Sunday Night Journal — April 25, 2004M

There was a large rally for abortion rights in Washington today. A few days ago I happened across a list of celebrities who intended to participate, and I took time to read it because I try to avoid spending money on the work of artists who are militant supporters of abortion.

I don’t expect virtue of artists, and I certainly don’t expect moral clarity and logical thinking from pop musicians and actors. I know that most artists today are on the leftward end of the political spectrum and that support for abortion rights comes with that territory. I also know that most of them preach and practice a way of life that puts them in a pretty fair way to want the services of an abortionist. So I am neither surprised nor outraged when they speak the conventional doctrines. But it’s one thing to be more or less thoughtlessly or selfishly “pro-choice,” quite another to be so committed to the notion of a fundamental right to abortion as to take to the streets in support of it. I look askance at anyone who does so, and the work of an artist is diminished in my eyes by such an association, just as would be the case with an artist who participated actively in fascism or communism: there is something amiss with his moral apparatus. In the case of a couple of artists, such as John Irving and Garrison Keillor, the intensity of their detestation for those opposed to abortion is enough to distort their work and make me avoid it altogether—a sad event in the case of Keillor, whose work I once enjoyed but which, when I last checked in with him five or six years ago, seemed to be getting steadily uglier.

But back to the rally: one name I noticed on the list was that of pop musician Sheryl Crow. I don’t really know Ms. Crow’s work except for a few songs that have been on the radio. They were not particularly to my taste and I haven’t investigated her music any further, although I’ve been told some of it is quite good. But her name caught my eye because she had been in the news a year or ago for her views on the war in Iraq. She was the author of one of the silliest things I’ve ever heard anyone say about war: “The way to avoid war is not to have enemies.”

There are many good reasons for opposing the war in Iraq, but to think that we can unilaterally decide “not to have enemies” is pretty stupid and would be criminally irresponsible in a person whose duty is diplomacy or defense. Of course there is a kernel of truth in Ms. Crow’s idea—we should certainly try not to make enemies, we should try to make peace, and one can, again, reasonably argue that we have made in the Middle East enemies we need not have made. But one wonders if she has read Osama bin Laden’s various declarations of war against the United States, and, if she did, how she believes she could coexist with someone who would probably at one glance classify her as a harlot deserving of death. “Those youths know that their rewards in fighting you, the USA, is double than their rewards in fighting some one else not from the people of the book. They have no intention except to enter paradise by killing you.”

Avoidance of reality is not a virtue. Discretion may be justified in averting one’s eyes from that which is unseemly to dwell upon, such as the broken bodies of the victims of a car crash, but there is no virtue in pretending that there was no crash and no one died. There is a degree of symmetry in Ms. Crow’s position on both war and abortion, in that they are both grounded in avoidance of reality. One may reasonably and fairly suppose that the motive for the first is a kind heart and a horror of violence, and that the motive for the second is something much less noble.

In regard to war she doesn’t wish to acknowledge the intractable conflicts that no one has yet figured out how to remove from human life, conflicts that are not mere disagreements subject to negotiation and compromise but deep and deadly oppositions that can only be settled by force.

In regard to abortion she seems to share with other advocates of the practice a wish to avoid acknowledging the thing itself, to the extent of not wanting to use the word at all. The strange and compulsive use of the word “choice” as a euphemism indicates a bad conscience and a suspicion that what they are advocating is abhorrent, which often seems to increase their rage against those who openly call it abhorrent. Sheryl Crow’s performance in Washington today is sponsored by a pro-abortion group called “Rock for Choice” whose official press release never uses the word “abortion.” The one-time National Abortion Rights Action League is also suppressing the word, having decided that its former abbreviation, NARAL, shall itself the name of the organization: I think the full name is now NARAL Pro-Choice America. The abortion rights movement wishes to avoid the reality that it is the abortion rights movement.

But those who propose abortion as a solution to the problem of unplanned and unwanted pregnancy attempt to avoid reality on a deeper level. They wish to avoid or cancel the fact that sexual relations between men and women frequently lead to the conception of a child, and that once that has happened there is no going back: a life has begun, and will cease only with a death. The promoters of abortion wish to pretend that it is possible to go back.

