Sacrifice, Not Martyr (Matt. 26, Mark 14, Luke 22, John 13, 18, 20, 21)

Saint Peter by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–1682)

Saint Peter by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–1682)

How glorious it seemed to me,

To die for Jesus.

And so I shall,

But not for my glory.

His story, not mine, defines my death.

 

He knew

My peril as prey of Satan,

And prayed for me;

But His warning found no place

To pierce my pride.

I turned aside His words,

And plunged headlong into the trap

The Enemy had set for me.

In the Garden I was ready,

Sword in hand, bold for battle!

But the Master stayed my hand

And healed the man I struck.

Disarmed and cowed,

I fled.

 

Following from afar,

Defenseless now for the real assault

(For I could not shift to the plane of His example),

I stood by the fire to observe,

Hoping yet to save Him from Himself.

And then those questions—

Pointing to me as one of His.

But none of His I proved.

Oblivious to my sin,

I betrayed Him from within.

And then His gentle gaze

Drove home cock’s crow,

Soul-piercing sound

That brought the bitter tears.

 

That purging, though,

Was not the end,

For Him nor me.

As Thomas touched His wounds

And healing found therein,

So I was also called anew

Beside Genessaret,

When one last time He supped with us.

Not my boast this time

Was focus for His words,

But gentle probing of my love for Him.

Profounder death he called for then

Than sword could bring:

Living sacrifice to serve His sheep,

And glory at the end,

When God would send

His cross for me.

                                                                                                Elton D. Higgs

                                                                                                July 1, 2014

 

 

Elton Higgs

Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

The Silent Christ (Mark 15:1-5)

Nikolai Ge, Christ and Pilate ("What is truth?"), 1890

Nikolai GeChrist and Pilate ("What is truth?"), 1890

Why, Jesus, no reply?
If ever defense was needed,
It was then,
When Pilate and the rabble
Confronted you.
You were not what you seemed--
Beaten, friendless, bound--
For you had trod the path of God,
And angels awaited your call.
These petty men had no idea
Of the Power they dared.

And yet you said nothing.

Yours was the last defense
Against the folly of men:
The silence of Love.
Oh, words may be prelude,
And daily in the Temple
They heard yours.
But when Satan has triumphed,
Blending the lies of men
With our own despairing doubts
To turn our virtue into pitch,
The time of words is past,
And we search the depths within
To find a place
Beyond defense,
Beyond our righteousness,
Beyond integrity,
To stand with the Silent Christ.

--Elton D. Higgs
June 20, 1977

Elton Higgs

Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

Pilate's Quandary (John 19:4-16; Matt. 27:24)

Cristo davanti a Pilato, oil on canvas painting by Giuseppe Vermiglio

Cristo davanti a Pilato, oil on canvas painting by Giuseppe Vermiglio

 

The gods lurk everywhere,

Even, perhaps,

In this wretched Nazarine!

How can I judge the judgment

Of this world

On one whose very presence

Scorns the power of death?

The breath of other-worldly royalty

Stirs upon his lips

And blows my threats away.

 

 

The people shout for blood

And wait upon my word.

Their guilt is greater--

So he said--

But mine is great enough,

And leaves no room

For subtle sophistry.

If "truth" has brought him here,

Then "truth" will have to save him--

 

 

But not through me.

Long ago I banked the fire of truth

That I might not be consumed.

The open flame is in his eyes,

And brooks no compromise.

 

 

I turn my face

And call for a basin

Of lukewarm water.

                                 --Elton D. Higgs

                                   Aug. 25, 1978

 

Elton Higgs

Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

The Broken Jar (Mark 14:3-9)

 Jacob Andries Beschey - Maria Magdalene washing the feet of Christ

 

Jacob Andries Beschey - Maria Magdalene washing the feet of Christ

The ointment with abandon

Runs down His cheek,

Sweetly joining tears of love

Set flowing by her extravagance.

Beauty and prescience

Are mingled there,

While spare and cautious faces

Grimace at the waste.

They advocate the shorter way—

Slipping pennies to the poor,

And making sure the books are kept.

But Jesus wept

That one should share His sacrifice,

And break the jar to pour out all.

 

                              --Elton D. Higgs

                                (Jan 9, 1977)

 

 

Elton Higgs

Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

The Brimming Basin (John 13:1-17)

 Dirck van Baburen - Christ Washing the Apostles Fee

 

Dirck van Baburen - Christ Washing the Apostles Fee

The basin was fuller

Than any of them knew.

There was the water, true,

But also humble love

That laved their dusty feet.

The Master chose to meet

Their need both higher and lower

Than clouded minds could see.

In later days,

When Paraclete was guide,

They too filled up

The bowl of servanthood,

Before they drank

The final bitter cup

He promised them.

 

Elton D. Higgs

(Feb. 14, 2010)

 

 

Elton Higgs

Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

Telling Time: The Apologetic of the Present, Part 2

Photo by Srikanta H. U on Unsplash

Photo by Srikanta H. U on Unsplash

Temporality, once reflected upon and resigned to, proclaims to humanity its essential question—the one Tolkien so eloquently asked—“what to do with the time given us.” It’s a common philosophical observation that time isn’t in itself material but is used to measure the distance, relationship, and alteration between material things. We measure our lives by time. We consider a relationship significant if it lasts fifty years. We call service to a job quality if it has the tenure of time. We want to make something of our lives in the time we have. We reflect on the past as a way to understand what kind of people we are. We look to the future in hopes that we won’t repeat the mistakes of today. We hope to leave moral legacies behind us as we near the end of our time.

Biblical authors understood the importance of time in creating moral urgency, and they often wielded timely rhetoric in attempts to empower their audiences to action. Jeremiah laments for the time wasted by his kinsman and delivers an urgent warning, "The harvest is past, the summer has ended, and we are not saved" (Jeremiah 8:20). Chiefly, the scripture writers emphasized the importance of the present. The temporal now is the only time to obey the will of Yahweh. 2 Corinthians 6:2 tells us that God proclaims, “At just the right time, I heard you. On the day of salvation, I helped you. Indeed, the ‘right time’ is now. Today is the day of salvation.” If one is to know Christ, there is no other time in which to know him than the present. And since God meets me only in the always present and since existence, in response to God’s presence, isn’t actualized in past or future,[1] I have only this present moment to respond to God. The eternal Christ can’t be met yesterday or tomorrow, only in today’s exact now.

Perhaps no period of time has seen more attention paid to the present than the twentieth century. Writers like Joseph Conrad, Walter Benjamin, Paul Valery, Wyndham Lewis, and C. S. Lewis fore-fronted the importance of time as the ultimate measure of humanity’s existential significance. Through time, we know ourselves. In time, we become the people we desire or fear to be. By time, we measure the space between the meaningful moments in our lives. From time, we learn an Ecclesiastian mortality. For Christian writers like C. S. Lewis, time pressed upon the human soul with all the force of heaven and hell behind it. In The Great Divorce, Lewis’s most superb example of his theology of the present, a ghost with a little red lizard on his shoulder is approached by a flaming, radiantly angelic solid person on the high plains of heaven. The ghost, a lost soul, has a strained, spiritually unhealthy relationship with the lizard, a metaphor for the ghost’s besetting sin of lust. Lewis catches sight of the ghost and noticed that “he turned his head to the reptile with a snarl of impatience. ‘Shut up, I tell you!’ he said. It wagged its tail and continued to whisper to him.”

Lewis then narrates the solid person’s reply, “Would you like me to make him quiet’ said the flaming Spirit—an angel, as I now understood.” Once the ghost admits that he would like to be rid of the lizard, the flaming Spirit announces, “Then I will kill him.” Shocked and afraid, the lizard-clad ghost defers, “Well, there’s time to discuss this later.” The flaming Spirit announces, “There is no time.” The ghost complains, “It would be most silly to do it now. I’d need to be in good health for the operation. Some other day, perhaps.” To which the solid person replies, “There is no other day. All days are present now.”

As a part of Lewis’s fictive eternal order, the angelic being serves as a metonym for God’s very essence. Though eternal, though standing outside of time—the slippage of time runs throughout the text serving as the novel’s bedrock theme—the angel’s eternality speaks to his moral perfection. In the high plains, once good is ripened, perfect timeless solidity constitutes nature. God’s timelessness, like His holiness, His perfect loving-kindness, and His omnipotence becomes the banner under which our temporality, like our sinfulness, our selfishness, and our weakness surrender. The solid person incarnates an apologetic of the present, which exposes the ontologically incomplete and morally decaying nature of temporal existence and of the ghost’s ephemeral sins. It is the weight of the present bearing down on the ghost that causes his conversion. He dies to what is temporal, knowing it as non-existence against heaven’s ultimate reality, and lives into the eternal. Once the ghost resigns to time’s deterioration, giving his decay over to destruction, a death by eternity, he transforms into pure, immortal substantiality. But transformation must take place in the present. All days are present for the ghost because all days are present for God.

If, alongside Augustine, Boethius, the biblical writers, and writers like Lewis, we are to understand God, then we must do so in full embrace of His atemporal existence. If I am to know God, then it will be at that crossroads of eternality and temporality called the present. Temporality proves an apologetic of ruin that forces from us the undeniable cry of mortality. The eternal God stands in perfect existence beyond time, though He enters time through the always present that we might shed the temporal and put on the incorruptible. Through time time is conquered. We turn to the eternal through the temporal present, which is the eternal present for God, and we gain immortal solidity. As Lewis says in his allegorical Pilgrim’s Regress, “The human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given—nay, cannot even be imagined as given—in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal experience.” May we enjoy more than time can afford.

[1] In other words, there is only evidence of my existing yesterday through artifact and memory. And I’m sure I’ll exist tomorrow. But I only exist in freedom of will and full actualization of life now.

 

 

Corey Latta

Corey Latta holds a BA in Biblical Studies from Crichton College, an MA in New Testament Studies from Harding School of Theology, an MA in English from the University of Memphis, and a PhD in Twentieth-Century Literature from the University of Southern Mississippi. Corey is currently Vice President of Academics at Visible Music College. Corey is the author of numerous articles, poems, and three books, including “Election and Unity in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans,” and “Functioning Fantasies: Theology, Ideology, and Social Conception in the Works of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.” His latest book, When the Eternal Can Be Met: A Bergsonian Theology of Time in the Works of C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden, was published by Wipf & Stock in April.

Telling Time: The Apologetic of the Present, Part 1

 

The time has passed when time doesn’t count.

-- Paul Valéry, “La Crise de l’esprit” (1919)

Humans live in time . . . therefore . . . attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself and to . . . the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity . . . in it alone freedom and actuality are offered.

-- C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942)

Throughout philosophy’s history, notions of eternity have developed alongside and in response to developments in theology of God’s nature. Significant texts like Augustine’s Confessions Book XI and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy spurred philosophical conversation about the nature of and differences between eternity (atemporality) and everlastingness (sempiternity). Now’s not the time to examine all of the nuances of eternity and timed reality, and even a cursory look at the paradigms of epoch and eternal duration will have to wait. For now, I want only to make that small case that an existential function of man’s temporality is to draw him to God’s eternality. And because Augustine, Boethius, and I are eternalists, I will proceed from that position.     Among the implications of God’s timelessness is His transcendent experience of tenselessness. Simply put, God, whose whole life exists beyond chronology, sequentiality, and temporal duration, experiences the past, present, and future in an eternal present, an “always present,” as Eliot poetically put in Four Quartets. To say it another way, God presently exists at all punctiliar moments. And all punctiliar moments exist presently in the transcendent God before He in them, to say it yet another way. This is no new view.

In Book XI of his Confessions, considering God’s relation to time’s reality, Augustine wrote of God’s causal agency in all timed things, stating that since God cannot precede created time (that would imply sequence—an utterly anthropomorphic idea), He must dwell outside of it. The age, then, in which God dwells, the “sublimity of an eternity” Augustine calls it, is “always in the present.” Augustine enjoyed good company in his eternally privileging the present. Early sixth century philosopher Boethius, who parsed eternity as the “complete, simultaneous and perfect possession of everlasting life,” argued that God’s atemporal existence occupied one “simultaneous present.” God couldn’t know beforehand or afterward, for example, because future and past were always present for God.

Lewis also championed an always present view of God on several occasions. In a superb example of Lewis’s eternalism from Miracles, Lewis says:

It is probable that Nature is not really in Time and almost certain that God is not. Time is probably (like perspective) the mode of our perception. There is therefore in reality no question of God's at one point in time (the moment of creation) adapting the material history of this universe in advance to free acts which you or I are to perform at a later point in Time. To Him all the physical events and all the human acts are present in an eternal Now. The liberation of finite wills and the creation of the whole material history of the universe (related to the acts of those wills in all the necessary complexity) is to Him a single operation. In this sense God did not create the universe long ago but creates it at this minute—at every minute.

