Dark Shadows of Turning

By Eric Scheske
Touchstone Magazine

On Evil in Legend & Life.

From sixteenth-century Germany comes the terrible tale of Stubbe Peeter. Stubbe grew up in the area of Collin, Germany, seemingly well-known to his fellow citizens. He often strolled about Collin and neighboring villages, attractively dressed, greeting acquaintances he met on the streets.

But Stubbe Peeter was an evil man, inclined to evil from his youth. The devil became well pleased with his young disciple, so he gave him an inconspicuous belt with which Stubbe Peeter could transform himself into a wolf. For twenty-five years, werewolf Stubbe Peeter committed terrible atrocities: slaughtering and eating animals raw; killing and eating small children; tearing children from their mothers’ wombs and eating their hearts raw; killing his own son and eating his brains; raping women; and committing incest with his daughter—monstrous acts that seem unbelievable until one recalls the fiendish deeds of those such as Jeffrey Dahlmer and other serial killers, ritual child abusers, and similar criminals of our own day.

Finally, hunters and their dogs successfully tracked the ravenous wolf and cornered him. Seeing himself surrounded, Stubbe Peeter removed the belt and resumed human shape right in front of them, hoping the hunters would not be able to believe their eyes. But they believed what they saw, and so apprehended him and took him to the magistrates for examination. After Peeter confessed his crimes, his executioners laid him on a wheel, pulled his flesh from his bones with red-hot pincers, broke his arms and legs with a hatchet, and then decapitated and burned him.1

We don’t know precisely where fact and fiction cross in Stubbe Peeter’s story. While it is obviously unlikely that he really was a werewolf, he could have been one of the criminally insane about whom grew a legend that reflected the surrounding culture (sixteenth-century Europeans greatly feared the wolf). But even if only a legend, the depiction of Stubbe Peeter as a “shapeshifter”—one who walked among his fellow villagers as a man but changed into a ravenous animal to perpetrate his crimes—is more than a reflection of sixteenth-century fears; it also contains a universal truth. For the shapeshifting that made Stubbe Peeter notorious in his day is a consistent feature of evil in all times: Evil things shift shapes.

Shapeshifting in Lore & Literature

This is a constant theme in folklore. For instance, almost every culture has its fearsome stories about were-beasts. In Asia, there are tales of the fearful were-tiger; in Africa, stories of the man who shifted shapes into a lion or hyena. Lore in the Amazon region tells of the jaguar-men—sorcerers who became jaguars at night in order to attack humans.

Shapeshifting has also been associated with witchcraft. During the Middle Ages, witchcraft was commonly suspected when an attacking animal was wounded at night and a woman then was discovered the following morning with wounds to the corresponding parts of her body. Such evidence was deemed convincing against a medieval woman named Finicella. She was convicted of using witchcraft to take the form of a cat and attack a small child after exhibiting a stab wound corresponding to that inflicted on a cat by the child’s father on the night of the attack. Between 1395 and 1405, a secular court near Bern burned many people for witchcraft. Among other crimes, the witches were accused of stealing children, draining their body fluids to make ointments, and using the ointments to change themselves into animals.2

Shapeshifting is also a feature of mythology. For example, every Viking knew of the shapeshifting Norse god Loki (the “Trickster”), a god who, after vacillating for some time between good and evil, eventually succumbed wholly to evil and became hateful of everything. According to myth, the goddess Frigg doted on her beautiful son Balder and sought to assure his immortality by seeking, and securing, from every substance on earth but one, a promise not to hurt him. Loki changed into a tiresome old woman and so pestered Frigg with questions that finally, at the end of her patience, she revealed her secret: she had failed to get a promise from the mistletoe.

The gods, meanwhile, would get harmless fun out of throwing deadly things at the seemingly invincible Balder, and Balder’s blind brother Hod joined in the sport. Loki made a dart from the mistletoe and gave it to Hod, who threw it at his brother. The dart pierced and killed Balder.

Loki’s spiteful cruelty did not end there. When the goddess Hel agreed to permit Balder to return from the dead on condition that every creature on earth weep for him, Loki turned himself into a giantess named Thokk, who refused to cry. When the gods heard of Loki’s further outrage, they hunted him. He turned into a salmon to try to escape, but was captured and bound to a rock with his own son’s entrails. He now awaits Ragnarok, the day of the last great conflict between good and evil, when he will be unbound to fight on the side of evil.

Evil’s shapeshifting character is also seen in literature. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for instance, Dracula shifts into a dog and a bat, and communes with the wolves around his castle. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll gives free reign to his debased urges by creating and shifting into Mr. Hyde and committing contemptible acts. He eventually throttles a gentleman with his cane, audibly shattering his bones as he kills him, and then afterwards gloats about it to himself while devising other crimes for the future. When C. S. Lewis’s small-souled character Eustace discovers a dragon’s treasure hoard in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” he is overcome by greed, stuffs his pockets with treasure, then lies down to sleep on the dragon’s hoard, with “dragonish thoughts in his heart.” When he wakes up, he finds himself turned into a dragon.

In his stories about Middle Earth, J. R. R. Tolkien describes Sauron, Middle Earth’s personification of evil, as a shapeshifter. In the First Age of Middle Earth, Sauron assumes the shape of a wolf to fight with the good hound Huan. Huan takes wolf-Sauron by the throat and will not let go, so Sauron shifts into a serpent, then into a monster, and finally into his accustomed form in an attempt to break loose, but cannot. Eventually Sauron negotiates for his release, and upon securing it, assumes the shape of a vampire and flies away.

Shapeshifting as a Sign of Evil

The most notorious shapeshifter, of course, has been the devil. This was taken as common knowledge in the Middle Ages. Stories abound of the devil’s numerous metamorphoses. He frequently appeared as an old man or woman, an attractive boy or girl, a pauper, fisherman, merchant, student, or shoemaker. He could appear holy, posing as a priest or pilgrim. He was often persuasive, posturing as a mathematician, physician, or grammarian. He could transform himself into a beast—a goat, wolf, bear, pig, raven, stag, or any of dozens of other types of animals. He could appear as a natural wonder such as a whirlwind. He shifted his shape to suit his purpose.3

Connecting shapeshifting with evil purposes, and especially seeing it as an attribute of the devil, reflects a certain fundamental metaphysical understanding: God is good. God is also changeless.4 The opposite of good is evil. Therefore, the opposite of God is changeful. The further a thing hurls itself from God, the more unlike God it becomes. As it becomes more unlike God, its changefulness becomes more pronounced, and the velocity and frequency of its changes increase. The devil, being the creature most removed from God, is the master of evil and therefore the master shapeshifter, as indicated by the plethora of shapes he is reported to have assumed.

Shapeshifting also sheds light on another metaphysical issue—the nature of evil. St. Thomas Aquinas, drawing on St. Augustine and the neo-Platonists, pointed out that evil is a privation of being. God is good, and God creates all things good. Being is therefore good; good’s opposite, evil, lacks being. Shapeshifting underscores this fact by attempting to hide it—a creature assumes different shapes to substitute for and disguise its lack of being, as one might don different masks in an attempt to give character to a faceless head.

Sin, Temptation & Shapeshifting

Shapeshifting tales are entertaining as long as they remain tales; it is a different story when they become real, when the abstract, metaphysical facts they symbolize become tangible experiences. And they are frequently more real and closer to home than people realize. Anne Rice, author of modern vampire novels, once said that vampire stories fascinate because they relate to real horror: The vampire story reflects every person’s predatory nature, the desire to feed off the essence of others. Stubbe Peeter ate others’ flesh, but everyone else is tempted to devour souls.

Everyone is prone to some form of shapeshifting because every person is born with original sin. This condition puts the self in opposition to God, seeking to develop traits that are opposed to those he implanted in us as creatures made in his image—including his trait of immutability. If not checked, this inborn rebelliousness hurls the individual farther and farther away from God, the Good and the Changeless, resulting in an increasingly evil and changeful being.

The criminal can provide an excellent modern illustration of shapeshifting’s evil nature. Despite his crimes, the criminal (as his defense attorney always points out) is rarely thoroughly corrupt, a criminal “at heart.” But he is still a shapeshifter: he may assume one shape to disguise his malice—as Loki took the shape of an old woman in order to learn Frigg’s secret—but later, after getting caught, he may shift shapes again into a remorseful penitent, so that the judge, jury, and social workers will endorse a lenient sentence. Should he get one, he is likely to shift shapes yet again after his release and assume a form better suited for the streets.

But no one should be smug just because he is not a criminal. Every person is susceptible to shapeshifting; the devil tempts us all to shift shapes to the form most likely to gain us our immediate desires. The lawyer who spends his day table-pounding or plotting becomes the benevolent community worker at night as he tries to lure more clients to his office. The pretty young girl becomes a motorcycle slut when trying to lure a wild youth who will shock her parents, a bookworm when trying to seduce a good-looking professor, and a modest and religious young lady when trying to pin down a nice young man. A man is pious in church on Sunday morning because he wants his neighbors’ respect, but rowdy at the bar on Friday evening as he tries to fit in with his friends.

All such people would scream if they saw Dracula swooping towards them, but they never scream upon seeing a vampire in the mirror every morning. They are willing to change shapes to achieve their goals, even if it means misleading and manipulating others. Like the devil, they just want their prizes. Like the devil, they change shapes to serve the self. And like the devil, they can spend eternity serving the self if they shift far enough from God, the Changeless One, and are overcome by the evil that catalyzes their shift, like Dr. Jekyll overcome at the end by evil Mr. Hyde.

The Christian Way

Charles Williams’s War in Heaven features Gregory Persimmons, a wholly evil man, a pure sadist who takes glee in destruction. When the holy man Prester John meets Persimmons, John detects an objectionable smell. The smell is the decaying Persimmons—the decay that is inevitable when existence rots away.5 Gogol touched on the same theme when he wrote, “When souls start to break down, then faces also degenerate.”6

The person with a decaying soul needs different masks to hide his degenerating face and assumes different shapes to conceal his decaying existence. But the Christian shouldn’t need masks and shapes. The Christian is called upon to imitate Jesus Christ, the Incarnation of the Good and Changeless. The Christian is required to shed the various forms that sin leads him to assume, so he can better dwell in his simple existence as created by God, an existence that is good and essentially changeless because it is created in God’s image.

