Light On Dark Water

It's only when we try not to experience our special suffering that it can really break us.

—Carryl Houselander, from Maisie Ward's biography of her

Faustina

This Polish movie is a biography of Saint Faustina Kowalska, the recipient of the revelations that became the Divine Mercy devotion. It came recommended by my friend Robert right around Divine Mercy Sunday with the note "Not perfect, but it has a good deal going for it. Likely the best film about a Christian mystic that we'll see in our time."

So I put it on my Netflix queue, and moved it to the top, with the intention of watching it within the period of the Divine Mercy Novena--which I was not praying, but I had some vague idea that watching this would be some sort of observance. And yet I put off watching it, and only did so this past Sunday. And the reason is that I resist watching explicitly religious films, because they're so often dull and subtly disheartening. I think they make me feel a little guilty because I think I should like them, and uneasy because I think there must be something wrong with either me or the faith if it seems like such thin stuff compared to the world.

But I needn't have hesitated in this case. This is an excellent film. As Robert said, not perfect, but well-executed, modest, with little or no forced piety. I found it very moving. 

Looks like a good bit of it, maybe the whole thing, is on YouTube. Here are the first nine minutes:

 

The DVD also contains a nice short documentary called Return about Vilnius, where Sister Faustina met the priest, Fr. Sopocko, who was of great assistance to her, and about the Divine Mercy Sisters there.

Sunday Night Journal — April 29, 2012

Dialogue and Motive

A few days ago in a comment thread Paul linked to this interesting report on a study which claims to find that conservatives understand the views of liberals better than liberals understand the views of conservatives. I take Studies of this sort in general with a pretty big dose of skepticism—after all, hardly a week seems to pass that someone doesn’t produce a Study purporting to prove that conservatives are fundamentally stupid, etc. This one is intriguing partly because the results actually go counter to the self-admitted bias of the liberal psychology professor who did it, and partly because, for what it’s worth, my personal experience supports the conclusion.

As far as I can remember I have never encountered, either in person or in print, a liberal who was able and/or willing to understand conservative arguments on their own terms—that is, to address what the conservative says he intends, and the arguments with which he supports that intention, rather than what the liberal assumes he intends. For instance, on the question of our responsibility toward the poor: if a conservative agrees that there is such a responsibility, but that there are better ways to meet it than the federal programs beloved of liberals, the liberal generally does not acknowledge that this is a disagreement about means and not ends. Instead, he concludes that the conservative doesn’t care about the poor, is a social Darwinist, etc. There simply doesn’t seem to be any willingness or ability on the part of liberals to believe that conservatives actually have the common good at heart, but differ about how to achieve it.

I don’t say that conservatives don’t often fall into the same way of thinking. But the study indicates that there are more exceptions to the tendency on the conservative than on the liberal side.

The liberal response seems always to assume that opposition to a particular approach toward solving a problem is opposition to solving the problem at all. In other words, the liberal is incapable of believing, or at least disinclined to believe, that any approach to a problem other than the liberal one can be reasonable and sincere. If you oppose affirmative action, you must favor racism. If you oppose giving more money to any and all government educational agencies, you must want children to be ignorant. (The teachers’ union in my state has been doing this for decades, pretty effectively: any opposition to anything it wants is deemed opposition to education, period.) If you think our programs for the elderly are unsustainable, you must want to push an old lady in a wheelchair over a cliff, as Congressman Paul Ryan was depicted doing in an ad attacking his proposals for Social Security and Medicare reform.

(I always feel obliged to insert this disclaimer: yes, I am mindful of the inadequacy of terms like “liberal,” “conservative,” “left,” and “right,” especially in the American context, but that doesn’t mean the parties don’t exist.)

