What Jacques Barzun Believes, Maybe

The Public Square

I share fully the pleasure that our reviewer, John J. Reilly, takes in Jacques Barzun’s big new book From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life (FT, November). It is a very big book indeed, coming to almost nine hundred pages with notes. But it is a wonderful read, summing up the learned and sometimes eccentric reflections of a scholar now ninety-three years old. Anne Fadiman has written, “Thank heaven he has lived long enough to complete a book no one else could even have begun.” The second part of that is a bit of an exaggeration. John Russell writes with no exaggeration at all, “This book is what used to be called a ‘liberal education,’ and it should bring that phrase back into favor.”

That Professor Barzun is learned, cosmopolitan, amusing, and wise there is no doubt, but I kept wondering what he really believes. In all his masterful displaying of the ideas, philosophies, and artistic representations of reality that have captured minds and souls over these five hundred years, where does Jacques Barzun stand? What are the core convictions that anchor and direct his way of trying to make sense of the world of which we are part? Answers are elusive, for he is sometimes coy, and he tries always to describe sympathetically intellectual and cultural movements of the most maddening diversity. From Dawn to Decadence is, as the title indicates, written in an argumentative mode but not in a confessional mode.

But there are here and there glimpses of a creed that sustains Barzun’s labors. I do not mean just his aesthetic, moral, and intellectual judgments. The book is riddled with those, which is a large part of its charm. By a creed I mean the comprehensive belief or affirmation that undergirds the lifetime enterprise represented by this remarkable book. The closest thing I could find to such a creed occurs on page 756 in the context of his discussing the sundry existentialisms that produced the literature and theater of the Absurd associated with figures such as Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Eugene Ionesco, and that a few decades ago exploded with such unhappy cultural and political effect through the writings of R. D. Laing, Norman O. Brown, and Herbert Marcuse. In an uncharacteristic tone of impatience, Barzun writes:

However fitting for the times, the existentialist complaint seems puny. It laments because man must make his own goals within a universe that stays aloof. Both are questionable assumptions. It can be argued that man and nature are one: nature is conscious of itself in and through man. And what man has made of the world, intellectually and materially, is his mission-chosen by him, it is true, but so universal that it is tantamount to fated, obligatory. Besides, how strange and unfriendly is nature? It has of course no intentions, friendly or unfriendly; it does not even exist as an entity; it is a man-made construct from his experience and for his purposes. But once taken as such “it” feeds him, it yields in a thousand ways to his handling, and it is beautiful. The sight of it often gives pure mindless joy. To dismiss as mistaken all these links with the cosmos that men have celebrated in worship and song is to forget that if the mind mistakes, it is because it “takes,” and that the current submission to the absurd is a taking within life, not outside it; hence not competent to damn it permanently.

What does he mean that the Absurdists were “taking within life, not outside it”? What can be outside life? Only, it would seem, upper case Life. He contrasts the Absurdists with earlier modernists, such as the Dadaists of Zurich in 1916. They, too, recognized and represented the absurd dimensions of existence, but they did not leave it at that; the absurd did not have the last word. Unlike them, the later practitioners of the Absurd “set off no spark of positive electricity, no rebellion against the absurdity of the Absurd.” Then this: “In contrast, earlier philosophies used life as the very source of sanity; it was the measure of rightness, not vulnerable to corruption. The distinction was implicit between Life and our life at the moment; and the new thought, the new art showed what Life demanded. Even the Stoics, who did not dance with joy at the idea of being alive, left life and the cosmos their validity. The Absurd marks a failure of nerve.”

The story line of From Dawn to Decadence is, in Barzun’s telling, a failure of nerve. A failure of nerve to do what or to be what? A failure to live in the truth that “Nature is conscious of itself in and through man. And what man has made of the world, intellectually and materially, is his mission—chosen by him, it is true, but so universal that it is tantamount to fated, obligatory.” A life lived in that truth is a life lived in response to what Life demands. At the risk of attributing to Barzun a theology that is not his, one is reminded of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s declaration, “Man is the cantor and caretaker of the universe.” There is no doubt about Barzun’s profound humanism, his devotion to the human project. And, although he is confoundedly reticent about it, there would seem to be no doubt that his devotion is sustained by the confidence that the project is in response to an obligation not entirely of its own creation. As to what that obligation and the promise attending it might be, perhaps Prof. Barzun will overcome his reticence and tell us in his next book.

Tired Taxonomies

He wrote a fine biography of Whittaker Chambers and is currently writing a biography of William F. Buckley, Jr., so I suppose it is understandable that Sam Tanenhaus is attentive to the squabbles over the definitions and incessant redefinitions of “conservatism.” Who is and who is not one, and of what kind? It is a subject for which I have severely limited patience. I don’t mean to sound coy or suggest that I am above the squabbles that preoccupy mere mortals. Goodness knows, I spend a good deal of my time making arguments, countering opposing arguments, taking positions, and advocating that we should do this rather than that. It is simply that I can’t work up much interest in the taxonomical disputes over which arguments and which positions belong in this ideological box rather than that.

But some attention must be paid when the taxonomists grossly misrepresent the work in which one has a part. Writing in the New York Times, Tanenhaus revisits, yet again, the “neoconservative” phenomenon, fretting over what is right, what is left, what is center, etc., etc. Nothing new in that, but then we come to this: “And a turning point came in 1996, when a group of Christian conservatives affiliated with the political-religious publication First Things declared a virtual war on the American government and proposed solutions ranging from ‘civil disobedience’ to ‘morally justified revolution.’ This extremism contradicted everything neoconservatives stood for.”

Where to begin? Maybe with the fact that our critique of the judicial usurpation of politics in 1996 and since is advanced by both Jews and Christians; or with the fact that the argument is entirely supportive of the American constitutional order; or with the fact that nobody in these pages has proposed civil disobedience, never mind revolution, as a solution, although we have with great care discussed the theoretical and historical responses to legal injustices—hardly an extremist subject in light of the American experiment, from its eighteenth-century beginnings to the civil rights struggle under Martin Luther King, Jr.

The locution “Christian conservatives” is telling. The neoconservative story is essentially a Jewish story; it is the last part of the last chapter of the endlessly retold legend of “the New York intellectuals.” Non-Jews make occasional appearances, but Mr. Tanenhaus writes as a Jew about Jews for Jews. “Christian conservatives” are something else. In urging that neoconservatives drop the prefix and acknowledge that they are, quite simply, conservatives, Irving Kristol, the “godfather” of the neocons, is saying that the story of the New York intellectuals is over. Mr. Tanenhaus, however, is stuck on the last chapter.

As for his alleged turning point, Mr. Tanenhaus tells me that he has read the original 1996 symposium, although not the continuing discussion in these pages, nor the several books that have appeared in this connection. What he did read he did not, I would suggest, read carefully. Except for my friend Norman Podhoretz’s book, My Love Affair With America, in which Norman used the 1996 symposium as a ploy to prove that he hasn’t lost his propensity for fighting with his friends. The fight was entirely one-sided, and Norman and I are anything but—to use the title of his earlier book—ex-friends. So much for Tanenhaus’ great turning point.

As Norman knows, I do wish he would stop claiming that, in criticizing this journal, he was combating “anti-Americanism on the right.” But one understands that he has been writing and living the story of “making it” since long before he published the controversial book by that title. The saga of his journey from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side is indeed a tribute to America, and to his talented tenaciousness. Unlike Groucho Marx who memorably said that he wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would accept him, Norman is inclined to the view that his being accepted puts the club beyond criticism. His unilateral revision of the club rules, however, is not likely to gain many adherents. While I find it mildly annoying to be accused of anti-Americanism, it has the dubious merit of balancing the many critics, on both the right and the left, who have over the years charged this journal and its Editor-in-Chief with excessive devotion to the American experiment. In any event, we will go on making the arguments that we have been making, and do so, I trust, with friendships intact. It’s the American way.

As for the important questions involved, there is, so far as I know, not one neoconservative cited in Tanenhaus’ article who disagrees with the substance of this journal’s analysis of the problem of judicial usurpation. It may be that there are some who deny that there is a transcendent referent by which this government can be brought under moral judgment, which strikes me as a denial that should be impossible for any serious Christian or Jew. And some are obviously made nervous by any discussion of legitimate and illegitimate government—at least with respect to this country—despite America’s founding truths, such as the Declaration’s claim that “just government is derived from the consent of the governed.” Discussion of those questions will continue as occasion requires. Meanwhile, the taxonomists will also go on churning out articles and books on Whither Conservatism? Whither Liberalism? Whither the Left? Whither the Right? Whither Whitherism? It is for the most part a harmless obsession, although one wishes it were pursued with greater attentiveness to the facts.

To Say that Jesus Is Lord: Part Two

In the last issue we commented on the declaration Dominus Iesus (Jesus the Lord) issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in September, and on various reactions to it. In an unusual public expression of differences within the Curia, Edward Cardinal Cassidy, who heads the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity, has carefully distanced himself from the tone, although not the substance, of the declaration. He and others have suggested that parts of the text, notably those dealing with ecumenism, could and should have been phrased with greater care for the sensibilities of non-Catholics. It is a view with which I have some sympathy, although it may well be that the straightforward—one might almost say stark—propositions of the document will serve as a bracing reminder that the only unity that we should seek is unity in the truth. Clarity in facing disagreements gives credibility to agreements.

A harsh but not unrepresentative reaction to Dominus Iesus is offered by Brazilian liberation theologian, Leonardo Boff. In a long attack, he says the document represents “the Roman system—immutable, implacable, cruel, and pitiless.” Cardinal Ratzinger of CDF “has appointed himself the executioner of the future of ecumenism.” “Only an old, bitter, and fading church could produce such a melancholic and spiritually corrupt text” setting forth doctrines that represent the Vatican’s “thirst for power.” Along the way, however, Boff does render a service by highlighting what is theologically at stake. “In the end this document, a supreme expression of totalitarianism, would say to everyone, in a cruel and merciless way: without Christ and the Church you have nothing; and if just by chance you were to possess something positive, it would not be because it is from you, but because it comes from Christ and the Church.” Ratzinger, complains Boff, would put public revelation in the past, whereas we should be open to present and future public revelations, including from different religions such as the Aztec, Buddhist, Hindu, and other traditions.

