Ten Years Ago Today

Divine aporia

By Moristotle

[Originally published on June 12, 2007, not one word different.]

I have long regretted that I didn’t study much classical rhetoric in college. My knowledge of technical terms in poetics and prosody has barely kept me afloat as I’ve tried to tread water reading literary essays and criticism. So my interest was piqued last October when a young Hollywood screenwriter [JD Payne] suggested I look at M. H. Abrams’s Glossary of Literary Terms. And I’ve since discovered Chapel Hill’s own English Professor William Harmon’s Handbook to Literature. Not bedside reading for everyone, but I delight in both books.

Case dismissed!

An old friend has brought to my attention that:

In Florida, an atheist created a case against the upcoming Easter and Passover holy days. He hired an attorney to bring a discrimination case against Christians, Jews, and observances of their holy days. The argument was that it was unfair that atheists had no such recognized days.
    The case was brought before a judge. After listening to the passionate presentation by the lawyer, the judge banged his gavel declaring,"Case dismissed!"
    The lawyer immediately stood and objected to the ruling, saying, "Your honor, how can you possibly dismiss this case? The Christians have Christmas, Easter, and other holidays, and the Jews have Passover, Yom Kippur, and Hanukkah. Yet my client and all other atheists have no such holidays."
    The judge leaned forward in his chair saying, "But you do. Your client, counsel, is woefully ignorant."
    The lawyer said, "Your Honor, we are unaware of any special observance or holiday for atheists."
    The judge said, "The calendar says April 1st is April Fools Day. Psalm 14:1 states, 'The fool says in his heart, there is no God.' Thus, it is the opinion of this court, that if your client says there is no God, then he is a fool. Therefore, April 1st is his day. Court is adjourned."

Moristotle comments

The judge in the case was just continuing to believe the superstitions he learned from his parents. But the lawyer's client was indeed a fool, and the client's lawyer greedy for a fee and ignorant of the fact that atheists already "have" many more days than "Christians" and "Jews" have. Count the number of non-holy days and compare it to the number of holidays.

January 17

By the way, I forgot to point out yesterday that the way the word "Jews" was used in the anecdote seemed to imply that all Jews are religious. In fact, not even all people called "Christians" are religious. Apparently even a number of ordained priests are atheists. Like Father Bernard in David Lodge's novel Paradise News.

"Take me!"

David Lodge's comic novel The British Museum Is Falling Down improvises an opportunity for practicing Roman Catholic Adam Appleby to...practice:

[Seventeen-year-old Virginia, bartering with Adam to deflower her in exchange for one of her mother's lover's manuscripts] came towards him radiantly. "Take me, Adam," she whispered. She took his hand and placed it over her breast. Adam groaned and closed his eyes.
      "I can't, Virginia. I daren't. I haven't...taken precautions."
      "Don't worry about that, darling," she murmured in his ear. Her breath made his skin tingle. With his free hand he began to stroke her back.
      "You mean," he said hoarsely, letting his fingers slide down her spine.
      "I don't mind taking a chance."
      He opened his eyes and jumped back. "Are you mad?"
      She came after him. "I don't, really I don't."
      "Well, I do," Adam said. He sat down, feeling faint. He had nearly lost control that time. He racked his brains for some further means of procrastination. "Have you got a thermometer?" he said.
      "Yes, I think so. Why?"
      "If you really want to go through with this, you'll have to take your temperature."
      "You are a funny man." With an air of humouring him, Virginia rummaged in the drawer of her dressing-table and withdrew, from a jumble of broken combs, broken jewelery, broken fountain-pens and broken rosaries, a miraculously unbroken thermometer. He took it from her and, having shaken down the mercury, slid it under her tongue.
      "Sit on the bed," he ordered.
      She looked like a naughty child, sitting there naked with the thermometer in her mouth. Adam drew up a chair and took a paper and pencil from his pocket.
      "Now, how long was the shortest of your last three periods?" he enquired.
      Virginia spat out the thermometer. "I haven't the foggiest," she said. "What is this all about?"
      Adam replaced the thermometer. "I'm trying to determine whether this is a safe time for relations," he explained.
      "Not very romantic," Virginia seemed indistinctly to say.
      "Sex isn't," he snapped back. He plucked the thermometer out and examined it. "97.6," he announced, and wrote the figure down. He stood up and began to collect the Merrymarsh papers with the air of a doctor at the end of a consultation. "Now, if you'll just go on taking your temperature every night and drop me a line when it rises sharply for three consecutive days, we'll see what we can do."....[pp. 155-156]

...the less sin

At a meeting of lay Catholics, in David Lodge's comic novel The British Museum Is Falling Down, Adam explains the casuistry of sin relative to birth control:

"The trouble with using contraceptives, from the point of view of practical moral theology," Adam went on, wondering what conclusion he was going to reach, "is that it's necessarily a premeditated sin. You can biff someone on the head or seduce someone's wife at a party, and go to confession and say, 'Father, I was overcome by my passions,' and be sincerely sorry, and promise not to do it again, and do the same thing a week later without being a hypocrite. But the other thing is something you commit, in the first place, in cold blood in a chemist's shop; and once you start you have to go on steadily, or there's no point."
      "That's very well put," said Maple, as Adam recovered his breath. "But what can we do about it?"
      "The only thing I can see is to get contraception classified as a venial sin," said Adam, with sudden inspiration. "Then we could all feel slightly guilty about it, like cheating on the buses, without forfeiting the sacraments."
      This proposition seemed to take the group by surprise, and a long silence ensued.
      "Well," said Francis Maple at length, "that's a novel point of view certainly. I don't know if there's any machinery for classifying sins...But there's a general consensus which can be modified, I suppose."
      At this point the door burst open, and Father Wildfire entered.
      "Ah!" said Maple, with relief. "You come at an opportune moment, Father."
      "Why, somebody dying?" said the priest, with a boisterous laugh.
      "No, it's just that we're getting into rather deep theological waters. Adam, here, thinks that the birth control problem could be solved if contraception were just considered as a venial sin."
      "Isn't it?" said Father Wildfire, with feigned surprise. The group laughed delightedly, but discreetly, as if they were in church. "Is there anything to drink?" asked the priest, unbuttoning his coat. This was a rough serge jacket of the kind worn by building labourers. Underneath it he wore a red woollen shirt and brown corduroy trousers. The Dominicans appeared to have very liberal regulations, of which Father Wildfire took full advantage, concerning the wearing of the habit. Adam often thought that if, as seemed likely, he was eventually de-frocked, no one would ever know it.
      A cup of coffee was passed to the priest, who extracted a small flask from his pocket, and poured a generous measure into the cup. "Seriously," he said, "this venial sin–mortal sin business is old hat. Something the scholastics thought up to while away the long winter evenings. All sins are mortal sins. Or, to put it another way, all sins are venial sins. What matters is love. The more love, the less sin. I was preaching at a men's retreat the other day, and I told them, better sleep with a prostitute with some kind of love than with your wife out of habit. Seems some of them took me at my word, and the bishop is rather cross."
      Adam wanted to ask if it was better to make love to your wife using a contraceptive, or not to make love to her at all; but somehow it did not seem an appropriate question to ask Father Wildfire. He lived at the frontiers of the spiritual life, where dwelt criminals, prostitutes, murderers and saints, a territory steaming with the fumes of human iniquity, from which souls emerged, if they emerged at all, toughened and purified by a heroic struggle with evil. In contrast, Adam's moral problem seemed trivial and suburban, and to seek Father Wildfire's advice would be like engaging the services of a big-game hunter to catch a mouse. [pp. 70-72]

We need religion?

Practicing Roman Catholic Adam Appleby (whose wife and their three young children, of David Lodge's third novel, The British Museum Is Falling Down, I introduced on August 11), receives some advice from a couple of his friends, who are concerned at Adam's distress over his wife's possible fourth pregnancy:

"You know," said Camel to Adam, "I think you ought to apostatize. You can't go on like this."
      "What d'you mean?"
      "Well, leave the Church—temporarily I mean. You can go back to it later."
      "Death-bed repentance, you mean?"
      "Well, more of a menopause repentance. It's not such a risk is it? You and Barbara have a good expectation of living past forty or so."
      "It' no good talking to him like that, Camel," said Pond. "There's always the bus."
      "Yes, there's always the bus," Adam agreed.
      "Bus? What bus?" asked Camel in bewilderment.
      "The bus that runs you down. The death that comes unexpectedly," explained Pond. "Catholics are brought up to expect sudden extinction round every corner and to keep their souls highly polished at all times."
      "How do you know all this?" Adam demanded.
      "Sally went to a convent," Pond explained. "No," he went on, "it's no use talking like that to Adam. We've got to convince him intellectually that Catholicism is false."
      "I wouldn't want to do that," said Camel. "I believe in religion. I don't have any myself, but I believe in other people having religion."
      "And children," Adam interpolated.
      "Quite so," Camel agreed. "I don't have any affection for children myself, but I recognise the need for them to keep the human show on the road."
      "Selfish bastard," said Adam.
      "But if you must have religion," said Pond, "why not Hinduism? Then you can have sex as well."
      "I thought you were against things foreign," said Camel.
      "Well, I think we could have a kind of Anglicanised Hinduism...get rid of the holy cows and so on."
      "No, it won't do," said Camel. "I want Christianity kept up, because otherwise half our literary heritage will disappear. We need people like Appleby to tell us what The Cloud of Unknowing is all about." [pp. 64-65]

Paternity

I'm distracted by some apprentice defects in David Lodge's third novel, The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965), but it's hard not to enjoy a book each of whose sections mimics the work of a well-known author, from Chapter 1's clear reference to the opening of Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis to the epilogue's (and the plot's) use of Ulysses' closing soliloquy of Molly Bloom.

Also enjoyable is the protagonist Adam Appleby's penchant for comic soliloquy, generously reported by the third-person narrator. Adam and his wife are a married couple of the type I'm already quite familiar with from Lodge's later novels: a practicing Roman Catholic couple faithfully (but unsuccessfully) relying on the rhythm method. From one of Adam's soliloquies in which he imagines an entry for Catholicism, Roman "for a Martian encyclopaedia compiled after life on earth had been destroyed by atomic warfare":

...distributed fairly widely over the planet Earth in the twentieth century. As far as the Western Hemisphere is concerned, it appears to have been characterised by a complex system of sexual taboos and rituals. Intercourse between married partners was restricted to certain limited periods determined by the calendar and the body-temperature of the female. Martian archaeologists have learned to identify the domiciles of Roman Catholics by the presence of large numbers of complicated graphs, calendars, small booklets full of figures, and quantities of broken thermometers, evidence of the great importance attached to this code. Some scholars have argued that it was merely a method of limiting the number of offspring; but as it has been conclusively proved that the Roman Catholics produced more children on average than any other section of the community, this seems untenable. Other doctrines of the Roman Catholics included a belief in a Divine Redeemer and in a life after death. [p. 16]

"To Mrs. Green [their landlady]:

herself a widow with an only son, Adam's paternity of three young children, whom he could patently not afford to support, indicated an ungovernable sexual appetite of which [his wife] was the innocent victim. "Ooh, isn't Mr Appleby naughty?" had been her first response to [his wife's] nervous announcement of her third pregnancy; and subsequently Adam had had to endure from his landlady the kind of half-fascinated, half-fearful appraisal usually reserved for prize bulls. As he calculated that there could be few married men in Metropolitan London who enjoyed their marital rights as seldom as himself, he found this situation particularly trying....[p. 28]

Speaking of letter-A Adam, my declining short-term memory appreciates the mnemonic way that his wife and their children are named:

Adam's family lined up in alphabetical order to be kissed goodbye: Barbara, Clare, Dominic and Edward (seated). When the principle behind this nomenclature dawned on their friends they were likely to ask humorously whether Adam and Barbara intended working through the whole alphabet, a joke that seemed less and less funny to Adam and Barbara as time went on....[p. 25]

Perhaps you too have trouble keeping characters' names straight?