Ryan, Rand, and Georgetown

Speaking of Paul Ryan: I have long wondered how it is that Christian admirers of Ayn Rand reconcile Rand’s ideas with their faith. At the level of fundamental metaphysics, the two simply cannot be reconciled. Rand’s philosophy as a whole can fairly be described as satanic, except that Satan does not share her foolish belief that there is no such thing as spiritual reality. I’ve suspected that what they, the Christians, do is to separate Rand’s economic ideas from her metaphysics. They read Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead and are thrilled by the achievements of the heroes, and filled with indignation toward their malicious collectivist enemies. They either miss or mostly ignore the materialist and atheist foundations of Rand’s didactic stories; what they see is an inspiring story of individual heroism against collective stupidity and venality. It wouldn’t be so hard to do that if one only read Atlas, which is the only work of any length by Rand that I’ve read; perhaps the same is true of The Fountainhead.

And they aren’t totally off base, at least if we ignore the question of literary judgment—I thought Atlas was bad to the point of being funny. Her opposition to collectivism was the one thing that Rand got mostly right. Her family’s pharmacy was confiscated by the early Soviet government, so she had direct experience of what happens when a government decides to confiscate private property, ostensibly for the benefit of the people but in practice for the benefit of those who run the government, either directly or indirectly. It doesn’t seem to be recognized by the most vociferous denouncers of Rand’s ideas that what disgusted her most (at least on the evidence of Atlas Shrugged) was not so much government itself as crony capitalism, the appropriation of government’s power by private interests. The most loathsome characters in Atlas are those who can’t compete with the genius of the heroes and therefore use the power of government to rig the game in their favor, like a football team that bribes the officials.

And she’s half-right about individual achievement. It’s a fine thing when a gifted person exercises those gifts, and a shabby one when the envious scheme to bring him down. Anyone can cheer the one and boo the other, just as audiences cheer and boo the heroes and villains of any melodrama. She was only half-right, because her gifted heroes are grotesquely egotistical, and risibly enchanted with their own (highly implausible) superiority, like characters in some cartoon version of Nietzsche.

Paul Ryan, a Catholic, is somewhat notorious for acknowledging Rand’s influence on him, while simultaneously claiming that his economic vision is compatible with Catholic social teaching. In the past week or so he has made some remarks distancing himself from Rand, and has been accused of lying about his earlier enthusiasm, as expressed in remarks such as “I give outAtlas Shrugged as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it. Well... I try to make my interns read it.” (This remark is usually paraphrased as something like “forces his staff to read Atlas Shrugged,” which is not exactly the same thing, and lacks the light tone of the actual words. The primary source and context for this remark seems to be a 2003 article in the Weekly Standard which is available only to subscribers.)

I don’t think Ryan's there is necessarily any contradiction between Ryan's past and current views (which is not to say that they are entirely coherent). In fact they are what I would expect to hear from the sort of Christian I was wondering about. Every admiring word about Rand that I’ve heard attributed to Ryan has been in the context of economics, and he seems offended that people would think this makes him a full-fledged metaphysical Randian. This doesn’t say much for his intellectual consistency, but it doesn’t surprise me very much.

At any rate, I think there are a lot of good things in his address he gave at Georgetown last week, which you can read here. Some of the Georgetown faculty are up in arms about him, in particular accusing him of being insufficiently orthodox, which is pretty funny coming from them. (Nor do those who signed the letter of protest—theology professors and others—seem likely to have much knowledge of economic reality). But—in line with the study I referred to earlier—they don’t seem even to attempt to meet the argument that his proposals will actually preserve the essentials of the social safety net they advocate. They assume that his disagreement with their means is a disagreement about the end. I am certainly willing to believe that he needs to keep working at the project of basing his economic views less on Ayn Rand and more on the teachings of the Church, but I’m not convinced that he deserves their wholesale condemnation, and I think his ideas deserve an open and charitable debate.

I don’t want to take a position on Ryan’s budget proposal (apart from the fact that I think it should include defense cuts, which it reportedly does not). These things have gotten so vastly complicated that it’s almost impossible for an ordinary person to grasp what a plan like this really contains and what its significance really is. And that in itself is a symptom of something gone badly wrong. What we need are honest and disinterested experts to study it and explain it to the rest of us. But most of the people who have the time for that sort of thing are highly partisan and can be expected to slant things their way, usually in the most hyperbolic way possible. I admit that I tend to dismiss liberal rhetoric about “gutting” social programs, because they say that about any attempt whatsoever to constrain the growth of their favored programs.

