Hildegarde

Every once in a while, when my life is going completely haywire, I do something I call “taking the week-end.”   What “taking the week-end” means is this:  from the time the mail arrives on Friday afternoon, until I wake up Monday morning, I just stop thinking about all the things I have to think about. 

If the writing is going well, I will write–but if it isn’t, I’ll let it lie.  I’ll listen to music.  I’ll read.  I’ll run DVDs if there’s anything I want to see.  I’ll even post a status on Facebook, although I don’t get over to Facebook all that often.

What I won’t do is try to solve the problems I have to solve.  That’s mostly because I’ve gotten myself into a psychological state where I couldn’t solve them if I worked on them for forever and a day.  The stress has set in to the point where it’s beginning to bleed into panic.   Once the panic sets in, I can’t do anything.

I bring all this up because I am, at the moment, in the middle of “taking the week-end.”   This means a lot of things, but what it means for this blog is that I’m likely to blither away on subjects that don’t have any direct connection to anything else I’ve been talking about.

Or, you know, not.  The theoretical point of this exercise is to let my mind float, to let it just do what it wants.  That was, I might unkink enough to think, and sometimes I manage to unkink enough to subconsciously solve a few of the problems. 

In that last case, though, the chances are good that I’d subconsciously solved them all along, and just hadn’t been able to access the information.

All that said, let’s take a look at this day for a moment.

First, the music that’s playing behind my head was written by a man named Francesco Geminiani, an Italian composer from the late seventeenth, early eighteenth century, the student of a man named Archangelo Corelli.

I know almost nothing about Geminiani except that I really like this CD set I’ve got, and I’ve got that by accident.  Years ago, I used to belong to one of those classical music of the month clubs,  and the Geminiani came as one of those selections I forgot to stop.

I know that the music on these two discs is supposed to have been written as a kind of homage to Geminiani’s teacher, but Corelli’s works seem not to have been preserved, except for one, and that in an “expansion” written by Geminiani himself.

I know that Geminiani spent most of the last part of his life in England, where he found the musicians so crude that he refused to have anybody play the harpsichord during concerts of his work except for Handel.

Which is, you know, a nice stipulation if you can get it to stick. 

It’s all chamber music for strings here, though, and no harpsichord that I can tell.  Part of me thinks I should to out and find more work by this person, and maybe find more harpsichords because of it.

Beyond that, I am, indeed, still reading Augustine–and when I’m done, I’m going to turn this book into a coffee table, because it’s big enough.

But the reading has brought up a couple of things that interest me.

Book XI, the first of Part Two, turns out to be a discussion of the opening chapters of Genesis, in an attempt to answer the objections to it from the neoPlatonists.

By neoPlatonists here, I do not mean what Augustine was.  Many Christian theologians of Augustine’s day and after were “neoPlatonists” in the sense that they say Plato and his successors as the closest the pagans came to Christian truth, and in the fact that they took over many technical philosophical terms and their definitions from the Platonic schools.

The neoPlatonists Augustine is debating in Book XI, however, are either pagans, or sort of quasi-pagans who believe that paganism is the best choice of religion for the common people of Rome.  They are all non-Christians, and some of them are anti-Christians.

And that’s how we get to Augustine explicating the opening chapters of Genesis.

The neoPlatonists, it seems, made exactly the same arguments as many people make now, so exactly the same that it can be a little disorienting to read them.

There is, for instance, the question of what a “day” was and how there could have been “days” when the sun and the moon weren’t created until Day 4.   I want to send the whole book–well, Book XI, which isn’t all that long–to the people who put up that Creation Museum in Kentucky.

I’d do it if only to prove that Christian have not “always” interpreted Genesis the way they do.  American “Bible based” churches notwithstanding, it has not been the case that it has everywhere and always been necessary for people to be either stupid or ignorant in order to be Christian.

But the thing that strikes me the hardest came in Book X, and it has to do with something I’ve never thought of in quite this way before.

It has long been a question of why bad things happen to good people–why people who are decent, hardworking, honest, honorable, and in all ways anybody can see upstanding end up getting awful diseases, losing children to accidents, seeing their entire life savings wiped out by a financial crisis they couldn’t have forseen unless they’d been God himself.

The Calvinists solved this by saying that only God knew who was among the elect, and the elect were forordained from all eternity, but that we could know who they were because they would in fact have blessings on this earth.   People who had all that awful stuff happen to them were not, in fact, good people, even if they managed to fake the appearance of being so in the limited vision of their fellow human beings.

I suppose I could go on at length about why that was always a minority point of view in Christianity–or any other Western religion or philosophy–but what interests me is what happens when you turn this upside down.

I’ve always said that although it’s impossible to prove that God does not exist, it’s not impossible to prove that the God of the Christians does not exist–that a God defined as all-good and all-knowing who always has our best interests at heart is almost certainly not true.

The old counter of “of course He’s true, you’re just too limited to understand the way the mind of an infinite being works” won’t wash, either.   It’s just a way of saying “I don’t get it either, but I’m going to believe it anyway.”

And in the Christian tradition with which I’m most familiar, such an argument one of the most basic elements of dogma–the idea that any person, even if he has not been made acquainted with revelation, or is in a state of invincible ignorance towards it–can come to the knowledge of God and His True nature and the basics of His moral law “by reason alone.”

Turn around that thing, though–why do bad things happen to good people?–and you get, “why do good things happen to bad people?

And that question is, in its way, considerably more infuriating than the first one.

It’s not just that God, if He exists, allows good and decent people to get cancer, lose their life savings, or be drowned in tsunamis. 

