The two men were very different. Havel, a poet and playwright, became a leading political dissident. Wojtyła, an actor and playwright, took the path of priest and philosopher. But they shared a set of concerns. Both had a passion for truth, which they saw as the foundation of human dignity. Both had emerged from regimes grounded in lies. Both admired the freedoms of the West. And yet—tellingly—both doubted that the democratic West was in any sense immune to the sort of casuistry, poisonous political thought, and systematic intellectual deceit that had destroyed Europe.

Nearly four decades have passed. The great ideological wars are over. The good guys won. Or at least that’s the story we in the “developed” world like to tell ourselves. We in the wealthy nations enjoy astonishing technical progress and material comforts. But the wound to man’s self-understanding and moral reasoning caused by the events of the last century has never really healed. Instead it has deepened, spreading a peculiar kind of confusion into our public discourse, political institutions, popular culture, the lives of religious believers, and entire communities of faith—including, at times, the Church herself.

Addressing that wound was a major focus of Karol Wojtyła’s pontificate.

Next year, 2018, marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the release of Veritatis Splendor, John Paul’s great encyclical on the “splendor of truth.” Written to encourage a renewal in Catholic moral theology and a return to its classical Catholic roots, Veritatis Splendor grounds itself in a few simple convictions. Briefly put: Truth exists, whether we like it or not. We don’t create truth; we find it, and we have no power to change it to our tastes. The truth may not make us comfortable, but it does make us free. And knowing and living the truth ennoble our lives. It is the only path to lasting happiness.

In the years that have passed, the crisis of truth has only seemed to grow. Our age is one of cleverness and irony, not real intellect and character. Today the wisdom of Veritatis Splendor is more urgently needed than ever.

It’s common, even among people who identify as Catholics, to assume that the Church’s moral guidance is essentially about imposing rules, rules that breed a kind of pharisaism. But this is exactly wrong. It’s an error that radically misunderstands the substance of Catholic teaching. It’s also one of the worst obstacles to spreading the faith.

John Paul II knew this. Thus the first chapter of his encyclical is a meditation on the encounter of Jesus with the rich young man (Matt. 19:16–26). The rich young man seeks to enter into eternal life, and this, John Paul writes, is the starting point for Jesus’s teaching on how to live as a Christian. In other words, Christian morality is about seeking fellowship with God, which is our true happiness, the goal of our human existence. Yes, moral rules, laws, and commandments do exist. But they have value because they point to something far more profound: how to live in order to grow in virtue and attain fullness of life.

Every parent knows the importance of what might be called “common-sense virtue ethics.” When children are young, a family’s rules serve as guardrails against accidents; later, they become guides toward virtue, maturity, and the capacity for self-command. In other words, good parents want their children to be happy. That’s why they give them rules. And that’s also why they sometimes need to admonish their children for breaking the rules. But the reason behind the rules is not arbitrary. The rules are an expression of love. Their motive is a desire to raise children who will become happy, virtuous, mature, flourishing adults.

God treats us in much the same way. Catholic teaching as a morality of virtue and happiness is not hard to understand. Like any good parent, God does indeed give us rules. The Ten Commandments are central among them. But this is not because he’s interested in displaying his power, or making us obey him. God does not “need” our obedience. It adds nothing to his sovereignty. But God is love, and that means he exercises his sovereignty to protect us from danger and lead us to grow in virtue. In the end, the reason for God’s commandments is very simple. He loves us and wants us to be happy.

This truth—that Christian morality is not a clutch of dead legalisms but a path to happiness—was a key theme of John Paul’s ministry. It was already clear in his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis (“Redeemer of Man”), where he announced the basic program for his pontificate:

Christ, the Redeemer of the world, is the one who penetrated in a unique unrepeatable way into the mystery of man and entered his “heart”. Rightly therefore does the Second Vatican Council teach: “The truth is that only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a type of him who was to come (Rom. 5:14),Christ the Lord. Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling.”

Jesus comes to reveal to man his true dignity. He sets man free with the truth of the Gospel, free to become by grace what God calls humanity to be: adopted daughters and sons in the joy of his love.

This is why John Paul placed such stress on truth, especially the truth about man and his vocation, a vocation to lasting happiness in friendship with God. In the Gospel, Jesus gives us a new commandment, the new law of love. This new law does not abolish the Mosaic Law and the Old Testament commandments. It does not override the natural law written on every person’s heart. Rather, it fulfills them and helps us live them in a more perfect way. Jesus teaches us the truth about right and wrong, and this truth does not diminish our liberty: “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:32).

As a result, John Paul II called for a deep renewal of Catholic moral theology, and also of the ways in which Christian moral teachings are presented to the faithful and to the world. He wanted the Church to recover her zeal in affirming that no richer life exists than one lived in the fullness of truth.

It’s precisely here—how the Church presents her moral guidance—that we still face serious challenges. Ironically, legalism is very much alive in the Church, even though it no longer looks like the rigorist, “conservative” legalism of the past. Legalist minimalism is just as deadly to the life of faith as legalist maximalism.

Many of today’s confusions about Catholic moral teaching stem from a one-dimensional morality of obligation. In this view, moral truth limits human freedom by constraining what man can legitimately choose. It “binds” his choice. A morality of obligation can only move us negatively, by teaching that disobedience carries the threat of divine punishment. The drama in moral reflection is thus reduced to figuring out exactly what we are “bound” to do by God’s law, and then what residual room is left for our freedom.

This kind of moral theory has a questionable Catholic pedigree. The great patristic and medieval Catholic synthesis of the High Middle Ages saw God’s commandments not as arbitrary acts of his will demanding obedience, but as expressions of the wisdom by which he teaches us what we’re made for, and how to become what he intended us to be.

This synthesis was attacked, starting in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, first by nominalist philosophers and later by the secularizing Enlightenment. When combined with the polemics of the Protestant Reformation and other splinter groups like the Jansenists, many moral theologians—including some famous early Jesuits such as Francisco Suarez—lost sight of the classical focus of Catholic morality on virtue and happiness. They began to turn to distinctively modern moral theories that stressed law, obligations, commandments, and conscience. Rather than a quest for happiness, the moral life came to be portrayed as a difficult navigation of detailed rules.

This approach became standard in many seminaries. And too often, it produced a demanding legalism. In this view, a good Catholic must know the moral law. He or she must then apply it rigorously to his or her own case to avoid falling into grave sin. Our native freedom simply needed to knuckle under, with our will submitted in obedience to divine commandments and to the laws of the Church. Moral theology thus judged actions mainly by whether or not they conformed to the duties of the law. Acts of virtue aiming at holiness and union with God belonged to a different domain (as “supererogatory” counsels, rather than mandatory commandments).

Against this backdrop, Vatican II (1962–1965) called for a broad reform of Catholic moral theology, one that reconnected moral truth with our desire for happiness. But many moral theologians remained trapped by the preconciliar theories that had formed them. They continued to presume a framework of divine commandments and obligations that bind and restrict man’s liberty.

Instead of reading the council as a call to deepen the life-giving power of moral truth, they believed—incorrectly—that Vatican II marked a break from the “oppressive” moral commandments of the past. They assumed that Catholic moral theology can be more life-affirming to the degree that it cedes territory to our unfettered freedom. But in practice, they only managed to exchange the rigorist legalism of their teachers for a new legalism with a laxist, progressive bent.

Many moral theologians of the last generation, including men like Bernard Häring, felt they were bringing the Church into the modern age by exploring new moral frontiers. In practice, though, most of these theologians stayed on the same old school bus, which they now ran in reverse. That is, they “solved” the problem of onerous moral commandments by eliminating some rules and generating doubts about whether this or that commandment applied in every case, or whether some exception might exist to rules that, before, had seemed absolute.

Those who favored this rebranded legalism made it their business to create doubts about the application of a law or commandment to particular cases, thus “freeing” the individual to exercise his “liberty of conscience.” This felt like a new turn in moral theology, one that released Catholics from the old regime of rigorous rules and duties. But in fact things didn’t change, at least not theologically. The new laxist thought stayed stuck in the old rut of legalism. Morality, in the end, remained about the rules, with a new generation of moralists essentially arguing for fewer of them.

Obviously no version of legalism can capture the real meaning of the Gospel, which is the promise of new life in Jesus Christ. Legalism of whatever sort sees God’s law as a limit (or even a threat) to human freedom. So in Veritatis Splendor, John Paul reoriented moral thought back toward the classical Catholic tradition of a morality of virtue leading to happiness.

In the United States, this has borne many good fruits, especially among those who teach moral theology in our seminaries. Over the last twenty-five years, a growing number of scholars have emerged who offer a persuasive explanation of Catholic teaching in defense of life and marriage, including the (now clearly prophetic) encyclical Humanae Vitae of Paul VI. They grasp that the core problem of our sinfulness is not that we’re breaking rules. It’s that we’re damaging our God-given humanity and forsaking the opportunity to live in the truth, which means living more fully human lives.

It is because we remain captive to a false rivalry between moral truth, on the one hand, and human freedom and fulfillment, on the other, that Veritatis Splendor remains so important. We can elaborate that in four points.

First, the text reminds us forcefully that truth, including moral truth (what we owe our neighbor; what leads us to or away from God), has an objective dimension. It’s not purely a function of cultural and personal circumstances. Of course, throughout history, and throughout our individual lives, many things do change. But some truths do not change. Murder, genocide, adultery—these are wrong in every case. There are no exceptions, no circumstances that make such actions morally permissible. They can never be directly chosen, even as a means to a good end.

Certain moral truths—the Ten Commandments, the basic precepts of the natural law—remain always valid. As John Paul writes:

The negative precepts of the natural law are universally valid. They oblige each and every individual, always and in every circumstance. It is a matter of prohibitions which forbid a given action semper et pro semper [always and everywhere], without exception, because the choice of this kind of behavior is in no case compatible with the goodness of the will of the acting person, with his vocation to life with God and to communion with his neighbor. It is prohibited—to everyone and in every case—to violate these precepts.

Such actions always and everywhere stand in opposition to friendship with God and to justice toward our neighbor. They’re always directly opposed to virtue and to our ultimate happiness.

A person might not be fully culpable for doing wicked things when faced with violent threats or intense pressure. But the acts themselves—acts like rape, euthanasia, and abortion—are always gravely wrong. They produce terrible evil in the life of the person who does them and suffering in the lives of others. This is why the Catholic tradition calls such actions intrinsically evil. The evil is found in the very nature of the kind of act that it is, no matter what the circumstances or reasons that motivate it.

In practice, this means that, even when we have a good reason and the noblest intention in the world, if an action itself is not rightly ordered to God, it’s still wrong. Its “wrongness” is not merely the result of violating some commandment or duty. It’s not the law or the commandment that “makes” the action wrong. Rather, even under the best circumstances, an intrinsically evil act leads us away from God, who is the supreme good. It wounds us, injures others, blocks our path to true happiness, and produces real evil.

This is the flaw in all forms of moral legalism, rigorist or laxist. Intrinsically evil acts aren’t wrong because the law proscribes them. The law proscribes them because, by their very nature, they deform the human person. They disrupt the just relations among persons and turn us away from God, our greatest good.

This central teaching does more than protect human dignity; it promotes it as well. As Václav Havel recognized, the objectivity of moral truth provides us with a place to stand in a fallen world that too often conscripts us into its evil doings. When the Church teaches that some things should never be done, she is issuing a wake-up call. Our freedom is not aimless. It does not serve itself. We were created with the capacity for freedom so that we could unite ourselves with the truth—in action as well as thought.

To be fully human, as the lessons of the last century taught both Havel and Wojtyła, is to live in the truth. And we can do this even in dire circumstances because we are always able to refrain from doing that which is intrinsically evil. To resist the temptation of adultery, to refuse to procure or perform an abortion, to refrain from mouthing falsehoods—even the most ordinary person who struggles with his own sinfulness (as we all do) is capable of living in the truth. This is why John Paul thought the classical notion of intrinsically evil acts to be so vital. It’s the dimension of moral theology that frames truth in the clearest of terms. And it is the clarity of the truth (and its rejection of that dull gray cult of moral ambiguity that numbs the soul before killing it) that speaks most directly to our desire for fullness of life.

Thus a pastor is not acting mercifully if he says, out of a misguided desire to help someone struggling with a difficult choice, “Don’t worry, as long as your heart is in the right place, God will understand.” Or even worse: “I dispense you from the law in this case.” The pastor has no power to launder a sinful choice into a morally acceptable one. In trying to do so, he commits a serious injustice. He also sins against charity, because he makes the problem worse by stealing the truth from the person he seeks to help.

To put it another way: Accompaniment, properly understood, is always a wise pastoral strategy. But the destination of a journey—a journey shared by pastor and penitent—does matter, especially if the route takes them over a cliff. Intrinsically evil actions always involve a turning away from God. This is the teaching of Jesus himself: “Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:19).

The spiritual problems that arise in morally difficult cases do not stem from the “cruel” nature of a seemingly merciless law. The problems come from the fact that we fallen creatures have a hard time choosing the good when it costs us something. The right path to happiness isn’t to relax the law, but to give ourselves over to God’s power and the promise of his grace.

This leads to a second reason for Veritatis Splendor’s enduring value. Catholic moral teachings are salvific. They’re central to the proclamation of the Gospel, and are, in reality, good news. Yet this good news, Christ’s new law of love, in no way diminishes God’s commandments.

John Paul puts it this way:

When the Apostle Paul sums up the fulfilment of the law in the precept of love of neighbor as oneself (cf. Rom 13:8–10), he is not weakening the commandments but reinforcing them, since he is revealing their requirements and their gravity. Love of God and of one’s neighbor cannot be separated from the observance of the commandments of the Covenant renewed in the blood of Jesus Christ and in the gift of the Spirit. It is an honor characteristic of Christians to obey God rather than men (cf. Acts 4:19; 5:29) and accept even martyrdom as a consequence, like the holy men and women of the Old and New Testaments who are considered such because they gave their lives rather than perform this or that particular act contrary to faith or virtue.

Catholic fidelity to moral truths—despite opposition, and especially when other Christian communities have fallen silent—has made the Church a vital witness of truth in a time of confusion. Many who come to the faith today do so not in spite of the “hard” Catholic teachings, but precisely because of them—and this, often in circumstances when they are not sure that they can even live up to those demands. They recognize in those teachings the voice of Jesus Christ and the confidence of the Church in the authority of moral truth.

Again, the solution to hard moral choices isn’t to rewrite or neuter the law. Instead, we need to acknowledge that, by ourselves, we can do nothing. Then we need to ask the help of God’s grace to live in the truth. When we choose to live in the truth—or at least to keep trying when we fail—we’re joined more closely to Jesus. We learn to depend more deeply on his grace. We start, even in this life, to have a foretaste of God’s friendship that we’ll experience fully in heaven.

The third reason for the encyclical’s extraordinary power is John Paul’s approach to the nature of authentic freedom. He writes: “God’s law does not reduce, much less do away with human freedom; rather, it protects and promotes that freedom. In contrast, however, some present-day cultural tendencies have given rise to several currents of thought in ethics which center upon an alleged conflict between freedom and law.” This “alleged conflict” lies at the heart of moral theories of obligation. Such theories assume that, in order to give freedom of conscience to individuals, the moral law must be softened, or exceptions found.

The opposite is true. We find true freedom only as we’re liberated from our vices so that we not only desire what is truly good, but also act to attain it. In other words, as we grow in moral virtue, we also grow in authentic freedom.

Freedom was not given to us by God so we could redefine, on our own, what is good or evil, but rather so we could respond in liberty to his offer of friendship.

Man’s free obedience to God’s law effectively implies that human reason and human will participate in God’s wisdom and providence. . . . Law must therefore be considered an expression of divine wisdom: by submitting to the law, freedom submits to the truth of creation. Consequently one must acknowledge in the freedom of the human person the image and the nearness of God, who is present in all (cf. Eph 4:6).

John Paul II lived through the most destructive war in history. He survived two crushing totalitarian systems in Poland. He knew from experience the threats to human dignity that arise, inevitably, from the denial of objective truth. We should never delude ourselves into thinking that, just because we live in a democracy, we’re safe from similar sufferings if we cease to respect the reality of objective truth. Nor should we imagine that a nation of nearly infinite consumer choices and new rights of self-definition amounts to a genuine culture of freedom.

As John Paul writes:

Totalitarianism arises out of a denial of truth in the objective sense. If there is no transcendent truth, in obedience to which man achieves his full identity, then there is no sure principle for guaranteeing just relations between people. Their self-interest as a class, group or nation would inevitably set them in opposition to one another. If one does not acknowledge transcendent truth, then the force of power takes over, and each person tends to make full use of the means at his disposal in order to impose his own interests or his own opinion, with no regard for the rights of others.

Not only Catholics proclaim moral truth, of course. Many other believers and people of good will do as well. But it’s vital for the sake of her mission and the world that the Church be a beacon of truth when so few such beacons remain.

The fourth and final reason for the encyclical’s power is this. In Veritatis Splendor, John Paul reaffirmed the classic Catholic understanding of the relationship between objective truth about right and wrong, and how the individual person applies that truth in his or her own life. He underscores what has always been Catholic teaching: The conscience of the individual can never be set against objective moral truth, as if conscience and truth were two competing, autonomous principles for moral decision-making.

Such a mistaken view would “pose a challenge to the very identity of the moral conscience in relation to human freedom and God’s law. . . . Conscience is not an independent and exclusive capacity to decide what is good and what is evil.” Rather, “conscience is the application of the law to a particular case.” Conscience stands under the objective moral law and should be formed by it, so that “the truth about moral good, as that truth is declared in the law of reason, is practically and concretely recognized by the judgment of conscience.”

When John Paul issued Veritatis Splendor nearly a quarter century ago, it very soon drew criticism from a range of “forward-thinking” theologians. They (rightly) saw that their efforts—to bend Catholic moral teachings toward more “humane” and “compassionate” standards, whereby moral truths could evolve over time, relative to historical and cultural circumstances—would be derailed by it.

Those of them who remain among church scholars and pastors still search for ways to evade the encyclical’s teaching, to say it was useful in the past, but history has moved on. To a great extent, today’s debates within the Church—on issues of sexual identity, sexual behavior, Communion for the divorced and civilly remarried, the nature of the family—simply exhume and reanimate the convenient ambiguities and flexible approaches to truth that Veritatis Splendor forcefully buried.

But the splendor of the truth cannot be hidden. It is ever ancient, ever new. In the long run, Veritatis Splendor will be remembered long after many other works of popes and politicians are forgotten.

It will be remembered for one simple reason: What it says is true.

Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., is archbishop of Philadelphia.

The post The Splendor of Truth in 2017 appeared first on First Things.

—James Matthew Wilson

The post Autumn Road appeared first on First Things.

In The Good Shepherd, the 2006 spy film, mobster Joseph Palmi asks CIA agent (and stereotypical WASP) Edward Wilson an insolent question: “We Italians, we got our families and we got the Church. The Irish, they have the homeland. The Jews, their traditions. Even the n——s, they got their music. What about you people . . . What do you have?” After a haughty pause, Wilson delivers the punchline: “The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.”

The line reflects an immemorial perception, never quite overcome and lately resurgent, that the United States is basically an Anglo-Protestant affair. In his final book, Continental Ambitions: Roman Catholics in North America; The Colonial Experience, the late Kevin Starr set out to dispel this perception. Continental Ambitions tells the story of Catholic conquest, exploration, and settlement in North America (involving Norse, Spanish, French, and British Catholics), emphasizing the relevance of this story to understanding the present-day continental United States. “The history of Catholicism in America,” says Starr in his preface, “is not simply Catholic history. It is American history . . . part of the warp and woof, the very fabric and meaning, of American life.”

Best known as a historian of California, Starr was also a thoughtful and erudite Catholic layman in the mold of his friend John T. Noonan, the jurist and historian he predeceased by only four months. While Continental Ambitions is addressed to all, it is written from an explicitly and passionately Catholic point of view. And passion, as great and refreshing as it is, is the least of Continental Ambitions’s many strengths. Nicely tempered by a certain scholarly caution, the book is neither embarrassed nor bloodless.

First of all, there is the writing. Starr manages to be thoughtful and vivid throughout, and his style often escapes the gravity of his massive material to achieve elegance. He also lets the light of gentle wit into the thickets of names, dates, and events. For instance, he describes an eighteenth-century Jesuit procurator, professionally bound to perpetual fundraising, as a man “sensitive to net worth in this life as well as the next.”

Then there is the rich historical substance. Some of Starr’s narratives are simply gripping tales—like the nightmarish 1012 Viking expedition to Newfoundland under Leif Ericsson’s sister Freydís, a less sunny and delicate Lady Macbeth—while others are powerful and significant, true revelations.

