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The Homebound Symphony

Stagger onward rejoicing

Tag: religion (page 1 of 2)

February 21, 2025

Douthat on belief

The central and absolutely essential premise of Ross Douthat’s new book Believe, the point from which the whole argument begins, is this: There is a genus of human belief and practice called “religion,” of which Christianity is one of the species. My problem with regard to Ross’s book is that I have come quite seriously to doubt this premise. My larger problem is that I don’t know quite how to do without this premise, since it is so deeply embedded in almost all discourse on … well, I guess I have to say on religion.

My difficulty was brought home to me when I was writing the Preface to my forthcoming book on Paradise Lost. That book is one of a series called Lives of the Great Religious Books, which meant that in said Preface I needed to explain and justify my claim that Milton’s poem really is a religious book — which, I argue, it is in some ways, though not in others: its relationship to Christianity is radically different than that of, say, the Book of Common Prayer, the subject of my previous book in the PUP series. In order to do this, I had to take the concept of “religion” seriously. Or semi-seriously.

I began thus:

Many years ago I heard it said — I wish I could remember by whom — that the only thing the world’s religions have in common is that they all use candles. Thus Sir James Frazer, in beginning his great The Golden Bough, wrote that “There is probably no subject in the world about which opinions differ so much as the nature of religion, and to frame a definition of it which would satisfy every one must obviously be impossible. All that a writer can do is, first, to say clearly what he means by religion, and afterwards to employ the word consistently in that sense throughout his work.”

But I had to settle on some kind of definition, so here’s the relevant footnote:

Emile Durkheim’s definition is a useful one: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and surrounded by prohibitions — beliefs and practices that unite its adherents in single moral community called a church”: Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Carol Cosman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001 [1912]), p. 46; italics in original. Durkheim is using the term church in a very broad sense, though one may doubt whether it can possibly be broad enough to cover all relevant cases. This definition contains both functional and dogmatic elements, but as Durkheim unfolds his conceptual frame the functional strongly dominates.

After that I went on to argue that Paradise Lost is religious in a dogmatic but not a functional sense. I think my argument is correct, given the premises — but, as I say, the premises are what I’ve come to question.

Basically, I’ve come to believe the various things we call “religions” … well, here’s what I wrote in a recent essay:

I often tell my students that whether Christianity is true or not, it is the most unnatural religion in the world. Even a cursory study of the world’s religions will show how obsessed humans are with finding some way to (a) gain the favor of the gods, or transhuman powers of any kind, and/or (b) avert their wrath. Religious seeking is almost always about these two universal desires: to get help and to avert trouble. But in Christianity it is God who comes to seek and save the lost (Lk 19:10); it is God who reckons with His own wrath, himself making propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world (1 Jn 2:2). The standard — or rather the obsessive — practices of homo religiosus have no place here. In Jesus Christ, the Christian gospel says, God has done it all.

I say: This may be true or it may be false, but it is the Christian account of things, and it is very, very weird — so weird that it is easy, indeed natural, for us to fall back on the standard model of religion and turn our prayers into spells. How often do we think, perhaps in some unacknowledged place deep inside our minds and hearts, that when we come to church and say the appointed words and perform the correct actions, we are somehow getting Management to take our side?

The distinction between spells and prayers is Roger Scruton’s — read the post for the context — and it’s a useful one. I think it is the natural human tendency, the natural religious tendency if you must, to look for spells that can influence or even control the Powers That Be. But what use is a spell if the Name above all names — Jesus Christ — has already redeemed the world?

(I am speaking here of the greatest thing a religion might be expected to do. We also ask smaller things, and in those cases we often fall back on the old spell-habit, not realizing how secondary even the things that most concern us really are in the divine economy. Our inability to keep these matters in their proper perspective is a great theme in the letters of the apostle Paul, but that’s a subject for another time.)

Back to Ross’s book, near the end of which he writes this:

Some people’s encounters with religion in childhood aren’t negative or abusive so much as they are just sterile and empty, making the faith of their ancestors feel like a dead letter when it comes time to start on their own journey. That was how it was for the British novelist Paul Kingsnorth. He was raised to experience his isle’s Christianity as a hopeless antiquarianism, a thing that mattered only as a foil for modernity. His own adult spiritual progress grew naturally out of his environmentalism, which led him first into a kind of “pick’n’mix spirituality,” and then into a commitment to Zen Buddhism, which lasted years but felt insufficient, lacking (he felt) a mode of true worship.

He found that worship in actual paganism, a nature-worship that made sense as an expression of his love of the natural world, and he went so far as to become a priest of Wicca, a practitioner of what he took to be white magic. At which point, and only at that point, he began to feel impelled toward Christianity — by coincidence and dreams, by ideas and arguments, and by the kind of stark mystical experiences discussed in an earlier chapter of this book.

In Ross’s account, I think I’m right to say, this is a gradual convergence on the True Religion, and while I do believe that the Christianity Kingsnorth now professes (and professes shrewdly and eloquently) is indeed true, I don’t believe that when he was a Wiccan — saying actual spells! — he was close to that truth than when he was a Buddhist or “spiritual but not religious.” In fact, Buddhism has a better understanding of the uselessness of spells than Wicca. Buddhism, though the very concept of “god” is not intrinsic to it, in its frank acknowledgment of a cosmos wholly beyond our control might be closer to the Christian understanding of the world than any practice committed to the efficacy of spells.

I dunno. I’m still thinking this through. But right now my thoughts are running along these lines:

While I doubt the genus/species premise of Ross’s book, almost everyone else in the world accepts its validity. A point that in intellectual humility I should bear in mind. And because the whole world accepts its validity, maybe Ross is right to structure his book in this way.

But I am not at all convinced that a move from, say, atheism to Wicca is necessarily “a step in the right direction” — i.e., once you’ve entered the genus-town of “religion,” you’re closer to the species-house of Christianity than you were before. Indeed, I wonder whether many people might be less interested in Christianity as a result of such a move, since they might plausibly think that as long as they’re operating within the genus, does it really matter what species they prefer? (The “We all get to God in our own way” line has had a very long run and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.)

It’s common to call people who move from one religion to another “searchers,” and usually Christians think of that as a good thing. But I doubt that many of the people we call searchers are really searching. We Christians don’t seek, we are found by the One who seeks us. And that may be more of a frightening than a consoling thought. I believe that C. S. Lewis, as God approached him, was feeling the right feelings:

I was to be allowed to play at philosophy no longer. It might, as I say, still be true that my “Spirit” differed in some way from “the God of popular religion.” My Adversary waived the point. It sank into utter unimportance. He would not argue about it. He only said, “I am the Lord”; “I am that I am”; “I am.”

People who are naturally religious find difficulty in understanding the horror of such a revelation. Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about “man’s search for God.” To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the cat.

Finally: Near the end of his book Douthat calls Christianity “the strangest story in the world,” a claim I enthusiastically endorse. But I think that if we take that claim with the seriousness it deserves, we might have to abandon the idea that Christianity is one of the things we call “religion.” Religion — if we must use the word — is a human activity that can be described more-or-less as Durkheim describes it. Christianity is something else altogether, I can’t help thinking. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” is not only stranger than we imagine; it’s stranger than we can imagine. 

It occurs to me, belatedly, that some of my earlier posts on enchantment are relevant to the argument I’m making here:— e.g. this one. But I’m wondering whether I’m moving the goalposts somewhat: perhaps I am criticizing Ross for something I’ve done myself. I’ll think about it and revisit the topic later. 

October 17, 2024

true believers

David Brooks:

In days gone by, parties were political organizations designed to win elections and gain power. Party leaders would expand their coalitions toward that end. Today, on the other hand, in an increasingly secular age, political parties are better seen as religious organizations that exist to provide believers with meaning, membership and moral sanctification. If that’s your purpose, of course you have to stick to the existing gospel. You have to focus your attention on affirming the creed of the current true believers. You get so buried within the walls of your own catechism, you can’t even imagine what it would be like to think outside it.

When parties were primarily political organizations, they were led by elected officials and party bosses. Now that parties are more like quasi-religions, power lies with priesthood — the dispersed array of media figures, podcast hosts and activists who run the conversation, define party orthodoxy and determine the boundaries of acceptable belief.

This is brilliant by Brooks, so read the whole thing. But than I would think so, wouldn’t I, because this converges with points I have been making for years. When the Repugnant Cultural Other becomes the Repugnant Religious Other — when the Other is a heretic out to destroy your very soul — then being “buried within the walls of your own catechism” is the Prime Directive. (“For the love of God, Montresor, don’t tear down this wall.”) 

Wow, that’s three allusions in, like, ten words. I should be on BookTok or something.

Anyway, this analysis helps to explain one of Brooks’s key points, which is that none of the priests who lead these two competing religions seem interested in making converts, only in dissing the other side.  As I wrote in another post, 

Recently I was reading Minds Wide Shut by Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro, and while I venerate GSM just this side idolatry, I don’t think the book quite works as intended. At the risk of oversimplification, I’ll say that its core argument is (a) that our culture is dominated by a set of fundamentalisms — “At the heart of any fundamentalism, as we define it, is a disdain for learning from evidence. Truth is already known, given, and clear” — and (b) that the fundamentalist mindset is incapable of persuasion, of bringing skeptics over to its side. 

All of which is true, but (and this is a major theme of my How to Think) what if people don’t want to persuade others? What if they don’t just hate their Repugnant Cultural Other but need him or her in order to define themselves and their Inner Ring? 

If I may cite myself one more time: Hatred alone is immortal. This is our problem in a nutshell. 

September 27, 2024

parochialism

I’ve seen a great many essays of this kind over the decades. I’m no longer surprised by them — I used to be disgusted, but now I try to be amused — but we shouldn’t forget that the radical parochialism of elite opinion is quite a remarkable thing. Manvir Singh thinks Christianity is dead (murdered by “the natural sciences”) — someone should tell the world’s two billion Christians — and that suspicion of our moral self-justification began with Nietzsche — someone should tell St. Paul. But for Singh, ideas that aren’t present (a) in his social cohort and (b) at this instant simply don’t exist. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Manvir Singh.” 

September 8, 2024

some enchanted evening

It seems that “enchantment” is having a moment right now — e.g. — and, well, okay, but I’d like to make two points: 

  1. Experiencing the world as enchanted has absolutely nothing to do with acknowledging that Jesus Christ is Lord, and that at the end of history every knee will bow and every tongue confess this. That is to say, Christians who have boarded the Enchantment Train should realize that what it promises is often (if not always) something quite different than what the Christian faith — which is often disenchanting — promises, and demands. 
  2. A related point: As I wrote a decade ago, “The porous self is open to the divine as well as to the demonic, while the buffered self is closed to both alike. Those who must guard against capture by fairies are necessarily and by the same token receptive to mystical experiences. The ‘showings’ manifested to Julian of Norwich depend upon exceptional sensitivity, which is to say porosity — vulnerability to incursions of the supernatural. The portals of the self cannot be closed on one side only.” 

You want to live in an enchanted cosmos? Cool. But be careful what you wish for. You might get it. 

Is the cosmos enchanted? Is it disenchanted? Is it standing on one leg and singing “When Father Painted the Parlor”? (Tom Stoppard reference there.) It’s not something I’m inclined to think about much, because for me — YMMV, and it really and truly may vary, you may be aided enormously by such reflections — it’s just another way to avoid thinking about Jesus. I already have a thousand of those, I don’t need a thousand-and-one. 

There’s a beautiful moment in the Introduction to Reynolds Price’s Three Gospels, when Price is remembering his childhood encounters with the Christian message: 

By then, in the countryside near my parents’ home, I had also undergone solitary apprehensions of a vibrant unity among all visible things and the thing I guessed was hid beneath the visible world — the reachable world of trees, rocks, water, clouds, snakes, foxes, myself, and (beneath them) all I loved and feared. Even that early I sensed the world’s unity as a vast kinship far past the bond of any root I shared with other creatures in evolutionary time, and the Bible stories had begun to engage me steadily in silence and to draw me toward the singular claim at their burning heart — Your life is willed and watched with care by a god who once lived here. 

Note that in the young Price’s experience, the perception of the “vibrant unity of all visible things” and the guess that some deeper unity lay beneath and beyond it led to something more surprising, challenging, and specific. That “singular claim” that he perceived is all that I place my hope and trust in, and I am disinclined to pursue avenues of reflection that seem to promise metaphysical comfort without reminding me that my life is willed and watched with care by a God — the only God there is — who once lived here. 

July 15, 2024

Hume puts his cards on the table

I mentioned in an earlier post Hume’s purpose in writing this history — or what anyway I believe to have been his purpose: To account for and celebrate (a) the diminishment of the rule of superstition and enthusiasm and (b) the corresponding rise of “civility and sciences.” This purpose can only be fulfilled if Hume follows certain practices in assessing evidence.  

Look for instance at his account of the rise and fall of Joan of Arc, in Volume II. Hume writes long paragraphs, but they consistently manifest a beautiful architecture, so I will here quote the whole of the first paragraph of his account: 

In the village of Domremi near Vaucouleurs, on the borders of Lorraine, there lived a country girl of twenty-seven years of age, called Joan d’Arc, who was servant in a small inn, and who in that station had been accustomed to tend the horses of the guests, to ride them without a saddle to the watering-place, and to perform other offices, which, in well-frequented inns, commonly fall to the share of the men servants. This girl was of an irreproachable life, and had not hitherto been remarked for any singularity; whether that she had [not] met with an occasion to excite her genius, or that the unskilful eyes of those who conversed with her, had not been able to discern her uncommon merit. It is easy to imagine, that the present situation of France was an interesting object even to persons of the lowest rank, and would become the frequent subject of conversation: A young prince, expelled his throne by the sedition of native subjects, and by the arms of strangers, could not fail to move the compassion of all his people, whose hearts were uncorrupted by faction; and the peculiar character of Charles, so strongly inclined to friendship and the tender passions, naturally rendered him the hero of that sex, whose generous minds know no bounds in their affections. The siege at Orleans, the progress of the English before that place, the great distress of the garrison and inhabitants, the importance of saving this city and its brave defenders, had turned thither the public eye; and Joan, inflamed by the general sentiment, was seized with a wild desire of bringing relief to her sovereign in his present distresses. Her unexperienced mind, working day and night on this favourite object, mistook the impulses of passion for heavenly inspirations; and she fancied, that she saw visions, and heard voices, exhorting her to re-establish the throne of France, and to expel the foreign invaders. An uncommon intrepidity of temper made her overlook all the dangers, which might attend her in such a path; and thinking herself destined by Heaven to this office, she threw aside all that bashfulness and timidity, so natural to her sex, her years, and her low station. She went to Vaucouleurs; procured admission to Baudricourt, the governor; informed him of her inspirations and intentions; and conjured him not to neglect the voice of God, who spoke through her, but to second those heavenly revelations, which impelled her to this glorious enterprize. Baudricourt treated her at first with some neglect; but on her frequent returns to him, and importunate solicitations, he began to remark something extraordinary in the maid, and was inclined, at all hazards, to make so easy an experiment. It is uncertain, whether this gentleman had discernment enough to perceive, that great use might be made with the vulgar of so uncommon an engine; or, what is more likely in that credulous age, was himself a convert to this visionary: But he adopted at last the schemes of Joan; and he gave her some attendants, who conducted her to the French court, which at that time resided at Chinon. 