It’s that, at the same time, He allows violent thugs to win multi-million dollar lotteries, child molestors to rise in the ranks of corporations, and complete jerks to sail through life without so much as a bad cold while nice people die young of cancer and generous people get hit by busses when they’re twenty-two.

All this is perfectly comprehensible if the universe is a place of chance and circumstance, and luck is truly random.

But I think it also is a perfectly good argument against intelligent design of any kind, unless the intelligence doing the designing is either a sociopath or a victim of ADD so bad He can’t concentrate for longer than a nanosecond on any one thing.

 You can put that down next to dental caries in the list of things that make me believe–about God and the nature of the universe–what I believe.

So, I’m  not so much writing a blog post today as I’m waiting out a period of time while I see if students will come in and save their asses.  Probably not, but where there’s life, there’ s hope.  And  this is my last day with these students, so I’m feeling generous.

I’m also feeling more than a little aggravated, because this morning I encountered the closest thing I get to writer’s block.  It’s been years–since right after Matt was born, to be exact–since I’ve experienced full blown writer’s block.  That’s a good thing, but it’s horrible, and I wouldn’t want to go through it again.

What I get instead these days is a thing where I write a passage over and over and over and over again and it just never sounds right. 

This almost always occurs when I’m introducing a character.  The more important the character is, the more likely I am to hate everything I write from that point of view for at least a few days.

But it doesn’t have to be actually introducing a character for the first time ever.  I have this problem when I start new books in the Gregor Demarkian series, with Gregor himself.  I write it, I hate it, I write it again.  And it always sounds wrong in that strange inner ear where I hear the music of prose.

Okay, there isn’t a lot of music to my prose.

But there it is, and so today and yesterday I spent spinning my wheels, and I still don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it.

That said, I want to correct an impression from a post from a few days ago, and it’s sort of on the same kind of subject maybe.

Well, it’s about “popular” writers.

When I say that you’re as likely to find meaning and substance in “popular” writers as well as in “the high art tradition,” at least as it is found in contemporary work–I mean that some contemporary “popular” writers are in the high art tradition.

Stephen King certainly is.  I think he’s the only writer now working I’d expect to last a hundred years.

I also happen to think that almost none of the contemporary literary stuff is in “the high art tradition,” or anything else–what we have no is basically a very cleanly well-written genre with not a lot of interest to much of anybody outside the closed world of people who write it and teach it.

I’ll say it again–neither the canon nor the high art tradition is defined by, or determined by, universities or Departments of English. 

Teachers of English literature are largely hangers-on (and sometmes parasites) of a world that does not find school congenial, and never has.  Hemingway and Capote never saw the inside of a college classroom.  Fitzgerald and Faulkner spent most of their time drinking there. 

And, aside from Gatsby, I’m not sure Fitzgerald belongs in the high art tradition either.

It’s getting to the point where I’d be willing to abolish all the literature departments, if only so that the rest of us could go on reading and writing, which is the point of the thing to begin with.

Okay, I’m in a weird mood, and sitting in an uncomfortable chair.

I think I’ll go make tea.

So, you know, every once in a while comments actually do what I want them to do, and that makes everything easier.

Robert complains–if I’m reading him right–that obviously there is no such thing as the summum bonum, because obviously different people are made happy by different things.  Sadists and masochists are made happy by things the rest of us would find abhorent. 

But this is, actually, a perfect example of the sea change in thinking that I was talking about–“happiness,” for Augustine, for Aquinas, for Plato, for Aristotle, was not about “feeling good and jolly.” 

They would have labeled that “pleasure,” and they would have had no trouble accepting that different people got pleasure from different things. 

Happiness was something considerably more complicated–a conviction of the rightness of your pursuit of the good life, with the good life defined as “the highest possible way of life available to man as a human being.”

And they would have said man, not man and women.

In a way, the classical philosophical idea of “happiness” is like the classical Christian idea of “faith”–it refers not to an emotion, but to an act of the will.

The problem with pleasures, for Augustine (and Plato, and Aristotle, and the Stoics) is both that it is fleeting, and that in being fleeting it so often ends in disaster.

Happiness, in this kind of writing and in this tradition, is by definition something that lasts.  The great danger, for human beings, is that they will mistake their momentary pleasures for happiness, and therefore end their lives in a muddle of compromises and corruptions.

I do not think that this amounts to inventing something that isn’t real.  I know the distinction in my own life, and I can see it around me in the lives of other people. 

I don’t think it’s that difficult a distinction to make. 

I do think it’s become very unusual to think of our lives this way, or to think of human life at all as something which we need to work to live up to.

The battle cry these days is that we have a right to “be ourselves,” by which we mean be whatever it is we have an impulse to be right this second.  We look at what the Greeks would have called “passions” and declare them as immutable attributes of our core identities.  The worst thing in the world we can say to another human being is that we don’t accept them as they are.

But the philosophers of antiquity and the early Christian theologians didn’t want to be accepted as they were, nor did they think it was a good thing to accept people as they were.

The human being in the raw was not a very good thing. He was subject to passions that burst out of him and overtook his will.  It took a long training in self-restraint and self-control to even begin to give him some semblance of freedom of action, to make it possible for him to choose what he did rather than be carried away on the storms of his passions.

Happiness lay–for the pagans and the Christians alike–in the attainment of that self control. 

The summum bonum, for the pagans,was the rational and examined life–a life lived by the force of one’s reason rather than one’s passions.

The summum bonum for the Christians was God, because only in a close relationship with God could man hope to conquer his passions and thereby become fully human. 

In both cases, the important thing, the issue, was the attainment of full humanity, and human-ness was defined in opposition to the less-than-human, the birds of the air, the beasts of the field.

Okay, I couldn’t help myself.  I just wanted to sound poetic for a minute there.  It’s a kind of fit that overtakes me every once in a while.

