The Givenness of Things

MEMORY

It is interesting that this country could have transformed itself radically in the last one hundred years, and, after so much time and so much change, should still be divided along the same lines that divided us two centuries ago. The United States has drawn immigrants from the whole world, with all that has meant culturally and in terms of historical memory. It has rethought, and is still rethinking, the entire system of social relations as a consequence of the civil rights movement. It has entangled itself so deeply in the affairs of the world at large that its policies are as perplexed as the circumstances they are meant to address. Materially and technologically, it has outrun its own ability to appraise or to channel and discipline its transformations. We Americans are almost used to all this. We have phrases that go some way toward mitigating its centrifugal force, “dynamic equilibrium,” “creative destruction.” We have accepted it as an identity, and it works quite well as an identity. Scotland may sometimes drift out of Britain, the Flemish may divorce the Walloons. But, despite all the complexities of our economic and demographic life, the United States will still be the United States, in all likelihood. Should it fracture, as we have done once, and have seen other nations do, the fault line will lie along the old Mason — Dixon line.

Here is a hypothesis. Despite the fact of air-conditioning, of heavy industry and high technology, of the movement of Northerners south, of the redistribution to the South of Northern tax dollars, of the prosperity of the recent past, still the South as a region imagines itself to be an enclave in which the Good Old Ways persist, minus a few that have run afoul of judicial activism, of course. The threat to this enclave is the North, with its bad manners and godlessness and its materialism. Of course I exaggerate, I overgeneralize. But, like everyone else, I live with the consequences of there being a regional faction in Congress who will take needed help out of American hands, off American tables, no matter how disgusted I and my kind may be by what they do and the rationalizations they offer for doing it. Indeed, they seem to feel affirmed by our contempt. Populations are inevitably judged by the people they, or some plurality of them at least, choose as their representatives, and therefore as our government as well as theirs. Elections matter.

Other things matter, too, in much the same way. There is an implied religious rationale or impetus and obligation behind very deplorable trends in contemporary society. The arming of the fearful and resentful and unstable with military weapons, supported by the constant reiteration of tales that make mortal enemies of their fellow citizens and elected government, is pursued with a special passion in regions that claim to be profoundly and uniquely Christian, and well mannered, to boot. Biblicist that I am, I watch constantly for any least fragment of a Gospel that could, however obliquely, however remotely, cast all this in any but a satanically negative light. I am moving, reluctantly, toward the conclusion that these Christians, if they read their Bibles, are not much impressed by what they find here.

In any case, how is it possible, given this economics of dark grievance that has so benefited arms manufacturers, cable celebrities, gold mongers, and manufacturers of postapocalyptic grocery items, that they can not only claim Christianity but can also substantially empty the word of other meanings and associations? I’m a Christian, insofar as I can be. As a matter of demographics, of heritage, of acculturation, of affinity, identification, loyalty. I aspire, with uneven results, to satisfying its moral and spiritual standards, as I understand them. I have other loyalties that are important to me, to secularism, for example. To political democracy. These loyalties are either implied by my Christianity or are highly compatible with it. I am a Christian. There are any number of things a statement of this kind might mean and not mean, the tradition and its history being so complex. To my utter chagrin, at this moment in America it can be taken to mean that I look favorably on the death penalty, that I object to food stamps or Medicaid, that I expect marriage equality to unknit the social fabric and bring down wrath, even that I believe Christianity itself to be imperiled by a sinister media cabal. It pains me to have to say in many settings that these are all things I object to strenuously on religious grounds, having read those Gospels. Persons of my ilk, the old mainline, typically do object just as strenuously, and on these same grounds. But they are unaccountably quiet about it. And here we have a great part of the reason that these gun-toting resenters of the poor and of the stranger can claim and occupy a major citadel of the culture almost unchallenged.

Let’s say the media are at fault. This is never entirely wrong. Reasonableness doesn’t make anyone’s pulse race. “The president is a crypto-Muslim” has so much more zing than “the president is not a crypto-Muslim.” This is especially true if the question of religious affiliation is not of particular interest to the person making the denial. It is hard to know where to begin objecting to an agenda set by factions and interests whose conceptual universe is so alien, so opportunistically contrived.

