Kurt Vonnegut: Unlikely Apologist

Editor's Note: This essay was originally posted at Christ and Pop Culture. 

The late Kurt Vonnegut inspires loyalty among his readers. He’s the kind of author whose fans devour book after book, reading one after another in rapid succession. Or at least I did. Back in 1997 a coworker recommended Vonnegut to me, specifically Slaughterhouse-Five. Unable to get my hands on that novel, I checked out Deadeye Dick. I was hooked. By the end of the year, I’d read at least ten Vonnegut novels, only whetting my appetite for more.

Vonnegut is often thought of as cynical, edgy, and distasteful, not the most inviting qualities. This reputation is based—I believe—on his role as social satirist and his liberal-leaning political stance. The Vonnegut I love, on the other hand, is found in his letter to an English class at Xavier High School, one of the most popular Letters of Note posts from last year. He’s charming and kind, concerned with the students’ flourishing, aware of the indignities of life (his aging and its effects), yet vanquishing them with humor and grace. Reading that letter reaffirms my enthusiasm for Vonnegut’s work.

By Kurt Vonnegut

At one time I felt a little timid about my affinity for Vonnegut. He was often conceived as tasteless, a charge getting its bite from a cursory reading of the author’s irreverent and iconoclastic titles. Satirists tip sacred cows, and Vonnegut’s no exception. His outspoken agnosticism further reinforced my timidity. Having flirted with both theism and atheism, Vonnegut was willing to commit to neither. He even claims that his first wife’s conversion to Christianity was a key factor in their divorce. Even so, Vonnegut retained interest in scripture and Christianity, with a particular fondness for Christ himself. Closing the letter to Xavier HS “God bless you all!” is, ironically enough, vintage Vonnegut. He also once claimed, tongue in cheek perhaps, his epitaph should read, “The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.”

Vonnegut’s words consistently dance with such delight, even when dealing with death and dearth—the firebombing of Dresden (Slaughterhouse-Five), apocalyptic nightmares (Cat’s Cradle, Galápagos), Nazi war crimes (Mother Night). Yet the most salient response he elicits from readers is laughter. The humor lacing Vonnegut’s letter to the high school class permeates all of his books. However heavy the subject matter, he never loses his light touch; however tragic, he retains the capacity to laugh. Vonnegut’s humor exposes man’s fears and limitations and invites his readers to reject human pretensions.

As he wraps up the opening chapter to Slaughterhouse-Five, for example, he turns the story of Sodom and Gomorrah on its head, using it as a parallel to the destruction of the Nazi-occupied city of Dresden and challenging us to reconsider the source and nature of evil and our obligations to one another:

Those were vile people in both cities, as is well known. The world was better off without them. And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.

Then, poignantly: “I’ve finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun. This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt.” The tension between loss and life, pain and joy, is felt in every line of this and many other of his books. Mingled among these jokes and laments are moving passages honoring human beings. In the aftermath of Dresden’s firebombing, the main character rests in a horse-drawn wagon, appreciating the sun, rest, and full belly he’d been denied while a POW. At this moment, Vonnegut introduces two German obstetricians who care for the horse Billy and his comrades have failed to feed or groom properly. Picturesque scenes like this one recur in Vonnegut’s work, encouraging readers to reject easy cynicism amidst pain and tragedy.

Vonnegut is a paradox like that—a likeable curmudgeon, a pessimistic optimist, an earnest humorist. And it’s his honesty about the paradoxes of life that draws me back to him again and again. It’s an honesty that, despite Vonnegut’s inability to submit personally to the gospel message, brilliantly proclaims its truth. As Christian enthusiasts of popular culture realize, evidence for the truth of the gospel can appear in the unlikeliest of places. In Vonnegut recognition of fundamental gospel truth abounds, reinforcing and renewing for me the wisdom of John 1:1, that in the beginning was the Word, that the logos of Christ underpins reality and speaks to us all. I no longer hide my fondness for Vonnegut and his work; I embrace it. I have come to realize that reading Vonnegut enlivens my understanding and practice of Christianity.

For this reason, I see in Vonnegut a depiction of the world as it is—filled with sorrow, overwhelmed by joy, populated by valuable human beings, capable of being redeemed (if only on a small-scale in his work). I see, too, Vonnegut’s inescapable paradox, a paradox resolved only by Christ: victim-perpetrators seeking salvation and absolution, powerless to save themselves. Such a world resonates with my experience, and Christianity makes best sense of it. The God he denies is the One who enters into the world to save the humans Vonnegut cherishes.

---

Marybeth Davis Baggett lives in Lynchburg, Virginia, and teaches English at Liberty University. Having earned her Ph.D. in English from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Marybeth’s professional interests include literary theory, contemporary American literature, science fiction, and dystopian literature. She also writes and edits for Christ and Pop Culture. Her most recent publication was a chapter called “What Means Utopia to Us? Reconsidering More’s Message,” in Hope and the Longing for Utopia: Futures and Illusions in Theology and the Arts. Marybeth's most recent book is The Morals of the Story: Good News about a Good God, coauthored with her husband, David.

Interstellar and Partiality

Christopher Nolan’s latest film Interstellar tells a sweeping story, speculating on potential widespread destruction and human potential in the face of such prospects. Despite its scope, it also zeroes in on individual concerns, using the protagonist and his family as the vehicle for considering important ethical questions. One such question centers on the tension between particular and more general moral judgments.

In an early critical scene, Cooper, the main character played by Matthew McConaughey, must decide whether or not to embark on an incredibly ambitious space mission. This mission requires leaving his children behind and risking never seeing them again. But his success in this endeavor could allow for survival of the entire human race, which has few options. A scientist involved in the mission encourages his participation, appealing to Cooper’s obligations to mankind: “You can't just think about your family,” Doyle says. “You have to think bigger than that.” Cooper’s response suggests that he recognizes his responsibility involves both the particular and the universal simultaneously: “I'm thinking about my family and millions of other families.”

One could not blame Cooper had he participated in the mission solely out of a desire to ensure his own family’s survival. But as the above quote suggests, he is also motivated by broader concerns. It seems rather unlikely, in light of Cooper’s character, that he would have refrained from the world-saving mission if he did not have his own family to save. Nevertheless, the fact remains that there is something unmistakably particular and concrete about his driving motivation.

And this particularity is emphasized through the touchingly depicted relationship Cooper has with his daughter Murphy. Despite his visceral aversion to leaving her behind, and his arduous effort to part on good terms, he feels compelled and likely obligated to leave. This tension—between duties to his daughter and his duties to the rest of humanity—raises an interesting question: is Cooper morally obligated to complete this mission, a mission for which he is the best qualified? Even if the mission is a success and he returns, it’s likely that his children will be considerably older. Does he have a duty to leave them behind? In light of all that’s at stake, perhaps he does, but if this is so, it shows something interesting. Parental obligations have their limits. Partiality is permissible, but not sacrosanct.

In the ethics of Immanuel Kant, a person is to follow the categorical imperative, which tells us to act only on those principle we can will to become universal laws. And the principles, or maxims, on which we are to act are to be expressible in universal terms, singular references (like to family) having been expunged. Kant, however, departed on this score from a number of other important ethical thinkers, like Aristotle, who thought that moral judgments are always made in the context of family or polis. Kant’s insistence that such particular terms be replaced with universal ones is an interesting claim, but one that leaves many dubious.

Various feminist thinkers, for example, have emphasized that morality is to be understood in more particular terms than Kant would allow. On their view, moral determinations are to be made in the arena of our relationships, as we take into account all the various concrete details and particular specifics of the richly contextualized circumstances in which we find ourselves. We shouldn’t be guided by universal and abstract moral principles bereft of reference to those we know, those with whom we have cultivated lasting relationships.

They have a point, of course, which makes understandable the protagonist in Interstellar being motivated most of all by a desire to save his own family. But he’s also confronted with a truly universal challenge: the planet is slowly dying, and time for rescue is short. The survival of humanity depends on a successful mission. And this crisis, it seems to us, renders unworkable a desire to care only about his own family. Although most of us won’t find ourselves in so dire a situation, we live in a much smaller world than we used to. We’re aware of human needs that go beyond those of our immediate family, close friends, and nearby neighbors. Because of technological advances, we know about innumerable global needs. If there’s a tsunami in Japan, we can watch it in real time. If there are refugees in the Middle East, we can read tweets about them instantaneously. This makes it less permissible to be indifferent to the needs of strangers. Of course, we care most about our close family members and friends, but this doesn’t license indifference to others beyond those confines. In fact, we can become so fixated on privileging and prioritizing our loved ones that that very partiality can become perverse.

Recently, we read an article about how so many college-aged kids of today’s generation are experiencing a hard time growing up and assuming responsibility. One of the reasons for the phenomenon, it was suggested, is overly protective parenting. Parents are supposed to make their children feel loved and special, no doubt, but parents also have to teach their children that disappointments are inevitable; that, though undeniably valuable, they are not more objectively valuable than others; that achievement requires work; and that failure requires ownership of responsibility. In his examination of Kantian ethics, The Moral Gap, John Hare explains the psychological challenges children face upon realizing they are not the guide of their parents’ moral compass: “It can be a startling lesson for a child who has been the apple of his mother’s eye to discover that his mother is not willing to put pressure on his teacher to get him into a tem, or even to make a scene in the shop to get him the last remaining construction set of the kind he wants for Christmas.” Yet as most parents know, protecting fragile psyches from such hard truths to avoid their kids from experiencing pain is to confer them permission to remain children, if not infantile.

Neglecting the responsibility to impart these truths, however sober, to their children is a recipe for disaster and perpetual adolescence. Rather than an expression of love, it’s to privilege the particular to the neglect of broader truths applicable to everyone. One is implicated in an objectionable form of extreme partiality when her judgments fail to be qualified and regulated by universal truths. C. S. Lewis depicts this insight in a brilliant scene from The Great Divorce, where a mother has so fixated on her son that her “love” becomes idolatrous, blinding her to the fullness of reality in which he exists. Sadly, her extreme particularism costs her paradise and is tantamount to choosing darkness over light.

So the feminists have their points to make, but it’s a mistake to swing the pendulum toward partiality to the exclusion of what remains true for the whole of humankind. Close personal relationships are particularly vulnerable to corruption, or even abuse, when they’re not guided by sound moral principles that apply universally. Every evil in this world is the distortion of something primordially good—wives whose selfless service gets cruelly taken for granted, a healthy sense of self that transforms into pride. Partiality is permissible, but not sacrosanct. Particular obligations obtain, but don’t vitiate more general ones.

Photo: "Hubble Helps Find Smallest Known Galaxy Containing a Supermassive Black Hole" by NASA Goodard Space Flight Center. CC License. 

The Husbandry of God

How can I contain this word from the Lord?

His light has pierced my being

And sown in single seed

Both glory and shame.

Content was I

To wed in lowliness

And live in obscurity,

With purity my only dower.

Now, ravished with power,

I flout the conventions of man

To incubate God.

In lowliness how shall I bear it?

In modesty how shall I tell it?

What now shall I become?

But the fruit of God's planting

Is His to harvest.

No gleaner I, like Ruth,

But the field itself,

In whom my Lord lies hid.