Boxes

On guard duty his last week in National Service (in David Lodge's Ginger, You're Barmy), Jonathan is reading a book:

"What yer reading?" said Earnshaw, who had left his desk. To avoid the labour of an explanation, I passed him the book. He glanced at the title on the spine [Seven Types of Ambiguity], and began to read where I had left the book open, his brows knitted.
      "What's it about then?"
      "Literature."
      "Yer, but what's it about. Anything 'ot in it, like?"
      "It's not a story. It's literary criticism. It's—"
      "Wodjer wanner read that sort of crap for?" he interrupted, handing back the book.
      "I happen to be interested in it."
      "Won't do you any good, will it?"
      "As a matter of fact it will, though that's not why I'm reading it."
      "Why, what good will it do yer?"
      "I hope to make the study of literature my career."
      "Gerna be a teacher I s'pose. But what good will it do yer? Or the kids yer teach. What use is lit'rature?"
      I opened my mouth to launch into a defence of the study of literature...getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said...and then closed my mouth. I was not eager to return to the university because I thought my research would be of any use, to myself, or to others. All human activity was useless, but some kinds were more pleasant than others. The Army had taught me that much philosophy. There was no such thing as communication operating over the whole of society. In fact, there was no such thing as society: just a collection of little self-contained boxes, roped untidily together and set adrift to float aimlessly on the waters of time, the occupants of each box convinced that theirs was the most important box, heedless of the claims of the rest. Success did not consist in getting into the box where most power was exercised: there were many people who were powerful and unhappy. Success consisted in determining which box would be most pleasant for you, and getting into it. If you were forced to inhabit an unpleasant box for a time, then you could make it as comfortable as possible until you could get out. Luck or cunning were the most effective attributes in this world, and cunning, though it worked more slowly, was the more reliable. [pp. 196-197]

Trust and obey1

David Lodge's second novel, Ginger, You're Barmy, was first published in England in 1962. "It is," he explained in his introduction to the 1982 edition, "'about' peacetime National Service, as an institution and as an experience—one which most young men born between, say, 1928 and 1941, underwent." (Lodge was born in 1935.) The novel's narrator is Jonathan Browne, who, like Lodge, "was drafted into the Royal Armoured Corps shortly after obtaining [his] B.A. in English Language and Literature at London University." Like almost all of his later novels that I have read, this one too makes pointed use of religious themes:

One Sunday we had a Church parade. I presumed that even the Army would not compel me to attend church, and said so to [Corporal] Baker, with a certain challenging note in my voice which was probably my undoing.
      "You can presume what you fugging² well like," he replied. "You'll parade with the rest of the squad. After the inspection, fall out and report to me. We'll find you something to do while the others are saying their prayers."
      When I reported to him he sent me over to the cookhouse. If there is a God, and if, as some say, He whiles away the long light evenings of eternity devising choice punishments for His creatures, He need not hesitate over selecting my particular hell. It would be an everlasting cookhouse fatigue. By the end of that Sunday I was almost weeping with misery and a sense of injustice. Whereas those on the Church parade were free (relatively speaking) by noon, I slaved all day in that stinking, greasy cookhouse. It was an old building, irremediably dirty: platoons of soldiers could not have scrubbed it clean, though the Cook Sergeant nearly drove me and my companions into the tiled floor in the attempt. I remember kicking a hot water pipe in sheer wretchedness and frustration, and the shudder of disgust that shook me as a swarm of cockroaches scuttled out over the wall. I kicked and kicked at the pipes in a masochistic frenzy until the wall was alive with the repulsive vermin. Then I retched into a nearby sink. I went over to the Cook Sergeant and said pleadingly: "I've just been sick. I feel ill. Can I leave?" He looked at my white face and gave permission with a contemptuous jerk of his head. Blessing him, I staggered weakly back to the hut, and collapsed on to my bed. Mike [Brady, the "Ginger" of the title] was less sympathetic than I expected. "You can now count yourself one of the glorious martyrs for Agnosticism," he said. Percy, sitting on the same bed, laughed. Their visit to church seemed to have put them in good spirits.
      "At the moment I'd cheerfully become a Jehovah's Witness, if it would get me out of cookhouse fatigues," I said savagely.
      "A very good idea," he replied. "Being a Jehovah's Witness would get you out of the Army altogether. They're conscientious objectors."
      "That's the religion for me," I said.
      "My brother-in-law was a Jehovah's Witness, but it didn't get him out of the Army," observed the soldier on the bed opposite to mine...
      "What happened to your brother-in-law then?" inquired Mike.
      "Well, it was in the war, like. And they wouldn't let our Ernie be a conscious objector. But Ernie said he weren't going to put on a bloody uniform no matter what they did. So they sent him to this training depot, and he wouldn't put on his uniform. So they put him in this cell in his underclothes, and threw in his uniform. It were winter, like, and they reckoned he'd be so cold he'd have to put the uniform on."...
      "And did he?"
      "Did he fugg. When they opened the cell next morning our Ernie were still in his underclothes; and on the table were his uniform—all in pieces."
      "What d'you mean, all in pieces?"
      "He'd spent the whole night taking his uniform to pieces. He never tore nothing mind you. He bit through the seams with his teeth. His socks were two balls of wool. He said with a bit more time he would have taken his boots to pieces. He could've too. He was in the boot trade."
      The story pleased us immensely.
      "They should put up a statue to that man," said Mike reverently.
      "What happened to him eventually?" I asked.
      "A few days after they came and told him his ma had been killed by a Jerry bomb. Went fuggin mad he did. Couldn't get his uniform on quick enough. Joined the paratroopers and finished the war with thirteen medals."... [pp. 63-65]

