Page 3115 – Christianity Today (2024)

i.m. (1953-1998)

I’ve had so many good thingshappen to me. So why not me?

And why not there, in that relic-worthy skull, where his good-willedthrust and parry with the local press existed in its jocular fullness?

I think Christwould do it that way. OrSteve Garvey.

Hardly a laureled Hall of Famer, but saintly in the modern sense, still heroenough, emblazoned on my place mat, his submarine curveball thrown.

No man is worth more than another, and none is worth more than $12.95.

He’d be clutch in the ninth, seal the game after afternoon bullpen slumber:those summer double-headers in the grim bubble of the Metrodome:

I don’t think there are any good usesfor nuclear weapons, but this might be one.

I-70 World Series that year, whole state euphoric, that autumn of ’85.Was a Royals victory “God’s will”? Of course! Their winning meant I’d be assertive.

God is concerned with hungry people and justice, not my saves.

New boy in Cardinal Country, I crowed and wagged my mouth and gallopedto class wearing a plastic batter’s helmet. When last bell rang I got my ass whipped.

I’m here! It’s Merry Christmas!

There are toys in my locker. Gloves and bats and balls.

Friend of Dad’s swore Quiz was a neighbor, single men in suburban apartments.He gave me a signed ball (real? maybe? doubtful now) for a birthday present.

I have seenthe future, and it’s much like the present,only longer.

No idea where that ball went. For ten years I’ve been reprobate, estrangedby boredom from the mediocre Royals. The game never changes, but people change.

Brett Foster is assistant professor of English at Wheaton College, where he teaches creative writing and Renaissance literature.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Brilliant. Brave. And a perfect picture of magnanimity.

These are the words I have always used to describe my friend and mentor, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. Now I write them in memory, with the mixture of grief and joy that comes with this privilege.

I first met Betsey in 1995, when I was doing graduate work in English at Emory University. I took her “Southern Women Writers,” the first of many seminars I would have with her. She was a historian by training, but in her teaching and scholarship, a humanities guru. Educated primarily at Harvard, her scholarly interests began with her investigations of the origins of physiocracy, and from there naturally expanded to the antebellum South, which was also her husband’s scholarly terrain. Her award-winning book Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South is a testament to the things that mattered most to her: impeccable, morally committed scholarship that endures. It also illustrates her lifelong commitment to the cause of feminism, which for Betsey was always about real justice for real women. Within the Plantation Household is a work of history, with all the usual trappings, but it is also a window into the lives of ordinary southern women, who are given the opportunity to speak for themselves. The book is perfect picture of Betsey’s convictions, for she always spoke for herself with courage, and encouraged countless other women to do so. Including me.

I remember timidly approaching her in the quad during a break, when she was smoking one of those dark cigarettes she loved (and later gave up). I asked her if she would direct my dissertation research; what I got was a broad smile and the beginning of a friendship. What I did not know until later was that it was a serendipitous time for both of us to meet. Make no mistake about it: while I hope I was an encouragement to her at an exciting but tumultuous time in her life, I know I got the much better end of the deal. She was an ideal mentor, the kind most graduate students can only dream about. She read my work carefully, and even line-edited it (she was a lucid and meticulous writer). She took me out to lunch more times than I can remember, which I would have appreciated even had I not been the bean-eating graduate student that I was. I have wonderful memories of dinners with her and her husband, Gene—along with other academic sorts—at their home in Atlanta. If you escaped being knocked over by their large dogs at the door, you were treated to a delicious meal. Betsey was an academic who could also cook, which says a lot about her. We often talked about nfl football. She even tried, at my request, to set me up with young men she respected. What I appreciated most was that under her care, I was neither a pet mind to indoctrinate nor a tool with which to fight other academics. She respected me and wanted me to succeed, to write about things that mattered to me, and to do so shrewdly—but also without fear.

I didn’t know at the time we met that she was nearing the final stage of her full reception into the Catholic church—and about to become the brunt of hostility occasioned by her conversion. I had entered Emory as a bit of a pariah myself: an evangelical studying American literature. But because of Betsey’s faithfulness,

I was able to work with a woman who not only respected my faith commitments—which she would have done even before her conversion—but also now fundamentally shared them. It was a privilege to sit in a graduate seminar on Flannery O’Connor with an accomplished scholar who was seeing these texts with new eyes herself.

Like O’Connor, Betsey thought of her faith as the natural outworking of intellectual honesty and a commitment to the truth. It is thus not surprising that in reflecting upon the arc of her life, a favorite passage of hers from another southern writer, Eudora Welty, came to my mind:

The events in our lives happen in a sequence of time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily—perhaps not possibly—chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation.

I know that Betsey’s turn to the Catholic church was this kind of moment for her. In her essay “A Conversion Story,” appearing in First Things, she noted that many of her fellow academics were mystified by her faith journey. But for her there was continuity. Marxist theory—which she and her husband had earlier embraced—is, at its core, an ethical critique. She wrote that “over the years, my concerns about morality deepened, and my reflections invariably pointed to the apparently irrefutable conclusion that morality was, by its very nature, authoritarian. Morality, in other words, drew the dividing line between good and bad.” The academy had come to view morality in increasingly relativistic terms, and Betsey knew better. So she began to take very unpopular stands, such as believing that a woman can be, without contradiction, both pro-life and a feminist. Not only can be, but should be.

Betsey also found in the Catholic church a spiritual articulation of the very best parts of her scholarly vocation, to love and to serve others. She had already done that part well, but, fully committed to God, she began to do it with greater joy, even as she began to struggle more with her health. And against a world that measures value by accomplishment, she recognized that the most important legacy we can have as scholars and teachers is to see others as God sees them:

For if He loves us all, He also loves each of us. And recognition of that love imposes on us the obligation to love one another, asking no other reason than God’s injunction to do so […] knowing how little we merit His love, our best opening to the faith that He does lies not in the hope of being better than others, but in the security that His love encompasses even the least deserving among us.

I have tried to emulate Betsey’s style as a scholar and a teacher. But it is this core humility that I can only pray will characterize my life in the way that it has characterized hers.

Betsey, thank you. You will be missed.

Christina Bieber Lake is associate professor of English at Wheaton College. She is the author of The Incarnational Art of Flannery O’Connor (Mercer Univ. Press).

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

We have impatient eyes. In our video age, we expect that one picture will be replaced by another as fast as our brains can take them in. We flatter ourselves that we are the most sophisticated viewers ever, when all the while we demand images so crude, they can be exhausted in the blink of an eye.

We are impatient in a different way with sacred art—impatient with its very right to exist. Secular viewers would prefer to imagine that religious motivation inevitably produces bad art. Urbane Christians are so afraid of being caught endorsing propaganda that they shy away from the very art that expresses their own vision of the world—however good it might be.

Hence the Pre-Raphaelites continue to unsettle us, just as they did many of their contemporaries. Critics seem always to be looking for a way to set them aside without having to go so far as actually to claim that their art lacks merit. In Michaela Giebelhausen’s Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in Mid-Victorian Britain, however, the art of the Brotherhood receives a welcome, genuinely sympathetic treatment.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and the other Pre-Raphaelites were rebelling against the high art conventions of their day. They stood for paintings that were infused with meaning, often through symbolism, and executed with realism and meticulous attention to nature. Their self-chosen name was a deliberate provocation: what if medieval art was in some ways better than that of the Renaissance? (Charles Dickens was sufficiently scandalized to write a satire in which he projected the emergence of a Pre-Galileo Brotherhood which would deny that the earth revolves around the sun.) And yet, the glories of the Renaissance notwithstanding, the way its artists flouted realism was assailable. John Ruskin, a seminal intellectual inspiration for the Brotherhood, objected that the apostles in Raphael’s Christ’s Charge to Peter were “a faded concoction of fringes, muscular arms, and curly heads of Greek philosophers.”

The Pre-Raphaelites admired leading medieval religious painters such as Fra Angelico and Giotto for their earnestness and sincerity: they patently believed the Christian truths that their art depicted. Ruskin observed that art used to be a way of communicating faith, but the great themes of faith were now cynically employed simply for the sake of displaying artistic prowess. He grumbled about the typical modern artist who thought of a picture of the Madonna merely as “a pleasant piece of furniture for the corner of a boudoir.” The Pre-Raphaelites wagered their artistic reputations and lives on the premise that it need not be so. In our irony-soaked, “post”-everything age, we need them. Most of all, we need Holman Hunt.

Judith Bronkhurst’s William Holman Hunt: A Catalogue Raisonné should be gratefully accepted as a gift to our age. A century from now, should the world endure, these volumes from Yale will be on display in some museum. A guide will speak reverently of them in hushed tones, conceding that having all of our images stored electronically is an advance in many ways, but lamenting that such physically beautiful objects as these are no longer being created. Her listeners will dream of owning these books the way that we dream of owning the original paintings they depict.

Mostly, these volumes are a gift to us because they can serve to re-train our impatient eyes, challenge our dismissiveness toward sacred art, and function as a catalogue of hope for those who have reached a cultural dead end. Unfortunately, neither Giebelhausen nor Bronkhurst is quite as sure-footed as Virgil when it comes to guiding us on this journey. Indeed, although Bronkhurst makes a few passing references to the evangelical influence on Hunt’s life and work, she is so unfamiliar with this terrain as to speak dismissively of “a bias toward evangelicanism [sic].”

Giebelhausen explains the need for her book thus: “Despite the centrality of religion to Victorian culture, this is the first study to engage with the theory and practice of religious painting in nineteenth-century Britain.” Lest anyone should make the embarrassing mistake of thinking that she personally believed any of the spiritual messages proclaimed in these works of art, Giebelhausen ends her acknowledgments with a disclaimer of sorts: “And finally, my biggest thanks go to my family and friends for taking my mind off Jesus.” This personal stance noticeably influences her work. She takes it for granted that God, like Prince Albert, did not outlive Queen Victoria. She writes as if the modern discipline of biblical criticism generated the compelling insight that people don’t rise from the dead. Nor is this personal distance redressed by a reasonably adequate factual grasp of the Christian tradition. Presumably projecting her own experience, Giebelhausen imagines that people learned to think of Christ fulfilling the offices of Prophet, Priest, and King by reading Thomas Carlyle.

The fundamental structural flaw in Giebelhausen’s presentation, however, is her inability or unwillingness to observe the influence of evangelicalism. One suspects that she could not envision herself defending evangelical works of art as innovative and compelling. In Painting the Bible, Hunt’s evangelical identity is literally confined to an endnote—and this was forced upon Giebelhausen by an unavoidably apt quotation from Hunt himself. Instead, the religious map is redrawn so that there are only two germane camps: “liberal Protestantism” (a full and final statement of Hunt’s religious identity, in this telling) and “the extreme High Church” (identified as the source of Hunt’s opponents).

As to the latter, the word “extreme” is apparently an attempt to deal with all the support that Hunt actually received from the high church. His main patron, Thomas Combe, after all, was a high churchman. Combe’s widow donated the original The Light of the World to, of all places, Keble College, Oxford, an institution whose high churchmanship can hardly be described as moderate. Hunt even made a wonderfully sympathetic portrait of an Anglican priest that emphasized his Tractarian zeal (New College Cloisters, 1852).

Core themes of evangelical Protestantism—personal conversion and atonement through Christ’s work on the cross—were the inspiration for almost all of Hunt’s great religious works of art. The Light of the World is as evangelistic a painting as one can imagine: a straight appeal for the viewer to open the door of his or her heart and let Jesus come in. Likewise, The Awakening Conscience was a direct call to be converted from a life of sin. The Shadow of Death drove home the point that Christ’s whole life should be viewed through the lens of his crucifixion. The Scapegoat is a piercing affirmation of penal substitution, a doctrine that liberal Protestants—then and now—endeavor to evade.

As to the evangelical emphasis on the Bible, not only was Hunt painting scenes taken from Scripture, but many of his pictures were also sermons. They even came complete with texts. Not content with having the biblical allusion embedded in the title or printed in the exhibition catalogue, Hunt pioneered a new practice of designing the frames for his major works, and he repeatedly had these inscribed with verses. (One of the delights of the second volume of the Yale catalogue is the inclusion of photographs of these ornate frames.)

The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple has Malachi 3:1, “And the Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his Temple,” written out in the painting itself in both Hebrew and Latin, while the frame adds the New Testament reading (Luke 2:48-49) in English. The Awakening Conscience has, as its text, Proverbs 25:20. The Scapegoat has Isaiah 53:4 written out on the top of the frame, balanced by Leviticus 16:22 on the bottom. The third version of The Light of the World, designed for St Paul’s Cathedral, has Revelation 3:20 in capital letters at its base: “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.”

The frame for the first version of The Shadow of Death reads: “He made himself of no reputation and took upon him the form of a servant * * * And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross” (Phil. 2:7-8). Queen Victoria was so struck by the expression on Jesus’ face in this picture that she commissioned Hunt to make her a head-and-shoulders portrait of Christ based on The Shadow of Death. Hunt entitled this picture The Beloved, and had Psalm 40:7 inscribed on its frame. (It is still in the Royal Collection.)

So set aside any knowing reaction to The Light of the World which is initial and final all in the same cursory glance, and look at it again more slowly. All its deliberate fairy-tale, mystical qualities notwithstanding, it is in keeping with the Pre-Raphaelite commitment to nature. We can trust Hunt that the plants in the foreground are just right. Indeed, the Pre-Raphaelites’ conception of realism could entail a fantastical literalism. Hunt had a real lantern made out of brass to his exact design for the model to hold. The light had to be real: so, when the moon was full, Hunt worked on this painting from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. Indeed, our Savior’s halo is less jarring for us than it might otherwise be because Hunt has made it resemble a full moon.