I think that there is good argument to be made about whether or not such a definition of the human is accurate.  We put a lot more emphasis on the ways in which human beings are like other animals these days than they did then, and we do it to some extent because they didn’t.   After twenty centuries of man as the rational animal, we might be due some down time on the examined front.

But the fact remains that in discussing the summum bonum, the issue is not if all men can be said to take pleasure in the same things. 

The issue is whether or not there is a definition of the human that all human beings should aspire to–something we are born with the potential for, but only with the potential for.

Aristotle and Plato, even most of the Roman writers, would have considered it shameful to accept themselves as they were born.  Augustine and Aquinas would have considered such a thing a surefire path to Hell.

Capitalized, because, as William F. Buckley once said, Hell is a place, like Scarsdale.

I do think that we’ve lost something in not being able to think about our lives this way, and the lives of all human beings this way.

We’re left with calling the sadists “happy,” even when their sadism lands them in jail for fifty years.

It’s been an odd few days.  For one thing,  the weather has been awful, and beyond awful.   First there was snow, then there was more snow, then there was ice, now there’s more snow coming.   Doctor appointments have gone down the tubes.  The schools are all closed.  The temperatures resemble nursery school counting games.

This morning, we’re socked in for the second day straight, and there’s a good chance we won’t be able to get out again until sometime tomorrow afternoon.

I’m less worried about that than I might have been on another date, since the next doctor’s appointment is late tomorrow afternoon, and yesterday we decided to approach the immobility with a little genius.

Or, you know, self  indulgence.

We had in the freezer a 22 pound turkey, bigger than the one we cooked at Thanksgiving.  We thawed it out, stuffed it, and cooked it, which made a very nice dinner for last night and will probably due for lunch and dinner today and lunch tomorrow.

And now it’s early morning, and I’ve got tea and Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony.  Not bad. 

Not having to go out and do things is one of the great boons of human existence, at least in bad weather.

It’s not, of course, the summum bonum.

In case you haven’t guessed, I’m still reading St. Augustine’s City of God.  I’m even almost halfway done, but only almost.   I am finally to a place where I don’t read a little of it, wander away, then come back to read a little more. 

And, of course, I’ve managed to do that just as Augustine got to Plato.

I’m not going to go on at length here about the state of late Antiquity’s love affair with convoluted formulas for explaining the nature of God.  If I’m honest about it, I have to say that the high Middle Ages weren’t much better.  Augustine proved that Plato could get you to formulas of being that would make any sane human being dizzy.  Aquinas proved that Aristotle could get you to the same place.

What I want to get to here is something I haven’t thought about in a long time, because I don’t think anybody thinks about it much anymore.  I can’t think of a single modern philosopher who mentions it.

It in this case would be the “summum bonum,” the sum of all good, the greatest good, the one thing necessary for happiness.

The idea was this:  it was thought (by Plato, by Aristotle, by the Stoics and Epicureans, by Augustine and Aquinas and Abelard) that we could identify the one, greatest good thing, the thing which the very possession of which would make us happy.

Modern philosophers, to the extent they can be called philosphers at all, seem to have all kinds of goals on their minds, many of them never stated.  They’re interested in ethics and morality.  They’re interested in politics. 

To the extent that they discuss happiness at all, it tends to be as a matter of taste.  Different things make different people happy.

Even modern philosophers who claim to follow ancient philosophers of one school or the other do this. 

A lot of modern secular philosophy, for instance, claims to build on the work of the Epicureans, but most of it lacks both the Epicurean passion for self-discipline and the Epicurean trust that there was one, single objective goal for all human beings if they wished to achieve happiness.

This aspect of philosophy as traditionally practiced always surprises me when I run across it–that the goal of every human being’s life was to achieve happiness and the purpose of philosophy was to help her achieve it.

Augustine and Plato would have made it more complicated than that, because for them “philosophy” was all of what we now call science–natural philosophy was the study of the natural world, including biology and chemistry and physics; moral philosophy was the study of the rules for right living; and rational philosophy was the quest for the summum bonum. 

By now, you all know how enamored I am of the idea that all knowledge is one–that mathematics and biology, physics and music, literature and art are all part of some bigger thing, all aspects of a single quality of being human.

Neither Socrates nor Augustine would have questioned that idea.  Hildegarde herself wouldn’t have questioned it.

But I want to get back now to that summum bonum, that idea that there is one good thing, the greatest good thing, and that all human beings must necessarily have that one good thing if they are to be happy.

It’s the opposite of the idea that different people have different things that will make them happy.   It’s the idea that only one thing can make any of us happy.

If you think about this a moment, it’s obvious what Christian philosophers like Augustine did with it–they declared that the summum bonum was God, and the only way any human being could be happy was to “possess” God.  They meant to attain to knowledge of Him and to be in communion with Him. 

But the idea of a summum bonun is not inherently religious.  Greek philosophers very unlike Plato in their mental habits agreed that such a thing existed.  They disagreed only about what it was, where it was to be found, and how it was to be obtained.

The issue was never if such a thing existed, but what it consisted of, and how to attain it.

I don’t inow why we no longer have an idea like this operating anywhere in our culture.   I don’t think the lack can be accounted for by the simple fact that we’ve all become much more secular in the modern age. 

The summum bonum disappears from philosophy sometime in the eighteenth century.  It’s certainly nowhere to be found in Hegel, although there are echoes of it in Kant.

These days, it’s as if the concept never existed–and, what’s more, as if the idea that “happiness” could have a definition that was not just “whatever feels good” has pretty much disappeared as well. 

I don’t know why that is.  I would think that it would be especially important to come to some kind of determination of these things if you were in fact secular, or even better atheist. 