...Badmore [where Browne is stationed to serve out his clerkship] was, and always would be, the despair of any sergeant-major, because the sergeant-major is a man who works in the medium of outward appearance. His object is to make every man look identical, because if all men look alike, they will act alike, and eventually think, or rather, not-think alike. But the sergeant-major must have a basic structure of uniformity to work on. Without this he is like a theologian without dogma. The analogy is not inapposite. A regiment is like a religion. Its dogma governs the way its members wear their lanyards, the angle they wear their berets, the manner in which they perform the movements of drill. As in [Cardinal John Henry] Newman's theory of religious doctrine, developments may occur. It is the responsibility of the sergeant-major, as of the theologian, to control and rationalize such developments, to distinguish genuine developments from heresies, and ruthlessly to suppress the latter.... [p. 70]

"...Now I want you to tell me why you want to be an officer." [Commanding Officer Lieutenant-Colonel Lancing] smiled encouragingly.
      "I feel in rather a false position at the moment, sir," I replied. "Because the fact is I don't want to be an officer." The C.O.'s smile vanished abruptly. I continued: "I told Lieutenant Booth-Henderson last week, but my name appeared on Orders for this interview, and Corporal Baker told me I should attend it."
      ..."Well now, Browne, suppose you tell me why you have changed your mind?"
      ..."Well, sir, I'll be quite frank with you. I don't like the Army. I know I'm stuck with it for two years, but I'm sure I shall continue to dislike it. I don't see how I could possibly be an officer with that point of view. Don't you agree, sir?"
      "What don't you like about the Army?"
      "Almost everything, sir."
      ...The C.O. began to look rather angry.
      "Now look here, I've been in the Army for twenty-five years. You've been in it for four weeks. I think you've got a lot of nerve to sit there and say the Army's all wrong."
      "I'm sorry, sir, I didn't mean to be impertinent. I quite understand that my position must seem inexplicable to you." I began to get into my stride. "I suppose it's my education. I've been encouraged to question everything, to form an independent judgment. In the Army one has to accept orders without questioning them. I feel that if I were to hope to become an officer I would have to give up too many principles."
      "When you're older, Browne, you'll discover that there must be some sort of authority which is obeyed without question...." [pp. 90-92]

_____________

1. The hymn "Trust and Obey" was ingrained into my adolescent head as thoroughly as any other song sung at the Assembly of God Church I attended during the very years of David Lodge's national service. Its words by John H. Sammis (1887) included the refrain:

   Trust and obey, for there’s no other way
   To be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.
         — Courtesy of Moody Bible Institute

2. Lodge noted in the 1982 introduction: "Working within the conventions of the day, I adopted Norman Mailer's expedient, in The Naked and the Dead, of representing the most common of the four-letter words as 'fugg'..."

The new world religion

On the flight with Bernard Walsh and his father to Hawaii (in David Lodge's novel Paradise News) is Rupert Sheldrake, an anthropologist in the field of tourism, who has overheard the Walshes' conversation and approaches Bernard:

"He said you were a theologian."
      "Well, I teach in a theological college."
      "You're not a believer?"
      "No."
      "Ideal," said Sheldrake. "I'm interested in religion myself, obliquely. The thesis of my book is that sightseeing is a substitute for religious ritual. The sightseeing tour as secular pilgrimage. Accumulation of grace by visiting the shrines of high culture. Souvenirs as relics. Guidebooks as devotional aids. You get the picture."
      "Very interesting," said Bernard. "So this is a sort of busman's holiday?" He indicated the Travelwise label on Sheldrake's stainless steel attaché case.
      "Good Lord, no," said Sheldrake with a mirthless smile. "I never go on holiday. That's why I moved into this field in the first place. I always hated holidays, even as a kid. Such a waste of time, sitting on the beach, making sandpies, when you could be at home doing some interesting hobby. Then, when I got engaged, we were both students at the time, my fiancée insisted on dragging me off to Europe to see the sights: Paris, Venice, Florence, the usual things. Bored the pants off me, till one day, sitting on a lump of rock beside the Parthenon, watching the tourists milling about, clicking their cameras, talking to each other in umpteen different languages, it suddenly struck me: tourism is the new world religion. Catholics, Protestants, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists—the one thing they have in common is they all believe in the importance of seeing the Parthenon. Or the Sistine Chapel, or the Eiffel Tower. I decided to make it my PhD subject. Never looked back...." [p. 61]

After visiting the exhibit of "The Unknown Monet: Pastels and Drawings" at The Clark in Williamstown, Massachusetts on Friday, I'd add the works of Claude Monet (1840-1926) to "the sights" that (in some sense) unite people in the visiting. A lily pond behind The Clark:

"Who knows?"

On the penultimate page of David Lodge's novel Paradise News, Bernard reads a quotation from Miguel de Unamuno's The Tragic Sense of Life, sent to him from Hawaii by the woman whose car knocked his father down:

In the most secret recess of the spirit of the man who believes that death will put an end to his personal consciousness and even to his memory forever, in that inner recess, even without his knowing it perhaps, a shadow hovers, a vague shadow lurks, a shadow of a shadow of uncertainty, and while he tells himself: "There is nothing for it but to live this passing life, for there is no other!" at the same time he hears, in his most secret recess, his own doubt murmur: "Who knows?..." He is not sure he hears aright, but he hears.
      Likewise, in some recess of the soul of the true believer who has faith in the future life, a muffled voice, the voice of uncertainty, murmurs in his spirit's ear: "Who knows?..." Perhaps these voices are no louder than the buzzing of mosquitoes when the wind roars through the trees in the woods; we scarcely make out the humming, and yet, mingled with the roar of the storm, it can be heard. How, without this uncertainty, could we ever live? [p. 293 (of Paradise News)]

