head butting, and petty self-interest. But even though he would surely agree that the low-mindedness of our current politics might be regrettable, he would insist on adding that this fact is not our only point of vulnerability, and far from being the most dangerous. Niebuhr would remind us that we need to be defended not only against our cynicism but also against our idealism. For we are never more 13
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susceptible to evil than when we are absolutely convinced that we are doing good. Both our pessimism and optimism can lead us astray. And yet we need them both, to balance and counteract one another. Niebuhr’s book The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness made these points with unforgettable power. It is enlightening reading at any time, in any season, but perhaps especially at the present rather ideologically overheated moment, in which politics is polarized between factions that each seem entirely certain, in equal but opposite ways, of their own goodness and the opposition’s mendacity. It may be especially important reading even when one is entirely convinced of one’s rectitude in a difficult and morally consequential struggle. That may help explain the otherwise odd fact that Niebuhr published The Children of Light in 1944, in the midst of World War II, a moment when it would have seemed blindingly obvious where to draw the line between good and evil. But Niebuhr was interested in more than this distinction; his book is best understood as a defense of moral nature of democracy, the form of government he thought best suited to deal with the equal and opposite propensities of our human nature.
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iebuhr believed human nature is best explained by the Christian belief that all persons are made in the image of God, and that our propensity for sin has tarnished but not entirely effaced that image. At a time when advanced thinkers left and right were jettisoning their culture’s inherited biblical faith, Niebuhr insisted that Christianity offered a uniquely complex view of our human nature—far more complex, in many respects, than any of its secular equivalents, and far more adequate to the world as we find it. No one better captured this tense complexity, or more compellingly rendered the underlying tough-mindedness of the Christian faith, than Niebuhr—arguably the outstanding American public theologian of the twentieth century. Niebuhr’s exploration of this tension came to define the concept of Christian Realism, which recognized both the hope and danger inherent in political endeavors. Reinhold Niebuhr was born in 1892 in Missouri and was educated at Eden Seminary and Yale Divinity School, graduating with a Master of Arts in 1915. He began his career as pastor of a small GermanAmerican church in Detroit, but his energetic writings and far-flung speaking engagements brought him to the attention of a wider na14
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tional and international audience. In 1928 he accepted a post as Professor of Practical Theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he remained from 1928 until his retirement in 1960. He also served as one of the founders of Christianity and Crisis, a magazine established in 1941 to counter the pacifist-leaning positions of the influential liberal journal Christian Century, positions he himself had once held but had come to reject, and instead insist upon the moral necessity of an American intervention in the Second World War on the side of the Allies. During his unusually long and productive career, Niebuhr wrote dozens of books, articles, reviews, sermons, speeches, pamphlets, and other pieces. Niebuhr was not merely a theologian of great distinction, but a public intellectual of the first order, who addressed himself to the full range of public concerns. He had a mind of enormous scope and ambition, and there is hardly an issue of importance—political, social, economic, cultural, or spiritual—that he did not discuss in his many works. Two themes were particularly prominent in Niebuhr’s thought, and they are both evident in The Children of Light. First was the problem of progress: the human tendency to over- or underestimate our ability to control the conditions of our existence. Second, and relatedly, Niebuhr came to see the Christian doctrine of original sin as foundational to political thought. His suspicion of progress developed over time, as he observed current events and trends in the American church. In his youth, Niebuhr was a devotee of the Social Gospel, the movement within liberal Protestantism that located the gospel’s meaning in its promise as a blueprint for progressive social reform, rather than in its assertions about the nature of supernatural reality. Adherents to the Social Gospel were modernists who often dismissed the authority of the Bible and the historical creeds. They insisted that the heart of the Christian gospel could be preserved by being “socialized,” i.e., translated into the language of scientific social reform. As Walter Rauschenbusch, perhaps the leading figure in the Social Gospel movement, put it, “We have the possibility of so directing religious energy by scientific knowledge that a comprehensive and continuous reconstruction of social life in the name of God is within the bounds of human possibility.” The Kingdom of God was not reserved for the next life; it could be created in the here and now by social scientists and ministers working hand in hand. 15
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In the wake of the calamitous First World War and the economic chaos of the Great Depression, Niebuhr came to see this kind of talk as cruelly implausible. He found the progressive optimism undergirding the Social Gospel to be utterly naive about the intractability of human nature, and therefore inadequate to the task of explaining the nature of power relations in the real world. Sin, he concluded, was not merely a byproduct of bad but correctible social institutions. It was something much deeper than that, something inherent in the human condition, something social institutions were powerless to reform. In what was perhaps his single most influential book, Moral Man and Immoral Society, published in 1932 in the depths of the Depression, Niebuhr turned the Social Gospel’s emphasis on its head, arguing that there was an inescapable disjuncture between the morality governing the lives of individuals and the morality of groups, and that the latter was generally inferior to the former. Individuals could transcend their self-interest only rarely, but groups of individuals, especially groups such as nation-states, never could. In short, groups generally made individuals morally worse, rather than better, for the work of collectives was inevitably governed by a brutal logic of selfinterest.
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n The Children of Light, Niebuhr dismissed as mere “sentimentality” the progressive hope that the wages of individual sin could be overcome through intelligent social reform, and that America could be transformed in time into a loving fellowship of like-minded comrades. Instead, the pursuit of good ends in the arena of national and international politics had to take full and realistic account of the unloveliness of human nature, and the unlovely nature of power. Niebuhr explained that the “children of light”—Christians and others who assumed that the purity of their motives would make them effective in doing good—were blind to the ways of the world, and to their own bent toward self-interested behavior. If they wanted change, they had to be willing to get their hands soiled, for it was an unfortunate fact that all existing social relations were held together by coercion, and only counter-coercion could effect change. This willingness, therefore, necessarily exposed them to profound moral risk. But so did the decision to refrain from acting. Either way, purity was not an option open to us. 16
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His sweeping rejection of the Social Gospel and reaffirmation of the doctrine of original sin did not mean that Niebuhr gave up on the possibility of social reform. On the contrary. He insisted that Christians were obliged to work actively for progressive social causes and for the realization of Christian social ideals of justice and righteousness. But in doing so they had to abandon their illusions, not least in the way they thought about themselves. Notwithstanding the more flattering preferences of liberal theologians, the doctrine of original sin was profoundly and essentially true, and its probative value was confirmed empirically every day. Man is a sinner in his deepest nature. But man was not merely a sinner, but also a splendidly endowed creature formed in God’s image, still capable of acts of wisdom, generosity, and truth, and still able to advance the cause of social improvement. In insisting upon such a complex formulation, Niebuhr was correcting the Social Gospel’s erroneous attempt to collapse or resolve the tension at the heart of the Christian vision of things. Niebuhr understood the doctrine of original sin—or more precisely, the Christian understanding of human nature, with its dualities and tensions—as central to the success of American democracy. Acceptance of that doctrine is, paradoxically, the best guarantor of the possibility of the improvement of the human race, since it offers us a truthful and realistic view of the crooked timber of humanity. In a rich and beautiful sentence from The Children of Light, he states, “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” Democracy, rightly understood, empowers us to do good while constraining us from doing evil. The celebrated principle of government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” points toward this very insight, toward the ways that “the people” can and do regulate themselves in a healthy democracy. The American constitutional system, with its checks and balances and separation of powers, contains safeguards against excessive concentration of authority, and embodies the selfregulatory principle—that combination of empowerment and restraining force—better than any other system yet devised. Such realism about human nature can help us correctly calibrate our political expectations. First, it should make us grateful for what peace and orderliness and prosperity we have, since none of these things is the natural condition of man. Second, we should recognize that the art of politics is almost always a matter of achieving proxi17
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mate, imperfect, and provisional goods at best, and confining our bad outcomes to lesser evils at worst. The sweeping solutions for which we yearn are not to be had in this world, since no sweeping solution is possible when the crooked entity called “man” is behind its design and tasked with its execution. And third, we should recognize that when we hope for leaders who will be transformative knights on chargers, men and women whose greatness and godliness will be evident in all they say and do, we make the best the enemy of the good. In Children of Light Niebuhr references the biblical paradox that encourages followers of Christ to be “wise as serpents, harmless as doves,” and this paradox also captures the political leader’s task exactly. Skilled political engagement and statesmanship are hard to learn and hard to measure. The true leader is someone sui generis; different from a towering intellect who is renowned for systematic thoroughness, a master political tactician who can craft effective majorities and move multitudes, or a great moral visionary who can mobilize the masses toward large reforms—although an effective leader will probably have some features of all three. He is not likely to have the arrogant confidence of the “child of light” Niebuhr critiques. Instead, he may be outwardly unprepossessing. This leader balances conviction and opportunity at every turn, looks twenty steps ahead without losing sight of the snares that lie close by, and cleaves to great goals while remaining prepared to revise them in light of the unknown. As such, he always runs the risk of seeming unprincipled or devious to some, and unrealistic to others: unprincipled because politics is the art of the possible, and great and noble things are not made possible simply by being stated loudly and emphatically, but may requires numerous deals and half-measures; unrealistic because “the possible” is not a static thing, and its nature may well be changed and expanded by the bold actions of wise leaders. A great leader can make a well-timed initiative that changes the nature of the possible, creating fresh imaginative space in which things become thinkable and even feasible that were not so before.
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enuine progress is difficult. One may never see it come about because of one’s own efforts, just as the sower of seeds knows that others will bring in the harvest. But we cannot presume to say that it is impossible. Still, we will be able to reckon 18
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progress rightly, and argue in good faith that it is possible, only when we have first accepted the profound limitations within which we must operate. We should not expect that we will see the outcomes for which we yearn, only that we will be given the privilege of living faithfully in the hope of them. That is why Niebuhr always insisted that hope, as one of the Christian virtues, is not the same thing as optimism. Optimism tells us that it is always darkest before the dawn; but that is not always so. Sometimes the darkness settles in to stay. Sometimes it seems impenetrable. It is not ours to know how the restoration of light will happen, but rather to contribute what we can toward that objective, and learn in the meantime how to draw our sustenance from a power beyond the reach of the darkness. To that end, Niebuhr offered, in his later book called The Irony of American History, a kind of catechism of theological virtue: Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness. These words offer a glimpse of Niebuhr’s devotional side—his life as a pastor and a man of prayerful reflection. So too do his prayers, which were collected and published after his death by his wife Ursula in a book called Justice and Mercy, and which showcase the wonderful way in which Niebuhr could compress a universe of complexity into a well-turned phrase. All the world knows Niebuhr’s famous “serenity prayer”: “God give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.” Let me conclude with a sentence from another one of his prayers, to show how his insights into the crooked nature of our political and social lives can be incorporated in our own acts of intercession, worship, and daily reflection. It is a searing prayer, which begins in lamenting “the sorry confusion of our world,” and asking God to grant mercy to on a generation that has “strayed from your ways,” and to give strength to “the vic19
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tims of tyranny.” But then he surprises us with this sentence: “We pray for wicked and cruel men, whose arrogance reveals to us what the sin of our own hearts is like when it has conceived and brought forth its final fruit.” It is a powerful and surprising sentence, one that first catches us up in righteous indignation toward evildoers, and then suddenly, without warning, whirls us around to stare into the mirror and look with that same intensity back at ourselves. It calls on us to pray for those whom we deem wicked and cruel, and not only for God’s help in defeating them. It goes on to pray for ourselves that we not regard our good fortune as “proof of our virtue,” and that we not “rest content to have our ease at the price of other men’s sorrow and tribulation.” Above all, it asks to God enable us to “know the limits of our powers, so that courage may feed on trust in you.” We might want to remember this call the next time we are inclined to dismiss with angry and demeaning prejudice the ideas or actions of those with whom we disagree in our political and social life. That doesn’t mean we don’t do battle with them, or fight as hard as we can for the right as we see it. It also doesn’t mean that the fact we will inevitably sin and make mistakes when we act relieves us of the responsibility to act on the behalf of those who find themselves in “sorrow or tributation” that we can relieve. But it does mean that we should pause to remember our limitations, and God’s consistent grace toward our us and own faulty endeavors, a grace that is not the sole property of ourselves or our “side,” but that God extends even to our enemies. Such reflexivity is not only the locus of Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought. It also is the moral and ethical heart of the Christian faith.
Wilfred McClay is SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities at the Univers ity of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he is also Professor of History. He is a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, for which he produced an abbrevia ted edition of The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness , which was published in October 2012. 20
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R.J. Snell
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lightly over twenty years ago, Lutheran theologian Carl Braaten described in First Things the “longstanding commonplace in Christian thought that Protestantism distinguishes its moral theology from that of Roman Catholicism by its rejection of natural law.” Seeing no intrinsic antithesis, Braaten suggested that “pressure to abandon the teaching of natural law stemmed not so much from the Reformation as from postEnlightenment developments in philosophy, especially utilitarianism and positivism.” Positivism’s tendency to capitulate before power “rendered people impotent in the face of the lawlessness of law,” and after “World War II, it seemed as though many people had had enough. Protestant theologians were invited to reconsider the relation between Christian faith and law.” Of course, “legalized atrocities and crimes against humanity as a result of the ascendancy of legal positivism in classrooms, legislatures, and courtrooms” did not end with World War II. Our experience includes Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the contraception mandate, embryonic-destructive research, the normalization of homosexuality, organ harvesting, proposals for post-birth abortion, concerted pressures against religious freedom, and on it goes. Given these threats to human dignity, and as mainline denominations lose their way, many orthodox Protestants think it unwise to blithely accept, in Braaten’s description, that “what the churches have to say on social issues has no way of reaching the other side, [with] churches… speaking only to themselves.” The “shattered bridge” between church and world needs reconstruction, with natural law a 21
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robust “bridge category on ethical and social questions between church and world.” Consequently, Protestant interest in natural law has revived, aided by an easing of suspicions toward Catholicism, ressourcement within evangelicalism, political engagement by evangelicals in need of a social theory, and historical scholarship on the Reformers’ comfort with natural law. Whatever the advances, the “Protestant prejudice,” as J. Daryl Charles terms it, has not disappeared, nor will it likely. In Retrieving the Natural Law: A Return to Moral First Things (Eerdmans 2008), Charles has no difficulty identifying continued sources of resistance from the Barthians, Jacques Ellul, John Howard Yoder, and Stanley Hauerwas, nor have the disciples of Cornelius Van Til capitulated, nor does the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America seem entirely ready to subscribe to Braaten’s ways. Within evangelicalism, the Manhattan Declaration and some signatories encountered resistance, with critical handwringing about cozying-up to the natural law. Protestant prejudice may have lessened, it has not vanished. As Braaten noted, Protestant hesitation provides boundary markers for the community. Every tradition has such memes, of course, and they serve a necessary function, for not every question can be kept open indefinitely or every edifice of thought reconstructed anew. Meaning is handed on, discoveries are codified; this is how humans progress. Yet commonplaces mutate into slogans, bromides which obscure rather than reveal. One can imagine a playbook being issued to young seminarians on the various issues—”ah, when they say this about natural law, you counter with that argument”—and the chess match of a previous decade is played again, with predictable results. Charles provides a helpful list of the plays: optimism regarding the fall, works righteousness, pagan understandings of nature, indifference to grace and the uniqueness of revelation, and minimization of the church. As Carl F. H. Henry once summarized, the three main objections are: “(1) that independently of divine revelation, (2) there exists a universally shared body or system of moral beliefs, (3) that human reasoning articulates despite the noetic consequences of the Adamic fall.” Of these, the trump card (or nuclear option) remains the fall, for even if prelapsarian Adam possessed and understood the natural law, human nature and human knowledge are so impaired as to render it non-existent or unknowable, or both. As Braaten put it: 22
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The chief reason for this theological hesitancy to fully recognize natural law is the problem of sin. Natural law seems to suggest that the order of being in the original creation has not been totally disrupted by the fall and sin. Further, it suggests that human reason is not so blinded as to be incapable of reading the will of God in the natural structures of creation. On the contrary, Protestants have wanted to argue, the imago dei is so fully destroyed that there remains only a negative relationship to God. Natural law theory, especially in its contemporary articulations, need not deny the wounds of sin and can agree with Braaten: “the fundamental structure of reality, including the rational and social nature of humanity, is deeply affected by sin. We live in a fallen world in which demonic forces have been let loose, distorting everything, including human reason.” Unlike older metaphysical articulations, contemporary natural law—I include the so-called “new natural law theory” of Germain Grisez, John Finnis, Joseph Boyle, Robert P. George, and others, as well as Martin Rhonheimer’s account of the perspective of the acting person—begins with concrete persons in their historicity, sociality, and culture, thus deeply wounded by sin. To put it another way, moving natural law from the theoretical to the interior mode is the next step in overcoming the Protestant prejudice.
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irst, theory and interiority. We inhabit our world with various concerns, questions, or projects governing our conscious intentionality. Often practical, sometimes theoretical, occasionally fixated on sensation, regularly adverting to the sheer existential drama of personhood, we find the shape and feel of our lives altering as our purposes change. Meaning itself is dynamic, variegated, functioning differently according to the variety of our concerns and interests. Borrowing from Bernard Lonergan’s helpful articulation in Method in Theology, the dizzying range of consciousness and meaning can by symbolized in three stages or modes. Common sense meaning tends to operate within the world of description, articulating the properties of extended bodies as they relate to the perceiver. Trees differ from shrubs because of their trunks and mammals from fish because of habitat—never mind what to do with rhododendrons or dolphins, for common sense does not explain, it describes. Since humans desire understanding, a distinct stage of meaning arises, the theoretical, a mode governed by rules of logic, often highly technical and conceptual. Consider the use of homoousios to explain the divini23
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ty of the begotten Son, as an example; or the distinction between speed and velocity, both meaningful with respect to motion. When we describe the movement of bodies relative to us in common sense we say “fast” or “slow,” but to explain motion we relate data to data (v=d/t or d=1/2gt2), providing an account through the rules and conceptual apparatus of theory. The third stage of meaning, interiority, occurs when the theoretical confronts critical consciousness, when rules of thought are challenged on how they hook on to reality, especially since consciousness plays some constitutive role in knowing— the turn to the subject in Descartes, Kant, or Husserl, for instance. Natural law exhibits these modes, for “nature” or “law” vary in purpose. What Aristotle meant by “nature” is not what Newton meant, even if for both “nature” served a similar heuristic task, the “that which was sought in inquiry.” In the Platonic dialogues, Callicles’ identification of nature with self-interest is markedly different from Socrates’ understanding, amounting to more than mere squabbling over usage. A more productive reading indicates the riddles and instability inherent in the various modes of meaning. Take an example: not long ago, a colleague (wrongly) explained that natural law judges homosexual activity illicit because it is unnatural, and unnatural because it is not in keeping with the obvious biological purpose of the reproductive organs. But since she remembered rhododendrons are trees and dolphins are mammals despite their variation from the “essence,” she denied the argument, claiming instead that a good many people experience their desires differently, with the variations perfectly natural. Note the impasse of description. As she understood it, natural law makes a perverted faculty argument—we observe that x does y by nature and so it is unnatural to do non-y with x—an argument she rightly rejects. But her response is a mimic: person x experiences y by nature and so y is natural for x but non-y unnatural. Her argument is the perverted faculty argument, merely beginning with a different experience of nature. Common sense imagines natural law as residing in biological processes—a meta-ethics too naïve to bear much examination. Given the coarseness of common sense, it is unsurprising to find sophisticated theoretical versions moving far beyond naïve attempts to discern morality in our tastes, but the tendency of theoretical accounts to imitate common sense by reducing the natural law to nature itself (ordo naturae) is disconcerting. It is as if the theoretical mode cannot ground 24
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itself, cannot quite answer the critical questions, and collapses back into the intuitive appeals of common sense, as so often happens with those accounts deriving finality from formality, discovering human telos by providing first a metaphysics of the person.
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hen I learned my Aristotle, I was taught that ethics followed physics, metaphysics, and theoretical anthropology. Material entities had four causes—material, efficient, formal, and final—and formality and finality were intrinsically related, with the what defining the for what of a being. Aquinas was read in the same manner: What is a human? A human is a substance with the nature of rational animal. Substances exist, so continued existence is their good—”Seek existence!” Animals exist, take in nutrition, and reproduce. Thus, nutrition and reproduction are among the goods of animals—”Seek life!” Animals are rational because of language and sociality, it follows to “Seek friendship! Seek order! Seek truth! Seek God!” First form, then finality. As Heinrich Rommen, a prominent theorist of an earlier generation put it, “natural law contains general acceptance only in periods the when metaphysics … is dominant,” for natural law “depends upon the doctrine of man’s nature.” Moral philosophy is “a continuation of metaphysics,” and being and goodness “must at bottom and ultimately be one.” Many, many others agree with Rommen—first a theory of soul, and from that theoretical base ethics is derived; that’s what the natural law is. While more sophisticated than common sense in attempting an explanation—x ought be pursued because it is the good of our nature— the theoretical mode encounters several damning objections prompting the need for interiority; here I sketch three. First, deriving ethics from metaphysics or anthropology attempts to ground prescriptions on descriptions, a clear logical problem. In providing a theoretical anthropology, it begins with statements of the form “the human is thus and such,” while concluding with statements of the form “humans ought to do this and that.” But this move from is to ought shifts categories, and no licit argument contains in the conclusion something absent in the premise(s). Further, derivation smacks of metaphysical biology, the pre-critical belief that purpose could be observed in nature while overlooking the intelligent observer’s role in positing purpose. 25
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Second, deriving ethics from anthropology is either circular or naive. In linking formal and final causes—the “what” and the “for what”—the theoretical grounds what we are to do upon what we are. And yet, those same accounts claim that the goal of moral life is to “perfect our nature,” or to “become what we are.” What does this mean? If I am already human, what would it mean to become human or to perfect my humanity? If I need to become more human, then I am not now fully human, but if I am not now fully human how can I base the moral goal upon a description of what I am—wouldn’t what I am be inadequate? All this implies, as Martin Rhonheimer puts it, that these accounts reverse themselves, for “the measure is not derived from that which is,” as is claimed, “but rather from the knowledge of what should be.” This is problematic: finality was supposed to be derived from formality. Either epistemology is grounded in metaphysics while epistemology explains metaphysics—circular— or it never asks the critical question of how we know, merely asserting that we do—naiveté. Third, natural law’s appeal comes from its claims of universality and self-evidency, but if its precepts derive from anthropology they are not self-evident. First principles have their status because underived, which does not mean they are innate or implanted or divinely illuminated, for self-evidency precludes only derivation, not learning or “arriving at” the principles. Generations of undergraduates have puzzled over Aristotle’s claim that first principles are selfevident and that a process of induction, which is neither self-evident nor certain, accesses the principles, which seems slightly problematic. Problems dissipate, however, if we admit that first principles are not innate, that babies do not possess some inner moral grammar but rather begin to grasp what must be the case for experience to make sense. It might be self-evident in itself that x=3 in the formula 3x=9, but not to a second grader, just as God’s existence is self-evident in itself and to Himself, but not to us. First principles may very well be self-evident in themselves, but we come to understand this through insights into the data of our experience. Coming to understand a first principle does not threaten the principle’s status as self-evident, for the principle is still underived; experience is the condition of our understanding of the principle, but the principle is not grounded by our experience or by an earlier premise in a logical series. But, if ethics is derived from metaphysics or anthropology, then the first principles 26
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are derived, not merely understood, and so not self-evident. Consequently, the theoretical model of the natural law contradicts itself right from the get-go. Behind these three objections is the suspicion that natural law theorizing is uncritical, merely accepting the moral status of description or asserting desired conclusions. “After all,” we have all heard a proponent say, “everyone just knows the moral law, it’s built into our humanity,” as if Hume, Foucault, and Peter Singer are thereby vanquished, either too stupid or wicked to get the obvious. But if natural law moved into a self-consciously critical phase (interiority), if it grudgingly admitted that not every objection from modernity was intrinsically flawed, would natural law be doomed or strengthened? And how might a self-consciously critical natural law address the Protestant objections?