One example of the latter category is the history of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and his companions. Survivors of a disastrous 1527 Spanish attempt to conquer and colonize what is now the American South, the travelers “sailed, trekked, rafted, suffered enslavement, escaped, and then trekked once more across two-thirds of the southern edge of the North American continent.” As later movingly related by Cabeza de Vaca, it was an epic full of moral and theological meaning. He recounts a journey of failure, horror, and radical dispossession as a prelude to a personal rebirth in which he discovers and communes with new lands and, especially, new peoples while rediscovering the power of the Spanish religion and Spanish civilization of which he is an involuntary ambassador. On the one hand, he is brought low. The proud hidalgo, tracing his lineage to heroes of the Reconquista and the annexation of the Canary Islands, becomes a slave. Materially inferior to and dependent on Indian captors, he comes to appreciate not just their basic humanity, but their frequently great intelligence and nobility—their worthiness as partners in civilizing the continent. On the other hand, his rudimentary knowledge of medicine, spirituality, and theology sustains him in adversity and eventually earns recognition and reverence from the Indians, who call the Spaniards “Children of the Sun”: healers, exorcists, vessels of a profoundly benevolent spiritual power.

Cabeza de Vaca returns to New Spain still committed to the Spanish empire in the New World, and still brimful of personal ambition. But he wants an imperial policy based on the truth that the greatest treasure of the New World is its men, whom it was essential to respect, protect, and enrich with Spanish religion and science. Cabeza de Vaca was able to apply his humanism as a governor in South America—he acquitted himself well, though local colonists opposed and frustrated him—but, tantalizingly, was denied his petition to govern the lands of his ordeal. It would have been very beautiful and very Christian had Catholic government first appeared to the Indians of North America in the person of Cabeza de Vaca, he who had once sojourned among them in the form of a slave.

Another revelation is the founding of Ville-Marie, now known as Montreal. On May 18, 1642, a group of roughly fifty Frenchmen heard Mass on an island at the confluence of the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence. They thus initiated an insane scheme to create an isolated missionary colony, devoted to Mary, in a river-island surrounded by ferociously hostile Iroquois. This improbable “Mary-Town” was founded, survived, and eventually flourished due to a remarkable convergence of aspirations, inspirations, and uncanny strokes of luck. The town sprang fully formed from the minds of the holy priest Jean-Jacques Olier (founder of the Sulpicians, Olier was mentored by St. Francis de Sales and by St. Vincent de Paul, Olier’s lifelong friend and admirer) and the rich layman Venerable Jérôme Royer de la Dauversière, who each independently received a vision directing them to found a missionary colony on the island of Montreal. The town survived thanks to the competence, discipline, and inexplicable devotion of Governor Paul de Chomedey, sieur de Maisonneuve, the sort of figure Cervantes’s Don Quixote had recently persuaded Europe could never exist. The town flourished as a true Christian commonwealth by the charitable, educational, and spiritual activity of women like St. Marguerite Bourgeoys and the freakishly capable Jeanne Mance.

Ville-Marie stands in interesting contrast with the nearby (and contemporary) Puritan settlements that loom so large in our national imagination. Like those settlements, Ville-Marie was conceived as a religious errand into the wilderness and marked by extreme corporate and individual rectitude. But unlike them, Ville-Marie was not founded by those who were most peripheral and discontented in the mother country. On the contrary, it was created by men and women of secure standing aided by lavish material and spiritual support from the cream of Paris. It was not an exodus, but a pure projection of Europe. Relatedly, while the Puritan project was neo-Israelite, with the perpetual danger of casting the Indians as Canaanites, Ville-Marie was essentially apostolic; outreach to Indians was the core objective. All North American Catholics should recognize that, despite the aggressive secularism that today stifles its true life, Montreal was inspired and built by an overflow of apostolic generosity that makes it nothing short of a holy city—like Rome, Częstochowa, or Villa de Guadalupe.

Starr also brings out general issues in Catholic history, providing much matter for meditation. He is keenly aware, for instance, that as the Church works the hard clay of cultural, political, and economic reality, the resistance always generates contradictions and anomalies. How are Spanish Franciscans in the Southwest to create their Indian-Catholic utopia without the protection of the very Spanish soldiers whose criminality alienates and scandalizes the Indians? How to sustain the apostolate of Ville-Marie, meant to make the Indians sons of God, without selling them the guns and brandy that enthrall them to the devil? How can there be any Catholic freedom in Maryland without wealth from black slavery?

One general moral to be drawn from the history Starr relates is that intellectual clarity and practical competence are much more valuable in creating an authentic Christian society than is the mystical exuberance that is currently in fashion. This becomes clear when one compares the North American record of the Franciscans on one hand with that of the Jesuits and Dominicans on the other. Franciscans indulged extravagant theologies of Indians as the new chosen people, but it took cold Dominican pedantry to define and guard the Indians’ most basic rights as human persons. Franciscans let fly thunderous condemnations of the soldiers who abused their Indian charges, but it was the Jesuits, with their traditional insistence on (as Starr says) “polity, power, results,” who got Spanish soldiers on their payroll—that is, on a leash.

Despite the superb production quality of the book, there are a few apparent typos—Starr certainly does not think John of the Cross lived in the tenth century—and a few distortions suggesting that Starr is working outside his specialty, perhaps with garbled notes. For instance, nobody familiar with the circumstances of the 1572 St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre would summarize it as the Catholic slaughter of Huguenots who had come to Paris “under a sign of truce to discuss peace.”

Somewhat more troubling, at least for the orthodox Catholic reader, is language in Starr’s preface suggesting that he dissents from, or at least regrets, Humanae Vitae. Reinforcing this concern is a thin thread of conniving remarks about sexual misbehavior by Indians, a hint that Starr is not altogether sold on the Church’s sexual ethics. Yet the hint remains merely a hint, and only the most inquisitorial readers will be put off. Indeed, some may be shocked by his downright “traditionalist” attack on postconciliar liturgy, preaching, and aesthetics.

Perhaps the greatest deficiency in the book is that Starr does not clearly see and convey the full cultural potential of his work. He explicitly writes to serve the Church in America by uncovering a “usable” past. But what use does he have in mind? Based on his preface, it seems Starr wants to help American Catholics (especially recent arrivals from Latin America) claim their share of credit for the construction of American civilization, so that they will be seen, by themselves and by others, as authentically, even aboriginally, American. To that end, it seems, he would enhance Catholic representation on the American roll call of explorers, founders, dreamers, and heroes.

This is fine as far as it goes. It is good to realize that St. Junípero Serra, founder of California, and Eusebio Kino, S.J., founder of Arizona, were as energetic, intelligent, visionary, and creative as anyone on Mount Rushmore. It is good to remember that the Catholic Lords Baltimore, like the Quaker William Penn, instituted an important colonial experiment in religious toleration.

Nonetheless, I think Starr does not go quite far enough. He risks achieving little more than the tribal pride that marked the comfy Catholicism of the mid-twentieth century, when “we” had Grace Kelly and JFK.

Consider again Edward Wilson’s boast in The Good Shepherd. What does he really mean, and why, despite every qualification, does the boast still ring true? The WASP elite Wilson represents does not cherish the illusion that it is a numerical majority, or that it is politically omnipotent, or that it is the sole contributor to national life. But Wilson quite rightly believes that the U.S. is universally seen as the creation of his people, the Anglo-Protestants, and continues to reflect the worldview, values, and attitudes that constituted their ethnic habit of mind, now the spirit of a whole civilization. Members of other groups who want to be authentically American may have this or that to contribute, but to do so, they need to imaginatively identify with Wilson’s people and spiritually participate in the ethnic legend that begins with the Mayflower and culminates in the Revolution.

Now this identification with the Anglo-Protestants presents difficulties for many groups (notably for Indians and descendants of slaves), but it also creates—or should create—a special problem for Catholics. As a general rule, the men who made this country hated the Catholic Church. They hated the Church with the same intensity and, what is more significant, for many of the same reasons, as did Voltaire or Robespierre. They judged that the Church’s exaltation of authority over private judgment enslaves and debases the human mind, impeding progress and disposing men to every kind of tyranny. The Church must wane for science and liberty to wax.

The problem lies precisely in the trans-sectarian notions of natural reason and natural law where thoughtful American Catholics generally hope to find the solution. To read Jefferson or (especially) Adams, the natural reason underpinning this novus ordo seclorum is best defined as the action of the human mind liberated from “the monster,” as Adams once called the Church. Had Catholicism been a real force in colonial life—rather than an apparently absurd and private opinion of the otherwise clubbable Mr. Charles Carroll of Carrollton—the American Revolution might have been as anticlerical as the French. As it was, although the founding generation inherited an Anglophone world already liberated from Rome by nearly two centuries of penal laws, 1777 found men like John Jay still attempting to ban Catholic immigration.

The point is not to denigrate the exceptionally intelligent and virtuous men who created the republic. It is, rather, to show that anti-Catholicism is a fully authentic American tradition. So much so that anti-Catholics can, without the least absurdity, think they alone are really keeping faith with the founders. Thus the widely read 1948 book by Paul Blanshard, American Freedom and Catholic Power.

The post-Protestant elites think, as did every right-thinking man in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, that orthodox Catholics surrender mind and conscience to an Italian priest, and thus cut themselves off from the democratic communion of natural reason. Time and again, these elites, having sagely deliberated together in Boston and New York, try to enrich and purify American civilization with some great reform. They advance plausible arguments couched in the vocabulary of our democratic life: liberty, equality, efficiency, practicality, progress. Time and again, they encounter disciplined Catholic resistance.

Catholics, like other men and perhaps more than other men, have a natural and healthy impulse toward civic piety. They want to identify revered ancestors whom they can honor. Therefore, despite the well-known attitudes of the founding generation, every wave of American Catholic intellectuals has contained brilliant minds bent on proving that anti-Catholic progressives are heretics to the national religion, some going so far as to find crypto-Catholicism on every honorable page of our history. Despite such efforts, it remains the case that just as Europe is a Catholic thing in which Protestants participate, America is a Protestant thing in which Catholics participate. And it is not easy to fully embrace a Protestant civilization without at least apparent disloyalty to the Church.

To many Europeans—and often enough to those who know us best—American Catholics are disturbingly comfortable in the American milieu, often to the point of embracing traditional Anglo-Protestant contempt for, and imperial velleities toward, the Catholic world. Perhaps the most extraordinary example of this attitude is the “Americanist” Catholic support for the Spanish-American War, expressed most colorfully in 1898 by Fr. Denis O’Connell, former rector of the North American College in Rome. In a private letter to Bishop John Ireland of Minnesota, O’Connell explained that if the conflict were merely a question of Cuban independence, he would be inclined to “let the ‘greasers’ eat one another up and save the lives of our dear boys.” But for him it was, rather, “a question of two civilizations. It is the question of all that is old and vile and rotten and cruel and false in Europe against all that is free and noble and open and true and humane in America. . . . And all continental Europe feels the war is against itself, and that is why they are against us, Rome more than all.” His loyalty is clear: “I am a partisan of the Anglo-American alliance . . . together they are invincible and they will impose a new civilization.”

But of course it is no solution for Catholics to reject or distance themselves from the United States. It is our duty to be patriotic—truly and heartily. This must go beyond a mere roll call of Catholics in the great American ethnic parade. Catholics must, then, find a way of seeing our country as basically Catholic in its origin and destiny, a way more plausible than treating The Federalist as a commentary on St. Thomas. An excellent tool for this purpose is Our Land and Our Lady, Daniel Sargent’s 1940 history of Marian devotion in America, an even bolder attempt than Starr’s to place Catholicism at the center of the American story.

Sargent, who died in 1987 at age ninety-six, was a bona fide Yankee. Born in Massachusetts and raised a Protestant, he was richly endowed with many of the gifts characteristic of the Brahmin breed: literary skill, keen wit, voluminous and varied learning, and long life. Perhaps because of this impeccably “establishment” background, Sargent (like Henry Adams, whom he greatly resembles) permits himself swipes at Yankee culture that would seem like ressentiment coming from an ethnic. For instance, he says the Yankees who first encountered Junípero Serra’s California “investigated it as if to find whether or not it were a mere mirage, and when they found that it was not and that they could trade with it, which meant that it was absolutely real, they were doubly fascinated.”

Such cracks aside, Our Land and Our Lady is an irenic and refreshing book. It reminds us that America, like many of its current residents, may have been raised Protestant, but it was baptized Catholic. Almost every region was first discovered, explored, and charted by ultra-Catholic Spaniards and Frenchmen. From the Bay of the Mother of God (the Chesapeake) to the River of the Immaculate Conception (the Mississippi) to the Bay of San Francisco, these Catholics christened the land with Catholic names. Far too often, these Catholics (especially the Spanish) went on to promptly profane the land with slaughter and slavery. But they also consecrated it with the blood of martyrdom—profusely in the Southwest, but also in Auriesville, New York, and by the Rappahannock, near Bull Run. Even British Catholics managed to play their part, discreetly devoting a Chesapeake colony to Mary, and there instituting a regime of tolerance based on Catholic humanism and prudence, not on the axioms of Locke. Even in the era of the Anglo-Protestant republic, the Church blessed our country with a true Enlightenment: heroic Catholic evangelization, such as Pierre-Jean De Smet’s work with the Indians of the Northwest, and the accessible Catholic education provided by vast armies of nuns. Finally, Catholics like the fathers of Maryknoll brought America to a sort of Catholic maturity when they harnessed its legendary wealth, energy, and goodwill for foreign missions, making it a spiritual center from which the Gospel is proclaimed to the ends of the earth.

The burden of Sargent’s book is to show that all this work was done, and often done explicitly, in service to the Virgin Mary, she whom the Spaniards called La Conquistadora. Sargent also demonstrates the specific importance, throughout our history, of the Immaculate Conception. Although not defined as dogma until 1854, the Immaculate Conception was the obsession of the conquering Spaniards—was not Columbus’s flagship La Santa María de la Inmaculada Concepción?—and of the Jesuits in New France. In 1760, King Charles III consecrated all his possessions (then including half of what is now the United States) to the Immaculate Conception. In 1846, just as Americans were taking much of that consecrated land from Mexico, the American bishops, convened at the Sixth Council of Baltimore, discreetly took the Marian baton on behalf of the United States, proclaiming our national patroness to be “the Blessed Virgin, conceived without sin.” More than a century later, in 1959, the bishops consummated the national devotion with the extraordinary Marian palace that is the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C.

More than “Catholicism,” more even than the Catholic Church, Mary Immaculate, Queen of Heaven and Earth, has entered our history and territory, claiming it for herself. Mostly without knowing it, we Americans live in a Catholic history and move in a Catholic geography.

If we are ever to realize this fact, it will be through pilgrimage to our domestic holy sites, and through observance of December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, as our preeminent feast. The status of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception as the national patron is currently a piece of Catholic trivia; Catholics can make it a public truth by the simple means of food, drink, song, and bunting.

Catholics will always and everywhere be wayfarers. Nonetheless, we are wayfarers in the land of promise. Like the sons of Israel, we sojourn in a land marked out for us, that we are instructed to possess, sanctify, and fill by anticipation with the corporate, public, and triumphant life of the City of God, with its living members on earth and in heaven. As Belloc put it, “Even in these our earthly miseries we always hear the distant something of an eternal music, and smell a native air. There is a standard set for us whereto our whole selves respond, which is that of an inherited and endless life, quite full, in our own country.” The true power of Starr’s book is that it can help American Catholics build a culture that makes this quintessentially Catholic experience available to all.

The post Catholic America appeared first on First Things.

James Zacchaeus’s story (“Thanks for Everything, Pope Francis,” June/July) is a testimony to what can result when a Catholic couple treats Christ’s commandments on marriage as divine guidance requiring obedience for their own good rather than an unachievable ideal admitting degrees of noncompliance in certain unfortunate, though increasingly ordinary, circumstances.

The latter understanding, sadly, seems to be favored by certain Catholic prelates. What they do not seem to understand, as Zacchaeus implies, is that such a view of the sacraments—however motivated by legitimate pastoral concern—treats the sanctifying grace we receive at baptism and confirmation as if it were not a divine quality. For if it is a divine quality, as the Church in fact affirms, then engaging in grave practices that result in the loss of sanctifying grace—mortal sins, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church—is no trifling matter. Thus, if the Eucharist is medicine for the sick, as the Holy Father maintains, it is clearly not meant for those who have lost sanctifying grace, since the wound is mortal, and the dead require something stronger than medicine (a good confession) to raise them.

On the other hand, if sanctifying grace is not a divine quality—if the water of baptism and the sacred chrism administered at confirmation are not metaphysically different from ordinary water and oil—then the Eucharist is just a religious cookie made out of bread. But in that case, there is no sanctifying grace to lose, and no sin, however grievous, can in principle bar anyone from receiving the Lord’s Body and Blood as long as one has a clear conscience.

The lesson is clear: sanctifying grace is either real or it isn’t. There is no light between these two poles. Anyone, whether prelate or professor, who suggests to you otherwise—as James and Elizabeth Zacchaeus have learned—is not acting in the best interests of your soul. 

Francis J. Beckwith
baylor university
waco, texas

Prosperity Politics

Contrary to Daniel Hummel’s analysis (“The New Christian Zionism,” June/July), the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICEJ) has always held that Evangelical Christian support for Israel must be based not on prophetic interpretation of Scripture, but on well-defined promises that God made to Abraham four thousand years ago. In my own writing on the subject, as the current ICEJ international spokesperson, and as executive director of ICEJ from 2000 to 2011, I have always and repeatedly stated that to build a Christian Zionist organization on prophetic interpretations of Scripture is neither wise nor even feasible, since the wider Evangelical church entertains so many divergent views.

The Abrahamic covenant was conditional only upon Abraham’s obedience, which was complete (Gen. 22:15–18). According to the New Testament, this covenant cannot be annulled (Gal. 3:17) and was sworn to by God himself, according to his divine word and character by which it is impossible for him to lie (Heb. 6:13–15). This position has long been mainstream in the Evangelical world. Great Evangelical leaders like Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Bishop Ryle of Liverpool, the Wesley brothers, Robert Murray McCheyne, and many more down to our day have stood in this theological stream. This is the foundation, theologically speaking, upon which ICEJ stands. It has not embraced any “new Christian Zionism,” as Hummel states.

As for the prosperity gospel, ICEJ has never embraced it other than to recognize that anyone who aligns himself with what God blesses will be blessed. All of Scripture teaches this. Neither I nor the leadership of the ICEJ has ever interpreted this blessing as the impartation of material wealth and prosperity.

Finally, there are many Evangelical leaders and others seeking to embrace our ministry who hold views that do not necessarily reflect our own. While we welcome them into our organization, ICEJ seeks to bring biblical balance and truth to their understanding, and while some of them may speak at our gatherings, we always state clearly that we do not necessarily endorse their theological positions.

Rev. Malcolm Hedding
murfreesboro, tennessee

I’m honored that my ministry with Faith Church Hungary was mentioned in Daniel Hummel’s essay on Christian Zionism. Hummel gives a detailed and balanced overview of how Christian philo-Semitism and support for the state of Israel have developed into a truly global movement. Walking the streets of Jerusalem today—and not only during the Feast of Tabernacles, but throughout the year—one can meet Evangelical groups from all over the world. Israel now has committed allies on every continent, including many nations beyond the English-speaking world in Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, and—to my great joy—Europe as well. This new Christian Zionism is one of the most important and prophetic movements of our age. It gives us a preview of the wonderful unity that will fully unfold in the future that was ordained by Jesus Christ when he “made both one, and [broke] down the middle wall of partition between us” (Eph. 2:14).

Support for Israel grants blessings to each believer individually and to every nation, while anti-Semitism and its modern analogues, anti-Zionism and the BDS movement, unleash destructive forces in the lives of individuals and nations. Global Christian Zionism helps Bible-based Christianity to rediscover its roots; as Hummel rightly notes, it gives us “hope.” In the past, neither Rome, nor Constantinople, nor Moscow, nor even New York or Houston could unite the Church. But today, Jerusalem is a universal treasure of humanity that fills every believer’s heart—whether Jewish or Christian—with love and longing for the Messiah. Surely it is not coincidental that this attraction intensified fifty years ago, in 1967, when Jerusalem became the eternal and indivisible capital of Israel. Christian Zionists stand with Israel by supporting the Jewish state in its decades-long struggle and by defending our common heritage, Judeo-Christian civilization, and the truth of the Scriptures.

The history of Hungary is strongly connected to Israel. The two prophets of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau, were born here in Budapest. Six hundred thousand Jews were deported from Hungary to concentration camps during World War II. The Communist regime was also an enemy of Israel. But after the fall of Communism, many Hungarian Christians—tens of thousands of members of Faith Church among them—lobbied for our nation to face its tragic past and turn a new leaf in its relations with Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Budapest in July of this year was an important seal on this new policy. He met with Hungary’s current leaders, who are among Israel’s strongest supporters in Europe, and with several other philo-Semitic heads of state from the region—the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia—who were invited to Budapest by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

There are those who dislike this new Judeo-Christian spiritual and geopolitical alliance. They attack anyone who works to strengthen our bonds of friendship. Yet before the Messiah brings about a perfect solution, the future belongs to those who do everything in their power to establish the righteousness of Jerusalem and Israel—until it goes forth “as brightness, and the salvation thereof as a lamp that burneth” (Isa. 62:1).

Rev. Sándor Németh
budapest, hungary

Daniel Hummel replies:

I thank my correspondents—both of whom I consider leading proponents of the new Christian Zionism—for the opportunity to clarify what I claim is new about their movement, and what role prosperity teachings play in it.