Whether all salvation is through Christ and the gospel of Christ proclaimed and lived by the Church has, of course, been the question for centuries. Without Christ and his Church we would indeed be eternally lost. Or so orthodox Christians of whatever denomination believe. The question is whether Jesus the Christ is one expression, one emanation, one revelation of God among others, or is, as we say in the creed commonly called the Nicene, “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.” Of course the orthodox Christian claim is scandalously audacious—some say arrogant—in the twenty-first century, as it was in the first and in all the centuries in between. The question is whether it is true. If it is true, it is good news for everyone, for the one God intends his one plan of salvation to be for everyone.

Given the storm of reaction and misrepresentation, not all of it so extreme as Boff’s, Pope John Paul II took the occasion of his Angelus address on October 1 to clarify what the CDF declaration does and does not say. It is a very careful statement that rewards close reading.

“With the Declaration Dominus Iesus—Jesus is Lord—approved by me in a special way at the height of the Jubilee Year, I wanted to invite all Christians to renew their fidelity to him in the joy of faith and to bear unanimous witness that the Son, both today and tomorrow, is ‘the way, and the truth, and the life’ (John 14:6). Our confession of Christ as the only Son, through whom we ourselves see the Father’s face (cf. John 14:8), is not arrogance that disdains other religions, but joyful gratitude that Christ has revealed himself to us without any merit on our part. At the same time, he has obliged us to continue giving what we have received and to communicate to others what we have been given, since the Truth that is has been given and the Love which is God belongs to all people.

“With the Apostle Peter, we confess that ‘there is salvation in no one else’ (Acts 4:12). The Declaration Dominus Iesus, following the lead of the Second Vatican Council, shows us that this confession does not deny salvation to non-Christians, but points to its ultimate source in Christ, in whom man and God are united. God gives light to all in a way which is accommodated to their spiritual and material situation, granting them salvific grace in ways known to himself (Dominus Iesus, VI, nn. 20-21). The document clarifies essential Christian elements, which do not hinder dialogue but show its bases, because a dialogue without foundations would be destined to degenerate into empty wordiness.

“The same also applies to the ecumenical question. If the document, together with the Second Vatican Council, declares that ‘the single Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church,’ it does not intend thereby to express scant regard for the other Churches and Ecclesial Communities. This conviction is accompanied by the awareness that it is not due to human merit, but is a sign of God’s fidelity, which is stronger than the human weaknesses and sins solemnly confessed by us before God and men at the beginning of Lent. The Catholic Church—as the document says—suffers from the fact that true particular Churches and Ecclesial Communities with precious elements of salvation are separated from her.

“The document thus expresses once again the same ecumenical passion that is the basis of my encyclical Ut Unum Sint. I hope that this Declaration, which is close to my heart, can, after so many erroneous interpretations, finally fulfill its function both of clarification and of openness. May Mary, whom the Lord on the Cross entrusted to us as the Mother of us all, help us to grow together in our faith in Christ, the Redeemer of all mankind, in the hope of salvation offered by Christ to everyone, and in love, which is the sign of God’s children.”

Invited to a Revolution

As best I can calculate, it was 1956 or 1957 when I was a seminarian at Concordia, St. Louis, and during the summer I was peddling Fuller Brush products in the north country of Ontario. Since I was only a temporary, I was assigned a rural territory with a handful of villages and farm houses few and far between. But one could make some decent money, at least by the reckoning of that time. The deal was that one got a straight 50 percent on sales of brushes, waxes, mops, and sundry other items with which—or so the sales pitch put it—no household should be without. I discovered that getting orders was a lot easier than getting payment when I delivered the goods a week later. Nothing new in that, I suppose. It was much the same the summer I sold Wearever pots and pans. The next summer it was life insurance. I was particularly good at persuading young ladies that lots of insurance would increase their marriage prospects. I am embarrassed to recall that spiel. It was effective, though, and they signed up eagerly—only to promptly default on paying the premiums, which wiped out my commission. Typically, there was a father in the picture who took a very different view of a young man selling his eighteen-year-old daughter a large life insurance policy.

It was in the Fuller Brush summer, however, that I stumbled across the Madonna House Lay Apostolate, nestled by the Madawaska River in the Laurentian wilderness of Combermere, close by Barry’s Bay and Wilno, the last being the first Polish settlement in Canada. My purpose was just to sell brushes, and I didn’t know what I was getting into. I am not entirely sure that I actually met “the Baroness,” Catherine de Hueck Doherty. I think I did, but it must have been very briefly, for, from what I know now, any extended encounter with her would certainly be remembered. I also don’t remember whether I made a sale there. Probably not, since the people of Madonna House take a vow of poverty and try to live on what they can produce themselves or beg from others. But the people with whom I talked for an hour or so impressed upon me that this was a very different place. In the years following, I would reflect from time to time on that odd community and what they told me about their way of life, and about their foundress, a Russian aristocrat who talked with God and, more interestingly, taught what she had learned when God talked with her, which, or so it was said, He regularly did. It all seemed a little strange, as in fanatical.

Much later, I came to a better appreciation of Madonna House and the Baroness. In addition to Combermere, where there are about a hundred lay “staff workers” and ten priests, some twenty other houses around the world have sprung up in response to Catherine’s invitation: “We need to be poor! Let us live an ordinary life, but beloved, let us live it with a passionate love for God. Become a mystery. Stretch one hand out to God, the other to your neighbor. Be cruciform. Christ’s cross will be our revolution and it will be A REVOLUTION OF LOVE!” Each year hundreds of lay people, religious, and priests visit Combermere and the other houses to be formed for a week or more in Catherine’s way of radical discipleship. This past summer I returned again to Combermere.

She was not, technically speaking, a baroness, since Russia did not have such a title, but she was from wealth and nobility. The media gave her the title when she arrived in Canadian exile following the Bolshevik revolution and it stuck. To say hers was an eventful life is to understate egregiously. Between her birth in 1896 and her death in 1985, she served as a nurse with the Russian army in World War I and with the poignantly hopeless White Russian army after the revolution; she married a Russian ne’er-do-well, gave birth to a son to whom she was an indifferent mother; supported herself and her family as a successful anti-Communist lecturer; established houses to serve the poor and advance interracial friendship in Toronto, Chicago, and Harlem, in which connection she was often compared with her friend Dorothy Day. After an annulment, she married the then noted journalist Eddie Doherty, and when their world fell apart following her rejection by the movement she had launched, they fled to Combermere. What seemed like the end was the beginning of Madonna House. These few words cannot begin to suggest the tumultuousness of this extraordinary life. The story is well told, not without a critical edge, in They Called Her the Baroness by Lorene Hanley Duquin (Alba House).

Dozens of her books and booklets have been kept in print by Madonna House Publications. I frequently have an ambivalent response to the writings of the founders of spiritual movements. What their followers hail as flashing spiritual insights often seem a bit obvious and even banal, and one just knows these founders must have been much more impressive in person. Some of Catherine’s publications are mainly transcripts of talks given at Madonna House, full of exclamation points and assertions in the upper case. One gathers that she herself was an exclamation point. From her writings and from conversation with those who knew her well, I expect she must have been quite impossible a good deal of the time. Her tone is relentlessly intense, imperious, and flaming with the passion of discovered love. The little book, Dear Father: A Message of Love to Priests, can be summed up: “Yes, but do you believe, do you really believe, the wonder of who Christ is and you are for him? Show it! Live it!” One is reminded of Chesterton’s remark that the only sin is to call a green leaf gray. Catherine railed against a world and a Church that seemed so indifferent to the luminosity of love. (Dear Father also contains an excerpt I had quite forgotten from Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain, in which he tells of Catherine’s influence on his vocation.)

For Poustinia, perhaps her most influential book, she must have had a good editor. The exclamation points and upper case excitements are muted in this strongly moving account of a practice of silence, solitude, and prayer drawn from the Russian experience of pilgrimage and time apart in which poustiniki live in a small hut—for days or months or years, or for a lifetime—in an isolation that is also total availability to the community. The heart of the poustinia is kenosis, joining Christ in the emptying of the self, as described by Paul in Philippians 2. “I think that God calls the poustinik to a total purgation, a total self-emptying,” writes Catherine. She cautioned against the impulse to be relevant by doing something useful as the world measures usefulness. “If you want to see what a ‘contribution’ really is, look at the Man on the cross. That’s a contribution. When you are hanging on a cross you can’t do anything because you’re crucified. That is the essence of a poustinik. That is his or her contribution.” Poustinia is one of the more insightful and disturbing books on prayer I have read in a long time.

As with Dorothy Day, Catherine’s “cause” has been accepted by Rome and it is possible that somewhere down that path she may formally be declared a saint. Also like Dorothy Day, Catherine’s faith and piety came to be viewed as “conservative” because so radically orthodox. (Catherine was baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church and part of the continuing apostolate of Madonna House is reconciliation between East and West, a purpose close to the heart of John Paul II.) Many who admire Dorothy Day are prepared to overlook her orthodoxy for the sake of the radical politics of her Catholic Worker movement. It is harder to do that with the Baroness since she more clearly distanced the Madonna House Apostolate from the political exploitation of its members’ dedication to live for and with the poor. But both Dorothy and Catherine understood that orthodox Christianity is ever so much more radical than the radicalisms that the world regularly throws up to challenge or recruit Christian faith; and they understood that the way of high adventure is not to trim the Church’s teaching but to penetrate ever more deeply into living the mystery of Christ.

