James E Hartley

The Joy of Cymbeline

“The play has many just sentiments, some natural dialogue, and some pleasing scenes, but they are obtained at the expense of much incongruity. To remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names, and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation.”

That is Samuel Johnson discussing William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, a bit of criticism which would be impossible to do anything other than relish. Lytton Strachey remarked that the play was written by a man “half bored to death.” How about George Bernard Shaw’s evaluation: “for the most part stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order, in parts abominably written, throughout intellectually vulgar, and judged in point of though by modern intellectual standards, vulgar, foolish, offensive, indecent, and exasperating beyond all tolerance.”

I am glad to report, however, that Johnson, Strachey, and Shaw are wrong. Cymbeline is a fun play. Indeed, after reading it, I was surprised when I started reading commentaries on it; so many critics seem to miss what makes the play fun.

Imagine someone sitting down with the collected works of Shakespeare and deciding to write a giant over-the-top parody of the complete works of Shakespeare. Then, imagine that the parody is written in language as good as anything Shakespeare himself would write. It is hard to imagine someone pulling off that feat. But, it happened. Shakespeare wrote it himself. Cymbeline.

To summarize the plot is nearly impossible, which is fitting because it contains within it the plots of multiple plays. So, start with the genre. Is the play a tragedy a comedy or a history? In the First Folio, it was listed as a tragedy, which makes sense because it is a lot like Romeo and Juliet and Othello and Macbeth. But, later on it was lumped in with the comedies which makes sense because it is a lot like Twelfth Night and As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing. Then again, Cymbeline was the British King at the time of Julius Caesar and this is a play about rules of succession and colonization and political infighting and actual battle scenes, so it really belongs with the Histories as a prequel to the Richard plays and the Henry plays.

You can instead look at a bunch of individual scenes and characters. Which play is this from: a conniving guy tries to make a husband doubt the faithfulness of his wife by convincing him that his wife has been unfaithful? Is the conniving guy Iago (Othello) or Iachimo (Cymbeline)? Or which is the play in which the young love-struck woman takes poison which causes her to fall into such a deep sleep that people think she is dead? Romeo and Juliet or Cymbeline? Or how about the play where the young woman leaves court and goes off into the forest where she finds a court in exile? As You Like It or Cymbeline? Or how about that play that ends with a seemingly endless series of revelations that people are not who everyone else thought they were? Pick your favorite comedy or Cymbeline? Cross-dressing? Check. Dream sequences? Check. Prophecies? Check. Plots within plots? Check. Seriously, pick a feature of Shakespeare, and it is somewhere in Cymbeline.

When I realized what was going on about halfway through the play (the Iachimo/Iago comparison was really hard to miss), I realized that this was just a play in which Shakespeare was having fun. I checked my instinct by asking Izzy Baird, whose claim to fame includes having read all of Shakespeare’s plays before her 23^rd birthday. Her reply: “I like that interpretation. The start of Cymbeline is what happens if King Lear married Lady Macbeth, the middle of the play is a weird mashup of Merry Wives and Julius Caesar, and the resolution is completely Twelfth Night.” Just so.

Now, imagine my shock when I looked at the professional critics and their disdain for this play. How did they miss the fun? Yes, the scenes in Britain are set in the age of Julius Caesar, but the scenes in Italy sure seem like they are taking place right down the street from Shylock making a deal with Antonio. That isn’t a failing; that’s funny.

Harold Bloom comes closest to getting it: “Cymbeline is a pungent self-parody on Shakespeare’s part: we revisit King Lear, Othello, The Comedy of Errors, and dozens of other plays, but we see them now through a distorting lens.” Aha! I thought. Exactly right…well except for the “pungent” bit. Even after realizing it is a parody, Bloom decides it is a failed play: “No other play by Shakespeare…shows the playwright so alienated from his own art as Cymbeline does.” Or this: “Shakespeare is his own worst enemy in Cymbeline: he is weary of making plays.” Does Bloom really think Cymbeline is “aesthetic self-wounding”? Yes he does.

What is happening here? Are serious Shakespeare scholars really so obsessed with thinking of everything in lofty terms that they are unable to recognize when something is just plain fun? Shakespeare just did the equivalent of writing a literary Airplane! and the critics forget to laugh and just sit up in their boxes shaking their heads at this guy who has lost his powers. You can hear the relief of the critics when The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest come along; maybe this guy isn’t washed up after all.