Sheep and goats

Dedicated to my friend Tom

After looking up at his students to see whether they seemed to be listening [most of them did], Bernard (in David Lodge's novel Paradise News) concludes the term's opening lecture:

"Modern theology therefore finds itself in a classic double bind: on the one hand the idea of a personal God responsible for creating a world with so much evil and suffering in it logically requires the idea of an afterlife in which these things are rectified and compensated for; on the other hand, traditional concepts of the afterlife no longer command intelligent belief, and new ones, like Rahner's, do not capture the popular imagination—indeed, they are incomprehensible to ordinary laypeople. It is not surprising that the focus of modern theology has turned more and more upon the Christian transformation of this life, whether in the form of Bonhoeffer's 'religionless Christianity,' or Tillich's Christian existentialism, or various types of Liberation Theology.
      "But if you purge Christianity of the promise of eternal life (and, let us be honest, the threat of eternal punishment) which traditionally underpinned it, are you left with anything that is distinguishable from secular humanism? One answer is to turn that question around and ask what secular humanism has got that isn't derived from Christianity.
      "There is a passage in Matthew, Chapter 25, which seems particularly relevant here. Matthew is the most explicitly apocalyptic of the synoptic gospels, and this section of it is sometimes referred to by scholars as the Sermon on the End. It concludes with the well-known description of the Second Coming and the Last Judgment:

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, escorted by all the angels, then he will take his seat on the throne of glory. All the nations will be assembled before him and he will separate men one from another as the shepherd separates sheep from goats. He will place the sheep on his right hand and the goats on his left.

Pure myth. But on what grounds does Christ the King separate the sheep from the goats? Not, as you might expect, fervency of religious faith, or orthodoxy of religious doctrine, or regularity of worship, or observance of the Commandments, or indeed anything 'religious' at all.

Then the King will say to those on his right hand, 'Come, you whom my Father has blessed, take for your heritage the kingdom prepared for you since the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you made me welcome, naked and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you came to see me.' Then the virtuous will say to him in reply, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you a stranger and make you welcome, naked and clothe you, sick or in prison and go to see you?' And the King will answer, 'I tell you solemnly, insofar as you did this to the least of these brothers of mine, you did it to me.'

The virtuous seem quite surprised to be saved, or to be saved for this reason, doing good in an unselfish but pragmatic and essentially this-worldly sort of way. It's as if Jesus left this essentially humanist message knowing that one day all the supernatural mythology in which it was wrapped would have to be discarded."
      Bernard caught the eye of one of the nuns, and essayed an impromptu joke: "It's almost as if someone tipped him off." The nun reddened, and dropped her eyes. [pp. 282-283]

__________________
Disclaimer: I acknowledge that I don't have the right to publish long excerpts from copyrighted work (such as the novels of David Lodge). I console myself with the thought that I have so few readers—a few friends—I can hardly be said to be "publishing" anything. It's more like calling the friend over to my reading chair and saying, "Come here, look over my shoulder. What do you think of this?"

In doubt about where we end out

Back in Rummidge from his trip to Hawaii, Bernard (in David Lodge's novel Paradise News) is giving the term's opening lecture, which might be titled "End Doubts":

"Traditional Christianity was essentially teleological and apocalyptic. It presented both individual and collective human life as a linear plot moving towards an End, followed by timelessness: death, judgment, hell, and heaven. This life was a preparation for eternal life, which alone gave this life meaning. To the question, 'Why did God make you?' the Catechism answered, 'God made me to know him, love him, and serve him in this world, and to be happy with him for ever in the next.' But the concepts and images of this next world which have come down to us in Christian teaching no longer have any credibility for thoughtful, educated men and women. The very idea of an afterlife for individual human beings has been regarded with scepticism and embarrassment—or silently ignored—by nearly every major twentieth-century theologian. Bultmann, Barth, Bonhoeffer, Tillich, for example, even the Jesuit Karl Rahner, all dismissed traditional notions of personal survival after death. For Bultmann, the concept of 'translation to a heavenly world of light, in which the self is destined to receive a heavenly vesture, a spiritual body,' was 'not merely incomprehensible by any rational process' but 'totally meaningless'....
      "Of course, there are still many Christians who believe fervently, even fanatically, in an anthropomorphic afterlife, and there are many more who would like to believe in it. Nor is there any shortage of Christian pastors eager to encourage them, some sincerely, some, like the TV evangelists of America, with more dubious motives. Fundamentalism has flourished precisely on the eschatological scepticism of responsible theology, so that the most active and popular forms of Christianity today are also those which are the most intellectually impoverished. The same seems to be true of other great world religions. In this, as in so many other areas of twentieth century life, the lines of W. B. Yeats hit the nail on the head:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

                                          [pp. 280-281]

[The conclusion of the lecture will be posted tomorrow under "Sheep and goats."]
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Disclaimer: I acknowledge that I don't have the right to publish long excerpts from copyrighted work (such as the novels of David Lodge). I console myself with the thought that I have so few readers—a few friends—I can hardly be said to be "publishing" anything. It's more like calling the friend over to my reading chair and saying, "Come here, look over my shoulder. What do you think of this?"