I do, however, take Ryan at his word that he believes his plan would be the best thing for the country as a whole, and is not just a cover for his desire to push somebody off a cliff. As he says,

Serious problems like those we face today require charitable conversation. Civil public dialogue goes to the heart of solidarity, the virtue that does not divide society into classes and groups but builds up the common good of all.

But you can’t have a civil dialogue when one side assumes that anything said by the other is only meant to divert attention from an evil conspiracy.

Sunday Night Journal — April 15, 2012

An Unexpected Vision

The past couple of weeks have been difficult at work, due to the departure of someone who not only was responsible for a lot of things that I don’t know much about but who will probably be impossible to replace. I should be working nights and weekends to try to compensate for her absence, but am stubbornly refusing to do so. Long hours are to some extent part of the package when you work in information technology, but I’ve reached a point in my life where I’m not willing to sacrifice for my employer what little time I have for other things.

I was very much looking forward to the weekend, and when I arrived at home I got an entirely unexpected vision of beauty. The picture below is of the street or road that I live on. “Street” for me implies pavement, and the pavement ends a little before my house. The street comes down a short but fairly steep hill, where the pavement ends, and takes a right turn before reaching my house. There are woods all around, and you can’t see beyond the turn. This is the view you get when you come around the turn.

That’s my mailbox, driveway, and red 1992 Volvo (for which I paid $3000 five years ago, a pretty good investment as it has served me reasonably well). The orange traffic cone presumably belongs to the city; I don’t know how it got there. At the end of the road there’s a path through some trees, and then Mobile Bay. Apart from the presence of my car, this is the way things looked when I came around that turn at about 6:30pm on Friday. The picture was taken a few minutes later, and I’m including it so that you can better imagine what I saw: four children running down the road to the bay.

They were, I guess, ten or eleven years old, three girls and one boy. I’ve met the boy, who lives with his apparently single mother in one of the condominiums a couple of blocks away. I don’t recall having seen the girls before. The girls all had long hair and were wearing jeans or shorts and light blouses or t-shirts, the boy has thick curly hair and was wearing shorts and a t-shirt. When I saw them they were about even with where my car is parked. The last of the group, a girl with light brown hair, heard my car and stepped off into the grass, while the others kept going. Then she saw that I was slowing down and ran to catch up with the others. I could hear them calling and laughing to each other. I stopped, more or less where I took this picture a few minutes later, and watched them till they disappeared into the woods.

I realize as I write this that it’s going to be impossible for me to communicate to you how beautiful they were, and how they moved me: their freshness, their gladness, their seemingly effortless vitality, their grace and freedom. There is a point toward the end of childhood where the body and mind have attained a certain maturity but have not yet fallen into the fears and lusts and longings of adolescence, which seem to stay with us in some degree for the rest of our lives. I found myself wishing they could remain as they were forever. But that’s to wish that they never complete the journey. They made me very happy for a little while, and I said a prayer for them.

1 Samuel by Francesca Aran Murphy

I had planned to write a full review of this book today, but have changed my mind for two reasons. First, the weekend has been busier than I expected. Second, I mentioned to someone in email last week that I was planning to review it, and he asked what publication I was reviewing it for. So I started thinking, well, why not take a bit more time with it, and see if I can place it with Touchstone or some other publication, because I think the book merits the attention. I don’t know how many subscribers Touchstone has, but I’m sure it’s more than the number of people who read this blog. I’m therefore going to make this just a quick first draft of what will be a somewhat longer review.

I don’t know much about biblical scholarship, but this book strikes me as being exactly the way it ought to be done. I should admit that I actually have...let us say low expectations of it, because as a discipline it seems to have played a significant role over the past 150 years or so in undermining Christian faith. It is with a certain weariness and dread that I hear a homilist open his discussion of a scripture reading with “What Matthew (or Mark or Luke or John...) is trying to tell us here is...” What follows is likely to discard the literal meaning of the text in favor of some psycho-literary lesson, possibly of dubious value.