Kallistos Ware hinted at this obligation when he wrote in his modern classic, The Orthodox Way, that “each man and woman is a living icon of God.”7 This icon merits reverence. The person who thinks evil thoughts and performs evil actions defaces this icon and becomes, in the most literal sense, an iconoclast. He eventually needs to find substitute shapes or masks as his self-vandalizing mutilates his true existence. The Christian must avoid this. He must realize that he is an icon of God, “but only insofar as he is fully human” and radiates “the presence of Christ.”8

Notes:

1. For the story of Stubbe Peeter, see A Lycanthropy Reader: Werewolves in Western Culture, ed. Charlotte F. Otten (Syracuse University Press, 1986), pp. 69–76.

2. See Jeffrey Burton Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Cornell University Press, 1972), p. 216.

3. See Jeffrey Burton Russell, Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages (Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 67–68.

4. Cf. James 1:17.

5. Analysis taken from Thomas Howard, The Novels of Charles Williams (Ignatius Press, 1991), pp. 97–98.

6. See Michael Quenot, The Icon: Window on the Kingdom (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996), p. 147.

7. See Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993), p. 161.

8. Quenot, op. cit., p. 158.

Eric Scheske lives in Sturgis, Michigan, where the small-town practice of law leaves time for study and writing. He and his wife have four small children and attend Holy Angels Catholic Church, where he teaches local high-school students about unconventional aspects of religion.

Speaking the Truths Only the Imagination May Grasp

By Stratford Caldecott
Touchstone Magazine

An Essay on Myth &“Real Life”

John Henry Newman once pointed out that it is very hard for anyone to believe something he cannot first imagine to be true. Today, many people growing up in an industrialized world cut off (physically and intellectually) from the natural environment cannot imagine the milk they drink coming from a cow, let alone how the supernatural claims of Christianity could possibly be true. It seems to bear no relation to the world they inhabit. They have no knowledge of it, nor even any knowledge from which they can draw analogies.

Their imagination (by which I mean that faculty by which they view the world and try to make sense of it) is shaped by technological rather than organic forms. They consequently have difficulty believing that everything in the world grows in order to manifest an inner, invisible unity and to believe that something, some being, created and maintains that unity. For children growing up in a modern city, the world is composed of physical objects jammed together by an external logic or more often by no apparent logic at all: noisy and random, forming no natural order but jostling and fighting for dominance, a unity based on power.

Life was not always so. A life lived close to the earth, to nature in all its forms—plants and animals, rocks and rivers—helps to create in a child the possibility of religious awakening. For those children estranged from nature, the early influence of good literature can have the same salutary effect. Traditional folk and fairy tales, heroic stories, and legends can help in preparing someone for what C. S. Lewis referred to as the “baptism” of the imagination; something that for him, albeit not for everyone, was an important preparatory step for receiving the gospel of Christ as Saving Truth.

In my own case, these things helped to wake a longing that could not be satisfied by the kind of knowledge offered by science alone. It was a longing that, once awakened, could not easily be lulled to sleep.

A Longing for Union

This longing has been experienced by men and women of all cultures and times. It is not merely the longing for an explanation of why the world exists at all, although that may come into it. It is a longing for union with something infinitely remote and yet infinitely beautiful; a longing for self-transformation, for the One who entirely transcends our present state. This is the longing that myths evoke, and the fulfillment of which they speak. As Lewis said in his sermon “The Weight of Glory,” God has given us such great wonders in nature that we should not want anything else, but

we want so much more—something the books on aesthetics take little notice of. But the poets and mythologies know all about it. We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves.1

Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss our myths merely as “wishful thinking” and nothing more. As J. R. R. Tolkien wrote, “legends and myths are largely made of ‘truth,’ and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode.”2 In the popular meaning of the word, of course, a myth is simply a story that is not true. I would say rather that a myth is a symbolic story intended to express truth, and a truth perhaps best apprehended and understood through story. Myth, wrote Lewis, “must be grasped with the imagination, not with the intellect.” If its characters

have some touch of mythical life, then no amount of “explanation” will quite catch up with their meaning. It is the sort of thing you cannot learn from definition: you must rather get to know it as you get to know a smell or taste, the “atmosphere” of a family or a country town, or the personality of an individual.3

But what is myth designed to express? It concerns not merely the world around us, but the world within us; not so much the surface appearance of the world, but its inner form. For a myth is a way of describing the rules by which the world is made, the rules that govern our lives; whether or not we know them or obey them. In a phrase from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, they reveal “the deep magic from before the dawn of time.”

I suppose, even so, that we should properly restrict the name of myth to those stories that encapsulate the religious and cosmological beliefs of an entire community. But the line between myth, folklore, “fairy tales,” and fantasy is hard to draw. Stories composed by an individual, such as Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, or Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, seem sometimes to touch the same level of archetypal truth as the myths of a people, and they achieve enormous and lasting popularity as a result. In the case of the leading “Inklings,” this amounted to a cult following within their own lifetime.

Fantasy “fandom” may be obsessive, but fundamentally it springs from a healthy response to a sick—a fallen—world. Given the situation in which we find ourselves, even escapism is not necessarily ignoble. To quote Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories”:

In what the misusers [of the term “escape”] are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic. . . . Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? . . . Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it.4

Lewis put it a similar way: “At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see.”5

What follows is partly an examination of this attempt to “go home,” to return to the world outside the prison walls. It is about how we can better understand our own lives in the light of mythic imagination and the relationship of Christianity to mythology. The stories I have chosen to reflect briefly upon are stories of a Quest. The quest is, after all, probably the best-known “plot device” of all folklore and mythology. If the first task of the storyteller is to hold the interest of his listeners, clearly what people find most interesting is a tale that describes a journey in which there is some difficult goal to be achieved, some challenge to be met, some initiation to be undergone, some place or object to be discovered or won.

Why are such tales so endlessly fascinating, so universally told? Perhaps because it is just such a journey that gives meaning to our own existence. We read or listen to the storyteller in order to orient ourselves within—to learn how to behave in order to get where we are going. Each of us knows that our life is not merely a mechanical progress from cradle to grave; it is a search, a quest, even a pilgrimage. There is some elusive goal that motivates us in our work and our play.

Christianity as Myth

The definition of “myth” as a symbolic story designed to express truth is broad enough to apply to the stories we find in the Bible. Of course, there is nothing in our definition that rules out the possibility that at least some of these stories may also be true accounts of historical events. The traditional understanding is that they are both. Wherever the text of the Bible does not appear to contradict itself, or is not contradicted by human reason or by certain knowledge from some other sources, tradition encourages us to assume that it is literally as well as symbolically true—that is, true to the surface as well as to the inner life of the world.

Both the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria and the third-century theologian Origen expressly stated this as a principle of interpretation. We could call it the principle of “Maximum Possible Meaning.” Behind it lies the conviction that the divine author of Scripture is also the author of the cosmos, and so the Book of Nature must be reflected in the Book of Scripture, and find there its definitive interpretation.

At one time Lewis regarded the Bible, and the whole Christian story, as no more than a fairy tale dressed up as truth, a “lie breathed through silver.” It is easy to see why. Fairy stories as well as many of the classical myths and legends contain many themes, stories, and ideas we also find in the Christian story.

In particular, a hero is generally marked out from birth for a special destiny. He has been born into a time and place in need of some sort of deliverance, usually from an oppressive ruler (who may or may not have supernatural powers). His birth is often marked by some supernatural mark of favor; indeed, he may even be the son of a god. On reaching maturity, he receives his task: a task only he can fulfill. He may have a time of trial before he begins, in which he has to resist temptations that will divert him from his task. The task may involve the recovery of a lost treasure guarded by a dragon, or the undoing of the enchantment that lies over a kingdom, or winning the hand of a princess; often it involves all three.

Jesus Christ fits this pattern for the hero. Just as he fulfills the prophecies of the Old Testament, he also fulfills the universal archetype of the mythic hero (although in both cases he does so partly by turning expectations on their head). He is born to a virgin and is called the “son of God.” He enters a world oppressed and enslaved (primarily by sin, but also by the Romans). He receives his mission when he is baptized in the Jordan; the Holy Spirit then drives him into the desert for a time of trial; there he battles spiritually with the “dragon” Satan; he returns from this skirmish to recover the lost treasure of his Father’s kingdom, the human race; by giving his life for his friends he succeeds in undoing the enchantment of Original Sin; finally he is raised to new life and, in the book of Revelation, is rewarded with the hand of the “princess” Israel, the “new Jerusalem . . . prepared as a bride” (21:2). The story of Jesus Christ is, clearly, whatever else it may be, a myth.

Lewis’s view that Christianity was merely a fairy tale met with an unexpected response when he discussed it with Tolkien, during a long walk one day around Magdalen College in Oxford.6 Yes, Tolkien said, the Gospels contain a fairy story—even the sum total of all fairy stories rolled together—the one story we would most wish to be true in all literature. But although we cannot make the story true by wishing, and we must not deceive ourselves into thinking it is true because we wish it, we still cannot rule out the possibility that it did all actually happen.

It may be that the very reason we wish it were true is that we were made to wish it, by the One who makes it true. God created us incomplete, because the kind of creature that can only be perfected by its own choices (and so through Quest and trial) is more glorious than the kind that has only to be whatever another made it to be.

Lewis was haunted by a comment on the Gospels by a “hard-boiled atheist,” a man he very much admired for the toughness and objectivity of his mind: “Rum thing, all that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once.”7 Much later, in a letter to his childhood friend Arthur Greaves, Lewis wrote how he had gradually and with reluctance come to believe that

the story of Christ is simply a true myth; a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference, that it really happened; and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing himself through the minds of poets, using such images as he found there, while Christianity is God expressing himself through what we call “real things.” Therefore it is true, not in the sense of being a “description” of God (that no finite mind could take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties. The “doctrines” we get out of the true myth are of course less true; they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection.8

For Christians it is obvious that the life of Christ will fulfill all myths and fairy tales because it is the Way, the Truth, and the Life within all lives. It is the Drama within all drama, the Story that all good stories reflect. The overcoming of death by infinite Love is the Quest at the heart of every quest, and the sacrifice that makes it possible is the essence of all heroism. In the Gospels, literal truth and universal symbolism, history and legend, time and eternity coincide. They are brought together by the “hypostatic union” of divine and human nature.