One of the serious blights on the academic landscape these days is this obsession with being serious. What happened to fun? What happened to the idea that you can show the heights of brilliance by being able to laugh? Of course we want Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but isn’t there space for Douglas Adams too? The Godfather and Citizen Kane are amazing, but does that mean we can’t appreciate at This is Spinal Tap? Doesn’t it make Shakespeare even more amazing that he can write both Hamlet and Cymbeline?

So, give me your discussions of comic books and Great Books. Give me your comparisons of Taylor Swift and T. S. Eliot. Give me your 500 pages of bad puns masquerading as a novel. Never forget that life is bursting with joy and if we can’t all pause to revel in the fun of Cymbeline, then we are missing out on a big part of the reason we are all here. God’s mirth is a beauty to behold and it shows itself in all these improbable ways.

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Dante’s Road Trip: Inferno

O Supreme Wisdom, what great art you show
In Heaven, on earth, and in the evil world
And what true justice does your power dispense!

O Dante, what great art you show
In Paradise, Purgatory and the Inferno
And what true delight does your power dispense!

T. S. Eliot once noted that “Shakespeare and Dante divide the world between them. There is no third.” It is hard to argue with him. There have been more commentaries written on Dante’s Divine Comedy than on any other book except the Bible. That is one of the things I love about it; it makes no difference how many times you have read it, there are always new things to discover. It is literally impossible to understand all the references and intricacies.

And yet, the whole thing is told in a remarkably simple manner. This is a road trip through the Inferno, Purgatory, and finally Paradise; our faithful narrator, Dante, simply tells us about the things he sees and the conversations he has. Fittingly, the conversations in the Inferno are all about the miserable lives led by miserable people; the conversations in Paradise, however, are all lofty philosophical and theological discussions.

By all accounts, Dante’s Italian is beautiful, an easy-reading colloquial style, done in a remarkable rhyme scheme, all of which is difficult to replicate well in English. There are 100 chapters (called Cantos); 33 for each part, plus an initial Canto to set the whole thing up. Lots of people have tried, and some of them have done an amazing job, trying to keep the rhyme pattern. But, my preferred translation is Robert and Jean Hollander’s. They abandon the attempt to keep the rhyme and instead try to preserve the easy-going nature of Dante’s verse.

We begin to see the artistry of the Divine Comedy at the outset. Dante is lost in a dark wood and meets three beasts before Virgil shows up and tells Dante to follow him. The commentaries are filled with attempts to figure out what the three beasts represent. If you like giant puzzles, you can spend time reading all the notes in whatever version you have. Or, you can decide to just go along for the ride; the story works perfectly well if you see the three beasts, notice they are scary and stop Dante from his journey, and thus make him willing to trust to a guide. In other words, the story of the Divine Comedy is perfectly enjoyable even if you have no idea who all the people are and what all the assorted things represent. You don’t need to look at a single editorial note to enjoy the work. Just imagine you are hearing a guy telling an amazing tale, and don’t sweat the details.

As we get into the Inferno, we, like Dante, are initially overwhelmed with the visceral terrors—Dante faints before even crossing into the Inferno, and then he faints repeatedly in the early cantos. But as Dante (and the reader) go along and the shape of the afterlife comes into focus, his (and our) perspective changes. By the end, he is ripping out the hair of a sinner; he does not show an ounce of sympathy for Ugolino.

The first clue to thinking about the Inferno as a whole comes in the third canto: we find out that the souls are eager to cross into the Inferno (3.124). Why eagerness and not dread? It is a sign that we think about Hell in the wrong way. We imagine Hell as a place of eternal punishment, a place to be avoided. But the souls here are eager to get to their final destination. Why?

Look at the punishments. People generally say that the punishments fit the crimes, but that is missing something important. They are less punishments in our usual way of thinking and more the simple revelation of the nature of the sin. Dante is saying: if you think the punishment sounds bad then you should realize that the sin is exactly like the punishment. The punishments in the Inferno don’t fit the sin—they are the sin.

The first group Dante meets, the neutrals, show the shape of what is to come. In life, the neutrals followed no set path, just running about aimlessly with no internal pricks of conscience— and here they are running around after an aimless, directionless banner pricked only on the outside by wasps and flies. In other words, in death, the souls get to spend eternity doing what they chose to do on earth.

The wrathful are forever fighting in the muck. The people who said there was no afterlife spend eternity in tombs. Murderers are standing in a lake of blood. Diviners want to see into things that cannot normally be seen, so their bodies are unnaturally twisted as they try to see what cannot be seen. And on and on. It is indeed great art…which Dante cleverly pretends comes from God and not Dante himself.