The key point to be noted here is Hume’s refusal even to entertain the possibility that Joan was indeed inspired by God. He unhesitatingly gives a psychological account: “Her unexperienced mind, working day and night on this favourite object, mistook the impulses of passion for heavenly inspirations.” It is noteworthy that he doesn’t accuse her of lying, nor suspect that she was in someone else’s control. That, I assume, is because her subsequent conduct — especially when tried, convicted and burned at the stake — is hard to reconcile with either of those explanations.

But in any case, here is where he pulls back the curtain to explain to his readers one of the fundamental assumptions of his historiography: 

It is the business of history to distinguish between the miraculous and the marvellous; to reject the first in all narrations merely profane and human; to doubt the second; and when obliged by unquestionable testimony, as in the present case, to admit of something extraordinary, to receive as little of it as is consistent with the known facts and circumstances. 

This is carefully put. To understand Hume’s point here, we need to make a distinction that I learned from the philosopher Alvin Plantinga, between metaphysical and methodological naturalism. 

Metaphysical naturalism is the belief that the “natural world” is all there is. No gods, no spirits, no secret causes, just the material cosmos. 

Methodological naturalism is agnostic on the question of whether there is something beyond the material cosmos — as philosophers like to say, it “brackets” that question, and pursues its intellectual and scholarly inquiries without reference to any spiritual or trans-material cause. For instance, I wrote for a general audience a biography of C. S. Lewis, and while I might in my heart believe that God raised up C. S. Lewis to confute the infidels and persuade the uncertain to follow Jesus, that thought could play no part in in the story I told. It might well be that a non-Christian would be unlikely to write the kind of book I wrote, but a non-Christian could have. There’s nothing affirmed in that book that requires, for its composition or its acceptance, religious belief. And that was intentional on my part: I strategically adopted methodological naturalism. 

Hume’s argument in the “business of history” passage cited above is not that the divine inspiration of Joan is impossible — though in fact Hume believed it impossible, or at least so improbable that the idea should be ignored — but only that it is not the job of the historian to deal in such matters. At least, this is true if the historian is narrating political and social history, i.e., “merely profane and human” matters. 

But why should Hume adopt this methodological naturalism? I have my own reasons for doing so, when I do so, but what reasons had Hume?

Because he thinks that societies which are free from the enthusiasm and superstition that characterize religious belief are happier societies. That is, setting aside the question of whether religious belief is true or not, Hume thinks that less religious societies are happier ones. Hume seems to think that even if God exists, which in his view is almost certainly not the case, there is no reason to think that God’s interests are compatible with the interests of human beings who must live with one another. 

In the concluding passage of his history’s second volume that I wrote about in my last post, Hume says of the “barbaric” millenium-and-a-half that he has just described, 

Nor is the spectacle altogether unentertaining and uninstructive, which the history of those times presents to us. The view of human manners, in all their variety of appearances, is both profitable and agreeable; and if the aspect in some periods seems horrid and deformed, we may thence learn to cherish with the greater anxiety that science and civility, which has so close a connexion with virtue and humanity, and which, as it is a sovereign antidote against superstition, is also the most effectual remedy against vice and disorders of every kind. 

The superstition and enthusiasm that accompany religion bring with them “vice and disorders of every kind,” which is why even the “marvelous,” as opposed to the “miraculous,” needs to be credited only grudgingly. (Don’t let people get excited about strange events! It’s bad for them and bad for the rest of us.) But when those powers are replaced by “science and civility,” then you get “virtue and humanity” and therefore a stronger, better grounded, more just social and political order. And a better social and political order is the object at which the philosophic historian aims. 

November 17, 2023

candles

Freddie:

Why do religions comfort? They comfort because the stories they tell involve divine beings who know everything and who can, often, save us all from the horror of death. We live in a world of intractable and painful moral questions that we feel that we can never resolve; religion says that there are divine beings who know the right answers, and that’s comforting. We miss our loved ones who have died terribly; many religions say that we will one day be reunited with them, and that’s comforting.

I might want to take one step back and ask: Do religions comfort? My experience as a Christian has been more about challenge than comfort, about figuring out how to respond to what I feel to be an unshakable claim on my life. It’s worth remembering that there is no clear picture of an afterlife in the Hebrew Bible, and that’s one reason (among several) while many Jews have always thought that while it might seem cool to be the Chosen People, in reality it might have been better for them if God had chosen someone else. And even for Christians, whose faith is centered on the Resurrection of Jesus, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” 

I would also note that while most people think that Buddhism is a religion, it typically doesn’t do or have any of the things that Freddie says religion does and has. I can’t now remember who said it, but one scholar of religion claimed that the only thing all religions have in common is that they use candles. That seems right to me. 

So “religion” is an intractably fuzzy concept, the many religions of the world do many different things and do them in many different ways, and even within a given religion people may believe and may commit themselves for an astonishing variety of reasons. The whole enterprise, if indeed we can call religion an enterprise, is so fraught with complications that I don’t think there’s anything that can be legitimately said in general about it. It’s like life itself in that respect. 

Relatedly: Freddie (like many people, it seems) is critical of the reasons Ayaan Hirsi Ali has cited for her conversion to Christianity. I’m not. My view is that everyone has to start somewhere — she’s very forthright about being a newcomer to all this — and what matters is not where you start but where you end up. One person may seek a bulwark against relativism; another may long for architectural or linguistic or musical beauty; another may crave community. Christian life is a house with many entrances. I became a Christian because I fell head-over-heels for a Christian girl who wouldn’t date me otherwise, so how could I judge anyone else’s reasons for converting? As Rebecca West said, “There’s no such thing as an unmixed motive”; and God, as I understand things, is not the judge but the transformer of motives. It’s a how-it-started, how-it’s-going thing, but often in a good way. Or so my experience suggests. 

November 6, 2023

Mann’s Joseph: 4

Akhenaten Egypt Alexandria National Museum jpg

This is Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, who renamed himself Akhenaten. In every surviving representation of him he is immediately recognizable; no one else looks like him. There is good reason to believe that he instructed his artists to portray him in a certain manner, a manner especially evident in full-length portrayals: 

Statue of Akhenaten Egyptian Museum al Qāhirah CG EGY 46992837435

He always bears the same features: a high-cheekboned face with slanting eyes and full lips; a narrow waist; a bit of a pot-belly; wide, feminine hips; full thighs and spindly calves. It’s hard to imagine why he asked to be portrayed in this way unless this is, to some degree anyway, what he actually looked like, but some scholars — for instance, Jacobs Van Dijk here — have noted that the artwork that survives from his reign portrays all people in a similar way, though no such mode of representation preceded this era. It is as though Akhenaten decreed himself the image of humanity. It can’t be accidental that he looks like a pregnant woman, like someone about to give birth to something. 

His wife, Nefertiti, gave birth to at least six daughters, but what he gave birth to was the most radical religious reformation ever undertaken: the elimination of the entire vast system of Egyptian worship and the replacement of every cult of every god with a single cult: that of the Aten, the disc (or globe) of the sun. The Egyptians already had a sun-god, of course, Ra, or Amun-Ra, who looked like this: 

DT553

Sometimes (after he was in some sense united with the sun-god Ra) he has a falcon’s head. But Aten looked like this: 

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The refusal of human or animal imagery was very much the point, though I guess the Aten in a way has hands: like the Beatles, it has arms enough to hold you. 

Akhenaten of course doesn’t mean to suggest that this is what the only God actually looks like: it is merely a visual representation of universality. The idea that a god “looks like” anything, even metaphorically, is part of what he wants to overcome. The great Egyptologist Sir Flinders Petrie wrote of this new theology,

If this were a new religion, invented to satisfy our modern scientific conceptions, we could not find a flaw in the correctness of this view of the energy of the solar system. How much Akhenaten understood, we cannot say, but he certainly bounded forward in his views and symbolism to a position which we cannot logically improve upon at the present day. Not a rag of superstition or of falsity can be found clinging to this new worship evolved out of the old Aton of Heliopolis, the sole Lord of the universe. 

On the other hand, a later Egyptologist, Sir Alan Gardiner, in his classic Egypt of the Pharaohs, has a terser description of Akhenaten: he calls him a “heretic.” 

The wonderful idea at the center of Joseph and His Brothers is this: Akhenaten is the Pharaoh who made Joseph his vizier. And thus the thematic tension between monotheism and polytheism is heightened — for, when these two men meet, who is more of a monotheist? 

Mann is of course neither the first nor the last to speculate on the possible relationship between Akhenaten’s monotheism and that of Israel. I am not sure, but I believe that the American archaeologist James Henry Breasted was the first scholar to note the relationship between Akhenaten’s Great Hymn to the Aten and (for instance) Psalm 104. Speculation has usually focused on the possible influence of Egypt on the Israelites, in part because the Israelites were a dependent and then an enslaved people, but also in part because the tradition of seeing Egypt as the source of religious ideas for the rest of the world goes all the way back to Herodotus (see the Histories, Book II ¶ 50ff). 

This is how Freud thought of the matter, in Moses and Monotheism, which presents us with Moses as an Egyptian adherent of Atenism. (It’s an incoherent book, alas — written as Freud was dying and little more than a confused riff on Breasted’s work.) This is also how C. S. Lewis thought of the matter. In his Reflections on the Psalms — written twenty years after Freud’s book, which Lewis may or may not have known — he wrote of Akhenaten’s revolution,

As we can see, it was a total failure. Akhenaten’s religion died with him. Nothing, apparently, came of it.

Unless of course, as is just possible, Judaism itself partly came of it. It is conceivable that ideas derived from Akhenaten’s system formed part of that Egyptian ‘Wisdom’ in which Moses was bred. There is nothing to disquiet us in such a possibility. Whatever was true in Akhenaten’s creed came to him, in some mode or other, as all truth comes to all men, from God. There is no reason why traditions descending from Akhenaten should not have been among the instruments which God used in making Himself known to Moses. But we have no evidence that this is what actually happened. Nor do we know how fit Akhenatenism would really have been to serve as an instrument for this purpose. 

Lewis’s thoughts on Akhenaten are interesting enough that I may have to return to them in another post. But for now I just want to note that his way of considering the relationship (which is also the archaeologists’ way) is not the only possibility. What if the flow of influence were reversed? What if one son of Israel, having risen to the position of Pharaoh’s vizier, had the eloquence and imagination to plant the monotheistic seed? — to plant it in fertile and ready ground, to be sure, but to plant it nonetheless. That is the possibility that Mann invites us to consider. 

And perhaps he reminds us also of another point, not a possibility but a reality. Akhenaten’s revolution failed utterly: his son Tutankhaten removed the Aten from his name and became Tutankhamun, affirming his loyalty to one of the gods his father had attempted to banish, Amun-Ra. Of course, ultimately all the gods of Egypt failed; but the children of Israel thrived, and despite countless setbacks, persecutions, and pogroms, despite living for centuries among people who have wanted and still want to destroy them altogether, still to this day worship the God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. 

November 4, 2023

Mann’s Joseph: 3

This difference we have identified between Jacob and Joseph is essential to the story that will unfold, for whether Joseph is a better or worse theologian than his father, his habits of mind are essential to the calling he will assume, the vocation of saving his family.

Again in this opening chapter, Joseph reflects on his name and the important fact that it contains the word sepher (or sefer), which means book or scroll or document. “He loved composing with the stylus and was so skilled at it that he could have served as a junior scribe at some place where documents were collected” (68).

Later, after his brothers sell him into slavery and he finds himself in Egypt, working in the household of a rich and powerful man named Petephrê (Potiphar), he actually becomes a scribe, and Petephrê’s overseer, Mont-kaw, contemplates this boy:

And here Joseph stood before him, scroll in hand, and, for a slave, even a scribal slave, he spoke clever, rougishly subtle words — and that combination of ideas was unsettling. This young Bedouin and Asiatic did not have the head of an ibis on his shoulders, and was, needless to say, a human being, not a god, not Thoth of Khmunu. But he had intellectual connections with that god, and there was something ambiguous about him…. [651]

Again and again in the tetralogy Joseph is associated with the Egyptian god Thoth. Thoth was the god of writing, of communication; he was also a wise counselor and mediator, and a messenger. In a story Socrates tells in Plato’s Phaedrus, Thoth offers the gift of writing to one King Thamus, who rejects it. When the Greeks learned about Thoth they immediately recognized him as a version of Hermes, or rather — since they were often inclined to see themselves as inheritors of Egyptian wisdom — recognized Hermes as a version of Thoth. 

At several key points in the story Joseph encounters a nameless figure who is a guide — especially a guide to the Underworld that is Egypt — and a messenger. This is clearly Thoth/Hermes. Maybe I’ll write about him in a later post. But right now I am concerned with Joseph’s own Thothness: what he ultimately becomes is the go-between, the messenger, the mediator, who links his family — his radically monotheistic nomadic-shepherd family — with the great Egyptian empire, full of magnificent cities and temples and a near-infinity of gods. Only Joseph can mediate those two worlds.

For much of the book, I assumed that in telling Joseph’s story Mann was essentially writing a critique of monotheism, at least in its Israelite form; that he was teaching us that Joseph’s flexible and quasi-syncretic way is the better way. But eventually I was forced to reconsider that view.

November 1, 2023

Mann’s Joseph: 2

Joseph, unlike his ancestors, delights in the gods of the gentes: he knows their names and attributes. He thinks about them, he plays in his mind with those names and attributes; he can’t help himself. When Jacob comes upon his son in nude contemplation he thinks Joseph is “blowing kisses to the stars,” which the lad denies, but in a flood of verbiage — he is an incessant chatterbox and will one day pay mightily for it — that takes him right back into danger. He soon finds himself describing the worship of the Mesopotamian moon-god Sin, whose “day of festive contemplation,” Shapattu, is coming soon, and recalls that the moon does not shine on its own, no, we know that “He made it to shine” and —

“Who?” Jacob asked softly. “Who made it shine?”

