I doubt anyone in the military believes that, if they disobeyed a flagrantly illegal order, that choice would be anything other than career-ending. So by giving such orders, you drum out people unwilling to obey, and make the remainder dependent on your personal authority for their continued freedom (since the pardon power is the only thing that assures they will be exempt from subsequent prosecution for having committed war crimes).
The political purpose of such an order, meanwhile, is essentially trolling: anyone who raises an objective will be mocked as weak and a loser simply for saying that there are such things as laws and ethical guidelines for behavior. I’ve written before about the gutter Nietzscheanism underlying this phenomenon, and specifically espoused by Hegseth: the belief that reestablishing manliness requires breaking both the law and ethical rules because in our purportedly feminized era one can presume that anyone who cares about such things only does so because he is pussy-whipped. That’s basically the message of Hegseth’s children’s book stunt in a nutshell. If you’re not one of the people who believes this, it should be obvious why it is horrible—and why it’s incredibly ominous if it proves politically effective. Even if you are a person who believes this, though, it should be obvious that, at least in the short term, you’re tossing ethics overboard—which is to say: doing things that you yourself think are wrong—in the service of a larger effort to reshape society.
existence—power—enough
Ironically, “interest” and “interesting” are vaguely boring words compared to words like “passion” or “excitement”. (“Interesting” can even be negative: it’s the euphemism you might deploy about your friend’s terrible choices, or inedible cooking, if you didn’t want to hurt their feelings too much.) But in his book Creating a Life, the Jungian therapist James Hollis makes a powerful case that an interesting life – interesting to you, that is, not necessarily to other people – might in fact be the highest and best goal to which any of us could aspire. His own specialism of psychotherapy, he writes,
…will not heal you, make your problems go away or make your life work out. It will, quite simply, make your life more interesting. You will come to more and more complex riddles wrapped within yourself and your relationships. This claim seems small potatoes to the anxious consumer world, but it is an immense gift, a stupendous contribution. Think of it: your own life might become more interesting to you! Consciousness is the gift, and that is the best it gets.
Perhaps the reason the idea of an “interesting” life feels like a cop-out – compared to, say, a wildly successful or influential or joyful one – is that it lacks any sense of domination or conquest. We want to feel as though we were handed the challenge of a human lifetime and that we nailed it, that we grappled with the problem and solved it. Whereas to follow the lead of interestingness is to accept that life isn’t a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had. And that engaging with it as fully as possible, connecting to the aliveness, is its ultimate point.
Not surprising here, Emily Dickinson said it first:
To be alive—is Power—
Existence—in itself—
Without a further function—
Omnipotence—Enough—To be alive—and Will!
‘Tis able as a God—
The Maker—of Ourselves—be what—
Such being Finitude!
The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.Tough-minded men get mushy in their sleep
And break the by-laws any fool can keep;
It is not the convention but the fear
That has a tendency to disappear.The worried efforts of the busy heap,
The dirt, the imprecision, and the beer
Produce a few smart wisecracks every year;
Laugh if you can, but you will have to leap.The clothes that are considered right to wear
Will not be either sensible or cheap,
So long as we consent to live like sheep
And never mention those who disappear.Much can be said for social savior-faire,
But to rejoice when no one else is there
Is even harder than it is to weep;
No one is watching, but you have to leap.A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep
Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear:
Although I love you, you will have to leap;
Our dream of safety has to disappear.
This Thomas Nast cartoon, published in the November 20, 1869 issue of Harper’s Weekly, celebrates the ethnic diversity and envisions the political equality of citizens of the American republic. Joining the Thanksgiving Day feast of hosts Uncle Sam (carving the turkey on the far-right) and Columbia (seated on the far-left) are Americans from all over the world: German, Native American, French, Arab, British, African, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, and Irish. Behind Uncle Sam is a large picture of Castle Garden, the main immigrant depot in the United States, with the inviting label reading “Welcome.” (Located at the foot of Battery Park in southernmost Manhattan, Castle Garden was the primary station for processing immigrants until replaced by Ellis Island in 1890.)