                                                --Elton D. Higgs

                                                      (Dec. 8, 1980)

Photo: "Annunciation. Icon by Andrey Rublev. 1430s" by paukrus. CC License. 

Book Excerpt: Fierce Convictions by Dr. Karen Swallow Prior

Here’s a moving excerpt from Dr. Karen Prior’s Fierce Convictions. A vital aspect of moral apologetics involves the power of God to transform lives, but such transformation is not just at the level of the individual. Whole societies have been radically transformed by the faithful witness and changed lives of followers of Christ, which is an evidential consideration for the truth of Christian theism. In this light, enjoy this selection from Dr. Prior’s recent book about Hannah More, and if it sparks your interest, by all means read the whole book!  

In the latter half of the eighteenth century, Christians in the British Empire were just beginning to turn their efforts toward widespread evangelism of unbelievers. In the middle of the 1780s, William Carey, later known as the father of modern missions, was beginning to develop a sense of the Christian’s duty to bring the gospel to all places. Missions had not been an emphasis of the Church of England since its inception during the tumultuous era of the Reformation. But in 1792 Carey would publish his famous missionary manifesto, a pamphlet titled, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens. This work helped form the basis for the kind of global missionary work that continues to this day. As evangelization emerged at this time as a focus for the practice of the Christian faith, those beginning to think about it generally had their sights set on bringing the Gospel to faraway lands like Africa and the West Indies—not the remote villages right there at home. But this was exactly where Hannah More would concentrate her efforts.

As it turns out, there were similarities between the faraway lands and the villages close at hand, particularly in their spiritual and intellectual states. Over the next several years, More and her sister Patty sojourned upon hills and fields, on foot and on horseback, knocked on doors and butted heads with landowners, cajoled, begged, bribed, ate and fed—all in the attempt to bring Christian doctrine to bear in unreached and uncivilized pockets of the world: the villages right outside the doorstep of More’s rural home outside England’s seaport city of Bristol.

The conditions of the villages were deplorable. Shocked at what they found, the sisters recorded their findings in their journals.

The poverty was crippling. The work—for those who had it—among the laboring class in these villages usually was in mining, stone quarrying, glass manufacturing, or farm labor. Earnings usually amounted to a mere shilling a day.[1] The poverty in one village was so great that “a single cup of broth cannot be obtained for there is none to give, if it would save life,” More reported.[2] “I am ashamed of my comforts when I think of their wants,” she said.[3]

The immorality they found in the villages also shocked them. Patty More described Nailsea, a village filled with laborers in the glass-houses and mines, as “abounding in sin and wickedness.”[4] The people lived in tiny cottages outside the glass factory. Inside where the furnaces blazed, “the swearing, eating and drinking of these half-dressed, black-looking beings, gave it a most infernal and horrible appearance.”[5] No wonder the village inhabitants called the place “Little Hell.” In Shipham, efforts to hold morning and evening prayers failed because, Patty More said, “not one could read’ but alas! every one could, and did, swear.”[6] Patty wrote of one hamlet that it was “so wicked and lawless, that they report thieving to have been handed down from father to son for the last forty years.” Where the churchwardens themselves feared to tread, they instead sent “two nervous women, really for the above reason of personal fear.”[7]

The abandonment of these villages by the church had devastating effects. Cheddar had been without a resident clergyman for decades, and the results were dramatic. Two thousand poor villagers lived under the virtual rule of several farmers. More reported after their first gathering of all the parents of the parish before the school’s opening that it was “a sight truly affecting.” They were “poor, miserable, and ignorant,” and More witnessed there “more ignorance than we supposed existed anywhere in England.”[8] The villagers they encountered were as uneducated “as the beasts that perish,” More wrote, “intoxicated every day before dinner [the mid-day meal], and plunged in such vices as make me begin to think London a virtuous place.”[9] In another parish, the clergyman was reported to be in a state of intoxication six times a week and often “prevented from preaching by black eyes, earned by fighting.” More said of the same village, “We saw but one Bible in all the parish, and that was used to prop up a flower-pot.”[10] The village had no resident minister and there was “as much knowledge of Christ in the interior of Africa as … in this wretched, miserable place,” Patty More lamented.[11] Such neglect by the state-assigned clergy was rampant. Rectors who collected tithes but neglected their parishes were all too common. In one village where they began a school, More was outraged that the clergyman had “claimed the tithes for fifty years, but had never cathechised a child or preached a sermon for forty.”[12] In at least one case, the village had no curate and the farmers told the Mores that although they had the right to appeal for one, they did not “for fear their tithes should be raised.”[13] No wonder some of the fiercest opposition More would face would come from some of the clergy. In one village, the laboring men were so feared that “no constable would venture to arrest” one, “lest he should be concealed in one of their pits, and never heard of no more.”[14] The sisters were warned not to even enter the village, “lest our persons should be endangered.”[15]

Many had no knowledge of the Christian faith whatsoever. A girl in one village, “a beautiful young creature about eighteen,” More said, was “deeply afflicted with a dropsy.” Upon hearing the gospel explained to her, the girl exclaimed, “Oh! Jesus Christ will be very unreasonable if He expects anything of me, for I never heard of Him in my life.”[16] Indeed for a young woman among them to get married in possession of “a fair reputation” was, the sisters said, “an event rare indeed in these villages.”[17]

Spirits in the village were so downtrodden that no one could believe that the “two ladies” who had come to inquire about starting a school would actually do so. After a meeting with the villagers in Yatton about opening a school, Patty More reported, the church bells “were set a-ringing, and the whole village seemed all gaiety and pleasure.” When the school opened the following week, one hundred and thirty children came.[18] More wrote to John Newton, “It is grievous to reflect, that while we are sending missionaries to our distant colonies, our own villages are perishing for lack of instruction.”[19]

Yet the More sisters’ attempt to alleviate such oppressive conditions received far from universal acclaim. Rather, the sisters were met with suspicion by both the rich and the poor. The wealthy feared that educated members of the underclass would strive beyond their station, and the poor, understandably, distrusted the motives of the sisters.

The Mores were savvy enough to know that they couldn’t just descend into a village from out of nowhere with grand plans for what would dramatically alter the status quo by changing community conditions for poor and rich alike. The sisters knew they would need local support and cooperation. They began their inquiries concerning Cheddar by chatting with a penniless rabbit catcher who lived nearby. The man, it turned out, was a Quaker and, upon learning what the women hoped to do, “was visibly struck at the prospect of doing good” in the village. “A tear rolling down his rough cheek seemed to announce there was grace in the heart,” Patty More wrote in her journal.

“You will have much difficulty,” the old man warned them, “but let not the enemy tempt you to go back; and God bless your work.”[20]

His words proved prophetic. In establishing not one but over a dozen Sunday Schools, More and her sister encountered much difficulty and many temptations to give up. Yet, they persevered, and their efforts did indeed seem to be blessed by God. Because of the widespread success and influence of her schools, some have credited More with teaching her nation to read.

Notes:

[1] Mendip Annals: Or, A Narrative of the Charitable Labours of Hannah and  Martha More in Their Neighbourhood: Being the Journal of Martha More. London: James Nisbet and Co., 1859. Reprint, 64.

[2] William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More.  2 vols. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1834. I 397.

[3] Roberts I 397.

[4] Mendip Annals 42.

[5] Mendip Annals 62.

[6] Mendip Annals 48.

[7] Mendip Annals 167.

[8] Mendip Annals 22, 23.

[9] Mendip Annals 18.

[10] Mendip Annals 19.

[11] Mendip Annals 15-16.

[12] Mendip Annals 29.

[13] Mendip Annals 18.

[14] Mendip Annals 28.

[15] Mendip Annals 67.

[16] Mendip Annals, 32.

[17] Mendip Annals 84.

[18] Mendip Annals 40.

[19] Qtd. in Mendip Annals 31.

[20] Mendip Annals 14.

Photo: "Hope" by L. Rosssato. CC License. 

The Responsibility of the Christian Writer

As an apologist and academic who works in the field of imaginative and literary apologetics, and as a working poet, I often think about what it means to be a Christian writer. I believe it’s a serious vocation; writing is a gift and a calling, and it can be a form of ministry -- but often not in quite the way that Christians think. My musings on the subject have led me to think that the Christian writer has a threefold responsibility.

First, the Christian writer is called to live so fully in right relationship with the true and living God, the most holy Trinity, that inviting a reader to share the writer’s perspective will mean sharing (in some way) in that living relationship,

Second, the Christian writer is called to trust fully in the power of the Holy Spirit: that God can, does, and will work through literature to reach the hearts and minds of readers. Writing that is aggressive in presenting explicit apologetic argument or doctrinal concepts is often writing that lacks a confident faith in the power of the Spirit. Remember that it was through the pagan Norse myths that God first began to call C.S. Lewis to Him, and that Lewis was at a deep level oriented toward God by the fantasy novel Phantastes, which, although written by a devout Christian, lacks any overt Christian or even theistic elements whatsoever. Readers can, and do, recognize Christian truth that’s presented subtly; they can be nourished, challenged, and drawn deeper by stories and poetry that have a gleam of truth, that awaken longing, that hint at the mysteries of our faith. Explanation is not always necessary; sometimes exploration is best.

Third, on the basis of that deep trust, the Christian writer is called to write to the glory of God, creating beauty and seeking to express truth at a deep level, so that the work becomes a locus of potential encounter with the living God not through any explicit maneuverings on the author’s part, but through pointing to the truth that is at the core of all truths: the one true and living God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

As apologists, evangelists, teachers, preachers, and pastors, we can make literature an important part of our ministry work. By celebrating art and literature, as well as reason and arguments, we honor the God who is both Truth and Beauty. By offering multiple ways to approach and encounter the living God, we respect the uniqueness of each human being made in God’s image.

What the writer leaves implicit, teachers, parents, and apologists can tease out and make explicit in response to questions. When the poet helps the reader recover clear vision, we can show how to live in the light of the insights gained. And when the storyteller creates a longing for more than this world can offer, we can point toward the One who alone can satisfy all longing.

Photo: "Written in  Gold" by Anonymous. CC License. 

Looking Back at the Mount

Looking Back at the Mount

(II Pet 1:16-18; Matt. 17:1-9)

Stunned we stood upon the Mount,

As echoes of Heaven's Voice

Resounded in our ears.

This Man Who shared the stage

With God's great voices of the past

Was not merely one of three,

As it appeared to me,

But One Alone, the Father's Son,

More than Law and Prophets both.

How little I understood

The words that God had made me say

When the Master asked us who we thought He was;

For before my words were cold,

I rebuked Him

For walking toward the cross

That was His goal

As sole, obedient Son—

The only One Who could embrace

Such pain for all of us.

Only later did I know

What had to be endured

Before the Glory of the Mount

Could be told to all the world.

Who would have believed

That Heaven's Glory could stoop so low,

Or love so much?

                                                                  Elton D. Higgs

                                                                  Sept. 14, 2002

Photo: "CHURCH OF TRANSFIGURATION - MOSAIC" by IsraelTourism. CC License. 

“You Must Change Your Life”: An Apologetic of Conversion in Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”

“Archaic Torso of Apollo”

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.