“Marduk-Baal!” Joseph cried all too hastily, but followed this at once with a long, drawn-out “Aeh-h-h-h,” shaking his head to undo it, and now continued, “… as He is called in the old tales. It is, however — as my dear papa has no need to learn from his poor child — the Lord of the gods, who is stronger than all the Annunaki and Baals of other nations, the god of Abraham, who defeated the dragon and created the threefold world.” (76)

Joseph is this, if not consciously and intentionally polytheistic, imaginatively so; moreover, he is, even when speaking conciliatory words to his father, not a strict monotheist but rather a henotheist — which suggests that that he thinks this may be acceptable to his father. (Mann is surely aware of the passages in the Hebrew Bible that sound henotheistic, for instance Psalm 95:3: “For the LORD is a great God, and a great King above all gods.”) But we readers know that it is not so acceptable. In this very chapter Mann describes a conversation Jacob had on just this subject with a man named Jebshe:

If the God who had established the sun, the signs along its path, and the planets, including the earth, was the highest God, then he was also the only god, and it would be best not even to speak of other gods, in such a case, otherwise one would be forced to label them with the name Jacob had refrain from using, precisely because reason demanded that the term and concept of “the highest God” be equated with the only God. [56]

Jacob is horrified by any suggestion that the gods of the gentes are to be treated with anything but contempt and revulsion, and Joseph has to employ his best and most charming eloquence to calm his father’s troubled spirit. (It is, fortunately for him, a task he is always up to.)

So this opening scene of the story-as-such establishes this tension between the single-minded devotion of Jacob to the Fear and Joseph’s playful delight in contemplating the religions of the gentes. It wouldn’t be right to say that Joseph simply is polytheistic. But he is inclined to enjoy correspondences and to seek whenever possible a reconciliation of opposing forces. The tetralogy as a whole is called Joseph and His Brothers, but I think in a more fundamental sense it’s about Joseph and his father. It explores the difference between a radical uncompromising monotheism and a more … flexible approach to matters of faith.

October 31, 2023

Mann’s Joseph: 1

There’s a long Prelude to the tetralogy — called “Descent into Hell” — which I may discuss later on. After the Prelude we enter the first of the four parts of the tetralogy, The Stories of Jacob. And while the main character of this book is (theoretically) Jacob, we don’t get his story in chronological order: we begin with a scene between Jacob and Joseph, his teenage son — indeed, we see Joseph before we see his father. This scene strikes certain notes which then resonate, sometimes harmoniously and sometimes discordantly, throughout the rest of the tetralogy.

The first substantive thing that we learn about Joseph is that he is widely and deeply aware of the religious practices of what the Israelites called the nations, the peoples that surround his little familial world. (“Nations” = Latin gentes = our word “gentiles.”) He sits, at evening, in a contemplative pose, and intently contemplates the moon. Or does he worship the moon? Moreover, the whole scene takes place under the influence, one might even say the patronage, of the goddess Ishtar, who gives her name to the first section of this first chapter. (Here, as is traditional, she is associated with the planet Venus.) Mann also tells us that there is something indefinably Egyptian about Joseph’s appearance.

Above I wrote of “Israelites,” but really there are no Israelites yet, just the family of the man born as Jacob and later re-named Israel — Yiśrā’ēl, “strives with God.” He is the son of Isaac, who is the son of Abraham; so we are just three generations into this new adventure in human history — and, Mann says, a new adventure in the life of God. For one of the points that he makes at several points in the story is that Abraham was the man who invented God.

Mann doesn’t think that Jacob is literally the grandson of Abraham — he believes that many generations separate them — but he accepts that Jacob is in some … other sense Abraham’s grandson. Mann has a notion, often referred to in the narrative, that certain personalities recur generation after generation: people as it were imagine themselves into the lives of their ancestors, so that they become their own ancestors: they inhabit the stories they have inherited. So for instance, when Jacob comes upon the contemplative Joseph, the boy is naked, and Jacob tells him put to put some clothes on — and as he does he finds himself recalling the mirror image of his experience, the moment when Noah’s sons saw his nakedness, and Jacob fells that he is in some way entering into that story, a story he had been told by his father and grandfather. That’s what happens, in this narrative, to old stories: through inhabitation they are revivified, generation after generation. (This is the beginning of typology.) 

So Abraham learned certain essential stories which he then passed down to his descendants, one of whom is Jacob. And the central story is that of Abraham himself having been called from his old life by God, a God who is jealous and singular — so much so that Abraham, reflecting on his encounters with this strange disembodied presence, comes to think that he is not encountered merely another god among the many gods, but Something more extreme, Something that can’t be classed with anything else. And this is the sense in which Abraham invents God: he discovers — or imagines; Mann allows the reader to judge, though he sometimes hints that this God really does exist, though perhaps only because Abraham imagined Him — a universal Deity, the Creator of all things visible and invisible, Lord of all the nations, even the nations who do not recognize him. That’s the God Abraham invented, and that’s the God that that Jacob has inherited, and Jacob is fierce in his monotheism. He thinks always of his God and imitates Him. “El-Elyon’s choice and preference of some individuals, absent, or at least beyond, any merit on their part was absolute and splendid; by any human measure, it was hard to comprehend and unjust, a sublime emotional reality that was not to be quibbled with, but to be honored with trembling and rapture in the dust. And Jacob, himself aware – though in all humility and fear — that he was the object of such favor, imitated God by existing exuberantly on his own predilection and giving it free rein” (63).

But Joseph doesn’t think this way. Joseph is, as I said earlier, highly aware of the gods of the peoples whom the children of Abraham regularly encounter. The children of Abraham, these herdsman and wanderers, don’t occupy the cities where the gentes dwell, with their temples and priests. They may visit such places to trade goods, but they don’t live there. They live, rather, in the places between, in the fields and on the hills. They take their herds with them wherever they go, and when their herds flourish, they become people of real substance. They buy and trade, and that become substantial figures in the economy of their world, but they remain always nomadic, and have no need for a city, a city with a temple in the midst of it and statues of God to bow down before. The God they worship, and whose voice in the fields and on the hills they can hear, is the one who has called them out of a dead life and has accompanied them; is also the one with whom Jacob wrestled on the banks of a river. He is the Fear (Gen. 31:42). But Joseph may not be as fearful as his ancestors. 

October 27, 2023

Mann’s Joseph: Prelude

I recently read Thomas Mann’s tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers — one of the more extraordinary reading experiences of my recent years. I had started it once, decades ago, and then again a few years later, but it’s probably been 25 years since I’ve even tried to read it.

I have a kind of instinct for reading, or at least I think I do. I always have plans for what to read; sometimes I follow those plans and sometimes I don’t. But every now and then I’ll be planning a series of books to read, or articles and essays — or maybe I’ll actually be in the middle of reading something — when I’ll suddenly think, You need to drop what you’re doing and read this other thing instead. That doesn’t happen often; two or three times a year, maybe. But it is an inner prompting (like Socrates’s δαιμόνιον) that I have learned to obey. I don’t know where it comes from, but I do know that when the impulse comes I find it irresistible. I have learned to accept the prompt and to be grateful for it.

So: a few weeks ago, I was in the middle of planning some reading, and I looked up from whatever I had on my lap, my computer or my notebook, and my eyes fell on my copy of Joseph and His Brothers, and I thought: It’s time to read that. I did, and I couldn’t possibly be happier that I did; it’s an outrageously brilliant work of art. While reading I had thought that I might write a long essay about the experience of reading this book, but on further consideration I doubt that my responses to it would fit into an essay. They’re too complicated and digressive. (In that sense, they’re much like the book itself.) So I’ll be writing about it here, on themes and topics and events that interest me, in no particular order. It’s not the sort of book that you comprehend on one reading – it’s not the sort of book that you can even confidently navigate in in one reading – so my attempt to write about it will require me to re-navigate it, to return and reread and rethink and reconsider. Stay tuned. I mean, if you’re into this kind of thing. 

May 5, 2023

cosplaying Kingship

In a much-celebrated essay on King Lear, Stephen Greenblatt writes about theatrical costumes: 

During the Reformation Catholic clerical garments – the copes and albs and amices and stoles that were the glories of medieval textile crafts – were sold to the players. An actor in a history play taking the part of an English bishop could conceivably have worn the actual robes of the character he was representing. Far more than thrift is involved here. The transmigration of a single ecclesiastical cloak from the vestry to the wardrobe may stand as an emblem of the more complex and elusive institutional exchanges that are my subject: a sacred sign, designed to be displayed before a crowd of men and women, is emptied, made negotiable, traded from one institution to another. Such exchanges are rarely so tangible; they are not usually registered in inventories, not often sealed with a cash payment. Nonetheless they occur constantly, for through institutional negotiation and exchange differentiated expressive systems, distinct cultural discourses, are fashioned.

What happens when the piece of cloth is passed from the Church to the playhouse? A consecrated object is reclassified, assigned a cash value, transferred from a sacred to a profane setting, deemed suitable for the stage. The theater company is willing to pay for the object not because it contributes to naturalistic representation but because it still bears a symbolic value, however attenuated. On the bare Elizabethan stage costumes were particularly important – companies were willing to pay more for a good costume than for a good play – and that importance in turn reflected the culture’s fetishistic obsession with clothes as a mark of status and degree. 

The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II was a genuinely sacral occasion; the coronation of her son will be a theatrical one. The regalia of sacred Christian kingship has been sold to the players — because they, and their international television audience, are the only ones interested. 

But perhaps, through the scrim of spectacle and costume, some observers will catch a glimpse of what the whole business once meant, a brief vision of something I’ve written about occasionally here: the deep human longing for a righteous anointed King. 

P.S. This “deep human longing for a righteous anointed King” is central to my argument for anarchism. But an explanation of that will have to wait for another day.

P.P.S. After the ceremony: Some of my English friends are telling me that I was too cynical in the above. I hereby repent. 

January 19, 2023

two views of Iain McGilchrist

Andrew Louth:

Although McGilchrist is clearly arguing a case (a case that he feels needs to be accepted, if there is to be any future), his mind is profoundly capacious, capable of entertaining ideas coming from elsewhere than he is coming from. The case he is making, however, is not unheard of: it coincides with all-too-common laments about modernity, pointing to the reign of quantity, the rise of individualism, the abandonment of tradition — opinions easily dismissed by those who pride themselves on the achievements of modernity. Perhaps it is to these “cultured despisers” that McGilchrist’s case is directed — a LH case against the hegemony of the LH.

Whether that is so or not, this book is almost unique in combining extensive scientific expertise with learning characteristic of the humanities, a sensitivity to language, and an appeal to poetry as the ultimate language of truth. McGilchrist sounds like someone who knows of what he speaks. RH, he tells us, is disposed to pessimism, but this book gives grounds for at least a cautious optimism, amounting to “good thoughts in bad times.”

Rowan Williams:

And so, unsurprisingly, the second volume of The Matter with Things leads us into considerations about “the sacred.” The chapter on this subject is as long as a short book in itself. It is both the natural conclusion to the argument up to this point and a springboard for further refinement of the themes of the whole project. McGilchrist has no difficulty in seeing off the high-school-debating-society arguments of fashionable atheists (and has some pertinent things to say about the imagined tension between science and religion in another appendix). He quotes with malicious relish from one or two famous names in this field, to demonstrate the intolerant and philosophically crude way in which some polemicists have foreclosed the question of what counts as knowledge or as truthful speech, and draws extensively on the traditions of “negative” theology in the Christian tradition (Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa), as well as ideas from Taoist and Buddhist cosmology, Indigenous American lore, some strands of Jewish Kabbala, and (not least) William Blake.

Whitehead is an important presence in this section of the book, chiefly because of his conviction that “process” is a fundamental category for thinking not only about the finite but also about the infinite; there is an argument for the relation between God and creation being seen as a sort of feedback loop, through which the divine is “enhanced” in some way. McGilchrist also distances himself both from the classical Christian argument about evil as “privation” (that is, as something that has no inherent substantiality but is simply the negation or erosion of what is desired as good) and from the Buddhist affirmation of nonduality (which he sees as compromising the reality of moral choice). He holds back from any identification with a particular religious tradition but is skeptical of the assimilation of spirituality to generalized well-being that seems to pervade so much contemporary talk about religiousness.

Ultimately, as he says in a forceful and eloquent epilogue, we either acknowledge God or we invent a God for ourselves. If we invent a God for ourselves, we are bound to invent that God out of ourselves, out of our own psychic resources, and so sacralize our own ambitions and anxieties, projecting on to the universe our passion for analysis of and control over every aspect of what surrounds us. This is the idolatry that is literally killing us as a species. That is why it is so urgent to rethink how we understand thinking.

December 27, 2022

Nick Cave:

Grief can be seen as a kind of exalted state where the person who is grieving is the closest they will ever be to the fundamental essence of things. You either go under, or it changes you, or, worse, you become a small, hard thing that has contracted around an absence. Sometimes you find a grieving person constricted around the thing they have lost; they’ve become ossified and impossible to penetrate, and, well, other people go the other way, and grow open and expansive.

Arthur’s death literally changed everything for me. Absolutely everything. It made me a religious person. I am not talking about being a traditional Christian. I am not even talking about a belief in God, necessarily. It made me a religious person in the sense that I felt, on a profound level, a deep inclusion in the human predicament, and an understanding of our vulnerability and the sense that, as individuals, we are, each of us, imperilled. Each life is precarious, and some of us understand it and some don’t. I became a person after my son died.

