James

Ten thoughts on Percival Everett’s James; spoilers abound:

1. It’s a compulsive read. I finished it in a day. Everett’s prose is supple without being simple. And he lives up to his reputation: bitterly funny and brutally direct, often one when you expect the other. His racial politics are likewise unpredictable, incisive, and reliably scrambled—that is to say, they scramble the reader’s priors.

2. The worst version of this book would have been a Mark Twain “own”: a simplistic takedown of a “problematic” American classic. Everett doesn’t take the bait. His affection for Twain is palpable. There’s nothing “corrective” on offer here. Which doesn’t mean there’s nothing elaborated, investigated, or interrogated. (Joel Rhone’s is my favorite essay on the novel so far.) In fact, for good or ill, Everett extends or completes the Twainian ethos that, perhaps, Twain elected, or felt compelled, to mute. For example, Twain’s book remains thematically Christian in ways Twain abjured in his own life; Everett eliminates all traces of this, about which I’ll say more below.

3. The second worst version of this book would have been a Huck Finn “own”: not a rebuke of Twain but of the indelible little boy he created. In this case, the trick would be, not to reveal Huck as problematic, but to make him so. Once again, no dice. Everett clearly loves Huck and draws his friendship with Jim with affection and care, deepening a relationship we thought we knew: no longer merely friends—who are, of necessity, equals (I take this to be Twain’s first aim and lasting achievement)—but father and son. This change functions to undermine Huck’s priority in Twain’s tale, a fundamental problem given that Jim is a grown man and Huck is a boy.

4. The paternity twist is clever without being cute for many reasons. At the level of the text, it enables a subtext that Twain never countenanced in the original. It offers an emotionally authentic explanation of why Huck’s dad hates him so much. And it explains Jim’s special bond with Huck, both in Everett and in Twain. Beyond these, it entwines the bloodlines of two of the most famous characters in American literature. In Albert Murray’s words, it makes “omni-Americans” of Huck and Jim both. Huck in particular has a white mother and a black father; in other words, the prototypical good-hearted Southern white boy is now, by the retroactive power of the written word, biracial.

In any other hands, this idea would have been cloying or overwrought. In Everett’s hands, it’s deftly hinted at and masterfully revealed at just the right moment. It forces Huck to face questions of identity and maturity from which Twain protects him, as Wendell Berry once observed; Huck’s transformation in Twain is morally profound, but he never grows up. By the end of Everett’s novel, by contrast, he’s ready to.

5. Now to Jim himself. Even calling him by that name feels like a choice, but I think it’s the right one, since “James” is a name he achieves in and through the narrative, and he does not definitively name himself by it until the final sentence. The power of language and especially of naming is the thematic thread of Everett’s whole novel. With great cost, Jim pockets a small pencil and carries it with him throughout his odyssey, up to and beyond his reunion with his wife and daughter. Having earlier noted a narrative “as related” by a slave, Jim ruminates on telling his own story himself. The implication is that what we’re reading is what he’s written.

6. I was surprised that Everett chose to depart from so much of the narrative spine of Twain’s original. The opening third (maybe half) is Rashomon-like, but from then on there’s not even an attempt to make it “line up” with the Urtext; it’s simply Jim’s story, as written by him, an author rendering himself (his name) on the page.

I wondered more than once whether we are meant to suppose that Huck’s tale is the fiction, filled with some “stretchers”; or whether Jim’s is a kind of private fantasy, an escape from his life on the lam, or perhaps behind bars—a life-saving fiction enabled by the word. I even wondered whether the middle third of the book, or alternatively the final 10-20 pages, were a dream: after all, Jim’s dreams are regular features of the novel; the fiery coda to the story is abrupt and ecstatically triumphant; and the tree under which Jim first dreams on the island, after having been bitten by a snake, is the tree under which he awakes on the same island just before the climactic action occurs. There’s a there there, I’m convinced, but I’m not yet certain what I think it is.

7. I’ve not yet mentioned the brilliant conceit at the heart of the novel, namely the code-switching from slave dialect (in front of white people) to standard English (when whites are absent). Nothing to say here except that, in the hands of a lesser novelist, it would be painful to read, at best imperfectly executed; here, it is brilliant and effective. The trap doors are everywhere, and Everett doesn’t fall into any of them.

8. Except one. The only thing I disliked, even hated, was Everett’s decision—loudly made and consistently upheld—to rob his black characters of all faith, religiosity, and superstition. Every black character knows Christianity is false; superstition is a show for the white man; and atheism is the universal default setting, with one or two characters vaguely allowing that maybe something numinous is real.

To state my criticism as bluntly as I can, this is a failure of imagination on Everett’s part. The problem is not that the decision is ahistorical and anachronistic, though it is. It serves no purpose, unlike the linguistic code-switching. It flattens each and every black character into a single non-religious shape. Why? To what end? Sure, make some characters skeptical of the white man’s religion, of the white gospel or the white church or the white god; but what narrative or philosophical purpose is served by evacuating any and all religiosity as such from the inner lives of black slaves in the antebellum South?

As I read the novel, this felt like Everett projecting himself onto his characters—not just Jim but all of them. Making them all the same instead of vibrantly different is a very strange move, in my view. Moreover, the implication is both absurd and insulting. Am I really meant to nod along, as if it were simply and self-evidently true that black American religiosity in toto, Christian faith most of all, has been one great deception from the beginning—a trick pulled by white Americans on Africans too gullible to know better? Give me a break. Granted: I can imagine a book that does the heavy lifting to try to justify such a claim. James, unfortunately, is not that book.

9. A second shortcoming was the ending. I was caught off guard, underwhelmed, and, finally, unpersuaded. In just eight pages Jim finds an unknown plantation, discovers male slaves without being detected, sets them free, rallies them to his cause, finds the female slaves, including his wife and daughter, then sets fire to the fields, liberates all those held in bondage, shoots the master through the heart, and escapes north with his (apparently unharmed) family. Come again?

Sure, send Jim—James!—off into a sort of sunset, however qualified by the horrors of his time and place. But as a literary matter, the finale is rushed and unbelievable, with James himself as the deus ex machina. Oh well.

10. Best not to leave it there though. Everett’s other brilliant conceit is a character named Norman. Norman is a black member of a minstrel troupe who passes as white, including to Jim. (More than once Jim wonders if Norman is playing him. The self-doubt in his mind is a welcome repetition of frailty in a character who is otherwise heroic and self-possessed from the start.)

The best parts of James are Jim’s conversations: with Huck, with Enlightenment philosophers, and with Norman. And every scene with Jim as part of the troupe makes for excruciatingly compelling reading—laughing through covered eyes, cringing with anger and discomfort while letting out an involuntary snort. (By the way, painting Jim’s face white before applying blackface to the white paint called to mind another recent revisionist tale: Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen, in which Hooded Justice is revealed to be a gay black man—a survivor of the Tulsa Massacre, actually—who applies white around his eyes, dons an executioner’s mask, and fights injustice.)

In any case, because Norman’s character is so well drawn by Everett, his death is all the more bitter when it comes. And tragic, given that Jim must choose to save Norman or Huck, whose paternity we have guessed but do not yet know. One more reason to laud Everett for his wit, style, and wry perceptive slant.

In the end, I didn’t adore the book as much as others did, but I’m glad I read it, and I remain in awe at Everett’s accomplishment. Next time I’d just like to see him let his characters believe in God.

Theological amnesia

It would be an understatement to say I’m taken with Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time. I’m positively obsessed. I’ve never read anything like it. I’m smitten with the prose and gobsmacked by the coverage. The man has read everything, or at least he makes me feel like I’ve read next to nothing.

One thing he hasn’t read, though, is theology. You might even say he hasn’t read Christians. Of the more than 100 authors and artists that he canvasses, mostly from the twentieth century, maybe five are religious, and their religion is not, in his view, part of their genius. Sure, he likes Chesterton and Waugh and Kołakowski. But those exceptions prove the rule. James cares (cared—he passed away at 80 the same month the first Covid cases began appearing in Wuhan, quite a time to lose such a vital voice in politics and culture) about influence, stature, prestige, literature, artistry, and above these and all else two things: style on the page and wisdom in the world. The latter, to James, meant a rejection of ideology—in twentieth century garb, fascism and communism in equal parts—without apology or compromise. He was a pure product of the postwar period; his heroes were the post-Left French who suffered for their apostasies, like Aron and Furet and Revel. He was right to honor them.

Right, I say, in what he honored, but wrong in what he ignored. Even on his own terms, James should have read, memorialized, and found profit in Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Maritain, Eliot, Belloc, Knox, Greene, Undset, Bonhoeffer, Barth, Weil, Mauriac, Bernanos, de Lubac, Auden, Lewis, Tolkien, Fermor, Solzhenitsyn, Ratzinger, Percy, Illich, Berry, MacIntyre, Taylor, Levertov, and so many others. Instead, it’s as if religion in any form except the severely private disappears from the world by the end of the long nineteenth century. You certainly wouldn’t know that theists of any kind put pen to page in the twentieth, much less that it was good, sometimes, and that their words and deeds regularly made a difference on the public stage.

A writer like James, for all his erudition, has amnesia of his own, both in the immediate past and in the distant past. It’s a deficit common to most of his peers: highbrow journalists and elite critics who can’t bother to glance in the direction of the pious (at least, not without cringing). The deficit may be understandable, but it’s not defensible. It renders all that they write incomplete from the outset, by definition. Not just their knowledge but their love is circumscribed artificially by choice, and this alienates them from every human culture of which we have evidence. At one point James comments that humans wrote poetry before prose, spoke before they wrote, and sang before they spoke in sentences. He leaves the observation there, hanging, but he should have known better. After all, what did humans do both before and by means of song and speech and poetry and prose?

They prayed. Let the reader understand.

About that famous Léon Bloy quote

From my “Sent” folder. The friends I sent this email to have yet to supply an answer. Perhaps a reader or Google ultra-sleuth or Catholic scholar of French literature can?

*

I've got a question for y'all. You know the famous Léon Bloy quote, almost always rendered this way in English:

The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.

It's rarely attributed to a text, but when it is, it's to La Femme Pauvre. In English, the last line evokes the famous quote, but it's much briefer, at least in translation. So I found a French text online. Here's the French (all caps original):

Il n'y a qu'une tristesse, lui a-t-elle dit, la dernière fois, c'est de N'ÊTRE PAS DES SAINTS.

If you Google French versions of the Bloy quote, it comes up with all kinds of riffs:

Il n'y a qu'une tristesse, c'est de ne pas être un saint.

Il n'y a qu'un seul motif de tristesse, ne pas être un saint

Il n'y a qu'une tristesse au monde, c'est ne pas être un saint

La seule tristesse, c'est de ne pas être un saint

Il n'y a qu'un seul malheur : ne pas être un saint.

La plus grande tragédie est de ne pas être un saint.