Christian Zionism today is “new” from a historical American perspective. For most Americans, Christian Zionism has long been synonymous with the agendas of home-grown Evangelical leaders such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and John Hagee. “New” refers to the growth of Pentecostal Christian Zionism outside the United States, of which ICEJ is a leading example. I do not claim, nor did I imply, that ICEJ has wavered from its original commitments to covenantal theology. Indeed, it is precisely in order to distinguish the covenantal theology propounded by ICEJ from American-style dispensationalism that I decided to describe the rise of Pentecostal Zionism since 1980 as “new.” My claim is that, demographically and organizationally, ICEJ and its constituents—including Rev. Sándor Németh and Faith Church—have eclipsed the American movement. I assume that Rev. Malcolm Hedding, who was integral to ICEJ’s development into a formidable organization since the 1980s, would agree.

As for prosperity teaching, I highlighted in my essay how many of ICEJ’s most vocal supporters—and even its officials—weave prosperity into their support for Israel. Renê Terra Nova, listed officially as ICEJ-Brazil’s “Branch Director,” teaches of a direct link between blessing Israel and personal prosperity. Terra Nova began his 2014 Feast of Tabernacles sermon with the promise “Everyone who comes up to Jerusalem in the Feast of Tabernacles, the rain of prosperity is going to come over their lives.” Kenneth Meshoe, whom I cited for linking Zambia’s economic performance to its diplomatic relations with Israel, is listed as a “Board Member” of ICEJ-RSA (Republic of South Africa). As speakers with ICEJ titles, often speaking at ICEJ events, they surely represent an influential strand of thinking in the organization.

In any case, the question of official policy is less important than the spectacular success of Christian Zionists, from many different backgrounds and nationalities and organizations, who combine the covenantal theology that Rev. Hedding articulates with prosperity teachings that Rev. Németh and others preach. According to them, adherence to the Abrahamic covenant of Genesis 12:3 (“I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed”) can influence the material blessings or curses that a nation (i.e., “family”) receives from God. Rev. Németh admits to his belief that one’s relations with Israel—on an individual and national scale—lead to either blessing or destruction, both spiritually and materially. This view often leads Christian Zionists to correlate the success or failure of past nations and empires with their treatment of the Jewish people. (Nazi Germany is a favorite example.) While an interest in Genesis 12:3 is not new to Evangelical Christianity, the confidence with which new Christian Zionists claim that God rewards those who support Israel is a novel development. The admixture of prosperity teachings has made this belief especially appealing to Pentecostal Christians in the Global South.

Ultimately, even though ICEJ’s branch directors and speakers have been some of the new Christian Zionism’s most influential proponents, the story is much larger than one organization.

Casual Causality

Like G. Bruce Boyer (“Dress Up,” June/July), I have argued that formal civic dress was dealt a fatal blow in 1967, making this year the dubious fiftieth anniversary of the birth of a slob nation. From operagoers in track shoes and hiking fleece to professors in flip-flops lecturing students in pajama bottoms, the whole motley throng of lowest-common-denominator dressers face-planted on the slippery slope to slovenliness that fateful year half a century ago.

Concurrence does not confirm causality, but much else has changed over the past fifty years while sartorial standards were plummeting. Boyer suggests that self-indulgent narcissism and do-your-own-thing individualism have led to the loss of formal dress, even stirring up a kind of costumed charlatanism in the picture he paints of the man strolling Midtown Manhattan—a “solitary figure of freedom”—speciously clad as a cowboy. But one could also argue that the century-long push for casual dress by the young and educated bespeaks not too much individualism but too much collectivism in American society, the egalitarian spirit that poet Charles Baudelaire decried as early as 1863 in his essay on dandyism, mocking “the rising tide of democracy . . . which reduces everything to the same level.” Technological and social progress have brought us an inevitable sartorial “Facebookification,” in which billionaire owner and modest minion stand side by side without visual distinction, performing—to use the academic buzzword—perfect equality.

Over the course of twenty years attending vintage-themed events in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, I have often observed a certain personality type. This is the chronically overdressed “retro-eccentric” who believes he was born in the wrong era, and despises the common masses in their sneakers and jeans. But this sartorial reactionary, who usually owns a large number of hats, is never a conservative. He’s convinced that it’s things like free-market economics, organized religion, competitive sports, institutional power structures, and other traditional concepts that have corrupted society and made everyone a slob.

By contrast, believers in original sin will note that man is irrational and perverse, and that it’s stable social norms that clothe his body with dignity and elevate his spirit above the beastly. We are all sinners, and, if given the indulgence, will dress as poorly as we can. Especially if we no longer believe we are worth redeeming—or in the concept of redemption itself.

Christian Chensvold
new york, new york

G. Bruce Boyer replies:

Christian Chensvold is one of the few who wants to place style, taste, and fashion into the context of a larger zeitgeist. In answer to his point that conformity is changing fashion standards as much as or more than self-indulgent individualism, I agree, even though I’m feeling rather dull having to do so. I might have mentioned in “Dress Up”—you only have so much space in an essay—that I believe peer conformity can be, and perhaps psychologically is, more potent than vanity. I would be particularly interested in the relevant psychological studies.

Russian Regress?

Reading Eugene Vodolazkin’s “The Age of Concentration” (June/July) reminded me of several points raised by the Russian lay theologian Alexei Khomiakov, who in the nineteenth century laid a foundation for the modern Slavophile movement. That movement’s main contention—ultimately idealistic and Hegelian—was that a presumed “Russian civilization” (though the word “civilization” was not used until Toynbee) is and should remain essentially different from the West.

The Slavophiles’ idealistic Russian nationalism turned within a few decades into the pogroms and the Black Hundreds movement. Vodolazkin’s idealistic perception of a new age of “inner strengthening and social reconsolidation” is likewise masking a more brutal reality. The current Russian consolidation, which Vodolazkin praises, has been called by some observers the “post-Crimea consensus.” Most Russian elites, both liberal and conservative, together with the majority of the Russian population, accepted their nation’s illegal annexation of Ukrainian Crimea in 2014. Many of them also accept the war that Russia still wages in eastern Ukraine. This military campaign—dubbed “the Russian spring”—has been aided by propaganda and misleading narratives propagated by Russian intellectuals from the beginning.

Here is only one of many examples of the brutal reality misrepresented by the essay. Vodolazkin states that the individualistic principle “That’s your problem” played prominently in Russia during its post–Cold War rapprochement with the West. This suggests that the principle is Western in origin. It also suggests that Russia, in its current antagonism toward the West, is now discarding the principle. However, the Russian state’s conduct toward its soldiers fighting in Ukraine disproves this suggestion. Russians killed in military operations there are not even given proper burials. They are either burnt in special crematoria on wheels, or buried with numbers instead of names on their graves. Russian media and most intellectuals keep surprisingly silent about this scandal. Even the mothers of the fallen soldiers are silenced, by either threats, or money, or both. When the Russian soldiers Alexander Alexandrov and Yevgeny Yerofeyev were captured in 2015, Russian authorities behaved as if it were the soldiers’ “own problem.” Eventually, the two returned home in a prisoner exchange—on the insistence of the Ukrainian government. Nor does the Russian state seem to care about another of its soldiers recently captured in Donbas, Viktor Ageev. According to Ageev, Yerofeyev was killed upon his return to Russia, because he had told too much to the Ukrainians about the Russian presence in Donbas.

Vodolazkin tries to justify the wall between Russia and the West, which was raised in paper by the Slavophiles and then in concrete by the Communists. He implies that the wall should exist because of a metaphysical incompatibility between the two civilizations. I think this is a wrong assumption. There are no metaphysical reasons for a wall between East and West, which—to use Benedict Anderson’s famous definition—are only imagined communities. The only reason why Russians are currently rebuilding the wall is to protect the “personal” political regime of Vladimir Putin. The only incompatibility between the West and modern Russia is between truth and post-truth, care for human life and waste of life, international cooperation and geopolitical manipulation.

Cyril Hovorun
loyola marymount university
los angeles, california

Eugene Vodolazkin is fascinated by the Middle Ages, and I am not at all surprised that his scholarly interests bring him to view the current epoch as a new Middle Ages. However, I fear that this attempt to synthesize the complexities and contradictions of our age will not succeed, and that in a few years the author will abandon his concept of the “age of concentration.” A century ago, Sergei Esenin noted in one of his poems that “One cannot see a face at point-blank range. / The big picture becomes apparent only at a distance.”

In the Soviet Union and subsequently in Russia, I have witnessed a series of historical periods, each of which was much too easily referred to as an “epoch”: the Cold War, the period of “developed socialism,” “perestroika,” “the rebirth of the Church,” and so on. With all due respect to the author, I must say that this kaleidoscopic sequence of various “epochs” (some of them overlapping) has taught me to view the proclamation of the appearance of any new epoch with a measure of skepticism.

This is all the more true if the purported new phenomenon conceals ghosts of the past. In the case of Russia, Vodolazkin’s “concentration” is not original and in fact possesses imperial roots. “Russia is concentrating” was a famous phrase used by Prince Alexander Gorchakov, Russia’s minister of foreign affairs, in a dispatch circulated to Russian embassies in 1856.

The Gorchakov missive has an almost contemporary ring: “Russia is being reproached for isolating herself and for her silence when confronted with facts that are not in keeping either with the law or with justice. It is being said that Russia is angry. It is not that Russia is angry, Russia is concentrating.” These words were written soon after Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War of 1853–1856. Would it be true to say that today’s Russia is not angry at Europe and America, but that it is “concentrating”?

Vladimir Putin reminded us of “concentration” some two years before Vodolazkin, with explicit reference to Gorchakov. Shortly before the 2012 presidential elections, he published a programmatic article titled “Russia is concentrating: Challenges to which we must respond.” Can the concept of the “epoch of concentration” be rooted in the politics of mid-nineteenth-century Russia and simultaneously in that of the Russian Federation of the early twenty-first century? If so, that would indicate a narrow sphere of relevance for a concept that claims to describe a process involving the entire world.

I also cannot pass over without comment a deeply troubling aspect of the picture of the world depicted by Eugene Vodolazkin. He predicts the restoration of nation-states as the basic organizational structure in the life of peoples. My first and most essential question to the author is: What countries does he have in mind? Does this mean that in the “epoch of concentration,” Russia too will become a nation-state? If the answer is yes, then this is an ominous prophecy of the disintegration of Russia as we know it, since Russia has never been a nation-state. Its very makeup is imperial, and even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was unable to become a federated state. The mentality of Russian citizens, the political system, Putin’s authoritarian regime—absolutely everything is oriented toward a multinational unitary state.

Russia has never undertaken the task of constructing a nation-state, nor has she ever imagined herself in that role. For that reason, if Vodolazkin’s prognosis should ever come to pass, it would entail a catastrophe of historic proportions—a catastrophe the magnitude of which would dwarf the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is possible that we should be prepared for this.

Sergei Chapnin
moscow, russia

Eugene Vodolazkin replies:

Both of my correspondents proceed by affixing my name to positions I do not hold and subjecting these to severe polemical censure. I even wondered, at first sight, whether they were discussing some other text altogether.

I begin with Sergei Chapnin’s letter—it is closer to my conception of what constitutes a genuine exchange of views. Chapnin doubts that the world is moving toward an “age of concentration.” He is right that I view the whole world, not only Russia, in terms of this phenomenon. And he is naturally entitled to empirical doubts concerning this “concentration,” just as I am entitled to expect the realization of my hypothesis.

Yet Chapnin’s “first and most essential” question to me asks which specific countries I had in mind when I spoke of the restoration of nation-states. I had thought my essay sufficiently clear on this matter: I was referring to the United States, where Donald Trump was elected by the American people in hope of refocusing the government’s efforts on internal affairs; to Great Britain, which left the European Union for similar reasons; and to a good half of the countries still belonging to the E.U. This process of nationalization affects Russia as well, but Russia is merely one participant in a general movement.

Some comment on the word “national” is in order, since it has badly misled Chapnin. In political contexts, by standard usage, “national” simply means “pertaining to a state or nation.” Thus in all formal questionnaires asking about “nationality,” the desired information is citizenship, not ethnic provenance. It would seem that Chapnin has confused the word “national” with “nationalistic,” the latter of which makes an ideological assertion of the preeminence of one ethnic group over all others. If I am correct in this diagnosis, then Chapnin and I have no disagreement; my views of nationalism are just as negative as his. For a multiethnic country like Russia, an ideology of Russian chauvinism would indeed have fatal consequences.

Cyril Hovorun, a university instructor as well as an Orthodox priest, is not one to confuse concepts. But he employs clichés so freely that they seem second nature to him. One instance is his use of the term “post-Crimea consensus” to describe the recent détente between rival factions in Russian politics. I wish to remind Hovorun that the cessation of the war of all against all that I discuss in my essay took place long before the events in Crimea. And it was a process that affected each of the numerous ethnic groups residing in this country, not only ethnic Russians.

Hovorun further states that I am trying to justify the existence of a wall that separates Russia and the West. He must have passed over the lines I wrote about looking forward to the demolition of that wall, where I spoke about our societies’ common spiritual roots and about the objective need to unite. That is in fact one of the leitmotifs of my essay.

Hovorun’s image of the world is so bare and simple that it could be called (rephrasing Stendhal slightly) “The Black and the White.” Thus we are presented with a clearly defined geographical distribution of evil and goodness between Russia and the West, with the location of evil hardly a well-kept secret. Particular mention should be made of the following historiosophic revelation: “The only reason why Russians are currently rebuilding the wall is to protect the ‘personal’ political regime of Vladimir Putin.” In my view, that’s a pretty feeble argument coming from a university-level educator, and an amazing one coming from an archimandrite.

I wrote my essay without belonging to either the Slavophiles or the Westernizers because their positions are too one-sided. Truth is never situated at the extremes. The philosophy that guides me is Christian personalism, and my measure is the human being much more than the state. When I speak of problems, I do so in an attempt to solve them. Is not the ongoing shift of epochs (however they might be named) obvious to all? And is not the metaphysics of this process a subject worthy of an open discussion? Political clichés are incapable of shedding light on the issue, just as a Haydn symphony cannot be performed on a village accordion.

I thank my opponents for their responses, though my arguments were misunderstood, because they reflect in miniature the situation in a world where free thought has become the subject of geopolitics. People who argue by echoing the words of their state’s official propaganda are not engaging in dialogue; they are delivering monologues in a vacuum. Statements of this type are meant for proclamation rather than persuasion; many words are spoken, but they no longer have any effect. Our current political folklore has exhausted its possibilities: Our ritual dances in support of the good guys against the bad ones are but a front for hard-nosed practical interests. Whenever these interests change, new dances or new “guys” are easily provided. What we need now are new words, and those are only possible in the context of a new spirit.

The current global situation is very, very alarming. There is urgent need for a positive intervention. I am convinced that a new worldwide conference similar to the one held in Helsinki in 1975 is essential to discuss the changes that have occurred in the world and to hammer out a foundation for a just world order. A conference of this type could initiate a long-term process involving the entire world, with philosophers, historians, writers, lawyers, churchmen, and journalists taking part alongside the politicians. It should be open to all who are ready to join in an effort to lead us out of the current impasse. 

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I

f there is a specter haunting the imaginations of Christians in the public square today, perhaps it is the specter of the premodern integration of church and state. As the postwar liberal consensus erodes, a wider range of approaches to Christian engagement in political and social life becomes imaginable. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has observed that some young Christians, disillusioned with liberal politics, are drawn to “a revived Catholic integralism.” For such young integralists, Before Church and State, a book by Andrew Willard Jones, has been the hot beach read of the summer, and—unusually for an academic monograph—a rich source of memes on Twitter. (Millennials will be millennials.) For those drawn toward integralism, Jones’s scholarship is positively exciting.

Jones, a historian at Franciscan University in Steubenville, never uses the word “integralism,” but the word nonetheless captures the society that he describes in thirteenth-century France. Aided by a philosophical and theological sophistication that is unusual for his profession, Jones challenges our most basic assumptions as moderns. He does, however, speak of “an integral vision which included all of social reality.” In this integral vision, “church” and “state” did not exist as separate institutions; rather, spiritual and temporal authority cooperated together within a single social whole for the establishment of an earthly peace, ordered to eternal salvation. Nor was there an “economy,” in the modern sense of a relatively autonomous system based on private property and contract. Rather, the use of material goods was thoroughly integrated into the peace. “State,” “church,” and “economy” were not merely underdeveloped, waiting to be discovered. They did not exist, and would have to be invented. The vision of social peace gave way to an idea of social life as a violent, primordial struggle for power, and of sovereignty as limiting that violence by monopolizing it.

In this Jones is following John Milbank’s account of the “construction” of the secular. But Jones’s approach adds to Milbank’s. By providing a detailed account of how a particular premodern society worked at a particular time—the Kingdom of France in the thirteenth century—Jones is able to give concrete confirmation to Milbank’s key insights into the construction of the secular, while also moderating Milbank’s exaggerated account of the integration of nature and grace. Jones provides strong evidence to show that historians have too often distorted our view of the Middle Ages by projecting modern constructions back onto them. But he is not merely making a historical claim. He is also making a normative claim: The construction of modern society with its system of separations between different social spheres was a bad development that inscribes false ideas into our very way of life. Conversely, the integration of spiritual and temporal corresponds to the truth about humanity as revealed in Christ, and is therefore demanded by Christian orthodoxy. It is this claim that is likely to be most contested in Jones’s work—even by Christians who accept his historical claims.

Jones’s normative claim can be criticized from opposite theological perspectives. On the one hand, it is contradicted by the tradition of Christian pacifism and anarchism that was strong in the Radical Reformation of the Anabaptists, and now finds adherents in all denominations. The Methodist theologian Stanley Hauerwas, for example, can be seen as belonging to this tradition. Hauerwas would likely accept both Jones’s historical claims and his critique of the modern institutions as based on a false understanding of human nature, but he would reject Jones’s claim about the necessity of integrating temporal power with spiritual authority. Instead, he would argue, worldly power should be rejected altogether. Instead of making use of the temporal sword to combat unjust violence, Christians should turn the other cheek and suffer in peace, thus constituting a nonviolent counter-society that will serve as a sign of contradiction to the world.

On the other hand, Jones’s vision can be challenged by the tradition that distinguishes between church and state, with one given the right to use violence and the other the mission of peace. The Reformed philosopher Lambert Zuidervaart recently gave a powerful and eloquent articulation of it in his book Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation. Zuidervaart too would accept that modernity constructed secular and sacred, church and state. And he too criticizes the individualistic assumptions embodied in modern institutions. Nevertheless, he argues that the modern differentiation of society into the economy, the state, and civil society (in which the churches are located) is a positive achievement that helps to limit corruption by allowing different aspects of human social life to unfold according to their own internal logic. Thus, for Zuidervaart, our goal should be the reform and development of these distinct areas of life, not the return to a violent and corrupt integralism.

Although Jones does not directly address such objections, his analysis of the integral kingdom of Louis IX, and the theological vision undergirding it, offers a strong implicit response. The integral society that Jones describes did not deny the need for differentiation. Indeed, it was a highly differentiated society. But differentiation was always for the sake of greater unity and integration. Thus, the three social orders of laity, secular clergy, and religious (monks and nuns) were seen as having a unity analogous to the unity of the Blessed Trinity. They did not form three separate societal spaces, but three orders united in a single society with a single end: the unity of peace.

Civil peace was seen as participation in the eschatological peace of the City of God, and it was ordered dynamically toward that coming peace. The unity of peace was understood as a common good—a good that could only be had together with others. And it was seen as the purpose and happiness of human life. There was no sense that the pursuit of happiness could be left to private life, with social structures serving a merely instrumental aim of allowing for that pursuit. Rather, the happiness of peace was something to which social structures had to be directly ordered.

By a detailed analysis of the acts of King Louis’s Parlement, his royal high court, Jones shows how the idea of peace functioned in integral society. In contrast to Hobbesian ideas of a violent state of nature overcome by the sovereign monopolization of power, the Parlement worked from the presumption of a natural state of peace developing in society. The intervention of royal power was for the sake of reestablishing peace when it had been disturbed by violence and sin.

The presumption of peace explains the lack of a separation between “the state” and “civil society.” Since the primordial condition was assumed to be peace, there was no assumption that coercive violence had to be monopolized by a “sovereign.” Rather, the use of coercion for the reestablishment of peace was treated like any other right in society. If a person or group had an established custom of punishing thieves, for example, such punishment was to be left in their hands. The king would only intervene if the duty of administering justice, which such a right entailed, was neglected. Again, Jones invites us to see this not as a corrupt blending of the procedural justice of the state with the structures of civil society ordered toward solidarity, but rather as the peaceful functioning of an integrated whole ordered to a peace that consisted of both justice and solidarity.

In the vision of peace that Jones describes, the clergy, who wielded the spiritual sword, and the lay authorities, who wielded the secular, had distinct roles, but they were cooperating toward a single end. They were not engaged in a struggle for “sovereignty,” a concept that had yet to be invented; instead, they actively promoted each other’s power as a means toward their common end. The relation of temporal and spiritual was understood as connected to the four senses of Scripture and the sacramental function of the material world. Just as God’s revelation in salvation history leads from the external law to the law of the heart and the peace of heaven, and the letter of Scripture leads to the spiritual meaning of the things described culminating in the eternal Word, and the sensible signs of the sacraments communicate the invisible grace of participation in the divine life, so temporal peace is ordered to leading Christians toward heavenly peace.