And this upsets what Lewis called “the whole demythology of our time,” the assumption that the biblical stories—the Christian myth—are only symbolic and can be revised or abandoned as needed, if they prove themselves “inadequate to our thoughts.”

But supposing these things were the expressions of God’s thought? . . . You cannot know that everything in the representation of a thing is symbolical unless you have independent access to the thing and can compare it with the representation. . . . How if we are asking about a transcendent, objective reality to which the story is our sole access? “We know not—of we know not.” But then we must take our ignorance seriously.9

If the myth comes from God, it is likely to mix symbolic and literal truth in ways we, fallen creatures, cannot see. “When I know as I am known I shall be able to tell which parts of the story were purely symbolical and which, if any, were not; shall see how the transcendent reality either excludes or repels locality, or how unimaginably it assimilates and loads it with significance. Had we not better wait?”

All this sets the scene for what the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar describes as the “theo-drama”: a drama enacted by God the Son, written by God the Father, and directed by the Holy Spirit. Each of us is offered a role in this cosmic drama, a mission to perform in mythic space. In relation to Christ, “each individual is given a personal commission; he is entrusted both with something unique to do and with the freedom to do it. Bound up with commission is his own, inalienable, personal name; here and only here role and person coincide.”10

The English word “person” derives from the Etruscan phersu and the Latin persona, meaning an actor’s role or mask. Thus the word originally referred to the face that the actor assumed for the purpose of participating in a drama. For an actor, of course, real life is what happens when he takes the mask off. Christianity reverses the relationship. Real life is what happens when he puts it on. The play, the cosmic theo-drama, is more real than what happens out of character and “off-stage.” It is only by accepting and carrying out a drama, that is, in the myth, that we can become persons who are real for eternity.

Perhaps this sounds strange: that, like the Velveteen Rabbit, we still need to learn to become real. But it is what I have come to see as the distinctive message of Christianity. While agreeing with the oriental religions that we must dissolve the illusion of the “false self,” Christianity teaches, not the abolition of the self, but that we may inherit a new self that is not illusory. This new self, the persona, is distinct from God by nature, but united with him through grace.

Fundamentalism and Myth

In his remark about “doctrines,” we see why Lewis, even after he came to believe in the literal, historical truth of the Christian myth, could not be dismissed as a fundamentalist. A fundamentalist is one who reduces religion to the size of his own mind. He mistakes the pointing finger for the moon, relative truth for absolute, the human definition for the reality.

But, as mentioned, believing something to be a historical fact need not prevent us from seeing it as a symbolical truth as well. It is because water is an apt natural symbol of birth and of death that God uses it to bring about rebirth in the sacrament of baptism. Lewis was not a fundamentalist; he was a sacramentalist. His religion was mystical. A fundamentalist will build a fence around a teaching to “protect” it; but he will never, like Lewis, permit that dogma to sink its roots deep into the earth, nor grow above his fence into the sky. Yet that is what it must do in those people whose faith is a living, growing thing—like the tree of the parable that starts as the smallest of seeds, but grows until the birds of the air can nest in its branches.

Lewis’s stories of the land of Narnia (written, of course, twenty years and more after his conversion) revolve around a Quest, reflecting in a hundred ways the understanding he had attained of the human heart and its ways to God—the drama of human and divine freedom. Narnia was the name of Lewis’s own “inner kingdom,” and the diversity of its talking animal inhabitants subject to a human king expresses the primordial harmony with nature that exists in every rightly ordered soul.

Each story in the series deals with a particular threat to this world within the heart, or test of allegiance to it. The recurrent subtheme of the “royal child” is not merely a device for holding the attention of Lewis’s young readers, but has its roots in the Gospel saying: “Unless you become like this child, you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” Lewis had perceived that it is only by restoring childlike innocence to the heart that our lives can become capable of fulfillment. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

In the Chronicles of Narnia the reigns of the usurper Miraz, of the Witches, of the Calormenes, are each in a different way images of what we fallen grown-ups have slipped into calling “real life”: the world of adulthood, of cynicism, hypocrisy, “realism,” and despair. The “Earthmen” under the spell of the Green Witch work like ants, as though in a great joyless factory. The Telmarines drive the Talking Beasts and magic out of Narnia, building stone bridges to avoid getting their feet wet and regimented schoolrooms for teachers with names like Miss Prizzle. The Calormene rulers speak with great courtesy, but their words cover treachery and deceit and the basest political calculations.

Part of the great power of the books lies in the contrast they paint between “natural” and “artificial” worlds, a contrast that Lewis explained in a more philosophical mode in The Abolition of Man. When the White Witch’s ice begins to thaw, when the vines tear down the Bridge of Beruna, what we are meant to feel—what we surely do feel—is that here, at last, is real life again; and the “reality” we had previously accepted as inevitable in our own lives is somehow shown up to be nothing but an evil enchantment.

One example will suffice. At a crucial point in The Silver Chair, Eustace and Jill, the Prince they have rescued, and their companion the Marshwiggle Puddleglum are trapped by a Witch in her underground kingdom. They almost succumb to her spell, woven of music and smoke. They are almost persuaded that Narnia, Aslan, and even the sunshine of Overland are all childish illusions (myths or fairy tales, we would say). “You have seen lamps,” the Witch tells them, “and so you imagined a bigger and better lamp and called it the sun. You’ve seen cats, and now you want a bigger and better cat, and it’s to be called a lion. Well, ’tis a pretty make-believe, though, to say truth, it would suit you all better if you were younger.”11

With his last strength of will, Puddleglum steps into the fire, and the smell of his burning flesh weakens the spell. Then he replies to the witch:

One word, Ma’am. One word. . . . Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things, trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one.

This, he says, is “a funny thing.”

. . . We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.

Puddleglum’s argument is directed against the “spell” we all fall under the moment we enter (for example) the London Underground, the moment we sit down at a desk to earn money, the moment we forget to pray. It is one of the most powerful arguments for religious faith in the modern world that I have come across. We have faith not because we can immediately prove what we believe, but because it is in some way nobler to believe than to disbelieve.

We are “outside of the world,” on “the wrong side of the door.” Through myth, we see inside the world, get through the door. And we set about, through a deliberate decision, to act as though the myths were true, as if the greatest and most wonderful possible things were real things that, although they cannot be disproved (for the Witch’s clever arguments are no disproof), may take enormous courage to believe. It takes courage to believe, in today’s skeptical atmosphere, not that Jesus of Nazareth was a historical figure (for there is respectable evidence of that), but that he died and rose from the dead (for which we have a great deal of impressive testimony but no strictly “scientific” proof, and none that can easily overcome the intrinsic implausibility of the claim), and certainly that there is no other name in heaven or on earth by which we can be saved (for there is no “proof” of that at all).

We are back with the principle of Maximum Possible Meaning, this time applied to life itself. Religious faith is a categorical refusal to act as though the world were less important, less interesting, less meaningful, than we are capable of conceiving. It may be more; it will not be less. This may be a gamble, but if so it is a gamble that will give our lives meaning even if we are wrong. It will create an island of meaning in a sea of unmeaning.

“I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.” I am going to live as though Christ rose from the dead and calls me to follow. In this way, as Lewis found in his own life, Christian myth becomes Christian experience, and in due course, in God’s good time, the proofs from experience that we lacked in the beginning are ours as well. For we do not walk in the dark forever.

“Speaking the Truths Only the Imagination May Grasp” is taken from The Pilgrim’s Guide: C. S. Lewis and the Art of Witness, edited by Touchstone senior editor David Mills and published by Eerdmans.

Notes:

1. “The Weight of Glory,” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (Eerdmans, 1965), pp. 12–13.

2. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981), no. 131. This explains the similarity between the world’s myths. “Long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear,” Tolkien continued. In particular, “all stories are ultimately about the fall.”

3. “Preface to Third Edition,” in The Pilgrim’s Regress (Eerdmans, 1943), p. 13.

4. “On Fairy Stories,” in J. R. R. Tolkien, The Tolkien Reader (Ballantine Books, 1966), p. 60. Emphasis added.

5. “The Weight of Glory,” p. 13.

6. They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greaves, 1914–1963, ed. Walter Hooper (Collier/Macmillan, 1986), pp. 426–428, quoted in The Quotable C. S. Lewis, ed. Wayne Martindale and Jerry Root (Tyndale, 1989), no. 243.

7. Surprised by Joy (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955), pp. 223–224 and 225.

8. They Stand Together, p. 426.

9. “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism,” in Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (Eerdmans, 1967), pp. 165–166. In the essay Lewis noted that skeptical biblical scholars were “imperceptive about the very quality of the texts they are reading,” because they lacked “any standard of comparison such as can only grow from a wide and genial experience of literature in general. . . . If he [a critic] tells me something in a Gospel is legend or romance, I want to know how many legends or romances he has read, how well his palate is trained in detecting them by the flavour; not how many years he has spent on that Gospel.”

10. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 3 (Ignatius Press, 1993), p. 51.

11. The Silver Chair (Macmillan/Collier Books, 1970), pp. 151–159. See Peter Kreeft’s “C. S. Lewis’s Argument from Desire,” in The Riddle of Joy, ed. Michael Macdonald and Andrew Tadie (Eerdmans, 1989), pp. 249–272. Kreeft wrote that Lewis gave the argument at length in three places: Surprised by Joy, Mere Christianity (in his discussion of hope in Book III, chapter 10), and the preface to The Pilgrim’s Regress. He does not mention Puddleglum.

Mr. Stratford Caldecott is the director of the Centre for Faith and Culture in Oxford, assistant editor of The Chesterton Review, and publisher with T&T Clark. He is the editor of Beyond the Prosaic: Renewing the Liturgical Movement, and with John Morrill the editor of Eternity in Time: Christopher Dawson and the Catholic Idea of History (both published by T&T Clark). He was for several years a senior editor for HarperCollins-UK.

