“Each Age Has Its Own Characteristic Depravity”

“Each age has its own characteristic depravity. Ours is perhaps not pleasure or indulgence or sensuality, but rather a dissolute pantheistic contempt for the individual man. In the midst of all our exultation over the achievements of the age and the nineteenth century, there sounds a note of poorly conceived contempt for the individual man; in the midst of the self-importance of the contemporary generation there is revealed a sense of despair over being human. Everything must attach itself so as to be a part of some movement; men are determined to lose themselves in the totality of things in world history, fascinated and deceived by a magic witchery; no one wants to be an individual human being. Hence perhaps the many attempts to continue clinging to Hegel, even by men who have reached an insight into the questionable character of his philosophy. It is a fear that if they were to become particular existing human beings, they would vanish tracelessly, so that not even the daily press would be able to discover them, still less the critical journals, to say nothing at all of speculative philosophers immersed in world-history. As particular human beings they fear that they will be doomed to a more isolated and forgotten existence than that of a man in the country; for if a man lets go of Hegel he will not even be in a position to have a letter addressed to him.”

Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941), 317-8; quoted in Kierkegaard, Works of Love, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 358-9.

“And now, what of Christianity! Christianity teaches that this individual human being—and thus every single individual human being, no matter whether man, woman, servant girl, cabinet minister, merchant, barber, student, or whatever—this individual human being exists before God, this individual human being who perhaps would be proud of having spoken with the king once in his life, this human being who does not have the slightest illusion of being on intimate terms with this one or that one, this human being exists before God, may speak with God any time he wants to, assured of being heard by him—in short, this person is invited to live on the most intimate terms with God! Furthermore, for this person’s sake, also for this very person’s sake, God comes to the world, allows himself to be born, to suffer, to die, and this suffering God—he almost implores and beseeches this person to accept the help that is offered to him! Truly, if there is anything to lose one’s mind over, this is it! Everyone lacking the humble courage to dare to believe this is offended. But why is he offended? Because it is too high for him, because his mind cannot grasp it, because he cannot attain bold confidence in the face of it and therefore must get rid of it, pass it off as a bagatelle, nonsense, and folly, for it seems as if it would choke him.”

Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, vol. XIX, Kierkegaard’s Writings (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 85.

“[T]he first thing to keep in mind is that every human being is an individual human being and is to become conscious of being an individual human being. If men are first permitted to run together in what Aristotle calls the animal category—the crowd—then this abstraction, instead of being less than nothing, even less than the most insignificant individual human being, comes to be regarded as something—then it does not take long before this abstraction becomes God.”

Ibid., 117-8.

“Each age has its own characteristic depravity,” says Kierkegaard, the ironist, who was necessarily in conflict with whatever was the depravity of his age. In his age, he battled a general “contempt for the individual.” Is “contempt for the individual” the depravity of our own age?

It’s hard to say, since perhaps we cannot talk about our fragmented and pluralistic times as having any singular, unifying “depravity” at all. For sure, I think we can say that we’ve patched up some of the flaws of the Enlightenment. We don’t worship reason. If we are collectivists, we are at least no longer celebrating some Hegelian picture of world-history. We are moderns; Kierkegaard is our father; Hegel is a backwards child of the Enlightenment whom we have left behind us. We pride ourselves on our recognition of and respect for “the individual.” But we’ve missed the point, because we try to talk about the individual in ways that are not self-referential, that are more than ironic. I don’t think we understand “the individual” as anything other than one more abstraction, and I don’t think Kierkegaard would approve.

We might do better to discuss the “depravity” of particular aspects of contemporary life, not of the whole. Take contemporary evangelicalism, for instance: its roots, nominally, are in the Protestant challenge that faith need not be mediated by a priest. Thus neither metaphysics nor ethics is either received or defined in the context of the Church. This is a good challenge, from Kierkegaard’s point of view. If I allow a community to determine my standards of behavior, I’m prevented from living “on the most intimate terms with God”—just as surely as Abraham would have failed the test of faith if he had considered all the reasons against killing his son. The only command that matters for Abraham is God’s command to Abraham. Abraham cannot speak about his obedience, and Abraham cannot give reasons for his obedience, precisely because he is not operating according to any system of earthly, societal norms when he sacrifices Isaac. The established church of his day, notes Kierkegaard, similarly has nothing to say about Abraham.

In practice—and, for Reformed covenant theology and the like, also in theory—Protestantism doesn’t necessarily give the individual his full ethical independence. Instead, it burdens or walls up the individual’s relationship with God. But evangelicalism today looks to be moving away from received ethical norms; witness the current hand-wringing about things like obscene language or premarital sex, which just might be okay for Christians after all. Amid contemporary criticisms of evangelical ethical practice, I think we tend to miss the fact that it is generally evangelicals who are asking the questions and trying to live authentically in response to those questions. So I’m optimistic in that respect.

