As recently as the early twentieth century, the Aeneid was embraced as a justification of the Roman—and, by extension, any—empire: “a classic vindication of the European world-order,” as one scholar put it. (This position is known among classicists as the “optimistic” interpretation.) The marmoreal perfections of its verse seemed to reflect the grand façades of the Roman state itself: Augustus boasted that he found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.
But in the second half of the last century more and more [“pessimistic”] scholars came to see some of the epic’s most wrenching episodes as attempts to draw attention to the toll that the exercise of imperium inevitably takes. […]
But perhaps we don’t need a translation to drag the Aeneid into the modern era. Maybe it’s always been here, and we’re just looking at it from the wrong angle—or looking for the wrong things. Maybe the inconsistencies in the hero and his poem that have distressed readers and critics—the certainties alternating with doubt, the sudden careening from coolness to high emotion, the poet’s admiring embrace of an empire whose moral offenses he can’t help cataloguing, the optimistic portrait of a great nation rising haunted by a cynical appraisal of Realpolitik at work—aren’t problems of interpretation that we have to solve but, rather, the qualities in which this work’s modernity resides.
This, at any rate, is what was going through my mind one day fifteen years ago, when, I like to think, I finally began to understand the Aeneid. At the time, I was working on a book about the Holocaust, and had spent several years interviewing the few remaining survivors from a small Polish town whose Jewish population had been obliterated by what you could legitimately call an exercise of imperium. As I pressed these elderly people for their memories, I was struck by the similarities in the way they talked: a kind of resigned fatalism, a forlorn acknowledgment that the world they were trying to describe was, in the end, impossible to evoke; strange swings between an almost abnormal detachment when describing unspeakable atrocities and sudden eruptions of ungovernable rage and grief triggered by the most trivial memory.
Months later, when I was back home teaching Greek and Roman classics again, it occurred to me that the difficulties we have with Aeneas and his epic cease to be difficulties once you think of him not as a hero but as a type we’re all too familiar with: a survivor, a person so fractured by the horrors of the past that he can hold himself together only by an unnatural effort of will, someone who has so little of his history left that the only thing that gets him through the present is a numbed sense of duty to a barely discernible future that can justify every kind of deprivation. It would be hard to think of a more modern figure.
Or, indeed, a more modern story. What is the Aeneid about? It is about a tiny band of outcasts, the survivors of a terrible persecution. It is about how these survivors—clinging to a divine assurance that an unknown and faraway land will become their new home—arduously cross the seas, determined to refashion themselves as a new people, a nation of victors rather than victims. It is about how, when they finally get there, they find their new homeland inhabited by locals who have no intention of making way for them. It is about how this geopolitical tragedy generates new wars, wars that will, in turn, trigger further conflicts: bella horrida bella. It is about how such conflicts leave those involved in them morally unrecognizable, even to themselves. This is a story that both the Old and the New Worlds know too well; and Virgil was the first to tell it. Whatever it meant in the past, and however it discomfits the present, the Aeneid has, alas, always anticipated the future.
“not of reciprocity but of nested dependencies”
Leah Libresco Sargeant, in a wonderfully written tribute to, and call for support for, “caring work”:
In [Eva Feder] Kittay’s view, care is never a private matter, something that can be contained in a single dyad or family. Dependency creates a chain of need, which extends out into the wider world. She takes the relationship of mother and child as paradigmatic: “The relation between a needy child and the mother who tends to those needs is analogous to the mother’s own neediness and those who are in a position to meet those needs.” Caring for a child makes the mother more dependent, and gives her a just claim on others, just as the baby has a claim on her.
Kittay terms this framework doulia. She adapts doulia from doula, a person who offers care to a laboring mother. In her broader term, she encompasses “a concept of interdependence that recognizes a relation — not precisely of reciprocity but of nested dependencies — linking those who help and those who require help to give aid to those who cannot help themselves.”
Governmental support can be a response to the claims of doulia. A public, universal benefit recognizes that need is universal and that it does not obey a law of reciprocity. A baby cannot pay back the time and attention he needs from his mother; a mother does not need to earn or recompense the care she receives from others. Instead of clean-cut transactions, there is a circulatory system of care and need, where each gives to the one they can, and receives from the person who cares for them, without concern for balancing the books.
This is the spendthrift logic of the communion of the saints, who know that “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matt 25:40). It is the action of the woman with the alabaster jar, who pours out perfumed oil over the feet of the Lord without calculation. But the economy of grace, drawing on the inexhaustible power and love of God, doesn’t map neatly into the economy of appropriations, bills, and state-run welfare programs. […]
[The current Medicaid] framework of careworker compensation sees payment through a market lens — what would it cost to change someone’s mind about providing care? What does it cost to get them to sell their services to this particular client? The programs are worried about fraud, auditing timesheets, requiring licensing and certifications. These programs are built as though the primary risk is giving money to someone who may not have earned it.