August 13, 2022

liberals believe

Stanley Fish, from How Milton Works: 

Liberals believe that knowledge of an object (be it a piece of data, a person, a concept) is one thing and evaluation of it is another, so that it makes perfect sense to say, as Satan does, I know what the good is — I just choose another path (as if knowledge and inclination could be severed from each other and opposed). Liberals believe that facts (of history, justice, science) are independent of the knower, and that it is the knower’s obligation to approach the task of knowing with as few preconceptions as possible so that the understanding he finally achieves is impersonal rather than a reflection of his antecedently held views and preferences; one must come to any situation calling for a decision (about what to think or what to say or what to do) with an open mind, a mind prepared to jettison its most cherished convictions should the evidence tell against them. Liberals believe that evidence lies about in the world waiting to be gathered and then arranged in patterns it itself suggests. Liberals believe that if we are sufficiently careful in our gathering of evidence (careful, that is, to keep ourselves and our desires out of the process) the truth will will finally emerge in a form everyone (whose mind is open) acknowledge. Liberals believe that when the truth to be determined is the meaning (political, moral, legal) of an action, the previous history of the actor — whether he has in the past been a good or bad man — is largely irrelevant and that we should look only to the shape of the present circumstances when assessing him. And because liberals believe in all of the above, they believe in the efficacy of procedures — scientific, parliamentary, judicial — designed to protect us from the overhasty judgments we make when we allow our commitments and allegiances to blind us. Liberals believe that the most important of these procedures is the machinery of rationality, of those laws of logic attached to to no agenda or vision, but sufficiently general in their scope as provide a normative perspective from the vantage point of which any agenda or vision can be assessed and, if necessary, corrected. Liberals believe that communication and persuasion take place (or should take place) in the context of that rationality and that it is possible to bring anyone — except, perhaps, the mentally impaired — to a clear understanding, so long as he or she is willing to set aside or bracket all biases and preconceptions.

Milton believes none of these things.

August 6, 2022

“One Manner of Law,” by Marilynne Robinson:

Hugh Peters, most disparaged of Puritans, wanted to exclude poor artists from taxation. He proposed that there be peacemakers appointed to settle disputes before anyone could be arrested or imprisoned. Writing as someone who was forced to flee England under the threat of persecution, and whose fellow dissenters had experienced prison and worse, he does not call for any equivalent punishment or any punishment at all for his (temporarily) defeated persecutors, but instead for an alleviation of the punitive bent in the assertion of public authority. 

A fascinating historical essay. 

July 30, 2022

building what looks right

Eboo Patel:

When I was in college in the mid-1990s—an era that feels quite similar to today—a lot of my activism was around diversity issues. It wasn’t called “wokeness” then, but there was a very heightened consciousness around race and gender and sexuality. I think there is a very positive story to tell about bell hooks and Cornel West being read everywhere. But towards the end of college, I realized that religious diversity is never a part of the conversation. I had become, at this point, more inspired by faith-based activists, particularly Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement. The way I put it is that they loved people more than they hated the system. And it seemed to me that a lot of activists I knew hated the system more than they loved people. 

I started going to interfaith conferences looking for the next generation of these great faith-based activists like Bayard Rustin, Dorothy Day, Pauli Murray and Martin Luther King Jr. What I found instead was old theologians talking. So I did what I was taught to do as an activist in college: I stood up, I raised my fist, and I called them out. This was June of 1988. I was probably 22, the firebrand young person on the floor, shouting people down. And a striking thing happened. This woman named Yolanda Trevino walked up to me, and she said, “What you’re talking about — a movement of young people from diverse religious traditions, engaging in social action together — is powerful. You should build that.” The scales fell from my eyes. She presented to me two paths: one was to continue yelling at other people for what they were doing wrong; the other was to build what I thought looked right.

Patel, who runs an interfaith organization, reminds us just how often people from various faith traditions have done just that — have built what they thought looked right and needed to be built. “If every institution founded by a faith community in your city disappeared overnight, preschools, hospitals, and universities would be gone. YMCAs would be gone, places where AA groups meet would be gone. Half of your social services would probably be gone. It feels to me that religious identity diversity should be at the center of our national conversation, and I’m curious as to why it’s not.” 

July 29, 2022

My colleagues Byron Johnson and Jeff Levin:

According to the 2018 General Social Survey, 6.4% of self-described atheists and 27.2% of agnostics attended religious services monthly or more; 12.8% and 58.1%, respectively, prayed at least weekly; 19.2% and 75% believed in life after death; and 7.3% and 23.3% reported having had a religious experience. 

Americans are weird. 

May 19, 2022

Kent Russell:

By accident of birth I am a modern, which means I will never know a charmed world. A world of consecrated hosts and faerie-haunted forests, where the line between individual agency and impersonal force is blurred at best. Gone is the idea of a porous human self, vulnerable to immaterial forces beyond his control. Significance has retreated from the outer world into our respective skulls, where, over time, it has stiffened, bloated, and finally decomposed into nothing, into dust.

This decay of faith — in institutions, in other people — is practically audible to me. I exist within a purely immanent culture in which the value of human life has been reduced to the parameters of the marketplace, where little is sacred and even less is profane. And I cannot take this shit much longer, I said. 

So he started getting to know a man who says he can summon demons. An extraordinary essay. For context, I would — with all due humility — suggest that you read two pieces by me:  

April 26, 2022

DBH:  

[T]he religion historically called “Christianity” is not a “truth” that exists among and in competition with “false” non-Christian religions. “Christianity,” in fact — which is not really one thing, in any event, but only a loose designation for a diverse set of beliefs and practices and cultural forms and numerous often incongruous religions, comprised within a single but nonetheless porous hermeneutical and historical “set” — is only one limited trajectory within history’s universal narrative of divine incarnation and creaturely deification, superior in some ways to alternative trajectories, vastly inferior in many others. (A strictly Reformed theology of, say, penal substitutionary atonement is infinitely more remote from the Logos who has become incarnate in created nature and history than is, for instance, the bodhisattva ideal unfolded in the Lotus Sutra and the Bodhicaryavatara; indeed, the latter in some very real sense attests, under the veil of the unfamiliar, to the truth made present in Christ, while the former is totally antithetical to that truth and therefore pure falsehood.) 

So religious traditions that deny every single clause of the ancient Christian creeds nevertheless “in some very real sense” — real but, alas, undefined — attest to the truth of the Incarnation, while other religious traditions that affirm every single clause of the ancient Christian creeds nevertheless remain “totally antithetical to that truth.“ Good to know! (Also, the scare quotes are doing some seriously heavy lifting here.) 

March 25, 2022

Sergei and Aimee

2066 jpg

Another story from Salka Viertel’s The Kindness of Strangers: 

Eisenstein and his friends wanted to explore the religious and the sinful Los Angeles, and the first stop on our itinerary was Aimée Semple McPherson’s Angelus Temple, which promised to combine both. We were lucky in hitting upon one of Aimée’s most glamorous productions. With a new permanent wave in her blonde hair, in a white silk gown, clutching red roses to her heart, she appeared at her pulpit to receive a frenetic ovation from a packed house. Her sermon appealed to the senses. She assured her audience that the Lord is sweet, and made gourmet sounds, tasting Jesus on her tongue — the congregation drooled and smacked their lips. The Russians were delighted. 

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February 3, 2022

two quotations: ears to hear

James Wood:

This objection to the free will argument seems decisive. It raises the most uncomfortable questions about why God bothered to create the world at all. If Heaven was not created on earth, then earth is a testing-ground for Heaven. But there is something more. For a world without freedom would be a world in which God controlled all our actions, it would be a world in which God spoke directly to us without the need of faith. We would all believe. Faith is, apparently, part of the test visited on us. I have always found Philip’s cry to Jesus in John 14, piercing: ‘Philip saith unto him, Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us.’ It seems obvious to theologians like Richard Swinburne that a world of limited freedom and absolute transparency of knowledge, in which not one of us was in any doubt about our creator, would be a limited, useless place. But it would not, presumably, be useless to God. It is what Heaven would be like; and why, before Heaven, must we move through this unhappy, painful, rehearsal, this desperate antechamber in which so few of us can find our way?

Kołakowski:

There are people who claim to be able to break this perplexing code (albeit only in part, never fully); but they do not necessarily attribute their success to some kind of gnostic initiation or privileged access to an esoteric treasury of knowledge. Rather, they claim to have adopted a special spiritual attitude, opened themselves up to the voice of the meaning-carrying mind; and they say that anyone can “tune in“ in this way. They might be wrong, of course, and certainly those of us who do not wish to hear this voice cannot be brought round by their arguments; rather, we will classify them as victims of delusions. But if they are right, and the voice really is audible to anyone who wants to hear it, then the question “Why is the message hidden?” is the wrong question. 

February 2, 2022

Ilana Horwitz:

When it comes to performance, religiously restrained students who live their life for God fare better because they are conscientious and cooperative. This is the case regardless of students’ social class upbringing. Working-class abiders have better grades than working-class nonabiders, middle-class abiders have better grades than middle-class nonabiders, and so on. But this story changes when we look at the next stage involving educational choices.

Since religiously restrained students have better academic performance in high school, we would expect them to make more ambitious choices about higher education.

This is generally the case, except in one social class group: adolescents from the professional class. When it comes to the transition to college, students from the professional class who live their life for God make less ambitious choices about where to attend college than we would expect given their stellar report cards. God-centered students undermatch in the college selection process because educational decisions are social decisions that highlight the effect of the home environment on norms and values surrounding education. God-centered students make choices that reflect their familial and social ties rather than choices that optimize their social class standing. Millions of young men and women do not live to impress college admissions counselors. For them, it is God who matters.

January 7, 2022

William Deresiewicz:

No, secularism cannot reassure us that the universe is governed by a benevolent deity, or that the wicked will be punished and the good rewarded, or that our souls will be clasped after death in the bosom of Abraham. But in leaving us to our devices, it does something better, because it does something truer. It forces us into the search: for truth, for beauty, for justice. 

The notion that secularism forces some unspecified “us” into searching for truth, beauty, and justice is a purely religious notion; and a more spectacular example of wishful thinking than any other religion has ever managed to put forth. 

October 1, 2021

medicine as religion

Giorgio Agamben:

It has been evident for quite a while that science has become our time’s religion, the thing which people believe that they believe in. Three systems of beliefs have co-existed, and in some ways still co-exist today, in the modern West: Christianity, capitalism, and science. In the history of modernity these three “religions” often and unavoidably intersected, each time clashing with one another and then reconciling until they gradually reached a sort of peaceful, articulated cohabitation (if not a true collaboration, in the name of a common interest). What is new is that, without us noticing, a subterranean and implacable conflict between science and the other two religions has ignited. Science’s triumphs appear today before our very eyes, and they determine in an unprecedented way every aspect of our existence. This conflict does not pertain, as it did in the past, to general theories and principles but, so to speak, to cultic praxis. No less than any other religion, science organizes and arranges its own structure through different forms and ranks. To its elaboration of a subtle and rigorous dogmatics corresponds, in praxis, a vast and intricate cultic sphere that coincides with what we call “technology.” It is not surprising that the protagonist of this new religious war is the very branch of science whose dogmatics is less rigorous and whose pragmatic aspect is stronger: that is, medicine, whose object is the living human body.

May 14, 2021

changing priors, changing life

I taught a a class last term called Philosophy and Literature, and for our last book we read Plato at the Googleplex, by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (hereafter RNG). The chapter that gives the book its title is a delightful imitation Platonic dialogue by RNG in which Plato, on book tour, comes to give a talk at Google headquarters. The primary character in the dialogue, aside from Plato himself, is a publicist named Cheryl, a shepherd and minder of authors on tour, who finds herself pushed by Plato to rethink some of her core assumptions about life. The whole conversation is handled with great subtlety and skill – it’s just the kind of thing that I wish I had written, though I have neither the knowledge nor the skill to do what RNG does here.

There’s a point near the end of the dialogue where Cheryl is reflecting on her experience with Plato, and tells a friend that the world needs more people like Plato, “super-arguers” she calls them, because the super-arguer has the power to force us out of our well-worn tracks of thought and practice. As we were discussing this passage in class, I suggested that what Cheryl is saying could be explained in Bayesian terms. So I gave my students a brief overview of Bayesian reasoning. We talked about priors, that is, our current assessments of probability, and how Bayes articulates the ways we revise our priors in light of subsequent experience. The thing that makes Bayesian reasoning so attractive is his ability to see probability not as a fixed proportion, but rather as one that is continually being revised — or at least should be if our minds are functioning properly.

One of the books that we read earlier in the class is Philip K Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch — about which I recently wrote a few words here — so I asked my students to engage in a thought experiment: You are walking across campus and see a spacecraft descend and land; from it emerges a man with a mechanical arm, steel teeth, and a kind of visor where his eyes should be, who offers you a drug called Chew-Z, which he claims will confer immortality upon its user. I asked: Would you take the drug? 

My students all agreed they would not. Their priors tell them that such an experience might be an illusion of some kind, or a prank, a reaction to medicine, a side effect of exhaustion – all of these seem clearly more probable occurrences than the actual arrival of a strange man in a spaceship bearing a drug that supposedly confers immortality. And this is setting aside the question of whether, assuming the reality of Palmer Eldritch, his intentions are indeed benign and his claims truthful. But then, I said, suppose it happens again tomorrow, and the day after. Or suppose it happens to a friend of yours, and that friend decides to take the drug and claims to have achieved enlightenment as a result. None of this might be enough to cause you to change your mind about taking the drug, but it would be enough, I think, to cause you to revise your prior assumptions about the possibility of weird men in spaceships landing in Waco. You don’t move from a “confidence interval” of 0% to 100%, but the probability definitely rises. 

So that’s how Bayesian reasoning works. And you can see that what Cheryl is praising in super-arguers like Plato is their ability to cause us to revise our priors. They are, and this is RNG’s chief point in the dialogue, socially useful as, shall we say, gadflies – gadflies who are annoying enough to force us out of our usual patterns. And I think this is true. But, as the example of Dick’s novel suggests, there are other forces in addition to skilled argumentation that can press us to revise our priors. In fact, this is one of the ways in which some scholars have accounted for, or at least helped to explain, the extraordinary effects of LSD upon people: psychotropic drugs have the effect of weakening our priors and making us open to possibilities that we previously had not been open to. Now, as I pointed out, this weakening of our priors may be truth-conducive or may be the opposite: it all depends on how good our priors were. Opening our minds to new possibilities can sometimes lead to disaster, even if it can also sometimes lead to enlightenment.

I also noted that the book we read just before Plato at the Googleplex, Iris Murdoch’s novel The Good Apprentice, concerns some of the same themes. In one sense the story can be described as a retelling of the parable of the prodigal son: we have a father, or rather two potential fathers, and two sons, one who pursues goodness in a way that seems extreme and weird to other characters, and a second who falls into a pit of anguish and despair because — here come the drugs again — he surreptitiously administered a dose of LSD to a friend of his who then walked out of the window of his apartment and fell to his death. So you can see the story as the story of fathers, sons, brothers — a small unit of men who need to find some way to be reconciled to one another.