Then as you look at the Inferno compared to Purgatory and Paradise, you notice there is a structural similarity. Each realm has three main parts, which get divided into 7 subparts. Then there are two more levels which are like, but not identical, to the three main parts, so that brings us to nine levels. Finally, there is a 10^th level which is unlike the other nine.

Surprisingly, the internal structure of the Inferno is not from Christian theology. It is straight out of Aristotle. Dante tips this off when he notes that the souls entering the Inferno are those who have “lost the good of the intellect.” It is not just faith that shapes this afterlife; it is also Reason. After all, Virgil, not one of the saints, is Dante’s guide.

In the Inferno, the three divisions are the sins of Incontinence, Violence, and Fraud, ranked in that order of seriousness by Aristotle. Incontinence has four circles (Lust; Gluttony; Avarice and Prodigality; and Anger and Sullenness); Violence is a single circle with three parts; Fraud is two circles (Simple Fraud and Treachery, with the former having ten parts and the latter four parts). That gives seven circles. Then add the circles of Limbo and Heresy, both of which are a lack of belief, the former because of ignorance of the truth, the latter because of denial of the truth; note that these sins do not fit into Aristotle’s structure because they are specifically Christian sins. The 10^th circle, unlike the others is the Neutrals, who neither believed nor didn’t believe.

For modern readers, murder is surprisingly high up; even in the realm of violence, it is the least serious of the types; violence against God and violence against self are worse than violence against others. Lust is at the highest level in the Inferno proper. The worst sin, the one at the very pit of Hell? Treachery against rightful lords.

Not only is the macrostructure fascinating, the individual levels also are. One of my favorite bits is in Canto 4, the circle of Limbo containing those who never had the opportunity to know about God. Dante meets the Great Poets there: Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan. When not being a tour guide, Virgil resides in this level, so the other Great Poets come over to chat. Then Dante relates this:

After they conversed a while,
They turned to me with signs of greeting,
And my master smiled at this.

And then they showed me greater honor still,
For they made me one of their company,
So that I became the sixth amidst such wisdom.

Thus we went onward to the light,
Speaking of things that here are best unsaid,
Just as it was fitting to express them there.

Yep. Dante just ranked himself as one of the six greatest poets of all time. Talk about having a high opinion of yourself! But, then, it dawns on the reader…Dante is actually better than the other five great poets. Even more amazing, Dante put himself among the greatest of all time on the basis of…what? His previous work is OK, but not even in the class of Homer and Virgil. The very work in which he asserts his greatness is the work on which his greatness is based. He knew he was writing something extraordinary. And despite the fact that we might want to say he was being a bit too prideful, it is hard to say his opinion of himself was too high. Indeed, by ranking himself with those other poets, he was lowering himself.

Canto Five is a perfect illustration of why there are so many commentaries on the Inferno; it is brilliant. In the circle of lust, Dante meets Francesca, who gives a speech designed to solicit Dante’s (and thus the reader’s) sympathy. She makes a case for why we should feel bad for her. Do we pity her? Remember, she is in the place where the souls have lost the good of the intellect. The whole speech is designed to play on your emotions, not your intellect. Dante falls into her trap; he swoons. Dante, like the reader, has not yet come to understand the nature of the Inferno; he still feels pity for these souls.

Francesca’s speech is a very clever riff on Augustine’s Confessions. Augustine’s job was a teacher of rhetoric; Francesca’s speech is a perfect example of classical rhetoric in both form and substance. Augustine realized the superficiality of classical rhetoric; Francesca embraces it, which proves Augustine’s point. Augustine notes his huge struggle with the sin of lust; Francesca embraces her lustful desires. Augustine’s conversion came when he was reading Paul—the dramatic moment is when puts down the book and reads no further; Francesca, reading a book with her lover, copies Augustine’s line about putting down the book and reading no further, but instead of converting, embraces her lust.

Then there are some incredibly fun parts. Dante and Virgil encounter a locked gate with some fallen angels who refuse to let them pass. So an angel from heaven shows up to help out. The angel comes down into hell with an attitude that this is some tiresome bit of nonsense that he just wants to get over as quickly as possible. Absolutely brilliant. While Dante and the readers are obsessed with all the details of the Inferno, the angel can’t be bothered to even say “Hi” to Dante after making a trip there just to open some doors for him. The angel just trudges in, waves open the gates, yells at the fallen angels, and then strides off.

Then there is the bit where Dante shows sheer audacity by inventing a whole story about Virgil going through the Inferno before, but presenting it as if it is a story all the readers would already know. He also repeatedly has bits which slyly mock Virgil. Dante is subtly asserting that his tale is so much better than Virgil’s. And remember, when Dante wrote this, everyone knew The Aeneid was the best thing ever written.