Dr. Murphy does not do this at all. In fact the book seems to engage in a sort of running argument with what I understand to be the conventional literary and historical approaches: the literary one which is all too literary, in that it treats the text as mere literature, the historical one which purports to sit in highly skeptical judgment of its factual truth. This book instead starts with the presumption that scripture means what it says, and that when it clearly treats events as having really happened it is not trafficking in myth and legend (or fiction). Most importantly, it presumes that scripture is intelligible, that the people who put it down were not fools or idiots—nor, on the other end of scholarly mistake, were they novelists, carefully crafting a narrative for literary and theological effect. It takes the biblical author’s historical situation and way of looking at the world as, yes, substantially different from our own, but, no, not so different as to be unintelligible. In short, it sets out to explain, not to explain away.

Broadly speaking, it is an extended and focused effort to bridge the gap between the biblical world and the contemporary believer. In the best tradition of modern theology, it makes ready use of modern discoveries in history and archaeology and languages, but it does not turn these tools against the text. And it doesn’t assume the necessity of what I have always, as a completely unschooled layman, regarded as the suspect practice of resolving disjunctures in the text by assuming them to be the work of multiple hands, in this case with differing agendas. Apparently it is widely held among scholars that the stories of Samuel and Saul, which seem at times to support and at times to condemn the Israelites’ desire for a king, must intermingle the writings of pro and anti-monarchic parties. But Dr. Murphy, in what strikes me as a genuinely literary and yet orthodox approach, tries to show (if I’ve understood her) that this ambivalence expresses something deeper, something about the possibilities inherent in the situation, something about the ultimately incomprehensible but metaphysically real freedom of both God and man.

An assumption of realism must direct our interpretation of the episode, if we want to read it within Christian tradition. The presupposition that the text is describing something that really happened is a tremendous gift to the historical biblical critic. It hinders the formulation of circular hypotheses about source documents and stimulates us to use our historical imagination to try to figure out what is really going on here.

To try to figure out what is really going on here. You would think that would be the primary mission of the scholar but it certainly doesn’t seem to be the case always.

This is not the sort of thing I ordinarily read, and with my chronic difficulty in concentrating I had to work at getting started in it. Once I’d gotten fifty or pages or so in, though, it became fascinating, though never easy; every page is dense with ideas and facts and references to other commentaries, from ancient times until the present. I’m somewhat in awe of the labor involved in the writing of it, not to mention the erudition manifested throughout. I really can’t imagine examining any text at such length and in such detail, and to follow it was a mind-stretching experience.

Challenging it is, but not dry. Those who have met Dr. Murphy online won’t be surprised to learn that flashes of wit appear throughout, sometimes most unexpectedly, as in the description of the Ark of the Covenant as a “bonsai temple.” Or the observation that “In the ancient world, they had to fall back on theater, since they did not have Home Box Office.” Nor will they be surprised by a number of references to The Wire and other contemporary dramas.

I haven’t said anything about the actual content of the book being studied, 1 Samuel. If you’re as biblically unlearned as I am, you may not immediately recognize that title as designating the story that begins with the birth of Samuel and ends with the death of Saul. I had never read it from start to finish. It is quite a story, and well worth the time spent reading this commentary on it, which naturally you’ll want to begin by reading 1 Samuel itself, unless you already know it well.

Quite a story indeed. My father, who was a churchgoer but ever inclined to questioning, used to say that the terrible behavior of Biblical figures like Saul and David was an argument for the truth of the Bible, or at least for the fact that the Hebrews believed it to be true: no one attempting to hoodwink or proselytize on behalf of a religion would have so openly exhibited the sins of so many of its major figures. 1 Samuel qualifies as a prime argument for that case.

Offline till Easter

I'm going to do my best to stay completely off the net from now (Thursday evening) till Sunday. I wish and pray for a blessed Easter for everyone, especially those who don't believe.