Thus, Jones’s implicit answer to pacifist objections to the use of temporal power for spiritual ends is that they contain an unwarranted supersessionism. As long as we are in this mortal life, there will be a place for the use of coercive measures, as pedagogical aids to fallen human beings, helping them to rectify their passions and to prepare themselves to enter into a deeper peace. Just as God himself uses such aids in salvation history, so too the Christian community continues to use them in its attempt at the realization of an ever-greater peace.

St. Benedict writes that if a brother is unable to be corrected by exclusion from the communal prayers and meals, then he should be whipped—a punishment that even carnal minds understand. The experience of many Christian communities confirms his wisdom. The Christian anarchist Dorothy Day, for example, describes how her refusal of any coercive measures in communal life allowed a Catholic Worker community to be torn apart by members who simply appropriated the community’s goods and did what they pleased.

Even a short time ago—with the ascendancy of the “religious right” in the Reagan and Bush years—it was plausible to argue that the separation of church and state was good for religion. The accelerating pace of secularization manifested, for instance, in the legalization of homosexual marriage makes that position much less plausible today. Before Church and State offers an alternative vision, a vision that could be realized only by a profound and fundamental transformation of the whole of our society. I am convinced that in working toward such a transformation, we have nothing to lose.

Edmund Waldstein, O. Cist., is a monk of Stift Heiligenkreuz.

Follow the conversation on this article in the Letters section of our December 2017 issue.

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—Shanna Powlus Wheeler

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Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh was born in 1903 to upper-middle-class Anglicans who lived in a suburb of London. He attended a boarding secondary school (Lancing College), read history at Oxford, published his first book (a biography of the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti) at age twenty-four, then his first novel a year later. Waugh married that same year (1928), divorced after two years, and converted to Catholicism. After the first marriage was declared null, he married a Catholic by whom he had seven children. He served honorably but ineffectively as an infantry officer in World War II, and was to publish thirteen novels, as well as seven travel books, three biographies, a volume of autobiography, and numerous essays and book reviews. Lionized in the 1920s as a trendy man of fashion, he became increasingly conservative in politics and churchmanship and notorious for his truculent contempt for the sham enthusiasms of modernity. He died on Easter Sunday, 1966, at his house in Somerset.

In addition to works published in his lifetime, Waugh left behind several hundred pages of diaries and thousands of letters. And in reading these we become aware that sometime between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, he acquired an almost freakishly mature mastery of English prose. For the remainder of his life, he was all but incapable of writing a boring sentence. Even in his commonplace and perfunctory communications—business correspondence, military reports, letters to agents and headmasters—Waugh wrote a clean, elegant, beautifully precise English that is appetizing in the most unpromising circumstances. Just as it’s unsettling to be reminded that Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier was a set of keyboard exercises composed “for the profit and use of musical youth desirous of learning,” it’s remarkable how much eerily flawless craftsmanship Waugh displays even when the occasion of his writing is casual or mundane.

The most outstanding characteristic of Waugh’s prose is its lucidity. Every sentence is clear. Even where his subject matter is thorny, I don’t believe I’ve ever had to read a sentence twice over to get its meaning. His friend and fellow novelist Graham Greene remarked that what struck him about Waugh’s writing was its transparency, that you could see all the way to the bottom, as with the Mediterranean in days gone by. This transparency is partly attributable to perfect syntax—grammatical solecisms are almost nonexistent—and partly to Waugh’s care in choosing the right word, the word that not only conveys but illuminates. Sometimes Waugh employs a recondite word from his compendious vocabulary, but never an obscure word for the sake of its obscurity. As a boy I learned the meaning of many words I had never before encountered from the perfect fit they were given by Waugh in a single memorable phrase. Reading Waugh, you don’t need a dictionary at your elbow; the sentence provides sufficient light on its own.

Waugh also had a genius for conveying spoken English matched only, perhaps, by James Joyce. Like Joyce, he lets us hear the speakers through their dialogue—their accents; their treble or contralto, their coughs, stammers, and lisps; their whining or their barking—and he does this with almost no departure from standard spelling. We recognize cockneys without resort to dropped aitches and Scotsmen without resort to tripled r’s; we recognize them because the speeches Waugh gives them convince us that only this cockney or only this Scotsman could utter them. Their language informs us about his characters’ class, age, education, and provenance with a certainty that makes further description superfluous. So too their brief speeches give us a glimpse into his characters’ souls that clumsier authors would require many pages of narrative to communicate.

Almost miraculous in this respect is Waugh’s first novel, titled Decline and Fall, whose minor characters, though mere props in a farce, have a kind of inevitability and immortality: Once having read the lines Waugh gives them, you can’t imagine their ever saying anything else. Something imperishable has been created out of nothing. You feel you’d know Dr. Fagan and Lady Beste-Chetwynde were you to overhear them in a bus. The quality persists in Waugh’s later works, but only sporadically and only in the minor characters.

A third characteristic of Waugh the prose stylist is the concord between the rhythm of the paragraph and its meaning—a concord that is easier to perceive than it is to analyze. By the operation of some deep poetic instinct, the rise and fall of the narrative augment and reinforce the sense of the words that underlie it. Here is one example, from the travel book When the Going Was Good, describing an encounter with a young American on a lake steamer on the way to the Congo:

I offered him a drink and he said “Oh no, thank you,” in a tone which in four monosyllables contrived to express first surprise, then pain, then reproof, and finally forgiveness. Later I found that he was a member of the Seventh Day Adventist Mission, on his way to audit accounts at Bulawayo.

As with Edward Gibbon, every sentence in Waugh has a kind of architectural perfection; as did Gibbon, Waugh knew how to maximize the blunt impact of the monosyllabic word by its well-timed departure from a stream of elegant polysyllables. Waugh strove for economy of expression, such that the structural elements of this prose would each carry as much weight as possible. He frequently compared the writer’s craft to that of a cabinetmaker or carpenter, and saw the joinery of words as an indispensable task of artisanship. In a 1949 letter to Thomas Merton—who had sent him a draft of his book The Waters of Siloe—Waugh criticizes the monk for shirking this chore:

In the non-narrative passages, do you not think you tend to be diffuse, saying the same thing more than once. I noticed this in The Seven Storey Mountain and the fault persists. It is pattern-bombing instead of precision bombing. You scatter a lot of missiles all round the target instead of concentrating on a single direct hit. It is not art. Your monastery tailor and boot-maker would not waste material. Words are our materials.

Waugh loathed the pretense of artists as members of a secular priesthood, and insisted that exalted art did not exist apart from the humble craftsmanship that was a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition of its existence. 

Yet the differences between Waugh and Thomas Merton were not limited to prose style, and this brings me to my second subject: Evelyn Waugh the Catholic. Both Merton and Waugh were converts to Catholicism, yet it would be difficult to find coeval coreligionists with more sharply contrasting approaches to their faith. Merton, the monk with the irrepressible ego, put the self on center stage to an extent that stood classical monasticism on its head; Waugh prized his religion precisely because it was objective, was doctrinally immutable, and by its inflexible demands aimed at mortifying the querulous self and its appetites. The English Jesuit Martin D’Arcy, who instructed Waugh prior to his conversion, remarked that he’d never known a convert for whom the truth of Catholic teaching was more closely scrutinized and, once accepted, more central to his faith.

It’s important to stress that Waugh, himself an artist, was not attracted to the Catholic Church by any aesthetic appeal. As he remarked, the hymns, the great cathedrals, the ancient titles, the liturgy written in the heyday of English prose—all were the property of the Church of England. Had he been guided by his own taste, he would have remained an Anglican. The appeal of the Catholic Church was simply her universal claim to authority, which, once found valid, required submission of mind and will, without regard to whether and to what extent it was gratifying or irksome. The faith Waugh embraced could be called “impersonal,” if by that term we mean not hostile to the person but sternly indifferent to the cravings and pleas of the ego. C. S. Lewis wrote that the Real is that which says to us, “Your preferences have not been considered.” So too for Waugh, it was the fact that the Church had not consulted him, or any other creature, in the formulation of her doctrines that made her claim plausible. It’s telling that, when changes were proposed in the celebration of the Mass during the 1960s, Waugh rejected the accusation that defenders of the Latin Mass were either conservatives or aesthetic thrill-seekers, citing his own conversion as evidence:

I was not at all attracted by the splendour of great ceremonies—which the Protestants could well counterfeit. Of the extraneous attractions of the Church which most drew me was the spectacle of the priest and his server at low Mass, stumping up to the altar without a glance to discover how many or how few he had in his congregation; a craftsman and his apprentice; a man with a job which he alone was qualified to do. That is the Mass I have grown to know and love.

Waugh does not deny that the Catholic Church has aesthetic splendors to offer; what he denies is that such splendors provide a reliable basis for accepting the Church’s claims as true. The feelings such splendors produce are sporadic and transitory, and those who wallow most deeply in them will feel cheated and distraught on the day their magic fails. Rather it is the ordinary daily Mass, the opus operatum, performed and assisted at out of duty rather than desire, that points to the objective reality of a universal immutable faith: Your preferences have not been considered.

One of Waugh’s lesser-known short stories is instructive in this respect. Its title, “Out of Depth,” makes reference to the hero’s being out of his depth in his collision with black magic, and simultaneously to the De profundis clamavi—the incipit of Psalm 130: “out of the depths I cry to thee, O Lord.” In the tale, the hero Rip, a languidly sybaritic bachelor, is thrust forward five hundred years into the future, to find London nothing but a marshland marked by hummocks and wattle huts inhabited by grunting white savages—a mirror image, in fact, of the Thames valley as it was 2,500 years prior to his adventure. Dazed and disoriented by the vanishing of everything familiar to his senses, he sees imperial conquerors from Africa making their way up the Thames in a launch (“a large mechanically propelled boat, with an awning and a flag; a crew of smart Negroes, all wearing uniforms of leather and fur though it was high summer; a commander among the Negroes issuing orders in a quiet supercilious voice”). Rip is taken downstream with some other natives to a mission compound. The story concludes as Rip regains awareness of his surroundings. Waugh writes:

And then later—how much later he could not tell—something that was new and yet ageless. The word “Mission” painted on a board; a black man dressed as a Dominican friar . . . and a growing clearness. Rip knew that out of strangeness, there had come into being something familiar; a shape in chaos. Something was being done. Something was being done that Rip knew; something that twenty-five centuries had not altered; of his own childhood which survived the age of the world. In a log-built church at the coast town he was squatting among a native congregation; some of them in cast-off uniforms; the women had shapeless, convent-sewn frocks; all round him dishevelled white men were staring ahead with vague, uncomprehending eyes, to the end of the room where two candles burned. The priest turned towards them his bland, black face.

“Ite, missa est.”

In part, “Out of Depth” is a dig at Hilaire Belloc’s view that “The Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith.” In part, it is a sly reference to Macaulay’s famous tribute to the perpetuity of the Catholic Church given in his 1840 review of Leopold von Ranke’s History of the Popes:

She may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.

Yet there’s more to Waugh’s story than a poke at Belloc or a nod to Macaulay. In Rip’s projection into the future, all the political, cultural, and social solidities of twentieth-century Europe have disappeared; every complacency has been demolished. The contingencies of history have made conquering races out of the conquered, and new empires carry their civilizing schemes to the barbarian wilds that were once Piccadilly and Grosvenor Square. Only the spiritual realities remain unchanged, realities that are symbolized by the Mass, but that include the moral and evangelical efforts of the missionaries, which are as deathless as the Church herself. We’re not to imagine Rip as a pious, churchgoing Catholic—quite the contrary—yet the unsensational gestures and rhythms of the low Mass provide, across the centuries, a touchstone of intelligibility: as Waugh puts it, “a shape in chaos.”

A shape in chaos. This is the key phrase in “Out of Depth.” The story is not a lament that Western civilization will decay into savagery. The point, rather, is that the sophisticated man-about-town and the grunting, scurrying savage are equally engaged in endeavors that are vain, transient, and, from the viewpoint of eternity, meaningless. External circumstances may flatter the one and humiliate the other, but in Waugh’s perspective, the bushman and theatergoer are both immersed in a maelstrom of futility against which the Catholic faith is an unchanging, if dimly understood, still point and touchstone of the good, the true, and the beautiful. It’s not that London’s glitterati might become the great-great-grandsires of savages; to the extent they are disconnected from the true Church, the worldlings are already savages themselves.

Throughout his professional life, Waugh was both admired and feared for the lethality of his tongue and pen. Some have suggested that his practice of satire was incompatible with the Christian vocation. When Waugh was asked, “Are your books meant to be satirical?” he answered:

No. Satire is a matter of period. It flourishes in a stable society and presupposes homogeneous moral standards—the early Roman Empire and eighteenth-century Europe. It is aimed at inconsistency and hypocrisy. It exposes polite cruelty and folly by exaggerating them. It seeks to produce shame. All this has no place in the Century of the Common Man where vice no longer pays lip service to virtue. The artist’s only service to the disintegrated society of today is to create independent little systems of order of his own. I foresee in the dark age to come that the scribes may play the part of monks after the first barbarian victories. They were not satirists.

Like any author, Waugh bridled at having his works pigeonholed so as to be approved or rejected with reference to a single category; on these grounds, he is justified in rejecting the label of satirist. From our vantage point, however, we can smile at Waugh’s claim that in his time (he wrote those words in 1946) vice no longer paid lip service to virtue. More to the point, Waugh the writer indisputably engages in the exaggeration of polite cruelty and folly, which on his own terms must be reckoned satire, however subsidiary he would rank satire among his artistic intentions. The attempt to illustrate Waugh’s satiric art is beset by a disadvantage. His satire was not, like Dorothy Parker’s, expressed in epigrams or pithy one-liners. It cannot be separated from the context from which it emerged so as to be repeated at a dinner party. His literary wit finds its poise in the balance of character, circumstance, and sudden felicity of language.

I want to argue that Waugh could not have been a great satirist were he not a Catholic, and, more controversially, that his satire had its source in appropriation of the truths of Catholicism rather than in extenuation of its precepts. Most fundamentally, it was Catholicism that made “Waugh the insular and class-conscious bully” into an internationalist taking the side of the underdog. His satire was subversive, and deliberately so. It is essential to grasp that his satire subverts the social and political tyrannies of our time.

There is, I admit, a good deal of subjectivity here. Both parties to a dispute may view themselves as David up against Goliath, and one man’s needle may be another man’s cudgel. We find in literary satire the same spectrum of moral and artistic value displayed in political cartoons. The best caricaturists help us see a new truth in an arresting and witty way. The worst—think of Julius Streicher of Der Stürmer and Boris Efimov of Pravda—strive to make their target not so much an object of ridicule as an object of hatred. Their exaggerations are indifferent to truth or falsehood and make a clandestine appeal to complacency—that is, they help us take pride in our bigotries and thus reinforce our vices. By the same token, satire may be used to fortify our contempt for some disfavored class, but it may have—and with the best authors does have—an emancipating element.

Consider the following passage in Waugh’s 1942 novel Put Out More Flags. It takes place in a Bloomsbury garret in which communist artists and atheist graduate students are gathered at the outbreak of World War II. They are unsure whether, as good Marxists, they should join the fight against Nazi Germany (and thus become unwilling defenders of bourgeois Britain), or else ignore the conflict entirely (and to that extent assist Hitler by weakening the war effort and spreading despondency). Waugh writes:

There was a young man of military age in the studio; he was due to be called up in the near future. “I don’t know what to do about it,” he said, “Of course, I could plead conscientious objections, but I haven’t got a conscience. It would be a denial of everything we’ve stood for if I said I had a conscience.”

“No, Tom,” they said to comfort him. “We know you haven’t got a conscience.”

“But then,” said the perplexed young man, “if I haven’t got a conscience, why in God’s name should I mind so much saying that I have?”

Note that Waugh does more than get off a jest at the expense of Marxist intellectuals. He exposes and illuminates a radical flaw in Marxist orthodoxy, and that so concisely that it would take many pages of philosophical exposition to make the same point. We aren’t moved to hate or despise leftists by this spoofing, yet we are inoculated against a great deal of nonsense by the wit displayed in the deftly revealed incongruity. Perhaps it’s also worth mentioning that in the 1940s, Marxism enjoyed a great deal of prestige—certainly more than did Catholicism—among educated elites. Yet it’s the Catholic David, whose faith has taught him what the word “conscience” means, who pulls the whiskers of the Stalinist Goliath.

As Dr. Johnson said, “A man had rather have a hundred lies told of him than one truth which he does not wish should be told.” Anarchists hate to be exposed as autocrats. I think in this connection of Waugh’s “Open Letter” to Nancy Mitford, in which he affected to find fault with her proposed model of an upper-class English family. Waugh objected that her portrait was inaccurate in that it included too few children. “Impotence and sodomy are socially OK,” he wrote, “but birth control is flagrantly middle class.”

Of course Waugh was only feigning sympathy with Mitford’s project and feigning a social rather than a moral objection to contraception. His inflexible Catholic convictions, as everyone understood, were provocatively masqueraded as class consciousness. The outrage that greeted this remark—or better, the humorlessness of the outrage—proved that Waugh’s shaft had found its mark. He had hit on a truth—namely, the ill-hidden bad conscience of heathen England—it did not wish should be spoken.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Christian satirist—so I would argue—is that he places himself under the same moral judgment as his targets. That is, he acknowledges a single system of morality governing the satirist and the satirized and holds himself responsible to the same precepts. I believe few critics of Waugh have adequately emphasized the extent to which his satire cuts most deeply at his own pretensions and illusions. This is most evident in the semi-autobiographical novels, such as The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold and the Sword of Honour trilogy, but detectable in nearly all his fiction. Consider the following excerpt from Helena, Waugh’s historical novel about the mother of the emperor Constantine. She was the wife of the Roman general Constantius Chlorus, and Waugh fancifully makes her the daughter of King Coel of Colchester. On a military mission to Britain, Constantius takes notice of Helena and asks her father for her hand. Coel is transformed from a mossy minor prince to become the upper-class Edwardian father, alarmed at the prospect of a southern European for a son-in-law. As did all fathers in similar situations, he tries to dissuade the suitor by pleading ignorance of his antecedents. “I daresay we seem old-fashioned in Britain, but we still care a great deal for such things.”

At last Constantius spoke. “You have a right to the information you seek, but I must beg you to respect my confidence. When I tell you, you will understand my hesitation. I would have preferred you to accept my word, but since you insist—” he paused to give full weight to his declaration—“I am of the Imperial Family.”

It fell flat. “You are, are you?” said Coel. “It’s the first time I’ve ever heard of there being such a thing.”

“I am the great-nephew of the Divine Claudius. . . . Also,” he added, “of the Divine Quintilius, whose reign, though brief, was entirely constitutional.”

“Yes,” said Coel, “and apart from their divinity, who were they? Some of the emperors we’ve had lately, you know, have been”—very literally—“nothing to make a song about. It’s one thing burning incense to them and quite another having them in the family. You must see that.”

“Apart from their divinity, who were they?” An unsurpassably devastating verdict on the insularity, snobbery, and narcissistic delusions of the British upper class—and it comes from the pen of a Waugh. The capacity to make oneself the target of one’s own mockery is, though not exactly humility, a kind of second cousin to humility, and points to the universalizing moral scope of a satire that instructs and does not merely deride. In his writing, Waugh made use of both Christian and un-Christian satire; I would argue that a blanket condemnation and blanket exoneration are equally misguided, and that each specimen should be judged on its merits.

Judging on the basis of merit is a distinctive virtue of Philip Eade’s new biography, titled Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited. Building on the achievements of Waugh’s earlier biographers, Eade retells the story of Waugh’s life primarily from the standpoint of relationships: father, mother, brother, schoolmasters, schoolfellows, wives, lovers, military superiors, children, and the many, many individuals of all ranks whom Waugh outraged or enchanted vividly enough to leave behind a report of the collision. Eade worked with the advantage of several documentary sources that the passage of time and changes in notions of literary propriety have made newly available to investigators, most notably the account of their marriage by Waugh’s first wife, and the diaries of his commanding officer during the Battle of Crete. It is to our advantage that Eade presents his material with a scholar’s eye: respectful of conflicting testimony, balanced in judgment, alert to bias in his sources, with a measured sympathy for Waugh and for the claims of those he failed or wounded. His biography restores, to some extent, many damaged reputations, and damages, to a lesser degree, a few others.

With commendable moderation and, I think, insight, Eade permits the severest judgments on the character of Waugh—and they were severe—to be those attested by Waugh himself, whereas the evidence for virtues contrary to his self-constructed image of truculent misanthropy comes from the first-person testimony of recipients of his silent but exceptional and exceptionally frequent acts of generosity. One gets the sense throughout his work that Eade has set his hounds to sniff out the documents and interviews that give the truth, even if unsensational, rather than the racy or amusing anecdote; yet in the end his evenhandedness serves to sharpen rather than blur the likeness he has crafted. In sum, Eade succeeds in giving a convincing picture of a complex man—one more interesting, in human terms, than the portrait the artist gave us of himself.

