The Banality of Feigned Indignation: Some Belated Thoughts in Honor of Desmond Tutu

Apparently the Dalai Lama and China are going through a rough patch. The Dalai Lama’s objection to Chinese rule seems to stem from his vigorous insistence on quirky ideas like religion, peace, and human rights, meanwhile China responds with equal vehemence that wrinkly old men ought to wear more clothing when they travel around and therefore, for the sake of his health, they try to keep him relatively contained to his home country. Or something like that.

So when Archbishop Desmond Tutu invited the Dalai Lama to South Africa to give a lecture in honor of the Archbishop’s 80^th birthday, nobody was surprised when China was displeased with the proposition. Nobody was surprised when China leveraged its position as South Africa’s premiere trading partner to manipulate the government of South Africa into holding the visa up in bureaucratic red tape. And nobody was surprised when South Africa’s ruling African National Congress South (ANC) explained, with a resigned shrug of the shoulders, that the paperwork was not in order, and for that reason and no other reason, the entry of the Dalai Lama into South Africa was rejected. Where the nonplussed demeanors ceased, however, was halfway through a press conference in South Africa with Archbishop Tutu himself reacting to South Africa’s obsequious submission to Beijing.

With all of the fervor and emotional of the black preacher that he is, Archbishop Tutu tapped into a reservoir of the brand of righteous anger that does not make for polite conversation: “Wake me up and tell me this is actually happening here. It's quite unbelievable. The discourtesy they have shown to the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama!” Tutu’s words recalled the strident condemnation of a Hebrew prophet as he gave notice of the downfall of the ANC: “Let the ANC know they have a large majority. Well, Mubarak had a large majority, Gaddafi had a large majority. I am warning you: watch out. Watch out.” The mere text of his comments do not convey a fraction of the force with which the Archbishop extemporaneously delivered them, and the reason for that is simple: he was angry. Sincerely, vehemently, passionately angry.

Contrast this response with that of the US Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, to one of China’s other exploits on the same day. That Bashar Al-Assad’s regime in Syria has made a habit of engaging in systemic and egregious violations of human rights is a fact as incontrovertible as it is obvious. That the exigencies of geopolitics and the expenditure of resources in several different deserts have castrated the west and presented us from seriously intervening in Syria is a regrettable but undeniable development. Nevertheless, in a sham substitute for real action, the United States joined together with this week to sponsor a resolution in the United Nations condemning Syria for its gleeful mockery of justice and hitherto uninhibited bloodshed.

As expected, China and Russia vetoed the resolution, citing concerns about the precedent of foreign nations impinging upon the internal affairs of other sovereign nations. The blatant hypocrisy in such a claim, especially when compared against China’s direct pressuring of South Africa to bar the Dalai Lama from entry, is so patently ludicrous as to obviate serious response. This author, for one, refuses even to entertain the suggestion that China and Russia’s actions are animated by anything but the most Machiavellian calculations of self-interest. The real reason for the veto is no mystery even to the uninitiated. While the rest of the world is looking on in horror at the events unfolding on the streets of Syria, China and Russia are taking notes as to the most effective way to quash opposition. They have jointly vetoed the resolution because any international opprobrium for the Syrian security forces is a preemptive excoriation of China and Russia’s own policies in Tibet, Kashgar, Taiwan, and Chechnya.

And here is an additional atrocity on top of the Syrian murders: certain Security Council members are responding to massive human rights violations in a way that is deliberately calculated to ensure their own ability to commit the exact same sort of acts in the future. Out of the fifteen member nations of the Security Council, only nine voted to condemn Syria while four abstained (Lebanon, India, Brazil, and South Africa) and two (Russia and China) used their veto powers.

Faced with this insidious mockery of justice, the tepidity of the United States’ Ambassador to the UN’s comments is breathtaking. She commented (and here there is no need to watch the video; Ambassador Rice’s remarks were as unpassionate as could be imagined: “The United States is outraged that this council has utterly failed to address an urgent moral challenge and a growing threat to regional peace and security.” Really now? Have we really become suddenly indignant at the processes and members of the United Nations? Of course not. That I am completing this essay some days after the events described herein give me the benefit of history (at least about ten days’ worth of it), and that history, quite sadly, has proven to be enough to show that the comments both of Ambassador Rice and of Desmond Tutu have quickly been forgotten by the press, and if by the mainstream press, then undoubtedly by “America” itself as well. Consequently, the simple critique of Ambassador Rice’s comments is this: the United States simply is not outraged. Far from it. The accuracy of the resolution in condemning the attacks was that detail which was most quickly jettisoned when it became expedient to do so, as is shown by the fact that the language of the resolution was diluted three times in order to avoid the veto that eventually was used.

It is no secret that diplomacy not infrequently requires us to tie our own tongues, but the danger is that we become too accustomed to our self-censure and begin to respond to the international scene perfunctorily as a caricature of our own selves. That’s why, for example, Admiral Mullen’s recent comments about the true nature of Pakistan’s ISI were striking and refreshing, and also why the strength of those comments has been undermined and eviscerated by the Obama administration. Reports are continuing to surface about Pakistani duplicity. But this is not an essay about Pakistan; it is about the abhorrently acceptable practice of feigned indignation that impresses and convinces nobody at all. So in summation: if we are indignant, let us say so. If we are not, let us play our cards face up on the table. In the case of Syria, imagine the difference in rhetorical tone a meeting of the UN Security Council would take were Ambassador Rice to stand up in those chambers and say emphatically: “No, the United States is not indignant. In fact, we are not even surprised. Russia and China have proven time and again that they are willing to sacrifice the human rights of vast swaths of their populaces in order to ensure the solidity of the ruling regime. So when protestors are dispersed with live ammunition and flattened by tanks, why should Russia and China’s complicity with Syria surprise us? It does not one bit. And in the words of Archbishop Tutu: ‘Watch out. Watch out.’”