Here, Lewis paints free will and the moment of creation in the color of divine simultaneity. To God, man’s continual expression of freedom and a definite moment in time, like creation, gather synchronously. God exists outside of time, transcendently beyond its sequential nature and effects. In a letter to a fan named Gilbert Perleberg, who is contending with Lewis’s view of time, Lewis states his idea of God’s eternality in a similar way,

This is v. [very] odd. All the arguments you advance as objections to my theory of eternity seem to me to show that you are in exact agreement with me. A doctrine that God ‘was’ more creative ‘at the beginning’ than ‘now’ is absolutely excluded by my view–‘was’ and ‘at the beginning’ being meaningless when applied to the Timeless Being. As I say in Screwtape the total creation meets us at every moment.[1] The distinction between miracle and natural even is not between what God once did and what He now does: it is always NOW with Him.

Temporalist critics of a timeless God accuse the eternalist position of presenting a virtually unknowable Deity. An eternal God is virtually unknowable, if He exists outside of time, man’s only known perception. If, indeed, God is transcendently beyond time, then how can we know him in our temporal trapping?

T. S. Eliot poeticized the theological tension between an eternal God and temporal man with “through time time is conquered.” Alluding to the incarnation, Eliot hit upon the nexus of God’s eternality and man’s temporality. God enters any temporal moment, and therefore into the stream of duration, with full ontological maintenance of His eternality. In entering time, God doesn’t change anymore than a man does when he enters a river. Time, though, changes. The “always present” nature of God’s existence opens up the temporal present, animating time with spiritual reality and allowing chronologically natured man to know the eternal God. The Incarnation demonstrated this break in the temporal more profoundly than any other historical event. The incarnational, tensed rhetoric of the “lamb slain before the foundation of the world [time]” reflects God’s taking on a tensed existence not only that man might live beyond time but also that he might live in time and in communion with eternity. If God is eternal, yet an occupant of time, then every singular moment within the continual flow of past, present, and future partakes in an eternal reality.

Indeed, God’s ever-occupying the present redefines humanity’s tensed existence. God, in full expression of His eternal nature, enters into all moments causatively and with consequence for those bound to dwell in time. Therein lies the apologetic of time. Against God’s eternality we must redefine our experience of past, present, and future. While time, and man’s experience within and of it, operates in tandem with God’s operative will, it also works against it. God exists perfectly within His own eternality. Eternal life is perfected in His nature. He occupies atemporal existence in perfection of non-decay. Humanity, though, suffers the effects of time until eventual death. By its very nature time endures in antithesis to eternality. Augustine knew this, saying of man’s experience with time that “we cannot truly say that time exists except in the sense that it tends toward non-existence.” Time’s finitude is the existential progression of fatal rot ending in death, and temporal man moves through that progression in steady entropy. Whereas God remains in whole existence, man breaths his way into non-existence. The life God enjoys in atemporal existence stands above decaying man as a great tower into which man longs to seek refuge.

 

 

[1] From Screwtape, letter 15: “The Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them” (61).

Photo: "Dawn of  Eternity" by Waiting for the Word. CC license. 

Corey Latta

Corey Latta holds a BA in Biblical Studies from Crichton College, an MA in New Testament Studies from Harding School of Theology, an MA in English from the University of Memphis, and a PhD in Twentieth-Century Literature from the University of Southern Mississippi. Corey is currently Vice President of Academics at Visible Music College. Corey is the author of numerous articles, poems, and three books, including “Election and Unity in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans,” and “Functioning Fantasies: Theology, Ideology, and Social Conception in the Works of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.” His latest book, When the Eternal Can Be Met: A Bergsonian Theology of Time in the Works of C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden, was published by Wipf & Stock in April.

Winners of the 2015 MoralApologetics.com Writing Contest

We at MoralApologetics.com are pleased to announce the winners of the 2015 Writing Contest. First, a hearty thanks to all who submitted a paper. We enjoyed reading them all, and it was regrettable there could be only one winner and runner-up in each category. If you entered this year and didn’t win, don’t be discouraged. This will be an annual event, so try again next year, most definitely!

And with that, here are the results:

 

BIBLE:

Winner: Andrew J. Spencer, “Biblical Ethics and the Moral Order in Creation”

Runner-up: Elizabeth Sunshine, “Job, Theodicy, and Ethics”

 

LITERATURE:

Winner: Josh Herring, “The Faustian Bargain of Fifty Shades of Grey

Runner-up: Rachel Boston, “Not Just for Pagans: God’s Redemptive Work through Story”

 

PHILOSOPHY:

Winner: Joshua Fountain, “Grounding Ethics in God: Why God’s Nature Determines Morality”

Runner-up: Dave Sidnam, “A Fundamental Issue with Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape

 

Some of these essays and others submitted to the writing contest will be appearing on the site, so be on the lookout for those.

Once again, thanks to all the participants. Exciting things are happening in Moral Apologetics!

Photo: "Trophies" by Brad.K, CC License. 

The Faustian Bargain of Fifty Shades of Gray

Editor's Note:  A longer version of this piece was originally published at The Federalist.

In the wake of Valentine’s Day 2015 and the unveiling of the much-anticipated theatrical release of Fifty Shade of Grey, I tried to pin down the appeal. It can’t be the prose—that seems to be one element at which all critics cringe. Nor can it be the level of explicit pornography. As the New Yorker’s review claimed, more graphic nudity can be found in a lecture on the Renaissance. Why then did this R-rated movie just pull in nearly $100 million on its opening weekend? In contemplating an answer, I began to consider the German novel Faust. Written by Johann Goethe in the late nineteenth century, Faust posits a bored academic who makes a bargain with devil. In so doing, Faust follows Mephistopheles (the devil) on a stream of adventures ultimately leading to tragedy. By understanding the Faust story, I think we can recognize the appeal of Fifty Shades of Grey.

Illustration by Harry Clarke for Goethe's Faust

Illustration by Harry Clarke for Goethe's Faust

In his interpretation of the Faust myth, Goethe changes the legend from a bored academic who makes a deal with the devil to a wager about the nature of the world. Goethe’s Faust concludes there is no cause of happiness in the world, and nothing beyond it. He is the epitome of dissatisfaction, and not even the Devil can show him lasting happiness. Mephistopheles as the modern image of the Adversary is more than happy to take this wager; after all, Faust’s wager serves Mephistopheles’ bet with God that Faust will choose the Devil’s path. This divine wager introduces the play, and serves as the primary point of the story: will Faust fall completely into the devil’s grasp, or regain his humanity by turning to God? The remainder of the play/novel/poem consists of a whirlwind of experiences, cycles of speed and experience swirling Faust ever downward into his own depravity, with naught but the love of Gretchen crying, “Heinrich, Heinrich!” as she ascends to heaven to provide any hope of redemption by the end of part one.

Mephistopheles is a clever devil. Gone are the old ways where the demonic fiend might get his prey addicted to drink, or harlots, or greed. No, Mephistopheles plays a closer game by showing Faust purity (in the form of Gretchen), and then leading him to corrupt the purity. Faust misses the actual hope of happiness in his quest for corruption. Faust is consumed with lust for Gretchen, and consummates his desire, leading to tragic consequences. In his quest for Gretchen, however, Faust discovers the one transcendent quality in his world: love. He cannot achieve that love, however, without abandoning his existential quest for proving the dissatisfaction of the world. In constantly seeking the hurly-burly of Walprugis Night, Faust fails to grasp the good in the world and instead condemns Gretchen to prison while he grinds against a naked witch in the Brocken.

Faust provides a helpful metaphor in light of the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon. After three poorly written erotic novels and a now-released film, the New York Times, Washington Post, Independent, and the Guardian carried articles the week before the premier about the upcoming movie and tie-in erotic toys. Why is this such an event? This film is garnering quick attention for at least two reasons. First, and most obviously, it is the entrance of BDSM into mainstream cinema. Secondly, however, it represents the temptation and titillation of a Faustian sexuality with all the incumbent promises of true happiness and empty fulfillment.

Fifty Shades of Grey is a recent re-articulation of the Marquis De Sade’s vision of sexuality: dominance and submission, power and punishment, pain and satisfaction stewed together producing the best experience for both participants. This vision of sexuality is exciting, and ultimately tragic. Just as Faust missed true happiness in the mundane, in a life wedded to Gretchen in the world, so Fifty Shades of Grey misses the right place of true sexuality: marriage. Men, women, and sexuality are all made in such a way that when sexual intimacy is embraced outside the confines of marriage, such as when Faust rushes into the orgy with Mephistopheles by his side, humanity is gradually eroded. Fifty Shades of Grey provides a stimulating pornographic vision of excitement while actually delivering a dehumanizing love of slavery enshrined in the closest physical human connections.

In the confines of marriage, sexuality becomes a raging force used constructively. Within a lifelong commitment between spouses, sexual intimacy serves a higher calling and produces true joy. Gretchen offered this life to Faust: the life of confinement, restraint, and true joy. Faust instead chose to allow Mephistopheles to “carry him away” into the never-ending rush of constant experience. Faced with a Faustian sexuality at the movies in coming weeks, the ticket-purchasing audience will be faced with a choice: is Fifty Shades of Grey be a celebration of real love between two humans who are called to serve, honor, submit to, and respect one another? Or is this film a call to step onto Mephistopheles’ cloak and be whisked away to a false pleasure creating a deceptive experience leading to tragedy?

 

On Playing the Man: Personal Reflections on Polycarp

Photo by Connor Dugan on Unsplash

Photo by Connor Dugan on Unsplash

Apologetics is all logos, and mind, and cerebration, and ism. And theology, apologia’s paterfamilias, conceptualizes and constructs new theories about God. If it’s very good theology, it recalls those older ideas from which the theories are built. I confess, as one who toils in both apologia and theologica, I find myself and my fellow thinkers a tad tiresome. Who are we, after all, that we would presume to argue on God’s behalf? What could I say to move a man’s mind closer to his Maker? Apologetics can be a presumptuous field full of ambitious intellectuals. I’m pressed to publish new material, to articulate anew at annual conferences. We say a lot, we apologists, maybe too much. I would distrust the apologist who didn’t doubt an old diatribe or regret not having a bit more reticence on occasion. And I suspect apologists and theologians are professional pundits and theatergoers critiquing God’s moving picture show.

In moments of clarity, I’m reminded that apologetics is, was, more.  I know myself involved in something greater. Apologists were the gospel of the crucified Christ embodied. Rationalizers and reasoners who bannered all truth as God’s. Defenders of the faith, I must remember, whose arguments weren’t vetted by editors or tenured peers but by persecutors and oppressive government officials. This is the apologetic tradition. I’d hold suspect any modern defender of the faith whose entire life was spent in the safe arena of academia, whose creed never faced the sword, or whose apologia didn’t determine living another day, if he didn’t feel just a tinge of sheepishness for all that theorizing so far behind the frontline.

Like the die-hard patriot who refuses to enlist, I’ve certainly let my theological arguments venture out beyond the truth of my life. And I might better know my place if I looked back to my greater kin. The authority from which I speak might gird me up if I leaned against it a little harder. If I could incarnate my ideas with more muscle and enflesh my Christian apologia so that it ran vein-long through me as it did my fathers in the faith.

Suppose, like Polycarp second-century Bishop of Smyrna, my case for God from the moral law or whatever defense for the historical validities of the Gospels I may make came from the same Christ-held-center that caused the apologist to say, “It must needs be that I shall be burned alive,” when his defense would cost his life. Sought, arrested, and led into a stadium for fatal interrogation, Polycarp heard what seems to me the apologist’s call, a voice from heaven saying “Be strong, Polycarp, and play the man.” Play the man. Would I, too, as one who defends the faith of Christ, who stands in the line of Polycarp?

When pressed by the Roman magistrate to consider his frail old frame and swear the genius of Caesar and “revile the Christ,” Polycarp replied, “eighty-six years have I been His servant, and He has done me no wrong. How then can I blaspheme my King who saved me?” An apologetic from testimony laden with as much keen logic as poignant pathos, Polycarp deals in reason and reciprocation. Polycarp’s response—my life proves that I’ve been treated well by God, so why should I not return my faithfulness to him?—is a sound defense in itself, but how much more coming from one whose best defense for the faith was his mere presence? Polycarp could play the apologist only because he played the man.

It seems to me, when reading Polycarp, that modern apologetics is at stake. My role as an apologist is at stake. What else should define my call, if not some Polycarpian paradigm? Indeed, if I, with mere degrees and books and a couple dozen conference papers, might wrap rhetorical wit the way Polycarp did, as a deflection against heresy premised by the apologetic of my life, then I might occasionally move to a defense beyond a regurgitated designer theory of the universe’s fine-tuning or an armchair deconstruction of naturalism. I might be more than a professional apologist, more than scholar, as Polycarp was more.

When the Roman magistrate commanded the Smyrnan Bishop to turn away from his fellow Christians, often accused of atheism because they denied Roman gods, and dismiss his kin’s faith by saying, “Away with the atheists,” we’re told that Polycarp answered, “with solemn countenance looked upon the whole multitude of lawless heathen that were in the stadium, and waved his hand to them; and groaning and looking up to heaven he said, ‘Away with the atheists.’”

An essential apologetic employs rhetorical wit in service to the Savoir. Polycarp knew no other kind. So he stands as, and so I’m reminded of, the Christan apologia’s beau ideal. It’s the old idea on which the western church was founded: that idea of a faithful disciple learned in the scriptures and sharp in thought, a living and breathing proof of Christ. No superfluous theologizing here. Only lived apologetics. A breathed bastion for the gospel. That’s the old idea.