So the question is: Did Bloy say (in print or at some public event) the larger form of the quote? Or has it somehow expanded over time in a generously paraphrased version? One of the French (Canadian) sources I consulted (which had the 'la plus grande tragédie' version) referred to the Maritains (who converted under Bloy's influence, no?) hearing Bloy say a version of the famous quote, an experience that had a lasting impact on them. So perhaps it's something Bloy wrote or spoke regularly, in essays and speeches and not just the novel, in which case the popular English version is not inaccurate?

Any help at all on this would be much appreciated. I'd love to know the truth about this English rendition.

(As a postscript, there's a parallel quote in the English translation of Bernanos' Diary of a Country Priest, so I looked up the French. I've bolded the relevant echo below. It's much less of a verbal echo in French than in the English, loosely rendered by Pamela Morris shortly after the novel’s original publication.)

Détrompez-vous, lui dis-je, je suis le serviteur d’un maître puissant, et comme prêtre, je ne puis absoudre qu’en son nom. La charité n’est pas ce que le monde imagine, et si vous voulez bien réfléchir à ce que vous avez appris jadis, vous conviendrez avec moi qu’il est un temps pour la miséricorde, un temps pour la justice et que le seul irréparable malheur est de se trouver un jour sans repentir devant la Face qui pardonne.

Young Christians (not) reading, 2

I received some really useful feedback in response to my previous post about the reading habits, such as they are, of high school and college Christians today. By way of reminder, the group I’m thinking about consists of (a) Christians who are (b) spiritually committed and (c) intellectually serious (d) between the ages of 15 and 25. In other words, in terms of GPA or intelligence or aptitude or career prospects, the top 5-10% Christian students in high school and college. Future professionals, even elites, who are likely to pursue graduate degrees in top-100 schools followed by jobs in law, medicine, journalism, the arts, academia, and politics. What are they reading right now—if anything?

(I trust my qualifiers and modifiers ensure in advance that I’m not equating spiritual maturity with intellectual aptitude, on one hand, or intellectual aptitude with careerist elitism, on the other.)

Here are some responses I received as well as a bunch of further reflections on my part.

1. One comment across the board: None of these kids are reading anything, whether they are cream of the crop or nothing of the kind. And they’re certainly not reading bona fide theology or intellectually demanding spiritual writing. All of them, including the smartest and most ambitious, are online, all the time, full stop. What “content” they get is found there: podcasts, videos, bloggers, and influencers, plus pastors with a “brand” and an extensive online presence (which, these days, amount to the same thing). To be fair, some of these online sources aren’t half bad. Some are substantive. Some have expertise or credentials or wide learning (if, often, of the autodidact sort). But to whatever extent any of these kids are acquiring knowledge, it’s not literate knowledge. It’s mediated by the internet, not by books.

2. If someone in this age range is reading a living Christian author, then I was right to think of John Mark Comer. A few more names mentioned: David Platt, Francis Chan, Dane Ortlund, Timothy Keller. I also had The Gospel Coalition mentioned as a group of authors read by some of these folks. In terms of dead authors, in addition to what I called “the usual suspects” (Lewis, Chesterton, Bonhoeffer, et al), I also heard Eugene Peterson, Dallas Willard, and Henri Nouwen. Which makes sense, since all of them have passed in recent memory, and professors as well as youth pastors would be likely to recommend their work. (I’m going to go ahead and assume John Piper is among those names, too, though he is still with us.)

3. An addendum: Some young believers are reading books, but the books they’re reading are mostly fiction. Typically YA fare; sometimes older stuff, like Tolkien or Jane Austen; occasionally scattered past or present highbrow fiction like Donna Tartt or Cormac McCarthy or Susanna Clarke. But still, not a lot of fiction reading overall, and the majority is page-turning lowbrow stuff, with occasional English-major nerdballs (hello) opting for the top-rack vintage.

4. A second addendum: It isn’t clear to me how to count or to contextualize kids who are home-schooled or taught in classical Christian academies. What percentage of the total student population are they? And what percentage of this small sub-population is being taught Homer and Virgil and Saint Augustine and Calvin and so on? Or, if we’re thinking of living authors, which if any of them are they reading? I simply have no idea what the answer is to any of these questions. Nor do I know what the difference is between such students being assigned these texts and their actual personal reading habits outside of class.

5. Back to the brief list of living authors above: Comer, Platt, Chan, Ortlund, Keller, et al. The question arises: Are young Christians who report these names in fact reading their books? Or are they “digesting” their message via sermons, podcasts, and video recordings available on the internet? The same goes for megachurch pastors with an online audience, like Jonathan Pokluda, who preaches outside of Waco; or Andy Stanley in Atlanta, or Matt Chandler in Dallas. There’s a lot of daylight between reading an author’s books and knowing the basic gist of a public figure.

6. To be even more granular: If a young Christian says that she has read Comer’s latest book, what is likeliest? That she used her eyes to scan a codex whose pages she turned with her hands? or that she read it on an e-reader/tablet? or that she listened to the audio version? After all, Comer—like other popular nonfiction authors today—reads his books himself for the audio edition. And since he’s a preacher for a living, it’s very effective, not to mention personalizing; which is part of the appeal for so many young people today.

7. In a word, is it true to say that even the readers among young believers today are often not “reading” in the classical manner many of us presuppose? So that, whether it’s a podcast or a TikTok or an IG Reel or a YouTube channel or a “book,” the manner of reception/intake/ingestion is more or less the same? So that “reading” names not an alternative mode of acquiring knowledge or engaging a source but simply a difference in type of source? In which case, it seems to me, young people formed in this way will not, would not, think of “books” as different in kind from other social media that make for their daily digital diet, but merely a difference in degree. Books being one point on a spectrum that includes pods, videos, and the like.

8. So much for technologies of knowledge production and consumption. Another question: What counts as a “serious” Christian author? That was part of my original question, recall. Not just intellectually serious young Christian readers, but serious Christian books by serious Christian authors. Not fluff. Not spiritual candy bars. Not the ghost-written memoirs of influencers. Not, in short, the “inspirational” shelf at Barnes & Noble. If one-half of the presenting question of the original post concerned a certain type of young Christian reader, the other half concerns a certain type of Christian author. Here’s what I have in mind, at least. The author doesn’t have to meet a credentials requirement; doesn’t have to have a doctorate. Nor does he have to write in an academic, jargon-laden, or impenetrable style. That would defeat the point. To be popular, you have to be readable. And “being popular” can’t be a defeater here, or else no one, however rich or good in substance, could ever sell books: they’d be disqualified by their own success.

As I’ve said, Lewis and Chesterton are the gold standard. Other names that come to mind from the twentieth century (beyond Bonhoeffer, Nouwen, Peterson, and Willard) include Karl Barth, Dorothy Sayers, Francis Schaeffer, Os Guinness, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Madeleine L’Engle, John Stott, J. I. Packer, Robert Farrar Capon, Frederick Buechner, Wendell Berry, Stanley Hauerwas, and Marilynne Robinson. That’s a very short list; it could be doubled or tripled quickly. As it stands, what do the names on it have in common?

Here’s how I’d put it. Each author’s writing draws from a rich, clear, and deep reservoir of knowledge and wisdom, a reservoir that funds their work but does not overwhelm it. Put differently, what a normie reader encounters is the tip of the iceberg. If that’s all she can handle, so be it. But to anyone in the know, it’s as clear as day that there’s a mountain of ice beneath the surface.

Furthermore, one of the consistent effects of reading any of these authors is not only sticking with them but moving beyond them into the vast tradition that so evidently informs their writing. This could be the Thomistic tradition, or the patristic, or the Homeric, or the Antiochene, or the Kantian, or the Reformed, or whatever—but what the author offers the reader is so beautiful that the reader wants more of whatever it is. And so she moves from Piper to Edwards to Calvin to Augustine in the course of weeks, months, and years. From there, who knows what will be next?

That is the kind of book, the sort of author, I have in mind. My original interlocutor was asking about such work in the present tense. Who fits the bill? And who are young people reading? I’m willing to say that Keller fits the bill. Comer does too, in my judgment, though that is a status he graduated into with his last two books. His earlier work was far too primitivist-evangelical, far too dismissive of tradition, to qualify. But to his credit, he has clearly read himself into the tradition and now invites his readers to do the same.

I can certainly name others, like Tish Harrison Warren, who are doing the work and who are selling books. But are they having a widespread discernible influence across a vast slice of 15-25-year olds today? It’s probably too early to tell.

9. Let me think about my own trajectory for a moment. Here are authors whose books I read cover-to-cover across three different age ranges:

• 15-18: Lewis, Chesterton, Bonhoeffer, Kierkegaard, Tolkien

• 18-22: Lee Camp, Douglas John Hall, Richard Foster, Nouwen, John Howard Yoder, Hauerwas, Berry, Walter Brueggemann, N. T. Wright, Ben Witherington

• 22-25: William Cavanaugh, Terry Eagleton, Robert Bellah, Augustine, Charles Taylor, Barth, Robert Jenson, John Webster, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Walzer, Kathryn Tanner

These aren’t all the authors I was reading at these ages, but rather the kinds of names I was introduced to that made an impact on me—so much so that I remember, in most cases, the first book I read by each, and when and where I was, and what my first impression of them was.

I’m sure I’m leaving off some important names. But the list is representative. I was a precocious, brainy young Christian who loved talking about God and reading the Bible, and these were the authors that youth ministers, mentors, and professors put in my hands. Not a bad list! Pretty much all living authors, or from the previous century, so not a lot of historical or cultural diversity on offer. But substantive, provocative, stimulating, and accessible nonetheless. The kinds of authors who might change your life. The kind who might convert you, or de-convert you. Who might shadow you for years to come.

And so, once again, the question is: Is the 2023 version of me (a) reading at all and, if so, (b) which authors, living or dead, is he reading? which is he being poked and prodded by? which stimulated and provoked by? Inquiring minds want to know!

10. This exercise has made me take a second look at my own teaching. Which authors do I assign? If you are a student who enrolls in my class, who will you read? A rough summary off the top of my head:

• Dead: Barth, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, Saint Athanasius, Saint Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, Martin Luther, Saint Augustine, Saint Oscar Romero, Pope St. John Paul II, Pope Paul VI, Henri Nouwen, James Cone, Gerhard Lohfink, Dietrich Bonhoeffer

• Alive: Tish Harrison Warren, James K. A. Smith, Thomas Joseph White, N. T. Wright, Beth Felker Jones, Martin Mosebach, Tara Isabella Burton, Ross Douthat, Andy Crouch, Andrew Davison, Andrew Wilson, Peter Leithart, Jemar Tisby, Victor Lee Austin, Michael Banner, James Mumford

Those are just authors of books I’ve assigned (and do assign). The list would be far larger if I included authors of chapters and articles and online essays. In any case, I’m pretty happy with this list, granting that I teach upper-level gen-ed elective courses to undergraduate students who have never taken theology before.

11. What lessons do I draw from all of the above? First, that people like me have a lot of power and influence and therefore enormous responsibility toward the young people who enter our classrooms. I cannot control whether my students fall in love with the books I assign them. But if I choose wisely, I make it far more likely that they might fall in love. That might in turn set off a chain reaction of reading and learning that lasts a lifetime.