Elsewhere, Kierkegaard has argued against metaphysical certainty—arguing for faith and, perhaps, against reason. Socrates with his ignorance stood “on guard duty as a judge on the frontier between God and man.” Sickness Unto Death, 99. A rationalistic approach to metaphysics destroys the believer’s faith and his life with God, but Christianity, which “teaches that everything essentially Christian depends solely upon faith,” needs “precisely a Socratic, God-fearing ignorance, which by means of ignorance guards faith against speculation.” Ibid. This speculation is not individual but communal. Loosely following Aristotle: we cannot reason without speech, we cannot have speech without community; and this is why Abraham’s silence is so significant in Fear and Trembling. Abraham is truly a man without a city—desiring “a better, that is, a heavenly country” (Hebrews 11:16). But nobody wants to be left out of the communal speculation or the collective hunt for certainty, even if inclusion requires submitting to the rationalist nonsense of a philosopher like Hegel; even if it means dismissing a true relationship with God as “a bagatelle, nonsense, and folly.”

Admittedly, most of evangelicalism is not much better than Thomism in this respect. As the church militantly reacts to an ever more hostile world, the temptation grows stronger to conscript reason in defense of faith. Kierkegaard will have no truck with such apologetics, calling the first person to defend Christianity “de facto a Judas No. 2” who “makes Christianity out to be some poor, miserable thing that in the end has to be rescued by a champion.” Sickness Unto Death, 87. This seems inherent in at least the nominal nature of evangelicalism as “evangelical.”

Are there, then, any alternatives to evangelicalism which avoid this traitorous apologetic? For myself, I don’t think either Catholicism or Anglicanism has anything better to offer. True, each holds the sort of mystery and paradox—in spite of scholasticism and orthodoxy—which for Kierkegaard might protect faith from “speculative philosophy.” But the collectivism of a sacramental faith hampers my existing as an individual. The mysteries of the Catholic faith I find attractive or useful only if they protect the mysteries of individual faith. But Catholicism has nothing to protect.

So the search for my own community of faith continues. But I wonder: why do we use the phrase “community of faith?” Can faith even happen in community? Kierkegaard doesn’t seem to think so; at least, we can’t talk about faith. Abraham has nothing to say to his fellow men.

Why does “church” matter at all, then? Perhaps the reason a local congregation of believers can be both good and necessary is: I cannot give up the temporal to live in the eternal like the “knight of infinite resignation;” I need to place myself in this temporal life “on the strength of the absurd.” Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. by Alistair Hannay (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 78. As Kierkegaard writes, perhaps autobiographically, “I am able by my own strength to renounce everything, and then find peace and repose in the pain.… But by my own strength I cannot get the least little thing of what belongs to finitude; for I am continually using my energy to renounce everything.” Ibid. The pauper can give up the princess in his own strength; Abraham can give up Isaac in his own strength. But more has been promised: we are meant for more than resignation in the arms of the eternal. To receive it requires my reliance on a greater strength.

Similarly, in my own strength I can accept the speechless isolation of my existence as an individual. But such resignation will prevent me from connecting in temporal finitude with my fellow believers. If I go beyond resignation, if against all reason I refuse to give up, I can indeed make this connection—not through the ethical speech which is impossible; not by speaking, but by loving. “Consequently,” our author exhorts, “whatever your fate in erotic love and friendship, whatever your privation, whatever your loss, whatever the desolation of your life which you confide to the poet, the highest still stands: love your neighbor!” Works of Love, 76. And my very inability to obey this command to love my neighbor is precisely the reason why I must obey the command; despite its absurdity, I must love in God’s strength.

This is why I need a community, and this is why I need a church: I need a place where I can love. And the lack of such a place, I submit, is the depravity of my age, and perhaps of yours.

For All Mankind

“In a way, the situation was like that in Europe before 1492. People might well have argued that it was a waste of money to send Christopher Columbus on a wild goose chase. Yet, the discovery of the New World made a profound difference to the old. Sending humans to the moon may yet prove to have had an even greater effect. It changed the future of the human race in ways that we don’t yet understand and may have determined whether we have any future at all.”—Stephen Hawking

I

They landed four days later. One of them stayed up in orbit while the others descended to the surface. Maybe he was really the hero: the one who kept a light burning for the others, who welcomed them and piloted them home. He was not the one who was going to be famous, though; not the one whose words would be remembered. Not the one who would leave his footprints eternal in the dust. In the flesh he could not walk with whatever nightmares stalked the surface of this severe and elegant globe.

Instead he waited and he watched. He was a lighthouse in the midst of the stars, swinging his beam around and around, sweeping out the area of his orbit. He was the invisible tether which bound his companions to a hope which vicariously flowed through him. He shone with none but twice-reflected light. He was a Moon to the Moon itself. He was so far from his home.

He had dreamed, before departure, that he would be scrubbed from the mission and replaced by a machine. It was the logic that frightened him: a robot might make errors, but no worse than any human errors. A robot would not sleep; but here was there any need to sleep? A robot would do nothing but sail from home to Moon to home to Moon to home . . .

A more desperate man might attempt to complete this long journey with a crash-landing, in spite of knowing that the survival of the crash would be a temporary reprieve and itself a sentence of more painful and protracted death. He had no such desire; whatever the view from this rock, it could not compare with the over-view of the rock which was his alone. Beneath him where those companions held the far end of his tether empty seas filled the place of rivers and cities as landmarks. From here the purity of the landscape was unmistakable; but who was to say that it was not like any other place, this rock which bore the scars of its playful dance with the other rocks of the Solar system. And this dusty battered piece of rock orbited a larger blue rock, from here appearing as the swirling and marbled maelstrom of chaos, from which perhaps one day it came and to which it might one day return, the sky falling in one last consuming catastrophe, a holocaust, the consummation of a war which began when life first looked up at the skies and dragged itself out of the swamp. Until then he was content to watch opposite the pupil-less blue iris of a blind blue cataract world.

