ANDREW SULLIVAN LOVES JESUS, NOT THE CHURCH

Just in time for Easter – or, more Correctly, the Day of the Spring Egg Hunt – Andrew Sullivan has a piece on The Daily Beast site.

I’d like to comment on that article here. (The Post I promised on Theodore Lowi’s 1967 article on ‘interest group liberalism’ will follow shortly.)

Sullivan goes for the Thomas-Jefferson gambit: take the New Testament, snip out all the “supernatural” stuff, and then what you have left over will be a handy ‘moral guide’ for the Enlightenment mind.

There are at least two problems with that approach.

First, Jefferson lived in a time when Western culture still lived off the ‘interest’ from the investment of Christendom’s integral and coherent and well-Grounded moral and spiritual heritage bequeathed (and achieved) by the Medieval Synthesis of Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas took the best of Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics, combined them with the Fathers of the Patristic Age and placed the whole under the guidance of the Judeo-Christian revelation … and thus effected the planet’s most comprehensive and integral and well-Grounded moral synthesis, which yielded what might be characterized as an Owners Manual for human life and for human be-ing.

The Enlightenment, teetering on the edge of oncoming night – if I may – could still carry on as if it were daylight, because the late 18^th century was the first moment of dusk, after ‘sunset’, when there was still more than enough light to play around with carefree abandon.

Thus Jefferson’s confidence.*

Second, the Jefferson approach is actually a variant of a strategy most vividly deployed by Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice”: it presumes that there is no deep and integral and visceral interconnection between the various elements of a living organism; thus – in Shylock’s grossly inadequate analysis – you could chop out a pound of flesh with no thought as to consequences to the other vitally interconnected and interacting systems within the living organism.  (And many thanks to Portia for belling that witless though potentially lethal cat.)

A culture, based in a comprehensive belief system, is not something that can be chopped up without dire consequence. Nor can the belief system itself, if it is complexly and integrally constructed (like, say, a modern large aircraft or spacecraft).  And Aquinas accomplished as much conceptually – more, I would submit – than Leonardo did with his sketching of flying machines.

So then when Sullivan wants to introduce his affinity with Jefferson’s principle of the Separation of Church and State, he is not quite anchoring himself on the mark. The key Question in all of this is the Relation of Religion and Culture, and not the Separation of Church and State.

Perhaps Sullivan is deflected and confused by the very visible efforts of the government to expunge religion from culture that We have seen going on for the past 40 Biblical years around here. But even if so, this is a vital and lethal confusion.

But this confusion – presuming it is not a carefully worked-out strategy – works toward his general purpose: to combine ‘religion’ with “power and politics”. This opens up the vast poppy fields of claims that the Catholic Church (which he takes under direct fire in the piece) is nothing more than merely another power-politics organization and establishment that seeks to impose its will, justified on the putative basis of some ‘supernatural’ warrant.

And which, he immediately continues, has given rise to nothing more than “war, pogroms, reformations and counter-reformations”. That the Church had played a constitutive role in the development of Western Culture after the Fall of the Roman Empire, seeking to establish and maintain some basic level of coherent decency in the face of warring  chieftains and barons and lords, nascent and then rampant monarchies, and all this on top of the perennial deformations and derangements generated by humanity’s innate tendency to betray its own best possibilities … none of this apparently counts for much in Sullivan’s assessment.

Nor does it give him pause that the foundations of Western Culture laid down by the Church in the age of  Christendom constituted – not to put too fine a point on it – a well-grounded foundation.  And you don’t need an engineering degree from MIT to realize that once you have a rather large structure, chock full of human souls toiling and living, you don’t want to simply go screwing around with the foundations with gay abandon. What homeowner can’t figure that out?

Sullivan will save his situation by focusing on “Jesus”, for Whom he evinces a large admiration.

After all, Jesus came up with all those neatly “radical” ideas (can you hear a certain drumroll starting up here?).

He’s especially enamored of Jesus’ insistence that His followers had to “give up power over others” because power inevitably requires “the threat of violence” and “violence is incompatible with the total acceptance and love of all other human beings that is at the sacred heart of Jesus’ teaching”.

Supporting his statement, Sullivan notes that Jesus “never defended his innocence at trial”. Just how defending one’s innocence in a trial is a form of violence, I can’t grasp. Surely – if Sullivan is going to be reducing his advice to Us to his conclusions about Jesus and violence – then this is rum advice indeed. Especially nowadays, when folks faced with an engorged and rampant government have few defenses left except defending themselves in trials – to the extent even that right is still operative.

But it does sound eerily and ominously familiar: defending yourself in a trial simply ‘proves’ you’re guilty. We’ve seen this poisonous serpentine ‘reasoning’ deployed against all sorts of designated-targets of the Left as well as the Right in the past few decades.

It was the Church that worked out the careful reasoning that in the light of Original Sinfulness and the violence that inevitably flows from it, there are legitimate grounds for self-defense in certain carefully determined circumstances. Humans must not only live with the human capacity for love, but the human capacity for violence (unless Sullivan – channeling Rousseau – wants to assert that only ‘institutions’ and ‘organizations’ create violence and humans, left to themselves, will simply live in love and mutual respect until the Second Coming).

But Sullivan is not going to let you think that he is some secular type of guy. He fully believes in Jesus’ “divinity and resurrection”.

But that’s not going to mean for him that there was anything to all that “supernatural” stuff. Nope, Jefferson was right about all that mumbo-jumbo. (I can’t help thinking of Francois Mitterand’s marvelously sly bit from 1965: “I was born a Christian and shall doubtless die in that condition. But meanwhile …”)
Rather, the “divinity” of Jesus simply goes to ‘prove’ what Sullivan sees as the take-away of His entire ministry: “What’s the use of preaching doctrines if you don’t live as these doctrines demand?”