The last half century, and especially the years of this pontificate, has witnessed an astonishing resurgence of renewal movements. Among the better known in North America are Cursillio, Opus Dei, Focolare, Legionaries of Christ, Regnum Christi, and the Neocatechumenal Way. The explosion of similar movements in Latin America and Africa is perhaps without historical precedent. These are mainly movements of lay people, married and celibate, locked in communal determination to live the gospel of Jesus Christ without compromise. The Madonna House Apostolate is part of this remarkable phenomenon. Father Robert Pelton at Combermere—a personable, gentle, and wisely innocent priest—says he does not know where the apostolate will go in the future, but he knows that he does not need to know. It is enough that the life of Catherine de Hueck Doherty—in both its pyrotechnical brilliance and silent deeps—begat a movement that has changed lives beyond numbering by its invitation to a disciplined adventure into a revolution of love. (For more information: Madonna House, Combermere, Ontario, Canada, K0J 1L0 or www.madonnahouse.org)

Truth for Tolerance

So many pundits weighed in on the question of Joe Lieberman and religion, but few so provocatively as Clifford Orwin, professor of political science at the University or Toronto. Orwin writes in the National Post under the title “Religion in the Public Square” that when he was growing up in Chicago, ethnic and religious bonds made a big difference, for better and for worse. “But everything has changed (and not in all respects for the better),” Orwin writes. “William Julius Wilson, the brilliant American sociologist, has written from a quasi-Marxist perspective of ‘the declining significance of race.’ His phrase applies equally to religion. This decline is vast and obvious. The real threat facing North American Jews today is neither intolerance nor evangelism nor the ‘Aryan’ lunatic fringe. Rather it’s an aspect of excessive tolerance (of nominal Christians toward Jews and of nominal Jews toward Christians). The seventeenth-century Jewish renegade philosopher Spinoza dreamed of a liberal world where Jews would cease to be Jews even as Christians ceased to be Christians. That world now looks uncomfortably close to realization. Intermarriage rates have soared exponentially, because to so many young people (and, increasingly, their parents) the old distinctions just don’t matter. If your child is marrying a nice person, you don’t ask for more. What remains of religion in mainstream North America is one thing only: a diffuse moralism accompanied by a vague conviction that religion supports morality. Polls purporting to show that Americans are highly religious reflect only this. (Try asking an American to explain what distinguishes his denomination from others. He’ll soon assure you that all religions are the same at bottom.) Most Americans simply equate religion with morality. Whether the moral person is Christian or Jewish or Sikh or a native American shamanist just doesn’t matter anymore. (When I lectured in Massachusetts recently a Wiccan cabdriver explained to me what his alleged paganism stood for: feminism, environmentalism, and the Golden Rule). Americans may go to church more often than other modern peoples, but what they learn in church is this gospel of universal toleration. All good people go to heaven.”

Orwin overstates the case, but only somewhat. Of course, Orthodox Jews and orthodox (also upper case) Christians are distressed by such a depiction of our circumstance, and may want to insist that the greater measure of mutual respect in our society is in fact grounded in biblical faith. As indicated by the general reaction to the recent Vatican statement Dominus Iesus (The Lord Jesus), which reiterated the traditional claim that Jesus Christ is the one way of salvation—also for those who are not Christians—in our culture the assertion that some religious claims are true and others false, or even less true, is taken as a sin against tolerance. In reaction to such muddled thinking, there are those who suggest that the test of vibrant religion is the readiness to declare that those who do not share one’s understanding of the truth will go to hell. Thus the debate is unhappily skewed in a way that pits dogmatic thugs against relativistic wimps.

The never-ending task for Christians is to make clear that their respect for others is not despite but because of their Christian faith. The alternative to tolerance premised upon indifference to truth is a lively pluralism premised upon the conviction that the truth both requires and makes possible our mutually respectful engagement of the differences that make the deepest difference. It is probable that only a minority of Christians understand and embrace that alternative, but then it has probably always been the case that most Christians are, at least most of the time, not terribly serious or reflective about what they say they believe as Christians.

There is nothing wrong with the claim that “all good people go to heaven,” if we understand that the good is inseparable from the true. The tolerance that, implicitly or explicitly, denies the reality of truth recruits religion to the service of the American Way of Life, which then becomes, not to put too fine a point on it, an idol. The circumstance and the temptations described by Prof. Orwin have been with us since the beginning of the American experiment, and in fact go back much earlier. The adherents of the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus have always been tempted to settle for His being tolerated as one of the gods of the tribe or nation. But He remains a jealous God because truth is jealous. Truth refuses to split the difference with falsehood.

Tolerance, rightly understood, is obedience to St. Paul’s injunction to “speak the truth in love,” which, in turn, is premised upon love for the truth. In this light, the “gospel of universal toleration” is not to be despised. Most Christians are not theologians, which is just as well, nor given to making fine distinctions, which is perhaps unfortunate but inevitable. When they tell pollsters that religious differences make no difference in their respect for others, many, if not most, Christians probably believe that that is what is required by the commandment to love one’s neighbors. What social scientists register as religious indifference may in fact be, to cite Paul again, “faith active in love.” It may be. Who knows? God knows. And one day He will let us know.

Civil Religion or Public Philosophy

Traditional language about “Christian America”—which once served both liberal and conservative purposes, as those terms are used today—was vigorously attacked by the school of “Christian realism” associated with Reinhold Niebuhr and his brother, H. Richard Niebuhr. From the late 1930s through the 1960s, Reinhold in particular assumed a “prophetic” mode in debunking any idea of the “chosenness” of America. This was part and parcel of his attack on the idea of moral progress (see The Idea of Moral Progress,” FT, August/September 1999). In the regnant liberalism of the time, three ideas came together: the idea of moral progress, the idea of American chosenness, and the idea of a socialist utopia. This made for a heady mix that Niebuhr condemned as a snare and delusion. He employed his impressive polemical powers against the notion that history can be understood in terms of a conflict between “the children of light and the children of darkness.” With almost mantra-like repetition, he underscored the “ironies” and “ambiguities” of history.

The Niebuhrs did their job well, perhaps too well in some quarters. While a Niebuhrian sensibility of skepticism toward historical delusions is to be cultivated, it was essentially a corrective against the excesses of the “Redeemer Nation” theme. In mainline Protestantism and in the liberal culture more generally, that skepticism was employed in a polemic against what was perceived as an anti-Communist crusade during the Cold War years. From the 1950s through the end of Soviet Communism in 1991, that crusade was portrayed as a contest between “the free world” and “godless communism.” In other words, the children of light against the children of darkness. The attempt to check that exaggeration, an exaggeration frequently freighted with hubris and self-righteousness, reinforced an attitude aptly described as anti-anticommunism. In this view, the great evil was not communism but anticommunism, a cause presumably discredited by the excesses of Senator Joseph McCarthy. The anti-anticommunism that McCarthy did so much to abet lived on long after his censure by the Senate and his pitiful death in 1957.

The story of American religion during the Cold War years, so closely connected with the idea of Christian America, still awaits historians who can untangle its knotted complexities. In retrospect, it is generally recognized, also by those who scoffed at the notion at the time, that there really was something very much like a free world that stood in sharp contrast to the tyranny of a communism that was “godless” in its aggressive atheism. Except in the most diehard circles of the left, it is not controversial today to refer to Soviet Communism as an “evil empire.” That was not the case in oldline Protestantism—meaning, roughly, those churches belonging to the once influential National Council of Churches—only a few years ago. From the mid-1960s until very recently, the Vietnam War was in these quarters taken as definitive proof that talk about a free world was a lie, and a good many religious leaders frankly believed that, for all its faults, communism was “the wave of the future.” In this view, as it was conventionally asserted, the United States was “on the wrong side of history.”

Even more common—indeed so common as to constitute a secure liberal consensus—was the belief that communism was a permanent feature of world history, or at least it would endure as far as we could see into the future. Many expected and encouraged a “convergence” between communism and the free world (the latter being defined as capitalism). All who participated in this consensus were committed to “peaceful coexistence” with communism. Figures such as Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who made no secret of their belief that Soviet Communism was a temporary and unsustainable aberration, were routinely criticized for threatening that peaceful coexistence.

As I say, American religion during the Cold War is a fascinating story that is yet to be told adequately. For present purposes, I simply note that the period resulted in an emphatic repudiation—and not only among oldline Protestants—of the last remnants of the idea of Christian America. Other factors contributed to that repudiation, notably the convergence of the civil rights movement with anti-anticommunism, and the passions surrounding the Vietnam War. Under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights movement was typically an affirmation of the American experiment, as most memorably articulated in his great “I Have a Dream” speech of August 28, 1963. His argument was that slavery and racial segregation contradicted the essential creed and character of that experiment. That was the liberal position. The later and more “radicalized” argument of the “new politics” would be that slavery and segregation, far from contradicting America, convicted America of being essentially racist, in addition to its inherent sins of militarism, imperialism, and propensity for the capitalist exploitation of the world’s poor. It followed that only the enemies of Christianity would want to call such a country Christian.

A Replacement Religion

Prior to what many perceive as the anti-American turn of what is comprehensively (perhaps too comprehensively) called The Sixties, the idea of Christian America had been sharply modified, and in some ways replaced by, the idea of an American “civil religion.” This was influentially set forth in Will Herberg’s book of 1955, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology. Herberg, a Jew and a great admirer of Reinhold Niebuhr, spoke of the American way of life as “the characteristic American religion, undergirding life and overarching American society despite indubitable differences of religion, section, culture, and class.” During those years and up to this day, a statement presumably made by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954 is frequently quoted: “Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith—and I don’t care what it is.” While it has never been documented that the statement, first cited in the Christian Century, was ever made by Eisenhower, the sentiment fit perfectly Herberg’s thesis. As Sydney Ahlstrom wrote in his monumental A Religious History of the American People, “The postwar form of civil religion debased the older tradition which had reverenced [America] as a bearer of transcendent values and summoned citizens to stewardship of a sacred trust.”

Now even that debased form of the American Way of Life as a civil religion has little currency in our public discourse. Beginning in the late 1960s, sociologist Robert N. Bellah and others tried to revive the civil religion argument, adapting it to the stringent critique of America favored by the left, but their efforts never caught on beyond students of religion in the academy. By the 1970s the doctrine, assuming dogmatic status, had been firmly established that America is a secular society. At least it appeared to be firmly established. When in 1984 I published The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America, it was generally viewed as a provocative—some thought eccentric and even dangerous—challenge to what “everybody knew” about the secularity of America. Still today there are those who contend that the dangerous argument of that book is that the naked public square should be replaced by the sacred public square. My argument then and now, however, is that the naked public square—meaning public life stripped of religion and religiously grounded morality—should give way not to a sacred public square but to a civil public square.