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nteriority arises when the theoretical confronts critical consciousness, when we ask how we know that we know. Not to be confused with introspection or innate knowledge, interiority concerns how meaning is made, the operations and acts of human consciousness by which we mean, and without which nothing could be meant. As such, interiority moves beyond any naïve assertion that we “just know” or any claim that we can move uncritically from one domain of knowledge to another, say from metaphysics to ethics. Contemporary natural law has made the interior turn, as evidenced by the school of thought associated with Grisez, Finnis, Boyle, and George, and the similar but distinct work of Rhonheimer. Both schools grant the three objections above and avoid theoretically grounding natural law in metaphysics or anthropology, instead beginning with the practical reasoning of actual human persons. This is natural law in a new mode. In Fundamentals of Ethics, John Finnis explains that in ethics one is “doing something.” Ethics is a matter of practical reason, concerned with our doings, our striving, thinking, deliberating, choosing, and acting. Intelligent action always seeks a purpose, but since purpose is intelligible the first precepts are those goods which emerge as reasons in themselves, or, in his terminology, as basic human goods which provide explanations for action but do not themselves require explanation. For instance, if I avoid playing with my children in order to make money that I do not need, it makes perfect sense to ask 27
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“Why do I want money?” Answering, “money, of course,” is unsatisfactory since not intelligent in itself; money is instrumental, as a means to some other good such as security, esteem, a house, or a new boat. Of course, none of those goods are themselves beyond question, for it makes sense to ask “Why do you want security?” or “Why a new boat?” On the other hand, it would be very strange to ask “Why do you want to experience beauty?” or “Why do you want to be happy?” Aesthetic pleasure requires no justification, nor does happiness, and Finnis claims that we come to understand the basic human goods by grasping our reasons for acting. Goods are intended practically, independent of any prior theoretical account of human nature, even though it is the case that if my nature were different certain goods would not reveal themselves as worth pursuing—so far as we can tell, starfish do not seek friendship as a reason for acting. Further, the practical pursuit of these goods is not even a theory of ethics, for ethics as a distinct mode of discourse occurs only when we pivot our attention from the practical pursuit of goods and advert instead to what we have already done in our everyday pursuits. First we seek what we believe good, only later do we change attention from the praxis and reflect on our seeking in order to construct a meta-ethics. As Rhonheimer explains, the precepts of natural law are not theoretical statements such as “seek good and avoid evil,” but those more mundane commands of practical reason at work, the concrete judgments of value we make about this or that, many never becoming stated. It is not the statements which are the natural law, but rather the deliberate seeking of goods in conscious intentionality—the work of practical reason—which weighs and measures and decides what is actually good. The doing is first, and the doing is not theoretical; theory does not ground practice, but practice grounds theory. This is why natural law cannot be denied coherently; certainly we can coherently deny many of the theories arising from our reflective speculations, but we cannot deny our performance, our seeking of goods. According to these schools, a metaphysics of the person comes at the end rather than at the beginning of ethics; ethics grounds anthropology, not the other way around. In good Thomistic fashion, Finnis notes that the human essence is understood by working backwards: by reflecting on objects we identify those acts by which the objects are intended, by noting the acts we can identify the potentialities 28
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allowing those acts, and by identifying the potentialities we finally grasp human nature, precisely the reverse order of the theoretical mode. First, we perform a seeking, then we advert to our own subjectivity, and in so doing grasp who and what we are.
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or many critics, this is simply too far afield from the tradition, and the claims are controversial. However, despite the rather expansive literature on these disputes, Protestant reflections on natural law would not appear to incorporate the third stage of meaning. Stuck with a playbook in the second mode, the chess match repeats endlessly, for the Protestant prejudice is also a theoretical prejudice, and the theoretical mode of natural law cannot overcome the impasse over the ontological and noetic effects of sin. First, the theoretical mode begins not with the practical reasoning of concrete persons as they intend goods but with a metaphysics of soul tending towards universal, static, and abstract accounts of the human. This is no failure as far as it goes, but concerned with what we are essentially, such accounts only woodenly incorporate history into their understanding of the person. Abstract essences do not have histories, after all, and a human is a human is a human. Understood metaphysically, pre- and post-lapsarian Adam are identical in essence else they would be distinct species, and sin thus seems an accidental modification. In fact, one common objection against Thomas is that sin and grace become “add-ons” to human nature, while nature remains a constant, unchanging substratum. In this reading, the nature of prelapsarian Adam is equal to our own, although he has a grace—original justice—added on top of nature, subsequently losing that same grace in the fall but with nature unaltered. Now, whatever the accuracy of such a reading, conceptualist metaphysics tends to communicate concrete realities like “sin” and “grace” and “human being” as abstract essences, with concepts retaining intrinsic meanings independent of accidental relations. Thus original justice reads like a discrete, reified substance in accidental relationship to nature. While some metaphysicians are able to impart dynamism even in the theoretical mode—the great Norris Clarke, for instance—it is easy to see how metaphysical concepts can appear far removed from salvation history or our own conscious experience. Reticence to include history in articulating the soul also contributes to an apparent optimism regarding reason. If humans are essentially rational animals, 29
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and sin cannot change our nature without turning us into different substances or species, then sin does not fundamentally alter our status as rational animals. Further, if human reason is defined by this or that property or power, then human reason is always and eternally defined by that property; since properties and powers have functions and purposes, those functions seem fundamentally unaffected by the fall, and a zone of pure nature immune from sin arises, making the work of Christ and his church tangential to ethics. Beginning from a first-person account of the natural law, contemporary perspectives grant methodological primacy to human subjectivity, to the concrete intentions of practical reason; unlike a metaphysics of soul, subjectivity is dynamic, historical, linguistic, embodied, encultured, disoriented by sin and healed by grace in both personal and social history. For interiority, natural law is not a universal law of nature and never reduced to a law of nature (ordo naturae) already operative in biology, but rather constituted by the activities of practical reasoning (ordo rationalis). While souls and their powers are timeless abstractions, the reasoning of actual persons is disoriented by passion, bias, temptation, rationalization, selfishness, and the whole range of vice. Natural law might always and universally operate in subjectivity, but it operates within subjectivity, distorted by sin, healed by sanctifying grace, edified and challenged by Scripture, educated by the Church, and trained by the sacraments. Reason is not static or abstract, at all. The order of nature just is the order of nature, but the order of subjectivity is ordo amoris, and we all know what it is to run burning to Carthage with ulcerated loves. As a result, the perspective of the acting person positions the natural law much closer to the Protestant playbook, or at least allows the possibility of productive conversations about natural law and sin. For this to occur, Protestants need to add some plays, although those plays are already sketched out by the best of contemporary natural law theory. Funny to think that the long Protestant struggles with subjectivity might allow a more robust grasp of natural law than possible for classical Thomists. But: one prejudice at a time.
R.J. Snell is is Associate Professor of Philosophy and d irector of the philosophy program at Eastern University. 30
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Paul D. Miller
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et’s begin with a quote: “I’ve heard the reasons for opposing civil marriage for same-sex couples. Cut through the distractions, and they stink of the same fear, hatred, and intolerance I have known in racism and in bigotry.” So spoke Representative John Lewis in 2003, a Democratic Congressman from Georgia and famous Civil Rights movement leader. In Lewis’ view, opposition to gay marriage can only be explained as bigotry. Lewis’ quote illustrates a broader problem in how we argue, what our arguments assume about truth and falsehood, and how we treat our opponents. Lewis’ contention is surprising because opponents of gay marriage generally do not rest their case on appeals to hatred. No one stands up and says “I dislike homosexuals and therefore believe they shouldn’t be allowed to marry.” Instead, advocates of traditional marriage advance a complex argument about the nature of marriage, the state’s interest in fostering family, the limitations of government, and the right of people in a democracy to privilege certain cultural institutions over others. Examples of these arguments are widespread; see, for example, the excellent discussion by Ron Sider in First Things in December 2010. Advocates of gay marriage rarely engage with their opponents’ actual arguments. Instead, they level the charge of bigotry. But note that the charge of bigotry is made in spite of what opponents of gay marriage actually say. In this sense, the movement for gay marriage is different from the Civil Rights movement, during which opponents were generally quite explicit about their dislike of African Americans. Today, advocates of gay marriage justify the charge of bigotry in one of two ways: either they claim that their opponents are 31
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secretly bigoted, that their actual arguments are merely polite justifications for an underlying animus, or they have to change the definition of bigotry so that mere disagreement is an act of hate. We might call this the theory of “imputed secret bigotry.” Either way, public debate is no longer possible. Principled disagreement is just a mask for the will to power.
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his all reflects ill on the gay marriage movement and explains why the public “debate” over gay marriage is more often akin to name-calling. But my concern is broader. The intellectual habit in question—ignoring an opponent’s arguments while imputing secret bigotry or malice to them—is actually typical across a wide range of issues. It is more than the logical fallacy of an ad hominem attack: there is an entire belief system behind it that claims that believing in “truth” is actually an expression of intolerance and oppression. This belief system is practiced by a specific group of people uniformly educated in a unique intellectual tradition—what a sociologist would call an “epistemic community,” a group of people bound together by a common set of assumptions and a common way of thinking. The intellectual tradition in question is called “postmodernism.” I want to argue that this way of thinking and arguing is essentially un-Christian because it functionally ignores questions of truth or falsehood and fails to act charitably towards one’s opponents. More controversially, I want to argue that we live in a world created by this epistemic community and that we have unwittingly inherited a way of practicing public debate shaped by their intellectual habits. Although Christians rightly reject postmodernists’ belief system as contrary to our faith, we behave as if they were right when we enter the public sphere and argue like they do. We do so because we’ve been trained to. Virtually everyone reading this article has already undergone the main form of training in postmodernism: attending a major university sometime in the last three decades. I recognize that you will immediately resist the suggestion that you act like a postmodernist. If you are a professing Christian and take the trouble to read publications like THE CITY, you are already making a deliberate effort to shape your thinking according to Biblical wisdom—to “take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ,” as the Apostle Paul puts it. But ask yourself this: if you were born blind in a world of blind people, how would you know that you lacked sight? If you were a fish, would you be aware of the ocean? If 32
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you were mentally handicapped, would you be consciously aware of your incapacity? Postmodernism so thoroughly permeates and pervades western culture and its institutions, including its universities, churches, and media, that most of us have lost the ability to recognize it or distinguish it from the background. Postmodernism so saturates our own thinking that we have lost the ability to get outside of it and analyze it—especially because one of the effects of postmodernism is to make us doubt our ability to get an objective perspective on anything. It is like asking a near-sighted man to describe and fix his glasses while they are still on his face; they are too close to see clearly, and a wrong lens makes it even worse. It is impossible to diagnose and cure your postmodern vision because it is everywhere and because postmodernism itself has crippled your ability to see rightly. These may sound like sweeping claims about something I haven’t even defined yet. That is part of the problem with postmodernism: it deliberately evades and defies definition. Evasion is part of its adherents’ strategy. Without definition, it is easier to treat postmodernism as the natural background noise to a pluralistic democracy. To counteract the deliberate ambiguity of postmodernism and to identify what it actually is, we have to tell its story. Postmodernism has a history; it developed in specific historical circumstances and in response to specific philosophical claims. To understand that story is to understand postmodernism, and thus to be able to judge it on its merits. It is crucial to recognize that our era was not inevitable, is not natural, and could be different. That is crucial for our ability to recognize postmodernism in our own minds; understand how postmodern thinking is inconsistent with Enlightenment rationality and with Biblical Christianity; and extricate ourselves from it.
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ostmodernism was a 20th Century intellectual movement that began among disillusioned former Marxists in post-World War II Europe. Having lost faith in the promise of ever-increasing knowledge leading to ever-increasing liberty and equality, European intellectuals turned on the Enlightenment with a vengeance. They blamed the evils of the early 20th Century—the World Wars, the Holocaust, the advent of nuclear weapons—on the relentless march of instrumental rationality and the pursuit of technological mastery. The Enlightenment’s blind faith in reason, science, and technology was unguided by any rationally-established moral foundations (because 33
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none could be established by reason alone), and the Enlightenment’s greatest achievements therefore became the handmaidens and midwives of war, terror, and tyranny. The philosophical analogue to the loss of faith during the Enlightenment was an epistemological attack on the status of words and the knowability of truth. The Enlightenment (and, it should be said, Christianity) only works if you believe words mean something, and that collections of words strung together can say things that are true. Knowing such words is how we know truth; speaking them is how we express our knowledge of the truth. Words and truth are thus cornerstones of human life. A belief in the reality of truth and value of words underpins both Christianity and the Enlightenment. God spoke the world into being, and John tells us that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Postmodernists, in their attack on the Enlightenment and its Christian antecedents, aimed directly at these cornerstones. In their view, words do not express unchanging truths and do not correspond to objective reality. Instead, words are arbitrary sounds (“signs,” they would say) whose social use determines whatever meaning they have. This isn’t the obvious point that the physical sound of a word has no necessary connection to the thing to which it refers. That’s a basic truth of linguistics. Rather, the postmodernists claim that words are arbitrary in relation to other words; or, to put it another way, the way we slice up concepts and categories is arbitrary. An example may help. Take the word “justice.” What does it mean? In some views it means “equity,” or “fairness.” Other definitions might include the concept of “proportionality,” or “getting your due.” Some might talk about “law” or notions of “right.” Note that we can only define the word “justice” with a whole lot of other words. Which ones are right? For that matter, what do any of those other words mean either? The postmodernist argues there isn’t a right definition of any of them. They are all collections of words that refer to each other in an endless, infinite cycle, and there is no final, fixed, objectively correct definition of any of them. It is even more complicated when you consider the multiplicity of human languages. Whatever the English word “justice” means, it is not exactly the same as the German gerechtigkeit, the Greek dikaiosunae, the Italian guistizia, or the Latin iustitia, let alone the Swedish rattvisa, the Welsh cyfiawnder, or the Vietnamese cong ly. Each word 34
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carries subtly different shades of meaning only roughly suggested by translations of one to the other. The postmodernist’s conclusion is that there is no such thing as “justice”—that is, not one that is objectively and universally valid. Whatever meaning the word has comes from how it is used in society. Some people talk about “justice” in advocating for redistributive social programs, other for tax cuts and economic freedom. To the postmodernist, neither are wrong and the dispute is irresolvable. There is no essence of justice, no extramental reality of justice to which one could appeal to arbitrate between rivals conceptions of it. No one idea about justice corresponds to the correct version because there isn’t one.
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hese are abstract claims of epistemology, but they have profound political implications. If these ideas are true, we have no incentive to try to persuade our opponents that our view of justice is the right one, because there is no “right view” of justice. It is pointless to engage in reasoned discourse, because there is no reason. Rather, we have a very strong incentive to push our preferred definition of justice by all possible means, honest or otherwise. Instead of arguing for our view, we simply state it as loudly and frequently as possible, while denigrating the other view. Propaganda, innuendo, half-truths, and spin are not perversions of public discourse: they are the heart and soul of it. Talk is another form of combat, and public discourse is the clash of rival wills to power. Postmodernists draw a dramatic conclusion from this. Claiming to know truth is an act of intellectual violence. All talk is combat; truthclaims are power-grabs; the attempt to persuade others of a truth is a form of terrorism. Lest you think I am exaggerating, Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998) repeatedly used “terror” and “terrorism” to describe truth-claims and their adherents in one of the founding texts of postmodernism, The Postmodern Condition (1972). Simply stating a particular conception of justice, for example, is arrogant. Attempting to persuade others of it is bigoted; trying to change society on the basis of your conception of justice is tantamount to tyranny and terror. Thus, opposing gay marriage is bigotry; advocating for traditional marriage is theocracy. It doesn’t matter what arguments we marshal for our beliefs; the fact that we have beliefs is proof enough. It is by this sleight of hand that virtually any political or religious belief can be dismissed out of hand. 35
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The French philosopher Jacque Derrida (1930-2004) argued this point in his seminal philosophy called “deconstructionism”, an attitude of refusing to take at face value any ideas, words, or philosophical or religious systems. Instead of seeking to establish the truth or falsity of truth claims—because the possibility of truth or falsity is largely ridiculous to a deconstructionist—a deconstructionist instead asks the question, “What advantage or power do you gain by advancing your truth claim?” Deconstructionists automatically discount, or simply ignore, the plain meaning behind any truth-claim-say, “God exists”—and instead ask the question “What advantage or power do you gain by making the claim ‘God exists’?” Absent a belief that the ideas “sin,” “repentance,” and “grace” refer to anything knowable or even real, a deconstructionist only hears someone entrenching the power of a religious institution by foisting on people guilt and religious obligations to attend church, give money, and listen to religious propaganda. Deconstructionism is the close cousin of full-blown postmodernism, which Lyotard defined as “distrust of metanarratives,” by which he meant comprehensive explanatory systems like Christianity, Marxism, or fascism. Postmodernism is a reflexive attitude of distrust toward truth-claims based on a prior assumption that “truth” and “falsity” are invented constructs and a belief that “knowledge” is impossible. The only virtuous thing (no irony intended) in the postmodern ethic is to tell stories and expose and debunk the hidden relations of power encoded into society by the ruling elites, whoever they are.
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t may sound like I am simply describing American public life. If so, that’s a strong validation of my thesis that we’re all living in a world created by postmodernists. If my argument is right, this indeed is what American public life will look like. But beware of a common fallacy. We have a tendency to treat our immediate experience as the standard of what’s normal. Nothing could be further from the truth. Just because this is the way things are doesn’t mean this is the way things are supposed to be, or that things have always been this way, or that there is anything natural about our way of doing things. The opposite is more nearly true. Were a person from almost any prior era in western history transported through time to witness contemporary American life, he would probably conclude that we are insane. Our hypothetical time 36
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traveler would have any number of different ideas of what constituted justice and rationality, depending on the era from which we summoned him, but it is certain that he would believe that justice and rationality were very real and very important and very worth arguing about. The idea of attempting to carry on human life, let alone public life, in the absence of a belief in justice would strike him not only as lunacy, but as the prelude to anarchy. It is not hard to see why. Postmodernism is obviously self-refuting. Its own arguments about the arbitrariness of words, the absence of truth, and the will to power are, of course, truth-claims subject to the same criticism as those of Christianity or the Enlightenment. Also, if postmodernists are right, there is no escape. Intellectual violence and terror are inevitable. There is no form of public discourse other than the clash of rivals’ truth-claims which can never be resolved. Public life is doomed to an endless cycle of claim and counter-claim, of violence and counter-violence. Finally, postmodernism is insufferably self-serving for its adherents. It is impossible to argue against postmodernism because any opponent can just be dismissed as another power-grabbing truth-terrorist whose worldview, if left unchecked, will lead directly to back to Auschwitz. To which we should respond: anybody whose worldview lets himself off the hook while damning every opponent so easily should be laughed off the stage.