This – if it sounds somewhat familiar – is the Question the Church has been posing to humanity for two millennia . Nor has the Church ever proclaimed itself or its agents divine, rather than being participants in humanity, constructed of the same crooked timber, although blessed with the guidance of the Holy Spirit that – or rather Who – is an integral part of Jesus’ “divinity”.

But that’s not where Sullivan is going with it.

“What is politics if not a dangerous temptation toward controlling others rather than reforming oneself?”

I don’t know how this fits in with the Framing Vision or that “deliberative democratic politics” that is the lynchpin of that Vision. I don’t know if Sullivan knows either – or cares.

Surely he doesn’t see Identity Politics as perpetrating – as a matter of Plan – ‘violence’ upon the body politic and the common-weal through its rejection of “deliberative democratic politics” and the manipulation of public law and policy through assorted agitprop tactics and strategies of manipulation and misinformation and the sidestepping of “deliberative democratic politics” through – as Obama noted in ‘The Audacity of Hope’ – an “overreliance” on courts, where – as Catharine MacKinnon acutely observed – the vanguard elites can avoid “messy” democratic political process neatly and effectively.

What, for that matter, is human life except an ongoing temptation to sidestep the dignity and rights of others in order to have it your way? That’s why there is a Constitution and – I submit – why there is a Church.

Which brings me to my next point: the Church evolved – and Jesus rather forthrightly intended to build it (at least if you take the Gospel text literally; if not then read on) or the generations succeeding Him realized that they somehow needed to preserve His teachings and structure their lives around those teachings.

You can go up, down, and all around as to whether Jesus imagined that with the Fall of Rome and the imperial government the Bishop of Rome would find himself and his Church in the unenviable position of being the only source of order left in the West.

But to propose that the Church as she is represents nothing more than an evil contraption constructed with malice aforethought for the purposes of a violent conspiracy of – to use the familiar recipe – “dominance, hegemony, marginalization and oppression”?  Sullivan, actually, uses the same thinking that gave Us ‘patriarchy’: that other phantasm of a deliberate conspiracy-to-oppress that somehow was put together a day or two after the beginning of recorded history and has been chewing away gaily ever since with the agreement of both the (putative) oppressors and oppressees.

Jesus, Sullivan insists, wants everybody to live as He said to live and as He Himself lived.

But what does that mean? If Sullivan has a decent house and a nice steady job and took the time to get an education, if indeed he is tapping away on a computer instead of wandering the streets of towns and cities and living under the stars … is he living that life?

What does it mean to live as Jesus lived when it becomes clear that He is not coming back right away? This is the Question that Christians faced from a moment not very long after the Ascension. Sullivan’s own well-established and well-furnished life is his answer and that’s fair enough.

But does he really think that the Church is not an answer to that Question? Does he think he can reasonably demonstrate why that should be so?

Jefferson – says Sullivan – had a vision of a “purer, simpler, apolitical Christianity”. That’s nice.

It was also a Ground-less vision, one that relied merely upon the Afterglow of Christendom illuminating the lives of Western Culture, but without any solid support structure underneath it. And as the Afterglow wears off, or wore off, or was ‘deconstructed’ – then there’s nothing to hold it all together.

Unless you want to rely on ‘the government’, that will replace the Church with whatever laws and regulations it feels it would like to impose. I see this option as neither progress nor conformable to the Framing Vision, nor conducive to the continuance of the Republic.

He then – conveniently – blames the Republicans and the Right for creating “a polity now saturated in religion”. Neat.

But if one changes the axial term from ‘religion’ to ‘ideology’ then who is responsible for American society and politics having become ‘saturated’ in ideology? I’d say you can make an excellent case for that being the handiwork of the Dems, who embraced radical-feminism’s Marxist-Leninist-Gramsican analysis (with ‘women’ substituted neatly for ‘proletariat’ and ‘the masses’ and ‘the marginalized’ wherever those terms appear in the original texts).

And for all practical purposes regarding Sullivan’s plaint, ‘religion’ and ‘ideology’ are the same: a pre-existing matrix of assumptions, presumptions, and beliefs about the validity of which their adherents entertain no doubt.

But that’s not where he wants to go with all this.

“Organized religion” is “in decline” he crows. His prime example in regard to Catholicism is the clerical abuse crisis, although that mania-stampede is now starting, finally, to run down as it is exposed for the hyper-inflated and oh-so-selective hatchet job it has always been.

The Protestant polities, he observes, have been declining ever more steeply in the past 50 years (thus since about the time post-1965 ‘liberalism’ got rolling) because they sought to embrace “religious moderation” (meaning: because they tried to appease the tide of secularism by abandoning their insistence that their faith and belief were Grounded in any Beyond and then gave themselves over to providing benefit-of-clergy to secularism and its demands and its agendas and all its pomps and all its works – seeking to ride the back of the tiger, they have wound up as a hot lunch for a beast that should have been recognized at the outset as being viscerally committed to consuming them). In the old tale of the scorpion and the horse – where the scorpion asked the horse for a lift across the raging river, then stung the horse halfway across, and when the dying horse asked Why since now they would both drown, the scorpion merely replied “I’m a scorpion and it’s what I do” – radical-feminism with its repellent Marxist-Leninist roots should have been recognized all along by the Beltway elites as being the scorpion it truly is.


The politicized saturation of religion “would also, one imagines, baffle Jesus of Nazareth”.  After all, “the issues that Christianity obsesses over today” – homosexuality, abortion, marriage – were not matters that occupied Jesus’ attention. And in regard to adultery, he merely preached “forgiveness” (although that ‘forgiveness’ presumes it is indeed something sinful that needs to be forgiven – a breach of trust and commitment, one would think … though those virtues are not high on the liberal and secularist agenda these days).