I conclude with a passage that touches on Waugh’s early manhood and continues in various ways to resonate throughout his life. It occurs in the novel Decline and Fall, when Paul Pennyfeather, expelled from his Oxford college, seeks employment as a schoolmaster and is granted an interview by Dr. Augustus Fagan, headmaster of Llanabba School in Wales:

“ . . . I understand, too, that you left your university rather suddenly. Now—why was that?”

This was the question that Paul had been dreading, and, true to his training, he had resolved upon honesty.

“I was sent down, sir, for indecent behaviour.”

“Indeed, indeed? Well, I shall not ask for details. I have been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason which he is anxious to conceal.”

Dr. Fagan’s sublime cynicism is never more than half a degree below room temperature and is expressed by unhurried, syntactically flawless disgust; his squalid criminal enterprises seem impelled more by boredom than venality. In moral terms, he is the point-by-point antithesis of Gervase, the saintly aristocrat and father of Guy Crouchback in the Sword of Honour trilogy. As creations, these equally urbane and imperturbable English gentlemen stand at the beginning and toward the end of Waugh’s authorial life, yet the virtuous elder Crouchback is one of the very few minor characters in Waugh’s repertory who fail to amuse. Endowed from boyhood with the ability to give pain and give delight, Waugh found it a lifelong task to learn how to edify; neither by his pen nor in his personal life did he wholly succeed. It is a testament to his character, and his faith, that he tried at all. 

Paul V. Mankowski, S.J., writes from Chicago.

The post Waugh on the Merits appeared first on First Things.

This collection of twelve essays tracks the long shadow cast by Martin Luther on modern society over the past five centuries. Addressing a range of topics including economics, political philosophy, science, technology, and social theory, the contributors show that although the seeds of modernity (nominalism, voluntarism, rationalism) predated Luther, Lutheran theology served as their justification and vehicle. The modernity we have inherited retains even today a distinctively Lutheran flavor.

Reading Luther and His Progeny, I couldn’t help thinking of the old saying, “the victors write history.” When even the pope, the leader of the Catholic Church, is celebrating Luther’s contributions to society, it is clear that the Peace of Westphalia was ultimately a Lutheran victory. The essayists freely admit this victory, but they do not celebrate it. They represent the losing side, the classical Christian metaphysics and theology that were rejected by modern man. Luther and His Progeny gives us the chance to see what the consequences of that rejection were and so come to a better understanding of our civilization.

—Nathaniel Gotcher writes from West New York, New Jersey.

The End of Europe:
Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age
by james kirchick
yale, 288 pages, $27.50

The lamps are going out all over Europe, argues James Kirchick. But the coming catastrophe will not be wrought by apocalyptic powers like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The End of Europe attempts to show how Putinism, Islamism, and the apologists for both have divided Europe against its best traditions: cultural particularism without chauvinism, and liberalism without rootlessness.

Kirchick’s book does not attend much to Christianity and decent nationalism as therapies for Europe’s distress. The continental left’s aimless cosmopolitanism and the continental right’s bigotry are both adulterated species of older and more redemptive principles. Europe rechristened and repatriated would have more children, and live with greater hope, because it had more to defend. But Kirchick’s book is intended to be more diagnostic than prescriptive.

—Cole Aronson is a senior studying philosophy at Yale College.

The post Briefly Noted appeared first on First Things.

When faced with a biography that could as well stop a door as fill a shelf, one’s first question is always, “Does the subject merit this exhaustive treatment?” There are a few historical characters about whom one wishes to know everything, but not very many. One would like to know, for example, what Hitler or Stalin had for breakfast, even though such information would add nothing to one’s historical understanding and in effect be perfectly useless. Of most authors, however, a biographical essay suffices, and indeed requires more real intellect to write well than a lengthy recitation of every known fact about its subject. Stefan Zweig (who wrote a book about Montaigne) used to say that the art of writing was more in knowing what to leave out than what to put in, and his first drafts were often six times longer than his final version.

At first sight, Michel de Montaigne, who after all wrote a book of a thousand pages both about and to please himself, might be thought unworthy of minute biographical examination. But though his book was about himself, it was only so in a special sense, that is to say in a sense of his own creation, and his life was so extraordinary (to say nothing of the times in which he lived), and he was of such enduring cultural significance, that a long biography seems both just and appropriate.

Philippe Desan is not a stylist—or perhaps I should say that his translators are not stylists. At best the prose is serviceable rather than elegant, and at times, especially when dealing in abstractions, it is somewhat clotted:

Determining Montaigne’s modernity is supposed to consist in locating in the Essais what we have become today. As if the questions that the author of the Essais asked were also our questions. There is no need to say that such a procedure can be gratifying, because it offers proof of a development or an implacable evolution toward progress and wisdom. Montaigne has finally been appropriated by philosophy.

One knows more or less, though perhaps not exactly, what this means, but one hardly reads it with pleasure. Moreover, what it says is clearly mistaken and wrongheaded. We do not think that Shakespeare is universal because we subscribe to a Whig interpretation of history according to which Shakespeare’s characters are a step on the ascent to our enlightened selves, but because, after four centuries of sweeping transformations, our existential position in the world, and our reactions to it, have not changed very much. Jealousy, ambition, despair, and pride are still as they are portrayed by Shakespeare in Othello, Macbeth, Lear, or Coriolanus; it is rather the implacable lack of progress and superior wisdom that strikes us when we read Shakespeare.

No doubt this is deeply disconcerting to some, who therefore wish to ignore or deny it, or to devise schemes for creating the New Man who will not suffer from these defects, but for others (among whom I am one) it is consoling. Thanks to this apprehension of an unchanging reality, I come no longer, in the words of Dr. Johnson, “to pursue the phantoms of hope” or “expect that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow.” I am content to be discontent, if by discontent we mean aware of the inescapable imperfections of our own condition.

It is part of Desan’s purpose to “liberate” us from this universalizing way of reading Montaigne, to make Montaigne more a man of his own time than a man for all time, by demonstrating how important was his involvement in the political life of his turbulent times to the creation of his literary work. If Montaigne wrote in his tower, it was certainly not an ivory one, at any rate not until late in life. He was a parliamentarian, an administrator, a soldier, a bureaucrat, and a courtier, all before he was a philosopher. According to Desan, Montaigne’s writings took on different, often political, purposes as his career changed or developed, and he would never have thought of himself as the kind of man that most of us believe he was—that is to say, someone who shut himself away from the world in a disinterested search for truth.

When the author says, however, that “we have to demystify the conventional image of the essayist isolated in his tower, far from the agitations of his time, playing with his cat and inquiring into the human condition,” I think he sets up a false dichotomy between the particular and the universal. No human being lives in a world of complete abstraction (or abstractions), as if free from all circumstance whatever. To say that a man is affected by his surroundings and the times in which he lives is to say nothing more than that he is a man—for a man without any particular circumstances could not exist and is literally unimaginable (this is one of the reasons why heaven is so difficult to imagine and hell so easy, because the latter at least has events). But not every man who takes part in public events and writes about them is read more than four hundred years after his death, even by people who have no special interest in the times in which he lived or in events that he witnessed. For every thousand readers of Montaigne, there is only one person who makes the French wars of religion his special subject. Montaigne is not principally of antiquarian interest, though he may be that as well.

In the Apology for Raymond Sebond, Montaigne says:

See the horrible impudence with which we bandy divine reasons about, and how irreligiously we have both rejected them and taken them again, according as fortune has changed our place in these public storms. This proposition, so solemn, whether it is lawful for a subject to rebel and take arms against his prince in defence of religion—remember in whose mouths, this year just past, the affirmative of this was the buttress of one party, the negative was the buttress of what other party; and hear now from what quarter comes the voice and the instruction of both sides, and whether the weapons make less din for this cause than for that.

Here Montaigne is clearly referring to particular historical circumstances: namely, the succession by the Protestant Henry of Navarre (albeit that he thought Paris was worth a Mass) to the French throne after the murder of the Catholic Henry III. Under the Catholic Henry, it was lawful for Protestants to rebel; under the Protestant Henry, it was lawful for the Catholics to rebel.

When I read this, however, it takes me straight, and no doubt strangely, back to my visit to Mogadishu in Somalia. I visited shortly after Somalia had become a client state of the United States, having been shortly before a client state of the Soviet Union; whereas Ethiopia had moved in precisely the opposite direction. The voice and instruction still came from both sides, but with the plus and minus signs, as it were, reversed. What remained unchanged, however, was the enmity between the two states that resulted in costly, bloody, and absurd armed conflict.

No doubt many other examples could come to a well-furnished mind: the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, for example. Also what comes to mind—or rather to my mind—is Whitehead’s famous dictum that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct: but he adds (in true Montaignesque fashion) that the search for metaphysical justifications is no less instinctive than our beliefs.

What Montaigne describes, then, is certainly particular to a time and place, but it is far more than merely particular, and it stretches credulity to believe that Montaigne did not know this or intend his example to cast light on a universal human condition. And if it be objected that what might be called ideological manipulation and hypocrisy are not human universals, because there may be tribes of isolated people somewhere on earth who do not indulge in them, they are nevertheless sufficiently common phenomena among humans who have reached a sufficiently sophisticated level of material civilization that they may be taken as universal. Would any reasonably intelligent and realistic observer of human life expect them to disappear soon from the human repertoire?

This is not to say that Montaigne is some kind of unscrupulous immoralist or lazy relativist with no idea of right and wrong, as he has sometimes been taken to be in the past (the Essays were on the Index of Prohibited Books for 180 years). No one today could read the Essays and believe that. His reflections are a call to honest and sometimes painful self-examination. When we learn how easily self-interest may make black white and white black, we feel obliged to examine more closely our own most passionately held opinions of the moment to ensure that they are not the product of self-deception and self-interest.

Moreover, a passage such as the one cited above is an implicit invitation to examine the whole nature of politics. Can it ever be a straightforward struggle for the implementation of an ideal? No, implies Montaigne, for not even our pleasures can be unalloyed. He is at one with Keats when the latter says “Ay, in the very temple of Delight / Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,” for “the weakness of our condition makes it impossible for things to come into our experience in their natural simplicity and purity.” There is something painful in excessive joy, says Montaigne, which always carries its own decay within it. With Montaigne, nothing is an unalloyed good.

He is not one to hold, however, that there is no difference between good and evil. Good exists for Montaigne, but not the good. A man who cites classical sources 1300 times in the Essays, and whose mother tongue was not French but Latin (his father allowed him to be addressed in no other tongue until he was six years old), can hardly be described as a contemptor of learning. But at the same time Montaigne is a stern critic and fierce opponent of what he calls pédantisme, in which a dry accumulation of learning is pursued for its own sake. For him, there must always be a dialogue or dialectic between books and life. He would have approved of Sir William Osler’s dictum three centuries later about the education of doctors: “He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all.” He is wisest, then, not who experiences or reads most, but who reflects best on what he has experienced and read.

Reflection can never be at an end, which is why Montaigne was revising and adding to his great book until the very end of his life, and would have continued to do so had he lived twenty years more. Its lack of system, its lack of clear doctrine, is precisely its point: “Grey is theory,” said Goethe, “but green is the tree of life.”

Montaigne’s famous skepticism, and his apprehension that reality itself had many contradictory aspects, was no doubt deepened by his experience of France’s religious wars of the sixteenth century, which lasted the major portion of his adult life. He remained a Catholic, though whether from deep belief, calculation, sentimental attachment to the religion of his youth, or sheer inertia is unclear (he was sometimes regarded as a heretic). No one could have lived through these times, however, without pondering deeply their meaning and the lessons to be drawn from them. But from any experience, diametrically opposed lessons can be drawn, for lessons from human affairs are not like the conclusion of a syllogism. Montaigne, who sometimes acted as a go-between in the wars, wrote against the procrusteans of all beliefs who want to reduce the conduct of life to simple rules: “Those people must be jesting who think they can diminish and stop our disputes by recalling us to the express words of the Bible. For our mind finds the field no less spacious in registering the meaning of others than in presenting its own. As if there were less animosity and bitterness in commenting than in inventing!” He might just as well have come to the conclusion that the only way to end the wars was to kill all the Protestants.

Who can read the above passage without thinking of the current disputes within Islam as to the real and indubitable meanings of the Qur’an and the hadith, and what conduct they command? The desire to base our conduct on indubitable authority, and thereby avoid the necessity of judgment (freedom and moral responsibility are anxiety-provoking), so that in effect we are only obeying orders, does give rise—despite Desan’s sneer—to one of our questions, just as it did for Montaigne. Moreover, it is unlikely that the question will be settled in the near future. Montaigne is above all and pre-eminently the philosopher of the permanent necessity of judgment.

Montaigne would certainly not have agreed with his biographer that “universality demands the erasure of temporality.” When, for example, he quotes Tacitus to the effect that “as formerly we suffered from crimes, so we now suffer from laws,” he could not have been unaware that his France and Tacitus’s Rome were not identical. Indeed, it is the main prop of Desan’s historicizing thesis that Montaigne was so deeply implicated in and concerned with the public affairs of his time that his thought was a reaction to them. But unless he saw underlying parallels between his France and Tacitus’s Rome, connected in some way to human nature, why would he have quoted Tacitus in the first place? Montaigne quotes him having just written: “We have in France more laws than all the rest of the world together . . .” And afterward he says: “And yet we have left so much room for opinion and decision to our judges, that there never was such a powerful and licentious freedom.” The analogy is clear.

Again, when Montaigne says (in Of Anger), “Plutarch is admirable throughout, but especially when he judges human actions,” he is appealing to universality: for how could he himself judge that Plutarch judges human actions well unless there were a subsisting vein of constancy that most of us know by the name of human nature?

Desan’s biography is the product of immense and admirable erudition, and no one who is not a specialist—and probably even someone who is—will fail to learn much from it. But I am afraid that it also illustrates one of Montaigne’s points, one of his chevaux de bataille, in fact: that learning is not wisdom.

Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal.

The post The Necessity of Judgment appeared first on First Things.

How different Poland’s history would be if it had a few dozen miles of deep salt water between it and its neighbors. How much trouble might be saved if Israel were an island. Countries with cliffs and churning, white-flecked seas for borders tend not to be partitioned or carted off into captivity, especially if they have the sense to build navies.

It is considered impolite to mention it these days, but Britain’s defiance of Hitler in 1940 owed more to the Channel and the North Sea than it did to the RAF. Salt water was our ultimate weapon, and our sensible respect for it made us hesitate, to Stalin’s fury, to launch any invasion against Hitler’s coastline. D-Day was a very near thing, even with the vast resources, the careful preparation, the brilliant deception. If the weather forecasters had gotten it wrong, the invasion fleet would have been scattered and the Red Army would have liberated Paris sometime in 1946, before driving on to the English Channel to ponder the future. At least it would have stopped there. 

People in free countries should be more in love with the sea, more sympathetic to those who don’t have it. I grew up in a Britain where every road ended at the sea. In fact, the sea lay just beyond the bottom of our garden in the Portsmouth suburb where we lived, endlessly reassuring especially when (as was usually so) it was rough or hidden by fog. As a naval family, we always remembered Lord St. Vincent’s witty promise to Parliament while Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grand Army gazed out toward England from the hills above Boulogne in France: “I do not say they cannot come,” St. Vincent creaked. “I only say they cannot come by sea.” Honorable members obediently laughed. For the British Navy controlled every square inch of those gray waters, and gaze as they might toward the coast of England from the parade grounds of Boulogne, the French could not cross them.

If a country has no sea, it must come up with a substitute. And that substitute is the guarded border. As a safe Englishman, I have never resented or decried these odd and often expensive structures. I can quite see why people want them. I can, alas, even envisage borders growing up in our own islands, where old nations are seeking to be reborn. There are worse things we might face. I have always thought that the French Maginot Line, now a derided ruin like the Great Wall of China, was rather sensible, its only fault being that it was unfinished, a major failing in any wall. I have helicoptered above much of the length of Israel’s frontier with the “occupied territories,” and indeed climbed through a rather feeble section of it in the Jerusalem suburbs, and I see the sense in it. No doubt it is often unjust, and it was much better for everyone when there was friendliness across the line and thousands of Arabs used to travel peacefully and easily to work in Israel. But the barrier is a reasonable response to the nasty tactic of sending suicide bombers into Israeli towns, as is shown by the fact that it has much diminished these horrible attacks. My only worry is that it cannot possibly be sustained. Walls, unlike oceans, require ceaseless maintenance and repair, and must be manned night and day by alert and disciplined guardians. Otherwise they become relics.

Israel is an interesting case. Turn eastward and you can, with some persistence, cross into officially friendly Jordan, just over the surprisingly feeble and narrow river of that name. This gateway is supposed to be part of the “New Middle East,” an absurdly optimistic concept dreamt up by the late Shimon Peres and based on the idea that Muslim Arabs would stop hating Israel if it made concessions to them. Very few people take the sort-of-bus service that runs from Tel Aviv to Amman, via Beit She’an—and no wonder. The Jordan River crossing on a Sunday evening is one of the loneliest places I have ever been, the sort of spot where you can hear yourself breathing, and the border officials hugely outnumber the travelers. The only other sound is the squeak of Israeli drivers unscrewing Hebrew license plates from their cars and substituting Arabic ones. This is an essential safety measure in Jordan, where the “Anti-Normalization League” campaigns ceaselessly against any concession to Zionism. Despite the country’s official moderation, it would not be a good idea to be identified as an Israeli on the country roads which wind down toward Amman. I saw no Jordanians crossing into the Zionist entity bent on pleasure or business. Normality is not just a fiction but an absurdity. Mr. Peres’s “New Middle East” is a phantasm, like the Arab Spring. The place only exists for propaganda purposes. In truth, the Jordan Valley remains a place of unalterable tension, and it is a pity that the river is not deep and wide, as the song says it is.

Travel up beyond the Sea of Galilee, past blasted concrete buildings and abandoned fortifications from the bitter war of 1973, and into the Golan Heights, where you will find a more honest frontier that is wholly dead and sealed, like a tomb. There is no pretense of friendship or normality here. Even so, when I asked an Israeli Army officer if he felt threatened, he remarked that it was one of the quietest places anywhere on his troubled country’s disputed edges. President Assad’s ruthless despotism left no doubt about who was responsible for any missiles or armed groups which came across it. “If anything bad comes across, we have a return address,” he pointed out, with quiet menace. This is why many Israelis will be glad if and when Mr. Assad regains full control. A reliable tyranny on the far side of the barbed wire is far more reassuring and desirable than anarchy or the Arab Spring.

Why, then, do so many speak darkly of borders as unnecessary and undesirable? Enthusiasts for “free movement of peoples,” the type who can be found in revolutionary Marxist sects and in the offices of liberal capitalist organs such as The Economist, claim to believe that the absolute equality of all humans is violated by the idea of frontiers. The Bolsheviks believed that humanity is infinitely malleable and that class and education determine changeable human nature. The economic liberals simply think that open borders bring greater general prosperity by keeping labor costs down. In most cases, such people live remotely from the areas most directly affected by the large-scale migration they say they support.

In practice, they will take a slightly different view if too many people act according to their vision. The open borders of much of the European Union have been at least partly closed again in recent years, following Chancellor Angela Merkel’s utopian decision to welcome thousands of undocumented Middle Eastern migrants (some of whom may actually have been refugees from the Syrian war, but many of whom were economically motivated, as The Economist would want them to be). Sweden, once a country of relaxed liberalism, has found its politics bitterly transformed after trying to apply those beautiful beliefs in practice. The decision of several E.U. navies to offer a ferry service across the Mediterranean for migrants from Africa caused a similar revulsion from this idealism. Suddenly, France began patrolling its borders with Italy for the first time in years.

Even on those who in general accept their usefulness, borders have a paradoxical effect. Precisely because they guard us from straying into a different culture, we long to do so. Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice clambering through the looking glass, we yearn to know what is beyond the wire, and what lies on the other side of the mysterious wooded hills that are visible but not reachable. Sometimes it is just a wish to know what is beyond that door or down that corridor. Not being allowed to go somewhere or know something, as we have known since the Garden of Eden, can be the greatest temptation of all. 

I felt this most powerfully—the mad instinct for crossing into the unknown—when at the Korean Demilitarized Zone, an exhilarating spot which (after many years of effort) I have now viewed from both sides. My first visit was from the South, in a press party accompanying Margaret Thatcher. All around was the peace of an unpolluted animal and bird sanctuary, thanks to the absence of man. Both sides competed by flying enormous flags of their rival nations, flags so huge that they ripped themselves to pieces in high winds. Just to the north, beyond the so-called “Bridge of No Return,” across which prisoners of war and the crew of the captured USS Pueblo had been released by the Communists, sat a fake village from whose empty concrete buildings eerie music drifted, supposedly demonstrating the happiness of its nonexistent inhabitants. I am not sure whom this was supposed to fool.

Strangest of all was that, for a few hundred yards, there was no fence. A line of scrubbed paving stones marked the border, once the most emphatic and angry contact between the two rival worlds of the Cold War. On one side, political and religious liberty, prosperity, rationality stretched onward and outwards. On the other, a vast dark planet of censorship, people shrieking slogans, parades, lies, and privation continued all the way to the middle of Germany. Now it is less of an ideological border—just a puzzling, dispiriting relic of a dead conflict, which nobody can find a way of dismantling. 

