But the newspapers don’t tend to see what remained the same in Fr. Neuhaus. Through it all, and more than anything else, he was a pastor. All his many, many projects grew out of his deep faith in Christ, and of his drive to give others the gift of joy, hope, and freedom that Christ had given him. He believed deeply that we are all made in God’s image for freedom and relationship, and so as a young man he marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma for civil rights, and as an older man he dedicated himself to the struggle to ensure that every American child is welcomed into life and protected in law. He saw no contradiction between these two stands; for him, they were the same thing. As he saw it, as American progressives began to embrace abortion on demand, it wasn’t he that abandoned the Left; it was they that left him.

If he changed his mind about some things — and many times, he did — it was because of his love of the truth, which was inseparable from his love of Christ. All his life, especially in his writing, Neuhaus embodied the classic Catholic synthesis of faith and reason. I have never known a person who read so eclectically and deeply, whose mind was so fascinated by discovery, who so delighted in ferreting out and endlessly arguing over what was true. Fr. Neuhaus published dozens of books and millions of words in his long career, taking on all comers in the endless, rambunctious conversation that was his life.

That was at the heart of Richard John Neuhaus — his boundless hope, joy, and faith in Christ, his Savior and Lord. He inspired countless souls during his life, many of whom I joined at his standing-room only funeral last week in New York. I was there because one of the lives he touched was mine. This journal owes its existence to him, and I owe him much more. He was a pastor and a writer, an intellectual and a fighter, and in the year I worked for him at First Things, I had the honor of becoming his friend. Knowing him was an unexpected and altogether unlikely gift, just like his life, and just like he knew God’s gift of life and the wonder of this world to be. He counted it all a blessing, and I learned to as well. He taught me what joy it is to spend a lifetime witnessing to the truth and the hope of Christ, and I will carry that with me so long as I live. Rest in peace, Father. I hope to be half the witness you were.

Unfortunately for Dawkins, his book is not quite so unanswerable as he imagines it to be. Granted, his friend Steven Pinker liked it-”Read this book,” he challenged on the dust jacket, “and see if you can counter Dawkins’s arguments”-but aside from a few others, such as Penn and Teller, it has met with an overwhelmingly negative response. So much so, in fact, that the New York Times saw fit to publish an article about how many negative reviews there were (March 3, 2007). Left, right, and center, philosophers and scientists alike lined up: Thomas Nagel in the New Republic, Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books, others in the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, National Review, Harper’s, First Things, Books & Culture, and so on. As it turns out, there are a lot of people who were able to counter Dawkins’s arguments quite well indeed – which, to be quite honest, should not have surprised anyone, because the arguments are simply not very good.

In my opinion, that is a shame. Many atheists today have genuinely interesting arguments against God’s existence-such as, for example, the Harvard literary critic James Wood. Thoughtful religious believers today cannot honestly go without butting their heads against Ivan Karamasov’s classic presentation of the problem of suffering (although Dostoyevsky himself was a Christian), or without wrestling against the world-weary skepticism of Montaigne and Hume. Modern-day giants of science, philosophy, and literature such as Wittgenstein, Einstein, Hoyle, Habermas, Graham Greene, T.S. Eliot, and William James have taken up the question of God with great depth and profundity. Such questions make up a large portion of the patrimony of Western civilization, and a serious contribution to the discussion from a scientist of Dawkins’s prominence would have been most welcome.

Sadly, Richard Dawkins seems not to care a whit about any such thing. Many reviewers have pointed out, and I will also, the surpassing incongruity between his excellent popular science work and his deeply shallow, prejudiced, middlebrow, and poorly reasoned anti-religion oeuvre. I am admittedly no more than an amateur myself, but Dawkins again and again made errors of fact and logic that made my head hurt. Terry Eagleton put it best: “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Dawkins on theology.” And commenting on Dawkins’s philosophical skills, H. Allen Orr in the New York Review was no kinder: “[Dawkins] suffers from several problems when attempting to reason philosophically,” he wrote. “The most obvious is that he has a preordained set of conclusions at which he’s determined to arrive. Consequently, Dawkins uses any argument, however feeble, that seems to get him there and the merit of various arguments appears judged largely by where they lead.”

It is all more than a little strange. In fact, there are so many things wrong with the book that it is hard to know where to begin. The central problem, however, I think can be summed up this way: Dawkins thinks that he has written a book using science and reason, but instead wound up writing a book filled with pseudoscience and angry rhetoric, containing no more than a dash of real science and logic thrown in now and then for seasoning. Dawkins exhibits almost no knowledge of theology and philosophy of religion, and what little he does know is deeply distorted by his own anti-religious prejudice. The sad result is that Dawkins has allowed himself to write a deeply unscientific and irrational book, in which straw men are set up over and over again, each time to be mowed down by bullying rhetoric and insult that desperately attempt to conceal the hand-waving and flawed arguments buried beneath.

What’s even stranger, Dawkins doesn’t even seem to realize the contradiction between what he says and what he does. Dawkins apparently thinks that “Reason” is some sort of unproblematic, disembodied tool that can be wrested from particular human perspectives, desires, and power-plays. At least, such is his claim-after which he goes on to fill page after page with burning invective, one-sided argument, and moral preening. It is the sort of thing that postmodernists eat for breakfast. For all its excesses, postmodernist thought was quite right to point out the way in which rhetorical power-plays often hide under the guise of disinterested dialectic, meaning that what goes by the name of “reason” often is not much more than the attempt to justify what one already believes or wants to be true. If Dawkins had the slightest amount of sympathy for the insights of postmodernism, he might have been a bit more wary of trumpeting the virtue of Voltaire and Jeffersonian enlightenment reason. As it is, The God Delusion is a veritable textbook example of everything postmodernism rightly decries, and likely has already been pounced upon by countless Kuhnian skeptics looking for one more reason to look askance upon all the works and all the ways of modern science.

But, for what it’s worth, I would like to hope that it remains possible to have a rational discussion about religion here at Harvard. My experience with this over four years-with students, although not always with professors-was actually quite good, and one of the most stimulating parts of my college education. So at the very least, although Dawkins himself has sadly not added much to the debate, I think there are several of his points that might make for worthwhile discussion.

First, we can examine Dawkins’s central argument, which can be summed up as follows: Darwinian evolution has expunged any hint of design, or telos, from the universe, and hence has rendered exceedingly improbable (or at least unnecessary) the notion that a creator-God exists. Formerly, Dawkins says, people thought that something like a God must lay behind the enormous complexity of the universe, but now that we have been met with Darwin’s argument for how complex organic life evolved from simpler forms of organic life, we ought no longer to suppose that anything complex in the universe did not do the same.

That’s a fair summary, I think. Now, to begin with, it can’t be denied that this sort of reasoning has had a great deal of influence on thoughtful people over the last century or so. When Darwin first proposed his theory of evolution, it was almost immediately seized upon by Anglican intellectuals in England as threatening to religion, and so was treated as such. Non-religious figures such as T. H. Huxley and H. G. Wells agreed, but took the opposite tack and started to convince a fair number of people that Darwinism meant religion could not be true. And, for better or for worse-in my opinion, much for the worse-the argument has stayed the same ever since, with Huxley and Wells replaced by Dawkins and Pinker, and with any number of fundamentalists jostling for the role of Bishop Wilberforce and William Jennings Bryan.

The sad thing is that, in a number of ways, the whole argument is something of a red herring. In reality, biological evolution does not really do what people like Dawkins and Bryan think it does-e.g., provide an all-encompassing explanation of the natural world, human experience, morality, and religion. In fact it is quite limited in scope. Evolution provides a splendid explanation for how species change into other species: Over time, they adapt to their environment by means of genetic heritability and random mutation. Theodosius Dobzhansky was quite right when he said that “Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution.” Evolution is an elegant and productive theory, without which numerous scientific advances would not have happened.

But for all that, it does not do anything to explain how organic life came about, or how DNA (the necessary foundation upon which evolution is built) came to be in the first place. Evolution does not say how the universe itself was created, or how the astonishing array of molecular, astronomical, and atmospheric constants necessary for life to exist (e.g., the “anthropic” problem, classically set forth by Fred Hoyle) combined as they did. Evolution does not do any of those things because it never set out to do such things in the first place. Arguably, evolution does not work very well to explain things such as consciousness, intentionality, language, morality, music, beauty, or love either. Consequently, although people like Dawkins and Pinker try valiantly, they have never quite produced arguments that explain such things without explaining them away.

Dawkins of course considers the argument against telos his specialty, and so he attempts to solve the anthropic problem at great length. For Dawkins, the answer is really quite simple: Let us say, he muses, that there are a billion billion planets in the universe, and that the odds of organic life appearing on any of them are a billion to one. That means that life would have appeared on a billion planets, of which Earth is only one. Not so improbable after all!

Of course, this is absurd. No chemist or physicist thinks that the probability of life appearing is even close to anything as high as a billion to one. Dawkins may as well be pulling numbers out of a hat. He seems to realize this a few pages on in the chapter, where he evokes the notion of innumerable parallel universes, of which we live in only one, which just so happens to be the one in which we live – e.g., the one that contains life. And since we are here, Dawkins argues, the anthropic problem clearly isn’t problematic after all, and so we don’t have to worry about it.

Now, there very well may be other universes, but I can’t possibly imagine how I would know anything about them-here, Dawkins has ventured beyond science and into speculation. And the logical move of eliminating the anthropic problem by in effect avoiding it is a neat trick, but it manages to bypass the central question altogether.

The philosopher John Leslie (whom Dawkins mentions) illustrates the problem with this sort of reasoning quite well. Imagine, he says, a man sentenced to death by a ten-man firing squad, who at the moment of execution finds to his great relief that all ten shots have missed. Why, he wonders, did they all miss? Did they all plan to miss on purpose? Was there a last-minute stay of the execution? Did a friend tamper with the rifles? All of these questions seem eminently reasonable. But for Dawkins, the best answer would be something like: “Well, I’m here, aren’t I? So obviously, there isn’t much of a question after all.”

Now, one is free, of course, to adopt Dawkins’s bizarrely head-in-the-sand attitude toward the origin of life and the nature of the universe. But for those more inclined to sympathize with the lucky fellow who wondered why his executioners all missed, there are any number of questions that ought to be explored. And this means that the argument from telos, or design, is actually not quite as dead as Dawkins supposes it to be. Thomas Nagel, emphasizing the puzzle posed by the appearance of DNA, puts it quite well:

At this point the origin of life remains, in light of what is known about the huge size, the extreme specificity, and the exquisite functional precision of the genetic material, a mystery-an event that could not have occurred by chance and to which no significant probability can be assigned on the basis of what we know of the laws of physics and chemistry. Yet we know that it happened. That is why the argument from design is still alive.

And it is, in short, why Dawkins’s attempt fails. As Nagel points out, the anthropic problem is an enormous philosophical conundrum, the solution to which is up for debate. But if sensible answers exist – contra Dawkins – it is quite safe to assume that the answer will have to come from somewhere other than biological evolution.

There is more to Dawkins’s book, of course-in length, if perhaps not in substance. Quite frequently, he makes the assertion that the invocation of a creator-God explains nothing, since then the existence of God would have to be explained. In order to create the organized complexity of the universe, Dawkins claims, such a God would have to be just as complex and then some. But the existence of such a being is exceedingly improbable, he says: Where did God come from in the first place?

It is an odd question, a bit like asking the color of Wednesday. As many reviewers have pointed out, Dawkins seems to think that when Christians speak of God, they mean some sort of super-smart ultra-complex inhabitant of the natural world, a cross between Zeus and Inspector Gadget. But that is not what Christians mean at all. Christians at least mean by God an infinite, transcendent, and eternal Being, ground of all that is, outside of time and space but active in both. It simply does not make sense to ask when eternity began, or to inquire as to what made infinity. And yet, both ideas are necessary. If anything exists at all-and obviously, we do indeed exist-then something or other had to have been around forever. Whatever that was, it certainly wasn’t us, and given what we know of the Big Bang, it doesn’t seem to have been the universe, either. Hence eternity and infinity, and hence the inference of some sort of Being that transcends the universe. It seems to be necessary in order for us to exist. Of course, thinking about such things long enough will make one’s head spin, and I am far from an expert. But thoughts like these have led many a physicist and astronomer to questions of God, and a good number of them to religion. It is more than a little disappointing that Dawkins seems not to even understand the question.

But enough with Dawkins’s attempts at philosophy. Such as they are, I can only imagine that they are motivated by a very strong prejudice against religion. And indeed, Dawkins makes no secret of the fact that he thinks religion to be the root of all sorts of evil, without which the world would be a far more rational and peaceful place. It is a common complaint these days, especially after the September 11 attacks. But there is, I would contend, no very compelling reason to think (along with John Lennon) that if religion suddenly vanished from the world, mankind’s deep-seated tribal animosity, vindictiveness, prejudice, superstition, greed, selfishness, power-lust, and penchant for violence would suddenly up and disappear. Indeed, if anything, the 20th century’s experiments in secularism ought to have made us wonder if precisely the opposite is true. As so-called “scientific” eugenics, the threat of nuclear technology, and Stalinism ought to have shown us humanity is quite capable of evil and destruction without any help from religion.

Neither does it help to assert that it is “dogma” and “belief,” not just organized religion, that is to blame. Unless we are all to become nihilist epicures-like Nietzsche’s last men, without hope or passion, satisfying our bellies and waiting for death-it seems that some sort of belief is desirable. Indeed, it appears that human societies cannot go without belief in something or other-as the historian Michael Burleigh has shown in his magisterial Sacred Causes, the decline of traditional religion in Europe left a gap that unfortunately was filled for many by Nazism and Communism. (Hannah Arendt, in her Origins of Totalitarianism, said likewise.) The trouble then is not with belief, since that seems to go along with human culture. Rather, the trouble is the content of that belief.

That, in the end, is the conversation that truly matters. And it is a conversation that, without any help from Dawkins, is already taking place among many thoughtful people, religious and non-religious alike. Dawkins seems to think that religion is a sort of reason-free zone, where people can do nothing but endlessly spout off about whatever superstitious version of fundamentalism they hold to. But for most Christians, such a notion appears quite odd. Pope Benedict XVI, in a recent lecture delivered at the University of Regensburg, held that faith is and must be congruent with reason. In so doing, he was saying nothing more than what the church had always taught. As classically expressed by Thomas Aquinas, Christians think that human reason can arrive at a great deal of truth, but cannot come on its own steam to certain truths about the nature of God. Revelation, then, consists of the particular truths about God’s self that God chooses to reveal to mankind-which, once known, prove to make sense given what we knew from natural reason all along. It is a bit like running into a roadblock while puzzling over the answer to a math problem, and then having a friend point out the part you were wrong about. For Christians, faith doesn’t destroy reason, but instead illumines and fulfills it.

This enlarged view of reason inspired Aquinas to pore through the wisdom of the ancient Greeks and the Muslim world, much of which he wound up incorporating into his own thought. For Benedict XVI, that is precisely the model for religious and philosophical discussion in today’s world – careful, respectful, and reasonable dialogue, rather than violent attack or irrational diatribe. One hopes that Dawkins will decide to join in, and sooner rather than later.