His Passion, Our Choices

By Patrick Henry Reardon
Touchstone Magazine

Matthew’s Trial of Jesus Is About More than Jesus

Although any day is a good occasion to read the Gospel accounts of the Lord’s Passion, it is hardly surprising that the ancient lectionaries of the Christian Church especially prescribe the solemn, public reading of these texts each spring—March or April—during Holy Week. An early witness to this prescription was Egeria, a nun from Gaul, who penned a priceless account of her travels in the Holy Land during the late fourth century, probably between 381 and 384.

Because she was fortunate to be present among the Christians in Jerusalem during Lent, Holy Week, and the Paschal season, Egeria’s account includes descriptions of the customs and rituals associated with the liturgical observance of those solemn seasons, including the public reading of the Passion narratives on Good Friday. This passage is worth quoting at length:

The entire time from the sixth to the ninth hour is occupied by public readings. They all concern the things that Jesus suffered; first they have the psalms on this theme, then the Apostolic Epistles and Acts which deal with it, and finally the passages from the Gospels. In this way they read the prophecies about what the Lord was to suffer, and then the Gospels about what he did suffer. Thus do they continue the readings and hymns from the sixth to the ninth hour, showing to all the people by the witness of the Gospels and the writings of the Apostles that the Lord actually suffered everything the prophets had foretold. They teach the people, then, for these three hours, that nothing which took place had not been foretold, and all that was foretold was completely fulfilled. Dispersed among these readings are prayers, all fitting to the day. It is impressive to see the way all the people are moved by these readings, and how they mourn. You could hardly believe how every single one of them weeps during those three hours, old and young together, because of the way the Lord suffered for us. ( The Travels of Egeria)

Jesus on Trial

Integral to the Gospel stories of the Passion are their records of the Lord’s two trials: the “Jewish” trial before the Sanhedrin and the “Roman” trial before Pontius Pilate. Jesus’ appearance before Pilate was ultimately included in the creedal narrative of the Church, including the Nicene Creed. This development apparently began early. If we bear in mind that a primitive word used for the baptismal creed was homologia (cf. 2 Cor. 9:13; Heb. 3:1; 4:14; 10:23), we perhaps detect in 1 Timothy 6:12–13 a first step toward the insertion of Jesus’ trial before Pilate into the Church’s confessional recitation:

Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life, to which you were also called and have confessed [ homologesas] the good confession [ homologian] in the presence of many witnesses [ martyron]. I urge you in the sight of God who gives life to all things, and before Christ Jesus who witnessed [ martyresantos] the good confession [ homologian] before Pontius Pilate. . . .

Although each of the four Gospels includes both of Jesus’ trials, the accounts differ quite a bit in the details. Sometimes these variations indicate source material peculiar to an individual Evangelist. For instance, it seems likely that Luke’s story of Jesus’ appearance before Herod (Luke 23:6–12) comes from his personal familiarity with Joanna, the wife of Chuza, who served in Herod’s court (8:3). In addition, only Luke includes the detail of the Lord’s turning to look at Peter after the third denial (22:61).

Likewise, only John tells of an interrogation of Jesus before Annas (18:12–13, 24), and only he seems familiar with the details of a conversation between Jesus and Pilate (John 18:34–37; 19:8–11). Again, Matthew alone appears to know that Pilate’s wife became interested in Jesus’ trial (27:19).

Sometimes, however, the differences between the four accounts of Jesus’ trials are better explained as particular features of the individual narrative preferences of the four authors. For instance, John provides not a single detail of Jesus’ interrogation by Caiaphas but says that Jesus was taken directly to Pontius Pilate in the morning (19:28). Thus, John records two distinct interrogations of Jesus by the Jewish leaders, the second ending in the morning.

Luke simplifies the narrative by saying the arrested Jesus was taken directly to the high priest’s presence (22:54). Although he tells us nothing about an interrogation until the morning (22:66), the details of that inquiry (22:67–71) closely resemble the interrogation before the Sanhedrin that Mark and Matthew portray as taking place during the night.

Another instance of a particular narrative preference is John’s arrangement of Peter’s three denials of Jesus. Each of these denials appears in all four Gospels, but only John separates them within the full narrative (John 18:15–27).

Mark is alone among the Evangelists in adding the detail that the rooster crowed twice (14:30,68,72). In fact, the first and second cockcrows refer to two different times during the night, the latter one coming at the break of dawn. Mark thus indicates the fairly lengthy time over which Peter’s three denials took place, the last one happening toward the morning. This prolonged lapse of time heightens our sense of Peter’s treachery.

In short, the differences between the four accounts of the trials of Jesus should be attributed to one or both of two causes: different sources available to the four Evangelists, and the narrative preference of each of them.

The Two Trials in Matthew

The present reflections are a study of the trial narratives in Matthew, with a view to elucidating certain theological and moral concerns I believe to be particular to this author. Matthew is the only Evangelist to insert, within both the trials, a story relative to one of the original Twelve—a story about Simon Peter in the trial before the Sanhedrin, and an account of Judas Iscariot in the trial before Pilate. Thus, Matthew’s structure of the two trials may be outlined in this way:

A. The trial by the Sanhedrin

1. Jesus’ appearance before the Sanhedrin (26:57–68)
2. The story of Peter (26:69–75)
3. The Sanhedrin’s plot to kill Jesus (27:1)

B. The trial by Pilate

1. Jesus appears before Pilate (27:2)
2. The story of Judas (27:3–10)
3. Pilate’s decision to kill Jesus (27:11–26)

Matthew’s double construction accomplishes two things: First, it varies the narrative by alternating stages: the story begins with Jesus, goes to Peter, comes back to Jesus, goes to Judas, and finally returns to Jesus once again.

This disposition to move quickly from scene to scene is very characteristic of Matthew’s style, as though to indicate that various activities are happening at once or nearly so. Thus, Matthew shifts from Jesus’ final prophecy of the Passion (26:1–2) to the Sanhedrin’s plot against his life (26:3–5), and then to the home of Simon in Bethany (26:6–13). From there, he follows Judas to the Sanhedrin again (26:14–16), and then returns to Jesus in Bethany (26:17). All these things take place on the same day (Spy Wednesday).

On the next day (Maundy Thursday), Matthew follows the two disciples to Jerusalem, where they make arrangements for the Seder (26:19); Jesus arrives in the next verse. Once in Jerusalem, Jesus moves from the room of the Seder to the Mount of Olives (26:30) and Gethsemane (26:36). After Jesus is arrested and taken to the house of Caiaphas (26:57), Matthew moves us to the courtyard of that residence to get Peter situated (26:58). He then goes back inside for Jesus’ trial (26:59). When this is over, he leaves Jesus inside and goes to talk about Peter’s denials in the courtyard (26:69). He returns briefly to the house of Caiaphas to gather all the characters of the drama and move them to the judgment seat of Pilate (27:1–2).

Once Matthew gets this scene established, he breaks off in order to tell of the final hours of the life of Judas (27:3–10). He then comes back to record the trial of Jesus before Pilate, but there is yet another interruption in order to introduce Pilate’s wife (27:19). Only then does he return to Jesus’ trial.

Consequently, Matthew’s Passion narrative is a weave of various scenes and several activities, involving various people, all of which happen at different places. Of the four New Testament stories of the Passion, Matthew’s is the most complicated.

Second, in joining a specific disciple to each of Jesus’ interrogations—before the Sanhedrin and before Pilate—Matthew demonstrates a concern about discipleship within the Passion narrative. For this Evangelist, the drama of the Cross is not isolated from the trial and trauma of the soul. That is to say, what transpires in the salvation wrought by God in his Son finds a resonating correspondence in the human struggle of failure and repentance—treachery and despair—in the souls of Peter and Judas. The ironic tragedy of the Cross resounds in the inner battle of the heart.

Thus, Matthew’s narrative construction encourages the reader to contrast Peter and Judas as two types of response to sin and redemption. In fact, Christians over the centuries have followed Matthew’s encouragement in this respect, as hundreds of extant sermons demonstrate.

The Jewish Trial: Peter

In his account of Jesus’ trial before the Sanhedrin, Matthew follows rather closely the Markan sequence by inserting Peter’s denials between the nocturnal interrogation of Jesus and the Sanhedrin’s determination, on the following morning, to seek his death. By this juxtaposition, in which both Jesus and Peter are subjected to questioning, the author invites us to compare the two cases: Jesus and Peter are both on trial, as it were, and we cannot help but contrast them.

One observes, for instance, that in both cases there are testimonies given under oath: “I put you under oath [ exsorkizo] by the living God: Tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God!” (26:63). And, “Then he began to curse and swear [omnuein] , “I do not know the Man!” (26:74). In each of these “trials,” moreover, perjured testimony is given, first by suborned witnesses and then by Peter (26:59–60, 70, 72, 74).

Peter, sitting in the courtyard outside the high priest’s residence, is approached by a servant maid, who believes she recognizes him as a companion of Jesus (26:69). He stands accused of only one thing—being “with” ( meta) Jesus, a charge that Matthew is at pains to sustain by his constant references to Peter’s being with Jesus all through this chapter (26:20,29,36,40,51). Apparently surrounded by a crowd, Peter denies the allegation in a voice loud enough to be heard by everybody (26:70). Matthew adds this detail to Mark’s version of the story (14:68), thus heightening the sense of Peter’s perfidy and fear.

Peter moves to the gateway (Matt. 26:71), perhaps to escape from the light of the fire that John mentions. This time, another of the high priest’s maidservants announces to everyone—and not just to Peter—that he was “with” ( meta) Jesus. Whereas in the first case the maid spoke of “Jesus of Galilee,” in the present she speaks of “Jesus of Nazareth.” The point of these references will become clear in the third denial, prompted by the remark about Peter’s Galilean accent (26:73). The more Peter protests his unfamiliarity with Jesus, the more occasions he provides for the bystanders to detect the regional inflections in his speech.

Thus, Peter is driven to greater desperation and begins completely to lose control. The evidence of this breakdown is found in his recourse to an oath in the second denial (26:72) and to cursing and swearing in the third (26:74). The reader recalls Matthew’s earlier inclusion of a dominical injunction against swearing (5:33–37; cf. 23:16–22).

After the third denial, Peter goes “outside” (26:72). One gains the impression that Peter is moving away, endeavoring to escape a growing crisis and the total unraveling of his moral character.