Writing in the New York Review of Books, the late J. M. Cameron was sympathetic to the argument of the book but suggested that the kind of religiously legitimated public philosophy that I called for required a credal form of Christianity with rich intellectual resources, such as Catholicism, rather than the revivalistic Protestantism now insurgent in American public life. The latter form of “fundamentalism,” he believed, had long since been bagged and stuffed by H. L. Mencken and was of no possible use in public moral discourse. It is a point that should not be dismissed lightly. At the same time, Cameron’s view does not take into account the degree of credal seriousness, albeit confusingly articulated, among Baptists and others, or the richer intellectual resources of the minority Calvinist tradition within evangelical Protestantism. Equally important, it fails to reckon with initiatives such as “Evangelicals and Catholics Together,” launched in the early 1990s, which give expression to a growing convergence in both cooperative action and theology. In this convergence, Catholic social doctrine, and particularly the power of natural law philosophy, are challenging conventionally secular habits of public debate.

Civil Religion Untethered

The reconstructed public philosophy that is required could provide a secure foundation for the civil public square. The civil public square is one in which different convictions about the common good are engaged within the bond of civility. The “common good” is—and we can never tire of making this point—unavoidably a moral concept, and that means the religiously grounded moral convictions of the American people cannot be excluded from the public square. Given the role of religion in American culture, both historically and at present, a religion-free public square is a formula for the end of democracy. To exclude the deepest convictions of the people from the deliberation of how we ought to order our life together is tantamount to excluding the people from that deliberation, and that is the end of democracy. We need not be delayed here by the old debate, still pressed by many conservatives, over whether our constitutional order is that of a democracy or a republic. Suffice it that the Constitution itself, as unanimously asserted by the Founders, is that of a republic, but it rests on the democratic premise that political sovereignty rests with the people. The Declaration of Independence declares that “just government is derived from the consent of the governed.” As the political sovereign, the people are authorized to name a sovereignty that they acknowledge to be higher than their own; for instance, “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” This is not, as some claim, a formula for theocracy. It is an exercise of democratic authority through republican or representative means by which the people place a check upon their own power by designating the higher authority to which they hold themselves accountable.

The civil public square requires something not entirely unlike Herberg’s civil religion. The problem with calling it a civil religion is that most Americans think they already have a religion and are not interested in exchanging it for another. For this reason among others, it is better to say that the civil public square requires a public philosophy attuned to the Judeo-Christian moral tradition. A Judeo-Christian moral tradition is not a Judeo-Christian religion. A moral tradition is part of religion but by no means the whole of it; nor, especially in Christianity, is it the most important part. But it is a necessary part. Sustaining the Judeo-Christian moral tradition in public requires that Americans who are Christians recognize that tradition as theirs, and recognize that it is necessarily dependent upon Judaism, both historically and at present. Here, too, it becomes apparent that cultivating the Jewish-Christian relationship is much more than a matter of interfaith politesse; it is essential to reconstituting the moral basis of our common life.

Civil religion, when it is untethered from biblical religion, can become a rival religion. Some Christian thinkers would go further and say that civil religion is by definition a rival religion. Such was surely the case with, for example, the religion of America’s “manifest destiny” mentioned earlier in this series on Christian America. In that instance, Christians succumb to a notion of the “Redeemer Nation” that is disengaged from, and becomes a competitor to, their Redeemer. The perennial attempts, commonly called “Wilsonian,” to assert some grand national purpose within the world-historical scheme of things are usually Christian in inspiration but end by aspiring to take the place of Christianity. If I am right in thinking that Henry Luce of Time was premature, that it is the twenty-first century that is “the American century,” it is certain that America will be safe neither for itself nor for the world without a guiding public philosophy. And it is, I believe, equally certain that any public philosophy that might be constructed will not be democratically sustainable unless it engages in a fresh way the idea of Christian America.

While We’re At It

• That time of year comes around once more, and John Grondelski, who teaches Christian ethics at Seton Hall University, says we should not take it lying down: “One hears endless calls for ‘tolerance’ and ‘civility.’ But those calls invariably ask Christians to be ‘tolerant’ and ‘civil’ about being gagged in public life. No one seems to ask, in the name of pluralism, that the atheist ‘tolerate’ the crèche. No, the civility is all on one side and the toleration is a sham—in which Christians are complicit so long as they play by the current misconceived rules. So, yes, Virginia (and Rhode Island and Jersey City and Pittsburgh and Scranton) . . . ‘tis the season to fight injunctions. Christmas (or Hanukkah or Ramadan) is only truly worth celebrating when Christians (or Jews or Muslims) can proclaim—even on the public square—their unadulterated messages. That is what American religious freedom is about, not about holiday scenes that hide Jesus in his manger behind the jolly snowman Frosty and the red-nosed reindeer Rudolph.”

• At the cottage up in Quebec there is no newspaper, so following morning prayer it’s breakfast with the splendid eleventh edition of the Britannica for chortles. George and Joan Weigel come up with the family and the day begins with regaling one another with our findings, both luminous and ludicrous, in those twenty-nine volumes. Of the ludicrous kind, an annual favorite is the long entry on Beethoven which, while acknowledging his debt to Bach, ends with this thumping conclusion: “And it is as certain as anything in the history of art that there will never be a time when Beethoven’s work does not occupy the central place in a sound musical mind.” Meaning no offense to those of unsound mind who disagree, that central place is of course occupied by Johann Sebastian Bach. Confirmation of this is to be found, were confirmation needed, in Christoph Wolff’s magnificent new biography, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (Norton). (See Briefly Noted, FT, November.) Admittedly, the book is not terribly well written, but its literary deficiencies are far outweighed by its exhaustiveness. There is almost nothing of interest that Wolff overlooks, including the minute examination of which works borrowed from which and exact tracings of the master’s endless revisions. In this he follows Johann Forkel, who wrote in his 1802 biography, “I have had opportunities of comparing . . . many copies of his principal works, written in different years, and I confess that I have often felt both surprise and delight at the means he employed to make, little by little, the faulty good, the good better, and the better perfect.” Now that is the judgment of a sound musical mind. Wolff writes, “Forkel does not exaggerate. . . . One need only compare the initial melodic contour of the principal theme of the ‘Confiteor’ fugal movement from the B-minor Mass, as notated in the autograph score, with its final shape. Here Bach changed the third note in order to avoid undue emphasis on the third syllable of ‘confiteor,’ thereby also mollifying the melodic flow of the subject. A revision such as this is not driven by any other than a purely musical consideration. . . . It shows the degree of attention he paid to the most subtle details of his scores, increasingly with advanced age and growing experience as a teacher-composer.” Apart from strictly musical considerations, I came away from Johann Sebastian Bach with a renewed appreciation of how admirable a human being Bach was. At the risk of provoking disbelief among those who know me well, I confess that I was humbled to recognize how pitifully small is my talent and what I have done with it in comparison with the greatness of Bach. It may alleviate somewhat the shock of that spasm of unwonted humility if I add that the same applies to almost everybody else who has ever lived. Years ago, when over lunch I told my friend Norman Podhoretz that I had decided to become a Catholic, there was a long silence. His expression was one of deep concern, and finally he came out with, “But what about Bach?” It had not occurred to me that I might lose him, and, the musical drivel in most Catholic parishes notwithstanding, Christoph Wolff’s excellent book reassures me that I have never more securely possessed or been possessed by the incomparable gift that is Johann Sebastian Bach.

• Unlike many New Yorkers, I have a deep and abiding affection for Chicago. Living there during my internship was my first experience of a really big city and confirmed for me that I am an incorrigibly urban person. It was therefore with keen anticipation that I came to the new biography of Mayor Richard J. Daley by Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor, American Pharaoh (Little, Brown). I hold no brief for the legendary Mayor Daley. When I was a delegate to the 1968 Democratic convention, I, along with many others, got beat up a little by his police for leading an unauthorized protest march on Michigan Avenue and spent a night in his jail. (Back then, everything in Chicago was “his.”) In the first few pages of American Pharaoh we are informed that Richard Daley was a product of an authoritarian Catholic Church, a racist, a man with an insatiable appetite for power, and a buffoon. With that conclusion in place, the following six hundred pages merely fill out the details of the indictment. The authors grudgingly acknowledge, because it can hardly be denied, that, at a time when other big cities were on the skids, Daley revitalized the downtown and prevented a wholesale middle class flight to the suburbs, thus laying the foundation for the flourishing metropolis that Chicago is today. But even when he did the right thing, they say, he acted from the worst motives of bigotry and self-aggrandizement. His damning sin in their eyes is that he did not create a city integrated by race and class. Today almost everybody recognizes the disaster of “vertical slums” such as the Robert Taylor housing project, but the authors never face up to the fact that no American city is integrated in the way that they think is morally imperative, or that most urban experts now agree that, even with the best will, it simply cannot be done for many reasons, including the simple demographics of race. This is something on which Nathan Glazer of Harvard has written in melancholic detail, as has been discussed before in these pages. In 1963, Martin Luther King took his movement north, forming the Chicago Freedom Movement and calling for an “open city.” He soon left, defeated and demoralized. Cohen and Taylor put all the blame on Daley. The reality is that neither Dr. King nor anyone else had a plan for racial integration that would not have radically destabilized the city, turning Chicago into, for instance, another Detroit. The authors pretty much reduce the high drama that is the wondrously various worlds of Chicago to little more than a good guy/bad guy story line of righteous protesters nefariously foiled by a bigoted and brutal fool. There is undoubtedly much for which Daley can and should be criticized. But American Pharaoh demonstrates once again that biographers who have neither sympathy for nor curiosity about their subjects end up writing very dull books. To make the story of Richard J. Daley dull is a disappointment. To make the great city of Chicago dull is an unforgivable achievement.

• Peter Berkowitz of George Mason Law School, a sometime contributor to these pages, takes on the rational choice theorists and their game plans. Nobody doubts that there is an economic dimension in human actions. “Economics casts light,” writes Berkowitz, “but economicism casts darkness.” Here is his conclusion that is, I think, both ringing and right: “But finally the law really cannot do without the dignity of man, if it is to command the assent and even the awe that it must command. To strip the law of its majesty, man must first be divested of his dignity. There may be rationality in all these clever actors making strategic moves for the aggrandizement of their interests; but there is not much dignity. Are men and women who have been divested of their dignity worthy of respect by the law? And is a law that has lost its majesty capable of commanding the respect even of these rational actors? These are questions, at once empirical and moral, that turn on the structure of the soul, or, if you prefer, on the logic of human desire. However these questions are finally answered, it is reasonable to believe that the game-theoretical standpoint, in its quest for comprehensiveness, diminishes us, if in no other way than by making us small in our own eyes. Insofar as we are small, game theory may explain what we do; but we are not only small.”