There is more to be said, but only space for two final points. First, it must be pointed out that Dawkins’s discussion of the Bible is no better than the rest of his book. “I respect an honest fundamentalist,” he writes, but if anyone should suggest that the Bible might perhaps be honestly viewed by Christians as an inspired yet variegated document that cannot simply be interpreted without a view of the whole, Dawkins seems to think there is some kind of trick involved-for him, it is either full-stop literalism or nothing.

Of course, some Christians do read Scripture this way, but most do not. Most Christians think that the Old Testament is a record of God’s progressive self-revelation to a specific people group, the Jews, some of which demonstrates extraordinary religious insight and truth (for instance, the Ten Commandments and the books of Isaiah and Amos) and some of which shows how much at early stages they had yet to learn. As for the New Testament, Christians think that it contains a faithful record of the life and teachings of Christ, in which the whole of Scripture is illuminated and by which the church itself is constituted and judged. There is no contradiction in saying that the ancient Jews understood God better as time went along (the entire Talmud is witness to this), or that God’s unique self-revelation in Christ provides the Church with the standard for its biblical interpretation.

Neither does Dawkins’s selective use of biblical scholarship prove helpful. When it suits him, Dawkins quotes various scholars in an attempt to “prove” the New Testament’s inaccuracy and moral culpability. He does not seem to realize that much of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century German historical-critical scholarship of which he approves was by and large an exercise in anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic prejudice, in which anything that smacked of Judaism or Catholicism was dismissed as “unhistorical,” thus leading to a view of Jesus that looked suspiciously like a nineteenth-century German liberal Protestant. Some of this foolishness persists today (not least in the work of John Shelby Spong and his historical-critical kind), but thankfully a great deal of it has been surpassed. If Dawkins had earnestly engaged with Church fathers such as Augustine and Origen (no biblical literalists they) or the best of modern biblical scholarship from places such as Cambridge, Durham, St. Andrew’s, Yale, and Duke, his discussion might have been more than an extended exercise in prejudice.

Finally, it is worth noting that what is missing in Dawkins’s rather emaciated view of Christianity – as well as in the view of people like Sam Harris and Steven Pinker – is any serious reflection on the central message of Christianity, which is that God has revealed himself to the world as a God of beauty, peace, joy, forgiveness, and love. To my mind, it is here that sociobiologists like Dawkins and Pinker are at their most unsatisfying. Love, to their way of thinking, is always something of an illusion underwritten by an ultimate selfishness-kin favoritism in service of genetic propagation, or reciprocal you-scratch-my-back-if-I-scratch-yours agreements. Beauty, more or less, is no more than an index of genetic desirability, whether in humans or natural habitats-and oftentimes is a seductress, who, like the Venus-fly-trap, hides only another power-play under her attractive guise. Certainly, sociobiology can make no sense of the transcendent beauty and emotional power of music-Pinker, in How the Mind Works, famously surmised that music is a fortuitous byproduct of the rest of our senses, a bit like a piece of excess mental cheesecake, which somehow jiggles our neurons in a pleasing way. For them, beauty is a trick, peace is an illusion, and love is a tease.

But as the theologians Hans Urs Von Balthasar, John Milbank, and David B. Hart have noted, Christianity’s claim of ultimate ontological peace stands in contrast to the “ontology of violence” underlying the purposeless world of striving set forth by Darwin’s vision of “nature red in tooth and claw” and assumed by most contemporary thought. For Christians, although the world is in many ways a deeply broken place, one can still see the rays of God’s light shining through-in the self-giving love of one soul to another, in the peace of the Dakota prairie after a summertime rain, in the transcendent beauty of Bach’s B Minor Mass and the symphony of a sunset, or in the joyful wonder of a child playing in winter’s first snow. They are clues, as it were, left to lead us toward the source of ultimate love, peace, beauty, and joy from which they came. And they are, finally, reasons for hope.

In the end, I fear that Dawkins’s book is unlikely to do more than inflame already-heated passions on both sides. Religious fundamentalists now have one more reason to fear and distrust the legitimate results of modern science, and millions of atheists and agnostics have been encouraged to view religious people with similar fear, incomprehension, and disdain. Dawkins has placed one more roadblock in the way of the genuinely respectful and thoughtful dialogue between religious folk and non-believers that is so desperately needed today. To my mind, that is cause for much regret. But it is no reason to suppose that Dawkins has the last word on God.

And so, there is probably no polite way to say this, but say it I must. I think that Mma Precious Ramotswe is a dangerous woman who is filling our mothers’ heads with nonsense, and must be stopped. In fact, it is not just her that is the trouble-really, it is warm and tenderhearted people everywhere. Now, by saying this, I know full well that my supply of cookies from home will undoubtedly be cut off, and all future interactions with the female sex deeply imperiled. But that, you see, is the magnitude of the problem-if I do not say it, then perhaps no one will. And it simply must be said. Tenderness, I say, is a blight upon our souls, and has placed us all in grave danger. Something needs to be done. Warmth and tenderness are sweeping through the civilized world like the plague, with Mma Ramotswe at the fore, waving their teapot-and-cookie standard and marching us all to a certain doom.

You think I am joking. Of course I am, a bit. But mostly I am dead serious, and I think you should be too. There is, I believe, an important argument to be made against tenderness, niceness, and sentimentality when it comes to ethics. Unfortunately it is a very difficult argument to make, since it means saying not nice things about folks like Mma Ramotswe, and championing ethical curmudgeons instead, like Fr. Smith from Walker Percy’s novel The Thanatos Syndrome. Nevertheless it is necessary, given that we in the late modern West do not suffer from a surfeit of niceness, but rather of clarity and moral courage. So, although he would no doubt make for a terrible teatime partner, it is well worth considering Fr. Smith’s somewhat startling challenge to the Mma Ramotswe’s of the world: “Do you know where tenderness leads? To the gas chamber. Tenderness is the first disguise of the murderer.”

That may sound extreme, and I realize it needs a bit of explaining. So, since we must start somewhere, consider this fact: They are killing babies right now in the Netherlands. I do not mean abortion; that by now is old news. I mean just what I said-they are killing babies, e.g. committing infanticide, legally and in medical clinics with doctors. The Times ran a story about it this past spring, and although there has been some controversy, apparently the Dutch are getting on with it quite well. This of course is in addition to killing old people, which is called euthanasia, and has been extended now to include nearly anyone who wants to die; and also the prenatal weeding out of handicapped and retarded people, who otherwise would suffer and be a burden on society. The thing is that none of it is done out of any sort of malice, eugenic impulse, bloodlust, or anything of the sort-no, instead it is done out of compassion, by good and civilized people. It is all done out of tenderness. Which, I think, should make us suspicious of tenderness-if these practices are wrong, they are not wrong because they lack compassion. Rather, they are wrong for different reasons altogether, which are obscured precisely by the compassion and tenderness with which they are done.

Now, far be it from me to lay all this at Mma Ramotswe’s feet. She and her friends are generally content to spend their days sipping bush tea and solving mysteries. But McCall Smith is after much more than that in his books-in the best tradition of writers like Agatha Christie and P.D. James, his novels are really at bottom an exploration of human nature, and of the vagaries of right and wrong. More than anything else, McCall Smith is an old-fashioned moralist, interested in questions of ethics, who has in Mma Ramotswe quite purposefully embodied a feminine moral ideal of nonfoundationalist tolerance, compassion, and empathy. The parallels are not exact, but she has a great deal in common with contemporary philosophers like Judith Shklar, Elaine Scarry, Peter Singer, and Richard Rorty, all of whom are good and tenderhearted people who think that there are no metaphysical grounds for morality but nevertheless argue that pain is bad and should be eliminated as much as possible, including by means of (in Peter Singer’s case at least) abortion, voluntary suicide, prenatal screening, and infanticide.

Here then is the problem. Just as there is no doubt that Mma Ramotswe is a good and tenderhearted person, there is neither any doubt that philosophers like Peter Singer and Richard Rorty are good people, with real compassion behind their arguments and views. It is the same with nearly all contemporary advocates of abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem-cell research, prenatal screening, infanticide, and the like. But that has never been in question, although it has often been treated as such. If we are going to have serious conversations about the morality of such practices, we will have to move beyond talk about doing the “compassionate” or the “caring” thing. Of course we all ought to be compassionate. But compassion and tenderness are amorphous and dangerous things, precisely because they tend to cover over serious questions of ethics in a vague cloud of niceness. And because tenderness can lead anywhere-even, like Fr. Smith warned, to the gas chamber.

I.

It’s too bad that Mma Ramotswe is marching us all to a certain doom, because she really is a nice lady. And her books are heartwarming-if you are familiar with the series, you will know that she got her start as a lady detective thanks to an inheritance left by her father, who had scrimped and saved all his life to provide for his beloved daughter and dreamed that she would one day start a business of her own. Private detection is of course a rather unusual line of work, and in fact Mma Ramotswe is a bit awed, but proud, to say that she is the “only lady detective in the whole of Botswana.” As she explains it, the people of Botswana are “My people, my brothers and sisters. It is my duty to help them solve the mysteries in their lives. That is what I am called to do.”

And that is what she does. Throughout the seven books of the series, Mma Ramotswe helps her customers solve the little problems of life. The plot is never really the point of the books-like Lillian Jackson Braun’s The Cat Who mysteries and Jan Karon’s Mitford series, the characters populating Mma Ramotswe’s world potter on through life in the assurance that nothing really bad could ever possibly happen. There are small matters, of course, which require attention-two-timing husbands, wayward teenagers, and the like. But these things are always solved to satisfaction in time for tea, and they are not what drive the books: The everyday business of life, friendship, and family is far more important. The reader cannot possibly help caring about how Mma Ramotswe will finally convince Mr. J.L.B. Maketoni to marry her, or how her poor but resourceful secretary, Mma Makutsi, will do at starting up her own business.

But, as important as Mma Ramotswe’s romance with Mr. J.L.B. Maketoni is, she is at her most interesting when trying to resolve the ethical predicaments she gets herself into, and when dispensing nuggets of wisdom about moral philosophy. At times, McCall Smith is quite explicit about what he’s doing-one chapter is even titled “A Problem in Moral Philosophy,” and a recurring apple-and-snake motif lets us know that the books take their cues from the Garden of Eden, where the ongoing human morality play of temptation, deceit, and sin is placed front and center. The philosophizing can be obtrusive at times-such as the unlikely passage in which Mma Ramotswe reflects on the merits of French existentialism-but for the most part, McCall Smith manages to impart his moral lessons without stepping out of character.

To start with, McCall Smith deftly argues for the nonfoundationalist and messy nature of ethics-basically, the position that there is no universal ethical system that can be derived from reason, revelation, or the natural law; and that consequently, it simply isn’t possible to find “right” answers to ethical quandaries in any absolute and final sense. At one juncture, he writes: “Mma Ramotswe was given to philosophical speculation, but only up to a point. Such questions were undoubtedly challenging, but they tended to lead to further questions which simply could not be answered.” As a champion of traditional Botswana values, Mma Ramotswe is quite sure that the old ways of doing things are right, but can’t figure out how to justify why that is so. “Ultimately,” she reasons, some things are just wrong “because the old Botswana morality said that it was wrong, and the old Botswana morality, as everybody knew, was so plainly right. It just felt right.” And, although the old Botswana ways are generally good, even they aren’t able to provide guidance for situations in which there simply are “sound points to be made on both sides.” In those situations, Mma Ramotswe decides firmly, one just has to choose the most compassionate course and act on it-doubts have to “be put away and the goal pursued wholeheartedly,” so long as the bad things you do (lying, for example) are outweighed by the good (like saving someone’s life).

Of course, anyone who has ever been faced with a tricky ethical situation can sympathize with Mma Ramotswe on these points-life is, after all, oftentimes messy. If we intend to move beyond a vague sort of life-is-messy-ism moral philosophy, we might have cause to wonder if her starting point for ethics is sound. But nevertheless, she is not alone in her starting point-in fact, she is joined by influential philosophers like Richard Rorty and Elaine Scarry, both of whom are self-described nonfoundationalists when it comes to ethics. And, of course, they are very far from ascribing to anything like a vague life-is-messy sort of moral philosophy. Like Mma Ramotswe, they would argue that it would be very nice to have a natural law or some such infallible moral code, but that no such thing exists. And, furthermore, they (like Mma Ramotswe) have a plan for figuring out how to do the right thing, even if there isn’t really any “right” thing to pull down from the sky.

Mma Ramotswe, for her own part, is convinced that the ability to “understand the hopes and aspirations of others… is the beginning of all morality. If you knew how a person was feeling,” she reasons, “if you could imagine yourself in her position, then surely it would be impossible to inflict further pain. Inflicting pain in such circumstances would be like hurting oneself.” As a good and tenderhearted woman, of course, Mma Ramotswe is especially adept at feeling the pain of others. In fact, that is why she became a detective-to do something, however small, to help people who are suffering. Empathy, for Mma Ramotswe, is where morality begins, which in turn leads us to acts of compassion in order to relieve others from pain.

Again and again throughout the books, the good and tenderhearted Mma Ramotswe and her friends follow a regular pattern-seeing the world through the eyes of another person; empathizing with that person’s suffering; and doing something concrete to help. Imagination is important in this process-when Rose, her maid, first knocked on her door to ask for a job, Mma Ramotswe noticed the child she brought with her, and imagined how happy he would be when his mother told him that she had finally found work. Imagination led directly to empathy, and empathy led to compassion-Rose was hired on the spot. Personal stories are important as well, as a way of seeing the world through another person’s eyes-Mr. J.L.B. Maketoni had no intention of adopting two children from the local orphan farm, but after he had heard their stories, he couldn’t resist. And Mma Ramotswe, who was understandably a bit surprised to hear that her fiancé had adopted two children without telling her, melted too after she heard the older girl tell their courageous and sad story. Morality, in this way, is shown by Mma Ramotswe to be nothing more or less than the ability to feel empathy for people in pain, and to respond with tenderhearted acts of compassion.

Evil, by contrast, is caused by the inability to feel empathy. “The only explanation” for cruel acts, Mma Ramotswe decides, “was that people who did that sort of thing had no understanding of what others felt; they simply did not understand. If you knew what it was like to be another person, then how could you possibly do something which would cause pain?”

Here again, Mma Ramotswe shows herself to be an uncannily accurate interpreter of philosophers like Elaine Scarry and Richard Rorty, who think that since “pain is bad” and “cruelty is the worst thing we do,” the way out is to tell people “sad and sentimental” stories about the suffering of others, which will prompt us to do something to help. This process, which Rorty calls “sentimental education,” is achieved entirely without the help of metaphysicians and theologians, whose claims he says ought to be dismissed as “morally irrelevant considerations.” The whole thing, he tells us, is part of a “general turn against theory and towards narrative,” incidentally making people like McCall Smith the most important moralists of all. The new moralist’s task, Rorty tells us, will not be accomplished by theorists (like, say, Kantians or Thomists), but instead by genres “such as ethnography, the journalist’s report… and, especially, the novel.” Here, we learn something interesting. Mma Ramotswe, whether she likes it or not, can probably best be seen as a new moralist along the lines of Richard Rorty and Elaine Scarry, as the protagonist of a Rortyan line of ladies’ detective novels. And her message is pretty much the same as theirs: Although morality is messy and not set in stone, we can figure out the right thing to do by feeling empathy for others who are in pain, and acting out of compassion to help.