If this picture does not move us, it is just possible that the fault lies with us rather than it. Perhaps such a jaded reaction betrays that certain doors in our hearts have become overgrown with weeds. It was not so for the Victorians. The Light of the World could jolt and haunt them. Crowds comprised of every kind of person came to see the painting. Eventually, ministers led groups; schools organized outings. It was a sensation when it came to New York. Countless ordinary people bought a cheap, engraved copy to illuminate their homes. It was printed in numerous editions of the Book of Common Prayer.

There is no more poignant tribute to its potency than that the artist himself was spiritually transformed by it. Holman Hunt never paraded his conversion experience, but it was real, profound, and lifelong—and it was prompted by his work on The Light of the World. In addition to all the symbolism that he has left for us to explore in The Light of the World, Hunt literally buried a secret message in it. At the top of the picture, in a portion of the painting that he deliberately hid beneath the frame, Hunt wrote, “Me non praetermisso, Domine!“—a heartfelt plea for his Lord not to pass him by. These private words of devotion were only found when repairs were made on the frame in 1919, by which time Hunt himself had been dead for almost a decade. (They have been left exposed to view.)

Thomas Carlyle was not converted by The Light of the World. Disliking the way that Hunt had symbolized Christ’s priestly and kingly offices, he protested: “Ne’er crown nor pontifical robe did the world e’er give to such as Him.” Carlyle called upon Hunt to present a Jesus that was true to the actual life of the real man, one who was “toiling along in the hot sun,” his “rough and patched clothes bedraggled and covered with dust.” Almost twenty years later, Hunt answered this challenge with The Shadow of Death (first exhibited, 1873).

Once again, we are called upon to look more carefully. This painting is an even more thorough example of Hunt’s attentiveness to nature. It was by then his standard practice to go the Holy Land to paint his biblical pictures. He went to great lengths to paint the light as it is, constructing two sheds on a Jerusalem rooftop that were rotated every hour to follow the sun.

This level of detail, when the Brotherhood had first adopted it, was itself an offense to the academic painters of the Royal Academy. One critic had said in regard to Millais’s widely derided Christ in the House of His Parents, when it was exhibited in 1850, that the artist had wasted his talent “on the representation of wood-shaving.” Given the cluttered floor of Christ’s workshop in The Shadow of Death, Hunt clearly had not been cowed by this point of view. Moreover, he did not present Mary as the ethereal figure she traditionally was in religious art, but rather in strikingly specific Middle Eastern clothes and jewelry. For this painting, Christ’s halo is cleverly gestured at by the way that his head is framed in an arched window.

Hunt proudly observed that the subject matter itself was innovative: “amongst the old masters there is not a single one representing Jesus Christ working as a carpenter.” The working classes recognized that Hunt was giving them a Jesus who was one of their own—a Savior who had done honest, physical labor. They loved this picture. The real money was to be made in reproducing the image for the masses, and Hunt received for The Shadow of Death the highest price that any English artist had ever been paid for a picture and its copyright.

In The Shadow of Death, Jesus, after a hard day’s work as a carpenter, has paused to lift up holy hands in prayer to his Father in heaven. In so doing, his body happens to take on a cruciform shape. This prefiguring is deepened by his shadow on the wall. There, a wooden tool-rack serves in our imaginations as the horizontal plank of the cross. Mary has been rummaging in the chest where the gifts from the Magi are kept but, for an evangelical, the incarnation and epiphany always point to the crucifixion. Her pondering heart is arrested by the shadow of death on the wall.

What are we to make of the efforts of the Brotherhood? Ruskin’s reaction to the initially unfavorable reviews of The Light of the World is more forceful than ever: “We have been so long accustomed to see pictures painted without any purpose or intention whatsoever, that the unexpected existence of meaning in a work of art may very naturally at first appear to us as an unkind demand on the spectator’s understanding.”

The comments of a teenage Beatrix Potter when she viewed Hunt’s The Triumph of the Innocents ought to serve as a retort to everyone who complains about Hunt’s willingness to insert abstruse symbolism: “My father objects to it that he can’t understand it, but I had rather a picture I can’t understand than one with nothing to be understood.”

Ford Madox Brown, himself an honorary Pre-Raphaelite, conceded that “stepping backwards is stumbling work.” Despite all the faux bravery of our endlessly proliferating “post”- movements, it strikes me that it would take far greater courage in our day for a few hearty souls of real intellectual mettle to pursue some daring “pre”- experiment. The Pre-Raphaelites knew that it is harder to recover what was good in the past than to deride what was bad. What they were searching for—and what I believe they found—was not a nostalgic retreat but rather a faithful manifestation of what Paul Ricoeur alluringly spoke of as a “second naiveté.” Evangelicals call it being born again.

Timothy Larsen is currently a Visiting Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge University. In July he begins as McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College. He is the author most recently of Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth Century England (Oxford Univ. Press).

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

“I don’t want to die.”

“Neither do I, baby, but if I have to, I’m gonna die last.”

That’s a bit of romantic dialogue between two characters from Out of the Past, one of the films featured in the Film Noir Classics Collection. The fifteen films in these three box sets were originally released between the mid-1940s and the early 1950s. (A fourth volume, featuring ten films, is promised later this year.) They thus bypass the early period of noir, defined by such classics as Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon, films whose viewing by French critics in the middle of the decade gave rise to the noir tag in the first place, but they include such gems as The Asphalt Jungle, The Set-Up, Murder My Sweet, Dillinger, On Dangerous Ground, and Narrow Margin. Clearly there’s a growing contemporary interest, both popular and critical, in film noir. Book-length analyses of the historical, cultural, and philosophical roots and implications of film noir continue to multiply—including two noteworthy recent examples, Mark Conard’s edited volume, The Philosophy of Film Noir, and John Irwin’s Unless the Threat of Death Is Behind Them. Even this limited sample of films and books gives evidence of the rich philosophical resources in noir; its penchant for subversive, anti-Enlightenment themes; and its revival of a peculiar kind of quest.

As the discussion of the essence or nature of film noir in the books from Conard and Irwin indicates, critics seeking a unifying definition of noir as a genre have failed to achieve consensus. Still, the films grouped under the noir label exhibit what philosophers call family resemblances, including recurring themes (criminality, infidelity, get-rich-quick schemes, and seemingly doomed quests), dominant moods (anxiety, dread, and oppressive entrapment), typical settings (cities at night and in the rain), and peculiar styles of filming (sharp contrasts between light and dark and tight, off-center camera angles). Noir is certainly a counter to the optimistic, progressive vision of postwar America; subverting the rationality of the pursuit of happiness, noir turns the American dream into a nightmare. Noir also counters the Enlightenment vision of the city as the locus of human bliss, wherein human autonomy and rational economics could combine to bring about the satisfaction of human desire. Instead of Enlightenment progress, with its lucid sense of where we are and where we are going, noir gives us disconcerting shadows and a present tense that is incapable of moving forward because it is overwhelmed by the past. In the noir universe, progress and autonomy are debilitating illusions. The title Out of the Past is a synecdoche for much of the noir genre.

Noir films regularly focus on characters who manage, at least for a period of time, to lead decent, peaceful, domestic lives—until some chance event pulls them back into their past, and the history of violence repeats itself and engulfs the protagonist. One of the original models for this motif is Out of the Past, which scholar James Ursini in his commentary track calls a “perfect noir.” The film opens with Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) living near an idyllic lake in the Sierras with Ann, his devoted girlfriend. Soon a stranger arrives and demands that Jeff come with him to see a gangster for whom Bailey had once worked in New York. On his way to the meeting, a long drive from the country to the city, Jeff confesses to Ann the details of his past. His current plan, it seems, is to return to the world of his past in the hope of re-emerging unscathed to continue his peaceful life with Ann. But when he visits his former employer, he also runs into Kathie (Jane Greer), an archetypal noir femme fatale, with whom Jeff has also had dealings. The plot is deliberately baroque in structure and requires multiple viewings to figure out its implications. What is clear up front is how acutely aware Jeff is of his own entrapment. “I think I’m a frame,” he admits at one point, but he continues to submit himself to the manipulations of others, particularly the magnetic and deadly Kathie. The question hinted at in the lines quoted at the outset of this essay—who dies last?—is subordinate in the viewer’s mind to a more fundamental question: can Jeff make it out of the past? Yet, since Jeff’s quest never fully transcends self-interested curiosity, the film thwarts viewers’ desire for intelligibility even as it manages to provide some negative satisfaction of the desire for justice—no one wins.

Yet other sorts of quests, less self-interested, populate the world of noir as well. As Irwin notes in his fine comparison of noir criminality with the “fair-play method” of traditional “analytic detective fiction,” the clear sense of justice publicly affirmed or even a neat solution of the plot is absent from noir. Instead, what noir presents is a “puzzle of character” in a world where it is unclear even what the most important mystery is. Not the one-dimensional struggle between the detective and the criminal but that struggle intertwined with another and often more significant struggle, between the detective and himself: this is the focus of the labyrinthine plot structure of noir.

A number of these themes are on display in the most influential film from the first volume of the Noir Classics collection, The Asphalt Jungle, whose very title nicely encapsulates the world in which noir is most at home: the dark city with its tall buildings blocking out natural light and entrapping human beings in a labyrinth. That is precisely the setting for Asphalt Jungle, where the city is never directly lit by sunlight and the interiors are typically windowless. Although the plot itself is not all that complex or compelling, the film provides rich background stories on a number of individuals conspiring in a theft. The two most interesting characters are at opposite poles of the criminal world. An elderly and well-educated mastermind named Doc (Sam Jaffe), who has just been released from prison, orchestrates the plan for a heist. Doc, the brains, enlists the services of Dix (Sterling Hayden), the brawn, a man with a gambling addiction.

There is a sense of fatalism about the entire scheme; its failure seems inevitable. But this does not mean that justice is clearly or optimistically affirmed. In the world of The Asphalt Jungle, criminals abound partly because of the corruption of official law enforcement. Toward the end of this film, a bad cop is arrested and the DA proclaims, “without cops, the jungle wins.” He goes on to describe the bad guys as men without feeling or mercy, whom the police will hunt down and bring to justice. That may be true of the cold calculations of Doc, but it is not an apt description of Dix. In an ironic and fitting twist on John Huston’s observation (in an introductory bonus track) about each character having a dominant vice, Doc’s petty lust proves his undoing. He nearly escapes at the end, but when he lingers to admire a young beauty dancing in a diner, the delay enables the cops to catch up with him. Meanwhile, an injured and bleeding Dix escapes with his girlfriend, Doll, from the city and into the light of country, to his childhood farm. In a genuinely moving scene, a rapidly fading Dix talks of his childhood and then dies with his weeping girlfriend by his side. The ending indicates that the official account of these individual lives would be wrong to see them as lacking every vestige of humanity. Dix may not be virtuous, but he is not unsympathetic either.

Because most noir films do not offer any clear way out of the trap, noir has with some regularity been decried as nihilistic, as a degenerate art form. Such pejorative evaluations can be traced as far back as the mid-1940s, when the French invented the phrase “film noir.” In a seminal essay, Jean-Pierre Chartier expressed distaste for the new wave of dark American films because of their “pessimism and disgust for humanity,” with characters who are “monsters, criminals” and who fail to “rouse our pity or sympathy.” But that judgment is misguided even for a film as saturated with criminality as The Asphalt Jungle. Moreover, Chartier’s pejorative appraisal fails to explain why noir has proven so popular and so enduring—indeed, many of Chartier’s compatriots adored the genre.

What exactly Europeans were seeing when they admired American film noir is another question. In an essay in the Conard volume, “Film Noir and the Frankfurt School,” Paul Cantor goes so far as to assert that noir as we have come to understand it is not really American but rather a “European projection.” Cantor’s thesis makes for provocative reading, but it doesn’t stand up very well next to Irwin’s account, which persuasively locates the development of noir out of the quintessentially American genre of hard-boiled detective fiction.

Of course it matters what films are included in the canon and what films are excluded. The loosening up of the categories defining film noir has led some, such as R. Barton Palmer (“Moral Man in the Dark City” in The Philosophy of Film Noir), to draw attention to unduly neglected films that deserve to be called redemptive—not in the sense that they advocate “cheap grace” or easy salvation but in that they depict an “authentically penitential” path of “difficult spiritual growth.”

Only one film in the Noir Classics collection, Narrow Margin—a twisting train thriller—has an unabashedly light and decidedly happy ending. This does not mean, however, that more or less overt ethical endings are alien to noir. Unusually direct in its moral lesson, Crossfire is the story of an investigation into an apparently motiveless murder. The film makes ample use of the stock noir technique of flashback as the events surrounding the murder are retold from multiple points of view. Its ending lays bare the ugly anti-Semitism at the root of the culprit’s action.

A lesser-known boxing film, The Set-Up, features Bill “Stoker” Thompson (Robert Ryan) as an aging boxer, “just one punch away” from success. Shot in real time, the film focuses on Bill’s last-chance boxing match in (where else?) Paradise City. Viewers know what Bill does not, namely, that he has been set up by his manager to take a fall. Partly because of his victim status and partly because much of the action is communicated through the perspective of Bill’s anxiety-stricken wife, the audience sympathizes with his plight. The ending of the film manages to combine physical brutality with the lingering possibility of love and fidelity; it suggests that, even in the midst of a corrupt world, a certain kind of integrity is still possible and that, in certain circ*mstances, defeat can be victory.