But that’s not all that the story is about. It seems to me that Murdoch is actually slightly more interested in the effects that extremity of experience or belief have, not upon the people who hold these extreme beliefs or have these extreme experiences, but on the people around them. The younger son Edward’s overwhelming misery is not just a challenge for him, it’s a challenge for everybody who knows him. It forces them to think about guilt and responsibility, about the conditions of healing, about what can be done to atone for sin. They don’t know what to say to Edward, and that reveals to them what they don’t understand about their own lives. Similarly, Stuart, the elder brother, who has commenced a quest for pure goodness and is willing to renounce anything in life that interferes with that pursuit, strikes many of the people in the novel as simply inhuman. He is often compared to an animal, which is odd, because what he is doing is precisely the opposite of animal life: he is questioning his instincts, questioning his desires — but his friends and family don’t have a language for someone who does this. They perceive it to be inhuman, and the only form of inhumanity that they can readily lay hold of is the bestial. In fact, though, Stuart is trying to be a saint. That doesn’t mean he’s right cut: George Orwell once said that “sainthood is a thing that human beings must avoid.” But that’s the proper description for his quest.

In any case, Murdoch’s chief theme seems to be that extremity of moral experience, whether it is an extremity of the desire for good or an extremity of guilt and shame, dislocates lives — not just the lives of the people who are having those experiences but also the lives of those who surround them. And that too can be explained in Bayesian terms: in the presence of moral extremity, everyone’s priors are weakened and disrupted. And in the presence of religious ecstasy. And in the presence of psychotropic drugs. And in the presence of super-arguers. 

So it turns out that what we were dealing with in that class was a series of stories about forces strong enough to weaken our priors. Because when our priors are weakened is when reflection begins. 

Archaic Torso of Apollo
Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Stephen Mitchell)  
 

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

April 23, 2021

acoustic renown

Kleos means both “glory” or “fame” and also “the song that ensures that glory or fame.” The noun is cognate with the Homeric verb kluō, meaning “I hear.” Kleos is sometimes translated as “acoustic renown” — the spreading renown you get from talking about your exploits.* It’s a bit like having a large Twitter following. In the Homeric version of the Ethos of the Extraordinary … to live a life worth living was to live a kleos-worthy life, a song-worthy life. Being sung, having one’s life spoken about, your story vivid in others’ heads, is what gives your life an added substance. It’s almost as if, in being vividly apprehended by others, you’re living simultaneously in their representations of you, acquiring additional lives to add to your meager one.

The Ethos of the Extraordinary answered that all that a person can do is to enlarge that life by the only means we have, striving to make of it a thing worth the telling, a thing that will have an impact on other minds, so that, being replicated there, it will take on a moreness. Kleos. Live so that others will hear of you. Paltry as it is, it’s the only way we have to beat back uncaring time. 

Our own culture of Facebook’s Likes and Twitter followings should put us in a good position to sympathize with an insistence on the social aspect of life-worthiness. Perhaps it’s a natural direction toward which a culture will drift, once the religious answers lose their grip. The ancient Greeks lived before the monotheistic solution took hold of Western culture, and we — or a great many of us — live after. A major difference between our two cultures is that, for the ancient Greeks, who lacked our social media, the only way to achieve such mass duplication of the details of one’s life in the apprehension of others was to do something wondrously worth the telling. Our wondrous technologies might just save us all the personal bother. Kleos is a tweet away. 

— Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex 

* “Though the gods are incessantly mentioned [in Pindar’s poems], this ethos presents a life worth living in terms that are drawn far more from the world of men. What is desired is not the attention of the immortals, but rather the attention of one’s fellow mortals. The gods come prominently into the picture because they either promote or prevent this good — that is, the achievement that brings fame — from being attained, but the good itself isn’t defined in terms of the gods. The good belongs to the world of mortals; it’s their attention and acclaim one is after.” – RNG↩

January 31, 2021

katharsis culture

A great many people have criticized the use of the term “cancel culture,” but have done so for different reasons. One group of people simply wants to deny that cancellation is a widespread phenomenon; others are aware that something is going on but don’t think that “cancellation” is the right way to describe it. I myself don’t have a problem with the use of the phrase, but I think there are more accurate ways of describing the very real phenomenon to which that phrase points. I think the two key concepts for understanding what is happening are katharsis and broken-windows policing.

In an essay that I published a few years ago, I talked about the prevalence among those committed to social justice, especially on our university campuses, of a sense of defilement. The very presence in one’s social world of people who hold fundamentally wrong ideas about race and justice is felt as a stain that must somehow be scrubbed away. As long as such people are present, one experiences akatharsia: impurity, defilement. The filth must be cleansed, the community must be purged. (I’m choosing the spelling “katharsis” rather than “catharsis” to focus on this archaic meaning.)

This kind of thing is sometimes referred to as scapegoating, but it isn’t, not at all. Essential to scapegoating is the belief that the unclean social order can be made clean by casting out or sacrificing something that is itself pure and undefiled. In the cases I am discussing here, the logic is more straightforward: the one who is perceived to bring the defilement must himself or herself be expelled. Scapegoat rituals have a complex symbolism. Katharsis culture doesn’t.

Now, such katharsis may be accomplished in several ways. Sometimes it involves actions for which the term “cancellation” is the best one: an announced lecture is canceled and the lecturer disinvited, or a television program that had been scheduled is canceled. But katharsis takes many other forms. For instance, James Bennet had to be fired from the New York Times because by authorizing an editorial by Senator Tom Cotton in the newspaper he had defiled its pages. The op-ed itself could not be erased, so, through a compensatory kathartic action, Bennet had to be removed.

Our society has largely forgotten the symbolism of defilement and purgation, so we don’t know how to call it by its proper name. When people feel that they have been defiled, what they say is that they feel unsafe. Everyone knows that such people are not in any meaningful sense unsafe; it is a singularly inapt word; but people use it because living in a publicly disenchanted world has deprived them of the more accurate language.

All this explains why Ben Dreyfuss’s preference for the language of “snitching” is not especially helpful. But that word does capture something relevant, which is the way that katharsis culture always involves appeals to authority: rarely do we see attempts at direct action against the sources of defilement — which is good, because that would require the more drastic and clearly illegal actions we saw on January 6 in Washington D.C. Rather, the existing authorities are asked to assume a sacral role and to enact the necessary purging. This return of archaic religious impulse, then, serves to reinforce existing power structures rather than to undermine them, which is why so many leaders accede to the demands of the mob: it’s good for their authority, it establishes them more firmly in place. And also, like George Orwell in “Shooting an Elephant,” they are being driven by the mob which they may seem to be leading, and in the eyes of that mob they can’t bear looking like fools. Thus they are doubly incentivized to carry out the sacral duties of their leadership position.

But there is another element to this behavior that likewise could be described in religious terms but might be more easily graspable if a more mundane analogy is invoked. Those who demand the expulsion from their community, whatever they perceive their community to be, of the producers of defilement do not just address their acts to the presently guilty: they seek to address all of us as well. The message is: Our vigilance is constant and you cannot hope to escape our surveillance. No matter how small or insignificant you are, we will find you and we will punish you. This ceaseless surveillance of public space by self-appointed cops, then, is a kind of broken-windows policing. It’s a way of letting everybody know that the space is watched, the spaces cared for. If trivial offenses are so strictly punished, more serious violators have no hope of escaping undetected.

In this sense, the hyperaggressive and absolutist pursuit of purging the unclean thing – no one ever thinks it adequate for people like James Bennet to be to apologize or to take a leave of absence or even to undergo anti-bias training, they’re always given the ultimate punishment possible – is meant less for the offender of the moment then for all the bystanders: thus Voltaire’s famous line about the British Navy hanging admirals pour encourager les autres. You can see, then, that what I’m calling katharsis culture has a double character, the sacral and the disciplinary. We are all invited to look upon the holy rite — to look, and to tremble.

December 15, 2020

The Return of the King

In Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell Susanna Clarke imagines an alternate history of England, one in which the north of England was ruled for 300 years in the Middle Ages by John Uskglass, the Raven King, who one day disappeared and never returned – though his people long for him to this day. (“This day” being the early nineteenth century.)

There’s a moment late in the book where a thoroughly modern and thoroughly nasty gentleman named Lascelles, an ally and confidante of the dourly pedantic magician Gilbert Norrell, notes with scorn and mockery a recently renewed devotion to the Raven King. This leads to a telling exchange with Norrell’s servant, one John Childermass.

“If I were you, Mr Lascelles,” said Childermass, softly, “I would speak more guardedly. You are in the north now. In John Uskglass’s own country. Our towns and cities and abbeys were built by him. Our laws were made by him. He is in our minds and hearts and speech. Were it summer you would see a carpet of tiny flowers beneath every hedgerow, of a bluish-white colour. We call them John’s Farthings. When the weather is contrary and we have warm weather in winter or it rains in summer the country people say that John Uskglass is in love again and neglects his business. And when we are sure of something we say it is as safe as a pebble in John Uskglass’s pocket.”

Lascelles laughed. “Far be it from me, Mr Childermass, to disparage your quaint country sayings. But surely it is one thing to pay lip-service to one’s history and quite another to talk of bringing back a King who numbered Lucifer himself among his allies and overlords? No one wants that, do they? I mean apart from a few Johannites and madmen?”

“I am a North Englishman, Mr Lascelles,” said Childermass. “Nothing would please me better than that my King should come home. It is what I have wished for all my life.”

It is understandable that people would long for the return of a King as a great as John Uskglass was. The talking beasts of Narnia likewise long for the return of Aslan – long for it so much that they are easily deceived by a donkey wearing a lion’s skin.

The return of the King. It’s a thought that may inspire at least a tickle at the back of the neck even for the most worldly and cynical of us. And as appealing as the thought of the King’s return is, equally appealing, perhaps, is the thought that one who remains faithful in dark days will be commended on that great day of restoration by the Sovereign.

Some have even lived to see such a moment. Upon the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy, the steadfast British royalist John Evelyn wrote in his diary,

29th May, 1660. This day, his Majesty, Charles II. came to London, after a sad and long exile and calamitous suffering both of the King and Church, being seventeen years. This was also his birthday, and with a triumph of above 20,000 horse and foot, brandishing their swords, and shouting with inexpressible joy; the ways strewn with flowers, the bells ringing, the streets hung with tapestry, fountains running with wine; the Mayor, Aldermen, and all the companies, in their liveries, chains of gold, and banners; Lords and Nobles, clad in cloth of silver, gold, and velvet; the windows and balconies, all set with ladies; trumpets, music, and myriads of people flocking, even so far as from Rochester, so as they were seven hours in passing the city, even from two in the afternoon till nine at night.

I stood in the Strand and beheld it, and blessed God. And all this was done without one drop of blood shed, and by that very army which rebelled against him: but it was the Lord’s doing, for such a restoration was never mentioned in any history, ancient or modern, since the return of the Jews from their Babylonish captivity; nor so joyful a day and so bright ever seen in this nation, this happening when to expect or effect it was past all human policy.

These intense monarchial feelings, these profound heart’s desires, may be embedded more deeply within us than we typically realize. Over at the Hedgehog Review, I wrote — extending some previous work of mine — about Emile Durkheim’s belief that we had transitioned irreversibly from elementary forms of religious life to a secularized modernity:

The relevance of Durkheim to our present moment arises, it seems to me, rather paradoxically from the strong possibility that he was wrong in his belief that the transfer to a modern social order was both imminent and irreversible. Certainly it seems that in our current moment some of the features of traditional society that Durkheim calls particular attention to have undergone a kind of revival. Perhaps this is their Indian summer; or perhaps the fundamental impulses of traditional societies are harder to kill off than Durkheim thought they were.

Among the atavistic impulses we thought we had outgrown is this longing for a sacred kingship. I have been reading Isaac Ariail Reed’s extraordinary book Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King’s Two Bodies, which demonstrates the various ways that that central doctrine of medieval politcal theology, the king’s two bodies, keeps returning to life, though in transfigured ways that can sometimes make it unrecognizable.

And late in the book Reed contemplates the rise of Nazism:

It is against this landscape of meaning that Carl Schmitt wrote of the importance of the discretion that accrued to judges; of the need for a sovereign to use his own judgment to decide both that there is an emergency and what to do about it; and of the grounding of all political concepts in the theological — a triptych of concerns that suggests rather strongly a particular kind of replacement for the King’s Two Bodies. In his book on Hobbes, published in 1938, Schmitt gave intellectual expression to the resentments that drove the Nazi revolution and regime. He first linked the emergence of modern, Weberian bureaucracy to the death of divine kingship as an ordered format of rule. He then preached about the inevitable collapse of liberal democracy, which he called a “fool’s paradise” with no real legitimacy. Into this breach, he could only imagine one solution: an entirely homogeneous demos could delegate to a single sovereign, who, because he was of the body of the people, would be trusted and endowed with absolute power. In this way would the dictator’s second body be born of the body of the people. It is a figuration that is still with us.

Indeed it is. As we have recently seen, people will even wish to die for Donald Trump — who is no Hitler but rather, essentially, a Shift the Ape who wears the lion’s skin himself rather than putting it on Puzzle the donkey. And Christians — Christians! — will gather on the Mall in Washington D.C. to luxuriate in the propwashed benediction of the Presidential helicopter.

marine

O sacred monarch, do not leave us. But if you do, we your faithful people will await your coming again in glory in 2024.

To all of this, I can only summon my readers to hear the Word of the Lord:

Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah, and said to him, “You are old and your sons do not follow in your ways; appoint for us, then, a king to govern us, like other nations.” But the thing displeased Samuel when they said, “Give us a king to govern us.” Samuel prayed to the Lord, and the Lord said to Samuel, “Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. Just as they have done to me, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so also they are doing to you. Now then, listen to their voice; only — you shall solemnly warn them, and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them.”

So Samuel reported all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king…. But the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel; they said, “No! but we are determined to have a king over us, so that we also may be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles.” When Samuel had heard all the words of the people, he repeated them in the ears of the Lord. The Lord said to Samuel, “Listen to their voice and set a king over them.”

Here endeth the reading.

December 13, 2020

testing the spirits

There is no infallible means for discerning when a religious believer has been spoken to, directly and personally, by God. However, there is a reliable way to disconfirm such a claim. When a person demands that other people immediately accept that he has been spoken to by God, and treats with insult and contempt those who do not acknowledge his claim to unique revelation, then we can be sure that no genuine message has been received, and that the voice echoing in that person’s mind is not that of God but that of his own ego.