Perhaps some modern apologetic publications would have more teeth if they were written to uphold the tradition of Polycarp, the “puller down of the gods,” as he was called. To pull the gods down so that the world might see Christ unobstructed. That we would have Polycarp’s strong shoulders able to topple over the statues of unorthodox thought. Modern apologetics as pulling down false gods. That’s the tradition in which I toil. I’m beginning to remember.

When threatened to be thrown to wild beasts—and if that wasn’t vile enough—to be burned, Polycarp said: “You threaten that fire which burns for a season and after a little while is quenched: for you are ignorant of the fire of the future judgment and eternal punishment, which is reserved for the ungodly. But why do you delay? Come, do what you will.” Polycarp’s pitting temporality against eternality and positing that life is best lived for the latter . . . that has teeth.

It’s all very romantic, I guess, and some esteemed colleagues might object to such a lofty, even unnecessary, return. Why should any western apologist want to champion Polycarp as anything more than a mythic figure? An antiquated model. Don’t we tend to see the first apologists as Thors and Herculeses and Beowulfs, really, trapped in distant hero tales? How unsettling, now in 2015, to meditate on my line of work in the light of Polycarp’s death. Polycarp died by fire and dagger in front of frenzied masses, while some apologists live by speaking to safe rooms of moderately hostile audiences, for goodness’ sake. I write this to recall the history in which I stand in hopes that I might remember to play the man when I play the apologist.

God, that we would be more romantic. That we would rehearse the myth when the times call for it. That we would pray Polycarp’s prayer when our backs are to the posts of the unbelieving world, “O Lord God Almighty, the Father of Your beloved and blessed Son Jesus Christ, through whom we have received the knowledge of You. . . . I bless You because You have granted me this day and hour, that I might receive a portion amongst the number of martyrs in the cup of Your Christ. . . . You that art the faithful and true God. For this cause, yea and for all things, I praise You, I bless You, I glorify You, through the eternal and heavenly High-priest, Jesus Christ, Your beloved Son, through Whom, with Him and the Holy Spirit, be glory both now and ever and for the ages to come. Amen.”

Corey Latta

Corey Latta holds a BA in Biblical Studies from Crichton College, an MA in New Testament Studies from Harding School of Theology, an MA in English from the University of Memphis, and a PhD in Twentieth-Century Literature from the University of Southern Mississippi. Corey is currently Vice President of Academics at Visible Music College. Corey is the author of numerous articles, poems, and three books, including “Election and Unity in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans,” and “Functioning Fantasies: Theology, Ideology, and Social Conception in the Works of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.” His latest book, When the Eternal Can Be Met: A Bergsonian Theology of Time in the Works of C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden, was published by Wipf & Stock in April.

What to Make of a Diminished Thing: Poeticizing the Fall (Part 2 of 2)

 

The ovenbird’s universal song, the natural revelation everyone has heard, is an augury of seasonal diminishment. Having a masterful knowledge of the Old Testament, Frost constantly drew from its imagery and themes. Frost’s use of biblical imagery—particularly images of the Fall—in “The Trial by Existence,” “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” and “The Onset” (to list only a few) underscore his reliance on the theological here in “The Over Bird.” As both are certainly present in the first three chapters of the Genesis narrative, it is fitting that Frost would marry these two themes of natural revelation and the Fall. The biblical account of the Fall describes a naturally perfect realm in complete harmony with itself and man (Gen. 2:8-19). Upon the entrance of sin into the created order, not only mankind but nature is said to have fallen: “cursed is the ground because of you. . . both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you [mankind]. . .” (Gen. 3:17-18). The Fall is the most cataclysmic theological and ecological occurrence in all of scripture: the entire natural world fell from an ideal form to a perpetual state of aftermath. Likewise, “The Oven Bird” depicts a natural realm where life once existed in an ideal state of spring, but in which now organisms are in a fallen condition, degraded by the passing of spring into summer. Echoing the narrative voice in Genesis, the ovenbird declares a state of natural decadence; the message that everyone hears exclaims a state of fallenness.

The poetic speaker shifts slightly from what the ovenbird proclaims to a larger theological context:

And comes that other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

“And comes that other fall we name the fall,” Frost declares with a definitive tone. The poem shifts to a more distinct doctrinal voice here. The octave presents a naturalistic mode of revelation: the poet can assert the theological implications of mid-summer’s diminishments. The double occurrence of “fall” in the first line of the sestet foregrounds the theme of the Fall that will run throughout the remainder of the poem. In this line Frost deploys his most foundational, and perhaps most important, poetic device—the previously explicated use of metaphor, Frost’s theology in poetic practice. At this point Frost begins to make his strongest metaphorical-theological connections.

When the poet says “and comes that other fall we name the fall,” the reader can certainly trace the seasonal meaning, which the poem endorses on its most basic level (spring to mid-summer to fall). However, the poem’s subtle theological undertones along with Frost’s insistence on metaphor should alert any interpreter that “fall” is a loaded term, one that draws on both natural and theological spheres. The ovenbird’s message of seasonal decay—the end of the flowers’ bloom at the peak of summer—culminates in the topos of the Fall of the natural order. The movement from natural occurrence to theological abstraction is a common gesture for Frost. The “fall,” both seasonal and lapsarian, is Frost’s entrance into both the natural and theological world in order to stretch the borders of each, interrogating the implications of one with the other, and perhaps rewriting the boundaries of both—all to create a highly charged poetics.

The speaker moves from his pun on the “fall” by returning once more to the message of the ovenbird: “He says the highway dust is over all.” The winged prophet describes a desolate condition in a sweeping statement. This fall, the Fall, has covered everything in the natural world. Going back to the role of human agency, it is the dust of the highway that has covered all. The poem seems to associate the origins of this desolation to a manmade object, perhaps as an indication of human agency in keeping with the Genesis narrative. Though the fallen world of the poem is purely natural, man—as the originator of sin in Genesis—is implicated as well.

After providing an aphorism on the Fall, the poem’s narrator then addresses the ovenbird’s condition: “The bird would cease and be as other birds/ But that he knows in singing not to sing.” These first two lines of the poem’s final quatrain provide a fascinating element to Frost’s use of the doctrine of the Fall. By postulating that the ovenbird “would cease and be as other birds,” the poet speaks to the bird’s role by reverting back to the biblical theme of functioning animals. Numerous times in the Old Testament animals were assigned specific functions, at times in an evil capacity (i.e. the serpent in the Garden of Eden—Gen. 3:1-4) but more often as agents for God (e.g. the dove sent from the ark by Noah—Gen. 8:8-9; the donkey who spoke to the prophet Balaam—Num. 22:28). Though there is no explicit divinity in the poem, the speaker makes a clear distinction between this ovenbird and other birds who merely sing without substance, “but that he knows in singing not to sing.”

The poem’s last two lines are by far the most powerful and poignant: “The question that he frames in all but words/ Is what to make of a diminished thing.” The theological elements of the poem necessarily culminate in the ovenbird’s inquiry. The speaker writes the last line as the sine qua non, the inevitable question from all the bird has said before. It is difficult to nail down what exactly this “thing” may be, but I think there are two likely options.

So profoundly diminished is this “thing” that the bird’s revelatory message primarily serves to frame the question of “what to make of a diminished thing.” Given the mid-summer state of immediate and approaching death, given the fallout and the degraded state of the natural world, what does one make of such faded and diminished objects? It is fitting that Frost ends with a question rather than a conclusion as he rarely seems interested—even in his exploration of biblical and theological tropes—in declaring answers. Instead, he interweaves the natural world of the poem with the theological and experiments with poetic meaning by metaphorizing the natural with the theological. Frost is more interested in writing catechistic verse than providing moral platitudes, and as a result, the poem concludes with inconclusiveness. The fallen condition of this “thing” bewilders the ovenbird, leaving the bird, the poetic speaker, and the readers in a state of contemplation over the poem’s two most prominent themes: the natural order and the assertion that it is fallen. Both themes, indeed Frost’s entire creative schema, argue for the presence of the theological as necessary for poeticizing the natural.

Photo: "Sunset" by Kamil Porembiński. CC License. 

Corey Latta

Corey Latta holds a BA in Biblical Studies from Crichton College, an MA in New Testament Studies from Harding School of Theology, an MA in English from the University of Memphis, and a PhD in Twentieth-Century Literature from the University of Southern Mississippi. Corey is currently Vice President of Academics at Visible Music College. Corey is the author of numerous articles, poems, and three books, including “Election and Unity in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans,” and “Functioning Fantasies: Theology, Ideology, and Social Conception in the Works of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.” His latest book, When the Eternal Can Be Met: A Bergsonian Theology of Time in the Works of C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden, was published by Wipf & Stock in April.

What to Make of a Diminished Thing: Poeticizing the Fall

Robert Frost was a poet on whom nothing was lost, nor was anything outside of his poetic jurisdiction. His poetry—though seemingly narrow in its New England regionalism, prosaic in its focus, and proletariat in its characterization—envisions a conspicuous natural world containing an intrinsic theological system of great interest. Frost’s knowledge of the Bible and his poetic engagement with religious doctrine reveal an acute investment in the theological by one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century. This investment proves an underlying argument in much of Frost’s work: perhaps an artistically literary experience of the natural necessitates consideration of the theological. Poems like “The Oven Bird,” “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” and “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same” unveil Frost to be a writer deeply invested in the use of theological tenets for deeper poetic meaning and a creative mind especially taken with the biblical narrative of the Fall. Within Frost’s verse lies an apologetic of creativity, a philosophy of poesy that implies the natural world cannot honestly be captured without the presence of the theological.

Frost’s continual return to the Fall—along with his employment of other theological matters, such as natural revelation—find fullest expression in the natural worlds of his poems. The landscapes, wildlife, and seasonal cycles of nature are all subject to theological animation and all detectable through metaphor. For Frost, these metaphors of animation could not attain their fullest meaning without synthesizing the natural with the theological. An important consideration when discussing any poet’s inclusion of theologically charged is his use of metaphor. And, in fact, Frost maintained an ardent belief in metaphor as the chief trope and function of verse; according to Frost, metaphor is where poetry begins, exists, and ends:

[T]here are many other things I have found myself saying about poetry, but the chiefest of these is that it is metaphor, saying one thing and meaning another. . . . Poetry is simply made of metaphor.

What I see as a type of Frostian orthodoxy, metaphor enables meaning by enacting a poetic schema inclusive of religious, scientific, and philosophical discourse. In Frost’s own terms, metaphor is a way to “say matter in terms of spirit.” If there is spirituality, theology, and the supernatural in Frost’s poems, they reside in his implementation of metaphor. Through metaphor, Frost opens the natural to the supernatural, and every natural object, every leaf, tree, brook, and animal is subject to fuller meaning through the metaphorical. Metaphor becomes a theological act.

The conversion from theological thought to metaphor was for Frost the ultimate act of literary and religious expression. If theology is the study of God, then metaphor is Frost’s theology, his attempt to give form to theological inquiry. For Frost, metaphor making is the doing of theology. Exposure to one trope is exposure to the other, as Frost said, “the person who gets close enough to poetry, he is going to know more about the word belief than anybody else knows, even in religion nowadays . . . now I think—I happen to think—that those three beliefs that I speak of, the self-belief, the love-belief, and the art-belief, are all closely related to the God belief.” Through poetry, one can “bring the thing into existence.”

In his poem “The Oven Bird,” Frost uses the theological tropes of the Fall along with natural revelation to give new meaning to the natural world of the poem while also continuing to develop metaphorical poetics in which meaning itself must be both natural and supernatural. Frost displays remarkable poetic dexterity by both theologizing and naturalizing the act of this common bird’s call.

There is a singer everyone has heard,

Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

He says the early petal-fall is past

When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers

On sunny days a moment overcast;

And comes that other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

I see this poem primarily exploring two theological tropes in relation to one another: natural revelation and the doctrine of the Fall. Note that, as is so often with Frost, the theological is deeply contextualized in the world of nature. Like the ovenbird’s nest, characteristically built on the forest floor, Frost grounds theology in the natural world. On the other hand, the poem’s natural imagery channels a theological dimension that forces the reader to contend with the work’s metaphorical meaning. Precisely in this melding of immanence and transcendence lies Frost’s poetic agenda: to infuse nature with theological phenomena so that both spheres (the natural and the theological) inseparably coalesce. This coalescence, in turn, creates an apologetic for the necessity of theology in the poet’s creative act.

Here, in the claim that “everyone has heard,” Frost interjects the doctrine of natural revelation, a theme that wends its way throughout the entire poem. Natural revelation is the doctrine that God has revealed, and continues to reveal, himself to all men through the natural order. As systematic theologian Louis Berkhof states, “The mode of [natural] revelation is natural when it is communicated through nature, that is, through the visible creation with its ordinary laws and powers.”

The most relevant aspect of natural revelation—and the most relevant distinction between natural and special revelation—is its universality, its common annunciation to all mankind through nature. Being a student of both science and the bible and often troubled by their apparent differences, Frost frequently sought to fuse religious and natural imagery, and it is extremely probable that Frost was well acquainted with the biblical doctrine of natural revelation and potentially saw it as the literal and metaphorical melding of theology and science.

