Volume 3, Issue 1 - Fall 2006 (click for pdf)

– Opinions –

Mary for Biblical Christians: A Meditation on the Annunciation
by Faye Darnall

Anima Forma Corporis: on Symbols, the Sacred, and Festivity
by Jordan Teti ‘08

Translation Necessary
by Grace Tiao ‘08

Debunking the Church-State Dichotomy
by Christopher Lacaria ‘09

– Features -

The Second Tablet Project
by J. Budziszewski

Mma Ramotswe, Walker Percy, and the Danger of Tenderness
by Jordan Hylden ‘06

– Books & Arts -

Christians: Spiritually on Fire or Down in Flames
by Adam Hilkemann ‘07

Truth Be Told
by Alee Lockman ‘10

Verdict on Vendetta
by Carol Green ‘09

– Fiction & Poetry -

The Roses: A Triptych
by Victoria Sprow ‘06

(untitled)
by Marie Laperle Scott ‘06

A poem takes to Sky
by Judith Huang ‘09

Bankrupt
by Albert Hwang ‘08

- Last Things -

What Now?
by Ann Chao ‘08

Christ is the center of these, of course, yet someone else is always present, in a role far beyond supporting actress: she who said, “be it done unto me according to thy word;” the woman who gave half her chromosomes to the project of the incarnation, then in a Bethlehem cave bore the light of the world into our darkness.

Christianity is a historical religion. The belief that God acts in time, through people and circumstances, is not true of all religions and it has implications for how we practice our faith. It means we can legitimately look to real events and people’s stories to learn about God’s unfolding intention in human life and in our own lives. We do this with the heroes and heroines, prophets and priests of the Old Testament, with the apostles, disciples and the martyrs of the New. Mary has a power to reveal Christ particular to her unique and extraordinary role in the story of salvation.

The record of her encounter with the Lord begins with the appearance of an angel, who startles her by his greeting, “Hail, Mary, [highly] favored one.^a The Lord is with you.” This leaves her “deeply troubled.” Apparently nothing Gabriel said accords with Mary’s own estimation of herself.

Our minds are always troubled when some idea of ourselves is proven false or inadequate. Think of the first time you did not do well academically at Harvard. The disjunction between what you thought your identity to be and the new information no doubt confused you and might even have produced panic: “Aren’t I smart? What if I’m not intelligent enough to make it here?” You had to formulate a new self-understanding as a student in the process of learning. This doesn’t stop with college. Life has a way of providing circumstances that make growth possible, and most of them are trouble.

The positive challenge happens when Christ comes into our lives as he came into Mary’s. Christ always brings an awareness of who we are meant to be in God’s eyes, a sense of being graced by the original holiness and justice God intended when He made us.^b For us this has negative implications as well.^c Since “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God,”^d this new self-knowledge is almost always excruciating.

A new or heightened sense of the reality of God and the graces God gives such as Mary experienced cannot help but bring fear and trembling. One of the most common troubles I hear from students when God becomes more immediate to them is uneasiness over whether God will ask something of them that they do not want to give.

All of us hold ourselves back from God in some ways. We fret over trying to understand what God might be saying to us while making sure we keep our own will firmly ensconced in the driver’s seat. Ask anyone long on the spiritual road. They will confirm that one’s will, even though it desires happiness, can just as likely lead to misery, and not infrequently does.

Despite this anxiety in some that God has monstrous designs for our lives to force us into a mold that will never fit — as though the perfect love that knit us in our mothers’ wombs to be exactly ourselves could ever want us to be false to that! — one of the most common desires I’ve heard from students is for a direct communication from God. “Just tell me what to do, God!” We assume a personal message from the Almighty would be consoling, that we would willingly undertake exact instructions if only God would give them. Scriptural evidence does little to justify such a hope: think of Jeremiah, Jonah and Elijah. Yet we persist in asking all the same.

Mary gives us indication of what a word from our Creator really means: a change in our understanding of ourselves so profound that our puny words can barely describe it. Ruth Burrows, a discalced Carmelite nun who dedicated her life to prayer, wrote in her classic Guidelines for Mystical Prayer that discomfort always accompanies God drawing close to us. What else could result when the infinite presses upon the finite, when perfect love enters this imperfect world? If we could see ahead to the growth God wants for us, we would thank Him for our uneasiness, even for suffering, as John of the Cross says we should, because we would never come to God without it.

God’s trouble is never the fruitless soul-destroying anxiety many of us have known. We are being stretched into a whole new being. That cannot help but hurt, but also feel freeing, like the loosening of a clenched muscle from a painful spasm.

The great consolation always given, even when we do not feel it, is this: we are not alone. To us has come Emmanuel, “a name which means ‘God is with us.”^e He came to be with us, and He went first to Mary. She was the first to believe the angel’s words: “God is with you.”

Drawing on the Latin root of the word “conversion,” Catholics believe that throughout life we turn more and more toward God through God’s grace and our cooperation with it. A key moment in that turning is precisely this: when the idea “God is with us” becomes personal, as it did for Mary; when it becomes, “God is with me.” God didn’t just come to be with and to die for all of humanity.^f He came to be with you.

Like Mary at the annunciation, we can but “ponder” this seemingly improbable proposition. If we ponder, again and again, even when no answer comes, at some point we will, as Mary, receive a word from the Lord. It may even be the one she received from pondering, repeated over three hundred times in scripture. “Do not be afraid.” It is both a consolation and a challenge. Letting go of fear is the prerequisite for growth in Christ. Fear keeps us from changing, shrivels us back into the half-life from which God would save us.

Only freed from fear could Mary give her famous fiat. “I am the handmaid of the Lord. Be it done unto me according to thy word.”^g Her yes to God had to come first for the rest of ours to follow. And so we treasure her as the first member of Christ’s mystical body, and follow her direction, saying our own “yes” to Christ as she did, humbly opening to Him, believing the angel’s final words to her: “for nothing is impossible with God.”

Then we too begin a movement toward our own “magnificat.” The more Christ’s Holy Spirit dwells within us, the more we will be able with her “to proclaim the greatness of the Lord.” We will not be able to stop ourselves, for our spirits too will have found our joy in Christ our savior.^h

^b If these terms are unfamiliar, see the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 374-384.

^c Catholics believe that Mary was without sin, so we would not attribute Mary’s consternation at the angel’s greeting to the sorrow that produces repentance, though other Christians might. Preachers through the years have suggested many explanations of her troubled state. I believe that the greeting troubled her because she was a humble woman, and Gabriel’s words implied she had a position of honor.

^d Romans 3:23

^e Mat 1:20-23

^f 1 Tim 2:4-6

^g Luke 1:38

^h Luke 1:46-47

Visit the ancient catacombs of Saint Callixtus, just outside of Rome along the Appian Way, and you will realize what a symbol means for a Christian. It is not simply a representative drawing, or a dispensable metaphor for something spiritual. Indeed, I think a walk through the crypts of the first Christians would convince most that symbols meant something real to them-that they were a necessary and important part of worshipping God, of experiencing what is sacred. In the first few centuries after Christ, these disciples of the faith frescoed and engraved various animals, objects, and letters on the tombs of their brethren. You can still see these mysterious etchings of fish, lambs, anchors, shepherds, and even phoenixes. But when we consider that they stand alongside the bodies of the courageous whose martyrdom laid the foundation for Christianity, we start to consider how important these symbols really were. Do they simply “stand for” Christian principles-are they merely metaphors for certain virtues, or for Christ, Himself? After walking through those literally hallowed halls, I sensed that these images had to mean something more.

The ICHTHUS fish, for example, was a sacred symbol of Christ for the early Christians. It literally means “fish” in Greek, but is also an acronym for “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.” It is often found near images of loaves of bread to indicate the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. To call the ICHTHUS a “cultural icon,” or a “historio-religious metaphor,” would do a great injustice to the power of this image for these Christians. So how can we properly understand the transcendent power of a sacred symbol?

In response to this question, Josef Pieper, a popular Thomist philosopher of the 20th century, argues that one must believe in the ancient philosophical idea that anima forma corporis, or “the soul is the form of the body.” You can find this statement in St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, and in Aristotle’s De Anima. Pieper writes about this in his essay, “The Grandeur and Misery of Man,” from his Anthology. This statement illustrates Aquinas and Aristotle’s belief that the body and soul are esssentially connected. The soul needs a body to experience the world and to interact with its surroundings. This is important because the intellectual soul does not possess a natural knowledge of truth, as angels do. As a result, the soul must cultivate knowledge using the senses. In order to do this, Aquinas argues that it needs a “corporeal instrument,” which performs the “action of the senses.” This corporeal instrument is the body, to which the incorporeal soul is linked for its complete activity. Thus, while the immortal rational soul can exist without the body, its union with the body allows it to engage with and apprehend what is sacred. Otherwise, without a body, the soul would need a “supernatural gift” from God to fully function. Also, we should remember that Aquinas states that the soul is the form of the body, not vice versa. In other words, “the body is not of the essence of the soul; but the soul by the nature of its essence can be united to the body.” Indeed, this unity is for the “soul’s good.”

Pieper argues in his essay that a belief in this reasoning is a sort of password that admits a person to the world of the sacred. To believe that the soul is the form of the body allows someone to “understand the fixed and predetermined form of sacred ‘language’, the language of gesture, symbol, and word.” In other words, through our senses-by reading a prayer, singing at church, seeing a symbol-we are able to exercise our soul.

This logic is challenged by “spiritualists” and “corporealists,” as Pieper calls them. On the one hand, spiritualists attack the anima forma corporis idea by arguing that the spiritual act is the central and “decisive factor in worship.” As a result, the manner in which praise is expressed is viewed with “indifference.” The symbols, music, and fixed prayers are “purely a matter of externals,” as long as one’s spirit is acting. This stems from the spiritualist’s belief that the soul can bypass the body to interact with God. “Corporealists,” for wholly different reasons, also believe that “the rite is entirely optional.” They see fixed forms of worship as “unwarranted constraint” and so rituals are put aside in favor of “letting ourselves go” so as to maximize a more natural form of worship. Both these interpretations devalue the power of symbols because they do not acknowledge that anima forma corporis-that the soul needs the body to operate as the “consummate form.”