But, in Kittay’s model of doulia, the reason for payment isn’t to persuade a caregiver to provide care. It is to enable them to offer the care they frequently already wish to provide. Compensation is often framed as wiping out altruism. If money changes hands, then the caring doesn’t count the same way it would if it were offered for free, or even at considerable cost.
In his prayer for generosity, St. Ignatius of Loyola asks the Lord to teach him, “to give and not to count the cost; to fight and not to heed the wounds; to toil, and not to seek for rest; to labor, and not to ask for reward.” The labor of uncompensated caregivers, caregivers who are strained past exhaustion, who are consumed and eaten up by their work, can sound like the fruit of this prayer. But St. Ignatius concludes his prayer by specifying the one reward he hopes for, “to know that I am doing your will.”
Although it is admirable when someone makes tremendous sacrifices to care for others, there is always something tragic about it, too. We see the saintly person at the center of the story, disregarding their own needs for the sake of another, but, at the peripheries of the story, there are others passing by, like the priest and the Levite who hurry by the man left broken and bleeding on the side of the road. The Catholic Church recognizes certain lives as embodying “white martyrdom” — the laying down of one’s life not in a single moment of death, but denial of self through poverty or celibacy. The martyr’s witness is always a testimony to God’s goodness, but, as with the “red martyrdom” of those killed for the faith, the actions of the person demanding the sacrifice can be wicked. It is good to serve the poor, it is sinful to impoverish. It is not God’s will for anyone to be neglected or left for dead, whether they are the initial victim of misfortune or someone who, in giving all they have, is newly vulnerable as a result.
We are not called to stand by and admire the white martyrdom of hard charities. We are called to answer need with our own gifts. But too often, our systems of care work presume that they can wring more and more work out of the families of the vulnerable, trusting that they will sacrifice themselves if we hold back our own help.
Sargeant goes on to tell the story of Tina, a 40-year-old teacher who was essentially required by her hospital and insurance company to coordinate the care for her brother with leukemia after his bone marrow transplant—even if she had to quit her job to do it. “Her work was admirable,” Sargeant writes, “as was that of her friends and relatives, but it is hollow to praise her without condemning the hard-hearted system that handed her this cross to carry, and then abandoned her.”
Here’s how she closes:
There is no sacrifice we make out of love for another that God disdains. But when we leave caregivers and their charges without support, we are like the Pharisees, who, Jesus says, “tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them” (Matt 23:4). From the beginning of the Church, the martyrs gave testimony of the depth of their love for God in their willingness to die rather than to renounce Him. We benefit from their witness, but we have no reason to be grateful to their persecutors. Paul addresses this question in his letter to the Romans, “Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means!” (Rom 6:1-2).
Persecution can make visible the love that might have otherwise expressed itself in more hidden ways, but we must learn to see the quiet virtues, rather than rely on sin and suffering to expose these loves to light. In answering the needs of caregivers, in living out Kittay’s vision of doulia, we respond rightly to others’ willingness to become lowly out of love. We honor the willingness to suffer by not demanding sacrifice. Love answers love, and our strengths are given to us only that we might be good stewards in spending them.
an ennobling invitation
How can it be that believers called to radical inclusion are the most hostile to refugees of any group in the United States? How can anyone who serves God’s boundless kingdom of love and generosity ever rally to the political banner “America First”?
That question comes from Michael Gerson at the Washington Post, in an article that almost everyone I respect would like to (and many could) have written. It is the common, basic Christian grievance that cannot be said too many times or in too many ways.
In the present day, the frightening fervor of our politics makes it resemble, and sometimes supplant, the role of religion. And a good portion of Americans have a fatal attraction to the oddest of political messiahs — one whose deception, brutality, lawlessness and bullying were rewarded with the presidency. But so it is, to some extent, with all political messiahs who make their gains by imposing losses on others and measure their influence in increments of domination.
Jesus consciously and constantly rejected this view of power. While accepting the title “Messiah,” He sought to transform its meaning. He gathered no army. He skillfully avoided a political confrontation with Rome. He said little about history’s inevitably decomposing dynasties. He declared instead a struggle of the human heart — and a populist uprising, not in the sense of modern politics, but against established religious authorities. […]
Jesus rejected the role of a political messiah. In the present age, He insisted, the Kingdom of God would not be the product of Jewish nationalism. It would not arrive through militancy and violence, tactics that would contribute only to a cycle of suffering. Instead, God’s kingdom would grow silently, soul by soul, “among you” and “within you,” across every barrier of nation or race — in acts of justice, peacemaking, love, inclusion, meekness, humility and gentleness.