In the case of “The Oven Bird,” natural revelation manifests itself in the winged singer’s “loud” call that “everyone has heard.” Frost positions this ovenbird as a prophet of nature, characterized by his seasonality, the audience of his message, and the nature of his oratory. Significantly, the one note Frost provides for the poem mentions the ovenbird’s common designation as the “teacher bird.” As a “mid-summer and a mid-wood bird” the ovenbird is situated seasonally in the progressive natural order, and it is from his seasonal office that he declares a natural message to the “solid tree trunks.” The ovenbird’s first hearers are not human, but rather organic members of his community that respond to the bird’s message, “the solid tree trunks sound again.” The revelatory world of the bird’s song is accessible and detectable to the listeners of the natural world. Indeed, the poem’s speaker describes the bird’s message as “loud” and resonating to the surrounding natural realm as the trees “sound again” the ovenbird’s oracle, implying a form of acceptance of the message by its hearers. In anticipation of that end, the ovenbird’s oratory begins to introduce the poem’s other prominent theological trope: the theological trope of the Fall. It is in the sonnet’s octave that Frost delves into the substance of the ovenbird’s natural revelation while also inaugurating a theology of the Fall. As the sonnet unfolds, the picture grows increasingly grim. The sonnet reaches its turn in both tone and theological theme as the natural revelation of the octave turns poignantly to a treatment of the Fall in the sestet. The ovenbird reveals a declining natural order where the first beauty of spring life has passed and all is given to the imminent coming of fall:

He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

He says the early petal-fall is past

When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers

On sunny days a moment overcast;

By mid-summer—the time of the ovenbird’s announcement—the leaves that spring birthed are old and on the verge of seasonal death. The ovenbird sings at a time of declivity as mid-summer holds little to no importance to other organisms in the poem. In a somewhat ambiguous line, Frost seems to say that “for flowers” summer is lowest on a scale of importance—numbered “one to ten”—because their time to bloom has past. The preposition “for” signals the position of the flowers as understood by the bird (“He says”). Just as the flowers’ petals have long fallen by mid-summer, so too have the pear and cherry trees, whose blooms “went down in showers/ on sunny days a moment overcast.” The bird speaks of sweeping loss and the beginning of death as leaves, flowers, and fruit trees—all images associated with the Garden of Eden—testify to their seasonal demise. As interpreter of this profound phenomenon reflected in nature’s cycles, the bird knows that mid-summer holds little importance for spring blooms and that the flowery life spawned in spring cannot live throughout summer.

The ovenbird’s universal song, the natural revelation everyone has heard, is an augury of seasonal diminishment. Having a masterful knowledge of the Old Testament, Frost constantly drew from its imagery and themes. Frost’s use of biblical imagery—particularly images of the Fall—in “The Trial by Existence,” “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” and “The Onset” (to list only a few) underscore his reliance on the theological here in “The Over Bird.” As both are certainly present in the first three chapters of the Genesis narrative, it is fitting that Frost would marry these two themes of natural revelation and the Fall. The biblical account of the Fall describes a naturally perfect realm in complete harmony with itself and man (Gen. 2:8-19). Upon the entrance of sin into the created order, not only mankind but nature is said to have fallen: “cursed is the ground because of you. . . both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you [mankind]. . .” (Gen. 3:17-18). The Fall is the most cataclysmic theological and ecological occurrence in all of scripture: the entire natural world fell from an ideal form to a perpetual state of aftermath. Likewise, “The Oven Bird” depicts a natural realm where life once existed in an ideal state of spring, but in which now organisms are in a fallen condition, degraded by the passing of spring into summer. Echoing the narrative voice in Genesis, the ovenbird declares a state of natural decadence; the message that everyone hears exclaims a state of fallenness.

The poetic speaker shifts slightly from what the ovenbird proclaims to a larger theological context:

And comes that other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

“And comes that other fall we name the fall,” Frost declares with a definitive tone. The poem shifts to a more distinct doctrinal voice here. The octave presents a naturalistic mode of revelation: the poet can assert the theological implications of mid-summer’s diminishments. The double occurrence of “fall” in the first line of the sestet foregrounds the theme of the Fall that will run throughout the remainder of the poem. In this line Frost deploys his most foundational, and perhaps most important, poetic device—the previously explicated use of metaphor, Frost’s theology in poetic practice. At this point Frost begins to make his strongest metaphorical-theological connections.

When the poet says “and comes that other fall we name the fall,” the reader can certainly trace the seasonal meaning, which the poem endorses on its most basic level (spring to mid-summer to fall). However, the poem’s subtle theological undertones along with Frost’s insistence on metaphor should alert any interpreter that “fall” is a loaded term, one that draws on both natural and theological spheres. The ovenbird’s message of seasonal decay—the end of the flowers’ bloom at the peak of summer—culminates in the topos of the Fall of the natural order. The movement from natural occurrence to theological abstraction is a common gesture for Frost. The “fall,” both seasonal and lapsarian, is Frost’s entrance into both the natural and theological world in order to stretch the borders of each, interrogating the implications of one with the other, and perhaps rewriting the boundaries of both—all to create a highly charged poetics.

The speaker moves from his pun on the “fall” by returning once more to the message of the ovenbird: “He says the highway dust is over all.” The winged prophet describes a desolate condition in a sweeping statement. This fall, the Fall, has covered everything in the natural world. Going back to the role of human agency, it is the dust of the highway that has covered all. The poem seems to associate the origins of this desolation to a manmade object, perhaps as an indication of human agency in keeping with the Genesis narrative. Though the fallen world of the poem is purely natural, man—as the originator of sin in Genesis—is implicated as well.

After providing an aphorism on the Fall, the poem’s narrator then addresses the ovenbird’s condition: “The bird would cease and be as other birds/ But that he knows in singing not to sing.” These first two lines of the poem’s final quatrain provide a fascinating element to Frost’s use of the doctrine of the Fall. By postulating that the ovenbird “would cease and be as other birds,” the poet speaks to the bird’s role by reverting back to the biblical theme of functioning animals. Numerous times in the Old Testament animals were assigned specific functions, at times in an evil capacity (i.e. the serpent in the Garden of Eden—Gen. 3:1-4) but more often as agents for God (e.g. the dove sent from the ark by Noah—Gen. 8:8-9; the donkey who spoke to the prophet Balaam—Num. 22:28). Though there is no explicit divinity in the poem, the speaker makes a clear distinction between this ovenbird and other birds who merely sing without substance, “but that he knows in singing not to sing.”

The poem’s last two lines are by far the most powerful and poignant: “The question that he frames in all but words/ Is what to make of a diminished thing.” The theological elements of the poem necessarily culminate in the ovenbird’s inquiry. The speaker writes the last line as the sine qua non, the inevitable question from all the bird has said before. It is difficult to nail down what exactly this “thing” may be, but I think there are two likely options.

So profoundly diminished is this “thing” that the bird’s revelatory message primarily serves to frame the question of “what to make of a diminished thing.” Given the mid-summer state of immediate and approaching death, given the fallout and the degraded state of the natural world, what does one make of such faded and diminished objects? It is fitting that Frost ends with a question rather than a conclusion as he rarely seems interested—even in his exploration of biblical and theological tropes—in declaring answers. Instead, he interweaves the natural world of the poem with the theological and experiments with poetic meaning by metaphorizing the natural with the theological. Frost is more interested in writing catechistic verse than providing moral platitudes, and as a result, the poem concludes with inconclusiveness. The fallen condition of this “thing” bewilders the ovenbird, leaving the bird, the poetic speaker, and the readers in a state of contemplation over the poem’s two most prominent themes: the natural order and the assertion that it is fallen. Both themes, indeed Frost’s entire creative schema, argue for the presence of the theological as necessary for poeticizing the natural.


IMG_2738.jpg

Corey Latta holds a BA in Biblical Studies from Crichton College, an MA in New Testament Studies from Harding School of Theology, an MA in English from the University of Memphis, and a PhD in Twentieth-Century Literature from the University of Southern Mississippi. Corey is currently Vice President of Academics at Visible Music College. Corey is the author of numerous articles, poems, and three books, including “Election and Unity in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans,” and “Functioning Fantasies: Theology, Ideology, and Social Conception in the Works of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.” His latest book, When the Eternal Can Be Met: A Bergsonian Theology of Time in the Works of C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden, was published by Wipf & Stock in April.

Corey Latta

Corey Latta holds a BA in Biblical Studies from Crichton College, an MA in New Testament Studies from Harding School of Theology, an MA in English from the University of Memphis, and a PhD in Twentieth-Century Literature from the University of Southern Mississippi. Corey is currently Vice President of Academics at Visible Music College. Corey is the author of numerous articles, poems, and three books, including “Election and Unity in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans,” and “Functioning Fantasies: Theology, Ideology, and Social Conception in the Works of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.” His latest book, When the Eternal Can Be Met: A Bergsonian Theology of Time in the Works of C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden, was published by Wipf & Stock in April.

Selma and Sacrifice: Dignity and Vigilance

Selma and.jpg

Watching Selma is a visceral emotional experience. True to life, it didn’t need to resort to the hyperbolic or maudlin, the sentimental or heavy handed—which makes it, to my thinking, considerably more profound and authentic than the self-important trainwreck God’s Not Dead. The story of Selma is itself compelling enough, a drama about issues like equality, dignity, respect, humanity, inhumanity. It requires no extra props, no tortured plot, no artificial melodrama, nor fictional caricatures to promote an agenda. It need not feign meanness or superficiality; history here is sadly replete with actual instances of such real people who, unwittingly, played their inverted roles to help justice prevail.

The movie chronicles the story of the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) going to Selma, Alabama to protest the de facto lack of voting rights among the black citizens there. They had the legal right to vote by this time, but in practice they were denied it by the enforcement of all sorts of arbitrary and prohibitive local requirements—like the need to quote the Preamble of the Constitution by heart or answer a series of highly specific legal or political questions at which most contestants on Jeopardy would stumble.

Spearheaded by the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—who once said that anyone who doesn’t understand the religious underpinnings of the movement doesn’t understand the movement—this arm of the civil rights front was, unlike those in the tradition of Malcolm X, committed to nonviolence. The restraint, wisdom, and courage of this approach is on full display in this remarkable film, which by turns stirs both shameful despair and soaring hope. We can read about such events and be deeply moved, but seeing various facets of the tale graphically depicted on the big screen—a church with four innocent girls blown to pieces, a young man shot defending his elderly grandfather against police brutality, women punched and kicked and beaten, men bludgeoned with a hideous array of blunt objects—carries with it an undeniable new level of poignancy.

The success of the movement would arise from the crucible of anguish and pain and sacrifice—as images of gross injustice, wicked violence against innocents, and beautiful and inspiring courage gradually did their work to capture moral imagination and change and turn the heart of a nation whose conscience had been seared and for which accommodation to evil had become normative—too often draped with the imprimatur of sanctimony. It is remarkably moving to see the tenacity displayed, the hope that survived such adversity, the faith manifested in the darkest of hours and in the face of such systemic and unspeakable violence, only bolstered by a silent White House—or worse, an administration that, to knock the movement from the radar and render silent its most prophetic and erudite voice, used tactics of intimidation, fear-mongering, and character assassination to undermine King’s credibility and resolve.

By certain recurring foibles, King was in fact susceptible to moral criticisms, and the movie doesn’t shy away from this uncomfortable fact; this unflinching honesty is one of the film’s many virtues. As is known, King had several adulterous affairs with other women, and the movie includes this regrettable feature of this great man with feet of clay. David Horner discusses this aspect of King, using “GMT” for “Great Moral Teacher,” writing that

Dr. Martin Luther King is almost universally considered a GMT, despite evidence of his sexual infidelities. … Why is it that we consider Dr. King a moral authority, despite his moral imperfections? Part of the answer, surely, has to do with the importance of what he said. The truths he expressed concerning human dignity were much “bigger” than he was, so to speak, and his infidelities do not cast doubt upon them. … But, of course, anyone—including Adolph Hitler—could have said those things, could have articulated those same propositions. What is it that made Dr. King a GMT, and not merely a conduit or reporter of significant moral truths? A necessary, core condition, I submit, is a special case of what I am defending here, and that is integrity, which expresses the coherence or intrinsic relation between content and character. We consider Dr. King a GMT, despite his lack of complete moral integrity, partly because he never claimed to possess the latter, and partly because there was coherence between what he did claim and how he lived. He uttered profound truths about liberty and racial equality, and he lived consistently and with integrity with respect to them, to the point of being jailed, beaten, and ultimately killed. I dare say, however, that had his central message been the importance of sexual fidelity (or had it turned out that he was actually a secret informer for the Ku Klux Klan), he would not in fact today be considered a GMT—no matter how exalted had been his teaching in other respects.

