It is impossible to choose or join a tradition and ever participate in it in the same way as you do the tradition you find yourself a part of. Your second language can never become your first language. There is no undoing the grammars of consciousness you inherit from childhood. Your inherited tradition will never leave you, even if you leave it. […]
In separating myself from my tradition I became aware of it, and the moment of separation is indelible. To know and be aware of one’s tradition is to be at least one degree removed from it—to have a knowledge apart from it rather than knowledge as a part of it. It is in fact to be in possession of two modes of knowledge with different objects: tradition as such and the truth that the tradition hands down. Knowledge apart from tradition can be experienced as either liberation or loss, or both at once, but the knowledge cannot be expunged. Knowledge apart from tradition is a knowledge that comes at the price of pure inhabitation. It breaks the enchantment, makes visible the invisible.
Once visible, aspects of traditions and the forms of knowledge they represent can be distinguished, categorized, and classified—religious, ethnic, intellectual, familial. But the various knowledges of tradition are abstractions. They all share the common elements of remembering, reconstituting, repetition, identity, belonging, preservation, handing on. In the shape of a human life the lines between them cannot be easily drawn. Even if theoretically distinguishable, they are near inextricable in experience. It might be the work of a life to sort them out.
It is my suspicion that this untangling was not always so difficult—nor particularly necessary. Prior to the advent of what we too easily call modernity, one could examine a tradition and inhabit it in a way that is now impossible. Or, at least, what our ancient forebears did with native intelligence we achieve only with great effort. Our distance from ourselves is a historical novelty. In the modern world, to examine a tradition is to assume a sort of objectivity, a mastery over it that precludes inhabitation. In the pursuit of absolute knowledge, some things that should not have been separated were separated, and thereafter it became necessary, in a sense, to choose. Once knowledge as a part of its object has been separated from knowledge apart from it, it is impossible to reintegrate them, even if you want to. […]
I have spent the better part of my adult life trying without success to extricate myself from my tradition, arranging and rearranging my mental furniture, trundling it from one space to the next in the many-roomed mansion of the Christian faith. But I am mired and immobilized by a tradition of blood and piety deeper than intellect or assent, one I know and sense and react to below the threshold of consciousness. I can only try to catch up to it in my waking mind. And so it betrays my attempts to leave. […]
As a child riding with my parents out to my grandparents’ farm, I noticed that the trees which manage to grow in open land, away from other trees or from a water source, often stoop permanently northward, shaped by the relentless summer wind. The branches and leaves on the northern side, away from the hot blasts of air, grow lush and full and green. The southern side languishes, pale and sparse. These trees have a kind of desolate beauty, setting themselves up in defiance of the very forces that give them their character and their form. I could never really decide whether I liked them.
“let him beware”
All first-hand experience is valuable, and he who has given up looking for it will one day find—that he lacks what he needs: a closed mind is a weakness, and he who approaches persons or painting or poetry without the youthful ambition to learn a new language and so gain access to someone else’s perspective on life, let him beware.
The mathematical, physical, biological, sociological, and psychological sciences reveal nothing but necessities and determinisms on all sides. As a matter of fact, reality is itself a combination of determinisms, and freedom consists in overcoming and transcending these determinisms. Freedom is completely without meaning unless it is related to necessity, unless it represents victory over necessity. To say that freedom is graven in the nature of man, is to say that man is free because he obeys his nature, or, to put it another way, because he is conditioned by his nature. This is nonsense. We must not think of the problem in terms of a choice between being determined and being free. We must look at it dialectically, and say that man is indeed determined, but that it is open to him to overcome necessity, and that this act is freedom. Freedom is not static but dynamic; not a vested interest, but a prize continually to be won. The moment man stops and resigns himself, he becomes subject to determinism. He is most enslaved when he thinks he is comfortably settled in freedom.
“their desperate search for a way to heal themselves”
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Thus, Nadezhda Mandelstam, in 1973 can write,
Cézanne was not in the least concerned about endowing his work with a specifically French character. In the Russian icon and in Rublev we see the qualities of the grand European tradition, with Russia, the land and the people, showing through them. Nationalism is at a lower level of consciousness. When it comes to the forefront, crowding out fundamentals, it is a sign not of health but of sickness; not of depth but of shallowness.
And yet, “Christian conservatives” in 2022 can still write statements like National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles, with opening lines like this:
We are citizens of Western nations who have watched with alarm as the traditional beliefs, institutions, and liberties underpinning life in the countries we love have been progressively undermined and overthrown.