Reflective Musings from Behind the House

It was about 10PM last Friday evening when I laid supine surrendering myself to any force that would take me to the Land of Nod (don’t think Genesis); however, the Sandman was not having office hours.

The illuminating declarations of the Anointed Generation walking past my (is using this possessive pronoun against the Front Porch Format?) university-owned townhouse could be heard through the windows as they staggered to and from the administration-sponsored youthful debauches of the evening. But it wasn’t only the external obstacles that prevented me from meeting my slumber – the existential questions which plague the mind had kept me restless as well. What should I wear tomorrow? Will I be able to charge my blackberry? Why am I not asleep yet?

After giving it some thought, I finally had some answers – at least to the first two. Overalls. And I’ll never know, because if I asked someone at the event, the response would probably be, “What do you mean ‘charge’ your fruit?”…… and then I finally found myself in the arms of Morpheus.

Cue Saturday, the day of the Mt. St. Mary’s/ISI/Front Porch Republic Conference on Human Scale and the Human Good.

We woke up at 6AM so we would have enough time to reap the Autumn harvest before we left for the bucolic countryside of Emmitsburg, MD. Tucked away in Frederick County, the location was central: it was decently close for Washingtonians, not too far from those who call themselves Northeasterners, and south of the Mason-Dixon line, just so we can say it was.

Once we arrived on the beautiful Mount St. Mary’s campus (as their university President tactfully pointed out, “the oldest Catholic college in the 50 states”), we were given the pleasure of listening to stimulating lectures warning us of the dangers of globalization, worldly liberal education, and the impending socio-political effects of technology. I would be remiss to not at least name a few of the speakers; Mark Mitchell, Patrick Deneen, Bill Kaufman, Jason Peters, John Schwenkler, and Josh Hochschild all offered great theses. I would love to summarize the lectures of the day, but let’s just say brevity isn’t an Aristotelian virtue.

However, I had an interesting thought throughout the entire day.

WWWD?

What would Mr. Berry (according to the Official Count, his name was invoked 20 times in non-Q&A sections of the day) say about the day?

For some odd reason, I have this vision of him descending the stairs of the Knott Auditorium confounded at the presence of iPads and Powerpoint presentations. The vision continues: as he ironically tosses to the ground “The Peace of the Wild Things” and Jayber Crow, Mr. Berry chastising the Golden Calf of the Windows logo prominently displayed and trivializing the Crucifix hidden in the shadows of the projector (the last addition is my own).

Well, maybe I’m just a purist.

Or, maybe our hallowed prophets just believe in fighting fire with fire. Coming to the realization that small town communities are not going to organically manifest themselves is a difficult recognition, but a truth nonetheless. The audiences are on our Facebooks and our FourSquares. The audiences are “updating,” “checking in,” and finishing the sentence “Nathan Coulter is…”. In order to reach out, we must become. In order to have a conversation, we must be speaking the same language.

Granted, the task is much easier when a community is considered “too big” at 75 citizens.

___________________

Apart from my musings, I would just like to thank those at MSM, ISI, and FPR for hosting such a conference. It has certainly continued the conversation. My prayers are with each of you.

“We should not stay away from our assembly, as is the custom of some, but encourage one another, and this all the more as you see the day drawing near.” Hebrews 10:25

The Sour Grapes of the Fathers

“Now, lo, if he beget a son, that seeth all his father's sins which he hath
done, and considereth, and doeth not such like…he shall not die for the
iniquity of his father, he shall surely live.” -Ezekiel 18

As a member of the recent-college-graduate club, I take personal interest in a spate of recently published articles analyzing the dire straights of today’s graduates and forecasting for them a continuation of these trends over several years to come. The catalyst for these articles is the economic recession which, devoid of all courtesy, slogs along well past its time, and the gist of these articles is that the current crop of college graduates faces the most foreboding future of any generation since WWII. The causes for this widespread hesitancy toward the future are numerous: the increasingly unavoidable suspicion that the west really is in decline, the international misadventures of an unreflectively hubristic political class, the resigned acceptance of the fact that globalization might have pernicious side-effects after all, and the inability of the federal bureaucracy to convince the moneyed class that investment in government debt is anything but throwing money into a pit are a few of them.

All of these diagnoses have one noteworthy characteristic in common: they are all beyond the control of the generation in question. This observation made by myself, a 20-something, ought not be read merely as an attempt by excuse my generation from our responsibility. On the contrary, more profound minds than my own have insisted that my generation is too serious and too focused on our careers. Rather, these diagnoses resound with the recognition of an uncomfortable truth virtually anathema in the modern west: the social order is decidedly not as individualistic as we proudly claim. As a consequence, this generation is inheriting a system that we did little to create and reaping the harvest of decisions we did not make. At the center of a culture that exalts individual merit and rejects as outdated notions of family, lineage, and heredity, the ancient maxim is beginning to resonate: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”

It is a common mantra for politicians to identify the problems plaguing their administration as “inherited” problems. The problem of Al-Qaeda is inherited; the recession is inherited; the failing War on Terror is inherited. The “inherited” nature of problems is often fingered as a scapegoat for the current administration’s inability to resolve the issues as they—irrespective of party—so patronizingly promised during their campaigns. So is it at all surprising when a series of “inherited” problems eventually becomes too much for posterity to handle? This is exactly the trend observable today. For some time now, politicians have used posterity as leverage to guilt their opponents into submission (“I will not force our children to foot the bill for our wasteful expenditures”). Such vapid assertions are the anthems heralding the rise of another heirloom with which we have been gifted, namely, the most banal and frivolous political class in memory.