But the film in these collections that most closely fits Palmer’s thesis is On Dangerous Ground, directed by Nicholas Ray with a score from Bernard Herrmann. The story centers on Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan again, in a superb performance), a cop whose residual commitment to justice isolates him from everyone else and sets him on a potentially self-destructive course of violence. In a seedy, urban setting where no one is trustworthy, Wilson uses force to accomplish his ends. To an informant who is not fully forthcoming, even in the midst of beatings, he says, “Why do you make me do it? You’re gonna talk. I always make you punks talk.” He calls another cop “garbage” and asks, “how do you live with yourself?” When Wilson is sent out of town, up north where the mountains are covered with snow and sunlight, he encounters a blind girl who eventually becomes a means of his moral and psychic regeneration, as he recognizes the possibility of living by a code other than brute force. In his useful commentary track, Glenn Erickson comments that, far from offering a superficially tidy resolution, Ryan’s credible depiction of character transformation requires better acting than the standard fatalism of noir.

One of the emerging themes in noir criticism has to do with noir narration as the attempt to come to terms with a loss of clear moral codes, with a certain kind of absence—in short, with what Conard identifies (“Nietzsche and the Meaning and Definition of Noir”) as the death of God. Conard’s thesis overlaps in this respect with that of Irwin, who sees the noir detective as attempting to sustain an archetypal American ethos of doing over being, devoting himself to work in a world from which God has vanished, a world void of “hope or fear of an afterlife.” But, as Irwin’s exposition of the career of Raymond Chandler’s detective Marlowe illustrates, this quest ends up “hollow and empty” (the words are Marlowe’s).

This universal sense of defeat strikes a strange, democratic note, not because it reflects the noble Enlightenment mottos of dignity, rights, or autonomy, but because no one wins. Indeed, the anti-reformist bent of noir renders problematic the assumption that noir is a Marxist vehicle, as many critics have argued. Even where there is reform, it is personal, often outside the modern city, and decidedly apolitical. Clearly many of those associated with the Hollywood production of noir films were associated with communism. Not without reason has noir seemed to many critics to offer a Marxist critique of capitalism, of a mechanized humanity dominated by instrumental rationality, wherein the pursuit of happiness is reduced to the futile desire for wealth. The fake bird, the rara avis, that consumes the aspirations of the characters in The Maltese Falcon, for example, can be nicely interpreted as a fetish object, emblematic of capitalism’s creation of false needs.

But noir has also a deeply conservative bent, which accentuates the inherent and ineradicable limits of the human condition. In classic noir, the violation of limits is rarely, if ever, successful, and whatever glimpse of redemption characters may have is always partial rather than revolutionary, personal rather than political. Moreover, noir exhibits an ethical thrust that transcends limited political labels: an ethics of discourse, a quest to discover a lost code, what scholar J. P. Telotte identified as the desire to “speak the truth about the human condition” or at least to narrate the “difficulty” of speaking that truth. Repudiating old-fashioned American optimism but never quite succumbing to despairing nihilism, noir’s most captivating characters are those who, in the words of Pascal, “seek with groans.”

Thomas Hibbs is dean of the Honors College and Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Culture at Baylor University. He is the author most recently of Aquinas, Ethics, and Philosophy of Religion, forthcoming this summer from Indiana University Press.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In 1996, in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel Huntington proposed a paradigm for understanding the world of the 21st century. He argued that the major civilizations would inevitably be the source of most major future conflicts because of their very different worldviews and understandings of personal identity and religious meaning. Since the publication of Huntington’s book, numerous events have lent support to his thesis: terrorist attacks in the United States, Spain, and England; the concern over Muslim immigration in Europe and Hispanic immigration in the United States; the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict; and the war in Iraq. Of course not all scholars agree with Huntington’s perspective; in part, his book was itself a response to Francis f*ckuyama’s argument that Western liberal democracy was evolving as the dominant form of human government and that the future would see only minor conflicts over peripheral issues.

The issue of the correct lens through which to see both world history and future events is a controversial one, and the book reviewed here, Indians and Emigrants: Encounters on the Overland Trails, by Michael L. Tate, is not an attempt to provide a big-picture explanation of the forces that generate either cooperation or conflict. Still, Tate’s work sheds some light on the question of whether civilizations and different worldviews are ultimately and always in conflict.

Tate examines a specific period in U.S. history and a specific set of events, namely the relationship between the Native Americans and the overland travelers in the heyday of wagon train emigration, from 1840 to 1870. During this period, more than 550,000 men, women, and children moved via wagon trains from jumping-off places such as St. Joseph, Missouri and Omaha, Nebraska to Oregon and California. In his case-study of this experience, Tate provides counter-evidence with respect to prevailing wisdom about how civilizations interact. He argues that popular images of a “clash of civilizations” on the overland trail are vastly overdrawn; indeed, “this vast region along the trails was more of a ‘cooperative meeting ground’ than a ‘contested meeting ground.’ “

In the interest of full disclosure, I should acknowledge that Tate’s work fits well with my research with Terry L. Anderson, where we also argue the West was not nearly as violent or anarchic as usually pictured.1 We find, as Tate does, that Indians and settlers interacted rather peacefully for a long period of time. We also find that effective systems of internal governance evolved for wagon trains; that the several thousand mining camps in the Sierra Nevadas were able to discover and enforce workable rules for establishing and maintaining claims that did not involve large amounts of violence; and that the movement of cattle from Texas to the northern ranges was primarily an exercise in cooperation rather than conflict. We argue that the evolution of water rights and irrigation institutions was remarkably effective, and that home-grown institutions such as the round-up among cattle ranchers solved most collective-action problems in a relatively peaceful way.

Tate takes up in much more detail, however, a very specific issue with respect to popular conceptions of violence and conflict on the frontier: the familiar assumption that wagon trains making their trek from their points of embarkation to the gold fields in California or the farming land in Oregon faced constant depredation from the Indian population. Tate is a careful scholar and presents considerable evidence that both the members of wagon trains and the indigenous population saw enormous potential for gains from trade through repeated interaction. The differences in wealth levels and knowledge of the two populations meant there were numerous ways in which profitable trades could occur. In many cases, Indians settled along the trail and established themselves as middlemen in the exchange system, trading native goods for manufactured items that were both more valuable to themselves and to remote tribes further from the trail. The Indians also provided ferry service across many rivers that were difficult to ford, acted as guides, and also provided fresh draft animals in trade for worn out ones along the trail.

To be sure, misunderstandings oftentimes stood in the way of beneficial interaction—and most of the misunderstanding and distrust came from the westward travelers. Stories of fearsome attacks and the continual hostility of the Indian population were repeated numerous times and were well-embedded in the consciousness of those making the wagon train journey. Many emigrants expected to be attacked by the Indians, and their ongoing suspicion made commerce more difficult. Nevertheless, over time, the lack of frequent attacks did have an impact on the trekkers and most of them came to trust the Indians as honest entrepreneurs and faithful guides. The emigrants were further persuaded by numerous acts of charity and benevolence on the part of the Indians, who returned lost children, helped to search for strayed livestock, and sometimes risked their lives in rescuing settlers from dangerous rivers when crossings did not succeed.

Tate reports the work of other historians finding that from 1840 to 1860 period, only 362 emigrants were killed by Indians, a mere 18 mortalities per year for the period. By contrast, 426 Indians were killed by whites. These deaths mostly occurred in small skirmishes or as a result of misunderstandings about the true intentions of the Indians. There were few major incidents or even organized plans of aggression. Tate finds that from 1840 to 1870 there were only eight “massacres” in which organized Indian attacks were inflicted upon wagon trains. Most of these took place in the latter part of this thirty-year period as the Indians became more aware of the problem of resource depletion by European settlers and as attacks on Indians by the U.S. Army became more frequent.

One of the interesting issues that Tate does not deal with is how the existence of a standing army changed the balance of power and made it more likely that settlers would simply claim land and other resources rather than engage in honest negotiations with the Indians. Once the standing army was in place after the Mexican-American War, and with its subsequent build-up during the Civil War, there were more full-time officers and military bureaucrats, all of whose careers and budgets were advanced by fighting. Thus, is it not always the case that increased force on one side means more peace: rather it can lead to increased potential for conflict.

It is too much to claim that Michael Tate has provided a new way of thinking about interaction and conflict between civilizations, but his work is certainly important in understanding the dynamics of such encounters. Under certain sets of circ*mstances, people from very different backgrounds and with disparate understandings of the world have been able to interact peacefully, particularly when there are economic advantages from trading with one another.

This is not to say that cultural understandings and religious worldviews are unimportant; some of the major conflicts between the trekkers and the Indians occurred over misunderstandings of the role of gifts and what signing treaties meant. The ongoing conception of gift exchange and reciprocal obligation meant that the Indians often expected wagon train members to accept an obligation of reciprocity that was many times not understood by the travelers. Likewise, the Indians regarded the discussions surrounding treaty negotiations as an important part of a treaty agreement. Rather than seeing themselves as agreeing only to the explicit terms of the treaty they thought that their signatures meant they had heard all of the arguments on both sides of those engaged in negotiation. Despite these misunderstandings and the rising level of conflict toward the end of the period, Tate has nevertheless provided us with an important insight into a relatively peaceful period of interaction between two very different civilizations. We ought not to be too quick to assume that people of very different backgrounds will always find their interactions laden with conflict.

Peter J. Hill is professor of economics at Wheaton College.

1. Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill, The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier (Stanford Univ. Press, 2004).

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.

The boat is the Áxion Estín, and I am finally on the boat. The concrete pier at the bow marks the end of the world, where lies a modest village with an ambitious name; it is Ouranoúpoli, Heavenly City. We remain bound to its bustling pier by two lengths of rope as thick as my thigh.

Any moment now, the boat will be loosed and let go, and we will be on our way to Ágion Óros, the Holy Mountain.

The air is sun-drenched, salt-scented, cool, and pulsing with a riot of gulls and terns dipping to grab bits of bread laid upon the water for them. The Aegean reflects the promising blue of a robin’s egg. A light breeze dapples the surface, reflecting to some degree the tremor I’m feeling just now in my throat.

I’ve been planning this trip for most of a year.

And I’ve been on this journey for most of my life.

For a good while now, the ache of my own poor progress along that journey has been escalating. It has reached the condition of a dull throb, just beneath the heart.

By which I mean, more or less, that when I had traveled half of our life’s way, I found myself stopped short, as within a dim forest.

Or, how’s this: As I walked through that wilderness, I came upon a certain place, and laid me down to sleep: as I slept, I dreamed, and saw a man clothed with rags, standing with his face turned away from his own house, a book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back. He opened the book, and read therein; and, as he read, he wept and shook, and cried out, saying, What shall I do?

Here’s the rub: by the mercy of God I am a Christian; by my deeds, a great sinner.

You might recognize some of that language. You might even recognize the sentiment. These lines roughly paraphrase the opening words of three fairly famous pilgrims, the speakers of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, and the Russian devotional favorite known as The Way of a Pilgrim.

In each of them I find a trace of what Saint Paul writes to the church in Rome in the first century: I do not understand what it is I do. For what I want to do, I do not do; but what I hate, I do.

I get it. I really do get it.

In each of these confessions I suspect a common inference as well: something is amiss. There is a yawning gap between where I am and where I mean to go.

Lately, the crux of my matter has pretty much come down to this: having said prayers since childhood, I startled one day to the realization that—at the middling age of forty—I had not yet learned to pray.

At any rate, despite half a lifetime of mostly good intentions, I had not established anything that could rightly be called a prayer life.

I remember the moment of this realization with startling clarity, and with a good dose of chagrin. I was romping at the beach with Mona, our yellow Labrador. It was a gorgeous morning in early spring: absolutely clear, the air still crisp, tasting of salt from the bay, the water and sky mirroring a mutual, luminous turquoise.

I was throwing a stick of driftwood, repeatedly—as instructed in no uncertain terms by my ecstatic dog—into the Chesapeake for her to retrieve, and I was delighting in the sheer beauty of her astonishing leaps into the surf—wholehearted, jubilant, tireless—followed by her equally tireless insistence that I keep it up. She yelped, she pranced, she spun like a dervish as water poured from her thick coat into the flat sheen of sand at the water’s edge.

In short, I was in a pretty good mood.

I was sporting cutoff jeans in February. I was barefoot. I was romping with my dog at the beach.

I was not the least bit depressed, or even especially thoughtful. I had hardly a thought in my head at all.

I was, even so, feeling a good deal—feeling, actually, pretty pleased with myself, and feeling especially pleased with that radiant morning on the shore, accompanied by a deliriously happy dog. My best guess is that, after some years of high anxiety, I was finally relaxed enough to suspect the trouble I was in.

We had moved to Virginia Beach about a year earlier, having arrived there with a palpable sense of reprieve from a stint of—as I have come to speak of it—having done time in Texas. I had left a difficult and pretty much thankless teaching-and-program-directing job in north Texas in favor of a similar but far more satisfying gig at Old Dominion University in Norfolk. We’d extricated our little family—by which I mean me, Marcia, our ten-year-old Liz, and our five-year-old Ben—from our rundown cottage in a run-down corner of a small (and, at the time, relatively run-down) north Texas town; we’d swapped those derelict digs for a bright, airy bungalow by the beach.

The contrast was stunning. Our first evening there, in fact, sitting at an oceanfront café, we were treated to the spectacle of a dozen or more dolphins frolicking northward as they proceeded to the mouth of the Chesapeake half a mile up.

Life looked good. It looked very good. It even tasted good.

I felt as if I had found my body again after having misplaced it for four intermittently numbing years in exile. I had even started running again, running on the Chesapeake beach or along the state park bike path most mornings before heading off to my job in Norfolk.

In the midst of such bounty and such promise, and provoked by nothing I could name, I suddenly thought what might seem like a strange thought under the circ*mstances. At the age of forty, I had accomplished only this: I saw how far I had gotten off track.

It was as if those difficult years in Texas had somehow distracted me from seeing that the real work—the interior work—was being neglected. And, to be honest, my difficulty with a handful of colleagues there and a regrettable lack of humility on my part had led me to speak and act in ways I knew, even at the time, to be wrong, ways that ate at me still.