We see the tradition of independent, self-governed nations as the foundation for restoring a proper public orientation toward patriotism and courage, honor and loyalty, religion and wisdom, congregation and family, man and woman, the sabbath and the sacred, and reason and justice. We are conservatives because we see such virtues as essential to sustaining our civilization. We see such a restoration as the prerequisite for recovering and maintaining our freedom, security, and prosperity.
We emphasize the idea of the nation because we see a world of independent nations—each pursuing its own national interests and upholding national traditions that are its own—as the only genuine alternative to universalist ideologies now seeking to impose a homogenizing, locality-destroying imperium over the entire globe.
Fortunately, there are at least a few who can still respond appropriately.
An Open Letter Responding to the NatCon “Statement of Principles”:
In the end the National Conservative statement is neither conservative nor Christian. As critics of liberalism from both Left and Right, we must reject it. We acknowledge the importance of national cultures. We recognise the rightful place of the nation acting in defence of the common good on behalf of its citizens. But we cannot accept the idea that to fight globalisation we must uncritically embrace the nation-state as the one true political form, or the most complete community; or that the best good we can aim for is nation-states re-armed against each other, seeking their own interests in perpetual implied conflict.
We the undersigned uphold the universal principles that underwrite nations, the natural law that is written on the heart of every man and woman in every nation, and the spirit of international friendship and charity that binds us together.
I think those universal principles mentioned in that past paragraph are close to the fundamentals that Nadezhda Mandelstam had in mind. She had the “nationalists” of her day pegged no less than today’s “Christian conservatives.” The willful blindness of it all is eerie, and sobering:
…there was something in their mentality that prepared the way for the debacle to come. . . . thus indulging a veiled cult of power in their desperate search for a way to heal themselves.
faithful bemusement
Alan Jacobs, on the passing of his friend Fred Buechner:
Fred was one of the great prose stylists of his era, and while I don’t write like him — I don’t have the skill, and in any case the sorts of things that I write about and the ways that I write about them demand a different style than he developed — I’ve learned a great deal about the writing of prose from him. He made me think about prose in a different way than I ever had before, and if I have ever managed to write well, I think I owe a lot of that success to Fred.
But the most important lessons that I learned from Fred, lessons I’m still learning from him, arise from his temperament as a Christian. Not his beliefs, specifically, but his manner of approaching God and approaching the world. It was open-minded, to be sure, but more than that it was open-hearted, and continually aware of the ways that the world, like the Fear who made the world, can both hurt us and bless us. (He and I shared a great love for the passage in Anna Karenina in which Kitty gives birth to her first child and Levin, the new father, immediately thinks: Now the world has so many more ways to hurt me.) Fred was always fascinated by the many ways the God who loves us can use both the wounds and the blessings to form and shape our very being. Fred manifested – and in some ways this is even more evident from his personality than from his writing – a kind of gently ironic but faithful and hopeful bemusement. It’s very hard to describe, but I found it enormously winning, and the absence of it from the world is I think a real loss.
“A gently ironic but faithful and hopeful bemusement.” I think that gets right at the “sense” of Buechner’s writing that I mentioned before. So many felt it. It’s very fitting that no one can quite describe it.
stirring numbed and dormant spirits
William Carlos Williams (New York City, 1955):
My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
Hear me out
for I too am concerned
and every man
who wants to die at peace in his bed
besides.
Nadezhda Mandelstam (Moscow, 1973):
The great mass of people thus prefer to glide over the the surface of reality, always shirking the effort of trying to understand it.
One of the most brilliant men in the history of mankind once said that as soon as thought dries up, it is replaced by words. A word is too easily transformed from a meaningful sign into a mere signal, and a group of words into an empty formula, bereft even of the sense such things have in magic. We begin to exchange set phrases, not noticing that all living meaning has gone from them. Poor, trembling creatures—we don’t know what meaning is; it has vanished from a world in which there is no room any more for the Logos. It will return only if and when people come to their senses and recall that man must answer for everything, particularly for his own soul.
But with all this, whatever his quality, the reader is the final arbiter, and it is for him that I kept M.’s poetry and it is to him that I have handed it over. And now, in this long period we are presently living through, a curious process is taking place: people casually leaf through a volume of poetry and, scarcely aware of what is happening, gradually soak it in, until it stirs their numbed and dormant spirits, waking them up and itself coming to life again as it revivifies those it touches. It is a process of diffusion, of interpenetration, by which at least some people are brought back to their senses and given the strength to shake off their accursed inertia. I do not know how it is elsewhere, but here, in this country, poetry is a healing, life-giving thing, and people have not lost the gift of being able to drink of its inner strength. People can be killed for poetry here—a sign of unparalleled respect—because they are still capable of living by it. If I am right about this, if the verse I have preserved is of some use to people, then my life has not been wasted and I have done what I had to do both for the man who was my other self and for all those people whose humane, that is, human instincts are roused by poetry. If this is so, it means that I probably had a preordained task to fulfill and that I have correctly understood it.
one of these is not like the other
I don’t often disagree with David French—he is, in fact, one of the people who keep me sane. But his latest Sunday newsletter says this about the two parties:
Again, remember that both of these coalitions are chock-full of Christians. It is not the case (at least not yet) that America has one religious party and one secular party. The mutual loathing you see comes from people who could recite every syllable of the Apostles’ Creed side-by-side and believe wholeheartedly in the divine inspiration of scripture.