When we meet Ulysses is the circle of False Counsellors, he tells a tale of a journey he convinced his crew to take, sailing out into the ocean until they came in sight of a great mountain. A great storm then came up and everyone drowns. We find out in Purgatory, that the mountain on the other side of the world is Purgatory, which you have to climb to get to heaven. So, Ulysses, in effect, is counseling his crew to set off on their own, unaided by God, to get to Purgatory and climb to heaven. The whole of the Divine Comedy is an argument that you can’t do that; at the outset, Dante was lost in the dark wood and he tried to climb a hill on his own. He failed. But at the behest of a heavenly soul, Virgil will lead Dante along the proper path, and Dante will then come back to tell us all.

As you travel through the Inferno, the message become quite clear:

Here piety lives when pity is quite dead.
Who is more impious than one who thinks
That God brings passion to his judgement?

The Inferno is reasonable and just. If you don’t want to deal with God, if you want to live your life in sin, then congratulations, you can spend all eternity doing exactly what you wanted to do.

The Inferno ends with a Great Trivia Question: name the three worst sinners in the history of the world, the ones who will be eternally chewed up by one of Satan’s three heads. If you have never read the Inferno, don’t Google the answer. Just read the story. You will be very very glad you did.

Avoiding the Fire Next Time

“If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, fire next time!”

That is the conclusion of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, published in 1963, which you will note is not only nearly 60 years ago, but before I and many (most?) of the readers of these ruminations were born. There are two things which are immediately striking when reading James Baldwin. First, he was an incredible prose stylist; it is impossible to read him and not be impressed with the way the words seem so viscerally alive. The second thing which is immediately striking is that the world is a lot different than it was in 1963. It is hard to see how anyone could read Baldwin and think that nothing has changed.

The disturbing part of this particular essay shows up when you step back and ask whether we have avoided the fire next time. Consider this passage, quoted at length because, well, it is a bit troublesome that Baldwin was so prophetic.

In any case, during a recent Muslim rally, George Lincoln Rockwell, the chief of the American Nazi party, made a point of contributing about twenty dollars to the cause, and he and Malcolm X decided that, racially speaking, anyway, they were in complete agreement. The glorification of one race and the consequent debasement of another—or others—always has been and always will be a recipe for murder. There is no way around this. If one is permitted to treat any group of people with special disfavor because of their race or the color of their skin, there is no limit to what one will force them to endure, and, since the entire race has been mysteriously indicted, no reason not to attempt to destroy it root and branch. This is precisely what the Nazis attempted. Their only originality lay in the means they used. It is scarcely worthwhile to attempt remembering how many times the sun has looked down on the slaughter of the innocents. I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them. I think I know—we see it around us every day—the spiritual wasteland to which that road leads. It is so simple a fact and one that is so hard, apparently, to grasp: Whoever debases others is debasing himself.

Can we all agree about that? Is there anything controversial in that statement? Does it make any difference which group is debasing another group? Can we agree that it is wrong to “treat any group of people with special disfavor because of their race or the color of their skin” no matter which racial group we select? Is it OK to agree with Baldwin that George Lincoln Rockwell and Malcolm X are both wrong?

How do we avoid the fire next time? Baldwin points the way to the solution as he explains why he left the Christian church in which he was raised:

But I had been in the pulpit too long and I had seen too many monstrous things. I don’t refer merely to the glaring fact that the minister eventually acquires houses and Cadillacs while the faithful continue to scrub floors and drop their dimes and quarters and dollars into the plate. I really mean that there was no love in the church. It was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair. The transfiguring power of the Holy Ghost ended when the service ended, and salvation stopped at the church door. When we were told to love everybody, I had thought that that meant everybody. But no. It applied only to those who believed as we did, and it did not apply to white people at all. I was told by a minister, for example, that I should never, on any public conveyance, under any circumstances, rise and give my seat to a white woman. White men never rose for Negro women. Well, that was true enough, in the main—I saw his point. But what was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved toward me? What others did was their responsibility, for which they would answer when the judgment trumpet sounded. But what I did was my responsibility, and I would have to answer, too…

It no longer sounds sophisticated to say this in elite society; it is a quick means of getting yourself labeled as an ignorant rube (or worse); it will not be viewed as a positive contribution to the discussion, but, even still, isn’t the real solution to our societal ills, isn’t the thing we want every child to learn, isn’t the message which we should be proclaiming a every opportunity simply this:

Love your neighbor as yourself

If people did that, if people faltering and incompletely, but genuinely and earnestly, did that, if people set out in every interaction to show love, exactly which problems remain? If you see an injustice and your first response was simply to note that the person committing the injustice is not showing love to the person who is being treated unjustly, if whether we are showing love is the first question we ask about ourselves, if that is the bedrock principle on which we build, what else would we need?