12. Second lesson: Don’t assign “textbooks.” That is, don’t assign purely academic or fake authors. Don’t assign books dumbed down for teenagers. Avoid books that do not look like any sane person would ever cozy up with them in a comfy chair and read leisurely for a whole afternoon. Instead, assign books whose authors are known for befriending their readers. Assign authors who have fanatical followings. Assign authors who have the power to convert readers to their cause. Assign poets and rhetors and masters of the word. Assign stylish writing. Assign passionate writing, writing with stakes. Assign texts with teeth. Don’t be surprised when they bite students. That’s the point.

13. Third, the express aim of Christian liberal arts education and certainly of every humanities class within such institutions ought to be for students to learn to read, thence to learn to love to read, thence to learn to desire to be (that is, to become) a lifelong reader. Every assignment should be measured by whether it conduces to this end. If it does not, it should be scrapped.

14. It follows, fourth, that professors should shy away from assigning online content, whether that be links, videos, podcasts, or even texts on e-readers. That’s not quite an outright ban, but it is a strong nudge against the inclination. Give your students books: physical books they can hold in their hands. Reading a book is an activity different from scrolling a website, watching a video, or listening to a podcast. Young people already know how to do those things. They do not know how to sit still for ninety minutes without a screen in sight, in utter silence, and turn pages, lost in a book, for pure pleasure or simple edification. They have to be taught how to do that. And it takes time. What better time than college?

15. All this applies twice-over for seminaries. What is a pastor who cannot read? The principal job of a pastor, alongside administering the sacraments, is to teach and preach God’s word, which means to interpret the scriptures for God’s people. You cannot interpret without reading, which means you cannot teach and preach without being able to read. Are we raising a generation of illiterate ministers? Is the time already upon us? Are our seminaries aiding and abetting this process, or actively opposing and redirecting it?

16. If professors have some measure of influence, youth pastors (in person) and pastors with a public platform (online) have much greater influence. What we need, then, is for pastors to see it as part of their job description to find ways to encourage and induce literacy in the young people at their churches and, further, to suggest authors and books that are more than candy bars and happy meals, spiritually speaking. For this to happen—allow me to repeat myself—pastors must themselves be readers. They must be voracious bookworms who understand that their vocation necessarily and essentially entails wide and deep and sustained reading. Their churches (above all their elders and vestries and bishops) must understand this, too. If you walk into a pastor’s office and he is reading, he is doing his job. If you never see him reading, something’s amiss. The same is true, by the way, if you do see him reading, but he’s only ever reading a book written in the last five years.

17. Returning to the academy, what happens in the classroom is not all that happens on a college campus. Much, perhaps most, learning happens elsewhere. To be sure, it happens in library stacks and dorm rooms and coffee shops and Bible studies. But it also happens at Christian study centers. The importance of these cannot be overstated. Their presence on public and non-religious campuses is a refuge and a haven for young believers. They can’t be only that, however. They have to be the kind of place that fosters learning, reflection, discussion, and—yes—reading. Reading groups on the church fathers, or the magisterial reformers, or the Lutheran scholastics, or the ecumenical councils: these should be the bread and butter of Christian study centers. Hubs of vibrant intellectual life woven into and inseparable from the spiritual.

18. I’ll go one step further (borrowing the tongue-in-cheek suggestion from a friend): What we need is Christian study centers on Christian college campuses. Sad to say, far too many Christian universities today have bought into credentialing, gate-keeping, and careerism. They do not exist to further the Christian vision of the liberal arts. They exist to stay alive by selling students a product that will in turn secure them a job. None of these things is bad in themselves—enduring institutions, diplomas, gainful employment—but they are not the reason why Christian higher education exists. The presence of Christian study centers on Christian campuses would signal a commitment to the telos of such institutions by carving out space for the kinds of activity that students and professors are, lamentably, sometimes kept from devoting themselves to within the classroom itself. Perhaps this could be done explicitly on some campuses, whereas on others you would have to do it on the sly. Either way, it’s a worthy endeavor.

19. Let me close on two notes, one negative and one positive. The negative: As I have written about before, we have entered a time of double literacy loss in the church. Christians, especially the young, are at once biblically illiterate and literally illiterate. They do not read or know the Bible, and this is of a piece with their larger habits, for they do not read anything much at all. That is a fact. It would be foolish to deny it and naive to pretend it will change in some seismic shift in the span of a few years.

The period in which we find ourselves, then, is a sort of return to premodern times: Granting a kind of minimal mass literacy, in terms of widespread active reading habits, there is now (or will soon be) a very small minority of readers—and everyone else. What will this mean for the church? For daily spirituality and personal devotion? For catechesis, Sunday school, and preaching? For lay and voluntary leaders in the church? For ordained ministers themselves? We shall see.

20. I am biased, obviously, in favor of literacy and habits of reading. I want my students to be readers. I want pastors to be readers. I want more, not less, reading; and better, not worse, reading. But not everyone is meant to be a reader. Not everyone should major in English. Not everyone’s evenings are best spent with Proust in the French and a glass of wine. God forgive me for implying so, if I have.

Here’s the upshot. If young people (and, as they age, all people) are going to learn about the Christian faith through means other than reading, and for the time being those means will largely be mediated by the internet, then what we need is (a) high-quality content (b) accessible to normies (c) funded by a reservoir of knowledge rooted in the great tradition, together with (d) ease of access and widespread knowledge of how to get it. We need, in other words, networks of writers, pastors, teachers, scholars, speakers, podcasters, and others who have resources, audiences, support, technology, and platforms by which and through which to communicate the gospel, build up God’s people, and educate the faithful in ways the latter can access and understand, with content we would call “meat,” not “milk.”

I know one such endeavor. There are others. I don’t want to give up on literacy. I never will. But we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Time and past time to get moving on these projects. I’m entirely in favor of them, so long as we do not see them as a substitute but instead as a supplement to the habits of reading they thereby encourage rather than block. What we need, though, is the right people, adequately resourced, finding the young, hungry and seeking Christ and open to learning as they are. If this is the way to reach them, and it can be done well, count me in.

The bishop of Rome in Alpha Centauri

I finally read Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, a novel with my name written on it if ever there was one. It’s more than six decades old—having been written in the wake of World War II; its origins there, as well as the fate of its author, are shadowed with tragedy—so I’m not worried about spoiling it for you, but be it known that the following quote comes from the final 50 pages of the book.

After humanity refuses to learn from its errors in the first nuclear holocaust of the late twentieth century, some two thousand years later they do it again, only this time with few survivors likely to see life beyond it. So the Church makes plans for human, and thus Christian, life beyond this planet. Here is the scene when an Abbot gives final instructions and blessings to a few dozen priests before they set sail for an interstellar voyage to a colony in another solar system:

It had not been easy to charter a plane for the flight to New Rome. Even harder was the task of winning clearance for the flight after the plane had been chartered. All civil aircraft had come under the jurisdiction of the military for the duration of the emergency, and a military clearance was required. It had been refused by the local ZDI. If Abbot Zerchi not been aware of the fact that a certain air marshal and a certain cardinal archbishop happened to be friends, the ostensible pilgrimage to New Rome by twenty-seven bookleggers with bindlestiffs might well have proceeded on shank's mare, for lack of permission to use rapid transport jet. By midafternoon, however, clearance had been granted. Abbot Zerchi boarded the plane briefly before takeoff-for last farewells.

“You are the continuity of the Order,” he told them. “With you goes the Memorabilia. With you also goes the apostolic succession, and, perhaps—the Chair of Peter.

“No, no,” he added in response to the murmur of surprise from the monks. “Not His Holiness. I had not told you this before, but if the worst comes on Earth, the College of Cardinals—or what's left of it—will convene. The Centaurus Colony may then be declared a separate patriarchate, with full patriarchal jurisdiction going to the cardinal who will accompany you. If the scourge falls on us here, to him, then, will go the Patrimony of Peter. For though life on Earth may be destroyed—God forbid—as long as Man lives elsewhere, the office of Peter cannot be destroyed. There are many who think that if the curse falls on Earth, the papacy would pass to him by the principle of Epikeia if there were no survivors here. But that is not your direct concern, brothers, sons, although you will be subject to your patriarch under special vows as those which bind the Jesuits to the Pope.

“You will be years in space. The ship will be your monastery. After the patriarchal see is established at the Centaurus Colony, you will establish there a mother house of the Visitationist Friars of the Order of Saint Leibowitz of Tycho. But the ship will remain in your hands, and the Memorabilia. If civilization, or a vestige of it, can maintain itself on Centaurus, you will send missions to the other colony worlds, and perhaps eventually to the colonies of their colonies. Wherever Man goes, you and your successors will go. And with you, the records and remembrances of four thousand years and more. Some of you, or those to come after you, will be mendicants and wanderers, teaching the chronicles of Earth and the canticles of the Crucified to the peoples and the cultures that may grow out of the colony groups. For some may forget. Some may be lost for a time from the Faith. Teach them, and receive into the Order those among them who are called. Pass on to them the continuity. Be for Man the memory of Earth and Origin. Remember this Earth. Never forget her, but—never come back.” Zerchi's voice went hoarse and low. “If you ever come back, you might meet the Archangel at the east end of Earth, guarding her passes with a sword of flame. I feel it. Space is your home hereafter. It's a lonelier desert than ours. God bless you, and pray for us.”

He moved slowly down the aisle, pausing at each seat to bless and embrace before he left the plane. The plane taxied onto the runway and roared aloft. He watched until it disappeared from view in the evening sky. Afterward, he drove back to the abbey and to the remainder of his flock. While aboard the plane, he had spoken as if the destiny of Brother Joshua's group were as clear-cut as the prayers prescribed for tomorrow's Office; but both he and they knew that he had only been reading the palm of a plan, had been describing a hope and not a certainty. For Brother Joshua's group had only begun the first short lap of a long and doubtful journey, a new Exodus from Egypt under the auspices of a God who must surely be very weary of the race of Man.

Those who stayed behind had the easier part. Theirs was but to wait for the end and pray that it would not come.

This excerpt provides a lovely sample of Miller’s fine grasp of both Christian theology and ecclesiastical language, without losing the heart of it all. The whole book is quite beautiful. I can’t believe it took me this long to read it.

As I got to this part—what is in effect a short story or novella contained in a larger set of stories spanning 1,500 years or so—it reminded me of Robert Jenson’s discussion of the papacy in the second volume of his systematic theology, published in 1999. I seemed to recall Jenson coming to the very question of whether the pope might continue the office of the bishop of Rome elsewhere than Rome, including elsewhere than earth. Here’s the passage:

Two matters remain . . . . The first is a question so far skirted: Granted that there must be a universal pastorate, why should it be located in Rome? Why not, for example, Jerusalem? The question is odd, since Roman primacy developed first and the theology thereof afterward. But it nevertheless must be faced.