Much as people are said to be tempted to hurl themselves off cliffs and tall buildings, I was gripped with a crazy desire to dash across into the North, and wondered if members of the Communist delegation, close and clearly visible on the other side, were troubled by the same folly. Years later, I knew they must have been. For I traveled down from Pyongyang, through the North’s fortifications and propaganda lectures, and found myself ten feet from where I had been twenty years before, with nothing between me and the South but air—but such air, fizzing and crackling with danger. Is there anything more savage than hostility between peoples divided by civil war? Enemy nations do not even begin to contrive the pseudo-moral excuses which people of the same nation dream up for killing and hating each other. Yet still I longed to make that foolish, fatal dash, just because it was there.

I used to get a similar feeling near the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. I now feel privileged that I saw Berlin many times in the days of the Wall, and penetrated through it at Friedrichstrasse Station to emerge in a place so different from its Western twin that it is still hard to believe it was so. Technically, it was only a political division. But East Berlin smelled different, had different colors, somehow a different light in the sky. The posture of the people was different. Above all, the purpose of everyday things in the Communist world was tinged with a second, less everyday purpose. I learned from my first voyages into this zone that this was the great distinguishing feature. Shops, opera houses, trains, museums, war memorials, newspapers all possessed a greater ideological purpose which completely transformed them, but which I was not allowed to know in full. It always seemed a small miracle when I succeeded in buying a meal, making a journey, or obtaining information. I felt I hadn’t really been meant to do any of these things. When I got back to the West, its obliging simplicity began to seem unsatisfactory. Where was the challenge?

Even if we could somehow construct a world where borders were not necessary for peace and security, could we really be happy without them? There is a joy in crossing from one place into another that we are robbed of by any effort to make all places one. I cannot be the only person who has developed an active joy in obtaining and using hard-to-get visas. People used to complain about Communist border checks. I didn’t. I positively liked these Ludmillas and Nastyas with their frazzled, bleached hair under severe peaked caps, glaring at my documents with patriotic zeal. Generally, they didn’t actually take that long, and it was possible, sometimes, to get the faintest ghost of a smile out of some of them before they whacked the entry or exit stamp (always in lurid green ink) onto my passport. Nowadays the Russian border officials are positively chatty. One rather beautiful passport checker in Moscow recently asked me, “Do you think Russia will ever be a normal country?” and creased up when I shot back, “I hope not!”

There is the Schengen Agreement’s abolition of European borders. If I can stroll unchecked (as I have) from Strasbourg in France to Kehl in Germany, or from Aachen in Germany to Vaals in the Netherlands, so can anyone else. What, then, is the point of my machine-readable, ultra-secure United Kingdom passport, obtained through severe bureaucracy? It goes deeper. When we study the dismal history of the European 1930s, isn’t Germany’s scorn for the borders of her neighbors one of the most striking things in the newsreels and the photographs? Grinning soldiers smash or sweep through the border posts of conquered or absorbed nations, tossing aside the striped poles that symbolized independence, the quiet existence of another way of doing things, a different language, a different coinage, and a different law. Didn’t we fight World War II at least partly to put those borders back, and allow those small nations to live once again undisturbed as they wished?

Yet all those borders once brushed aside by German tanks are now vanished. Travel down from Berlin to Prague, or Berlin to Brussels or Amsterdam or Vienna, on Europe’s swift new trains, and nobody will ask for your papers. I jolly well think they should. This isn’t just because untold numbers of migrants, having crossed the Mediterranean or the straits between Turkey and the Greek islands, are now roaming a borderless Europe. People are entitled to live differently if they want to. It makes them happy and proud. A world without differences would be a world without any true character or any true freedom, since the planet is far too big a community for people to be effectively unselfish in it. Without borders, we would dwell in a global parking lot. A reasonable love of where you live, its customs, landscape, language, and humor, is the basis for all other communal loves.

So I have never really seen why Donald Trump likes the idea of a proper border between the U.S. and Mexico. He doesn’t seem to me to be the kind of person who has that generous affection for the small, the local, and the particular which is the foundation of proper patriotism. But never mind. It is a good idea, if only for the following reason: How can the U.S. reasonably ask people such as me, from law-governed, civilized nations, who have no plans to stay, to submit to fingerprint checks and intrusive questioning at airports, if it simultaneously allows countless persons from who-knows-where to walk straight into the country, vanish for years—and then apply for and be granted citizenship on the grounds that it is too much trouble to do anything else? If you want to have a country, you have to decide who can come into it. If you don’t, won’t, or can’t, it’s not a proper country. President Trump, build up that wall!

Peter Hitchens is a columnist for the Mail on Sunday.

Follow the conversation on this article in the Letters section of our December 2017 issue.

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The last thing we need is cynicism, and we certainly need more than moralistic sincerity. If the polar ice is melting steadily and the seas are rising, if extreme flooding and droughts wreak havoc with agriculture, spread disease, and cause large-scale dislocation of population, then climate change is indeed a more urgent threat to civilization and culture than terrorism or war, as Ghosh argues. The causes of massive natural disturbances cannot be stopped by a last-minute conference or even national mobilization. It doesn’t matter whether these changes result mainly from human activity or from natural cycles. Mitigating the threat requires timely action; it is too late to step on the brakes once we come close to the abyss. For believers in disastrous climate change, and even for those who merely are convinced it is a likely possibility, the widespread failure to respond appropriately causes immense exasperation. Why the indifference and delay? Why do people deny the undeniable?

Some say that human beings are hardwired to fight particular enemies in motion but not to mobilize against large, impersonal natural phenomena. Tangible threats provoke us, but not statistics about increasingly extreme weather. Or, they say, evolution has programmed us to react to sudden movements of predators but not to gradual, insidious change. The “storm of the century” soon becomes an annual event, and we reconcile ourselves to the new norm instead of seeing in it the monition of a progressive, hard-to-reverse perturbation that will have dire global consequences.

All true, perhaps, but Ghosh thinks cultural blindness is at work as well. He argues that the popular scientific outlook itself anesthetizes us against taking climate change seriously. That is because science is associated with stability. Belief in evolution is commonly taken to be virtually synonymous with faith in gradual, step-by-step change. When change occurs, science tends to emphasize continuity rather than revolutionary upheaval. Nature, we assume, makes no leaps. Theories of punctuated, dramatic species change cause discomfort, and even when advocated by reputable evolutionists, these theories are often shunned as vaguely unscientific.

So it seems our secular scientific culture, at least in its popular forms, prevents us from seeing our situation with appropriate clarity. Even the authors of sophisticated science fiction appear unable to treat the imminent crisis of climate change with the urgency it demands.

By contrast, Ghosh, drawing on his Asian heritage, observes that traditional societies, living closer to natural realities, know that nature can be violent and often hostile to human hopes and plans. Unanticipated upheavals are the rule, while in a modern scientific culture that imagines it has mastered nature through experiment and explanation, they become impossible exceptions. So traditional societies ready themselves for the worst, and when it happens, they endure. Modern society and modern technology are not prepared to adapt and suffer in the same way.

There’s something to be said for Ghosh’s provocative analysis. Sometimes, however, the simple explanation is the best. True, we lack the imagination of a future so radically at variance with the familiar present. But this is mainly because, as the old moralists never tired of repeating, we discount the future. Present pleasure and convenience are vivid to us; the price to be paid tomorrow is remote. The iron law of shortsightedness affects the average climate activist who knows better no less than the climate denier who hopes that what he doesn’t believe in won’t occur.

This stubborn fact about our humanity should sober us. Whatever we think of the science of climate change, the activists are certainly right: Countering the effects, to say nothing of addressing the causes, transcends individual agency. But the aversion of activists to individual responsibility leads them to deny the undeniable. Any realistic approach to climate change will almost certainly require us to sacrifice significant elements of our self-indulgent lifestyles. The lowered thermostat in winter, the higher setting in summer, and other, perhaps more serious, hardships and deprivations—we will not be spared. And there will be a psychocultural suffering as well. Many of us believe that the vital health of a society is bound up with ever-increasing material comfort. To the degree that addressing climate change will demand an ethic of less rather than more, this faith in material progress may end up shattered. As we lose confidence in our culture’s ability to deliver on the promise of ever-greater wealth and comfort, so too will the sense of solidarity decline, making us far less likely to be able to cope collectively with the prospect of doing without.

This prospect should be more frightening to conservatives than to liberals, because we have more to lose. A demoralized and destabilized society is one in which the survival of the civil and spiritual life, not to mention its preservation and propagation, is threatened. We may suspect that the activist program of combating climate change masks an appetite for intrusive, centralized government engineering, as it has in the past. But if the environmental menace is real, putting off the day of reckoning will only make government intervention less effective and thus more heavy-handed. Should we not seek strategies now, ones that appropriately use government to ensure collective action, but in ways that minimize intrusion, and the sooner the better?

Most of us are not technologically competent. It is hard for us to judge among the various solutions being proposed. Supporters of a market economy lean toward incentives like carbon taxes, and this in spite of the recent encyclical Laudato Si, which disparages them as inadequate and susceptible to corrupt manipulation. All of us, however, are capable of recognizing that the habits of temperance and the capacity for material sacrifice may be indispensable in days to come. How to make the practice of these habits widespread, palatable, even honorable, is a task for all.

In Ghosh’s opinion, the scientific parts of Laudato Si are free of wishful thinking about the power of technology to meet optimistic goals and deliver us from the need for significant material sacrifice, in a way that the Paris Agreement is not. Perhaps that is because the former document proceeds from a more sober, hopeful, and realistic conception of individual responsibility. Those who are formed by traditional religion value and cherish temperance and self-discipline as expressions of lives dedicated to the service of God. Others, who place their confidence in impersonal utilitarian methods for promoting human welfare, may yet be forced to accept that the future of our societies relies upon our capacity for sacrifice just as much as our scientific understanding and technological ingenuity. 

Shalom Carmy teaches Jewish studies and philosophy at Yeshiva University and is editor emeritus of Tradition.

Photograph by UNclimatechange via Creative Commons. Image cropped.

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This is not an exaggeration. The 2012 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts found that only half of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds read a book in leisure hours in the preceding twelve months. The same lack of interest shows up in the annual CIRP Freshman Survey, a large questionnaire administered to undergraduates a short time into their college career. Recently, it tallied one-third of college freshmen racking up zero (!) hours of “reading for pleasure” during an average week in the previous year. Another one-quarter of them did less than one hour—at most, seven or eight minutes a day. And these are four-year college students pursuing a bachelor’s degree, not vocational and two-year college students.

When they do read, they don’t do it very well. Currently, just a bit more than one-third (37 percent) of twelfth-graders on the National Assessment of Educational Progress reach “proficiency” in reading, while SAT reading results in 2015 were the lowest in more than forty years. On last year’s ACT exam, fully 56 percent of test-takers fell short of “college readiness” in reading, which means that they had only a 50 percent chance of earning a B in a basic civics class.

Before I came to First Things in the summer of 2014, these results meant the same thing to me that they did to other concerned observers. They are an economic and civic calamity. In writing about them, I cited a 2004 College Board report that stated that “remedying deficiencies in writing may cost American firms as much as $3.1 billion annually” (good writing skills are correlated with strong reading habits), along with a National Association of Manufacturers survey that had more than one-quarter of manufacturers (29 percent) place “inadequate reading/writing/communication skills” among “the most serious skill deficiencies in your current employees” (take a look at the daunting manuals and catalogs in a car repair shop).

As for civics, I collected statements like Peggy Noonan’s Wall Street Journal column on the decay of reading among the political class, subtitled “What ails American democracy? Too much information and too little thought.” The “young of politics and journalism . . . have received most of what they know about political history through screens,” she remarked. It seems that “they have seen the movie and not read the book. They have heard the sound bite but not read the speech.”

All true, yes, productivity and citizenship are casualties of a nonreading population. But every night some of the First Things staff gather for prayers in the townhouse that Fr. Richard John Neuhaus occupied for thirty years in Manhattan. We sing the Magnificat, recite a psalm or two, and read a passage from the Gospels before finishing with a litany. Fr. Larry Bailey and the others underscore what I didn’t realize in all my years as a blundering atheist: how much Christian faith depends upon the text. You’ve got to be a habitual reader.

Low reading rates and scores can’t help but damage the churches. It’s not only that young people don’t read the Bible as much as they should. It’s that they don’t read much of anything, so on those occasions when they are called to pay attention to a Bible passage, they take in only the bare information. Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead—got it. Judas sold him out, then killed himself—message received. The full truth of the written word escapes them.

Let me give an example. Right at the beginning of the Book of Acts, we have one of those amusing moments of human expectation that present the disciples in all their endearing weakness. Jesus appears to them a final time, promising, “Before many days you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” They follow with a natural question: “Is this it? Is it happening now?”

Those aren’t their exact words, of course. They say, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?”—a logical query in light of Jesus’s (and John’s) announcements from the beginning of his ministry. The Crucifixion looked like a catastrophe, his Resurrection a final triumph. They have witnessed more than we can conceive, but their eyes are still too worldly. Now’s the time, they assume, right?

That’s when Jesus recalls them back to faith: “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority.”

You don’t have to be a strong reader to take the practical lesson. If Acts 1:4–8 were the daily reading in the Mass and the priest explained how we should absorb Jesus’s statement, you could leave the church with a sure catechism. Do not set a schedule for God. Do not assume that your time scheme has any bearing on providence.

But in the process, the human significance of this critical exchange would contract to an injunction alone. The full context would be forgotten. The Passion has transpired! In a moment the disciples shall witness the Ascension. Every second of his presence counts as a fresh inauguration of human history. This is his final direct communication. It can’t be merely a curt rebuke of misguided followers, though our two-thousand-year advantage tempts us to smile at their naive anticipation of the kingdom tomorrow morning or afternoon.

A Christian with a readerly sensibility looks at the same passage and does something else, too. He tries to experience it. Luke, the author of Acts, doesn’t provide very much. His phrases record miraculous tidings, but the prose is flat and objective. “To whom he showed himself alive . . . many infallible proofs . . . speaking of things pertaining to the kingdom of God . . . commanded them that they should not depart from Jerusalem.” It’s a recapitulation, not a description. The nonreader hears it as that alone, as fact. To him, the present scene stands pretty much by itself. The words don’t activate his imagination. They fill in slots of information. He doesn’t have the disposition that converts words on a page into flesh-and-blood situations.

Regular readers, on the other hand, visualize setting, “hear” dialogue, “see” faces, “think” and “feel” what characters think and feel. They are attuned to depths and implications and ironies that aren’t stated outright. They recall previous events. They read these verses with a larger context in their heads, a silent condition that blares out from every word. It is this: The disciples have seen God, and nothing can go on as before.

In other words, experienced readers put themselves in the position of Peter and the rest. They hear the question “Will you restore . . .” as much more than an error. It is erroneous, yes, but it’s also unavoidable. God has promised a new day, and he has proven it with his risen life. How can the disciples believe that the whole world in its ordinary political doings isn’t going to be transformed? The Resurrection has happened! It isn’t possible for the disciples to continue with their daily lives now that the teacher has returned from the dead. They confuse the nature of this new kingdom, of course, but how could this lightning bolt from the heavens not cloud their sense? They strive to assimilate the new meaning of History, Time, and Death, and so they resort to familiar circumstances: Jesus brings a new politics and power, a restoration of the worldly kingdom . . . The meaning of this miracle, which has swept everything into an uncertain fate, is now unequivocal, or so they think.

The experienced reader speculates in just this way. He appreciates the full force of the conversation. In his hands, the disciples’ query “Is it now?” rises into a personal challenge every believer faces. It is the temptation posed by the Incarnation. When God becomes man, he lures us into forgetting his absolute otherness. In their inquisitiveness, the disciples merely voice the ordinary desire for a clear sign, a worldly object, a concrete meaning that makes infinitude easier to absorb. Their mistake is God’s warning to us. Do not flee the trepidation that a finite consciousness undergoes in the presence of the eternal.

Before the Reformation, most Christians were illiterate, but they grew up in a culture that inspired them with daily prayer, Communion, and stories of the saints. Their imaginations were primed to hear in Jesus’s precautions both the rule to follow—don’t be too curious about when and where—and the human temptation to keep asking. Young Americans today are a-literate, not illiterate. Their imaginations are weak, not least because the media they consume supply all the sights and sounds that the mind must create when all it has is words on a page. They only heed the rule, not the longing. Emerson, despite his infidelity, got it right when he proclaimed the merits of “creative reading as well as creative writing.” But it only comes with practice: “When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion.”

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Even so, the Court was hardly immune to the steady transformation of our governing institutions into reality TV shows. Over the weekend leading into the final day of the term, speculation ignited from who-knows-where about the possible departure of its main character, Justice Anthony Kennedy. To us, the chatter seemed forced—as if the viewing public needed something to fill the vacuum left by a season of episodes with fewer sex scenes and less louche intrigue than usual.

But the scriptwriters did not disappoint entirely. In the season finale, the justices delivered split opinions in two cases that had not even been fully briefed and argued on the merits—one about President Trump’s limits on immigration from six majority-Muslim nations, the other about the right of a female same-sex spouse to be listed as a parent on a birth certificate alongside the birth mother. These opinions hint at some of the stories that will shape next year’s plotline—the first full term for the new character, Justice Neil Gorsuch.

And the producers promise a thrilling new season. For readers of this journal, Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission is likely to be the most prominent case, one about the freedom of a Christian baker to decline to design a custom cake for a same-sex wedding celebration. Other potential showstoppers include a case about partisan gerrymandering and another round on President Trump’s executive order on immigration. We may also see more shake-ups in the cast. Before peering ahead to what may be coming, though, we look back at some of the signal events of the past term.

The biggest Supreme Court case in recent memory remains Obergefell v. Hodges, in which the Court two years ago created a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Our retrospective begins with two cases in which Obergefell continued its work. Neither was directly about marriage, but both involved challenges to laws that differentiated between men and women with respect to parenthood.

First is Sessions v. Morales-Santana, a constitutional challenge to the immigration rules governing the eligibility for U.S. citizenship of children born abroad to only one U.S. citizen parent. Under the then-current scheme, U.S. citizen fathers such as Luis Ramón Morales-Santana’s needed to reside in the United States for longer than similarly situated mothers for their children born abroad to be eligible for citizenship.

The Court unanimously held that Morales-Santana was not eligible for the relief he sought: eligibility for citizenship under the shorter time period. The vote on the outcome was 8–0 (Justice Gorsuch did not participate). There was, however, a 6–2 split on rationale. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the Court, held that the differential treatment of mothers and fathers was unconstitutional, but that the remedy was to apply the longer time period to the children of both. Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, concurred only in the judgment. The Court’s lack of authority to order the shorter time period sought by Morales-Santana, he wrote, fully disposed of the case and made it unnecessary to decide the merits of the constitutional claim.

Obergefell was not essential to the reasoning of Morales-Santana. But it was cited in the majority opinion and emblematic of its narrative. The challenged rules were enacted decades ago, Justice Ginsburg wrote, in “an era when the lawbooks of our Nation were rife with overbroad generalizations about the way men and women are.” Happily, more enlightened understandings obtruded onto our constitutional law in the 1960s and 1970s. “In light of the equal protection jurisprudence this Court has developed since 1971,” she said, the differential treatment of unwed mothers and fathers is “stunningly anachronistic.” The disparate criteria, the majority stated, “cannot withstand inspection under a Constitution that requires the Government to respect the equal dignity and stature of its male and female citizens.”

The judicial perspective that conceived Obergefell is the same progressive mindset that brings us the majority’s contestable and unnecessary disquisition in Morales-Santana. It is on full display in Justice Ginsburg’s quotation of Justice Kennedy’s opinion for the Court in Obergefell: “New insights and societal understandings can reveal unjustified inequality . . . that once passed unnoticed and unchallenged.” The passive voice suggests that the Court remains open to the voice of revelation, inspiring it to issue its next blockbuster.

If the question in Obergefell boiled down to whether states could insist on marriage certificates with spaces for “husband” and “wife,” the question in the other Obergefell-inflected case of the term, Pavan v. Smith, was whether states could insist on birth certificates with spaces for “father” and “mother.” In an opinion issued per curiam rather than under the name of any individual justice writing for the Court, a majority of the justices treated this question as easily resolved by Obergefell. The right of a male spouse to list his name on the birth certificate of a child born of the biological mother, said the Court, is a marriage-related benefit. And Obergefell announced a constitutional “commitment to provide same-sex couples ‘the constellation of benefits that the States have linked to marriage.’” Because male spouses of birth mothers are presumptively listed on birth certificates, states must provide the same thing to the female spouses of birth mothers. According to the Court, Arkansas uses birth certificates “to give married parents a form of legal recognition that is not available to unmarried parents. Having made that choice, Arkansas may not, consistent with Obergefell, deny married same-sex couples that recognition.”