It is, like we said at the beginning, a very warm and tenderhearted way of looking at things. Certainly, there is a great deal to praise about it-one can hardly help but admire someone like Mma Ramotswe, who spends her life in service toward others, looks after orphans, loves her family, and cares for those around her. But McCall Smith does offer an unwitting hint, at least, of how it might all go wrong outside the world of his novels. Towards the end of one of her escapades, Mma Ramotswe gives counsel to a man who had forced his girlfriend to have an abortion, which, she makes clear, was a bad thing of him to do. The man agrees:

“It was wrong of me to say that she should end that baby. I know that.” Mma Ramotswe looked at him. “It is not that simple, Rra. There are times when you cannot expect a woman to have a baby. Many women would tell you that.”

This is, of course, a defense of abortion. Mma Ramotswe recognizes rightly that it was uncompassionate for him to force his girlfriend into an abortion. And she also echoes the oft-heard advice that men, out of compassion, should not stand in the way if women want to choose abortion. No doubt, it is true that many men and women feel this way, out of compassion, for good and tenderhearted reasons. But that says nothing about whether or not it is right. And, in abortion, along with many other similar ethical quandaries, there is no telling where compassion and tenderheartedness will take us.

For that, we need to take a hard look at Fr. Smith’s difficult advice, from Walker Percy’s novel The Thanatos Syndrome-that tenderness, for all its virtues, can lead us anywhere.

II.

The Thanatos Syndrome is the last published novel of Walker Percy, one of the 20th century’s most significant American writers. Although it was not a major achievement from a literary standpoint (unlike his first book The Moviegoer), it is the most philosophically profound of his novels and as such serves as a fitting last testament. In the book, Percy is concerned mainly with how the human search for meaning and purpose, when misdirected, can devolve into dangerous ideologies-and, with the way in which tenderness and compassion can obscure the murderous acts that ideologies often lead to, particularly with reference to eugenics and so-called “mercy” killing.

Fr. Smith, its most significant character, is a seemingly nutty old priest who lives by himself in a forest-service watchtower and tends to speak in either gnomic aphorisms or long prophetic jeremiads. And he says, as we have already seen, some very shocking things: for example, that “Tenderness is the first disguise of the murderer.” Unfortunately, Fr. Smith is so odd that his message is not just misunderstood by the other characters in the book, but also often by Percy’s interpreters. Nevertheless, he is in fact the novel’s moral voice, although it takes a bit of context to understand what he is getting at.

The novel begins with Dr. Thomas More, who has started to notice some very troubling things about his patients. For years he had been an old-fashioned Freudian psychologist, persisting in the old method of talking through his patients’ problems rather than giving them medication. His practice is small, as few people in his town seem to have the patience for talk therapy anymore, but nevertheless he maintained a certain number of loyal patients who came to him to talk about their troubles. Quite suddenly however, his patients had changed-rather than acting like their old, worried, slightly neurotic selves, they had become flat, contented, unable to form coherent sentences, and somewhat empty. In an odd way they were happy, but nevertheless Dr. More wondered if something important was missing:

What’s going on?… Are they better or worse? Well, better in the sense that they do not have the old symptoms, as we shrinks called them, the ancient anxiety, guilt, obsessions, rage repressed, sex suppressed. Happy is better than unhappy, right? But-but what? They’re somehow-diminished. Diminished how? Well, in language, for one thing. They sound like Gardner’s chimps in Oklahoma: Mickey like-Donna want-Touch me-Ask them anything out of context as you would ask chimp Washoe or chimp Lana…Then there’s the loss of something. What? A certain sort of self-awareness? The old ache of self?… There’s a sameness here, a flatness of affect.

It was all very strange. Soon, however, the pieces of the puzzle begin to fall into place, when Dr. More pays a visit to an old acquaintance, Dr. Bob Comeaux, who runs the federal Qualitarian Center outside of town. Eventually, Dr. Comeaux explains that he is behind the odd symptoms Dr. More has been noticing-rather than a curious new disease, they are in fact the intended result of a secret pilot project he started. Dr. Comeaux had discovered that heavy sodium, when administered in small amounts, had the effect of inhibiting dopamine and increasing endorphin production: Essentially, it made people feel happy by altering the chemical composition of the brain. More than that, it had the remarkable effect of dulling activity in specific areas of the brain that control the capacity for speech. The end result was the “syndrome” that Dr. More had noticed in his patients-an unfocused, animal sort of good spirits, coupled with a loss in speech ability and a consequent loss in higher mental functions, resulting in people who were happy but had lost the characteristically human sense of “self.” As Dr. More had noted in his patients, the removal of the language capability had also taken away his patients’ existential yearnings and fears, since they no longer had the words to describe them. This, it seemed to Dr. More, was at least possibly a bad thing, since it in effect had regressed his patients into contented animals instead of anxious, neurotic humans. But Dr. Comeaux, as one might expect, strenuously defended his actions on the grounds that they reduced pain and suffering:

“…What would you say, Tom-” Bob, who has been lilting along with Strauss, leans forward and, turning down the music, fixes me with a smiling, keen-eyed look. “What would you say if I gave you a magic wand you could wave over there”-he nods over his shoulder toward Baton Rouge and New Orleans-”and overnight you could reduce crime by eighty-five percent?

Dr. Comeaux proceeds to rattle off an impressive string of statistics: child abuse reduced by 87%, teenage suicide by 95%, wife battering by 73%, teenage pregnancy by 85%, depression and anxiety by 79%, AIDS by 76%, and incarceration by 72%. Indisputably, as Dr. More concedes, Dr. Comeaux’s program reduced the amount of human suffering in those whom it has affected, not to mention those who had been indirectly affected by urban crime. All of it, of course, Dr. Comeaux justifies on the reasonable, tenderhearted grounds of “improving the quality of life [for] the greatest good, the highest quality of life for the greatest number.” Which, as Percy means us to conclude, he has done: Dr. Comeaux has, in fact, eliminated his subjects’ suffering, but only because he has also eliminated their humanity.

Even this Dr. Comeaux is willing to defend, and gladly: “What we have here,” he explains to Dr. More, “is a philosophical question”:

“The hypothesis, Tom,” says Bob, speaking slowly, “is that at least a segment of the human neocortex and of consciousness itself is not only an aberration of evolution but is also the scourge and curse of life on this earth, the source of wars, insanities, perversions-in short, those very pathologies which are peculiar to Homo sapiens. As Vonnegut put it”-his arm is on the back of my seat; I feel his pointy, jokey finger sticking into my shoulder-”the only trouble with Homo sapiens is that parts of our brains are too damn big. What do you say to that?”

Dr. Comeaux is quite happy to admit to Dr. More that he has eliminated precisely that which makes humans “peculiar”-it is exactly this, he argues, that has been responsible for all of the uniquely human biological “aberrations,” known to no other species, that have made us both so miserable and so dangerous, both to ourselves and the entire planet which we inhabit. His elimination of humanity, he tells us, is nothing more than a reasonable application of his good, tenderhearted desire to end human suffering.

In a word, Dr. Comeaux believes in “quality of life”-like Peter Singer, Richard Rorty, and their followers, he believes that pain is bad, and that we ought to do as much as possible to alleviate human suffering. Part of his duties as head of the federal Qualitarian center, we learn, is the elimination of people who are judged to have an unacceptable quality of life, which includes the unwanted unborn (abortion); unwanted, retarded, mongoloid, severely deformed, AIDS-infected, epileptic, and/or otherwise “suffering” infants (infanticide, which Dr. Comeaux calls “pedeuthanasia”); and unwanted and/or suffering elderly people (Comeaux calls this “gereuthanasia”).

His argument for this to Dr. More is familiar-sounding, and on its surface quite plausible: “Can you honestly tell me,” he asks Dr. More, “that you would condemn a child to a life of rejection, suffering, poverty, pain?” His philosophy, he tells Dr. More, is quite “simpleminded… I think good is better than bad, serenity better than suffering.” His job, as he describes it, consists simply in “ministering to the suffering, improving the quality of life for the individual regardless of race, creed, or national origin… [for] the greatest good, the highest quality of life for the greatest number.” Although we may be startled by provisions allowing for infanticide and the death of “unwanted” old people, his actions, as he reminds Dr. More, are entirely within the bounds of the law. They were made legal, he explains, by a Supreme Court decision determining that personhood is not attained until the age of eighteen months, thus making “pedeuthanasia” just as permissible as abortion, and by recent “Right to Death” clauses that give both “neonates” and “euthanates” (infants and elderly people) the “right… not to suffer a life of suffering… to a death with dignity.” “Argue with the proposition,” he challenges Dr. More, “that in the end there is no reason to allow a single child to suffer needlessly, a single old person to linger in pain, a single retard to soil himself for fifty years, suffer humiliation, and wreck his family.”

This section of the novel, of course, is provocative, just as Percy intended it to be-the mix of positions held by many Americans (e.g., abortion) with others that may sound abhorrent to our ears (e.g., infanticide) is meant to offend, and also meant to provoke us to think carefully about why we believe what we do. It is arguable that none of Dr. Comeaux’s positions are outside the realm of possibility, and indeed accord well with the premise that human suffering should be alleviated. Peter Singer, for instance, has quite famously argued in favor of infanticide, which he justifies on utilitarian grounds in precisely the same manner as Dr. Comeaux. According to Singer, infants with severe birth defects, Down’s syndrome, hemophilia, genetic defects, and so on can be justifiably killed, both in the interest of freeing the child from a life of suffering, and (since infants can be regarded as replaceable) in the interest of reducing the amount of total human suffering in the world. His position is not without its supporters-in the Netherlands, as we have already mentioned, infanticide has very recently been made legal by the government, with the support of the medical establishment. And euthanasia (which Singer also supports) is also a legal practice in many countries. And it is all done, of course, out of tenderheartedness.

Which is where Fr. Smith’s criticisms come in. Unlike Dr. More, who is at first not sure how to respond to Dr. Comeaux’s apparently reasonable and compassionate argument, Fr. Smith sees through it. Aware that Dr. More is unconvinced that it is wrong, he sets out to convince him of its true nature.

“They have their reasons,” he agrees with Dr. More: “Not bad reasons, are they? …They make some sense… Well, don’t they?” Throwing off Dr. More, he begins on a completely different tack. “Let me tell you something, Tom. People have the wrong idea about the Holocaust. The Holocaust, as people see it, is a myth.” At this, Dr. More’s “heart sinks… On top of everything else, is he one of those?” he thinks. But Fr. Smith is not done: He does not mean, he explains, that the Holocaust itself is a myth, but rather that its origins are not understood. “You are a member of the first generation of doctors,” he tells Dr. More, “…to turn their backs on the oath of Hippocrates and kill millions of old useless people, unborn children, born malformed children, for the good of mankind… Do you know what is going to happen to you?… You’re going to end up killing Jews.” And indeed, beyond that, he asks Dr. More: “Do you know where tenderness always leads? …To the gas chamber. Tenderness is the first disguise of the murderer.” After this, he gives Dr. More what he says is his “final word”:

“If you are a lover of Mankind in the abstract like Walt Whitman, who wished the best for Mankind, you will probably do no harm and might even write good poetry and give pleasure, right?”
“Right.”
“If you are a theorist of Mankind like Rousseau or Skinner, who believes he understands man’s brain and in the solitariness of his study or laboratory writes books on the subject, you are also probably harmless and might even contribute to human knowledge, right?”
“Right.”
“But if you put the two together, a lover of Mankind and a theorist of Mankind, what you’ve got now is Robespierre or Stalin or Hitler and the Terror, and millions dead for the good of Mankind. Right?”

Dr. More is, to say the least, indifferent to Fr. Smith’s ramblings. But before he can leave, Fr. Smith makes sure he knows one last thing: “Did I ever tell you that I had spent a year in Germany before the war in the household of an eminent psychiatrist whose son was a colonel in the Schutzstaffel?” “Yes, you did,” Dr. More replies, and with that he leaves.

From this significant passage, combined with others in the book, we have all we need to tie Fr. Smith’s statements into Percy’s larger position. First, as we have seen, Fr. Smith ties Dr. Comeaux’s practice of euthanasia explicitly to the horrors of totalitarian Germany during WWII. Second, it is also clear that Fr. Smith is, in the strongest possible terms, condemning ideology-in short, all political movements that attempt both to “understand” mankind in the abstract, and to “love” mankind in the abstract enough to do something about it in the political arena, like “Robespierre, Stalin, and Hitler… for the good of Mankind.” Third, Fr. Smith is claiming that mere “tenderness” cannot save us from the horrors of ideology-Rorty’s “sentimental education,” we may infer, will not be enough. In fact, Percy is saying that the two are connected-that abstracted tenderness is the most dangerous of all.

The first step in Fr. Smith’s chain of reasoning is abstraction. The problem with Dr. Comeaux’s argument, he explains, is that it begins with a single premise-”Pain is bad”-and works its way to a logical conclusion, without stopping to consider the reality and value of individual human beings along the way. For Percy, any structure of meaning that does not involve genuine encounters with persons as individuals, and with a real openness to Being, will necessarily be based upon a false understanding of reality. This, as Fr. Smith puts it, is the abstract “theory” against which he warns-since it has become unmoored from reality, it can lead anywhere at all.

This abstraction in turn leads to an existential crisis of meaning-without a true understanding of who we are and what we are doing, Percy believes, we will fall into despair and inauthenticity. This crisis of meaning, consequently, can lead us to adopt ideological systems by which to make sense of our lives, like Dr. Comeaux’s Qualitarianism. Fr. Smith applied this principle to his seemingly manic warnings: Once you begin to operate under the abstraction of an ideology, there is no reason to stop, even after one begins killing unwanted babies and old people. Throughout the book, Percy drops hints that Dr. Comeaux differs only in degree and not in kind from the Weimar and Nazi doctors of Germany, and Fr. Smith (not one to mince words) calls him a “Weimar psychologist.”

Fr. Smith, in a later conversation with Dr. More, explained more fully the ideological attraction that even he had felt to Nazism upon his visit to Germany before the war: “It is important to understand,” he told Dr. More, “that in the 1930s most Americans didn’t have two thoughts about the Third Reich and Hitler,” and that furthermore, National Socialism’s attraction for him had nothing to do with Jews, and everything to do with the way in which the Germans believed, wholeheartedly, in themselves and in their cause. During his time there, he had stayed with relatives and gotten to know their young son, a member of the Hitler Youth in training to join the SS. “He was ready to die,” Fr. Smith remembered: “I had never met anyone ready to die for a belief… [he was like] a young English crusader signing up with Richard to rescue the holy places from the infidel.” He had been deeply impressed by the young man’s complete dedication, his willingness to die, and the mystical aura of purpose with which the SS surrounded itself-the “shining blades” inscribed with “Blut und Ehre“; the songs that made one’s “blood run cold,” and the “solemn oath of the Teutonic knights at Marienberg.” The lure of meaning and purpose was so strong, Fr. Smith recalled, that if he had been German, “I would have joined him.” We are thus meant by Percy to understand, in no uncertain terms, the way in which the seductions of ideology can lead to anything, even to the horrors of the SS.