Pragmatic reasons are not hard to find, and the dialogues have gone far with them. So international Catholic-Anglican dialogue: it occurred “early in the history of the church” that to serve communion between local diocesan churches “a function of oversight . . . was assigned to bishops of prominent sees.” And within this system of metropolitan and patriarchal sees, “the see of Rome . . . became the principal center in matters concerning the church universal.” And so finally: “The only see which makes any claim to universal primacy and which has exercised and still exercises episcope is the see of Rome, the city were Peter and Paul died. It seems appropriate [emphasis added] that in any future union a universal primacy . . . should be held by that see.”

It is clear that the unity of the church cannot in fact now be restored except with a universal pastor located at Rome. And this is already sufficient reason to say that churches now not in communion with the church of Rome are very severely “wounded.” Just so it is sufficient reason to say also that the restoration of those churches’ communion with Rome is the peremptory will of God. Yet such considerations do not provide quite the sort of legitimation we look for in systematic theology and that we found for the episcopate and for the universal pastorate simply as such.

The historically initiating understanding of Roman primacy is perhaps itself the closest available approach to what is wanted. For in the earlier centuries of the undivided church, it was precisely the local church of Rome, and not the Roman bishop personally, that enjoyed unique prestige. The bishop of Rome enjoyed special authority among the bishops because their communion with him was the necessary sign of their churches’ communion with the church of that place. If the pope's universal pastorate is based on a unique prestige of the Roman congregation, then obviously in Rome is where it must be exercised.

In the fathers’ understanding of the apostolic foundation of the church, the founding history of each apostolic local church was a different act of the Spirit. This act was thought to live on in a special character of that church, in what one might perhaps call a continuing communal charism: the continuing life of each apostolically founded church was experienced as an enduring representation of her role within the Spirit-led course of the apostolic mission. The specific authority of the church of Rome derived from her honor as the place to which the Spirit led Peter and Paul, in the book of Acts the Spirit's two primary missionary instruments, for their final work and for their own perfecting in martyrdom; the Spirit was therefore expected to maintain the Roman church as a “touchstone” of fidelity to the apostolic work and faith.

But one need not enter the realm of science fiction* now to imagine a time in which Rome, with its congregation and pastors, no longer existed. Yet the role that initially developed around that church, once developed and theologically validated, would still be necessary. Surely an ecumenical council or other magisterial organ of the one church could and should then choose a universal pastor, elsewhere located. The new ecumenical pastor might of course still be styled “bishop of Rome,” but this is neither here nor there to our problem. Probably we must judge: identification of the universal pastorate with the Roman episcopacy is not strictly irreversible. On the other hand, hard cases make bad law.

Indeed I did remember correctly, though almost too correctly. For where you see the asterisk in the final paragraph, there is a footnote where Jenson writes the following:

In A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, it having become nearly certain, after millenia [sic] of repeated nuclear catastrophes and repeated slow rebirths, that this time nuclear warfare will render the earth permanently uninhabitable, three cardinal bishops are sent to the small human colony of Mars.

Face palm! I was right to think of Jenson’s discussion, since Jenson literally tells the reader he’s thinking of Miller’s novel. Well then! I’ve come full circle. Though having just finished the book, I’m at least in a position to note that Jenson was quoting from memory, since he refers to a colony on Mars rather than a planet in the Alpha Centauri system.

Oh well. Read both books, is the moral of this story.

Double literacy loss

Last week I was asked by a graduate student the following question: In today’s culture, what is the biggest challenge for Christians in attempting to steward and share the scriptures with the next generation—whether within the church or without?

This was a very helpful question to be forced to face head on. I’m not especially good at apologetics, either in practice or at the level of theory. But a concise answer occurred to me that I’ve been reflecting on since I gave it.

The biggest challenge, it seems to me, is a sort of double loss of literacy.

First is biblical literacy. For centuries this has been the ambient culture of Western societies, including the United States. Whether or not this or that individual was a Christian, the default setting around him or her was inflected by the Bible: its stories, its characters, its plots, its very verbiage. Read public speeches from the nineteenth century. They are positively studded with allusions to the Bible. A Bible nerd from 2022 wouldn’t catch them all. But a barely literate teenager in 1822 might have. That’s what “biblical literacy” means. Even a generation ago at my own institution, students came in with impressive knowledge of the Bible. Today, not so much—even from students who are committed Christians, having attended church all their lives.

But that’s not the only challenge, or rather, the only loss of literacy.

The second is literal literacy. People under 25 today, including those who earn high school and college and even graduate degrees, including those who get A’s and B’s and generally “succeed” at school, do not read. That is to say, they are not readers. For most of them, perhaps nearly all of them, sitting still with a book for 30 minutes, much less two or three hours, is either wishful thinking or a nightmare. One gets itchy after five minutes at most. Check for mentions, check for texts, check for DMs, refresh the feed, refresh the inbox, send a Snap, send a Polo, stream a video, play a game—the options are endless. This presumes one is already sitting down, book in hand, ready and even eager to read. That’s too much. Nine times out of ten down time is the same as it always is, every evening and late into the night: watching a show on a streaming service and/or YouTube, assuming all the social media and communication with friends are turned off (which they aren’t).

None of this is meant as criticism. Don’t (yet) imagine me as an old man waving my cane at the youngsters to get off my lawn. My register here is not pejorative. It’s purely descriptive. Teenagers and twentysomethings today, by and large, are not readers. By which I mean, they are not readers of books. They read endlessly, as a matter of fact, but their reading takes place in 5-15 second chunks of time on a glowing device, before the next image or swipe or alert restarts the clock. Minds trained on this from a young age simply lack the stamina, not to mention the desire, to read for pleasure for sustained stretches of time.

In a prior age of mass education and biblical literacy, one largely devoid of screens, literal literacy was crucial for apologetics as well as evangelism and discipleship, because it meant that the necessary conditions for coming to have a direct experience of and relationship with the Bible were in place. It meant too that, often if not always, a primary entry point for reaching someone with the gospel was studying the Bible with them. For their own preexisting habits, as well as their inherited mental atmosphere, conduced to support the reception of Bible reading in their daily lives. Getting to know the God of Christian faith and reading the sacred book of Christian faith were convertible; to do one was to do the other.

No longer. And it seems to me a profound error—the older generation “always fighting the last war,” as the saying goes—to assume that this once apt or successful strategy is a fitting approach moving forward. Even if you were to convince a 17-year old curious about Jesus that the Bible is the way to learn about Jesus, why assume that she will now do something she never otherwise does, namely spend hours in deliberate demanding literary study, in order to keep learning about him on her own? That’s a bad bet. Assume rather that she likes the idea of doing so but will never quite find the time to get around to it.

What does this mean for evangelism and discipleship today? For reaching the next generation with the riches and truths of Holy Scripture?

An answer to the second question will have to wait for another day. Partly I simply don’t know; partly a proper answer is too big for this blog post, perhaps for any such post.

As for evangelism and discipleship: What it means, negatively, is that the Bible will not, for most young people, be the principal means thereof. Which means, positively, that something else will be. Not that the Bible will be uninvolved. Only that it won’t (usually) be the point of entry, and it won’t (directly) play the starring role.

What will? So far as I can tell, the answer is liturgy, friendship, witness, and service. That is to say, the sacramental life of tight-knit Christian community in mutual support and external care. The Bible will and must saturate such a life, from top to bottom and beginning to end. Such a life will be dead on arrival if the testimony of the apostles and prophets does not animate it from within and at all times.

Nevertheless this role is different than the role the Bible has had in churches, especially “low” Protestant churches, these last two or three centuries. It will take some getting used to. It’s time we got started, though. The double loss of literacy is a fait accompli. It’s a done deal and already in the rear view mirror. The only question is whether we respond, and how. We can mourn and bemoan the loss, recalling the good old days. Or we can get to work.

I say let’s get to work.

The queen

Of all the brilliant British women writers who lived to a good old age in the long twentieth century, who is your favorite? The candidates are many; both Mary Midgley and Agatha Christie come immediately to mind. Doubtless Rebecca West is chief among all women and men of English letters during this period. But as for me and my house, we hail P. D. James, or as I affectionately call her, The Queen. Long may she reign, even in death.

Born in 1920, James published her first novel in 1962. From her early 40s to her early 90s she published more than 20 books, one every 2-3 years. Just before her 90th birthday, in 2009, she published Talking About Detective Fiction, a winsome and leisurely stroll through the genre she mastered, having received it from the reigning women before her (Christie, Sayers, Marsh, et al) and made it her own. Born two years after the end of World War I, she lived to see every one of the wonders and horrors of the twentieth century; she then died—to give some perspective on the sheer expanse of her life—some 18 months before the U.K. referendum on leaving the European Union.

The Queen is famous for many things, but most of all, and deservedly, for her series featuring Adam Dalgliesh. The series spans 14 novels written across 46 years. They are, in my humble and mostly uninformed opinion, the finest detective novels in the English language. I’m not a fanatic of the genre, but I’ve read widely across the decades (and across the Atlantic), and I’m not even sure who should come in second.

(I’m reading Gladys Mitchell’s Rising of the Moon right now; perhaps I’ll come to agree that that half-forgotten peer to Christie is a worthy competitor for the throne.)

What makes James’s work so royally perfect? The answer may be boring, but it’s true: she’s a master at the mechanics of what makes a mystery novel work. Put them together, and you’ve got the best of the genre.

First is the prose. It’s readable—she was popular, after all—but crisp, detailed, and stylish, too. More, it’s English: you can tell this is a woman who knows her eighteenth and nineteenth century poetry and novels. The sentences never waste a word, but they take their time. And they always come to a point. In this James was very much a woman of her time; she reads more like Sayers than she does Tana French or Louise Penny. Though she lived into the twenty-first century, she was born closer to the nineteenth, and you feel it in her writing.

Second is the lead. Adam Dalgliesh is the platonic ideal of the English detective. Son of a vicar, widower whose only child and young wife died giving birth, a poet of minor acclaim in his spare time, Dalgliesh is a detective whose reputation precedes him due to his supreme and inarguable competence. Reticent, tactful, passionate, compassionate, and possessed of a rich but private inner life, he lives for the job, and always gets it done.

Third is the plotting. The deaths are rarely outlandish but always complex; they’re also always equally difficult to figure out (though that may just be me, as I’m generally terrible at guessing whodunnit). Again, the mysteries lean more toward the golden age than to contemporary crime novels, so the template is classic rather than realistic: a surprising, even shocking murder; a cast of suspects; three dozen paths criss-crossing the murder scene and the victim’s now-revealed secret lives; a patient narrowing-down of suspects via interviews, alibis, discoveries, and evidence; and the final, climactic confrontation and confession. To watch James weave the web then unravel it is never anything but a joy.

Fourth and finally, and most important in terms of what elevates the Dalgliesh series above its peers, is the social observation and characterization. The plot hooks me; the prose keeps me; the acute eye for human and social detail is what strangely warms my heart. Whatever one’s view of arguments about highbrow versus middlebrow and “art” versus “entertainment,” James’s books bridge the gap inasmuch as they use the occasion of a murder and the form of a mystery to examine the human condition. And the insights invariably illumine.