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nfortunately, in this case, they own the stage. Even more unfortunately, we’ve fallen for their trap. We act as if their view of truth and words was right. In response to the liberal dominance of the mainstream media (NBC and the New York Times) and academia (the Ivy League) from the 1950s onwards, conservatives began constructing a counter-establishment starting in the 1970s. The best that can be said for the counter-establishment is that it has increased the intellectual diversity of American public life. Too often it is the diversity of a shouting match. Conservatives have, I fear, copied their liberal adversaries by falling into the habit of simply shouting their talking points at everhigher decibels whenever they meet opposition. Why not? If rational discourse is a sham, victory goes to the most skilled manipulator of words. Even if we don’t believe rational discourse is a sham, we inhabit a political world shaped by those who do, and it is tempting to believe that we must either play by their rules or we lose. Liberals wrote the book on how to do this, interpreting social conservatism as 37
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theocracy, gun ownership as mental illness, and enthusiasm for free market entrepreneurship as class warfare against the poor. But conservatives are also guilty of behaving this way when, faced with a liberal proposal to raise taxes, they cry “socialism,” when they interpret reasonable environmental regulations as hostility to business, or when they question the patriotism or manliness of critics of U.S. foreign policy. Imputing malice to your opponent is uncharitable—it is un-Christian—at its core. Campaign consultants reinforce the habit of disregarding rationality when they recommend saturation advertising: drown the voter in positive propaganda to increase a candidate’s name recognition and make the voter feel well-disposed to them regardless of substantive policy positions. Or consider candidates during televised debates: instead of answering tough and pointed questions, they ignore the questioner and repeat scripted, focus-group-approved lines to avoid thinking on their feet or engaging with actual ideas. And consider the record of self-appointed “neutral” fact-checking organizations, and their failure during the 2012 cycle. These are bipartisan failings. Sure, you may think, but hasn’t it always been that way? Have American politics—or anyone else’s—ever been characterized by mutual respect, intellectual rigor, or an honest exchange of ideas? The 19th Century was the heyday of Tammany Hall and corrupt machine politics, of political violence (see the Sumner-Brooks affair), and of tawdry tabloid campaign newspapers. Thomas Jefferson’s and John Adams’ campaign proxies make today’s politics look prim and restrained by contrast. The difference is that corruption, dishonesty, and intellectual vacuity do not characterize the shady underside of the political system, as in the 19th Century: today they characterize the system itself, including its elite practitioners. Party leaders and candidates for office used to act in public with at least a show of respect and intellectual honesty. Think of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, for example: seven debates, three hours long each, of extended and detailed argument and oratory. Today, a substantive policy speech is a headline making event rather than a regular occurrence, and debates are staged as televised events. Today’s major-party candidates act like the machine bosses and propagandists of old, not statesmen or public leaders. But they do so in response to the demands of the marketplace: our expectations of candidates and office holders have fundamentally shifted. 38
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It isn’t clear if we can ever recover the older public discourse. The older public discourse relied on the arts of rhetoric and logic, which used to be the sine qua non of public life. But they—pillars of classical learning—haven’t been required in western universities for generations. The skill of handling ideas carefully in spoken, public debate is essentially a lost art—a symptom of the broader malaise that afflicts American democracy. Curing that broader malaise would require the wholesale excision of postmodernism from American culture, which is sadly impossible—at least in the short run. But even if we eliminated postmodernism, we are still saddled with its legacy. We have been trained in its assumptions and its method of argumentation. Reforming university curricula to teach the classical western heritage, with its belief in knowable truth and the meaningfulness of words, would be a start, as would be the revival of rhetoric and logic. Another step that can be taken immediately is to cultivate the habit of charity towards our political opponents. Jesus commanded us to love our enemies; much more so ought we love those who are not our enemies but our neighbors of a different party. Loving them means giving them the courtesy of listening to them and talking with (not at) them. We should treat their ideas—especially mistaken ideas—with enough respect to refute them with intelligent, clear, and superior arguments, not by shouting them down. The sin of contemporary politics to treat politics like war without bloodshed, in which the utter defeat of the other side is seen as a legitimate goal. This kind of politics treats opponents as barriers to be overcome, and denies them the dignity due all human beings. In repentance, we should recognize that politics is not war, but argument, the goal of which is not conquest but persuasion, and our opponents in this are people, not barriers.
Paul D. Miller is an assistant professor of internatio nalsecurity studies at the National Defense University . The views expressed here are his alone. 39
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Christopher Hammons
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ebates regarding the intent of the Founding Fathers and the role of religion in America are usually characterized by two extremes. On one side are those who believe that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, with a government informed by religious ideals. On the other side are people who contend that the Founding Fathers desired a secular nation, characterized by a strict separation of church and state. Both sides of the religion in America debate, however, have made a critical mistake by ignoring the federal nature of our political system. In doing so, the current debate is based largely on the premise that the U.S. Constitution is the best source for understanding the political principles of the Founding generation. This premise is false and misleading. The debate about religion in America overlooks an older and equally important constitutional tradition. Hidden by our overwhelming fixation with the U.S. Constitution, state constitutions reveal much about American politics and the role of religion in America. Aside from the fifty state constitutions that currently exist, the American states have written a total of 145 state constitutions since 1776. Some states have had several constitutions over the centuries (Louisiana has had 11 constitutions) and others have retained only one (the Massachusetts constitution ratified in 1780 is the oldest active constitution in the world). An analysis of these state constitutions, early constitutions as well as current, reveals that our federal political system has a long tradi40
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tion of invoking God as the foundation of order, liberty, and good government.
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onstitutionalism in the United States is a state tradition. On May 15, 1776, just before Jefferson penned his famous Declaration, the Continental Congress adopted a resolution calling on the legislatures of the various colonies to draft written constitutions in preparation for independence. When independence was declared the colonies adopted these new constitutions and became independent American states. By the time of the Philadelphia convention in 1787, written constitutions had existed in the United States for over a decade. The 55 men who gathered in Philadelphia to draft our national constitution were profoundly influenced by the state constitutional experience. As a result, the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was slow and tedious. Contrary to what we often teach school children, this sluggish pace was not because the attendees were unfamiliar with constitution-making or constitutional principles. To the contrary, much of the deliberation was largely a result of preconceptions the framers had about what the new national government should look like. Most of their preconceptions were based on their respective state constitutions. While state constitutions served as reference points for the men of the Philadelphia convention, they served another important purpose as well. If on any particular issue no consensus could be reached, the framers of the national constitution often let the states handle the issue on a state by state basis. For instance, regarding elections, determining the qualifications for voters, selecting senators, and choosing presidential electors, the Constitution simply punted these issues back to the states. As a result, numerous provisions of the U.S. Constitution refer the reader back to state constitutions, leading political scientists to argue that the U.S. Constitution is really an incomplete document unless the state constitutions are read in conjunction. As political scientist Donald S. Lutz writes: [The U.S. Constitution’s] form and content derived largely from the early state constitutions, as borrowings and as reactions. These often overlooked documents occupy a critical position in the development of Ameri41
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can constitutionalism. They are the culmination of a long process, and the foundation upon which the United State’s Constitution rests. That is, the Constitution is an incomplete foundation document until and unless the state constitutions are also read. In short, the U.S. Constitution depends heavily on state constitutions. The Constitution itself is a product of the state constitutional tradition, and makes use of state constitutions to complete those issues where the U.S. constitution is largely silent. Religion is one of these issues. Religion is addressed primarily, but not exclusively, in the preamble of most state constitutions. The purpose of a preamble at the beginning of a written constitution is largely philosophical. Preambles are not legally binding. Nor do they establish political institutions or policy. The main purpose of a constitutional preamble is that it provides a statement of values and beliefs about the origin, operation, and purpose of government. In essence, constitutional preambles provide the basic beliefs of the constitutional framers. The preamble to the United States Constitution is probably the best example of this: We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. In essence, the preamble addresses some of the most fundamental questions of political theory. In the case of the US Constitution, the preamble provides the function of government (order, justice, peace, prosperity), the philosophical justification of government (preservation of liberty), and the source of governmental authority (the people of the United States). A similar pattern is seen in state constitutions, although there are some striking differences. Almost all of the 145 state constitutions have a preamble. Only two constitutions, the current New Hampshire and Virginia constitutions, do not. These two constitutions start with a Bill of Rights, which in many ways provides the same philosophical underpinnings of government, but has the added impact of legal enforceability. 42
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State constitutional preambles frequently invoke God as the source of good government. The reference to God usually takes one of several forms—the Almighty, the Supreme Being, the Supreme Ruler, Divine Providence, or simply God. Perhaps more poetically, the South Carolina constitution of 1868 professes its gratitude to the “Great Legislator of the Universe” while the Vermont constitution of 1777 acknowledges the goodness of the “Great Governor of the Universe.” Of the 145 constitutions used by the American states since 1776, 89 constitutions or 61% contain references to God in their preambles. In most cases these preambles invoke God as the source of good government, appeal to God for help with good governance, or give thanks to God for the “blessings of good government.” The afore mentioned Vermont constitution of 1777 gives thanks to the “Great Governor of the Universe” for the blessings of democratic government, noting that He alone “knows to what degree of earthly happiness, mankind may attain, by perfecting the arts of government.” The Connecticut constitution of 1818 acknowledges “with gratitude, the good providence of God, in having permitted [the people of Connecticut] to enjoy free government…” And the North Carolina constitution of 1868 states that the people of North Carolina are “grateful to Almighty God …for our civil, political, and religious liberties”. While it is tempting to say that such references merely reflect the literary style of early American people, or the unique colonial experience of the states formed during the Revolution, the pattern is not restricted to those constitutions drafted during the days of the early Republic. Most current American state constitutions, as well as those from the Founding Era, invoke God as part of their preamble. Of the 50 constitutions currently in use by the American states today, an astounding 90% mention God in their preamble. To this end, invocations of God in state constitutions are not just an artifact of the past. For example, God is mentioned prominently in the current constitution of Wyoming, which gives thanks to “Almighty God for our civil, political, and religious liberties…” The current constitution of Wisconsin is “grateful to Almighty God for freedom…” Washington State’s constitution gives thanks to the “Supreme Ruler of the Universe for our liberties…” The people of Texas “Humbly [invoke] the blessings of Almighty God…” while establishing their constitution. Utah is “Grateful to Almighty God for life and liberty…” New York professes thanks to “Almighty God for our freedom…” California 43
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also operates under a state constitution that also invokes God. In total, 45 of 50 current state constitutions mention God in the preamble. The geographical diversity of the five states that do not mention God in their preambles—New Hampshire, Oregon, Vermont, and Tennessee and Virginia—indicate that there is no regional explanation for the references to God, or lack thereof, in state constitutions. What state constitutions reveal is that unlike the national constitution, which is devoid of religious reference, previous and modern state constitutions explicitly invoke God in the preambles as the basis of good government, order, and liberty. This is part of a long constitutional tradition in the United States—a tradition that starts at a century and a half before the U.S. Constitution was drafted.
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he American tradition of invoking God in political documents stems back to the Pilgrims’ arrival in 1620. Having survived a long and dangerous journey across the Atlantic Ocean, the exhausted voyagers paused off the shore of “Northern Virginia” (what would later be Massachusetts) to draft what many historians and political scientists consider the first glimmer of constitutional government in the New World. The famous Mayflower Compact, named after the little ship that carried the Pilgrims across the Atlantic, isn’t really a constitution. It lacks any discussion of political institutions or rights. Rather, the Mayflower Compact stands as an agreement among all free men on the ship to abide by majority rule in decision-making for the colony. In short, it’s a social contract that commits the group to follow whatever government or laws will be established once the colony is planted. The Pilgrims felt this was important for their safety and the good of the colony. Earlier efforts at Jamestown had suffered terribly from any sort of political consensus, and the Pilgrims didn’t want to take such a risk. While most historians and political scientists focus on the democratic nature of the document, the religious nature is often overlooked. The first line of the Mayflower Compact reads “In the name of God, Amen.” The invocation is more than just 17th century formality or the styling of religious refugees. For the Pilgrims, the entire premise of the Mayflower Compact was that it bound men to obey the will of the majority. However, the only forces that really compelled men to follow this arrangement in the virgin wilderness of 44
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North America were the ink in which they had signed, their honor, and the fact that they had made this pledge “in the name of God.” In essence, the Mayflower Compact was as much a covenant with God as it was a compact among men. This concept of political documents as covenants between people and God sounds novel to us today, but it has a long tradition in American politics. Colonial charters during the 17th century are rife with religious language, religious instruction, religious obligations, and religious laws. In fact, a good portion of these colonial charters enforce church law as the basic means of a well ordered society. The blending or religion and politics is pervasive in early colonial charters like the Virginia Articles (1610), the Massachusetts Body of Liberties (1641), and the Pennsylvania Charter of Liberties and Plan of Government (1682). While the connection between religion and government was strong during the 17th century (what some historians call the “Planting Generation”), it took a more philosophical turn during the 18th century. Much of the philosophical rhetoric of the “Founding Generation” was based on the language of natural law that was prevalent during the Enlightenment period. Many Enlightenment thinkers argued that men have natural rights given by God, and embraced the idea that man’s freedom was a Divine Gift rather than a product of the state. This sentiment is most evident in our Declaration of Independence which, unlike the U.S. Constitution, invokes God as the source of human rights. This articulation of natural rights became the basis for our limited, constitutional government. Without the Divine origins of freedom, the state becomes the ultimate arbiter of liberty, and knows no bounds other than what it sets for itself. The Founding Generation, while perhaps more philosophical and less religiously devout than the Planting Generation, nonetheless believed that religion could serve as an important tool for the preservation of a fledgling, democratic state. The argument went something like this: if democratic government is based on the people, the people need virtue and morality to maintain self-government. Religion provides the necessary moral compass for virtuous self-government. Therefore, religion and good government were inherently linked. John Adams, for instance, commented that constitutional government would only work for “a moral and religious people.” Benjamin Rush said that while there are virtues to all religions, Christianity 45
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was most suited to promote virtuous government. Some men, like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, were openly suspicious of organized religion but still considered the teachings of Christ as valuable to a virtuous democratic system. The tenets of “love they neighbor” and “thy brother’s keeper” work well in conjunction with the democratic ideal. To this end, the 55 men who met in Philadelphia in 1787 harbored no opposition to religion as a force for good in civil society. What they disagreed on was the extent to which government should sanction or endorse religion. And this is where state constitutions come into play. Aware of the long religious traditions and stark denominational differences of each state, the Founders realized there was very little probability of any consensus on the degree, form, or doctrine of worship at the national level. There was very little discussion of religion at the Constitutional Convention because most delegates realized that any effort to centralize religious authority was not only unlikely, but contrary to the purpose of designing a limited national government.
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s a result, the U.S. Constitution only references religion in three places. The first mention of religion in the Constitution is the prohibition of religious tests for office found in Article Six. The provision prohibits the requirement that a person be of a particular religion, or openly religious, to hold office. It does not prohibit a person from holding office because they are religious. The latter formulation would have been foreign to the Founding Fathers. The provision in Article Six protects people from religious discrimination but is not anti-religious. Article Two, Section One, which provides the oath of office for the president, takes into consideration that presidents may be religious. The oath allows a president-elect to affirm rather than swear their duty to uphold the constitution. This often overlooked provision, a nod toward Pennsylvania Quakers, is an accommodation to men whose religious views would prevent them from swearing allegiance to anything other than God. It is ironically read by secular humanists and atheists now as a means of avoiding swearing, which implies reliance on God for fidelity in upholding the Constitution. The fact that this alternative “affirmation” was included in the oath to accommodate religious people has been lost. 46
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The third and most famous reference to religion in the Constitution is found in the First Amendment prohibition that “Congress shall make no law respecting the respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The prohibition is telling to the extent that the restrictions are clearly directed towards the actions of the national government, with no mention of the states. This is because religion, like many other constitutional issues, was left to the states.
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he wording of the First Amendment to the Constitution, contrasted with similar amendments at the state level, helps make the case that religion has a special status in American state constitutions. While the national constitution uses agnostic language that offers no government interference or endorsement of religion, most state constitutions take a markedly different approach to protecting religious rights. Many use the word “God” or make reference to the “Almighty” in protecting religious freedoms. For example, Article 5 of the New Hampshire constitution states “Every individual has a natural and unalienable right to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and reason; and no subject shall be hurt, molested, or restrained, in his peers on, liberty, or estate, for worshipping God in the manner and season most agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience…” Section 16, Article 1 of the Virginia state constitution reads: “That religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and, therefore, all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity towards each other.” And Article 1, Section 4 of the Nebraska constitution reads “All persons have a natural and indefensible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own consciences.” All of the above provisions, and several others, are still in effect today. How different would the legal debate over religious freedom in the United States be if the First Amendment stated that “Congress shall make no law respecting the respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free worship of Almighty God?” Such a statement would be an endorsement of religion, and protection of it. 47
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The wording would prevent the agnostic or atheistic readings that often accompany First Amendment legal cases today. The frequent invocations of God in the preambles of almost all state constitutions indicates that religion, far from vanquished in American constitutionalism, is merely another aspect of our federal government reserved for the states. The fact that the religious invocation found in state constitutional preambles is absent in the national preamble indicates that the state language is more than mere stylistic flourish or 18th century tradition. If it were perfunctory language— merely religious window dressing for state constitutions—there would have been little resistance to including similar language in the national preamble as well. Its absence at the national level, and near ubiquity at the state level, means the religious invocations found in state constitutions had significant meaning that the framers of the national constitutional wished to avoid.
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he debate over religion in American politics centers largely on the intent of our constitutional framers. The problem with these discussions is that they overlook the federal nature of our political system, and the history of state constitutionalism in the United States. Both sides in the debate place too much emphasis on the national constitution while overlooking the equally important state constitutions. The American state constitutional tradition is one that invokes God as the source of good government and natural rights. The national constitution was built on this state constitutional tradition, but left many issues to the discretion and protection of the state. Religion was one of these. Legalistic interpretations of the national constitution (and particularly the First Amendment) absent the context of the larger state constitutional tradition that informed the Founding Fathers are inaccurate because they lack any historical and theoretical understanding of the American Founding, and unfortunate because they undermine the basis necessary for a virtuous and stable democratic republic.
Christopher Hammons is Associate Professor of Gover nment and Interim Dean of the School of Humanities at Houston Baptist University. 48
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George David Clark Even emptied in a backstage storeroom Houdini’s Chinese water cage would cause one first to flinch, and then, in lurid awe, draw near that marshaled trauma in the gloom. Filled beneath the spotlights, it would bloom like altar-fire, inhale a mob’s applause, until the veil was drawn and all would pause as he gulped air then vanished in the tomb. Two minutes in, the crowds would notice they’d quit breathing and along the aisles they’d clear their lungs with sighs that hinted at their flaws: that they were human; that, in part, they prayed he wouldn’t rise; that, more than death, they feared a man who’d overturn the natural laws.