Baldwin hits the nail right on the head in the middle of his “A Talk to Teachers”:

My ancestors and I were very well trained. We understood very clearly that this was not a Christian nation. It didn’t matter what you said or how often you went to church. My father and my mother and my grandfather and my grandmother knew that Christians didn’t act this way. It was as simple as that.

Indeed, it is as simple as that.

In our collective rush to throw more fuel onto the fire next time, perhaps it is worth pausing and asking: are we showing love right now? Or even better: Am I showing love right now? “But what was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved toward me? What others did was their responsibility, for which they would answer when the judgment trumpet sounded. But what I did was my responsibility, and I would have to answer, too…”

That’s it. Nothing more to be said. That’s the blog post. That’s the admonition. Love your neighbor as yourself.

Church Scandals and Elmer Gantry

As you might have heard, there was a recent scandal in the church when it was discovered that a prominent Christian figure was exposed as being a fraud, engaged in all sorts of terrible behavior behind the scenes.

The most important thing about the preceding sentence is that it could have been written at any point in the last two thousand years.

And yet, there are still people who are surprised every time it happens.

Perhaps it would be good if more people read Elmer Gantry. Sinclair Lewis’ novel is a tale of a guy with a wonderful resounding voice who stumbles his way into Christian ministry because it is sure a lot more lucrative and pleasant than being a travelling salesman. He is far from a paragon of virtue and his theological convictions are shaky at best, yet he just keeps going from successful ministry to successful ministry. It is an excellent novel, worth reading if for no other reason than its literary quality.

The question is what devout Christians should make of a book in which the clergy throughout range from outright frauds to bumbling idiots. One reaction is to castigate the book as a vile bit of trash, vulgarly defaming the souls who devote their lives to doing God’s work on earth. The novel is a perfect example of the work of those godless heathens who constantly sneer at religion and religious figures while joining hands in merry revels round bonfires every time a Christian falls.

The other option is to acknowledge that there are indeed a lot of Elmer Gantrys in this world. Indeed, it is hard to see how “There are no outright frauds like Elmer Gantry in the world of Christian ministry” is any more true than “Every person in Christian ministry is an outright fraud like Elmer Gantry.” Why is it so hard for people in the church to simply acknowledge that in the midst of a great many devout and godly Christian figures, there have been, continue to be, and always will be people who look great on the outside, but are veritable whitewashed tombs? You don’t have to take my word for it:

He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?’ He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ So the servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he said, ‘No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, “Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.”’” (Matthew 13: 24-30, ESV)

Why then are so many Christians so surprised when Jerry Falwell Jr or Ravi Zacharias are revealed to have been leading double lives? Why the shock at the rampant problems in the Roman Catholic Church? Why did a great number of Southern Baptists see what happened in the Roman Catholic Church and take pride that it couldn’t happen in their denomination?

Of course there are people exactly like Elmer Gantry in Christian ministry. We may cherish the image of the Christian minister serving in poverty like St Francis of Assisi, but, truth be told, Christian ministry can be a very lucrative profession. Pastors in large Protestant churches average six figure salaries; the upper end of Christian ministry hits seven figures. Even if you don’t hit that upper end, however, Christian ministry can be a nice stable job, making a good solid income with a lot of flexibility in how you spend your time and no boss to whom you have to report. After all, most churches pay minsters and missionaries because they do not want their pastors or missionaries to have to lead the life of St Francis.

What Elmer Gantry does excellently well is present a portrait of Christian ministry purely as a career option. While Lewis has a merry time portraying every pastor as a dullard at best, it is not hard to realize that the novel can be illuminating even if not every person in Christian ministry is exactly like those portrayed in the book. Lewis himself mocks people who read his novels that way. One of the characters is Elmer Gantry complains about one of Sinclair Lewis’ earlier novels:

Lord, how that book of Lewis’, ‘Main Street,’ did bore me, as much of it as I read; it just rambled on forever, and all he could see was that some of the Gopher Prairie hicks didn’t go to literary teas quite as often as he does!—and that was all he could see among those splendid heroic pioneers.