Immediately ( evthys—26:74) after the third denial, the rooster crows, prompting Peter to remember what Jesus predicted (26:75). He remembers, leaves the place, and breaks into tears, now aware that he has added his own failure to the tragedy of the night. What Peter had boldly considered unthinkable (26:35) has now become a reality: He has publicly repudiated Jesus. The crowing of the rooster occasions the final test of Peter’s character, and his tears represent the very dissolution of his soul. Peter’s heart lies broken and crushed beneath the weight of his guilt. The man he thought he was is now proven to be nothing more than a phantom.

Matthew, however, like each of the other Evangelists, describes Peter’s repentance as immediate. No more than a few seconds separate his downfall from his rising up, and this prompt conversion is likewise incorporated into the narrative of the Passion. Just as failure is possible to any Christian, so the door to repentance is closed to no one. Peter’s tear-filled repentance is integral to the story of Jesus’ suffering and death. It is as though his repentance is the first fruit to grow on the tree of the Cross.

The Roman Trial: Judas

One is struck—perhaps even surprised—by Matthew’s insertion of the suicide of Judas within his account of Jesus’ trial before Pilate. As soon as the author puts Jesus in Pilate’s presence (27:2), he leaves the scene in order to describe what Judas did.

There is ample reason to believe that Matthew is not guided here by a strict chronological sequence. We observe, for instance, that Matthew pictures the chief priests as talking with Judas in the temple at the very time they are talking with Pilate at the pretorium (27:2–3). We also recall that Luke does not narrate the death of Judas until somewhat later (Acts 1:18–20).

It is rather easy to demonstrate, in fact, that both writers tell the story of Judas’s death at a place appropriate to the theological points they want to make. Here, we consider only the case of Matthew, where the suicide of Judas fits into his larger account of Jesus’ trials.

A first concern of Matthew is to contrast the death of the innocent Jesus with that of the guilty Judas.

Second, this arrangement also permits Matthew to compare Judas and Pilate. Each man recognizes the innocence of Jesus (27:4,18,23–24), but both men refuse the path of responsibility and repentance (27:5,24). Each of them assumes an unwarranted authority over a human life, and in each the reader recognizes the profile of a coward.

Third, there is a contrast between Judas and Peter. Although Judas feels remorse at his treachery (metameletheis), Matthew avoids the vocabulary of repentance (metanoia, for instance) in his description of Judas. Indeed, this story, which follows almost immediately on the repentance of Peter (26:75), invites a contrast between these two disciples with respect to their sins: repentance in the one case, despair in the other.

“I have sinned,” says Judas— hemarton—but he quickly finds he cannot undo the sin. In fact, his efforts are mocked by men hardened in sin, who feel no remorse. The chief priests, playing Mephisto to Judas’s Faust, have purchased a soul at market price and are quite content with the deal.

A fourth concern of Matthew here is to compare Pilate with the officials of the Sanhedrin. Judas, in pronouncing Jesus “innocent” (athõos—27:4), prepares for the self-assessment of Pilate, who somehow recognizes that he, too, is on trial: “I am innocent athõos] of the blood of this person” (27:24). Likewise, when Pilate goes on to tell the Jews, “You see to it” (hymeis opsesthe), he simply pluralizes what the chief priests told Judas: “You see to it” (sy opsei).

Judas finds himself in the state described by St. Paul, who writes of the Law’s inability to justify the sinner. Judas has fallen under “the curse of the Law” (Gal. 3:13). Specifically, the conscience of Judas is faced with the divine judgment, “Cursed is he who takes a bribe to slay a soul of innocent blood” (my literal translation of the LXX of Deuteronomy 27:25). Deuteronomy’s expression, “soul of innocent blood”— pyschen haimatos athõou—is obviously the reference Matthew has in mind when Judas says he sinned in his betrayal of “innocent blood”— haima athõon (27:4). Judas, then is the man cursed by the Law, and whom the Law can in no wise justify (cf. 26:24).

The suicide of Judas finds its Old Testament prefiguration in that of Ahitophel (2 Sam. 17:23), and similar circumstances attend both cases. Judas betrays the true king; indeed, Jesus’ kingship is the burden of Pilate’s question that immediately follows the death of Judas (Matt. 27:11). With respect to Ahitophel, we recall that he, too, betrayed the true king, David, in order to side with Absalom, the usurper. Both betrayers come to the identical fate of suicide by hanging.

The contrast between Peter and Judas is, finally, a matter of choice between repentance and despair. Even within the limits of his many manifest faults—recorded in all four Gospels (as well as the Letter to the Galatians)—we recognize in Peter a fundamentally repentant heart. When he does succumb to temptation, his repentance is immediate. Judas, in contrast, when he realizes the great gravity of his offense, immediately strives in vain to make things right by his own efforts. Failing this, he falls into despair. In Matthew’s view, the mercy of God and the powerlessness of man in his sins is the difference between Peter and Judas.

Patrick Henry Reardon is pastor of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of Christ in the Psalms, Christ in His Saints, and The Trial of Job (all from Conciliar Press). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.

Creating Equal

By Louis Markos
Touchstone Magazine

On the Inegalitarian Leadership of Jesus.

We hold these truths to be self-evident,” the United States’ Declaration of Independence boldly asserts, “that all men are created equal.” This noble sentiment declares unapologetically that all human beings—no matter their age or sex, culture or religion, race or ethnicity, social class or educational achievement—possess intrinsic dignity and worth. Unfortunately, over the last century, America—and even more Western Europe—has increasingly shifted its focus from political liberty to social engineering, from equal protection before the law to sameness mandated by law, from equality to egalitarianism. The focus today is not on equal creation but on creating equality.

This almost obsessive urge to create equality has spread even to the Church herself. The last several decades in America have witnessed many Christians’ slow surrender to egalitarian values and the projection of those values back onto Jesus, the Bible, and church doctrine and discipline.

To be sure, certain facets of the church have at times adopted a partly egalitarian vision. The early Church described in Acts 2:42–47 engaged in a voluntary sharing of goods and properties. Catholic monastic orders, past and present, have lived communally, their members taking vows of poverty. In the centuries since the Reformation, Protestant sects from the Anabaptists to the Amish have, in keeping with the priesthood of all believers (see 1 Pet. 2:4–5), broken down much of the hierarchical structure between clergy and laity.

Still, even the most radical of Protestant sects or the most severe of monastic orders retain high respect for the authority of the Bible and for the moral wisdom of spiritual leaders (abbot, elder, pastor). In the egalitarianism of today, however, the Bible is treated as a malleable text and church doctrines and disciplines subject to constant revision.

Thus, if the phrasing of the Bible stands in the way of an egalitarian view of the sexes, you simply change the phrasing of the Bible—along with hymns, creeds, and prayer books—to fit your gender-neutral vision of church, marriage, and society. Likewise, if you decide that original sin or substitutionary atonement or eternal damnation might “damage” the self-esteem of the more sensitive in the congregation, you simply find new ways to “understand” these cornerstones of biblical doctrine. Or, to come to the defining egalitarian issue of our day: If you think no distinctions should be made between heterosexual and homosexual “lifestyles,” then you simply jettison the Church’s (and humanity’s!) age-old understanding of marriage and human sexuality so as to embrace same-sex “marriage.”

The Heresy of Inclusivism

Note that Christians who insist on the sanction and blessing of same-sex “marriage” are not saying: “Well, society’s changing, and if the Church doesn’t keep up with the change, she will be looked upon as old-fashioned and irrelevant to the concerns of today.” No, they are saying something far more radical and troubling: “ Because we are Christians, we should be in the forefront of those who are currently fighting for gay ‘marriage.’”

How could those who call themselves Christians take such a position? The answer is that many have accepted what I must call, without apology, the heresy of inclusivism. Though rarely stated so baldly, this heresy posits that at the core of Jesus’ life and teachings is a simple, non-negotiable message of absolute love, tolerance, and inclusivism that should determine every aspect of the faith. Any belief or practice that jeopardizes this message is to be rejected, even if it is stated clearly in the Bible, accepted by the historic Church, and believed by nearly all Christians since the founding of the faith. Any statements or doctrines that portray Jesus as exclusivist or intolerant, even if spoken by Jesus himself, must either be rejected or reinterpreted to fit in with his “true” message of inclusivism and tolerance.

Love is to be “expanded”—that is, reduced—to a nonjudgmental attitude that desires only that people find and experience happiness in their own way. But what of that bold, Christ-like love that will do what it must to rescue a friend from a self-destructive lifestyle, that would rather see a family member suffer pain than live in bondage to sin? Well, if by self-destructive lifestyle and sin you mean that he does not recycle his garbage or support affirmative action or that he votes Republican, I guess it would be okay to set him straight in a loving way. But if you mean that a Christian might be impelled by love to disagree with the lifestyle “preferences” of a brother in Christ and help guide him back to the road of biblical morality, then you simply don’t understand Jesus’ message.

Egalitarian or Not?

Well, then, let us boldly ask the question: Was Jesus an egalitarian or not? To the Christian advocate of same-sex “marriage,” the answer is as obvious as the incident that proves it. Didn’t Jesus, just before celebrating the Last Supper, wash his disciples’ feet? And wasn’t foot-washing a task performed by household slaves? Surely in humbling himself like this, Jesus was clearly demonstrating to posterity that the distinctions between teacher and student, master and servant, leader and follower were no longer valid. Surely this was his way of leveling the old hierarchies and ushering in the egalitarian Age of Aquarius.

It was not.

Right before giving the account of the foot-washing, John says the following: “Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God; so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist” (John 13:3–4). Notice that Jesus performs the humble act of washing his disciples’ feet from a position of strength and authority. He does not do it because he suddenly realizes that he is the same as everyone else and has no right to claim special authority, but because he knows fully and uniquely who he is.

But the real key to the meaning of the passage comes afterward, when Jesus returns to his seat and explains carefully to his disciples the meaning of the action he has just performed:

“Do you understand what I have done for you?” he asked them. “You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’ and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you. I tell you the truth, no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them.” (vv. 12–17)

Had Jesus wanted to announce the tearing down of all distinctions and ranks, this would have been the ideal time to do it. Instead, he pointedly reiterates that servants are not greater than their masters and messengers are not greater than those who sent them. Indeed, he informs the disciples in no uncertain terms that they are absolutely correct to refer to him as Teacher and Lord. He even, two chapters later, exhorts his disciples to remember that “no servant is greater than his master” (15:20).