I remember a civil rights course in college as one of the best classes I ever took. In that class we read King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” After watching Selma, I reread the letter, and I would encourage you to do the same if you can find the time. It’s really quite remarkable. So many lines stand out from this letter to ministers who were lamenting the involvement of the SCLC in Birmingham, but I’ll share just a few:

I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their "thus saith the Lord" far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

In that letter King outlined a few of the reasons nonviolence was his favored approach, the sort of nonviolence we see in Selma. “I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.”

Explaining that justice too long delayed is justice denied, King goes on to make clear that the time for action had arrived:

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. … Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

Much could be discussed from Selma. This is nothing like a thorough review of this terrific film which offers a painful snapshot of actual history about brave men and women putting their lives, reputations, and bodies at risk to battle grave injustice and be given a voice. The film features people animated by and collectively embodying a rejection of Bentham’s perverse notion of human rights as nonsense on stilts. Their example was a living, breathing refutation of the idea that our only rights are those that government deigns to confer.

More primordial underlying moral truths are the real bedrock on which our legal and political rights reside, and it’s those unchanging moral verities alone that can ensure a trajectory of justice, however incremental and protracted, labyrinthine and excruciating, the political process required may prove. Under totalitarian rule that categorically denies God-given and intrinsic human rights and equality and dignity, callous to claims of justice, victory in this world is by no means an ineluctable, inevitable historical contingency, which reminds us all the more that a sanguine dismissal of the ultimate foundations of morality is a foolhardy, historically myopic, and objectionably short-sighted pitfall we need assiduously to avoid.

Jean Bethke-Elshtain once wrote, “It is interesting—and troubling—that we are in an age of human rights par excellence, and yet there are forces at work in our world that undermine the ontological claims of human dignity that must ground a robust regime of human rights.” So the one take-home I want to emphasize is that the battle to accord human dignity and value, worth and equality, their proper pride of place is one bathed in blood and sacrifice, and that vigilance is necessary to ensure that this labor was not in vain.

As Selma shows.

 

Photo: Jack Rabin collection on Alabama civil rights and southern activists, 1941-2004 (bulk 1956-1974) , Historical Collections and Labor Archives, Eberly Family Special Collections Library, University Libraries, Pennsylvania State University.

Why Bertrand Russell Was Not a Moral Realist, Either

Editor's note: This essay comes from Philosophy and the Christian Worldview: Analysis, Assessment and Development edited by Mark Linville and David Werther. 

So long as he is content to assume the reality and authority of the moral consciousness, the Moral Philosopher can ignore Metaphysic; but if the reality of Morals or the validity of ethical truth be once brought into question, the attack can only be met by a thorough-going enquiry into the nature of Knowledge and of Reality. –Hastings Rashdall, 1907

Bertrand Russell was not a Christian, and he bothered to tell us, in some detail, why he was not. At the time of the writing of “Why I Am Not a Christian,” his moral philosophy was a variety of emotivism. But this was not always so. At fifty, Bertrand Russell reflected upon the early days of his philosophical career and wrote, “When the generation to which I belong were young, Moore persuaded us all that there is an absolute good.” Indeed, for a period of nearly a decade, Russell defended a robust version of moral realism. His 1902 essay, “A Free Man’s Worship” touts a human vision of the Platonic Good as the one saving grace in a world where all human aspiration and accomplishment is “destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system.” Through our knowledge of the Good we may retain our dignity and find meaning despite the “omnipotence of death” and the utter indifference of the cosmos to all that we hold dear.

Just a few years later Russell published his Philosophical Essays (1910), which originally included “A Free Man’s Worship” as well as his essay, “The Elements of Ethics.” The latter offers an account of moral philosophy that is taken, with little alteration, straight from the pages of Moore’s Principia Ethica. Russell maintains that goodness is the fundamental moral concept and resists analysis into other terms, moral or non-moral. And moral properties resist identification with properties of any other order. Further, they are “impersonal” or objective: if a thing is good, then it is such that “on its own account it ought to exist.” Hence, “the object of ethics, by its own account, is to discover true propositions about virtuous and vicious conduct, and … these are just as much a part of truth as true propositions about oxygen or the multiplication table.”

Russell appealed to intuition.

In the case of ethics, we must ask why such and such actions ought to be performed, and continue our backward inquiry for reasons until we reach the kind of propositions of which proof is impossible, because it is so simple or so obvious that nothing more fundamental can be found from which to deduce it.

Thus, this “backward inquiry” arrives at “premises which we know though we cannot prove them,” and these become the starting ground for moral reflection. Moral beliefs ultimately receive their sanction through “immediate,” i.e., non-inferential, judgments. The final court of appeal is to “ethical judgments with which almost everyone would agree.” In short, the younger Russell was a stark raving moral realist.

But in the years between the publications of Philosophical Essays and Mysticism and Logic (1918), Russell’s confidence in the objectivity of morality had begun to erode. The latter collection included “A Free Man’s Worship,” but “The Elements of Ethics” was omitted. In the preface to that collection, and in reference to his views in “A Free Man’s Worship,” he confessed, “I feel less convinced than I did then of the objectivity of good and evil.” By the time of the 1929 edition, his abandonment of moral realism was complete: “I no longer regard good and evil as objective entities wholly independent of human desires….” He added, “It was Santayana who first led me to disbelieve in the objectivity of good and evil by his criticism of my then views in his ‘Winds of Doctrine.’”

George Santayana thus seems to have argued Russell back out of the moral realism of which Moore had earlier persuaded him. To my knowledge, Russell never bothered to elaborate on the specifics of Santayana’s arguments that he found compelling. There is some speculation on this. Harry Ruja, for instance, suggests that Russell’s moral realism was but a short-lived and halfhearted interlude between periods when he embraced varieties of anti-realism. According to Ruja, it took little more than a nudge to dislodge Russell from a view that he never found all that compelling. And the brutalities of war may have played a role. Be all of that as it may, our chief interest here is in Santayana’s arguments themselves and not whatever propensities caused Russell to change his mind. Are any of them any good?

Moral Faith in an Accidental Universe

Santayana’s criticisms of Russell’s “hypostatic ethics” are many. Some are specific counters to particular Russellian arguments. Two of his arguments are much grander in scale. On the one hand, Santayana argues that the requirements of moral realism per se are incoherent. In fact, he offers a number of arguments that seem to foreshadow those that would be marshaled in defense of non-cognitivism in the following decades. Space does not permit discussion of these interesting arguments. And a century of space-time is filled with discussions of similar arguments.

My chief interest is with Santayana’s second argument, which I believe has received but scant attention. According to Santayana, the conjunction of Russell’s moral philosophy with his naturalist metaphysics forms an unstable compound and thus lacks cohesion. In fact, Santayana thinks the combination is reduced to absurdity. Harry Ruja thinks this is Santayana’s “most telling criticism,” and I quite agree.

On the one hand, Russell’s moral philosophy implies, “In the realm of essences, before anything exists, there are certain essences that have this remarkable property, that they ought to exist, or at least, that, if anything exists, it ought to conform to them.” Russell’s language echoes that of Moore, who was concerned to show that some things “are worth having purely for their own sakes.” In Principia Ethica, Moore had argued against Sidgwick that some values—beauty in particular—obtain even if forever unappreciated by any conscious mind. Moore’s thought experiments using his method of “absolute isolation” were designed to discern what sorts of things are of intrinsic value. Generally, things have intrinsic value just in case “if they existed by themselves, in absolute isolation, we should yet judge their existence to be good.”

On the other hand, given Russell’s naturalism, “What exists…is deaf to this moral emphasis in the eternal; nature exists for no reason.” In the very essay in which Russell found solace in the human vision of the Platonic Good, he asserts that “Man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving.” But in such an accidental world it would be marvelous indeed were the very things that ought to exist should have come to be. It would be as though among the verities a special premium had forever been placed upon something—featherless bipeds, say—to the exclusion of all other possible forms (feathered monopods?), and, despite the countless possibilities and, because of sheer dumb luck, the same had been fashioned and formed of Big Bang debris. The cosmic lottery seems not only to have turned up Moore’s beautiful world, but also a Fink-Nottle to gush over it: “People who say it isn’t a beautiful world don’t know what they are talking about”

Moral Scepticism and Animal Faith

Further, if human hopes and fears, loves and beliefs are, as Russell affirmed, “but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms,” it would be especially surprising to learn that, by fortuitous circumstance, and with no direction or influence from any heaven above, the emergent human conscience, to which Russell appeals, is a reliable indicator of eternal moral truth. Indeed, Russell observes a bit later in “A Free Man’s Worship” that it is a “strange mystery” that nature, “omnipotent but blind” should, in her “secular hurrying,” have “brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking mother.”

At this, G. Dawes Hicks wrote in his 1911 review of Philosophical Essays,

Strange mystery indeed! But why should we be called upon in the name of science  complacently to admit such occult and incredible mysteries? The alleged miracles of former days were at least ascribed to a cause that could conceivably have wrought them.

The trouble with Russell’s overall position is that he has latched upon one set of possible values to the exclusion of the rest, and has done so by appeal to “intuition,” but he lacks any sort of background account, in the form of a supporting metaphysic, that would warrant his taking “felt values” as any indication of moral truth. As Santayana puts the point in Platonism and the Spiritual Life,

The distinction between true goods and false goods can never be established by  ignorant feeling or by conscience not backed by a dogmatic view of the facts: for felt values, taken absolutely and regarded as unconditioned, are all equally genuine in their excellence, and equally momentary in their existence.

If Russell thought that there are immediate judgments, “which we know though we cannot prove them,” Santayana replied, in effect, that their very immediacy is grounds for thinking that they do not constitute knowledge. Russell maintains that moral properties are mind-independent, and endeavors to justify his assertion by appeal to moral consensus, or something near enough. At this, Santayana complains,

Mr. Russell … thinks he triumphs when he feels that the prejudices of his readers will  agree with his own; as if the constitutional unanimity of all human animals, supposing it existed, could tend to show that the good they agreed to recognise was independent of their constitution.

Russell finds sympathy for his intuitions, not because they are self-evident, but because his reader is “the right sort of man.” And even if the sympathy were found to be universal, this would only demonstrate that his readers were members of the right sort of species.

Taking certain considered moral beliefs for granted, Russell proceeds in a forward direction to the construction of a moral philosophy. After all, one cannot reasonably demand that such intuitions themselves be inferred from yet more primitive moral beliefs. But, according to Santayana, Russell’s vision is “monocular” where a “binocular” perspective is required.

The ethical attitude doubtless has no ethical ground, but that fact does not prevent it   from having a natural ground; and the observer of the animate creation need not have much difficulty in seeing what that natural ground is. Mr. Russell, however, refuses to look also in that direction.

Russell spoke of a “backward inquiry” that terminates when and only when one has run out of grounds of a moral nature, but, Santayana thinks, the sequence continues into natural, physical and even animal grounds that reveal the conditioned nature of Russell’s would-be ethical axioms. Though Santayana agrees with Russell that “the good is predicated categorically by conscience,” a “glance back over our shoulder” will reveal that conscience itself is conditioned and has its basis “in the physical order of things.” Hence, “Ethics should be controlled by a physics that perceives the material ground and the relative status of whatever is moral.”

Given the implications of Russell’s “naturalist philosophy,” it is “no marvel that the good should attract the world where the good, by definition, is whatever the world is aiming at.” Nor is it any marvel that the dictates of human conscience should share such a trajectory. “Felt values reconcile the animal and moral side of our nature to their own contingency.” They arise out of “a substantial harmony between our interests and our circumstances.” When that harmony is achieved, there is a propensity to hypostasize the resulting “home values” into “a cosmic system especially planned to guarantee them,” and Russell’s very philosophy is just the outworking of this propensity. Russell’s good is but “natural laws, zoological species, and human ideals that have been projected into the empyrean.” Where Russell envisions the human intellect attracted by, and ascending to, a fixed and eternal Good, Santayana sees the vision of contingent and relative goods emerging in consciousness as the product of actual natures placed in actual circumstances.

Thus “good” and “bad” are understood in reference to “constitutional interests”: “The good is relative to actual natures and simply their latent ideal, actual or realized, is essential to its being truly a good.” Though the life of an oyster may not be the good life for anyone capable of reading philosophy, it suits the oyster. And while the human constitution and human society may set a premium upon the ideal of a “universal sympathy,” “the tigers cannot regard it as such, for it would suppress the tragic good called ferocity, which makes, in their eyes, the chief glory of the universe.” Either way, ethical absolutism is but a “mental grimace of passion” and thus “refutes itself by what it is.” “Human morality … is but the inevitable and hygienic bias of one race of animals.” The outcome of Moore’s thought experiments or Russell’s poll regarding “ethical judgments with which almost every one would agree” are predictable given the fact that they employ “an imagination which is exclusively human.”

Darwin’s Descent of Man cannot have been far from Santayana’s elbow as he wrote. According to Darwin, human morality is ultimately rooted in a set of social instincts that conferred fitness upon our remote ancestors given the circumstances of the evolutionary landscape. Some behaviors (feeding one’s babies, fleeing from large predators) are adaptive, and others (feeding one’s babies to large predators) are not. Any predisposition or prompting that increases the probability of the adaptive behavior will thus also be adaptive. The circumstances of early hominid evolution were such that various forms of altruistic behavior were fitness conferring. For instance, members of a cooperative and cohesive group tended to have greater reproductive success, since the group itself would tend to fare better than competing, discordant groups.