II

They are descending to the surface of the Moon. The one who is going to be famous is supervising the descent. He has taken partial control of the landing craft. His actions are almost automatic. He is not sure why it is called the Moon and not by some name of its own. Every other place has the name of an ancient god: Jupiter, Neptune, even Saturn itself. They have not come here on behalf of those gods. They have come here for themselves.

He is going to be famous, his name will be in lights, his face will be in the papers. His safe return will proclaim festivals in the streets of the greatest cities. They will all hear his words. This is a story that belongs to him. He will write it but he will not use words.

They were briefed on the possibility of alien contact. However foolish the possibility, only a fool would not prepare for it, choosing instead to ignore this moment. But they have brought no weapons; although they are men of war they come in peace. They rode in a tiny ship mounted on a bomb that could destroy the world.

He has fought for his country, though; he was no coward. He can understand authority: there are men over him and men under him. But here, little commanding and less fighting. Here you can’t even breathe. In fact the ground beneath him already looks like a battlefield.

Is he here only to fulfill a commanded journey? Is he here because he is healthy and strong? Because it had to be done? They cannot sit at home forever. They must grow and build because growing and building are required for survival. The native heat of their cooling globe will not last forever. Already they can see around them the signs of decay, on other planets. They did not choose to visit those planets. Why were they visiting the Moon? It was, in their sky, closer to the Sun and would be a later casualty to the advancing darkness.

Already he can see around him the end of the wilderness. He can see the future colonists of this Moon. But he is the first. All others wait for him to act; soon they will watch him set his feet upon the rocks of the Moon and upon its high places. His companions will not have this privilege of greatness. It is his by birth, by right, and by choice, and he would fight them for it. Had they sent a robot it would be the same, except no robot would fight its own kind. And now a satisfying jolt and the words of the computer tell him that his ship has touched the ground.

III

The real exploration began later that day. They had overshot their intended landing site, and their destination lay four miles back. The third member of the party, the scientist or the technician, drove the lightweight car which had been provided against such an error. He drove carefully yet in casual style, as if a sudden shock might send the whole vehicle bounding into the sky. The frozen basalt of the mare on the right hand and the left hand; motionless shadow, inorganic dust were the materials of this alternate planet, an occult underbelly, a mirror of their own world. He could invoke in comparison a day on some Titanic beach, but a beach cleft from its vitalizing sea was a deathly shore indeed. His own body was wrapped circumspectly in what amounted to a larger, synthetic body endowed, if not with life, at least with the ability to carry out the functions of eating and breathing and so on.

It was not the hostile atmosphere from which this cell protected him as much as from the fear of a mutual plague unleashed by this meeting. This must be understood: that Apollo could initiate such destruction as easily as he could cure it. On the other hand, it would be no simple matter for the god to protect, to stand as advocate for the peace of partial justice between mankind and the worse part of an infinite blind revenge. Safety was not guaranteed, but this careful knowledge they sought as the only way.

As if their thoughts were parallel yet infinitely intersecting the mission commander asked why this Moon did not have a name, as did the Moons of their own planet. His voice condensed and clipped and carried a distance of a foot or two by the radio before it reached his companion in reply: “Maybe we have come to a place that is not a place. It is after all a place between worlds.” No winds swept the unchiseled rocks of the nameless plain save that latent history which they and their counterparts carried with them.

No necromancy could call forth from the dead satellite life. But he was glad that to his two companions, without a doubt, he would seem oracular: largely as a manifest of the dark mythology held in common with the alien intelligence. His profession was no mean scientistic twisting of nature but the orchestrating of paeans as the mouthpiece of a long unheralded god.

IV

This was how the men of Saturn met the men of Earth, on the Moon of that warm wet blue planet. At the appointed time, at the appointed place.

They exchanged gifts but not words. Communicating in pantomime, they would leave the nicer points of language to the professionals on Earth and Titan, those who had first made contact, by chance, sitting now beside their radio telescopes which were the instruments of this newly divined project.

If they were children of the Sun then the men of Earth had the disadvantage of the eldest child. Earth was no secondary satellite, and her people had once believed themselves seated at the center of all existence. But Titan needed no Copernicus to correct its rustic astronomy, for its own sky was filled with the eternal ringing evidence of a spacious framing of the universe. Its natural place had been set in its early days.

The scientist watched his reflections in this uncanny valley and asked: When had they last walked together? When they were one in the person of a forgotten ancestor? The movements of the Earthmen admitted no unhappy ignorance of their birth, their gestures and motions suggested to him a self-importance not pompous nor tiresome but itself life-giving. But here he stood, awkwardly, speechless, before the incomprehensible sight of men at play. These men of Earth had outpaced their enemies for the privilege of bounding, leaping, and cavorting in a lunar sea; but those of Saturn navigated the paths of an empty cosmos.