Bernard's personal revelation

Bernard (in David Lodge's Paradise News) continues to write into his journal the story that he regrets not having told his friend:

You don't have to go very deep into the philosophy of religion to discover that it is impossible either to prove or to disprove the truth of any religious proposition. For rationalists, materialists, logical positivists, etc., that is a sufficient reason for dismissing the entire subject from serious consideration. But to believers a non-disprovable God is almost as good as a provable God, and self-evidently better than No God at all, since without God there is no encouraging answer to the perennial problems of evil, misfortune, and death. The circularity of theological discourse, which uses revelation to apprehend a God for whose existence there is no evidence outside revelation (pace Aquinas), does not trouble the believer, for belief itself is outside the theological game, it is the arena in which the theological game is played. It is a gift, the gift of faith, something you acquire or have thrust upon you, through baptism or on the road to Damascus. Whitehead said that God is not the great exception to all metaphysical principles to save them from collapse, but unfortunately, from a philosophical point of view, that is exactly what He is, and Whitehead never found a convincing argument to the contrary.
      So everything depends on belief. Grant the existence of a personal God, the Father, and the whole body of Catholic doctrine hangs together reasonably well. Grant that, and you can bat all day. Grant that, and you can afford to have a few mental reservations about the odd doctrine—the existence of Hell, say, or the Assumption of the Virgin Mary—without feeling insecure in your faith. And that was what I did, precisely—I took my belief for granted. I didn't seriously question it, or closely examine it. It defined me. It explained why I was who I was, doing what I did, teaching theology to seminarians. I didn't discover that my belief had gone until I left the seminary. [pp. 149-150]
      All the radical demythologizing theology that I had spent most of my life resisting suddenly seemed self-evidently true. Christian orthodoxy was a mixture of myth and metaphysics that made no kind of sense in the modern, post-Enlightenment world except when understood historically and interpreted metaphorically. Jesus, insofar as we could disentangle his real identity from the midrash of the early Gospel-writers, was clearly a remarkable man, with uniquely valuable (but enigmatic, very enigmatic) wisdom to impart, infinitely more interesting than comparable apocalyptic zealots who were characteristic of that period of Jewish history; and the story of his crucifixion (though not historically verifiable) was moving and inspiring. But the supernatural machinery of the story—the idea that he was God, "sent" by himself as Father from heaven to earth, born of a virgin, that he rose from the dead and returned to heaven, from whence he would return again on the last day to judge the living and the dead, etc., well, that too had its grandeur and symbolic force as a narrative, but it was no more credible than most of the other myths and legends about divinities that proliferated in the Mediterranean and Middle East at the same time.
      So here I was, an atheist priest, or at least an agnostic one. And I didn't dare to tell anyone.... [p. 154-154]

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Disclaimer: I acknowledge that I don't have the right to publish long excerpts from copyrighted work (such as the novels of David Lodge). I console myself with the thought that I have so few readers—a few friends—I can hardly be said to be "publishing" anything. It's more like calling the friend over to my reading chair and saying, "Come here, look over my shoulder. What do you think of this?"

The "paradise news"

In Chapter I of Part Two of Paradise News, David Lodge reveals what I think is the theological reference of his novel's title. Bernard has just returned from dinner with the woman who was driving the car that knocked his father down. He feels that he behaved clumsily and churlishly, having listened to her story but not having told her his. In a journal he has begun to keep in Hawaii, he writes, "I should have repaid her confidence. I should have told her the whole story. Something like this:

...My role [as a pastor] was clearly designated, "supernatural reassurance." They looked to the Church to provide a spiritual dimension to lives outwardly indistinguishable from those of their secular neighbours...They wanted me to marry them, to baptize their children, to comfort them in bereavement, and to relieve them from the fear of death. They wanted me to reassure them that if they were not as prosperous and successful as they might have wished, or if their spouses deserted them, or their children went off the rails, or they were stricken with fatal illnesses, it wasn't the end, it wasn't a reason to despair, there was another place, another time out of time, where everything would be compensated for, justice done, pain and loss made good, and we would all live happily ever after.
      That, after all, is what the language of the Mass promised them every Sunday....
      This has always been the basic appeal of Christianity—and no wonder. The vast majority of human lives in history have not been long, happy, and fulfilled....It explains why Christianity spread so rapidly among the poor and underprivileged, the conquered and the enslaved, in the Roman Empire of the first century....The appeal of the Gospel message, though, remains essentially the same. The Good News is news of eternal life, Paradise news...." [pp. 144, 151-153]

[More of the story Bernard would have told his friend in Hawaii will be posted tomorrow under "Bernard's personal revelation."]
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Disclaimer: I acknowledge that I don't have the right to publish long excerpts from copyrighted work (such as the novels of David Lodge). I console myself with the thought that I have so few readers—a few friends—I can hardly be said to be "publishing" anything. It's more like calling the friend over to my reading chair and saying, "Come here, look over my shoulder. What do you think of this?"

Religion X 3.0

Thursday on C-Span I saw part of a speech by Irshad Manji^*, talking about her book The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith. If I understood her, she holds that Islam is essentially a benign religion, but it has been applied in tyrannous ways by particular individuals or regimes. Her web site suggests examples:

• the inferior treatment of women in Islam [she gave some horrific examples in her speech];
• the Jew-bashing that so many Muslims persistently engage in; and
• the continuing scourge of slavery in countries ruled by Islamic regimes.

Hearing how passionately Manji could criticize Islam "from within" reminded me how little Muslims generally condemn abhorrent acts by other Muslims.

In Wednesday's New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman wrote:

Of course, not all Muslims are terrorists. But it's been widely noted that virtually all suicide terrorists today are Muslims. Angry Norwegians aren't doing this—nor are starving Africans or unemployed Mexicans. Muslims have got to understand that a death cult has taken root in the bosom of their religion, feeding off it like a cancerous tumor.

This cancer is erasing basic norms of civilization. In Iraq, we've seen suicide bombers blow up funerals and schools. In England, seven out of the eight people detained in the latest plot are Muslim doctors or medical students. Doctors plotting mass murder? Could that be? If Muslim leaders don't remove this cancer—and only they can—it will spread, tainting innocent Muslims and poisoning their relations with each other and the world.

Irshad Manji seems to be working hard toward excising the cancer (and placing herself in mortal danger, having received numerous death threats).