But Jesus didn’t “obsess” over nuclear weapons either – so where do Sullivan’s exegetical games really lead Us?  For that matter, Jesus did not ‘obsess’ over most of the issues currently defined as social-justice. That does not at all mean that ‘social justice issues’ cannot be derived legitimately from the principles Jesus enunciated. But clearly you have to derive your practical conclusions from His principles, and thus the necessity of the Church. Jesus was primarily concerned with the individual human heart and soul, whose Stance under Grace would lead to actions more in conformity with the responsibilities of being created in God’s Image. But He was not primarily concerned with ‘reforming’ (or deconstructing) the political and cultural institutions of that time and that place in which He found Himself. First things first.

But Sullivan  presses on. “The family? [Jesus] disowned his parents in public as a teen, and told his followers to abandon theirs if they wanted to follow him.”

Here you see the gaping error in his entire approach. How distinguish between what Jesus as the man situated in his mission in life in that time and that place recommended to those who would join his little peripatetic missionary band … from what core principles Jesus was propounding for any and all human beings who would in present and future times follow Him?

Or are We to presume that Jesus never wanted anybody to live in (or start up, or remain faithful to) a family ever again?

These are precisely the type of Questions for which later generations of Christians needed to find guidance. And from that need – obvious as hell even to the Christians of the earliest era – the Church’s role as focal matrix for careful and prayerful deliberation on the genuine import of Jesus’ sayings developed. And how else to carry on?

Ditto as Sullivan notes that Jesus “was a celibate” and that Jesus and his “followers” actually “anticipated an imminent End of the World where reproduction was completely irrelevant”.

Well, then, so … if on top of the practicalities of having his immediate band of disciples leave their families so they could live on the road with Him, Jesus really didn’t imagine in His human capacity that the world as they knew it was going to be around much longer … then what the frak to do when later generations of Christians quickly realized that somehow that ‘End of the World’ didn’t mean exactly what it seemed to mean? How then to figure out what He did mean?

Hence, again, the need for the Church. Much later, the Protestant solution was to let every believer work out whatever the hell Jesus meant for him/herself. But that was simply to let each player in the orchestra play whatever s/he thought would be a nice melody – and who would pay to sit through a symphony like that?

But if I infer correctly, Sullivan wants Our take-away to be simply (and simplistically) that Jesus didn’t worry about questions of family and sex so why should anybody claim to oppose recent cultural agendas from the Left on merely religious grounds? Verrrrry eeeenterestink … but unfortunately, incoherent. (With attributional nod to Arte Johnson’s German soldier on ‘Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In’ show.)

Sullivan uses the example of Francis of Assisi, who embraced poverty and eschewed violence and the conventionality of the 13^th century Italian world around him. But then even Sullivan notes that before long Francis found himself in an organizational quandary: so many wanted to follow him that he had to – not to put too fine a point on it – organize his followers so that they would keep to his vision and principles and not simply go off into all sorts of stuff claiming to be following his path.

Precisely the problem that gave rise to the answer called the Church in the earliest Christian times.

But this is not where Sullivan wants to go, or wants Us to go, with it.

It appears that – humans being humans – even a good idea about getting beyond conventionality and organization requires that you somehow preserve said good idea by organizing some normative (and in a sense conventional) praxis in order to sustain the genuine idea. Who knew?

If you have a great piece of rich and complex music, then you need an orchestra to play it. But you also need a score, and you also need some sort of Conductor to keep everybody at the same place on the same sheet of your music. Surely Alinsky saw the same thing when he insisted that folks had to Organize.

Otherwise you will surely wind up lamenting in the accents of the Songstress**: ‘What have they done to my song, Ma?’

Jesus left behind a ‘rich and complex and textured’ heritage of sayings, and it would take and still takes a whole lotta careful and informed and prayerful work to figure out a) just what the core content of His principles and guidance actually is and b) how to apply that in one’s contemporary world and one’s own life.  You can simply leave all that up to the occasional illuminations and excitements of this or that individual, or perhaps leave it up to a government that insists nothing can stand outside of it, nor against it, nor above it … but you can’t intelligently expect that if you just toss the sayings out there you are going to sustain a coherent conceptual grasp of the heart of the matter.

Jesus “was without politics”. Phooey. Phooey and baloney. His timing, His confrontation with the authorities, His shrewd rhetorical but ironclad logical one-liners always delivered in front of a useful audience … this guy was shrewd to the very max. Even His death was expertly crafted for maximum impact on public opinion (though, unlike so many, He most surely put His money where His mouth was and backed up His teachings with His own blood, and did so with an iron intensity of purpose and careful arranging that must seem ‘obsessive’ to the modern and postmodern, secular mind).

After what can only charitably be construed as some gay (he is most publicly and avowedly ‘out’) Irish sentimentalism about his dear granny, Sullivan insists that he is not advocating some sort of Irish-granny type of “privatization of faith, or its relegation to a subordinate sphere”. Because “there are times when great injustices – slavery, imperialism, totalitarianism, segregation – require spiritual mobilization and public witness”.

Ummm – and not ‘sin’? But of course, ‘sin’ is something that is taboo in secularist and – alas – post-1972 ‘liberal’ circles nowadays. You won’t stay on many A-lists by talking about (let alone preaching – or ‘obsessing’ – about) ‘sin’.

But Sullivan reduces here the entire content of Christian spirituality and religion to – by remarkable coincidence – the assorted agendas of his favorite politics. Which is the gambit that so utterly deranged the mainstream Protestant polities in this country and seduced them to self-deconstruction.

Is there no venue for exercising ‘spirituality’ except in some form of social action (but not if you are acting against ‘sin’, of course)?

And then he asserts that King and Gandhi did indeed “renounce power”. Well yes, but really no.