Then again, I probably startled some here when I said, matter-of-factly, I’m a Christian. Even though I have been writing theologically influenced essays and novels for many years, I find that I startle people when I make this simple statement of fact. This is a gauge of the degree to which the right have colonized the word and also of the degree to which the center and left have capitulated, have surrendered the word and also the identity. A very close analogy is to be found in the strange history of the word “liberal,” which erstwhile liberal people use to counsel earnestly against using. Asked what enormity liberals have been guilty of that made the very word opprobrious, they have no answer. Nevertheless, this was simply not a word one used. At the same time political liberalism more or less collapsed, with consequences that persist to this day. A movement that cannot acknowledge its name cannot acknowledge its history, its philosophy, or its achievements. Those who, so to speak, subscribe to the Consumer Report of Acceptable Language and Opinion knew that both word and concept were embarrassingly passé, a gaffe that marked one out as a nonsubscriber, the sort of person who bought suboptimal appliances.

The phenomenon is ridiculous and also truly grave. Look what has happened to us in the last fifteen or twenty years. Deeply held values and aspirations have been abandoned and betrayed. We have trouble now articulating a case for justice and opportunity. We have shrunk away from weighty controversies, shamed or intimidated by the suggestion that these things are un-American. The L-word, the detractors said, though it was introduced into our political vocabulary by John Winthrop before the Puritans had even landed. When it was used as an aspersion, we reacted as if it were one. We live in a moment when people say all sorts of self-revealing things and are admired for their courage, so it is interesting that taboos of a potent kind are still operative and can be brought to bear to such great effect. I was given to know once, quietly, in tones of the kindliest authority, that the world “ontology” could no longer be used. Well, one can say now “I am a liberal” without rousing that strange deflected scandal that once made well-wishers try to protect one from oneself. I believe The New York Times has announced that the word is rehabilitated. So all we have to do is figure out how to reinvest it with meaning.

Could my subject be cowardice? Let me say first that, in my view, true and utter cowardice is defined by the act of carrying a concealed weapon. Over against this, few varieties of fearfulness can seem absolutely disgraceful. Still, enniched as I am and have long been in a safe and comfortable life, am I in any position to raise this subject with reference to the generality of America’s cryptoliberals? Be that as it may, I will have to nerve myself and run the risk of offending. If it were a small thing, only an adult equivalent to the adolescent dread of going to school in the wrong clothes, then it could be laid to anthropology, some subrational human need to affirm identity with one’s tribe. But the analogy breaks down under the sheer weight of the good that has been done, and has since been ridiculed and abandoned, by generosity as a social and moral ethic, by openhandedness as a strategy of wealth creation, material as well as social and cultural. By liberalism.

As it happens, the capitulation I mentioned earlier, which has allowed Christianity to become a brand name for assorted trends and phenomena that have no more to do with its texts and traditions than mythical women warriors have to do with online retail, is the default of liberal Christianity. (My analogy is flawed in that these warriors are neither exploited nor traduced.) Perhaps the counterintuitive nature of certain of Christ’s counsels, to cast bread on the waters in the confidence that it will be returned to you, for example, made it seem the weaker side of the argument. (I should note here that Jesus is quoting from Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Bible, a section of the book for which the Puritan heading is “Liberalitie.”) In any case, he was probably referring to those intangible returns that have become so suddenly and deeply unfashionable, that is, unmonetizable. Overcoming evil with good does not often yield results in the short term, and it lacks all the special satisfactions of revenge. The Consumer Report of Acceptable Language and Opinion was telling us that tough-mindedness was hot. In the face of all this, what to do but capitulate?

I wish I were joking. I wish I had better grounds for admitting that I have been unfair. Certainly I acknowledge that, through all this, persons of great integrity have been faithful to high ideals. But their integrity is underscored by their loneliness, and their heroic patience is proved by what can only be called their inefficacy. We live in a country with for-profit prisons, where the decency of treatment to be received by some hapless boy or girl can be weighed against the interests of stockholders. The gospel invoked in this case as in so many others is privatization, an addendum to Scripture greatly revered in those regions most inclined to call themselves Christian. Incarceration for profit. I would never have thought we could sink so low. I understand that marriage equality offends some people’s religious sensibilities, and I know that denial of basic civic equality offends the religious sensibilities of others. My own, for example. Why does only one side of this question merit attention as an issue of religious freedom? My denomination blessed the unions of same-sex couples until the minute it could instead perform their marriages. Was not our religious freedom constrained by law until the state supreme court acted, and would it not be again if the Governor Jindals of the world had their way? Why is this controversy, insofar as it is conducted in the language of religion, so one-sided? I never feel more Christian than I do when I hear of some new scheme for depriving and humiliating the poor, and feel the shock of religious dread at these blatant contraventions of what I, as a Christian, take to be the will of God. And yes, I can quote chapter and verse.