I would like to leave you with some serious message, if only a quotation from someone else, but I'm distracted and hurried halfway to madness these days, and can't muster any substantial thoughts. Instead, I'll suggest that you go over to Janet Cupo's blog and read her series of posts on the Stations of the Cross. Click here and you'll be taken to a page containing all fourteen of them, though in reverse order. See you Sunday.

Sunday Night Journal — April 1, 2012

Fifty Shades of Grey

This is depressing: it seems that there is a pornographic novel called Fifty Shades of Grey which is extremely popular among women, and that its plot involves a young woman who gives herself as a masochistic sex slave to a billionaire. Here is one of several commentaries on it which I’ve run across recently. I wouldn’t be surprised at such a book coming from a man, and I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that it came from a woman, because I have long since accepted, though very unwillingly, that money and power are extremely attractive to at least some large proportion of the female sex. In my younger and more conventionally liberal days, quick to defend woman as an oppressed minority—and, more fundamentally, naturally chivalrous and a bit idealistic about God’s most beautiful creation—I objected to this. Observation proved me wrong.

It’s not the novel itself but its popularity that depresses. Every man who reads a news story like this must  surely wonder, at least for a moment, if his own wife or girlfriend would drop him in an instant for the first billionaire who expressed an interest in tying her up. And reportedly it is especially popular among married women. 

Also depressing, though simultaneously amusing, is the view of the two women who wrote the commentary linked to above. With that grim and superficial ideological blindness typical of academic feminism, they deplore the novel’s “reactionary gender politics,” though not of course the fact that it’s pornographic. They think its appeal stems from the fact that women have not attained the imagined level of socio-economic power which would make them indifferent to the promise of attaining it by association with a rich and powerful man. What a silly delusion. If there’s another thing I’ve learned, it’s that there is something elemental in desires of this sort, something that can’t be  explained away with socio-economic arguments (even if they’re plausible, which I don’t think these are). Even at its best feminism was never more than a very incomplete account of what women really think and, as Freud wondered, what they really want.

Is it arrogant of me, as a man, to say that? Too bad; I am only proceeding according to the common-sense maxim watch what they do, not what they say. If nothing else has emerged clearly from the gender debates of the past forty years, it is that the presence of “reactionary gender politics” does not in the least deter most women from liking some piece of art or entertainment that otherwise appeals to them. The career of Madonna alone is proof of that (no matter how such sexual exhibitionism is dressed up as “empowerment”).

I suspect, and hope, that women having good relationships with men and a grounding in faith are less susceptible to the likes of this novel. It’s almost an axiom in many intellectual circles—and nowadays not only there, but in decidedly non-intellectual circles, as a result of ideas being propagated into fashion and popular culture—that religion is frequently the expression of a repressed sexual impulse. But I think it’s more often the other way around, that erotic obsessions and perversions are frequently misplaced religious longings. The desire to surrender oneself to a sadist is a perversion of the desire to surrender oneself to God. And, on the earthly level, no matter how reactionary it is to say so, it seems pretty clear that most women want their husbands to be, in a sense, and most certainly a non-abusive sense, in some degree of authority over them—this is only another way of describing the oft-stated preference of women for men who are “confident,” “in command,” etc.

In fact—and this is pure speculation—I wouldn’t be surprised if women who, as a matter of principle and perhaps as an effect of anger, are in the habit of pushing aggressively against the men in their lives are more susceptible to the pornography of submission than those who are at ease with...how do I say this without using words that carrying implications I don’t intend?...in some fundamental psychological way looking up to their husbands? Nature will have the penultimate, though not the last, word in these things.

Smart Kids in Small Towns

I found this post by Pentimento an interesting twist on a phenomenon I’ve noticed more than once, first of all in myself. She describes her reaction to moving from the life of an artist and intellectual in New York (City) to the life of a wife and mother in a much smaller city in the same state:

I felt that I was in a dull, dreary place that was a poor match for my ...specialness, the specialness I'd long believed to be my birthright.