Jesus’ deliberate retention of social relationships that embody an inequality of power and status is not confined to John’s Gospel; it is also given voice in the synoptic Gospels: “A student is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master” (Matt. 10:24); “A student is not above his teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like his teacher” (Luke 6:40).

A New Type of Leadership

What is Jesus “doing” if he is not abolishing all hierarchy and ushering in a new egalitarian order? He is instituting a new type of leadership, one that loves and serves those over whom it has power and authority. Luke records a saying of Jesus that, like the foot-washing episode in John, balances an endorsement of distinctions with a call to servant leadership:

Jesus said to [his disciples], “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors. But you are not to be like that. Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves. For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one who is at the table? But I am among you as one who serves.” (Luke 22:25–27)

Again, the servant is not greater than his master, yet the true Christian master will manifest his authority through service. Once we accept this, we can see how Jesus’ “intolerant” condemnation of sin and his “tolerant” love for the sinner go hand-in-hand. Throughout the Gospels, we see Jesus forgive sins; we never see him condone or endorse the sinful choices and lifestyle that placed the sinner in need of forgiveness. His word to the sinful woman caught in adultery is not “Continue as you are,” but “Go now and leave your life of sin” (John 8:11). The very fact that he forgives her sin is a clear indication that he considers her actions to be sinful.

Christ offers salvation freely to all who repent and follow him, yet he does not cease condemning the Pharisees for their hypocrisy and hardness of heart (Matt. 23). When asked if only a few people are going to be saved, he answers: “Make every effort to enter through the narrow door, because many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able to” (Luke 13:24).

The Divine Perspective

No figure in the Bible speaks more about hell and punishment than the meek and loving Jesus; his very presence in a town tends to polarize people. Images of sifting, judging, and separating abound in his parables; indeed, though we are taught in Sunday school that he spoke in parables so that everyone could understand him, Jesus himself says that he spoke in parables so that “those on the outside” would not understand (Mark 4:10–12). “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth,” he proclaims. “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matt. 10:34).

All this is not to say that Jesus is “unfair” or that he is a harsh taskmaster who is unaware that we all struggle under different weights and have different gifts and resources. In the parable of the talents (Matt. 25:14–30), he tells of three servants who are entrusted with five talents, two talents, and one talent respectively. The third, lazy servant buries his talent in the ground and receives both “exclusivist” scorn and “intolerant” condemnation from his master.

But what of the first two? According to the parable, the first makes five more talents, while the second makes only two. We might therefore expect the first servant to be praised more highly than the second. But this, unexpectedly, does not occur. Instead, the master bestows upon both servants the exact same blessing: “Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness.”

God is just and merciful. He judges us not by what we begin with, but by what we do with what we have been given. He pays us the compliment of treating us as unique individuals, and does not seek to press us all into the same mold.

In a magisterial passage from Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville describes the divine perspective of God:

The deity does not regard the human race collectively. He surveys at one glance and severally all the beings of whom mankind is composed; and He discerns in each man the resemblances that assimilate him to all his fellows, and the differences that distinguish him from them.

God is not like those modern humanitarians who love humanity but care little for human beings. To God, each of us has not only a “corporate” value as a member of the human race but also an individual value that distinguishes us from every other human being who has ever lived or will live on this earth. Neither on earth nor in heaven does God desire to collapse that distinctiveness.

For he who created us knows that we are not all equal!

Louis Markos (www.Loumarkos.com) is Professor of English at Houston Baptist University; he is the author, most recently, of From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics (IVP) and Pressing Forward: Alfred, Lord Tennyson and the Victorian Age (Sapientia). He lives with his wife and two children in Houston, where they attend a Southern Baptist Church.

Wasted by Watching

By J. Daryl Charles
Touchstone Magazine

Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

It is twenty-four years ago that the late Neil Postman published what was arguably his most significant piece of cultural criticism. Therein Postman argued that television is our culture’s principal mode of knowing about itself. Thus, how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that entertainment on the television screen has becomes the metaphor of all discourse; it is that, off the screen, the same metaphor prevails. Americans no longer talk to each other; they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas; rather, they exchange images.

Amusing Ourselves to Death was intended simultaneously to be “an inquiry into the most significant American cultural fact of the second half of the twentieth century”—the decline of “the age of exposition” and the ascendancy of the age of television—and a lamentation. The changeover lamented by Postman has “dramatically and irreversibly shifted the content and meaning of public discourse.” As a result, the substance of American cultural life—from politics to education to business to religion—“must be changed and re-cast in terms that are most suitable to television.”

A Discerning Social Critic

Despite knee-jerk reactions from Hollywood and New York City at the time, Postman cannot be thought (then or now) a mere cultural handwringer by any stretch of the imagination. This becomes clear to anyone who has read his other works—particularly The Disappearance of Childhood, The End of Education, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Conscientious Objections and Technopology. Rather, Postman’s work has shown him to be a social critic of the first order and a supremely discerning observer of cultural trends.

Indeed, Postman’s cultural analysis, even when more than two decades removed, finds confirmation and parallels in more recent social critiques that deserve to be taken seriously. One thinks, for example, of Francis Fukuyama’s The Great Disruption, James Davison Hunter’s The Death of Character, and Morris Berman’s The Twilight of American Culture.

Berman, a cultural historian, offers a secularized—though far more readable—version of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. Both writers are united in the conviction that ours is a society of moral cave dwellers. By both accounts, we have undergone a catastrophic shift in understanding that has warped our ability to do moral reasoning at all, plunging us into a new “dark age” of sorts. Berman’s call for a “new monastic option” to preserve what is enduring in the midst of this period of cultural decline is primarily literary in character. In this way he stands in broad agreement with Postman: A major factor in this cultural collapse is the replacement of reading and communication with entertainment.

Prophetic Sources

In his opening chapter, titled “The Medium as the Metaphor,” Postman acknowledges his debt to two principal sources. Marshall McLuhan was an unknown English teacher when Postman met him in the 1950s. “I believed then, as I believe now,” Postman writes, “that he spoke in the tradition of Orwell and Huxley—that is, as a prophesier, and I have remained steadfast to his teaching that the clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools of communication.”

Postman’s “media as epistemology” argument is owing to yet another source of inspiration—a source that in standard reviews of his work receives short shrift or goes entirely unnoticed.

[M]y interest in this point of view was first stirred by a prophet far more formidable than McLuhan, more ancient than Plato. In studying the Bible as a young man, I found intimations of the idea that forms of media favor particular kinds of content and therefore are capable of taking command of culture. I refer specifically to the Decalogue, the Second Commandment of which prohibits the Israelites from making concrete images of anything. . . . I wondered then, as so many others have, as to why the God of these people would have included instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize, their experience. It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture. . . . The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture. People like ourselves who are in the process of converting their culture from word-centered to image-centered might profit by reflecting on this Mosaic injunction. (emphasis added)

TV as Anti-Communication

While part of Postman’s book chronicles a rather condensed yet fascinating and informed history of public discourse, Postman focuses with laser-like precision, abetted by an acerbic wit, on the implications of the shift from exposition to entertainment in American culture. The reader comes away, twenty-some years later, stunned by the author’s prescient insight. These are not the rantings of a cultural Luddite who is hell-bent on decrying the broadcast media or preventing progress. Given the explosion of the Internet, the information glut of the last two decades, and the trivialization by the electronic media of murder, mayhem, and geopolitics in general, Postman appears more prophetic today than when he wrote the book.

By way of example, consider for a moment the “Now this . . .” approach to news broadcasting. Postman believed that as unnerving as the words “Uh oh” are—whether uttered by an airplane pilot, a surgeon, or a security guard—the two words “Now this” are even more ominous. Why? Because, as Postman reminds us, they are not spoken with a measure of puzzlement or regret, but rather almost with a kind of idiot’s delight. But they are scary as well because of what they signify. To wit: there is no murder so brutal, no natural disaster so devastating,

no political blunder so costly that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster in the interest of a commercial.

Should this approach to what is newsworthy not disturb us? Viewers are permitted neither the luxury nor the necessity of entering into any thoughtful reflection on what might possibly be significant to their lives—and the lives of others. And while television technically did not initiate the shift from word to image (as telegraphy and photography are thought by Postman to have done), television has nurtured it to a place of perverse maturity. Because the medium of television subsists in images and not words, news is not merely fragmented; it is without context, without consequence, and therefore, without value.

Television as epistemology, moreover, becomes in Postman’s view “anti-communication,” since as a form of discourse it both abandons and militates against logic, reason, reflection, and sequential thinking. The philosophical term for this is nihilism, while in psychiatric terms we call this schizophrenia. Even the relatively esteemed Robert MacNeil, of The MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour, has stated the crass reality of television discourse—off camera, of course: Television news aims

not to strain the attention of anyone but instead to provide constant stimulation through variety, novelty, action and movement. You are required . . . to pay attention to no concept, no character, and no problem for more than a few seconds at a time . . . [C]omplexity must be avoided . . . nuances are dispensable . . . [and] qualifications impede the simple message . . . [whereby] visual stimulation is a substitute for thought. . . .

Remember: this is Robert MacNeil talking, not Jerry Springer.

More Huxley than Orwell

Amusing Ourselves to Death begins and ends with a Huxleyian warning, which forms a rhetorically effective inclusio in the book. Twenty-four years ago, Postman was writing in the aftermath of the year for which George Orwell’s dystopia was named. Postman was part of a chorus of literary enthusiasts who were critiquing Orwell’s cautionary tale. The year arrived but the dire prophecy did not. Postman’s critique, however, was different from most. He believed that not Orwell but Aldous Huxley had it right:

Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

Indeed Postman seems to have a point. For, as Postman interprets the two dystopians, Orwell feared “those who would ban books,” while Huxley feared that eventually “there would be no reason to ban a book, since "there would be no one who wanted to read one." Orwell feared “those who would deprive us of information”; Huxley, by contrast, feared that truth would be “drowned in a sea of irrelevance,” a consequence of our own “passivity and egoism.”