People who are opposed to abortion are frequently told that they are advocates of a “simplistic” solution, by which is meant not that the solution is simple but that it is too simple to serve the purpose. The idea that making abortion illegal would remove the problem is indeed “simplistic.” And in fact there are not many abortion opponents who think it would end the problem; they only think it would greatly reduce the number of abortions, not begin a golden age. I don’t think I’ve ever heard from the anti-abortion camp an idea so truly simplistic as Sheryl Crow’s suggestion for avoiding war.

There is, however, a perfectly simple solution to the problem which abortion is intended to solve. That is for people (I suppose nowadays I ought to specify “male and female people”) not to engage in sexual relations when they aren’t willing to accept the possibility that a child will be conceived. In any single concrete case this is always perfectly workable (barring, of course, the case of rape). It may be difficult, but “simple” and “easy” are not synonyms. And it is hard to imagine any reasonable person having an ethical objection to it (I specify “reasonable” because no doubt there are those who would argue that restraining sexual desire is immoral). Of course it is foolish to expect that everyone would follow this rule, and so it would never solve the problem across the entire scope of society, but it is simple, and it is a solution for any specific couple, in that it will always work for those willing to avail themselves of it. Unlike Ms. Crow’s proposal for ending war, it requires no utopian conditions in the world at large, and depends on no help or cooperation from the state or anyone else. As Garrison Keillor himself had one of his Lake Woebegon priests say “If you didn’t want to go to Minneapolis, why did you get on the bus?” (the fictional character thus, in a paradoxical phenomenon not at all unheard of in art, showing himself more wise than his creator seems to be, or to have become).

The problem of unwanted pregnancies may be a complex shades-of-grey sort of business when viewed from the perspective of the law, which must apply to all. From the perspective of any individual couple it is very much black-and-white: they either do, or they don’t, engage in sexual relations, and they either are, or are not, willing to accept the possibility of pregnancy. (Once a child is conceived things are less straightforward, at least for those who do not maintain an absolute prohibition against the deliberate taking of innocent life.) The decision for war takes place at the level of the state, where a great number of calculations and guesses, some of them mostly blind, about the motives, intentions, and capabilities of other states, and about the consequences of going or not going to war, are involved, and it will in many cases never be perfectly clear in retrospect whether the decision was wrong or right. Anyone who thinks he has a simple solution to that problem is truly being simplistic.

Sunday Night Journal — April 18, 2004

Certain anecdotal evidence, including particularly conversations with several of my children (ages sixteen to twenty-four), leads me to believe that Jews who have been almost hysterical in their insistence that The Passion of the Christ conveys and will foster anti-Semitism are fighting the wrong battle.

My son John, for instance, seemed to find the idea absurd, saying that in all the years in which he, growing up Catholic, had heard the Biblical accounts of the Passion read on Palm Sunday and Easter, it had never once entered his mind that present-day Jews should be blamed for the Crucifixion. He certainly had not heard it from his parents, who have never believed it. And the idea was known to me only from reading accounts of European anti-Semitism. I grew up Protestant in the South, in the 1950s and ‘60s, among a people widely assumed to be a boiling pit of hatred for Jews and every group not themselves, and although I did hear occasional derogatory remarks about Jews it was pretty mild stuff and seemed to have more to do with the likelihood of their being Yankees than with their ethnicity. I cannot recall ever hearing anything along the lines of “Christ-killer.” I dare say I would encounter more, and more hostile, remarks about Christians in a couple of issues of The Nation than I have heard about Jews in my entire life.

My other children, and a few other Christians whom I’ve asked about this, had similar responses to my query and related similar experiences. I am not naïve; I know Christian anti-Semitism survives here and there and probably always will, but it has been effectively destroyed as an active force in shaping the way most Christians view the world.