Shame is a curious phenomenon. It can provoke further, entrenched, and shameful responses—compounding the shame, compounding the poor response, ad infinitum—or like a sharp and stinging wind it can startle even the dullest of us into repentance. Now that my job was once again rewarding, now that my family was safe and happy, I relaxed enough to glimpse a subtle reality: I saw how far I stood from where I’d meant to be by now.

Rather, I saw how far I stood from where I’d meant to be by then.

I have recently turned fifty. And though it is possible that some progress has been made in the intervening ten years of meantime, that progress has been very slow, negligible, and remarkably unsteady, with virtually every advance being followed, hard on its heels, by an eclipsing retreat—with hard words, harsh thoughts continuing to undermine any accomplishment in the realms of charity and compassion.

In his Christmas oratorio, For the Time Being, the beloved Mr. Auden puts it in a way that never fails to resonate with me, to slap me awake when I recite the poem (which I do as a matter of course every Christmas Eve): “To those who have seen / The Child, however dimly, however incredulously, / The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.”

I get that, too.

Wise men and women of various traditions have troubled the terms being and becoming for centuries without arriving at anything like a conclusion. Every so often, though, I glimpse that some of the trouble may derive from our merely being, when—as I learned to say in Texas—we might could be becoming.

I wonder if we aren’t fashioned to be always becoming, and I wonder if the dry taste in my mouth isn’t a clue—even a nudge—that staying put is, in some sense, an aberration, even if it may also be commonplace.

I have been a Christian nearly all my life, have hoped, all my life, eventually to find my way to some measure of … what? Spirituality? Maturity? Wisdom? I’d hoped, at least, to find my way to a sense of equanimity, or peace, or … something.

As one desert father, Abba Xanthias, observed—clearly anticipating my Labrador—”A dog is better than I am, for he has love and he does not judge.”

At the age of forty, I raised my arm to fling a sodden stick into the Chesapeake; I looked down to see my beautiful, dripping, yellow dog—braced, alert, eager, her eyes lit up with wild expectation. I didn’t want to let her down.

My life at that precise moment reminds me of the bumper sticker I saw years ago: I WANT TO BE THE MAN THAT MY DOG THINKS I AM.

More generally, my life at that moment reminds me of an often-repeated comment one monk made to a visitor to Mount Athos. I imagine it like this: The visitor asks what it is that the monks do there; and the monk, looking up from the black wool of the prayer rope he is tying, stares off into the distance for a moment, silent, as if wrestling with the answer. Then he meets the other man’s eyes very directly and says: “We fall down, and we get up again.”

A little glib, but I think I get the point.

Monks, it turns out, can seem a little glib on occasion, and I’ve noticed that they have a penchant for the oblique; but I’ll have more to say about that by and by.

As for me, at the moment when my brilliant day at the beach was suddenly clouded by an encroaching unease, I saw that I was less like that diligent monk and more like the actor in the tv ad who says, I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up.

Even if the monk’s words do offer a glimpse of a truth that is available to us all, I keep thinking that—for the saints, for the monks, for the genuinely wise, presumably for anyone but me—the subsequent fall needn’t seem so completely to erase all previous progress.

I keep thinking that, for the pilgrim hoping to make any progress at all, the falling down must eventually become less, that the rising up must become something more—more of a steady ascent, and more lasting.

I also have an increasing sense that the subsequent fall need not be inevitable.

I keep thinking that this is actually possible, the proposition of spiritual development that leads us into becoming, and—as the fathers and mothers of the Eastern Christian tradition would have it—into always becoming.

The question must be how to get from here to there.

And that question has pressed me to get serious, to slap myself awake, take up my bed, and get to walking.

I hope to be, at long last, a pilgrim on the way.

The boat—whose name means It Is Worthy—is backing away from the chaos of crates and trucks and the crowd of very loud, very animated men burdening the concrete pier. With a shudder and a plume of diesel smoke, the ferry discovers a forward gear and angles out, pressing into the Aegean’s dappled blue.

I was a little puzzled, at first, by the size of the crowd boarding the boat. And, earlier in the morning, I was a little panicked that my friend Nick and I had to wait to see if there would be room for us to join them. We had made the necessary arrangements to enter Mount Athos on this date but hadn’t known to reserve tickets for the boat itself. Let that be a lesson for somebody.

Given a well-publicized daily limit of 134 pilgrims—120 Orthodox Christians and 14 “others” who are allowed to enter the Holy Mountain—I had no idea there would be so many pressing to catch the morning ferry, easily four hundred men, probably more.

I was puzzled, as well, by the early-morning demeanor of some of my fellow travelers. Though we were embarking about 9:30 AM, a good dozen or so were sipping cans of Amstel lager, and many of them were obviously nursing serious hangovers. Not just a few seemed still to be drunk, and one was passed out between two comrades who kept him from falling over—for the most part.

The official limit of 134 men, it turns out, applies only to the uninvited. There is apparently no limit for visiting monks, Orthodox clergy, or those pilgrims who have made arrangements to visit their spiritual fathers by invitation.

Still, those particular exceptions didn’t absolutely account for the drunks.

The official limit doesn’t apply to laborers either. In recent years, reconstruction support has come to Mount Athos from the European Union and from various public and private sources in predominantly Orthodox countries. Of the twenty monasteries and the dozen-plus sketes, nearly all are undergoing some degree of reconstruction and repair. Some, like Chelandári and Simonópetra, have suffered recent losses from fire, but all have suffered the toll of time. Megísti Lávra, Saint Panteleímon, and Saint Andrew’s Skete, for example, appear to have a good many more derelict structures than usable ones.

A thousand years can erode a lot of stone and mortar, rot a lot of wood—even the iron-like chestnut beams and boards used for most wooden structures on the Holy Mountain. As a result, Mount Athos is occupied daily by an army of excavators, stonemasons, and carpenters; this morning, they weren’t all hungover, but all bore the demeanors of men on their way to a day (or several weeks) of serious labor. I really couldn’t blame them for their grim looks.

And I have to say that, progressively, during the boat ride, as the reality of Mount Athos began to weigh on my idealized, abstract expectations, I guessed that I too was on my way to work.

It wasn’t until Nick and I had stowed our backpacks under our seats and were stretched out, feeling the sun on our faces, that any of this began to feel real. Nick, by the way, is Nick Kalaitzandonakes. As you might have noticed from his substantial surname, Nick is Greek. If you were Greek, you would also gather from his name that his family originally hails from Crete. Nick is also an American, having been naturalized about fifteen years ago. He is married to the indefatigable Julie, and they have two beautiful, busy kids, Maria and Yorgo—both brilliant, and each, in his or her own way, full of beans.

Nick and I have served together on the parish council of our Saint Luke the Evangelist Orthodox Church since before it was a parish council, since before we even had a parish. We were just a “mission steering committee” at first, working to establish the first-ever Orthodox church in mid-Missouri. It worked out pretty well.

Nick is also a colleague at the University of Missouri, where I teach poetry writing and American literature in the English department, and where he is an agricultural economist. Nick was also, for the first five days of this first pilgrimage, my guide and translator.

So far, my Greek is very lame. As with about seven other languages, however, I maintain certain priorities. I can manage—politely even—to get myself fed in Greek. And I can order red wine. Or single-malt scotch, when it’s available. On this trip, I also learned how to reserve a room, pay a tab, count my change, and shove my way onto a bus. Nick, on the other hand, could help with the occasional theological discussion, and he’s a pretty funny guy, to boot. Nick is also, as it happens, a pilgrim.

At that moment on the deck—with the breeze whipping up whitecaps on the Aegean, the ferryboat tooling along in what I swear was a confident, dactylic rhythm, and the first monastic enclaves coming into view along the shore—I realized that I was really going to the Holy Mountain.

Mount Athos has always been a unique phenomenon, and, for most folks, it remains a downright puzzling phenomenon; its uniqueness and puzzlement are all the more pronounced in the 21st century, when ancient pursuits like monasticism, asceticism, and hesychasm (EH-see-kazm; the pursuit of stillness) strike the modern psyche as anachronistic, extreme, and maybe a little perverse.

The monks also follow the Julian, or “old,” calendar, and this involves a tweaking of dates to a point thirteen days behind where you thought you were.

Think of it as a cosmic pressure to slow down—or, maybe better, as a metaphor for our failure to know, even, where we stand, or when.

Then don’t think about it again. The monks are, for the most part, gracious enough to suppose where and when you think you are, and will play along.

Oh, and one other thing: the clock. The hours of the day begin at sundown rather than at midnight. Not to worry; you’ll catch on.

The easternmost of three peninsulas—easily the steepest and rockiest of three long fingers of steep and rocky land—reaching south into the Aegean from that region of northeastern Greece known as Halkidikí, the peninsula of Mount Athos is about thirty-four miles long and varies between five and eight miles across, covering less than 250 square miles total. The sharply rising terrain moves precipitously from sea level to 6,700 feet, which is the summit of the Mount Athos peak itself, very near the southern tip of the peninsula.

In physical terms, then, the area of the Holy Mountain isn’t much. In spiritual terms, it is immense, impossible to chart.

Archaeological evidence suggests that since as early as the second century, ascetics have lived here in pursuit of prayer—in pursuit of, rather, lives of prayer. I’ll get to what I mean by the italics soon enough. Or nearly soon enough. By and by.

Since the 3rd century—and perhaps even earlier—ascetics desiring lives of prayer have lived in community here. Over the next seventeen hundred years, the precise number of these communities has varied, witnessing intermittent increase and decline; some documents indicate that as many as 180 such communities flourished at one point. The establishment of these communities appears to have occurred in two distinct waves, an early wave during the 3rd through the 5th centuries, and a second, more pronounced wave commencing in the 10th century and continuing into the 14th century. (Megísti Lávra, founded in 963, is agreed to have been the earliest in the second wave.)

Today, twenty such communities are recognized as “ruling monasteries”; because Mount Athos operates as a virtually autonomous political state, representatives from these twenty constitute the Holy Mountain’s governing body. Although seventeen are identified as Greek, one as Bulgarian, one as Serbian, and one as Russian, the Holy Mountain comprises a full array of Orthodox nationalities, including substantial numbers of Romanian, Moldavian, Ukrainian, English, American, and Australian monks. There are also a dozen or more sketes; these are very like monasteries, but ostensibly—with a few notable exceptions—smaller. Each skete is a dependency of one of the twenty ruling monasteries, on whose lands it rests. Some, like the Romanian Skíti Timíou Prodrómou (named after “the Forerunner,” Saint John the Baptist), the Russian Skíti Agíou Andréa (Saint Andrew’s Skete), and Skíti Profíti Ilioú (Prophet Elias Skete), look very like full-fledged monasteries, with a central katholikón (church) protected within a high-walled structure; others, including Skíti Agías Annis (Saint Anne’s Skete) and Néa Skíti (New Skete), appear more like thriving residential communities spread across the steep Athonite slope, dotted with churches, chapels, and monastic kellía, or cells. There are, as well, throughout the Athonite wilderness, many scattered, communal farm dwellings, kalyves (communal huts), kathísmata (smaller huts for single monks), and hesychastéria (squat huts or simple caves etched in a cliff face for the most ascetic of hermits, an increasingly rare breed).

The twenty ruling monasteries are now coenobític, meaning that the monks all follow a common rule. Until recently, some were idiorrythmic, in which the monks pursued more individualized ascetic practice, often allowing for a more demanding rule. The idiorrythmic approach—still observed in many of the sketes and smaller dependencies—is thought by some to be an aberration of the ideal monastic community, albeit a necessary one brought about during foreign occupation by Franks, Turks, and so on. Others understand the idiorrythmic rule of the skete to be more aptly suited to those monks who are permitted a more strenuous áscesis.

In either case, the monastic rule has always revolved around prayer. And fasting, too—but fasting as a tool assisting prayer. It is safe to say that nothing about life on Mount Athos is understood as an end in itself, and that everything deliberate about life there is undertaken to accommodate prayer. Prayer is undertaken to accommodate union with God—what those in the business like to call theosis.

We should probably stick to prayer for now, but theosis is the crux of our matter, and that is where—I pray—we will eventually arrive.

Odd as Mount Athos may appear by contemporary standards, the Holy Mountain is visited by hundreds of pilgrims every month. The generally balmy weather and calm seas of spring, summer, and fall bring boatload after boatload scrambling to visit the steep and rocky slopes, the deep forests of chestnut, pine, and juniper, and the ancient enclaves; though wintertime draws relatively fewer, they continue to arrive daily and by the dozens whenever the weather-driven surf allows the ferryboats to dock.

That is to say, year-round, pilgrims arrive at Mount Athos almost every day, looking for something. One friend (now a novice monk at Simonópetra) told me that a good many visitors come in search of healing from serious illness—their own or that of a loved one. Some arrive because their marriages are failing or have failed; some come to kick an addiction or two; and some few arrive because they are drawn to a fuller sense of prayer.

Most of the visitors are Orthodox Christians, and most are from Greece; a good number arrive from other parts of eastern Europe, notably Romania and Russia. Concurrent with the rise of Eastern Orthodoxy in English-speaking countries, many also come from England, Australia, and North America. Many non-Orthodox arrive as well; from what I could gather, these are often from Germany and other parts of western Europe.

As I mentioned, the daily limit for entry to the Holy Mountain is 120 Orthodox and 14 non-Orthodox men. Since a vote among resident monks in the year 1045 and a subsequent edict of Emperor Constantine in 1060, women are not allowed entry at all, ever.

This last bit seems to many—as it has seemed to me—to be the most archaic element of the entire operation, an element that, for some of us, threatens to turn admirably quaint into regrettably anachronistic, verging right up on the cusp of damned insulting. Granted, there are many monastic communities, East and West, that choose to limit their communities to one gender; the Athonite monasteries are not unique in that respect. Many convents exclude men; many monasteries exclude women.