Let us consider this “spiritualist” idea with respect to the symbols in the catacombs, which were so dear to the first Christians. If we overstress the value of spiritual action, without acknowledging the role of the body, then we necessarily view the etchings on the crypts to be charming, but arbitrary. As long as we spiritually feel that Christ gives us hope, we don’t need to view the anchor as a symbol of the hope that derives from Christ. If this is true, were the early Christians simply fascinated by symbology? I think not; these symbols were not merely for “show.” Nor did they serve much of a utilitarian purpose. Instead, the anchor meant something to them because seeing it provoked a movement of their soul towards something higher-towards the core of all that is sacred-God. When you see a beautiful crucifix in a church and feel something in your soul because you see it and detect the reality of God in it, you too are experiencing what the ancient Christians found so powerful.

Indeed, this idea of anima forma corporis can lead us to a very enriching spiritual life. As Pieper eloquently writes, there is a “unique opportunity offered the individual by the challenge to transcend the limitations of the self precisely by submitting to the objectivity of the consummate form.” We can overcome our body’s inability to physically see God by acknowledging that what our eyes see can move our soul because of God’s real presence in that object. This is the essence of worship. This paradox allows us to truly view something as sacred.

I have still not mentioned what is perhaps Pieper’s most persuasive point in his argument. He rightly observes that someone who does not accept anima forma corporis cannot understand the reasons behind a purposely non-utilitarian act. In other words, he “will never comprehend what is meant by a symbol.” Think about the last time you lit a candle to celebrate a special occasion, or to commemorate a loved one who had passed away. You do not light this candle to illuminate the room, but to symbolically express something that involves your soul. If you have ever done this, you know the meaning of a symbol. It exists so that we can use our body to apprehend something sacred and holy-God.

Perhaps this is why the Eucharist, the ultimate “symbol” in Catholic worship, is not even a symbol. The presence of Christ in the Eucharist is not “merely symbolic,” but sacramental. As Pieper says, “like no other sign in the world, it at the same time effectuates what it means,” not merely “signifying” what it means. “In other words, it creates objective, solid reality… It is the actual presence of God among men.” The spiritualist we have mentioned, who “thinks primarily in abstract, conceptual terms,” might view the “act of feeding on God himself” to be excessively “materialistic or even primitive.” Indeed, their denial of anima forma corporis necessarily makes the consumption of the Eucharist-a bodily act- “merely symbolic” since they cannot see a necessary unity between the soul and body. But for the believer in real signs, the “bread of life” that is Jesus Christ in the Eucharist (John 6:35) gives life to our soul through our body. Indeed, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, Holy Communion “augments our union with Christ,” as according to the Gospel of John which reads “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him” (John 6:56). The Catechism also states this in a different way-”what material food produces in our bodily life, Holy Communion wonderfully achieves in our spiritual life.” Clearly this “symbol” is not merely an external act that “signifies” something. Instead, it is an interaction with the reality of God.

It was clear from my walk through the catacombs that the Eucharist was a life-force (and not in the material sense) for the early Christians. They deemed it so important that they created small chambers, many feet underground, for the sacrament of Holy Communion. Although their lives were threatened in the world outside the catacombs, these Christians succored their spiritual lives with the Eucharist. In his essay, “Not Words but Reality,” Pieper refers to the deep, transcendent power of this “real” symbol:

The Eucharist, whose nature may appear dubious or insufficiently “spiritual” to a man sitting unmolested at his desk, has, again and again, for many thousands of people living in the most desperate conditions and facing the ultimate problems of existence, proved a source of true comfort and healing, and above all has proved to be the only tangible reality in their lives, the only solid ground beneath their feet.

When someone told Flannery O’Connor that the Eucharist was merely a symbol, she responded: “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” She later wrote: “That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.”

I don’t think enough people realize their almost natural acceptance of anima forma corporis. For example, this idea connects to the spirit we surely feel around Christmastime. It is true that commercialization has somewhat clouded the sacred season that is Christmas, the celebration of the birth of Christ. But think about the times you remember sitting at the dinner table on Christmas Eve, surrounded by your family, and love abounds. Everyone is eager to open gifts and to watch others open their gifts; but there is something more than eagerness. There is joy. It is a joy that is “an expression of love,” as Pieper puts it. What creates this “festal joy”? It has to be more than the idea of a desacralized Christmas, which consists of material exchange. Indeed, we receive gifts on our birthday, too, and there is something clearly different between the two celebrations. The joy of Christmas is created by “something of another order,” something real and holy. It is only possible to celebrate Christmas festively if we believe that the Incarnation matters in our life. As Pieper puts it:

The past cannot be celebrated festively unless the celebrant community still draws glory and exaltation from that past, not merely as reflected history, but by virtue of a historical reality still operative in the present.

I deeply believe that we can sense this historical reality through the love and joy that flourishes during Christmas. Our celebration is not utilitarian in the name of gifts, but is, in Pieper’s usage of the word, symbolic. Our festivity brings us to something greater than ourselves.

G.K. Chesterton describes this sort of experience, which might even relate to those who are not Christian:

Father Christmas is not an allegory of snow and holly; he is not merely the stuff called snow afterwards artificially given a human form, like a snow man. He is something that gives a new meaning to the white world and the evergreens, so that the snow itself seems to be warm rather than cold.

If you happen to catch yourself feeling joyful at the sight of the cold snow on Christmas Day, you are experiencing the reality of God.

Weeping is a severe response, and the fact that the Translators mean for the example to be representative of the damage registered in any version 2.0 – including their own – ought to warn us that translation is a serious business. And serious business it has remained in the intervening 400 years: modern literary theory puts translation in terms of infinite exile, or worse, expatriation from a motherland (mother tongue) that never quite existed in the first place. Language itself is a long, echoing gallery of loss: words cast off old ontological ties to meaning, acquiring sense only in contrast and context with each other. That sense of monumental loss of origin is best expressed, for me, in the opening lines of a poem by Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas”:

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.

A translator, then, plies her trade as a writer of obituaries – one loss after another, piled onto a page like a mounting heap of truncated prosthetics. Why bother, I wonder, with the impossible task of translation – why endure the pain of an inevitable diminishment? Yet the KJV Translators find, as one telegrammatic subtitle in the preface insists, “Translation necessary.” This, coming from the craftsmen of the most popular and aesthetically acclaimed translation of the most translated text in history, grips me, I admit, inexplicably; the Translators’ resolute affirmation of the necessity of their work, following close on the heels of such a bald reckoning with pain, is the stoic stuff of Hemingway and Seneca – not the hopeful take-home message of the Gospel.

Of course there are those with other, more optimistic attitudes towards the efficacy of translation. Borges, for example, always maintained that the English translation of Don Quixote was the better version of the original Spanish. In saying this, Borges anticipated late 20th-century literary theory’s radical structural reconception of text: What was written on the page was not the whole story – a text lived outside its paper projection, changing and being generated in turn by its intersection with readers and their readings.

Surprisingly, there are hints of that same conception in the 1611 Preface: “Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtain, that we may look into the most holy place; that removeth the cover of the well, that we may come by the water.” Translation, they say, is window dressing: good thing, too, given language’s tyranny – its grammatical structures that govern what is permissible to think and to say; its changeability, its entrenchment in particular a culture, place, and time. But if language is not the thing in itself, then translation ceases to affect content and becomes a useful tool – a tool that, like dissolving stitches, discreetly disappears after being used. The opening of a text into a different language is precisely that – an opening into a text that remains separate and therefore uncompromised by whatever flubs and mistranslations a translator is capable of injecting.

The only problem with this optimistic view is that the question of quality (or, as the case may be, the absence of quality) remains: Surely some tools are better than others – are certain translations better? By what criteria do we judge – aptness, truth, fidelity, aesthetics? How do I deal with the reality that all are still imperfect?

It makes sense to circle back to the original problem of fallibility, this image of translation as a teetering temple on stilts. The Translators waste no time in laying down the party line: “We do not deny, nay, we affirm and avow, that the very meanest translation of the Bible in English set forth by men of our profession … containeth the word of God, nay, is the word of God. …A man may be counted a virtuous man, though he have made many slips in his life.” Or, as we might say, a translation might be considered “good” despite its blunders and strayings, given that it contains – or better yet, is - the text.

The reason why the mere fact of being the text counts so heavily in favor of any translation is that translation is an art with a practical purpose: the facilitation of understanding. “How shall men meditate in that which they cannot understand? How shall they understand that which is kept close in an unknown tongue?” The Translators insist upon a practice that is a service and an ethics – an ethics in service of the living – so that we might say the translated text itself is “living.” It’s at once a text that reproduces itself in translation and revision, as well as a text that is practiced. Here the traditional literary production scheme, in which an author produces a work which is then received by the reader, is inverted and brought around into a circle. The reader generates, does the practicing, requires the translation. She is the ethos, and her humanness – her dependence and entrenchment in language – dictates the terms on which the translated text appears.

Her humanness, however, guarantees the failure of every translation – our answer to the question of quality. Never mind the humanness of the Translators: even a perfect translation, free of the “imperfections and blemishes” would fall on the deaf ears of a reader of incomplete understanding. A translation in itself, regardless of quality, is always powerless to convey truth: that only comes in a moment of grace, a revelation, a lifting of the veil. It is “He [who] removeth the scales from our eyes, the veil from our hearts, opening our wits that we may understand his word” [italics mine]. Grace is the assurance that what’s most important will be conveyed and understood, whatever the merits of the translation itself: “Whatsoever things are necessary are manifest,” says Saint Chrysostom. It is grace that allows the Translators to write, in full justification, “A man may be counted a virtuous man, though he have made many slips in his life.” It is the “Spirit of grace, which is able to build further than we can ask or think” that slides the burden of efficacy off the shoulders of the translator – and what a relief! For the work of the translator is forever asymptotic – there is always a gap, some blank margin that skirts the realm of the human text, marking the boundary between language – its beautiful flaws – and perfect understanding.

Here, pressed against the margin, we’re faced with a hard and earnest reckoning with the difficulty of difficulty – that is, with the fact that life is hard, and translation but an abstracted taste of what it means to live in a world that is loss, pain, incomprehensibility, and disparity. But we’re told translation is necessary – as an art, an exercise in pain not merely for its own practical purposes but as a practice that clears space amid the rubble for redemption and grace. The losses it manifests are emblematic of the losses sustained in any individual’s life: Even as it bleeds and oozes, it acknowledges its situation within the reality of a fallen and imperfect world. It attempts to heal; it bumps up against its human, cultural, structural limitations; and just as it seems most in danger of collapsing under its accumulated weaknesses, it passes under a generous swooping salvation. It emerges, a small miracle of transformation; and the wider gap, the greater the canvas for the work of grace.