A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of  patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.

Assuming that the spirits of patriotism, sympathy and so forth are heritable, the predisposition for such behaviors will be passed from patriotic parent to obedient offspring.

Of course, there is more to the moral sense than the instincts that Darwin had in mind. All social animals are possessed of such instincts, but not all are plausibly thought of as moral agents. According to Darwin, conscience is the result of the social instincts being overlain with a certain degree of rationality.

The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that any   animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man.

Santayana may be right in thinking that ferocity is the chief glory of the universe for the tiger, but your average tiger is not given to reflection on the matter. Were he graced with intellect alongside his ferocity, he might be found guilty of hypostasizing ferocity in just the way that Russell has projected his own ideals. Were he to employ Moore’s method of absolute isolation the results would be radically different, dominated, as he is, with an imagination that is exclusively tigrine. He might think Russell eloquent on the topic of oysters, but only because he is the right sort of cat. Tigrine morality is, after all, nothing but the inevitable and hygienic bias of one race of animals.

Russell’s vision is monocular, then, in that he takes the deliverances of conscience as his point of departure but fails to consider the conditioned nature of conscience itself. He assumes that the moral sense is truth-aimed, with objective moral truth as its object, when, in fact, “moral truth” proves simply to be whatever it is that human conscience projects. If there is indeed anything “inevitable” about the “hygienic bias” that is human morality, it is only a hypothetical necessity, conditioned upon a radically contingent set of circumstances. Had the theater in which human evolution has played out been different in any of countless ways, either we might never have been among the cast at all, or we might have played an entirely different role. There may be some “forced moves” through evolutionary design space, as Daniel Dennett has observed. But if there are such inevitable engineering solutions, the set of predispositions out of which human morality has emerged, according to Darwin, seems not to be among them. Consider what I’ll call “Darwinian Counterfactuals.”

If . . . men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can   hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering. Nevertheless the bee, or any other social animal, would in our supposed case gain, as it appears to me, some feeling of right and wrong, or a conscience. . . . In this case an inward monitor would tell the animal that it would have been better to have followed one impulse rather than the other. The one course ought to have been followed: the one would have been right and the other wrong.

This “inward monitor” that is the source of moral belief thus appears to be fitness aimed in that it directs the creature towards whatever behaviors are adaptive given the contingent circumstances in which it has been placed. But—and this is Santayana’s central point—there is no reason to suppose a connection between a conscientious belief’s being adaptive and its corresponding to whatever is eternally inscribed in the moral heavens. To paraphrase Santayana, natural selection is blind to this moral emphasis in the eternal; nature exists for no reason.

Metaphysical Underpinnings

Russell has divorced the realms of nature and morality and, in a way reminiscent of Mark Twain’s quip about naked people, has left morality with little or no influence in the world. He manages, with Moore’s help, to disentangle values from natural facts, but then sends morality to “fly into the abyss at a tangent,” leaving the earth in moral darkness. The result is an “impotent dogmatism on high.” Russell’s trouble, at bottom, is that he is “not a theist after the manner of Socrates; his good is not a power.”

According to Santayana, Russell and Moore erred by isolating one element of Platonic morality—the hypostasis of the Good—to the exclusion of two others that are essential to its overall cohesion: the “political” and the “theological.” By the former, Santayana has in mind a theory of human nature holding that human happiness is to be achieved only in the appropriate relation to the good. He develops this idea more fully in Platonism and the Spiritual Life.

Life … has been kindled and is alone sustained by the influence of pre-existing  celestial models. It is by imitating these models in some measure that we exist at all, and only in imitating, loving, and contemplating them that we can ever be happy. They are our good.

The “theological” element constitutes the metaphysical underpinning for the conviction that something or someone is actively working all things together for the good. On such a scheme, that something just so happens to be the Good itself. Indeed, Santayana thinks that a conception of the good as an influential power is the “sole category” that would justify Russell’s hypostasis of the good.

The whole Platonic and Christian scheme, in making the good independent of private  will and opinion, by no means makes it independent of the direction of nature in general and of human nature in particular. For all things have been created with an innate predisposition towards the creative good and are capable of finding happiness in nothing else. Obligation, in this system, remains internal and vital. Plato attributes a single vital direction and a single narrow source to the cosmos. This is what determines and narrows the source of the true good; for the true good is that relevant to nature. Plato would not have been a dogmatic moralist had he not been a theist.

This Platonic hypostasis without the underlying metaphysic and theory of human nature is merely “half-hearted.” It is a Platonism “stultified and eviscerated.” Russell, like a number of “modern moralists” attempted to retain much of the substance of such an account of morality “without its dogmatic justification.”

Thus, on both classical Platonism and Christian theism, “The Platonic ideas, the Christian God, or the Christ of devout Christians may be conceived to be the causes of their temporal manifestations in matter or in the souls of men.” As Robert Adams has put it in a work that appeals to a theistic and Platonist framework for ethics,

If we suppose that God directly or indirectly causes human beings to regard as  excellent approximately those things that are Godlike in the relevant way, it follows that there is a causal and explanatory connection between facts of excellence and beliefs that we may regard as justified about excellence, and hence it is in general no accident that such beliefs are correct when they are.

However, there is no place for such teleology on Russell’s naturalistic philosophy. Russell’s morality seems to Santayana a “ghost of Calvinism,” except that the deity has “lost his creative and punitive functions.”

Santayana thus seems to have thought that moral realism is tenable only within the scaffolds of a theistic metaphysics. Given what Russell affirms in his “Free Man’s Worship,” one is left with an undercutting naturalistic explanation for the human propensity to form moral beliefs. Even if Russell’s heaven of ideas exists, we cannot know it, for the simple fact that the only apparent evidence for supposing that it does—our considered moral beliefs—is given an explanation on naturalism that in no way requires the truth of such beliefs. The more plausible view,  Santayana thinks, sees morality as relative to the personal or constitutional beliefs of creatures. If Moore thought that “good” was like “yellow” in being indefinable. Santayana adds that both are secondary qualities as well.

Ethical Naturalism Redux

Charles Pidgen notes that even after Russell came to abandon Moore’s moral realism “… he continued to believe that if judgments about good and bad are to be objectively true, non-natural properties of goodness and badness are required to make them true. It is just that he ceased to believe that there are any such properties.” In the century that has followed, Moore’s refutation of ethical naturalism has come to be widely rejected, probably for good reason.

Moore assumed that the identity of any two properties entails the synonymy of the terms by which they are designated. Given this assumption, he could argue that pleasure is not the good on the grounds that “X is N ” (where N is any natural or descriptive property) and “X is good” obviously do not mean the same thing, as is demonstrated by the Open Question Argument.

We have splendid reason for rejecting the claim that identity entails synonymy. Gold just is that element with the atomic number 79. But the meaning of “gold” was fixed long before talk of the atomic structure of this metal. And it is surely an open question for one to ask, “I know thar is an element of the atomic number 79 in them thar hills. But is thar gold?” John’s disciples surely knew that John baptized with water, and could have explained the difference between water baptism and, say, baptism in fish oil. But if any of John’s contemporaries knew that water just is H2O, they seem to have kept it to themselves. The discovery would have to wait another 1700 years. And once the discovery was made, the headline, “Water is H2O!” was informative in a way that “Water is water!” would not have been.

This, along with a number of other considerations, has reopened the possibility that some variety of ethical naturalism may be true after all. The ethical naturalist will maintain either that moral properties are identical to natural properties, or that they are constituted of and thus supervene upon them. If this is so, one may affirm the identity of the moral with the natural without being committed to the claim that there is synonymy of meaning. “Hitler was depraved” might be true in virtue of some set of wholly descriptive properties that he possessed. These might include his low regard for the value of human life, his monomania, his will to power and his anti-Semitism. I suppose that one may sensibly say, “I know the man thinks nothing of killing people, hates people simply because of their ethnicity, and wants to force the entire world to its knees, but is he depraved?” But this no more stands in the way of supposing that some such set of natural properties constitutes depravity than open questions about water suggest the possibility that the lakes are filled with anything other than H2O.

The ethical naturalist does not posit the “abhorred dualism” of the Platonist, and so there seems little risk of the moral flying “off into the abyss” and little need for a demiurge to ensure that it does not. Moral properties are home grown and terrestrial according to this view, being constituted of garden variety facts discoverable through ordinary means. If justice just is equitable treatment under certain circumstances, then coming to believe that a given arrangement is just would seem to be no more problematic or mysterious than coming to believe that it is equitable and that those circumstances obtain. Does ethical naturalism thus survive the arguments of both Moore and Santayana that, in their turns, convinced Russell? I think not. With a bit of fine-tuning, Santayana’s arguments—or at least an insight central to them—are equally effective against ethical naturalism.

Darwinian Counterfactuals

That “look over the shoulder” that Santayana recommends reveals that the direction that the human moral sense has taken is determined by factors apparently oblivious to the notion of moral truth, even if there were such a thing. The mechanisms responsible for the production of human moral beliefs are fitness-aimed, and, unless we’ve some reason to suppose a connection between their being fitness-aimed and their being true, such beliefs would seem to be unwarranted.

Sharon Street has recently advanced an argument that capitalizes upon these features of the Darwinian account. The core of her paper is her “Darwinian Dilemma” that she poses to “value realists.” Our moral beliefs are fitness-aimed. Are they also truth-aimed? Either there is a fitness-truth relation or there is not. If there is not, and if we suppose that evolution has shaped our basic evaluative attitudes, then moral skepticism is in order. If there is a relation, then it is either that moral beliefs have reproductive fitness because they are true (the “tracking” relation), or we have the moral beliefs that we have simply because of the fitness that they conferred (the “adaptive link” account).

But the adaptive link account suggests some variety of non-realism, such as the constructivism that Street endorses. The realist requires the tracking account in order to provide an account of warranted moral belief. Here, fitness follows mind-independent moral truths. But the tracking account is just implausible from a scientific standpoint, which is important given the fact that ethical naturalists are keen on assimilating their theory within an overall scientific approach. While there is a clear and parsimonious adaptive link explanation of why humans have come to care for their offspring—namely, that the resulting behavior tends toward DNA-preservation—the tracking account must add that basic paternal instincts were favored because it is independently true that parents ought to care for their offspring. Why not just say that our ancestors who had a propensity to care for their offspring tended to act on that propensity and thus left more offspring—particularly when we witness such propensities among non-human animals? Do dolphin mothers care for their daughters because they ought to do so?

A consideration of Darwinian Counterfactuals helps to strengthen the point. If, as Darwin supposed, human conscience might have been radically different had the circumstances been different, this strongly suggests that conscience goes whither fitness goest. And it is hard to see just how the ethical naturalist should assess such counterfactuals. Masked boobies, for instance seem wired for siblicide. A female will typically lay two eggs. The first to hatch frequently kills its smaller and weaker sibling, often with an assist from the parent. On the one hand, two eggs are better than one for insurance purposes. But one hatchling is better than two, as the probability that either will survive is decreased if both remain. And so the diminished reproductive value that results from the death of one offspring is outweighed by the advantage that is had in the increased likelihood of the survival of the elder sibling. Siblicidal behavior is thus selected for its reproductive advantage.

So consider “Booby World” —that possible world in which the conditions of reproductive fitness in the evolution of humans (or creatures of similar intelligence) were the same as those of boobies. Here, Cain kills Abel and is met with approval, and his mark is a badge of honor. Here, booby people regard siblicide and infanticide as “sacred duties,” as Darwin puts it. Such moral beliefs are fitness-aimed. Are they also true? Is killing certain of one’s offspring in fact obligatory and even meritorious in Booby World?

It is clear how Santayana would answer. These are moral duties in the only sense in which there are duties in any world. “Obligations … presuppose a physical and social organism with immanent spontaneous interests which may impose those obligations.” But, “As the spirit is no respecter of persons, so it is no respecter of worlds.” His “spirituality” involves the full recognition and embrace of the contingency of existence and of whatever values are discovered in the world in which we happen to find ourselves. He describes “spirit” as a “disenchanting and re-enchanting faculty … of seeing this world in its simple truth.” Disenchantment is a matter of deconstructing absolutist morality and whatever dogmas have been erected for its support. Re-enchantment occurs when one sees things as they are in their contingent and relative nature, but fully values them as one’s own. Thus, he can write, “What folly to suppose that ecstasy could be abolished by recognizing the true sources of ecstacy!” Sugar is no less sweet, nor does salt lose its savor, once we realize that those qualities are not “objective” but depend, in part, upon our own constitution. We do not thereby unweave the rainbow. And so, “spirit has no reason for dwelling on other possible worlds.”

Would any of them be less contingent than this one, or nearer to the heart of Infinite Being? And would not any of them, whatever its character, lead the spirit inexorably there? To master the actual is the best way of transcending it.