Be that as it may, Mount Athos is an entire peninsula, an entire monastic republic, and—some would say—the spiritual center of the entire Eastern Church. So the exclusion of women strikes the casual observer as extreme, not just a little misogynistic. That sense is not much mitigated by the fact that this prohibition extends to female animals in general—save those among the wild animals and the countless cats who are pleased to keep both the rats and the vipers nicely in check.

Explanations abound, of course. One tradition has it that the Virgin Mary (whom, incidentally, the Orthodox call Theotókos, or God-bearer), traveling by ship with Saint John en route to visit Saint Lazarus (then Bishop of Cyprus), was blown off course and came upon this beautiful peninsula. Moved by its beauty and isolation, the Virgin prayed to her Son that it might become hers to protect. The story goes that this was, and remains, a done deal.

Some legends include miraculous, audible warnings to historical female visitors—one of them being the stepmother of Mohammed the Conqueror who had come to return the gifts of the magi to the Christians near the site of today’s monastery of Saint Paul (where those relics are now kept). By and large, the legends share one element: women are not to come here, and if they do come here, they shouldn’t plan on sticking around.

My own guess is that the lives of prayer these men seek to acquire are understood by them to be more possible in an environment where certain longstanding human failures—pride, greed, violence, lust, and so on—are mitigated by a lack of opportunity. The absence of women effectively takes at least one species of error off the table, and indirectly protects the monks from a good many others.

That said, notable exceptions have been made in the past. In particular, during the Greek civil war—which occurred in the aftermath of World War II—the monasteries of Mount Athos offered sanctuary to many women and girls fleeing the brutality of mainland atrocities. The monks made places for them, saw that they were fed, and kept them safe for the duration of hostilities. When, back on the mainland, the coast was clear, the monks promptly cleared the Athonite coast of women.

I hoped to ask, at one point or another, about this continuing prohibition of what are, generally speaking, my favorite people. I hoped to hear an explanation that didn’t sound quite so specious as the ones I’d heard so far. Mostly, I hoped at some point even to understand it, suspecting that, as with a good many things, the business might look different from the inside than it does from the outside.

On the Áxion Estín, leaning into the headwind at the bow, I was waking to the fact that after many months of planning and anticipation, Nick and I would soon be inside, setting foot on land blessed by centuries of prayer—genuine prayer, prayer of a sort I could only suspect, and desire.

Soon, I’d be walking through what the Orthodox call the garden of the Theotókos.

I hoped, moreover, to come upon a holy man, an adept, a spiritual father, who could help me to pray.

It was more than a little daunting.

In a curious and surprising way, at that moment the bleary-eyed stonecutter who was slumped next to me, picking at the bandage on his knuckle, became something of a comfort.

Scott Cairns is professor of English at University of Missouri-Columbia, where he directs the creative writing program and the Center for Literary Arts. Among his many books of poetry the most recent is Compass of Affection: Poems New and Selected (Paraclete Press). This essay is excerpted from his new book A Short Trip to the Edge: Where Earth Meets Heaven—A Pilgrimage (HarperSanFrancisco). Copyright 2007 by Scott Cairns. Used by permission of HarperCollins.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In the background of this book there lies a disaster; in the foreground, a contradiction. The disaster has been aptly labeled, by Victor Davis Hanson and his colleagues in Classical Studies, “the bonfire of the humanities.” In English Studies, twenty-five years ago there were 65,000 undergraduate majors in the United States. Since then the college population has doubled, so that one might expect to find 130,000. Five years ago the actual figure was 49,000, and it is unlikely to have increased since. Putting it in commercial terms, departments of English have lost close on two-thirds of their “market share.” This, of course, is not a concern for tenured professors in élite institutions, like Seth Lerer and his contributors, who can continue to teach their graduate seminars in the sure and certain knowledge that their jobs are safe, and that the social cachet of their universities will ensure a constant supply of students. It is a concern for the students in those graduate seminars, being poured into a shrinking job market, and even more for students outside the élite institutions. But that’s their problem, and their disaster.

To turn to the contradiction, Lerer (professor at Stanford) is well aware that there are already half a dozen “guides” and “companions” to Chaucer on the market, and is concerned to establish selling points for this one. In brief, it’s young, it’s American, and it aims to do more than “just conveying facts” or providing “bald surveys.” Young is stretching it: most of the contributors are in their forties and fifties, though academics start late these days. I am sure all the competing collections aimed to do more than “just convey facts.” As for Americanness—and here the reviewer must confess that he is just the kind of old-style Englishman whom Lerer has in his gunsights—it’s odd that, while all Lerer’s contributors subscribe to the normal academic ideal of diversity, as soon as they encounter figures who do not conform to the approved “theoretical and critical perspectives” (listed as “poststructuralism, psychoanalytic feminism, New Historicism”), the deviants are said to be not just out of date, ignorant, or misguided but “almost willfully out of step.” Willfully? Deliberately? Because the values of modern American academia should always have been self-evident? There’s a narrowness of vision here which contradicts the diversity rhetoric and shows up even in what is said about Chaucer.

The plan of the volume carefully avoids the traditional division by works and genres. Instead there are four essays on “Contexts and Cultures,” four on “Major Works, Major Issues,” and two on “Critical Approaches and Afterlives.” One of the most useful essays is actually the last one, by Ethan Knapp (the only contributor from a state university, Ohio State), who details the long struggles between philologists and critics, Leavisites and New Critics, leading to the present set of “theoretical and critical perspectives,” where Knapp adds “queer theory” to Lerer’s list above. A major claim being made collectively in this volume is that it takes a broader view, looking not just at texts but also at contexts, and looking not just at the familiar texts as edited for generations of students by the Riverside Chaucer (which despite several updates goes back to 1933) but also at the manuscript evidence too often airbrushed out of the picture. No one can argue with the value of such approaches. But are the claims meant seriously? Or are they tacitly subordinated to the values and perspectives given above?

Chaucer’s life, for instance, is by medieval standards unusually well-documented, though almost all the documents relate to his life as an administrator and royal servant. Drama has been extracted from it by Terry Jones, of the Monty Python team, with his recent book Who Murdered Chaucer? There is not much to be said for Jones’ theory, but one might ask conversely, not “who did Chaucer murder?”, but perhaps “what was Chaucer’s relationship to the murder of King Richard II?”, probably arranged, and possibly carried out, by Chaucer’s nephew-by-marriage Thomas Swynford, acting for his mother’s stepson (not quite Chaucer’s nephew), Henry IV. Chaucer was continually on the edge of great events, but Christopher Cannon’s “The Lives of Geoffrey Chaucer” does not make much of them. He prefers to see Chaucer as “acutely conscious of a glass ceiling.” His son was Speaker of the House of Commons, his granddaughter was duch*ess of Suffolk, his great-grandson even had a shot at the throne, but no, the American stereotype of England is one of social immobility, and Cannon—an American, though a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge—sticks with the stereotype.

Meanwhile, there’s the question of Chaucer’s relationship to other writers of the time. Several of the contributors would clearly like him to have been in contact with and responding to his contemporary William Langland, author of Piers Plowman, especially as Langland seems to have had something to do with the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, an event very congenial to politically liberal academics. It’s true Chaucer never mentions him or alludes to or quotes from his work, but there is a Plowman among the Canterbury pilgrims, though he never tells a tale. If Langland were a sympathizer with the revolt, and Chaucer were a sympathizer with Langland, then there would be a basis for the kind of democratizing biography of Chaucer which Derek Pearsall (another Englishman) noted long ago as the preferred American narrative. The truth is that if the rebellious peasants had got hold of Chaucer in 1381, they would certainly have lynched him—bureaucrat, civil servant, tax-collector, just the kind of target they were looking for. D. Vance Smith of Princeton feels sure, however, that “Chaucer’s virtuous plowman must be directly indebted to Langland” because of the “point-by-point reversal of the almost universal contemporary criticism of laborers.”

What is shocking about this view, to this reviewer, is the casual confusion of plowmen and laborers. As was pointed out long ago by serious historians, tenant-plowmen plowing their own land with their own draft-teams (an important point) were very different creatures in agricultural society from landless day-laborers; and while Langland is all in favor of the former group, he rarely has a good word to say about the latter. For one thing, day-laborers probably wanted nothing better than the chance to get into town and find a steady job, while any attempt to get a plowman off his land would have had him running for the medieval equivalent of the National Rifle Association. (Note that the one other individualized Canterbury pilgrim for whom Chaucer never finds a tale is the Knight’s Yeoman, “And in his hand he bar a mighty bowe.”) Langland, one might argue, finds it easy to identify, maybe for family reasons, with the independent, intransigent, and militarily formidable rural yeomanry—with the medieval equivalent of modern “rednecks,” in fact, a group with whom modern academics have no sympathy, and one whose political loyalties cannot securely be counted on by Left or Right. Chaucer by contrast has no liking for them at all, and trying to line him up with Langland, to line up plowmen with laborers and with Wat Tyler, to get them all to fit a modern liberal narrative of equality and democratic aspiration—this is just a new kind of airbrushing.

And though it’s no doubt coincidental, it’s unfortunate that Stephanie Trigg (Melbourne), in her essay on “Chaucer’s Influence and Reception,” confuses the two different “Plowman’s Tales” tacked on by later authors to the Chaucerian canon. She predictably picks the one which “foregrounds a reading of Chaucer as anticlerical satirist and ecclesiastical reformer,” but that is not the one “in Christ Church Oxford MS 152,” which is instead an entirely orthodox Virgin-miracle story written by Thomas Hoccleve. We all make mistakes, but this one does make the back-to-the-nitty-gritty-of-manuscript-culture claim look rather hollow.

It is always unfair, in reviewing collections like this, to lump all the contributors together, and several of the essays have their own views and their own value. James Simpson (Harvard) provocatively sees Chaucer, and English writing in his time, as essentially “suburban,” hanging on the edge of London and the edge of Europe. Rita Copeland on rhetoric and Jennifer Summit on Troilus (Pennsylvania and Stanford respectively) have good things to say, and there are other authors for whom space forbids even a mention. Lerer himself, however, writing the lead essay on the Canterbury Tales, seems to be offering venerable clichés in new language. The “signal moment” of the collection is the Miller’s anti-hierarchical interruption of the Knight; the Reeve “takes the laughter of the Miller’s Tale and turns it into spite”; the Pardoner “seeks only coin”; and so on. Verbiage about linguistic trickery and language remaking the world can only cover so much. And there are blind spots even as regards language—nothing about the contest of literates and illiterates, not much to the point about dialects and sociolects, no attempt to get to grips with a trilingual society, or indeed with Chaucer’s own quite unusual abilities as a polyglot (French, Latin, Italian, and a good case might be made for Flemish). Chaucer could do Arabic numerals too, a rare talent in his time, and he knew a great deal about money, both matters possibly connected with his documented employment “on the secret business of the king” and certainly reflected in his poetry.

He really is an interesting writer, whatever they do to him, and it’s sad to see him so flattened out by the new and dominant academic orthodoxy. But going back to all those missing students of paragraph one, scores of thousands of them, and every one young and American, remember: does this kind of deeply politicized treatment perhaps explain where and why they’ve all gone?

Tom Shippey is Walter J. Ong Chair of Humanities at St. Louis University. He is the author of The Road to Middle-earth (Houghton Mifflin) and J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (Houghton Mifflin).

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In his extraordinary new book The Things that Matter, Edward Mendelson devotes a few sentences of his introduction to a discussion of pronouns. “A book could be written about the way critics use … pronouns,” he comments. There is the “presumptuousness” of the way critics use “we” to suggest like-minded (and therefore right-minded) people; there is “the evasiveness of one“—and, I would add, the implicit universalizing of the critic’s own opinions: “One sees in Middlemarch….” But if those tics and strategies are rejected, “That leaves I and you. Parts of this book are written in the second person singular, but that doesn’t mean I assume you will agree with everything I say about you, just as I would not assume such a thing if we were talking face to face.” One begins this book, then—doesn’t one?—a little startled to hear a literary critic so directly acknowledging his own humanity.

But it is as a human being addressing other human beings that Mendelson writes. In treating seven novels—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts—as explorations of key stages of human life—birth, childhood, growth, marriage, love, parenthood, “the future”—Mendelson assumes that the vast majority of readers of novels over the past two centuries have done well to read fiction in light of their own lives. “This is a book about life as it is interpreted by books”; so goes the first sentence of The Things That Matter, and I think it’s important to note the boldness of that sentence’s main clause: “This is a book about life.”

I call attention to this boldness because I have rarely seen a work of literary criticism that takes such pains to disguise its own ambition, and to do so because it seeks to serve something more important than its own ambition: “the things that matter.” George Steiner noted many years ago that, while we may have to work to compile a list of great readers, it’s easier to come up with a list of great critics because “critics advertise.” Mendelson has no interest in advertising his own aspirations. Only one sentence, also from the introduction, gives away the game: “Taken as a whole, [this book] is designed to provide something on the order of a brief (extremely brief) history of the emotional and moral life of the past two centuries, an inner biography of the world of thought and feeling that came into being in the romantic era of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.”

This goal only makes sense if novels are at or near the heart of “the emotional and moral life of the past two centuries”—but I think it’s fair to say that they are. The rise of the novel from an uncertain, fumbling, and generally despised form of cheap popular entertainment to the central and dominant genre of Western literature, all in little more than a century, is one of the more remarkable events in the history of human sensibility. Over the past two hundred years whole generations of readers have learned to measure themselves according to standards set by their favorite books—something that actually becomes a major theme of novelistic fiction itself, most notably in Emma Bovary’s obsessive reading of Bernardin De Saint-Pierre’s Paul and Virginia, and Anna Karenina’s absorption in an unnamed English novel whose heroine’s life she wishes she could live.

Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina both “identify with” the characters of the books they read, and that identification leads them to self-destruction. Similarly, Mark David Chapman’s identification with Holden Caulfield’s protests against “phoniness,” in J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, led him to murder John Lennon. No wonder, then, that so many teachers and critics, especially on the university level, dismiss such “identifying” as immature and unsophisticated at best, dangerous at worst. But Mendelson argues that “a reader who identifies with the characters in a novel is not reacting in a naïve way that ought to be outgrown or transcended, but is performing one of the central acts of literary understanding.” Moreover, it is the kind of understanding that many great novels positively invite: when Jane Eyre begins the last chapter of her long narration by saying, “Reader, I married him,” she is asking us to test our own moral and emotional compass against hers. She is, in effect, asking whether in her circ*mstances we would have done the same. And it is because readers recognize that the whole novel builds toward this solemn invitation to identify with Jane that the sentence is one of the most famous in English literature. Mendelson’s contention is that if we perform these acts of identification poorly, to our own endangerment or that of others, then the proper response is not to abandon that way of reading but rather to practice it more carefully, with what Virginia Woolf called “passionate attention.” And we will only do this if we believe that in reading these books are also, somehow, reading our lives.

The last word of each chapter in Things That Matter provides the title for the next one: the chapter on Frankenstein ends with the word “childhood,” which is the theme of the chapter on Wuthering Heights; it in turn ends with the word “growth,” which leads to the discussion of Jane Eyre; and so we proceed until we reach the last word of the book, “birth.” These little grace notes serves to indicate (among other things) how the various “stages” of life blend into one another: the opening chapter on “birth” treats not just Victor Frankenstein as an abortive father, but also shows that the very same traits which make it impossible for him to be a father also make it impossible for him to be a husband. Likewise, chapter 2 considers not just its announced theme, “childhood”—especially as it is experienced by Heathcliff and Catherine—but also shows through the same characters that our deepest experiences as children can influence and perhaps even determine our later erotic lives. (Mendelson points out that this same connection between childhood and adult romance is central to Jane Eyre, though Charlotte Brontë’s understanding of the connection directly contradicts her sister Emily’s.)

Thus, while Mendelson has not written a novel, and his style is not novelistic, Things That Matter shares certain structural features of the works it responds to. This is a very good thing, especially since a more mechanical way of approaching the “stages of life” idea would likely produce a terrible book. But Mendelson evidently operates under the assumption that the way great novels work—by the teasing out of subtly woven themes, the shaping of correspondences that never perfectly match, the circling back to people or events who now look different in the light of later experience, and so on—constitutes a set of valid and powerful insights into how we live our lives and how we might live them. Mendelson takes the remarkable step (remarkable for a literary critic, anyway) of treating great writers as though they are really, really intelligent. Not immaculate sages, mind you—he is shrewd and even cutting in his exposure of some of the blind spots of the great George Eliot—but very intelligent people whose stories have counsel for us, counsel worthy of our attention.

This can be seen in small matters and large ones. There is a school of criticism that celebrates “close reading,” but not all of its proponents actually read very carefully. Mendelson is truly a close reader. A lovely illustration of this comes near the end of his chapter on Middlemarch, a book which, as Mendelson notes, places a great emphasis on learning. Indeed, the novel organizes itself around the varieties of human learning, especially to contrast the dry encyclopedism of the old scholar Casaubon to the kind of knowledge—of other people, of history, of the natural world—which Mendelson defines as “the spirit that gives life.” The book’s protagonist, Dorothea Brooke, desires this true live-giving knowledge above all, but because, as Eliot notes near the beginning of the story, Dorothea is both “theoretic” and “rash”—deficient in experience and impulsive—she makes many serious mistakes in her quest for the learning that seems to her necessary. With all this in mind, Mendelson calls our attention to a single sentence near the end of the book, when Dorothea confronts the fact that by marrying Will Ladislaw she will forfeit her inheritance. “And in her last words in the climactic scene where she and Will declare their love, she is still talking about knowledge, this time the domestic knowledge that the wife of a poor man will need: ‘I will learn what everything costs.’ “

A small sentence with vast implications about needful knowledge. But Mendelson also sees the implications of the books’ obviously encompassing themes. For instance, here’s a sentence from the conclusion of the chapter on Jane Eyre, comparing that novel with the masterwork of Charlotte Brontë’s sister Emily: “The unity of Catherine and Heathcliff is so complete that it excludes everyone else. The marriage of Jane and Rochester is so fertile that it embraces others.” (Says Jane at the end of her story, “My Edward and I, then, are happy: and the more so, because those we most love are happy likewise.”)

Throughout his reading of Wuthering Heights, Mendelson shows himself deeply sympathetic to Heathcliff and Catherine; but by the time we reach the end of his treatment of Jane Eyre, we are prepared to see the price that those two famous lovers pay, and that they cause others to pay, for their own experience of union. Mendelson lays out for us the key oppositions of those two great novels—unity versus marriage; completion versus fertility; exclusion versus embrace—and leaves it to us to decide which vision we prefer. But he does not hesitate to affirm his own judgment: “Jane Eyre offers the most profound narrative in English fiction of the ways in which erotic and ethical life are intertwined.”

I don’t agree with all of Mendelson’s opinions. I think he may be too hard on George Eliot at times: at least one instance of ethical shortsightedness he notes in Middlemarch, the “psychological sadism” she directs towards Rosamond Vincy, is revisited and corrected by the compassion she shows to a very similar figure, Gwendolyn Harleth, in her last novel, Daniel Deronda. I also think James Joyce’s Ulysses manifests some of the very virtues Mendelson commends, though quite clearly he does not think so. But agreement or disagreement about particular interpretations aren’t really to the point of the book. Mendelson doesn’t expect me to share each of his verdicts. He expects me to join with him in considering and debating the counsel given by these great books, because this can help us to understand and cultivate “the things that matter.” In this regard the book’s dedication is noteworthy: “For, to, and about James Mendelson.” When a father says that the book he has written about seven novels is for his son, to his son, and about his son, he is saying that he strives for a deep connection between how he reads and how he lives, between the moral passion we ought to bring to books and the moral passion we ought to bring to our closest relationships. In the current intellectual climate, that is a powerful and a challenging affirmation.

Alan Jacobs is professor of English at Wheaton College. He is the author most recently of The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis (HarperSanFrancisco). He’s currently at work on a book about original sin.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Early in my college career, the distinguished literary critic Wayne Booth paid a visit to a class in which I had managed to wangle a seat. The text of the week was Booth’s Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, an attempt to rescue reasoned discourse from the clutches of corrosive modern skepticism. Asked a question about a point on one particular page, Booth borrowed the teaching assistant’s copy to check the exact wording. He looked up in surprise, a slight smile on his face, and said, “I see that the owner of this book has written in the margin, ‘Bullsh*t.’ “

As the graduate student in question turned bright red and the rest of us laughed out loud, I noticed that Booth seemed strangely satisfied. Someone was paying attention, even if they didn’t exactly respond with “the rhetoric of assent.”

I can only hope that Roger Gottlieb is half as indulgent as the late Dr. Booth should he ever come across my copy of his book A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet’s Future. While I believe the marginalia are free of scatology, they do betray a fair amount of frustration. There are few causes in which I would more hope a writer to succeed, and there are few books that strike me as more likely to injure the cause, at least among one pivotal constituency: the evangelical Christians who, if books like Gottlieb’s can be kept from doing too much damage, may yet become the decisive constituency for environmental stewardship in the 21st century.

Gottlieb, a professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and frequent contributor to Tikkun magazine, is the very model of a postmodern progressive thinker. He leans “to the left side of just about any spectrum one could think of” but professes eagerness to engage those well to his right. He is frequently self-deprecating, generous to his likely opponents, and, it would seem, kindly disposed to folk of any flock who might join the environmental cause.

The phenomenon that Gottlieb documents—the flourishing of religiously motivated environmentalism in the past two decades—is both real and supremely important. Gottlieb ably surveys the development of Catholic teaching from Rerum Novarum‘s silence on environmental issues to John Paul II’s ecologically astute questioning of unbridled technology in Redemptor Hominis. He briefly covers the Evangelical Environmental Network’s “What Would Jesus Drive?” campaign and its Evangelical Climate Initiative (of which I was a founding member). He interviews Buddhist monks in Thailand who are “ordaining trees” to the Buddhist priesthood in order to signal the worth of nature, documents a Jewish movement to redefine kosher in light of “the deep well-springs of Jewish wisdom about protecting the earth,” and reports on Unitarians, Episcopalians, Wiccans, Sufis, and Calvinists who have engaged in various sorts of environmental activism. He approvingly quotes Bill McKibben: “Only our religious institutions, among the mainstream organizations of Western, Asian, and indigenous societies, can say with real conviction, and with any chance of an audience, that there is some point to life beyond accumulation.”

This is exactly right, and a reason to take this book seriously. At its best it is a useful compendium of efforts, albeit mostly by those on the liberal wing (if not the radical fringe) of their religious traditions, to take the care of life on earth seriously as a spiritual issue. But where it is most needed, it is likely to make as many enemies as friends for “greener faith.”

For the place where religious reflection about the environment is most needed is among evangelical Protestants in the United States—a bloc whose leaders have been at best indecisive about environmental issues. A column I wrote for Christianity Today in 2005 suggesting that climate change was real, and that prompt action to avert its worst effects was justified, produced more letters than the magazine received for the other five years’ worth of columns combined. All but one were strenuously opposed to my position. The Evangelical Climate Initiative, with 86 principal signatories, has been contested by a smaller group called the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, and intense pressure forced Ted Haggard, then president of the National Association of Evangelicals and a participant in the dialogues that led to the ECI’s statement, to withdraw his personal, and the NAE’s institutional, support of the document.

Evangelical leaders’ concerns about environmental activism, including the current flashpoint of climate change, come down to two basic concerns that have yet to be effectively dispelled. The first is the suspicion that “creation care” is a wedge issue designed to split evangelical voters from their allegiance to the Republican party (a concern not allayed by the roster of blue-state foundations that underwrote the launch of the ECI), or, more broadly, that it represents a left-wing attempt to undermine free enterprise and economic growth. The second concern, which for all the politicization of the evangelical movement is still the more fundamental and gripping one, is that environmentalism is a thinly disguised pantheism that sees the earth as “God’s body” and human beings as merely transient—or parasitic—parts of the evolutionary web of life.

Evangelical environmentalists have worked strenuously to counter these two concerns. The ECI statement and other major evangelical documents on creation care have gone out of their way to affirm human enterprise and have avoided taking a position on the Kyoto Protocol or, indeed, any specific piece of legislation—though this has not stopped critics from the Christian Right from trying to tar the eci with the Kyoto brush. The coining of the phrase “creation care” is accompanied by repeated emphasis on the orthodox bona fides of evangelicals who advocate it, especially their affirmation that the Creator is distinct from the Creation, and that there is nothing about caring for the earth that requires us to worship it. Yet the suspicions remain, making progress agonizingly slow on mobilizing key evangelical leaders—even though 66 percent of evangelicals say that they would support paying up to $180 a year in additional taxes to mitigate climate change.

Alas, Gottlieb’s survey of “greener faith” could not be more calculated to inflame the suspicions of the politically and theologically conservative. When he turns his attention to Christians, at least, Gottlieb displays a touching confidence that even very radical activists are mainstream representatives of the faith, both politically and theologically.

So the Sisters of Earth, “an informal network of some three hundred Catholic nuns,” do not “couch their concerns in leftist rhetoric.” Perish the thought! But, “as politically committed environmentalists, they engage in ‘disrupting shareholder meetings of corporate polluters, contesting the construction of garbage incinerators, and combating suburban sprawls [sic].'” One wonders what they would be doing if they did couch their concerns in leftist rhetoric.

Similarly, Gottlieb, not unaware of the concern that Christians who are too enthusiastic about the environment may have abandoned orthodoxy, hastens to reassure us that the Sisters of Earth still “believe in the Trinity, but now see Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as permeating all of life, including human beings who have different names—or no names at all—for God.” Now, the Sisters of Earth are not responsible for Gottlieb’s summary of their trinitarian theology, but this clumsy identification of the Trinity with “all of life” gives no comfort to those who suspect that religious environmentalism is pantheism pure and simple.

Indeed, nearly every time Gottlieb touches on Christian belief and practice, he strikes a false note—or rather, frames Christian belief in a way that would only be recognizable to a liberal Protestant. In a book that makes a real effort to account for evangelical Christians (including an interview with Cal De Witt, the closest thing evangelicals have today to a Johnny Appleseed), he is still capable of tossing off phrases like “fundamentalist evangelical Christians” (apparently unaware that the two terms describe distinctly different groups) and “believers who still cling to the absolute truth of their faith” (the patronizing phrase “still cling” is, as Richard John Neuhaus would say, a nice touch). More substantively, Gottlieb’s claim that Christians celebrate Easter “as the rebirth not only of Jesus but of all life as well” may describe the cutting edge of “Christian ecotheology” but is hardly representative of orthodox Christian thought.

Gottlieb devotes considerable space to ecotheology in its various forms, from the writing of Thich Nhat Hanh to theologians like Rosemary Radford Reuther, John Cobb, and Thomas Berry. The thread that connects all of these is a radical reconsideration of the relationship of human beings to the natural world, rejecting the Christian (and Jewish) anthropocentrism that grants human beings a special place within the created order. Tellingly, when Gottlieb seeks to rebut the idea that religious environmentalists would gladly “sacrifice people to trees,” he resists framing the rebuttal in anthropocentric terms: “The entire ‘earth community,’ as Larry Rasmussen put it, is the focus of our work. The reasons for valuing nature—as creations of God, as interdependent parts of a system of life, as subjects of their own lives, as unique products of an evolutionary history—apply to people as well.”