In democracies such as ours which invest the people with the power to elect their government, all citizens must fully comprehend the gravity of their political responsibilities to ensure a just and moral commonwealth. For more than a millennium, the great states of the West communicated such gravity with clarity and vigor from the altars of established churches. While many were representative democracies, political institutions that maintained order and dispensed justice have always relied on the public’s general moral consensus in executing their functions. Justice and order cannot be obtained in a society which does not agree on the meanings of those concepts. A commonly-professed religion provided that moral consensus for most of our civilization’s history.

Religion has since been banished from the public sphere throughout nearly every Western country and reduced to the realm of individual conscience. The minimal formal role that religion today plays varies from the de jure establishments in disempowered European monarchies like Britain and Monaco that belie the de facto condition of traditional religious strictures, to the abundance of religiously steeped rhetoric in American political language which varnishes an otherwise secular regime. Religion is all around us-in our history, in our social traditions, and in the churches that dot our cities-but yet one cannot help but feel that it is nowhere to be found in our democratic public life.

The relationship between religion and the state looms large in contemporary political debate. Yet it is an issue of acute concern for the Christian, especially one that lives in an ostensibly secular commonwealth like the United States. America in many ways represents a repudiation and a reaffirmation of the traditional role of the church vis-à-vis the public authority. Despite the deistic or atheistic sentiments of founders like Franklin and Jefferson, America was constructed as a country of Christians, whose national and moral prosperity depended on the general adherence to long-established codes of religion and morality. Yet by explicitly forbidding the official establishment of a national church, the Constitution anticipated the purging of all religious expression which is directly or indirectly supported by public revenue-a purging which presently plagues our country. If to be American truly requires the conviction that religion has no role in public and political life, the faithful Christian cannot-and must not-be a loyal citizen.

The doctrine of the “two swords,” which states that the separate sabers of secular and sacred power jointly govern man, gained ascendancy early in Western history and dictated the political and religious structure of pre-Reformation Europe. While much controversy punctuated the development of this thesis, most disputants generally assumed that both the state and the church would be public and complementary entities, although the consensus quickly collapsed in deciding which of the two merited preeminence. As the fifth-century pontiff, St. Gelasius I, outlined, “There are two powers…by which this world is chiefly ruled, namely, the sacred authority of the priests (auctoritas sacrata pontificum) and the royal power (regalis potestas).” St. Gelasius elevated the clerical auctoritas over the regal potestas, but still clearly discerned a distinctness and independence to each of those corresponding jurisdictions. The king-the public authority-was charged with the governance of peoples’ actions, while the priests-the representatives of God-with the governance of peoples’ souls. Ideally imagined, there could be a harmony between these two swords and their separate responsibilities, one that would not devolve into tyranny.

St. Thomas Aquinas added to this debate by comparing the theocratic state-the Mosaic state ordered by God Himself in the Old Testament-with the present condition of man after the birth and resurrection of Christ. The Hebrew kingdom of the Old Testament was founded upon laws which God Himself delivered to Moses. The principles which governed the Hebrews were singularly and indistinguishably religious, a seamless union of the secular and sacred. Yet, such a unity could not be similarly realized in the New Testament world, posited St. Thomas. The Old Law given to the Hebrews dealt with outward actions, often ruling through fear of punishment and conducement of reward because salvation could not yet be obtained until the sacrifice of Christ. The New Law of the Gospel was instead promulgated primarily upon men’s hearts and extended into internal actions. The sway of the state, despite its contemporary largesse and administrative capabilities, is not potent enough to penetrate into the inner workings of men’s minds and hearts. Thus, such matters must belong to the purview of the church.

Where, then, is the place for religious authority in modern public life? The answer, at least for Americans, is very difficult. Though it requires individual conviction and personal faith of each of its adherents, Christianity presupposes a community. As Christians, our own relationship with God is inextricably connected to our relationships with our neighbors. While we are still a generally Christian nation, America professes no institutionalized creed; state-subsidized action that can be construed, however indirectly, as an endorsement of a particular faith has become constitutionally anathema and is considered a constraint on those with alternative beliefs. But to assume that public religious expressions infringe unacceptably upon the rights of others implies that, in a just nation, faith may not figure at all into decisions about political and social issues-a fundamentally undemocratic tenet. Christianity informs our attitudes about ethics, morality, and justice, all of which necessarily influence our opinions about politics. Faith shapes the way we look at the world and everything in it: to completely divorce our private morality from our conception of public policy is to commit a fraud of the highest order. Eliminating all moral assumptions rooted in Judeo-Christian civilization for fear that they are chauvinistic threatens the idea of objective truth in our political system. A Christian cannot tolerably live within a system that draws no distinction between right and wrong.

The solution for the crisis of public morality is not to support a theocratic Christian regime. Disestablishment, as articulated in the Constitution, can actually exist alongside a public affirmation of general ethical principles. American Christians must therefore affirm and vigorously defend the notion that disestablishment does not mean secularization. Christian morality has defined and shaped the political institutions which we have inherited and by which we continue to abide. While church attendance continues to decline in Western countries, the cultural and social heritage of Christianity still remains visible and vibrant. As Christians, we can and still must practice tolerance toward those with other beliefs; yet tolerance does not mandate that all viewpoints-while equally permissible and expressed-possess an equal claim to truth.

The Second Tablet Project is probably more popular among lukewarm religious believers who wish to make the moral law palatable to nonbelievers than it is among nonbelievers themselves. Nonbelievers who want to get rid of the First Tablet usually have doubts about the Second too-and for the same reasons. God, they think, is a dubious proposition, but why should morality be less dubious than He? Aren’t both matters equally dim? As to the notion of “things we can’t not know,” they do not believe that there are any-we have only a grab bag of incompatible opinions about God and how to live, all of them equally controversial because none of them can be known to be true. Under the circumstances, they think, the only sensible thing to do is to eject the whole lot of these opinions from the public square. This is the mentality that finds it scandalous to post the Ten Commandments on a courtroom wall. The argument seems to be, “Because we don’t agree with each other, you must do as I say”-for if anyone should protest, “But your opinion that these norms are not common knowledge is far more controversial than the norms themselves,” they respond, “See what I mean?” Or perhaps, like John Rawls, they respond that their opinion should have special privileges because it is “political, not metaphysical.” Here the argument seems to be, “The ultimate truth of things is unknowable, and that’s why you must do as I say.” Of course, any view of what is knowable or unknowable presupposes something about what is, so that is another sleight of hand.

For those who do believe in natural law or general revelation, the fact that the Second Tablet Project so often turns into a No Tablet project raises an important question. What difference does it make to the knowledge of the moral law that we do have some knowledge about God? If we didn’t have that knowledge, then could we retain knowledge of morality? And if we could retain it, would it be different?

The inquiry requires two parts, because there are two ways to know about God: the vague, partial, natural knowledge of God that is available to every human being, and the additional knowledge of God that is offered (for those who accept it) in the biblical tradition of direct revelation. Though my emphasis is on the first way, I will comment on the second as well. To be sure, the Bible is not included in the things one can’t not know. But every perspective for discussing what we can’t not know is some perspective for discussing what we can’t not know, and my perspective is biblical.

By the first way to know about God I mean the sensus divinitatis, the spontaneous awareness of the reality of the Creator. I do not exclude the clarity that philosophy can add to this awareness; I only wish to point out that the philosophical arguments for the existence of God do not start from nowhere. However complex they may be, they merely elaborate pre-philosophical intuitions, such as the everyday idea that anything which does not have to be requires a cause. “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is a question that anyone can ask.