Even “tenderness,” Fr. Smith argued, cannot save us from ideologies like Dr. Comeaux’s, which are covered over with the language of science and are based on good and tenderhearted premises like the elimination of suffering. The danger of ideology, Percy warns, is not that it might be based upon bad premises-usually, that is not in fact the case. In fact, tenderhearted ideologies are even more dangerous, since they are on the surface so attractive. In The Thanatos Syndrome, Dr. More struggles for much of the book with Comeaux’s claims, viewing them as “reasonable” in that they do, in fact, serve to diminish suffering. Fr. Smith, however, has no such illusions, since he had already seen the consequences of this line of thinking during his time in Germany. He knew, as did Percy, that “the Nazis didn’t come out of nowhere.”

In fact, the ground for their actions had been prepared long before by the Weimar eugenicists, who had carried Comeaux’s arguments even farther, allowing for the destruction of “useless” people along with those who were suffering, which led to the extermination of thousands upon thousands of people determined by the psychiatric establishment, not the Nazis, to be either lacking sufficient “quality of life” or otherwise “useless” and thus an unnecessary expense. Fr. Smith knew, furthermore, that these actions, based as they were on good and tenderhearted notions like the “greatest good for the greatest number” and the “elimination of needless suffering,” had gained the approval of nearly the entire German medical establishment and a great number of the German people, one of the most “tenderhearted, civilized, and romantic” in the world.

One of the pivotal images of the novel is Fr. Smith’s recollection of his experiences in Germany as a U.S. soldier. He was haunted, he told Dr. More, in particular by a hospital which he had helped liberate in Munich-a nurse, he explained, had taken him to a “special department” within “the children’s division, a rather cheerful place,” in which a well-kept room, bright and sunny with a geranium in the window, had been used regularly to kill children (of many types, even merely “unsocial”) who had been determined unfit to live. The nurse, he remembered, had not seemed to find it particularly horrifying, and neither had he at the time-”Only later was I horrified. We’ve got it wrong about horror. It doesn’t come naturally but takes some effort.” The implications for Rorty’s thesis are clear: “sentimental education,” Percy argues, will do us little good. As Percy commented later about his own time in Germany during the 1930′s:

The Germans seemed to me extremely likeable people, extremely sentimental people; they had tremendous tenderness in their conversations. After all, the romantic Gefuehl, openness to feeling, comes from the Germans… The apposition of German feeling, German tenderness, and the gas chambers struck me as a great mystery at the time. Yet is it a paradox? If Gefuehl or tenderness is all you have, it can lead anywhere. The opposite of tenderness is not cruelty.

III.

Percy leaves us with an ending that is both dark and hopeful. Thanks to Fr. Smith’s warnings, as well as increasing evidence of the darker side of Comeaux and his colleagues, Dr. More finally manages to put an end to Comeaux’s project. But he is not, of course, able to do anything to solve the human quest for meaning in the face of suffering that led to Dr. Comeaux’s murderous ideology in the first place.

Percy shows us why Rorty’s “sentimental education,” just like Mma Ramotswe’s empathy for people in pain, is sorely inadequate. “Tenderness,” Percy tells us, “is not the opposite of cruelty,” and in fact, as it did in Weimar Germany, can “lead to the gas chamber.” Dr. Comeaux, just like Mma Ramotswe, Peter Singer, Judith Shklar, Elaine Scarry, and Richard Rorty, is a good and compassionate human being, with a genuine desire to help people who are suffering. But we must consider: Mma Ramotswe supports abortion out of compassion; Peter Singer supports infanticide, euthanasia, and prenatal screening out of compassion; and Dr. Comeaux supports what virtually amounts to the end of humanity, also out of compassion. That, in the end, is the danger of tenderness-as admirable as it is, compassion is ultimately a vague and sandy ground on which to base our moral judgments. If compassion and tenderness can be used to justify even the horrifying eugenics of Weimar Germany, then it can lead us anywhere. If abortion is right, or if infanticide is wrong, it is not because of compassion.

And that, really, is the challenge Fr. Smith sets before us. If Ramotswe, Rorty, Singer, and Comeaux are wrong, then where have they made their error? If there is something that separates us from the animals and gives value to our humanity even in the face of suffering, then what is it? And if even tenderness and compassion can lead to the gas chambers, then what can we use to guide us along life’s way?

That is a topic for another time, but Percy had something to say about this as well. In his books and essays, he recommended that we give up the ironic language of our jaded, secular world, and take up instead the language of telos, with which he thought we might find meaning and purpose in relation to the world in which we live. Our sense of morality, he thought, just like our need for meaning, points beyond itself to a transcendent source. Percy, in this sense, offers us an old-fashioned humanism-one that of course views suffering as bad, but at the same time finds a greater meaning in the dignity and inherent worth of the individual, and knows that the end of suffering is not worth the end of our humanity. Indeed, it allows one to recognize that the end of suffering-in the old, philosophical sense of “end,” as “purpose”-can even at times be seen in terms of the struggle, often painful and difficult, to learn how we each may live true and authentic lives, as good and wise men and women journeying along life’s way.

Perhaps, like Percy, and like wayfarers lost in a strange land, it would do us well to set out on a search, watching for what signs there may be.

Some months ago, I received a check for several hundred dollars from Harvard University, because I had been authorized by President Lawrence H. Summers to attend church regularly and tell children about Jesus. No, I am not joking. Believe it or not, that is a true statement, although I acknowledge its wild incongruity.

In fact, the incongruity of that statement is in a sense the point of this essay, but we will get to that in a moment—but first, I will explain how it is that President Summers paid me money to teach children about Jesus. For the past two years, I have taught Sunday School at the Memorial Church, where I have regularly read the Bible lesson and taught the Affirmation class, meaning that I have been responsible for teaching children the Bible and the essential doctrines of the Christian faith. Although I love my job and would do it for free, it comes with a small stipend which I have received each year. Now, where does President Summers come in, you ask? Well, as it happens, the Memorial Church is a somewhat unusual entity here at Harvard, reporting to no one but the Office of the President. Its esteemed minister, Prof. Peter J. Gomes, is thereby authorized to preach and maintain the activities of the church, and in turn, he has made sure that the church maintains a healthy children’s education program. And so, as you can see, there is a sense (albeit stretched, I know) in which I can truthfully claim that I was authorized by President Summers to tell kids about Jesus, and even got paid to boot.

But you and I both know that this is, shall we say, not the normal course of events here at fair Harvard. By some combination of hard work, Providence, and the sheer force of inertia, the Memorial Church continues to function and thrive as a Christian house of worship here on campus. Even so it has become increasingly odd, with each passing year, for a Christian church to stand in the middle of a great secular university. It isn’t very difficult to measure the vast cultural change that has taken place since the days of old Mather, Dunster, and Winthrop. To take only two examples, I seriously doubt that pious old Mr. Winthrop would have cared much for the annual Debauchery party in the house that bears his name, and I cannot even begin to imagine what Rev. Cotton Mather would have thought of the Lather festivities held yearly in his memory. Somehow I’m guessing he would have called down fire from heaven, rather than just calling up HUPD to help usher drunk soapy kids into the shuttle bus.

You begin to catch my meaning, I am sure. To put it bluntly, it is no longer clear to many of us how religion in general, and Christianity in particular, has anything to do with our lives. This is not to say that religion has ceased to be a significant force in the world—all one has to do to disabuse oneself of that notion is to read the morning paper—and nor is it to say that the modern university has ceased to concern itself with matters of religion. But there is an important difference, as I am sure you will recognize, between acknowledging that religion is a significant force within the world at large, and acknowledging that the doctrines of religion are in any meaningful sense true, such that they make absolute claims over your life and give it purpose, direction, fulfillment, and meaning. A great many of us, here in the liberal secular Northeast, are quite wary of religion, and apart from maintaining the traditions of our ancestors (Passover and Yom Kippur; Christmas and Easter), we do not consider ourselves to be very religious, and in fact likely have a difficult time even conceiving of what that might mean. Oftentimes we consider ourselves to be spiritual, but would never think of ourselves as religious, seeing as how that rings uncomfortably with echoes of the past—with old-fashioned notions of guilt and sin, with unscientific anti-modern fundamentalism, with unfashionable moral codes and sexual strictures, and with any number of other items that we’d much rather leave behind us, gently but firmly consigned to the dustbin of history.

And so, given all this, you may be justly wondering why we even bother to have a church in the middle of Harvard Yard, seeing as how our culture has, in large part, moved on. Certainly you might wonder why it is that I bother to attend—besides, that is, my handsome paycheck from President Summers. In fact, given all the nasty baggage that goes along with organized religion—like patriarchy, war, discrimination, absolutism, harsh moral codes, and all the rest—I would completely understand if you simply threw up your hands, put this magazine in the recycling bin where it belongs, and dedicated your time to something a bit less nebulous and a lot less dangerous.

You could, I suppose, do all of this. Nevertheless, I would like to ask you for a moment to suspend judgment and take me up on a modest proposal. Quite simply, I would like you to entertain the possibility that the entirety of human experience cannot be explained by the current methodology of natural science—such as it is practiced by Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, E.O. Wilson, Daniel Dennett, and Jared Diamondand, consequently, that something like “religion” is therefore a possible, and even a necessary, way to understand who we are as human beings. I am not asking you to discard science, evolutionary biology, or anything of the sort. Instead I am asking you to consider that there might be something unique about the human experience that does not so easily lend itself to these sorts of explanations—something that points, in fact, to a realm of human existence that can only be described with rather old-fashioned words like authenticity, meaning, purpose, soul, and even God.

During this past semester, I have been taught by Prof. Steven Pinker that the human soul does not exist, and that religion is a natural phenomenon, thus making religious belief incompatible with science. In what follows, however, I aim to suggest a way in which Steven Pinker might be wrong, pertaining to the uniquely human phenomenon of language. Unfortunately I am not nearly as learned as Prof. Pinker, and so cannot hope to provide anything more than an amateur’s analysis, based upon ideas that are not even my own. By the end of this essay, however, I hope to have shown you that some notion of the “soul,” and also of religious belief, is in fact the best way to make sense of our unique status in the world as the only species that talks, laughs, lies, weaves fables, cracks jokes, searches for meaning, and gets itself into the crazy, glorious, and often disastrous predicaments of humankind.

Sadly, there will not be time to address the many objections you undoubtedly have about organized religion, and about Christianity in particular. And we will not even be able to touch on the innumerable other ways in which men and women have come to faith in God—if you come to the end of this essay and think it is quite shaky indeed to rest the edifice of religion upon the logical argument which we shall here lay forth (or, indeed, upon any sort of logical argument at all), you would be right. I am not a religious person because of this argument, and I would not expect anyone else to be either. Even so, I hope you will soon begin to agree with me that the gift of language is exceptionally curious, and in fact seems to point to the necessary existence of a human self, or soul, that produces it—and (if you like) why Steven Pinker actually might have a soul after all. Our guide, in the task ahead, will be a somewhat unusual figure in twentieth-century letters, whom I like to call, for reasons that will soon become clear, a “doctor of the soul”—the philosopher and novelist Walker Percy.

If you have been previously introduced to Walker Percy, it is most likely by means of his first novel, The Moviegoer, which was awarded the National Book Award in 1962. Percy was trained as a physician, but spent forty years of his life as a novelist and philosopher, producing six novels, two book-length essay collections, and an extended theoretical work, Lost in the Cosmos, that can best be described as a sort of existential self-help book. One year before his death in 1990, he was presented with the prestigious Jefferson Award by the National Endowment for the Humanities, in recognition of his status as one of America’s leading men of letters. Proof of his enduring impact may be had simply by walking over to Widener Library, where one will find row upon row of literary criticism devoted to his work. Still today, it is remarkable how many Percy devotees one may find—and when I say devotee, I do mean it. There are a multitude of writers, of course, with well-earned reputations for brilliance of style, keenness of wit, and profundity of thought, but there are only a few whose books have a way of changing people’s lives.

Walker Percy is such an author, and while his writings are widely regarded for the consummate skill with which he weaves his plots and turns his phrases, his books are perhaps most remarkable for the often deep effect they have upon their readers. They seem to diagnose something, as it were, about the soul of modern man, and prescribe a solution that continues to arrest and compel. But I must apologize, since I am getting ahead of myself. You will no doubt be wondering how a man who began his career as a medical doctor ended it as a philosopher-novelist. I shall do my best to explain.

Walker Percy was born on May 28, 1916, in Birmingham, Alabama, to an aristocratic old Southern family of considerable means. His father, Leroy Percy, was an Ivyleague educated Birmingham lawyer with a country-club house and a great deal of respect in the community, who nevertheless committed suicide when young Walker was only thirteen. Two years later, his mother followed him in death due to an automobile accident, which Walker believed all his life to have also been suicide. Thus orphaned at the age of fifteen, Walker and his two younger brothers were adopted by their bachelor uncle, William Alexander Percy, who thankfully did not commit suicide but nonetheless was constantly plagued by a deep depression. Upon graduating high school and leaving the dark, gloomy world in which he was raised, Walker studied at the University of North Carolina and at Columbia Medical School, from which he obtained his M.D. in 1941. Later in life, he commented that his pursuit of science as a young man was due in large part because of its order and regularity—perhaps his own life did not make sense, but science did, and for a time it provided the youthful Percy with a way to make sense of the world. No sooner had he gained his M.D., however, than he contracted tuberculosis, and was hospitalized for three years in a New York sanitarium.

It was here, isolated and ill, that the ordered world of science began to fail Percy, forcing him to finally face down the demons that had haunted him since his troubled childhood. All his scientific training, Percy realized, was not enough to give his life meaning and purpose, and he struggled mightily with the same feelings of despair that had led both his parents to suicide. He began to read widely among the existentialists: Heidegger, Kafka, Marcel, Kierkegaard, Camus, Dostoyevsky, and Sartre, who put into words what Percy had begun to suspect: that science, despite all its successes, “cannot utter one single sentence about what a man is, or what he must do.” In the existentialists, he found a diagnosis of the disease that had taken his parents, quite different from the one he had been taught in medical school: instead of clinical depression, negative environmental stimuli, and chemical imbalance, the existentialists wrote about malaise, inauthentic existence, the dread of nothingness, the void of meaninglessness, and the terrible emptiness of everyday life. From them he learned that there are some diseases that cannot be found in textbooks of medicine, and that the wild, dark despair he felt in his soul was not due to any conventional malady, but rather instead was brought on by a crisis of meaning. It was not long before Percy abandoned the practice of medicine, seeing as he did that it was inadequate to provide him with answers to the questions of purpose that begged for solutions. He did not, however, leave off being a doctor, for in his long years of searching he had not only found a diagnosis for the modern malaise, but also, so he thought, had discovered a prescription, perhaps even a cure. Consequently he left off being a doctor of the body, and began practicing as a doctor of the soul. Percy, it might be said, took the temperature of the Western world, and found it dangerously ill. In his fiction and non-fiction alike, he spoke of the chronic “everydayness” which pervades modern life; trapping millions in numbing lives of empty banality; and leading men and women who should, by rights, be the most blessed of all people, with every conceivable material need fulfilled, living in the freest, most prosperous society the world has ever known—the men and women of American suburbia, just like Percy’s parents—to the point of madness and despair; to steep their flesh in antidepressants, alcohol, and pornography; to spend their lives in endless pursuit of material wealth; to stoke their latent rage with films and television shows and wars so violent as to recall the brutality of the ancient Roman Empire; to give themselves over to every sort of deranged political ideology and system of belief; and even, as did Percy’s parents, take their own lives in despair. “Why is the good life,” Percy asked, “which men have achieved in the twentieth century so bad that only news of world catastrophes, assassinations, plane crashes, and mass murders can divert one from the sadness of ordinary mornings?” Why indeed, Percy asks. We should be happy, but we are not—what is the matter with us? Do we know what is the matter? Do we know why we are here? Do we even know who we are?