Rainer Maria Rilke, 1908

Turn of the twentieth-century poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s verse often exists on the margins of both modernist abstraction--that strained reach for meaning in the seemingly meaningless material world--and the spirituality of Christian theism. Infused with the transcendent, poems like “The Panther” and “The Swan” and “Autumn,” to name a very few, present the reader with the converted quotidian, a paradoxical reality that leads the reader through the world-that-is into the world-beyond. This poetic world-beyond’s laws are constituted by beauty, truth, and the morally good. And without the presence of a spiritual reality within and beyond their empirical worlds, Rilke’s poems lose a vitally important interpretive key, namely, artistically-derived, theologically-animated morality.

The suffusion of artistically-generative morality--an absolute morality produced by art that speaks authoritatively into the moral life of the partaker--is at the heart of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” Here, through the marbled chest of ancient deity, Rilke exhibits a broken statue of Apollo, god of music, poetry, art, and religious oracle. The statue sits broken, an amputee of decaying time. The poem begins in a sort of agnosticism, with onlookers refusing the god’s glorious head. The fruitful life of Apollo’s eyes is cut off, and the old god sits in blind decapitation.

And yet, the poem declares, the dismembered god’s power is but dimmed, not diminished. The headless Apollo’s is now a lamp turned low, but a lamp all the same. To see the statue--and by extension, to read the poem--is to bask in the dimmed divinity of broken beauty. The quadriplegic torso presents a paradigm of an emptied beauty that imposes a transformative power on the expectations of viewer. If, Rilke intimates, the statue were whole, if it kept head and arms and legs, then observers would miss the dazzling curved breast, the grinning placid hips, and its thighs like inroads to the god’s life giving center. It’s not the god himself that need be seen, but the beauty housed within his now shattered frame. The reader now finds himself before an incarnation. The self and the god’s otherness meet in an encounter of artistic beauty and mortal life.

The second stanza’s “otherwise,” refrained in the third, calls our attention back to what is, not to what is not. What faces the onlooker is the “translucent cascade of the shoulders” wildly glistening from borders that “burst like a star.” Here art, and theology, and morality collide in fragmented form of broken marble an apologetic emerges from the incarnation of the divine. In the artistically inanimate, Rilke gives us a form for animate morality. The amputation of the god’s members paradoxically proves the regeneration of the onlooker, and an omniscient affinity bursts forth in the star of moral awareness. Here, before the marbled god, you are seen and known and revealed. It is not the statue that stands exposed, but you. It’s not the broken bust being watched, but your very morality. And the apologetic conclusion of the matter, the poet’s argument from the torso’s beauty, is that “you must change your life.”

Rilke reminds us of what other writers have testified to: that when truly known, artistic truth and beauty birth the good. Irish writer Iris Murdoch explored the connection between art and morality, concluding along with Rilke, that, “Art and morality are, with certain provisos . . . one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.” So in calling readers out of themselves and into a state of awful love of the beautiful, “Archaic Torso of Apollo” calls us into moral change. One can’t stand in the gleam of beauty long before seeing the good.

Photo: "Apollo" by N. Thompson. CC License

Shadows

Shadows lengthen, deepen, merge.

Darkness is all, and I am there.

No thought of shadows when

The sun is full, for then

They merely accent the brightness.

When all is shadow, love may thrive,

Though hope be dim; when all is bright,

Shallow bliss holds sway.

Even the Arctic is both night and day.

Darkness gives more to defining light

Than light to the understanding of dark.

I will see the shadow grow,

And dwell in it even, to know

That light is its own verity,

And darkness but an island in its midst.

                              --Elton D. Higgs

                                (Dec. 31, 1974)

Photo: "Shadow" by E. Sandstad. CC License. 

Story and Truth

Holly Ordway is Professor of English and Director of the MA in Cultural Apologetics at Houston Baptist University, and the author of Not God’s Type: An Atheist Academic Lays Down Her Arms (Ignatius Press, 2014). She holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst; her academic work focuses on imagination in apologetics, with special attention to the writings of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams.

Why Story Matters

We are all storytellers.

Our lives have a beginning, a middle, and – one day – an end. Birth announcements connect the new baby with the lives of the parents; later, graduation, wedding, and retirement announcements flag important plot points; the obituary will be a final summing-up.

Couples recount the story of how they met and fell in love. Travelers regale us with the stories of their adventures. Frustrating events become good stories when the sting has passed.

We need story. Imagine encountering a friend who seems distraught. Our first question will likely be “What happened?” We know intuitively that we must know something of the narrative to understand and sympathize properly. It’s the same when we encounter a joyful friend: we want to be drawn into the story, to be able to rejoice!

We understand our lives in terms of story, and thus story can help us understand our lives.

Stories are necessary for presenting truth in other contexts as well. In a court of law, we don’t just have a set of facts, we have the testimony of witnesses, individual stories about motives and events that make part of the larger narrative of “What really happened?” In job interviews, every candidate has a narrative of past jobs and experience, a story that is more than just items on a resume, but includes what that person has learned from those experiences.

Yet, in our increasingly post-Christian culture, the idea of story has become divorced from the idea of truth. Even though we live our lives in a context where true stories are vitally important, the connection of story with objective truth is obscured at best, obliterated at worst.

In the secular world, story is often treated as morally insignificant. Movies, books, television, and video games are all built around narrative - that's what makes them powerful - but the idea that these forms of story be challenged as to their truth seems odd at best. “It’s just a story, just a game, it’s not real” - these are the stock responses to any who express concern about what falsehoods or bad influences might be presented in entertainment media.

Paradoxically, however, our culture encourages us to consider own stories about morality and the meaning of our lives to be authoritative. Our modern culture encourages a cafeteria spirituality, in which we pick and choose our values, with personal preference having ultimate authority. “This is what’s true for me. It might not be true for you, but it is for me.” It’s impossible to argue with, and isn't that the point? Splendidly free from anything that might challenge our carefully constructed citadels of individual truth, we carry on untroubled by any suggestion that self-sacrifice rather than self-indulgence is called for.

Sadly, Christians have contributed to the marginalizing of story as a means of telling truth. Although the Scriptures are largely composed of story - narrative and poetry - many Christians, especially Protestants, view story with suspicion, as a form of lying, and have thus impovershed their imaginative lives. A few crucial figures over the past century have kept the connection between story and truth alive for Christians: most notably the Protestant George MacDonald, the Anglican C.S. Lewis, and the Catholic J.R.R. Tolkien and G.K. Chesterton. Their work, especially that of Lewis and Chesterton, has had a profound effect on many individuals, and is becoming more and more on the forefront of apologetics - the defense of the faith - and evangelization today. We need to carry on that good work, as a way of bringing the light of Christ to a culture in desperate need.

Story, Adrift

In order to understand what has happened to story as a mode of telling truth, and how we can reclaim story, we first need to consider what has happened to the Western worldview over the past few centuries.

In a slow process that began with the Enlightenment and has continued to the present day, the human faculties of reason and imagination have been separated, to the detriment of both.

On the one hand, reason has been given free rein, and the pursuit of knowledge using our God-given intellect has become scientism and materialism, the idea that only those things that can be empirically measured and logically figured out can be considered “true” or “real.” In the world of science, truth is held to be only that which is measurable and testable. Intangible things like emotions and spiritual truths are decidedly second-class citizens. After all, souls can’t be detected with an MRI, and love can’t be weighed and measured!

This adulation of reason without the counterbalance of imagination leads to an inevitable diminishment of the vision of what it means to be human. Our culture is showing many signs of this part of the reason / imagination divide. For instance, in a culture that embraces “scientific” ways of thinking, it becomes difficult to justify spending any extra time or money in promoting the arts, or making buildings beautiful. In older cities like Boston or Philadelphia, the public buildings from the 18th or 19th centuries – the town hall, the courthouse, the banks – have elegant, inspiring architecture. Contrast that to your local 20th century Department of Motor Vehicles.

More seriously, the fact that the human soul cannot be weighed, measured, or detected with scientific instruments has led to a creeping tendency to define human beings by what they can do, not by their innate dignity as men and women made in the image of God. The elderly and disabled, who cannot define themselves in terms of what they can accomplish, can very easily be considered a burden on society.

Narrowing the definition of truth to what reason alone can determine makes it possible for people to design functional buildings that depress the soul, and for people to talk about the suitability of ending one’s life simply because one is old and tired. With the use of reason alone, it is too easy to make categorical distinctions; a person can be a statistic, not recognized as one of the human beings that the scientist or bureaucrat interacts with on a daily basis. It is Imagination that would reveal the truth: the true connection between the imago Dei, the image of God in human beings, and each individual, unique human being.

Yet in the broader culture, unchecked imagination goes its own route to error. Ungrounded and undisciplined, a de-Christianized imagination has not led to more beauty, but to less. When less is left to the imagination, storytelling becomes shallow and limited. In order to get some sort of response, art, literature, music, and film move toward  the breaking of standards for the sake of destruction, and the rejection of limits of any kind.

Sexuality and violence, ever more of it, and ever more corrosive, become the norm for entertainment. In movies, we have gone from Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Psycho to the gore-fest of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with the same trend appearing in books. The popular young-adult series The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, is full of graphic depictions of violent injuries and gruesome death. Peter Jackson’s film version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit adds violence at every turn.

The high level of sexuality in books and film, including books for younger readers, has become so much the norm that one of the things that makes the Harry Potter series distinctive is its refreshing lack of explicit sexuality and its depiction of chaste dating behavior – in other words, J.K. Rowling is notable for holding to standards that were normal up to a few decades ago.

Criticism of these trends is muzzled, however, because all of these excesses are claimed to be for the sake of art or fun, with no “meaning” behind them whatsoever. “It’s just a book” or “It’s just a movie” are the most common retorts to any expressed concern about the ideas and behavior being presented (and implicitly promoted) in the media.

We need to recover the connection between imagination and truth. Without the recognition that our values are objectively grounded in the living God, and that our flourishing as whole human beings depends on a right relationship with Him, the imaginative impulse will lead us to destruction as surely as unchecked reason.

But we are all storytellers, and the human need for story pops up wherever we look, even where we would not expect to find Story at all. In the realm of unchecked reason, skeptics tell just-so stories to explain every aspect of our lives in terms of biology and evolution. In the realm of unchecked imagination, celebrity culture allows people to participate in drama, and to have heroes and villains (if only for a fleeting moment). Even when we’re completely wrong about the way the world works, with our lives completely out of touch with the living God, we are drawn to narrative, imagery, characters – story. Such is the power of storytelling.

Story, when it is rightly used in the service of truth, can help connect reason and imagination into a healthy, God-focused whole.

A Dangerous Dead End

Redeeming story for the cause of truth means more than just slapping a Christian label on the idea of storytelling. Portions of the Christian church – most notably those that describe themselves as the Emerging or Emergent Church movement – have wholeheartedly affirmed a postmodern understanding of story. In this view, Christians have a wonderful story, one that brings meaning and joy and purpose to those who accept it, but it is a story that makes no claims, or sharply limited claims, about objective reality and objective truth.