In the end, as seen through Postman, Orwell feared that we would become a “captive” culture, whereas Huxley feared that we would become a “trivial” culture, failing to take seriously “man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” Accordingly, Orwell’s concern ultimately was that what we hate [italicize "hate"] will ruin; Huxley, by contrast, believed that what we love [italicize "love"] will ruin us.

Fulfilled Prophecy

It is uncontroversial today to assert that television truly has become the medium and the metaphor of American culture. Our society’s adjustment and acquiescence to television as epistemology is now virtually complete, so that Survivor, Fear Factor, and American Idol—and the endless facsimiles of the sub-genre they have spawned—constitute reality for many of us.

Only heaven—and Hollywood—knows what the next step is in the social construction of reality for most Americans. Reality and show business, alas, are by all accounts indistinguishable. Huxley’s prophecy, and that of Postman, have come to pass.

Nowhere Man

By Anthony Esolen
Touchstone Magazine

Without Remembrance There Is No Eternal Life

Behold,” says the Psalmist, “I searched for the place of the wicked man, and it was no more.”

The ancient Hebrews, it is commonly said, believed that the dead would go down to a shadowy place called Sheol, a realm of next-to-nothingness. “Can dust praise you?” cries David, pleading that God should vindicate him before he dies, as it would be to no avail afterwards. Even so, death was not the most dreadful fate they could conceive.

“Man dies, and his place knows him no more.” It is the second clause that expresses the greater dread, of a death beyond death. It is the terrible prospect of a total and unalterable severance—expressed as a loss of place. How should it be, if one were wiped clean from the memory of earth and heaven and all that dwell therein? How should it be, not to cease to live, but to have one’s few days of life delivered over—in their essence—to nothingness?

Alien to All

That is a foreshadowing of the doctrine of hell. It is also, I think, what modern man has accepted, somewhat uncomfortably, as his lot in life. He fears death, true enough, and seems ready to squeeze out a few final years by cannibalizing his offspring, farming human beings for spare parts to gerry-rig the rickety machine he has resigned himself to being. Yet he cannot understand, or will not confront, the Psalmist’s dread. That is because he already has no place: His u-topia, his no-place, is the price of his autonomy. He has made it the cornerstone of his ways and days. Search for modern man, and you may find him, for a while—anywhere, nowhere in particular.

I don’t simply mean that modern man moves about a lot. He does that; he conveys his body from place to place, or from subdivision to subdivision, whose streets are like little commercials, naming no revered man or celebrated victory, but “Julie” and “Dana,” or the trees that had to be cut down to build the thing. Such no-places resist roots, and that suits him fine. He draws enjoyment from his travels, as he’s a butterfly of a tourist, but he would scoff at the suggestion that he should belong to and love a certain place in return for the nourishment it has provided him. What nourishment? From earliest youth his strongest place-memories are of styrofoam: nowadays the garish colors of the daycare, the speckled tiles of a drop ceiling, the smell of cleaning fluid on linoleum, the ketchup oozing through the pores of one more hamburger bun among billions and billions.

He “chooses” here or there according to his autonomous taste, and that reduces his place already to insignificance. The philosopher Philippe Beneton puts it well: We are all different, says modern man, and the differences make no difference. I may choose to live in the Loire valley, because my caprice inclines me to rolling countryside and quaint little empty churches. Tomorrow I may choose the Arizona desert. It makes no difference. Any land is mine, because I am equally alien to all. I am the inverse of the old French peasant, whose boots might never have pressed the soil twenty miles beyond his farm and village, but who knew his home, as his home knew him.

Knowing One’s Time & Place

And who is the braver traveler? As a man’s commitment to love this woman, to cleave unto her alone until death shall part them, is not the end of love’s journey but its most adventurous onset, so it may be that a man’s commitment to one place—and by “place” I mean more than locale, as I will explain—fits him best to embark upon the pilgrimage. Even when he travels abroad, modern man is a commuter. The termini of his life are not birth and death, but this anywhere and that anywhere.

Compare him with the peasant who did not go abroad because he could not go abroad. When that farmer heard his church toll the noonday prayer, it might once in a while recall to his mind the hora mortis that awaits everyone. It might remind him that he really is going somewhere. If he is a good Christian man, he prepares his rucksack and chooses his walking stick well. Even when he sits still, perhaps especially when he sits still, eating his bulky fare at table with his wife and children, such a man is a viator. He knows his place, and is on his way.

He knows his time, too. The merciful exigencies of his life make it hard for him to forget it. When he turns his mattock in the loam, he may consider that his father and grandfather turned it there before him, as his son and his grandson would in the years to come. His life grips its roots down into the soil of time. Perhaps he might die of an early heart attack, or of a blister on his foot that does not heal. He sees fewer years and more hardship; still, his time stretches long before and long after his allotted days of sunlight. He almost cannot choose but dwell, living and working under the canopy of his fathers. Possibly they are in his sight each day, buried on the high hill overlooking the spire. He expects to lie there too, gathered to his fathers, exactly as if he were no ordinary farmer but a king of Judah.

I am not arguing for agrarianism; I might have used for an example a plumber in Paris instead. The point is that “place,” in the Psalmist’s sense, embraced time also, and a way of life, the treasured memory of one’s forebears, and the hopes for one’s children. It is incomprehensible without culture: the loving cultivation of one’s heritage, springing from a people’s deepest beliefs about what this place is, why we are here, and where we are going: “I will go in unto the altar of God, to God, who gives joy to my youth.”

For the Christian, the earthly place derives its authority and meaning from the place to which he is traveling, a city that will make Paris look like a bundle of sticks in the wind. But modern man has no heritage. He has forgotten his fathers, and expects to be forgotten in turn. He is like the rich man of the psalms, who amasses wealth as a stay against the hour and the destination that come to all, but “he shall carry none of it away.” Modern man must lengthen out his days, because they are all he has.

Memorial Day

Am I too hard upon my man of nowhere? I don’t think so; I’ve seen the change occur within my own lifetime.

When I was a boy, we celebrated a feast called Memorial Day. It’s hard to describe, because the holy-day was, on paper, a secular feast, but it was our shared sense of the sacred that made the public celebration conceivable to begin with.

Just after dawn the men of the American Legion, followed by a brass band from the local high school, marched through our neighborhood. My cousins and I, having waited for this morning all week, praying that it wouldn’t rain, would bolt down a breakfast and run after them, climbing up to the Protestant cemetery. From that height, you could see half of the valley into which my town was tucked, with mountains of coal residue, heaped up from a hundred years of mining, towering over the river.

A well-done headstone has something disconcertingly eloquent about it. So it was in that cemetery. Some leaned at rakish angles, riding the natural buckling of the land. A stolid obelisk of the Propst family looked with satisfaction upon lesser men beneath. Some of the oldest white slabs were porous at the skin, covered with splotches of golden lichen. You could hardly make out a date, just a few curled numerals near “geboren” and “gestorben,” words that neither I nor my cousins understood, but that we guessed were full of meaning.

We knew we weren’t supposed to walk over the graves, but it was hard not to, so we did it, gingerly. Whole families lay beneath the mounding grass, under hemlock and pine. History lay there, too. Here was a Mrs. Yuengst who had four children, one of whom died when he was a baby. Here was a star that read “Grand Army of the Republic.” Next to that star, another grave and a small American flag, in honor of a youth who died in 1917, twenty years before his father.

The men commemorating the dead on that morning understood what they were about. The band would be still; a few drum rolls, then silence. Finally one man stepped forth, big chest, big belly. A barked command, the clock-clock of rifles loading. Aim, fire. Clock-clock, fire. Clock-clock, fire. Then a lone bugle playing Taps, that solemn call to rest.

I hardly knew what I was looking at, but my cousins and I stood transfixed, every year. We said nothing. I can recall it still: the light wind, the warble of robins, the gunsmoke drifting away, the booming persistent in the ear, and the men turning about in formation, in honor of sons who served their nation and died, who served us long before we were conceived. To stand and watch and hear was not simply to remember the dead, but to acknowledge their claims upon us, to carry them with us. It was to dwell in that place and time, fostered by the eternal.

The day didn’t end there. We hopped the fire trucks. We joined up with entourages of old ladies and boy scouts and gray-haired men in uniform and cheerleaders. We heard Mass at the Catholic cemetery on the opposing mountain. We converged upon the American Legion for doughnuts and orange juice.

It’s gone. My town has had no such parade in at least twenty years. Being a semi-modern man myself, I’ve moved far away. Where I live now, there’s a paltry something-or-other that blocks up Main Street on the long weekend that has usurped the holiday’s name. It doesn’t visit the cemeteries; it just peters out after a few blocks. No Taps, no service. The rags of an old form, without the substance; no felt reality of death and eternity, and therefore nothing vital. It is our Oblivion Day parade, no commemoration of the dead, but a specter of the living.

Machines of Oblivion

“Where are the snows of yesteryear?” asks the troubadour Villon, who loved this passing world all the more for his knowing that it was passing to somewhere. As for us, we no longer care about the snows of yesteryear. A snowflake falls upon a blade of grass, then vanishes in the sun, and who remembers? So has our own past evaporated, and we have fanned a breeze to speed the process.

In America, history is taught as if it were but a sorry tale of wickedness and bumbling. Children were once brought up on the heroic stories of John Paul Jones and Commodore Perry. In the Carolinas they knew the Swamp Fox; in Pennsylvania they knew Mad Anthony Wayne. Towns and counties were named after them. Not one student in twenty would now recognize those names. “Depart from me,” says the ungrateful nation. “I never knew you.”

We have cut ourselves off from the past, in large part to free ourselves of the deep bonds between secular life and faith. All we have done is to free ourselves of meaning, putting our hearts to slow death before we die. We remember maybe a verse of one or two national hymns. Historic sites are for tourists; Emerson writes in Old English; “Puritan” is a byword for “bigot.”

School, once devoted to the hallowing of hard-won learning and past accomplishments, is now an efficient machine of oblivion. Its wheels wear away every groove of memory still surviving—of coherent family life, of games passed down from child to child for centuries, without the deadening organization of adults, of summers free, of life apart from grades and scholarships and degrees and careers and diapered retirement and the unremembered grave. Universal schooling is our universal solvent.