As the Baby Boomers and the Therapy Generation temporarily abate their flitting between impassioned allegiance to sitcoms to choose the leaders of the free world based upon the unspeakably asinine criterion of “looking presidential” (has nobody else noted that Sarah Palin’s exorbitant shopping sprees are as much an indictment of the American polity’s vapidity and materialism as it is a revelation of her need to substitute style for substance?), an unexpected reality occurred: “posterity” has come of age. We’re paying attention to our ruling class. And the titanic expenditures that are fritted away by business-suit-bedecked adolescents in elected office make our occasional jaunts to the mall with daddy’s credit card look paltry. We know that only a hallow shadow of the system of social safety nets that we are financing (if we are currently lucky enough to have a job and pay income taxes) will be in place for us when we come calling for it. It is impossible to read about the stunted progress and stalled careers of today’s graduates without realizing that it is a direct result of decisions made when those students were diligently studying the wee hours away in artificially lit libraries under the assumption that their diligence would be rewarded vocationally. We were wrong. Our fathers’ sour grapes are expensive.

Almost as if in support of the thesis that this phenomenon has a much more salient generational explanation than individualist explanation, almost all of the students interviewed for the NYT article hold degrees from prestigious universities, but their current occupations do not reflect their qualifications. These are not slackers, but they are relegated to menial positions that have precious little to do with what they had studied at their Ivy League schools. And all the talk of “fulfilling artistic goals” in lieu of real employment ought not obscure the fact that this phenomenon is symptomatic of a deeper problem. The tacit bargain that has characterized the relationship between generations for decades in America is that if you stay focused and play by the rules for the first few decades of life, you will be generously rewarded with consistent employment and financial prosperity commensurate with the effort exerted to get there. Hard work and wise choices will result in a more prosperous future than that enjoyed by your parents. Such runs the credo of meritocratic individualism. Yet for all the tugging that our bootstraps are enduring, this credo is increasingly dissonant with reality. The fabric of the tacit bargain between generations is beginning to fray. Instead of the meritocratic ethos that we had assumed would be passed down the generations, our inheritance is nothing more than the discarded refuse of a pandemic of midlife crises.

The generation whose last wills and testaments we are now reading was more surreptitiously hostile to notions of family and community than any other in recent memory. The landmark accomplishments of our fathers and forefathers are triumphal arches commemorating the sacrifice of responsibility to the sacred god of individualism; no-fault divorce eviscerated the vigor of romantic commitment, abortion on demand undermined the link to the next generation by making posterity a matter of preference, and the inconvenience of elderly parents was comfortably outsourced to nursing homes while suburbs devoid of backyards and front porches swelled with newly liberated individualists desperate to avoid even the most passing interaction with their neighbors. This is the world bequeathed to us.

And if it is not enough that the rising generation has been poorly equipped socially, a growing body of literature suggests that we are similarly unprepared to make even the most quotidian of moral choices. The Economist magazine, in a review of Lost in Translation: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood by Christian Smith, laments that “[i]n the guise, often, of teaching tolerance, we are failing to ensure that our children understand how to frame moral issues and make judgments about right conduct and what is good in life. The reason for this, Mr. Smith suggests, is that we are not so sure ourselves.” This omission represents a failure in parenting and education, both of which thoughtlessly parrot the mantras of relativism and the self-expression of the individual. These sacred cows of relativism and self-expression were to signify liberation from the strictures of hoary, antiquated moral dogmatism. Instead they represent an institutionalized agnosticism toward what is good and worthwhile in life. David Brooks is right to observe http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/opinion/if-it-feels-right.html?ref=davidbrooks “[The youth] have not been given the resources—by schools, institutions and families—to cultivate their moral intuitions, to think more broadly about moral obligations, to check behaviors that may be degrading. In this way, the study says more about adult America than youthful America.” For decades the institutionalization of laissez-faire parenting theories assumed that children were sufficiently capable of choosing the Good for themselves. How unexpected it was, then, when to the question of what is the Good, the virtuous, and the worthwhile, the answer came back univocally: nothing.

Yet lest the unpleasant factuality of our empty inheritance give way to bitterness or despondency, we ought to gain solace and resolve from the cyclicality of history. The parents of the boomers are still known as the Greatest Generation for good reason. Theirs was a generation that saw world wars, the reorganization of the international political landscape, and a Great Depression. All of these events awakened their vigorous virtues, the exercise of which earned that generation the title Greatest. The social and political landscape today more closely mirrors the virtue-arousing disturbances of 1930-1945 than the stultifying ease of 1965-1995. Consequently though not necessarily, to us belongs the somber honor and responsibility of steeling our virtues and challenging the Greatest Generation for their title. Wartime service, though hellish, tragic and arguably unnecessary, has exposed to a tranche of our generation the triviality of the west compared with the harsh exigencies of life in the developing world, and impressed upon them the importance of dignity and honor—both foreign, antiquated concepts to many Americans. For the rest of us, recession and austerity will highlight the importance of frugality and the insufficiency of materialism. The erosion of other social safety nets will highlight the importance of the family and local community as agents of informed and altruistic care.

Though on the whole our parents have failed to give us the moral categories required to fulfill the vision described above, I have little doubt that our generation is capable of supplying our deficiencies, albeit over time, through great difficulty, and with abundant error. Yet even if we can muster these virtues, our work will still not be done. It was the delinquency of the WWII generation that spawned the most self-centered generation of progeny in American history. We cannot repeat their mistake. After we have made Virtue our guide and Wisdom out counselor, we must introduce them to our children in order not to repeat the errors of the Greatest Generation. All of these things will be costly. But the purchase of another stock of sour grapes for ourselves and our posterity would be costlier still.