We do not, Percy said, and in this lies the root of our problems. Ever since the nineteenth century, the halls of Western civilization had echoed with what Matthew Arnold named the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the sea of faith. For centuries, the idea of God had been the capstone of Western thought—God was, so to speak, a part of the air that one breathed. Even when Western men and women were not particularly pious (and many of course were far from holy), they regarded God and his Church as an essential part of their societal fabric. Westerners were possessed of a sense of place: they looked up at the stars, and knew that they were God’s stars. They looked around at the world, and knew that it was Gods world. They looked at themselves, and knew that they were God’s people. Their lives were endowed with purpose; their actions had eternal import; their souls were immortal. They knew that life at times may not make sense, and indeed, often would not: wars raged, plagues ravaged, and thieves plundered throughout their difficult lives. But suffering was eventually to be redeemed; in fact was redemptive, for so it had been made by Christ’s suffering on the cross. In this world they would have trouble, but they did not fear, for they knew that Christ had overcome the world. By faith, they were sure of what they hoped for, and certain of what they did not see; this defined their lives, and anchored their world.

But of course, as beautiful and as comforting as all this was, it was not to last. Changes came to the Western psyche, which were to forever change the way in which they saw the world and their place therein. In the High Middle Ages, the theological certainty of St. Thomas Aquinas had reigned supreme: all truth was God’s truth, and all the world was God’s. By the nineteenth century, however, the rigid proofs and postulates of Aquinas had long been a thing of the past. The Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution had all burst upon the scene with their freewheeling, freethinking ideas. Religious doctrines were no longer secure, and even God’s existence was very much in doubt.

The publication of Darwins Origin of Species had dealt the last remaining argument for God’s existence a fatal blow, the result being that the framework by which Western man had long understood himself had disappeared, virtually overnight. Even the cherished human soul was not safe—Herbert Spencer, in his widely influential Principles of Psychology, asserted that our minds were nothing more than stimulus-response machines created by the process of evolution. Evolutionary psychologists confidently stated that our so-called “souls” were really nothing more than physical functions caused by simple chemical reactions. It is difficult to underestimate the seismic shift represented by all of these changes: no longer were the stars God’s stars; no longer was the world God’s world; no longer were we God’s people. Man’s life was not endowed with purpose; the soul was not immortal, in fact did not even exist; and God, who had benevolently watched over us all these long years, was dead.

Many wondered, as did Nietzsche’s madman, if the entire Western world was now “straying as through an infinite nothing,” and it is from this world that the existentialists grew. Their differences notwithstanding, each of them in their own way diagnosed the symptoms of the modern malaise. Dostoyevsky’s tortured underground man spoke of the loss of human freedom that accompanied scientific determinism: “Science itself” has taught us, he wrote, “that in fact man possesses neither a will nor a whim of his own, that he never did, and that he himself is nothing more than a kind of piano key or organ stop.” Nietzsche, in his Genealogy of Morals, wrote of the eclipse of traditional notions of morality, which had long been underwritten by divine revelation, but must now be understood as historically contingent, mutable, and lacking in any intrinsic force. Sartre spoke of the fundamental human need for transcendence; and Marcel of our need for relatedness; neither of which could be satisfied in a world without God, ruled not by divine love, but instead by the cold, hard, and arbitrary laws of nature. Life, in a sense, had become impossible, since the very things which man most required to live had disappeared, seemingly never to return. Percy of course knew this, and the protagonists of his fictional work reflect all the symptoms of existential angst that had long been the hallmark of existentialist fiction. In this Percy is not unique—his most enduring characters, such as The Moviegoer’s Binx Bolling, The Last Gentleman’s Will Barrett, and The Thanatos Syndrome’s Tom More, have much in common with J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, and even little Alfie Singer in Annie Hall, who refuses to do his homework because the universe is expanding. The question Percy asks, then, is a common one, and indeed might be said to be the central question facing modern society: “What does a man do,” Percy writes, “when he finds himself living after an age has ended, and can no longer understand himself because the theories of man of the former age no longer work?” What, indeed, do we do, when we no longer know who we are? Professor E.O. Wilson, who teaches right here in our very own department of biology, has said forthrightly that a proper understanding of science cannot include a belief in God, and that theology will not survive as an independent discipline. Likewise our famed professor of psychology, Steven Pinker, has clearly stated that modern science has made religious belief impossible, and that the old notion of the “human soul” is entirely obsolete. How, then, can we heal our empty souls if they no longer even exist? How could we possibly regain a new sense of meaning and purpose, when the words themselves have become impossible anachronisms of a former age? Where do we start; where do we begin?

It is here that Percy is unique, and in my opinion absolutely fascinating. “There is,” Percy tells us, “only one place to start,” if we mean to build up, from the rubble as it were, a new understanding of humankind: “The place,” he writes, “where mans singularity is there for all to see and cannot be called into question, even in a new age in which everything else is in dispute. That singularity is language.”

Now, you will have to bear with me for a moment. I realize that statement may sound at first a bit like the ravings of the folks on the street corner who promise that Lyndon Larouche is the savior of all mankind, or perhaps the fellow on television in the question-mark suit who sells that book, or whatever it is, that somehow makes you fabulously wealthy simply by dialing a telephone number. But I promise you, Percy is after something quite different here; something that I think is absolutely revolutionary. His argument is somewhat complex, and it will take us a bit of work to get through. Nevertheless, it is exceptionally important, because it is nothing less than an argument for the existence of free will, meaning, purpose, the human soul, and yes, even God.

To begin with, let’s go back to the mention I made of Dostoyevsky’s underground man, whom I said lamented the loss of human freedom that accompanied scientific determinism. Now, you may never have had occasion to believe that science is in the business of taking away your freedom—unless, in my case, you have a great deal of reading to do for next week that rather interferes with your videogame plans—but, let me assure you that that is in fact what the men in white coats over at the Science Center are doing. I am not really joking: if you have a passing familiarity with physics, chemistry, or biology, you will begin to understand my point.

Take any elementary physics problem: if little Johnny pitches a baseball to little Susie at a velocity of 30 kilometers per hour, and little Susie’s bat hits the baseball with a velocity of 40 kilometers per hour, at what speed will the baseball be traveling when it breaks your living-room window? A simple problem, quite easily solved by applying a simple formula, which essentially is a derivation from the law of cause-and-effect. Johnny pitches ball; Susie hits ball; ball breaks window. This, you see, is the way in which science understands the world: as a series of physical phenomena; an interaction of matter; all operating according to readily derivable laws in a relationship of cause-and-effect. Physics, chemistry, and biology all operate in essentially the same way, meaning that if you sign up for a biology class on evolution and human behavior (which I did last semester), you will receive an explanation for human phenomena that is, at bottom, the same as that given for little Johnny and Susie’s baseball game.

Why do we act the way we do? Why do we build empires, explore the unknown, and wish upon stars? Why do fools fall in love? Because, you will be told, the human mind is a collection of instincts that have developed through time by the process of evolution, each of which respond in regular ways to the stimuli they receive from the environment. This, you will learn, is all the product of the sociobiological revolution, led in fact by our own fair Harvard, which is in fact nothing less than an entirely materialistic attempt to provide a “scientific” explanation for all human activity. Free will, of course, and notions of “mind” and “soul” must go completely out the window. Tom Wolfe, in his marvelous essay collection Hooking Up, expresses doubt that anyone “ever believed so completely in predestination as these, the hottest and most intensely rational young scientists in the United States.”

But you of course know better than that, because you know that really we have not gotten beyond Herbert Spencer, who believed it might one day be possible to plot all of human activity on a well-ordered chart, just like a train schedule, or Freudian psychology, which firmly held that all mental activity is entirely material and therefore completely determined. Dostoyevsky’s underground man knew this, and so do you. This is how all human activity can be explained, including the quintessentially human activity of language.

Almost. You will have heard, perhaps, of B.F. Skinner, who also incidentally both studied and taught psychology at Harvard. Skinner was for years the principal exponent of behaviorism, which was, like Spencer and Freud and everything else, a dyadic system for understanding human behavior as a set of responses to given stimuli. Among other things, Skinner wrote the magisterial Verbal Behavior, which quickly became the standard in its field. Skinner’s explanatory model for human language, in Percy’s own words, was rational and elegant, standing “in a direct line of continuity with chemistry and physics. The happenings in a speakers mouth, in the air, in the ear of the listener, along the nerves, could all be understood, at least in principle, as chemical and physical interactions occurring between molecules or electrons.” The behaviorist model of language was precisely what one would expect, given that the entire range of scientific knowledge in mans possession depended upon the assumption that all observable events take place in a dyadic, stimulus-response relationship. “Particles hitting particles, chemical reactions, energy exchanges, gravity attractions between masses, field forces, and so on,” explained Percy, “can all be explained as an interaction of elements in a dyadic system.”

The only problem with the behaviorist model, however, for all of its rational simplicity and scientific elegance, was that it didnt work. Noam Chomsky’s famed review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior in 1959 dismantled the behaviorist paradigm, permanently changing the field of linguistics. Not since then, Percy wrote, “has it been possible to take seriously the application to language of the old stimulusresponse theory, however refined and modified it might be.” A look at Chomsky himself will be useful to understand the import of this paradigm shift: in his 1963 book Language and Mind, he recounts the general consensus among language scholars during his time as a graduate student at Harvard—”that the framework of stimulus-response psychology would soon be extended to the point where it could provide a satisfying explanation for the most mysterious of human abilities [e.g., language].” This approach, however, was shown by Chomsky and those who followed him to be “not only inadequate but misguided in basic and important ways.” By an analysis of actual human language, Chomsky discovered that all known languages share what he called a “universal grammar” based upon an unchanging “deep structure.” To make a very long story short, Chomsky was saying that language is not explicable in terms of learned behavior in interaction with the environment, but instead only in terms of a universal, built-in structure, unique to humans and qualitatively different from stimulus-response phenomena. As he explained:

This system of linguistic competence is qualitatively different from anything that can be described in terms of the taxonomic methods of structural linguistics, the concepts of S-R [stimulus-response] psychology, or the theory of simple automata. …Mental structures are not simply more of the same but are qualitatively different from the complex networks and structures that can be developed by elaboration of the concepts that seemed so promising to many scientists just a few years ago.

This of course was a remarkable assertion to make, both then and now. If human mental structures could not be explained in terms of stimulus-response mechanisms, then they apparently had no analogue in the rest of the natural world, and became exceedingly difficult to account for by the processes of natural evolution. Indeed, Chomsky recognized the import of his claim, writing that the radical uniqueness of human language made it “quite senseless to raise the problem of explaining the evolution of human language from more primitive systems of communication than appear at lower levels of intellectual capacity.” Natural selection, he wrote, could only be put forward as an explanatory device so long as it was recognized that “there is no substance to this assertion, that it amounts to nothing more than a belief that there is some naturalistic explanation for these phenomena.” Skeptical that human language could be accounted for in such a manner, Chomsky wondered aloud “whether the functioning and evolution of human mentality can be accommodated within the framework of physical explanation,” and even cited Descartes old idea of mind-stuff, while being careful not to quite go so far as accede to the notion of an immaterial mind. In the end, although Chomsky had decisively dismantled Skinners behaviorist model of human language, in doing so he had opened a veritable Pandoras box of questions about the nature of the human mind. If human mental activity could not be explained in terms of dyadic, stimulus-response activity, then what did make sense of it? Chomsky ultimately defaulted on this question, pointing suggestively in the direction of Descartes but finally concluding that “the processes by which the human mind achieved its present stage of complexity and its particular form of innate complexity are a total mystery.”

It was precisely this ambiguity that Percy picked up on in his own work. “While the prevailing behaviorist theory has been dismantled,” he noted, “no other theory has been advanced to take its place… It is somewhat as if the Ptolemaic geocentric universe had been dismantled but Copernicus had not yet come along with his heliocentric model. ” The behaviorist theory, although wrong, at least gave a coherent picture of how language worked. Chomsky’s “universal grammar” hypothesis fit with the actual phenomenon of language, but did not really explain it: as later critics (like Hilary Putnam) were to point out, positing “innate ideas” was another way of saying that no one quite knew how it worked.

To his credit, Chomsky did in fact admit that he could not give a good explanatory model, calling the processes by which the human mind acquired the capacity for language a “total mystery.” Nevertheless this did not satisfy Percy: in Chomskys schema, the infamous “Language Acquisition Device” remained a “black box whose contents were altogether unknown.” The current state of knowledge, Percy thus argued, did not even reach “the level of explanatory adequacy of, say, seventeenth-century biology, [in which] the work of Harvey and Malpighi [constructed] crude but accurate models of cardiac and renal function; to suppose, for example, that the heart is like a unidirectional pump or the kidney is like a filter. One may not say as much at the present time about the unique human capacity for language.” Into this void, Percy proposed to place not Descartes mind-stuff, but instead the semiotic philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce: the only theorist, Percy held, who had provided an adequate explanatory model for the unique phenomenon of non-dyadic human language.

C. S. Peirce is an extraordinarily important figure in American philosophy: a brilliant polymath whose writings ranged over a wide range of topics, he managed to found both philosophical pragmatism and semiotics while never holding tenure at a university or, indeed, becoming very well known outside of a small circle of friends during his lifetime. His writings are unapologetically technical, containing dozens of terms which he coined himself as he went along, making his work at times extremely difficult to decipher. While his writings had an important impact on twentieth-century philosophy, however, Percy contended that their full import was never realized. He argued:

The extraordinary insight of Peirce into the triadic nature of meaning for humans has been largely perverted by the current European tradition of structuralism and deconstruction and the American version of ‘dyadic’ psychology, that is, various versions of behaviorism. It would be nice if someone pursued Peirces breakthroughs.

By this, Percy meant that although different sections of Peirce had been appropriated by various schools of contemporary philosophy, his central idea—the notion of Thirdness, or “triadicity,” that was central to his entire metaphysic had been largely ignored and distorted by modern philosophy and psychology. Percy’s official biographer, Patrick Samway, traced back Percy’s interest in Peirce to a book which a friend had given him in the late 1940′s, containing a short passage which bears striking similarity to Percy’s later recorded opinions: “Peirce was a lone voice in the howling wilderness of late nineteenth-century irrationalism; he was not appreciated during his lifetime, and has hardly been recognized since. The full consequences of his thinking have not had their effect on philosophy.” Percy could not have agreed moreall his life, he intended to write a book on Peirces philosophy and theory of language, although he never was able to do more than write up his ideas in essays. In a 1971 letter written to Shelby Foote, he explained the reasons why he thought such a book would be important:

I still think it would be as important as I told you. I would even say that it is revolutionary: that 100 years from now it could well be known as the Peirce-Percy theory of meaning. No kidding. Im not even being vain. It just so happens that this old fellow, Charles Peirce laid it out a hundred years ago, exactly what language is all about and what the behaviorists and professors have got all wrong ever since. I propose to take his insight, put it in modern behavioral terms plus a few items of my own, and unhorse an entire generation of behaviorists and grammarians.