The new freedom from the past, a freedom that makes us small, imprisoning us in ourselves and our fads, can be seen even in cemeteries. “All floral displays must be removable,” the signs read, because if you plant something that lives, it is presumed that you will not tend it. Then the caretakers, or rather the men hired by the landscaping outfit, will take too long trimming around it, and that would cost money. In the really New and Improved grounds for putting away, the landscaper mows over the memorials with his riding machine, and not gingerly either. For the sake of that machine, nothing but flat stones are allowed. Other New and Improved grounds allow the loved ones to choose pink hearts for headstones, engraved golf clubs, motorcars, whatever. Everyone is different, and the differences make no difference. Long or short menu, it is all the same at McGraveyard.

No wonder many people reject even the pretense of memory. They order their ashes to be whisked out of the community entirely, strewn over the vast nowhere of a hillside, or the sea, or stashed on someone’s mantelpiece, awaiting final and inglorious disposal. They are emptied, but not like Christ. And their place knows them no more.

Keeping Our Lamps Trimmed

Let the Christian resist. Let him honor the dead, and find wellsprings of life in that honor. Let him be a pilgrim, and know the virtue of stability. Let him not run from distraction to distraction, in a deadening attempt to forget death. Let him know his place, and in knowing it, go forth, even unto the last communion rail he will approach on earth, the moment of his death.

In the days of Bishop Ambrose, only the Christians could ensure that the poor were fed and that Roman justice was served, once the pagans had lost heart and had shrugged away what it meant to be Roman. Long after the paterfamilias had ceased to play a part in the civic life of the empire, the Christian remembered—and the abbots, fathers who followed the rule of Benedict, would lead their small platoons of monks to preserve for a better age not only the Christian Scriptures and their commentaries but even what was noblest in the pagan learning and customs.

Is our challenge any the less? For man’s temporal and eternal good, we must keep alive the very idea of a culture—to remember what it means to remember. Jesus himself lights the way, breaking bread at the Last Supper and commanding us to do the same, in remembrance of him. Whatever our doctrines about the Eucharist, we Christians must all break that immemorial bread and see in it the bread of life. Our treasuring of the Lord’s words and deeds, his miracles, his commandments, his consolations, his passion and death on the Cross, his glorious resurrection, his ascension into heaven, and his promise to return as our judge, does not bury us in a dead past but plants us in the truth that brings life to all time, past and present and to come.

Think of those holy women who went to Jesus’ tomb with great earthenware vessels of aloes that stooped their shoulders. Why did they go? They didn’t yet understand what Jesus meant when he said he would rise again. But he could not be, for them, simply a body, a broken vessel. They kept their lamps trimmed, and on that Easter morning they learned that the burial shroud had become a wedding garment. Had they not remembered the dead, they would not have been the first to testify to the living.

Did the women recall then a final plea for memory, on Calvary? The Jewish leaders, cutting their cloth to fit the Roman wear, still remembered that their fathers threw Jeremiah down a cistern and murdered Zechariah in the Temple. They remembered that David had been a mere lad, Moses a stutterer, Abraham childless and old. But they forgot what these things meant. They forgot the suffering servant, the stone which the builders rejected.

Remembering & Providence

To give them their due, they at least intended to honor their dead, and in this they were superior to us. But they, like us, were men of the passing day. They bought and sold, married and gave in marriage, while the clouds of doom were gathering. So they stood there in their ignorance, mocking.

Suddenly, one of the thieves crucified at Jesus’ side—called Dismas by tradition, though his true name is written in the Book of Life—was pierced with remorse. Mindful of his sinful life, this errant man, now at last fixed in one small spot of earth, turned to Jesus, saying, “Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

Good words for the Christian to ponder at the hour of his dying, which is also this hour, here, as we sojourn to eternity. Then the Lord of time, whose remembering and providence and act are one, will surely reply, “This day you shall be with me in Paradise.”

He goes before us, to prepare a place.

Anthony Esolen is Professor of English at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island, and the author of The Ironies of Faith (ISI Books), The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Regnery), and Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child (ISI Books). He has also translated Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata (Johns Hopkins Press) and Dante's The Divine Comedy (Random House). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.

Divine Legalities

By Michael P. Orsi
Touchstone Magazine

The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea
by Rémi Brague
University of Chicago Press, 2007
(269 pages, $28.00, paperback)

Rémi Brague is a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne and the University of Munich. In this book, he examines the 3,000-year history of law as an expression of the divine will. Because religion has reemerged as a powerful political force, both nationally and internationally, Brague’s analysis of the notion of the divine law is an invaluable resource for understanding the underlying dynamic that motivates human beings. Brague especially focuses on law as it pertains to the “People of the Book” (Jews, Christians, and Muslims).

Sources of Law

Brague’s basic insight is that law is an expression of how a society exercises power over itself. There are, he says, two fundamentally different sources, the natural law of Greek philosophy and the revealed law of Israel given by Yahweh. Brague sees Christianity and Islam as two offshoots of the Athens-Jerusalem axis. Nevertheless, he says, they understand the source of law and its application in radically different ways.

Brague says that “Greek law is divine because it expresses the profound structures of a permanent natural order; Jewish law is divine because it emanates from a god who is master of history. In both cases, it is external to the human and transcends the quotidian [that which is characteristic of ordinary life].” Brague traces the development of these philosophical concepts in the writings of the major commentators of each school of thought.

For the Greeks, although the laws were not of heavenly origin, they were seen as emanating from what is inherent in reality, and so had to be cognizant of (and commensurate with) the divinely ordained natural order. For Jews and Muslims, divine law had explicit and exclusivist political and historical dimensions.

Jewish understanding of law was limited, as something set down for the children of Israel alone. It embraced a messianic hope, not an earthly kingdom. On the other hand, Islam envisioned a transnational earthly community where law demanded submission to Allah based on divine command. The implication of both these models is more than obvious in the contemporary geopolitics of the Middle East, particularly in light of fundamentalist Islam’s effort to bring the world’s peoples to submission via the aegis of a worldwide theocratic state.

The understanding of law in Christian tradition points in a third direction, one that shows particular contrast with Islam. For Christians, law is not something “other.” Instead, it is God’s light within the heart of the believer. Muslims understand law as the will of Allah revealed directly to Mohammad in the Koran, essentially a force imposed from the outside.

Practical Implications

Brague emphasizes the different practical effects on society of these two approaches. “Christianity conquered the state through civil society,” he writes, “Islam to the contrary conquered civil society through the state.” This bespeaks a fundamentally different anthropology, touching on personal human conduct, political structures, and attitudes toward human rights. For example, concepts such as religious freedom, equality of the sexes, and the inherent dignity of the human person have little standing in

Islamic society.

Brague offers a fascinating overview of how each scriptural source—the Torah, the New Testament, and the Koran—interprets divine law. Also valuable is his survey of the work of scholars who have tried to discern the practical implications of each faith’s understanding of where and how law originates.

A key insight is the importance of Greek philosophical thought—especially that of Plato and Aristotle—which Brague sees as having provided a cross-pollination of ideas between scholars in the three major religions who imagined this world vis-à-vis their sacred texts. For example, the Muslims preferred Plato, and saw Mohammed as the philosopher king in the ideal city. On the other hand, religious thinkers in the Christian West preferred Aristotle, who saw human reason as the intermediary between God and man. They understood “nature” as indicative of the divine order, believing that human reason is capable of discerning the fundamental principles for human living.

(This “natural law” understanding is the hoped-for common ground that Pope Benedict XVI sees as the basis for a peaceful co-existence between Islam and the West. Unfortunately, Brague’s analysis doesn’t offer much optimism for the fulfillment of the Holy Father’s vision, since the Koran offers a profoundly different understanding of God and how human morality is ascertained.)

Brague provides an invaluable discussion of the religious law systems of the three faiths, making an important distinction between the Talmud and Sharia, on the one hand, and Catholic Canon Law, on the other. He notes that while the Talmud and Sharia provide exegesis of their respective (Jewish and Muslim) sacred texts, Canon Law is an autonomous discipline, standing apart from the Bible, though indirectly informed by it.

Indeed, Canon Law is procedural. Its primary emphasis is on providing individual believers (and the Church herself) with principles for addressing moral questions and making moral decisions—with comparatively little stipulated about religious requirements that must be fulfilled. Canon Law, Brague says “does not claim to embrace all of human behavior; it leaves aside the entire domain of morality,” which in the end, is the province of the properly formed conscience.

De-Naturalized Law

Brague is excellent in discussing the destruction of the idea of divine law in the modern world. He traces the development of philosophical relativism (which has led to legal positivism, the idea that law should reflect current social conditions, rather than any timeless, transcending principles) from its roots in the Enlightenment, to its pervasive application throughout post-modern Western society. He observes that “the birth of wholly human law was at first a consequence of the modification of the notion of the law of nature” (as if the law of nature were only a metaphor designed to help human beings achieve whatever transitory goals they might be pursuing at the moment). “As the law is not presently seen as natural,” he writes, “even the human comes to be conceived as not natural.”

He asserts that this de-naturalization of law lends itself to the contemporary ideology of the “rights of man,” noting wisely that this “avoids evoking to what source ‘man’ owes the humanity that renders him capable of having rights.” Law thus becomes not an expression of divine truth, but simply a balancing of pragmatic interests.

Brague lays this development largely at the feet of Protestantism. For the Jews, he writes, “law could only be deployed in the private domain . . . its political dimension is reserved for the time of the Messiah.” Islam, on the other hand, “insists on the impossibility of separating the political and the religious.” But Protestant Christianity’s “separating the entire genus of the practical from the divine made it possible for three species of that genus—the ethical, the economic and the political—to declare their independence.”

The book concludes with Brague’s positive appreciation of the basic Catholic principles of law expressed in the works of the late Pope John Paul II. He approves the pope’s insight that if law is to be humane, it must be rooted in a “transcendent source of meaning,” which united to human reason, can provide a moral culture.

Clearly, Brague’s observations will not convince relativists, legal positivists, or, for that matter, radical Islamists. They do, however, provide at least an understanding of (to use the modern colloquialism) “where people are coming from.” And that may, perhaps, act as a foundation for dialogue.

Michael P. Orsi is a Catholic priest and a Research Fellow in Law and Religion at Ave Maria School of Law.