Both Gandhi and King were immensely shrewd in developing the power (and political power, at that) of non-violence. Neither of them simply quietly lived out his life in a private renunciation of ‘violence’; they both wielded the power they craftily evoked and managed in order to realize their agendas. (And in King’s case, certainly, We are the better for it – although he was kicked to the curb in 1966 by black-power proponents, almost immediately after his greatest achievements – yet even then he kept fighting for his vision.)

Sullivan wants to support “mystery”, but apparently not the profound and lethal mystery of ‘sin’. And he assumes blithely that every believer can be sent forth to sail him/herself across the Seas of Mystery with no compass and no charts and no navigational skills and that somehow it will all work out nicely enough, precisely as Jefferson could blithely assume that folks could just make up their minds to ‘be moral’ and everything else would work out well enough.

They both want to have their cake and eat it too: they can presume the sublimely effected Shaping afforded by Christianity, while simultaneously pooh-poohing it formally and playing to the peanut-gallery, urging everybody to just ‘getcha’sef free’ (a nod to Simon and Garfunkel, of course).

This can only end in a spring egg-hunt that will never discover the eggs.***

NOTES

*Let me say right here that I strongly support the constitutional principle of Separation of Church and State. But what has been happening around here most recently is not really an instance of that particular matter but rather something else: the government-abetted imposition of a secularist culture that acknowledges no Beyond (and thus, alas, no sufficient Ground for any morality and any wide and deep cultural consensus).

John Rawls gave this gambit the ‘benefit of philosophy’ by coming up with the neat claim that ‘comprehensive meaning systems’ cannot be admitted into public discourse and deliberation. This neatly eliminated ‘religion’ or religious belief as a legitimate obstruction to the various elements of the secularist agenda that required cultural, conceptual, and moral ‘space’ that the Christian moral tradition (as comprehensively formulated by Aquinas) would not permit.

Neatly, his own matrix of post-1972 ‘liberal’ presumptions, assumptions, and beliefs were not – he insisted blithely – to be considered as a ‘comprehensive meaning system’ but rather constituted merely a collection of insights and illuminations that ‘any reasonable person’ would come up with on his/her own.

Neat.

**Melanie Safka, if memory serves from 40 Biblical years ago.

***One thinks too of a recent book by Alain de Botton (‘Religion for Everyone’), urging that Yes, we secularists can develop sufficient substitutes for such fuddy-duddy old stuff as ‘sacraments’: so, he urges for example, when you sit down to eat, stop for a minute and think of those who have gone before and whom we love. This, apparently, will cover Correctly and sufficiently all of the bases covered by the Catholic Eucharist, the Mass.

We can “create shared meaning” all by ourselves. No need for any Beyond nor for any external supports to sustaining genuine belief. We can just sort of ‘will’ ourselves to do it, whenever we feel like it or whenever we remember to do so and have the time.

This is the brave new world that the secularists figure will more than adequately replace – will indeed hugely surpass – the world Shaped by sustained communal belief in Christ (or anybody/thing else). A vacuum constructed over an abyssal void. Oy.

Cue the Bhagwan. And prepare to be adrift.

ADDENDUM

What would the Framing Vision – and hence America itself – have looked like if there had been no Afterglow of Christendom that Shaped the culture and spirit of the Citizenry even before the country itself was formally established?

How could Slavery have seemed repugnant? For that matter, how could Lincoln have formulated his opposition to it in the debates with Douglas, counting upon the moral sentiments of the Citizenry? Plato and Aristotle both accepted it; St. Paul himself – focused so intently on the primacy of the individual Christian’s spiritual Stance toward life in Christ – didn’t devote much ink to the worldly station of believers. How could Abolitionists – those among them who gave thought to the theological – anchored their concerns morally?

And among the Framers themselves, that ‘universality’ of Jefferson’s in the Declaration of Independence – that all human beings are created equal (a theological concept before it was a political concept) – is derived from the universality that derives from God’s creation of each human soul.

As Jefferson tried to have Jesus without the supernatual, Sullivan wants to have Jesus without the Church. Just what will precipitate out of such alchemical distilling is food for serious thought.

My concern is not so much for the ‘religious’ mindset as for the 'ideological' and 'authoritarian' mindset, because it is a more basic and dangerous problem. It is one that is shared by both Left and Right, but we can't ignore it just because it doesn't conform to conventional political framing.

Related mindsets are the 'fundamentalist' (although you can be a of fundamentalist secularist mindset as easily as you can be of a fundamentalist religious mindset) and the ‘primitive’ mindset (stereotyping, either-or thinking, self-servingly selective, refusal to accept contradictory facts). They all share basic dynamics and they all degrade the competence and effectiveness of public discourse.

There is a thus revealed a clear authoritarian streak on the current Left as well as on the Right. After all, if most of the citizens 'just don't get it' (however you define that 'it'), then the danger is instantly created that you will want to sidestep deliberative democratic politics because it's not worth the time or effort to debate or deliberate with so many people who 'don't get it'. Down that road - think of MacKinnon and Chantal Mouffe, among others - lies authoritarianism just as surely as down the corporatist and neocon Rightist road that seeks to make everybody cannon-fodder. The touted Knowledge and Service Economy (as dark a cartoon phantasm as any Night On Bald Mountain) will reduce the country to Correct college-educated elites or coffee-pouring, leaf-blowing helots, bereft of status as both Citizens and as Images of God and existing simply as creatures of the State.

Mussolini's assertion "Nothing outside the state, nothing against the state, nothing above the state" can - ironically - support the demands of an ideologically-controlled government of the Left as well as  of the Right. Funny how the conceptual night moves.

The issue is not so much 'Separation of Church and State' (a constitutional principle I fully support) as it is the Relationship of Religion and Culture. The Framers and especially Jefferson could erect the Separation Principle because they lived at a moment in Western History where the burning sun of a culture controlled by a single authority had set, but there was still enough daylight in the early dusk.