For Percy, Peirce’s notion of “triadicity” (which he was to call the “Delta Factor”) provided a way to understand the otherwise inexplicable phenomenon of human language, and in fact, laid the foundation for a new theory of the human self.

You are, of course, likely wondering what precisely I mean by “triadicity,” and how on earth it is supposed to relate to language and the human soul. Thankfully, it is actually quite simple, and was explained very nicely by Percy himself. In what is perhaps his most important essay, “The Delta Factor,” Percy begins by asking a simple question: how did Helen Keller learn to use language? The story, of course, is familiar to all of us: for years, Helen had lived in a sort of shadow world, unable to communicate with those around her except by emotional acting out, pointing, gesturing, and so on; indeed, her communicative capacity was roughly equivalent to Washoe the chimpanzee and other trained apes who communicated in similar fashion. One morning, however, thanks to the determined efforts of her nurse, Anne Sullivan, Helen Keller broke out of her prison of silence and into the light of language. Her autobiography tells it best:

Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away…

Something remarkable happened in that moment, Percy believed: in fact he wrote that “if one had an inkling of what happened in the well-house in Alabama in the space of a few minutes, one would know more about the phenomenon of language and about man himself that is contained in all the works of behaviorists, linguists, and German philosophers.” How did Helen Keller come to understand that the word water meant the cool liquid running over her hand? And perhaps more significantly, how did she immediately know that everything had a name, and so subsequently ran around the house and yard asking Anne Sullivan what everything was called? What was going on in Helen Kellers mind at that moment?

We have already seen, thanks to Chomsky, that the behaviorist theory of language acquisition does not work. Chomsky, however, declined to draw a diagram relating the elements together: his “Language Acquisition Device” remained a mysterious and inviolate black box. Percy, however, following Peirce, drew a diagram representing the relationships between all the elements at play:

The word “water”
/         \
/             \
/                 \
/                     \
Helen _______ The object
Keller                        “water”

The three elements of the triad, Percy argued, were completely irreplaceable: the word “water” was a symbol for the actual object (water), or the referent, both of which were joined by a coupler: Helen Keller. All three were joined in real relationship to each other, but their relations could not be described in terms of a dyadic, stimulus-response interaction. Skinners behaviorism was ultimately described by Chomsky as inadequate because it attempted to draw stimulus-response arrows between a series of related items. Peirces triad, however, did not commit this error, since it was not possible to draw such arrows between three equally related and irreducible elements. The word and the object are not inherently related to each other, but rather are arbitrarily coupled together. Language is fundamentally an act of symbolic naming and coupling: in Hellen Keller’s example, it is of course the case that the word “water” is not actually the object water, but instead is an arbitrary set of vocables. But when Helen learned from Miss Sullivan that the word “water” is water, she engaged in an act of symbolic naming, by which she understood the actual object through a symbol which stands for it. Here, then, comes the crux of Percys point: the word and the object are not in any way independently related to each other, and yet they are joined together, in a real relationship in which the symbol is understood to stand for its referent. This, Percy and Peirce argue, can only be done by a coupler: by a third element which is capable of joining the two other elements together.

It is in this precise sense that Percy believed himself not merely to be constructing a plausibly diagrammed description of language acquisition and use, but something which to him was far more important: a semiotic of the self. Language makes no sense at all as a phenomenon of naming and communication, Percy argued, unless a Third entity exists capable of joining the symbol to its referent: here, Helen Keller; more generally speaking, a self, or a coupler. There is no other way by which Helen could have joined the two disparate elements together and understood immediately that they were part and parcel of an entire system; that everything in fact had a name: if Helen had merely been an organism in an environment, she could not have done so. Skinners pigeons and Washoe the chimp could learn to press a button or make a hand signal in exchange for food, but they could not learn to understand a symbol to mean its referent, and so could never approximate the human use of language. Consequently, animals are unable to break out of the dyadic, stimulus-response relationship in which the universe of matter interacts: by breaking out of the endless chain of dyadic relations, however, Helen Keller (and by extension, mankind) gained the sovereign ability to name, and therefore to stand apart, as it were, from the universe of objects, connect and comprehend and judge them, and so to create from them meaning. Unlike the animals, Percy argued, we do not exist solely in the dyadic environment (Umwelt) of sensory experience, but also and most fundamentally in the “triadic” world (Welt) of linguistic signs, from which we create meaning and derive understanding and purpose. Through language, humans create a “world of signs” by which they communicate to one another about themselves, about their environment, and about their world, and it is “in this immaterial world of meaning that they achieve whatever consciousness they have of the self and world.” This world of knowing is also one of relatedness, in which we depend upon our relationship to other humans (in Helens case, upon Anne Sullivan) to “name” and thus make sense of our physical environment and mythological universe: together, we name chairs, dogs, winter, December, punctuality, jealousy, love, Leviathan, and God.

This, then, is what Percy meant by the “Peirce-Percy theory of meaning”: when Helen Keller understood “water” to mean water, the full light of language opened up to her the door of understanding, naming, comprehending, asserting, willing, and knowing. In short, she entered into her full personhoodand by extension we, human beings, have done the same. Percy thus believed firmly that language, the “Delta Δ factor”, mans “singularity” which stood for all to see and could not be called into question, could provide a firm ground for a new theory of man: as Homo loquens, Man-the-Talker. Using this concept, Percy set out to “understand Man as the languaged animal,” arguing that one might “even begin to understand the manifold woes, predicaments, and estrangements of man—and the delights and savorings and homecomings—as nothing more nor less than the variables of the Delta phenomenon, just as responses, reinforcements, rewards and such are the variables of stimulus-response phenomena.”

Percys criticisms of behaviorist psychiatry, which regarded man as simply an organism in an environment, were thus resolved: the uniquely human feelings of angst, alienation, homelessness, and transcendence could not be understood by modern psychiatry precisely because such feelings lay in the domain of the Welt, mans symbolic world of meaning. One could make sense, finally, of the claims of the existentialists, and understand how one might begin to live “authentically” or “inauthentically”—one must learn how to live meaningfully within the meaning-world of symbols.

So, too, could one begin to understand how to give a real ground to the old notions of “dignity,” “freedom,” “morality,” and the “sacredness of the individual”: if Man had broken out of the deterministic sequence of dyadic energy exchanges, and had begun to give names to the items, persons, ideas, and myths with which he filled his world, then it began to make sense to talk of human beings as willing individuals, possessing sovereignty, freedom, and the capacity for moral action. And in his last public lecture, delivered in 1990, Percy spelled out what he (along with Peirce) saw as the inevitable implication of the new theory of Homo loquens; man the triadic creature:

Once one concedes the reality of the triadic event, one is brought face to face with the nature of its elements. A child points to a flower and says “flower.” One element is the flower as perceived by sight; and the spoken word “flower,” a Gestalt of a peculiar little sequence of sounds… But what is the entity at the apex of the triangle, that which links the other two? Peirce, a difficult, often obscure writer, called it by various names, interpretant, interpreter, judge. I have used the term “coupler” as a minimal designation of that which couples name and thing, subject and predicate, links them by the relation which we mean by the peculiar little word “is.” It, the linking entity, was also called by Peirce “mind” and even “soul.” Here is the embarrassment, and it cannot be gotten round, so it might as well be said right out: By whatever name one chooses to call itinterpretant, interpreter, coupler, whatever it, the third element, is not material. It is as real as a cabbage or a king or a neuron, but it is not material. No material structure of neurons, however complex, and however intimately it may be related to the triadic event, can itself assert something. If you think it can, please draw me a picture of an assertion. A material substance cannot name or assert a proposition. The initiator of a speech-act is an act-or, that is, an agent. The agent is not material.

Peirce, he said, insisted on “both the reality and the nonmateriality of the third element,” and so did Percy. Choosing to reject both German and Berkeleyan idealism as inconsistent with what he regarded to be the real findings of science, and likewise convinced by Chomsky that man could not be regarded as merely an organism in an environment, Percy was left with Peirces triadic theory of meaning as the only explanation consonant with both the uniquely human phenomenon of language and the uniquely human feelings of angst, alienation, homelessness, and transcendence. Peirce understood that his linguistic triad, along with his acceptance that the scientific method offered an avenue to real truths about the world, involved him “in a realism and not in a nominalism,” and thus was led to reconcile “medieval realism with scientific empiricism.” Percy, too, agreed with Peirce that the best explanation of the facts at hand led to a metaphysical realism, and so to a robust definition of the human self within an ordered world. Given this understanding, then, even old notions like “dignity” and the “sacredness of the individual” could be seen to make sense, even in light of great trials and suffering.

You see what Percy has done. On purely empirical, indeed, on scientific grounds, using nothing but the everyday phenomenon of human language and solid logic, he has rehabilitated the old, musty doctrines of the human soul, free will, meaning, and the supernatural realm. In fact he has shown that such ideas are necessary to understand the phenomenon of human language. In a real sense, the only way to understand the fact that I am sitting at my desk writing to you, is to first believe that I possess an immaterial soul. And while, of course, Percys argument does not prove the existence of the Christian God, it does point to the existence of the supernatural and breaks the back of scientific determinism. And, once that dam is burst, all the old reasons to believe in God come rushing back. Religion is no longer the crazy old aunt in the attic, lingering around long past its glory years. It is in fact, precisely the best way to understand the human predicament, and to find a cure for the existential malaise that plagues modern society. Philosophical theology, of the sort done by Aquinas, and also of the more phenomenological, existential sort done by Walker Percy and the late Pope John Paul II, is the best way we have to understand the problems we face in this life, and to perhaps find an answer to them.

It may be that you have some idea of what Percy meant when he spoke of despair, suffering, and the crisis of meaning. It may also be that you have been in search of this sort of meaning for quite some time; for some sort of answer to the all-too-human crises of angst, loneliness, and despair, but did not think it was possible to find it. Percy, however, in his books would remind us not to forget that, in a real sense, to be human is to suffer, because to be human is to exist as a wayfarer upon this earth; as a pilgrim in search of a homeland. And if the suffering we face in this life is a result, as the existentialists held, of our unfulfilled needs for transcendence and relatedness, and if in fact we do live most fundamentally in relation to others through our meaning- world of linguistic signs, then it may be that our angst is due to the disordered way in which we relate to each other, and to the way in which we have forgotten what is truly meaningful in our lives. It could be that we are all disordered and fallen creatures, turned inwards upon ourselves, who will never really become who we truly are until we turn outwards again, towards our neighbors, in the fundamental human relationship of love. It may also be that we will never be able to do this on our own, and that we stand in need of being loved if we are to learn how to love—that Someone else must first love us. A wise pilgrim, of course, will keep close watch for signs pointing the way home, and if during the night he loses his way, then he will seek guidance from the stars above. Perhaps, the light from the heavens will show him the true way home—perhaps there is even a message sent from above; one of grace, and love, which can make him whole again. And the message just may be found in these very words, written down long ago: “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. And this is how God showed his love for us: He sent his one and only Son into the world, that we might live through Him.”

Jordan Hylden ’06, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus, is a Government concentrator in Currier House.

- Opinions –

Things That Count
by Jordan Hylden ‘06

God and the Tsunami
by Megan Buresh ‘08

Why I Go to Church
by Nathan Rosenberg, Jr. ‘05

Jesus in the Real World: Reclaiming What Christian Culture Forgot
by Mark Hill ‘05

– Features -

Looking for Fathers in All the Wrong Places
by Simeon Zahl ‘04

Eyes Wide Open: A Christian Response to Poverty and Oppression
by Yi-An Huang ‘05

G.K. Chesterton and the Joy of Living
by Jordan Teti ‘08

– Books & Arts -

How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
by Benjamin Woodruff ‘08

Frodo’s Gospel
by Laura Shortill ‘07

Glimpses of God at Tinker Creek
by Grace Tiao ‘08

– Fiction & Poetry -

Gasp! |   Shepherd — A David Poem
by Chi-Chi Esimai ‘08

Carmelites |   prayerful |   poppies
by Atalie Young ‘05

Midnight Eyesight
by Marie Laperle Scott ‘06

- Last Things -

Coming Home
by Kristen Nyborg ‘06

I was going to write this article about the purpose of education; indeed, more broadly, about the meaning of life. As if I know the answer to such questions. It is something that has been on my mind lately—my roommate, for example, has been going through the recruiting process for the past few weeks. He just got a wonderful job, and I’m very happy for him. But it was nerve-wracking for him; I could tell. He was so nervous, he made me nervous, too. And I got to thinking about what I was going to do after I graduate—law school? Seminary? Consulting? Graduate school? The possibilities swirled around in my mind, and before long, became something of an obsession. If seminary, which seminary? Lutheran? Episcopalian? None of the above? Or if law school, which law school? Am I smart enough to get into Harvard or Yale? If not, where will I go? Where will I go afterwards? Do I really want to work 15-hour days in a big corporate firm? What, where, when, WHY? That, finally, was the question that stuck most in my mind. If I’m running around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying to get into the best law school or the best seminary, why am I doing it? What really do I want? Why, why, why, why, why???

Death has a way of concentrating the mind. Most college students, I imagine, don’t often think about death—I certainly don’t. Living in the Quad as I do, the shuttle takes me each day to the Yard, and drops me off right smack in front of an old cemetery—God’s Acre, I believe it is called. But I rarely look at it. Really look at it, I mean. Rows upon rows of gravestones, most of them inscribed with gruesome little winged death’s heads—I don’t really see that when I get off the shuttle bus. “Even in the midst of life, we are in death,” the old Puritan preachers used to say. That’s not really true, I think. In the midst of life, we do everything we can to forget about death. We think about the problem set due tomorrow, and the cute girl in section, and so on, and so forth. In the midst of life, we tell ourselves, we are in life, and death is something far, far away…

Until it actually hits home. Death, I think, is something so strange, so different, so other, that we can’t handle it on a day-to-day basis. But when it comes, it changes us for a bit, and makes us see things differently, if only for a little while. It’s a lot like the mini-existential crisis brought on by my roommate’s job search—it makes us ask the why questions, only more so. Why do I want to be a lawyer, or a writer, or a pastor? More than that, why do I want to be anything at all? What should I spend my life at? I won’t have it forever—someday, even if I don’t like to think about it, I too will die. And so will my parents, my family, and my friends. Does that sound morbid? I suppose it is—but unfortunately no less true. Most of us don’t ask these questions out loud; they seem silly, in a way; too personal, and too subjective. But I think, in the end, they are the only questions that matter at all. What am I to do with my life? Who am I to spend it with? It’s so fragile… like a house of cards, or a sandcastle. How will I live? Why?