• This is the kind of thing you stumble across in a new collection, The Quotable Knox, edited by George Marlin et al. and published by Ignatius: “When you compare Christianity with Confucianism, you are comparing two systems of personal morality. When you compare Christianity with [Islam], you are comparing two forms of fighting enthusiasm. When you compare Christianity with Buddhism, you are comparing two streams of mystical tendency. And, unconsciously, you have recognized that Christianity is something greater than the other three; because each of those others corresponds to one particular need, one particular mood.” Monsignor Ronald Knox was one of those writers for whom the phrase “the wit and wisdom of . . .” seems to have been coined. The above quote does short-change the mystical tradition in Islam, but that is an Islam whose face is largely hidden from the West, and thus the quote remains eminently quotable.

• “I am a Christian because Christianity makes more sense of more facts than any other way of thinking I know of.” I first ran across that statement many years ago, I believe in something by Reinhold Niebuhr, and it greatly impressed me. That’s not the whole reason for being a Christian by any means, but it is a supporting consideration. Thoughtful human beings look for a total explanation, a “theory of everything,” as it is sometimes called. On religion more generally, practitioners of evolutionary sociobiology, which is the soft underbelly of evolutionary biology, are today claiming that people are religious because religion has a strong survival value. Thus E. O. Wilson in Consilience: “There is a hereditary selective advantage to membership in a powerful group united by devout belief and purpose. . . . Much if not all religious behavior could have arisen by natural selection.” Lionel Tiger in Optimism: The Biology of Hope writes that religion is universal and is fundamentally about hope. “Optimism is a biological phenomenon. Since religion is deeply intertwined with optimism, religion is a biological phenomenon rooted in our genes.” So it is that evolutionary theory, which led many to believe there is no God, now purports to explain why we believe there is. In the absence of something that makes more sense, it makes a kind of sense. Fortunately, explanations that make more sense are not absent.

• Students should take control of their education, or at least know what they’re getting into. That’s the purpose of a handsome series of books published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Each is “A Student’s Guide To” and the books include Ralph McInerny on philosophy, R. V. Young on literature, John Lukacs on history, James V. Schall on liberal learning, and Mark Henrie on the core curriculum. They are all basic, as in attending to the essentials, and are available free to students and teachers from ISI Books, P.O. Box 4431, Wilmington, Delaware 19807.

• What is to be done about the world’s poor? Over the last thirty years and more few people have given such relentless and acute attention to that question as Peter Bauer (Lord Bauer), now Professor Emeritus of Economics at the London School of Economics. Most welcome, therefore, is the publication of From Subsistence to Exchange and Other Essays, a collection of Lord Bauer’s thoughts on a wide range of pressing topics, with an introduction by Amartya Sen, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics (Princeton University Press, 153 pages, $19.95

). One could pick out any number of excerpts for special attention; for instance, the essay “Population Explosion: Disaster or Blessing.” Going back to Malthus in the late-eighteenth century, it has been said that the problem of poor people is that there are too many of them. Today American foundations, NGOs at the United Nations, world development institutes, and, lamentably, the U.S. government pour huge sums into countering the “population crisis” which, it is routinely asserted, is the chief obstacle to improving life in LDCs (less developed countries). “The crisis is invented,” writes Peter Bauer. “The central issue of policy is whether the number of children should be determined by the parents or by agents of the state.” The fear of population growth, he continues, is based on fundamental misperceptions. “These apprehensions rest primarily on three assumptions. The first is that national income per head measures economic well-being. The second is that economic performance and progress depend critically on land and capital per head. The third is that people in the Third World are ignorant of birth control or careless about family size: they procreate regardless of consequences. A subsidiary or supporting assumption is that population trends in the Third World can be forecast with accuracy for decades ahead.” In addition, there are some rather unseemly moral assumptions at work. “Some have argued that high birthrates in LDCs, especially among the poorest, result in lives so wretched as to be not worth living: that over a person’s life, suffering or disutility may exceed utility. If this were so, fewer such lives would increase the sum total of happiness. This view implies that external observers are qualified to assess the joys and sorrows of others. It implies that life and survival are of no value to the people involved. This outlook, which raises far-reaching ethical issues, is unlikely to be morally acceptable to most people, least of all as basis for forcible action to restrict people’s reproductive behavior, especially when it is remembered how widely it was espoused about the poor in the West only about two generations ago. Nor is this opinion consistent with simple observation, which suggests that even very poor people prefer to live rather than not to live, as is shown by their striving to remain among the living by, for instance, seeking medical help to prolong their lives. Thus these considerations make clear that the much-deplored population explosion of recent decades is seen more appropriately as a blessing rather than as a disaster because it reflects a fall in mortality, which is an improvement in people’s welfare, not a deterioration.” The essay concludes with this: “Throughout the less developed world, the most prosperous groups and areas are those with most external commercial contacts. And such contacts also encourage voluntary reduction of family size. Thus, extension of such contacts and the widening of people’s range of choice promote both economic advance and reduction in fertility. In these circumstances, the reduction in family size is achieved without the damaging effects of official pressure on people in their most private and vital concerns. Yet this type of policy is not on the agenda of advocates of the need for fewer children in LDCs. It is widely agreed that the West should not impose its standards, mores, and attitudes on Third World governments and peoples. Yet, ironically, the most influential voices call for the exact opposite when it comes to population control.” Not here but elsewhere, Bauer and others point out that, instead of trying to impose statist controls on poor countries, the rich nations of the West might better attend to the real crisis of their own population decline, notably in countries such as Italy, Spain, and Germany, where, extrapolating from present replacement rates, entire peoples might disappear in the next century. Fortunately for both rich and poor countries, it is a repeatedly demonstrated error to think that “population trends . . . can be forecast with accuracy for decades ahead.”

• Professional communicators “attempting to meet their responsibilities deserve audiences conscientious about theirs.” That’s in a new statement from the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, an office of the Vatican. I rather like that. We hardworking writers have a right to equally hardworking readers. In truth, at this journal we’ve never had occasion to complain about the quality of our readers, although we would always like more of you. The document goes on to say that Jesus is a model for communicators: “In his communications he showed respect for his listeners, sympathy for their situation and needs, compassion for their suffering (e.g., Luke 7:13), and resolute determination to tell them what they needed to hear in a way that would command their attention and help them receive the message, without coercion or compromise, deception or manipulation.” For which, the document does not add, he was crucified.

• I do not understand it. The rule of the barbarians is not so total as to preclude its receiving review attention. After all, it is published by a mainstream press, St. Martin’s. Yet nowhere have I seen a notice of Felipe Fernandez-Armesto’s scintillating, erudite, and wise little book with the self-consciously pretentious title, Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed. I know, you’ve had it up to here with chatter about relativism, postmodernism, deconstructionism, and all the rest. But give this Oxford historian (author of Columbus, Millennium, and Reformations) a hearing. In the course of his learned ramblings on the ideas that got us into the fix we are in, he serves up glittering wit and swashbuckling polemics, but, withal, an informed hopefulness. There is, for instance, this: “Underlying the traditional truth-tests of humankind, and enfolding the concepts to which they are related, there is a notion of the sacred. Words which seem unrelated have the same ancestry: verity and virtue; order and rite; arithmetic and dharma. They all share the same Indo-European root. The search for truth is a struggle: part of a war against chaos, a strenuous ritual to wrest reality from doubt by naming its parts, or a spell to save it from being engulfed in nothingness. Relativism, subjectivism, and deconstruction could all break the spell. Truth could be relativized out of the lexicon, or left as just another name for falsehood; without objects to speak of, the subject could become an unheard voice, crying in an unpopulated wilderness; deconstruction could demolish every utterance and every sign, leaving only a cosmic smirk hanging in the néant, like the disappearance of the Cheshire cat. These barbarous programs might succeed; civilizations have sometimes succumbed to destroyers and history is a path picked across their ruins. More often, however, the barbarians have ended up by joining the civilizations they threaten. They get seduced or absorbed and end up making constructive contributions of their own. I think there are good grounds for hoping this will happen with the truth-vandals who face us today. First, because they have some good points on their side, which seekers for truth can appreciate. Second, because they are not all implacable enemies; some of the most devastating critics of recent times, including Foucault and Derrida, were fellow-seekers who despaired or who, striving to rescue truth from false conceptions of it, overdid their efforts. Finally, there are loops in their arguments which, if we follow them boldly, lead back to truth.” Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed. St. Martin’s Press. 257 pages, $23.95. It is a very good book. And that’s the truth.

• Many people have written insightfully about the linguistic contortions that necessarily follow when one buys into the mendacity of denying that abortion does what abortion does. But I had not come across this one before. It occurs in a special issue of the New York Times Magazine devoted to impending technological changes that will presumably change our lives. (The entire issue is reminiscent of the superficial futurism of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Plus ça change . . .) The article is titled, “The Genetic Report Card That Will Tell You If Your Embryo Will Get Prostate Cancer.” Not “an embryo” but “your embryo.” Imagine your friend happily announcing, “Jim and I are having an embryo.” The “having” doesn’t quite work, since it is tilted toward the future, suggesting that the embryo might become something else—maybe a baby. She might try, “We have an embryo, and next month we’re expecting a fetus.” But that seems to fall somewhat short of doing justice to the element of continuity regarding the phenomenon in question. And the “we” is an egregious intrusion into a purely personal and private circumstance. In addition, the point of the “genetic report card” is that “your embryo” might get a failing grade and next month you will have nothing. The important thing is to keep attention focused on the “your,” as in your ingrown toenail, or your extra weight, or your whatever. It is a condition you picked up somewhere along the way and, if it turns out to be a problem, you get rid of it. In this case, the “it” is, in fact, a he or she. But that is the fact that must not be admitted. “Your embryo.” The trope requires painful twistings of both mind and language. “Oh, what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive.”