Thus the Framers lived in the Afterglow of the comprehensive cultural and social shaping of the old Medieval Christendom: they could quietly presume that common structuring and shaping of society that had already been achieved, while formally erecting the Separation between Church and State in the new American order.

The universal equality of all human beings that Jefferson pronounces in the Declaration of Independence is taken over from Judeo-Christian theology as synthesized by Aquinas - that idea is grounded solidly and immovably in the rock-solid belief that all human beings are created in the Image of God;  the idea of some Higher Law that judges and boundaries the actions of the government and forbids  it from creating laws that interfere with the genuine fulfillment of those human beings is also derived from that theological synthesis; the idea that since people are so marvelously created in the Image of God that they deserve and must be given some voice in their own government is also derived from that theological synthesis.

In fact, the Question might well be asked, as I have asked it before: what would the American Framing Vision have looked like without that heritage from the Medieval Synthesis?

Lastly, and coming around to current political eventsthat Sulllivan mentions: the Tea Party is in some ways a counter-burst of ideology generated by the sustained ideological suppression by Political Correctness from the Left. But both Tea Party and the Left-Correct agendas and justifications are instances of ideological and authoritarian thinking and it is that type of thinking - beneath the conventional framing of 'religious-or-secular', conservative-or-liberal, that is the great and lethal  danger.

In fact, I would go so far as to propose that what should be an unwritten principle of the American Vision is: the Separation of Ideology and State ... because an ideologically-driven government, by the very  dynamics of its presumptions, is going to have no use for deliberative democratic politics. And that will be true whether it is a government of the Left or of the Right.

Hence, the reality that now confounds the conventionally framed national political narrative: Bush 2 is continued and intensified by Obama who should - in the conventional and Correct framing - be the marquis paragon of all that post-1972 'liberalism' has been trying to do.

And, I would conclude, perhaps he is.

ADDENDUM 2

I recall also the Italian Maoist radical students’ slogan of the late 1960s: “Only violence helps where violence reigns”.

This sentiment quickly, I would say, found its way into radical-feminism here: since the ‘patriarchy’ is based on sexual violence, then any violence done (to truth, reality, objectivity, and to the patriarchally dominant, oppressive, hegemonic and marginalizing American Culture and Tradition and Framing Vision and Polity and Common-weal is all to the Good and is also Necessary.

Again, you wonder how any government could swallow this and take  it on board in a democratic polity based on deliberative democratic politics.

TERRY EAGLETON 2

I continue to share thoughts here about Terry Eagleton’s 2009 book “Reason, Faith, and Revolution”.*

He points out (p.13) that if God is “pointless” then morality is too. At least any solidly-Grounded morality whose basis and authority resides in something (or Someone) Higher than mere human ‘choice of values’ (such a ‘choice’ relies on nothing but the individual’s continued preference for the ‘value’, which can change over time or at whim). Imagine trying to navigate a ship at sea not by reference to the fixed points of the stars but rather by whatever you ‘choose’ to consider the best course across the trackless sea. You won’t be getting anywhere very often.

Still, Eagleton continues on the same page to assert – and justify his Correct creds – that “it is a question of how to live most richly and enjoyable, relishing one’s powers and abilities for their own sake”.  

This sounds nice – very nice – but it won’t work; it won’t stand up under the pressure of a life that is a Vale of Tears and turmoil, in a human existence that, in the Buddhist vision, not ever going to be ‘happy’ but rather is always going to be characterized by the dukkha of dissatisfaction.

This is a layered problem.

First, human beings are ‘incomplete’ in the sense that they are – and in this dimension or on this Plane of Existence (PoE) always will be – separated from their genuine highest capabilities and self; the German for it might be Echtheit, translating into the clanky English ‘genuineness’. Thus, in the Christian and Catholic view especially, humans are always ‘workin’ my way back to You’ (as the Songster saith); we are always working upwards through the clutter of inferior desires and urges to get closer to our Echt self (which, of course, is made in the image of that God to Whom we are also working our way back toward; working toward an ever more congruent relationship with both our Echt Self and with the God in Whose image that Echt Self of ours has been created).

But it’s a journey that is never going to be completely fulfilled in this dimension and on this PoE, so ‘fulfilllment’ is not going to work as a source of happiness for us humans: if you’ve based all your ‘happiness’ on something that you can never achieve, then you are always going to feel – rightly so – incomplete and unfulfilled and not-totally-happy.

Second, to the extent, then, that humans try to find fulfillment and happiness through their inferior or less genuine or less Echt urges and desires, they are not only not-going to feel fulfilled, but are actually going to sail way off their primary course and get lost in the trackless welter of the inferior interior world of those desires, passions, urges and all that.

And once you’re in those shark-filled waters, the more you kick the deeper you’re going to get yourself into trouble. Physiological addiction to drugs is simply the most obvious example of this dynamic: you get badly off course and away from your higher and Echt Self and from the image of God – and maybe from God too – and then you can only muster enough energy to keep going forward (on the wrong course) even more intensely … and the band will play on until the unhappy end.

The great Axial religions – and especially in the core Christian variant – therefore insist that ‘autonomy’ or freedom is not enough; if you don’t know where you’re heading, or how to handle the ship, then simply having all the sails up and getting out of the harbor isn’t going to do you much good at all. Indeed, in that condition of existential incompetence you are safer staying in the harbor, tied to the pier of brute custom and tradition that imposes some Shape on you from outside yourself – which is ‘oppressive’ but at least keeps you from cutting loose, heading out into the deep when you don’t know where you’re going or how to sail the ship, and winding up lost or wrecked.