Emily Dickinson 🙂
to escape the coercive hairball
Beneath their talk of education, of unplugging from technology, of having time for creativity and solitude, I detected a desire to be free of forces and agendas: the university’s agenda of “relevance,” the professoriate’s agenda of political mobilization, the market’s agenda of productivity, the internet’s agenda of surveillance and addiction. In short, the whole capitalistic algorithmic ideological hairball of coerced homogeneity. The desire is to not be recruited, to not be instrumentalized, to remain (or become) an individual, to resist regression toward the mean, or meme.
resigned and thankful
We are not our own, any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves; we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We cannot be our own masters. We are God’s property by creation, by redemption, by regeneration. He has a triple claim upon us. Is it not our happiness thus to view the matter? Is it any happiness, or any comfort, to consider that we are our own? It may be thought so by the young and prosperous. These may think it a great thing to have everything, as they suppose, their own way,—-to depend on no one,—to have to think of nothing out of sight,—to be without the irksomeness of continual acknowledgment, continual prayer, continual reference of what they do to the will of another. But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man—-that it is an unnatural state—may do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end. No, we are creatures; and, as being such, we have two duties, to be resigned and to be thankful.
educated, civilized, violent
Nadya Williams, discussing Leah Libresco Sargeant’s book The Dignity of Dependence:
To take the principles Sargeant presents and apply them to war means, ultimately, to confront the continued existence of genocide in our seemingly civilized modern world. The problem is that any one of us, if we were to find ourselves in the wrong part of the world at the wrong time, could be the object of a brutal missile attack or a nuclear bomb or a terrorist group invading a peaceful kibbutz on a holiday morning. It is not only that our own society does not recognize the dignity of the weak. It’s that the weak are considered worthless even today in war zones the world over, deemed good for nothing other than violence and outright destruction. The very attacks on the weak that the Geneva Conventions outlaw are repeatedly violated with no visible consequences for those committing these war crimes—just ask Victoria Amelina, the Ukrainian mother and poet, who sent her son away from Ukraine and became a war crimes investigator in 2022, until she was killed during a bombing of a pizzeria in summer 2023. In wartime, such simple acts as meeting friends for dinner can be deadly.
Virginia Woolf, via Mandy Brown:
Need we collect more facts from history and biography to prove our statement that all attempt to influence the young against war through education they receive at universities must be abandoned? For do they not prove that education, the finest education in the world, does not teach people to hate force, but to use it? Do they not prove that education, far from teaching the educated generosity and magnanimity, makes them on the contrary so anxious to keep their possessions, that “grandeur and power” of which the poet speaks, in their own hands, that they will use not force but much subtler methods than force when they are asked to share them? And are not force and possessiveness very closely connected with war? Of what use then is a university education in influencing people to prevent war? […]
It seems as if there were no progress in the human race, but only repetition. We can almost hear them, if we listen, singing the same old song, ‘Here we go round the mulberry tree, the mulberry tree, the mulberry tree’ and if we add, ‘of property, of property, of property,’ we shall fill in the rhyme without doing violence to the facts.
But we are not here to sing old songs or to fill in missing rhymes. We are here to consider facts. And the facts which we have just extracted from biography seem to prove that the professions have a certain undeniable effect upon the professors. They make the people who practice them possessive, jealous of any infringement on their rights, and highly combative if anyone dares dispute them. Are we not right then in thinking that if we enter the same professions we shall acquire the same qualities? And do not such qualities lead to war? In another century or so if we practise the professions in the same way, shall we not be just as possessive, just as jealous, just as pugnacious, just as positive as to the verdict of God, Nature, Law and Property as these gentlemen are now?
incarnation & the hermeneutics of the second naïveté
Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you?… Praise be to everyone who works to consolidate the reputation of Christian scholarship, which helps to restrain the New Testament, this confounded book which would one, two, three, run us all down if it got loose…
~Søren Kierkegaard~
Someone in a newsletter last week (Elizabeth Oldfield?) pointed to Alan Jacobs’ post on Dorothy Sayers’ The Man Born to be King and W.H. Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio. Sayers and Auden, Jacob’s writes, “were moved to reflect, and reflect very intelligently, on the ways that the Gospel story demands that we understand it both historically and contemporaneously.” (Barbara Reynolds, in her biography of Sayers, said of the broadcast of The Man Born to be King that it “was a great evangelistic undertaking, an unprecedented achievement in religious education and one which has never since been equalled.”)