George David Clark is a postdoctoral fellow at Valpara iso University. This winter his poems can be found in The Believer , FIELD, The Missouri Review , and Pleiades, as well as online at Verse Daily and P oetry Daily. He is the editor of 32 Poems and lives in Indiana with his wife and son. 49
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A Conversation with Camille Paglia Camille Paglia is one of the most prominent art and literary critics in the world. She is a professor at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her most recent book is Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars (Random House, 2012). Paglia is a lesbian dissident feminist, an atheist who has raised the hackles of other critics for her defenses of religion generally and Christianity in particular. She spoke to THE CITY in an interview focused on her unique view of art, feminism, and culture. Professor Paglia, what inspired you to write this book? I spent five long years on this very slim book which is meant to be an introduction to art history, crossing 3,000 years from Egypt to digital art in the present. I did this in part because we are living in a very visually chaotic kind of cultural environment right now. The entire professional class is chained to computers and hand held devices and so on, and the quality of design is degenerating in my view. People have these images flashing at them chaotically in fragments from every direction, and there has been a speeding up of editing techniques in commercials, the effect of which is to give the whole culture ADD. There is a kind of perpetual state of anxiety we are in because of this inundation of visual chaos. I also found that, for a number of reasons, knowledge of art history is receding and declining. It was never that deep, particularly in the United States. The U.S. has always had a problem with the fine arts which tend to congregate in the big cities. But it’s also the political and religious themes that obsess Americans in our history. We are 50
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always talking about the Constitution. It’s almost like our founding documents are the most important American works of art. But in Europe, with much older nations and cultures, going back thousands of years obviously compared to our American society, there is a presence of the fine arts in great works of architecture, in monumental object sculpture, and so on. There is so much to access. I think a lot of our freshness and exuberance in the United States, our originality, our freedom from preconception, comes from the fact that we are such a young nation. We don’t have that burden of the past, so there are good and bad things that come from this. The perspective I have as a career educator—I have been teaching in art schools now for forty years—has been altered because I listen to talk radio a lot. I’m a great fan of talk radio. And what I’ve heard has led me to believe that the image of the arts and of artists have been in a crisis stage really since the explosion of those controversies over sacrilegious art in the late 1980s that led to the conservative challenge to the National Endowment of the Arts, the attempts to even abolish it and so on. And I myself wrote a very scathing piece about the administration of the National Endowment of the Arts at the time. The issues that blew up were about Andre Serrano’s photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in a vat of its own urine which he gratuitously called “Piss Christ”, and then has in a very cowardly way ever since then tried to pretend that the theme really was about the cheapening of the image of Christ. It’s absolute nonsense, spitting in the eye of the public. Now, I’m an atheist, but I cannot stand this kind of knee jerk defamation of other people’s religious symbols that goes on among liberals. I’m a registered Democrat, but among my fellow liberals, and then, you know, in the art world, this is just omnipresnt. And the real crisis point for me was the Brooklyn Museum’s sensational exhibit in 1999, because this was the last straw, where you had the Saatchi collection being brought over without any kind of territorial support by the museum. The painting that caused a huge furor, which passed without notice really in England because it’s a Protestant nation, was one of the Holy Virgin Mary by the British-Nigerian artist Chris Ofili. It was a black Madonna, and what got a lot of attention was that real elephant dung from the London Zoo was used as an ornamentation, not only as two pedestals to hold up the painting in a multi-media way, but also one breast was composed of a clump of dung. 51
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Now, this got all distorted in the newspapers—that manure was being flung at the painting and the like. That wasn’t true. But I was really angry, as the only voice from academe or from the art world to criticize the museum for this. They were clearly trying to use inflated and angry rhetoric coming from the Catholic League in New York merely to boost their own ticket sales, because that’s exactly what happened. The museum made no attempt to explain the work. It didn’t help the artist at all. They left the artist out there, you know, high and dry to hang as it were, twisting slowly in the wind. It didn’t do anything to talk about well, what might be the meaning of using manure, you know, in terms of African fertility calls. There’s a whole tradition of the black Madonna in southern European countries, in Italy, in Spain, and so on. There are so many things that could be said, and I was outraged by the lying that was done by the mainstream media about that work. They deliberately tried to make the whole thing about racism. “Oh, white people don’t want an image of a black Madonna.” Okay. What they suppressed was that Chris Ofili had cut out from pornographic magazines pictures of women’s genitals and had pasted them all over the painting to, so they looked like butterflies or angels from a distance. Come on. We were just recovering from the disasters of the late 1980s and slowly there was more solidarity, you know, in the political scene for sustaining, for leveling support for the National Endowment for the Arts. But this did it, this was the end of it. Talk radio immediately talked about this incident and the whole, you know, nation heard about it. The image of art and the artist just went into the pit. I was listening to radio and I heard it. The image of the artist is as a hoaxster, a scammer, anti-American, juvenile, you know, right down the line. And particularly anything about abstract art, forget it. Abstract art may be accepted by people who are knowledgeable of the arts, but abstract art is still not accepted 100 years later by most mainstream Americans. So, I felt there was a great need for public education. You write in your book that the art world is in crisis—”It’s experiencing an intellectual and aesthetic crisis.” Let’s talk about the intellectual, the spiritual side of this crisis first. What role does religion have to play in art—what role has it historically played, and what role should it play? 52
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Well, that’s what I’ve tried to do in the book. I’ve tried to demonstrate the spiritual nature of art and the artistic mission. I feel that the artist is a kind of a seeker, a quester. And one of the big points I’ve been making is that when the story of my generation—I was in college, graduate school in the 1960s—is portrayed in documentaries and so on, there’s way too much tilt toward the political side. The political side is important—radical politics were at the heart of my generation’s identity—but there was this other element, this spirituality which after the 1960s turned into the New Age movement which has its commercial cheapening side as well. It’s like everything was massage with hot stones, and aromatherapy, and reflexology and all of that. But part of this was this movement toward the world religions. Even though we were rebelling against the moralism and the Puritanism of the organized religions of our own youth, we were still hungry for spiritual illumination, of our search for our own identity, for our place in the universe. And there is what I regard as a metaphysical element to the 1960s revolution, following in the path of the beats, having embraced Zen Buddhism. We were very interested in Hinduism. You had Ravi Shankar playing the sitar in Monterey, you had the Beatles going to India with Maharishi Yogi. Now, people became disillusioned searching for those gurus. There were also all kinds of false gurus and so on, so there was a kind of movement away from that. I personally believe that every one of the great world religions is almost like an epic poem in itself. The true multicultural reform of education, the true multiculturalism, is not identity politics. It’s not that breakdown into African American studies, and Chicano studies, and Native American studies, and Women’s studies. That’s not it. It should have been about just demolishing the entire curriculum and putting at the heart of it the study of comparative religion. Every single person, every student in the world should know about the other great world religions, and know the sacred texts of those religions, know the sacred iconography and the architecture. I mean, it’s a fabulous way to introduce other cultures to students. But you know, this has gone nowhere because on the one hand you have conservatives who don’t want other religions, generally, taught to children, taught to young people. And then on the left you have people who are utterly opposed, and it’s a very snide, and shallow, snarky way, to religion at all. And I say in the introduction to my new 53
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book that sneering at religion is juvenile. It’s symptomatic of a stunted imagination. I completely reject Christopher Hitchens, who knew nothing about religion, made no effort to study it, and whose life was nothing as a model for today’s new atheists. Richard Dawkins is another perpetual juvenile. These are not true atheists to me. These are people with a daddy complex who are running around and who, for some reason, other people think are deep thinkers. And this is not right. So what I’m saying is that this movement toward secular humanism has reached a dead end. It is a complete dead end. It’s empty and the proof of it is the lack of great works of art, of literature or of the visual arts. Nothing is coming out of there. What I’m arguing is that you see wonderful work being done in architecture, in industrial design and so on, but not in these fields. Why? Part of it is because secular humanism has become empty. If you’re going to say, “remove the Bible, remove the sacred texts,” then you must have something to put in its place. Art has a tremendous spiritual dimension which has been completely ignored. Many people who have seen the book are amazed to see that Piet Mondrian, who is considered the ultimate abstractionist, wrote extensively about the spiritual meaning of everything he was doing—of the lines, of the colors, of everything. People are shocked by that. Mark Rothko always spoke of the spiritual nature of his abstractions. And Pollock was a great seeker in his lifetime as well. This element needs to be restored to our understanding of art. I read with interest a piece in The New York Times that followed you as you went through the Egyptian exhibit at the Met. And I was curious about one aspect of it that they noted. And I have to say I think a recording of a “Camille Paglia Guide to the Met” would be a wonderful thing to listen to as you’re walking through. I was struck by the fact that I too, sort of, had the experience like you of being amazed as a small child by the museums that I go to, that I would go to. What I see less and less are families with children sort of going to these museums, going particularly to art museums, as something that’s a motive to these families. Do you think that this is because of sort of a cultural reaction to the kind of secular humanist domination that you’ve talked about? Those secular humanists are now viewed as sort of owning art and so instead we are going to take our children to the National History Museum or something like that. 54
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Do you think that that’s a problem if it’s true or do you think that it’s something that could be addressed by encouraging some of these evangelical Christians with all of these kids, saying: you need to be taking your children to the art museums, too? Yes! Well, I’m trying to do that. One of my target audiences is the home schooling moms whose voices I heard on talk radio at the very start of the Tea Party. I don’t have any distorted view of the Tea Party because I heard these women’s voices who are part of the organization of it. They are very concerned about the national budget. There’s no element of racism that I ever heard coming from Tea Party voices on there. So yes, they were in my mind as I was writing this book and it really did guide the kind of images I chose. I’m known for my extreme sexual views, my pro-pornography stance and so on, but I was very careful to have just a little bit of sexuality. You know, I have a beautiful nude depiction of the goddess Nuvenius, okay, and Cupid, the Bronzino portrait of Andrea Doria. I have a fabulous photo montage by the African American photographer Renee Cox who is posed like Wonder Woman on the Statue of Liberty. But on the whole I didn’t want any distractions. I really wanted to show to my ideal reader, who is a homeschooling mom, the choices are about the spirituality of these themes, beginning with the very first wall painting of Queen Nefertiti being led along by the goddess Isis toward the underworld and so on. And it’s just chapter after chapter where there are these religious choices. Even the Charioteer of Delphi, his solemnity gives him almost a mystical quality. He’s like a victor in this race, but it’s clear he’s in another dimension. He’s in some sort of meditative trance. And the theme of Laocoön, you know, the justice or injustice of the gods and so on. I have a page from an Irish manuscript, the Book of Kells, an illumination of a page in the Bible, and Mary Magdalene by Donatello. I’m trying to lead people along just to see the spiritual dimension, and then once I’ve gained the confidence of those conservative readers who have never had any exposure to art, then we get to Picasso, Mondrian, Pollock, etc. I want the whole thing to feel like this continuity and so for the first time in their lives they can accept that these radical modern painters are in this main line of this spiritual quest of art. There is a tremendous movement out there for home schooling, young people being educated at home and with Christian values and 55
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so on. But they also need some more exposure to art. This book is, I hope, a guide to the home schooling mom. At the same time I’m trying to reach the students at the college and graduate school level who are still unfortunately being saturated with post-structuralist ideas, the backwash of it. And there’s a whole style of approaching art in this very cynical way. You approach art and you look for the problems and you look for the omissions. You look for the hidden power plays. It’s all this arm-chair leftism thing which I think is just such a crock. And as a consequence people don’t know how to appreciate art. This is a book where each chapter pays its due to history, to the physical materials that went into the work, but also it’s about art appreciation. It’s a guide to how you approach art, being able to understanding anything in the arts. That’s why I tried to keep it as slim and as readable as I could. In the age of Kindle I thought that I might have trouble even getting my original vision of the book published. I wanted this ravishing kind of look to it, but writing over five years I was in doubt about whether my vision of it would ever, be attained. But instead Random House saw this as an opportunity to say to the world, “look at how beautiful books can be, something you can hold in your hand.” This is something that the Kindle can’t do, a beautiful book you just page through and see all the tactile quality of the beautiful paper and so on. I want to specifically talk about one passage which I thought was very interesting, and that was your passage on the Caryatids and sort of getting rid of this myth from Vitruvius, about them being humiliated and enslaved. You correct this, showing them to be a strong sisterhood. I think about that in relation to this debate that we’ve seen blow up in relation to the Anne Marie Slaughter article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All”, that ran in The Atlantic and she is now already going out on the lecture circuit to apparently talk about this. I wonder if you had some thoughts and reactions to that, and the kind of post feminist diagnosis that’s going on within that community, about whether they’ve been sold this fiction about, sort of the lives that they live and the choices that they make. Do you think that that is sort of an interesting conversation to be happening right now with the rise of women as we’ve seen to some of the uppermost levels of business and of finance? 56
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I just wrote an op-ed actually for The Globe and Mail in Toronto where they asked me to address the case of the new Yahoo CEO who was pregnant this summer and just had her baby. There were questions raised about this—she said that planned to work right up to the moment of going into labor, she was going to have a very brief period of recovery, her maternity leave would only be a week or two, etc. And there was a great deal of criticism from other women that this is, in fact, endangering a hard-won right to maternity leave from employers. People think “if she can do it as the head of Yahoo, well then you can do it, too.” Feminism has been extremely unfair or blind to the issue of motherhood. The obsession with the career woman from the start of second wave feminism, and the predominance of women like Gloria Steinem who are childless, has led to this idea that “you can have it all.” Now, of course, the sort of house philosophy about gender on every elite campus in the United States is that there are no real deep fundamental gender differences. Everyone is such a constructionist. Basically we are blank slates, we are inscribed, by social pressures and expectations from our earliest years. And I have been saying for my entire career, it’s why when my book Sexual Personae finally was published in 1990 there was such a storm about it, I’m saying that there are real biological differences, that there are all kinds of things operating within sexuality that cannot be “cured” despite data from a gender study. Young women need some kind of early warning about these choices when they’re teenagers—don’t even wait for them to get to college, because the burden of procreation falls much more heavily on a woman than a man. A man can father children as a momentary thing. He might have paternal responsibilities, but there is nothing to compare with the fact that a woman who is pregnant has for nine months her body taken over and then there is the period of nursing, and the profound physiological changes that occur in that process. The number one issue facing women today, now that virtually every door is opened to women in the career realm, is: if you want children, when should you have them? Should you have them early? Or should you have them later? And what if later means never? And in choosing to have them later, there are all kinds of physical risks to it, as well as the fact that you are a different kind of person in your late 30s or 40s than you are when you’re in your early 20s. My parents 57
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married at age 20 after World War II. My father came home from the war and had me when they were 21. I had completely different kinds of parents, with a lot of energy and pizzazz, and even though we didn’t have any money, the way I was raised was quite different than if they had waited another 20 years to have me. This issue that follows is: at what point does a woman who wants a career, at what point does she leave her children in the care of others, and allow other people, strangers often, to have those first experiences of a child walking for the first time, playing sports for the first time. It’s a terrible and agonizing choice. The standard feminists like Susan Faludi and so on, who are all childless, say that men must do more. Well, I’m sorry. The very first days that a baby is born, in fact the first month, the baby doesn’t want a father. The baby smells the mother, knows the mother, recognizes the mother’s voice, the vibrations of her voice and so on and so forth. There is this elemental thing going on between a mother and a child that feminism has tried to dismiss. Feminism has tried, rather immorally in my view, to mechanize the entire process, in effect treating the woman like a machine. “Oh, sure, have a baby. Now get right back to work!” So these are agonizing decisions that women have to make all over the world. Is it better to take time off early in your career and to be off the promotion track for a while, have the children and then return, or try to take time later when actually your life may be more hectic and stressed? To me the answer is that the issue of motherhood, and the issue of integrating marriage with career, must be brought to the foreground when girls are in puberty. Right now what do we have? This ridiculous system where it’s like “oh, we can give you sex education, we will talk to you about, contraception and abortion, but we won’t talk to you about motherhood.” I’m someone who is like the career woman, it was right to my core. I had this obsession with having a career back when I was a child. And no other girls that I knew had this obsession. I wanted to be an archeologist—that was my original passion, for research and so on. And so for my entire life I had no desire to have children and then I became a parent very late in life. I haven’t changed my views at all about any of this, instead I have now gained a tremendous amount of observational experience of the world of moms. And all these mothers in the suburbs, many of whom, you know, are very talented, and well educated, and ambitious in their own right, took time off to be 58
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with their children. In the world I inhabit, with all these women in these liberal suburbs, the men pitch in. The men do a lot. There’s not any big polarization here. But I also see that the women are the strategists and the managers of the household. Once there are children, the men actually go to the periphery. He helps but he’s assigned his work by the mother. I don’t know whether it’s an archetypal, primal, a DNA-imprinted thing or what, but there’s no doubt in my mind having observed so much of it, that once there are children the woman is in charge of the household and the man takes his orders along with everybody else. And it really is a managerial skill in this multitasking thing that women do. Everything needs to be presented to young woman so that they can plan their lives. I mean, young women have to be asked: How do you imagine your life, not just when you’re 30 or 40, but when you’re 50, 60, 70? Because as you get older and your competitive juices start to wane and you’ve achieved everything you might want to have achieved, all of a sudden to have grandchildren and great grandchildren. For my generation of women, the ones who didn’t marry and didn’t have children, what’s happening is they are heading for a very, very lonely old age, unless they happen to have sisters who have many children. Go to any beach and look and see the multiple generations who are there of lower middle class and working class people, see these old people brought out to sit in a chair. You see the great pleasure they have watching their grandchildren and greatgrandchildren as they’re fading in life. This brings us back to the issue of life’s meaning and life’s ultimate reward. This is what is missing from feminism! Women are being sold a bill of goods in this country to imagine that career success is ultimately all-sustaining to the end of your life. I thought the 1960s was all about questioning materialism, and questioning social status. What happened to that? So there are all these spiritual values of the Sixties that have been lost. Speaking of the disarray that feminism is in: Naomi Wolf is out promoting her book, Vagina: A New Biography. I know that you’ve been following the controversy about the book, and I was wondering if you could offer a few thoughts on what Naomi Wolf is writing about now, and what her state reveals about where modern feminism stands? 59
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Well, I was very surprised when I heard that this book was coming out. It was under embargo until very recently, so I only saw the summary of it in Publisher’s Weekly earlier this summer. But first of all I felt that putting “vagina” in the title of a book was unnecessarily provocative, and also very clichéd after Eve Ensler’s vulgar “The Vagina Monologues”, which was fifteen years ago for heaven’s sake, and has become this kind of hackneyed routine that is done on college campuses. I thought that was absurd. Ensler made that horrible mistake to imagine that the exterior, an individual part of a woman’s genitalia is called the vagina when it’s actually the vulva—the whole thing was an embarrassment to me, to have all these supposed feminists running around using scientifically inaccurate language to describe women’s genitals. The whole thing was an absurdity, the kind of exhibitionism that has always struck me as passé. In my view, Naomi is just completely out of sync with what women are really thinking about right now. And to me the number one issue is precisely how are women going to plan their lives and balance the career and home, and how they’re going to plan for the birth of their children and so on. These are very practical issues now. But this pseudo-celebration of the vagina from everything that Naomi is saying is just nonsense. Her research skills are so superficial. The Beauty Myth was just a hash of inaccuracies and inadequate research and so on. But it struck a chord with a certain strain in feminism that doesn’t care about fact, doesn’t care about history. Naomi’s claim is that vaginas were once worshiped all over the world, and let’s bring that back now. How absurd. How did Naomi Wolf graduate from Yale University and become a Rhodes Scholar with this kind of lack of information or ability to find it as a researcher? To embrace such a canard that reads like the lowest level of glossy magazine for teenagers, to imagine that that is the meaning of these vaginal images around the world? Or to think that in this day and age that it’s helpful for every time a man looks at a women to see “vagina” flashing like a neon sign? Oh, that’s just what we need right now. One last question: in your book you embark on something that is actually quite controversial when you endorse the artistic achievements of George Lucas. And I just have to say this as someone who is from a generation of people who really feel that Lucas’ latest efforts have in a larger sense gone back in time and destroyed our childhoods in terms of what he’s done 60
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with these green screen overload pictures. And I have to ask you, why do you really feel that Lucas is a quality artist? Why do you think that he’s sort of the one that you would pick in terms of someone who is alive today to pay attention to in this sense? And do you understand any of the opposition to him that comes from people who loved his previous works? Well, it was never my intention to put George Lucas in this book. I had intended to end the book with works of contemporary art. And I searched, and searched, and searched… and found absolutely nothing that I thought was strong enough to hold up to the great works that preceded the last chapter. And in the five years of writing the book I would be channel surfing and keep hitting this Spike TV, a man’s channel, which would often run all of the Star Wars films in sequence. I would be coming in to the middle of these films, the later films. And I realized I knew the earlier films, but not the later ones, not the most recent films, which I never saw in the theater and really never see mentioned anywhere, as if they’ve fallen off the map. I mean, they are known to real Star Wars fanatics, but I certainly wasn’t acquainted with them that deeply. So I was watching individual scenes out of order and I discovered I was increasingly fascinated. And one of the first things that really fascinated me was the spectacular water planet in the Attack of the Clones which I thought was amazing and even those strange creatures who greet Obi-Wan Kenobi when he arrives, who look like fashion models and so on. It was so eerie. The other thing that began to obsess me was the volcano planet climax of Revenge of the Sith, which of course belongs midway through the series narratively. This volcano planet scene, every time I saw it I would just have to sit down and I was so absorbed in it. The more I would learn about the plot, suddenly the incredible emotional cresting of the entire saga in this volcano planet scene became clear, where you have this passionate dual between Obi-Wan and Anakin Skywalker, with the sense of betrayal, where Obi-Wan is almost in tears as this is going on, and then the mutilation of Anakin’s body and how he becomes Darth Vader. But also what fascinated me was the industrial complex on this volcano planet of Mustafar, and the way that you have this theme of industry and of the collapse of, you know, as everything begins to malfunction, as the controls are going wrong. I noticed the cross-cutting Lucas did to the destruction of the Senate chamber on 61
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Coruscant, back and forth between this total destruction of political structures and total destruction of industrial structures against a backdrop of apocalyptic nature, this incredible emotional drama and intensity of these two men with each other and so on‌ it was absolutely amazing. I was moved by it as I am by listening to opera, Italian opera in particular. To me it’s always Puccini with his tremendous score, which I say in the book sounds like a black mask going on. And then after all of this going on, suddenly we are back in this laboratory setting where you have Darth Vader being constructed. You have the death of Natalie Portman as the mother and then the two babies, the twins Luke and Leia, being separated at birth. All of a sudden all of these horrors and the darkness in the opera becomes very quiet. And then at the very end you see the two babies being delivered to their parents, the babies are being handed off by strong men. Where in movies do you see this? I mean you have to go back to Kramer vs. Kramer, where you see such incredible tenderness of strong men with babies, and handing them off to these two couples, against this backdrop of the landscape of the two quite different planets. And I thought: We are dealing with something on a major level of art. And there is absolutely nothing in the world right now, nothing, in any of the art forms, and I mean in literature too, nothing that can compare with that great climax of Revenge of the Sith. And I will put my entire reputation as a critic on the line for that.
Camille Paglia is a prominent author, academic, and cultural critic. She is a professor at The University of the Arts in Pennsylvania. She is the author of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson and most recently of Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars . She was interviewed as part of the Acculturated.com project on virtue and pop culture. Benjamin Domenech is Editor in Chief of T HE C IT Y . 62
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Louis Markos Professor, apologist, novelist, literary critic, fantasy writer, philosopher, theologian, and ethicist, C.S. Lewis has exerted a profound influence on the way millions of people read literature, make moral choices, think about God, and live out the Christian faith. By means of a genial blend of reason and imagination, logic and fantasy, profound academic insight and good old common sense, Lewis has challenged the modern world to re-examine the claims of Christ, the Bible, and the Church, re-experience the goodness, truth, and beauty of literature, and re-expand its vision of God, man, and the universe. Louis Markos takes us through an alphabet of Lewis’s work, beginning with letters A through M.
A
is for Aslan. As an English professor, I have spent the last two decades guiding college students through the great books of the western intellectual tradition. And yet, though I have taught (and loved) the works of Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dickens, I do not hesitate to assert that Aslan is one of the supreme characters in all of literature. Though many readers assume that Aslan, the lion king of Narnia who dies and rises again, is an allegory for Christ, Lewis himself disagreed. According to his creator, Aslan is not an allegory for Christ but the Christ of Narnia. The distinction is vital. Were Aslan only an allegory, a mere stand-in for the hero of the gospels, he would not engage the reader as he does. In fact, as Lewis explained, Aslan is what the Second Person of the Trinity (God the Son) might have been like had he been incarnated in a magical world of talking animals and living 63
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trees. As such, Aslan takes on a force and a reality that speaks to us through the pages of the Chronicles of Narnia. In Aslan, we experience all the mighty paradoxes of the Incarnate Son: he is powerful yet gentle, filled with righteous anger yet rich with compassion; he inspires awe and even terror (for he is not a tame lion), yet he is as beautiful as he is good; The modern world has ripped apart the Old and New Testament, leaving us with two seemingly irreconcilable deities: an angry, wrathful Yahweh who cannot be approached, and a meek and mild Jesus who is too timid to defend his followers from evil. Aslan allows us to reintegrate—not just intellectually and theologically, but emotionally and viscerally as well—the two sides of the Triune God who calls out to us on every page of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. Every time a character comes into the presence of Aslan, he learns, to his great surprise, that something can be both terrible and beautiful, that it can provoke, simultaneously, feelings of fear and of joy. Borrowing a word from Rudolf Otto, Lewis referred to this dual feeling as the numinous. The numinous is what Isaiah and John felt when they were carried, trembling and awe-struck, into the throne room of God, and heard the four-faced cherubim cry out “holy, holy, holy!” It is what Moses felt as he stood before the Burning Bush, or Jacob when he wrestled all night with God, or Job when Jehovah spoke to him from the whirlwind, or David when he was convicted of his sin with Bathsheba and experienced (all at once) the wrathful judgment and infinite mercy of the Holy One of Israel. Our age has lost its sense of the numinous, for it has lost its sense of the sacred. Through the character of Aslan, Lewis not only instructs us in the nature of the numinous, but trains us how to react when we are in its presence. When we finish the Chronicles, we may not be able to define the numinous, but we know we have felt it: each and every time Aslan appears on the page.