V

The two men of Saturn remained behind when the two men of Earth ascended again to orbit. As tiny satellites above them their respective orbiting companions mused in their perpetual wakeful dreams. Gifts or charges to unknown successors were left behind by the men of Earth: an olive branch, a tablet, a wafer of interplanetary communion. “We came in peace,” it said, though the writing was foreign to them; “we came in peace—”

“The Deadly Light”

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu,” in Tales of H. P. Lovecraft, ed. by Joyce Carol Oates (New York: The Ecco Press, 2000), 52.

One of the great pathologies of mankind, according to the stories and novellas of H. P. Lovecraft, is a destructive lust to uncover that which ought to remain hidden. I don’t often make a fuss about what sort of literature is appropriate or inappropriate for Christians to read, but the nightmarish darkness and horribly consistent atheism of Lovecraft impels me to raise that question here. In so doing I feel somewhat justified by Lovecraft’s own motif of forbidden knowledge; should that prohibition be applied, by and for the Christian, to Lovecraft’s own work? At minimum, I think it would be wrong for me to read Lovecraft only for my own morbid fascination. Consequently, I ask: what are the redeeming qualities of Lovecraft’s work? What truths does it communicate about the universe?

First, as has already been implied, there is a dark and destructive side to even the best and noblest qualities of the human race. Our drive to explore unknown places and uncover unknown things seems to be a divine gift: “the honour of kings is to search out a matter” (Proverbs 25:2). But like so many divine gifts, it can be turned to evil. I’m no enemy of progress on a proper scale, but I agree with Lovecraft’s suggestion that there are things which it is not proper for humans to know. In fact, one of the most terrifying Lovecraftian moments occurs in his story “The Shadow Out of Time” when the hero realizes that he has somehow obtained knowledge of things which he should not know, which he would have no way of knowing unless through astral possession by incomprehensible beings from other times and places and planes of existence. I recognize that to force this moment into a lesson on any kind of human nature would be to turn Lovecraft on his head, but one lesson is clear: humankind prides itself on its power derived from knowledge, but that knowledge can hurl us down to insanity as easily as it can elevate us to enlightenment.

Lovecraft has discovered something more generally true about the universe: it is larger than us. This discovery is illustrated by the organization of his anti-cosmology, which is populated by a hierarchy of more and more terrible beings, more and more removed from our dimensions, more and more indifferent to the existence of human life. Through the anti-Copernican impulse, the Church tried to keep man—and thereby God—at the center of the universe; but I wonder how much encouragement any of us needs to egocentrism. I appreciate more and more the individual emphasis of Protestantism—an emphasis, however, which can be impoverished when not accompanied by some understanding of the terrifying and awful nature of God. If the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, that wisdom is ever more difficult to attain in an age which produces men largely at peace with their surroundings. Lovecraft’s portrayal of nature as hostile and terrifyingly indifferent, I think, can be a useful corrective for a Christianity which has become complacent and unable to experience fear.

“You Will Never Know”

“I watched the trees gradually recede, waving their despairing arms, seeming to say to me: ‘What you fail to learn from us today, you will never know. If you allow us to drop back into the hollow of this road from which we sought to raise ourselves up to you, a whole part of yourself which we were bringing to you will vanish for ever into thin air.’ And indeed if, in the course of time, I did discover the kind of pleasure and disquiet which I had just felt once again, and if one evening—too late, but then for all time—I fastened myself to it, of those trees themselves I was never to know what they had been trying to give me nor where else I had seen them. And when, the road having forked and the carriage with it, I turned my back on them and ceased to see them, while Mme de Villeparisis asked me what I was dreaming about, I was as wretched as if I had just lost a friend, had died myself, had broken faith with the dead or repudiated a god.”

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2: Within a Budding Grove, trans. by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. by D. J. Enright (New York: The Modern Library, 2003), 407-8.

Sometimes I feel a compulsion which has its source in a recurring thought: like Proust, if I don’t uncover some particular piece of information now, I will never know. This is usually as trivial as the name of an actress on television or the final word of an obscured newspaper headline. I think that’s the same kind of subjective loss which Proust describes here. I’ve learned to counter that recurring thought by remembering that no information is lost forever, thanks to the Internet; but we slander what the young narrator could learn from the trees if we call it “information.”

And the greatest sadness I’ve ever felt is when this irreversible emptiness discovers as its object a fellow human being. By analogy, Proust hints at the great loss that occurs when a person leaves our life, even if they entered only for an instant:  if the trees, impersonal though transcendent, can be the occasion of such regret, how much more, then, can another soul which is the personal unity of temporal and eternal, immanent and transcendent. If we part company, it may be with good reason; but it will never be with gladness that I lose touch with a friend.