As to the second way of knowing about God-the biblical tradition of direct revelation-I use the qualifier “biblical” advisedly. Other religions have traditions too, but traditions of direct revelation are quite rare. Every major religion that claims to record God’s direct revelations to human beings in actual historical time accepts at least part of the Bible; this includes Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. No major religion outside of the biblical orbit claims to record God’s direct revelations to human beings in actual historical time.

~~~

Part one of the inquiry, then, is this: Apart from any consideration of an alleged direct revelation, what difference does it make to the natural law that we naturally have knowledge of God? It seems to make not one difference, but at least four.

The first difference has to do with what C. S. Lewis called the “abolition of man.” If God has designed and endowed us with our nature-this is not a question of how He did it or how long it took, only of who is responsible-then we can be confident that we have the nature that we ought to have in accord with His good purposes. This premise in no way slights the Fall; even a crushed foot remains a foot. The proposition that we are in conflict with our nature has nothing to do with the proposition that it is not, in fact, our nature.

Let us imagine someone who denies divine design. He admits that human beings have a nature, just in the sense that certain ways of living go against the grain; he only refuses to allow that we were endowed with this nature by God. Paraphrasing George Gaylord Simpson, we are to regard the direction of the grain as the result of a meaningless and purposeless process that did not have us in mind. I think it follows that had the process gone a bit differently-had our ancestors been carnivores instead of omnivores, had they laid eggs instead of borne live young, or had they never left the oceans for the land-then we would have had a different nature. Given the nature that we do have, certain things go against the grain, hence a certain natural law. Honor your father and mother. Do not kill. Do not covet. Given some other nature, different things would have gone against the grain-hence a different natural law. It might have been anything. Supplant your father. Chase away your mother. Eat your neighbor and covet his mate. What strikes our nature as distressing would for that nature be the norm.

The entire basis of morality, on this account, is the particular nature that we have at the moment. There would be nothing wrong with having a different nature and thus a different natural law. We just don’t.

But what if we could? What if we could change our nature? According to those who hold this view, we already have. Our ancestors were as different from us, they say, as a prosimian is different from a man. Generation by generation, the ur-men of the long-gone past adapted to a changing environment. Our great-grand-primates were the products of adaptation to a life in the branches of trees. Our grand-primates were the products of adaptation to a life on the savanna. Our parents were the products of adaptation to the practice of agriculture. And our descendants will be the products of adaptation to the most enduring features of our own environment, whatever those turn out to be. Perhaps television.

Notice that on this theory, some of the circumstances to which our ancestors adapted were the results of their own prior actions. It was they who came down from the trees, and had therefore to adapt to the savanna. It was they who invented agriculture, and had therefore to adapt to a different diet. In a sense, then, we have been influencing our own evolution all along. We have already changed our nature. We just didn’t know that we were doing it.

If there is nothing wrong with having a different nature-and if we have already changed our nature without knowing-then why shouldn’t we take the process in hand? Why shouldn’t we deliberately change ourselves as we wish to be changed? Why shouldn’t we determine the nature of our descendants?

Such proposals are no longer idle talk. In October 2000, news leaked that an American company named Biotransplant and an Australian company named Stem Cell Sciences had successfully crossed a human being with a pig by inserting the nuclei of cells from a human fetus into the pigs’ eggs. Although the embryos were destroyed when they reached the thirty-two-cell point, they would have continued to grow had they been implanted in the womb of a woman-or a sow.

According to J. Bottum in the Weekly Standard, “There has been some suggestion from the creators that their purpose in designing this human pig is to build a new race of subhuman creatures for scientific and medical use. . . . Then, too, there has been some suggestion that the creators’ purpose is not so much to corrupt humanity as to elevate it.” His comments are worth quoting at some length:

It used to be that even the imagination of this sort of thing existed only to underscore a moral in a story. . . . But we live at a moment in which British newspapers can report on nineteen families who have created test-tube babies solely for the purpose of serving as tissue donors for their relatives-some brought to birth, some merely harvested as embryos and fetuses. A moment in which Harper’s Bazaar can advise women to keep their faces unwrinkled by having themselves injected with fat culled from human cadavers. . . . In the midst of all this, the creation of a human-pig arrives like a thing expected. We have reached the logical end, at last. We have become the people that, once upon a time, our ancestors used fairy tales to warn their children against-and we will reap exactly the consequences those tales foretold. Like the coming true of an old story-the discovery of the philosopher’s stone, the rubbing of a magic lantern-biotechnology is delivering the most astonishing medical advances anyone has ever imagined. But our sons and daughters will mate with the pig-men, if the pig-men will have them. And our swine-snouted grandchildren-the fruit not of our loins, but of our arrogance and our bright test tubes-will use the story of our generation to teach a moral to their frightened litters.

Plainly, Bottum is not pleased with what the researchers have done. As he writes, it makes no difference whether they plan to create subhumans or superhumans, for “either they want to make a race of slaves, or they want to make a race of masters. And either way, it means the end of our humanity.” The evil is not that the experiment might turn out badly. It is that our nature would be abolished.

But our atheist will ask: What exactly is the objection to abolishing our nature? Why not abolish it? We won’t be around to mind. Our descendants won’t mind either, because we can build into their natures that they are satisfied with the natures they get. If we like, we can make an entire graded set of natures, along the lines of Huxley’s Brave New World. “I’m glad I’m a Beta,” say his Betas. So why should we reap the consequences that the tales of old foretold? Why should the pig-men use the story of our generation to teach a moral to their frightened litters? Why should these litters be frightened by what, to them, would be the story of Genesis?

Genesis, I think, is the crux of it: not the text of Genesis, but its idea of creation. To abolish and remake human nature is to play God. The chief objection to playing God is that someone else is God already. If He created human nature, if He intended it, if it is not the result of a blind fortuity that did not have us in mind-then we have no business exchanging it for another. It would be good to remember that Genesis contains not only the story of creation but the story of Babel, of the presumption of men who thought they could build a tower “to heaven.”

~~~

Here then is the first difference that the knowledge of God makes to the natural law. A godless natural law would revere the laws of human nature only insofar as we continued to be human. Denying that our humanity is a creation, it would have no reason to preserve this humanity, and no objection to its abolition.

The second difference it makes to have natural knowledge of God concerns what we might call “oughtness.” A moment ago we spoke of a godless natural law. But in what sense can a godless mind revere the laws of human nature at all? The early modern Dutch legal philosopher Hugo Grotius famously remarked that even if there were no God (as he conceded that it would be impious to believe), the natural law would still have a kind of force. What seems to impress most people who read this remark is that Grotius thinks it would have a kind of force. More interesting is his qualifier: it would have a kind of force. The suggestion is that it would not have the kind that it would have if God were real.

Taken with that emphasis, the remark of Grotius might be true. Although a godless natural law would lose the force of “oughtness,” it would retain the lower force of prudence. But perhaps it would lose that force too. Let us consider further.

The argument for saying that the natural law would lose the force of oughtness but retain the force of prudence runs like this. If there is no God, then the universe is not a creation. One immediate consequence is that I owe nothing to anyone for the fact that I am in it. If there is a reason to keep the moral laws, it cannot lie in honoring the one who made us. Another consequence is that the universe has no meaning beyond itself. The patterns in it just are; they do not reflect the goodness or the intentions of a Designer.

And this makes a difference. A theist who attributes the order of nature to God can say things like this: “I see that the sexual powers cause conception, and that the fact that they do so is part of the explanation of why human nature has been endowed with such powers in the first place. This tells me that conception is a purpose of the sexual powers, a part of what they are for. When I employ them, I ought to respect this fact; I ought not to use them in ways that are incompatible with their purpose.” Adding inference to inference in this fashion, he gradually works out a comprehensive account of the right use of the sexual powers and the respect that is owed to the natural institutions which direct and contain them, and he can reason similarly about the other natural powers and institutions.

But an atheist might reply like this: “I use the word purpose too, and I am even willing to concede that you use it correctly. If one thing causes another, and that’s part of the explanation of why the first thing occurs, then the second thing is a purpose of the first; even a Darwinist like me can concede that much. So what? How do you get from ‘One of the purposes of the sexual powers is procreation’ to ‘I should not use the sexual powers in ways that are incompatible with procreation’? So far as I can see, the only thing that follows from the connection between procreation and sex is that when I do have intercourse, it would be prudent to watch out.” Stretching a point a bit-taking into account the entire set of things there are to “watch out” for (not only conception, but jealousy, emotional emptiness, loss of trust, and so forth)-perhaps a purely prudential justification of marriage and family and so forth could be developed. Perhaps a purely prudential justification for each of the other natural laws and institutions could be developed in the same way. And perhaps that is the sort of thing that Grotius had in mind.

Unfortunately, a truly oughtless prudence would have nothing to say to free riders. Anyone who thought he saw a way to obtain the benefits of these laws and institutions without their costs-or who was willing to accept the costs of transgressing them-would do so. To speak again of marriage, some men prefer seducing married women. Others say they can do very well without trust. Still others, that although they fear exposure, they would rather risk it than forgo their pleasures. Some even enjoy the risk; for them, it isn’t a cost.

To be sure, the oughtless sort of prudence is rather thin. The thicker prudence of the natural law tradition would point out that free riders sacrifice greater goods for lesser ones; they ought to desire better for themselves than they do. But they have no ought-remember? In their sort of prudence, the good is nothing but the desirable, and the desirable is nothing but what they actually desire. From their point of view, the good for which they feel the greatest desire is the greatest good-just because they desire it most.

Some people would say that the thinness of the oughtless sort of prudence is a problem only for the naive sort of atheist. With a little more sophistication, the atheist can reply that in the same way things just do have causal and functional properties, so they just do have moral properties. The argument saves oughtness by sheer fiat-or so it seems. But does it really save anything at all? In one way, it makes the atheist’s moral case even weaker, because it concedes the arbitrariness of the universe in which he thinks he is living. So we come to the third difference it makes that we have natural knowledge of God: it determines whether we can expect the universe to make any sense at all, morally or otherwise.

~~~

In the colloquy between theist and atheist presented above, both parties assumed that the universe is causally and rationally patterned: this causes that, that explains this, such-and-such is a reasonable explanation of so-and-so. But what right has the atheist to this assumption? Why should there be any patterns whatsoever? If the universe just is, then why shouldn’t the things in it just happen? There is no reason to expect them to yield to reasoning, no explanation of why they should even have an explanation. Moreover, we are not out of the woods even if we do find patterns in the universe, for if these patterns too just are, then there is no warrant for assuming that they are more than local, accidental, superficial, inconsistent, and ephemeral. The sun may not rise tomorrow morning. Fire may not burn this afternoon. Two plus two may equal now four, now six, now one. For me, conception may not be caused by sexual intercourse (that seems to be how some teenagers think). Even if today I am myself, next week I may be someone else (that is how postmodernists think). So why should the natural law have even the force of prudence, much less oughtness? Why should there even be logic? Why should I “watch out” for anything? How could I?

But perhaps the only problem with our sophisticated atheist is that he is not sophisticated enough. If without God he has no right to assume Pattern, very well: let him be a sort of Platonist, and posit that Pattern itself is God. Of course Pattern would not be what the theist means by God, but it would be God in the impersonal sense: the deepest reality, the underlying principle of everything, that on which all else depends.

But if he is to be a sort of Platonist, then what does he make of Plato’s problem? There are a great many patterns, not just one. This raises the question of what organizes them, what binds them all together, in a unity, a Design. We know of only one thing that is capable of Design, and that is mind-intelligent agency. It is not enough for the universe to resemble a mind in having design; let us have no tricks, like calling the patterns “ideas” when we have not earned the right to do so. Behind the universe there must be a real mind that is capable of the things that real minds do, like designing. That brings us back to God-God as the theist means God, God with a mind, God in the personal sense.

If our atheist accepts this implication, then he is back in the fold; he is no longer an atheist. But if he denies it-then it will not help him even if Pattern really is the deepest reality, because in that case “Pattern” is merely a fancy name for “patterns,” and plurality of patterns without Design is merely chaos; “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” After all, Plato merely gave names to the ways things hang together; he never explained why they had to hang together, where there was any necessity to it. For example he said that all good things participate in a sort of super-pattern, or transcendental, called Goodness, and in token of the fact he assumed an underlying unity among the virtues-courage, wisdom, justice, moderation, and all the rest. But with nothing to bring these good virtues into unity, there is no reason why they should be in unity. Perhaps cowardice is the fount of justice, wisdom comes only to the wanton, and courage makes fools of us all. Perhaps righteousness and peace have not kissed each other, as the Psalmist claims, but tear each other daily into pieces. Don’t many people think this way?

Another of Plato’s convictions was that Goodness is but one of the transcendentals. He supposed there were two more, Truth and Beauty. Even supposing this true, it doesn’t help matters, it only makes them worse. For why should the three transcendentals hang together? Why shouldn’t Goodness be ugly, Beauty lie, and Truth be inimical to the good-not because they have come apart, as they seem to in this fallen world, but because they must come apart, because that is how they are?

Natural selection gives no reason; a clash between, say, Truth and Goodness would not keep an organism from passing on its genes. In fact there is no reason-unless there is something else at work, Someone else at work, Whom Plato may have known but did not name. In the end we find that the sophisticated sort of atheist is no better off than the naive sort. His universe is just as mad, and perhaps more terrifying still. It may contain just as much oughtness as he likes: but what ought to be, what charms us, and what is are all at war, and the house of Ought is divided against itself.