B
is for Beauty. Those who have not had the opportunity to study literature at a college or university may be surprised to know that most English departments in our nation (secular and sacred) have thrown out the concept of beauty. If that statement does not shock you, then consider a doctor who cares nothing about health, or a philosopher who cares nothing about wisdom, or a scientist who cares nothing about the laws of nature. What would you 64
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think about such people? You would think they were frauds who had betrayed their profession and were running their race in vain. And you would be right! For the last three millennia, beauty has been the end, the goal, and the criterion of great literature (not to mention music, dance, and the visual arts). Men wrote poetry as a way of approaching that divine Beauty which transcends the ceaseless change and decay of our world. They yearned for a kind of balance and harmony that was not subjected to death and corruption, that celebrated wholeness and clarity, that dwelled together with goodness and truth, and that carried in its wake understanding and illumination. Lewis is best known as an apologist for the Christian faith, but he was also an apologist for beauty. With great courage, he resisted those who sought to deconstruct beauty and convert it from an essential element of the Creation inscribed by God in the heart of man and nature into a bourgeois construct, a tool of the status quo used to enforce conformity. Rather than give in to the modern Cult of the Ugly, which embraces ugliness as a form of freedom and selfexpression, Lewis championed the pursuit of beauty as an affirmation that we were created in the image of a God who is himself the standard of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness. Lewis dramatizes this titanic struggle between essential Beauty and the Cult of the Ugly in part three of his Space Trilogy, That Hideous Strength. In the novel, which fuses domestic drama with apocalyptic fantasy, Lewis introduces us to N.I.C.E. (the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments), an anti-Christian, anti-beauty, antihumanistic society that worships the decapitated head of a criminal that they have managed to preserve through their occult science. Near the end of the novel, Lewis’s male hero (Mark Studdock) prepares to be initiated into the inner circle of N.I.C.E. To induce him to reject Christ and accept the Head, Mark is thrown into a lop-sided room whose function is to disrupt all standards of beauty and thus pervert his natural human reactions. What Mark is confronted with in the room is an illusion of order that continually deconstructs itself. Every time he tries to rest his eyes or mind in one corner of the room, his attempts are frustrated. The point of the exercise—which disturbingly mimics what thousands of undergrads have faced in literature classes across America—is to get Mark to reject Beauty, Form, and Meaning, and embrace, in its stead, the void. 65
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But the exercise backfires! By being confronted with ugliness in all its horror, Mark is pressed to embrace something deep within him, something he calls the Normal. It is my prayer, as it was Lewis’s, that the nihilism of the modern university will push its charges, not toward the abandonment of standards but toward a realization that standards do exist and that their source lies outside our ever-shifting world.
C
is for Courage. Christian theology makes a vital distinction between special and general revelation. Special revelation refers to those moments when God has communicated directly with the creatures he made. For Christians these moments include the inspiring of the Old and New Testament, the giving of the Ten Commandments to Moses, the various theophanies when God manifested his presence on earth (the burning bush, Jacob’s ladder, the one “like a son of God” who stood beside Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego, etc.), and, supremely, in the incarnation of Christ. General revelation, in contrast, refers to those moments in which God has made his presence known in less direct ways. God displays his glory and power through nature, shows his compassion by providing rain for the harvest, writes his moral and ethical laws upon our conscience, and speaks (dimly) of the need for sacrifice and atonement in the highest myths and rituals of the pagan nations. And in one other way: Though the full Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love were not revealed until the coming of Christ and the New Testament, the more enlightened pagans of Greece and Rome—Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Virgil—were able to grasp, through God’s general revelation, what Christians call the classical (or cardinal) virtues: wisdom (or prudence), temperance, justice, and courage. In Book III of Mere Christianity, Lewis devotes a chapter to the cardinal virtues, and most of what he says in that chapter is derived as much from the Bible as from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Though Christianity makes it clear that we are all sinners and that we cannot earn our salvation by righteous works, the fact remains that those who lack special revelation from God are nevertheless capable of practicing real virtues. Of the four, courage is perhaps the most vital and essential, for, as Lewis explains in Mere Christianity, you cannot practice the other three virtues successfully if you do not possess courage. 66
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In Screwtape Letters (#29), Lewis theorizes that one of the reasons that God created a dangerous world is to force the humans he made to make moral decisions. And to make a moral decision very often means to choose between courage and cowardice. Courage, writes Lewis, “is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point . . . A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.” In our modern age, we tend to identify courage with soldiers who stand firm on the battlefield when the bullets are flying over their head. But it takes just as much courage to stand firm against the myriad temptations we encounter in our everyday lives. To remain chaste in the face of the sexualized media blitz with which we are daily assaulted takes courage. To remain honest when it would be so easy to plagiarize a paper or change a few numbers on a balance sheet takes courage. To remain merciful in a society where most social and political issues have become polarized takes courage. If the virtuous pagans of ancient Greece and Rome could practice the cardinal virtue of courage in a world that lacked the gospel, then it is not asking much for Christians to do the same!
D
is for Desire. When the Apostle Paul brought the good news to Athens, he was initially dismayed by the great number of idols that dotted the landscape of the Athenian marketplace. That is, until he noticed one idol dedicated to an unknown god. Convinced that he had found a bridge by which to connect the longings of Greek paganism with the gospel of Christ, Paul requested an audience with the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers of the city. Having assembled the intelligentsia of Athens, Paul began by complimenting them for their religiousness, even choosing to use the word “temple” rather than “idol” to describe their myriad centers of worship. Among these temples, Paul explained, he was excited to find one dedicated to an unknown God: excited because he (Paul) had come to Athens for the very purpose of proclaiming to them the true name of that nameless God. From one man, Paul told them, God had made all the races of men and assigned them their times and places. And he did this, not so that the nations would go astray, but “so that men would seek him 67
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and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us” (Acts 17:27; NIV 1984). Augustine perhaps had this verse in mind when he began his Confessions with the profound observation that God made us for himself and that our hearts are restless until they rest in Him. Behind these two insights lies a firm conviction that when God created us, he implanted within us a desire for him. True, the Fall has corrupted our desires, even as it has corrupted our reason, emotions, and will, but the desire that God breathed into us in the beginning remains. It is no exaggeration to say that all of Lewis’s fiction and non-fiction is underwritten by our ineradicable longing for God. The reason Lewis was able to build so many bridges of faith to so many diverse people may have less to do with the power of his logic than with the wide appeal of his apologetics of desire. Without denying original sin, Lewis called on his readers to search within themselves for that deep yearning that cannot be denied or effaced. In his finest sermon, “The Weight of Glory,” Lewis explains that our desire for God and our desire for heaven are, ultimately, the same desire. And because they are the same, Lewis feels confident in asserting that no one who truly desires heaven will miss it. For to desire heaven is not to desire some mercenary reward, but to long for reality itself—to long to dwell for eternity in the direct presence of the One who made us for Himself. Too often, Americans fear that their desires are too strong, and that they must therefore deny them if they are to achieve salvation. In sharp contrast to this semi-gnostic view of the body and its longings, Lewis assures us that the real problem with our desires is not that they are too strong for heaven but that they are too weak. “We are half-hearted creatures,” writes Lewis, “fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” Heaven promises a purification, not a mortification, of our deepest desires.
E
is for Easter. Most readers of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe have no trouble seeing the parallels between Aslan’s death on the Stone Table and the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ. In both cases, the innocent Aslan and the sinless Christ are killed on behalf of 68
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a traitor (Edmund, Adam and his heirs) whose betrayal and disobedience have enslaved them to the power of the enemy (the White Witch, the devil). In both cases as well, the blood shed by the righteous scapegoat provided the ransom to buy back the traitor from the power of evil. In Narnia, this exchange is called the deeper magic—an ancient promise that when an innocent, willing victim died in the place of a traitor, the Stone Table would crack and death would start working backwards. In our world, the exchange is called the atonement—the powerful and eternal promise that when Christ died on the Cross, he brought us back into a right relationship with God the Father. As a pledge of those promises, both Aslan and Christ rose from the dead, and, in doing so, crushed the power of the White Witch and the devil. In Narnia, this resurrection occurs at dawn, some six hours or so after Aslan is killed; in our world, it occurred on the third day, on that first glorious Easter morning. That Lewis means these two resurrections to parallel one another is also something that few readers miss. However, there is a deeper level to Lewis’s reworking of Easter that often goes unnoticed by even the most careful reader—a reworking that has the power to open our eyes to a dimension of the Resurrection that is too often overlooked by Christians. In Lewis’s telling, after Aslan rises from the dead, he leaps into the courtyard of the White Witch’s castle to rescue the poor Narnians whom the Witch has turned to stone. One by one, Aslan goes up to the statues and breathes on them, causing them to regain their status as living creatures. Though Lewis does not say this directly, it is implied that before experiencing and defeating death, Aslan did not have the power to breathe on statues and bring them back to life. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul makes a vital distinction between the first Adam, whom God made a living soul, and the last Adam (Christ), whom God made a life-giving spirit. Unlike Adam (that is, us), who possessed a life that eventually ran down and died, the Risen Christ possesses Life itself—a life that can never get sick or grow old or die. In Mere Christianity (IV.1), Lewis makes an equally vital distinction between our own mortal, creaturely life (bios in Greek) and the eternal, indestructible Life of God (zoe). To become a Christian does not mean gaining more bios: to do so would merely extend our life by a 69
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few decades. No, becoming a Christian means having our bios killed and replaced with zoe. And that is why, Lewis concludes, the transformation from an unregenerate sinner to a saved saint is less like a sick man becoming a healthy man and more like a statue coming to life. When Christ rose again on that first Easter Sunday, he went through death (bios) and came out on the other side. As a result he now possesses Life (zoe) and can share that Life with others.
F
is for Faith. The childish notion that faith means “believing in something you know isn’t true,” is, alas, still very much with us. That faith might mean what Hebrews 11:1 says it means (“the assurance of things hoped for” and “the evidence of things not seen”) seems counter-intuitive and even foolish to a modern age that insists on founding all its beliefs on empirical evidence. “If I can’t see it or hear it or touch it or taste it or smell it,” so the saying goes, “it doesn’t exist.” Even amongst believers, Christianity is too often thought of as an emotional “leap of faith” that lays aside reason and logic in its search for spirituality. Faith, it is often argued, is meritorious in itself, apart from its object. Belief makes us strong, despite the content of that belief. Although Lewis was well aware that no one can reason himself into the Kingdom of God and that there comes a point of surrender to super-natural realities that transcend all human logic, he was convinced that the acceptance of Christ could be a reasoned step of faith, rather than an existential leap. Christianity, Lewis demonstrates in his books and essays, makes sense: it embodies a worldview that is logically consistent and squares with the world around us. Christianity says we were made in God’s image but fell into sin. Does not the fact that we all possess the innate ability for great good and great evil—that we each have a little Mother Theresa and a little Hitler within us—make this teaching both rational and self-evident? Christianity says Christ was the incarnate Son of God, 100% human and 100% divine. That may sound irrational, yet are we not ourselves incarnational beings (fully physical and fully spiritual), and does not marriage and sexuality represent an incarnational mingling of the two into one? The Bible says Christ turned water into wine and fed 5000 men with five loaves and two fish. But every day, water turns into wine, a 70
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little grain blossoms into much grain, and a few fish multiply into many. It says as well that Christ died and rose again. But then there is not a single oak tree in the forest that did not spring from a dry, lifeless acorn that was buried in the ground. The great miracles and doctrines of the Christian faith are written deep into our world and our psyche, if only we have eyes to see and ears to hear. Yes, we are told, seeing is believing, but it is just as often the case the believing is seeing. So the faith that draws us to Christ need not be irrational or illogical, but what of the faith that sustains us in Christ. Too often, writes Lewis in an essay titled “Obstinacy in Belief,” the modern world expects Christians to continually question their faith. That may sound reasonable on the surface, but it does no hold up to scrutiny. What would you think of a man who married a woman and then immediately began to spy on her every time she left the house? You would think the man was a fool and a lout, for he refuses to put faith in the love he shares with his wife and the vow that cemented their marriage. And yet that is exactly what the modern world expects Christians to do: to question the God they have vowed to serve every time something goes wrong or an incident occurs that cannot be explained. Christians put their faith not in a temporal idea but an eternal Person. To doubt that Person after surrendering our life to him would reveal us to be not only faithless but foolhardy.
G
is for Great Divorce. Though I have a deep love for all the works of C.S. Lewis, if I were forced to choose just one book, it would have to be The Great Divorce. And yet, though this richly imaginative book draws together all that is most unique and insightful in Lewis’s thought, there are many who have not read it because they are dissuaded by the strange title. “Why should I read a book about divorce?” they reason with themselves, “and, in any case, what is so great about divorce!” To understand Lewis’s title, we must first understand another book with an even stranger title: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Written— or, to be more accurate, engraved—by the British Romantic poet and artist William Blake in 1790, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell propounds a thesis that is more postmodern than modern: that heaven and hell are merely states of mind. 71
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Midway through his work, Blake has a devil take an angel on a tour of hell. With language and imagery reminiscent of Dante and Milton, Blake presents a horrific picture of hell replete with giant spiders and burning sulfur. However, the moment that the angel leaves, hell transforms from an inferno of despair and pain to a “pleasant bank beside a river by moonlight.” Though there are many parts of Blake’s Marriage that are hard (if not impossible) to decipher, his meaning in this passage is quite clear: hell only appears dreadful to those who have adopted an absolute view of morality that makes a sharp division between devils and angels, hell and heaven, darkness and light. In direct contrast to this Judeo-Christian view of good and evil, Blake asserts that what the Bible calls sin represents not disobedience but a failure in perception. “If the doors of perception were cleansed,” promises Blake, “every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” According to Blake, salvation comes not through confessing one’s sin and accepting the forgiveness of Christ, but by learning to see the world differently. Neither heaven nor hell has any absolute reality— all is determined by the way we choose to perceive it. The “great divorce” Lewis announces in his book not only shatters Blake’s moral and theological relativism but asserts a truth about heaven and hell that Blake refused to acknowledge. What if, Lewis’s book wonders, the damned were allowed to ride a bus from hell to heaven? And what if, when they got there, they were met by the souls of the blessed who tried to convince them, even now, to give up their sin and pride and embrace the mercy of Christ? What would they do? In all but one instance, the sinners freely choose to return to hell. Their rejection of grace has not only blinded them to the truth; it has robbed them of their humanity. They are, to borrow a phrase from The Last Battle, so afraid of being taken in by the saints sent to help them that they cannot be taken out of their self-imposed imprisonment and willful exile from God. Surprisingly, Lewis agrees in part with Blake. “Hell is a state of mind... And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind—is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself.” Heaven and hell cannot be married: one might as well try to unite life and 72
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death, growth and decay, love and narcissism, substance and shadow, truth and error, that which is and that which is not.
H
is for Heaven. Why, Lewis asks in Miracles, do we always speak of God and heaven in negative terms? We are corporeal, we say, while God is non-corporeal. Earth is physical; heaven is non-physical. The truth, as presented in Scripture, is quite different. The God of the Bible is not non-corporeal but transcorporeal. He is more than the creatures he made, not less. We are personal, conscious beings, not because we were created by an impersonal, unconscious force but because the One who made us is both trans-personal and supra-conscious. In the same way, heaven is not non-physical but trans-physical. God’s dwelling place is more than, not less than, our own. Heaven is not earth with all the “stuff” taken out, but ultimate reality. Though Plato was wrong to speak of our world as an illusion, as an insubstantial imitation of an imitation, Lewis was right to suggest (in the final chapter of The Last Battle) that compared to the thundering reality of heaven, our earth is but a shadow-land. Our misunderstanding of heaven rests in part on our misunderstanding of our own human nature. We are not, as Plato thought, souls trapped within bodies but enfleshed souls: not half body and half soul, but 100% physical and 100% spiritual. And when we die, that duality will persist. Though I love the film It’s a Wonderful Life, I’m afraid it has led many Christians astray. Let me state it clearly: we do not become angels when we die. Angels are fully spiritual beings, even as animals are fully physical. But we, the great amphibians of the universe, were created to be enfleshed souls and will remain so in heaven. Even so, Jesus Christ, who assumed our nature in the Incarnation— becoming fully God and fully man—will remain incarnate for eternity. Rather than return to heaven as pure spirit (as the First and Third Persons of the Trinity are pure spirit), Christ rose in a Resurrection Body with which he will be clothed forever. When the last trump sounds and the old earth and old heaven pass away, we too shall be clothed in Resurrection Bodies and live upon a new earth that is more, not less, physical than our present planet. Indeed, in The Problem of Pain, Lewis suggests that there will be animals in heaven—not because Lewis thought animals had souls, but be73
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cause he could not believe that heaven would be robbed of the physical glory of the lion, the bear, and the elephant. In The Great Divorce, Lewis imagines what might happen if the souls of the damned were allowed to board a bus in hell and ride on it to heaven. In keeping with Lewis’s firmly biblical view of a transphysical heaven, when the shrunken souls of the damned (Lewis compares them to greasy stains on a window pane) step off the bus, they find that the grass of heaven is so physical, so substantial that they are unable to bend it. In fact, in a bravura display of heavenly irony, Lewis depicts the damned as being able to walk on the water— not because they are Christ-like, but because the water is too solid to allow their ghostly bodies to penetrate it. Yes, our world is real, but its temporal reality offers us but a glimpse, a faint foreshadowing of the greater reality that is to come.
I
is for Influence. C.S. Lewis was the greatest Christian apologist of the 20th century. But he defended far more than Christ and the Bible. In addition to championing the Christian worldview, he was an advocate for that period of history when all of Europe embraced the faith: the Middle Ages. Rather than accept 200 years of Enlightenment propaganda that had dismissed the Middle Ages as a time of darkness, ignorance, and superstition, Lewis called on his readers to take a second look at the medieval period. In his fiction, his non-fiction, and his academic books and essays, Lewis consistently presented the Middle Ages as a positive era in which society was galvanized by a unified vision of God, man, and the universe. In one of those academic books, The Discarded Image, Lewis even took the time to lay out the medieval model of the universe. Whereas our age views the universe merely as our house, the Medievals considered it their home. They often referred to it by its Greek name (cosmos), for the word cosmos connotes something about the heavens that is absent from the Latin “universe.” Cosmos shares the same Greek root as cosmetics: a root that means “ornament.” Just as cosmetics are used to ornament the face of a woman, so the Medievals viewed the cosmos as the ornament of God. It showed forth God’s glory, beauty, and splendor, even as man himself does. 74
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As God is ordered and harmonious so is his cosmos. The Medieval who looked up at the night sky, Lewis explains, reveled in the intricate balance of the heavens, which he believed stretched above him in a series of perfect concentric circles. Each of the seven “planets” (Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) was fixed in a crystalline sphere, and as the planets spun in their eternal orbits, they produced a celestial music known as the music of the spheres. Alas, though that heavenly melody plays all around us, our ears have grown to dull to hear it. And as each planet turned in its sphere, it cast down a heavenly influence that produced metals in the earth and imprinted a personality type upon those born beneath its cosmic revolutions. Thus, while the moon produced silver and inspired lunacy, and Venus produced copper and made men amorous, Mars drew iron out of the ground and inspired a martial spirit in those on whom it shed its influence. (In his fine book, Planet Narnia, Michael Ward argues, convincingly, that the seven Chronicles of Narnia are patterned, in part, after the influences of the seven planets.) Though such a notion may seem absurd to citizens of the modern world, we must not forget that most people today believe that a microscopic strand of information known as DNA determines everything about our life and character. Now it is true that there were some superstitious Medievals (as there still are today) who believed that the stars controlled our fates, but that was not the official view. For most believers, it was up to us to receive the influence properly. A woman born under Venus could be a passionate wife or a reckless harlot; a man born under Mars could be a knight or a warlord. Even so, the same sun that makes clay hard and brittle makes wax soft and pliable. Though Lewis did not advocate a simple return to the medieval notion of influence, he encouraged his readers to take seriously their interactions with the cosmos and to choose wisely how they used the gifts and personalities that were given to them.
J
is for Jesus. No person has ever had a greater impact on the history of the world, and yet no person has been the focal point of more controversy and strife. No person has ever been worshipped with such devotion or manipulated with such selfish ingenuity. For well over a century, an ever-changing band of biblical “scholars” (some of them genuine, but most of them self-appointed) have organized 75
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themselves under the rubric of the Jesus Seminar and have taken as their goal the grail-like search for the “historical Jesus.” Sadly, though the majority of their findings are based on their readings of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (with an occasional gnostic gospel thrown in), most members of the Jesus Seminar refuse to treat the canonical gospels with the respect they deserve. And that despite the growing number of historians and textual critics who have judged the gospels to be reliable historical documents based on eyewitness accounts that corroborate, rather than duplicate, one another. Though C.S. Lewis was not a trained biblical scholar, he was an expert reader of literature with a fine eye for the distinctions between genres. Long before modern scholarship confirmed the historical accuracy of the gospels, Lewis had already explained to his readers that the Jesus of the gospels and the “historical Jesus” of revisionist scholarship were one and the same. Anyone who reads the gospels alongside other ancient texts will immediately see the difference. There is nothing legendary about the gospels. They are, Lewis asserts, sober biographies grounded in real, down-to-earth details—the kind of details that do not appear in literature until the 19th century. As for Jesus himself, he emerges from the gospels with a concrete reality that surpasses all other figures in the ancient world (only Socrates comes close). When we read the gospels, we know Jesus in a way we do not know anyone else before the modern period. As for the claims Jesus makes in the gospels, Lewis, in what is perhaps his best known apologetical argument, defuses all those critics who would treat Jesus as a good teacher or prophet and nothing more. In Mere Christianity (II.3), Lewis gives the lie to this attempt to domesticate and defang the historical Jesus of the gospels. Again and again, Lewis reminds us, Jesus makes incredible claims about himself: he is the Way, the Truth and the Life; he is the Resurrection and the Life; he is one with the Father; he has the authority to forgive sins; he calls on people to follow him (and not just his teachings); he takes upon himself the power to reinterpret the Law. A person who made these claims and was not the Son of God would not be a prophet or even a good man. He would either be a deceiver on a grand scale or a certifiable maniac. Yet the overwhelming consensus of the gospels and of those who knew Jesus rule out the possibility that he was either a liar or a lunatic. Once these two 76
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options are eliminated, however, we are left with only one possibility: that he was who he claimed to be. And that is why Lewis concludes that we can shut Jesus up as a lunatic, kill him as a devil, or fall at his feet in worship—but “let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
K
is for Kingship. America is a country that does not like kings! We threw off George III in the late 18th century and have (with the exception of FDR) limited our presidents to two terms in office. And yet, most Americans harbor a fascination with the throne and the crown. We love to follow the ins and outs of the British royal family, we flock to fantasy films that feature strong and courageous kings, and we patronize renaissance festivals that recreate a world run by noble lords and ladies clad in magnificent clothing and possessed of genteel manners. Though most Americans grow up with an almost innate distrust of class distinctions (our Constitution actually forbids the granting of hereditary titles), we devour The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia—books that rejoice in medieval hierarchy and pageantry. The reason for this, I would suggest, is that the Creator implanted in us a yearning to honor and serve something greater than ourselves. And though that yearning will not be fully consummated until we stand before the throne of Christ the King, I believe that something deep within us longs for the glory and splendor that surrounds true earthly kingship. Though Lewis understood that democracy was, practically speaking, the most successful form of government and allowed for the most individual freedom, he knew that a desire for kingship was written in the collective heart of the human race. Not, of course, for tyrannical monarchs who rob their people of their wealth, their liberty, and their dignity, but for true God-appointed kings who rule with truth, justice, and honor. Near the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Lewis explains to us what true kingship means when King Caspian announces that he will abandon his ship, forsake his crown, and sail on to the end of the world in search of adventure. Though Reepicheep the mouse is a loyal subject of the Narnian throne, he makes it clear to Caspian that he cannot do what he wishes: “‘You are the King of Narnia. You 77
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break faith with all of your subjects... if you do not return. You shall not please yourself with adventures as if you were a private person.’” Though the king has power and authority, he is not to use it to please himself but to bring order and stability to his realm. The king is not a private person but belongs to his people. Indeed, when Shasta/Cor (in The Horse and His Boy) says he would rather not be king, he is quickly informed that the “‘King’s under the law, for it’s the law makes him a king. Hast no more power to start away from thy crown than any sentry from his post.’” As for the true subjects of the king, they understand that the presence of a rightful monarch assures them of their dignity rather than robbing them of it. That is why when (in Prince Caspian) the evil dwarf Nikabrik says he has had enough of human kings, Trufflehunter the Badger first identifies himself proudly as a beast and then speaks up boldly for proper order and hierarchy: “‘This is the true King of Narnia we’ve got here: a true King coming back to true Narnia. And we beasts remember, even if Dwarfs forget, that Narnia was never right except when a Son of Adam was King.’” Hierarchy, properly understood, gives purpose, meaning, and integrity to king and subject alike.