• The long-standing liberal line on McCarthyism, says the liberal Thomas Powers, must be junked. In an essay in the New York Review of Books, he evaluates some of the new books on what we now know about Soviet intelligence and concludes: “Once the new evidence is frankly faced no one can write the history of McCarthyism and the early Cold War without taking into account that the hunt for spies was based on the fact that there were spies—lots of them; that those spies began with an idealism shared by a significant minority of the American people; and that the defensive response of many American liberals not only was wrong on the facts, but also exacerbated the suspicions of the right, making it easier for demagogues to argue that progressive causes and treason somehow went hand in hand.” In addition to the merits of truth, there is an element of self-interest in this new candor. The material from Soviet intelligence includes hundreds of code names for American spies not yet exposed, and liberals should start telling the truth, says Powers, “before the Russians further thicken the stew by telling us who was hiding behind the other half of those 349 cryptonyms.”

• From the quiet part of Yale that he helps to sustain, philosopher Louis Dupré has for decades been providing us with some of the more convincing analyses of why modernity is at war with the spiritual life. Symbols of the Sacred is a kind of summing up of what he has learned (Eerdmans, 168 pages, $20 paper). I have long been uneasy with what I am inclined to think is Dupré’s excessive emphasis on the secularism of our time and his accent on personal experience largely disengaged from the institution of the Church, but this book is rich fare, as is all his writing. The last chapter is an interview with Dupré in which he reflects on a Christian humanism that must of necessity be attentive to movements of the Spirit evident in other religions and cultures: “It would be wrong, however, to regard these analogies as justifying a syncretistic relativism that entitles each person to compose his or her own religious collage. This attitude, all too common today, shows a lack of respect not only for one’s own faith but also for those faiths one so casually dismantles for spare parts. It is yet another manifestation of that radical anthropocentrism, the main enemy of sincere religion, that tempts believers to bring the language of transcendence down to the level of purely human wants and choice. Without detracting from the providential nature of other faiths, Christians cannot ignore the fact that this same Providence has led them to a faith that is not a ‘choice’ but, for those chosen to it, an absolute summons. To relativize faith is, I think, to subvert its fundamentally divine character.”

• “It appears that most non-evangelicals have little more to fear from the majority of ordinary evangelicals than being thought of as spiritually or morally mistaken, and thus prayed for, shown a life of good example, and occasionally offered a word about one’s relationship to God. . . . These may be things that non-evangelicals would prefer to do without. But they are hardly views and practices that threaten civil American pluralism and democracy.” So writes Christian Smith in Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want (University of California Press). On the basis of his research, sociologist Smith concludes that, for most evangelicals, “Christian America” means, for all practical purposes, the American Way of Life, including the Bill of Rights, balance of powers, and the commandment to be nice to people. Not very exciting. Not very threatening either.

• One of the big names in cognitive neuroscience is the very articulate and media-savvy Steven Pinker of MIT. He is also, unfortunately, very glib in reiterating the weary clichés of the village atheist. Religion, says he, is “constructed from the cognitive modules of the brain, and used to explain certain data that stymie our everyday theories.” In other words, religion is for people who cannot live with the world as it is. “But believers avoid working out the logical consequences of these piecemeal revisions of ordinary things and concepts. They don’t stop to wonder why a God who knows our intentions has to listen to our prayers, or how a God can both see into the future and care about how we choose to act.” That is indeed worth wondering about. It is much like parents who understand and see so much more than their little child but care intensely about how the child comes to understand and see and act. It is called love, and that is really worth a wonder why.

• Here’s a voice not heard from in a long time. Many years ago, Harvey Cox of Harvard Divinity School wrote The Secular City. Now married to a Jew, Baptist Cox writes in the Jewish monthly Sh’ma on the possibility of “secular Judaism.” He notes that many people who are religious—most Buddhists, for instance—do not believe in God. The Jewish circumstance is different, however. “Unlike Buddhism, loyalty to God has been central to virtually every expression of Judaism for millennia. There are, however, large numbers of people today who consider themselves Jewish and are not theists of any recognizable variety. Many of them yearn for a spiritual home that would preserve their link to the Jewish people and the Jewish past but not require them to hold their breath and try to believe something they just do not believe. . . . I hope a secular Judaism flourishes. I hope it nourishes a sense of mystery and depth, avoiding market values and the success ethic. The question, of course, is whether it will last. But I would prefer not to speculate about that. Only God, so to speak, knows.” And maybe He, so to speak, has changed His mind about the loyalty thing.

• Martin E. Marty’s Context quotes at length Paul Wilkes’ review of Donald Cozzens’ The Changing Face of the Priesthood, a book not so grim as Wilkes makes it out to be. “Wilkes all but shrieks to get attention for Cozzens’ book,” writes Marty, but then he goes on to accept his hyperbole at face value. We have, according to Wilkes’ shriek, “a church culture that is alarmingly dysfunctional . . . a significant contingent among our spiritual leaders who have not faced their own humanity,” and so forth. A chief culprit, if not the chief culprit, is, you will not be surprised to learn, celibacy. I know priests who seem to lead disheveled, harassed lives, forever snatching at the grace that recruited them and will not let them go. Most of the studies we have suggest that priests are a pretty happy lot, despite the aggravations that attend the human condition. My seminary teaching and other contacts with younger priests in no way fit the Wilkes picture of dysfunctionality desperately longing for “the transformation of the priesthood” that progressives demand. A manifest sense of purposeful confidence and satisfaction is undoubtedly related to the increase in priestly vocations in recent years. Reading Marty on Wilkes on Cozzens, I was reminded of a conference some while back where a speaker was addressing the problem of “priestly burn-out.” I was seated beside an older bishop, a veteran of many crises real and alleged, who leaned over and said sotto voce, “Of course we always got problems, but with most of the priests who tell me they’re burned out, I never noticed they were on fire to begin with.”

• With a wit that I cannot avoid the temptation to call brilliant, Tom Wolfe writes in Harper’s on the “Land of the Rococo Marxists.” His subject is why no one is celebrating the second American century, and, yes, he has a villain: the intellectual. “But if there was decadence, what was decaying? Religious faith and moral codes that had been in place since time was, said Nietzsche, who in 1882 made the most famous statement in modern philosophy—‘God is dead’—and three startlingly accurate predictions for the twentieth century. He even estimated when they would begin to come true: about 1915. 1) The faith men formerly invested in God they would now invest in barbaric ‘brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non-brothers.’ Their names turned out, in due course, to be the German Nazis and the Russian Communists. 2) There would be ‘wars such as have never been waged on earth.’ Their names turned out to be World War I and World War II. 3) There no longer would be Truth but, rather, ‘truth’ in quotation marks, depending upon which concoction of eternal verities the modern barbarian found most useful at any given moment. The result would be universal skepticism, cynicism, irony, and contempt. The First World War began in 1914 and ended in 1918. On cue, as if Nietzsche were still alive to direct the drama, an entirely new figure, with an entirely new name, arose in Europe: that embodiment of skepticism, cynicism, irony, and contempt, the Intellectual.” Wolfe takes his readers on a wondrous romp through the fevers of academic and political correctness, finally asking what it is that they really want. Despite their protestations to the contrary, it cannot be that they want change. Change might mean they would have to go to work, taking on the hard tasks of understanding, reason, scholarship, and the acquisition of knowledge. So what do they want? “It’s a simple business at bottom. All the intellectual wants, in his heart of hearts, is to hold on to what was magically given to him one shining moment a century ago. He asks for nothing more than to remain aloof, removed, as Revel once put it, from the mob, the philistines . . . ‘the middle class.’“ Wolfe knows that he will be accused of sympathizing with the prejudices (which can be a very good word) of ordinary Americans, and even of the cardinal sin in the catechism of intellectuals, namely, patriotism. To which he responds, paraphrasing Patrick Henry, “If this be patriotism . . . make the most of it!”

• “But we secularists are the ones who protect your right to be religious,” said a distinguished professor responding to my lecture. My answer is that he had it quite backwards. I should have had in hand this fine article by David Novak in the Virginia Law Review. Novak is making the point that only those who can establish human rights as natural rights are able to check the power of the humanly created state, making sure it remains our servant and not our master. He writes: “Without such prior obligation and its protections, our rights as humans cannot trump the power of the state because they are derived from that very power that, without true covenant, can easily take away what it has given. So those who would interpret Grotius’ dictum literally, that we can have law ‘even without God’ (etiamsi non sit Deus), and who claim that de facto atheism is the only cogent basis for commitment to a democratic polity, have no basis for rationally challenging the unjust exercise of state authority, which is the very antithesis of constitutional democracy. Ironically, those whose god is neither the cosmic order nor the orderer of the cosmos have their human rights protected for them by the democratic commitments of those who have a moral religion or a religious morality. But how, then, can our doctrinaire secularists attempt to exclude their very protectors from the conversation any democracy needs to justify its own life and future?”

• The retirement of Gerald H. Anderson after almost twenty-five years as editor of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research provides occasion for bringing that excellent publication to the attention of our readers. There was a time when, for both Protestants and Catholics, missions (in the plural) was a staple of parochial piety, prayer, and preaching. Today, as John Paul II’s encyclical Redemptoris Missio reminds us, the very mention of missions is an embarrassment for many Christians who are captive to the multiculturalist aversion to the claim that there is a truth to be shared with all. IBMR bears refreshing testimony to the large community of thoughtful Christians who have kept the faith by sharing the faith. Protestant in origin but vibrantly ecumenical under Anderson’s leadership, it is published by the Overseas Ministries Study Center (490 Prospect Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06511).

• The claim that popular music of the rock, rap, satanist, and druggie varieties has a strong connection to real-world behavior is often lightly dismissed. The evidence, however, is very impressive indeed. Both scholarly and anecdotal testimony is usefully pulled together in an eighteen-page booklet by Thomas L. Jipping, “‘There is a Virus Loose Within Our Culture’: An Honest Look at Music’s Impact,” published by the Free Congress Foundation (717 Second Street, NE, Washington, D.C. 20002). The quote in the title is from the Governor of Colorado following the Columbine High School killings. Parents, clergy, and teachers may want to have a copy of this study at hand.

• A reader is upset about what she calls our “continuing campaign of defamation against Christians and Catholics specifically.” Our offense, she says, is that we have referred to non-Jews as gentiles. She writes, “Quite rightly, other terms used by a group to define those outside—i.e., infidel, pagan—have been excluded from public discourse because those so defined found them offensive. We find ‘gentile’ offensive and demand the same respect you accord other religious/ethnic groups.” As an unoffended person, I feel excluded from the writer’s “we.” But then, we goys are used to that.