~~~

Our question has been what difference it makes to the natural law that we naturally have knowledge of God. So far I have been treating this question as though it meant, “What difference would it make to the natural law if we didn’t have such knowledge?” But there is another way to take it: “What difference would it make to the natural law if we do have such knowledge but tell ourselves we don’t?” In other words we may ask about the consequences of lying to ourselves about Him. One of these consequences might be called moral “metastasis”-as in the growth of cancers. This is the fourth way it matters to have natural knowledge of God.

Do we not lie to ourselves about ordinary right and wrong? The desire to know truth is ardent, but it is not the only desire at work in us. The desire not to know competes with it desperately, for knowledge is a fearsome thing. So it is that we often groan about how difficult it is to know what is right even though we know the right perfectly well. Every honest person can confirm this from his own experience. Just how much lying goes on was recently confirmed during the high-level political scandals of the late ’90s, when everyone from television interviewer Geraldo Rivera to comedian Jerry Seinfeld seemed to agree that “Everybody lies about sex.” As Seinfeld put it in interview with Michael Blowen, “Truth and sex don’t go together.” Presumably he had in mind not only our lying to other people but our lying to ourselves, because one just can’t do that much lying without rationalizing it to oneself somehow.

But the problem of lying to ourselves goes far beyond sex. Along with the mainstream of the natural law tradition, I have suggested that one of the things about reality and goodness that we know perfectly well is the reality and goodness of God. Biblical tradition agrees: when Psalm 14 remarks, “The fool says in his heart ‘There is no God,’” it doesn’t call him a fool for thinking it, but for saying it even though yet deeper in his mind he knows it isn’t true. From this point of view, the reason it is so difficult to argue with an atheist is that he is not being honest with himself. He knows that there is a God; he only tells himself that he doesn’t.

One need not take this from a theist like me. Consider the remarks of the Harvard population biologist Richard Lewontin-an atheist who thinks matter is all there is-in the New York Review of Books (January 9, 1997): “Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.” He continues, “It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.”

What Lewontin is admitting here is that he and those who think like him are only selective skeptics. They are hostile to belief in God because of a prior commitment to a dogmatism that excludes God-a dogmatism about which they are not skeptical at all, which they accept not because of the evidence but in spite of it, and to which they will cling even when it forces them into absurdities. For another example, consider the remarks of the philosopher Thomas Nagel in his book The Last Word. The purpose of the book is to defend philosophical rationalism against subjectivism. At a certain point Nagel acknowledges that rationalism has theistic implications. For the moment, the important thing is not whether that is true, but that Nagel thinks that it is. Note well what he says next. After suggesting that contemporary subjectivism may be due to “fear of religion,” he writes, “I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.” Nagel adds, “My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. . . . Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world.” If Nagel is right, then those who say that theism is a crutch have got it backwards. For our contemporary intellectual culture, it is atheism that serves as a crutch. It couldn’t have been easy to admit that.

So it seems that these men come close to agreeing with me. To be sure they don’t agree that God is real. But they agree that there is something not quite honest in their rejection of Him-something driven either dogmatically, as in Lewontin’s case, or emotionally, as in Nagel’s-rather than forced upon them by the evidence. The view that the atheist is not being honest with himself-that he knows that there is a God, but only tells himself he doesn’t know-is looking better and better. If this apparently preposterous view is true-as I think it is-then it changes everything. For then the important question is not, “Is there a God?”, but “Can I concede one part of my moral knowledge while holding down another?”, or “Can I admit to myself that I know about, say, the goodness of love and the evil of murder, while not admitting to myself that I know about the goodness of God and the evil of refusing Him?”

One certainly can do that-lots of agnostics do-but one can never do it well. The gambit slips from one’s control because, at bottom, it is a lie, and lies metastasize; the universe is so tightly constructed that in order to cover up one lie, we must usually tell another. This applies with just as much force to the lies we tell ourselves as to the lies we tell other people. One could imagine a universe so loosely jointed that lies did not require the support of more lies, but the one we live in is not like that. In this one, deception begets deception, and self-deception begets more self-deception; the greater the lie, the greater its metastatic tendency. This tendency is strongest precisely in the case of the greatest self-deception, pretending not to know that God is real, because there are so many things one must not think of in order to not think of the reality of God.

One cannot predict in advance what stories people will tell themselves to make believe that they do not know the reality of God and their obligation to Him; every agnostic and atheist devises a different set of plausibility gambits, a different pattern of omissions, of forgettings, of avertings of gaze. But it is extraordinarily difficult-I think impossible-for such self-deceptions not to slop over at some point into what one admits about the moral law. Our minds won’t go like that.