This is exactly what I and no doubt millions of others have felt while growing up in places like the one to which Pentimento has moved. If you’re one of the bright kids, interested in art and ideas and other things which are not generally high on the list of concerns for most people in such places, you almost inevitably start thinking of yourself as special, by which of course you mean superior.

The usual or classic pattern is that this smart kid escapes from the country or the small town to the metropolis (or perhaps only to the university) and there suffers the humiliating passage from big fish in small pond to very ordinary fish in big pond. This may, but doesn’t necessarily, lead to some degree of humility. I would expect that to go in the opposite direction—from the intellectual life of the metropolis to the dullness of the provinces—would provoke a strong impulse to hold oneself forever above the natives, and it speaks well of Pentimento that she wants to choose otherwise.

Sometimes, whether or not he leaves the small town behind, the smart kid’s sense of superiority hardens into lasting contempt. I think of an Alabama native who used to write for a newspaper here and who, on leaving to take a job in the northeast, bade farewell to the state with a sneer that he was happy to be leaving a place he’d never liked anyway and which was notable only for football and racism. I wonder how he fared in his new place. If he found appreciation there for the abilities that went under-praised at home, it has not achieved enough notice to reach us here.

That person was very proud of being a liberal in this heavily right-wing state. The path of the smart kid often leads to conventional liberalism. The provinces tend to be conservative in an instinctive and unreflective way. The smart kid looks beyond that, criticizes the simplistic and conventional views he encounters all around him, reads books and magazines that present him with other and more well-thought-out opinions, and decides that if his townspeople are conservatives, then he must be a liberal. And that’s perfectly understandable. But if he escapes to the metropolis (perhaps only in his mind—with modern communications one may mentally escape while remaining physically in place), he may find himself again among people who all think alike; only now he may not recognize the force of convention and fashion in maintaining the prevailing opinions, and so become as locked in to a set of received ideas as the people back home.

As one of those smart kids, the thing I had to learn, first, was that I was  not special in the way that I thought I was. Later, I learned that everyone else is special, that those people I thought were dumbbells are every bit as complex and interesting as I thought I was, and often also smarter in some ways than me and my intellectual heroes and friends. And then I could come back around to seeing myself as special, but this time without pride: special not because I am superior to others but because I’m just like them: unique and important in God’s eyes, a fact in which everyone’s sense of being special originates and is objectively justified.

April Fool’s Day

I was planning what I thought would be an amusing April Fool’s Day post, but when I realized that April 1 would fall on Palm Sunday decided it would be inappropriate. Check back next year.

Speaking of Palm Sunday, I’ve always been a little puzzled by the fact that we have a Passion narrative on this day. It seems out of place. Shouldn’t we celebrate the entry into Jerusalem today, the better to acknowledge our perfidy on Thursday?

Staying focused

on the fundamentals.

She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.

--Flannery O'Connor

Sunday Night Journal — March 11, 2011

David Horowitz: A Point In Time: The Search for Redemption in This Life and the Next

The only reason I was not surprised that this book came from the hand of David Horowitz was that I had read his Radical Son, and already gotten over my surprise that such a ferocious political combatant would write so sensitively and reflectively—and so well. I reviewed that book here last October (link). Horowitz ran across the review, thought I might be interested in A Point in Time, and graciously sent me a copy.

“I think you’ll find it challenging,” he wrote to me. And although I did not find it so in the way that I think he meant, I understand why he thought I might. It is a rich and hopeless book, the most affecting attempt I can remember to quiet the human longing for eternity in the face of mortality, individual and collective, and the absence of any hope beyond extinction; to make a sort of meaning out of the acknowledgment of unmeaning. 

I wish I could place my trust in the hands of a Creator. I wish I could look in my life and the lives of my children and all I have loved and see them as preludes to a better world. But, try as I might, I cannot. And so I am left to ponder the pointlessness of our strivings on this earth and to ask impossible questions, and receive no answers.