The Emergent movement has been reacting against extremes in both the secular and Christian world. On one hand, the Emergents are rightly reacting against the harsh extreme of scientism, which has no room for human spiritual needs. On the other, they are also reacting against the extreme of cold literalism in the church, which strips Scripture of its beauty and reduces our relationship with the living God to a set of detailed doctrinal principles to affirm. The postmodern reaction against these extremes is not surprising, and indeed in many ways the postmodern Christians serve as a canary in the coal mine: the reason / imagination split can't be ignored as something in secular culture alone.

The postmodern view of story can be very appealing at first, but it fails because it does not firmly connect story to truth. If our narratives are generated and sustained by our communities, eventually differences in beliefs will fragment those communities down to the individual: my truth, my story. Either we will be trapped in the particular story we happen to be in, or we will shop around for a story we like better. Ultimately the postmodern Christian view of story disintegrates, because it acknowledges no transcendent Author of the story, and offers no way to determine if a given story is true.

Such a view is deadly, for it saps all the urgency to find the truth about spiritual matters. If Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life only for those who find that particular faith flavor appealing, then Buddhism or transcendental meditation or indulging in unlimited sex is equally valid for those who prefer those alternatives. Why pay attention to the Gospel if it is just one story among many?

Even in ordinary life, story without truth fails to satisfy. When I hear a story of my friend's life, I expect it to be true, that is, corresponding to the way things actually are. When I read a poem, I expect it to show me something true about the world, to illuminate some aspect of my experiences, or help me appreciate real beauty better. When I read a novel, I expect it to make sense, for it to add to my enjoyment of the world, or help me understand things better, even if those things are sad or terrible (since we live in a fallen world, much of what is true is rather painful to hear). Even a story read for pure escapism needs to have some connection to truth in character, setting, or plot (not necessarily all three!). Surrealist fiction does not make for good beach reading; adventure and romance stories do, because they connect with things that we do recognize as true, namely that people can have adventures and do fall in love.

On a day to day basis, we flourish when the stories we tell about ourselves and the world, including our inner narratives, are true. The self-esteem movement attempted to help children live better, happier lives by telling them stories about their own greatness. But such stories were fabricated: kids were praised even when there were no objective grounds for praise. As a result, we have an entire generation of young people who have been trained in narcissism and brought up to believe that what matters is how they feel - the story they tell about themselves - not their actual accomplishments or character.

Simply telling oneself a new story is appealing. Americans are constantly reinventing themselves. It is good to have the freedom to make a course correction in life, but it is burdensome to think that one’s identity is one’s own responsibility. Our culture produces tremendous pressure to define oneself according to other stories: workplace success, or physical beauty, or social conformity. These are powerful alternate stories, and a Christian "story" that is simply one more feel-good option among many does not stand up as a viable alternative.

We must reclaim and redeem story, for the Church and for the world to which we minister in the name of Christ. If imagination gives us story without truth, and reason gives us truth without story, what we need is Christ who is Truth in story, the living Word.

The Christian Story

Christians are the only ones who can truly reclaim story. We do not offer just one more story, but the true story that is grounded in reality.

Reason and imagination are not separate, but are two sides of the same coin – two aspects of being made in the image of the Creator God. In Holy Scripture, we see no such false division between reason and imagination.

Consider Genesis: we can make propositional statements about the truths expressed in Genesis, but the way in which  God chose to reveal these truths is in narrative. Out of nothing, God created everything that is, and He gives us a story about it: then, and then, and next, and then. Genesis is the truth behind every “once upon a time,” the reason that we thrill to a story. We make, we create, because of who God is. God Himself is the ultimate Maker, the ultimate creative artist, whose creative stamp is impressed on us.

Holy Scripture is largely composed of poetry, narrative, parables. It is filled with beautiful imagery and communicates profound truth through metaphors: consider the description of the New Jerusalem, in Revelation, or the gentle imagery of Jesus as the Shepherd.

And, pre-eminently, the Word became flesh came and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. We who follow Christ do not just know about him (with our reason), though our reason tells us many true things about him, such as the fact of his Resurrection, and the nature of his claim to be our only Lord and Savior. We also know him, directly and experientially, most deeply in the Eucharist. Such an experience cannot be fully conveyed through words, but only experienced, but the faculty of imagination helps in the process. Imagination opens the doors of our hearts, so that the Spirit may more fully enter in.

The beauty of the true Christian story is that it works at every point on the scale - as you would expect from a story that corresponds with truth.

The Christian story accounts for creation, for why there is something rather than nothing.

The Christian story accounts for the existence and nature of human beings, of rationality, of thought and language, logic and art.

The Christian story means that each of us has an absolutely secure part in the great Story, as adopted children of God the Father, an adopted brothers and sisters of God the Son, and as temples of God the Holy Spirit.

Reclaiming Story for Christ

For the Christian, the created world, which God made and called good, is full of beauty that points toward the living God. We do not create the meaning in the world, but rather discover it. We each have our own story, but it has meaning because it is part of a grand narrative that has an Author.

As Christians, we have the best story of all: the fairy tale to cap all fairy tales, the epic to top all epics, the romance of all romances, the bitterest of tragedies and the most joyful of happy endings – we have the story of a Creator God who so loved the world that He sent His only-begotten Son to die on a cross to save us. It is the best story of all – utterly captivating, thrilling, and satisfying – and also absolutely, completely true.

We need to reclaim story from those who would separate story from truth, making the one into meaningless reverie and the other into sterile ‘facts.’ It is one of the great lies of the Enemy in this day and age that storytelling is nothing but entertainment. Oh, no. The power of story is the power to tell the truth in ways that reach deep into both heart and mind; to draw the reader into the experience of knowing truth.

The account of God’s plan for the redemption of the heavens and the earth, our glorious future in the new creation, is often shrugged off by skeptics as just a story. Such a dismissal leaves us, however, with an intriguing opening. Indeed, we can say, the Christian story does sound like a fairy tale, but we have it reversed: in fact, it is fairy tales that sound like the Christian story.

Reading Redemptively

We need to recover the ability to read redemptively: to find and cultivate truth and beauty in the stories we read, watch, and share. Fiction, fantasy, poetry – too often we either disregard the power of storytelling or fear it as deception, but for human beings made in the image of the Creator God, storytelling is a profound means by which the Spirit can move and transform us.

Given that I have been talking about story, it may surprise readers to realize that most of the essays that follow focus on poetry. There is no mistake! Poetry offers us story just as much as novels do, though sometimes in different ways or in smaller, tantalizing glimpses. Above all, good poetry can help us to connect to the larger story that is our God’s work in the world. If we can read rightly, treasures await.

How can we read redemptively? The process includes recovering an understanding of how:

Literature can both reveal and reinforce worldview (one’s basic understanding of how the world works).

Imagery and symbols both communicate truth and deepen its impact on the heart and mind.

Immersion in the right kind of literary experience can refresh and renew our vision, enabling us to see the world in the light of Christ.

Reading redemptively will help us in discipleship, providing more ways in which we can grow in heart and mind in our relationship with Christ.

Photo: "old book" by T. Carvalho. CC License. 

Review of A Beautiful Mind

Marybeth and I sat down last night after visiting with my mom in rehab and watched A Beautiful Mind again. I’d seen it once before, having read the book on which the movie was based by Sylvia Nasar, a challenging but rewarding read. Marybeth had seen the movie three times already. We both wanted to watch it again, and we were glad we did. What a truly remarkable movie. We knew it was, but MB and I were both struck anew by just how remarkable it was this time around. Not only the acting—Jennifer Connelly is great and Russell Crowe simply outstanding—but the direction, the music, the choreography, the writing; every part of the movie is top notch. Definitely worth watching more than once.

I won’t get into it much here, but the movie provides ample fodder for a range of fascinating and fundamental philosophical questions: What is real? What is knowledge? But my thoughts here will dwell less on philosophy than the humanness of the film. The Nash character—a real-life mathematician who suffered from severe mental illness yet who still managed ground-breaking achievements in game theory and differential geometry, enough to earn a Nobel Prize—begins as a socially awkward misanthrope. His brusqueness and bluntness tend to be off-putting to those around him, who he acknowledges don’t care for him much. As his mental illness grows, he retreats increasingly into his own delusional world, interacting with a range of characters we eventually discover only he can see. His breakdown brings to a halt his work and puts a horrible strain on his marriage.

Deliverance comes not by getting healed of the disease but by a prodigious effort of cognitive discipline, a “diet of the mind” that refrains from indulging certain appetites. It’s a long road back, with plenty of bumps to overcome, humiliations to endure, indignities to suffer, and a particularly intractable thorn in his flesh all the while. Helping sustain his resolve is the unconditional commitment and love of his wife, whose suffering may have been nearly as intense as his; but her faithfulness and fidelity provide a model of what a marital commitment through the worst of times might look like. The Connelly-played wife admits at one point to a friend her frustration, her guilt at considering leaving, her rage at John and even God; but despite it all, she sticks with him and sees him through, even at the risk of her own safety.

The abstruse and analytic Nash’s proposal to her, before his schizophrenia had become obvious, is couched in the most dispassionate and empirical of terms—a request for measurable confirmation of her long-term commitment and the like. She jokingly responds about her need to recalibrate her girlish, romantic expectations, but accepts his proposal and loves him despite what were already his obvious idiosyncrasies and lack of social graces. It is this image of the man she married, warts and all, that sustains her commitment when his condition changes into something barely recognizable, a vision she said that transformed both him and her. That particular speech is just one of a plethora of powerful moments in the film featuring writing that is, well, beautiful.

Early on, too, Nash thinks of relationships with those of the opposite sex mainly in terms of an exchange of bodily fluids. All the Platonic pleasantries and niceties are but a necessary prerequisite to the real thing. Usually his forthrightness on this score is effective at eliciting smacks from women, but in the case of the woman who married him, she could see something else about him; and her love for him is as authentic as it proves transformative.

As a young man Nash is competitive, with a desire to stand out, be remembered, and make a difference. His attitude toward women is impersonal and dehumanizing; his mentality about teaching is that it is nothing but a waste of his time. People are distractions or means to ends or competitors to overcome. Despite his prodigious mathematical abilities, clearly his humanity needs tweaking, and Ron Howard’s direction and the powerful screenplay succeed in showing how the tragedies and pain to ensue, more than can hardly be imagined, ultimately prove effectual in making the great mathematician into a great person.

After battling his demons and disciplining his mind, Nash not only learns to cope. He begins to teach again, this time with a genuine affection for his students and a newfound sense of the importance of the vocation. (As a student he hadn’t even attended classes himself, a sign among other things of his insularity and isolation.) After earning the accolades he’d always yearned for by being granted the Nobel Prize for his work on equilibrium (not what most mathematicians insist was his considerably more impressive work on manifolds), he has stopped thinking in terms of one-upmanship or winning. He is moved to appreciate unexpected honors rather than demanding them as what he deserves. He grows to appreciate his colleagues as friends and collaborators rather than competitors. Rather than viewing women merely as sexual objects, he acquires a much deeper and more authentic understanding of relationships. In his acceptance speech of the Nobel, he celebrates the undying love of his wife as more important than numbers and reasons and the reason he’s there.