I need to reread Jacobs’s post, but I wanted immediately to bring Bonhoeffer’s “religionless Christianity” and “nonreligious interpretation” into the conversation.
Bonhoeffer wrote, in a now famous passage, to his godson on the day of his baptism:
You are being baptized today as a Christian. All those great and ancient words of the Christian proclamation will be pronounced over you, and the command of Jesus Christ to baptize will be carried out, without your understanding any of it. But we too are being thrown back all the way to the beginnings of our understanding. What reconciliation and redemption mean, rebirth and Holy Spirit, love for one’s enemies, cross and resurrection, what it means to live in Christ and follow Christ, all that is so difficult and remote that we hardly dare speak of it anymore. In these words and actions handed down to us, we sense something totally new and revolutionary, but we cannot yet grasp it and express it. This is our own fault. Our church has been fighting during these years only for its self-preservation, as if that were an end in itself. It has become incapable of bringing the word of reconciliation and redemption to humankind and to the world. So the words we used before must lose their power, be silenced, and we can be Christians today in only two ways, through prayer and in doing justice among human beings. All Christian thinking, talking, and organizing must be born anew, out of that prayer and action.
Similarly, Sayers, in a letter to Dr. James Welch, wrote “My Lord, the people have forgotten so much. The thing has become to them like a tale that is told. They cannot believe it ever happened.…The people are apathetic, because the story has become unreal, and the priests are in despair how to bring its reality home to them.”
The church, Bonhoeffer continued,
is still being melted and remolded, and every attempt to help it develop prematurely into a powerful organization again will only delay its conversion [Umkehr] and purification. It is not for us to predict the day—but the day will come—when people will once more be called to speak the word of God in such a way that the world is changed and renewed. It will be in a new language, perhaps quite nonreligious language, but liberating and redeeming like Jesus’s language, so that people will be alarmed and yet overcome by its power—the language of a new righteousness and truth, a language proclaiming that God makes peace with humankind and that God’s kingdom is drawing near.
It’s probably very easy both to overstate and to understate what Bonhoeffer had in mind, largely because he wasn’t sure yet himself what he had in mind. (“I’m just working gradually toward the nonreligious interpretation of biblical concepts. I am more able to see what needs to be done than how I can actually do it.”)
But I’m thinking of this again after reading Garrett Green’s essay “Hans Frei and the Hermeneutics of the Second Naïveté,” especially his explication of Frei’s 1976 Greenhoe Lecture at Louisville Seminary. Frei gave the second half of that lecture the title “Interpretation and Devotion: God’s Presence for Us in Jesus Christ,” but he also suggested an alternative title: “Notes on Leaving Things the Way They Are.”
The mistake that so many modern theologians have made is to think that in order to affirm that Jesus Christ is somehow present to us now they must “explain [it] by translating the notion of presence into some explanatory concepts. That is precisely what I think cannot be done, and which I think need not be done. There is, it seems to me, a very ordinary way of talking about the presence of Christ.” The job of Christian theology “is simply to talk about the way Christian language is used by Christians, and to ask if it is being used faithfully” — in other words, whether it is faithful to biblical language and the tradition that flows from the Bible.… This task does not require us “to translate Christian language into a language that will be relevant to our situation.” In fact “the whole metaphor of translation there is misleading.” After all, Frei has demonstrated that at its very heart the Bible “means what it says—so there is no need to translate it; no need to reconceptualize it. There may be a need to redescribe it, but that’s a very different thing.
It’s probably worth remembering that much of Frei’s thought was addressing Liberal Theology. In George Hunsinger’s collection of essays on Frei, the title of Part IV, which opens with Green’s essay, is titled “Postliberal Hermeneutics.” In his Greenhoe Lecture, Frei gave what Green calls one of his best one-liners, in response to death-of-God theology of the 60s: “Well, all right, if Christianity is going to go out (let us assume for a moment that it depends on what we do and not on the grace of God!) it’s had a magnificent history and I’d rather see it go out with an orthodox bang than a liberal whimper.”