Beyond the interesting claim that “nature” is (are?) “subjects of their own lives” (does this apply to dolphins? redwoods? viruses?), the order is salient: any significance that people have is predicated on the significance of all life. Consequently Gottlieb frequently returns to the claim of the “deep ecologists” that the language of stewardship of, let alone dominion over, nature needs to be supplanted by the language of “partnership” and “cooperation.”

Gottlieb is not unaware of the perplexities that this language poses. A particularly telling passage is worth quoting at length:

Yet, many would argue, the very idea of cooperation with rather than domination over nature, though (perhaps) appealing in the abstract, is impossible in practice. Don’t humans need to eat, build houses, and watch TV? Don’t deep ecologists and ecofeminists use antibiotics to treat their kids’ ear infections? And don’t we all use computers and drive our cars? Isn’t all of this talk of cooperating with nature simply an armchair philosophy that evaporates once we leave our armchairs and start to deal with real life?

These questions are not easily answered.

Coming from a professional philosopher, this is a curiously imprecise statement of the argument. The initial three examples—the need to eat, the need for shelter, and the need for television—are incommensurate. Shelter could be procured in ways that might thoroughly “cooperate” with nature (e.g., a return to living in caves or, more feasibly, “energy-neutral” homes). Television is not a “need” in any sense. The reference to antibiotics and ear infections is also a strange choice, given that the use of antibiotics for that purpose is increasingly debated among pediatricians. And as for computers and cars, well, most of the world’s population has neither. One begins to suspect that most of these objections are red herrings, designed to weaken the apparent force of the argument before the answer has even been attempted.

Most of these objections are easily answered. But one is not. To live, human beings must eat, and to call eating “cooperation with rather than domination over nature” is nonsensical. The lion does not cooperate with the gazelle (or, more to the point, vice versa). It is doubtful if we can even say that the cow cooperates with the grass—or if she does, then my misgivings about “cooperation” between deep ecologists and traditional Christians are even more grave than before.

But in the very next sentence, instead of confronting this logical box canyon, Gottlieb seeks to re-frame the problem:

It is interesting, however, that comparable [questions] can be asked of any religion. Can people really love their neighbors as themselves or (harder still) love their enemies? Isn’t it unrealistic to expect people to completely submit to God or overcome all their desires? … In the end, aren’t all grand religious values completely utopian?

Ah, so the challenges of “deep ecology” are simply the same as those faced by traditional religion! I try to cooperate with nature (but still find myself eating plants, and probably swatting mosquitoes); you try to love your enemies (but often fail). This bit of rhetorical jujitsu, from an alleged friend of religion, is jaw-droppingly unfair.

There is nothing fundamentally illogical in people loving their enemies—this has happened, even unto death, perhaps millions of times, inside and outside of Christian history. (Loving one’s neighbor as oneself, admittedly, poses ethical complexities, but it is not prima facie incoherent the way that the deep ecologists’ dilemma is.) The Christian witness, no less than the Muslim one, is that yes, it is possible to completely submit to God—this is what saints do, and the Catholic Church celebrates at least ten thousand of them. As for “overcoming all desires” (not a Christian virtue), according to Buddhism this is exactly what Gautama Buddha did. What our religious traditions ask us to do is certainly not easy, but they do not ask us to do something logically impossible in the terms in which the argument is set. That Gottlieb cannot or will not see this can only be chalked up to his unwillingness to question a thoroughly sacralized nature and a thoroughly naturalized anthropology.

Unfortunately, these turns of thought are all too characteristic. In a commendably careful review of the problem that “ecotheology” has in accounting for human moral reasoning, Gottlieb acknowledges that “the rest of nature does not … [consider] alternatives in the light of reasons—only human beings do. The redwood and the beaver may be our kin, but in terms of the actual practice of moral deliberation, the kinship is rather distant.” But rather than let this significant observation stand, he has to add: “This fact does not make us better, higher, or worthier. It makes us different.”

Why is it so hard for Gottlieb to affirm that there is something precisely better, higher, and worthier about our ability to deliberate morally and to take a responsibility for the redwood and the beaver that they assuredly do not take for us? What would be lost with that affirmation? How much, in terms of motivation to serious environmental stewardship, is gained when we name what is evidently true: that in the whole known universe we are the only species that takes responsibility for the others; the only species that demonstrates the slightest interest in naming, tending, and conserving the others; that indeed is accountable for the stewardship of the others; and the only species that feels guilt (however fitfully and hypocritically) when its stewardship fails?

The only possible reason for entering into the twisting and tortuous attempt to simultaneously charge human beings with moral responsibility while also demurring that we are, after all, merely “different” is, in a word, theological. It is the belief that god is in the redwood and the beaver, and that our refusal to set aside our own sense of being uniquely made in the image of God is at the root of our environmental foolishness. This is a perfectly recognizable position. But it is not compatible with the religious traditions that collectively claim the allegiance of several billion human beings. Why someone interested, even excited, about the prospect of religious engagement with environmental concerns would not recognize how many barriers this erects to any genuine partnership is puzzling at best. A philosopher who cannot recognize that he is in this instance making a contested religious claim, who fails conspicuously both to acknowledge and to defend that claim rather than merely assert it as presumed common ground, is deceiving himself.

This willful imperception leads Gottlieb to at least one memorable display of journalistic foolishness. In the midst of chronicling new religious rituals that account for environmental concerns, Gottlieb singles out a particular Earth Day service developed by the National Council of Churches that was mailed “to each one of the NCC’s 170,000 member congregations.” (Emphasis in original—Gottlieb displays a great faith in the power of bodies like the National Council of Churches to influence the grassroots.) Included in the “Earth Sabbath” litany is a brief quotation: “Chief Seattle said: Whatever we do to the web of life we do to ourselves. God of justice, we confess that we have not done enough to protect the web of life.”

This quotation from “Chief Seattle” meets a rapturous reception from Gottlieb:

It is … noteworthy that this Christian prayer service includes, without apology or caveats, a quote from a Native American…. [T]he inclusion of Chief Seattle says more than ‘Native peoples have some ecological wisdom.’ It affirms, rather, that the words of an indigenous religious leader have enough holiness to be a vehicle for Christian worship…. To welcome the words of a different tradition—one despised for so long—is in itself to make a dramatic statement not just about what Christians think about Native Americans, but what they think about Christianity…. [T]his does not mean that all theological differences disappear. Protestants (even liberal ones!) will not become Native Americans nor will Native Americans become Protestants. It means that now, under the fierce demands of the environmental crisis, what it means to be a Protestant Christian includes the possibility of celebrating the words and insights of someone from a different faith.

It is difficult to know where to begin in commenting on this display of ignorance (and italics). A two-minute Google search will confirm that Chief Seattle never said anything like, “Whatever we do to the web of life we do to ourselves.” That quotation is part of a famous, or infamous, speech put in the mouth of Chief Seattle by a screenwriter named Ted Perry for a film called Home, broadcast in 1972, in which the noble savage sadly foretells the rise, and eventual fall, of the white man’s civilization.

But far more telling is Gottlieb’s interpretation of the spurious quotation’s significance. We should not suppose, Gottlieb says, that with this adoption of the “words of an indigenous religious leader,” all of our “theological differences” will be resolved. After all, in the brave new world of religious environmentalism, “Protestants … will not become Native Americans nor will Native Americans become Protestants.” This conflation of religious with ethnic identity ignores the patent fact that countless Native Americans are Protestants—and even today still convert to Protestant Christianity. More importantly and ludicrously, it flies in the face of one of the best-known facts about Chief Seattle: he was himself an adult convert to Christianity, albeit of the Catholic, not Protestant, variety, and had his children baptized in the faith as well.

Underneath this simpering celebration of diversity is a sorry display of condescension. Native Americans, like all human beings, can in fact choose a new religious tradition rather than being preserved in amber as “indigenous religious leaders,” and they can speak for themselves (the real Chief Seattle was a noted orator, though, alas, none of his speeches were reliably transcribed) rather than having words foisted upon them. For their part, as Gottlieb surely should know, Protestants of the NCC persuasion have been energetically celebrating “the words and insights” of persons of different faiths for quite a while, with such promiscuity that one sometimes wonders if they have any “words and insights” of their own. More to the point, it has never been outside the purview of even very conservative Protestantism to recognize that Native Americans have their own wisdom to offer, as a cursory acquaintance with the life of Puritan missionary David Brainerd will confirm.

To seriously engage the much more complicated narrative of the real Chief Seattle (who, by the way, forthrightly arranged for the sale of large tracts of land to the settlers, putting rather too much faith in their scrupulousness about honoring contracts) might require Gottlieb to confront what so many “progressive” religious thinkers wish to avoid: many of the world’s religions, certainly including orthodox Christianity, make claims about human history, not just human spirituality.

At one point Gottlieb turns his attention to new rituals that might help us understand that “the rest of the earth now forms part of our congregations,” such as the “Council of All Beings,” where “like children, poets, or shamans, speakers engage their capacity for empathic connection beyond the ordinary realms of the human ego,” speaking on behalf of lichen, trout, and even the rainforest. Or the “Cosmic Walk,” “in which participants follow a long rope in a spiral marked with significant moments in our universe’s history,” arriving at one point at this rather arresting item: “1 billion years ago, Organisms begin to eat one another in the predator-prey dance that promotes the vast diversity of life as predators pick off the least healthy members among their prey species.”

“At this point,” Gottlieb acknowledges, “I can almost hear someone muttering that all these rituals are little more than quasi–new age fluff… . How can they even be spoken of in the same breath as taking Holy Communion, celebrating Passover, or honoring Krishna?” Ever able to see both—or three or four—sides of the issue, Gottlieb begins his response, “Although I sympathize with this concern… .” What the muttering objector wants, though, is not sympathy but critical thinking, which unfortunately is not forthcoming:

I believe that what really distinguishes Communion or a seder from the Council of All Beings is simply the familiarity of Communion and a seder to us, their long-standing embeddedness in our culture, and not their content or structure… . Is not a Passover seder, after all, in many ways just like the Cosmic Walk: a ritualized retelling of an ancient story to help us understand where we came from and who we are? … Of course, it is essential that the contents of the ritual in question fit something deep in the structure of our experience and hope. It helps … that Christmas occurs when the nights are long and Easter in the spring.

One notes again Gottlieb’s maddeningly unphilosophical tendency to neglect to respond to his own questions, since devotion to Krishna has, strangely, dropped from view. (In fact, one might very credibly argue that the Council of All Beings and the Cosmic Walk are quite akin to it.) On Gottlieb’s account, the rituals cherished by Christians and Jews are significant essentially because they are familiar—they “fit something deep in the structure of our experience and hope.”

To be sure, some modern Christians will readily agree with Gottlieb, happy to find that they are climbing the same mountain, if by different paths of ascent, as those who attend the Council of All Beings. But to any thoughtful orthodox Christian, this is nonsense. It does not “help” that Christmas or Easter take place at a particular season, especially not when most of the world’s Christians live in the Southern Hemisphere where the seasons are reversed. It does not hurt either. It does not matter, because what we are celebrating at Christmas, Easter, and at every Communion service is an event in human history, not an internal experience of any sort.

The Passover seder is not “in many ways just like the Cosmic Walk.” The reverse is closer to the case, since the Cosmic Walk betrays human beings’ incorrigible need for a redemptive story even when one is unlikely to be found in the dubious arrival of the “predator-prey dance.” The Passover seder is not about a cosmic history that only incidentally, and in all likelihood temporarily, includes us—it is about a moment in the human story when a people are singled out for rescue.

What is signally missing from Gottlieb’s account of religion is history—the possibility that our faith hinges not on subjective (or even shared) experience of a numinous, interior sort, but on the intervention of God in a particular place at a particular time. History, of course, is itself a form of human experience, but it is unlike the experience so prized by Gottlieb in that it is anything but universal. The claim that God has been definitively revealed here, and not there, creates the “scandal of particularity.” It may well not be true—orthodox Christians do not believe it is true in the case of Islam’s particular claims, and many fair-minded Westerners do not believe it is true of Christianity’s particular claims. But such particularity is of the essence of orthodox faith.

Individual experience, on the other hand, is, paradoxically enough, universal, and in this sense all religious roads do lead to the top of one mountain—though whether once we get there we are in the presence of the divine, or merely at a high place, is the point at issue. If nothing human is alien to me, nothing religious is alien to me either—I can recognize and respect the profound experience of smallness and grandeur reported by mystics of all sorts.

Yet the experience of the mystic, the interior journey to awareness, lends itself to one of two conclusions—both of which Gottlieb seems likely to heartily welcome as resources for environmental activism. On the one hand the mystic may experience himself as radically a part of nature, interpenetrating with all other beings and indeed perhaps with the inanimate world as well. For this is one readily accessible truth even to the unmystical among us: we are dust, and to dust we return.

On the other hand, the mystic, especially if located in a pleasant Zen center in sunny California, is equally likely to discover that the divine is located within her—that far from being a vanishingly small part of a grand Everything, she is imbued with an infinitely grand divinity, lifted out of mundane existence into the life of the god within. Either dust, or god—these are the two truly mystical experiences, and they are not as differentiable as one might suppose.

But only historical religion, only the religious tradition set in motion by the Exodus and confirmed by the Incarnation and Resurrection, makes the extraordinary claim that we are “a little lower than the angels”: that we are not merely dust, but we are not God either. Only Incarnation can affirm that God came among us, but only Incarnation insists that God had to choose to dwell among us, that humanity is capable of but not intrinsically possessed of the divine life. And only the historical tradition ultimately makes such a big deal of sin, because only when we enter into relationship with a God who is outside of us and greater than us, and begin to try to trust that God in the midst of history, do we discover—as Israel did in the desert of Sinai, as Peter and the rest of the Twelve did in the garden of Gethsemane—the depth of our faithlessness.