Mental Foolishness and Marital Faithlessness

“Even a fool who keeps silent is considered wise;

When he closes his lips, he is deemed intelligent.”

-Proverbs 17:28

It may surprise you, gentle reader, to hear my confession that I am breathlessly thrilled at the reaction to the most recent manifestation of Pat Robertson’s chronic inability to keep his mouth shut. That is to say, I am honestly, truly thrilled that the false prophet has an almost pathological inability to critically and rationally engage with the world around him, that his opinions are nothing less than monumental pillars to the human ability to evacuate words of logic, and that his heretical idiocy has achieved such a stentorious level as to make glib dismissal an impossibility.

The first reason I rejoice is that Pat Robertson’s egregious ignorance about the intricate beauty of the Christian faith has been exposed once again. His unilateral insistence that a man is doctrinally justified in abandoning his Alzheimer’s-laden wife is merely another point in Robertson’s already expansive resume of gaffes. Neither is he alone in his paucity of doctrinal perspicuity. On the contrary, he takes his place among a voluminous company who are similarly infected. The unlikely marriage of Jesus Christ and the Hallmark Greeting Card Co. have saturated America with a fluffy, cotton-candy Christianity whose primary potency is the peddling of trinkets emblazoned with Bible verses taken out of context to be placed on toilets, refrigerators, and sofa pillows. Such bland spiritualism is the diuretic of discipleship; its vapidity ensures the ejection of all weighty doctrinal and experiential Truths of the revered faith “once for all delivered to the saints.” This is the spiritual junk food that Pat Robertson has shoveled down the gullet of nominal American Christians for decades, but before we unsheathe the rightfully accusatory finger against him, Confessional, Biblical Christians ought to observe an opportunity to repent for making his travesty possible.

That Pat Robertson is a peddler of plastic platitudes (theology is far too noble a word for what it is that he casts to the four winds) is his sin; that blood is on his head. But that that the nominal believers that comprise his audience do not know better is an abject failure of the churches to stress discipleship and doctrine. Upon leaving the elders at Ephesus, Paul was able to boldly declare “I am innocent of the blood of you all for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God” (Acts 22:26-27). I shudder to think how few pastors and teachers in our churches today would be able justly to echo these words. Pat Robertson is only one of a host of radio preachers and TV evangelists filled with personality and devoid of charisma (in the 1 Corinthians sense), and though his abrasive stupidity is tending progressively to relegate him to a mere amusement, it would be naïve to fail to recognize the hosts of gospel-peddlers who, with toll-free number in hand, would rise up to replace him.

The second reason for my joy at his comments is the reaction it has sparked among Christians. The dominant effect of him airing his heretical opinions about marriage have kindled fires of righteous indignation in Christians for whom I often feared such sentiments were beyond their range of feeling. Robertson’s cruelty and his “repudiation of the gospel of Jesus Christ”, as Russell Moore categorized it with equal parts fervency and accuracy, is deserving of the harshest censure that can be roused from the depths of our souls. The anger of the Christian ought to blaze as a forest fire between the firelines of our humble pleading for his repentance and our longsuffering willingness to embrace him as a brother in Christ should he turn from his sin and become a Christian. If Robertson’s comments have exposed the insufficiency of our tepidity and passivity, then it is an evidence of grace. The time has not only for Christians to regain the intellectual rigor of our great Faith, but also to learn deep, righteous, passionate, godly feeling that is nonplussed by the junk-food of bumper stickers and cultural Christianity because we are frequent diners at the deep, rich, satisfying banqueting table of the Lamb. Public proclamations of unabashed heresy and theological distortions of the type that Pat Robertson has so recently modeled ought to elicit a righteous indignation that will not be satiated until the injustice is corrected as well as humble prayers that we will be spared from the same error.

And finally, I am pleased that the reaction to his comments has revealed the lines of demarcation between the Christian philosophy of marriage and the secular surrogate for the same. Robertson’s comments did arouse censure from many liberal individualists, but those voices were at least matched by Ph.D.s and other “experts” who filled the morning talk shows with reiterations of an individualist, Lockean-based consent theory of marriage. “Let us not so quickly excuse Robertson’s comments,” they counseled. “This decision ought to be made after careful consideration of the well-being and lifestyle choices of the healthy spouse.” In contrast to that are the reaffirmations of marriage and self-sacrificial commitment by many Christians such as Robert McQuilken. These contrasting responses make it clear that the distinction between a consensual, contractual version of marriage and a Biblical, self-sacrificing view of marriage is a weighty one. For the Christian, marriage is always an allegory of Christ’s relationship with the Church, a relationship not based upon convenience and self-interest. Consequently, in his advocacy of disposable marriage, Pat Robertson tells lies about Christ. There are few sins as weighty as that.

Italy Through Literature: Physicality & Spirituality

Italy is a sensual place, a corporeal place. It is a land that assaults one’s senses with sights and smells and tastes and sounds. In a sense, it is a sacramental place, that is, all of this deep sensory connection points to the presence of the Creator. That Italy is a place for the sacred is nothing new. For millennia people have felt here a deep connection with that which is divine. From the Etruscans through the Romans into Christianity, Italy has always been marked by an acute awareness of the sacred. Perhaps this is no better expressed than at Sant’ Antimo, where Gregorian chant wafts out of the abbey church, which is nestled among the breathtaking Tuscan landscape. It is this kind of intimate connection between the natural environment and the divine that led St. Francis to praise God through Brother Sun, Sister Water, Mother Earth, and Brother Wind. Indeed, many a writer has found Italy, with all of its sensual sacredness, to be the proper inspiration and context for his pieces. Tomasi’s The Leopard, Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread, and Ondaatje’s The English Patient are among the many works of literature that effectively use Italy as a context for exploring the sacred.