Even his understanding of mathematics seems to take on a more human touch near the end of the story. He’s overheard telling students that, contrary to what others may tell them, mathematics is art. Early in the film, his girlfriend (later his wife) admitted to being an artist herself. Her influence on him is profound, even in this. Throughout the process of his painful healing, numerous times he can be seen holding in his hand the handkerchief that she had given him on that early date, and again he extricates it from his pocket after his final speech and gives her a wave with it. The movie is a success story against all odds, a gripping narrative of mental illness, the story of a prodigy and tortured genius, but ultimately it’s a love story, and testimony of love’s power to overcome and to endure.

“Living Life All the Way Up”: Hemingway’s Moral Apologetic from Absence

Within the pages of a literary text lies a cosmos, each chapter hosting a world citizened by people of faith and doubt. Here, authorial intention, cultural representation, imagination, characterization, and realism constellate in textual code and the symbol, in diction and device, in tropes of verisimilitude, and in themes of selfhood and otherness to generate a moral worldview. Twentieth-century modernist literature—to which I’m drawn and in which I specialize—marks both a seismic shift in worldviews as well as a kaleidoscope of worldview itself. In modernism, there are many moral paradigms, but common to them all is the centrality of the self. Among Modernism’s writers, Ernest Hemingway stands as one of the movement’s most exemplary figures, an author unparalleled in illustrating the absence of the spiritually other as the heart of the self’s plight. Hemingway’s works demonstrate the mores of modernism, those themes of self-isolation, spiritual laceration, and nihilistic morality that defined a “lost generation,” as Gertrude Stein labeled it. In Hemingway’s works, humanity struggles to find and recover itself from those emotionally fragmented relationships that populate a bleak existential reality.

As an interpreter of literature whose lens is utterly Christian, I find Hemingway’s writing a complexly fascinating representation of an unredeemed reality, a worldview that betrays its need for the very divine presence it resists. I’m stricken by Hemingway’s recreation of a refractory human condition defined by a morality that reaches for transcendent spiritual meaning with a closed fist. Yet, reach it does. While Hemingway’s fictive worlds are populated with the emotionally wounded, the physically derelict, and the spiritually lost, they promote a resistance to Christian truth that yet resonates with a profoundly apologetic acknowledgement of that truth’s reality. Here, I’ll take a brief glance at Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises to draw out that veiled apologetic.

This novel, Hemingway’s earliest and whose title is taken from Ecclesiastes 1:5, captures humanity’s perennial moral dilemma: man’s attempt to find purpose and meaning in a world seemingly bereft of absolute truth but full of fractured communities. The Sun Also Rises has no God to speak of—at least not an active, immanent, or apparent one—nor any other authority placed above man except that which derives from man. Yet it is precisely an absence of God that haunts the novel, creating a modernist apologetic of misplaced desire for greater life meaning. True to its titular source, The Sun Also Rises decries human longing without divine fulfillment. The novel’s world is that of the self in painful void of the theologically other. The reader sees no God, though feels the need for His presence.

Jake Barnes, the first-person narrator of the story, is written as a wounded individual—physically, emotionally, relationally, and spiritually—whose experience in the Great War has left him physically marred and desexualized. Jake loves Brett (Lady Ashley), who feigns reciprocated love for Jake but resists giving herself to him because of his sexual impotence, even refusing to live with him due to fear of her own infidelity. Both Jake and Brett are part of a larger social circle of morally flawed characters, caught in lives of debauchery. After a series of promiscuous affairs, Brett rejects Jake for another suitor, leaving him in a state of dejection. Through such a mercurial myriad of relational instabilities, the reader follows Jake, the novel’s self-referential “I,” as he approaches life significance with a mercenary understanding that moral meaning was a tradable commodity bought and sold in the market of experience. No higher good matters in Hemingway’s modernist morality. All one can do in life is live it, and there is no room for meaning beyond existence and experience.

In a particularly telling scene, Jake, while in an insomniac state, expresses his view of moral dealings with others as “[n]o idea of retribution or punishment. Just exchange of values.” He continues,

You gave up something and got something else. Or worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. . . . Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what is was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it.

Jake’s practical existentialism exchanges any kind of spiritually underpinned or absolutist morality for a rather bleak pragmatism. Jake cares not for meaning but for social functionality. This passage immediately follows Jake’s bitter response to his relational despairs with Brett Ashley. Jakes says, “To hell with women, anyway. To hell with you, Brett Ashley.” Here Jake operates along the lines of his own isolation in which his relational distanced proximity to others determines, in part, his estimation of self-worth and morality.

In Jake’s melancholic world of self-enclosed morality—a virtual display of vanities upon vanities—beliefs do not shape man’s moral makeup. Instead, self-protection reigns. If Jake cannot have Brett, then he will damn her. And while the novel features sparse solitary acts of “rightness,” as in Jake’s compensating the prostitute for her wasted evening, each gesture proves to be of no real consequence—yet another dimension of the novel’s display of meaninglessness.

For Hemingway, moral positioning takes place in relation to the community, or lack of, as opposed to God or a higher authority. Pre-modern models of authority would have certainly shown the importance of understanding life in relation to transcendent meaning rather than an inward-turned existentialism as seen in The Sun Also Rises. Buried within the self, however, and twisted up with that inward turn rests a cautionary tale of life without the sacred. As a Hemingway-esque sun of moral emptiness rises on the novel’s broken characters, an apologetic from the absence of God appears. Modernist morality shores the fragments of wounded morality against the ruins of the human condition, revealing and arguing for the need for divine presence.

Absent any divine presence, characters futilely search for moral meaning in a murky society of modernist selves, a world of wounded egos in relationship with other wounded egos. It’s remarkable how often Hemingway’s common theme of broken relationships opens up into a consideration, albeit cynical, of existential virtue with an ever-present realization that life can, indeed, be wasted. Like many other early- to mid-twentieth-century modernist authors who lived through and wrote intently about death, Hemingway draws on this imagery to communicate the ecclesiastical futility of life, bringing this message to the forefront of the novel as death looms over the characters.

Jake is a wounded veteran who has seen and nearly experienced death. Romero, a matador, exemplifies death by characterization and vocation and embodies modern man’s nearness to death. Hemingway uses this character to overemphasize death, drawing on the metaphor of bullfighting to demonstrate its vitality and its symbolic significance of fully living life. “Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters,” Jake says. Cohn, another example of modernist morality, is consistently portrayed as lifeless throughout the story: from his passive role in relationships, “I rather liked him and evidently she led him quite a life,” to his losing fight with Romero that essentially killed whatever spirit that remained in Cohn. The novel’s worldview of self-centered morality includes its characters’ perpetuating dismal fates, symbolic deaths, and self-destruction.

Cohn is a most interesting example of this bleak perpetuation. A product of both tradition and severe codependence on women with much stronger personalities than his own, Cohn admits what he sees as his existential problem to Jake, “I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.” Cohn seeks adventure in traveling to foreign places in hopes to find meaning and fulfillment, to which Jake replies, “You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.” Cohn is the quintessential modern man, lacking meaning and purpose in his world, and vainly searching for a “lived life.”

Highly impressionable, Cohn’s experiential and emotional capacity depends on his falsely constructed ideas of reality, primarily derived from books and the women who have ruled him. Jake observes, “Several women had put themselves out to be nice to him [Cohn], and his horizons had all shifted.” Jake even attributes to the writing of Mencken Cohn’s inability to enjoy Paris. Cohn’s easily swayed romantic notions of women and wandering are partly pursuits of “purification,” as Hemingway writes it. By fleeing to new places and experiencing new dynamics of community, Cohn seeks a kind of self-cleansing. Man’s search for higher meaning takes a thematic turn, when Jake warns Cohn to not seek new geographic places as a way to finding one’s meaning in life. In a conversation between the two about travel from France to Spain, Jake depicts France as a corrupt country, a place where value is determined by money, “Everything is on such a clear financial basis in France. . . . If you want people to like you you have only to spend a little money.” Jake contrasts this with Spain, where financial value and exchange are minimized in light of the celebratory mode of carefree living. In Spain, “[e]verything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences. It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta.” Jake and his expatriate community move spatially in attempts to move meaningfully. In the end, their attempts to find meaning by experience and adventure are tainted by the presence of their “selves.” The idea that Jake initially set up of not getting away from self by going to different places still holds up; no matter where they go, there they are. The self is omnipresent.

What ties Cohn to Hemingway’s modernist presentation of morality is the character’s lack of perception concerning what is valuable and true. Cohn’s is a blind romantic sentimentality. Indeed, Cohn’s moral imperceptibility lends itself to the modern mold of meaning without an absolute point of reference, a fixed standard beyond the self. That self, ever sprawling out in empty relationships, simultaneously closes back in on itself in condemnation (cf. Charles Williams’s Descent into Hell). If there is one word spoken by the characters in The Sun Also Rises that define human relationships, it is the word “hell.” For Hemingway, “hell” becomes an anti-theology, both denying the possibility of and affirming a pitiful desire for a transcendent adverse reality. Jake Barnes, Cohn, Romero, Lady Brett—indeed, all of the novel’s characters—cast their lives and the lives of those around them into a damned state. Brett describes her love for Jake as “hell on earth.” Jake wishes women, Brett specifically, to go to hell. Another character, Bill Gorton says, “road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs.” Robert Cohn tells Mike Campbell to go to hell in a fit of jealousy and then says he feels “like hell, naturally.” Jake and Bill say of Cohn, “Oh, to hell with him! He spends a lot of time there. I want him stay there.” Brett tells Jake, “I feel like hell” as she confesses her love for Romero the matador. In a passage where Cohn hits Jake, “hell” is used six times, four of which in the form “go to hell.” After an apology to Jake, Cohn confesses, “I’ve been through hell. . . . It’s been simply hell.” When Cohn leaves Paris, Jake says, “[T]o hell with Cohn,” but goes on to say repeatedly, “I feel like hell.” Finally, at the novel’s end, in a final conversation between Brett and Jake, Brett exclaims, “I’ve had such a hell of a time.”

The great irony of modern morality is that the hellish, unfulfilling feast of relationships proves to be precisely the greatest desire of the modern man. Hell, a term used often in the context of community, spreads through the “herd” of wounded society. In a moment in the novel when Jake talks about steers and the vulnerability of a lone steer, Bill promptly exclaims to Mike, “Don’t you ever detach me from the herd.” Morality in modernism centers, if it can indeed truly be centered, on the herd, the community of the flawed. As impossible as it may be for Hemingway’s heroes to relate to one another in a healthy and fulfilling fashion, it is even more impossible for them to live without relating to one another. There is no room for true individualism in Hemingway’s moral prescription. The novel denies ultimate fulfillment of meaning and truth but assumes man’s innate desire for them through relationship. If higher life meaning exists, it must be sought, though vainly, in the herd.

Characters in The Sun Also Rises define themselves by their relationship to the herd, but as the herd is a mere extension of the self—the reflexive modernist “I”—engagement in the socio-relational ultimately terminates in the self. The frustrated attempt to move beyond the self is where the novel’s apologetic lies. The novel readily raises questions of God and His role in life meaning, indefinitely suspending those questions in its characters’ desire for, but disbelief in, the transcendent. In the closing dialogue between Jake and Brett, she says, “You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch. . . . It’s sort of what we have instead of God.” To which Jake replies, “Some people have God. . . . Quite a lot.”