Gerson asks “why so many American evangelicals have rejected the splendor and romance of their calling and settled for the cultural and political resentments.” One answer, as he goes on to point out, is that this rejection of the flow of political tides can be difficult and lonely. But, while it certainly is difficult and lonely, faith isn’t only or even mainly those things. And all of us, whether stuck in the tide or tired of resisting it, can at any moment find in Jesus a better way:
What I am describing, however, is not a chain or a chore. When we are caked with the mud of political struggle, and tired of Pyrrhic victories that seed new hatreds, and frightened by our own capacity for contempt, the way of life set out by Jesus comes like a clear bell that rings above our strife. It defies cynicism, apathy, despair and all ideologies that dream of dominance. It promises that every day, if we choose, can be the first day of a new and noble manner of living. Its most difficult duties can feel much like purpose and joy. And even our halting, halfhearted attempts at faithfulness are counted by God as victories.
God’s call to us — while not simplifying our existence — does ennoble it. It is the invitation to a life marked by meaning. And even when, as mortality dictates, we walk the path we had feared to tread, it can be a pilgrimage, in which all is lost, and all is found.
Before such a consummation, Christians seeking social influence should do so not by joining interest groups that fight for their narrow rights — and certainly not those animated by hatred, fear, phobias, vengeance or violence. Rather, they should seek to be ambassadors of a kingdom of hope, mercy, justice and grace. This is a high calling — and a test that most of us (myself included) are always finding new ways to fail. But it is the revolutionary ideal set by Jesus of Nazareth, who still speaks across the sea of years.
“it’s not the 30 percent”
As to the state of the right.
Partisan media serves two masters, the truth and the cause. When they align, all is well. When they conflict, you choose. If you prioritize the truth, you’re a traitor; if you prioritize the cause, you’re a propagandist. One recent example of the latter is the left mocking Republicans who accepted PPP loans during the pandemic for opposing Biden’s student debt bailout. The differences between those two programs would be evident to a reasonably intelligent fourth-grader but the imperative to serve the cause by rationalizing Biden’s giveaway forced liberals to treat it as a smart own. I think some even talked themselves into believing it. Propagandists lie to others, then lie to themselves to justify propagating the original lie. Propaganda rots the brain, then the soul.
That’s one reason why, when I’ve been forced to choose, I preferred to be a traitor than a propagandist. Here’s another: What is the right’s “cause” at this point? What cause does the Republican Party presently serve? It has no meaningful policy agenda. It literally has no platform. The closest thing it has to a cause is justifying abuses of state power to own the libs and defending whatever Trump’s latest boorish or corrupt thought-fart happens to be. Imagine being a propagandist for a cause as impoverished as that. Many don’t need to imagine.
The GOP does have a cause. The cause is consolidating power. Overturn the rigged elections, purge the disloyal bureaucrats, smash the corrupt institutions that stand in the way. Give the leader a free hand. It’s plain as day to those who are willing to see where this is going, what the highest ambitions of this personality cult are. Those who support it without insisting on reform should at least stop pretending that they’re voting for anything else.
I agree with others who say that, fundamentally, the last six years have been a character test. Some conservatives became earnest converts to Trumpism, whatever that is. But too many who ditched their civic convictions did so for the most banal reasons, because there was something in it for them — profit, influence, proximity to power, the brainless tribalism required by audience capture. “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket,” Eric Hoffer wrote. We’ve all gotten to see who the racketeers are. […]
Never forget, it’s not the 30 percent of Trump worshipers within the party who brought the GOP to what it is. It’s the next 50 percent, the look-what-the-libs-made-me-do zombie partisans, who could have said no but didn’t. I said no. Put it on my tombstone.
bear, not shape; hope, not plan; hold out, not stride ahead
Nathan Gardels and Kathleen Miles:
As the poet Archibald MacLeish understood, a world ends when its metaphor has died. At the moment of such a rupture, a new space opens up in place of the shattered status quo. Illusions about an old order vanish, making way for what has been incubating to emerge. Above all, a rupture demands choices about the foundations of the future.
We grew up with our parents’ and grandparents’ experience that each person can and must plan, develop, and shape his own life, that there is a life work on which one must decide, and that he can and must pursue this with all his might. But from our own experience we have learned that we cannot even plan for the next day, that what we have built up is destroyed overnight. Our lives, unlike our parents’ lives, have become formless or even fragmentary. … If we come through the wreckage of a lifetime’s acquired goods with our living souls intact, let us be satisfied with that. … It will be the task of our generation, not to “seek great things,” but to save and preserve our souls out of the chaos, and to realize that this is the only thing we can carry as “booty” out of the burning house. “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life” (Prov. 4:23). We shall have to bear our lives more than to shape them, to hope more than to plan, to hold out more than to stride ahead. But for you, the younger, newborn generation, we want to preserve that soul, which will empower you to plan and build up and give shape to a new and better life.
a tree in open land
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.