From the first lines, the reader is already quite aware that The Leopard will deal with matters of the sacred. From these same lines the reader is also made aware of the novel’s intent to explore the relation of death and the sacred. With the Rosary barely finished, another aspect of the sacred is introduced: pagan gods and goddesses. These divinities, painted on the ceiling, “awake” at the conclusion of the Rosary, to reign until the next day’s recitation of that same Marian devotion. Tomasi’s discussion of these pagan divinities in the midst of Christian piety sets the scene for the reader, underscoring that, while Italy is a Christian land, the legacy of Rome lives on. This points to a deeper reality existing in Sicily: there are certain kinds of ‘gods’ who reign on the island, living a shared life with the religious orthodoxy of Christianity. That is to say, the Sicilian mindset or character and even the Sicilian nobility, are kinds of sacred, almost divine, institutions that have the permanency of gods. Thus, it is made clear that, while political things have changed, no revolution, no army is able to alter that which makes Sicily, Sicily.

The progress promised by the Risorgimento stands in opposition to the sacred, in some sense. This is the reason for Fr. Pirrone’s opposition to the new order, as he understands that what happened in England and France will be repeated in Italy. The Risorgimento promises a kind of secularism, yet it is made clear that, Sicily, at least, will always have her gods, hence Tancredi’s comment: “If things are to stay as they are, things will have to change.” This is a kind of indictment on modernity that promises such change and progress, but ultimately cannot unseat the gods of the old way of doing things in Sicily. Thus, the elections are rigged and while the house of Salina does decline, no one is made to feel any terrible discomfort, and the nobility’s legacy is, in a sense, carried on by the likes of Caligero, the new aristocrats who will continue to operate according to the old ways. These gods, then, that rule Sicily may be more likened to ghosts that haunt the island.

The novel’s treatment of death is perhaps the most poignant example of how Italy serves well as a context for the sacred. The motif of death permeates the work, even from the first line “Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.” This interplay of death and the sacred is expressed in a number of ways. The most obvious use of death as a motif is to examine the supposed death of the old order when Italy becomes a modern, unified republican state. The irony, perhaps, is that much of the old way of doing things will live on, just as the legacy of Rome’s pagan deities lives on in the midst of Christianity. Fabrizio, then becomes a symbol of this. He, as a Jove-like figure, is seen to be dying in the final pages of the novel. Italy once again serves well as the scene for this drama, as Fabrizio witnessing a priest bringing Viaticum through the streets foreshadows the prince’s own death. Then, on his own deathbed, Fabrizio himself hears the bells indicating the bringing of the last Sacrament. Yet, in his death, Fabrizio, in seeing a kind of Venus-Maria Stella conflation, is almost assured a certain immortality that is not unlike the ‘gods’ of the stars he had so carefully studied.

The same omnipresent sense of the sacred that is found in The Leopard is also used by Forster in his Where Angels Fear to Tread. Herein, one sees the importance of choosing Italy as the setting and context for a novel. However brilliantly woven, one cannot help but set a story of the Risorgimento in Italy. Yet, a critique of British social order at the turn of the century need not be set in a place so removed from Sawston. The choice of Italy, and in particular rural Italy, as the location for the unfolding drama is important in several respects. Firstly, Italy as a sacred place allows Forster’s characters to become enchanted, converted, and transformed, something very necessary for these British gentry who cannot escape the disillusionment of life in Sawston. In Italy, Phillip, Caroline, and for a time even Lilia can find transcendence through that which is ordinarily beautiful, in a very physical sense: a medieval piazza, a Tuscan vista. Mrs. Herriton can never experience such transcendence because she remains in domestic Sawston. Harriet remains there in spirit and thus cannot transcend the place even though she visits Italy.

In Italy, Forster is able to recast traditional Italian religiosity in a new way so as to communicate something sacred. A visit to the Collegiate church in San Gimignano reveals Forster’s inspiration for the Collegiate church of Santa Deodata in Monteriano. One sees how the church becomes a place of refuge from the hot Tuscan sun, a place where cooler heads can prevail to decide how to deal with the situation left by Lilia’s begetting a child and subsequent death. In this, Forster is making use of the church as an Italian church had been used centuries before: as a place for meetings, discussions, deals, transactions, planning, and the like. Yet, in the midst of this, there is the sense that Phillip and Caroline are seeking a kind of divine intervention or assistance to remedy the situation. Such assistance comes in the Christ-like death of the baby. It is as if the baby, who is at the center of the entire situation, is sacrificed, so that by his death some resolution may be brought about. Such final resolution and closure is only realized in the scene where Caroline offers to Phillip and Gino what would have been the baby’s milk. In this symbolic act, Forster re-envisions the sacred, so that the milk becomes ‘Eucharistic,’ bringing about a healing and reconciliation between Phillip and Gino. Such a thing, it seems, would only be possible in the context of the spirituality of Italy.

To recast the sacred in the context of Italy is further undertaken by Ondaatje in his The English Patient. That the drama is set in a war torn Italian villa and its gardens evokes the imagery of Eden and suggests a kind of fallen paradise. This imagery is most poignant in the patient’s room, decorated as it is in a kind of garden-motif wallpaper. Thus, from the beginning, the patient is seen as a kind of saint, at least as far as Hana is concerned. The sacred transposed is further evidenced in Hana’s use of the chapel’s crucifix as a scarecrow. The cross is thus deconsecrated in the sense that it no longer promises eternal life, but rather ensures the continuance of earthly life through the food grown in the garden. It is within this context of the sacred transposed, within the context of this fallen Eden, that Ondaatje places his characters who are all in need of redemption.