The book is structured as a series of three meditations, each bearing a date—October 2006, November 2008, December 2010—in which are interwoven, like currents from several streams meeting in a larger one, the personal, the philosophical, the literary, the political, and the history and fate of the Jewish people. It opens with a scene very familiar to me, one in which I play my role twice a day: a man taking his two dogs for a walk, on the same route each time. It is a peaceful routine for the man, a thrill as exciting each day as it was on the last for the dogs:

As though life were an endless horizon always met for the first time. How their excitement when I put on my cap at the onset of our rituals never fades. How they do not contend with their fates but devour them as if their days will go on forever. But I, who do not have the luxury of their comity with nature, see the silence coming, and look on the brief turn of their lives with bittersweet regret, and mourn them before they are gone.

Which situation holds greater pathos: the dogs unaware of death, or the man all too aware? In any case only the man foresees the end, and feels the impact of knowing it. The man experiences this point in time, but also knows that others came before and will come after it, that even a man's lifetime is only a somewhat longer span of time than the daily walk: longer, but no less decisively bounded.

From here Horowitz moves to a theme which recurs throughout the book, and which was also prominent in Radical Son: the sad waste of his father’s gifts on an unworthy object, the dream of a communist utopia. Perhaps even more than in the earlier book he focuses on the hopelessness of this dream, though now more in sadness than anger, and maybe more sympathetic to the longing that produces the delusion: the longing to find a meaning in history, and to see the fulfillment of its apparent movement. He might have added the word “futile” before “search” in his subtitle, with no redemption in the next life, and the quest for it in this life not only hopeless, but often the engine of enormous evil.

The creed of the revolutionary divides the world into forces of good and evil—on the one side enemies of the people, on the other the social redeemers. The passion to create a new world is really a passion to destroy the old one, transforming the love of humanity into a hatred of the human beings who stand in its way.

I think this is the reason why the Church’s zeal for purging heresy when it was the dominant cultural influence did not generally result in the same level of carnage that the revolutions of the 20^th century did. I don’t think the effectiveness of modern technology accounts entirely for the difference. The Church insisted that every Christian affirm its theological and moral teachings, and was often intolerant of non-Christians, but it never believed that it could or should create a perfect world on earth, and destroy those who could not or would not be perfected, or who stood in the way of the program of perfection.

In this context Horowitz refers often to Dostoevsky, to that writer’s experience of the revolutionary dream and witness to the demonic turn it took. He looks closely at the famous Grand Inquisitor passage from The Brothers Karamazov, and its description of the potency of the human longing for a fulfillment of history. But Dostoevsky—and I didn’t know this about him—apparently succumbed to a dream which was at least semi-utopian: that of a Russian-led Christendom which would be “the fulfillment of the destinies of humans on earth.”  Even for a Christian whose theology more or less explicitly denies the possibility, it is difficult to resist the temptation to believe that the fulfillment of history will arrive within history.

Similarly, Horowitz spends a good bit of time with Marcus Aurelius: “Be not troubled, for all things are according to nature and in a little while you will be no one and nowhere.” But—and this also I did not know, having read Marcus Aurelius only in brief excerpts—the great Stoic also succumbed to the difficulty of living without purpose, and toward the end of his meditations declares his belief in a kind of God.

If even Marcus Aurelius was, in the end, unable to face the idea that life has no meaning, and if Dostoevsky couldn’t resist the idea that Russia would bring about the nearest thing possible to a perfect Christian society, what is to be expected of the rest of us, who generally have not explored the questions at hand as deeply as they did?

I have some doubt as to whether anyone can truly dispose of the belief that life has no purpose. Even one who comes to that conclusion can’t leave it alone. This book is witness to that fact, an attempt to find out and confront the meaning of non-meaning. I suspect that only someone well on his way to being damned could truly leave it alone—that is, truly ignore it,  not even think about it, not be aware of the problem it poses—because doing so would entail an almost complete insensibility not just to the idea of God but to good and evil, truth and falsehood. I have known any number of people who professed to believe that life has no meaning, but not one who was genuinely indifferent to the idea. They betray themselves by their strenuous insistence upon it, clearly driven by strong emotion, which would not exist if they were truly reconciled.