Modern American society has the idea that there’s nothing very grace-ful or ‘free’ about staying tied to a pier or just puttering around the harbor where your ship was launched. But that will at least keep you safe enough, compared to heading out into life’s deep ocean with no knowledge of course or vessel, where your chances of making progress or even staying afloat are hugely reduced.

Eagleton rhapsodizes in classic Romantic and Boomer fashion about “this self-delighting energy” that is “entirely without point or function” and “stands in no need of justification by some grim-faced tribunal of History, Duty, Geist  [German for ‘spirit’], Production, Utility, or Teleology [the study (and reality) of deep human Purpose]”.

In other words, ‘just do it!’; just take this hog out onto the highway and open it up and let the good times roll and the chips fall where they may. BUT this presumes that you know how to handle a motorcycle, especially at speed on the open road. Otherwise the simple glee and excitement of going reely reely fast and feeling the wind in your face and so on isn’t going to last long.

He reflects the Romantic/Boomer presumption that you can just take the human ‘bike’, hop on and turn the key, and head for the highway and total ‘freedom’ and ‘exhilaration’. Not if you don’t know what you’re doing. Because A) the bike is a lot more complex and dangerously powerful than you seem to think, and B) the ‘highway’ will thus provide ultimately only the opportunity for you to wrap yourself around a tree or go off a cliff; and C) you will be sharing the road – especially these days – with a whole bunch of other wannabe-bikers who also don’t know what the frak they’re doing but are equally giddy with ‘freedom’ and ‘exhilaration’.

The possibilities of you wrecking yourself or somebody else, or somebody else colliding with you or wrecking you, are huge.

This simplistic short-cut to ‘freedom’ approach – just do it – tries to anchor humans in God by claiming that you can be like God (ummmm – remember the Serpent in the Garden of Eden?) just by enjoying the exhilarating freedom that God has.

But it can’t work like that. God knows how to be His Echt Self; God knows what He’s doing. Humans, alas, don’t. We are made in the image of God but we are not gods. Recall the kid Icarus whose father Daedalus made wings for him, stuck them on his back with wax, and figured he could escape the surly bonds of earth and fly like the gods – the ancient Greeks knew what would happen, and they didn’t even read the Bible. (The kid Icarus got so exhilarated he flew too near the sun, the wax melted, and the kid was history.)

Humans are born into ‘the surly bonds of earth’, of this incomplete PoE. It’s what we do. Or were created to do: to develop our Echt Self in the midst of this still-developing world that, like a new planet, is a dangerous and complicated place as each human and all humans are enmeshed in their inferior selves, some trying harder to climb and others not so much.

God and Grace help; but as any father knows, each kid has to actually master his bicycle on his own or he’ll never learn to do it right; dad can teach and encourage and stay close, but Junior has to get on the bike and learn the balancing bit and steering and pedaling and all that.

Or imagine a cargo-cult native suddenly given, with no introduction, an automobile there on his remote island. He has no idea whatsoever about what it is for, what is capable of. He has no instruction booklet or owner’s manual and there are no cues from the world around him. But he has a brand new car with the keys on the front seat. How ‘free’ is he, really? As the owner of a new car, I mean. He could wind up using it as a house, or a planter, or a status-symbol or even an awesome burial container (or at least plan to, when the time comes) – but that’s all. Maybe he’ll discover the gas in the tank and even siphon it out for fuel, or to mix with war-paint.

Elements of modern Pomo culture would call that marvelous and creative and – feh, this overused word – ‘rich’. But really, how ‘free’ is he in terms of having this auto? If you get my drift.

Reviewing the recent (and intriguing) German film “The White Ribbon”, Roger Ebert says that when the prevention of evil becomes more important than the preservation of freedom, totalitarianism results. This is true but too simple. The key – as always and as always must be – is in how you conceive of ‘freedom’. A Freedom without Shape or Grounding Image or Template is no freedom at all, but merely the Shapeless discharge of energy. To make this profound mistake is to imagine that because your oil well is spouting the stuff high into the air 24/7 you are therefore successfully conducting an oil business.

 

There is a reason why the “tribunals” of History and Culture and Tradition are “grim-faced”: being human and being an individual human is serious business, and dangerous if you don’t get it right. With more experience, you can let yourself feel a little exhilaration because you’ve earned it by going through the long and hard discipline of mastering your energies.

But the Romantic/Boomer/Youthy idea that the young are more god-like because they aren’t ‘inhibited’ is grossly and profoundly deceptive and mistaken: the young are much more susceptible to thinking (or feeling) that they can just skip the reading and get straight to the exhilaration. And thus, if they are of a spiritual bent, be closer to ‘God’ or be ‘like God’ or experience the god-ness within them. It doesn’t work that way.

The Boomer approach – and lots of folks with gray hair now still think the way they did when they were young – doesn’t work because it presumes there’s no hard work involved, and no danger.

Being a Boomer myself, I think it had something to do with the fact that we were born into an America that just ‘was’ rich and powerful and very clever and oh-so-modern and cutting-edge. We didn’t experience the Great Depression or World War 2 and we hadn’t really been in the life-business very long and just figured that everything was Groovy and all you had to do was lose the ‘grim-faced’ approach and Go For It because life, obviously (it seemed) was really great and you only had to enjoy it and enjoy yourself. Anything less was to fail as a human: if you didn’t enjoy your human-ness to the easily-available max then you must be ‘sick’ or ‘old’ or ‘repressed’.

Well, that was then and none of it worked.

But the Boomers created a revolution in culture that actually tossed out History, Tradition, and even nowadays Culture itself, in the name of total freedom and autonomy in this way or that way or any way at all. No ‘grim face’; remember the 1970s happy-face icon? We passed it on to subsequent age-cohorts. Remember the 1980s “Don’t worry – Be happy!”?