The symbol, then, of this redemption may be seen as water. This of course is an echo of Baptism. It is a symbol that is very effective. For Hana, scarred as she is by her abortion, the death of her father, and the scourge of war, redemption is realized by her caring for the English Patient. This is most clearly seen in her washing of him, a scene evocative of Mary Magdalene’s washing the feet of Christ. The reader also sees Hana wanting to be washed of her pain as she sits in the fountain, awaiting the rush of water, in a larger sense, awaiting her final redemption that will come in the water escape in Clara’s canoe.

Kip’s presence in Italy and at the villa is curious in several respects. It is stated that, as a Sihk, he comes to Italy already in possession of his own spirituality. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, he finds himself at home, in a sense, with the company of religious statues and paintings in churches. It is in a church in Naples that he lays down to perhaps die if the city is indeed rigged to explode. Here, under the protection of angels, he finds comfort. Kip is also described as a saintly figure, yet he too is in need of redemption following the war and the death of Hardy and Lord Suffolk. This he also finds by water, in an echo of Hana’s watery redemption, by his escape by motorcycle through the rain and eventual crash into a river.

The symbol of water, as a kind of transposition of the sacred and a promise of redemption, is very effective, especially when considered in the context of where the novel is set. The desert is traditionally seen as a place of purification or preparation. It is a place to which the first monks retreated in order to be closer to God. In the Almasy’s time in the desert, the one thing needed for survival is water. This fact is underscored in his fiery crash and his burns. It is as if the desert prepares Almasy for his redemption at the hand of Hana who washes him. In the isolation of the villa, in a land that is now barren because of war, Almasy and the rest find a new kind of desert, wherein they can draw close to the sacred in search of redemption and healing.

The experience of Italy as a place, a nation, and a history forces one into a kind of contemplation of higher, spiritual things. If nothing else, the beauty of the landscape presents the problem of gratitude, and giving thanks must logically involve an indirect object. With a patrimony that exudes the sacred, Italy presents itself as the perfect context for exploring questions of profound implication, questions which are essential to one’s being human. Modern authors, in using Italy as such a context, follow in the great literary tradition of the likes of Dante and Boccaccio. In doing so, Italy is not just a setting for the exploration of the sacred. Rather Italy comes to symbolize and make present that very sacredness.

Unexpected Recollections of Old Lectures: An Essay in Honor of Fr. Thomas King, SJ: Part I

“Tell your neighbor what teacher said last time in class...”

-Father Thomas M. King, SJ

To my great pleasure and greater surprise, a number of situations in which I happen to find myself through no fault of my own, have induced me to nostalgia about a dear old teacher, Father King, SJ of Georgetown University. (I am not alone). A great teacher and even greater man, Father King simply mesmerized me time and again during my first semester of freshman year at Georgetown. The experience was captivating, eye-opening, and, without any hyperbole, life-changing. I remember my term paper from his class. I remember the questions on the exams he gave (What a fool I was for not knowing the name of Augustine’s mother!), I remember his mannerisms; the way his right hand would write beautiful cursive, a la Fulton Sheen on the chalkboard with his left hand resting on the small metal lip of the board where the chalk itself is kept, leaving him with the appearance of alabaster fingers and leaving me constantly wondering how many semesters it took him to be able to give lectures, his hands full of chalk dust, and not allow an atom of it on his jet-black clerical attire.

For the record, it was something like sixty semesters that he taught this class. Sixty semesters. I always laughed when any foolish freshman mustered the hubris to debate with him. “Surrender the point,” I always thought. “He’s been teaching this class longer than we have been alive.” Those sixty semesters were plenty of time for him to perfect his dry-as-the-Sahara sense of humor (I certainly had no idea what to think when he joked about doing experiments on little children—all for the purpose of demonstrating that humans have an innate sense of what constitutes evil—or when he obliquely referenced the fact that he may or may not have performed exorcisms on the sixth floor of Healy.), his iconic “tell your neighbor” or “Teacher says…”, and his simply enrapturing delivery of “The Grand Inquisitor” story from Dostoeyevski’s The Brothers Karamazov. More on this later.

I have my concerns about future classes of students at Georgetown; asinine education requirements that amount to nothing by a group exercise in missing the point of the purpose of a university, diversity requirements that will quickly become a punchline among undergraduates, and the humiliation of our president continuing to drive around campus in a faded blue minivan—all of these will factor into the Georgetown experience of future generations of Hoyas. Yet I am even more saddened for them for this reason: they will never have the inestimable privilege to be taught by the great mind of Fr. King again. Had I known how influential the class was to be in my formation, I would have recorded every lecture. It is a continued source of bitter regret that I did not. Nevertheless, because his legacy is worth being remembered, oh patient reader, here is a synopsis of Fr. King’s Problem of God (for the record, it was, I believe, Fr. King himself who orchestrated the institution of this class at Georgetown. He was one of the few who taught it well, realizing that the class was, in fact, something higher than merely a forum for professors to air their Problems With God.)

We opened the class with, of course, the taking of attendance. Father King had seen far too many students in his day to remember all of them, and thus he read the attendance sheet word-for-word every class period without ever looking to see which face corresponded to which name. The real substance of the course began, of course, with the classical proofs for the existence of God and for the famed debate between Bertrand Russell and Fr. Copleston. The first third of the course was an introduction to a logically-rigorous and almost rationalistic approach to the divine. It was here that he lectured at length about the Allegory of the Caves, and his chalkboard drawings of the characters will never leave my memory whenever I open the well-worn pages of my Plato. Then a midterm. 28 points, each one correlating to a point on your final grade. There were only ever 100 points available in the class. Miss a single question on any assignment, and you had a point deducted from your final grade. Education is a serious business, you see.