I wonder why not many Muslims are heard on this. Do they imagine that just because these suicide terrorists (and those who run them) are Muslims it doesn't follow that they are in any way acting in the name of Islam? Just statistically there would seem to be some critical Islamic correlation. Are Muslims afraid to condemn what I call religious tyranny within their communities because they feel that in doing so they would be perceived as apologizing for Islam itself? Muslims seem to love their religion assertively, if not aggressively. Perhaps they don't think it needs to be apologized for? One of the tenets of Islam, as I understand it, is that it offers God's final and finest word to mankind. To Muslims, Muhammad was God's Final Messenger, after all. Or, as Friedman cleverly puts it:

Two trends are at work [in the Muslim failure to condemn atrocities committed by Muslims]: humiliation and atomization. Islam's self-identity is that it is the most perfect and complete expression of God's monotheistic message, and the Koran is God's last and most perfect word. To put it another way, young Muslims are raised on the view that Islam is God 3.0. Christianity is God 2.0. Judaism is God 1.0. And Hinduism and all others are God 0.0.

One of the factors driving Muslim males, particularly educated ones, into these acts of extreme, expressive violence is that while they were taught that they have the most perfect and complete operating system, every day they're confronted with the reality that people living by God 2.0, God 1.0, and God 0.0 are generally living much more prosperously, powerfully, and democratically than those living under Islam. This creates a real dissonance and humiliation. How could this be? Who did this to us? The Crusaders! The Jews! The West! It can never be something that they failed to learn, adapt to, or build. This humiliation produces a lashing out.

I'm willing to accept, pending my continuing reading of the Qur'an, that Islam is, at its core, benign, even actively benevolent—as I'm willing to accept the same of Christianity and Judaism.

The trouble, it seems to me, is that when a particular religion, however fine in its pure form, is put into practice, it rarely remains pure. Depending on the purity of heart of the practitioner, the religion is subject to all manner of abuses (such as in the three areas Manji lists for Islam). Vile men intent on owning women as property are not likely to practice Islam benignly.

Or as the novelist David Lodge adduces in Paradise News, speaking of the mainland Christians who decimated the Hawaiian islanders:

We got talking [Bernard writes in his journal of his champagne conversation with the woman who knocked his father down with her car] about the permissive sexual mores of the ancient Polynesians, which Yolande described as "the kind of sexual Utopia we were all pursuing in the sixties—free love and nudity and communal childrearing. Only with them it wasn't a pose, they really lived it. Until the haoles came along with their hang ups and bibles and diseases." The sailors gave the beautiful amorous women of Hawaii the pox, and the missionaries made them wear muu-muus even in the sea so they sat about in damp clothes and caught cold. In seventy years the population of the island declined from 300,000 to 50,000.... [Well, decimation more than eight times over! p. 186]

Insofar as practitioners of any religion—call it "Religion X"—say that they are only doing what Religion X commands its true followers to do, Religion X even in its pure, presumably benign form sooner or later gets a lot of bad raps. People who don't follow Religion X might be tempted to write it off as an "evil religion" (as Sam Harris, for example, writes off Islam in The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason). And the more or less benign followers of Religion X are put in the position of appearing to criticize it if they come out against the perverse acts of those who use it malignantly. But perhaps they must come out, if they are to preserve the core goodness of their religion and avoid an ugly backlash among non-followers who would condemn the whole religion for its tyrannous misuses.
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I had never heard of Ms. Manji before, but I was impressed by her articulate speech, as I am by this information about her on her web site:

[She] travels the globe to lecture about the liberal reformation of Islam. Her audiences include Amnesty International, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the United Nations Press Corps, the Democratic Muslims of Denmark, the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, the International Women’s Forum, the Swedish Defense Research Agency, the Pentagon, the Jean Jacques Rousseau Institute, and universities from Cambridge to the President Clinton School of Public Service.

God the cosmic lover

One of the things I especially like about the David Lodge novel I'm reading now (Paradise News) is its central character, Bernard Walsh. He, like me, tends to be skeptical (or "sceptical"):

There weren't many jobs for sceptical theologians, and St John's College [in Lodge's own Yoknapatawpha County of Rummidge, England] had given him one. It was only part-time, admittedly, but he had hopes that it might eventually become full-time, and meanwhile they allowed him to live in one of the student rooms in the College, which saved him a lot of trouble and expense.
      He returned to his room and made the narrow, iron-framed bed, which he had left untidily rumpled in his eagerness to get out to the travel agency. He sat at his desk and took out his notes on a book about process theology he was reviewing for Eschatological Review. The God of process theology, he read, is the cosmic lover. "His transcendence is in His sheer faithfulness to Himself in love, in His inexhaustibility as lover, and in His capacity for endless adaptation to circumstances in which His love may be active." Really? Who says? The theologian says. And who cares, apart from other theologians? Not the people choosing their holidays from the travel agent's brochures. Not the drivers of the car transporters. It often seemed to Bernard that the discourse of much modern radical theology was just as implausible and unfounded as the orthodoxy it had displaced, but nobody had noticed because nobody read it except those with a professional stake in its continuation. [emphasis mine, p. 29]

My sensitivity to the final sentence—about nobody's reading stuff like Bernard is reading—had been heightened by my having just read Maliha's meditation on futile reading in her post of Friday...and by my uncomfortable awareness that the observation applies to the blabble that I write here about religion and other matters.

No-sweat terrorism

I've begun to read my seventh or eighth David Lodge novel in the past two or three months. (I've lost count.) This one's Paradise News, and it's set in Hawaii. But I'm still in the airport in London watching the passengers board:

"What do they see in it, eh? What do they see in it?"
      Leslie Pearson, Senior Representative (Airport Reception) of Travelwise Tours plc, surveys the passengers swarming in the Departures Concourse of Heathrow's Terminal Four with an expression of mingled pity and contempt. It is mid-morning in the high summer season and, adding to the normal congestion, there is a security alert in operation, because of a recent plane crash thought to have been caused by sabotage. (Three different terrorist organizations have claimed responsibility, which means that at least two of them are trying to obtain a reputation for indiscriminate murder without exerting themselves....) [emphasis of classic David Lodge wit mine; p. 3]

Paradise News was published in 1991, not that terrorism (and lazy terrorists) haven't been with us a whole lot longer than ten years before 9-11-2001.