His first question is rhetorical. No possible world is closer to the heart of “Infinite Being,” because it “includes all worlds.” And spirit would be led “inexorably” to embrace whatever values it discovered in those counterfactual circumstances. “Good” and “evil” are world-relative. All such values are world-bound. It is thus “provincial” and a kind of “animal arrogance” to exalt the values that obtain in this world to the exclusion of those that might have been. Our cosmos has turned up one set of “ambient values” which we hold dear as our own. But when in Booby World, do as the boobies do.

This is not the sort of answer that we should expect from the ethical naturalist, who wishes to affirm that moral facts or properties are mind-independent. According to the ethical naturalist, moral properties are either identical to or at least supervene upon natural properties. Consider supervenience, the weaker of the two claims. On a standard account, any two things that are indiscernible with respect to their natural properties N are also indiscernible with respect to their moral properties M. And this is usually seen as metaphysically necessary so that if there is any world W in which X has N then, for every world W*, if X has N in W*, then X has M in W*. It follows that if Hitler is depraved in virtue of the set of non-moral properties mentioned above, then there is no possible world in which anyone has precisely that set but is not depraved. And if it was wrong for Cain to kill Abel, then that wrongness is in virtue of certain natural properties of the act.

Suppose that the natural properties and circumstances involved in Booby Abel’s slaying are identical to those that were instanced and obtained when Cain killed Abel, but for the fact that in that world the act enjoys the approbation of both conscience and consensus. If moral properties supervene upon natural properties, then, presumably, we should conclude that Booby Abel’s slaying is murder, despite it’s being hailed as a sacred duty in that world.

But if the human moral sense, with its verdict regarding siblicide, is in place ultimately because it was adaptive given actual but contingent circumstances, why suppose that it has any legitimate authority where those circumstances do not obtain and it is not adaptive? Santayana compares such universal judgments to “…the German lady who said that Englishmen called a certain object bread, and Frenchmen called it pain, but that it really was Brod.” They seem to be instances of what Judith Thomson has called metaphysical imperialism. To illustrate, in seeking the reference of “good” as used in “this is a good hammer,” Thomson suggests that the natural property that best serves here is “being such as to facilitate hammering nails in in manners that conduce to satisfying the wants people typically hammer nails in to satisfy.”

She opts for this property as opposed to the more determinate properties of “being well-balanced, strong, with an easily graspable handle, and so on” Even though we may find that this familiar set of properties coextends with those that “conduce to satisfying the wants that people typically hammer nails in to satisfy,” there are all sorts of “odd possible worlds” in which people typically have quite different wants for which deviant hammers come in handy. There are worlds in which “large slabs of granite” do the best job in this regard. And so we are metaphysical imperialists if we presume to impose our nail-hammering wants upon the counterfactual carpenters of those worlds.

Thomson thus fixes upon a property that is less determinate than those that characterize hammers of earthly goodness: it is good insofar as it answers to wants or is useful. Let’s say, then, that usefulness is the natural property upon which the evaluative property, being good supervenes. And the usefulness of the hammer supervenes, in turn, upon those more determinate features that fit this or that hammer to its purpose. Since the uses vary from world to world, so may the particular features that render hammers useful—and thus good—vary.

Should the ethical naturalist follow her lead in the case of siblicide in that Darwinian world we are imagining? Sure, in both worlds, the victim was a fully sentient person with a desire to live, ends of his own, and no intention of bringing harm to his killer. But perhaps the actual supervenience base for such acts is less determinate than such a set of properties. Might this permit one to say that the acts of both worlds are right?

In fact, as we have set things up, both familial love in the actual world, and siblicide in the counterfactual world, are adaptive from the standpoint of reproductive fitness, just as Estwing hammers and chunks of granite are both useful, despite sharp differences between the features that render them useful. Perhaps, then, the sacredness of infanticide is in virtue of the fact that it is conducive to fitness, so that truth tracks fitness, so to speak. A perhaps seeming advantage of this suggestion is that we have now been afforded a guaranteed link between fitness and truth. What reason have we for thinking that moral beliefs that are adaptive are also true? Why, because being adaptive is the very thing that makes them true! But this seems an overly convenient way of replying to Street’s Darwinian Dilemma; it does so by conflating the “adaptive-link” and “tracking” accounts. And it calls to mind Santayana’s quip about the good being, by definition, “whatever the world is aiming at.” All archers are equally good marksmen when the mark is determined by where the arrow happens to fall. But where this is the case, there can be no such thing as a poor marksman. Nor can any be better or best. And then one is left to wonder whether it is meaningful to call any of them “good.” Santayana’s tongue-in-cheek remark was offered in the service of his view that the good is not objective at all, but, rather projective. But on the suggestion that we are presently considering, this proves to be a distinction without a difference. Edward Wilson and Michael Ruse once suggested that ethics is “an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes.” But now we know that, by definition, genes never fob.

One might suppose that what is needed is an appeal to natures. Thus, actual human nature being what it is, familial affection and reciprocal kindness commend themselves as virtues. But in the sorts of worlds that Darwin imagines, the creaturely natures are different, and so it is no surprise that virtue and duty should assume quite different forms. Since Darwin is imagining beings with natures different from our own, the fact that those counterfactual moralities come out so different has no bearing upon the objectivity of our own.

Now, assuredly, there are possible worlds in which natural differences are sufficient for various sorts of acts to differ with respect to their moral properties from the same acts performed in our neck of the logical woods. Here, it is a fairly serious matter to shoot off a person’s head. But it might amount to little more than an annoying prank in those worlds where heads are quickly regrown. But we are imagining counterfactual heads that do not grow back, and counterfactual owners of heads who wish very much to retain their titles. If the appeal to differences in “natures” amounts merely to the observation that, here, we think it wrong to kill babies, but there, they do not, what is this if not just to rephrase the suggestion above regarding fitness? We should allow that this difference in the moral sense is sufficient by itself for sorting justified from unjustified homicide only if we think that killing in the actual world is permissible so long as the killer can sleep nights and no one else, save the victim, seems to mind.

Perhaps there is some other natural, subvenient property that is common to both earth and all such Darwinian worlds and is that in virtue of which the various acts described have the property of moral rightness. Presumably, this would be some natural property that is common to both equitable and inequitable social arrangements and to both the nurturing and the strangling of babies. There are, of course, such common natural properties. Random acts of kindness and random acts of violence share the property of being an act. But this will hardly serve as a plausible right-making property of acts. (The Decalogue might have been reduced to one precept: Thou shalt do something.) Presumably, we seek something a little more determinate, but not so determinate as to exclude counterfactually evolved moralities. But whatever we settle upon, the natural properties upon which justice and injustice or depravity and saintliness supervene are not equity or inequity, cruelty or kindness, but something that serves as the genus for these seemingly opposed species of moral properties.

One unhappy result here is that those more determinate natural properties that are favored by reflective equilibrium would prove to be merely accidental and coextensive features of morality. If there is some natural property N that is common to both equitable and inequitable bargaining outcomes, and upon which justice supervenes, then N, and not equity, defines the essence of justice. This would appear to be the metaethical equivalent of the suggestion that water is whatever fills a world’s oceans, so that earthly H2O and Twin-Earthly XYZ both qualify as water. But then being H2O is not the essence of the stuff that we call “water.” One might thus offer a functionalist account of moral properties. Perhaps, for instance, “justice” picks out whatever natural properties tend toward societal stability. We happen to live in a world in which equity has this effect. But there are worlds in which inequity does the trick. In addition to signaling a significant departure from the sort of account that ethical naturalists appear typically offer, such a move would seem a precarious footing for any robust account of moral realism. It is, in fact, a recipe for relativism.

It is hard to see how a metaphysical naturalist after the order of Russell can afford to reject a Darwinian reckoning of human morality. Moral behavior is not the sort of thing likely to be overlooked by natural selection because of the important role that it plays in survival and reproductive success. Early ancestors who lacked the impulse to care for their offspring or to cooperate with their fellows would, like the celibate Shakers, have left few to claim them as ancestors.

And it is hard to see how ethical naturalism can be reconciled in any plausible way with the contingency of human morality as implied by a standard Darwinian reckoning of things as understood within the framework of metaphysical naturalism. Whether the claim is that moral properties are identical and reducible to natural properties, or that they are constituted by and supervene upon them, the relation should be fixed across worlds in order to anchor the realist element. In fact, on a standard account, moral terms function in much the same way as natural kind terms in that they rigidly designate natural properties and thus track those identical properties across worlds. But it seems that this will either end up asserting an unwarranted form of metaphysical imperialism, or it will require the identification of some natural property (or set of properties) that is common to and right-making across widely divergent Darwinian worlds. Among other things, one might wonder how such a property could seriously be set forth as one empirically discerned or as playing the sort of explanatory role that is claimed for moral properties on ethical naturalism.

In principle, as a Platonist of sorts, Russell could avoid the charge of metaphysical imperialism. If the Good exists, then there is a fixed, transcendent standard in virtue of which we may evaluate the moral beliefs and practices of our own world as well as those of others. But, as we have seen, neither Russell nor naturalists in general have reason to believe that we have epistemic access to the Good even if it does exist. The ethical naturalist may avoid the charge either by allowing, for instance, that familial love and siblicide are equally right, or by offering some account as to why the human moral sense succeeds in acquiring moral truth where the booby moral sense fails. But in the absence of the sort of teleology that is precluded on naturalism, such an account seems not to be forthcoming. And the suggestion that there is some natural property that is common to all of the possible moralities countenanced on the Darwinian scheme is just implausible. Thus, the trouble that we have been documenting arises not out of neither ethical non-naturalism nor ethical naturalism per se, but from the attempt to combine any variety of moral realism with metaphysical naturalism. Given the metaphysics of at least Russell’s brand of naturalism, one lacks the “dogmatic justification” required in order to suppose that the “felt values” with which moral reflection begins constitute knowledge. The point is similar to one raised by Norman Daniels in his discussion of reflective equilibrium. Before one may proceed with confidence, one requires “ a little story that gets told about why we should pay homage ultimately to those [considered] judgments and indirectly to the principles that systematize them” (Daniels 1979, p. 265). Russell, like any metaphysical naturalist, lacks such a story because he is “not a theist after the manner of Socrates.”

Epilogue: Lotze’s Dictum

I am inclined to think that Santayana’s argument succeeds in showing that Russell’s Moorean moral philosophy is unwarranted given his worldview. As Harry Ruja puts it,

In his eagerness to establish the good's objectivity, Russell has separated values from  man and man's will so emphatically that there is no way to reunite them. He may proclaim "ought to exist" as often as he wishes, but if no one is moved to take on the role of the demiurge, the eternal and potential ideals will remain remote from depraved reality.

But Santayana viewed the positing of some such “demiurge”—or, more generally, a “dogmatic justification” for this moral vision, in the form of the requisite metaphysics—as nothing more than a “gratuitous fiction” that can hardly be taken seriously by any modern critic. The only reasonable position, he thought, was a conjunction of naturalism and some sort of moral skepticism.

In the same year that Santayana published Winds, W.R. Sorley delivered the first of his Gifford Lectures. There, Sorley defended and developed what he termed, “Lotze’s Dictum,” after the 19th century German philosopher Rudolph Hermann Lotze: “The true beginning of metaphysics lies in ethics.” Sorley observed that “the traditional order of procedure”—business as usual in metaphysics—was to construct an interpretation of reality—a worldview—that drew exclusively upon non-moral considerations, such as the deliverances of the sciences. Not until the task of worldview construction was complete did one “go on to draw out the ethical consequences of the view that had been reached.” Sorley thought it likely that such a method would result in an artificially truncated worldview, and that moral ideas would be given short shrift. And the exclusion of our moral experience was simply arbitrary. “If we take experience as a whole, and do not arbitrarily restrict ourselves to that portion of it with which the physical and natural sciences have to do, then our interpretation of it must have ethical data at its basis and ethical laws in its structure.”

I do not know about those “modern critics” who were Santayana’s contemporaries, but now a century later Sorley’s suggestion may enjoy enhanced plausibility. It is widely recognized that we must approach each and every field of knowledge, including the sciences, with some fund of beliefs that we just happen to have. Since all theorizing has these same humble origins, how can one non-arbitrarily single out a particular domain of beliefs for suspicion? To use an example from recent discussions, a scientist’s belief that a proton has just passed through a cloud chamber might be explained (away) merely by appeal to her background beliefs and theoretical commitments. For example, her theory has it that the appearance of a vapor trail is evidence of proton activity, and so, of course, when she sees, or believes that she sees, a vapor trail, she forms the belief in the proton. But here we are required to be realists about protons only if we have assumed that the scientist’s theory is “roughly correct.” But, again, why extend this courtesy in these cases while being decidedly discourteous in the case of morality? Certain of my moral beliefs seem to have a greater degree of epistemic security than any of the various empiricist principles that would cast doubt upon them. Why reject the moral beliefs for the sake of such principles unless there is a splendid reason for doing so?

Given Santayana’s metaphysics, moral properties turn out to be metaphysically queer. But, then, so is the phenomenological property of redness, which some philosophers do not admit, and the rest do admit, but also admit that they cannot explain it. Chesterton said that he took pleasure in the fact that the rhinoceros does exist, though it looks as though it does not. There is redness and there are rhinos, and if my philosophy does not admit them, then perhaps it is time to get a new philosophy. Might the same thing go for rightness?