The second third of the class was much different; it was a more emotional and relational approach to God focusing on his interaction with humanity and our desperate need for Him. It was in this section, if my memory serves me, that he devoted an entire class period to the reading of Dostoevsky. I had never heard the passage before, and I was captivated. I do not know what I would pay to have a recording of that lecture. Then another midterm. Finally, the third part of the class focused on, among others, Pierre De Chardin, King’s intellectual idol.

(Yes, perspicacious reader, the quote emblazoned above the stairway heading toward the ICC auditorium is from Chardin. Yes, perspicacious reader, it was Fr. King who is responsible for that quote being there. And yes, gentle reader, I abhor that quote with everything in me, and I still count it as the one thing about King that I could never understand or approve of. But we are, for sure, sinners all.)

In this third of the class, Fr. King performed his greatest feat: a freehand drawing of the map of the entire world, used to demonstrate the idea of panentheism, the idea that God is in everything, not to be confused with pantheism, the notion that everything is God. Then the last class came. A recap of the entire semester. And on the board he writes:

1. God is knowable rationally, logically-understandable, and fulfilling to the intellect.

2. God is relational, able to sympathize with our weaknesses, and emotionally close.

3. God infuses everything with life and beauty, and everything about the world displays some aspect of his goodness.

Then, as the long hand of the clock makes its last sprint around the clock, Fr. King scans the class gleefully, turns to face the board, and next to each of the three aspects of God, writes: “Father. Son. Holy Spirit.”

Class dismissed.

Now, is this a convincing understanding of the Trinity, that eternal, divine, and concrete Thing the understanding of which Augustine compared to the emptying of the ocean with a thimble? Perhaps not. It does perilously approach modalism. Nevertheless, I miss Fr. King. Dearly. And as his memorable sayings come into my head these recent days, so close to the second anniversary of his death, they do fill me with joy and a hopeful expectation of conversing with him once again.

Of the Italian Bar

Fiesole, Italia

The Italian bar. It is a ubiquitous institution in the Boot. Part coffee shop, part watering hole, part restaurant, part gelateria, part convenience store: this is one-stop shopping, Italian style; a kind of conglomeration that is perhaps one of this country’s few efficiencies. This place might be the closest thing to Italian fast food. (I am purposely ignoring those golden arches that assault one exiting his train at Santa Maria Novella.) Yet, the Italian bar is, in reality, a bastion of a kind of ‘slow food.’

Any frenzy here is of a different sort. On entering, taking in the heavy smell of coffee and tobacco, one gets the sense that he should slow down just a bit to enjoy his coffee and his morning. Or perhaps the coffee is so eminently enjoyable that it demands a minute unto itself. There’s no rushing off with latte in hand, no drive through window. If any paper cups exist, they’re gathering dust some place and the management doesn’t know where that place is. Real porcelain cups reign supreme, complete with saucer and spoon.

So, take five and be an Italian. Order your cappuccino at the bar to avoid paying three times as much for table service. Only hipsters in Seattle have “grande” and “venti.” Here, there’s only one size: a perfect proportion of espresso and milk, probably not enough to qualify for a “kiddie size” stateside. If you’re really pressed for time, drink at the bar, otherwise grab an open table, and maybe a pastry, and linger for a while. The whole town is here: grandma, an old man reaching for a smoke, young maidens with the latest gossip, the parish priest, even the garbage men stop in for a caffe. Strike up a conversation with any one of these characters or just take it all in by yourself.

The scene is admittedly noisy, but in an exhilarating sense. Patrons shout coffee orders over already loud conversations taking place at a break neck pace (apart from driving, it seems that talking is the only thing done with any rapidity in this country). There is the constant clatter of cups and saucers and the hiss of the espresso machine. Attendants behind the bar, often clad in funny little hats, engage in a dizzying dance: taking orders, setting out saucers and spoons to be crowned with cappuccini, clearing away empty cups. The cycle repeats throughout the morning. Half of the fun lies in watching this little show. A certain order and civility emerges from this seemingly chaotic scene, a civility marked by the ability to stop for a moment and say hello to the guy making your coffee or catch up with a friend standing next to you. The bar is a neighborhood establishment; no chains or franchises here. The whole ordeal is very personal. In taking his coffee in the morning, one is actually forced to interact with those with whom he shares his daily existence. Heaven forbid!

This is real community, not in some contrived, politically correct platitudinous sense. Rather it is real people engaging each other, appreciating each other’s being in a kind of local context that is mindful of the human need for place. The Italian bar, then, represents a few moments of sanity in the craze of modern life. It remains a fixture of a more conscientious, slower life in a modern world that is all but devoid of such a thing.

On Doing Irrelevant Things

Having recently transferred to a new city, I am often greeted with the typical “and what did you study?” about three minutes into whatever polite conversation I find myself in. My ears perk up immediately, partly because I love discussing what I studied, and partly because I cannot wait to see the reaction of my interlocutor as the well-trod path of small talk suddenly shifts into unknown territory. "Why, I study (note the present tense, even after graduation) Political Theory." And without fail, my response of “political theory” never fails to elicit looks of confusion. For certainly—the average man supposes—people do not actually graduate with such degrees and maintain their functionality and relevance to society! What sort of hideous chimera must this be who can both quote Plato at length and also use an Excel spreadsheet? How does one interact with one who studies "political theory", the words falling from his lips with the same disgusted expression of a prima donna forced by cruel nature to remove some sort of lately deceased rodent from her sidewalk. What, to quote dozens of perplexed loved ones and friends of mine, does one actually do with that?