Toward the end of the lecture, Frei says this:
I am suggesting there is no need for an explanation. I am suggesting there is no explanation. I am suggesting that there is no problem. I am suggesting that this is precisely the function of Christian language; this is its character, its ordinary use, and, if you will, at the same time its uniqueness: it is both these things …. To try to go to a level underneath them, you see, is precisely what I am saying is wrong, and is precisely where the technical theologians have been wrong. And we need to be released from that verbal and conceptual cramp.
It may sound as though Frei has no place for either Sayers’ or Auden’s (or Bonhoeffer’s) project — to make the story of Christ “real to the listener, even at the cost of some slight shock to the pious,” as Sayers put it in the same letter mentioned above. But, as Jeffrey Stout has also pointed out, the difference Frei has in mind between “translating” and “redescribing” is significant. The point, says Green, was to free the language (and narrative) of theology from the modernizing translators:
Once Frei has liberated Christian language from the prison house of theory, we are able to see it (hear it!) in its proper context—in the everyday life of Christian men and women in the world. The most important legacy of Hans Frei is his call for an end to the academic captivity of Christian theology.
In Jacobs’ post above, he mentions that Sayers’ project with the B.B.C. temporarily fell apart. One of the things that came out of that interruption — though it came after the project had resumed — was something of a writing interlude. The B.B.C. was planning a series of 10-minute talks on the Nicene Creed. Sayers was asked by them to give six talks in the section dealing with the Son of God. Barbara Reynolds points out that this had “the very timely effect of obliging her to scrutinise the theology of the Incarnation before making her presentment the Incarnate in her plays.” (In fact, Reynolds’ chapter on the development of these plays is titled “Incarnation.”)
After the first play had aired, Dr. Welch (“a man of vision, courage, and diplomacy,” said Reynolds) wrote to Sayers:
What [it] has revealed to me quite clearly is that at heart most of us are Arians; we are prepared for Our Lord to be born into the language of the [Authorized Version], or into stained-glass or into paint; what we are not prepared to accept is that He was incarnate. Incarnatus est is a phrase; we bow when we say it; but how many of us are prepared really to believe it? … What has always thrilled me about your plays has been this combination of Christology with a full belief in the Incarnation.
Sayers was certainly concerned with Arianism — she specifically changed the title of her talks on the Nicene Creed from “The Son of God” to “God the Son” for this reason — but her real concern, which endears her to me greatly, was Docetism. In a prior letter to Dr. Welch, written just after she resumed work on the second play, she wrote,
Nobody, not even Jesus, must be allowed to “talk Bible” … [The thing must] be made to appear as real as possible, and above all … Jesus should be presented as a human being and not like a sort of symbolic figure doing nothing but preach in elegant periods, with all the people round Him talking in everyday style. We must avoid, I think, a Docetist Christ, whatever happens — even at the risk of a little loss of formal dignity.
Here’s how Sayers put it in January 1939, in a letter to a critic of her previous B.B.C. play He That Should Come:
forgive me for saying that it is impossible to measure that condescension unless one realises that He was born, not into an allegory, or a devotional tableau, or a Christmas card, with everybody behaving beautifully; but into this confused, coarse, and indifferent world, where people quarrel and swear, and make vulgar jokes and spit on the floor. He was a real person, born in blood and pain like any other child, and dying in blood and pain, like the commonest thief that was ever strung up on the gallows.… We may shrink from the brutal facts of life, but He did not; and that is the measure of His strength and our weakness.
(Doesn’t this just pack that Pauline phrase with so much weight and flexibility: “I became all things to all people.”)
Clearly one of the ways we imitate — praise, honor, reflect — that “vulgar condescension” is with our language and our desire and willingness for The Story to be told and heard, tellable and hearable. As Jacob’s indicates, this is a present task in every age. And as all of the above make clear, it is an orthodox one. So I don’t know about there being, as Bonhoeffer said, some particular day coming when a new language will take hold. The truth of that might hinge on what he meant by, and how right he was about, “the world come of age.” But that’s a thought for another day. Right or not about a day coming, Bonhoeffer closed his letter to his godson with a call to the everyday task, and with a wink to what he called the disciplina arcani:
Until then the Christian cause will be a quiet and hidden one, but there will be people who pray and do justice and wait for God’s own time. May you be one of them, and may it be said of you one day: “The path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day” (Prov. 4:18).