The tumultuous love affair between Jake and Brett concludes with them sitting in a cab together. While “God” has been convincingly displaced in the novel, leaving only the self and other selves to regulate morality, His unaccepted presence haunts the world of the text. In fact, a rare acknowledgement of God hosts one of the novel’s most honestly intimate moments: “We sat close against each other. I put my arm around her and she rested against me comfortably. . . . ‘Oh, Jake,’ Brett said, ‘we could have had such a damned good time together.’ . . . ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’” In the world of The Sun Also Rises, divinely authored moral meaning crumbles under the weight of broken life experience. Exemplified by a distinct displacement of transcendent meaning and the presence of fractured community, the meaning of morality proves as perishable as the self. The transparently dismal hope of a good life found in the wounded community of Hemingway’s world betrays a wantonly fraught human desire for the divine. Without God, the human condition remains bound to a hellish expression. Unless one ascends past the meaninglessness of selfed morality, like Solomon himself, one can’t live life “all the way up.” But isn’t it pretty to think so?

Photo: "hope" by Forest Wander. CC License

Link: Dr. Karen Swallow Prior on "What we lose by choosing death with dignity"

Photo by Chris B on Unsplash

Dr. Karen Swallow Prior has a new essay up at Think Christian. Using insights from literature, Dr. Prior provides thoughtful comments on suffering, the meaning of life, Brittany Maynard, and the Christian worldview.

There are few, if any, arguments that can answer the questions raised by Brittany Maynard’s decision. But perhaps literature, in embodying the paradoxes of human existence in the same way that human beings embody the paradox of decaying life, can go where law, logic and theology fear to tread. Literature shines light upon the mysteries of our humanity, and in so doing, shows how much more mystery lurks.

You can read her work here. 

Order and Justice: Mystery Novels as an Apologetic for an Objective Moral Order

Mystery novels, taken as a whole, reflect at a deep level the truth of the Christian worldview. And yes, I mean mystery novels in general, not “mystery novels by Christian writers.”

Here’s why.

In any normal mystery novel (notice that I am omitting weird literary or experimental ones; those are the exceptions that prove the rule), certain ingredients are essential:

1. A crime.
2. An investigation of the crime.
3. A resolution of the crime.

All three conditions point ineluctably toward a moral universe, one in which right and wrong, good and evil, have objective meaning. Let’s consider each point.

1. A crime. In order for a mystery novel to be satisfying, the crime needs to be something recognizably wrong, not something that is merely illegal. For instance, building an office block in contradiction to the city’s zoning requirements is illegal, but in itself is not wrong. The investigation and fining of the culprits would be dull, to say the least. But what if the builders bribed a city employee to make fake permits? What if the architect was blackmailing the mayor into turning a blind eye? What if the people who started to investigate turned up dead? Corruption, blackmail, and murder are crimes, not against some statute created by a bureaucrat, but against the moral order. These things are wrong – and so we have a crime worthy of a mystery novel.

Murder is the gold standard, as it were, of mystery novels, because lethal violence against a human being means violence aimed at destroying a being made in the image of God, one who bears the imago Dei. Murder is objectively worse than, say, stealing the Crown Jewels. That is also why murder that includes torture or degradation of the victim is worse than simple murder.

However, murder seems to be losing some of its ability to shock and disturb in a culture that is saturated with visual images of violence and death, and that is losing its hold on the dignity of the human being. After all, the reason murder is murder, and not just killing, is that human beings have special dignity from being made in the imago Dei, the image of God. So if murder is losing its edge, how is a mystery writer to provoke that desired frisson of moral outrage, so that the reader will eagerly await the unmasking, capture, and punishment of the villain? My completely unsystematic and unscientific sampling of mystery novels suggests that child victims are ever more “popular.” In our jaded culture, we may not be moved by the death of an adult, but we are not so degraded (yet) as to be able to shrug off the death of a child. And in a culture that has become blasé about adultery and homosexuality, one of the few things left that can raise a genuine sense of moral outrage is child molestation. At least so far.

1. An investigation of the crime. As human beings, we are free to make moral choices – which means we can, and indeed must, be held accountable for those choices. In a materialistic world, there would be no point in investigating a murder. The murderer was acting in the way that the bouncing around of his molecules determined he would act, and the victim was acting in the way his molecules determined he would act, and the intersection of the two yields one of them being returned to his component molecules. So what? In a materialistic world, bound by determinism, a murder victim would be no different from the victim of a natural disaster. To investigate means to look for an active agent in a crime; to find the person whose free moral action caused the criminal event to take place.
2. A resolution of the crime. The most satisfying resolution to a mystery is for the criminal to be found and punished. The fact that we find a resolution necessary in a mystery novel points toward the moral reality of justice. It is not enough to know what happened; we want justice, not just on an intellectual level, but on a visceral, intuitive level. A mystery novel satisfies precisely when it provides for justice; when it does not, we are left unsettled, unsatisfied.

In some mystery novels, we desire mercy for the criminals – but even that points, again, toward a deep recognition of the moral structure of the universe. Only if justice is the basis for our relationships can mercy enter the equation, for mercy is precisely that which is not deserved but granted, setting the demands of justice aside. Without justice, there can be no mercy, only arbitrary decisions about who is punished and who is not.

In this way, any well done mystery novel points to the existence of a transcendent moral order, of good and evil, right and wrong, justice and mercy grounded not in the passing whims of a culture but in the eternal being of the Creator.

Image: Sherlock. M. Fortsch. CC licsense. 

Dr. Karen Swallow Prior on Hannah More, the Christian Worldview, and Creation Ethics

Dr. Karen Swallow Prior discusses her book, Fierce Conviction: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More - Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist, in this insightful, four part video series. Dr. Prior explains how Hannah More's Christian convictions motivated her to care for animals. Because of her Christian worldview, More realized the value and worth of God's creation. In these short videos, Dr. Prior reminds us that a complete Christian ethic includes not only care for others, but care for of all creation.  Dr. Prior's discussion of worldview also helps us see how Christianity makes sense out of the world.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Photo: "Mountains Majesty" by S. Harwood. CC license

Pagan Setting, Christian Virtues: Christian Character in Beowulf

The epic poem Beowulf dates to around the 8th century AD. We don’t know the name of the poet; indeed we don’t even know for sure if the poet composed the entire poem himself, or adapted and Christianized an existing, pagan oral poem. (For the record, I hold with the first theory, of original composition by a thoroughly Christian poet.) Loosely, the poem recounts the adventures of Beowulf, a young hero who comes to the rescue of the Danish king Hrothgar, whose people are being terrorized by the murderous attacks of the monstrous Grendel. Subsequently, Beowulf deals with Grendel’s mother and then, after the passage of much time, with a dragon.

There’s so much rich material in Beowulf that I hardly know where to begin, so I’ll just say this: the poem provides rich material for reflection on sin and virtue, with Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon serving as powerful images of envy, anger, and greed.

When I read Beowulf, I am reminded that within my heart lives a little Grendel; when I feel lonely, how easily that turns to envy. And Grendel shows that envy turns to violence, whether the violence is outward as in the poem, or inward in the form of vicious thoughts or self-loathing. And I recognize the wisdom of the Desert Fathers, who knew that the deadly thoughts, or what we call deadly sins, can only be successfully fought by the cultivation of the corresponding virtue, with God’s help.  Just as Unferth in the poem redeems himself from his envy of Beowulf’s achievements by the generous act of giving Beowulf a sword to use in the fight with Grendel’s mother, so too I can turn away from envy by the acting out the virtue of kindness – having gentleness toward myself, acknowledging my own weakness, and toward those whom I love.

I’m also reminded of the danger of pride and the need for humility – a constant theme throughout the poem. Beowulf is not falsely humble: he recognizes and acknowledges that he has great gifts, and he uses them to do good work. I, too, can acknowledge that I have gifts, but like Beowulf I must always keep it very clearly in mind that these gifts come from God and are not my own. Beowulf keeps it real for me: he does pretty well with handling the temptation of pride, but he still slips up. He fails, and falls. And yet he’s still a hero.

For men, Beowulf has a particular value. The character of Beowulf is both virtuous and manly, which is a vision much needed today when our culture seems to send conflicting signals about manhood, including ambiguity about whether men are necessary at all, or about how men should behave toward women. Beowulf is confident, yet gracious; he is a man of action, and also one who freely shows his emotions.

In Beowulf, those attitudes of the heart that lead toward sin are shown for what they truly are: ugly, hateful, destructive things. And those attitudes of the heart that lead toward God are shown as attractive and desirable.

Beowulf shows that you can shout Christian truth loud and clear, even in a poem that never mentions the name of Christ, not even once. But even though the name of Christ doesn’t appear in the poem, I would say that the person of Christ certainly does: for Beowulf himself is a Christ-figure in many respects, for in the end we see that Beowulf lays down his life for his people.

A monster-fighting, sword-wielding Christ-figure? Now there’s an image of Christ that will resonate with different people, and on a totally different level, than “lowly Jesus, meek and mild” – and still be true to the Gospel. What a fruitful way to talk about virtue, and the imitation of Christ!

Why it Matters

In a blog yesterday I offered my critique of God’s Not Dead, the recent Christian movie containing a smattering of apologetic arguments, a cheesy storyline, farfetched caricatures, and a conspicuous absence of subtlety, nuance, and sophistication—however noble and well-intentioned were the motivations of the film-makers. Someone responded with this comment: “Psssst. It’s a movie. Movies are meant to entertain. Provoke feelings. Make you laugh. Make you cry. Maybe start a little thinking. What movie has believable characters?? Really?? Enjoy it! I cried. I got angry. I laughed. I praised my Lord and Savior. It made me think. It inspired God filled conversation with my husband. Isn’t that what we are supposed to do??? So what if a freshman outdid a professor. Doesn’t God lead the ones we least expect??? I for one enjoyed it. Completely.”  

I don’t count it my job or duty or even prerogative to dictate to people what they like or don’t like, but this response was troubling to me for several reasons. Besides its needless and gratuitous snarky tone, the individual is obviously convinced that the main or perhaps even sole purpose of movies is entertainment—to provoke feelings, make you laugh, cry, maybe start a little thinking. And the person appears to be a Christian. This reminds me of when I used to teach business ethics, and students, including Christian students, would inform me, most soberly, that the purpose of business is to make money—which usually was taken to entail that pretty much anything goes. It struck me then as an emaciated picture of the purpose of business—what about a more expansive picture of what business is about? How about serving others, meeting needs, building relationships, following your passion, weaving a fabric of healthy, harmonious relationships—and in the process making a living? A narrow view of movies and the arts, too, strikes me as sadly myopic and theologically deficient. Especially when we’re talking about a Christian movie, what about conveying truth, provoking deep thought, smartly challenging reigning secular plausibility structures, imbuing wisdom, embodying excellence? And in the process, it can also entertain. Assigning primacy to entertainment seems objectionably thin to me, and predicated on a lame worldview.