We have been asking how it matters that we have natural knowledge of God, and we have found that it makes four differences: as to whether man may be abolished, whether morality has oughtness or only prudence, whether we have reason to expect the universe to make any moral sense at all, and whether, having lied to ourselves about God, we can be honest about the rest of our natural knowledge.

~~~

Part two of the inquiry is how Scripture illuminates our understanding-how it matters that there is a biblical revelation over and above the natural knowledge of God. This revelation makes at least three differences, and the first difference has to do with forgiveness.

Clear vision of the moral law is crushing, because the first thing that an honest man sees with this vision is how far he falls short of it. He cannot escape the awareness of a debt that exceeds anything he can pay. Apart from an assurance that the debt can somehow be forgiven, such honesty is too much for us; it kills. The difficulty is that without a direct revelation from the Author of the law, it is impossible to know whether the possibility of forgiveness is real. Therefore we look away; unable to accept the truth about ourselves, we might keep the law in the corner of our eye, but we cannot gaze upon it steadily. Apart from an assurance that the debt can be forgiven-an assurance which transcends what human reason can find out on its own-no human being dares to face the law straight-on.

Yet we can’t quite wipe the law from our intellects. It is woven into the deep structure of our minds, as experts on linguistics say the threads of language are. Unable to make it go away, we use every means we can devise to pretend that we are really being good. Evasions and rationalizations spread through our intellects like the mycelium of a fungus in its host. That is why the ancient world was brutal, as we of all people should understand. Not even the greatest of the pagans could admit what was wrong with infanticide, although they knew that the child was of our kind. Neither can we admit what is wrong with abortion and a host of other evils.

It is hard enough to face the moral law even with the possibility of forgiveness. It offends our pride to be forgiven, terrifies it to surrender control. Without this possibility it would be harder still: How could we ever face how wrong we had been about anything? How could we bear to change our minds? The history of ethics would be a history of digging in against plain truths. Consider how many centuries it took natural law thinkers even in the Christian tradition to work out the implications of the brotherhood of master and slave. At least they did eventually. Outside of the biblical orbit, no one ever did-not spontaneously.

It may seem that the possibility of forgiveness matters only on the assumption that there is, in fact, a God-that without the lawgiver, there would be no law, and therefore nothing to be forgiven. The actual state of affairs is more dreadful, for the Furies of conscience do not wait upon our assumptions. One who admits the Furies but denies the God who appointed them-who supposes that there can be a law without a lawgiver-must suppose that forgiveness is both necessary and impossible. That which is not personal cannot forgive; morality “by itself” has a heart of rock. And so although grace would be unthinkable, the ache for it would keen on, like a cry in a deserted street.

The second difference it makes to acknowledge biblical revelation has to do with providence. Self-interest is not the only thing that tempts us to commit injustice. One of the strongest motives to do wrong is to make everything go right, for sometimes justice requires allowing bad things to happen to other people. If we forbid hanging innocent men, the mob may break out in a riot. If we forbid bombing noncombatants, the war may be prolonged. If we forbid giving perjured testimony, the murderer may go unpunished. Surely it isn’t right, we reason, that there are riots, longer wars, and murderers free in the streets. Let us do evil for the sake of good. It doesn’t seem just to do justice.

Christian faith undercuts the urge to fix everything on our own through conviction of the final helplessness of man and confidence in the providence of God-through certainty that only God can set everything to rights and faith that in the end, He will. Man can merely ameliorate, not cure; but there will be a Judgment, and there will be a hand that wipes every tear from the eyes of those who mourn.

The final helplessness of man to fix himself may seem fatuously obvious after a century that killed hundreds of millions of people, all with the idea of improving human life. If it is a fatuity, however, it is an unbearable fatuity, one that we persistently refuse to accept. I commented earlier on the idea that one may play God if no one is God already. What we have in view here is the conviction that one must play God if the Creator is not Judge and Healer too. Immanuel Kant thought that morality would be undermined without a belief in divine judgment, but Kant did not say the half of it. The wrongs of the world would not merely dismay the desire to do right. They would taunt, torture, and drive men to a despair that could be relieved only by committing yet greater wrongs, on the principle that if God does not save us then we must save ourselves.

There may be some few who could resist this terrible conclusion. I have not met them. It is no accident that not even the Stoics, who invented the very term “natural law,” ever rose to the idea of principles which hold without exception, principles which may not be violated even to prevent violations. The problem was not that they failed to find these principles written upon their hearts, but that they could not bring themselves to attend closely to the inscription. It would have been too awful to believe that the goodness of the ends did not justify the wickedness of the means, because how else could the ends be achieved? The same people who said Fiat justitia ruat caelum, “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall,” also said Salus populi suprema lex, “The safety of the people is the supreme law”-and as they understood these mottoes, the second unraveled the first. Have the Germans begun another uprising? Then raze their villages, rape their virgins, and show them what the Pax Romana means. All for justice, all for order, all for peace.

Without confidence in providence, our vision of every Commandment goes askew. For example “Thou shalt not murder” seems to change before our eyes to “Thou shalt keep alive the greatest number possible-at the expense of others, if that is what it takes.” In the novel (and later movie) Sophie’s Choice, a Nazi guard at Auschwitz commands the young mother to choose which of her children will be sent to the ovens. If she cooperates in the crime, the one she selects will be burned; if she refuses, then both of them will be taken to their deaths. After a long, hanging moment, she pushes away her smallest child and cries out that he take her-not the other, not her favorite! Her choice is plainly evil; for the sake of a better result, she has united herself with the sin of the murderer. And in the end her favorite child dies too. But without faith in a God who hears the cries of the suffering, how could she choose otherwise? One day I was surprised to hear one of my seminar students argue that it would have been “selfish” for Sophie to refuse to mark one of her children for death. How so? His reply was that she should have been willing to “sacrifice herself”-by which he meant sacrifice her conscience. It took me some time to realize that although my agnostic student considered “I must promote life” to be a real moral duty, he viewed “I must not have complicity in murder” to be a merely personal scruple on the order of “I am not the sort of person who skips bathing.” He didn’t deny that conscience speaks differently, but for the sake of a “better” result, he thought, Sophie should have been willing to suffer the agonies of its accusations.

And if there is no God, why not? The motto “Do the right thing and let God take care of the consequences” makes sense only on the assurance that He will take care of the consequences. Without that assurance, doing the right thing means taking care of the consequences-or trying to. And so it is that unless there is providence, the urge to do good irresistibly consorts with evil; unless God is just, our judgments become unhinged.

The third difference biblical revelation makes to moral understanding concerns our ability to recognize our neighbors for what they are. To be a person is to be a proper subject of absolute regard-a “neighbor” in the sense of the Commandments-a being of the sort whom the Commandments are about. It is persons whom I am not to kill, persons whom I am to love as I love myself. But what is a person? If we accept the biblical revelation that man is the imago Dei, the image of God, then every human being is a person-a person by nature, a kind of thing different from any other kind, a being whose very existence is a kind of sacrament, a sign of God’s grace. Trying to understand the nature of man without recognizing him as the imago Dei is like trying to understand a bas-relief without recognizing it as a carving of a lion.

The problem with rejecting this biblical revelation is not that one loses the dim, inbuilt sense of awe that clings to human life; we intuit the image of God even if we do not know what it is. The problem is that this inbuilt sense is not enough. We need an explanation of what it is that we are intuiting-of what we experience when we experience the sense of awe. Without this explanation, I may try to hold onto my knowledge of the evil of murdering my neighbor, but I will find it difficult to recognize my neighbor when I see him. It is not impossible; more or less adequate explanations can be constructed from materials accessible to natural reason. But that is the long way around, and most people weary long before they reach the end of it. By and large, the ones who do stay on the trail are the same ones who acknowledge the biblical revelation of the imago Dei.

In contemporary secular ethics, the ruling tendency is to concede that there are such things as persons, but to define them in terms of their functions or capacities-not by what they are, the image of God, but by what they can do. To give but a single well-known illustration, philosopher Mary Ann Warren defines “personhood” in terms of consciousness, reasoning, self-motivated activity, the capacity to communicate about indefinitely many topics, and conceptual self-awareness. If you can do all those things, you’re a person; if you can’t, you’re not. The functional approach to personhood seems plausible at first, just because-at a certain stage of development, and barring misfortune-most persons do have these functions. But to think that they are their functions blows the core right out of the moral code.

Warren offers her definition to justify abortion. Obviously, unborn babies are not capable of reasoning, complex communication, and so on. If they cannot perform these functions, then by Warren’s definition they aren’t persons, and if they aren’t persons, they have no inherent right to life. But it cannot end with abortion. If unborn babies may be killed because they lack these functions, then a great many other individuals may also be killed for the same reasons-for example the asleep, unconscious, demented, addicted, and very young, not to mention sundry other cases, such as deaf-mutes who have not been taught sign language. In Warren’s language, none of these are persons; in biblical language, she refuses to recognize the imago Dei. She does claim to oppose infanticide-but only because any given infant is probably wanted by someone. She does not concede that the infant has an inherent claim to our regard, and if no one does happen to want it, then, she says, “its destruction is permissible.”

The cure for such blindness is not to tinker with the list of functions by which we define persons, but to stop confusing what persons are with what they can typically do. Functional definitions are appropriate for things which have no inherent nature, things whose identity is dependent on our own purposes and interests. Suppose I am building an automobile and I need to keep two moving parts from touching each other. I don’t need an object of a particular natural kind for that; anything which fills the space can be a spacer. Its very identity as a spacer is relative to how I want to use it, or to what function I value in it.

By contrast, if I am a person then I am by nature a rights-bearer, by nature a proper subject of absolute regard-not because of what I can do, but because of what I am. Of course this presupposes that I have a nature, a “what-I-am,” which is distinct from the present condition or stage of development of what I am, distinct from my abilities in that condition or stage of development, and distinct from how this condition, stage of development, or set of abilities might happen to be valued by other people. In short, a person is by nature someone whom it is wrong to view merely as a means. If you regard me as a person only because I am able to exercise certain capacities that interest you, then you are saying that I am not a person. And so the functional definition of personhood does not even rise to the dignity of being wrong. It is incoherent.

Some modern people will bite the bullet and agree with me. They will try to rescue their position not by drawing back, but by pushing further still, becoming “post” modern. “Very well!” they might say. “Let us grant that persons in the merely functional sense are not persons in the moral sense. But in that case there are no moral persons, because the ‘human beings’ whom you call moral persons do not exist. There are no ‘natural kinds.’ There are no ‘natures.’ There is no ‘what-I-am.’ All value is relative because all meaning is relative; all meaning is relative because every definition is contrived to the convenience of the definer. The definition of the ‘human’ is no less contrived than any other.” They have a point. We saw earlier that without God, there is no reason to believe in any sort of pattern in things-”natures” included.

But they escape one incoherency only to fall into a greater one. The former incoherency concerned only how we think of persons. The new one concerns how we think of everything-how we think of reality, even how we think of thinking. A condition of being able to say anything meaningful at all is that not everything is a creature of our own regard for it. There must exist some things that are what they are despite us; their meanings provide the anchors for all other meanings. If all meaning were relative, then even the meanings of the terms in the proposition “All meaning is relative” would be relative. Therefore the proposition “All meaning is relative” destroys itself. It is nothing but an evasion of reality. That seems a high price to pay, even for the privilege of killing people.

A modernist who rejects the greater of these incoherencies is not yet in the clear; one does not have to believe that all meanings slip away to see the meaning of the person slip away. Though a modernist may keep up the pretense that he is still talking about what persons really are, his functionalist method allows him to know only what he wants them to be-and different modernists want them to be different things. One thinker has greater regard for sentience, another for cognition, another for self-awareness. One thinks the important thing is sociality, another the capacity to make plans. With each different criterion of personhood, a different set of beings is welcomed through the gates of others’ regard. This writer says that higher mammals are persons, but human babies not. That one says that human babies are persons, but Grandma not. The one over there says that some human babies are persons, but only if their mothers think they are.

Denial of the imago Dei is something new, and much more dangerous than a simple return to paganism. As Francis Schaeffer once remarked, the worst that could be said of the pagans was that they had not yet heard that man is made in the image of God. Although they naturally recognized the dignity of man and the justice that is due to him, their understanding of this intuition was deficient. By contrast, our thinkers have heard that man is made in the image of God, but deny it. This puts such a strain on the inbuilt structures of moral knowledge that justice flips upside down. Refusing to learn, they finally distort even what they already know.

~~~

What shall we say about the Second Tablet Project? Just that it cannot succeed. The Second Tablet depends on the First; whoever denies his duty to God will find, if he is logical, that he can no longer make sense of his duty to his neighbor. Conscience will certainly persist, reminding him of both, but it will seem to him an absurdity in a sea of absurdities. Though he may admit that he has a nature, he will be unable to say why he should keep it. Though he may admit that this nature is governed by certain laws, he will find that their oughtness creeps out the door and that even their prudence slips away. All this will be needless, for he does have the knowledge of God; he merely denies it. But denial only makes his crisis deeper, for lies metastasize, and the greatest lie metastasizes to the greatest degree.

Then should we say that the Two Tablets are enough if only we take them as a pair? More’s the pity, no: not even the pair of them is enough by the light of nature alone. Though natural knowledge is sufficient to illuminate our duty, duty by itself is despair. It cannot assure us of the possibility of forgiveness when we fall short; it cannot assure us of the certainty of providence in the face of evil; and it cannot explain to us the fallen dignity we bear as images of God. In want of the first assurance, we seek refuge from guilt by denying our sins. In want of the second assurance, we seek to make everything go right by doing wrong. In want of the explanation, we find it all too easy to pretend that we do not recognize our neighbors for what they are.

In these senses, moral knowledge is protected and illuminated by the knowledge of God, and the natural knowledge of God is protected and illuminated by the knowledge of His word. Faith and reason contain and depend on each other. May we be spared the illusion of an ethics that stands wholly by itself.

¹ I am paraphrasing the formal analysis of purpose developed by philosopher Robert C. Koons

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.

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady of Loki Films are known for making controversial films, such as their collaborative project “Boys of Baraka” and Ewing’s critically acclaimed film about Cuban Nobel Peace Prize nominee Oswaldo Paya. The pair has teamed up again to create Jesus Camp, a documentary that examines a Christian summer camp for six to fourteen year-olds in North Dakota. In what is perhaps a rare glimpse of charismatic Christianity for many Americans, the film spends much of its time on the frequent all-camp gatherings involving singing and preaching. Despite what appear to be attempts made in good faith by the directors, the film still comes off as not particularly fair to its subjects, regardless of one’s political or religious views. Nevertheless, for both outraged critics and Jesus Camp fans, the film does raise some important questions about Christianity, appropriate ways to raise children, and the role of religion in politics.

Before any discussion about the central questions raised by the film, it should be made known that the music and lighting in the film strongly influence one’s initial interpretation of the film. Perfectly innocent scenes at the camp are introduced with a dark, rainy atmosphere lit by the smeary red of stoplights accompanied by scary music. Despite the fact that the directors toned down the “sinister” music at the request of camp directors, a rather chilling mood remains for the simple purpose of manipulating the audience. Further anecdotes of the manipulative slant of this film are available but would do the film injustice, as it does bring up significant issues that should be dealt with.

The documentary starts by following the experiences of five children as they prepare for camp. The kids all come from suburban white families, relatively typical of the camp, and are extremely friendly, obedient, and excited to go to camp. The film then cuts to the kids’ arrival at “Kids on Fire Summer Camp” in the ironically named town of Devils Lake, ND (laughter ensues in theater.) We find that Becky Fischer, the camp’s director, is a middle-aged, overweight woman who throws all of her often depleted energy into the camp. The movie accurately depicts that during their time at camp, the kids spend most of their time in the large event hall hearing rousing speeches followed by powerful altar calls and praise songs. Views of the children and the camp are also interspersed with short in-studio video clips from Mike Papantonio’s “Ring of Fire” political radio show on Al Franken’s recently bankrupt Air America radio network.