L
is for Love. Christians are fond of declaring that “God is love,” and we are right to do so (1 John 4:16). But what do we mean when we say God is love? How could God have been love in that timeless time that preceded his creation of us and our world? Before God spoke the universe into being, there was nothing to love, so how can we say that God is love? In answer to this question, Lewis reminds us (Mere Christianity IV.4) that the Christian God is not radically singular (as he is in Islam) but exists as an eternal Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God is not some lonely, radically monotheistic deity, but three Persons in one God. He is his own community. When the Bible declares that God is love, it does not mean that he is the Platonic Form of love (Love with a capital “L”) or that he is love in some abstract, idealistic sense. It means that he is love in action. For all eternity, the Father has loved the Son and the Son has loved the Father, and the love between them is so real, so substantial that it is itself a Person: the Holy Spirit. 78
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We’ve all been part of group or club in which the spirit between the members was so strong that it was almost a felt presence. Well, in our world, that spirit of camaraderie is only that—an almost tangible feeling of unity between the members—but within the Godhead, it is a living Spirit that shares equally in the deity of Father and Son. Actually, love is ultimately not a feeling at all, but an action, a dynamic activity. In Christianity, to be truly and fully saved means not just to have our sins washed away and to spend eternity in heaven. It means nothing less than participating in the triune life and love of God. Even on the earth, love manifests itself in its fullest form as a movement out of the self toward the other person. True marriage, Lewis writes, is not founded on a feeling (“being in love”) but on an active love that draws husband to wife and wife to husband. Many of the divorces in our country are caused by the wrongheaded notion that the only true foundation of marriage is the feeling of being in love. Unfortunately, once this premise is accepted, it means that the moment one spouse ceases to feel warm feelings toward the other, he or she is free, if not obligated, to end the marriage. Now it is true that the feeling of love does strengthen a marriage, but that love proceeds out of the action of love (the movement out of the self toward the other), and not vice versa. Indeed, Lewis advises husbands who no longer feel love for their wives to start treating them as if they loved them. If they do that for several weeks, Lewis assures them, the feeling of love will return. In the same way, when the Bible commands us to love our enemies, it does not mean that we are to feel warm emotions toward them. Of course we don’t feel warm emotions toward them! But, if we will treat them in a loving manner, we will often find that we are capable of feeling positive emotions toward them as well. This is even more true of charitable acts toward the poor. The more we treat the less fortunate with acts of compassion, the more we will find a capacity within us to feel true (rather than hypocritical and self-righteous) emotions of pity and love.
M
is for Myth. Although most readers of C.S. Lewis know that he spent much of his life as an atheist, few realize that Lewis’s journey to faith did not take him directly from
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atheism to Christianity. On the contrary, Lewis spent two full years as a theist (a believer in God but not in Christ) before he was able to accept the Trinity, Incarnation, Atonement, and Resurrection. What held Lewis the theist back from embracing Christianity was his great knowledge and love of mythology. From his passionate study of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, Lewis knew that every ancient culture was aware of the pervasive power of human sin and guilt, particularly as it manifested itself in terms of forbidden acts or taboos. In order to deal with such taboos, these cultures not only practiced rituals of sacrifice and ablution, but harbored a cherished myth about a god who came to earth, died, and then returned to the abode of the gods. Frazer referred to this divine, or sometimes semi-divine, scapegoat as the Corn King, for his death and rebirth paralleled the seasonal cycle of the grain: what Americans call wheat, the British call corn. As the grain is harvested and milled but then returns to life in the spring, so the Corn King is killed and buried, only to be reborn and renewed. In Greece, the Corn King goes by the name of Adonis or Bacchus. In Egypt he is called Osiris. Amongst the Babylonians and Persians, he bears the name of Tammuz and Mithras. And in the northern regions of Scandinavia, he is called Balder. Given the persistence of the Corn King across all ancient cultures, Lewis concluded (along with most of his fellow academics) that Jesus of Nazareth was nothing more than the Hebrew version of the Corn King myth. That is, until one fateful night, he took a long walk with his friend J.R.R. Tolkien (author of The Lord of the Rings and a committed Catholic). As they strolled along Addison’s Walk on the grounds of Magdalen College, Oxford, Tolkien suggested something to Lewis that revolutionized his understanding of myth and the Christian gospel. What if, Tolkien suggested, the reason Christ sounded so much like the Corn King myth was that Christ was the myth that became fact? To put it another way, perhaps the reason that every ancient culture yearned for a god to come to earth, to die, and to rise again was because the Creator who made all the nations placed in every person a desire for this very thing. And, if that is the case, then does it not make sense that when God enacted his salvation in the world, he did it in a way that fulfilled the desire that he put in all of us? Indeed, if the life, death, and resurrec80
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tion of Christ had been a wholly foreign thing, with no glimpses or foreshadowings in the myths and legends of the world’s peoples, then it would seem that Christ was an alien god, one whose plan of salvation bore no resemblance to our most ancient and persistent longings. But if Christ is the fulfillment of all the legends of the Corn King— if he is truly the myth that became fact—then the God of the Bible is not just the God of the Jews but of all the nations. Christians believe that the events of Good Friday and Easter Sunday fulfilled the messianic prophecies recorded in the Old Testament. What Lewis learned from Tolkien is that Christ fulfilled as well all the deepest yearnings of the pagan peoples.
Louis Markos (www.Loumarkos.com), Professor in En glish and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist Univers ity, holds the Robert H . Ray Chair in Humanities . His books include From Achilles to Christ (IVP), Apologetics for the 21st Century (Crossway), and Literature: A Student ’s Guide (Crossway). His most recent book, On the Shoulders of Hobbits: The Road to Virtue with Tolkien and Lewis was published by Moody in October 2012. 81
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Jordan Ballor Nation of Takers: America ’s Entitlement Epidemic , by Nicholas Eberstadt, Templeton Press, 2012 .
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radical transformation in American society has taken place over the last two generations, and the driving force behind this change is the growth of the welfare state. This is the basic thrust of Nicholas Eberstadt’s concise and chart-laden treatise, which explores, in his words, how “the United States government today would be scarcely recognizable to a Franklin D. Roosevelt, much less an Abraham Lincoln or a Thomas Jefferson.” Eberstadt’s argument proceeds through examination of various measures of governmental expenditure with some brief, albeit provocative and instructive, elucidation of the implications of these trends. First, a review of some of the more salient figures is in order. As Eberstadt puts it, “As a day-to-day operation, the U.S. government devotes more attention and resources to the public transfers of money, goods, and services to individual citizens than to any other objective; and for the federal government, more to these ends than to all other purposes combined.” When federal programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (commonly, albeit imprecisely, described as entitlements) are taken into account, for instance, they amounted to 18% of personal income in 2010. In fact, as Eberstadt notes, “A majority of American voters live in homes now applying for and obtaining one or more benefits from U.S. government pro83
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grams.” But things weren’t always this way. How did we get here from there? One helpful way of understanding the transition during the postWorld War II era in the United States is to examine government expenditures by type and compare spending priorities across time. What we see is that America has moved from spending about a third of its budget on entitlements in fifty years between 1940 and 1990, to spending roughly two-thirds of its budget on entitlements from 1990 to the present. Eberstadt concludes, “Thus, in a very real sense, American governance has literally turned upside-down by entitlements—and within living memory.” The urgency of this shift really comes to the fore, however, when placed within the context of ballooning federal debt and unfunded future liabilities. The consequences may be dire for future generations. As Eberstadt writes, “For the sake of pure short-term expedience, the U.S. democracy has decided to mortgage its tomorrow for a more comfortable retirement today.” Moving from the descriptive to the diagnostic, Eberstadt contends that this shift in policy represents a sea-change in American culture. “The United States is at the verge of a symbolic threshold,” writes Eberstadt, “the point at which more than half of all American households receive, and accept, transfer benefits from the government.” The moral and cultural concerns boil down to some familiar political dichotomies, such as making vs. taking, self-reliance vs. dependence, the individual vs. the state.
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virtue of William Galston’s rejoinder to Eberstadt’s case is that it helpfully complicates these dichotomies, although Galston is generally agnostic about the negative implications of the transition Eberstadt describes. Here we see a fundamental divide between the views of Galston and Eberstadt: the former is inclined to view government action as essentially benevolent, or at least benign, while Eberstadt’s position is rather more skeptical. Galston’s point is well taken, though; the changes that Eberstadt describes do not entail a particular judgment about whether society is now better or worse than it was. The key question becomes whether our society has become more or less just. The debate, in this way, essentially becomes about the validity of the logic of the modern welfare state and the history of social democracies. The same evidence 84
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regarding the growth of government will thus be interpreted quite differently depending on your view of social justice; if our society has become more just, then perhaps the costs incurred are justified. Galston does substantially agree with Eberstadt on one significant point, however, which really gets the crux of the problem going forward: “If we do not change course, we risk leaving to our children and grandchildren a less prosperous and advanced society and a less promising future.” A real challenge for modern social democracies is whether, how, and which rights imputed to the citizenry can be afforded. As Galston observes with respect to social spending, “It will be interesting to see what happens when these generous instincts run up against inevitable future efforts to rein in massive budget deficits.”
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uval Levin’s contribution represents the climax of the book. Levin’s piece is a bracing essay on the plural institutional roots of the free society, and provides depth and substance to the argument sketched in Eberstadt’s narrative. Levin argues for what he calls a “fuller response,” both to the political case made by progressives for increasing the size and scope of government as well as to Eberstadt’s case. Such a response “would have to marvel at the thin view of American life revealed in the left’s critique of the right: a view that sees in our society only individuals and the government, and that neither discerns nor wants much of consequences in the space between the two.” To be fair, Levin’s perspective is consistent with Eberstadt’s, and amounts in most places to making more explicit what is merely implicit or not fully developed in Eberstadt’s essay. Indeed, in his epilogue Ebertstadt admits as much, noting parenthetically with respect to Levin’s perspective on government threats to civil society that “I very much doubt I could have put my finger on the philosophical and metaphysical dangers these pose to our very democratic system as beautifully as he just did.” One reason that a makers vs. takers model is insufficient and reductive is that it takes its point of departure, its frame of reference, primarily from the political. An individual’s or an institution’s contribution to social life is reduced to their direct contribution to governmental coffers. But it seems quite clear from a perspective that recognizes the fundamental place of other institutions besides government, such as the family and the church, that this kind of measure 85
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is inadequate. The political philosopher David Schmidtz put it well when he observed, in the case of market action, for instance, that “We sometimes speak as if the only way to ‘give back’ to society is by paying taxes, but any decent mechanic does more for society by fixing cars than by paying taxes.” Levin’s emphasis on the structures of civil society and their vitality as an index of social health is helpfully corrective to a social calculus that tends to consider the size of the tax bill as indicative of whether one is a maker or a taker. This small book, consisting of a larger constructive case by Eberstadt on the entitlement crisis facing America, along with two critically helpful perspectives in Galston and Levin, really does stand together to make a cohesive and compelling case for the need to, as Levin puts it, recognize that “the source of any counterforce to this tendency to corrupt the ethic of self-government must come from our institutions of civic culture and civil society.” Politics really is downstream from culture in this sense, and A Nation of Takers helps us to recognize the implications of this for the various facets of the crisis facing our civilization today.
Jordan Ballor is a research fellow at the Acton Institute and serves as executive editor of the Journal of Markets & Morality. 86
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Peter Augustine Lawler Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics , by Ross Douthat, Free Press, 2012 .
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he truest criticism of Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion is that it slights the fact that America has always been a nation of heretics. And there’s nothing wrong with that as long as the heresies sort of balance each us out. It’s better to be heretically but genuinely Christian than not to be Christian at all. That’s why my criticism of Douthat is all about talking up the Christian dimensions of our heresies, and then talking down what he mistakenly calls the heresy “the God within” or, better, pantheism as not even Christian and so not even a heresy at all. For America’s most wonderful and effective theological balancing act, look to our Declaration of Independence. It derives its greatness from a compromise between the Deistic and more Calvinist members of Congress, and also between the unrelational, past-tense God of nature of the modern philosophers—particularly John Locke—and the personal, judgmental, providential God of the Puritans. By reconciling the God of nature (or, better, the God of Descartes) with the God of the Bible, our Declaration can be called a kind of accidental Thomism, although that result was intended by neither of the parties of the compromise. Because of Congress’ amendments to the original draft, the God of Nature becomes emphatically also the living God of the Bible. Had our Declaration been the exclusive product of the original Puritans, it would have been theocratic—that is, not orthodox Christianity. The Puritans, Alexis de Tocqueville tells us, were heretics in the sense that they were about basing the law of their political community on 87
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the law found in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. Not a word in the New Testament would justify their effort to criminalize every sin. The Puritans were authentically Christian in their view that every person, as a being with a soul, must know his or her origin and destiny through the word of God, and their political view was that under God all sinful persons made in God’s image are equal. The American Founding’s balance was achieved through the Deistic or individualistic criticism of the Puritans’ idealistic, intrusive, highly personal idea of Christian citizenship, and the Puritanical criticism of the Deistic detachment of one person from another—and from the personal, relational, judgmentally and providentially intrusive God. Sophisticated Americans, from our Founders until today, have always resisted the Puritanical correction to their enlightened individualism. Douthat is correct that one reason that this correction is indispensable is that the devotion to individual rights, by itself, doesn’t justify the personal sacrifice required to achieve egalitarian political reform. It was the neo-Puritanical abolitionists, located, as the neoPuritanical novelist Marilynne Robinson has reminded us, more in the Midwest than New England, who produced the relentless egalitarian agitation that made the Civil War inevitable. Those neoPuritans were also the main source of the bloody ferocity celebrated in the Battle Hymn of the Republic that brought victory to those fighting on behalf of free persons. The Civil Rights movement, Douthat reminds us, wouldn’t have succeeded without the social reformism based a kind of residually Puritanical or Biblical conception of citizenship, one also that didn’t shrink from the sacrifice of one’s own blood for justice. Christians can’t simply reject some of the Puritanical concerns of the Progressive movement—such as worry about the souls of mothers and children—and Christians can’t be so realistic as to see nothing admirable at all in the “Wilsonian” intrusiveness that fuels often misguided American efforts to secure justice for people everywhere. One reason American citizenship seems so obviously impoverished today is that too many of us pride ourselves in having freed ourselves from Puritanical moralism, from our duty to be of service to others. This begets indifference to the inegalitarian excesses generated by the rigors of the competitive marketplace of our free economy. Douthat is surely right that no orthodox Christian should be too 88
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complacent about “capitalism,” even after truthfully concluding that a free economy corresponds to part of the truth about free persons. Tocqueville marveled most of all at the American determination that all persons be educated to exercise their freedom. No person, the Puritans and Jefferson agree, exists by nature to be dominated by another, and slavery is the contrary to the truth about who each of us is. That truth shouldn’t be hidden from anyone. Our egalitarian individualism—which understands every person to be middle-class or a free being who works—produces universal literacy and universal technical education. Everyone is obliged to and deserves to work for him- or herself. But it’s from the Puritans that we get the idea that freedom is about more than work or productivity. Every person has a soul, and so everyone should be able to read what the Bible says about one’s personal destiny and charitable moral responsibilities for oneself. The Puritans, Robinson explains, are a potent source of our devotion to liberal education, to education for civilization. Most of our best colleges have had a religious inspiration, and they suffer in the most important respects when they lose confidence in what they can do for souls. The true understanding of our religious liberty has typically depended on public education being completed by Sunday schools. The Jeffersonians excel in the pursuit of the means or conditions of freedom, but it’s the Puritans who supplied us with our original insight about the personal end or point of our freedom.
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outhat’s book slights the Puritanical heresy both as a distinctively American heresy and as an indispensable part of who we are as a people. In recovering our understanding of the Declaration’s balance, we see how our Deistic heresy is an unsustainably incomplete account of who we are. The attempt of Deism to liberate the person from his or her relational context morphs in the direction of pantheism, of a perniciously un-Christian theology that denies the very reality and so the very dignity of the person. The Declaration’s theoretical core—the product of the minds of Jefferson and Franklin—is, as Douthat notices, the Deism of John Locke. There’s a Creator, but he’s past-tense. He’s not actively engaged in our lives. God made us free or somewhat unnatural persons, who have to institute government to free ourselves from our fearful discontent with our natural existence. The teaching of the Creator, which we discover through reflecting on who we are by nature, is to 89
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escape from nature to secure our inalienable rights. We must provide for ourselves because neither God—the author of each of our beings—nor nature cares about any of us in particular. We certainly weren’t made to be happy, and that’s why we’re stuck with pursuing happiness all of our lives. It’s the being God mysteriously stuck between Himself and the animal who is driven away from nature toward divinity through his rational and industrious efforts, unhappy with who he is or what he’s been given. The very definition of man in the Declaration is the being with rights. That means each of us is not defined by relational duties characteristic of other social or gregarious animals. Nor are we defined by the loving concern displayed by the God who became man, died for our sins, and still actively offers us redemption from our sinful misery. According to Douthat, our Founders’ Jeffersonian Deism had its source in “men who found the idea of ultimate mystery offensive.” They viewed themselves as overcoming the contradictions in Christianity—especially the one between the personal Creator and impersonal nature—by depersonalizing God. God becomes “the First Cause,” an “unmoving and unmoved” clockmaker who started the mechanistic process that is Newtonian nature going. Douthat’s characterization confuses Deism with pantheism, a form of “sexed-up atheism.” Privately, it appears Jefferson understood himself as an Epicurean, or a serene atheist who lives beyond hope and fear in a way that might be confused with Buddhism or pantheism. But his public, Lockean theology of the Declaration is supposed to inspire in men and women the very opposite of serenity now. The Declaration is all about change—not only political but technological—free persons can believe in and achieve for themselves. Locke thought that the theology of the Bible was superior in its understanding of both God and man to than those of Plato and Aristotle. The God of the Bible reveals himself to himself and others through his active creativity. The man created by Locke’s God does the same. For Jefferson and Locke as much as the Bible, there’s the mystery of personal identity—the “I”—who can’t be integrated into mechanical nature and is bound to other “I’s” only through contract and consent. The free person, as the Bible says, is infinitely valuable and irreplaceable. That’s why, for Locke, his connections with others are inalienably justified only in terms of his rights as a free person. 90
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This personal focus explains why American Lockeans and more orthodox Christians allied against every modern effort to reduce particular persons to expendable parts of some civic, natural, or historical whole, with a personal focus based on a Christian discovery about who we are. Locke and Tocqueville surely agree that a proper understanding of personal reality depends upon the egalitarianism of the incarnation, upon our equal liberation—as men and women— from biological and political determination. We see the influence of this Lockean/Christian understanding in Douthat’s determination that religion in America not be reduced to a civil theology—to degrading lies about our divine significance as a national for beings who are citizens and nothing more. Our Lockeans and orthodox Christians also stand together against various forms of Darwinianism—against any comprehensive explanation of what we are that reduces each of us as species fodder. Both orthodox Christianity and Jefferson’s Declaration are based on the self-evident premise that each free person is real, unique, and irreplaceable. The central, “Socinian” heresy of the Lockeans is the denial of the Trinity. Locke was able to assimilate much of Christian doctrine into his strange theology, and, for the most part, that which he could not assimilate he ignored. The aggressive component of his Deism was anti-Trinitarian. As our current pope explains so well, the mystery of the Trinity reconciles the logos that is Greek monotheism with the idea of loving relationality that is the distinctive characteristic of the Christian God. God is one in being but three in persons. He relates to himself, mysteriously, interpersonally—the way he relates to us. The idea of the Trinity corresponds to the Christian discovery of the personal logos that is God, each of us made in his personal, relational image, and the ground of being. The personal God cannot be reduced to the Aristotelian idea of God as pure mind or the materialistic idea that all is pure body or pure mechanism.