Besides which, isn’t it relevant what entertains us? What’s entertaining about a movie lacking subtlety, depth, texture, honesty? What’s moving about one-dimensional characters and farfetched storylines, cultivating victimization mentalities and demonizing those to whom we’re called to minister, insulting secularists and trivializing apologetics, confirming people’s worst suspicions about evangelicals and communicating to Hollywood that we care more about a conclusion or resolution we like than quality production values in a film, bolstering the perception that evangelicalism is tantamount to superficiality and shallowness? I can’t say I find any of that remotely entertaining. But the simple truth is that we’re not here to be entertained, at least not primarily; as Christians we have serious business to do, and being entertained by simplistic caricatures and contrived narratives, even if they contain a modicum of cursory apologetics, doesn’t cut it.

I responded to that critic by writing this: “We’re called to think on what’s lovely, beautiful, of good report, excellent. We can and should do better–not convey to Hollywood that we as Christians are content, indeed thrilled to be entertained by movies with bad plots and shallow caricatures. There really is such a thing as excellent movies; there are such things as textured, profound characters; we should strive for these.” Our being merely entertained isn’t the end of the story. We shouldn’t be so easily satisfied and mollified into mediocre acquiescence.

I hate to rain on the parade of my Christian friends who are excited by such a film. I respectfully submit they haven’t thought hard enough about this. Let’s take just one example of the apologetics in the movie—the best part of the movie gesturing in hopeful directions, but still altogether too simple. The student defender of faith argues that secularists can’t make any sense of objective morality, quoting the Dostoevsky line that “everything is permissible without God,” as if that does the trick and makes the point.

The philosopher who replaced me at my old school when I moved to Virginia—a thoroughgoing secularist and bright fellow—recently wrote a scathing critique of the movie for the online version of Psychology Today. This was one of his points: “The ‘everything is permissible without God’ argument is one of the worst arguments for God. Not only are there many secular ethical theories, but divine command theory—the idea that God grounds all ethical truths—is one of the most discredited positions in all of philosophy. Not only is it subject to the Euthyphro problem (which suggests that God determining morality makes morality arbitrary) but it's not clear that divine command theory is any better than a ‘God of the gaps’ argument: ‘What makes a good, good and the bad, bad? I don't know, God did it.’”

I don’t at all agree with his assessment here; in fact, I think it’s predicated on a number of mistakes. The existence of “many secular ethical theories” doesn’t show that such a list contains the best explanation of objective moral values and duties, or even a plausible one; divine command theory is but one way to try couching the locus of moral obligations in God; most divine command theories worth their salt do not entail that God grounds all ethical truths since most divine command theories are delimited to deontic matters of moral obligation; divine command theory has undergone a major resurgence in recent years, garnering defenses and articulations by some of the brightest philosophers alive today from John Hare to Robert Adams to C. Stephen Evans; the Euthyphro Dilemma has been, in my estimation and in that of many others, definitively answered in the recent literature; and a whole panoply of reasons has been offered to take theistic ethics and even divine command theory seriously beyond a “God of the gaps” approach.

But such stiff resistance to the apologetics on offer in the movie is implicitly encouraged. Simplicity breeds simplicity; caricature breeds caricature. This is why this matters. It’s not just about our entertainment. These issues are important, and need to be handled responsibly.

Despite all of the various efforts to answer the Euthyphro Dilemma in the last decade alone, secularists continue relishing pointing to it as an utterly efficacious refutation of theistic ethics. In a recently published book by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (Plato at the Googleplex), she writes: “Socrates proceeds to formulate a line of reasoning that will prove to be of fundamental importance in the history of secularism, one that will be adapted by freethinkers from Spinoza to Bertrand Russell to the so-called new atheists of today, persuasively arguing that a belief in the gods—or God—cannot provide the philosophical grounding for morality…. What is still referred to as ‘the Euthyphro Dilemma’ or ‘the Euthyphro Argument’ remains one of the most frequently utilized arguments against the claim that morality can be grounded only in theology, that it is only the belief in God that stands between us and the moral abyss of nihilism. Dostoevsky may have declared that ‘without God all is permissible,’ but Plato’s preemptive riposte, sent out to us across the millennia, is that any act morally impermissible with God is morally impermissible without him, making clear how little the addition of God helps to clarify the ethical situation. The argument Plato has Socrates make in the Euthyphro is one of the most important in the history of moral philosophy. … We humans must reason our way to morality or we will not get there at all. Relying on fiats, even should they emanate from on high, will not allow us to achieve an understanding of virtue.”

Answering these objections is eminently possible, but requires that we develop more sophistication in defending our theistic convictions, not watering down and simplifying the complex matters at issue. It’s remarkable that Goldstein acts as if the capricious pantheon of Greek divinities are on a moral par with the God of Christianity in whom there’s no shadow of turning. This is a huge disanalogy that makes a great deal of difference defending an intelligent theistic ethic, and one she dispenses with by a wave of her hand.

Included in the most important biblical command is loving God with all of our minds; this means we need to stop assigning primacy to entertainment, stop settling for superficiality, stop being indifferent to excellence, and stop settling for pat answers. Or we’ll get the relegation to irrelevance we deserve. If we treat those with whom we disagree like benighted dolts unable to think their way out of a paper bag, driven by irrational impulses, we’ll receive such treatment ourselves.

The Big Ghost, Thor, and the Self

The fourth chapter of C. S. Lewis’s imaginative Great Divorce features the Big Ghost, formerly a man, now an insubstantial wisp of a ghost, a transparent phantom who’s pursued by one of the solid people under whose tread the earth seemed to shake. In contrast the Big Ghost and other inhabitants of the heaven-bound bus from hell had trouble walking at all, for to their feet the blades of grass in this strange land seemed sharp as diamonds. The Big Ghost had already been told he didn’t have to leave this place, but was free to stay as long as he pleased, and his pursuer confirms it by offering to accompany him on his journey into the high country. The Big Ghost is appalled when he recognizes the bright person following him, a solid spirit jocund and established in its youthfulness, for the spirit is none but Len, who as a man had murdered their mutual acquaintance Jack. To the Big Ghost Len is still nothing but a bloody murderer, while he himself had unjustly been relegated to haunt the filthy, macabre streets of Dark Town. The Ghost is incredulous that Len is in this place of light instead of him. Len deserves punishment and should be riddled with guilt and shame, and seems entirely delivered from them, which grates against the Ghost. Len the substantial spirit’s entire orientation contrasts with that of the self-consumed, paradoxically insubstantial Ghost. The bright spirit assures the Ghost, “I do not look at myself. I have given up myself. I had to, you know, after the murder. That was what it did for me. And that was how everything began.” The event in Len’s life that had served as the catalyst for repentance and deliverance from self-consumption is, to the Ghost’s undiscerning eyes, a cause for nothing but perpetual condemnation.

The forgiven spirit isn’t interested in vindicating himself, whereas the Ghost is interested in nothing but trying to vindicate himself. “I done my best all my life, see? I done my best by everyone, that’s the sort of chap I was. I never asked for anything that wasn’t mine by rights.” The Ghost doesn’t see that his very effort at self-vindication is a manifestation of his focus on self that prevents him from the necessary process of losing his self in order to gain it. Comparing his behavior with those of others, he thinks he comes out smelling like a rose, and thus demands nothing but his rights, without realizing that, as the bright spirit says, “I haven’t got my rights, or I should not be here. You will not get yours either. You’ll get something far better. Never fear.” But it’s as if their frameworks of understanding are so different that the wisdom the bright spirit is trying to share doesn’t even register to the Ghost, smacking of inverted or perverted truth, as he remains caught up in indignation that he would be put below “a bloody murderer” like Len.

The irony is palpable that the insubstantial Ghost, unable to move a blade of grass even if he were to exert all his strength, continues puffing himself up. Refusing to give up his self-focus, he’s relegated to becoming ever less substantial, while insisting on the sort of chap he is, how he only wants his rights, and refusing anybody’s bleeding charity.

Elsewhere in Lewis’s writings he laments the diminution of meaning the word ‘charity’ has undergone. Traditionally it wasn’t merely benefits conferred on the less fortunate, but one of the theological virtues, an orientation toward others rather than oneself, putting the needs of others before one’s own, esteeming the other better than oneself. “Ask for the Bleeding Charity,” the spirit exhorts the Ghost. “Everything is here for the asking and nothing can be bought.” But the Big Ghost will have none of it: “I don’t want charity. I’m a decent man and if I had my rights I’d have been here long ago and you can tell them I said so.”

Undeterred, with mirth dancing in his eyes rather than a log of judgmentalism lodged there, the bright spirit points out that the Big Ghost, as a man, didn’t do his best and wasn’t so decent after all. “We none of us were and none of us did,” but he assures the Ghost it doesn’t have to matter now. But once more, the offer of hope sounds to the Big Ghost like nothing but condemnation from a worse sinner, and he won’t countenance it.

In a sense the bright spirit admits it’s worse than that, that his murder of Jack wasn’t the worst thing he himself had done during his life—that he had murdered the Big Ghost in his heart for years while they lived as men. This is why he was sent to him—to ask for forgiveness and to be his servant as long as he needed one, longer if the Ghost pleased. The Ghost bristles at any suggestion of his own shortcomings, insisting they’re his own private affairs, to which the bright spirit replies, “There are no private affairs,” we’re all tied in an interlocking web of mutuality; an insight lost because of the Ghost’s inflated sense of self.

Relishing the chance to refuse the offer, content with his diminished state, insistent on his rights, the Big Ghost tragically chooses hell over heaven. Unwilling to give up his life, he loses it, still unable to bend a blade of grass for being so diminished and insubstantial.

And here I can’t help but contrast the Big Ghost with Thor. In the first movie, the initially brash and arrogant Thor is cast out of Asgard and stripped of his powers, and subsequently unable to lift his hammer, no matter how hard he tries. He’s like the Big Ghost, too weak and diminished to move a small stone or leaf after disembarking from the bus. When Thor was banished, his father, before casting the hammer to earth as well, had said, “Let him who is worthy possess the power of Thor.” And at the climax of the film, a matured, heroic Thor had now become willing to give up his life to save others. He offered his own life to spare the rest, and then, after a moment when it looked like his brother might relent, Thor is killed. And it was then that the hammer, miles away, took off and flew in a fiery trajectory into the hand of a revived Thor. Having given up his life, he found it. Having been unable to so much as move the hammer, now he could wield it with powerful force. It’s a great scene, resonating with a universal truth: life is found when we’re willing to lose it.

Of course Thor is no real god. As Captain America says, after all, “There’s only one God, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.” The essence of salvation, on a Christian picture, is not about obtaining a ticket to heaven, saving your cosmic rear end from the flames, but about deliverance from the tyranny of self, from a hell locked from the inside, from sufferings intrinsically connected to the inevitable product of consumption with self. To be saved to the full is to be made able to love God and others with all of our hearts, to find deliverance from an inward orientation that forever blocks us from the life that only comes when we’re willing to give up our own. It’s not about being good enough, but realizing that we’re none of us very decent, and we can do nothing to purchase this life; only receive bloody charity from nail-pierced hands.