Let’s put aside the fact that there are no more than twelve right-wing Christians in the entire country who can recite the Apostle’s Creed.
Are the two sides chock-full of Christians? Absolutely. Does the secular faction of the Democratic party often forget and overlook its (largely non-white) religious base? Absolutely. But everything French goes on to describe in his newsletter applies without question to the Republican party’s (largely white) religious base. A much better case would have to be made—and he makes no case at all—to show that the “mutual hatred” from the Left stems from its non-white religious members. I don’t think French would hold on to this statement very tightly, but why the equivalence at all?
I get that both sides of the political isle—as a whole!—do a wonderful job of maintaining a mutually despising feedback loop. And I’m not saying that the Left—religious or not, non-white or otherwise—hasn’t earned a great deal of scorn. But as far as I can see, the Right, especially in its religious elements, has earned every last drop of its closed-minded, dishonest, immoral, unintelligent, and lazy reputation. Its house is entirely corrupt, and that is no one’s fault but that of its own members.
Buechner
Frederick Buechner died last week. I can probably say along with many others that I am a Christian still because of him. As Russell Moore so rightly describes him and his writing, he is one of the authors “who kept me Christian, who upended the way I think or feel about everything.” Or, as Justin Ariel Bailey puts it,
He was not interested in getting me to question my belief. Whatever he was trying to do, it didn’t feel like deconstruction.
If he challenged my unexamined certainties, he did so gently, by painting more beautiful pictures of the life of faith. He wrote so honestly about how it feels to be human: the loneliness, the confusion, the clumsy struggle to receive the love we are given or to give love in a way that can be received.
That was Buechner’s special ministry—saying the quiet part out loud. Giving language to the inarticulate murmurings of the heart. Speaking what we all felt rather than what we were supposed to say. Teaching us to tell the truth.
But what Buechner did better than almost anyone was holding the door ajar for grace to come bursting in, when it is least expected and least deserved.
Given how little of him I have read, I think it’s fair to say that few people have had a more disproportionate effect on me. Reading various profiles during the week, I was constantly reminded of the sense of his writing, something that you can catch much better than you can explain—“a light unutterable“. As Julie Mullins wrote, his legacy is a “testimony to an understated kind of faith.” All the profiles of him I’ve seen have caught this too, but what I think I enjoyed reading the most this week is Philip Yancey’s 1997 profile of Buechner in Books and Culture:
At times Buechner has been tempted to interpret his conversion experience in Freudian terms as a search for a missing father, or in existentialist terms as a self-validating response to anxiety and failure. He resists that temptation. Instead, he sees in it an exemplar of the “crazy, holy grace” that wells up from time to time “through flaws and fissures in the bedrock harshness of things.” As Buechner has noted, many modern writers have plumbed the depths of despair in a world where God seems largely absent, but few have tried to tackle the reality of what salvation, of what God’s presence, might mean.
In his own writing, Buechner has never forgotten that Christ was crowned in the presence of laughter. Beyond the shadows in which we live and move there lies, in a phrase from Tolkien he often quotes, “joy beyond the walls of the world more poignant than grief.” Buechner writes of a magic kingdom, like Oz, of an end to our weary journey, of a home that will heal at last the homesickness that marks our days. “I have been spared the deep, visceral look into the abyss,” Buechner says. “Perhaps God indeed saves his deepest silence for his saints, and if so I do not merit that silence. I have intellectual doubts, of course. But as John Updike put it, if there is no God then the universe is a freak show, and I do not experience it as a freak show. Though I have had neither the maleficent nor the beatific vision, I have heard whispers from the wings of the stage.”
bleak, by specific definition
[T]o my Republican colleagues, who are defending the indefensible: there will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.
In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our Republic than Donald Trump.
– Dick Cheney
I think Liz Cheney’s phrasing was more on point than her father’s. Maybe the way to say it is this: Donald Trump is and has always been a threat to all things rational and good. That is his brand, his life’s message. (If that is news to you, or if you have even one bone in your body that resists the truth of that statement, you are beyond help.) But, if it is not true already, it is nearly true, that in our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been a political party that is a greater threat to our Republic than the current Republican Party—and the religious, Christian core of it is its most dangerous faction.