One of the serious weaknesses in secular and atheist philosophy these days is its inability to confront the unhappy nature of too many lives–not just the neurotically unhappy nature of relatively rich people, but the unquestionably unhappy nature of people throughout the world. 

If the meaning of life is contained in the joy you experience in living it–which is pretty much what Paul Kurtz says–then there are a great many people out there living utterly and unquestionably meaningless lives.

What are we, after all, supposed to say to the child dying inexorably and painfully from cancer,  or the young mother gunned down in a genocidal war in Africa, or the masses dying of starvation or disease or any of a number of things throughout the world?

And even if we can come to some kind of answer to that–and on that particular intellectual path, I don’t think we can–we’d still have to contend with what it means to be happy.

What happened, in the end, to the summum bonum?

So, here’s the thing.

Today, I ran across two articles, on subjects at least theoretically completely different, that in fact claimed things I think are pretty much alike.  The first of them is this one, posted in the comments by Mike Fisher:

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-religiosity-gene-dominate-society.html

This is about religion, and the sentence that struck me the hardest was this one, right at the beginning:

>>>Even if some of the people who are born to religious parents defect from religion and become secular, the religious genes they carry (which encompass other personality traits, such as obedience and conservativism) will still spread throughout society…>>>

The second comes from today’s Arts and Letters Daily, and you can find it here:

http://chronicle.com/article/Narcissus-Regards-a-Book/126060/

I’m having a harder time finding a single sentence that sums up my problem with it, but we could try this one:

>>>Check out the best-seller lists, even in the exalted New York Times. See what Oprah’s reading. Glance at the Amazon top 100. Look around on the airplane. The common reader—by which I don’t mean the figure evoked by Dr. Johnson and Virginia Woolf, but the person toting a book on the train or loading one into his iPad or Kindle—the contemporary common reader reads for pleasure, and easy pleasure at that. Reading, where it exists at all, has largely become an unprofitable wing of the diversion industry.<<<

These things may not sound similar, but for me they have a distinct similarity in their reasoning, and it’s one I’ve seen other places on nominally different.

In the first article, for instance, the writer tells us that there are “other” personality traits that correlate to “religiosity”–“conservatism” and “obedience.”

But is this actually true of religious people in the US today?  Worldwide, maybe–I don’t know enough about the rise and spread of Islam, for instance, to tell–but American religious people seem to be “conservative” only if we use the world in the contemporary political sense, and not in its original meaning of trying to conserve something that already exists or exists as a tradition.

I’m not sure we could get to obedience at all.  The phenomenon I was talking about yesterday–what I call American folk Protestantism because I don’t know what else to call it–is the result of the opposite of obedience.   It’s a movement started by people who simply refused to swallow what their mainstream denomination churches were telling them and struck out on their own to do religion the way they personally thought best.

“Conservative” Christianity in America today is neither conservative nor obedient.  It is radical and defiant, and many of the individuals who comprise it retain their commitment to it at great personal and professional discomfort. 

Standing up for “conservative” Christian principles on a college campus these days can run you afoul of restrictive speech codes, get you tried in campus disciplinary courts and even get you expelled.  Standing up for those same principles in professional programs can get you barred from the profession, not just removed from the program.

And yes, there are indeed cases of all of those.

But the other thing such a statement in such an article does is to imply that the opposite is true of the groups outside the one the article is examining.

If “conservatism” and “obedience” are personality traits related to religiosity, then “liberalism” and “independence” must be personality traits related to lack of religiosity.

And I don’t think that’s provable either. 

The wider culture in the US is largely socially liberal.  The socially liberal college student has nothing to fear from his college’s orientation sessions or speech codes or civility protocols.  He is in tune with all his professors, and especially the ones at selective, elite schools.  He can enter any of the “helping professions”–teaching, social work, nursing–without having a single one of his preconceived ideas challenged.

There is no way to tell if a secular college student is thinking independently and liberally, or just going along to get along, with his “social liberalism” being just “upholding the status quo.”

And I fail to see how people who “accept evolution” just because science says so are being any less anti-intellectual, and anchored to dogma, than the people who accept creationism the same way. 

And those people do exist.  They exist more abundantly than anybody wants to admit.  I keep running across them in Internet forums, passionately “disproving” creationism and then wailing heartfeltly that they don’t actually understand evolution, but they wished they did.

The second article assumes that “high culture” is “hard” and challenges our assumptions about ourselves, while “popular culture” is easy and lets us wallow in unchallenged preconceived ideas about ourselves and our society.

But that doesn’t seem to me to be true, either.

For one thing, I doubt if most of the books we now consider part of the “high art tradition” were in fact difficult in their time.  To the extent that the Iliad or the Odyssey are difficult, it’s mostly because we no longer live in that time and place. There are assumptions about thousands of things–the relationships between men and women, the nature of marriage, the social status of actors–that we no longer share, and may be unaware that anybody ever held.

My students sometimes have a problem with that when reading Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess.”   The poem is nearly undecipherable to anyone who does not understand that it was once customary to arrange marriages between families without really caring much if the bride wanted to match, or even if the bride and groom had ever met. 

Browning’s intended readers, however, would not have had that problem.  They knew how those things worked.  Browning was a popular writer in his time, not a “difficult” one.

But the bigger issue here is whether or not contemporary high and popular art conform to the article’s assumptions–that high art challenges our prejudices and assumptions and forces us out of our “comfort zones,” while popular art is all about easy escapist diversion that we never have to think twice about.

I think I can say, with perfect accuracy, that the present run of contemporary “literary” novels represents some of the most predictable and intellectual  hackneyed literature ever written. 