Image: By Mårten Eskil Winge - 3gGd_ynWqGjGfQ at Google Cultural Institute maximum zoom level, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22007120

Podcast: Website Introduction

Hello!

One of the features we are working for MoralApologetics.com is a weekly podcast. On this very first episode, we hear from Dr. David Baggett on his vision for the website.

Thanks for stopping by,

Jonathan Pruitt

The Obfuscations of Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish has written:

"In the period between the attack on the World Trade Center towers and the American response, a reporter from the Los Angeles Times called to ask me if the events of the past weeks meant 'the end of relativism.' (I had an immediate vision of a headline—RELATIVISM ENDS: MILLIONS CHEER—and of a photograph with the caption, 'At last, I can say what I believe and mean it.') Well, if by relativism one means a condition of mind in which you are unable to prefer your own convictions and causes to the convictions and causes of your adversary, then relativism could hardly end because it never began. Our convictions are by definition preferred; that’s what makes them our convictions, and relativizing them is neither an option nor a danger. (In the strong sense of the term, no one has ever been or could be a relativist for no one has the ability to hold at arm’s length the beliefs that are the very foundation of his thought and action.) But if by relativism one means the practice of putting yourself in your adversary’s shoes, not in order to wear them as your own but in order to have some understanding (far short of approval) of why someone else—in your view, a deluded someone—might want to wear them, then relativism will not and should not end because it is simply another name for serious thought."

  So the first way Fish envisions someone defining moral relativism is like this: “a condition of mind in which you are unable to prefer your own convictions and causes to the convictions and causes of your adversary, then relativism could hardly end because it never began. Our convictions are by definition preferred; that’s what makes them our convictions, and relativizing them is neither an option nor a danger.” Let’s call this the “preference” account of relativism. Fish rejects the idea that such relativism can or should go away because, after all, people holding beliefs means they take them seriously.

  And the second formulation of relativism goes like this: “the practice of putting yourself in your adversary’s shoes, not in order to wear them as your own but in order to have some understanding (far short of approval) of why someone else—in your view, a deluded someone—might want to wear them, then relativism will not and should not end because it is simply another name for serious thought.” Let’s call this the “empathy” variant of relativism. And again, Fish says this variant of relativism shouldn’t and can’t go away either.

  The problem here, as I see it, is that Fish has offered two highly idiosyncratic definitions of relativism. Ethical relativism is the view that says morality is relative—usually to culture, though some relativize it to subcultures or even individuals. It’s a subjective understanding of morality in the sense that there aren’t objectively true moral answers—instead the content of morality is a function of individual, subcultural, or cultural choice. The problems confronting ethical relativism are legion and well-rehearsed. What’s interesting to me about Fish is that he simply tries sidestepping all of that by offering two accounts of relativism that have nothing essentially to do with it.

  Consider the preference variant. Fish is of course entirely right to say people prefer their own beliefs. But if so, why would he think that anyone means by relativism the denial of such a thing? If a student did such a thing in a paper, I’d rake him over the coals. So why on earth is Fish, an established academic, doing such a thing?

  Take the empathy variant. There’s nothing indigenous to relativism that involves putting yourself into your enemy’s shoes to see things from his perspective. That may be a cultural or subcultural approach, but it equally well may not be, in which it would be, by relativistic lights, the wrong thing to do. If someone wants a principled reason to embrace judicious tolerance and a cultivated sense of empathy, he needs to look in direction other than relativism. In other words, any good reasons there are to cultivate such attitudes most assuredly don’t come from relativism. So why treat such a thing as relativism’s distinguishing or defining feature except to answer the easy question and avoid the hard ones?

  Fish is an academic who works with words. Remarkable to me how willing he is to bastardize them with such shameless and reckless abandon, and that an outfit like the New York Times accords space to such obfuscation while turning down so many pieces far more worthy but written by folks less well known. For he employed the same procedure in an October, 2001 NYT commentary on 9/11 when he reduced “postmodernism” to merely this: “The only thing postmodern thought argues against is the hope of justifying our response to the attacks in universal terms that would be persuasive to everyone, including our enemies.”

  Postmodernism means lots of things, but surely what it doesn’t mean is the mere suggestion that we can’t persuade terrorists that their tactics are wrong—a recognition anyone has who’s spent more than an hour engaged in substantive debate. Postmodernism isn’t without its insights—the need to see other perspectives, recognize our own shortcomings, demonize opponents, etc. (though I hardly think we need postmodernism to grasp such truths). But I simply don’t see how discussion is advanced when, confronted with the flaws and fallacies of one’s approach, one simply reduces the view in question to an isolated, incidental, innocuous thread and argue it’s harmless, while overlooking the plethora of troublesome and profoundly counterintuitive implications of its more robust (and honest) versions. Serious academics should do a whole lot better.

A Universe That Makes Sense

My wife loves Kurt Vonnegut, and I suspect I would too if I spent more time reading him. What little of him I’ve read I’ve enjoyed immensely; his short story “Harrison Bergeron” simultaneously made me both want to take up my pen to write something myself and set my pen down and never try to write anything again, because it was that scary and bloody good. Vonnegut was, by his own admission, not at all conventionally religious, though he loved to say iconoclastic things for an atheist, agnostic, or whatever he was exactly, such as: music was all the evidence he needed to believe in God. For such reasons he really is a delight to read.

     “I am a humanist,” he said, “which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead.” His characterization of humanism is that it’s distinguished by two things: a willingness to behave decently, and no hope for a reward. I’m sure there are other accounts of what constitutes humanism, perfectly consistent with religious conviction. Flannery O’Connor, a devout Catholic, is often identified as an example of a Christian humanist; Erasmus another. At any rate, orthodox Christians of pretty much any stripe will affirm that hope for a heavenly reward is misguided, since salvation isn’t something earned or deserved. If we got what we deserve, their idea is, it wouldn’t be pretty. So there’s a sense in which secular folks and many traditionally religious folks can agree that doing good shouldn’t be done for a reward or to avoid a punishment.

      Ethicists would suggest that this goes to show that Vonnegut seemed to have an appreciation for doing things for their own sakes—for reasons more intrinsic to those actions than instrumental, like rewards or punishments. I suspect atheists have the capacity to recognize intrinsic goods like love and friendship just as well as theists can—and I’ve argued to this effect, despite another conviction of mine, namely, that their worldview can’t sustain an account of why such intrinsic goods obtain in the first place as effectively as theism can. But I don’t think anyone has to believe in God to apprehend the goodness and value of people and relationships.

      The issue I’d like to consider a bit more in depth is this matter of rewards and punishments—or more broadly, the connection if any between morality and happiness. I suspect that, if this life is all there is, there are likely many instances where there’s a lack of correspondence between these. Henry Sidgwick, a 19th century ethicist, actually dubbed the disconnect between happiness and ethics the “dualism of the practical reason,” and considered it the biggest challenge ethicists had to face. He thought theism could solve it, but he wasn’t a theist, so he thought ethics irremediably saddled with the challenge. Immanuel Kant, before Sidgwick, saw that full rational commitment to morality required belief in ultimate resonance between holiness or virtue and happiness, and he used this as a way to argue for an afterlife, since he thought it obvious that we don’t see this correspondence in this life.

      Whenever the issue of this connection between happiness and holiness comes up, though, it smacks some of the mercenary—as if it shows that, down deep, what’s motivating the ostensibly moral behavior is self-interest and something prudential, rather than something genuinely ethical and other-regarding. A crass works righteousness model of soteriology, for example, would seem to be susceptible to this sort of criticism. But as mentioned, Christian theology classically understood doesn’t seem so obviously vulnerable to it. Good works are certainly important, on the model of classical Christian thought, but more as a reflection of a pre-existing state of justification rather than as a means to procure it.

      The bigger question for now is this one: Is it reasonable to believe in an ultimate correspondence between holiness and happiness? In a universe that makes sense, should we expect such correspondence? Remember that Vonnegut’s worldview was such that, though he valued hard thinking, he didn’t exactly always suspect it to yield fruit. Recall this line from one of his books: “You are pooped and demoralized. Why wouldn't you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn't meant to be reasonable.” See the comparison and contrast here between Vonnegut and Kant? Both would say do things for the right reasons, without hope of reward—but whereas Kant thought full rational commitment to morality required a universe that made sense and ultimately made happiness and holiness perfectly cohere, Vonnegut (maybe anyway—if that line adduced reflects his own convictions) simply wasn’t so sure the universe did make sense. Perhaps he considered it all the more heroic to be committed to morality despite the lack of confidence that all would come out well in the end.

      Atheist John Shook argues similarly: “The naturalist may not know how it all will turn out, but the naturalist can reasonably want morality to prevail right here and now. Helping the needy, promoting peace, and protecting the weak are always morally meaningful, regardless of what may happen tomorrow.” I have to confess that I find something about this to be compelling, despite my conviction that he is also wrong in an important sense. There is, undeniably, a case to be made for the heroic choice of morality in the face of potential defeat and loss of vindication. There seems to be an element of purity in such moral motivation, not even possibly spoiled by the undergirding conviction that nothing genuinely good ultimately will be lost or unredeemed.

      Interestingly enough, there are echoes of something in the close vicinity of such heroism and pure moral motivation in scripture. Consider Job’s words: “Though he slay me, I will hope in him” (Job 13:15). Or consider Moses’s cry for the salvation of his people in Exodus 32, offering himself as a sacrifice for their sins. “But now, if You will, forgive their sin–and if not, please blot me out from Your book which You have written!” Notice the profundity of this: Moses, out of love for his people, offers to give up his own salvation, however Moses conceived of soteriology, to purchase theirs. One more example: In Romans 9:3, the apostle Paul wrote these words: “I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh.”

      What we find in these verses is at least the flavor of what Shook and Vonnegut are talking about: a willingness to sacrifice, pay a price, give up hope, do the right and loving thing with no guarantee it will work out. The implicit suggestion is that there is something profoundly right about the willingness to do this—the heroic, pure commitment to love and goodness.

      In none of these cases, of course, did God follow through; he didn’t slay Job, he didn’t allow Moses to sacrifice himself for the people of Israel, he didn’t cut Paul off from Christ. But the willingness of these men to remain committed to truth and goodness despite the risk that doing so might not be an ultimately vindicated and personally beneficial decision seems to be about the purest example of moral motivation imaginable. But, importantly, in each of these cases, theirs was the conviction that morality was real and that at the heart of reality was a God of unspeakable love and faithfulness. At the heart of Christianity is a paradox that resounds time and again: by being willing to lose our life we will find it. By caring about more than self-fulfillment, we will find it, and so much more. To find life we must undergo a dying process—not just a repression program or reprogramming exercise. Real death is called for before new life is possible. But the glorious news is that the death is not the end of the story, that just when things seem bleakest and darkest, there is hope and light.

     So personally I am left skeptical at the idea that there’s something sublime about committing ourselves to what the universe itself isn’t committed to; the “heroism” of such a thing strikes me as more appearance than reality. To me it simply makes more sense, if integrity and virtue and goodness are indeed things we think worthy of believing in—as I firmly believe they are—to believe in a universe that cares about these things too. This isn’t being mercenary; it’s following the evidence where it leads. It’s about believing in a universe that makes sense.