G. K. Chesterton said somewhere that God gave us death so that we might appreciate life. I am not sure if that is true, but there may be something to it. Adam and Eve, so the story goes, were given everything they ever could have wanted—a blissful Eden in which to live out their days, in perfect happiness and perfect peace. But still, they were not satisfied. “Ye shall be as gods,” the serpent told them, if only they would eat from the forbidden tree. And so, they took, and they ate. And God came and found them in the garden, and told them then that they would one day die—that, somehow, there would come an end to things. Adam would not forever live with Eve, nor Eve with Adam—someday, they would die. I wonder what Adam and Eve thought of that—I wonder if they even had any idea what to think. How can someone who has not known death understand it? But even as I write, I know that this is a silly question. I do not understand death; I don’t suppose that I ever will. All I know is that there will come an end to things—that, so to speak, I will not forever dwell in the Garden. I suppose Adam and Eve grasped that somehow too, when God told them that they were going to die. And I imagine that the fruit on the trees, and the grass on the hills, and the flowers on the meadows, looked all the more beautiful because they knew that they would not always have them. Adam and Eve had it all, and still were not satisfied—maybe God really did give them death so that they could appreciate life.

Life really is a funny thing, when you think about it. It doesn’t really answer the why questions for you—you’re born one day, even though no one asked you about it; you start spitting up and crying and eating mashed peas; you go to kindergarten and try to avoid the school bully; you go to middle school, and as if that wasn’t confusing enough, you get shipped off to high school; then you go to college, and wham!—there you are, 21 years old, and not too much more sure about things than you were during your mashed-pea days. At least then, you knew for a fact that you didn’t like mashed peas. The why questions are still out there, waiting, and they don’t get a bit easier as you go along.

I don’t think I can answer the why questions for you; not in a tidy little magazine like this one, published thrice yearly and door-dropped for your convenience. I don’t think truth works like that; I don’t think you can wrap it up tight with paper and string and leave it on someone’s doorstep. But I can tell you to please, please—start asking the why questions for yourself. Sometimes I worry that we forget to ask the why questions—we’re too busy running around, making sure that we get good grades, have the right friends, get the right job, and things like that. It’s like we spend our whole lives running, and don’t stop to think about where we’re running to, or why we’re even running in the first place. Maybe I’m wrong—maybe more of us lie awake at night than I think, wondering what we’re doing down here, and asking if there’s a God up in heaven who cares about all of us. I hope so. But I just worry that lots of us forget to do that.

Anyhow, I’ll be home this weekend for the funeral. It’ll be in a little side chapel at the First Lutheran Church ; they use it mostly for funerals, I guess. I remember once when I was much younger, I was in that chapel with my grandmother, and she told me that she thought she’d like to have her funeral there someday. It sort of creeped me out—to think that, one day, I would be back in that room, attending her funeral. And now, very soon, I will be. I still don’t know what to think about it all—my grandmother was a wonderful lady, and I know that she loved my brothers and me very much. The last time I saw her, it was in the nursing home, over Christmas break. She couldn’t talk very well, but I told her that I loved her, and that I’d miss her when I was gone. She understood what I’d said, and told me the same. And then I left, and now she’s gone. Death is too big for us to understand—any of us, no matter how much we’ve seen it—which is why, I think, we have funerals in churches. Things like that are too big for us, and so we bring them to God. I’m not going to understand death any more than I do now after the funeral, but I imagine that somehow, it will help to know that even if I don’t have all of the answers, God does.

There are some things in life, I think, that really count. Like love, for instance, and God, and what we’re here for, and what we’re going to do with our lives, and who we’re going to spend them with. Death has a way of concentrating the mind—of making you realize how important things like that are, and how so many other things that we spend our lives chasing after don’t really matter all that much. I’ve never been able to buy the notion that life is meaningless—that we’re just cosmic accidents, tricked by chemicals in our brain into thinking that things like Love, Truth, and Beauty really exist. I don’t buy that—I think they do exist. I think that, in this life, there are some things that count, and that those things are what make life worth the living. I even think that some of those things are stronger than death itself. I suppose, finally, that that’s why I am a Christian. I’m not going to get into what I think about all of the why questions right now—as much as I hold what I’ve found close to my heart, and care deeply about finding answers to the questions I haven’t figured out yet, those are the sorts of answers that we all have to find for ourselves. I just hope that, wherever you’re at, you start looking for them. I, for one, am still sorting them out.

Jordan Hylden ’06, Editor-in-Chief, is a Government concentrator in Currier House.

- Opinions –

On Life and Stem Cells
by the Editors

Sins of Omission
by Benjamin and Heather Grizzle ‘03

Gays and God: What’s at Stake for Conservatives
by Jeffery David Dean ‘06

– Features -

The Underground Man, and How He Got There
by Jordan Hylden ‘06

The Preaching of the Passion: The Seven Last Words from the Cross
by Rev. Prof. Peter J. Gomes

Waiting on Tables and God’s Calling
by Mattie Germer ‘03

– Books & Arts -

Jesus Walks With Me
by Jacob Bryant ‘07

Evolution Under the Microscope
by Chiduzie Madubata

Somewhere East of Eden
by Michael Cover ‘04

– Fiction & Poetry -

Debts
by Margaret Maloney ‘06

I Tire of Chasing Shadows
by Albert Hwang ‘04

untitled/crucifix
by Michael Cover ‘04

- Last Things -

Receiving the Kingdom of God
by Anna Bingham ‘06

As many of those who did not believe in God were standing together there, he excited considerable laughter. Have you lost him, then? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated? Thus they shouted and laughed. The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances.

“Where has God gone?” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him – you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us – for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.”

Here the madman fell silent and again regarded his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground, and it broke and went out. “I have come too early,” he said then; “my time has not come yet. The tremendous event is still on its way, still travelling – it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the distant stars – and yet they have done it themselves.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Gay Science”

***

Given the current state of American culture, it may seem that such melodramatic reports of God’s death are much like those of Mark Twain’s demise: greatly exaggerated. We just witnessed a presidential election pitting Altar Boy against Born-Again, in which each candidate seemed bent on proving the veracity of John Knox’s old dictum: “One man with God is a majority.” Indeed, in some ways, God seems to be more popular than ever. American churches are filling up faster than contractors can build them, movies about crucifixion have become Hollywood blockbusters, and even Ashton Kutcher wears T-shirts declaring that Jesus is his homeboy. Superficially, at least, it seems very difficult to make the case for God’s death: if anything, he seems to be quite spry in his old age.

But perhaps Ashton Kutcher’s wardrobe is not the best place to look for the Almighty. God, if he is real, should surely have more impact on our lives than that. He should be more than an idea that stubbornly clings to the minds of the backwards and the uneducated; he should be more than the organizing principle behind presidential elections and shiny new suburban megachurches. These things, finally, prove very little about God. For many of us, the words of Nietzsche’s madman hit home, far too close to our hearts. Many of us are no longer sure about God anymore. Our families are, but we are not. We have grandfathers that were preachers, uncles and aunts that were religious leaders, mothers and fathers with faith that can move mountains, even brothers and sisters who love the Lord with all their hearts, but to us, the faith of our fathers no longer makes any sense. At times we wish—no, we long—that it would, but it does not. God is intangible, ineffable, inscrutable, and perhaps even impossible. We go home for Christmas, and sit next to our grandparents in church, and wish that the joy they so earnestly feel and the faith they so deeply possess could be ours. But it is not, and we fear that it can never be. The madman speaks to our hearts, for we know what it is that we have lost, and despair of ever getting it back.

The main character of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Notes From Underground felt much the same way, for he struggled with the same dilemma that many of us know all too well: how, in a rootless world where we feel as if we are straying as through an infinite nothing, we are to face life. How, without God, are we to go on? The intensity of the underground man’s struggle can be felt from his very first words to us: that he is “a sick man… a spiteful man.” For page after page of impassioned narrative, the underground man breathlessly pours forth his invective at the world, screaming laments about the pointlessness of it all, all the while knowing there is no one at whom to scream. Perhaps better than any other book, Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground gives us a portrait of what it is to live without God. We are told, in fact, by the author that the underground man, though a fictional character, “not only may, but indeed must exist in our society, considering the general circumstances under which our society was formed… He’s a representative of the current generation.” While these words were of course penned not in 21st century America but in 19th century Russia, they may indeed have a great deal of applicability to our own time. It may be true that the underground man is, as he himself asserts, someone who has “only taken to an extreme that which you haven’t even dared to take halfway,” and when we find him at the end of his Notes, twenty-four years old and standing alone in the wet, dreary snow of St. Petersburg, we may find more of ourselves standing there with him than we had ever dared to dread.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. The underground man, as Dostoevsky implies, did not go underground, as it were, by his own volition: he was driven there. Something, he asserts, about modern society made him possible, and in fact necessary. He is, he tells us, a “representative of the current generation.” Dostoevsky is pointing us towards something radical, something drastic, that shook at the roots of the underground man’s world, and that by implication has shaken the roots of our world as well. If you are clever, you will have already figured it out—he is pointing to the massive changes in European thought that occurred in the 19th century, such that prior to 1859, the underground man’s existence would not even have been possible, but afterwards, was made necessary. Since these changes have much to do with the nature of our own society, and since many of the questions that they raise remain current today, it is worth our time to briefly look back at how the underground man found himself where he was.

The world that gave birth to Dostoevsky’s underground man and Nietzsche’s madman was something altogether new in European history. The idea of God had long been the capstone of Western thought, which since the conversion of the emperor Constantine had been popularly expressed through the Christian religion. As the intellectual historian James Turner points out, the very idea of atheism would not have made sense to the average European man or woman for over a thousand years. God was, so to speak, a part of the air they breathed. Even when they were not particularly pious (and many Europeans were far from holy), they regarded God and his Church as an essential part of their societal fabric. Europeans were possessed of a sense of place, the importance of which Romano Guardini explains: they looked up at the stars, and knew that they were God’s stars. They looked around at the world, and knew that it was God’s world. They looked at themselves, and knew that they were God’s people. Their lives were endowed with purpose; their actions had eternal import; their souls were immortal. They knew that life at times may not make sense, and indeed, often would not: wars raged, plagues ravaged, and thieves plundered throughout their difficult lives. But suffering was eventually to be redeemed; in fact was redemptive, for so it had been made by Christ’s suffering on the cross. In this world they would have trouble, but they did not fear, for they knew that Christ had overcome the world. By faith, they were sure of what they hoped for, and certain of what they did not see; this defined their lives, and anchored their world.

But as beautiful and as comforting as all this was, it was not to last. Changes came to the European psyche, which were to forever change the way in which they saw the world and their place therein. In the High Middle Ages, the theological certainty of St. Thomas Aquinas had reigned supreme: all truth was God’s truth, and all the world was God’s. By the 19th century, however, the rigid proofs and postulates of Aquinas had long been a thing of the past. The Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution had all burst upon the scene with their freewheeling, freethinking ideas. Religious doctrines were no longer secure, and even God’s existence was very much in doubt. Rival philosophical schools had for centuries attacked each other’s pet proofs of God’s existence, with the ultimate effect of dismantling all but the biological argument from design. This line of reasoning for a time seemed secure, as even the most inveterate atheist could be silenced by simply pointing to the apparent providential design of nature.

The publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, however, dealt this argument a fatal blow. God was no longer necessary to explain the origin and intricacy of nature, with the result that God was no longer needed to explain anything at all. God was not even needed to explain the human soul—Herbert Spencer, in his widely influential Principles of Psychology, asserted that our minds were nothing more than stimulus-response machines created by the process of evolution. Evolutionary psychologists confidently stated that our so-called “souls” were really nothing more than physical functions caused by simple chemical reactions. It is difficult to underestimate the seismic shift represented by all of these changes—the idea of God, which had been the capstone of Western thought for centuries, was suddenly gone. No longer were the stars God’s stars; no longer was the world God’s world; no longer were we God’s people. Our lives were not endowed with purpose; our souls were not immortal, nay, did not even exist; and God, who had benevolently watched over us all these long years, was dead. And so it was, finally, that in the latter half of the 19th century, an entire culture strove to come to grips with the death of God. Many wondered, as did Nietzsche’s madman, if all of Europe was now “straying as through an infinite nothing.”

This was the new world about which the madman prophesied; this was the world that drove the underground man underground. Those who heeded the madman’s words struggled to redefine the very foundations of their lives: if we were not made by God, then why were we made? If the cosmos itself is purposeless and our very existence no more than happenstance, where does that leave us? Do our lives have meaning? Can we invest our lives with moral purpose without a transcendent moral standard? Do any of our choices even matter? Indeed, can we even speak of “choice” and human emotions like “love” in a mechanistic universe, where our “souls” are no more than highly advanced stimulus-response machines? All of these questions troubled 19th century Europe, as indeed they trouble many of us today. Dostoevsky, in his Notes from Underground, does not offer us answers: rather, he presents to us a man who attempts to live his life in the face of the unanswerable. It is because of this that the underground man, like Nietzsche’s madman, hits us where we are: the answers to these questions are so far beyond our ken that, indeed, “we must ourselves become gods” to answer them. The underground man knows they are unanswerable, and given the death of God and of the soul, is concerned only about finding a way to live. In the end, is it possible at all? This is the ultimate question that the underground man sets out to answer, and so with the same question in mind, we turn now to him, to find out, as it were, if life underground is worth the living.

***

When first we come upon the underground man, he has been living in self-imposed exile for twenty years, alone and unemployed in a squalid apartment on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. He is quick to tell us that he was not always this way; that at one time he was employed as a civil servant, and before that a student. But no longer: now, he is alone. He quit work years ago, since he had been given a small inheritance and did not see the point in it, and avoids all but the most superficial human contact. It is tempting to write him off as a lunatic—his frantic prose does not always seem like that of a sane man (as we understand sanity), and it is at first difficult to understand why he has chosen to live a life of solitude. It becomes clear, however, when we listen to him carefully, that he is not in fact a madman. Rather, he is completely sane: his life in the underground, miserable as it may be, is driven by his unshakeable belief that life is pointless. For the underground man, life cannot possibly have meaning unless we are endowed with the ability to make free moral choices, and to have those choices correspond with transcendent values, like love. But both of these things, he believes, are not possible, given the death of God and the human soul. Some people may not realize this, he says, but for those of us who know that free will is an illusion and love a farce, there can be no other choice than the underground. We are mice, and not men, he argues, and so cannot honestly, without denying our conscious knowledge of the futility of life, live anyplace other than a mouse-hole.

Central to the underground man’s despair is his belief in what he calls the “wall.” The wall, he writes, consists of “the laws of nature, the conclusions of natural science and mathematics. As soon as they prove to you, for example, that it’s from a monkey you’re descended, there’s no reason to make faces; just accept it as it is.” The mechanistic universe of Darwinism, he believed, left no room for free choice. “Science itself” has taught man, he tells us, “that in fact he possesses neither a will nor a whim of his own, that he never did, and that he himself is nothing more than a kind of piano key or organ stop; that, moreover, there still exist laws of nature, so that everything he’s done
has been not in accordance with his own desire, but in and of itself, according to the laws of nature.” Since God did not endow us with souls, and since our minds (as Spencer was to point out later) are nothing more than highly evolved stimulus-response machines operating by means of chemical reactions, the underground man was unable to conceive of free choice. In theory, then, man’s desires and actions could be predicted “according to these laws, mathematically, and will be entered on a schedule… so that there will be no actions or adventures left on earth.” This “wall,” the underground man believed, was completely destructive of our humanity, which to him only made sense in the context of free choice. “Man needs only one thing,” he asserts, “his own independent desire, whatever that independence might cost and wherever it might lead… What is man without desire, without will, and without wishes but a stop in an organ pipe?” It is for this reason that the underground man calls us “mice,” and not men. While the uneducated “men of action” act as if their choices matter, we who are conscious know that they do not. We know, he tells us, that they are not really even our choices at all, and so we are robbed of the ability to have and act upon independent desires and wishes, which of course are essential characteristics of personhood.