November 30, 2020

incomprehension

For decades now, James Wood has been writing about his Christian upbringing, but he has gotten progressively worse at it. For instance, compare his 1996 essay in the London Review of Books with his new piece in the New Yorker. Both essays emerge from the same perspective: a kind of bemusement at the world he was raised in, an attempt (one he knows will have limited success) to explain that world to an uninformed and possibly uninterested audience. But in 1996 he certainly knew what Christians think and believe, whereas in 2020 he seems to have forgotten — and doesn’t seem interested in recollecting, either.

Let me draw my examples from a single paragraph:

Modern Christians in the West like to think of themselves as believers who have left behind any cultic relationship with a usable God. Doubtless not a few of them harbor a special disdain for American Evangelicalism, with its gaudy, prosperous instrumentalism. Certainly, if belief were plotted along a spectrum, at one end might lie the austere indescribability of the Jewish or Islamic God (“Silence is prayer to thee,” Maimonides wrote) and at the other the noisy, all-too-knowable God of charismatic worship, happy to be chatted to and apparently happy to chat back. But it is still a spectrum, and, indeed, any kind of petitionary prayer presumes a God onto whom one is projecting local human attributes. In this sense, you could say that Christianity is essentially a form of idolatry.

The quote from Maimonides is accurate but scarcely to the point, especially as an intended contrast to “chatty” evangelicals, to what one of E. M. Forster’s characters calls “poor little talkative Christianity.” Does Wood think Jews don’t talk to God, and don’t believe He talks back? Does he think Jews don’t petition God? Has he never heard of the Psalms?

He continues,

The difficult, unspeakable Jewish God becomes the incarnated Jesus, a God made flesh, who lived among us, who resembles us. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer blamed Christian anti-Semitism on just this idolatry of the man-God: “Christ the incarnated spirit is the deified sorcerer.” They called this “the spiritualization of magic.” Evangelicals are hardly the only Christian believers to draw this Jesus, the deified sorcerer, near to them. I’m reminded of that whenever I see professional soccer players crossing themselves as they run onto the field, as if God really cared whether Arsenal beats Manchester United.

Again, one has to wonder what Wood is thinking — or rather not thinking. Can he not imagine any other reason for an athlete to pray than to secure victory against his opponents? If he were to ask players why they cross themselves as they come onto the pitch, he would learn that the great majority of them are praying to be protected from injury. Many players pray for everyone on both teams to be so protected. Javier Hernandez, the Mexican striker, kneels and prays on the pitch before each match to thank God for the opportunity to play the game.

chicharito

And yet it does not occur to Wood that there could be any explanation for praying before an athletic contest other than pleading for conquest. He cannot imagine any reason for drawing near to Jesus other than siphoning some of the power of a sorcerer. But surely there was a time when he knew these words: “Come to me, all who are weary and heavily burdened, and I will give you rest.”

At one point, early in the essay, Wood writes of his account of his childhood church experiences, “I know how unbalanced this is. I’m sure I should have seen all the human goodness and decency — there was plenty of that around, too.” He writes as though, having not seen the goodness and decency then, he is somehow forbidden to see it now. He just plows ahead with what seems to me a studied incomprehension, an almost desperate determination to put the least charitable, least human, construal on every manifestation of religious belief and practice. I almost want to ask him what he’s afraid of.

November 12, 2020

mistrust

An update on this post:

I occasionally read NYT news stories now, for a very particular reason: the newspaper’s two chief religion reporters, Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham, are former students of mine, and I am so proud of the careers they have made for themselves — they are both outstanding at what they do.

So I read whatever they write, but not much else, from the news side anyway. (Sometimes friends send me links and I will usually read those stories.) In general, I simply can’t rely on the NYT, any more than I can rely on Fox News, to tell the truth about anything that I really care about — and my suspicion has increased, if that’s possible, in the year since I wrote that post, thanks to the gradual conquest of the NYT newsroom by “insurrectionists” who openly disdain fair-minded reporting in favor of whatever stories and angles they think will serve their political agenda, AKA Justice.

Recently Elizabeth and Ruth were interviewed in the Times itself about “the challenges of covering religion during a pandemic in a campaign season,” and one thread that ran through the whole interview was reporting under conditions of mistrust. Elizabeth: “I’ve found conservatives are increasingly wary of talking with us no matter what the story is.” Ruth: “The rising distrust of the media among a lot of conservative religious people is a major challenge, and one that is not going away.”

Now, I’m not one of the conservatives they’re talking about — QAnon true believers, MAGA-hat wearers — at least I don’t think I am; maybe Elizabeth and Ruth would disagree. But in any case, if in the highly unlikely event that either Elizabeth or Ruth wanted to interview me about religion, I would be really hesitant. I trust them — I trust them both implicitly — but I don’t trust their editors or the newsroom in which they do their work. I don’t feel I could reasonably expect the final published version of any such story to be … well, to be anything but driven by an ideological urgency in which any white male small-o orthodox Christian such as myself is an Enemy of the People.

This is I think the inevitable outcome in a journalistic world increasingly shaped by Manichaean binaries of the kind that the Right used to specialize in (remember RINOs?) but that the Left now owns the rights to. Consider for instance an idea that I’m sure is highly popular in the NYT newsroom, Ibram X. Kendi’s claim that everyone is either a racist or an antiracist — with the implicit but necessary corollary that he and people who agree with him wholly get to (a) establish the categories, (b) define the categories, and (c) put any given person definitively in the category they choose. What category do you think I am going to be in, regardless of what I have written or said?

In such an environment it’s hard for me to see what good would come of my being interviewed in the New York Times, at least about matters Christian — even if I were being interviewed by people with the honesty and integrity that Elizabeth and Ruth possess. I just think that’s where we are right now.

August 14, 2020

wokeness as Counter-Reformation

My old friend Jody Bottum thinks that the various Woke movements amount to a kind of post-Protestantism. I think this is wholly wrong. Wokeness is aspirationally Roman Catholic in its structure. It already has:

  • magisterial teaching that one must hold de fide in order to belong
  • the pronouncing of anathemas upon those who dissent from that magisterial teaching
  • a distributed Inquisition devoted to unearthing and prosecuting heresy
  • an ever-growing Index of Prohibited Books

Wokeness despises the fissiparousness of Protestantism and wants to replace it with Real, Substantial, and Visible Unity under its banner. It’s basically a secularized Counter-Reformation.

May 14, 2020

QAnon: costs and benefits

Adrienne LaFrance on QAnon:

In Toledo, I asked [a woman named Lorrie] Shock if she had any theories about Q’s identity. She answered immediately: “I think it’s Trump.” I asked if she thinks Trump even knows how to use 4chan. The message board is notoriously confusing for the uninitiated, nothing like Facebook and other social platforms designed to make it easy to publish quickly and often. “I think he knows way more than what we think,” she said. But she also wanted me to know that her obsession with Q wasn’t about Trump. This had been something she was reluctant to speak about at first. Now, she said, “I feel God led me to Q. I really feel like God pushed me in this direction. I feel like if it was deceitful, in my spirit, God would be telling me, ‘Enough’s enough.’ But I don’t feel that. I pray about it. I’ve said, ‘Father, should I be wasting my time on this?’ … And I don’t feel that feeling of I should stop.”

Why do people believe such things? After all, there is no evidence that anything Q says is true; there is no reason to believe in Q’s Gospel. Or even to believe that Q is a single person. Or, if Q is a single person, that he or she isn’t doing it for the lulz.

The answer, I think, is pretty straightforward: Believing in Q has many benefits but very low marginal costs. Believing in Q gives people a sense of having tapped into the hidden meaning of things, an explanation for their low social status, and a strong network of like-minded people. WWG1WGA, as the QAnon mantra goes: “Where we go one, we go all.” These are significant benefits!

And those marginal costs? I suppose time spent on matters Q is time one can’t spend on Netflix; and if educated people mock and laugh at the followers of Q, well, weren’t they already mocking and laughing at people like Lorrie Shock? How does believing in Q change anything in that respect? Nor does Q-following affect the ability of those followers to do their jobs or raise their children.

Again: significant benefits, low marginal costs. Looked at from that point of view, belief in Q demonstrates a kind of rationality.

LaFrance writes, near the end of her excellent report,

The Seventh-day Adventists and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are thriving religious movements indigenous to America. Do not be surprised if QAnon becomes another. It already has more adherents by far than either of those two denominations had in the first decades of their existence. People are expressing their faith through devoted study of Q drops as installments of a foundational text, through the development of Q-worshipping groups, and through sweeping expressions of gratitude for what Q has brought to their lives. Does it matter that we do not know who Q is? The divine is always a mystery. Does it matter that basic aspects of Q’s teachings cannot be confirmed? The basic tenets of Christianity cannot be confirmed. Among the people of QAnon, faith remains absolute. True believers describe a feeling of rebirth, an irreversible arousal to existential knowledge. They are certain that a Great Awakening is coming. They’ll wait as long as they must for deliverance.

In order to evaluate this view of the matter, I think we need to press hard on the word “adherents.” People who spend a lot of time chasing down Q on the internet don’t really qualify. Even the occasional IRL meetup won’t do it. A movement gains genuine adherents when the costs of belonging to it — financial, social, intellectual, legal — reach a kind of critical mass of pain. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of every church.

March 14, 2019

Remembering David Martin

The great sociologist of religion David Martin has died: you may read an overview of his incredibly wide-ranging career, written by a former colleague, here. (I was fascinated to learn there that he wrote a so-far-unpublished book on “secularization through the lens of English poetry”!) Today I am giving thanks for his life and witness, and remembering in prayer his family: his wife Bernice and his daughter Jessica Martin — my friend, and a priest whose sermons I sometimes quote or post in toto here.

Much attention will be given, in reflections on Martin’s career, to his work on secularization, and rightly enough, given its influence. But it will be very hard for us to get our minds around the totality of that work, for what it did, above all, was complicate all previous work on secularization. And the primary way it complicated that work was by decentering the Western European account (WEA, I’ll call it) of secularization, which Western intellectuals have always had a tendency to see as the normal or expected path of change in religious practice and experience. But, as Martin wrote in his concise and accessible Forbidden Revolutions (1996), “We can observe at least four distinct trajectories in Christian cultures: Eastern Europe, Latin America, Western Europe and North America. If social differentiation is the working core of the theory of secularization, it takes at least four forms, which do not necessarily converge.”

That WEA model of secularization, Martin argues, “acts as an implicit guide and censor on what we permit ourselves to see” — and therefore obscures from us how secularization happens, if it happens at all, elsewhere. The influence of the WEA model led to it being imposed in Eastern Europe, “the guiding spirit [of] an explicit programme to enforce secularization.” To a somewhat lesser extent attempts at enforced secularization happened in certain Latin American countries as well, and Forbidden Revolutions describes how stubborn practitioners of the Christian faith were able to resist such imposition. Why that resistance took Catholic forms in Eastern Europe and Pentecostal forms in Latin America is the meat of Martin’s story.

Forbidden Revolutions is not generally thought of as one of Martin’s central works — it’s less academic and more Christian than his most celebrated texts — but I find myself thinking of it often these days, even though I only read it once, many years ago. I think perhaps it is time for me to return to it. In the meantime, thanks be to God for the life and work of David Martin. Rest eternal grant unto him, O LORD: and let light perpetual shine upon him. May he rest in peace.

January 30, 2019

Plutarch and the end of the oracles

In my History of Disenchantment class, we’ve been discussing Plutarch’s essay on the cessation or the silence or the failure of the oracles. (The key word there, ekleloipoton, seems to be an odd one — I’m trying to learn more about it.) I read it long ago, but this is the first time I’ve taught it, and goodness, what a fascinating piece of work.

It was widely recognized in Plutarch’s time (late first and early second century A.D.) that the great oracles of the ancient world — the most famous of them being the one at Delphi, of course — had largely ceased to provide useful guidance or had fallen silent altogether. Some of the once famous shrines had been abandoned and had fallen into ruin. But no one understood why this had happened. Plutarch’s “essay” is a fictional dialogue — narrated by one Lamprias, who also takes the leading role in the conversation and may well be Plutarch’s mouthpiece — in which a group of philosophically-inclined men debate the possible reasons for the oracles’ failure.

In the opening pages of the dialogue, some of the participants deny that there is any real problem. They point to the inaccessibility of some of the shrines, and the lack of population in the surrounding areas: for them the issue is merely one of low demand leading to low supply. But this view is not widely accepted; most of the philosophers are uneasy about the oracles and feel that something is up. And after all, if low demand leads to low supply, why is there low demand? Even if the oracles are located in remote places, surely people would take the trouble to make a pilgrimage there if they believed that by doing so they could receive wise guidance for their lives.

To one of the participants, the answer to the whole problem is obvious: The gods are angry at us for our wickedness and have punitively withdrawn their guidance. But, perhaps surprisingly, no one finds this a compelling explanation. For one thing, it’s not clear to them there was any less wickedness in the earlier eras when the oracles flourished; and more to the point, are oracles given by the gods in the first place?

If they are, then shouldn’t they continue forever, since the gods themselves are immortal, unless they are specifically withdrawn? Not necessarily, says one: “the gods do not die, but their gifts do” — a line he says is from Sophocles, though I don’t know its source. Maybe the oracles lived their natural course and have now fallen silent, as one day we all will.

But what if oracles do not come from the gods, but rather from daimons? In that case the oracles might die because the daimons do. This leads to a long discussion about whether daimons are mortal, and if mortal or not whether they are necessarily good. (The one truly famous passage from this essay — in which someone recounts a story about a sailor instructed to pass by an island and cry out “The great god Pan is dead” — assumes that Pan was not a god but rather a daimon, the son of Hermes by Odysseus’s famously loyal wife Penelope.)

And this in turn leads to a very long conversation about the beings that populate the world and whether there might be other worlds populated differently and, now that we think about it, how many worlds are there anyway? (The most popular answer among the discussants: 185.) As I told my students, this is by modern standards a bizarre digression, especially since it takes up about half the dialogue, but our standards were not those of Plutarch’s time; and in any case the discussants might plausibly say that we can’t come up with a reliable solution to the puzzle of the silenced oracles unless we have a good general understanding of the kind of cosmos we live in.