The decision in Pavan was a summary reversal, which means that the Court reversed without the full briefing and argument usual in cases it decides on the merits. Justice Gorsuch wrote a brief dissent, joined by Justice Thomas and Justice Alito, arguing that the case did not meet the demanding standard for summary reversal, which is “reserved for cases where ‘the law is settled and stable, the facts are not in dispute, and the decision below is clearly in error.’” The Supreme Court of Arkansas, Gorsuch continued, “did not in any way seek to defy but rather [sought to] earnestly engage Obergefell. . . . And it is very hard to see what is wrong with [that court’s] conclusion.” The state’s scheme was based on biology, he reasoned, and “nothing in Obergefell indicates that a birth registration regime based on biology, one no doubt with many analogues across the country and throughout history, offends the Constitution.”

Pavan pierces the pretense that one can dispense with husbands and wives relative to marriage without also dispensing with fathers and mothers relative to children born within marriages. Changes in marriage and birth certificates illustrate this starkly. “Spouse” replaces “husband” and “wife,” while “parent” replaces “father” and “mother.”

Although the dissenting justices were right that summary reversal was not warranted, one need not interpret the summary treatment as an aggressive move (though that is certainly a possibility). Given that Justice Kennedy did not retire, the case would have come out the same way after full-dress treatment. And that opinion likely would have been worse. If Chief Justice John Roberts had dissented, which he very well could have in light of his dissent in Obergefell, the opinion assignment would have fallen to Justice Kennedy, who almost certainly would have taken the occasion to inflict more damage on family law in the Constitution’s name. Yet it is worth noting that the chief justice did not dissent—either in Pavan or Morales-Santana.

When it came to the freedom of speech this term, there was broad agreement on outcomes, but not on too much else. In Packingham v. North Carolina, the state had made it a felony for registered sex offenders to visit a broad range of social media sites that the offender knew could also be visited by children. The law included not only sites like Facebook and Twitter, but also Amazon, WebMD, and the Washington Post. The Court struck down the statute 8–0 (Justice Gorsuch did not participate) as a violation of the speech clause of the First Amendment, but the opinions reveal some interesting divisions among the justices.

Justice Kennedy’s opinion for the Court gave us yet another sample of his grandiloquent and pontificating style. Not content to strike down the law simply as overly broad, Kennedy composed a panegyric on the democratic glories of social media: “While in the past there may have been difficulty in identifying the most important places (in a spatial sense) for the exchange of views, today the answer is clear. It is cyberspace—the ‘vast democratic forums of the Internet’ in general . . . and social media in particular.” After all, he continued, “Facebook has 1.79 billion active users . . . about three times the population of North America”—as if naked numerosity were self-evident proof of the value of social media. One wonders whether Justice Kennedy has ever explored 4chan or Reddit to see how his Court’s decisions are received there.

Then it got worse. Justice Kennedy described the advent of social media as a “revolution of historic proportions.” Like that other Revolution of 1776, “we cannot appreciate yet its full dimensions and vast potential to alter how we think, express ourselves, and define who we want to be.” And while, he wrote, it is true that “advances in human progress” such as the railroad have been exploited by “the criminal mind,” the juggernaut of progress must not be stopped. Close readers will see traces of the self-definitional, identitarian, solipsistic quality of constitutional rights that Justice Kennedy has made the centerpiece of his substantive due process opinions in cases like Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Lawrence v. Texas. In his universe, rights are about who we are, not what we do.

Writing for the chief justice, Justice Thomas, and himself, Justice Alito concurred only in the judgment. He agreed that this law swept too broadly, but he could not join the opinion for the Court “because of its undisciplined dicta” and “unnecessary rhetoric.” The Court’s opinion, Alito wrote, “is unable to resist musings that seem to equate the entirety of the internet with public streets and parks.” The recklessly romantic language of the decision, he said, might suggest to a state that it was powerless to preclude an adult who had been convicted of molesting a child from visiting dating sites for teenagers or sites in which “minors communicate with each other about personal problems.” A few months ago, the editor of this journal wrote that “we know we are in trouble when the right of free speech becomes a right to unlimited pornography.” But we are well beyond that point if the Court’s bloated rhetoric is taken at face value. Let’s hope it won’t be.

The other notable free speech case of the term was Matal v. Tam, a challenge to a statutory provision authorizing the federal government to deny a trademark if it “disparaged” someone or brought someone “into contempt or disrepute.” The trademark application of a rock group of Asian ancestry calling itself “The Slants” was denied under this provision because the government believed the name was derogatory even though the group’s aim was to “reclaim” it.

The Supreme Court overturned that determination in another 8–0 decision (again, without Justice Gorsuch). In an opinion by Justice Alito, the Court held that the law violated the speech clause because trademarks are private speech, not government speech, and discriminated on the basis of viewpoint. In essence, the government conditioned the granting of trademarks on the saying of nice things, not mean things. Justice Alito’s opinion went on to decide several other issues concerning the law’s constitutionality under the Court’s doctrine regarding speech in the context of government subsidies and commercial speech, while a separate opinion authored by Justice Kennedy and joined by Justices Ginsburg, Kagan, and Sotomayor that joined in the judgment would not have addressed these issues. But the bottom line in Tam was another solid statement by the Court in favor of powerful protection for free speech, and against any sort of “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment.

Just as for the speech clause, so, too, for law and religion cases: The October 2016 term gave us a few interesting decisions, some of which faltered in their language or reasoning, but nothing explosive. In a kind of coda to the Little Sisters of the Poor litigation, the Court decided unanimously that religious nonprofits that operate hospitals and that offer defined employee benefit plans not only operated but also established by those hospitals qualify as exempt “church plans” under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. The case was a fairly straightforward exercise in statutory interpretation, and Justice Elena Kagan’s opinion for the Court was noteworthy for its textualist approach. The Court chose an interpretation of the statutory text that was both consonant with its plain meaning and Congress’s objective in getting the IRS out of the business of “deciding just what a church is and is not—for example . . . whether a particular Catholic religious order should count as one.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a concurring opinion with the sole purpose of advising Congress to change its mind.

The most important law and religion case of the term was Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer, in which the state of Missouri denied the application of a church-operated preschool and day care center to share in certain public grant monies set aside for the resurfacing of playgrounds. The state argued that its decision was required by Article I, Section 7 of the Missouri Constitution, which states in part that “no money shall ever be taken from the public treasury, directly or indirectly, in aid of any church, sect or denomination of religion.”

The Supreme Court ruled 7–2 in favor of the church, but once again the opinions were fractured. The chief justice’s opinion for the Court (except as to a footnote, about which more in a moment) held that the exclusion of Trinity Lutheran Church violated the free exercise clause because Missouri was targeting religious status for especially bad treatment. The state’s interest in avoiding the appearance of violating the establishment clause by including churches in its disbursement of monies for nonreligious uses was insufficiently compelling to justify its policy.

In reaching this result, the Court drew a distinction between religious status and religious belief or conduct: The state had excluded Trinity Lutheran Church and other religious institutions because of their religious “character” or identity. While in a previous case, Locke v. Davey, the Court had upheld a state scholarship program that prohibited the use of funds for devotional studies, that, said the Court, was different: “Davey was not denied a scholarship because of who he was; he was denied a scholarship because of what he proposed to do—use the funds to prepare for the ministry. Here there is no question that Trinity Lutheran was denied a grant simply because of what it is—a church.” In a concurring opinion joined by Justice Thomas, Justice Gorsuch pointed out the instability of the line drawn by the Court: “Does a religious man say grace before dinner? Or does a man begin his meal in a religious manner? Is it a religious group that built the playground? Or did a group build the playground so it might be used to advance a religious mission?” Not unreasonable questions.

The status/conduct distinction is an old one, and not strictly a legal one. Yet it fits awkwardly, to put it gently, with the manner in which religion is protected under the Constitution, which enjoins the government not to prohibit “the free exercise” of religion. The clause seems to protect exactly what people and institutions “propose to do,” and not who or what they are. But the Court’s emphasis on identitarian concerns is of a piece both with other cases like Packingham and with what the Court has come to believe is the most powerful justification for the First Amendment’s protections: authenticity and self-actualization. Once again, and regrettably, identity seems to be supplanting activity as the constitutional touchstone.

Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ginsburg, dissented. In her view, the exclusion of Trinity Lutheran Church was not merely permitted but actually compelled by the establishment clause. Perhaps the most intriguing bit of her sprawling dissent was the final footnote, in which she cited a case about Bible reading in school for the proposition that “while the Free Exercise Clause clearly prohibits the use of state action to deny the rights of free exercise to anyone, it has never meant that a majority could use the machinery of the State to practice its beliefs.” One wonders which American religious majority Justice Sotomayor had in mind.

While Trinity Lutheran was a victory for the church, two important questions remain open. First, its scope. In a footnote joined only by four justices, the Court appears to limit the holding of the case to “express discrimination based on religious identity with respect to playground resurfacing,” giving new meaning to judicial minimalism. At the same time, however, the Court remanded several other cases involving school vouchers to the circuit courts for reconsideration in light of its decision, perhaps intimating that the case may have more precedential weight than is suggested by the footnote. Interestingly enough, the placement of this scope limiter in a footnote may itself be a sign of its importance. The initial draft circulated by Chief Justice Roberts probably did not contain this footnote, but rather similar language in the body of the opinion. Its segregation from that opinion into a footnote probably gave the justices who would not sign on to that language a simple way of expressing their disagreement.

Second, the role of “animus” analysis in these cases is still unclear. Missouri’s constitutional provision was passed at about the time of the failure of the notorious federal “Blaine Amendment,” named after Sen. James G. Blaine of Maine. As Philip Hamburger has noted on firstthings.com, the federal amendment and its state analogues, which prohibited the disbursement of any public funds to “sectarian” or “pervasively sectarian” schools, were motivated in large part by hatred and suspicion of Catholics and their schools. There is scholarly disagreement about whether Missouri’s constitutional provision is part of this history: Its exclusion of churches reflects a policy that was adopted some decades before the Blaine Amendment controversies of the 1870s. Yet it seems highly artificial and historically obtuse to isolate this provision from the more general liberal theological anxieties and suspicions that attended these laws in the late nineteenth century. It certainly illustrates that those who rely on arguments about animus have powerful motives to control the terms of the debate—to prescribe exactly which groups and evidence count, and for how long the stain of hatred lasts. At any rate, the Court, probably prudently, did not mention any of this history in Trinity Lutheran Church, and it remains to be seen whether it will affect similar cases.

Animus was also in the background of another season thriller. The challengers in Trump v. International Refugee Assistance Project and Trump v. Hawaii sought to block enforcement of an executive order imposing temporary immigration restrictions on would-be entrants from six majority-Muslim countries. Soon after the order was issued, federal district courts in Maryland and Hawaii granted sweeping injunctions preventing its enforcement against anyone anywhere, and the Fourth and Ninth Circuits upheld these orders. The Supreme Court granted a partial stay of the lower courts’ overbroad injunctions, accepted the cases for full review, and set them for argument in October 2017.

The justices were unanimous with respect to most of the outcomes in the consolidated Trump v. IRAP cases. All nine justices supported a significant rollback of the lower courts’ injunctions. The order may now be enforced against everyone it covers except “foreign nationals who have a credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.” Questions about precisely who fits that description have unsurprisingly given rise to immediate litigation. But whatever the contours of the stay, the injunctions now cover a fraction of total potential entrants. In a partial concurrence and dissent, Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Alito and Justice Gorsuch, would have gone further and stayed the injunctions in their entirety.

The unsigned per curiam opinion for the Court in Trump v. IRAP is most notable for what it does not say. The opinion is silent about the administration’s likelihood of success on the merits—that is, whether the administration is ultimately likely to prevail after full review—the lead element under the test for a stay. Justice Thomas’s separate opinion interpreted this silence as tantamount to “the Court’s implicit conclusion that the Government has made a strong showing that it is likely to succeed on the merits.” But sometimes silence is just silence. The justices likely disagreed about the merits, including a set of controversial issues that made no appearance in the per curiam opinion: Donald Trump’s statements about Islam and Muslims as candidate and as president. Was the executive order a “Muslim ban” infected by unconstitutional animus? The challengers relied on statements by candidate Trump, President Trump, and others associated, sometimes only very loosely, with the campaign and administration. The Supreme Court said nothing about them.

Will the challengers or the administration prevail? We may never know. The executive order set temporary rules that are likely to run out before the Supreme Court decides. If so, the expiration of the order will “moot” the challenges, which is lawyer-speak for rendering their legality no longer susceptible of judicial resolution. The Supreme Court would then have acted deftly, absorbing the order and the challenges to it, lowering the temperature, stretching things out, and providing some relief while upholding those parts of the order most plausibly related to the safety of American citizens. Of course, the president may extend or renew the order, effectively compelling the Court to take the case up again.

Safety of a different sort is at the center of one of the potentially most significant cases to be decided next term: the security of politicians in districts that have been gerrymandered on partisan lines to be safely Republican or Democratic.

The case of Gill v. Whitford is a reprise of issues last addressed by the Supreme Court in the 2003 case of Vieth v. Jubelirer. The claim there was that Pennsylvania legislators had impermissibly configured their election districts to advance partisan interests excessively. The Court in Vieth fragmented into a 4–1–4 configuration. Writing for a four-justice plurality, Justice Scalia held that partisan gerrymandering presented a nonjusticiable “political question”: Once one acknowledged that some partisanship is permissible in drawing districts, how much partisanship is too much? The lack of judicially manageable standards for answering that question, wrote Justice Scalia, required dismissal. Four dissenting justices contended that judicially manageable standards did exist, but they could not agree on what those standards were. That left Justice Kennedy, who was unwilling to accept that there are issues he should not resolve. He joined in the disposition of dismissal and agreed that the case was nonjusticiable. But he refused to declare political gerrymandering claims categorically nonjusticiable. Although no judicially manageable standards for these claims had yet emerged, he held out hope that perhaps they might in the future. 

Fast-forward fourteen years. A divided three-judge appellate court found a partisan gerrymandering challenge to Wisconsin’s legislative districting plan to be justiciable, held the statewide plan unconstitutional, and ordered a new plan. Lawyers for the state obtained a Supreme Court stay of this ruling (over the objections of Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan), and the Supreme Court will hear Wisconsin’s appeal at the beginning of the October 2017 term. As always, all eyes will be on Justice Kennedy.

Justice Kennedy will also be the center of attention in Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the Christian cake baker case. As a legal matter, the case involves not only the scope of federal constitutional protection for the free exercise of religion and against compelled expression, but also the distinction between a conjugal understanding of marriage and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Just below the surface are questions about the government’s authority to coerce people not to hurt others’ feelings, the tolerable scope of moral disagreement in a free society, and the distinction (as in both Packingham and Trinity Lutheran) between status and conduct.

The events at issue in Masterpiece Cakeshop took place in 2012—one year before the Supreme Court held the federal Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional in United States v. Windsor, and three years before it created a constitutional right to same-sex marriage in Obergefell—at a time when Colorado law still required a husband and a wife for marriage. Charlie Craig and David Mullins planned to get married in Massachusetts and then celebrate with a wedding reception in Colorado. They went to Jake Phillips at his Masterpiece Cakeshop business and asked him to design and create a custom wedding cake for their celebration. Phillips politely declined, which led to a complaint of sexual orientation discrimination. The Colorado Civil Rights Commission adjudged Phillips a lawbreaker and ordered Masterpiece to comply with the law and bake the cake.

Backers of the baker had been bracing for disappointment for several weeks before the Court granted review because the chance to act on the petition came and went many times. But the addition of native Coloradan Neil Gorsuch apparently provided the needed vote to hear the case.

The briefing aside, Masterpiece Cakeshop is best conceived as concerning the scope of Obergefell rather than free speech or religious free exercise. The center of the Court on the questions presented is Justice Kennedy, and his self-conception is likely to drive the outcome. Justice Kennedy is sometimes susceptible to arguments for free speech limits on government power. There is, of course, a more direct argument in Masterpiece Cakeshop’s favor: that politely declining to design and bake a custom cake because one adheres to the conjugal understanding of marriage is not discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The Supreme Court typically does not decide state law questions like that, but might in this case because the Colorado court relied on what it believed Supreme Court precedent required in rejecting the cake artist’s key argument on this state law question. And determining the meaning of its own precedent is obviously within the Supreme Court’s domain.

If the Court follows the parties’ lead, though, it will focus on the Colorado appellate court’s view of the relationship between First Amendment freedom and the right to same-sex marriage decreed in Obergefell. In holding that Phillips’s refusal violated state antidiscrimination law, the Colorado court wrote: “Masterpiece admits that its decision to refuse Craig’s and Mullins’ requested wedding cake was because of its opposition to same-sex marriage which, based on Supreme Court precedent, we conclude is tantamount to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.” The Colorado court therefore ruled as categorically illicit the view of marriage described by Justice Kennedy himself in Obergefell as one that “has been held—and continues to be held—in good faith by reasonable and sincere people here and throughout the world.” Although this incompatibility seems to cut in favor of the cake artist, experience suggests it would be a mistake to rule out the possibility of a majority opinion in Masterpiece Cakeshop authored by Justice Kennedy about the logical and spiritual imperatives of extending Obergefell’s legacy. Of all the cases on the Supreme Court’s docket next term, this one has the greatest blockbuster potential.

In fact, Masterpiece Cakeshop is less a sequel to Obergefell than an aftershock. For a blockbuster is not just a TV and film sensation. It is also—and originally—a bomb powerful enough to destroy a neighborhood block. Blockbusters wipe out the existing habitations of civilization so that new structures can replace them. And, as in much home building today, the new construction’s obsolescence begins the moment it is finished. Impermanence is part of its design, a planned feature, the better to stimulate the urge to blow it up in its turn. It is built not to last.

To say that a blockbuster decision is destructive is not to say that it is extreme or unexpected. To the contrary, the blockbuster has become a critical moment in the Court’s ordinary time, the passing over of which generates howls of protest that the Court has shockingly regressed or even abdicated its office. The weeks of late June have become the Court’s most avidly anticipated, when each year it issues its exalted mandates of creative destruction.

True, some justices do not share in these enthusiasms. In his Obergefell dissent, Justice Alito wrote that the majority’s opinion “evidences . . . the deep and perhaps irremediable corruption of our legal culture’s conception of constitutional interpretation.” Deep and perhaps irremediable corruption. The phrase suggests not merely that the justice disagrees with the outcome, but that Obergefell is simply the latest symptom in a persistent and possibly terminal sickness in constitutional adjudication. But what, exactly, is the disease, the rot, the “corruption”?

It is the unslakable thirst to see the Court break things, upend existing arrangements, upset the patterns and traditions of law and life that offer some stability and solace to the people who rely on them, and to do it over and over again in each new constitutional season. This has been the Court’s most prominent mission for at least half a century. This is constitutional law today: the relentless smashing and remaking of rights to match the Court’s advancing conception of American identity. And it seems to be the lasting temptation of perennially disillusioned court watchers to hope against hope that changes in personnel—the arrival of Neil Gorsuch! The departure of Anthony Kennedy!—will at last cure that chronic illness. This time, they intone term after term, surely it will be different.

Judged by what Michael Paulsen described in this journal three years ago as the “low standards of the desperate,” the 2016–2017 term was by turns inoffensive and disappointing, but not devastating. It was a less corrupt term. And yet as soon as the season ended, reviewers were already salivating over the potentially world-shattering cases on the upcoming docket. There’s always next year. 

Marc O. DeGirolami is professor of law and associate director of the Center for Law and Religion at St. John’s University. Kevin C. Walsh is professor of law at the University of Richmond.

The post A Less Corrupt Term appeared first on First Things.

Thesis 1: The fundamental academic task is no different for the theologian than for anyone else. It is to learn to love God with the mind, as Jesus teaches us. Or, as a well-known hymn puts it:

Have you not bid me love you,
God and King;
All, all your own, soul, heart, and
strength, and mind?
I see your cross; there teach my
heart to cling.
Oh, let me seek you and, oh, let
me find.

This is not always easy—especially for academicians too readily tempted to assert themselves under the guise of scholarship and pedagogy. But God claims our minds as his own, and to offer them back is our reasonable service.

Thesis 2: The point of loving God with the mind is not only to seek but also to find. “Oh, let me seek you and, oh, let me find.” Or as G. K. Chesterton put it: “The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.” A certain simplicity of mind remains necessary for the theologian, however learned he or she may become. And our greatest danger is that, constantly immersed in analysis and evaluation, we may lose that simplicity. We may forget, as C. S. Lewis said, that “to see through all things is the same as not to see.”

Thesis 3: Loving God with the mind calls, therefore, for the virtue of humility, a much misunderstood virtue. For humility is not shown simply in an endless search for truth. It also instills in us a willingness to find that truth—or, perhaps better, to be found and taught by it. To seek is dangerous unless we truly desire to find. After all, the day may come when we are found—when a powerful hand takes us by the shoulder and an authoritative voice invites us to look, to see, and to know.

Thesis 4: Attaining the simplicity of mind that is eager not only to find but also to be found does not mean to think uncritically. We do not have to teach for very long before we realize that no paper is easier to write than one that offers negative criticism of someone else’s argument. Indeed, if with no further instruction I assign a “critical” paper, students are likely to assume that they must find fault. The true critical task for theology, as for all academic work, is both more difficult and more instructive. It is to explore and unfold the meaning and significance of our subject matter, whatever it may be. For the theologian, this means an attempt to understand and make sense of what the Church has affirmed, and what it has debated, over the centuries. In service of that task, all our powers of critical intellect will be needed, and we must learn to disagree without scorn.