We are all familiar with the assertion that America is a Christian nation. Obviously, I am not always sure what the people most inclined to say this actually mean by it. Those looking on from the outside are aware that we Christians have our factions, our rivalries, our quarrels. The fact is, however, that, demographically, we do preponderate. Demographically, America is Christian enough that what we do matters. We have a shared moral and ethical language that takes a particular authority from its origins — ideally, at least, or in principle. It has been pointed out many times that Christian morality is profoundly indebted to Judaism, and that it bears a strong likeness to the teachings of the other great religions. Well and good. This means that if we act as we ought to we will act consistently with the values of Americans at large, since even those Nones that show up in statistics now are alienated not by our ideals but by our hypocrisies. If an accident of history has made us a dominant presence here, the consonance of religions could make us worthy agents of values held in other terms and anchored in traditions other than our own. Conversely, as often as we fail to be their agents, every culture or faith with which we share these values suffers defeat.

The question of identification is interesting and important, too. There are any number of people who check the religion box based on whatever they think they ought to be, or intend to be at some unspecified later date. This can be true because they have an intuition of the good or the sacred which is embedded in that identity. Therefore it will have authority for them based on teaching and practice they do not feel they understand well enough to take exception to or to endorse, except passively. Very often, from this perspective, the harshest version of a religion seems the purest, the most serious and authentic. Those inclined to defer to “Christianity,” however defined, can be persuaded by an apparent consensus that it is essentially a system of prohibitions meant to fortify believers’ consciences against any doubt they might otherwise feel about behavior the Bible forbids — vilifying and condemning, for example, or about depriving and excluding. This might be what moral rigor looks like, after all. Those who identify as Christians but are dependent on the culture at large, or on the radio, to instruct them as to the particulars might reasonably have this impression. For their purposes, there is no countervailing view of it. Again, polemic on one side, virtual silence on the other.

One complicating factor is that Christianity is difficult. This is true because it is based on ancient texts and on a vast and diverse body of thought and interpretation, stretching back to antiquity. It is difficult because it is dependent on the kind of learning that occurs over time within community. And it is difficult in a much more important sense because it is contrary to our crudest instincts. Love your enemies. Yes. No sooner said than done. Throughout its history there have been many so moved by the beauty of its teachings that they have been willing even to murder those who seem to them to threaten it, whom they cast as Christianity’s enemies, not their own, a useful bit of Gospel-chopping. We are seeing a version of this now, in all this talk about attack on religion. Such thinking serves well to sanctify exactly those crudest instincts. To encourage them is, as Hamlet would say, as easy as lying.

On the liberal side we have a long retreat from Scripture and tradition. Scripture so primitive, theology so elitist, everything between so middlebrow. Since the “higher” and very dubious criticism emerged in Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century, liberal American Christianity has been agonizing over mythic elements in Scripture, taking the crudest interpretations as the ones most liable to be correct, since “mythic” was thought in those days to mean “primitive”—if its origins were Hebrew, though certainly not if they were Greek. Out of all this has come trudging an ogre worthy of the Brothers Grimm — Jehovah has given place to Yahweh. Whether “Yahweh” is an improved rendering of the divine name is neither here nor there. The contexts in which the newer form occurs tend to be ones in which the deity is assumed to be patched together out of Baal and El, with a little Marduk thrown in. In other words, the ancient Hebrews were simply appropriating local narratives, not pondering a divine self-revelation, or, if this is too strong, a conception of divinity, of cosmic origins and human nature, that was unique to them. No one can read what remains of Canaanite or Babylonian myth — which is all these scholars have had to work from — and find this plausible, unless profound intellectual deference intervenes, as it does so often. Intellectual deference is in fact often prevenient, to use an old word. It can set in so instantly that these highly accessible Near Eastern remains are never looked at. A fair sense of them does emerge, however, where the transformation is made of the Hebrew God into this pagan amalgam. If I am blind to the complexity and profundity of Canaanite or Babylonian myth, these scholars are, too, because complexity and profundity are altogether lost from the conception of God when he is made a creature of that landscape. One beautiful psalm is often said to be adapted from an unspecified Canaanite hymn. I have looked for this hymn and have not found it. I suspect this bit of “information” is simply carried along on the tides of intellectual deference.