“What You Don’t See”

“He turns the corner into Paddington Street and stoops in front of the open-air display of fish on a steeply raked slab of white marble. He sees at a glance that everything he needs is here. Such abundance from the opening seas. On the tiled floor by the open doorway, piled in two wooden crates like rusting industrial rejects, are the crabs and lobsters, and in the tangle of warlike body parts there is discernible movement. It’s fortunate for the fishmonger and his customers that sea creatures are not adapted to make use of sound waves and have no voice. Otherwise there’d be howling from those crates. Even the silence among the softly stirring crowd is troubling. He turns his gaze away, towards the bloodless white flesh, and eviscerated silver forms with their unaccusing stare, and the deep-sea fish arranged in handy overlapping steaks of innocent pink, like cardboard pages of a baby’s first book. Naturally, Perowne the fly-fisherman has seen the recent literature: scores of polymodal nociceptor sites just like ours in the head and neck of rainbow trout. It was once convenient to think biblically, to believe we’re surrounded for our benefit by edible automata on land and sea. Now it turns out that even fish feel pain. This is the growing complication of the modern condition, the expanding circle of moral sympathy. Not only distant peoples are our brothers and sisters, but foxes too, and laboratory mice, and now the fish. Perowne goes on catching and eating them, and though he’d never drop a live lobster into boiling water, he’s prepared to order one in a restaurant. The trick, as always, the key to human success and domination, is to be selective in your mercies.  For all the discerning talk, it’s the close at hand, the visible that exerts the overpowering force. And what you don’t see… That’s why in gentle Marlylebone the world seems so entirely at peace.”

Ian McEwan, Saturday (New York: Anchor Books, 2006), 127-8.

Saturday is the most ambiguous day of the week, following the work week but preceding the day of rest. It is a day typically set aside for the activities of the private life. For successful London neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, this means a friendly game of squash, a trip to the fish market, a visit to his mother, and a family dinner celebrating his daughter’s return from France. McEwan’s prose is nothing spectacular; it is the structure of the book and the details of its plot that have been magnificently constructed around a deceptively unassuming story.

The publishers of the book didn’t summarize the premise of the book as usual on its back cover, showing admirable and, in this case, necessary restraint. I don’t mean to imply that the novel relies on some kind of twist ending; instead, McEwan writes with jarring transitions which made me hate him almost as much as Perowne must hate those who disrupt his life of peace and contentment and middle age. The author enchanted me with his descriptions of Perowne’s insignificant domestic affairs, drawing my attention away from the main storyline, which shocked and gripped me when it resurfaced again and again. And that seems to be the point: this Saturday occurs in February 2002 as Britain and America prepare for the invasion of Iraq, yet Perowne’s attention is drawn away from that momentous event by his own more immediate joys and concerns. Despite his sensitivity, he is able to ignore the suffering of sea creatures because, “it’s the close at hand, the visible that exerts the overpowering force.”  I’m left wondering what I might be ignoring in my life because it is not close at hand, because it is invisible.

“Thinking About Limits”

“The ‘utopias’ of the twentieth century rested on the myth of self-creation, self-foundation, and on the self-sufficiency of mankind, conceived to be capable of rebuilding any lost heritage. They claimed that one could say nothing about mankind, per se. The reexamination of totalitarianism therefore calls for thinking about limits, which are statements about mankind. Limits bestow a name and an identity upon man, since the human being takes his name and identity from what distinguishes and therefore limits him. The lesson of the twentieth century is the following: we have limits that we do not choose, and which it would be in our interest to accept rather than suppress, given the damage attempts at suppression have caused.”

Chantal Delsol, The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century: An Essay on Late Modernity, trans. by Robin Dick (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), 30-1.

Typically I would consider “limits” as referring primarily to man’s epistemological limits: the limits of our knowing, which therefore limit our action. Here Delsol implies the reverse; her “limits” are the limits of our acting, which therefore limit our knowledge. In the same chapter as the above paragraph, she appropriates Marcel Gauchet’s phrase “the contrary evidence inflicted by reality on belief” (28) to describe the situation of communism today, its ideals discredited by history and its tenets proven false by experience. The twentieth century’s tragedies have resulted in a kind of tentative “experiential knowledge about man” (30)—a knowledge, says Delsol, which can be debated but which cannot be rejected wholesale.

Such debate is the source of a safeguard against the misuse even of such experiential knowledge. Delsol argues that the late modern stands between the Scylla of fanaticism and the Charybdis of relativism. Even when rejecting ideological and grasping experiential truth, “he sooner or later risks becoming its unconditional accomplice or henchman.” (98) Instead of drawing absolute and essentially abstract conclusions from experience, this knowledge must avoid both fanaticism and relativism by avoiding “depersonalization, the deepest source of the ills that might befall us.” And to avoid such depersonalization we must assume a certain view of truth and adopt a certain approach in dealing with it: “For the truth is not meant to be hammered into others or to be suppressed: it is to be pursued.”

The pursuit of the truth is tied to the person, which Delsol refers to as the “modern subject,” (85) in at least three ways. First, it cannot be “hammered into others;” it must be pursued willingly by each person out of his individual motivation. Second, it must involve the individual mind in debate and questioning. Third, it finds its source in experience as acted and observed by individuals. Yet this individualistic aspect is not merely subjective, for three parallel reasons: experience takes place in a world peopled by other subjects; the act of debate and dialogue is necessarily communal; and one’s conclusions about ethical truth, though they cannot be “hammered,” may be displayed in his actions by the subject as witness. “Morality is not a science or knowledge that can stand on thought alone,” writes Delsol, echoing Karl Jaspers; “morality is a practice.” (112)

I approve of this conclusion. But I think Delsol’s assertion that limits are “statements about mankind” is open to criticism or at least to further discussion. She says man “takes his name and identity” from limits, but Aristotle says that man takes his identity not from a limit but from ability: the capacity for speech and, more generally, the capacity for social life. Perhaps we could say that Aristotle saw the polis as arising in some sense from man’s limitations, from necessity—though he states this more positively in terms of self-sufficiency and higher good. Epistemologically, of course, Aristotle bases almost every one of his conclusions in an experientially grounded sort of thinking. Delsol’s idea of limits, then, might be no more than a restatement in modern terms of Aristotelian empiricism, relying on the individual subject to avoid the dangers of excessive certainty and excessive skepticism.