That social aspect to the Dalgliesh books makes them doubly significant, since the first in the series was written in or around the year JFK was elected; the last, in or around the year Obama was elected. What one feels when reading the books in chronological order is the extraordinary social changes happening in real time in the background of the stories—and James is deeply attuned to them. (As she should be, having spent her girlhood in interwar Britain, raised in a family with so little money she had to quit school as a teenager to go to work.) That aforementioned first entry, Cover Her Face, feels very much a portrait of rural postwar England, itself still bearing traces of the Victorian and the Edwardian. By the sixth Dalgliesh novel, Death of an Expert Witness, published in 1977, the world has turned upside down. The book is littered with casual references to the signs of the times: recession; abolition of the death penalty; women wearing trousers(!); a more or less out lesbian couple living in the Fens (albeit referred to by both the narration and the dialogue solely as “friends”—this is James’s ironic reserve, not prudishness); the rise of the management class; “women’s Lib”; abandoned country churches; even ordinary police use of a helicopter, which ferries Dalgliesh from London to East Anglia the day after the murder.

What suffuses every page, adorning the narrative without ever weighing it down, is James’s lightly worn but deeply felt Anglican faith. She doesn’t require her hero to believe—his familiarity with tragedy and evil both walls him off from and draws him ineluctably toward the religious life—but the presence, or rather absence, of God haunts his every endeavor of detection. Whence law? justice? mercy? She forces her readers, as she does her characters, to wonder. It’s something every good mystery novelist aspires to do. For her part, the Queen never fails to execute.

The Book of Strange New Things, 3

So I don’t think Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things works. Its lead is unbelievable; the prose is unmemorable to a fault; the payoffs meant to explain the eerie human and mental atmosphere on the alien planet are unsatisfactory, and call in turn for further explanations that are never forthcoming.

What works, if anything? A few things.

1. The aliens. Or as Peter calls them, the Oasans. Faber succeeds in creating and depicting—with considerable restraint—a plausible and heretofore unimagined style of intelligent life beyond Earth. We get to know them, but at some distance. They are hungry for Jesus, and believably so. They are stubborn, and stubbornly non-human, yet intelligible. They are both like us (bipedal, five-fingered, linguistic) and unlike us (misshapen, hideous faces; radically communitarian; lacking something like an Ego, though individuated nonetheless). Faber is at his best when he’s describing the Oasan community or narrating a conversation between one of them and Peter.

2. The most theologically pregnant feature of the book is the suggestion that the Oasans are mortal, profoundly vulnerable to suffering, illness, and death, but may not be sinful. This is half a virtue for the novel, because Faber is clever enough to imagine this state of affairs (and, by extension, the effects it might have for pastor-missionaries who think of Sin as the one great problem addressed by Christianity), but not committed or interested enough to follow through on its many pastoral and theological implications. C. S. Lewis did so in the first two books of his Space Trilogy, but that is a work of fantasy as much as it is science fiction. Faber here could have offered a more realistic or at least less of a #FullChristian take. But he just leaves it untouched, beyond the crisis it creates for Peter’s faith, since what the Oasans want is healing of their infirmities, and he doesn’t know if he truly believes he can offer that. Then he decides to leave them. The end.

3. That’s a tad glib. The final two pages, the final paragraph, and the final line are all utterly fitting to the book, and quite apt to the biblical verse on which they are a riff. Speaking of which…

4. The relationship between Peter and Beatrice (hello there, Meaningful Names; may I take your baggage?) that is, or is meant to be, the emotional heart of the novel largely works, I think, though I am undecided on what Faber himself thinks of it. Due to the distance between them, Peter’s poor communication skills, and the roiling catastrophes on Earth, Bea more or less lets go of Peter within two or three months of the six-month mission. Seems abrupt, no? She doesn’t stop loving him, but she in effect hands him over to the Oasans, thinking him dispassionate and uncaring, even as she is carrying their first and only child in her womb. It would not be an unjust reading to say that what the novel reveals is that Peter and Bea’s relationship was fragile from the start, built on codependency (she rescued him from addiction and led him to Christ; marrying him brought her out of shame for her upbringing and past sexual experiences) and persisting mutual neediness (they have no friends to speak of; they have no activities other than evangelizing and caring, together, for their little flock). Each of them has nothing but the other, plus Jesus. When all is right with the world, that’s more than enough. When the world—their world—starts to crumble, it proves not nearly enough. What I want to know is: Does Faber want us to see this? Or does he think their relationship a beautiful, healthy, antifragile thing that is only called into question by the stress shocks, so to speak, of unprecedented distance and trial? In any case, it’s emotionally credible, and while I wasn’t devastated by their increasing detachment and loss, I felt it.

4. Speaking of which, Faber also succeeds in his depiction of Peter’s relationship with Grainger, his main “handler” and only real friend on Oasis. Their budding no-yes-maybe-no relationship—little more than seeking some kind of basic human connection in an emotional wasteland—is worn and lived-in and all too recognizable.

* * *

I cannot conclude these reflections, however, without instancing a few quotations to show how off, finally, Peter is as a character, that is, as a Christian convert, pastor, and missionary (recall: not because his theology is wrong, but because it doesn’t hold together; the parts don’t add up to a whole that makes sense of his character, or that echoes anything one would find in the world of Christian faith and ministry). First:

“So what’s your role?”

“My role?”

“Yeah. A minister is there to connect people to God, right? Or to Christ, Jesus, whatever. Because people commit sins and they need to be forgiven, right? So . . . what sins are these guys committing?”

“None that I can see.”

“So . . . don’t get me wrong, Peter, but . . . what exactly is the deal here?”

Peter wiped his brow again. “Christianity isn’t just about being forgiven. It’s about living a fulfilled and joyous life. The thing is, being a Christian is an enormous buzz; that’s what a lot of people don’t understand. It’s deep satisfaction. It’s waking up in the morning filled with excitement about every minute that’s ahead of you.”

Mmm. Okay. An enormous buzz. Filled with excitement. Did I mention that this guy left behind his wife and all he knew to share the gospel with aliens? That he and his wife, back on Earth, would hand-stitch tracts of Bible stories to be mailed and delivered to foreign, “unreached” people groups? For what? Buzz and excitement? (NB: He’s not a charismatic, and his faith is rocked to the core when an Oasan asks him to pray for her to be healed from a physical injury.)

Second:

He only wished he’d had the chance to explain more fully how prayer worked. That it wasn’t a matter of asking for things and being accepted or rejected, it was a matter of adding one’s energy—insignificant in itself—to the vastly greater energy that was God’s love. In fact, it was an affirmation of being part of God, an aspect of His spirit temporarily housed inside a body. A miracle similar, in principle, to the one that had given human form to Jesus.

Ah. Gotcha. So this dude’s a “we’re all incarnations of God/Jesus is just the highest version” sort of Christian. Excellent. No further comment necessary, none whatsoever.

Third and last:

“You one of those decaffeinated Christians, padre? The diabetic wafer? Doctrine-free, guilt-reduced, low in Last Judgment, 100 percent less Second Coming, no added Armageddon? Might contain small traces of crucified Jew?” Tartaglione’s voice dripped with contempt. “Marty Kurtzburg—now he was a man of faith. Grace before meals, ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,’ none of this Krishna-has-wisdom-too crapola, always wore a jacket and pressed pants and polished shoes. And if you scratched him deep enough, he’d tell you: These are the last days.”

Peter swallowed hard on what tasted like bile. Even if he was dying himself, he didn’t think these were the world’s last days. God wouldn’t let go of the planet he loved so easily. He’d given His only son to save it, after all. “I’m just trying . . . just trying to treat people the way Jesus might have treated them. That’s Christianity for me.”

Faber almost grasps the nettle here. Almost. The problem is that he supposes there are only two options: either fundamentalist (the Lutheran Kurtzburg) or non-fundamentalist (the (Abelardian?) evangelical Peter). Faber’s imagination can conceive a traditionalist Christian believer exclusively as a fundamentalist who travels to an alien world in “jacket and pressed pants and polished shoes.” Equation: true believer = traditionalist = confesses an actual bodily resurrection = fundamentalist = culturally parochial and anthropologically naive stereotypical Western missionary. And since Peter is not that, that is to say the last item, he cannot be any of the others. But Faber also wants—or rather, his narrative requires—Peter to be a Bible-believing, hyper-evangelistic, tract-mailing, low-church Pietist type. One who thinks Christianity is a matter of life and death … and yet who also describes Christianity as an exciting emotional buzz, moralized without remainder into treating other people the way Jesus would treat them.

The novel remains powerful and evocative, and I don’t regret reading it. But the unrealized potential makes the whole thing all the more disappointing. Oh well.

The Book of Strange New Things, 2

In my last post I wrote about how Peter, the protagonist of Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, is unbelievable. I want now to say a bit more about why the novel doesn’t quite work.

One is the prose. It is bloodless and boring. Perfectly adequate, never “bad,” it is so unmemorable that at times I wondered if that was Faber’s intention: perhaps to signal the inner purity of Peter’s converted heart and mind. Based on a quick perusal of Faber’s other work (esp. Under the Skin and The Crimson Petal and the White), the man can write interesting and stylish prose. So what went wrong here? Or, if the plain style is a choice, why does it fail in its purpose? The only possible narrative effect is to make of Peter an utterly vanilla protagonist.

A second issue is the tone. For much of the novel the atmosphere on Oasis, the alien planet, is somehow askew: haunting, haunted, moody, oppressive, mysterious. The reader gets major Solaris vibes (or even, for me, echoes of Sphere). Something is wrong here. What could it be?

Nothing at all, as it turns out. The “reveals,” such as they are, are fourfold:

1. Light years away, Earth—politically and ecologically—is falling apart at the seams.

2. The corporation that sponsors both the intergalactic travel to Oasis and the scientific outpost on it has as its goal to make Oasis a kind of ark or haven for the elite few on Earth who are (a) rich enough and (b) sane enough to qualify to come.

3. The corporate employees (scientists, engineers, doctors, mechanics) who work at/for the Oasan outpost are such flat personalities—resorting to neither sex nor drugs nor violence to let off steam or give vent to their vices and repressed desires—by design: they were selected by a sophisticated psychological process created to exclude all persons who might fall back on such “anti-social” habits.

4. The intelligent alien species, the Oasans, have extremely vulnerable bodies supported by nonexistent immune systems. The slightest injury or illness is terminal, therefore, and they believe “the technique of Jesus” to provide deliverance from, and possibly miraculous healing for, this condition.

I’m going to save comment on number 4 for the next post, because (along with the depiction of Peter’s epistolary estrangement with his wife, Beatrice) it the depiction of the Oasans is the best thing about the book. What I want to focus on now is simple: none of these reveals is satisfying, because none of them explains the brooding, discombobulated atmosphere so effectively manufactured by Faber. The closest any of them comes is number 3, and this one is the least credible. Why?