So while some people outside the church may read Elmer Gantry as a description of all Christian ministers, that does not mean that thoughtful people need to read it that way. In fact, it is an excellent book for people inside the church to read to help disabuse them of the notion that all Christian ministers are paragons of virtue.

There is an extraordinary amount of vernation in Christian circles. At times, one wonders whether the first commandment has been broken. No pastor and no political figure is above reproach. At best, at the very best, they are godly individuals struggling with sin as they try to live a life of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. That is the very peak of human achievement. Yet the confusion of flawed individuals with Christ Himself, the sense that the people being venerated can be doing no wrong because “look at all the good they are doing,” that mindset is precisely what leads to the shock when a Christian figure is disgraced. You want a test of whether you venerate people too much? Ask how surprised you were there last time you heard of a prominent Christian figure who fell.

Why does this matter so much? There are hordes of devout people toiling in this world to share the gospel, to demonstrate the love of God to others. These people get no recognition for what they do. There people like this in your church right now. The pastors and priests and people on TV get all the glory and attention, but God is saying to that quiet person two rows behind you in church “Well done, my good and faithful servant.” A little less fanfare for the Glamorous Christians and a little more rolling up your sleeves to quietly do some good in this world would go a long way.

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Rebuilding the Moral-Cultural Order

Michael Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism is a curiously neglected work these days. While it was published in 1982 and has much that is specific to the debates of that era, the underling argument is curiously relevant to a contemporary debate about the nature of a Good Society.

How important was the book in its day? The Dean of Studies of the History of American Conservatism, George Nash, listed it as one of the 12 most influential books of the 1970s and 1980s. Once upon a time, it was big, really big.

Why? The 1970s were a time when all the Respectable People knew one thing: Christianity and Capitalism were irreconcilable. Within the Roman Catholic Church, for example, Liberation Theology, with its blurring of lines between Christianity and Marxism, was becoming ever more influential. Enter Michael Novak, who argued not simply that it was possible to be a devout Christian and think capitalism was OK, but that Democratic Capitalism was fully in accord with Christian Orthodoxy.

The “Democratic Capitalism” phrase needs to be defined. As Novak rightly noted, the word “capitalism” has no universal definition; it is a vague term that people use to describe all sorts of economic systems. Novak instead wants to point to what he dubbed “Democratic Capitalism,” which is a description of an entire societal order and one that describes, not coincidentally, the American Experiment.

In a Democratic Capitalist society power is deliberately divided into three distinct realms; there is no unitary order, but rather a constant and very messy interaction of three different sets of leaders. First there is a political system, marked by its own internal division of power, composed of leaders who are elected, directly or indirectly, through a democratic process. Second, there is an economic order marked by the existence of competition between firms in free markets. Third, there is a moral-cultural order, composed of religious and cultural leaders establishing the moral underpinnings of our lives. In a well-functioning Democratic Capitalist society, none of these three groups has the ascendancy; instead there is a constant jostling for influence as the realms rub against each other.

Back in 1982, the primary target of Novak’s work was those who believed that the moral cultural system needed to control the economic system via something akin to or exactly like a socialist or Marxist order. Novak argues that the socialist ideas are antithetical to Christian theology because they suppress individuality. In a striking imagine, Novak describes the system as having an empty shrine at the center:

In a genuine pluralistic society, there is no one sacred canopy. By intention, there is not. At its spiritual core, there is an empty shrine. That shrine is left empty in the knowledge that no one word, image, or symbol is worthy of what all seek there. Its emptiness, therefore, represents the transcendence which is approached by free consciences from a virtually infinite number of directions. (Aquinas once wrote that humans are made in the image of God but that since God is infinite He may be mirrored only through a virtually infinite number of humans. No concept of Him is adequate.) Believer and unbeliever, selfless and selfish, frightened and bold, naive and jaded, all participate in an order whose center is not socially imposed.

With no order imposed on people, it leaves individuals free to muddle along, with both good and bad effects. It creates both alienation and loneliness, which then creates the desire and need to create new organic communities. By refraining from imposing an order from above, Democratic Capitalism allows each individual to flourish in a constantly shifting set of communities.

As a description of the idea of American Experiment, Novak’s argument is really good. However as a description of the actual workings of the American Experiment in the last half-century, it runs into a bit of trouble. The Democratic Capitalist ideal hinges on having all three parts of the societal structure being robust. What happens when one of the parts collapses?

Another way of asking the question: Novak describes the center of the three parts of society as being empty with each of the three legs jostling for position around that center. But, what if the empty center at the heart of Democratic Capitalism ends up hollowing out one of the legs? Does the whole thing collapse?