Preaching and singing are not exactly foreign to the religious experience, but the energy with which lessons are taught and the level of enthusiasm of the campers’ response are certainly unexpected. The preaching style can probably best be compared to Southern televangelism revivals, often designed to intimidate and guilt-trip listeners. As many of the large gatherings reach their climax, the hall is filled with crying children of all ages. Some are shaking with their hands clasped above their heads as their lips move quickly in frantic prayers. Other children give passionate testimonies or astonishingly mature sermons to their peers. The leaders on the steps of the stage in front pour water on the hands of the anxious children, telling them how the blood of Christ has washed their sins away. In a few scenes other campers are “struck with the Spirit” and drop to the floor, in spasms, as leaders pray over them.

Soon after the release of the film in theaters, accusations of brainwashing children erupted, echoing Papantonio’s criticisms in the film. They are children after all; it is cruel and wrong to manipulate them into believing in radical doctrines. But the situation is not quite so simple. Children are educated by a broad range of sources: their parents, teachers, the media, friends, and so on. All parents are selective in some way of what they expose their kids to. Violent or sexually explicit TV shows and reading materials are almost always off limits. So are friends who frequently misbehave or are judged to be delinquents.

Parents frequently influence their children with their own political, social, and moral beliefs. Republicans, Democrats, Greens, and people of all sorts of political parties can raise their children with a particular political viewpoint. Some parents instill more liberal values in their children about sex and sexuality, while others stick to more traditional views. Are these examples of value judgments? Yes, it would be ludicrous indeed if parents did not make decisions they felt to be in the best interest of their children. The disagreement then seems to be about the content of the material selected, not the act of selection itself, by their parents. It is quite easy to throw around claims of brainwashing when one disagrees with the nature of the content, but much more difficult to defend one’s own childrearing program.

Another objection is that the children at “Jesus Camp” are, in a sense, harmed by being forced against their will to participate in certain activities. Yet, the film does not portray the use of force at all. Sullen faces are visible in the crowds of children in the camp. The adults present never handle the children roughly or ask the children to do something they do not want to do. Emotional pressure, however, is harder to gauge, and it is obvious that the camp’s leaders target the emotions of the children in order to impress certain beliefs upon them. Nevertheless, there are many other avenues of emotional manipulation in our society. Who can deny the heavy emotional element in anti-smoking/anti-drug campaigns and even in charity TV ads for poverty-stricken African AIDS orphans? The difference between these agendas in the play of emotions is only a matter of degrees at best. The discussion then comes back to content. What is it that makes the events depicted in Jesus Camp so offensive to so many?

The sort of spiritual passion, or “charismatic” Christianity, shown in the film is shocking, or at least surprising, to people who are only familiar with more austere forms of Christianity, Catholics, and “mainline” Protestants, but also Southern Baptists and many Evangelicals.

The charismatic movement had its clearest beginning in American Pentecostal churches in the 1950s. By the late 1990s most mainstream churches worldwide had experienced some sort of “charismatic renewal” within their congregation. With the exception of the Roman Catholic and Episcopal Churches, most charismatics left or were forced to leave their home churches and eventually formed interdenominational churches with other charismatics. Thus, excepting churches which have drifted even farther from their mainstream roots, most charismatic churches are otherwise orthodox. (The use of “mainstream” to describe non-charismatic is becoming increasingly problematic with the dramatic expansion of charismatic congregations.)

The first difference is that most mainstream churches believe that spiritual manifestations like speaking in tongues and prophecy stopped occurring after the first century. Secondly and more importantly, mainstream churches, Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant, generally hold that the Holy Spirit is only received once by the Christian at the point of salvation or the initiation of salvation, depending on one’s denomination, and that thereafter the Spirit permanently dwells in a person, thus annulling the concept that one can receive the Spirit many times. Some Christians who exhibit charismatic behaviors believe that a Christian may, by preparing himself, receive the Holy Spirit any number of times subsequent to his conversion in a way that is somehow greater than the first and it is then that the Christian life is empowered in its fullest sense. It is important to note that this doctrine is different from the Catholic concept of multiple receptions of grace, and is solidly in opposition to most Protestant and Orthodox denominations.

There are of course Christians who display charismatic behaviors who do not hold to the second teaching of subsequent and greater receptions of the Spirit. This is akin to the New Testament example of Jewish Christians trying to push Jewish dietary restrictions and circumcision on Gentile Christians, in which case Paul recommends that Christians follow whichever course they feel is best as long as it does not cause other Christians in the church to stumble in their faith. It is hard, and wrong, to argue that God simply does not or cannot perform miracles anymore. Therefore, many would contend that the responsible and unobtrusive practice of charismatic behaviors by Christians is at least acceptable within mainstream Christianity.

The question then is where along the spectrum Becky’s camp falls. According to her website, it does not appear that she believes in the subsequent receptions doctrine, and sees charismatic Christianity solely as a “style of worship”. However, it seems rather clear from the film that Becky may not even be aware of the important theological issues at stake. That, from a Christian perspective, is perhaps the greatest failing of the camp, and for that matter, of many Christians.

Nonetheless, few people seem upset that the camp’s teachings might be slightly heretical, or its pursuit of clear doctrine lax. The camp’s main offense, according to Papantonio and others, seems to be the mixing of religion and politics. Examples of evidence for this are the invitation by many of the camp’s leaders to the crowd to “pray over President Bush,” for God to “raise up righteous judges,” to smash mugs emblazoned with various political corruptions with a hammer, to pray for an end to abortion, etc. Papantonio’s criticism contains two separate claims that should be dealt with independently.

The first is that bringing one’s religion to bear in the political realm is somehow irrational because religion is irrational. This is a non sequitur. Papantonio himself claims to be a Christian. Yet, he has decided that his religion should play no role in the formation of his political beliefs. The “Jesus Campers” have chosen to do the opposite. The very fact that while holding ostensibly similar religious beliefs, two groups can come to two opposite and practical conclusions shows that reason is at work, albeit on a political, not a religious level. Here is another example. Both Libertarians and Democrats believe that the formal education of children is good for society. However, many Libertarians reject the idea of public schools, citing poor results and lack of substance, while Democrats embrace it wholeheartedly, detesting unequal results. Neither party in this case would be seen as irrational. However, the belief that children should be formally educated is just that, a belief. Education in the past was conducted quite differently, if at all. Formal education developed at a specific point in time, and large segments of society have acknowledged its correlated benefits and compatibility with human nature and pursued it wholeheartedly. It not something that can be “true” or “false” in the scientific sense – exactly like religion.

The second claim is that regardless of the rationality or irrationality of the politics, the teaching of these political and religious beliefs to children can be harmful to their development in some way. This is simply preposterous. As directors Ewing and Grady have reiterated through various media outlets, the children shown in this film are consistently good-natured, well-behaved, articulate, and thoughtful. Furthermore, when asked, “‘Do you think that these kids are capable of violence?’ …we [the directors] have been giving a strident “NO!” to this question.” As one particularly sweet and articulate seven year-old girl makes clear, the kids understand their fight to be a spiritual, not a physical war.

However, one might suspect that Papantonio and other critics already understand this. Many of those opposed to Becky’s summer camp quite willingly spread their own beliefs over the radio and other media and most likely impart them to their children. They throw around hypocritical accusations of brainwashing and hide behind deceptive walls of rationality. Furthermore, in light of the numerous hate emails and calls to Becky and her staff and an incident of vandalism to the camp in October, one begins to wonder if the search for potentially harmful beliefs would best be started somewhere else.

It is high time to stop looking at Christian conservatives, whose biggest failure has been submitting to big-government Republicans by whom they have been betrayed, to find the source of America’s ills. Neglecting to engage with a group entirely because one disagrees with their religious and political beliefs is the worst kind of intolerance and is much worse than anything of which the passionate people at Kids on Fire are guilty. Still, the leaders of the camp, and all Christians, would do well to engage in a more thoughtful kind of Christianity that is more careful with its core doctrines than is evidenced by the Christians in Jesus Camp.

Kelly Monroe Kullberg has had quite an adventure. As founder of the Veritas Forum, Kullberg has used her gift with words to capture audiences, invoke thoughtful discussion, and, most recently, share a story of trials, hard work, and hope-a story that starts-where else?-at Harvard.

In her most recent book, Finding God Beyond Harvard, Kullberg reveals the joys and successes of the Veritas Forum, which she founded fourteen years ago. The Forum, which strives to act as a venue for students and faculty to engage in discussions about Truth and Christ, is now in place at over fifty universities across the country. In the book, Kullberg weaves her story of personal spiritual growth with the account of the Forum’s development. We should not be too surprised that as she was building this new program, she was personally grappling with issues of the highest importance-love, feelings of uncertainty, and the relief of redemption.

Kullberg begins her story by painting an image of her first encounter with Harvard itself, where, as a Divinity School student, she faced a culture of extreme tolerance “except that for which Harvard College was founded-In Christi Gloriam-Jesus Christ’s glory” (pg 30). As she works with other universities for the Veritas Forum, Kullberg discovers that many other major institutions have similar foundations that they have abandoned. While visiting Dartmouth, Kullberg encounters a chapel located in the heart of the campus, which featured stunning stained-glass windows depicting Christ’s life. The windows, however, had been covered by dry wall because a group of students felt offended by the images. Similarly, she finds that several other prominent universities promoted education influenced by the Christian faith in their original charters but today no longer acknowledge their religious roots. They have figuratively plastered over their founding purpose.

Today these universities seem to view the principles on which they were founded as simply historical accidents-conditions that made Christianity the focus at the time. But what colleges seem to forget is that the search for Truth, for Veritas, was closely linked to the academic mission of these universities when they were founded. Their mottos were salient reminders to faculty and students of their everyday purpose. A common element in these mottos was that Truth was ultimately held in a higher power; that theology had to be considered to engage with the full picture of Truth. Today, colleges seem to have abandoned this ever-important, yet lofty search for Truth, and consequently jettisoned Christianity as well.

But Kullberg has dedicated herself to the original purpose of many of these universities, including that of Harvard-Veritas. Her vision of truth is apparent on every page, and her selfless goal to allow this truth to be revealed in her book is clear. Lessons of forgiveness, love, sacrifice, and humility seep through the pages, yet Kullberg never seems overbearing or too imposing. As a woman who values academia, Kullberg shows intolerance for deceit and ignorance, yet at the same time displays an unwavering compassion for those who have not yet discovered the truth.