Eagleton tries to salvage a palpable Sense of God by locking onto ‘exhilaration’ and the old ‘happy face’. It’s a quick-burning fuel (which deludes the incompetent into thinking that the bright pretty flame and ‘rush’ means that it works). But quick-burning fuels don’t last long. And then you’re wayyy up there in your jet plane after an exhilarating steep vertical climb and a couple of good zooms high up above those ‘surly bonds of earth’ and suddenly you’re out of fuel and the jet – who knew? – doesn’t just fly because it likes to but instead, because you’ve burned up the fuel, it starts heading back toward those ‘surly bonds of earth’ at continually increasing speed. By that point, the Lesson can only end unhappily.

But achieving Mastery is so grim-faced (and, some would say, so ‘macho’ and ‘patriarchal’ and ‘control-oriented’) that no kids in their right mind would want to accept that such a hard Road is the only way to start toward fulfillment; to the Boomers it seemed more like just one more way to be a drone and to a later generation just one more way to prove ‘you just don’t get it’.

Kant, grim-faced but earnestly trying to help humanity get a grip on itself, went as far as to proclaim that if it’s pleasurable, it’s not virtuous. Virtue, to Kant, had to reflect the qualities in the human being necessary to marshal the self’s abilities to face the frak of living in so incomplete and confused and dangerous a dimension as this world of human history has always proven itself to be.

Eagleton will take the opposite route, the quick-burny Boomer route: pleasure and the high of exhilaration are the virtue, and Duty and all that are just proof that you’re unimaginative and not ‘with it’.

I would say this: there is indeed a pleasure and exhilaration that comes to a Master and Commander, after working hard to achieve competence in handling the ship and navigating and in getting the necessary things done, when standing on the quarterdeck, with the ship well-put before a good wind … there is a sense of legitimate exhilaration there, well-earned and indeed reflecting the image of God as God intended humans to ‘operate’ on this challenging PoE.

But there’s no short-cut to it. And to get that much mastery, you won’t be ‘young’ (chronologically speaking, anyway) by the time you’ve achieved it. (But really, is there anything less ‘young’ than a chronologically older person still trying to pass-for being ‘young’?) The amazing thing about the way God has set things up, the older you get – but if you’re working toward the Echt – then the younger you become.

And kids aren’t closer to God because they’re more ‘genuine’ or Echt. They’re closer to God because they don’t know what they’re up against and so they need all the help they can get; they are ‘innocent’ not in the legal sense but in the sense that they don’t-have something. And what they don’t have is the maturity that only comes with clear-eyed courageous Mastery, and it takes time to achieve that.

And it really does take courage. William Gass, riffing on Nietzsche, recalls that crazed thinker’s image: some people treat genuine consciousness like a knapsack that frightened soldiers rip off and throw aside in order to speed their escape from the field. That is a frightening, vivid characterization of the existential challenge that faces all human beings: to be human you have to be faithful to your (God-given) potential ability to see things clearly. And on this PoE that is bound to be frightening because this PoE is so full of incompleteness and people who are operating out of their ‘inferior’ passions, desires, and urges and organizations large and small that do the same thing.

It’s frightening to be a human and to truly inhabit human consciousness. You see and feel the weaknesses and dangers all around you – and within you.

And some people, like frightened soldiers, toss the knapsack of consciousness aside in order to escape that awful real-ness.

A real Master and Commander is up on deck and can see the huge waves of storms and lives always with the awareness that even on its best days, and with the best ship, captain, and crew – things can go wrong. You can’t just remain ‘optimistic’ in a situation like that; ‘optimism’ and the happy-face won’t get you very far. You have to have achieved a Mastery of your Echt Self, and that includes a steady source of fuel in the relationship with the God in Whose image you are made. Nothing less will sustain you.

Or you can hide down below-decks and get drunk or pretend you’re somewhere else or go to your happy-place or see if the ship’s doctor hasn’t got a handy bottle of some pills.

But you’re still on the ocean with all its possibilities.

The Existentialist writers like Camus said that you must keep the knapsack on, stay on deck and look the ocean and the elements straight-on; but that you had no help except what strength you could find in yourself. There was no other help (or Help) available to you.

This is where the Christian vision of how God works with humans demonstrates what Help is always available in the multi-Planar vision of human existence: the God in Whose image we are made also sustains humans as we try to work through this PoE’s complexity and work through our own frikkery and frakkery of inferior qualities, working to achieve more Mastery of our higher and superior qualities (catalogued handily as the Theological and Cardinal virtues).

No happy-faced Boomery ‘religion’ or god of Wheeeee is going to suffice if you want to be fully human. The world and the human self are too wonky, lethally so, for such saccharine stuff – no matter how much of a ‘high’ you might get for a brief period (before your fuel burns away).

So too, Eagleton is then forced (p. 14) to characterize the morality Jesus preached (as Eagleton sees it) as “reckless, extravagant, improvident, over-the-top, a scandal to actuaries and a stumbling-block to real-estate agents”.

This is the cutesy Boomer short-cut: you are either crazy like a kid, or else you are stodgy, repressed and sleazy like the worst this-dimensional older people who represent the ‘grown-up’ world. Remember "The Graduate" from 1968?

Now I would say this: Jesus was against non-Genuine or anti-Genuine living; but Jesus wasn’t against maturity (which in the Christian vision requires growing toward God as you grow toward your own Echt and Genuine-ness).

Yes, many adults – having been around a longer time – have succumbed to the temptation to throw away the knapsack of Genuine consciousness and relationship to God and just try to cobble together whatever satisfactions and pleasures and successes they can manage on their own, and some of them really really don’t care what they have to do to get that done.

But although ‘older’ they are not at all Mature (capitalized to indicate the Christian sense of the word I’m going for in all this).