• Margaret Atwood’s hysterical rant of the 1980s, The Handmaid’s Tale, depicts an America that in the year 2002 has been turned by the “religious right” into the Republic of Gilead. In this new order, women of child-bearing age who have been divorced or slept around are given to God-fearing but childless couples and undergo impregnation sessions by the man of the house, called the Commander. Given the anti-American fever raging in much of Europe, it is perhaps not surprising that the Royal Danish Opera has given Poul Ruders’ adaptation of the novel a splashy world premiere. There is a telling phrase in George Loomis’ rave review in Opera News. “Ann Margrethe Dahl, as the authoritarian ‘Aunt’ Lydia, made one think of some twisted version of Dialogues des Carmelites as she presided over the handmaids, singing her high-flying phrases with fearsome intensity.” A twisted version that assigns the martyrs the role of the perpetrators of the Great Terror. The reviewer intends that as praise.

• It is not sufficient to say that the French are virulently anti-American, or possessed by ressentiment over the loss of the glory that once was France in world history. Among intellectuals and in the political culture (the two being joined in a way that is not the case in America), there is a need to make everything explicit, an intolerance of human untidiness. Which of course results in even more untidiness, often of an embarrassingly silly sort. Thus the war against McDonald’s as a threat to the French way of life, and the official tribunals guarding the linguistic borders against the invasion of English. Now the government has established the Interministerial Mission to Battle Against Sects (MILS). It is headed by the former foreign minister, M. Alain Vivien, who says, “In the United States, freedoms are crazy. In the name of the First Amendment of the American Constitution, which forbids legislation on religious matters, one can say and do anything.” A parliamentary report lists 172 groups as “sects,” including the Southern Baptists. The Catholic Church in France, which still has some clout, could reap honor by speaking out against MILS and the pitiful mindset it represents. For the sake of religious freedom. For the sake of rescuing France from its penchant for appearing ridiculous.

• It was a narrow escape, but Dutch authorities say they will not prosecute Pope John Paul II for the crime of inciting homophobia. Charges were brought by the Dutch magazine Gay Krant after the Pope criticized the gay pride march in Rome last summer (which turned out to be something of a flop). In the course of his remarks, the Pope said that the Church considers homosexuality “objectively disordered” and homosexual acts “against natural law.” The Dutch court said in a statement that his elevated position as head of the Catholic Church and of the Vatican state gave him “global immunity from jurisdiction.” But don’t think that that means you can get away with it.

• “If, five hundred years from now, the ordination of women has come and gone, [but] is viewed by some scholar as a historical curiosity worth his further investigation, he will find in The Close a revealing hint or two as to why it failed.” That is Sarah E. Hinlicky reviewing a book of that title by Chloe Breyer on her first year as a student at Episcopal General Theological Seminary in New York. Hinlicky, who is a student at Princeton Theological Seminary and supports the ordination of women, quotes Breyer: “Like many people of my age and gender, I put most of St. Paul’s writings into the category of things despite which I call myself Christian. My list of disclaimers includes the Crusades, the excommunication of Galileo, the Pope’s stand on abortion and birth control, and most of the activities of the extreme religious right.” Breyer adds that she developed “a grudging respect for the apostle’s passionate, practical campaign to bring Christianity out from the umbrella of Judaism,” and is sure that had he lived today he would support “the rights of gay men and women” and other favored causes. Hinlicky comments that Paul gains Breyer’s “respect” at the cost of becoming a mirror of her own fashionable convictions. “In all too many passages [Breyer] manifests the ugly qualities of—and I do not use this term lightly—a bigot, utterly unaware of it and shockingly lacking in critical awareness.” Hinlicky concludes: “The ordination of women is not a foregone conclusion. It is a young movement, a significant break from previous practice, and by no means widely accepted. Let Breyer’s account leave no room for doubt that mere feminism, unchecked and unreformed by the gospel, is going to derail and destroy the cause for which it cares most. Women are going to fail in the parish and pulpit as long as they are spoon-fed ideology instead of theology and as long as they are taught liberation from patriarchy instead of liberation from sin.” (The Close is published by Basic Books.)

• It does seem odd that the committee of bishops charged with implementing Ex Corde Ecclesiae has appointed four consultants nominated by the Catholic Theological Society and other academic groups that are on record as strongly opposed to implementing Ex Corde Ecclesiae. I am told that the bishops are seeking the widest possible cooperation in fulfilling their mandate, which is only right. That surely includes consulting with opponents of that mandate. But appointing them as consultants and thus making them partners in doing what they think should not be done at all? On the other hand, it is understandable that the opponents of what the bishops overwhelmingly approved are eager to contain the damage of what they view as grave episcopal error. One observer says that this arrangement is a little like asking the foxes to assist the chickens, which is, I think, an unfortunate metaphor that might all too easily be misunderstood. But the arrangement does seem odd.

• “You may have heard accusations or rumors that CTA (Call to Action) is pro-abortion. This is not true.” The response to an inquiry says that “What CTA tries to do is to serve as a forum where Catholic people with various perspectives on the issue can dialogue.” “We have no organizational connections to CFFC (Catholics for a Free Choice)” although it “is one of those organizations that we work with on church reform issues.” The CTA letter, sent in response to an inquiry by a First Thingsreader, says that among “the range of ‘life issues’ that our members work on are: opposing the death penalty, working for peace, supporting the ban on land mines, and calling for the closing of the U.S. Army School of the Americas because many of its graduates are responsible for human rights abuses.” CTA adds, “Many members undoubtedly subscribe to the late Cardinal Bernardin’s seamless garment principles.” The implication is that other members make an exception for abortion. So is CTA, which claims to have among its members six hundred religious and priests and six bishops, pro-abortion? If an organization described itself as a forum where people with various perspectives on anti-Semitism can dialogue, one might reasonably think it is at least open to the view that there is something to be said for anti-Semitism. As has been observed in another connection, when you come across an article titled “Whither Incest?” you do not expect to read a vigorous argument in opposition to the practice.

• The editors of the New York Times, our parish newsletter, are cheered by the number of institutions that are withholding support from the Boy Scouts because that organization excludes leaders who, it has reason to believe, may be homosexually active. The editors say that “the organization needs to realize that a growing number of donors will question its claim to belong on the center stage of American life if it continues asserting a discriminatory philosophy.” And who defines what is the center stage of American life? Need you ask? Then comes a categorical moral judgment of sweeping exclusionary implications: “In today’s world, children cannot learn about honor from an organization that views homosexuality [i.e., acting on homosexual desires and identifying oneself as one who so acts] as a moral defect.” It follows that children cannot learn about honor from the churches and synagogues to which around two-thirds of the American people belong, nor from what is certainly the majority of parents in the country. The center stage is getting emptier and emptier all the time, if you believe the left wing is center stage.

• During the UN summit of world leaders, Fidel Castro, age seventy-four, donned his battle fatigues to address a rally of cheering supporters at Riverside Church up on Morningside Heights. The Reverend Bernard Wilson, executive minister of Riverside, said the church was pleased to host the event. “Riverside has always been on the cutting edge of what is happening in the world,” he said. The rheumatoid religious left moves boldly, if creakingly, into the second half of the twentieth century.

• I watched one episode of Bill Moyers’ On Our Own Terms. Maybe I’ve been thinking and writing too much about death in recent years, but it seemed to me terribly superficial, and one felt sorry for the people and their families who turned the most intimate and truth-demanding moments of their lives, unrepeatable moments, into something to be retailed on PBS by Moyers Inc. Yes, I know, they probably meant well and were told that it was a public service, and nobody should accuse them of publicity seeking, but it was a grave disservice to themselves and to a time that should be protected by reticence within the small community where love’s hard work must be done. Dave Andrusko, editor of National Right to Life News, stayed with the whole six hours, and went on to examine the various book tie-ins and other promotions connected with the series. He calls the series an “infomercial for assisted suicide.” That may seem hard, but let him explain: “It is one thing to ‘demystify’ death, if what is meant by this is that we must face up to the fact that no one gets out of this life alive and that when we are dying it is crucial that there be people near by to sustain us with love and affection. That connectedness, that assurance that we will never be abandoned is crucial to ensuring that people do not become despondent and contemplate suicide. But it is quite another when people start to romanticize the ‘last days,’ to make our departure sound like preparing for a permanent ski trip. Be highly skeptical of people, like Bill Moyers, who gush about death. Too often that kind of ‘enthusiasm’ leads to an eagerness to help the patient pack and depart early.” Andrusko is right about that, but I keep thinking of the sadness of people who turned their long and last goodbye into what was, after all the chatter about its being a public service, a show.

• As for the annual Erasmus Lecture (this year by papal biographer George Weigel), there were many more requests for tickets than there were seats. We are sorry that some were disappointed, but, as we have said before, tickets are handled on a first-come-first-served basis, and we don’t know a better way of doing it. A hint to subscribers: ask for tickets when you first see the notice in these pages. Don’t wait for a special notice in the mails. The up side of this, of course, is that the Erasmus Lecture is so very popular. Next fall the fifteenth Erasmus Lecture will be delivered by Rabbi David Novak of the University of Toronto on the future of the relationship between Christians and Jews. Watch for details.

• A front page story in the New York Times, under the heading “Priests of the 60s Fear Loss of Their Legacy,” features priests who once thought that Vatican II would usher in a revolution, making the Church an agent of radical social change, but now complain that younger priests do not share their vision. They express bitter disappointment, fearing that their generation is turning out to have been no more than a blip on the screen of history. As reporter Diana Jean Schemo writes, “The younger, conservative generation is more interested in sacramental matters and issues of faith.” Even worse, it is rumored that the new Archbishop of New York, Edward Michael Egan, may think that a very good thing.

• “Criticism is still strong. I think it is deplorable that they attack us rather than deal with the issues.” So says Robert Funk, seventy-four, founder of the Jesus Seminar, who many years ago got some rich friends to pony up for meetings at which he gathers religion teachers with nothing better to do with their time and with a taste for notoriety who discuss questions such as whether Jesus thought he was the Messiah, and then cast ballots of colored beads to determine the outcome. That’s what Mr. Funk calls dealing with the issues. An issue that Mr. Funk insists we deal with—what will his fertile mind come up with next?—is whether God exists. Funk and seventy-five seminar participants will vote on the question at Texas Christian University. The world waits. Says Mr. Funk, “We are discussing the future of God, so to speak.” God waits.