Photo: "Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell" by Bassano Ltd. CC License. From National Portrait Gallery

In the Crucible of Life: “Good Country People” as Moral Apologetic

Flannery O’Connor’s literary works are unforgettable. Small in number but powerful in effect, her short stories bring to life bizarre characters who are often psychologically distorted and, as a result, relationally debilitated. There’s much to pity about the O’Connor protagonist—usually he or she is alienated from friends or family and has had some past traumatic experience with lingering physical or emotional damage. But any such pity is tempered by the story’s revelation that the character’s current difficulties are self-created and self-perpetuated. This brings us to the crux of any given O’Connor story, as each one culminates in a ruthless exposure of the main character’s pretenses, the false beliefs about themselves, the world, or others that they use to promote or protect themselves.

This confrontation with reality, O’Connor brings to her characters to free them from self-delusion and the unavoidable pain that comes from being misaligned with reality. O’Connor is not one to enable a character’s skewed take on the world. Thus, the shocking conclusions of O’Connor’s stories are not only the defining feature of her work; they are the impetus behind their creation. She seeks with her writing to get her readers’ attention, to reveal the truth to a contemporary world that doesn’t often see it. She explains as much in her essay, “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” collected in Mystery and Manners, a book worth the time of anyone interested in the humanities:

“The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.”

To this end, O’Connor places her characters into situations that try their convictions. The result is a reckoning, a testing of how well the character’s worldview matches up to reality. O’Connor shows readers that the success of a worldview in the crucible of life’s real challenges provides a key measure of how evidentially strong such a worldview is; this is philosophy in practice, philosophy through literature. The testing is often painful because it reveals (to the character and reader) the consequences of thinking against the grain of reality. Such is definitely the case in O’Connor’s devastating “Good Country People.” (If you’ve never read it, read it now; you won’t regret it! O’Connor’s stories are better experienced than explained.)

This memorable tale is populated with stubborn characters, clinging to their problematic understandings of reality in the face of compelling evidence of just how deeply wrong their convictions are. The story reveals the twistedness of human nature, our self-defeating selfishness, and our self-protecting worldview blinders. At its center is Joy Hopewell, a thirty-two year old still living at home, dependent on yet resentful of the support offered by her divorced mother. The relationship between the two is fraught with tension as Mrs. Hopewell treats her daughter as a child, and Joy—for all her education and presumed sophistication—remains emotionally impaired.

Much of Joy’s life is spent provoking her mother, from studying philosophy to legally changing her name to Hulga to over-exaggerating the noise made by her wooden leg when she walks. All of these activities are designed to highlight the bitterness of life that Joy feels her mother has refused to acknowledge. Mrs. Hopewell, for her part, in Pollyannaish fashion, coasts through her life, ignoring anything at odds with the superficiality she confuses and conflates with happiness. She explains away any of life’s challenges with meaningless generalities that offer no actual comfort: “Nothing is perfect,” “that is life!” and “other people have their opinions, too.” “Good,” a word central to the story’s title and repeated often in the text, seems to have little meaningful content for either mother or daughter. It is simply a label applied of convenience, somewhat manipulatively to coerce others and to project an impression of equanimity. The disparity between its use and the characters’ worldviews become clearer as the story progresses.

The “good country people” first mentioned in the story are the Freemans, the tenants hired out by Mrs. Hopewell to farm her land. Yet despite insisting the Freemans were a “godsend,” Mrs. Hopewell clearly dislikes the wife and mother, finding her gossip tiresome, her nosiness off-putting, and her obsession with the grotesque disturbing. Regardless, whether out of necessity or stubbornness, Mrs. Hopewell withstands these daily assaults on her patience, all the while projecting an agreeable façade.

For Joy, her mother’s “happy” façade is more than unsatisfactory. Joy has experienced much pain—losing her leg at ten in a freak hunting accident, encumbered by a heart condition that will most likely cost her life, friendless, and without romantic prospects. In the face of the pain she has experienced (and continues to experience), her mother’s denial of life’s difficulties is offensive. And Joy seeks to unsettle that denial; however, she does so by embracing the opposite error of her mother’s. Where her mother can acknowledge only a goodness-reduced-to-politeness, Joy espouses only darkness. She harasses her mother, launching inexplicable, inappropriate, and inordinate philosophical tirades at her benighted parent. To make up for her mother’s denial of life’s tragedies, Joy props herself up with outrage and angry derision, all of which is a willful decision on Joy’s part to overlook the blessings she has.

O’Connor endorses neither Joy nor her mother’s approach to life, yet it is Joy whose worldview is unmasked as faulty and self-destructive. Joy supposedly embraces moral anti-realism, predicated on her atheism. In her conversations with the traveling Bible Salesman, Manly Pointer, she mocks his professed belief in God and patronizes his requests for affirmation of her love. She believes she is educating this seemingly backward yokel in the harsh realities of this world: “‘We are all damned,’ she said, ‘but some of us have taken off our blindfolds and see that there’s nothing to see. It’s a kind of salvation.’”

In all of this, O’Connor sets Joy up for a confrontation between her self-conception and the implications of her stated worldview. When she finds herself duped by one she thought beneath her, one she assumed held traditional moral values, she is left without shelter to hide behind. For the protection she had been relying on—a cynical condescension that claimed to reject absolutes—is revealed as a sham. What she claimed to believe is precisely what leaves her vulnerable in the barn loft, legless and exposed. For, ultimately, O’Connor seems to suggest, Joy has the luxury of claiming to believe in nothing only because of her deeper conviction that others who claim to believe in human dignity and who espouse values such as honesty and compassion will actually live by those convictions.

Absent such a context, her radical claims are domesticated and rendered toothless; rather than inhabiting the role of renegade and maverick, her stance would merely be garden variety, humdrum, and bland. As such, Joy’s nihilism, paradoxically enough, parasitically depends on abiding, even absolute moral realism. Joy can mock her mother’s niceties, for example, only because she never doubts her mother’s commitment to her. Joy is free to proclaim that she “is one of those people who see through to nothing” only because nothing actually rides on this proclamation. That is, nothing rides on it until she meets her moral anti-realist match.

By creating a real-world situation governed by the nihilism Joy professes and putting her at the mercy of one who lives according to the anti-realism Joy claims to believe, O’Connor deftly dismantles the hypocrisy of such an attitude. And the resulting shock leaves the character altered (one hopes for the better) and the reader schooled.

Photo: "Düsseldorf Shattered View" by Magnus. CC License. 

A Reluctance for New Wine

The fabric of threadbare hope

Stretches toward year's end.

Pieces of frayed ambition extend

To cover the old wineskins

That many disclaim

But few set aside.

Like children clutching tattered dolls,

We hug in vain security

The rags of the past,

Because in some degree

They are accommodated to our wills.

The outworn selves we cling to

Can be our own

The more as time goes by:

We patch and mend

In order to possess.

The New

Stirs something deep within—

But I would not willingly admit it.

                              --Elton D. Higgs

                                (Dec. 31, 1977)

Photo: "Sofa" by Gzooh. CC License. 

Elton Higgs

Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

Podcast: Emily Heady on the Connection between Literature, Ethics, and the Christian Worldview

Podcast with Emily Heady On this week's episode, we discuss the connection between literature, ethics, and the Christian worldview with Dr. Emily Heady. Dr. Heady explains what role morality and the imago Dei play in the reading and composition of literature. She also helps us understand the relationship between reading and human flourishing.

 

 

 

Emily Heady

Emily Walker Heady is Dean of the College of General Studies and Professor of English at Liberty University.  She holds a PhD in Victorian literature from Indiana University and has published on Victorian literature and culture, especially Dickens and the realist novel.  Her book, Victorian Conversion Narratives and Reading Communities, was released in 2013 (Ashgate).  She serves as a worship pianist at Lynchburg First Church of the Nazarene and, along with her husband Chene, is raising two children, Beatrice and Avery.

"And the Word Became Flesh"

 

"And the Word Became Flesh"

(John 1:1)

 

When Word invested in flesh,

No matter the shrouds that swathed it;

The donning of sin's poor corpse

(Indignity enough)

Was rightly wrapped in robes of death.

 

Yet breath of God

Broke through the shroud,

Dispersed the cloud

That darkened every birth before.

Those swaddling bands bespoke

A glory in the grave,

When flesh emerged as Word.

 

Take up this flesh, O Lord:

Re-form it with Your breath,

That, clothed in wordless death,

It may be Your Word restored.

 

Elton D. Higgs (1985)

Photo: "Detail of the Adoration of the Magi Stained Glass Window; the Anglican Church of St Paul – Corner Queen and Bridge Streets, Korumburra" by raan99. CC License. 

Elton Higgs

Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

Advent and Christmas Poetry: Awe – John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet 15”

 

After the anticipatory and penitential season of Advent, we come to Christmas. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:1, 14) Christmas is the Feast of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ – the Word made flesh.

The Greek word used in the Gospel for “Word” is Logos. It doesn’t just mean word, in the sense of a spoken or written word; Logos also means order, rationality, logic. The universe is an orderly place, one in which laws of nature can be discerned. Cause and effect function; we can observe nature and draw conclusions from it; we can use our own minds, our own reason, to interpret the world rightly and put our interpretations into practice. We take all this for granted, but we shouldn’t. It doesn’t have to be the case that the universe is orderly and comprehensible. The ancient Greeks thought the world was fundamentally chaotic; as a result, they didn’t bother to pursue experimental science. Why observe nature, when it is random? Why run an experiment, if it will just come up differently another day? We should pause in wonder and awe at the fact that the world is, indeed comprehensible, because it doesn’t have to be. Though there is so much that we do not understand about the world, yet we can understand so much through the use of our minds, somehow standing above and apart from the universe that we study.

The underlying structure of the cosmos; the basic rationality from which all reason comes; order, rationality, meaning – Logos. “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us... full of grace and truth.” When we speak of the order of the universe, whether we know it or not, we speak of the Second Person of the most holy Trinity, the Son of God, Jesus Christ.

Who was born in a stable in Bethlehem.

John Donne’s poem “Holy Sonnet 15” invites us to consider what that means.

 

Holy Sonnet  15

Wilt thou love God as he thee ? then digest, My soul, this wholesome meditation, How God the Spirit, by angels waited on In heaven, doth make His temple in thy breast. The Father having begot a Son most blest, And still begetting—for he ne'er begun— Hath deign'd to choose thee by adoption, Co-heir to His glory, and Sabbath' endless rest. And as a robb'd man, which by search doth find His stolen stuff sold, must lose or buy it again, The Sun of glory came down, and was slain, Us whom He had made, and Satan stole, to unbind. 'Twas much, that man was made like God before, But, that God should be made like man, much more.

 

Like Eliot, Donne shows the connection between the Incarnation and the Crucifixion. For why did God become man? For us, and for our salvation: “The Sun of glory came down, and was slain, / Us whom He had made, and Satan stole, to unbind.” We are bound by sin, stuck in alienation, misled by Satan to put our own wills higher than the will of the One who made us. Despite the fact that our situation is, to put it bluntly, all our own fault, the Son, the Light of the World – the Sun of Glory – came infinitely far down to us, to loose us from the chains of sin.

And at what a cost. He made us, and so we are rightfully His, but even so, He chose to pay for us again – to pay the ultimate price of His own perfect and sinless life, for us: “And as a robb'd man, which by search doth find / His stolen stuff sold, must lose or buy it again, / The Sun of glory came down, and was slain.”

Yet Donne reminds us that our Lord offers not just rescue from sin, but eternal life as adopted children of God! “The Father... Hath deign'd to choose thee by adoption, / Co-heir to His glory, and Sabbath' endless rest.” It is an offer that seems too good to be true... except that it comes from the hand of the Father, who is perfect Good, and so it is an offer that we can trust.

What does Christmas Day mean to us? It means that on a particular day in history, God Himself took on mortal flesh and was born as a human baby, in cold and poverty, in fear and uncertainty and the shadow of Herod’s murderous intentions.

We could not reach up to Him, so He came down to us. No myth, this. No fairy tale – but reality, a fact of history, as hard-edged as it gets.

What does this mean to me, to you?

If it is true – it changes everything.

“'Twas much, that man was made like God before,

But, that God should be made like man, much more.”

 

Photo: "Virgin and Angels Watching Over the Sleeping Infant Jesus." By Francesco Cozza. Public Domain. Obtained from National Gallery of Art. 

Holly Ordway

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 William

The Budding Stump

The Budding Stump

(Isaiah 11:1-3 and 53:1-3)

The Stump of David,

Cracked and grey with age,

Neglected, cast aside,

Now sprouts again, as God had said.

Not couched in beauty, or in power,

Comes this obscure and unexpected Branch;

Nor with glory sought by swords,

Drenching Israel's enemies in blood--

Though bloodshed nascent lies within.

O Lord of stumps,

Whose sapience informs

What men have cast aside,

And makes to grow again

What you yourself have pruned away:

Now take the hopes of glory

Grown and nourished by our pride;

Reform them by Your promised Shoot,

That we may find the power

That lies in roots, and not in mighty trees.

Elton D. Higgs

(Dec. 26, 1982)