To work the New Testament free from the Old is an impulse that manifested itself very early in Christianity. Second-century Marcionism rejected the belief that the God of the Old Testament could be the father of Christ, and so posited another god in opposition to him. Very many people now who want their religion to be intellectually sound consider the Old Testament to have been debunked on the grounds of syncretism, and on the grounds that its primitivism makes it morally unacceptable, incompatible with whatever they choose to retain of Christianity. They cannot do as Marcion did and become dualists outright, but they are left with something like Marcion’s problem. Say Yahweh is what the scholars say he is. Then how is Christ to be understood in relation to him, when traditionally the holiness ascribed to Christ has a character that derives from the conception of the divine in the Hebrew Bible? Thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, thy soul, thy mind, and thy strength, Jesus said, quoting Moses. What happens to this greatest commandment when God is deconstructed into a set of beings who starve and sleep and cower and threaten to beat each other bloody? In order to discover Baal and El and Marduk in the God of the Old Testament it is necessary to strip away everything beautiful about him, his attention to humankind, first of all. To say he is the God of history is to say that he is the God of human history, there being no other kind. It is to say that he is bound to us, freely, out of love and faithfulness, and that he is in some sense defined by his relationship to us. Savior, Redeemer, Shepherd, Father. Even Judge and King bind him to us, since they imply equity and order. In their myths those other gods come near destroying the human race because they are so noisy that they literally prevent the gods from sleeping. The destruction ends when the gods realize they will starve if there are no humans to offer them sacrifices. Neither love nor faithfulness plays any part in their détente.

If some sort of evolution made the God of the Hebrew Bible unlike other gods, what pressures or influences would have brought about this change, this difference? Why is this a question of less than secondary interest? If there was a capacity within the culture to produce and elaborate a distinctive cosmic vision, when and how did this begin? And if the capacity was present, why propose that its god is essentially derivative? It is characteristic of evolutionary models of change that the germ from which anything is supposed to have had its origins is treated as its essence, and whatever departs from this assumed original character is treated as somehow not fully real. The Hebrew God is deprived of his character by the presumption of syncretism just as human beings are deprived of theirs when the beastly origins posited for them are taken to make guile or hypocrisy of compassion, generosity, creativity, and so on.

I have no idea what made Marcion determined to be rid of the Hebrew Bible. Why German scholarship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries might wish to discredit it is a question that seems to answer itself. And why do we accept, even embrace, this project? Well, it seems intellectual. It creates a sphere of esoteric learning that lets us keep one foot in and one foot out of a tradition we are uneasy with but not ready to abandon. It excuses us from reading and pondering a difficult old book that looks squarely and at length at the problem of evil, which can seem to comfortable people to be more than a little impolite, and also primitive. Of course the vast majority of people who have lived on earth have had evil to deal with, and very, very few of them have been comfortable. We have no reason to expect the Bible to be addressed primarily to us.

I dwell on this because it is liberal Christianity that — very perversely, in my view — defers to this old German scholarship. It is meant to be an escape from literalism, but it is really an inverted literalism. Who was the Elohist? The Yahwist? — as if their existence, single or in troops, were more than the artifact of a questionable critical method. What interests were they serving? As if we could know. Two names must equal two gods, right? Then the primal abyss might be Tiamat the serpent, so that makes three. An ancient scrawl somewhere gave Yahweh a consort. Doesn’t this prove an original polytheism? Syncretism? To quote Hamlet again, How if I answer no? In fact it proves nothing. It should be obvious that the word “proof” has no place in a discussion of this kind. To treat speculation as fact is no more sophisticated than to insist on a six-day Creation. We may sometime find the means to make dark matter and dark energy comprehensible, available to meaningful description. We will not know how or by whom the book of Genesis was made. Ever. Nor The Iliad, nor Beowulf, for that matter. Who wrote the plays of Shakespeare? Again, proof and disproof are not meaningful in many contexts. To proceed as if this were not the case is naive, unless it is tendentious.

The old positivist rejection of metaphysics has a part in this, no doubt. If God is Baal and El, Christian metaphysics is thoroughly incoherent, meaningless. For those who doubt the legitimacy of metaphysics this may be no loss. For many who have not been told that there ever was thought of this kind, or have been told that we have been wised up by a modernity that disallows such thoughts, it is a grave loss. In any case, the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection are all highly charged statements about the nature of Being and human being. They are profound, and, so far as I know, unique assertions of the transcendent value of human life, asserting most forcefully the value of the lives of the powerless and the obscure. Baptism, Communion, and worship are participations in this metaphysical, ontological vision.

Or they are pleasant customs. And Christianity is an ethical system that probably deserves to be taken seriously.

There has been a great collapse of the scale at which reality is to be conceived, which, remarkably, happened just at the time that science began to discover for us what a truly vast and astonishing system of Being we are a part of. Only think how the psalmists or the Job writer would have loved to see an issue of Science News. What actually happened at the events called Incarnation and Resurrection I do not know — that there was a crucifixion is far too plausible by historical standards to be at issue. Reality is subtle and free because its consistencies cannot be described as necessity or inevitability — this I do know. Whatever happened happened, and left to the world a statement that could not have been made otherwise. God so loved the world.