“A Vast Conspiracy To Make You Happy”

“Or perhaps you talk the kids into the Mexican restaurant, and as they sit in candlelight struggling with their tacos and enchiladas you sip your salt-rimmed Margarita and think, This is America, where we take everything in, tacos and chow mein and pizza and sauerkraut, because we are only what we eat, we are whatever we say we are. When a Japanese says ‘Japanese,’ he is trapped on a little definite racial fact, whereas when we say ‘American’ it is not a fact, it is an act, of faith, a matter of lines on a map and words on paper, an outline it will take generations and centuries more to fill in. And, yes, the waitress bringing the sherbet and the check appears to illustrate these meditations, for she is lovely and young and deracinated, one of the breeds our coast-to-coast desert has engendered, her bones grown straight on bland food, her fertility encased in the chemical Saniwrap of the Pill, her accent pleasantly presupposing nothing, her skin tanned dark as an Indian’s but her eyes blue and her hair sun-blond and loose down her back in Eve’s timeless fall.”

John Updike, “How To Love America and Leave It at the Same Time,” in Problems and Other Stories (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1981), 57-8.

“Three themes pervade John Updike’s fiction,” The Economist observed upon his death early this year: “God, sex and America” (“John Updike: An American subversive,” The Economist, 29 January 2009). Thus it is unsurprising that in this collection nearly all of Updike’s characters have been failed or broken by broken or failed marriages, whether we observe them as they enter these discordant unions or as they leave. The lover arousing his mistress by quoting Augustine; the man obtaining the copy of his marriage license which is necessary to obtain his divorce; the archeologist unearthing his own past at a class reunion; the Christmas shopper who picks up a prostitute; the newly divorced father driving through Nevada; the bored couple on an Ethiopian excursion; the leper who is healed and thereby made discontent; the successful single clinging to independence; the chairman of a purposeless committee; Augustine’s spurned concubine; the refugees from Atlantis; Augustine himself; the insomniac—all these face the same universal problems, which Updike portrays with sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle, always desperate metaphor. Consisting of a series of story problems in the style of a math textbook, the title story encapsulates the mundane—and thereby the universal—quality of that desperation. Characters here are not even named except by abstract algebraic identifiers (A, B, C); solutions are not provided.

But there is some hope: if there are no solutions, there is at least a very precise diagnosis which shines beneath the surface of all Updike’s work. The Protestantism, the America, the sexual landscape of which he writes have this in common: they ought to be quintessentially individualistic. Such is their ideal character, for better or for worse. Updike chronicles how these institutions have lost their individualism but not their selfishness. He describes a generation caught between the discipline of a world war and the excesses of the 1960s, caught up in an abstracted selfishness that they do not even recognize themselves except as a nagging dissatisfaction that impels them to greater excess and a guilt they cannot quench. Even the most optimistic story of the collection—“How To Love America and Leave It at the Same Time,” quoted in part above—examines the same problems as its companions, composed in the imperative mood, addressing an abstracted second person. America has become blurred and lost its demarcations for the sake of commercialism, which is a poor attempt to satisfy that dissatisfaction and guilt: “America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy” (p. 56).

“A Choice of Lives”

PROTEUS [astonished]. A shining midget! This I’ve never seen.

THALES. He wants advice; he’s only been
Half born, it seems, in a most curious fashion.
To be born fully, that’s now his great passion.
His intellectual qualities are many,
But earthly solid life he has hardly any.
This glass retort’s still all that gives him weight;
His wish now’s to become incorporate.

PROTEUS. A case of true parthenogenesis!
Before he should be, he already is!

THALES [sotto voce]. And there’s another thing that’s critical:
He seems to me to be hermaphroditical.

PROTEUS. So much the better: he arrives
In this world with a choice of lives!
But here’s no need for much discourse:
In the wide sea you must begin your course!
At first one’s small, but with great pleasure
One swallows creatures of still tinier measure;
Gradually one will thus augment
And shape oneself for high accomplishment.

THE HOMUNCULUS. How soft and fresh the air! This smell
Of moist fertility contents me well.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. by David Luke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), act II, scene 10d, lines 8245-66, p. 116.

Part Two of Faust may be the strangest book I’ve ever read. In its five acts, Faust invents paper money, travels through time with a homunculus, fathers a child with Helen of Troy, creates a supernatural army for the Holy Roman Emperor, builds land out of the sea, and ultimately wins his wager on a technicality.