The irony of it all could not be thicker. For all the shit-talk from across the isle, the Democratic Party, as David Brooks put it, “is an institution that still practices coalition politics, that serves as a vehicle for the diverse interests and ideas in society to filter up into legislation, that plays by the rules of the game, that believes in rule of law. Right now, it is the only major party that does that.”
There has probably never been a time when parties were not cult-afflicted. The current Democratic Party is no exception. But the Republican Party at this point is pure cult-of-personality, cult-of-grievance. Its insanity and stupidity can not possibly be overstated.
fidelity as hope
Phil Christman, with a passing view of David Bentley Hart’s new book:
Another thing that Hart’s system can’t give us is “an unimpeachable claim to Christian orthodoxy as many people define it.” His new Tradition and Apocalypse answers this charge the only way one can: By saying, in effect, “Well, so’s your mother.” No religious tradition is particularly stable. No version of Christianity doesn’t reject a whole lot of other ones. Our record of the early church’s beliefs and behavior, even if we just confine ourselves to what we find in the New Testament, shows a group of people whose opinions sit at every point on every chart, about very important things. … What else would one expect? These people had just watched history get invaded by God. He unfurled himself around it … and … died. Then he came back, ate fish, and flew away.
The attempt to keep fidelity with such a bizarre event will surely involve as much disagreement and confusion as unity “Faith,” [Hart] writes, “is not the assurance that one possesses the fullness of truth, but is rather a fidelity to the future disclosure of the full meaning of what little one already knows.” Efforts to reach “back through the welter of contingent events to some initial and pure impulse whose subsequent unfolding could then be followed” are doomed to failure, however interesting they may be. We are looking forward to love’s full disclosure, at the end of time, and for now we know love only – how else? – as through a glass darkly.
I would only clarify, for my own sake, at least, that those efforts to “reach back and follow” are doomed not to failure but to strife, friction. Understanding them this way can produce much harmony and joy in the midst of the strife—in the midst of the friction-that-is-not-failure.
seriously
What happens next? The ousted ruler and his representatives claim that this affront to his dignity is really an insult to all of his supporters. Like followers of Hugo Chavez or Manuel Ortega, they insist that only by returning their leader in internal exile to power can they avenge this travesty and purge the government of these enemies of the people.
That’s the argument raging like a religious awakening across much of the right this week. Once Trump announces he’s running for president, Mike Huckabee insists, “We need to rally around him and simply say, ‘He is the candidate.’ He will be re-elected. That’s because he’s the only candidate who’ll have the guts to take on this incredibly corrupt machine. We must put him back in and let him do this. I’m convinced at this point that this is the only hope for our nation, to get it back to the point where people can believe in it.”
This isn’t an argument against banana republic politics, it is banana republic politics. Let’s put aside any consideration of primaries or policy debates and simply anoint a strong man to redeem our nation, purge corruption, and punish our enemies.
I’ll put it plainly: If your “belief” in our country is so fragile and pathetic that you will lose “hope for our nation” unless Donald Trump is given free reign to cleanse the land of evildoers, then you don’t actually believe in this nation. If your love of country is contingent on your preferred faction being in power, you’ve confused partisanship for patriotism. Taken seriously, all of this banana republic talk is un-American.
I don’t mean it’s a wrong or flawed argument or simply an argument I don’t like—though it is all those things. I mean it is literally an un-American argument because it fundamentally betrays the whole idea of this country. And I’d say this if the claims were made about any politician. …
Presidents are not redeemers, messiahs, incarnations of mystical aspirations, or righteous settlers of seething grievances. They’re not god-kings or the fathers of our American family. They’re politicians elected to do some specific things as the head of one branch of one level of government. They get that job for a limited and defined period of time, and afterward they’re simply citizens.
It’s a source of constant consternation and amazement for me that so many people either don’t understand this or simply pretend not to.
I don’t know for sure which politicians and pundits yammering about our “corrupt regime” are truly ignorant and which are merely duplicitous demagogues chumming the waters with bloody nonsense. But I do know it’s dangerous, because whether they believe it or not, they want millions of people to believe it. […]
If you’re worried about America looking like a banana republic, please don’t tell me that the first president in American history to defecate on the peaceful transfer of power is the antidote to the rot of Third World corruption of our regime. He is the rot.
Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you people?
The entire article behind that Huckabee link is truly astonishing. As someone who once respected Huckabee—for what reasons I’m not sure—I’m beyond comprehending any of it. I can only echo Goldberg’s cry: Seriously, what the FUCK is wrong with you people?!