Dearly beloved, I gather you today around the casket of the Renaissance Man. While he had a good run, it seemed that he died of a tragic case of consensus—consensus that things deemed “irrelevant” because synonymous with things “contradictory” and “worthless.” And thus died the Renaissance Man, his epitaph reading “Here lies a contradictory and worthless old specimen who never could sufficiently specialize.” Yes, the Renaissance Man is dead, and whenever a doctor happens to mention that he is perplexed by the opera more than by an anatomical chart, or a lawyer betrays his love for latin, or a lone college graduate looking to pay off debts sheepishly pulls out Dostoevsky at his lunch break, someone will undoubtedly note the family resemblance to homo Renaissanus with bewilderment. If, they often wonder, it does not contribute to your future income, or fit neatly on a polished resume, or improve your sex life, then why, pray tell, would you have any reason to spend time on it? The funeral will be celebrated by refraining from all such pastimes and obsessing about weight, cars, mortgages, and, albeit infrequently, the romantic life of British aristocrats.

So today I make my declaration: I will forever be a political theorist. No matter how I make my money or which books I continue to read, I will throw my lot in with those who staunchly defend the virtue of irrelevant things and study them joyfully even if they cannot easily explain to inquiring relatives at Thanksgiving just what exactly it is that they “do” with them.

What does one do with so-called irrelevant things? I will tell you. He becomes a true human being. Dancing and smiling have naught to do with mammon and materialism, yet we do not therefore disdain them as “irrelevant” because somehow we know; the Dionysian daemon within reminds us that there is something about them that is truly and profoundly human. So also philosophy, literature, and political theory. Perhaps it is just those things that we ought to “do”, and leave the money-making as a hobby, a necessary evil to try to placate our bestial nature that clamors for physical sustenance, but certainly not how we define our identity as humans. It is given by God to the squirrels and the birds and the beavers and the snakes to concern themselves primarily with where their next meal will come from and whether it is served on a silver tray. But we men, the image-bearers of God, must have higher things to concern ourselves with—things whose connection to each other are as truly real as they are superficially untraceable, things uniquely given to man along with the Promethean fire of the gods, so-called “irrelevant” things to toil and fret about. This is what it is to be human.

On Strange and Foreign Bookstores

Wise and insightful minds monotonously and repetitively remind us that it is in poor taste to judge a book by its cover. Be that as it may, I have never received counsel against judging an entire city by its book covers, and therefore I will proceed with alacrity to do that. On Tuesday I moved from my home in Pennsylvania to work in San Diego. After my first day of work today, I decided to mosey (as I am wont to do) through downtown. As I was investigated the local temple to the god of materialism (read: Horton Plaza), I providentially came across a bookstore that was going out of business. (n.b. While the closing of bookstores is fortuitous for the poor bibliophile like myself, it is an unnerving sight to stumble upon and undoubtedly bodes very poorly for our future). I naturally jumped at the opportunity simultaneously to investigate the locals’ taste in literature while hoping to snag a bargain or two for myself.

It would not be inaccurate to describe myself as a bookstore snob. When in DC, I had a ranking system of used bookstores more detailed and intricate than that used by the NCAA when determining seeding for March Madness. This system is not to be trifled with, nor is it comprehensible to the uninitiated. However, the condensed and abridged version is both easily grasped and stunningly effective in judging the quality of a bookstore, and the cardinal criterion of quality (one observes my Baptist heritage in the alliterative cadence of that phrase) is this: what is the ratio of books that are more than five hundred years old to the number of mass market paperbacks?

Oh San Diego, how I longed to embrace your Plato and Augustine to myself as a hen embraces her chickens, but you would not! Indeed, I fear that all your writing is in vain, because for all of your printed words, the Golden State is heretofore devoid of a single golden word from the divinely-inspired quill of anyone who trod this humble ball more than a mere one hundred years ago! Indeed, the only exception to this proves the lamentable state of decay into which this one great republic has fallen. The lone herald of the ancients left in print here is Catullus, a sentry all too eager to permit debauchery and licentiousness to pass into the citadel of latin poetry. Perhaps it is a source of consolation for the “romance” novels (for indeed they are “romantic” in the sense of representing the very worst of Rome, that heart of viciousness which even now is not dormant in the souls of man) to have their original Romantic forefather on shelves not far away from their own images of scantly-clad vampires and werewolves, a phenomenon proving that the libido is too often the taskmaster of the imagination, and that when a culture creates boredom out of its own erotomania, it rarely fails to create new sources of titillation. The modern version of this is only quasi-bestial, a subtle enough play to allow millions of parents to foolishly allow their children to consume the rabble and teach them that there is nothing beautiful about words or romance.

Good Christian that I am, I would be remiss if I did not mention that the “religion” section did yield a small nugget of gold. I am the new owner of C.S. Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, the last copy on the shelf (the irrepressible optimist in me wants to believe that there were originally dozens of copies and that my fellow San Diegans were prescient enough to snatch them up quickly and are even now basking in the poetic prose of the English master. But while this find proves the Augustinian maxim that there is good to be found even in the most evil of circumstances, Augustine’s realism counsels me against hoping that I will stumble upon avid readers of the Inklings anytime soon in this city.

Let us therefore hear the conclusion of the matter. When the religion section is devoid of Augustine, Aquinas, or Calvin, and the books therein are outnumbered strongly by the so-called “Self-help” books, we betray ourselves, and like San Diego after the passing of the “marine layer”, the true god we worship is clearly revealed.