There is nothing in any novel by Jonathan Franzen, or Ann Beattie, or Cynthia Ozick that will cause the least intellectual, emotional or political discomfort to any denizen of Cambridge, Ann Arbor, New Haven, or Palo Alto.  All the residents of suburbia will be, at best, living lives of quiet desperation, all religious people will be either stupid or crazy, all popular culture will be corporate homogenization, all death will be painful and meaningless.

The other side of the coin is the idea that popular literature is about wallowing in narcissistic self-congratulation, never having any of our beliefs or values challenged, and never influencing the reader to change his or her life in an attempt to make it better.

But this is exactly what the people who love Harry Potter–the adults, now–say they are doing with that series.  And they say it consistently. 

What’s more, it’s what I have myself done with all kinds of literature, some of it popular and some of it not.  My guess is that the impetus to do that–to use fiction in whatever form as a template to see what else you could be but what you are–is an integral part of why anybody reads any kind of fiction, ever. 

Very few of us are truly and wholly satisfied with who and what we are. Very few of us don’t have a little place at the back of our heads going “do something else, be something else, get the hell out of here.”

I do think that we are all of us–high culture types and low; secular and religious–less likely to read things or watch things or listen to things that we don’t like, or don’t agree with.  That’s why so much of our public discourse is useless these days.  Each side builds straw man arguments because it has to.  Neither side is reading what the other side says.

That said, though, I think that there is at least as much to jar sensibilities in a good “popular” novel than in a “literary” one–hell, I should’t put it that weakly.

The best of Stephen King covers a wider range of human beings in a wider range of situations than anything any high art writer has done in decades, and maybe in the last century.   It is, of course, possible to read King while ignoring all that and just paying attention to the monsters–but the books aren’t really about the monsters, and never were.

Sometimes I think we’ve gotten to the point where we no longer write social analysis.  Instead, we outline the world the way we want it to be–religious people are stupid and conformist! secular people only want to screw and murder at will and not have to answer to God for it!–and say we’ve done a study.

The weather is miserable, and I need tea.

One of the problems I have discussing religion on the Net is that I seem to be out of place and out of time for the present discussion.  When I think of  “Christianity,” I think not just of the high intellectual end of Roman Catholicism, but of the high intellectual end of Roman Catholicism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.  Christianity is Augustine for me, and Aquinas, and Teresa of Avila, and, for that matter, Hildegarde.

When people these days say “Christianity,” however–especially in America, but not only here–what they tend to mean is American folk Protestantism, that vast web of vaguely independent churches that call themselves “Christian” without any other designation, that may or may not be affiliated with any traditional denomination, and that help make up what is called here politically “the religious right.”

What’s more, these churches also tend to be associated with a particular set of stands on a particular set of social issues–against government recognition of gay marriages;  against the theory of evolution and legal abortion; and more or less in favor of “small government” but against “the separation of church and state.”

I’ve put scare quotes around all of that because the definitions of those things are in contention, sometimes even in the “religious right” itself. 

And the entire situation is made ever more complicated by the fact that most of the people who reject religion in the US seem to be solidly on the other side of those issues, making it seem as if the issues themselves are about “religion” even if they are not.

Right at the moment, though, I want to take up one thing, and that is something that has bothered me for years. 

The non-specific “Christian Churches” are almost all self-declared as conservative, and by that they almost always mean conservative on economics as well as on social issues. 

In the present-day US, conservative on economics means lower taxes, smaller government (in the sense of a government that does fewer things, not necessarily one that is cheaper), and fewer regulations.  That is, conservative in the US today is what liberal is in the rest of the West:  in favor of capitalism.

But here’s the thing: one of the other things these churches are known for is their adherence to the idea of Biblical literalism, meaning reading the Bible as if everything in it were literally true.

Let’s skip the part about how they don’t actually do that.  American folk Protestantism is perfectly happy to declare that the Bible is using a metaphor when it suits its purpose, such as not being too Catholic in its beliefs.  It therefore assumes that “Take, eat, for this is my body” is a metaphor, and that Christ didn’t mean the bread was being turned into his actual body.  It also assumes that the keys given to Peter didn’t actually mean that Peter and his successors could forgive sins in Christ’s name and make it stick.

And let’s also skip the part about how this is what I think of as the great fault line in Protestant Christianity.  A lot of Protestant denominations have claimed to admire Augustine, but in fact Augustine was not a literalist, and his idea of how the world actually came to be created sounds in some respects a lot like Darwin.  And sola scriptura can get you into a lot of trouble, because the scriptures were not the original expression of Christianity as a religion and are not now exhaustive of the traditions of that religion. 

But what I want to get to now is a lot simpler:  how did we get from the Acts of the Apostles to Christian conservative championship of capitalism?

I’m still reading Augustine, in case you can’t tell.  And at one point in Book VI, Augustine makes a point of the fact that the apostles lived, in the years immediately after the death of Christ, communally, and without personal property, “holding every thing in common.”

For Augustine, the point of bringing this up is to counter Roman pagan arguments about the power of the Roman gods to bring good fortune, riches, power, privelege to their worshippers. 

Augustine did not think that the Roman gods did not exist.  He just thought they were demons, fallen angels under control of Satan, who showed up in various societies and established themselves as “deities” in an attempt to keep men and women from knowing the True God.

This was necessary because God gave to every man and woman the ability to find the truth about God’s existence and His Law “by reason alone”–meaning without the grace of revelation.

That was why some people who called themselves Christians would go to Hell, even though they knew that Christ was their Savior, while some pagans would be rewarded after death even though they didn’t.  Belief was not enough for Augustine, nor was lack of it.  Which puts quite a spin on the sola fideii business.