The homunculus reflects in miniature the major theme of the entire work: Faust’s continual striving to reach a higher plane of existence. When first alchemically created by Wagner, Faust’s onetime student from Part One, the homunculus is incorporeal and unable to survive outside of his glass jar. He travels to classical Greece and meets Thales, a pre-Socratic notable for his naturalistic cosmology: arguing that that the universe is comprised essentially of water. Unsurprisingly, then, Thales leads the homunculus to the aquatic deity Proteus, who prescribes for him an oceanic course of development. The feminine vitality of this elemental chaos contributes to the metaphor of the eternal feminine which is the means of the homunculus’s—and Faust’s—ascension. (The God of Part One is in fact notably absent from the conclusion of Part Two, having been replaced with the Virgin Mary.)

Similarly to the homunculus, Faust is in a sense only “half born” when first met by Mephistopheles in Part One; he therefore embarks on a journey that becomes increasingly bizarre in its quest for the ideal. At the end of his life, a blind and feeble Faust thinks he has found perfection, and therefore contentment, in the task of building dikes to reclaim land from the sea—literally creating life from chaos—but the sound he hears is not the building of dikes but the digging of his grave by demonic skeletons conjured up by Mephistopheles. The brokenness of the world has caused even the most noble and selfless creative project of Faust to fail; Heaven is the only place where his striving can be at last fulfilled.

“The Remembered Glimpse of an Empty Milk-Can”

“Others again, no less colossal, were disposed upon the steps of a monumental staircase for which their decorative presence and marmorean immobility might have earned, like the one in the Palace of the Doges, the name ‘Staircase of the Giants,’ and on which Swann now set foot, saddened by the thought that Odette had never climbed it. Ah, with what joy by contrast would he have raced up the dark, evil-smelling, breakneck flights to the little dressmaker’s, in whose attic he would so gladly have paid the price of a weekly stage-box at the Opera for the right to spend the evening there when Odette came, and other days too, for the privilege of talking about her, of living among people whom she was in the habit of seeing when he was not there, and who on that account seemed to be possessed of some part of his mistress’s life that was more real, more inaccessible and more mysterious than anything that he knew. Whereas upon that pestilential but longed-for staircase at the old dressmaker’s, since there was no other, no service stair in the building, one saw in the evening outside every door an empty, unwashed milk-can set out upon the door-mat in readiness for the morning round, on the splendid but despised staircase which Swann was now climbing, on either side of him, at different levels, before each anfractuosity made in its walls by the window of the porter’s lodge or the entrance to a set of rooms, representing the departments or indoor service which they controlled and doing homage for them to the guests, a concierge, a major-domo, a steward (worthy men who spent the rest of the week in semi-independence in their own domains, dined there by themselves like small shop-keepers, and might tomorrow lapse to the bourgeois service of some successful doctor or industrial magnate), scrupulous in observing to the letter all the instructions they had been given before being allowed to don the brilliant livery which they wore only at rare intervals and in which they did not feel altogether at their ease, stood each in the arcade of his doorway with a pompous splendour tempered by democratic good-fellowship, like saints in their niches, while a gigantic usher, dressed Swiss Guard fashion like a beadle in a church, struck the floor with his staff as each fresh arrival passed him. Coming to the top of the staircase, up which he had been followed by a servant with a pallid countenance and a small pigtail clubbed at the back of his head, like a Goya sacristan or a tabellion in an old play, Swann passed in front of a desk at which lackeys seated like notaries before their massive register rose solemnly to their feet and inscribed his name. He next crossed a little hall which—like certain rooms that are arranged by their owners to serve as the setting for a single work of art (from which they take their name), and, in their studied bareness, contain nothing else—displayed at its entrance, like some priceless effigy by Benvenuto Cellini of an armed watchman, a young footman, his body slightly bent forward, rearing above his crimson gorget an even more crimson face from which gushed torrents of fire, timidity and zeal, who, as he pierced with his impetuous, vigilant, desperate gaze the Aubusson tapestries screening the door of the room in which the music was being given, appeared, with a soldierly impassiveness or a supernatural faith—an allegory of alarums, incarnation of alertness, commemoration of the call to arms—to be watching, angel or sentinel, from the tower of a castle or cathedral, for the approach of the enemy or for the hour of Judgment. Swann had now only to enter the concert-room, the doors of which were thrown open to him by an usher loaded with chains, who bowed low before him as though tendering to him the keys of a conquered city. But he thought of the house in which at that very moment he might have been if Odette had only permitted it, and the remembered glimpse of an empty milk-can upon a door-mat wrung his heart.”

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1: Swann’s Way, trans. by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. by D. J. Enright (New York: The Modern Library, 2003), 461-3.

Reading Swann’s Way is an experience which has left me breathlessly amazed at Proust’s virtuosity and at the magnitude of his project. I’m particularly taken by his effective descriptions of people and places, of artwork and architecture and city and countryside, but even more by his psychological portraits. And what is perhaps unique about these portraits is the boldness and authority with which he paints them: rather than confining himself to indirect implications made through external plot development, Proust opens up to us the inner workings of the minds and souls of his subjects with a specificity of detail which one would at first expect to be tiresome. Yet somehow the author is able to develop a vocabulary for the life of the mind which immerses the reader in the urgency of a character’s interior drama. Dostoevsky is the closest I can think of; but not even Dostoevsky can compare with Proust’s deliberate descriptions of involuntary memory or of falling asleep and waking in a suddenly strange room.