Some more of the story

I meant to add to yesterday's post, apropos the scene on the train in David's Lodge's semi-autobiographical novel Out of the Shelter, that my own traveling wet dream occurred when I was a few years older than Timothy Young. And I was on an airplane rather than a train. I don't think I had to change planes in Chicago, and the seat next to me came to be taken by a young woman who boarded there. She wasn't much older than I and—if my memory is not playing tricks on me, for how could I possibly really remember now?—her name was Arlette Blake. Anyway, she was friendly and attractive and it was clear from our conversation that I could fall in love with her, if I hadn't already. At length we joined the rest of the passengers in sleep over the Atlantic toward Reykjavik. When I awoke in the morning, the stain on my tan trousers, though unsettling, didn't embarrass me (I seem to remember) as much as it might have.

Out of the shelter

Growing up, a wise man once told me, requires that we cut the symbolic umbilical cord that binds us to our parents. We have to leave the shelter. In David's Lodge's early work, his semi-autobiographical novel Out of the Shelter, "the shelter" stands not only for that, but also for the literal bomb shelters that Lodge (and the book's hero, Timothy Young) experienced in London during World War II. While this work was not as easy to get into as Lodge's subsequent novels that I've read, I soon found myself identifying so much with Timothy's growing up that I have become fully engaged. At fourteen (in 1949), Timothy is on holiday at the beach with his parents:

There seemed to be nothing much to do except mooch about the pier playing the pinball machines. In one part of the pier they had machines that you looked into to see pictures of bare women. He walked past them every day, longing to have a look, but afraid that people would stare, or his parents come past by chance. One afternoon when there weren't many people about and his parents were listening to a concert at the bandstand, he sidled up to one of the machines, inserted a penny, and pressed his face to the viewer. The machine whirred and a succession of faded sepia photographs flicked past, depicting young women larking about on swings and seesaws. It was true that they were bare, but the parts you wanted to see had been blanked out. The hairstyles reminded him of snaps of his mother and her friends when she was young, in the album at home. He left the pier feeling both guilty and cheated, and went to sit on the beach.... [pp. 42-43]

And two years later, on a train going to visit his sister in Heidelberg:

The train picked up speed. The percussion of its wheels drummed in his ears, shifting in rhythm and resonance as it clattered over points and rumbled across bridges. He rolled and swayed unresistingly with its motion. He was dimly conscious that people were stepping over him, but he did not bother to move. It was the schoolgirls, going to the lavatory again. They stepped over him in a steady procession and he looking up under their skirts, at their dark blue knickers, with handkerchiefs tucked under the elastic. The girl with the black pony-tail had no knickers on. Unable to move forward, she straddled him, and he saw all the smooth pearl pink fissured wedge of flesh between her thighs and a delicious warmth welled up inside him and spilled over.... [p. 82]

Ah, those adolescent desires and fantasies!

Divine Aporia

I have long regretted that I didn't study much classical rhetoric in college. My knowledge of technical terms in poetics and prosody has barely kept me afloat as I've tried to tread water reading literary essays and criticism. So my interest was piqued last October when a young Hollywood screenwriter suggested I look at M. H. Abrams's Glossary of Literary Terms. And I've since discovered Chapel Hill's own English Professor William Harmon's Handbook to Literature. Not bedside reading for everyone, but I delight in both books.

This morning I had occasion to look up a technical term in Harmon, for last night I came across a passage in David Lodge's Nice Work that seemed to bear on my recent infatuation with seminal contradictions and their seeming to provide a ground for the concepts of "believing all things" and "all things are possible"—which, for me, are admirably expressed by Howard Nemerov's short poem that I am fond of citing¹.

Robyn Penrose's term of shadowing Vic Wilcox under the Industrial Year Shadow Scheme has come to an end, but an inspired Vic has wangled an extension of the program by which he will now shadow Robyn. In the first of Robyn's tutorials that he will observe, the discussion has turned to a line from Tennyson's "Locksley Hall" whose use of the word "grooves" seems to defy interpretation: "Let the great world spin for ever, the ringing grooves of change."

"It's an aporia," said Robyn. "A kind of accidental aporia, a figure of undecidable ambiguity, irresolvable contradiction. We know Tennyson intended an allusion to railways, and, as Helen said, we can't erase that knowledge...But we also know that railway trains don't run in grooves, and nothing that does run in grooves seems metaphorically adequate to the theme. As Simon says, trams aren't very poetic. So the reader's mind is continually baffled in its efforts to make sense of the line." [p. 243]

I turned to Harmon for more²:

Aporia: A difficulty, impasse, or point of doubt and indecision. Used to describe a species of irony in which a speaker expresses uncertainty but intends none, as in this sentence: "I don't know what scares me more—your stupidity or your dishonesty." Aporia has also been used by recent critics to indicate a point of "undecidability" in a text, which indicates the site at which the text most obviously dismantles or deconstructs itself.

I muse whether "God" intended the irony implicit in the seminal contradictions of the Cosmos (freedom, for example). The overarching "divine aporia" seems to be that in dismantling and deconstructing itself, Being creates and constructs all, including in the food chain and the inexorable opposition of Good and Evil, not to mention another that affects us all: the fact that because we were born we will also die.
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1. "Creation Myth on a Moebius Band":

   The world's just mad enough to have been made
   By the Being his beings into Being prayed.

2. Fifth edition of A Handbook to Literature. New York: Macmillan, 1986.