It may seem that an environmental crisis which is universal by definition requires a religiosity that is freed of the scandal of particularity. But the stubborn truth is that in the United States at least, the traditions that “still cling to the absolute truth of their faith”—for “absolute” I would much prefer the term “historical”—are the ones that are thriving. Furthermore, as Gottlieb has the clarity to note at one point, the liberal religious traditions that seem so hospitable to environmentalism bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the very consumerism that environmentalism must overcome, affirming as they are of an endless search for the sacralized self set free from the constraints of tradition—which is another way to say, from history.

Elsewhere there are more prosaic, yet equally troubling, gaps in Gottlieb’s argument. His reading of our current economic and environmental situation is incorrigibly pessimistic. “Unless we live in California or Florida, the vast majority of our food comes from hundreds or thousands of miles away, most of it nearly tasteless, laced with additives, or genetically engineered.” No doubt such food is the only practical option for some Americans, especially those living in the grocery-store-deprived inner cities, but any other urban or suburban American who chooses such a diet is doing so of their own accord. The increasing availability of tasty, non-additive-enhanced, local food in even the most pedestrian suburban supermarket is entirely a development of the last twenty years. Meaning no disrespect to my parents’ cooking, my children and I (and for that matter, my own parents today) have access to vastly more tasty, non-processed food than I remember eating as a child in the 1970s. Have these developments completely escaped Gottlieb’s notice? Has he not been to Trader Joe’s?

“Even if pollution diminishes, the unending multiplication of buildings, roads, and commodities is likely to leave little room for anything else on this earth.” Yet much of what advanced economies produce—notably, information—takes up little or no space. Nor does Gottlieb seem to be able to imagine that human beings might, in the long run, choose density rather than sprawl, come to prefer infill development to greenfield development, and reach a natural limit both in population numbers and in appetite for material goods—all without the global economy returning to a steady state.

“Capitalism produces dazzling technology and wealth for some, while the rest languish in social dislocation and brutal deprivation.” There is surely truth in this, but how can Gottlieb not at least acknowledge the extraordinary progress in reducing absolute poverty in the last several decades—from 38 percent of the world’s population in 1970 to 19 percent in 2000? (A graphical tour of the progress of world development, which shatters many assumptions while also driving home the ongoing inequities within and between nations, is readily available on Hans Rosling’s UN-funded website gapminder.com.) Has he not contemplated the hopeful option of “leapfrog” technologies whereby poor nations can adopt the innovations of advanced economies without having to retrace every (often environmentally destructive) intermediate step? Does he have no vision for responsible economic growth, given that if we simply spread the world’s current gdp evenly around, we would all enjoy the standard of living of today’s Bulgaria ($9,500 per capita)? The glaring absence of any serious consideration of these factors betrays, again, a loose touch with the particularities of history and a preference for a grand, if vague, spiritual vision—to which, one might even say, Gottlieb “still clings” while the rest of us are wrestling with a global situation that seems too complex for pious platitudes.

There is another way.

There is an environmentalism that is rooted in historical faith—that indeed is modeled on the life of an historical human being who modeled both feasting and fasting, abundance that offended the ascetic and simplicity that challenged the affluent. This environmentalism is agnostic about our market economies, recognizing that on past form they are likely to foster innovation, relieve poverty, and solve many of our worst problems, while not expecting them to deliver us a life without suffering and sacrifice, nor granting them impunity from their consequences for our descendants. This environmentalism affirms the dignity, uniqueness, and accountability of humanity and thus can motivate serious stewardship without the circularity and contortions of ecotheology’s self-defeating pantheism.

And fortunately, several recent books articulate exactly this kind of environmentalism, and are likely to be remembered as the salvos that awakened a sleepy and complacent American evangelicalism to its responsibility for God’s good earth. Reviewing them is a far more encouraging task, which I will undertake in this magazine’s next issue. Future scholars may appreciate Gottlieb’s survey of religious environmentalism, for all its limitations both as reportage and as philosophy. But let us hope that among environmentally concerned Christians, and even more so among their fellow pilgrims who are skeptical of environmentalism, it will be quickly forgotten.

Andy Crouch is editorial director of The Christian Vision Project and executive producer of the documentary series intersect|culture.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

As a former emergency room physician, how could I resist an invitation to review a book with “fractured” in the title? When I served as chief of the medical staff and director of emergency services, my job was to put people back together. But after years of practicing medicine, I felt like I was straightening deck chairs on the Titanic while the whole ship was going down. My interaction with 30,000 patients supplied ample evidence of a world made toxic by the stress of too much—too much soot in the air causing asthma attacks to escalate; too many chemicals in the environment, doubling our cancer rates; too many people on the planet living unsustainable, stress-laden lives. So I quit my job and started writing, preaching, and speaking full-time about caring for the created earth, based on my faith as an evangelical Christian.

Perhaps the most controversial issue that I talk about is population. Moral, intelligent, well-intentioned people hold sharply conflicting views on the population issue—an issue that is at the very crux of our environmental crisis. That is why the chapter on population in Allan Carlson’s book Fractured Generations, though faulty in its conclusions, strikes me as worthy of discussion.

Fractured Generations is a book devoted to family policy issues. Carlson limits himself to one major issue per chapter, and ends each discussion with a list of public policy suggestions. I find myself agreeing with much of the reasoning in this well-researched book. My major source of disagreement with Carlson lies in Chapter 2, “Recrafting American Population Policy for a Depopulating World.” Carlson tells us that many Western countries have either a nearly flat or slightly negative level of population growth, and that the United States, though still growing, may soon suffer the same future. He warns of a coming “surfeit of retirees” and an aging workforce that cannot compete on an international level.

In medical school, we were required to take eight semesters of statistics courses. Here’s one statistic that no one argues with: the population of the United States has just reached the 300 million mark. At our present rate of growth, our population will reach 600 million in seventy years and one billion in a hundred years. And yet Carlson asserts that immediate policy steps must be taken to promote “greater fecundity” because “the demographic problem facing the twenty-first century is depopulation, not overpopulation.”

Even if we were in danger of “depopulating,” I disagree with Carlson’s economic conclusions. He creates a false dichotomy when he implies that a sub-replacement rate of population growth will lead to dire monetary problems. If it’s the workforce he’s worried about, then all we have to do is open our borders. Countries that once depended on immigration for economic growth have slammed shut their doors. The rest of the world has more than enough people to meet the labor requirements of Western nations.

Indeed, the carrying capacity of the earth is a global issue, not a national one. If the children born between 2000 and 2005 were gathered on one island, that island would immediately be named the third most populous country in the world. On the flip side, not one island or acre of land has or can be added to this planet.

As I travel to speak with audiences about faith and the environment, I can see for myself the effects of population growth. In my lifetime, the world’s population has doubled. The fields behind my boyhood home have sprouted “Woodfield Estates.” Two-lane country roads are now six-lane highways. The streets of every major suburb are lined with cloned mega-box stores and chain-linked restaurants. Cities everywhere are becoming progressively more congested. This holds true around the globe.

When there is a problem I feel compelled to examine, I turn to the Bible for answers. The Bible devotes an entire book to census issues. In the book of Numbers, Moses records a census of the Hebrew population. Two thousand years elapsed between the time of Abraham and Jesus. During that time, the population grew steadily. If the human population continued to increase at the rate it did then, our current global census would be one billion. Instead, we have 6.5 billion.

What happened? The rate of population growth has changed because we—particularly those of us in the field of medicine—have fiddled with the limits imposed on us by nature. We have prolonged life, thus prolonging the length of each generation. By making three and four generations overlap, we have increased the total population of the earth.

One way of visualizing the rate of population growth is to take all of mankind’s history and place it on a 12-month “Big Calendar of History.” January 1 stands for the year 8000 BC. Each “day” represents twenty-seven years. December 31 on the Big Calendar of History represents ad 2000. Some important “days” are circled. In July, people start writing, building libraries, and using iron tools. In September, Christ lives, dies, and is resurrected. December 24 is a big day. By now 98 percent of all human history has passed. On this day, the Census Bureau throws a party. Mankind has reached the one billion mark. On the 29th of December, we reach two billion. We add another billion on the 30th, and during the 31st we add a billion in the morning, another billion in the afternoon, and another billion before midnight.

If we continue at our current growth rate, placing a check on the calendar each time we add a billion more to the census, January of the next “Big Calendar Year” will have sixty million check marks. This means that there will be sixty million billion people on the earth by the month’s end, or ten people for every square foot of earth.

According to Carlson, the real reason for smaller families in Western countries is the rejection of Christian values. In fact, Carlson goes on to claim that religion is the number-one factor in determining birth rates, since religious people will, he assumes, desire large families and eschew the use of contraception. And Carlson is right when he says that people are having fewer children for selfish reasons. Declining birth rates are, in large part, the result of people turning away from Christian virtues like sacrifice, long-term commitment, altruism, and responsibility.

He is wrong, however, in his implicit assumption that everyone who had large families in the past was doing so out of obedience to Christian teaching. Human nature hasn’t changed. Advances in medicine have simply given people new means of exercising their selfishness—or altruism—through contraception.

Is the use of contraception against Christian teaching? I have heard many versions of this argument, but they all boil down to the same thing: Contraception is against God’s law, since it interferes with the created purpose of sexual intercourse. In short, contraception is unnatural.

I agree that contraception runs counter to “nature,” and that science, by enabling people to engage in sex without the possibility of pregnancy, has altered the natural constraints within which previous generations of humanity have lived and died. But then, if we’re being fair about this, science has also provided us with a number of decidedly “unnatural” ways to cheat death and prolong life. Indeed, our natural birth rate would not be a problem were it not for our current “unnatural” death rate. Why should we as Christians choose to accept what medicine can do to prolong life but abhor what can be done to prevent conception?

Throughout the chapter, Carlson seems intent on proving that underpopulation is real, and that overpopulation is a lie invented by social engineers to advance their agenda. The implication is that the concepts are mutually exclusive: either underpopulation is happening and overpopulation is a myth, or vice-versa. If we’re just looking at the words themselves, this certainly seems to make sense. However, a little examination of what we actually mean when we say “overpopulation” and “underpopulation” reveals that the two terms inhabit different realms.

Overpopulation occurs when the human population exceeds the resources necessary for each person to have a good life. Underpopulation, in Carlson’s terms, occurs when a country’s population becomes too small for that country to maintain its economy in its current form. Underpopulation is an economic problem for specific countries. Overpopulation is a problem for the whole human race—a global issue.

Many of Carlson’s claims regarding underpopulation are correct. There are a number of countries in the world—including virtually all of Europe, as well as Russia and Japan—that do not have a fertility rate necessary to sustain their current populations. And it is true that this may cause some short-term economic instability. But on a global scale, the problem isn’t underpopulation, it’s overpopulation. As noted earlier, any of the countries that have a static or shrinking population need only open their borders to immigration if they want to grow their population. There is no global shortage of people.

There is, however, a global shortage of the things necessary for each and every person on the planet to live a good life. When I say “good life,” I don’t mean a life lived according to the current North American standard; I mean a life that is good in the way that God intended it to be. Many of us go about our daily lives without once seeing God’s creation unmarred by human hands. A growing global population will mean more human destruction of creation.

From an economic standpoint, there are ample resources to support a growing global population. But from an environmental standpoint, there are too many people consuming too much of the planet’s resources. I don’t want my grandchildren to live in Tokyo-style apartments in cities that cover thousands of square miles.

There can be little doubt that our environment is already suffering terribly from the selfish choices of humankind—indeed, from our lack of commitment, altruism, sacrifice, and responsibility. The lifestyle of the richest people on the planet—Westerners, mostly, though they have a growing number of counterparts elsewhere—is environmentally unsustainable. We already produce more waste, both in terms of landfill mass and in terms of chemicals, than we know how to deal with. More human beings and an ever-improving planetary economy will only exacerbate these problems.

As Carlson says, it all comes down to Christian virtue. Should I choose to have a large family and add even more people to a crowded planet? The Population Resource Board estimates that more that 106 billion human beings have been born since God issued the commandment to “be fruitful and multiply.” I think that we can safely count “be fruitful and multiply” among the few divine commands that we have fulfilled. But we must not forget that this commandment applies to every one of God’s creatures, not humans to the exclusion of all else. We are to be good stewards, not exterminators.

God has also given us another commandment—we are to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. I agree with Carlson that large families are preferable for a number of moral and economic, not to mention personal, reasons, but I believe that the Golden Rule trumps all other considerations. The suffering and the terrible quality of life that result from unchecked global population growth is more important than my desire for a large family, or my country’s continued economic growth.

In my years as an emergency room physician, I saw thousands of people suffering from humanity’s irresponsible treatment of the environment. How many more thousands of children must die from asthma before we recognize that air pollution is a killer? How many more million-dollar cancer centers do we need to build before we understand that prevention, not “running for the cure,” is the answer?

The human race has a lot of progress to make before we can be considered good stewards of God’s creation. I can all too easily imagine the catastrophic destruction that would result if every one of the 6.5 billion people on earth began to live like most Americans. My prayer is that these disasters will stay imaginary, and that my children and grandchildren will live in a world where every living person can drink clean water, breathe fresh air, and walk through unblemished forests.

My prayer is that God will act on the hearts of his people and help them to see that sacrifice is required if we are to live according to his plan. We can’t keep using coal and gasoline at the current rate, or treating God’s creation like a toxic waste dump. If we are serious about loving our neighbors, you and I cannot keep behaving much of the time as though we were the only people on the planet.

J. Matthew Sleeth is the author of Serve God, Save the Planet: A Christian Call to Action (Chelsea Green), coming in April in paperback from Zondervan.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.