Answer: Faber wants us to believe that, so long as you put the right controls in place, you could transplant 50-100 adult human beings from Earth to a colony on another planet, and without actually lobotomizing, sterilizing, or otherwise chemically sedating them, they would go about their daily jobs more or less contentedly and consistently, without psychic or emotional needs or problems, absent children, elders, religion, recreation, marriage, family, sex, alcohol, drugs, gambling, art, literature, theft, envy, deceit, or violence.

To me, that reads like a joke. Or a thought experiment by someone who’s never met a human being, or read human history. Or, at best, a “what if?” exercise or narrative puzzle that calls for further explanation—rather than itself an attempt at an explanation of some other mysterious phenomenon, which is how it functions in the novel. How can this fanciful assertion of neutered, compliant, prelapsarian humans (who are, mind you, nothing but a random assortment of corporate employees who live on an alien planet with nothing to do but work) serve to answer the reader’s befuddlement at the unyielding, inhuman, overbearing environment in which Peter finds himself? The answer to one inexplicable mystery cannot be the assertion merely of another inexplicable mystery, not least one so implausible as this. But there it is. And it does not work.

The Book of Strange New Things, 1

I just finished Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, and I’ve got Thoughts. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it either. I think I might expand on a couple reasons in future posts. But the first thing I have to say about the book is this.

The lead character is simply not believable.

Here are things that are true of him:

1. He is a Christian.

2. He is a British evangelical.

3. He is an adult convert.

4. He is an ex-addict, sober alcoholic, and onetime homeless person.

5. He is happily married.

6. He is a pastor.

7. He and his wife are partners in ministry.

8. Their ministry is extremely evangelistic; the sort that moves heaven and earth to reach a single soul.

9. Their church is very “low.”

10. Their church and ministry are Bible- and sermon-centric (liturgy and sacrament are, if I recall correctly, never mentioned).

11. Their evangelistic efforts include, for example, hand-crafted tracts and pamphlets for far-away “unreached” people groups.

12. They both agree, upon discovery of intelligent life on a distant planet, that it is God’s will for him, the husband-pastor, to journey light-years away to bring the gospel to this alien species.

13. Also, they both share misgivings about, bordering on dislike for, St. Paul.

14. Also, he, the husband-pastor, takes for granted that the Pastoral Epistles were written by St. Paul to St. Timothy in the year AD 68.

15. Also, he rejects with vehemence the doctrine of the resurrection of the body.

The story is set in the near future; though the year is never specified, it is probably meant to be sometime in the next 50-150 years.

Numbers 1 through 12 are perfectly believable. Number 14 would be consonant with them. Number 13 would be an odd fit; the reader would be right to expect more than a passing explanation (which she would not receive). But number 15 brings the whole edifice crumbling down.

Let me instance very nearly the only reference to bodily resurrection in all 500 pages of the novel:

Jesus Lover Five [an alien believer] had fallen silent. Peter couldn’t tell if she was persuaded, reassured, sulking or what. What had she meant, anyway? Was Kurtzberg [the alien congregation’s former missionary-pastor from Earth] one of those Lutheran-flavored fundamentalists who believed that dead Christians would one day be resurrected into their old bodies—magically freshened up and incorruptible, with no capacity to feel pain, hunger or pleasure—and go on to use those bodies for the rest of eternity? Peter had no time for that doctrine himself. Death was decay, decay was decay, only the spirit endured.

The author, Faber, is unfailingly unpatronizing in his own (alien) inhabitation of an evangelical missionary’s mind and thoughts, even his piety. But this false note is telling. Like a fart in a fugue, it afflicts the whole. And the fact that it comes halfway through the novel, with neither preparation nor elaboration, tells us that the author cannot hear the dissonance, does not smell the stench.

Bible-centric low-church hyper-evangelistic born-again missionary-pastors are, without exception, Pauline in flavor and faith, and above all they are adamant believers in the resurrection of the body: first Jesus’s, then believers’. There are no exceptions to this rule. They do not pick and choose books of the New Testament with which they disagree or in which they casually disbelieve. To begin to do such a thing, to begin to make exceptions, is to cease to be a Bible-centric low-church hyper-evangelistic born-again missionary-pastor, one willing to move heaven and earth to win a single soul, to place a New Testament in the hands of a single unbeliever.

Perhaps I exaggerate. Perhaps Faber is himself such a person (though, from what I can tell, he most certainly is not), or perhaps he knows such a person. But such a person in unique on this planet. To make such a unique person the protagonist of a novel, one must know, and show that one knows, that he is indeed so unique; and, thereupon, to sketch what led to his being thus unique. That Faber does not offer that sketch suggests to me, his reader, that he lacks this knowledge. Lacking it, the novel’s central character does not hold together. Which means the novel does not hold together.

Late le Carré

The truth is that politics began to intrude itself into le Carré’s work more flagrantly. It certainly preoccupied him. The Brexit vote outraged him, and at the end of his life he petitioned for Irish citizenship, so that he might remain a European. “I think my own ties to England were hugely loosened over the last few years,” he told The Guardian in 2019. “And it’s a kind of liberation, if a sad kind.” This growing disenchantment could not help but leave its mark on his work. In his classic novels, politics is the background against which his figures act; in the later ones, politics itself is the subject matter, and his figures become the surrogates who act it out.

One of the reasons that the later books tend to blur together is in the sameness of their plots: an essentially decent but rather dim fellow is complicit in some sort of international conspiracy about which he is ignorant until he is enlightened through his encounter with a clear-eyed idealist, after which he tries to redeem himself with a selfless but typically futile act of heroism. Le Carré’s idealists were sadly generic: all-purpose human-rights lawyers or international doctors—types rather than individuals. This is the tragic irony of his career: having made his mark by introducing moral complexity and ambiguity into the spy novel, he ended by making cardboard cut-outs against whom James Bond seems like Hamlet.

—Michael J. Lewis, “The Cooling of John le Carré,” The New Criterion (June 2021). That seems a harsh assessment, but what comes before and after the essay is measured, fair, and deeply appreciative of le Carré’s art. I wrote about his second-to-last novel, A Legacy of Spies, when it came out in fall 2017. I enjoyed it, though my reaction was similar to Lewis’s, and only confirmed by what turned out to be le Carré’s last novel, Agent Running in the Field, which Lewis calls his “Brexit novel.” Le Carré was one of a kind, and his prose was always top notch, but his career was bifurcated by two 30-year periods: 1961–1989, and 1990–2019. A Perfect Spy (1986) is his masterpiece, or rather his crowning masterpiece, alongside The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and the subsequent Smiley/Karla Trilogy. But there are other jewels in the crown, both before and after the end of the Cold War, because the man did not know how to write boring sentences or boring stories. I think of him the way I do P. D. James: a master of his craft whose second-tier work runs circles around would-be competitors. And as with her prolific output, I look forward to finishing every single book that came from his pen in my lifetime.

New piece published in Mere Orthodoxy: "Befriending Books: On Reading and Thinking with Alan Jacobs and Zena Hitz"

I'm in Mere Orthodoxy with a long review-essay of two new books: Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind by Alan Jacobs and Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. Here's a section from the opening:

If the quality of one’s thinking depends upon the quality of those one thinks with, the truth is that few of us have the ability to secure membership in a community of brilliant and wise, like-hearted but independent thinkers. Search for one as much as we like, we are bound to be frustrated. Moreover, recourse to the internet—one commonly proffered solution—is far more likely to exacerbate than to alleviate the problem: we may find like-minded souls, yes, but down that rabbit hole lies danger on every side. Far from nurturing studiositas, algorithms redirect the energies of the intellect into every manner of curiositas; far from preparing a multicourse feast, our digital masters function rather like Elliott in E.T., drawing us on with an endless trail of colorful candies. Underfed and unsatisfied, our minds continue to follow the path, munching on nothing, world without end.

Is there an alternative?

Jacobs believes there is. For the community of potential collaborators in thinking is not limited to the living, much less those relatively few living folks who surround each of us. It includes the dead. And how do we commune with the dead? Through books. A library is a kind of mausoleum: it houses the dead in the tombs of their words. We break bread with them, in Auden’s phrase, when we read them. Reading them, we find ourselves inducted into the great conversation that spans every civilization and culture from time immemorial on to the present and into the future. We encounter others who are really and truly other than us.

Go read the rest here.

On “anti" films that succeed, and why

More than one friend has pointed out an exception or addendum to my last post on "anti" films, which makes the claim that no "anti" films are successful on their own terms, for they ineluctably glorify the very thing they are wanting to hold up for critique: war, violence, misogyny, wealth, whatever.

The exception is this: There are successful "anti" films—meaning dramatic-narrative films, not documentaries—whose subject matter is intrinsically negative, and not ambiguous or plausibly attractive. Consider severe poverty, drug addiction, or profound depression. Though it is possible to make any of these a fetish, or to implicate the audience as a voyeur in relation to them, there is nothing appealing about being depressed, addicted, or impoverished, and so the effect of the cinematic form does nothing to make them appealing: for the form magnifies, and here there is nothing positive to magnify, only suffering or lack.

So, for example, The Florida Project and Requiem for a Dream and Melancholia are successful on their own terms; my critique of "anti" films does not apply to them.

But note well a few relevant features that distinguish these kinds of movies.

First, no one would mistake such films for celebrations of poverty, drug abuse, or depression. But that isn't because they're overly didactic; nor is it because other "anti" films aren't clear about their perspective. It's because no one could plausibly celebrate such things. But people do mistake films about cowboys, soldiers, assassins, vigilantes, gangsters, womanizers, adulterers, and hedge fund managers(!) as celebrations of them and their actions.

Second, this clear distinction helps us to see that films "against" poverty et al are not really "anti" films at all. Requiem is not "anti-hard drugs": it is about people caught up in drug abuse. It's not a D.A.R.E. ad for middle schoolers—though, as many have said, it certainly can have that effect. In that film Aranofsky glamorizes nothing about hard drugs or the consequences of being addicted to them. But that is more a critique of the way most films ordinarily bypass such consequences and focus on superficial appurtenances of the rich and famous, including the high of drugs but little more.

Third, this clarification helps to specify what I mean by "anti" films. I don't mean any film that features a negative subject matter. I mean a film whose narrative and thematic modus operandi is meant to be subversive. "Anti" films take a topic or figure that the surrounding culture celebrates, enjoys, or prefers left unexamined and subjects it to just that undesired examination. It deconstructs the cowboy and the general and the captain of industry. Or it does the same to the purported underbelly of society, giving sustained and sympathetic attention to the Italian mafia or drug-runners or pimps or what have you. In the first case, the lingering, affectionate gaze of the camera cannot but draw viewers into the life of the heretofore iconic figure, deepening instead of complicating their prior love. In the second, the camera's gaze does the same for previously misunderstood or despised figures. Michael Corleone and Tony Montana and Tommy DeVito become memorialized and adored through repeated dialogue, scenes, posters, and GIFs. Who could resist the charms of such men?