For me, at least, there is a greater obstacle to the belief that life has a meaning than the absence of proof that it does: the question of evil. Horowitz uses a couple of horrifying stories to bring this home; no more are needed.

I mentioned earlier that I did not find this book challenging in the sense that I took Horowitz to mean it, that is, in the sense that it challenged my convictions as a Catholic. That’s not because it isn’t in fact a challenge, but because it is one to which I am accustomed. I deal with these questions every day. Whatever my faith is, it is not knowledge that was given to me, as it was given to St. Paul—not knowledge of a fact. And it is not a sense of God’s presence, or a consciousness of his love. And it is definitely not a certainty; I am never without some awareness of the possibility that I may be wrong. And I never see a news story about a murder or a war or a natural catastrophe, or even pass by a dead dog on the road, dead only because it was too innocent to fear properly an oncoming automobile, without wondering why the God in whom I place my trust permits such things to happen. My faith is a conscious decision, renewed every day, to accept the Christian revelation and to order my life according to it, or at least make a persistent effort to do so.

The intellect cannot make this decision for me, cannot force it upon me as an indubitable certainty. The heart wants it, but the heart often wants what it should not have. Does it want what it cannot have, not just practically but in the very nature of things? Of course it can and does in the immediate course of life, but can its ultimate longing be for something that does not exist? The idea that it can is a deeper puzzle than is generally recognized.

Is the longing for heaven like a dog dreaming of a bowl which is never empty of hamburger? Well, suppose it is; suppose that is the best a dog might think to ask of heaven. It doesn’t matter. The important question is not what sort of heaven the dog might want, but whether he can want it at all, whether he can have the self-awareness and the ability to step outside the moment necessary for him to have the dream, and to know he is having it. And, after all, hamburger does exist; we assume the dog can't long for something that he can’t imagine. And I’m not convinced that we can, either, though the intensity of our longing and our difficulty in naming its object leads us to use words like sehnsucht. Like the dog with his hamburger, we have tasted it, if only briefly. We have imagined that there is something better than we can imagine.

But back to the book. I don’t think I’ve conveyed just how enjoyable it is: its graceful writing, its contemplative tone, its recourse to the inconceivably precious texture—and, one must say, the meaning—of ordinary life. In spite of the fact that the conclusion it draws are the opposite of my own, I’ll return to it, for the way it faces the problems it raises.

I have sometimes distinguished between deep and shallow atheism: the former understands the seriousness of the question, the latter does not, and thinks a shallow materialism answers all. I don’t think Horowitz describes himself as an atheist—if I’m not mistaken he uses the word agnostic a few times—but like most agnostics he takes the assumption of the absence of God as the outcome of his doubt. At any rate, his unbelief is definitely of the deep variety. And I always suspect that those who hold it are closer to the Kingdom than they realize, or is apparent to us.

Horowitz blames his own people for helping to fuel the expectation that history will arrive somewhere: 

Deep in the millenial past, Jews were the original progressives and invented the idea that we are on our way toward a brighter future, which perhaps is why our history is so filled with tragedy and defeat.

I can't help seeing a trace of ironical Jewish humor here: in other words, the Jews invented a system for making themselves miserable for all time. But did they invent it? Or was it given to them?

I neglected to mark the passage, and may not be quoting it perfectly, but Horowitz says something to the effect that we comfort ourselves by imagining that we inhabit stories that have no end. After I had written most of this review, I ran across the last lines of the last book of The Chronicles of Narnia:

All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page; now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no man on earth has read; which goes on forever; in which every chapter is better than the one before.

"The kingdom of God is within you." This saying shows, I believe, that the goodness of God is not separated from our nature, or far away from those who seek it, but it is ever present in each individual, unknown, and forgotten when one is choked by the cares and pleasures of life, but discovered again when we turn our attention to it.

--St. Gregory of Nyssa