In any event, the discussion eventually circles back around to the initial question, and in the final pages Lamprias gets the chance to develop the argument that he has been hinting at all along. In brief, he contends that oracles are always situated in or near caves because from those caves issue “exhalations of the earth”; and that certain people with natural gifts and excellent training of those gifts may be sensitized to the character of those exhalations, and in that way come to some intuitive and not-easily-verbalized awareness of what the world has in store for people. It’s almost a Gaia hypothesis, this idea that the world as a whole acts in certain fixed ways, and those “exhalations” attest to the more general movements of the planet. But these processes are, like all processes in Nature, subject to change over time. As a spring might dry up, or a river after flooding alter its course, so too the conditions for such exhalations might change so that there is nothing for even the most exquisitely sensitive and perfectly trained priestess to respond to.

The first and overwhelming response to Lamprias’s explanation is: Impiety! One of the interlocutors comments that first we rejected the gods in favor of daimons, and now we’re rejecting daimons in favor of a purely natural process. That is, Lamprias’s position is fundamentally disenchanting. To this Lamprias replies that his position is not impious at all, because they had all agreed earlier that in addition to humans and daimons and gods, none of whom create anything, we also have, abobe and beyond all, The God, “the Lord and Father of All,” and He is he first cause of all things, including exhalations of the earth and priestesses.

But whether it’s impious or not, Lamprias’s account is disenchanting, because it removes power from spirits and gods and concentrates them in a single transcendent Monad. His monotheism is a big step towards the religion of Israel, which tells us in the very first words of its Scriptures that the sun and moon and stars are not deities at all, but rather things made by YHWH, who alone merits our worship. Lamprias’s position, like that of the Jews, looks to those accustomed to polytheism as a kind of atheism. And by their standards that’s just what it is.

January 5, 2019

he’s always the boss

LARRY: Well, she’s, she’s seeing Sy Ableman.

RABBI SCOTT: Oh.

LARRY: She’s, they’re planning, that’s why they want the get.

RABBI SCOTT: Oh. I’m sorry.

LARRY: It was his idea.

RABBI SCOTT: Well, they do need a get to remarry in the faith. But this is life. For you too. You can’t cut yourself off from the mystical or you’ll be — you’ll remain — completely lost. You have to see these things as expressions of God’s will. You don’t have to like it, of course.

LARRY: The boss isn’t always right, but he’s always the boss.

RABBI SCOTT: Ha-ha-ha! That’s right, things aren’t so bad. Look at the parking lot, Larry. [Rabbi Scott gazes out, marveling.] Just look at that parking lot.

— The Coen Brothers, A Serious Man

December 14, 2018

Christians, Pagans, Jews

Richard Schragger and Micah Schwartzman discern a renewal of Christian critiques of paganism and they’re not happy about it. On Twitter, Schwartzman has applied his argument to a recent column by Ross Douthat in what I think are unhelpful ways — but I also think Ross’s column blurs some issues that invite the unhelpful response from Schwartzman. Let’s see if we can do some disentangling.

The key reference point for Douthat’s column and Schragger and Schwartzman’s essay is a recent book by Steven D. Smith, Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac, in which Smith attempts to reclaim and update the argument made by T. S. Eliot in The Idea of a Christian Society that English culture was then (80 years ago) faced with the increasing dominance of a kind of “modern paganism.” Wrote Eliot, “The choice before us is between the formation of a new Christian culture, and the acceptance of a pagan one.”

But what does Eliot mean by “pagan”? Alas, he never clearly defines it. But when he says that he thinks England has reached “the point at which practising Christians must be recognised as a minority (whether static or diminishing) in a society which has ceased to be Christian,” that seems to be what he means by a “pagan society.”

For C. S. Lewis, this is just carelessness. In a passage from a lecture in which he does not mention Eliot but clearly has him in mind, Lewis says,

It is hard to have patience with those Jeremiahs, in Press or pulpit, who warn us that we are ” relapsing into Paganism”. It might be rather fun if we were. It would be pleasant to see some future Prime Minister trying to kill a large and lively milk-white bull in Westminster Hall. But we shan’t. What lurks behind such idle prophecies, if they are anything but careless language, is the false idea that the historical process allows mere reversal; that Europe can come out of Christianity “by the same door as in she went” and find herself back where she was. It is not what happens. A post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce. The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past and therefore doubly from the Pagan past.

And elsewhere in the lecture Lewis says, “Christians and Pagans had much more in common with each other than either has with a post-Christian. The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as that between those who worship and those who do not.”

What’s interesting about Smith’s book is that he knows this critique by Lewis, indeed he quotes it — but then he ignores it, and instead uses “pagan” in the frustratingly loose, and in my view indefensibly inaccurate, way Eliot uses it.

Because Smith uses the term “pagan” in this way, Schragger and Schwartzman assume that every Christian critic of paganism does the same. In this respect they’re careless, and indeed, I don’t get the sense that they’ve paid much attention to the writings they’re denouncing. In their first footnote, where they purport to list such critiques, they name an essay by Adrian Vermeule in which the term “pagan” is used only in a historical sense, and they don’t even get the title of Rod Dreher’s book right. In Schwartzman’s Twitter critique of Douthat, he assumes that Douthat is using “pagan” to mean “non-Christian” — but it’s not obvious that that’s right.

In fact, Douthat (following Smith in this) demonstrates awareness of multiple forms of post-Christianity:

  • “First, there is a tradition of intellectual and aesthetic pantheism that includes figures like Spinoza, Nietzsche, Emerson and Whitman, and that’s manifest in certain highbrow spiritual-but-not-religious writers today. Smith recruits Sam Harris, Barbara Ehrenreich and even Ronald Dworkin to this club; he notes that we even have an explicit framing of this tradition as paganism, in the former Yale Law School dean Anthony Kronman’s rich 2016 work ‘Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan.’”
  • “Second, there is a civic religion that like the civic paganism of old makes religious and political duties identical, and treats the city of man as the city of God (or the gods), the place where we make heaven ourselves instead of waiting for the next life or the apocalypse.”
  • Third, “there are forms of modern paganism that … offer ritual and observance, augury and prayer, that do promise that in some form gods or spirits really might exist and might offer succor or help if appropriately invoked. I have in mind the countless New Age practices that promise health and well-being and good fortune, the psychics and mediums who promise communication with the spirit world, and also the world of explicit neo-paganism, Wiccan and otherwise.”

But like Smith and Eliot before him, Douthat (as I read him) seems content to describe all these as forms of paganism, rather than what they actually are, which is three wholly different ways of looking at the world. I think faling to maintain these distinctions leaves us vulnerable to misunderstanding all three movements. And when Christian critics of such movements blur those lines, that leads to a further blurring by those, like Schragger and Schwartzman, who mistrust those Christian thinkers. I think all this blurring leaves us with two big problems.

First, it leaves us unable to respond appropriately to something really interesting, which involves Douthat’s third category: those who — from the right and the left, as I noted yesterday — are genuinely attempting to renew paganism as such, are striving to disprove Lewis’s account of “the false idea that the historical process allows mere reversal.” How many of these people are there? And how successful are they likely to be in their project of restoration?

Second, we’re faced with a kind of Jewish problem, which is what Schragger and Schwartzman, in their essay are primarily interested in. S&S argue that when people like Eliot and Smith and Douthat seek the renewal of some kind of Christian society — Douthat recently wrote, with tongue just barely touching his cheek, that his ideal ruling elite for the Americas is “a multiracial, multilingual Catholic aristocracy ruling from Quebec to Chile” — and present that society as an alternative to paganism, then that tends to cast Jews as pagans. (This is especially true of what Eliot called “free-thinking” Jews, that is, people who are ethnically Jewish but lack religious belief.) Here again some distinctions need to be made, this time among several groups who resist the secularization of Western societies:

  • Those, like Eliot, who seem interested in the cultural and indeed legal dominance of a kind of generic Christianity (it’s hard for me to see just how specifically Anglican Eliot’s ideal is);
  • Those — like Milton Himmelfarb (whom S&S quote) and Will Herberg (whom they don’t but should) — who appeal to a highly generalized “Judeo-Christian” inheritance which they typically want to be dominant in civil society but not enshrined in law;
  • Proponents of Catholic integralism —perhaps including Douthat, whose comments on integralism over the years have oscillated between wariness and admiration — who want Roman Catholicism to regain what they believe to be its proper temporal as well as spiritual power.

For the first group, it’s hard to see how Jews don’t get lumped in with pagans; for the second group, Jews and Christians are theoretically cooperating in the project, though given the numerical disparity between the two groups, keeping the Judeo- in Judeo-Christian might well be a challenge; and for the third group, all of us non-Catholics are effectively pagans, as I have argued.

Maybe it’s because I suffer from nostalgia for the philosophical thinness of liberal proceduralism, but I’m suspicious of all these models. They all, it seems to me, think about politics from the position of power, from some imagined world in which Our Boys are the ones making decisions. In contrast, I find myself recalling and admiring — as I often have in the past — George Washington’s great letter to the leader of the Newport synagogue in which, responding to their gratitude for his tolerance of their religion, he says, “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent national gifts.”

November 19, 2018

Tim Larsen on John Stuart Mill

My friend Tim Larsen has written an absolutely fascinating brief biography of John Stuart Mill. (It appears in the Oxford Spiritual Lives series, of which Tim is also the editor.) Everyone knows that Mill had little time for or interest in religion, and that his father James Mill, aide-de-camp to that great enemy of faith Jeremy Bentham, was even more hostile than JSM himself. Given JSM’s secular and rationalist upbringing, it cannot be surprising that, as he put it, “I looked upon the modern exactly as I did upon the ancient religion, as something which in no way concerned me. It did not seem to me more strange that English people should believe what I did not, than that the men I read of in Herodotus should have done so.”

However, as Tim shows convincingly, this statement is seriously misleading to the point of being simply untrue. The same must be said for the familiar family story. James Mill was a licensed preacher and had turned to the life of a writer and public intellectual only after failing to get the kind of pastoral position he thought he was qualified for — a fact he carefully hid from his children — and probably didn’t become a complete unbeliever until he was in his mid-forties, by which point JSM was already a ten-year-old, or older, prodigy. James’s wife Harriet was a Christian, each of their nine children was baptized in the Church of England, and probably only two of them (JSM and his youngest sibling George Grote) departed in any significant way from standard-issue Victorian religion. JSM grew up learning not only the Bible but the worship of the Church of England. Nothing about that religion was strange to him.

Moreover, Tim also demonstrates that throughout the course of his life JSM held to a minimal but stable theology, which he summarizes thus:

Even from a scientific point of view and without any intuitive sense or direct experience of the divine, there is still sufficient evidence to warrant the conclusion that God probably exists; God is good, but not omnipotent; the life and sayings of Christ are admirable and deserve our reverence; the immortality of the soul or an afterlife are possible but not certain; humanity’s task is to co-labour with God to subdue evil and make the world a better place; the affirmations in the previous points such as that God exists and is good cannot be proven, but it is still a reasonable act to appropriate these religious convictions imaginatively not he basis of hope.

(One of the most interesting parts of Tim’s book is his exploration of the potent role “hope” played in Mill’s moral and intellectual lexicon.) There is much more than I might comment on, especially Mill’s alliances with evangelical Christians in his campaign for the rights of women — his rationalist friends were generally cold to this idea — and the interestingly varied religious beliefs of his family, but I will just strongly suggest that you read the book. Its subtitle is “A Secular Life,” and JSM’s life was indeed secular, but not in a modern sense. As Tim puts it, in the Victorian era, even for atheists “the sea of faith was full and all around.”

August 10, 2018

not for fun

At the beginning of Two Serious Ladies, the great Jane Bowles novel, one little girl asks another to play a new game. “It’s called ’I forgive you for all your sins,’” she says. “Is it fun?” asks the other. “It’s not for fun that we play it, but because it’s necessary to play it.” This, undoubtedly, is just why religion is so queer; it’s not for fun that we play it.

— Michael Warner, “Tongues Untied”

February 12, 2018

religion and public life revisited

I’m late to this party, but there’s something to be said for taking time to think things over. The already-much-discussed book review in First Things by Romanus Cessario, in which Cessario defends the kidnapping of a Jewish child by Pope Pius IX, raises many important issues, and I want to focus on just one of them here. But first some clarifications.

First of all, there can be no question that Cessario is not simply defending Pio Nono’s action within the context of the governance of the Papal States, but is also laying down a more general principle. Thus:

No one who considers the Mortara affair can fail to be moved by its natural dimensions. It is a grievous thing to sever familial bonds. But the honor we give to mother and father will be imperfect if we do not render a higher honor to God above. Christ’s authority perfects all natural institutions — the family as well as the state. This is why he said that he came bearing a sword that would sunder father and son. One’s judgment of Pius will depend on one’s acceptance of Christ’s claim.

The lesson is clear: If you accept Christ’s claim, you will support Pius’s decision; if you do not support Pius’s decision, then you are ipso facto denying, or at the very best questioning, “Christ’s claim.” Cessario reaffirms this view when he says, in his last paragraph, “Those examining the Mortara case today are left with a final question: Should putative civil liberties trump the requirements of faith?” Civil liberties are merely “putative”; Pio Nono acted in accordance with the requirements of faith. He could do no other and be faithful to his vocation and his office. And the “claim of Christ,” and the consequent “requirements of faith,” surely do not change from time to time and place to place. (Note that Cessario does not have any questions to pose to those who support Pio Nono’s actions.)

A second point of clarification: As Robert T. Miller points out in this post, that Edgardo Mortaro was Jewish is culturally significant, in that time and place and perhaps in ours as well, but theologically not to the point. For doctrinally speaking what underlies Pius’s action was not the fact that Mortara was ethnically Jewish but the fact that his family was not Catholic.

The operative assumption in Cessario’s argument is not that the child’s parents were Jewish but that they could not reasonably be expected to give the child a Catholic upbringing and education. Hence, if it is right to terminate the custodial rights of Jewish parents if their child somehow gets baptized, it will be right to do the same to parents who are pagans, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, or — it certainly seems — Protestants and even fallen-away Catholics. I don’t deny that, as a historical matter, the Mortaras were treated so badly because they were Jewish — of course, they were. I mean only that Cessario’s argument to justify Pius’s actions in the case would, by its terms, apply to many parents other than Jewish ones, and it helps in keeping the analysis clear to think in the broader terms in which that argument is cast.

Miller concludes his post by asking Rusty Reno, the editor of First Things, to “disavow the position Cessario takes on the Mortara case and to reaffirm the journal’s historical commitment to the freedom of religion as understood in liberal states.”

Writing in response, Rusty very straightforwardly does the former: “The Edgardo Mortara episode is a stain on the Catholic Church. Whatever one thinks about the efficacy of baptism, forcibly separating a child from his parents is a grievous act. And even if one can construct a theoretical rationale for doing so, as Romanus Cessario does, it was wildly imprudent of Pius IX to take Edgardo from his parents, given the scandal it brought upon the Catholic Church, a scandal that continues to this day.” The latter request he does not explicitly address, though much of his post does so implicitly.