Furthermore, given the excision of free will from humanity, the underground man believed that altruism was, as a result, impossible. Although we appear, at times, to act out of love for our fellow man, these actions are illusory. According to Darwinian evolution, all organisms act out of a selfish desire for their own preservation, disregarding the interests of others. Acts that appear to be altruistic are not, since they are actually done in the expectation of receiving personal benefit somewhere on down the road. As the underground man noted, referring to this doctrine of natural science:

As soon as they prove to you that in truth one drop of your own fat is dearer to you than the lives of one hundred thousand of your fellow creatures and that this will finally put an end to all the so-called virtues, obligations, and other such similar ravings and prejudices, just accept [it]…

The “so-called virtues” did not make sense to the underground man, for science had given them definitions far, far different from their traditional meanings. Concepts like friendship, compassion, and love were rendered meaningless to him: if people could no longer truly care for one another, what good was friendship? And if science had reduced love to a transactional relationship, what was the point in pursuing it? What does love matter if we can no longer truly love one another? This, finally, is what drove the underground man underground. He could not “conceive of love in any way other than a struggle… it always begins with hatred and ends with moral subjugation.” The underground man knew that this was not love; it was power, and he found himself, in the end, unable to live without love.

His last chance at love came from an unlikely place: a brothel. Fresh from a humiliating encounter with his friends, in which he had destroyed every shred of respectability he had left to him, he stumbled into a brothel from the cold St. Petersburg night in a frenzy, bent on taking whatever pleasure he could from whomever he could find. It is there, in that place, that he met Liza, a young woman with “something simple and kind in her face.” He did not talk to her for the first two hours, and in fact made a point of not looking into her eyes, but when the time came for him to leave he found that he could not. His feelings towards Liza, which at first had been based upon nothing more than a naked desire for power, had turned into shame. “I’d suddenly realized,” he tells us, “how absurd, how revolting as a spider, was the idea of debauchery, which, without love, crudely and shamelessly begins precisely at the point where genuine love is consummated.” They begin talking, haltingly at first, in what is, for him, a rare attempt to show kindness towards another human being. The twenty-year-old Liza soon reveals that she has been separated from her parents, and was forced to work in the brothel to make ends meet. As a result, she is sick, and depressed. Sick and depressed himself, the underground man empathizes with her, almost despite himself.

This commendable goal, however, quickly metamorphoses into his old habits of relational subjugation. He soon writes that “it was the sport that attracted me most of all. Something had suddenly caught fire in me, some kind of goal had ‘manifested itself’ before me.” Forgetting his good intentions, he brings her dormant fears to the surface and presents himself as a sort of personal savior, inviting her to his apartment, ostensibly with the magnanimous goal of removing her from the squalor of the brothel. Realizing his subjugation fantasies, he imagines telling Liza that “you’re mine, you’re my creation, you’re pure and lovely, you’re my beautiful wife.” Even as his desire for power comes to the surface, however, one can detect an undercurrent of something else: perhaps affection, perhaps compassion, or perhaps even love. After he leaves the brothel, he muses that “she really did interest me,” and wonders if maybe “it wasn’t only the sport” that had attracted him. In the interval before their next meeting, he works himself into a frenzy, warning himself that at their next encounter he’ll “once again put on that dishonest, deceitful mask,” then countering immediately with the objection, “Why deceitful? Yesterday I spoke sincerely. I recall there was genuine feeling in me, too…” The tension between his desire for love and his belief that it does not exist builds before their next meeting, giving him one final chance to reject his philosophical beliefs and accept the love that he so desperately desires.

When Liza appears on his doorstep, he is immediately ashamed of himself and bursts into tears. After regaining his composure, however, he launches into a tirade against her, telling her not quite truthfully that he had only seemed to care about her, and had only “craved the sport.” He ends in tears, calling himself “a scoundrel and a bastard,” and screams “Why are you here? Why don’t you leave?” But instead of taking offense or becoming angry, Liza instead embraces the underground man and weeps with him. Taken off guard, he stammers out “They won’t let me… I can’t be… good!” and collapses in hysterics.

The selfless act of Liza represented the last best chance for the underground man to understand love: it was a gift, it was completely undeserved given his actions, and, as a pure action, it came without any of the philosophical baggage of language that might have served as a detriment. Because it was selfless, it was an act of love, but also because it was selfless, he could not understand it. “After all,” he tells us, “I couldn’t live without exercising power and tyrannizing over another person…” Finally unable to understand love, he reverts back to his old methods of relational subjugation, having sex with Liza out of nothing more than a desire for power, once again feeling only “hatred” and “revenge.”

We are not told what awful thing he does to Liza; we only know that a mere fifteen minutes later she is sitting on the bedroom floor, her head leaning up against the bed, and sobbing. “She fully understood now,” he writes to us, “that I was a despicable man, and, most important, that I was incapable of loving her.”

This finally is the end of life for the underground man: he could not understand love, and so he could not live life. He “could no longer love,” he explains, “because for me love meant tyrannizing and demonstrating my moral superiority… all my life I could never even conceive of any other kind of love.” He had grown, he says, “unaccustomed to living life… real life oppressed me, so unfamiliar was it, that I even found it hard to breathe.”

Liza left his apartment, with one last long, sad look back at her almost-lover, and walked out into the snowy winter night. The underground man could not even let her go without one last, terrible cruelty, which he tells us came “not from my heart, but from my stupid head.” To drive home the (false) notion that he had never loved her, he thrust a five-ruble note into her hand as she left; the old exchange of the brothel; the only exchange he ever understood. Not able to look her in the eyes, he turned and let her walk away—no last looks, and no last goodbyes. But even then, his heart cried out one last time, rebelling against the “wall” of science that would not let him feel. He ran out into the cold St. Petersburg night, crying her name, frantically looking for her footsteps in the dim and dusky light. But it was not long before he stopped. Although his “heart was being torn apart,” he knew that he could never love her; that he would surely grow to hate her, even “perhaps as soon as tomorrow.” He could not understand love, and so knew that he could never love another human being. In the last glimpse we get of the underground man, we see him walking slowly back to his apartment, the wet snow of St. Petersburg falling all ‘round him, his heart made cold and his soul made dead. We are told that he retreated then into the underground, for he was unable to live the life of the living. He speaks to us from there, crying out that he is not the only one who dwells under the earth:

We’ve all become estranged from life; we’re all cripples, every one of us, more or less. We’ve become so estranged that at times we feel some kind of revulsion for genuine ‘real life’… we don’t know ourselves. What concerns me in particular, is that in my life I’ve only taken to an extreme that which you haven’t dared to even take halfway; what’s more, you’ve mistaken your cowardice for good sense; and, in so deceiving yourself, you’ve consoled yourself. Just take a closer look! Why, we don’t even know where this ‘real life’ lives nowadays, what it is, and what it’s called… We’re even oppressed by being men—men with real bodies and blood of our very own. We’re ashamed of it; we consider it a disgrace and we strive to become some kind of impossible ‘general-human-beings.’ We’re stillborn; for some time now we haven’t been conceived of living fathers; we like it more and more. We’re developing a taste for it. Soon we’ll conceive of a way to be born of ideas. But enough; I don’t want to write any more ‘from Underground…’

***

The underground man is different, profoundly different; so different as to be unsettling. We look at him, and turn away, for he shows us something we do not want to see—in the end it is not his otherness that unsettles us, but instead his sameness. He struggles with the same questions that we struggle with, faces the same existential crises that we face, and yet while we live here in the aboveground, with our schoolwork and friends and hopes and dreams, he dwells in the underground, without friends, without purpose, and without love. This unsettles us, because we do not want to end up where he is. We are afraid to look deep down into the recesses of our souls, for fear that we shall find there only an abyss.

The abyss, however, is what the underground man shows us. Emptied of freedom and robbed of love, our souls have been replaced by nothingness. Life has become impossible: the abyss has bored into our very souls, emptying them of all that once had made them human. We are not men: we are mice; we are organ stops; we cannot love, and we cannot live. Faced with the abyss, the only option left for us is the retreat underground, to dwell under the earth among the shadows of men who once were alive. We cannot fulfill the prophecy of the madman, he tells us: God has died, and we cannot replace him. We are doomed, like Sisyphus, to forever roll our stones up the mountain, but we cannot smile. What is the point? And how can we smile, when we know what it is that we have lost? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves?

The underground man cannot give us an answer, because he does not have one. The world in which he was born did not give him one, and neither can the world of today. Spencer has been replaced by new apostles, and our souls still dwell beneath the earth. There are some who do not heed the cry of the madman, and refuse to stare into the abyss, but for those of us who do, there can be no solace on this earth. God is dead, and we have died with him.

Our hope, if it is to come, must come from beyond this earth. God has died here, but there may yet be a chance—oh, and if there is only a chance!—that he is still living elsewhere. Faith, if it is possible, may yet save us. Dostoevsky speaks of this in his masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov: the good priest, Father Zosima, is asked a question that many of us know all too well:

You see, I close my eyes and think: if everyone has faith, where does it come from? And then they say that it all came originally from fear of the awesome phenomena of nature, and that there is nothing to it at all. What? I think, all my life I’ve believed, then I die, and suddenly there’s nothing, and only ‘burdock will grow on my grave,’ as I read in one writer? It’s terrible! What, what will give me back my faith? Though I believed only when I was a little child, mechanically, without thinking about anything… How, how can it be proved? I’ve come now to throw myself at your feet and ask you about it. If I miss this chance, too, then surely no one will answer me for the rest of my life. How can it be proved, how can one be convinced? Oh, miserable me! I look around and see that for everyone else, almost everyone, it’s all the same, no one worries about it anymore, and I’m the only one who can’t bear it. It’s devastating, devastating!

And Father Zosima, old and full of wisdom, replies:

No doubt it is devastating. One cannot prove anything here, but it is possible to be convinced… by the experience of active love. Try to love your neighbors actively and tirelessly. The more you succeed in loving, the more you’ll be convinced of God and the immortality of your soul. And if you reach complete selflessness in the love of your neighbor, then undoubtedly you will believe, and no doubt will even be able to enter your soul… I am sorry that I cannot say anything more comforting, for active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with everyone watching… whereas active love is labor and perseverance, and for some people, perhaps, a whole science. But I predict that even in that very moment when you see with horror that despite all your efforts, you not only have not come nearer your goal but seem to have gotten farther from it, at that very moment—I predict this to you—you will suddenly reach your goal and will clearly behold over you the wonder-working power of the Lord, who all the while has been loving you, and all the while has been mysteriously guiding you. Forgive me for not being able to stay with you longer, but I am expected. Goodbye.

Works Cited:

1. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes From Underground. Trans. Michael R. Katz.
New York: Norton, 2001.

2. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa
Volokhonsky. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002.

3. Guardini, Romano. The End of the Modern World. Trans. Elinor C. Briefs. Wilmington:
ISI Books, 2001.

4. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York:
Random House, 1974.

5. Turner, James. Without God, Without Creed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1985.

Jordan Hylden ’06, Editor-in-Chief, is a Government concentrator in Currier House.

- Editor’s Note –

Searching for Veritas
by Jordan Hylden ‘06

- Opinions –

Gay Marriage: a Moral Imperative
by Stephen Dewey ‘07

There’s Something Missing Here
by Professor Ellen B. Aitken, Harvard Divinity School

– Features -

The Real Losers of Locke V. Davey
by Joshua Davey, HLS ‘06

Love and Marriage?
by Bronwen Catherine McShea ‘03, HDS ‘06

Right and Wrong: God, Law and the Secular State
by Paul F. Niehaus ‘04 and Jeffery J. Niehaus Ph.D., GCTS

Utmost and Highest
by Jeffery David Dean ‘06

– Books & Arts -

Overcoming the Wall
by Dustin Michael Saldarriaga ‘06

The Da Vinci Con
by Adam D. Hilkemann ‘07

The Passion of the Christ
by Ted K. Lim ‘06

Systems and Christianity
by Joel Mitchell ‘04

– Fiction & Poetry -

Next of Kin
by Emily S. High ‘06

Cripple
by Michael Cover ‘04

(improv) |   Peace Surpassing
by Marie Laperle Scott ‘06

But although the old man upstairs may have built himself into our campus architecture, it’s often difficult to see how he matters in our everyday lives. While some students here seem to have him all figured out, for most of us the question is much more difficult. If you grew up in a devoutly Christian home, you might have gotten the impression that knowing God has something to do with not drinking, not smoking, not swearing, not having sex, and generally NOT doing a lot of things. If you grew up in a less religious home, you probably weren’t really sure what knowing God meant—if it meant anything at all, it meant taking care of poor people and living a good life, but then, since lots of atheists and agnostics did that as well, it was hard to tell what difference it made. And of course, if you grew up in a religious tradition outside of Christianity, you received a completely different set of preconceived notions about God, and have your own struggles about how best to know and serve him (or her). One of the largest problems we face is that God means different things to different people. It’s hard to know just who God is, and even harder to know how he matters to us, or why we matter to him.

The way we live doesn’t help, either. Most of us worked our tails off in high school in order to get into Harvard, and now that we’re here, we’re still working our tails off in order to get into the best law school, med school, or i-bank. No matter how we were brought up, there just isn’t a lot of time to think about God—it’s all we can do to keep up with our homework, our extracurriculars, and to try to have a little fun once in a while too. And so, given all the difficulties involved, many of us simply give up. It’s simply so much easier to stop asking these sorts of questions, and to either believe, by default, what we were brought up believing, or to conclude that there are too many problems with religion to have faith in anything, choosing instead to float along in a sort of comfortable agnosticism. After all, there’s a problem set due tomorrow, and a party tomorrow night, and why does any of this matter in the first place…?

The Harvard Ichthus exists to change that attitude. We believe that religion is something entirely serious, requiring the complete energy of one’s mind, and that the choice of and devotion to a religion is the most important choice any of us will ever make. Religion is nothing less than the framework by which we live our lives, whether we choose to follow Jesus, Adonai, Allah, someone or something else, or nothing at all. We at the Ichthus are Christians—we believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God; that He died on Good Friday and rose again on Easter Sunday, and that He is the answer to the problems of our broken world. We believe this so strongly that we are not willing to put our faith upon a shelf or take it for granted—we want to think about it critically, and talk about it with whomever will listen. The Ichthus is a journal of Christian thought, written by people who endeavor to apply that faith to every aspect of their lives—to think Christianly about biology, psychology, mathematics, physics, history, philosophy, economics, political science, art, music, poetry, literature, film, relationships, marriage, careers, beauty, truth, and love. We are not interested in proselytizing; we are interested in discussing, and we hope that people of all faiths, and of none, will join with us in the discussion. We are interested in searching for Veritas—Truth—and in putting that Truth into practice in our everyday lives. We might be right, and we might be wrong, but we are searching for something that we can hold on to. We are a journal for searchers, and we invite you to join us in our search.