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common interpretation of the Declaration is that “Nature’s God” refers to the God of the philosophers and scientists as opposed to the God of the Bible. Nature’s God, from that view, replaces a personal God. Revelation is replaced by reason. But Locke and Jefferson view us all as free persons, as simply a part of nature. The God who created free persons in some way or another— in addition or in opposition to nature—must be a person too. The 91
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mystery of the personal identity makes room in Locke for belief in a real Creator, and it certainly is a personal refutation of those selfforgetting thinkers who claim that all is necessity. The mystery of Christianity, rejected by most philosophers and scientists, is personal, relational monotheism. But Locke doesn’t replace that mystery with an account of reality as a natural whole, and he doesn’t call that principle of comprehensive intelligibility Nature’s God. Locke’s heretical mystery is actually more mysterious. How can God be both personal and not relational and loving? Each of us, like God, is a self-sufficient “I”—the personal—or unnatural—reality discovered by Descartes. How the self-sufficient “I” that can’t be reduced to the intelligible logoi of mind and body appeared is a mystery. That’s why the “I” is radically alienated from the nature indifferent to its existence. It’s the task of the rational and industrious “I” to transform nature through inventions to make his mechanical environment a more hospitable or personally controlled one. It’s only an exaggeration to say that, for Locke, each of us creates ourselves out of nothing—or does what even God himself can’t claim to have done. We’ve been given a personal experience that survives all our doubt and is the foundation for what we create for ourselves. Tocqueville jokes that the Americans are Cartesians who’ve never read a word of Descartes. He could have said, with somewhat greater exaggeration, that they’re Lockeans who’ve never read a word of Locke. He does say that the Cartesian method—doubt—also the democratic method. If I trust the word of someone else, then I let that person—that I—rule me. So my intellectual freedom and my avoiding being suckered depend on my being radically skeptical of all personal authority. Tocqueville observes that the unencumbered democratic “I” is too isolated and disoriented to be sustainable. Thinking and acting in freedom depend on social content—on even dogmatic premises—that one can’t provide for oneself. It’s not enough to know what I know all alone: I’m not nothing. Beyond that I can give no content to who I am. Genuine consciousness, of course, “knowing with” others, and I can’t give myself any content—any point of view—all by myself. From a democratic view, the good news might be that nobody is better than me. But the corresponding bad news is that I’m no better than anyone else: I have no right—no authoritative point of view—to oppose myself as a thinker or moral agent to the sea of indistinguishable free persons who surround me. 92
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he excessively or unrealistically unrelational view of the free person in Descartes and Locke unintentionally produces selfsurrender to impersonal forces, including passive deference to public opinion. If I trust your personal authority, then my deference is undemocratic. Democratic deference is when we both are too apathetic to resist being determined by opinion that comes from no personal in particular. We also readily defer to the allegedly impersonal or objective authority of science—to those who say “studies show” instead of “I think.” We’re too willing to listen to experts who say that the “I” or person is a dogmatic illusion, that we’re all determined by our natures as animals are. That ambiguously good news, we can hope, frees us from all our personal anxiety, which will turn out to have a chemical or environmental—and so not an existential or theological—foundation. Tocqueville adds that we also too readily defer to the impersonal processes we call history and technology. The theology that corresponds to the self-surrender of the unrealistic unrelational “I,” Tocqueville observes, is pantheism. Using the example of pop theologian Karen Armstrong, Douthat shows that the aggressive part of pantheism is the denial that God is personal. He errs by thinking of pantheistic mysticism as a Christian heresy. Our pantheists take one step beyond the Lockean Deists. The idea that God and each of us is both personal and unrelational is dismissed as both incredible and too hard to bear. The democratic deconstruction of personal privileging or identification is completed on behalf of both equality and the abolition of anxious alienation. So, Armstrong explains, the fundamental experience of the Trinitarian God isn’t personal at all, and the mystical God absorbs himself (or herself) in some undifferentiated way to creation as a whole. The distinction between Creator and creation—and so the one between creature made in God’s image and the rest of creation—disappears. There’s nothing left of Christianity, because “the God within” can’t be distinguished from the impersonal divinity that envelops us all. God, for our pantheists, is experienced in some vaguely mystical way as the absence of personal reality, as the losing of oneself in some kind of divine oceanic whole. As Tocqueville predicted, the idea of unity—or the unreality of one’s own distinctive individuality—becomes the emotional obsession. Pantheism is what follows Protestant theology that has become too individualistic or Deistic, which is why the sophisticated “natural rights” New England Protes93
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tantism of the founding generation was followed by Transcendentalism. It’s also why liberal Protestantism in our time is morphing into a kind of cosmic or “nature” religion that seems like a kind of undisciplined Buddhism. For sophisticated Americans, unlike real Buddhists or real Socratics, self-surrender is supposed to be easy. Getting over one’s alienated self becomes one form of therapeutic self-help among many being offered in a time that increasingly privileges, as Douthat, using Philip Rieff, reminds us, therapy over truth. The same folks who defer to pantheistic mysticism are also the ones deferring to public opinion or sophisticated fashion and various scientific experts. Pantheism, public opinion, and pop scientific materialism (or “new atheism”) understand ME to be nothing more than one of an infinite number of specks in a homogeneous whole. Pantheism is an extreme form of what Tocqueville calls individualism, the emotional withdrawal into oneself that corresponds to the intellectual self-sufficiency claimed by the American Cartesian. Individualism, according to Tocqueville, is an apathetic emotional calculation that corresponds to the Lockean/Cartesian intellectual judgment that love and hate are more trouble than their worth, turn persons into suckers, and don’t correspond to the truth we can actually see with our own eyes. The virtue of individualism is indifference to any personal reality outside of oneself. Individualism is meant to facilitate self-assertion and to resist any form of selfsurrender, but eventually the indifferences turns on the emptiness that is one’s own isolated self. Today’s theological truth is that is that sophisticated Americans tend to oscillate incoherently between Deistic personalism—or feverish concern for one’s own “autonomy”—and completely impersonal pantheism. The incoherence concerns whether the person that is ME actually exists. Pantheism corresponds to science’s deterministic or neo-Darwinian or neuroscientific discovery of the unreality of particular persons, including the Creator, giving us solace by according divinity to our experiences of personal insignificance. Today’s pantheism rarely defines a whole way of life, but instead functions as a stress relief from the competitive marketplace.
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ocqueville encourages all lovers of the true greatness of human individuality to rally against pantheism. Certainly pantheistic mysticism as we experience it today is contemptible. 94
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As Douthat points out, it lacks the toughness of real atheism or even Lockean Deism in facing up to the scientific discovery of the random indifference of nature to personal existence or to the anxious existential experience of being for a contingent moment between two abysses. So our pantheists retain the vaguely comforting view that somehow God and nature still care for each of us, and so we need not worry about our ultimate fates. Pantheism fuels environmentalism insofar as it suggests the divinity that is nature encompasses us all, and so it’s a mistake to struggle against nature on behalf of ourselves. The virtues that correspond to our pantheism are the opposite of aggressiveness—they keep us from committing hate crimes or the sin of bullying and support emotionally safe sex—sex detached from the hard realities of personal birth and personal death. The pantheistic virtues don’t depend on thought or real personal sacrifice or loving, active concern for the unfortunate. The virtues most conspicuously unsupported by post-Christian pantheism are, in fact, courage, charity, and what the anticommunist dissidents Havel and Solzhenitsyn called living in the truth. Tocqueville says that religion is the indispensable American counterculture insofar as it teaches that we have souls and so high and immortal personal destinies and relational moral to duties to each of us we share in common. From a Christian view, pantheism is worthless or worse as an antidote to Deism. It’s not a counterweight but an intensification of the heretical denial of a personal, relational God. It isn’t personal or relational at all. Thank God, pantheism is destined to remain a failed self-program that provides sophisticated Americans nothing more than momentary stress relief in the form of self-indulgent spiritual reveries. No free person really believes, deep down, that the characteristic claims of the pantheistic lullaby are true. My DNA might live on beyond me in the form of a tree. But I know all too well that tree won’t be me, even if it’s a sacred tree. Pantheism or Western Buddhism or some other form of vague and fluffy spirituality isn’t going to free me from the anxious struggle against the nature that’s out to kill me. That’s why we Americans have invented the seeming oxymoron power yoga. The genuinely subversive HBO series Girls reminds us that emotionally safe sex is the failed project of persons who can’t help but remain free and relational. Pantheism fails to negate our faith in the contingent and temporary but quite real existence of the free person. Our liberal theorists— 95
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in defense of human rights—have become non-foundationalists. They say that there’s no “foundational” standard that trumps our devotion to the life and liberty of persons alive these days, and there’s no need to explain why. All we know for sure is that not believing in human rights—in personal freedom—has intolerable moral consequences. Our theorists often come darn close to admitting that we have no choice but to privilege, quite arbitrarily or merely pragmatically, one part of Christian faith while jettisoning the others. Our Supreme Court has written, in defending the free choice of a woman not to be chained to the imperatives of being a biological female, of the mystery of personal identity and self-definition. That sounds way existential at first, but it’s also the faith of Lockean Deism. Douthat has engaged in spirited debates over whether our devotion to human rights depends on Christian faith. His opponents can’t believe that such a reasonable and humane devotion depends on believing in ridiculous doctrines such as personal immortality, the resurrection, and the Trinity that we’re used, after all, to justify despotism in the past. But neither party quite sees that the very idea of human rights depends on personal freedom from dependence on both nature and personal authority. It depends on a selective view of what’s true about traditional or orthodox Christianity. Orthodox Christians should be hopeful about our current heretical situation. The reason for the rise of pantheism as a failing self-help program is in the intellectual and emotional burden of the isolated and contingent experience of the free, unrelational individual. The idea that reality is personal to be both credible and sustainable has to be reconciled with the idea that to be personal is to be relational. It even needs to be reconciled with the idea that logos itself is personal and relational and therefore erotic and creative. As far as we know the rational opening to the truth about all being appears only in persons experiencing the joy of knowing with each other. According to our present philosopher-pope, we’re stuck with revisiting anew the discovery and articulation of the personal logos by the early church fathers. We’re stuck with thinking about the personal truth embodied in the mystery of the Trinity.
Peter Augustine Lawler is Dana Professor of Government at Berry College . 96
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Collin Garbarino The Casual Vacancy, by J.K. Rowling. Little, Brown and Co., 2012.
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s a fan of the Harry Potter series, I was keenly interested when I heard that J. K. Rowling planned to publish a novel for adults. Though the Potter books are uneven, on the whole they make a successful series. There are some things that Rowling does very well— such as creating likeable characters and blending allusions to the British tradition with allusions to the Christian narrative—and I assumed that the new book would contain many of these satisfying elements. The title and the prepublication synopsis suggested to me that The Casual Vacancy would resemble a comedy of manners along the lines of Trollope’s Barchester Towers, but nothing could be further from the case. Those things that Rowling does well are almost completely absent from The Casual Vacancy. I had expected that Rowling would write a book with a bit of wit and winsomeness. Her previous writings convinced me that there would be a bit of humor. Instead, her first “adult” book is juvenile and boring. The pages of The Casual Vacancy are so laced with profanity that it is almost laughable. The F-bomb occurs on every other page, and Rowling comes across like a middle school child who has just discovered that he can “cuss” with friends and get away with it. This newfound vocabulary is used to the point of absurdity. The ubiquitous sex and vulgarity make the book awkward and clumsy. Some turns of phrase in The Casual Vacancy are genuinely cringeworthy. 97
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Take this description of an obese man, for example: “A great apron of stomach fell so far down in front of his thighs that most people thought instantly of his penis when they first clapped eyes on him, wondering when he had last seen it, how he washed it, how he managed to perform any of the acts for which a penis is designed.” Rowling goes on to explain that this particular fat man spends his working day wearing a “stiff dark-green canvas apron.” I am skeptical that the majority of the population, upon meeting an obese man, immediately think of his penis and are discomforted when they visit his shop, especially when his girth is hidden behind. Or there’s this: about halfway through the book, when a father and son are throwing their family’s computer into a river, Rowling writes, “Things denied, things untold, things hidden and disguised.” This sentence appears in a paragraph all on its own with no explanation. This lonely fragment, pretending to have deep meaning, evinces an author who is trying too hard. The book contains many similarly sloppy passages. The biggest problem with the book, however, is its cast of characters. A few characters are interesting, but most of the citizens of Pagford are clichés, and none of the characters are likeable. I genuinely didn’t care about one person in the book. The only person that I thought might potentially be likeable was the councilman whom Rowling killed off on the second page. The small town of Pagford is broken and dysfunctional, and all the people who live there are despicable or pathetic. I assume that Rowling wanted to present “real” people who are multifaceted, but all the facets of the Pagfordians are ugly, which makes them not only unlikeable but also a bit unrealistic. At times I realized that Rowling wanted me to view certain characters sympathetically, but she never managed to convince me. This lack of sympathetic characters is the unforgivable sin in a novel, but Rowling compounds her transgressions by offering a fairly boring plot. Not only did I not care about the characters in the book, but also their deeds were tedious and unrelated. The book claims to be about the election to fill the dead councilman’s seat, and a number of pages deal with that theme. But really, the whole election could have been left out of the book and not much would have changed. The political maneuverings that attended the election spark a few interesting events, but alas, these events go nowhere. 98
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At one point it seemed as if the plot was about to get underway, but in the end every action fizzled into inconsequential pettiness. The climax of the book is almost totally unrelated to the 450 pages that came before. The characters do not develop, nor does the plot. By the book’s conclusion, it is merely a string of mostly unrelated, meaningless actions performed by pathetic characters. Instead of feeling sorry for the book’s characters, I began feeling sorry for Rowling.
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he tragedy is that this book had some potential. I understand what she is aiming for thematically, but she never hits the mark. Rowling attempts to illustrate the Christian doctrine of total depravity, through her characters’ depravity, and she wants us to view the dead councilman as some sort of Christ figure. He is the only good man in the small town, but in this world Jesus’s death does not save anyone. In some ways the subtext of the book resembles Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, but Rowling’s execution in this book is so poor that The Casual Vacancy frustrates rather than enlightens the reader. Rowling makes some flailing and unsuccessful attempt at repentance and redemption by the end of the book, but it all rings hollow. Her characters’ depravity is not “total” in the Christian sense, in that it pervades every aspect of the person, but total in the sense that it is complete. This complete depravity destroys the image of God, instead of marring it, and robs the characters of their humanity. This lack of humanity, in turn, makes the book banal and trite. In the final analysis, Rowling’s problem is that she tried to write an “important” book. The book tries to tackle “important” social issues and say “important” things about the human condition. The book’s theme is ambitious, but Rowling’s plot, characters, and writing style do not support it. She wants to be known as a writer, not a writer of young-adult fiction. If she can give up some of her pretensions then she might have a hope, but she is not there yet.
Collin Garbarino is Assistant Professor of History at Houston Baptist University. 99
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Micah Mattix Olives, by A.E. Stallings . Triquarterly Books, 2012.
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n the second poem of A.E. Stallings’s latest collection, we have her poetics in miniature. “Jigsaw Puzzle” closes with that universal experience of puzzling—the missing final piece:
Slowly you restore The fractured world and start To re-create an afternoon before It fell apart: Here is summer, here is blue, Here two lovers kissing, And here the nothingness shows through Where one piece is missing.
The four corners of the puzzle become in Stallings poetry four line stanzas (her preferred stanza length) in which she re-creates “afternoon” events, most often touching on domestic matters. These afternoons, while wonderfully crafted, are not mere confections, but stark reminders of life’s missing pieces. The title poem of the volume, for example, tells us that, for some reason, we crave bitterness in life, “Full of the golden past and cured in brine,” as much as sweetness. “Sometimes a craving comes for salt, not sweet,” Stallings writes, “For fruits that you can eat / Only if pickled in a vat of tears–.” In “The Compost Heap,” the haphazard care of a garden turns up the “dark glissando of a snake,” and in “Two Nursery Rhymes: Lullaby and Rebuttal,” we have a mother exclaim in exasperation: “For crying out loud, / It’s only spilt milk.” 100
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These universal events of human life–eating, gardening, and caring for children–can be moments of great satisfaction, but they are also moments that are most often spoiled by sin, or, to borrow Stallings’s vocabulary, by “nothingness” and “shadow.” It is not insignificant that the volume is broken into four sections, beginning with “The Argument” and ending with “Fairy-Tale Logic.” If philosophy tries to find the missing piece of the world, poetry reminds us, it seems for Stallings, that certain pieces will always remain missing. In “Fairy-Tale Logic,” for example, she begins with the observation that “Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks: / Gather the chin hairs from a man-eating goat, / Or cross a sulfuric lake in a leaky boat.” “You have to believe,” she writes coyly, That you have something impossible up your sleeve– The language of snakes, perhaps; an invisible cloak, An army of ants at your back, or a lethal joke, The will to do whatever must be done; Marry a monster. Hand over your firstborn son. The logic of fairy tales, in other words, is that there are no fairy tales—in the now clichéd sense of that term, at least none of our own making. Stallings, though, is no brooding Russian. If these poems show us that life is always missing something of fullness, she does it with a sharp wit and good humor. In “Dinosaur Fever,” she laments that stage of development parents loathe more than puberty: Dinosaur fever–they all get it. Kindergartners of either sex. It’ll drive you crazy if you let it– Facts on Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops, Iguanodon, Stegosaurus, always a classic; You must become an expert on All things Cretaceous and Jurassic. Tots tell you what things mean in Greek, In tones superior and mammalian; It seems they only just learned to speak And now they speak sesquipedalian. 101
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Puberty, of course, will bring its own fevers. She writes in “Pop Music” that “The music that your son will listen to / To drive you mad / Has yet to be invented. Be assure, / However, it is approaching from afar / Like the light of some Chaldean star.” Yet, unlike Dinosaur fever, such music has, at least Stallings seems to hope, some real relation to love or life: And while you knit another ugly sweater, The pulsars of the brave new tunes will boom From the hormonal miasma of his room, Or maybe they’ll just beam into his brain– Unheard melodies are better. Thus it has always been. Maybe that’s why The sappy retro soundtrack of your youth Ambushes you sometimes in a café At this almost-safe distance, and you weep, or nearly weep For all you knew of beauty, or of truth. To be honest, when I hear some song of my youth, I find myself laughing more than weeping. But in any case, these somewhat lighter poems provide variety and balance to the volume. These are also the poems of an American abroad. Stallings, who is from Decatur, Georgia, studied classics at the University of Georgia, but currently lives with her husband, John Psaropoulos, who is the editor of the English-language Athens News, in Athens, Greece. We have poems on visits to the countryside and to the First Cemetery of Athens. Throughout the volume there is the comingling of old and new, life and death, love and fear. In “Two Violins” the poet chooses a yellow “Baltic amber” violin from “the Old World” that is as “Light as an exile’s suitcase” over a new “fire-red” piece made from “a torndown church’s pew.” Unlike the red violin, which answers “merrily and clear,” the yellow instrument is “sad” and mellow, responding, as if by magic, to the poet’s unpracticed fingers. Greece, perhaps, is Stallings’s old violin. Her “fingers,” however, at least in Olives, are marked by the sure, practiced movements of a master.
Micah Mattix is Books Editor of T HE C I T Y and Assistant Professor of Literature at Houston Baptist University. 102
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John Poch I lift my voice unto the hills where there are no hills, perhaps rises where they bulldozed a homestead, my voice torn among the cedar windbreaks, hung up, strung out like spent shotgun shell Christmas lights the locals strew with what decadence or what abandon they can muster. What little rain falls makes a paste of caliche an inch thick on my boots. The shovel under foot and in my hand has a voice like horse teeth eating sand. This nexus of my Texas exile, this burying the family dog in sand and limestone strains and stains me. Suddenly, the Busted Triangle Ranch seems symbolic as do the three hearses yesterday in the Allsup’s parking lot. Smile and say, To Kill Ya. My voice would move a mountain to where there are no mountains and would not cast it into the sea. And daydreaming the sea, I feel what the dog must have know when I played for her my recordings of coyotes. O, for the smooth dunes of childhood! O, look, a baby javelina skull.
John Poch is professor of English at Texas Tech Univers ity. His most recent collection of poems is Dolls (Orchises) . 103
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Hunter Baker
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t is interesting to read about education in the 19th Century. One encounters a former emphasis on memorization and recitation. I suppose that method is considered inadequate now and we have moved well past it. I can’t help but think, though, that it is a loss that children no longer know what it means to embed bits of verse and wisdom into one’s mind. The title and substance of Rudyard Kipling’s The Gods of the Copybook Headings (“The wages of sin is death.” and “If you don’t work, you die.”) makes little sense to a modern person because no one copies and memorizes pithy statements any more. Though I am in my early forties, I, too, am part of the more modern set which possesses very little memorized material. For that reason, I find myself somewhat awed and wistful when I see what a person like my father (educated in rural Tennessee) still owns thanks to his school lessons. On occasion he has quoted from The Chambered Nautilus by the poet father, not the jurist son, Oliver Wendell Holmes: Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!
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But my favorite that he occasionally shares is from William Cullen Bryant’s Thanatopsis: So live, that when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan which moves To that mysterious realm, where each shall take His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night, Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams. These are materials which help a person to grow strong and to endure life’s difficulties. I regret that we no longer build with them. We are replacing stone with vinyl.
I gathered my order from the counter at Hardee’s and took a table where I began to read The Man Who Was Thursday. When I sat down, I noticed a pale woman sitting with an unopened bag of food. She looked sallow and unhealthy. As I read, she began to cough. Each cough was deep and seemed to rattle in her chest. This was no simple cold. I thought about picking up my food and moving, but I felt it would be insulting to her to do so. I continued to read and listened to that attention-getting cough of hers. Finally, I discovered I could not give the book the attention I wanted to because I had become focused on the woman behind me. For the moment, at least, she had become more present to me than G.K. Chesterton. I got up and walked my tray over to the trash receptacle. Looking her way, I saw that she was hunched over and working her way through a substantial stack of lottery cards. With great concentration and methodical effort, she scratched away the silver coating on the numbers. Occasionally, she punctuated her practice with long, ragged ugly coughing noises. Those lottery tickets she must have spent at least $20 dollars on (more than for the flip flops on her feet) came from the state of Tennessee. I thought about how she is addicted to gambling thanks to 105
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the active assistance of her government. I also thought about how addicted the rest of us have become to the revenue. If you want to understand social conservatives, thinking about the woman in Hardee’s scratching away at lottery tickets is a good way to start. We want to encourage the things in life that help a person grow strong: faith, work, education, character, duty, and family. We want to work against the things that seem to shrivel up a soul such as perpetual dependence, reliance on games of chance rather than personal industry, an inability to connect consequences to choices, and the loss of the kind of strong family ties that prepare a person for life in a hard world. At a minimum, we don’t want to support a government which invites the poor to sacrifice what little they have for a mirage. We have lost that argument everywhere. And more’s the pity.