And here I return to the place where I began. One of the dominant canards in American culture is that the South is religious and the North is not, that this has been true time out of mind, and that the Bible offered justifications for the institution of slavery which the North answered with brute force. Of course there is slavery in the Old Testament, debt-bondage or indenture that bears very little relation to the industrialized chattel slavery that produced cotton for manufacture in Britain. On the grounds of this canard, however, biblical piety has long been made to seem mean, obscurantist, or sinister. I have been looking at the rhetoric, on the Southern as well as the Northern side, from before the Civil War, and I am interested to find that the Northerners allude to Scripture far more often, and use it far more essentially as the basis of their argument, than, say, Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens, who refer to it seldom, then only passingly and without particular awareness of context. Stephens famously referred to the institution of slavery as “the stone the builders [the founders] rejected.” He said that through the Confederacy it was to become at long last the head of the corner. Remarkable. If there are Southern equivalents of Henry Ward Beecher or Lydia Maria Child, I haven’t found them. Since American intellectual culture is an endless corridor of funhouse mirrors, we don’t know what Karl Marx did know, that the cotton economy of the South was altogether the creature of British industrial capitalism. It was the greatest producer of wealth in the American economy, and its apologists foresaw a limitless expansion of it, into the North, and even into Central and South America. It was a great engine of wealth dependent on what Davis called, rather coolly, “this species of property,” African slaves. One need not read far to see what our great experiment might have become. And the spirit behind it would have been Mammon, not Moses.

In a speech titled “The Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society,” Henry Ward Beecher says,

This relationship [that subsists between man and his Maker] begins in the fact that we are created in the divine image; that we are connected with God, therefore, not by Government alone, but by nature. This [initial] truth is made radiant with meaning, by the teaching of Christianity that every human being is dear to God: a teaching which stands upon that platform, built high above all human deeds and histories, the advent, the incarnation, passion, and death of Christ, as a Savior of men. The race is a brotherhood; God is the Father, Love is the law of this great human commonwealth, and Love knows no servitude. It is that which gilds with liberty whatever it touches … You cannot present man as a subject of Divine government, held responsible for results, compared with which the most momentous earthly deeds are insignificant, plied with influences accumulating from eternity, and by powers which though they begin on earth in the cradle, gentle as a mother’s voice singing lullaby, go on upward, taking everything as they go, till they reach the whole power of God … you cannot present man as the center and subject of such an august and eternal drama, without giving him something of the grandeur which resides in God himself.

This is humanism articulated in the terms of Christian metaphysics, as it was, over the centuries, until somehow the notion took hold that the two of them are at odds. In any case, Beecher’s terms being granted, there is no scriptural refutation to be made. Nor was any offered, so far as I can discover.

Where would we be if the Hebrew God had not said and insisted that human beings share his image and are sanctified by it? Do we have any other secure basis for belief in universal human dignity? There is no evidence at all that this is anything we know intuitively. We would not now have a sizable part of our own population walking around prepared to engage in homicidal violence if they truly believed that that young man in the hoodie was an image of God. If Christianity is thought of as a religion of personal salvation that allows one to sin now and repent at leisure, it is, one must say, almost limitlessly permissive. It virtually invites the flouting of Jesus’ teachings. We can ignore what Jesus says and does, however we may admire it — with a few reservations — and love him most of all for the certainty that he will take us back, poor sinners, no matter what harm we may have done to those others he presumably loves just as much as he does us, or a little more. What protections he may have intended for them in his preachments he thoughtfully makes null and void in his ready forgiveness of those who violate these protections.

But if Christianity is instead a metaphysics that resolves all reality at every moment into holiness, whether honored or offended against, then its demands are of a higher order entirely. This second, utterly sacred cosmos is the splendid old home of liberal Christian thought. And we were the ones who once elevated the Hebrew Bible to a prominence unique in Christian history. It seems we have wearied of the demands our traditions made of us, perhaps of its emphasis on learning, perhaps of its mystery and beauty. At any rate, many of us, many in our pulpits and seminaries, have turned away from it. That strange verse in the first chapter of Genesis, “in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them,” is meaningless by the standards of positivism or the higher criticism. It is unfalsifiable, undemonstrable, and dependent on terms for which we have no stable definitions. It is dependent as well on a conception of God that compels reverence and will make us reverent of one another. It tells us every essential thing about who we are and what we are, and what we are a part of. It is ontology. It is metaphysics.