NOR does not-being ‘old’ mean that you are any more Mature or any closer to being Genuine in the Christian sense. You simply haven’t had the time to make the mistakes, to run away once you’ve seen the terribilita (as the Renaissance Italians would put it) of life.

Babies – the exact opposite of ‘old’ – aren’t closer to God (if they were, would they dump their poop all over you at every opportunity?). They simply haven’t gotten out onto the field yet. Ditto, to a lesser extent, youth (who before very many years pass from being a baby and are already threatened by the existential challenge of facing their own and the world’s incompleteness, and the darknesses that can result).

And of course those humans who have never Matured will demonstrate the fact by indeed dropping their poop on you in their witless and terrified flight from Genuineness, trying to make life ‘happy’ as best they can on their own (having cut loose from God as well as their own Echt Self).

These great tectonic existential challenges and how humans respond to them are what make ‘life’ and ‘history’ take the rough bounces they take. This whole PoE is knocked out of whack, like a planet off its axis, and that it comes from human beings thrown off their Genuine axis, not achieving their true and Genuine Shape.

But the Boomers tossed out any idea of ‘boundaries’ and ‘limits’, and yet while boundaries do limit you, they also give you a Shape (depending on what boundaries you accept, which is where the Church’s essential Rules of Navigation and Ship-Handling come in). Some folks accept a much inferior Shape, based on their ‘inferior’ and less-Genuinely human (made in the image and likeness of God) choices. Other folks just settle for being Shapeless.

And it is precisely here that the Boomers (and Eagleton) went off the rails: they ‘valorized’ Shapelessness (they didn’t even admit that there could be a wrong, less-Genuine Shape) as ‘freedom’ and ‘liberation’ and as being Genuine, and in Eagleton’s example even consider the fake ‘exhilaration’ of boundaryless-ness to be a participation in God’s very Life.

Nope. Not hardly.

And nowadays the Pomo’s have erected this terrific, catastrophic  mistake into a Plan and call it Good. Oy, feh, and oy-gevalt!

It’s like the Naval Academy graduating officers who don’t know the first thing about how ships work, or the Air Force Academy graduating officers who don’t think they need to know the first thing about the laws of aerodynamics and how planes fly. This is not a good thing.

And it will not – cannot – end well.

Eagleton acknowledges that Jesus was so reckless because he thought that the end of the world was coming and people didn’t have to worry about what I would call Maturity over the long haul.

But he misses something vital here.

Jesus may have been, in His human awareness, a tad off in when the End of the World would arrive.

But then again, in His awareness that all human beings are faced with the end of the inferior-Shaped world every minute of their lives, then the really important End of the World faces human beings right now, all the time, 24/7.

And in the Christian and Catholic vision, then the Church has been continuously keeping that awareness alive, trying to function as the officers’ Academy to continuously train folks and give them the knowledge of how to operate their human craft, their human vessels, so that they have a decent shot at getting closer to their own Genuine-ness and simultaneously a closer relationship with God (in whose image and Shape they are, you recall, created).

God’s Grace (capitalized to remind you how vitally and urgently important it is) is always among humans and within them, seeking to Help prompt the life-long faithfulness of the trek toward Genuine human Shape and the true fullness of human life that such a trek brings.

Eagleton thus comes a bit back on track when he decries the Modern and Pomo replacing “of a transcendent God with an omnipotent humanity”. Humans are not omnipotent; and anybody who has ever been out at sea in a storm or up in the air when a plane goes wonky or put his/her entire well-being in the hands of raising crops at the mercy of the weather and the locusts can ever delude themselves into thinking that humans are omnipotent.

As Lord Elrond said to Gandalf in “The Fellowship of the Ring”: this evil cannot be contained by the power of the Elves – we have not the power …”. So if even the Elves realize it …

The Boomers were big – reely reely big – into Henry David Thoreau back in the day. That little fraud spent a few years out in the woods on the border of downtown Concord, Massachusetts, living in a wooden hutch. Of course nobody bothered to recall that he frequently went back into town for handouts and supplies.

But what was even more lethally ignored was that a few years after that romp, he went up to the forests of the Maine wilderness. Not ‘woods’, but genuine, God-awful, dark, lonely, primeval wilderness forests. It terrified him. He came back wayyyy sobered-up and decided that the Concord woods weren’t really the total-challenge of life that he had so easily ‘conquered’ … all on his own.

The animals weren’t cuddly like woodchucks and squirrels and cutesy groundhogs and chipmunks. They were these remote, powerful, majestic beings of a darker and larger – huge – world that made him feel like a pipsqueak. (Which was probably one of the most accurate insights into himself that he ever managed to get.)

Perhaps now that Americans are finding themselves in the primeval forest of economic Scarcity and uncertainty, they might have that type of ‘Damascus Moment’ that St. Paul had when he was just plain old Saul and got knocked off his horse on the road by a God Who was wayyyy bigger and more real than he had previously given the old boy credit for. Perhaps some Americans can admit with Mark Twain that "when I was seventeen I was amazed by how stupid my father was; when I was twenty-one I was amazed by how much the old man had learned in a few years".

But Americans – like the Boomers and, alas, courtesy of the Boomers – are now going to face the sea of life in all its lethal uncertainty and perhaps agitated dangerousness. Abundance has gone and Scarcity is upon us.

No happy-face godling or do-it-yourself god is going to Help. All the illusions of the Boomer years (which to some extent are quintessentially American illusions from the long centuries of some sort of Abundance) are going to be burned away.

It will be terrifying and it will bring Americans face to face with that terribilita that is part of the incompleteness and brokenness of this PoE.

This could be a Damascus Moment for a whole of folks. And that could turn out as well for a lot of folks as it did for St. Paul.

Stay tuned.

NOTES

*New London: Yale University Press. ISBN: 978-0-300-15179-4