What happens, for example, if the moral cultural order itself get hollowed out? What if there is no longer a robust moral-cultural order because internal debate has removed the ability even to articulate a shared set of values? Can Democratic Capitalism survive, using Richard John Neuhaus’ phrase, a naked public square? The question is not whether there should be debate within the moral-cultural order; for the system to work, the moral-cultural order should have every bit as much competition as the political and the economic orders. The question is whether society can survive if it loses the idea that there should be a robust moral-cultural order of any sort?

This is an intriguing way to describe what has happened in the decades since Novak wrote. In 1982, the problem was an assault on free markets and Novak was trying to convince people that a pluralistic society which respected markets was better than a unitary order which did not. Since then, while the socialist temptation has lingered, it is no longer the most obvious battle line. The battle line has shifted from being between the moral-cultural order and the economic order and into a civil war within the moral cultural order itself.

Christians are now faced with a rather stark choice. One the one hand, they could declare the American Experiment with its pluralistic democratic capitalism to be a failure. There is no lack of people making arguments like this these days. There are plenty of people counseling that the culture war is lost and that the only path forward is a retreat to a Christian enclave.

More surprising perhaps is the increasing number or arguments in favor of an even more vigorous war to build a more perfect society from the wreckage of the American Experiment. The surprising part is that if you replaced “Liberation Theology” with “Integralism,” Novak’s 1982 argument suddenly reads like it was written in 2021. The economic arguments of the 2021 “Common Good Capitalism” sound surprisingly like the 1970s “Liberation Theology” arguments. In both cases, evil corporations run by capitalists are not acting in ways which benefit the poor among us. In both cases, the government should develop policies to construct a more virtuous economic order. It both cases, it is the responsibility of Christians to advocate for these government polices to rid society of the baleful influences of unfettered capitalists. It is not hard to imagine Novak recoiling in horror.

If Novak is right, though, a messy pluralistic society in better than a Theocracy, whether the theocrats align themselves with the left or the right. The challenge is to avoid the counsels of despair. Yes, the moral-cultural order has collapsed; the challenge is finding ways to rebuild it. If Novak is right, it is well worth our time to try to build anew in the naked public square, to find a language to appeal across the divides of society in rediscovering a robust moral-cultural realm which can once again take its place as a robust leg in the Democratic Capitalist system.

I recently had the opportunity to discuss Novak’s book with the interns in the Acton Institute’s Emerging Leaders program. They were a rather impressive set of thoughtful college students and recent graduates. If you want a reason to be optimistic that the moral cultural order can be rebuilt, if you want a reason to avoid the counsels of despair, then you need look no further than these 14 young men and women.

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Glory be to God for Dappled Things

Do Christians need Austen, Dostoevsky, and John Updike; Bach, John Coltrane, and Bob Dylan; Caravaggio, Fujimura, and Picasso; The Passion of the Christ, Chariots of Fire, and The Godfather?

According to Terry Glaspey, the answer in every case is an emphatic “Yes!”

Discovering God Through the Arts: How We can Grow Closer to God by Appreciating Beauty & Creativity is an argument that Christians sell themselves short, they limit the possibilities of their faith, they cripple their relationship with God when they do not fully and frequently engage with the Great Works of Art. Far too many Christians, Glaspey argues, fail to see how much richer their relationship with God could be if only they would step outside their cloistered comfort zone and embrace Great Art. Limiting themselves to pabulum that is labeled Christian self-help books, Christian music, Christian novels, Christian movies, these Christians never see the fullness of God and his Creation.

This book is best read as a companion book to Glaspey’s 75 Masterpieces Every Christian Should Know, also recently reissued by Moody Press. While the earlier book provided arguments for why Christians would benefit from an encounter with the 75 works Glaspey describe in detail, this book reads like an introduction to that other book, stepping back from individual parts to think about the question as a whole.

Each of the artistic disciplines we’ll be exploring in this book—visual art, music, literature, poetry, architecture, filmmaking, photography, and more—cannot only be a source of enjoyment but also a tool for spiritual growth and formation. The arts can change and transform us within, which is why they are indispensable for our lives.

Glaspey is a lot like an excitable tour guide; he just can’t help himself as his joy just bubbles over the pages. At one point he describes a class he taught exploring the assorted ways the crucifixion of Christ was portrayed in paintings over the ages; you can just imagine him standing in a class with the painting displayed on a screen getting so excited to show how this painting draws our attention to the pain and that painting draws our attention to God holding Christ up, and this other painting examines the assorted responses of the spectators. It would have been a marvelous class. This book is like that class.