I bought Andrew another collection of the old Thor comics, which he loves. I asked him if he would like to live in Asgard. Him: “It doesn’t exist, Dad.” Me: “I don’t know that and neither do you. How can you be so sure?” Him: “The old Vikings just made that stuff up. They’re just legends.” Me: “Yeah, but I wonder what the origin of it was. I wonder why the Vikings came up with those legends.” Him: “They just wanted to believe in a false religion.” The kid is his mother’s son.
Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s columns appear with regularity in my old hometown papers The Decatur Daily and The Huntsville Times. They are often homespun and interesting. Regrettably, Ms. Johnson has broken that streak with the column I am required to anoint as The Most Egregious Strawman Construction Project of Recent Memory or alternately, The Worst Column I Have Ever Read. Johnson begins the column “in the Free State of Texas” with a desolate scene. Loose trash blows about on cold, windy streets. (There’s no one to pick it up because the national trash removal service has 106
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been banished! Never mind that there is no national trash removal service. There would be one without awful states like Texas to stand in the way!) A self-satisfied man sits and burns books on the fire to keep warm. The books come from the town’s library. It sits nearby with windows broken on the first day of secession. There are fewer books to burn than might be expected as a citizen’s group has “swept the shelves” of “offensive literature” such as Twain, Steinbeck, and Shakespeare. (My dear sweet heaven, can I go on describing this ridiculous piece of writing to you? I must.) Everyone has a concealed weapon. The parks are dangerous. No one can figure out who should empty trash or clean toilets (because local authorities could never handle something so difficult), so buildings are padlocked. The man burning books to stay warm wonders whether Alabama and Kansas have “broken loose.” Alabama was a state that could be counted upon “to be on the right side of history.” (Because anyone against collectivism must be in favor of slavery. A most subtle pen at work here.) Even if a person had a television or radio, one would be unable to hear the now blocked “government-controlled airways.” Such possessions as televisions and radios have been lost “to enthusiastic looters the state police couldn’t stop.” Yes, in Texas as in every other state, the brave federal police maintain order. Of course, law enforcement is predominantly carried out by the states. Ms. Johnson is a victim of constitutional illiteracy. Don’t worry, Ms. Johnson, the disease is epidemic. You are very far from being alone. For the big Twilight Zone type finish to accompany the Mad Max depiction of the column, Johnson has the freedom-loving Texan toss another book on the fire for warmth. The cover reads Atlas Shrugged. DA DA DUMMMMMMM!!! I am emphatically not in favor of secession, nor is any such thing likely to happen in America. It is no better an idea now than it was when some on the left floated the notion after the re-election of George W. Bush. What I find objectionable is first the broad-brush, ugly slander on the character of a great state and its people. I cannot understand the vapidity of thought which would imagine that selfgovernment is somehow impossible for a state of 25 million people accompanied by plentiful natural resources. As if the United States of America in its fullness (and current leftwardness) is the only possible way the collected peoples of the many states could ever be governed! 107
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Perhaps another measure is in order. There is one state which completely follows the liberal point of view in its policy prescriptions. That state is California. There is another state which goes the other way. That state is Texas. Guess which direction all the U-Hauls are running? And guess which one can’t get out of debt and has cities poised to declare bankruptcy left and right? Check it out, Ms. Rheta Grimsley Johnson.
Imagine that you are the Obama White House. You know that you need to maximize your base to win the election. Single women are solidly in your camp, but they don’t vote. How do you get them going? Answer: find a way to make contraception a presidential campaign issue when it never has been before. (Remember how mystified Mitt Romney was when George Stephanopoulos raised the matter in one of the primary debates?) The way to make contraception an issue is to pick a fight with the Catholic church. You will only upset the Catholics who are seriously devout and they don’t vote for you anyway. That is exactly what the administration did and voila! It appears that single women bought into the idea of a war on women and the need to “vote with your ladyparts” as the Obama campaign famously suggested. Somewhere, Machiavelli is peering through the mists of time thinking, “Wow, those guys are devious.”
You’ve been missing something. You have lived your life wondering whether there might be anything greater than yourself, some cause, some great undertaking to which you might dedicate your life. You have experienced many of the world’s possibilities, eaten many meals, played with many toys, accumulated goods, but still found yourself dissatisfied. Perhaps now you have come to a time of decision. Maybe you are ready to move to a different level. You are ready to leave lesser things behind as you subordinate your life and goals to something big enough that you can place your hopes upon it. What I am asking is this: “Are you ready to give your life to the Southeastern Conference of the NCAA?” Or maybe you already have? We have meetings every Saturday. 108
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If you really have given your life to the SEC, then you should try to get it back. College football is a wonderful diversion, but if you find yourself constantly thinking about divisions, playoff scenarios, recruiting classes and the like, then it may be time to revisit your priorities. The same advice applies if you live your whole week just waiting for Saturday which will climax in a great game with roughly the same import as the fate of great civilizations. Rome fell. But did you see what happened to the program at Auburn? Wow. Cataclysmic! The second option is a bit more subversive and less obvious. Do you treat Sundays and the church the way you do the SEC? Does the church serve as your primary form of entertainment? Are you constantly attending new churches looking for a bigger thrill and a more entertaining experience? Do you perform a score-keeping function as you watch different teams of Christians compete in the culture wars? Do you despair with every setback as though your favorite college lost the big one on Saturday? Whether you worship at the altar of the SEC or you treat the church as though it were the SEC, there is a more important question out there. And really, there is nobody quite so good as my fellow southerners to ask this question. Have you submitted your entire life and being to God the father and Jesus Christ his son? Do you try to discern how God would have you make every decision? Are you sensitive to the prompting of the Holy Spirit, not only in how you should pray or read, but also in how you respond to the needs of others? Do you concern yourself primarily with how you can bring something to the church? Or are you mostly worried about whether you are being properly “fed.” Are you a lot more loyal to the SEC or to your team than you are to any church body? Good questions for all of us.
Both of my children, upon learning the fact-opinion distinction, became drunk with power. “That’s just your OPINION, dad!”
Listening to NPR recently, I heard a story about Ambassor Susan Rice and her recent travails regarding Benghazi and the administra109
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tion response. The reporter related information and opinions gathered from supporters and critics in an attempt to give listeners information needed to decide how to view recent events and significant actors such as Ms. Rice. So far, so good. But what happened next was interesting. It turned out that the reporting on Rice was merely an introduction to a much larger story about Kelly Ayotte, the U.S. senator from New Hampshire. Listeners learned that Ayotte has been a significant critic of Ms. Rice despite her mere two years in the senate. It also turns out, the reporter noted, that Ayotte was often spoken of as a potential running mate for Mitt Romney. In the discussion of Ayotte, there was really none of the full-orbed treatment afforded to Ambassador Rice. Instead, the listeners were left with a vague sense that there was something not quite right about this Senator Ayotte person. Remember, the story was ostensibly about Ambassador Rice’s difficulties of late. This is the nature of media bias. Looking at a room full of excrement with a Democrat standing in the middle, reporters start digging frantically. After all, there’s got to be a Republican in there somewhere.
As we near the so-called fiscal cliff at which time, among other things, the Bush tax cuts (which benefitted everyone) are close to an end. They would be replaced by the Clinton tax rates which preceded them. All the attention has been on the fact that the highest Clinton rates (up to 39%) would result in more taxes on high income earners. There has been little discussion of how more taxpayers on the lower end would have to pay higher taxes. Personally, I welcome the return of the Clinton rates. A few extra points is not too much to pay in order to broaden the base of taxation. The more citizens who pay taxes, the more interested they will be in fiscal policy. Of late, however, many on the left have expressed a substantial interest in much higher taxes on top earners. More than a few modern liberals have spoken with affection of the times when marginal tax rates of 90% or higher enforced a greater degree of equality. At the same time, they note that the U.S. experienced economic expansions during periods when we had very high rates. Has the U.S. had good economies during times of high tax rates? Certainly. It is possible to have good economies and high tax rates 110
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because people find ways to defeat the confiscatory impact of high taxes. For example, today’s corporate exec may get a very high salary and join an exclusive private club. Such an exec in a high tax regime may work for a company that builds its own golf course which the execs may enjoy for a very low fee. In addition, the company may invest in all kinds of perks related to the headquarters building and other benefits. Many of the rich benefits we are losing now are relics of a time when people sought to blunt the impact of income taxes by having companies provide non-cash rewards. There were other ways to defeat confiscation. Tax credits for speculative investments, various tax shelters, obscure loopholes in the code. Though marginal rates have sometimes been radically different, the actual take from the rates has been more steady. People will only pay so much before they will start to work hard NOT to pay more. The key in tax policy is to find a rate which people will pay without working too hard to avoid taxes. Such a policy is more efficient because it should bring in more money and not waste human energy in schemes to dodge payment. The bigger issue, here, though, is the attitude exemplified by viewing a 90% top marginal rate with favor. I think the best way to get at these things is by asking basic questions. Why should those who earn more pay a much higher rate than others? After all, a man who makes 100,000 dollars will pay 10,000 dollars at a ten percent rate while a man who only makes 10,000 dollars will only pay 1,000 dollars. Such a principle would treat the two men as equals and yet would still make the wealthier man pay more. Why do we want to create a special higher rate for the person who makes more money? What justifies us in this plan of action? Rousseau (never thought of as a conservative) argued for a principle of law in which all laws must apply to all people equally. Otherwise, it would always be in the interest of a majority to target a minority for confiscation or other advantage-making. The main answer that comes back is that if the government has additional needs, it is better to look to the rich to make up the difference than to ask others to pay. There is an immediate problem with that perspective in the sense that we probably honor notions of equality and citizenship better by asking rich and poor to pay an equal percentage of all costs if not an equal amount. It may be a greater problem still to encourage part of the population to look another part of 111
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the population as a national resource of some kind, which can be exploited as needed. A pragmatist will shun these notions of principle and favor the expediency of taxing the wealthy at higher levels. It is true that they will feel less impact from higher rates, up to a point. The problem (setting principle aside, which is dangerous) is that the appetite for asymmetric taxation will only grow. Note England with its 50% rate on millionaires. What have they achieved other than a sense of satisfaction? Fewer millionaires. Rich people are mobile. Are you going to lock them up so you can tax them? France is ready to undergo a similar experiment with its 75% top rate. The question of locking people up so you can tax them takes us back to the arena of principle. Do we think we own the rich? Or would it be better to encourage the sense that we truly are all in this thing together and that the decisions of all will affect all?
A short while ago, I tried to watch The Walking Dead after hearing many people praise it. I couldn’t handle the program. Too raw. Too much emotion. I also had to give up on my viewing of Downfall. I managed most of it, but when Frau Goebbels started giving her children cyanide in the bunker, I was done. This is a stark change from my younger years when I could watch practically anything and feel almost nothing but vicarious thrills at sex, violence, and tragedy. My hope is that rather than becoming weak and sentimental, my soul is actually becoming stronger and more engaged. Sensations that would register little when there are no fully developed nerves to feel them are now felt with alarming force.
In preparation for a meeting, I read an outstanding book titled The Innovative University. It is an excellent account of how Harvard has shaped higher education for both good and ill during the past two centuries. I recommend it. However, I have encountered the same claim made on a couple of occasions in the book. The authors describe Harvard as having thrown off the “intellectual shackles of Puritanism.” According to the book, this secularization enabled scholars 112
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such as John Winthrop (a descendant of the one you know) to do things such as discovering “the true, natural causes of earthquakes.” I suppose the statement makes sense to the authors, but not to me. I have no idea why Puritanism would prevent scientists from learning things about earthquakes. Someone will likely say to me that Puritans would attribute an earthquake to the sovereign action of God. But so what? Does that mean that religious human beings would have no interest at all in the natural mechanisms of an earthquake? Have religious persons never made scientific discoveries? Of course they have. Besides, I’m sure Puritans saw the hand of God in the success and failure of crops. Do you mean to tell me, then, that they had no interest at all in methods of farming? Ridiculous. I wrote about this problem in The End of Secularism. We have been taught to believe that Christianity is some kind of science stopper, but that isn’t really so. Christians often object to particular applications of science, such as embryonic stem cell research. But there is nothing about being a Christian that would prevent a person from using the tools of science to learn and to know. There is a great difference between being against driving on the sidewalk and objecting to the general use of automobiles.
I put my daughter Grace in bed and started pulling her socks off. She giggled and said, “You’re my servant.” I went to school a long time to end up as the servant of a seven year old girl. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like it.
It isn’t the World Cup final, game seven of the World Series, the climax of the Final Four, or the Super Bowl. It is an unheralded game played in Jackson, Tennessee before a crowd of maybe 50-75 people. There aren’t a lot of rules. The basic idea is baseball. Everybody takes a turn at bat in every inning. Nobody ever gets out. Each runner eventually scores. And yet, there is no score for the game. You may be wondering why I think such a game is beautiful. It doesn’t sound like a contest that has the drama of sport and competition. Indeed, this game lacks those things. 113
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The infield and front edge of the outfield is full of people. Most of them are not players. In addition to children wearing the brightly colored shirts that function as uniforms, there are a larger number of adults and teens. They are there to help and protect some of the participants. They are also there to be encouragers. One moment in the game: A little girl is up to bat. She is very small. Her father carries her in his arms. Her tiny legs are crossed below the knee and positioned behind her. She excitedly grips a bat. A helper brings out a tee and places a ball on it. She takes a swing, connects, and then runs to first using her hands and arms to propel her along the base path. Some children come to the plate in wheelchairs. Others approach in a stilted walking motion. One boy is missing half an arm. A few have no obvious physical difference, but struggle with mental disabilities such as retardation or forms of autism. There is an athletic and smiling man who pitches to each child who has a chance of hitting without a tee. Sometimes, he throws them 10-15 pitches. Often, he creeps in and tosses balls from one knee. He tries to gauge each swing and aim his pitches for the arc along which the bat will travel. Each child hits and runs, walks, stumbles, or rolls to first base. Each time the crowd roars its approval. Sometimes, there are students from a local Christian college sitting in the bleachers. They have made signs with exhortations and the names of each child on them. When that kid comes to bat, they make him or her feel like an all-star. If you happen to see the delighted surprise from each player the first time (and every time, really) they get the celebrity treatment, you will feel your heart swell with a great proud and happy fullness. You know that this is how the world should be. This game, played in the twilight hours in a southern town, is the most beautiful game on earth.
Hunter Baker serves as Dean of Instruction and a ssociate professor of political science at Union University . He is the author of two books, The End of Sec ularism and Political Thought: A Student ’s Guide. You can read more at his website, endofsecularism.com . 114
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Saint Augustine In each volume of T H E C I TY , we reprint a passage from great leaders of the faith. In 410, the empire which had dominated the world for ce nturies was shocked as the Visigoths sacked Rome . Some saw the calamity as punishment for abandoning the pagan gods of Roman history for Christianity. In this context, Augustine of Hippo began writing De Civitate Dei , the work after which this journal is named, focusing on the conflict between the Cities of God and Man, the pursuits of the world and the pursuits of the fait hful, and our confidence that the City of God will triumph. Here are a few excerpts from Book XIV.
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e have already stated in the preceding books that God, desiring not only that the human race might be able by their similarity of nature to associate with one another, but also that they might be bound together in harmony and peace by the ties of relationship, was pleased to derive all men from one individual, and created man with such a nature that the members of the race should not have died, had not the two first (of whom the one was created out of nothing, and the other out of him) merited this by their disobedience; for by them so great a sin was committed, that by it the human nature was altered for the worse, and was transmitted also to their posterity, liable to sin and subject to death. And the kingdom of death so reigned over men, that the deserved penalty of sin would have hurled all headlong even into the second death, of which there is no end, had not the undeserved grace of God saved some therefrom. And thus it has come to pass, that though there are very many and great nations all over the earth, whose rites and customs, speech, arms, and dress, are distinguished by marked differences, yet there are no more than two kinds of human society, which we may justly call two cities, according to the language of our Scriptures. The one consists of those who wish to live after the flesh, the other of those who wish to live after the spirit; and when they severally achieve what they wish, they live in peace, each after their kind. First, we must see what it is to live after the flesh, and what to live after the spirit. For any one who either does not recollect, or does not sufficiently weigh, the language of sacred Scripture, may, on first 116
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hearing what we have said, suppose that the Epicurean philosophers live after the flesh, because they place man's highest good in bodily pleasure; and that those others do so who have been of opinion that in some form or other bodily good is man's supreme good; and that the mass of men do so who, without dogmatizing or philosophizing on the subject, are so prone to lust that they cannot delight in any pleasure save such as they receive from bodily sensations: and he may suppose that the Stoics, who place the supreme good of men in the soul, live after the spirit; for what is man's soul, if not spirit? But in the sense of the divine Scripture both are proved to live after the flesh. For by flesh it means not only the body of a terrestrial and mortal animal, as when it says, “All flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, another of birds,” but it uses this word in many other significations; and among these various usages, a frequent one is to use flesh for man himself, the nature of man taking the part for the whole, as in the words, “By the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified;” for what does he mean here by “no flesh” but “no man?” And this, indeed, he shortly after says more plainly: “No man shall be justified by the law;” and in the Epistle to the Galatians, “Knowing that man is not justified by the works of the law.” And so we understand the words, “And the Word was made flesh,”—that is, man, which some not accepting in its right sense, have supposed that Christ had not a human soul. For as the whole is used for the part in the words of Mary Magdalene in the Gospel, “They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him,” by which she meant only the flesh of Christ, which she supposed had been taken from the tomb where it had been buried, so the part is used for the whole, flesh being named, while man is referred to, as in the quotations above cited. Since, then, Scripture uses the word flesh in many ways, which there is not time to collect and investigate, if we are to ascertain what it is to live after the flesh (which is certainly evil, though the nature of flesh is not itself evil), we must carefully examine that passage of the epistle which the Apostle Paul wrote to the Galatians, in which he says,” Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the 117
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which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.” This whole passage of the apostolic epistle being considered, so far as it bears on the matter in hand, will be sufficient to answer the question, what it is to live after the flesh. For among the works of the flesh which he said were manifest, and which he cited for condemnation, we find not only those which concern the pleasure of the flesh, as fornications, uncleanness, lasciviousness, drunkenness, revellings, but also those which, though they be remote from fleshly pleasure, reveal the vices of the soul. For who does not see that idolatries, witchcrafts, hatreds, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, heresies, envyings, are vices rather of the soul than of the flesh?... But if any one says that the flesh is the cause of all vices and ill conduct, inasmuch as the soul lives wickedly only because it is moved by the flesh, it is certain he has not carefully considered the whole nature of man. For “the corruptible body, indeed, weigheth down the soul.” Whence, too, the apostle, speaking of this corruptible body, of which he had shortly before said, “though our outward man perish,” says, “We know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven: if so be that being clothed we shall not be found naked. For we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened: not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up in life.” We are then burdened with this corruptible body; but knowing that the cause of this burdensomeness is not the nature and substance of the body, but its corruption, we do not desire to be deprived of the body, but to be clothed with its immortality. For then, also, there will be a body, but it shall no longer be a burden, being no longer corruptible. At present, then, “the corruptible body presseth down the soul, and the earthly tabernacle weigheth down the mind that museth upon many things,” nevertheless they are in error who suppose that all the evils of the soul proceed from the body… For the corruption of the body, which weighs down the soul, is not the cause but the punishment of the first sin; and it was not the corruptible flesh that made the soul sinful, but the sinful soul that made the flesh corruptible. And though from this corruption of the flesh there arise certain incitements to vice, and indeed vicious desires, yet 118
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we must not attribute to the flesh all the vices of a wicked life, in case we thereby clear the devil of all these, for he has no flesh. For though we cannot call the devil a fornicator or drunkard, or ascribe to him any sensual indulgence (though he is the secret instigator and prompter of those who sin in these ways), yet he is exceedingly proud and envious. And this viciousness has so possessed him, that on account of it he is reserved in chains of darkness to everlasting punishment. Now these vices, which have dominion over the devil, the apostle attributes to the flesh, which certainly the devil has not. For he says “hatred, variance emulations, strife, envying” are the works of the flesh; and of all these evils pride is the origin and head, and it rules in the devil though he has no flesh… For it is not by having flesh, which the devil has not, but by living according to himself—that is, according to man—that man became like the devil. For the devil too, wished to live according to himself when he did not abide in the truth; so that when he lied, this was not of God, but of himself, who is not only a liar, but the father of lies, he being the first who lied, and the originator of lying as of sin. When, therefore, man lives according to man, not according to God, he is like the devil. Because not even an angel might live according to an angel, but only according to God, if he was to abide in the truth, and speak God's truth and not his own lie. And of man, too, the same apostle says in another place, “If the truth of God hath more abounded through my lie;” “my lie,” he said, and “God's truth.” When, then, a man lives according to the truth, he lives not according to himself, but according to God; for He was God who said, “I am the truth.” When, therefore, man lives according to himself—that is, according to man, not according to God—assuredly he lives according to a lie; not that man himself is a lie, for God is his author and creator, who is certainly not the author and creator of a lie, but because man was made upright, that he might not live according to himself, but according to Him that made him,-in other words, that he might do His will and not his own; and not to live as he was made to live, that is a lie. For he certainly desires to be blessed even by not living so that he may be blessed. And what is a lie if this desire be not? Wherefore it is not without meaning said that all sin is a lie. For no sin is committed save by that desire or will by which we desire that it be well with us, and shrink from it being ill with us. That, therefore, is a lie which we do in order that it may be well with 119
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us, but which makes us more miserable than we were. And why is this, but because the source of man's happiness lies only in God, whom he abandons when he sins, and not in himself, by living according to whom he sins? In enunciating this proposition of ours, then, that because some live according to the flesh and others according to the spirit, there have arisen two diverse and conflicting cities, we might equally well have said, “because some live according to man, others according to God.” For Paul says very plainly to the Corinthians, “For whereas there is among you envying and strife, are ye not carnal, and walk according to man?” So that to walk according to man and to be carnal are the same; for by flesh, that is, by a part of man, man is meant. For before he said that those same persons were animal whom afterwards he calls carnal, saying, “For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of this world, but the Spirit which is of God; that we might, know the things which are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the animal man perceiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto him.” It is to men of this kind, then, that is, to animal men, he shortly after says, “And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal.” And this is to be interpreted by the same usage, a part being taken for the whole. For both the soul and the flesh, the component parts of man, can be used to signify the whole man; and so the animal man and the carnal man are not two different things, but one and the same thing, man living according to man.
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