Fourth, the foregoing raises the question: Why are bad things like crime and violence and illicit sex plausibly "attractive" to filmmakers and audiences in a way that other bad things are not? I think the answer lies, on the one hand, with the visual nature of the medium: sex and violence, not to mention the excitement and/or luxury bound up with the life of organized crime, are visual and visually thrilling actions; in the hands of gifted directors, their rendering in film is often gorgeous and alluring to behold. Bodies in motion, kinetic choreography, beautiful people doing physically demanding or intriguing or seductive deeds: the camera was made for such things. Depression and deprivation? Not so much. (A reminder that film is not a medium of interiority; psychology is for print.)

On the other hand, the perennial topics of "anti" films are, as I said in my first post, not wholly bad things. War, needless to say, is a deeply complex phenomenon: just causes and wicked intentions, wise leaders and foolish generals, acts of heroism and indiscriminate killing, remarkable discipline and wanton destruction. War is a force that gives us meaning for a reason. But sex and westerns and extravagant wealth and even organized crime are similarly ambivalent, which is to say, they contain good and bad; or put differently, what is bad in them is a distortion of what is good. The Godfather is a classic for many reasons, but a principal one is its recognizable depiction of an institution in which we all share: family.

One friend observed that, perhaps, films cannot finally succeed in subverting vices of excess, but they can succeed in negative portrayals of vices of privation. I'll have to continue to ruminate on that, though it may be true. Note again, however, the comment above: vices of privation are not generally celebrated, admired, or envied; there is no temptation to be seduced by homelessness, nor is the medium of film prone to glorify it. Which means there is nothing subversive, formally speaking, about depicting homelessness as a bad thing that no one should desire and everyone should seek to alleviate. Whereas an "anti" film, at least in my understanding of it, is subversive by definition.

Fifth, another friend remarked that the best anti-war films are not about war at all: the most persuasive case against a vice is a faithful yet artful portrait of virtue. Broadly speaking, I think that is true. Of Gods and Men and A Hidden Life are "anti-war" films whose cameras do not linger on the battlefield or set the audience inside the tents and offices of field generals and masters of war. Arrival is a "pro-life" film that has nothing to do with abortion. So on and so forth. I take this to be a complimentary point, inasmuch as it confirms the difficulty (impossibility?) of cinematic "anti" films, according to my definition, and calls to mind other mediums that can succeed as subversive art: literature, poetry, music, photography, etc. I think the phenomenon I am discussing, in other words, while not limited to film, is unique in the range and style of its expression—or restriction—in film.

A simple way to put the matter: no other art form is so disposed to the pornographic as film is. The medium by its nature wants you to like, to love, to be awoken and shaken and shocked and moved by what you see. It longs to titillate. That is its special power, and therefore its special danger. That doesn't make it all bad. Film is a great art form, and individual films ought to be considered the way we do any discrete cultural artifact. But it helps to explain why self-consciously "subversive" films continually fail to achieve their aims, inexorably magnifying, glamorizing, and glorifying that which they seek to hold up to a critical eye. And that is why truly subversive literary art so rarely translates to the screen; why, for example, Cormac McCarthy's "anti-western" Blood Meridian is so regularly called "unfilmable." What that novel induces in its readers, not in spite of but precisely in virtue of its brilliance, is nothing so much as revulsion. One does not "like" or identify with the Kid or the Judge or their fellows. One does not wish one were there. One is sickened, overwhelmed with the sheer godforsaken evil and suffering on display. No "cowboys and Indians" cosplay here. Just violence, madness, and death.

Can cinema produce an anti-western along the same lines? One that features cowboys and gorgeous vistas and heart-pounding action and violence? Filmmakers have tried, including worthy efforts by Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, and Kelly Reichardt. I'd say the verdict is still out. But even if their are exceptions, the rule stands.

2021: the year of Martin, Rothfuss, and Williams?

Could 2021 see the publication of long-awaited sequels to three major fantasy series?

It would mark a full decade since George R. R. Martin published the fifth entry in his Song of Ice and Fire. He's been writing pages and pages since then, or so he says. He turns 72 this month, and following the TV adaptation of Game of Thrones concluded, then living through a global pandemic, he's had nothing but time to write. In any case, even after #6, he's got at least one more book in the series to write, assuming it doesn't keep multiplying and fracturing indefinitely. One can hope, no?

It's also been a decade since the second book in Patrick Rothfuss's Kingkiller Chronicle trilogy was published. Four years spanned the first two books. Perhaps ten will span the second and the third? Rothfuss insists that he is hard at work on The Doors of Stone, yet reacts cantankerously to continuous "Are you finished yet?" queries. It's unclear whether it's the perfectionist in him or whether, like Martin, the sprawl of the story plus the lure of other projects is keeping completion just over the horizon.

Speaking of completion: A full three decades ago Tad Williams published his extraordinary trilogy Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. He sat on it, sat on it, and sat on it some more—then finally made good on some hints and gestures in the closing pages of the final volume, To Green Angel Tower, with the publication in 2017 of a "bridge novel," The Heart of What Was Lost (a more Williams-esque title there never was, plangent and grand in epic lament as so much of his work is). Thus began a new trilogy, The Last King of Osten Ard, with volumes published in orderly sequence: 2017, 2019, and, in prospect, October 2021. (A second short prequel novel will be published in the summer.) Once he breaks the story, the man knows how to tell it, and how to finish it.

In sum, these are three great fantasy novelists working to complete three much-beloved fantasy series. And we could have all three authors publishing eagerly anticipated books in the next 15 months. Let it be so!

Ahab, slave to the dread tyrant Sin: Melville's dramatic exegesis of Romans 7

Near the finale of Moby-Dick, in the closing moments of the last chapter before the great chase for the white whale begins, gloomy Ahab has one final heartfelt conversation with Starbuck, his earnest and home-loving first mate. At the very moment when the climactic encounter is nigh, Ahab looks to pull back. And Starbuck is eager to help him do so. They converse on the deck, Ahab unsure of himself and Starbuck pleading with him, wooing him, conjuring the decision against the fatal hunt that he so hopes Ahab is capable of making. And just when Starbuck thinks he has his quarry, something inexplicable and wholly mysterious changes in Ahab. Here is Melville:

But Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil.

"What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is it Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year's scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swaths—Starbuck!"

Melville is playing out for us here, in dramatic form, the similar soliloquy of St. Paul in chapter 7 of his epistle to the Romans:

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.  So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. (vv. 15-21)

The "old man" weighed down by the flesh, Adam in his chains, lies in the squalor of bondage to sin—not just his own sins, but Sin, a sort of emergent personified power, a tyrant who reigns over the fallen children of Adam. Such a one is by definition unfree, and therefore utterly unfree even to choose the good, and therefore absolutely incapable of saving himself. Even with the wise route laid out before him, he cannot act. He needs a savior and more than a savior: a rival king to trample down Sin's false kingdom, and together with him to put to Death to death.

So argues Matthew Croasmun in his book The Emergence of Sin: The Cosmic Tyrant in Romans. (See further Wesley Hill's stimulating reflections on the book.) Ahab exemplifies Croasmun's thesis.

But because Melville is Melville, he's up to even more. Notice the brief, seemingly throwaway prefatory line of poetic simile: "But Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil." Melville knows he's depicting the old man; he knows he writes of Adam. That is why he places us in a garden with a spoiled tree with its spoiled fruit "cast"—fallen—to the "soil"—adamah. And it is why, finally, he begins with the gaze: "Ahab's glance was averted." As St. Augustine writes in Book XIV of City of God, the sin of Adam was not per se the eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; evil acts come from an evil will. (Augustine quotes Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount to note that evil fruit could only come—metaphorically—from an evil tree—the will of the first man.) Whence Adam's evil will, then? There is no trite answer, no easy explanation. In chapter 13 Augustine spells out the logic (italics all mine):

Our first parents fell into open disobedience because already they were secretly corrupted; for the evil act had never been done had not an evil will preceded it. And what is the origin of our evil will but pride? For "pride is the beginning of sin" (Sirach 10:13). And what is pride but the craving for undue exaltation? And this is undue exaltation, when the soul abandons Him to whom it ought to cleave as its end, and becomes a kind of end to itself. This happens when it becomes its own satisfaction. And it does so when it falls away from that unchangeable good which ought to satisfy it more than itself. This falling away is spontaneous; for if the will had remained steadfast in the love of that higher and changeless good by which it was illumined to intelligence and kindled into love, it would not have turned away to find satisfaction in itself, and so become frigid and benighted; the woman would not have believed the serpent spoke the truth, nor would the man have preferred the request of his wife to the command of God, nor have supposed that it was a venial transgression to cleave to the partner of his life even in a partnership of sin. The wicked deed, then—that is to say, the transgression of eating the forbidden fruit—was committed by persons who were already wicked.

Evil acts have their source in an evil will, and a will becomes evil when it becomes uncoupled from its true end and finds its end in itself. To become one's own end is to fall away from the true and eternal Good that alone satisfies the longings of the soul. "This falling away is spontaneous": there is no narrative, no logic, no inner rationale much less necessity, that can account for it. It just happens. The image Augustine uses for this spontaneous falling is "turning away," depicted as a kind of anti-repentance. Adam turns his eyes from God, his final End and supreme Good, to lesser things. Doing so just is The Fall.

And that is just what Melville his his Adam, Ahab, do in response to Starbuck's eminently reasonable efforts to persuade: "But Ahab's glance was averted." By what? To what? Why? We aren't told. It's spontaneous; there is no explanation to be sought because there is no explanation to be had. Ahab's turn is a surd like all sin is a surd. It has no reason, for it is no-reason, not-reason incarnate. His desire has overwhelmed his sense; his craving has overtaken his will; he himself has become his own end, and answering the command of another, from without, he rushes to his fate "against all natural lovings and longings," no matter the cost, his own life and the life of his men be damned.

Damned, indeed. Ahab is Adam without a second Adam. There is no savior in his story, even if Starbuck stands in for one as a kind of messenger or angel. Ahab, that archetypal self-made American man, is finally not the captain of his own ship. The captain of the Pequod is rather that "cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor" in whose service Ahab places himself when he baptizes the barb meant for the white whale: "Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli."

The devil is Ahab's lord, as he is fallen Adam's master. He reigns in their death-bound lives through their bent and broken wills by the tyrannical power of Sin. Absent intervention, Adam's fate is Ahab's: to be drowned eternally in the depths of the sea, bound by the lines of his own consecrated weaponry to the impervious hide of Leviathan: the very object to which his gaze turned, the means of his helpless demise.

Wallace Stegner on the writing life of academic overachievers

I remember little about Madison as a city, have no map of its streets in my mind, am rarely brought up short by remembered smells or colors from that time. I don’t even recall what courses I taught. I really never did live there, I only worked there. I landed working and never let up.