In saying this, I am certainly not implying that Jewish fear of anti-Semitism is only paranoia. We know far too well that the idea of Christians blaming Jews for the Crucifixion is not the least far-fetched. We know that there is a long history of Christian hatred of and violence toward Jews, and that blame for the rejection of Jesus as Messiah was a major justification of that hatred. Nevertheless, it would seem that the Gospel accounts, taken at face value, need not produce that sort of tribal hatred. It must be taught and nourished. It is easy to see how the Gospels could, in conjunction with other factors, be an ingredient in the development of serious anti-Semitism. But the Gospels alone would not be likely to produce it in anyone who did not already have it.

As with the Gospels themselves, so with Mel Gibson’s film. As I and many others have insisted, anyone who leaves the theater with anti-Semitic feelings has brought them with him in the first place. No one not already harboring a grudge against Jews as a group would come away with one, because what the film depicts, quite plainly, is a division within the people of Israel.

The high priest Caiphas is portrayed not as a sinister conspirator but as a man of dignity and integrity making a catastrophic mistake. He is not eager to shed blood and is willing to believe that Jesus is being maligned and to give him a chance to prove the charges wrong. But he is unable, upon hearing the blasphemy for himself, to do other than call for the offender’s death.

The mob is a mob, irrational and fickle. But one does not see Jews over here, screaming for blood, and Christians over there, cowering and innocent. One sees only Jews, bitterly and tragically at odds. This is the most natural and obvious way to read these scenes, and to read the Gospels. Knowing the history of the two thousand years to follow only deepens the sense of tragedy.

It is easy to understand why Jews, having experienced the most terrible imaginable results of group hatred, would be alarmed by The Passion. But the alarm is, nevertheless, misplaced in this case. I said earlier that in objecting to this film Jews are fighting the wrong battle. Christians today are far more likely to be philo- than anti-Semitic. It is among Muslims that murderous anti-Semitism is flourishing now. (I’m aware that The Passion is being used by some Muslims as a propaganda stick with which to beat the Jews, but the fact that they are doing it, and Christians are not, only proves my point about the anti-Semitism being brought to the film, not found there.) And it is on the political left that resentment of Israel, not necessarily anti-Semitic itself, is now causing anti-Semitism to be tolerated. I’m not sure whether anything can be done to ameliorate Muslim anti-Semitism. Nor do I claim to know a great deal about the history of Israel and the rights and wrongs of her struggle for existence. But I do know that Israel is the object of genocidal intentions on the part of her neighbors and that these intentions must not be ignored or allowed to win the propaganda battle. I don’t believe Israel’s side of the history of the past one hundred years in the Middle East is being told as prominently and clearly as is required by justice. And I believe that the lazy or biased journalists who are failing to tell this story are the present danger to Jews—the Jews of Israel, at least—not the Christians who have flocked to see The Passion of the Christ and seen their Savior as a Jew bound not only intimately but ontologically to his people: family, followers, and enemies alike.

Sunday Night Journal — April 11, 2004

The phrase is my brother John’s description of Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ, and it’s the most apt I’ve heard. To dwell on the Passion on Easter Sunday may not seem appropriate, but that also is apt, I think, in this case, as I shall explain.

I did not see the movie until most of the fuss had died down. I was not at first sure that I wanted to, in light of what I was hearing about its vivid depiction of extreme violence. I decided in favor of seeing it for two reasons: first, the good opinions I was hearing from people I respect, including not only friends and relatives but also journalists like Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review, whose eloquent and clearly heartfelt review was NR’s March 8 cover story, and second, the hysteria of some of the film’s opponents, which seemed to require some explanation.

Having decided to see it, I had to admit to myself that I didn’t really want to, as it promised to be a grueling experience. So I was in no great hurry. Moreover, I felt instinctively that it was not something to be seen without at least a little preparation, and I was very busy. I didn’t want to squeeze it in hastily between work and other obligations and distractions. It wasn’t until last week that I had slowed down a bit and found a little time for prayer and scripture, so it was on Wednesday night of Holy Week that I finally made my way to the theater, alone because my wife had decided early on that she did not want to see it, as she has a very low tolerance for cinematic violence.