My point here, however, is that one of the ways Augustine counters the Roman pagan arguments in favor of Roman pagan gods is exactly because those gods are supposed to provide their worshippers with the good things of this world.  The one true God would never do that, he says, because the one true God deals in the things of true and lasting value, such as eternal life.  The ephemerally good things of this world can actually be bad for us, because they can alienate our affections from God, lead to sin on a lot of different levels, and end with sending us to hell.

Maybe in a handbasket.

Never mind.

But Augustine proved the truth of these assertions by pointing out that the early Christians lived without personal property of any kind, and by the fact that holy men and women lived that way still.

My question is:  how did we get from there to modern day Christian right capitalism?

Or even to eighteenth century Puritanism?

When I’ve asked this question of people in the past, I’ve been told that the reason is that the doctrine of original sin means that Christians think of men and women as fallen and inevitably imperfect, so they look for a political and economic system that takes into account that fallenness.

Socialists expect men and women to be like angels, because they think men and women can learn to control themselves and live well by the use of their own reason without the help of God.  Christians know that men and women are not perfectable, and therefore do not try to erect social systems that require their perfection.

There’s a level on which this makes perfect sense, and Edmund Burke said it better than I can.  But the fact remains that the early Christians are reported, in Acts, as living in common without personal property, and life in holiness was considered to be life without property for centuries after the apostolic era.

How did we get from there to here? 

And what does it mean–assuming you’re relying on sola scriptura–to take no care for the things of this world?  Where and when did the “common sense” interpretation of these admonitions–take care of your responsibilities in this world, just don’t get overattached to them–come in?  

If we are really meant to take the scriptures literally, why not take these scriptures literally? 

St. Paul said that not everyone would have the grace to try to live perfectly, but it seems to me a long way from that to megachurches, Christian publishing and Christ-centered retirement villages, never mind ending the income tax.

So.  I’m having one of those weird mornings here.  The final draft of the Georgia Xenakis book is sort of finally getting there.  In a lot of ways, I really hate working on a new book, but especially on a new book that isn’t part of an existing series.  Introducing characters is actually a lot more difficult than just throwing them down on the page.

And even with a series like this, which I’ve pretty much decided is going to be limited–nine books and out, nothing open ended–there’s the need to set up situations that the reader can know nothing about, and to do it in a way that it’s not obvious that that’s what you’re doing. 

It took me three or four tries just to figure out where the story was actually supposed to start.   You’d think you would just know these things, before you got to the point where you put them down on paper.  For me, though, I find that I need to write it to know it, so I’ve been writing a lot without feeling as if I had anything I could show anybody.

And now I do.  And that’s good.  But since I first went to work on this, this book has changed states, changed venues, changed murder methods, and changed motivations for one of its lead characters.

Well, on that last one–just sort of.

But here I am, with tea and Bach.  In fact, I’m listening to Gustav Leonhardt playing harpsichord on The Well Tempered Clavier.  And I’ve got Augustine, to help ward off a day of Dr. Who DVDs.

Somebody should remind me every once in a while that I thought I was a genius when I found these things to get for Matt for Christmases and birthdays.

With Augustine, I’m up to Book V, which is about a quarter of the way through, and what he’s doing in this book is beating the crap out of astrology.

And I do mean beating the crap out of it.

It’s interesting, because I was always taught that astrology for the ancients was not superstition but science.  They didn’t look on the effect of the stars on human behavior as magic or supernaturalism, but rather as a natural phenomenon that could be studied like any other natural phenomenon.

So, with astrology, the ancients were wrong, but they weren’t engaging in mystical thinking.

Augustine didn’t agree, and it’s been interesting to watch how his arguments against astrology mirror the ones that are not made by skeptics and other critics. 

There are some very funny moments when Augustine starts trying to unravel the problem of the stars’ effects on twins, for isntance, or on two people born simultaneously but one to a noble family and one to a slave.  He goes through the contemporary apologia for this sort of thing, including the writings of astrologers who say that the really important effect comes not with birth but with conception.

But what really caught my eye is that he makes the same argument about the missing constellation–the one it was just announced was supposed to go back into the zodiac, the one that starts with O whose name I can never remember–as was being made only a couple of days ago in my daily newspaper.

In fact, the tone of a lot of this is very similar to what I see now in places like Skeptic and Skeptical Inquirer.   So is the tone, which comes down to Augustine having completely apopleptic fits along the lines of “this is science for stupid people!  Can’t you see that?  Nobody could believe this but stupid people!”

And I sympathise, because I have tried to talk to people about astrology, but it’s like talking to people about–well.  Whatever. 

It always amazes me how passionately attached to astrology some people are, certainly as or more passionately attached as some people are to their religion.

And arguments about astrology are a hotbed of the kind of argument I was talking about the other day–the everything is an opinion argument, which is really an attempt to shut down argument altogether.

And although I also sympathize with Augustine on the stupid thing, a fair number of people I think of as reasonably bright are very attached to astrology on lots of levels, and not just in reading their little blurb in the paper every day.

I find this a harder phenomenon to understand than I do religion, really.  The high intellectual end of most of the world’s major religions are well thought out and well reasoned.  You can argue with Roman Catholic theology on the basis of its premises, but once you accept the premises the rest tends to follow almost automatically.

And the premises are harder to argue with than you’d think.  I tend to explain my own unbelief by saying that I see no positive evidence of the existence of anything beyond this material world, but I know when I do that that I’m making a number of premises myself, and the conclusion is not definitive.

With astrology, however, there is a lot of evidence available to investigate, and none of it supports the idea the human actions and human destinies are being controlled by visible constellations that appear in the night sky.