The Veritas Forum soon featured influential Christian scholars and speakers, including author Madeleine L’Engle, philosopher William Lane Craig, and Condoleeza Rice, who was, at the time, the provost at Stanford. Kullberg tells stories of students becoming engaged by the intellectual discussions concerning Christianity and the impact of these conversations. Through tales of personal experiences, speakers such as Craig were able to reach students on a deeper level, and, as Kullberg explains, when “other Christian philosophers and scientists are allowed to use reason and to include their personal experience, it is hard to find a willing opponent, and there is rarely a contest” (pg 94). While this certainly does not mean each discussion led to conversion for non-believers, it does indicate that Christianity can have a place in the forum of academia. Kullberg has shown us that we can rationally discuss and advocate a theological Truth, remaining faithful to an honest and humble quest for Veritas while avoiding proselytizing.

One of the most personal passages in Finding God Beyond Harvard is the chapter entitled “Knowing and Believing.” In this section, Kullberg recalls several events in her life that have helped define her personal motivations and beliefs. She remembers an evening where she and several other graduate students discussed the wonders of the universe and the concepts of creation and the Big Bang. Although several physics students excitedly shared how they are able to explain the Big Bang and measure time back to the universe’s conception, an M.I.T. student stated: “The only problem with that theory is that there was no time, energy, matter, or space before the Big Bang. It’s all a consequence, not a cause. The first cause had to be immaterial, omnipotent, and genius” (pg 135). Students seem to yearn for disucssions about the highest things, which intensifies Kullberg’s enthusiasm for the cause of the Veritas Forum.

Kullberg continues to describe how God’s love has saved her time and again, and how her faith has helped her through turbulent times in her personal life outside her work with the Veritas Forum. Near the beginning of the Forum, Kullberg began a relationship that lasted six years but never resulted in marriage. She discusses the pain and healing that she experienced as a result of the failed relationship, and shows how God worked through her trials to increase her commitment and vision for the Forum. As she began to forgive, she discovered how much she depended on others and on God’s grace. “God was asking me to live forwardly,” she says, “to be reestablished in love… I sensed him asking me to take him at his word, to believe in his sovereignty and power beyond my own mistakes” (pg 150).

Kullberg never offers a true alternative to the increasing secularization of college campuses, but she does clearly suggest how Christian students should promote Veritas. She remarks that “Veritas is a new way of seeing and living. It begins with the humility to say that we know little on our own.” This is perhaps the most difficult concept that Kullberg presents. As Harvard students, we sometimes revel in our intelligence and take pride in our accomplishments. Kullberg, however, argues that we ought to replace pride with humility in order to display the love and light of Christ, who embodies the Truth. Only with an attitude of humility can we truly show love toward others and pursue knowledge that is much greater than ourselves. For Kullberg, then, the first step toward Truth-and the embodiment of Kullberg’s personal life and dedication to the Forum-is to cultivate humility.

As students at one of the most influential universities in the world, we are called to be the light in the world of learning, and to foster a sense of knowledge and intelligence combined with the Truth that Christ offers. As Harvard students, we should not leave our pursuit of academic excellence behind, but as Kullberg makes clear, we must also not make that our main focus.

By uniting the quest for truth in academia with the realization of Veritas in Christ, Kullberg’s organization has captured the hearts and minds of students across the world. Finding God Beyond Harvard is a book that examines this connection and delves into Harvard’s reasons for abandoning its Christian foundation. It should also make people think more deeply about the simple, single-word motto of the university that is emblazoned everywhere on this campus- Veritas. It is the one word that still remains from the original motto of Harvard University: “Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae,” Truth for Christ and the Church. And it might lead readers to wonder if perhaps the reason Veritas still shines today is that those unspoken words are inextricably tied to the very core of Truth.

Open a newsmagazine and see the terrified faces of Sudanese refugees and grisly scenes from Iraq. Open a history book and read about the violent crimes committed in the 20th century alone. Then listen to the language of our “safe” society. Hear the micro-murder with every word of slander and hatred towards individuality. The world tries to oppress individuality with words; if this does not work, it uses action. Always know that a dark force seeks to rule this world, smothering life and creativity. Suddenly, every act of creativity seems like a noble act of counter-terrorism.

A film that addresses this attempt to oppress and veil individuality should be applauded, for such a message can never be outdated. However, V for Vendetta, the futuristic action film based on David Lloyd’s graphic novel of the same name, should receive only a modicum of applause in this area. It does not deserve much more.

V for Vendetta, with a screenplay by the creators of the Matrix movies, the acclaimed Wachowski brothers, certainly has noble intentions. It takes the frame of the Guy Fawkes story and fleshes it out in a futuristic setting. That same narrative, the film tries to say, can be the story of any society or person. Fawkes, the English Catholic rebel who in 1605 tried to blow up the Protestant-dominated Parliament, serves as the archetypal man of mettle who stands up to an oppressive regime. In the first moments of the film, we see his shadowed face creeping through the tunnels beneath Parliament; the droves of guards who overtake him as he valiantly swings his saber, but in vain; his defiant pride at the scaffold, and his wife’s despair as we watch his lifeless body swing from the noose. A few centuries pass. We find ourselves in 21st century England amidst a new government and new rebels. The Conservative Party has taken over the country. It has marked non-Christians, homosexuals, political activists and dissidents, and excessively “creative” art as “undesirable” elements of society. Party members are wooed by the idea of a better political, cultural, and genetic England. They must swear loyalty to the government and bear the constant fear of accusations of sedition. Only one man has the strength and courage to face up to this totalitarian regime. His tall, muscular figure is veiled by a dark cape. A white mask hides his scarred face. He has vowed vengeance on the leaders of England, and he has the power to destroy all of them. He leaves a red rose behind with each of his victims. He calls himself V.

Keep watching the film, and you will find some curiously familiar themes. Is the description of the totalitarian government and its internment camps for “undesirables,” for instance, reminiscent of something you learned in European history class? Or perhaps V’s appearance-white mask, black cape, red rose in hand-is strikingly similar to that of an elusive man in an opera house who has been known to sing well? Vendetta is also riddled with allusions to Shakespeare, The Count of Monte Cristo, and 1984. Such references to eminent literature, works of art, and moments in history have the potential to develop a weighty film indeed. Unfortunately, Vendetta fails to do more than contain this mélange of allusions to great things. It is no great thing itself.

For if Vendetta has one artistic flaw (and I would argue it has many more), it is the film’s misguided and maladroit effort to make a significant and subtle commentary on the human condition. The Wachowski brothers attempt to deliver a “deep” message about the resiliency and ability of the human spirit to endure and rise above suffering, but they flounder and drown in the process. They seek to make symbolism the film’s foundation. Unfortunately, the symbolism is often frustratingly obvious and cliché. For instance, when V takes Evie, the heroine played by Natalie Portman, outside for the first time since her internment and torture, rain pours onto the rooftop where she stands. She lifts her face to the sky, looking pitiably cold in her meager prison uniform, but unafraid of the discomfort. Lighting flashes in the distance, and she raises her arms in a gesture of empowerment and joy. She is a new person, “without fear” as V phrases it, baptized after her trial in prison. Rain falling, lightning flashing, protagonists standing on a roof, religious symbolism-seems like a common recipe for a cliché scene. At another point in the film, we see that V has been literally “baptized with fire” to become the quasi-super-hero that he is. Such scenes are intended to stir up wonder and empathy among the audience. But when the intent of the filmmakers is so obvious, the symbolism so formulaic, it achieves the opposite response. This audience member, for one, felt empathy only for Portman, as she struggled to save an action flick’s sorry attempt at subtlety.

Vendetta takes another swing with its saber and misses when it appears to accuse Christianity and conservatism of leading to totalitarianism. The lack of subtlety is almost humorous here, for the film’s creators fail to distinguish between these three very different concepts. In Vendetta, Christianity consists of hatred towards homosexuals, non-Caucasian ethnicities, non-Christian religions, and anyone who tries to point out that this intolerant attitude is misguided. As a Christian, it is sad to see this portrayal of hate being nurtured in the name of Love. But the Wachowski brothers pull Vendetta in such disparate directions-subtle commentary and shoot-’em-up action (the latter wins, of course)-that the audience hardly has time to mull over the film’s portrayal of Christianity. Indeed, lack of a nuanced approach does not allow the Wachowskis to present a cogent argument against the faith, if this is indeed their intention. The film takes a few cheap shots, but they are simply too cliché and juvenile to be troublesome. For example, there is a malevolent bishop who likes to sleep with little girls and is in league with the government’s plot to use “undesirables” as scientific experiments. So, we are presented with a corrupt child molester who calls himself a man of God. After seeing this especially anti-Catholic clergyman, we are supposed to take a cheap laugh at the Catholic Church.

The film has a few other cynical moments towards Christianity, including one cantankerous television host’s assertion that “God is on our side,” as he proceeds to berate homosexuals and Muslims. But ultimately, the film uses its critiques of Christianity as clumsily as it uses literary allusions and symbolism. Vendetta is no threat to its audience’s faith. And by the final scene, the film demonstrates that its intention is beneficent, if still misguided. A fantastic mass of black capes and white masks gather to watch Parliament explode (the earlier work of our hero). As fireworks erupt from the building, people remove their masks one by one. We see the chief investigator (a superb performance by Steven Rea), Evie’s executed uncle, the prisoners of the concentration camps; every citizen, alive or dead, is free to be “unmasked,” to find his individual identity, following the destruction of the regime. Vendetta suggests that “unmasking,” then, is the source of fulfillment and peace for society. A Christian would not argue with this. But a Christian would insist that the route to unmasking is not through violence, defiance against authority, or even ardent individualism. Rather, it is through Christ that we find our identities. Christ is the true hero. Christ has the power to overcome an oppressive and sinister regime. Christ takes off our masks and lets us be who we are created to be.

Unfortunately, V for Vendetta cannot reconcile its cynicism with a Christian perspective. It offers its audience pessimism, flashy explosions, and excellent acting while bringing attention to various social and religious issues. In other words, it brims with blockbuster potential. So if it carries a winning formula in its pocket, why does it never use it? The screenplay’s lack of subtlety hinders Vendetta from excellence. If it had a more nuanced approach it might avoid, among other things, making trite generalizations about conservatism and Christianity. But if Vendetta tried to be truly thoughtful, it likely would have fewer explosions and less gore. And that might be awfully dull for today’s average audience.