Thesis 5: Not only is this harder than mere negative critique; in the long run it is more interesting as well. “It is,” Dorothy L. Sayers once wrote, “the dogma that is the drama . . . the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realize that here is something that a man might be glad to believe.” Not to explore the dogma is to cut off both our students and ourselves from one of life’s great pleasures.

Thesis 6: To close the mind on something solid, to seek to enter critically into the Christian web of belief, will mean learning not only from our contemporaries but also from teachers of the Church who have preceded us—Irenaeus, Augustine, Teresa of Avila, Wesley, Edwards. They did not think in terms already familiar to us, and their assumptions may not be our own. They represent the Church’s true cultural diversity.

Thesis 7: To love God with the mind in this way calls not only for humility but at least as much for the virtue of patience. To learn to say, “I don’t know.” To learn that the Church can and will carry on even if I never get entirely clear on how the external works of the Trinity are indivisible. Gradually to learn to offer God the whole of my intellect with all its powers, yet not to suppose that the Church is built upon that intellect. This demands a patience for which we ought daily to pray. Barth’s Church Dogmatics is unfinished. St. Thomas’s Summa Theologiae is unfinished—in his case, at least according to the accounts, by choice. For having had a mystical vision, Thomas declared that, compared with what he had seen, all he had written was straw. And he stopped. It is important to remember that he stopped. It is just as important to remember that he wrote a good bit before he stopped.

Thesis 8: If and when theologians in the academy attempt all this, they can and should do no more. It is not our task to overcome the naivete of our students—which naivete may, after all, be that simplicity we should all seek. Nor is it our task to make believers of our students—as if the Holy Spirit had relinquished that responsibility.

Thesis 9: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said ‘Repent,’ he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.” Those are, of course, the words of the first of Luther’s ninety-five theses. In their original setting they had special relevance to the controversy over indulgences, but they enunciate a more general truth about the Christian life. There is no way to offer up our weak attempts to be true academicians except within a life that is fundamentally one of confession and repentance—a life that is a continual return to our baptism. In that baptism, the sign of the cross was placed not only on our hearts but also on our minds, which minds we now seek to offer back to Jesus’s Father and our Father.

Thesis 9.5: As C. S. Lewis once wrote: “One is sometimes (not often) glad not to be a great theologian; one might so easily mistake it for being a good Christian.”

Gilbert Meilaender is Senior Research Professor at Valparaiso University and a fellow of the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture.

The post 9.5 Theses appeared first on First Things.

If it is always and everywhere difficult for human beings to hold in their minds seemingly contradictory tenets of Christianity, Silence makes the task feel impossible. Mercy is pitted against truth, love of neighbor against allegiance to God. Following the release of the film, the debate stirred up by the book was reignited, fueled by competing clues: For example, in both the book and the film, Ferreira’s appeals to Rodrigues to apostatize are rhetorically persuasive, but when Rodrigues actually steps on Christ’s face, a cock crows. The Jesuit Fr. James Martin, a consultant on the film, argued in America that in circumstances like these, well-formed, prayerful Jesuits might legitimately deny Christ. Other Catholic critics lamented Silence’s implications, appealing to centuries of church teaching and the eternal validity of Christianity’s truth claims.

On one point, at least, critics would probably have agreed. In a time and place unsurpassed in the history of the Church for the ingenious ferocity of the tortures that were visited upon Christians, Inoue’s psychological stratagem deserves an eminence of its own. How diabolically perverse must the mind of that Japanese magistrate have been to have dreamt up such a devastating turn of the screw, one that carves up the good and pits love against love—!

Turning to the historical record, however, one discovers that the real story unfolded differently. Inoue was a real magistrate who brutally persecuted the Church, and Ferreira was a real priest who apostatized at his hands. The character of Rodrigues is based on another real Jesuit named Chiara, who, hoping to make amends for Ferreira, entered Japan as part of a group of ten, all of whom were captured and all of whom eventually apostatized. But the truth about Ferreira’s and Chiara’s actual apostasy is straightforward. They were tortured, and they broke. They denied Christ not because of a manipulated, unbearable pity for the sufferings of others, but because of their own unbearable suffering.

What this means is that the deeply disturbing, polarizing drama at the heart of Silence is an anachronism. It is a projection of the modern mind, a hallucination of an anxious, confused, and codependent imagination. It is a story dreamed up by Endō himself, a troubled twentieth-century Catholic, which attracted the attention of Martin Scorsese, another troubled, long-lapsed cradle Catholic.

Not coincidentally, Silence was published in the same year (1966) that so-called Death of God theology made its Time magazine debut, a theology eloquently summarized in these pages by Matthew Rose last year (“Death of God Fifty Years On,” August 2016). Anyone interested in the Silence controversies who reads Endō’s novel and Rose’s essay side by side will understand that when Endō’s Ferreira says to Rodrigues, “You are now going to perform the most painful act of love that has ever been performed,” and “Certainly Christ would have apostatized for them,” he is speaking not the language of seventeenth-century Jesuits, but the language of Thomas Altizer and William Hamilton, twentieth-century Death of God theologians who believed that not only Christ but Christianity must die, that it is not finally Christian to be Christian, and that in the name of Christian charity, Christians must reject Christian truths.

In other words, if Endō sometimes defended his book by protesting that he wasn’t writing theology, he wasn’t writing history, either. The real Ferreira was not a Death of God theologian, and the real Inoue, a man of seventeenth-century Japan, would never have employed the strategy Endō attributed to him. Why not? Because it would not have occurred to him that it would have worked. A lot has happened in three hundred years. As secularization has advanced and man has had to learn to live without God, his solution for the most part has been to draw closer to other people, in unprecedented, ultimately untenable ways.

In 1937, in Germany, near the end of a vanishing age, Romano Guardini wrote in The Lord:

Man’s desire to share in the life and the destiny of another certainly exists, but even the profoundest union stops short at one barrier: the fact that I am I and he is he. Love knows that complete union, complete exchange is impossible—cannot even be seriously hoped for. The human ‘we’ capable of breaking the bonds of the ego simply does not exist. . . . My every act begins in me, who am alone responsible for it.

Guardini goes on to describe the economy of the Triune God, and the way the Holy Spirit, mediating the relationship of the Father and the Son, makes possible a life characterized by both individuality and union. Only by the mediation of the same Spirit, he argues, can man’s longings for selfhood and intimacy be realized. Only with the help of God’s Spirit can his needs for both autonomy and community be met.

There is wonderful writing in the late chapters of The Lord, and wisdom for the ages, but by asserting as a given that, apart from God’s Spirit, man’s intractable separateness can never be overcome, Guardini failed to anticipate all the ways man would attempt to overcome it nevertheless. He failed to imagine the astonishing lengths to which man would go, and all the means he would employ—political, ideological, juridical, surgical—to try to break the barriers that separate him from other people, and to achieve, apart from God’s Spirit, the happiness for which he was created.

Already in the 1930s, at the same time that Guardini was writing The Lord, a young couple in America began testing the boundaries Guardini assumed were inviolable. Sheldon Vanauken and Jean (“Davy”) Davis, two self-proclaimed pagans, fell in love, and with an eye to preserving their love, agreed to reject everything that might separate them. Everything had to be shared: books and music, spur-of-the-moment impulses and long-term dreams. Because pregnancy and childbirth were exclusively female tasks, they ruled out children; Vanauken made every effort to think like a woman and Davy like a man; and against the threat of death, they made a suicide pact. Around the sanctuary of their co-inhering, gender-fluid love, they raised what they called the Shining Barrier, which held for a time but was eventually breached by God himself. His entrance into their lives did indeed bring about differentiation and separation, even to the death of the young wife and a prolonged reassessment of their relationship by the bereaved husband—a “severe mercy” in the words of C. S. Lewis, who was instrumental in the couple’s conversion to Christianity.

A Severe Mercy, Vanauken’s memoir, is a valuable book, because it articulates so clearly an impulse that is bearing such strange fruit in our time. Transgender experiments are only the tip of an iceberg. Underlying them is a widespread, largely unexamined assumption that has been gathering strength for some time: a conviction that we should be experiencing the feelings of others (which in practice turns out to mean their sufferings rather than their joys) as if they were our own, that this exercise is now morally obligatory.

In a world without God, the new commandment of empathy might have been foreseen. Once God has been pronounced dead and the loyalty we owe him void, the question of what we owe to others and what we can expect from them becomes urgent. Unable to locate our life’s meaning in God and his eternity, we seek it in our relationships with other people. This is the eventuality the Death of God theologians anticipated: a horizontal, desacralized world that has broken down every barrier to inclusion, a world in which, undistracted by an outgrown God, we can finally give our full attention to one another.

Empathy, in this secular kingdom, does not mean simple kindness, consideration, or compassion. It means actually feeling what you believe someone else is feeling at any given moment. If I am sorry that you are suffering, I am compassionate, but if I am suffering what you are suffering, I am empathic, which means that presidential candidate Bill Clinton got empathy exactly right when, in a crystalizing moment at a 1992 fundraiser in New York City, he said to AIDS activist Bob Rafsky, “I feel your pain.”

Many of us in the larger audience laughed at Clinton’s assertion at the time, but the joke turns out to have been on us. For many years now, we have been living in what Frans de Waal called an age of empathy, an age not of reason but of overflowing emotion, as if the sea, that great universal symbol of ungoverned passion and seething affective life, had burst the bounds God laid down for it in the beginning (“so far and no further”) and covered the whole earth with its waves.

In our neurological arsenal, scientists now tell us, we have neurons called “mirror neurons” that do not distinguish between the self and others. They tell us, too, that an empathic response to another person’s pain can involve the same brain tissue that is activated when we ourselves feel the same pain. Moreover, while some people are naturally more empathic than others (women, for example, tend to be more empathic than men), with practice, or “empathy training,” everyone can improve. By deliberately and habitually dwelling on the sufferings of others, as the empathy commandment, sensational media, and a culture of victimhood encourage us to do (contemporary versions of Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, which required traditional Jesuits to dwell on the sufferings of Christ), everybody can enlarge their empathic capacities. Indeed, given a choice between reason and emotion, or sense and sensibility, as a culture we incline to emotion and sensibility more and more, and we are proud of our choice, as if it were evidence of our evolving humanity.

But is it? What have been the real consequences of our unprecedented emotional spending? What have we purchased by it, and have there been hidden costs for what Buddhism calls “sentimental compassion” and psychology “unmitigated communion”?

Sadly, it turns out to be an exhausting, counterproductive business, this business of trying to participate in the sufferings of other people. In his recent book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, Yale psychologist Paul Bloom summarizes the experimental evidence and concludes that empathy, strictly defined, “[corrodes] personal relationships; it exhausts the spirit and can diminish the force of kindness and love.” Far from being kinder and more supportive of others, overly empathic individuals are so overwhelmed by the sufferings of others that they are finally helpless to help them, and may even actively avoid them. Nursing students, for example, whose empathy scores were high spent more time seeking support for themselves than caring for their patients. Bloom’s book is full of examples of people suffering from what he calls “empathic distress,” not only in the helping professions but in relationships in general.

Part of the problem with empathy is that it is so vulnerable to manipulation. If empathy means feeling what you believe someone else is feeling at a given time, then not only the psychopath but any especially needy or unscrupulous individual will enjoy an advantage in an empathy-driven world. Empathic individuals are imaginative individuals, easily persuaded that the sufferings of others are worse than they are. (Who would know?) In The Great Divorce, in an imagined posthumous encounter between an emotionally manipulative husband and his long-suffering wife, C. S. Lewis distinguishes between a proportionate, constructive pity and a pity that we merely suffer, a Passion (Lewis’s word) that Endō all but divinizes in Silence, but one that impairs our judgment and destroys our peace, and may persuade us to concede what we would not otherwise concede.

Consider, too, Adam Smith’s mournful observation that “Nature, it seems, when she loaded us with our own sorrows, thought that they were enough, and therefore did not command us to take any further share in those of others, than what was necessary to prompt us to relieve them.” Is it reasonable, or wise, to expect people to bear other people’s sufferings? Is it a coincidence that in a world that has made a fetish of vicarious suffering, suffering itself—real suffering—has become taboo?

Today, even the Church is increasingly fearful of inflicting pain: afraid of exercising appropriate authority or disciplining her members, afraid of telling them hard truths. In the home, likewise, parents are overly protective and anxious, ineffectual and unsure. They shrink not just from disciplining their children but even, in some cases, from bringing them into the world. In her introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann, Flannery O’Connor warned that, in an age of unbelief, we govern by a tenderness that, long since cut off from the person of Christ, ends in terror. Abortion, opioid addiction, assisted suicide, euthanasia: Can we agree that this is not the brave new world the Death of God theologians promised us, but a new kind of hell, with new kinds of suffering in it?

In the same introduction in which she calls our secular tenderness into question, O’Connor argues that a gain in sensibility and a loss of vision go hand in hand. “If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith.” They saw, in other words, all the way to the telos, the end for which man is made, in light of which the sufferings of the present time are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed to us (Rom. 8:18).

This ability to take the long view, this far-seeing eye that fills the whole body with light, is a distinguishing mark of the saint. The saint is not empathic; he is charitable, which means that he always wills the ultimate good of his neighbor. Because the saint’s emotions are ordered to faith and to reason, he is neither particularly manipulable nor unduly afraid of suffering, his own or anyone else’s. The mother in Maccabees, for example, in the second century B.C., urges her sons in her presence to suffer and die for the truth. In 1619, in Kyoto, Japan, tens of thousands of native Christians accompany and encourage fifty-two of their own as they are slowly burned alive for their faith, among them small children in their mothers’ arms, the mothers crying out, “Jesus, receive their souls!” More recently, in 1940 in Germany, the Polish priest Maximilian Kolbe refuses an offer of German citizenship from the Gestapo, even though acceptance of the offer would have saved the lives of his brother priests as well as his own. In his refusal to save either himself or his spiritual family (a refusal that does not seem to have been for him a “terrible dilemma” or an “impossible choice,” words Fr. Martin uses to describe Rodrigues’s dilemma in Silence), Kolbe resembles Christ himself, who accepted not only his own Calvary but the Calvary of all his disciples, all those who would suffer and die for him down through the ages.

Solidarity in suffering is a keynote of the Body of Christ, but it is a solidarity constituted by singular individuals, whose unity derives from each one’s primary allegiance to Christ. Empathy solidarity, on the other hand, is Christian solidarity’s demonic counterfeit, one that carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction. If the Holy Spirit strengthens both individuals and the ties that bind them, empathy weakens them. Excessive, unmediated intimacy leads to affective confusion (whose suffering is whose?), and even to confusion about identity and agency (whose choices are whose?). In a world of porous boundaries and blended identities—think of Dante’s thieves in hell, bleeding into each other—Guardini’s confident assertion “my every act begins in me, who am alone responsible for it” is cast into doubt. Modernity suffers not only from Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence (an oedipal fear of being influenced by one’s forebears), but also from what we might call an anxiety of influencing others, a disabling fear of being responsible for others’ choices.

Again, Silence holds up a mirror to modernity. Repeatedly, in the novel and the film, characters give voice to a fear that Japanese Christians are suffering and dying for their priests. (“Look! Look! For you blood is flowing . . .”) The despondent Rodrigues concludes that “he had come to [Japan] to lay down his life for other men, but instead of that the Japanese were laying down their lives one by one for him.” Where is God in this sentence? Where is the truth that, convinced by God’s Spirit, seventeenth-century Japanese by the thousands suffered and died of their own free will for the God whom they refused to betray?

Christianity is not a cult. Its stated goal is not to control others but to set them free, even from the person evangelizing them. In a letter to Vanauken, Lewis compares the disproportion between an evangelist’s influence and its sometimes outsized effects with the disproportion between a boy’s puny finger on a trigger and the thunder and lightning that follow. Christianity’s ideal method is to preach to others a word that has the power to put them in touch with the Source. Its goal is to introduce others to the God who alone has the power to confer identity and individuality on human beings.

Our age’s obsession with individuality is expressive of a crisis of individuality; it is symptomatic of a deficit rather than a surfeit. People today are no more selfish or egotistical than previous generations; rather, their selfhood is more genuinely imperiled. Unacquainted with the Holy Spirit, which introduces into human relationships the same kind of spacious, identity-enhancing intimacy that characterizes the Trinity itself, and far from the Church, whose sacraments, the Eucharist especially, “[enable] us to break our disordered attachments to creatures and root ourselves in [Christ],” too many people fall into binary, diminishing relationships; thievish relationships in which, in Guardini’s words, “always the one must live at the cost of the other”; mutually destructive relationships from which people eventually withdraw in dismay.

Put another way, in a world without God, man attributes too much agency to himself. This may exhilarate him for a time, but in the end, he cannot bear so much responsibility. There is a reaction, and, across the culture, a collective retreat, as unprecedented numbers of people lick their wounds in solitude, or seek comfort in drugs, legal or illegal, or in pornography, or in the soothing, impersonal ministrations of electronic devices.

This is not a world in which Christianity can flourish. Christianity, to be passed on, depends upon strong individuals, people who know where they end and others begin. It depends upon people who understand both their natural limits and their supernatural potential—secure individuals, who are unafraid either of proposing strong truths or of entertaining challenging proposals from others.

In the swamp of modernity, these conditions no longer obtain. In Silence, Inoue calls Japan a swamp in which Christianity cannot take root, but in fact it did take root in the seventeenth century, surviving underground for generations. Modernity is the real mud in which Christianity struggles to find a footing. Christianity, after all, can only take root in individuals, and in our day, bona fide individuals are in short supply. In a world of recovering codependents, God’s word is still reverberating, but man is too timorous to repeat it. He is too fragile and insecure, too existentially touchy and emotionally raw. Suspicious of others’ influence and terrified of exercising his own, frightened of suffering himself but even more unnerved by the thought of others suffering—how can such a person receive Christ or offer him to others, when either to receive or propose Christ is always, at the same time, to receive and propose his cross? In a suffering-averse world, handing on the Gospel is almost impossible. In the culture of the modern West, it is not God’s silence that should trouble us, but our own.

Meanwhile, in a world in which even our present pontiff has compared Christian evangelization to jihad, another kind of proselytism continues unabated, one that has no anxiety at all about influencing others. This is the kind of proselytism brought to bear on Rodrigues: the insidious, relentless pressure on the Christian to deny Christ.

Like Satan himself, Ferreira wants Rodrigues to apostatize to justify his own apostasy. So, at a remove, do Endō and Scorsese. Inoue, too, a former convert to Christianity who abandoned the faith, has skin in this game, as do the film’s liberal admirers, many of whom have made their own compromises with orthodoxy. Even the native Christians suffering in the pit belong to this company, because in Endō’s fiction they, too, have apostatized and are being tortured anyway, in an effort to persuade Rodrigues to fold. The deck, in other words, has been stacked in every possible way. If modernity has been called rationalized sexual sin, how much more is it rationalized apostasy.

What is most subversive about Silence is that it recruits Christ himself to this team. (“Certainly Christ would have apostatized for them.”) The same double-talk that we are accustomed to hearing from Death of God theologians (to fulfill itself, Christianity must deny itself), and from advocates of assisted suicide (your dignity demands the right to destroy your own dignity), Endō places in Christ’s mouth, as the image of Christ (the fumie) on which Rodrigues is being pressured to step speaks to him: “Trample! Trample! . . . It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world.” By this device, Endō turns Rodrigues’s denial of Christ into obedience to Christ, and the Christian God into something like the arbitrary, self-contradictory deity of Islam.

In his article in America, Fr. Martin takes this scene at face value. He does not specify that it is Endō’s imaginary Christ who tells Rodrigues to trample. Instead, he treats Endō’s fiction as a private revelation, one with the same status and authority as sacred Scripture. He says flatly, “This is what Christ asked [Rodrigues] to do in prayer”; and “Confusing as it seems to some Christian viewers, Christ requests this contradictory act from his priest”; and (betraying a little impatience?) “There is nothing subtle here: [Rodrigues] apostatizes, finally, because Christ asks him to.” There is no mention by Martin of Christianity’s long tradition of discerning spirits, no mention of the myriad occasions in the lives of the saints when a demon shows up disguised as an angel of light, or even as Christ himself. If in Eden the excuse was “The devil made me do it,” in Silence the excuse is “Jesus made me do it,” a rationalization that gives new meaning to the word Antichrist.

As promised, there are many Antichrists abroad in our day, of which Endō’s fictional deus ex fumie is just one small, particularly brazen example. In an age of empathy, the more pedestrian temptation is to become faux Christs ourselves, false messiahs who promise more than we can deliver.

Thinking along these lines, we can understand, finally, why empathy is preoccupied with the sufferings of other people, rather than with their joys. In the spiritual economy of modernity, the place that remains vacant is the place that belongs by right to Christ alone: “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.” Our culturally sanctioned practice of empathy is an attempt to fill Christ’s shoes; it is a reiteration of the sin of Eden in a fresh guise. In place of Christ’s fearless, definitive Passion, we offer others our problematic, uneasy pity, a passion from which no one rises incorrupt.

Follow the conversation on this article in the Letters section of our December 2017 issue.

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