In fact, there’s a fair amount of evidence that this isn’t the case, and that’s without going into the sheer logic of the assertion.

But then, I’ve never understood the sheer force of the willingness to believe against all evidence–the kind of thing that comes out when people go to see John Edward, for instance, or Peter Popoff. 

But there is Bach, and tea, and Dr. Who approacheth.

My apologies–or maybe not–to Terry Pratchett.

There was a minor deity (small god?) in classical Rome called Vaticanus, who was the god of crying infants.

I came across this information while sort of winding my way through City of God. 

It’s one of those books that isn’t really a book in the way we define the term now.  It’s mostly a collection of short (very short, often only a paragraph or two) expositions on one subject or another having to do with the differences between Christianity and paganism, the nature of paganism, the reality (or lack of it) of pagan gods…that kind of thing.

Augustine wrote it in the wake of the sack of Rome in 410, because many people were declaring that Rome had left herself open to sack because the Christians had proscribed the old rites and worship of the pagan gods.

It all sounds very esoteric, put the way I’ve put it, but it’s actually fascinating, because so much of the context of Augustine’s book is similar to the context now, sometimes in direct and particular ways.

First, though, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Vaticanus. 

Augustine finds it absurd and laughable that there should be a god of crying infants.  And on that score, he and I are in complete agreement.  Besides, there’s not just a god of crying infants.  There’s a goddess of  sleeping infants (Cunina) and another (can’t remember the name) for infants suckling at the breast. 

I told my older son about this and he said, “Mel Brooks was right.  The Romans had a god for everything.”

My initial interest, though, was in the name of this one.  It can’t be an accident, after all.  The name “Vatican” must come from “Vaticanus” in some way, if not from the name of the god then for the name of something or someone else named Vaticanus.

I’ve got to assume that, even though I can’t find it, there must be someone or something else, because I can’t imagine the Church naming its principle place of authority after the Roman god of crying infants.

Anyway. 

To get back to the point I thought I was heading for, and hoping that I will not do with this post what I did with the last one, which was first spend a lot of time writing it and then forget to publish it for more than thirty six hours after I was finished. 

I’m not getting a lot of sleep lately.

Augustine’s book is eerily familiar, if not contemporary, in more than one way.

For one thing, its overall context has more in common with now than I remembered from reading it in grad school. 

Even the idea that this is an argument between Christianity and paganism fits.  There are a number of secular people these days who like to call themselves “modern pagans.”

They don’t mean by that that they believe in and worship gods like Vaticanus, but that they are opting for a world in which moral questions are decided by philosophy rather than theology and in which many practices (sexual practices, yes, but also things like suicide) that were proscribed by the Christian Church would be allowed and even honored.

Some of the practices in question, then, are the same in Augustine’s time and our own.  Chief among them are homosexuality and sex outside the marriage bond.

I don’t remember Rome being all that fond of the idea of sex outside the marriage bond for women,  but Augustine lived at a time in the history of Christianity when it had yet to come to a comfortable little compromise with the Don Juans of the world, so there’s that.

We, of course, have come to the point where we think that everybody screwing everybody else all the time is not only perfectly normal, but probably desirable.

Augustine seems to think that the Romans of his era, and of many eras before his, thought much the same as we do about generalized rutting, and he’s good at bringing up details on just those practices.

He’s especially good at bringing up such details when they’re stories of the rutting activities of the various Roman gods. 

The main difference I can see between this discussion of sexuality and one that would take place now between, say, a writer for The Humanist and a Catholic moral theologian is that Augustine was able to assume that his opponents shared his disgust at such behavior–that everybody believed that chastity (not the same as celibacy) was a virtue and sexual license was not.

The Romans of Augustine’s time found him pinched and prohibitive in his sexual ideas, but not because they thought that it was a good thing to screw people other than your spouse.  They just thought it was natural, at least for men.

The more interesting parallel is with discussions of homosexuality, or at least of homosexual practice.

First, the major difference:  there was no such thing as “homosexuality” in the classical world.

There was plenty of homosexual sex, and it was far more widely accepted (among men) than it would be after the rise of Christianity, but the idea that some men had an exclusive “sexual orientation” that made them want to have sex with other men in exclusion to all other kinds of sex would have sounded to the Greeks and the Romans as ridiculous as searching the entrails of birds for next week’s lottery numbers would seem to us now.

The Greeks and the Romans accepted the fact that men like to have sex with each other because they assumed that men liked to have sex, period–with each other, with women, with sheep, with random tree bark.

The actual moral status of homosexual sex, though was always ambiguous.   In Greece, there tended to be mild acceptance for the man who took the male role in homsexual intercourse and mild contempt for the one who took the female role.   There was also a lot of difference in acceptance between a man-boy relationship (man-teenager, usually), which although widely practiced tended to be branded more than a little dishonorable, and a man-man relationship, as between bonded men in combat, which was often celebrated.

The Romans, meanwhile, tended to think of all this homosexual sex stuff as vaguely…decadent.  Rome was, after all, a warrior culture.  Of course, you could say the same about Greece at the time of the Trojan War, and there are definitely intimations of homosexual relationships there.

But the Romans thought of homosexual sex as decadent and somewhat “weak,” the practice of men who were not dedicated to upholding the stern and self-denying virtues of the Roman Republic.

Of course, by Augustine’s time, the Roman Republic had been toast for centuries, and the old Roman virtues had had to suffer through Nero and Caligula. 

So there’s that.

What I think is so familiar in Augustine’s arguments, though, is the way in which they seem to set up the virtuous country against the decadent city.

And that’s an old trope in Western literature, of course, but it also happens to be the one we’re now playing out between “red states” and “blue states.”  If there’s a real difference between those two, it’s that the red states are largely rural and the blue states are largely urban–or maybe I should say largely self-identified as such.