What I was paid to do I did conscientiously with forty percent of my mind and time. A Depression schedule, surely—four large classes, whatever they were, three days a week. Before and between and after my classes, I wrote, for despite my limited one-year appointment I hoped for continuance, and I did not intend to perish for lack of publications. I wrote an unbelievable amount, not only what I wanted to write but anything any editor asked for—stories, articles, book reviews, a novel, parts of a textbook. Logorrhea. A scholarly colleague, one of those who spent two months on a two-paragraph communication to Notes and Queries and had been working for six years on a book that nobody would ever publish, was heard to refer to me as the Man of Letters, spelled h-a-c-k. His sneer so little affected me that I can’t even remember his name.

Nowadays, people might wonder how my marriage lasted. It lasted fine. It throve, partly because I was as industrious as an anteater in a termite mound and wouldn’t have noticed anything short of a walkout, but more because Sally was completely supportive and never thought of herself as a neglected wife—“thesis widows,” we used to call them in graduate school. She was probably lonely for the first two or three weeks. Once we met the Langs she never had time to be, whether I was available or not. It was a toss-up who was neglecting whom.

Early in our time in Madison I stuck a chart on the concrete wall of my furnace room. It reminded me every morning that there are one hundred sixty-eight hours in a week. Seventy of those I dedicated to sleep, breakfasts, and dinners (chances for socializing with Sally in all of those areas). Lunches I made no allowance for because I brown-bagged it at noon in my office, and read papers while I ate. To my job—classes, preparation, office hours, conferences, paper-reading—I conceded fifty hours, though when students didn’t show up for appointments I could use the time for reading papers and so gain a few minutes elsewhere. With one hundred and twenty hours set aside, I had forty-eight for my own. Obviously I couldn’t write forty-eight hours a week, but I did my best, and when holidays at Thanksgiving and Christmas gave me a break, I exceeded my quota.

Hard to recapture. I was your basic overachiever, a workaholic, a pathological beaver of a boy who chewed continually because his teeth kept growing. Nobody could have sustained my schedule for long without a breakdown, and I learned my limitations eventually. Yet when I hear the contemporary disparagement of ambition and the work ethic, I bristle. I can’t help it.

I overdid, I punished us both. But I was anxious about the coming baby and uncertain about my job. I had learned something about deprivation, and I wanted to guarantee the future as much as effort could guarantee it. And I had been given, first by Story and then by the Atlantic, intimations that I had a gift.

Thinking about it now, I am struck by how modest my aims were. I didn’t expect to hit any jackpots. I had no definite goal. I merely wanted to do well what my inclinations and training led me to do, and I suppose I assumed that somehow, far off, some good might flow from it. I had no idea what. I respected literature and its vague addiction to truth at least as much as tycoons are supposed to respect money and power, but I never had time to sit down and consider why I respected it.

Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim’s Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn a man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else—pathway to the stars, maybe.

I suspect that what makes hedonists so angry when they think about overachievers is that the overachievers, without drugs or orgies, have more fun.

—Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety (1987), pp. 96–98

On Moby-Dick

I finally did it. Last month I read Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.

 It would be an understatement to say that I loved it. I fell in love. And with all of it: the prose, the themes, the characters, the plot, the figural saturation, the endless and endlessly digressive chapters, the sheer American mythic theogony of it.

When one commits to read such heralded classics, there's always the question lingering in the back of one's mind whether it will prove a crushing disappointment. Like meeting one's heroes, reading the canon is not always for the faint of heart.

No such disappointment with Moby-Dick. Since I started it, and especially since I finished it, I have been an annoying pest to anyone and everyone who will listen to me sing of its greatness, some 170 years since its writing.

The air one breathes while reading Melville is rare. It's the same air one discovers blowing through Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Dostoevsky, Virgil, Homer. After reading such authors, one understands the true meaning of such over-used terms like "classic," "genius," and "master." They are a class unto themselves.

Reading Melville's writing in Moby-Dick is like reading Shakespeare, only if he were an American and wrote prose. It's poetry in long-form and without line breaks. Melville did not know how to write an uninteresting sentence. The cavalcade of words builds and builds until it becomes a vast and imposing army in flawless formation, executing whatever order of subtle wit or penetrating insight Melville deigned to issue.

Did I mention he's funny? Laugh out loud funny. Every sentence in the book could be underlined, every third paragraph circled and starred, every fifth excerpted in an anthology of nothing but samples of perfect instances of American English construction.

I got bit by the theology bug early in my teens. I was dead set on my discipline from an early age. But had I read Moby-Dick at the same age, they might have gotten me instead. I mean language and lit: I might have been bound for English departments, buried beneath a rubble of 19th century manuscripts, for the rest of my life. Indeed, what makes a classic a classic, and therefore what makes Melville's opus a classic, is its inexhaustible character. Upon closing the final page, I could imagine dedicating my life to this book and this book alone. Its riches are bottomless.

Yet the one thing I can't imagine is having anything original to say about such a widely interpreted and commented-upon book. Even these reflections are little more than modest variations on the same ringing theme common to thousands upon thousands of American readers since the centenary of Melville's birth in 1919. But I'm hungry for more. I already read Nathan Philbrick's Why Read Moby-Dick? Here's to more where that came from, and above all, to many, many, many re-readings of that great mythic tome—that oceanic mishmash of Qoheleth and the Book of Job—that biblical pastiche of the enduring American soul—the undoubted and unrivaled great American novel—the one, the only, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale.

The hatred of theology

In the latest issue of The Point, Jon Baskin writes on behalf of the magazine's editors about what he calls "the hatred of literature." By this team he means the attitude—apparently dominant in English departments a couple decades ago and imbibed by graduate students across the land—that the study of literature exists not to appreciate its multifarious goodnesses and beauties, rooted in love for the object of study, but instead to uncover, unmask, and indict the social, moral, and political problems belonging to its conditions of production. The novel or poem is therefore not an object at all, that is to say, an end, but a means to a larger, political end; criticism thus becomes an instrument of political advocacy. The work of literary art plays no role in calling me or my convictions into question. Rather, the critic measures the work by the correctness of its views or its capacity to activate social change (for the better, that is, more or less in line with my priors), and judges its quality accordingly.

Baskin labels this approach the "hatred" of literature for two reasons. On the one hand, it does not treat literature as an end (however proximate) in itself, but only as a sort of weapon to advance or stymie the cause—whatever that may be. On the other hand, and more important, it quite literally does not arise from what usually stands as the origin story for so many students and teachers of literature: love. Love for the thing itself, for its own sake, just because. A love that does not demand agreement or relevance or revolutionary potential or the "right" politics, but only that ephemeral experience that is the root of all art: an encounter with that which outstrips the mundane, calling to the self from beyond the self. That old word "beauty" is one of the ways we try to capture such encounters.

Reading Baskin as an academically trained theologian, it made me wonder: Is there a similar phenomenon in academic theology? Does one find—or, in recent decades, could one find—in the academy "the hatred of theology"?

I think the answer is yes, in at least six ways.

First, there is a style of doing theology formally parallel to the "New Historicism." Namely, theology reduced to its sociopolitical function. What does theologoumenon X or Y accomplish with respect to certain desired political ends? There's plenty of that around, past and present.

Second, there is what some, at least in the U.K. a few decades ago, used to call "doctrinal criticism." This comprised the study of traditional doctrines from church history and the subjection of them to "critique" under the conditions and presuppositions of modernity. In other words: What is "modern man" permitted to believe, and what of the Christian dogmatic heritage must be revised, and in what ways, in order to fall in line with the Enlightenment and its heirs?

Third, in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, there was a kind of obsessive-compulsive anxiety about methodology that, as the old saw goes, never got around to actually talking about God, but only talked about talking about God. This, too, served as an avoidance strategy for academic theology.

Fourth, there is a mode of theology similar to the first example above that is nonetheless subtly different. It isn't so much about theology being merely a means to a foreordained end. But its utility as a source of or exercise in knowledge is indexed to its practical relevance. So that, e.g., the doctrine of the Trinity must have direct and obvious consequences for human social life—or else, why are we talking about it in the first place?

Fifth, a similarly practice-oriented theology is less interested in the potentially transformative implications of otherwise esoteric doctrines like the Trinity for human life. Instead, it works the other way: such doctrines are ruled out of court in advance. Only certain doctrines and topics are intrinsically practical; it is those that theology ought to attend to. Often this approach is coordinated to, or a function of, a laser-like focus on the church's life and the conduct of its ordinary members. Of what benefit is this doctrine to the average Christian? is the pressing question that filters the worthy from the unworthy loci.

Sixth and last, much theology simply proceeds with little to no reference to God as such. It is identifiable as a kind of Christian discourse (it speaks, as it were, Christianese), but the subject matter, by any reasonable account, is not the God of Christian confession. Something else is thereby sought to "make" the discourse "theological," whether or not that effort succeeds.

I should say that this is a quick and dirty list, with considerable overlap between the different items and almost certainly other examples left off. And I should clarify the quirkiness of theology compared to literature, since the analogy is imperfect at key points.

First, the subject matter of literature is literary artifacts written by human beings. Whereas the subject matter for Christian theology God: alive, on the one hand, yet inaccessible to empirical investigation, on the other. Knowledge of God is mediated by that which is not God. Furthermore, the "love" of which Baskin writes is disanalogous in the extreme compared to the "love" that grounds and sustains theology. For this latter love is personal love, directed (ideally) in complete and utter devotion to that than which nothing greater can be conceived: the author and perfecter of our very souls. Nothing similar can be said of literature (or when it is, it is sad to see).

But this only highlights the oddity, even the tragedy, of loveless theology. To speak and write about God as if he is not the all-consuming fire of one's life—as if, indeed, his existence and attributes are a matter of polite speculation—is to repudiate theology itself. Why bother? One can at least understand the literary critic who "hates" literature in Baskin's sense. In the case of the theologian who "hates" theology, and by implication theology's Sache, it is wholly unintelligible.

Second, theology has a natural home, and it is not the university or even the seminary. It is the church. So there is a community that both houses and is the beneficiary of theology's labor. In that sense theologians and believers are right to expect theology to service the church, which does at some level mean a practical effect. (That is why there is a tradition in the church that understands theology to be a practical science and not a theoretical one; compare, for example, the Franciscans to the Thomists.)

Third, theology concerns not just any God but the God revealed in Jesus Christ, who calls all people, including theologians, to follow him. This entails, in summary form, loving God with one's whole self and loving one's neighbor as oneself. The upshot: theology touches on all of life, for it considers all things in relation to God; therefore theology would be incomplete without speaking to moral, social, and political matters. Even by implication, to speak of God is inevitably to speak of issues of great human import, since that same God, who created humanity, became human in Christ and lived an exemplary life to which all are called to conform. To do theology abstracting from these facts would be a failure of serious magnitude.

The trick, then, is to balance the theoretical and practical tasks of theology without denying one in favor of the other or rendering either synonymous to the other. Above all, though, theology must never be embarrassed to be itself. And to be itself, theology must speak of God, boldly and with unbreakable faith. So to speak of God, however, means one must love God, which is the beginning and end of theology. The theologian, it turns out, is one who loves God and thus, in a manner of speaking, loves theology too.