While the Table of Contents does not indicate this fact, the chapters are divided into three sections. Part One of the book is an argument about Modes of Thought, four different ways that art helps us experience God. First the arts show us how to pay attention. Think about how you normally go through your life, quickly going from one task to the next, from one place to the next, from one Facebook post to the next. Now take any one of the numerous paintings reproduced in this book and look at it for a while, just three minutes. Or go wild and spend five minutes. You will be amazed, truly amazed, at what you notice when you look at it for longer than the 5-10 seconds you would have normally allocated to seeing the picture and registering “Oh, picture of woman poring milk” or “Oh, orange paint on a white canvas.”

Now imagine a life like that, noticing the absolutely stunning variety of things in this world. One of the things you start noticing is how wonderful the world is. This is yet another benefit of Art; it teaches us to “stop and consider God’s wonders” as Elihu counsels Job. Ponder Starry Night or “Pied Beauty” and there is no way you don’t come away saying “Glory be to God for dappled things.”

As you are delving into Great Art, learning to pause and find wonder, another thing starts happening. You begin to find deeper meanings than you noticed at a first glance. You never really fully understand Eliot or Blake or Shakespeare or Dylan; you just keep getting deeper and deeper into the world, seeing new things at every turn. And when you realize this is true of poets and novelists and songwriters and painters, you discover it is also true of God and the Bible.

If you want to settle for a simple faith, then it becomes dangerous to ask too many questions of life and faith. But if you want a rich, full, and authentic faith, then you are going to have to be willing to live with the mysteries and only partially answered questions that are embedded in Christian belief.

Then, after you have learned to pause, find wonder, and dig for deeper meanings in Great Art, you will also notice the final benefit of these travels. Great Art breathes new life into scriptures. It does not take long in the Christian walk for Scripture to become tame and a bit lifeless. “You must be born again” slowly slides into being “bornagin,” one word which just runs quickly of the tongue, and you start thinking being bornagin is just a code word for “conversion” and you miss the wild oddness of Christ’s Phrase, a strangeness that caused Nicodemus to asked in a startled voice, “Whatever do you mean?” As Glaspey notes, Great Art draws us into new ways to see the stories and sayings of the Bible in fresh ways, keeping the mysterious and marvelous message evergreen.

Having reached this point, Glaspey turns to the second part of his argument by looking at Topics of Thought. Beyond teaching us how to think, Great Art offers new thoughts, new ways to see and reflect upon Christian themes. Great Art helps us deal with our emotions, provides comfort and courage, helps us become more empathetic, and gives us a renewed passion for Justice. These four chapters all read like the syllabus for a course on the topic, providing a guided tour. For example, the chapter on Justice begins with Isaiah and the other Old Testament prophets, and then moves on to Dante, Blake, Austen, Walker Percy, Spirituals, Blues, John Coltrane, Billie Holliday, Grandmaster Funk, Public Enemy, N.W.A., Talib Kweli, Lauryn Hill, Bob Dylan. Francisco Goya, Picasso, A Hidden Life, Just Mercy, Dark Waters, The Lord of the Rings, and To Kill a Mockingbird. That is all in one chapter, exploring one theme. Add three other chapters like that and you have this section of the book.

Glaspey’s argument closes with the punchline. After finding in Great Art new modes of thinking about God and new ways to express topics of thought, Glaspey notes that ultimately Great Art helps us learn to pray, to converse with God, to contemplate God. Great Art teaches us to get out of the mindset that our relationship with God is nothing more than going to him with our prayer list of requests and then trying to be a semi-decent person today. A relationship with God is always to learn more, to find new ways of expressing ourselves and new ways to listen. God uses Great Art to show us how to draw closer to him.

The breadth of the enterprise Glaspey is proposing is seen at the end of the book when he provides 15 pages of suggested artists and works of art. Like all such lists, it is a wonderfully idiosyncratic set of artists and works of art.

On the whole Glaspey has done a marvelous job here in making a case that desperately needs to be made again and again. Far too many Christians, like far too many scientists and economists, treat art like it is some sort of mushy swampland of imprecision. The message to anyone who does not grasp the value of poetry and novels and paintings and film is Hamlet’s exclamation, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” If you have never read the book of Genesis or the Gospel of John, you have limited your ability to understand God and this world. If you have never read Dostoevsky or spent five minutes with a Caravaggio painting, then you are similarly living in a small world indeed.

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(Moody Press sent me a copy of the book in exchange for this review.)