I had been thoroughly prepared for the violence and was expecting to need to avert my eyes often. I was steeled for that. What I was not prepared for was the beauty that accompanies the violence. I thought several times of W.H. Auden’s Musee des Beaux Arts and its description of a painting in which Icarus falls from the sky while the natural world and normal life go on undisturbed. I should have seen this coming, for even if one dislikes, as I do, many contemporary films (for reasons which are to me obvious and which I will forebear to rant about here), it can’t be denied that the level of sheer craft in images and sound attained by today’s filmmakers is extremely high. So the settings of The Passion—the stones, the light, the desert, the birdsongs—are rich in that unnatural way cinematography can achieve, and which, for me at any rate, always brings home the real and solid goodness of the created world. The contrast with the devilish torture being perpetrated by the human beings in the drama makes for a terrible poignancy.

Without repeating what so many others have said, let it be a sufficient statement of my reaction to the movie that I could probably not have spoken for the first fifteen minutes or so after it ended. I found myself driving very slowly through side streets all the way home, with one idea in my head: this is the cost of sin.

Was it necessary that the story be told with such emphasis on the violence? In asking the question I refer not to the question of whether the violence as it occurred in real life may or may not have been accurately represented, but to the ability of modern cinema techniques to emphasize it so unsparingly: the sheer size of the screen, the huge sound of every blow, the crushing slow-motion fall of the Cross onto the crumpling figure of the flayed Christ. I am far from the first or only commentator to answer that question with the famous remark of Flannery O’Connor: “To the hard of hearing you shout and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.” I had not thought of myself as one of these, but I came away believing that I had been in need of the shock I was given—in need of facing the cost of sin.

I am not one who can much stomach horror movies, and don’t consider myself nearly as jaded with regard to screen violence as many people seem to be. Yet I would have to admit that I am in a sense jaded about the Crucifixion. It has been tamed for me by art and habit. The Passion achieved its intended effect on me, and I am not sure that it would have done so if it had been gentler. It has been many years since I felt the depth of Good Friday and of Easter as I did this year, and Mel Gibson’s film is the reason. This revivification was the gift in the dark wrapping, recapitulating in my inner life the external reality, the death-wrapped gift of eternal life given to us by the historic Passion.

I did not consider the film perfect as a work of art. If Mr. Gibson had thought to ask my opinion as he worked, I would have advised him to do certain things differently. But measured against its strengths my criticisms seem like quibbles, hardly worth articulating.

And for the opponents of the film—“opponents” seems the right word, rather than “critics,” because so many of them seem offended that it exists at all: it is perfectly reasonable to object to The Passion on artistic grounds, to be so appalled by its amplified violence as to be unable to receive its message, or to refuse to see it at all on the grounds that to be a spectator of such violence is not healthy. The fear that it might encourage or reinforce anti-Semitism is also reasonable, although I’m pretty certain that only one who brings anti-Semitism, or the fear of it, to the film would see it there. But I’m afraid it must take a dangerously hardened heart to see it and respond only with mockery and sneering. There is much to be said about this phenomenon, but that is a discussion about the psychology of the viewer, not about Mel Gibson’s movie.

Sunday Night Journal — April 4, 2004

Since my first reading, many years ago, of Perelandra, I’ve often reflected on one particular symbol from it. It comes to me unbidden when I attempt to examine my conscience and to discover what mental forces are at work in me to undo my (rather feeble) good intentions. That is the placement of the human couple, the Adam and Eve of Perelandra, on floating islands in a world mostly covered in water, and their being prohibited by God from living on the little fixed land that does exist. They can visit there, but the temptation which occupies for them the place of the Tree of Knowledge in our story is the violation of God’s decree that they are not to pass a night there. Lewis develops this into what seems to me a very rich symbol for our essential problem: we want to hang on to things. We want to hang on to persons and to physical things, and we do not want any pleasure to end, or if it must end we want to be able to retrieve it from the past by repeating it whenever we like. We do not want to surrender ourselves to a will not our own and an order not of our own making (especially since, as is often the case, the order is not apparent to us). In Perelandra every new day and every new wave of the great sea bring a new gift, but only so long as the man and woman are willing to let its predecessor go into the past. They are to trust perfectly that God will provide, and as earnest of this trust they are to remain on the floating islands where nothing remains the same for very long. The Eve of Perelandra explains it:

The reason for not yet living on the Fixed Land is now so plain. How could I wish to live there except because it was Fixed? And why should I desire the Fixed except to make sure—to be able on one day to command where I should be the next and what should happen to me? It was to reject the wave—to draw my hands out of Maleldil’s, to say to Him, “Not thus, but thus”—to put in our own power what times should roll toward us.

There is an erroneous, indeed a sinful, approach to this same aspect of reality. We heard a great deal of it in the 1960s, when it seemed a new and liberating idea, and it still turns up, although it seems to me that there are not now very many people who embrace it explicitly, for it is now too widely seen to be the self-serving dodge that it is. It is to use the fact that nothing in our world is truly permanent as an excuse for breaking faith, for refusing to make and honor commitments. It would be difficult to count the number of pop songs written since 1965 or so in which a lover—usually a man speaking to a woman, but sometimes the other way round—tells his once-beloved that what they had was very nice but now it’s time for him to move on. The song generally conveys a strong note of self-congratulation: I’m bound to ramble, I can’t be chained, I’ve got to be free—meaning, I am too pure and strong a soul to allow myself to be limited and confined by petty rules. In the devil’s typically slick perversion of truth, the fact that everything does indeed change in our world, and that nothing indeed does last, is used to justify disregard of the plain demands of real love—which is to say, of God’s law. It is as if the Adam and Eve of Perelandra were to say to Maleldil (God): Yes, we know you forbade us to live upon the fixed land. But that was yesterday. We’re just embracing change, as you told us to do.

It is some such attempt to use God’s own commands against each other that the devil in Perelandra attempts, and that he uses on us. This logic has a certain sophistic plausibility to anyone who has lost sight of the fact that we owe to the Creator certain duties of fealty upon which our enjoyment of the Creation depend. The true Fixed Land is not any place where our bodies can stand, but the holy will of God Himself, and when we step out of that we step, as the Eve of Perelandra says, into nowhere, a condition from which we can no longer see or know or obtain the thing in pursuit of which we left the Will, because it is back there in the Creation, and therefore in the Will, not with us in the nowhere. This is how, pursuing what we think are our lives, we lose them.

I noticed in this reading of Perelandra something I hadn’t noticed in earlier readings. I’ve often wondered, more or less idly, what people would do in an unfallen world. With no evil to produce dramatic conflict, would not the inhabitants of an earthly paradise inevitably end (if they did not suffer a fall) in an infantile condition as passive recipients of sweet things? Lewis provides an interesting possibility when he has the Adam (and King) of Perelandra describe the future of the race of which he is the first father:

“On the Fixed Land which once was forbidden,” said Tor the King, “we will make a great place to the splendour of Maleldil. Our sons shall bend the pillars of rock into arches…. And there our sons will make images….We will fill this world with our children. We will know this world to the center. We will make the nobler of the beasts so wise that they will become hnau [rational creatures] and speak….”

And he goes on to describe even vaster enterprises. In short, the people of Perelandra will have work to do, but work done for the joy of making their world even finer that it already is, rather than for the purpose of averting want and pain. They are to join Maleldil in a continuing work of creation. It may well be that that is what we lost, or mostly lost, in the Fall. And it may have something to do with our esteem of those works of human hands which are created for themselves and which have no immediate purpose except to be beautiful.