However, Rusty certainly does not apologize for running Cessario’s review. He argues rather that “Cessario, however, wants to challenge me. I must not imagine complacently that my natural moral sentiments and the modern liberal principles I endorse will always happily correspond with the demands that flow from ‘the reality of the Lord’s things.’” He adds, further, that “Cessario, a priest, is perhaps more perceptive that I am about our spiritual challenges” — which, for what it’s worth, I do not read as a qualification of his repudiation of Pius’s action, though I suppose some have taken it as such.

Rusty goes on, quite movingly, to describe his own family situation: his wife is Jewish and his children have been raised as Jews, and going to church alone has been his portion for many years now. So in this light you can see what he means, and that what he means is quite powerful, when he says that Cessario wants to challenge him.

And yet, it should be said — and I hope I can say it without seeming to minimize the painful complexities that Rusty has experienced — that the challenge that Cessario poses to people who, like Rusty, already believe that the Pope stands at the head of the One True Church is different, and less offensive, than the challenge it offers to non-Catholic Christians; and that challenge is less scandalous still than the one Cessario poses to non-Christians — primarily, though not only, Jews.

Which leads me, finally, to the one point I want to make. Imagine that I, an Anglican, were the editor of First Things, and I published an essay by a priest of the Church of England arguing that Elizabeth I was perfectly justified in carrying out her lengthy persecution of English Catholics, since she was ordained by God as His royal servant implementing the True Biblical Faith in England, and the Roman Catholic Church by contrast is the Whore of Babylon as described in the Revelation to John. Imagine further that I responded to criticism by saying that I don’t agree with that argument but find that it challenges me in salutary ways. Would Catholic readers of the magazine be mollified by that explanation? I suspect not — even if my wife were a Catholic and my children were being raised in that communion.

Of course, the real-world First Things would never run such an essay, any more than it would run an essay by a Muslim arguing that the right and proper place of Christians and Jews in the world is dhimmitude under a restored Caliphate, or one by a Jew arguing that Christianity in all its forms is necessarily and intrinsically anti-Semitic and should therefore be repudiated and marginalized by all right-thinking people. As I have noted several times on this blog and elsewhere, the Overton window of acceptable positions for First Things articles has been moving for several years now, but moving in only one direction: towards an increasing acceptance of the claims of the Roman Catholic Church over against other religious communities. Whether it might be defensible for non-Catholics to be in a position of dhimmitude vis-a-vis Catholicism is a question to be asked in the pages of First Things; but the legitimacy of Catholicism is never similarly open to question. For some time now it has been quite clear who at First Things are the first-class citizens and who need to make their way the back of the cabin. And this cannot be surprising, given that the entire editorial staff of the journal, as far as I tell, is Roman Catholic.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But the Institute on Religion and Public Life, which publishes First Things, describes itself as “an interreligious, nonpartisan research and educational 501(c)(3) organization.” To what extent can the Institute’s flagship publication be “interreligious” when its entire staff belongs not just to one religion but one communion within that religion? Certain questions about “religion and public life” — First Things calls itself “a journal of religion and public life” — will perforce be explored narrowly and (I think) in limited ways if one religious communion always takes the role of arbiter, if its core commitments are always considered normative while others’ fall under deeper scrutiny.

I have made arguments similar to this one before, and they haven’t been heeded or even acknowledged. But is is precisely because I believe in the stated mission of First Things, and regret its dramatically constrained current understanding of that mission, that I have become involved with Comment, which I believe is trying, in its currently small way, to take up the torch that First Things has, in my judgment, dropped. But I would be very pleased if First Things would pick it up also and we could carry it together.

November 21, 2017

the poison of consequentialism

From this conversation:

Rebecca Traister: … the argument for keeping Clinton … was in part that the power he wielded could theoretically shore up or increase the very set of policies and protections that are supposed to ameliorate the gender-imbalanced conditions that make sexual harassment so pervasive, i.e., it was to some degree a compromise on a feminist issue designed specifically to further a feminist agenda. I don’t think there’s the same moral symmetry with Trump voters: that they’ll vote for a man who spews open racism or is accused of groping women specifically because they think that if elected, he’s going to strengthen defenses for women or for people of color; in some cases, the opposite. This week, Kellyanne Conway said that voters should pick Moore because he’ll help pass the tax bill. Is there a line of logic that says that voters upset about pedophilia charges should vote for the accused pedophile, despite their distress, because a lower corporate tax rate would lead to a systemic reduction of child abuse?

Ross Douthat: It’s not precisely the same, but many of Trump’s supporters framed it as “we’re compromising Christian values by electing a man who doesn’t live up to them, because that’s the only way in order to further a Christian agenda on abortion or religious liberty.” There’s some overlap with your view of how feminists thought about Clinton there.

You know what both of these arguments sound like to me? “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

Or consider this story that Rod Dreher recounted the other day:

Back in 2002, I interviewed a Catholic woman who had been blackmailed by her confessor into having an affair with him, even though she was married. She finally broke down psychologically, and sought professional help from a psychiatrist who was known to be a faithful Catholic. (I interviewed him too, and he confirmed her account.) When she and her psychiatrist went to the local bishop (who is now dead, by the way), the bishop told her he had sent the priest away overseas (as he had — that I confirmed), and that if she pursued charges against the offending priest, or made his abuse public, then he, the bishop, would be forced to go after her publicly for her messy past.

She quoted him as saying, “I have to protect the people of God.”

Protect the people of God … by destroying this woman who is one of the people of God. As I have suggested in a different context, consequentialism poisons character.

October 30, 2017

Vladimir Nabokov on his mother’s religion

She found a deep appeal in the moral and poetical side of the Gospels, but felt no need in the support of any dogma. The appalling insecurity of an afterlife and its lack of privacy did not enter her thoughts. Her intense and pure religiousness took the form of her having equal faith in the existence of another world and in the impossibility of comprehending it in terms of earthly life. All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and the chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour.

— Speak, Memory

October 13, 2017

the “decline of religion”

Here’s something C. S. Lewis wrote in a 1946 essay called “The Decline of Religion”:

The `decline of religion’ so often lamented (or welcomed) is held to be shown by empty chapels [in the Oxbridge colleges]. Now it is quite true that that chapels which were full in 1900 are empty in 1946. But this change was not gradual. It occurred at the precise moment when chapel ceased to be compulsory. It was not in fact a decline; it was a precipice. The sixty men who had come because chapel was a little later than ‘rollers’ (its only alternative) came no more; the five Christians remained. The withdrawal of compulsion did not create a new religious situation, but only revealed the situation which had long existed. And this is typical of the ‘decline in religion’ all over England.

I think it’s pretty obvious that the situation that obtained at Oxford and Cambridge when chapel attendance was made optional is closely analogous to the religious situation in America today. Everywhere in America, and even in the deep South, being a Christian has ceased is rapidly ceasing to be socially rewarding or even acceptable.* More from Lewis:

One way of putting the truth would be that the religion which has declined was not Christianity. It was a vague Theism with a strong and virile ethical code, which, far from standing over against the ‘World’, was absorbed into the whole fabric of English institutions and sentiment and therefore demanded church-going as (at best) a part of loyalty and good manners as (at worst) a proof of respectability. Hence a social pressure, like the withdrawal of the compulsion, did not create a new situation. The new freedom first allowed accurate observations to be made. When no man goes to church except because he seeks Christ the number of actual believers can at last be discovered.

That’s what we are discovering. The question is whether American churches will have the intellectual and spiritual integrity necessary to recognize and accept how completely they have relied on the social appeal of a “vague Theism” and how little they have spoken to those who go to church because they seek Christ. What’s at stake here is merely life or death.

*I changed that on reflection — where I live in central Texas, and in the many parts of the Southeast, being known to have a church community is still an index of trustworthiness in some business and social contexts. 

October 2, 2017

making God

To develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence and through understanding and worship of the Godhead contribute to the betterment of society.

— Mission statement of Way of the Future (2017)

In a sense there is no God as yet achieved, but there is that force at work making God, struggling through us to become an actual organized existence, enjoying what to many of us is the greatest conceivable ecstasy, the ecstasy of a brain, an intelligence, actually conscious of the whole, and with executive force capable of guiding it to a perfectly benevolent and harmonious end. That is what we are working to. When you are asked, “Where is God? Who is God?” stand up and say, “I am God and here is God, not as yet completed, but still advancing towards completion, just in so much as I am working for the purpose of the universe, working for the good of the whole of society and the whole world, instead of merely looking after my personal ends.”

— George Bernard Shaw, “The New Theology” (1907)

September 13, 2017

litmus tests and revulsion

In trying to explain to National Review why she doesn’t apply a religious litmus test to judicial nominees, Sen. Dianne Feinstein in fact revealed that she does indeed have a litmus test. She says, “I have never and will never apply a religious litmus test to nominees — nominees of all religious faiths are capable of setting aside their religious beliefs while on the bench and applying the Constitution, laws and Supreme Court precedents.” But she is worried about an article Prof. Amy Barrett in which she acknowledged that situations might arise in which a Catholic judge’s faith commitments were at odds with what the law declares.

So Feinstein’s litmus test for nominees like Amy Barrett is this: Are your religious beliefs weak enough that you can effortlessly “set them aside”? The same logic was at work when Sen. Dick Durbin denounced Barrett for using the term “orthodox Catholic”: “Do you consider yourself an orthodox Catholic?” he demanded. (“Are you now or have you ever been …”) And again when, a few months ago, Bernie Sanders challenged Russell Vought, President Trump’s nominee for deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, about his views on soteriology — a branch of doctrine that has no possible bearing on public service.

What all these lines of senatorial questioning have in common is an open revulsion towards people for whom religious belief is consequential. It doesn’t really matter what you think the consequences are, or whether they bear on your job in any way: if you simply think that your religious beliefs matter, that is sufficient to bring you under suspicion.

And again, the form the suspicion takes is that of revulsion, revulsion tending towards outrage. It is hard to tell how much of the revulsion is performative and how much heartfelt, but of course the performative eventually becomes heartfelt. As Bertolt Brecht teaches us, “weeping arises from sorrow, but sorrow also arises from weeping.” And in any case the claim, explicit or implicit, that religion matters is easily perceived as a challenge to those who don’t think it matters, or (more likely) who have never really thought about whether it does, and that is provocative. So look for much more of this kind of response in the years to come.

July 24, 2017

the wisdom of Xún Zǐ

On his blog this morning, Rod Dreher publishes a fascinating letter from a reader in China, who suggests that the work of Xún Zǐ might be a good entryway into Chinese culture.

As it happens, I wrote about Xún Zǐ in my book on original sin. I introduce him after briefly describing the thought of Confucius’s disciple Mencius, who believed that human beings are intrinsically good. Here’s the relevant passage:

But some generations later there came along another great sage, one who also considered himself a faithful disciple of Confucius, who believed that Mencius had gotten it all wrong. His name was Xún Zǐ (310-237 BCE), and it is probably not coincidental that he lived in what has long been called the Warring States Period, when the unifying power of the Zhou dynasty was weakening and the social order crumbling. “The nature of man is evil,” Xún Zǐ wrote; “man’s inborn nature is to seek for gain. If this tendency is followed, strife and rapacity result and deference and compliance disappear. By inborn nature one is envious and hates others. If these tendencies are followed, injury and destruction result and loyalty and faithfulness disappear.” If we feel a pang of compassion or anxiety for a child falling into a well, that is because the life or death of that child does not affect our interests — we do not gain by it. If we knew that we would gain by that child’s death, then not only would we feel no anxiety, we’d give the kid a good push.

But then, someone might say, people often, or at least sometimes, do virtuous deeds. If our nature is evil, where does goodness come from? Xún Zǐ has a ready reply: “I answer that all propriety and righteousness are results of the activity” — this word carries connotations of creativity and artifice — “of sages and not originally produced from man’s nature…. The sages gathered together their ideas and thoughts and became familiar with activity, facts, and principles, and thus produced propriety and righteousness and instituted laws and systems.”

So it would seem that the news from Xún Zǐ is not so bad after all, and not so different from the model of Mencius. Yes, we have an innately evil nature, and come into this world predisposed to greed and strife; however, these tendencies are correctable by the judicious enforcement of well-made laws. The one thing needful is that the sages, who have “gathered together their ideas and thoughts and became familiar with activity, facts, and principles,” are the ones given charge of “laws and systems.” Philosophers rule — or should.

So for Xún Zǐ inborn evil is not so much a curse as an annoyance. Thanks to basic human intelligence, which allows us to see when things aren’t working properly and then take the necessary steps to address the problems, we can find sages (“sage-kings,” he later says) to establish laws and social structures that mitigate evil and build up good. And, not incidentally, Xún Zǐ believes that “Every man in the street possesses the faculty to know [humanity, righteousness, laws, and correct principles] and the capacity to practice them.” Therefore, almost anyone can become a sage; there is no reason why there should ever be a shortage of them.

It’s Xún Zǐ’s matter-of-factness that’s noteworthy here, and really rather attractive. What his philosophy indicates is that one can have a very low view of human nature without being what William James, in his classic Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) calls a “sick soul”: a person tormented by consciousness of sin and helpless in the face of temptation. James spoke of such people as “these children of wrath and cravers of a second birth,” and it was almost axiomatic to him that their personality is antithetical to the confidence and assurance and warmth of what he calls “the religion of healthy-mindedness.” But Xún Zǐ, for all his insistence on the depths of our innate sinfulness, seems the very embodiment of healthy-mindedness. How is this possible? It turns out that what matters more than your view of “human nature” is your view of the relative importance of nature and nurture. For Xún Zǐ human nature is evil, but nature is also easily controllable and eminently improvable. All you have to do is put the philosophers in charge.

July 22, 2017

faith

We’re in a society that thinks entirely about faith, because of our sense of encroachment by Islam, and our defiance against that because we have our own way of being, which of course is based in Christianity. But no one is Christian. So we’re trying to defend an ideal which we can’t really define ourselves, which we almost entirely don’t believe in. And we’re coming up against something which is quite overwhelming and encroaching and dictatorial – some aspects of Islam – and yet at another level, there’s something so beautiful and glorious about it. And so I feel as if this conflict is entirely about faith, and yet the one thing no one wants to talk about is faith.

— Nicola Barker

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