The arguments cascade down in little two and three paragraph chapters and all sound so familiar.  I could go onto the net today and look up half a dozen sites all saying the same thing, and not knowing that anybody had ever said it before.

But that brings me to a question, for which I do not have the answer:  what is decadence, anyway?  How do you know a society is decadent?  And what does it mean?

And I’ll leave it there, and go off and let my sons throw Dr. Who at my head for the day.

I can get to Augustine’s attempts to prove that the Roman gods never existed–or some of them didn’t–some other time.

Well, what can I say?  Things are calmer here today, if only because there’s not much I can do in the weather we’re having. 

I’d intended to make some comment about Mike Fisher’s comment about the epistemology of evangelical Christians, and I want to do that–for the reason, really, that declaring everything an “opinion” is not the epistemology of evangelical Christians.  It’s the epistemology of modern social science and some of the Humanities, which declared all science to be “social construct” long ago.

If you don’t believe me, read The Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science, by Gross and Levitt, which takes about the way in which feminist and other critics have been redefing science as an exercise in male hegemony for decades now.

This trend translated into social science dogma as “cultural relativism,” but what was important about that for Protestant evangelicals is how the dogma was used.  They were told that they could not have their ideals and values taught in public schools because the idea that sex outside a formal, heterosexual marriage was always morally wrong was “just an opinion” because all religion was “just an opinion.”

If this had been followed by actual neutrality–say, public schools without any sex education because no sex education could be taught without one set of opinions being at least implicitly supported over all others–it might have ended there, but that isn’t what happened.

What happened instead was that the opinions of the social science types were installed in public education and public policy as if they were facts.  Teaching a class that “different religious and cultural traditions have different ideas about what is acceptable in sexual behavior” is not neutral.   It is a classroom exercise in establishing the idea–“sexual rules are abitrary and socially constructed, there is no true and universal morality”–as if it were a fact.

But it is not a fact, it’s an opinion.  And nobody has yet established the truth of it any more than they have established the truth of the Christian idea on the same subject, quoted above.

I agree that there is empirical evidence for evolution, but there is not such evidence for the vast majority of theoretically “neutral” ideas that have been promoted as “established science” in dozens of different policy debates across the US in the last twenty or thirty years.

All that’s changed recently is that Protestant evangelicals who oppose those ideas and policies have learned how to approach an argument about them. 

I sincerely doubt that anybody in any of the Evangelical organizations using the “it’s just an opinion” argument about evolution thinks that it really is “just an opinion.”  Rather, they know that that is what they have to say to win the argument on the level of policy. 

And that is, quite frankly, very far from stupid.

And I’ve got, I will admit, less sympathy than I might have for the people now complaining about the Evangelical use of this approach to policy arguments. 

Numerous people–and I was one of the–tried to point out that that approach could be used by anybody to justify anything.  If rules about sexual conduct are “just an opinion,” then the idea that homosexual practice ought to be acceptible is just as much “just an opinion” as that it should be proscribed, and the idea that it should be allowed because that gives the widest number of people what they want–well, that’s just an opinion, too, no better than the opinion that individual happiness is unimportant next to sexual purity or the encouragement of larger and more stable families.

It’s like the song–this door swings both ways. 

And it can be used to defend things much less palatable than “save it till you’re married to a person of the opposite sex.”   If rules about sexual conduct are all “just an opinion,” then there’s nothing to say that declaring rape or pedophilia wrong isn’t “just an opinion” too.

And no–this is for you, Lymaree–telling me that those two don’t count because there is no consent doesn’t work either, because if everything is “just an opinion” then saying that consent is necessary for sex to be licit is itself “just an opinion.”

I’ve always said, and I still believe, that the reason there is so little respect among so many Americans for science is that a lot of what they’re told is science isn’t.

Far too often we put a gloss of “peer reviewed research” over what are in fact predetermined opinions, and opinions often predetermined without any prior acquaintance with reality.

If you have the training and education and ambition all at once, you can investigate the “studies” and find out if they’re actual studies or just opinion masquerading as science, but most people don’t have all three. 

And the people who don’t have all three include a lot of people who are recognized as “social sciences.”

The broad outlines of the relativist argument, on the other hand, are not that hard to learn. 

It’s not a sign of stupidity that Protestant evangelicals are learned them.

What was needed all along, from the prophets of social change, was a positive defense of the changes they wanted to see.  What we got instead was defensiveness and smokescreens.

What they’ve got now is what they should have expected.

And, in all this, I haven’t even gotten close to what I was originally talking about–such as pasting the “stupid” label on people who don’t want government subsidized health care on the assumption that anybody who would rather go without the benefit than give the government an excuse to regulate what he eats and how much he ways must be “stupid,” because–well, those priorities are just stupid, that’s all.

Except, of course, that’s not what we do. 

What we do is to ignore the actual point they’re making entirely, declare them addled and incomprehensible since they don’t seem to have any reason for what they’re doing, and then go back to calling them stupid.

It turned out I wrote the thing on epistemology anyway.

Tea and Dr. Who now.

So, today I got a number of e-mails noting that I haven’t posted anything for four days–which I’m sorry for, if only because I want to answer Mike Fisher’s comment about epistemology.

And, on the subject of “it’s all just opinion,” I’ve got a lot to say.

But I’m not totally crashing and burning, and I’m not completely messed up, and I’m even physically well.  I’ve just got family members with medical issues and a lot of other stuff to worry about, and I haven’t gotten around to it.

I may be able to get to it tomorrow, but in all likelihood it will be Thursday before things calm down, if at all.

But I’ll get there.

Sorry to be distracted.