Proust is at his best when his physical and psychological observations join together in a thematic unity which is always present but there most obvious. The selection I’ve copied out here, for instance, concludes a description of the servants at an upper-class Parisian party which spans several pages and serves as a backdrop and counterpoint to the inner drama of Swann’s love for Odette.

Through constant references to great works of art, Proust almost begs for comparison of his novel to those works. I myself don’t know much about art, but it seems to me that In Search of Lost Time is baroque in its attention to detail yet impressionist in the psychological artistry by which Proust evokes mental states and subconscious associations in the minds of his readers. Proust seems to describe so well so many of my own thoughts and feelings that at first I wondered whether such was a testament to the magnetism of his style or to the universality of his subject matter—before concluding that it must be both.

“The Fault of Our Science”

“You are clever man, friend John; you reason well and your wit is bold; but you are too prejudiced. You do not let your eyes see nor your ears hear, and that which is outside your daily life is not of account to you. Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be contemplate by men’s eyes, because they know—or think they know—some things which other men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says that there is nothing to explain. But yet we see around us every day the growth of new beliefs, which think themselves new; and which are yet but the old, which pretend to be young—like the fine ladies at the opera.”

Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. by Maud Ellmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 191.

As the summer began, Dracula headed the list of last semester’s uncompleted reading assignments which I hoped to put to rest as soon as possible. I now resurrect this work, not to brag that I have finally concluded an assignment which most of my classmates read weeks ago, but mostly to seize the opportunity to plug once again for my all-time favorite TV show, The X-Files.

Philosophically, The X-Files owes much to the sort of sentiments expressed in the above quotation from Van Helsing. By importing traditional science fiction elements such as little green men into a sustained mystical or paranormal context—such as that presented in Dracula and other early entries in the horror genre—The X-Files has created a form of science fiction which is predicated upon the inadequacies of science. The conflict between science and—for lack of a less religious term—faith is incarnate from the first episode in the forms of skeptical scientist Dana Scully and obsessive believer Fox Mulder, respectively. The paradox which is so beautifully captured throughout the series, however, is that Mulder’s is  a belief that doubts itself, while it is Scully’s almost smug self-confidence that prevents her from seeing “all the truth in the universe” (p. 193) and “says that there is nothing to explain.”

Mulder’s belief, though, is not entirely devoid of a religious element, for it includes some kind of existential willing: “I want to believe,” Mulder famously proclaims in an early episode while undergoing hypnotic regression therapy (“Conduit,” season 1, episode 4). “I want you to believe,” Van Helsing says a few pages later in his conversation with Dr. Seward (p. 193). Even more significantly, the father of a boy with an unclean spirit cried out to Jesus: “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24) Indeed, explicitly Christian elements were never completely absent from the stories and characters of The X-Files, with Scully’s Catholic faith providing a constant foil to her scientific doubt. Her internal conflict came to the forefront in the 2008 film The X-Files: I Want To Believe—a film which might be the most profound meditation on the problems of faith and reason that I’ve ever seen on the big screen.

And the worldview of Dracula and The X-Files overlaps with Christianity either explicitly or by analogy in a few particular ways. First, both worldviews posit the existence of an unseen world, or at least a part of the world which we are not always competent to see. This world might be the world of vampires, of extraterrestrials, or of heavenly things. Second, both argue that modernistic, Baconian science is an inadequate conceptual tool for dealing with this unseen world, whether a literal paranormal realm or a figurative moral realm. Third, these realms can only be understood through belief, not through scientific analysis.

Bram Stoker’s universe—and the Christian universe—may diverge from that of Mulder and Scully, however, in that it is not purely postmodern or existential; it is emphatically not subjective. To be sure, “some people see things that others cannot,” but Van Helsing’s point is that those things exist whether or not a particular observer is willing to see them or able to explain them. And because they exist independent of observation or verification, another tool in addition to faith is available to those who wish to understand them: the wisdom of the past and of common experience. New beliefs can best be understood when we realize that they are in fact old beliefs. Dracula can only be overcome with the aid of lore and superstition. But I’m not sure how far the X-Files universe follows Dracula in that respect; at times the show’s skepticism regarding science seems to be a function of a larger skepticism regarding objective reality and absolute truth. Admittedly, “the truth is out there” is one of the show’s most enduring catchphrases, and Mulder’s quest is for the truth regarding alien colonization of our planet, but he fruitlessly searches for that truth throughout the course of nine television seasons and two feature films—partly because he stumbles upon so many different sides of an ultimately incomprehensible conspiracy, partly because the show’s narrative fragmentation mirrors so well the epistemic helplessness of its postmodern hero. I doubt this fragmentation was intended by the show’s creators, but if its disjointed episodes were replaced by coherent and intricately plotted story arcs, I think the elements of mystery and irreducible complexity—elements true to reality as we experience it—would be unhappily lost.

Dracula itself also benefits thematically from a narrative structure that is less than disciplined. The first few chapters, narrated by Jonathan Harker, provide an opening which builds an almost impossible tension through its very deliberate pacing. At some point the shifting voices of the characters become distracting; the learned Continental professor Van Helsing, for instance, lapses at times into an incongruously broken English. But in spite of a lack of editorial polish in places, the originality of its story and the consistency yet complexity of its themes make Dracula a classic which is well worth reading and emulating and which, intentionally or not, has been well emulated by The X-Files.