• “Had he been sheltered from the Christian ‘star system,’ with its voracious appetite for fresh faces and sensational testimonies, might things be different?” The article in World on Eric Craig Harrah, a flamboyant homosexual and abortion-clinic operator turned evangelical Christian and pro-life champion, clearly suggests that the answer is yes. Harrah’s speaking engagements raised big funds for pro-life groups, and for himself. The 700 Club and similar programs hailed him as a convert hero, until only three years after his conversion he publicly repudiated his Christian profession and returned to the gay subculture. Says one pro-lifer, “We in the leadership have taken those who have left [the pro-abortion side] and held them up as our trophies.” Says another, “It’s almost impossible for us to restrain ourselves from wanting to use them. Exploit is a bit of a strong word, but it’s applicable.” The moral of the story is that superstars and sensational testimonies are no substitute for the tested endurance of those who bear witness, as the apostle says, in season and out of season.

• “Banned in Opelousas.” That probably won’t boost sales as much as “banned in Boston,” nor will it likely hurt the reputation of Flannery O’Connor, one of the great writers, as well as one of the great Catholic writers, of the century past. The curious thing is that she is banned at Opelousas Catholic High School in the diocese of Lafayette, Louisiana. A teacher assigned O’Connor’s short stories, A Good Man is Hard to Find, in which some white folk use the “n” word. The parents of some black students went ballistic. The bishop did not insist on the firing of the teacher, but he did write, “No one can tell another person whether or not he or she should be offended. That is simply a matter of fact and should be respected in so far as is possible. For that reason, I direct that the books in question should be removed from the reading list immediately and other readings substituted for them.” “Blessed are they who take no offense at me,” said Jesus, at least implying, it would seem, that people should not be offended. Paul says he preaches Christ crucified, “foolishness to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews.” They were offended. That is simply a matter of fact and should be respected in so far as possible? Okay, so Flannery O’Connor is not to be compared to Our Lord or the gospel, but there is some comparably muddled thinking here. The Bible is full of many lesser stories and statements at which people have been offended for centuries. Okay, so Flannery O’Connor is not the Bible. How about Dante who put homosexuals in hell (although some are also in purgatory on their way to heaven), Huckleberry Finn who had distinctly incorrect views on race and women, or that ugly streak of anti-Semitism in T. S. Eliot, a streak not entirely absent from the writings of G. K. Chesterton? “No one can tell another person whether or not he or she should be offended”? One might have thought that that is what education—in part, but in essential part—is about. Commenting on the scandal created by the bishop’s ban, a distinguished literary critic says, “To guard students against O’Connor is to confess a very unseemly and un-Christian cowardice.” The fear probably has less to do with the danger that O’Connor might corrupt the minds of impressionable young people and more with the terror of the thought police labeling a Catholic school “racist.” Paul may have also had bowdlerizing bishops in mind when he wrote, “I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands; for God did not give us a spirit of timidity but a spirit of power and love and self-control.” One must hope that the bishop, rekindling the gift, will reconsider his decision.

• It’s only about eight hundred words, the size of an op-ed piece, but it is the cover article in America, with a picture of a sick pope and in big letters, “A Disabled Pope?” With the cankered morbidity that characterizes the Jesuit weekly’s disposition toward this pope, the article reviews the points familiar to anyone who has looked into the matter, expressing deep concern that the “special laws” to be followed if the Apostolic See becomes vacant or impeded have not been drawn up. In fact, the author and editors do not know whether such laws are in place. Well, maybe the author, Father James Provost, does now. He died a month before the article was published. Meanwhile, John Paul II is alive and well—intellectually and spiritually, although weakened physically. The facts will not prevent many more such journalistic handwringings in what will be, God willing, the future years of this pontificate. The secretive ways of the Vatican are such, an old saying has it, that a pope is never officially sick until the day he dies. Which prompts journalists to overcompensate by holding a death watch from the day he is elected. Especially journalists who do not like him very much. There is piquancy in Fr. Provost’s spending his last days worrying about the Holy Father’s health. It is a quality of devotion to the papacy that is reminiscent of earlier times in the Society of Jesus.

• We have given favorable attention to the work of Gerald McDermott, Associate Professor of Religion at Roanoke College, Virginia, notably his fine book on Jonathan Edwards and Deism. At hand is a notice from the people at the C. S. Lewis Institute that he is speaking under their auspices. Above his picture is the legend, “Wisdom from America’s Greatest Theologian.” I expect Dr. McDermott is embarrassed. I didn’t even know the post was open. I checked with a number of friends who said they had not resigned.

• Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was, by virtue of his much writing, a very famous monk. He sometimes worried out loud whether his writing, and his poetry in particular, was consistent with his monastic vocation. The late Father Eamonn O’Sullivan of Butte, Montana, rhymed him the following whimsical counsel. Gethsemani, Kentucky, was Merton’s monastery. Cistercians and Carthusians are orders of strict observance established in the eleventh century. Merton had written that he was wondering whether he shouldn’t join the stricter Carthusians. Fr. Eamonn’s counsel and Merton’s response are published with the permission of Fr. Sarsfield O’Sullivan of Butte, who is Fr. Eamonn’s brother.

Thomas Á Gethsemani
Baits the cowl with poetry,
Who would clap each God-ward man
To hell or go Cistercian,
Saves for cigarettes a curse
Bleak as T. S. Eliot’s verse;
Might his better blasts address
To his indecisiveness.
Still tempts heaven every time
Thomas puts his hand to rhyme;
Still is not entirely sure
Writing verse is for the pure.
Fear of the Carthusian louse
Keeps him from the Charterhouse.
Thomas, is it the devil’s ruse
Tempts you, bookly, go Chartreuse
Or stay Trappist? Why not, man,
Cast with me, Diocesan?
Dante, grant you, boiled in hell
Parish clerks—but monks as well.
Geoffrey Chaucer, who I hear
Banged your friar across the ear,
Sent not to rede helle doun
Any persoun of a toun.
Thomas, Thomas, why the fuss?
Simon Peter’s one of us.
Abelard, who unsettled so
Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux,
Later came to know this fact
By the desert fathers back’d:
Prudent clerics learn to flee
Maids who’d learn Theology.
(Peter, having had his fling,
Went Cistercian, solving nothing).
Devils not the least deceive
Those the parish care would leave.
Ars’ own Cure, but for God,
Might have died Cistercian shod.
(Even I might not be saved
If I “this? Or that?” behaved.)Thomas, when the monthly bills
Dwarf the everlasting hills,
When a Ladies-Aid debate,
Tempts me from the higher state,
Tempts me to the easy way:
Vaguely pictured on a wain,
Faceless, lest some think me vain.
Or, aft, enjoying in a wood
My daily photo’d solitude,
Juan De La Cruz calls me not;
Matthew, Mark, and Luke I’ve got;
Each a stout Diocesan. (That is not to slander Juan—
Nor you, Thomas.) Pray for light
As a holy Pastor might.
Thomas, you could stand the gaff!
Courage! Earn the epitaph:Thomas Merton
Happy Man
Died a good
Diocesan.

Thomas Merton responded:

On one point, Eamonn, you’re not right
The louse, Sir, is a cenobite
Indeed I think I have been bitten
Eighty times since you have written
The main suggestion of your poem
Tempts me from my Trappist hoem
Such advice no doubt surprisin’
Opens up a new horizon.
I may not earn that epitaph
But you at least have made me laugh.

• A company called Armento builds columbariums, a facility for the interment of the ashes of the cremated deceased. A promotional brochure includes this testimonial from St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in San Antonio, Texas: “The columbarium is one of the most significant actions in the history of our parish.”

• We will be happy to send a sample issue of this journal to people you think are likely subscribers. Please send names and addresses to First Things, 156 Fifth Avenue, Suite 400, New York, New York 10010 (or e-mail to subscriberservices@pma-inc.net). On the other hand, if they’re ready to subscribe, call toll-free 1-800-783-4903.

Sources:

Sam Tanenhaus on neoconservatives, New York Times, September 16, 2000. Leonardo Boff reaction to Dominus Iesus is on Internet, October 5, 2000. Clifford Orwin on “Religion in the Public Square,” National Post, September 11, 2000.

While We’re At It: John Grondelski on false tolerance, New Oxford Review, December 1999. Peter Berkowitz on game theory, New Republic, June 5, 2000. On statement from Pontifical Council for Social Communications, catholic trends, June 10, 2000. “The Genetic Report Card That Will Tell You If Your Embryo Will Get Prostate Cancer,” New York Times Magazine, June 11, 2000. Thomas Powers on McCarthyism, New York Review of Books, May 11, 2000. Christian Smith on evangelicals, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 30, 2000. Steven Pinker on religion, Science & Spirit, May/June 2000. Harvey Cox on “secular Judaism,” Sh’ma, June 2000. Paul Wilkes’ review of The Changing Face of the Priesthood by Donald Cozzens, Context, July 1, 2000. Tom Wolfe on the “Land of the Rococo Marxists,” Harper’s, June 2000. David Novak on secular vs. religious defense of freedom, Virginia Law Review, April 2000. Operatic version of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, reviewed by George Loomis, Opera News, July 2000. On religious sects in France, Insight, August 2000. On Dutch charge of homophobia against Pope John Paul II, Reuters, July 18, 2000. Chloe Breyer’s The Close reviewed by Sarah E. Hinlicky, Books and Culture, October 2000. On Ex Corde Ecclesiae‘s opponents, catholic trends, August 19, 2000. On Boy Scouts objecting to gay scoutmasters, New York Times, September 3, 2000. On Fidel Castro at Riverside Church, New York Times, September 9, 2000. Dave Andrusko on Bill Moyers’ On Our Own Terms, National Right to Life News, September 2000. “Priests of the 60s Fear Loss of Their Legacy,” New York Times, September 10, 2000. Robert Funk on the Jesus Seminar, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, September 19, 2000. Article on Eric Craig Harrah,World, September 2, 2000. On Flannery O’Connor, Baton Rouge State-Times/Morning Advocate, August 26,2000. “A Disabled Pope?” on the cover of America, September 30, 2000.