Sunday Night Journal — April 4, 2004

Since my first reading, many years ago, of Perelandra,I’ve often reflected on one particular symbol from it. It comes to me unbidden when I attempt to examine my conscience and to discover what mental forces are at work in me to undo my (rather feeble) good intentions. That is the placement of the human couple, the Adam and Eve of Perelandra, on floating islands in a world mostly covered in water, and their being prohibited by God from living on the little fixed land that does exist. They can visit there, but the temptation which occupies for them the place of the Tree of Knowledge in our story is the violation of God’s decree that they are not to pass a night there. Lewis develops this into what seems to me a very rich symbol for our essential problem: we want to hang on to things. We want to hang on to persons and to physical things, and we do not want any pleasure to end, or if it must end we want to be able to retrieve it from the past by repeating it whenever we like. We do not want to surrender ourselves to a will not our own and an order not of our own making (especially since, as is often the case, the order is not apparent to us). In Perelandra every new day and every new wave of the great sea bring a new gift, but only so long as the man and woman are willing to let its predecessor go into the past. They are to trust perfectly that God will provide, and as earnest of this trust they are to remain on the floating islands where nothing remains the same for very long. The Eve of Perelandra explains it:

The reason for not yet living on the Fixed Land is now so plain. How could I wish to live there except because it was Fixed? And why should I desire the Fixed except to make sure—to be able on one day to command where I should be the next and what should happen to me? It was to reject the wave—to draw my hands out of Maleldil’s, to say to Him, “Not thus, but thus”—to put in our own power what times should roll toward us.

There is an erroneous, indeed a sinful, approach to this same aspect of reality. We heard a great deal of it in the 1960s, when it seemed a new and liberating idea, and it still turns up, although it seems to me that there are not now very many people who embrace it explicitly, for it is now too widely seen to be the self-serving dodge that it is. It is to use the fact that nothing in our world is truly permanent as an excuse for breaking faith, for refusing to make and honor commitments. It would be difficult to count the number of pop songs written since 1965 or so in which a lover—usually a man speaking to a woman, but sometimes the other way round—tells his once-beloved that what they had was very nice but now it’s time for him to move on. The song generally conveys a strong note of self-congratulation: I’m bound to ramble, I can’t be chained, I’ve got to be free—meaning, I am too pure and strong a soul to allow myself to be limited and confined by petty rules. In the devil’s typically slick perversion of truth, the fact that everything does indeed change in our world, and that nothing indeed does last, is used to justify disregard of the plain demands of real love—which is to say, of God’s law. It is as if the Adam and Eve of Perelandra were to say to Maleldil (God): Yes, we know you forbade us to live upon the fixed land. But that was yesterday. We’re just embracing change, as you told us to do.

It is some such attempt to use God’s own commands against each other that the devil in Perelandra attempts, and that he uses on us. This logic has a certain sophistic plausibility to anyone who has lost sight of the fact that we owe to the Creator certain duties of fealty upon which our enjoyment of the Creation depend. The true Fixed Land is not any place where our bodies can stand, but the holy will of God Himself, and when we step out of that we step, as the Eve of Perelandra says, into nowhere, a condition from which we can no longer see or know or obtain the thing in pursuit of which we left the Will, because it is back there in the Creation, and therefore in the Will, not with us in the nowhere. This is how, pursuing what we think are our lives, we lose them.

I noticed in this reading of Perelandra something I hadn’t noticed in earlier readings. I’ve often wondered, more or less idly, what people would do in an unfallen world. With no evil to produce dramatic conflict, would not the inhabitants of an earthly paradise inevitably end (if they did not suffer a fall) in an infantile condition as passive recipients of sweet things? Lewis provides an interesting possibility when he has the Adam (and King) of Perelandra describe the future of the race of which he is the first father:

“On the Fixed Land which once was forbidden,” said Tor the King, “we will make a great place to the splendour of Maleldil. Our sons shall bend the pillars of rock into arches…. And there our sons will make images….We will fill this world with our children. We will know this world to the center. We will make the nobler of the beasts so wise that they will become hnau [rational creatures] and speak….”

And he goes on to describe even vaster enterprises. In short, the people of Perelandra will have work to do, but work done for the joy of making their world even finer that it already is, rather than for the purpose of averting want and pain. They are to join Maleldil in a continuing work of creation. It may well be that that is what we lost, or mostly lost, in the Fall. And it may have something to do with our esteem of those works of human hands which are created for themselves and which have no immediate purpose except to be beautiful.