There are so many ways we’re suffering due to disenchantment. We’re all feeling a bit lost and unwell in this post-Christian world. We might be good people, but we aren’t very happy.
This is America in a nutshell, really. We may believe we are good people, but none of us are very happy. Oh, we try to convince ourselves and those around us otherwise. That’s the power of indulgence and consumption; these things serve as powerful veils to cover our emptiness. But, nevertheless, we can justify our emptiness as long as we can feel like we are morally superior to Them. Hence, the onset of over-politicization and Twitter mobs and cancelling and rampant self-righteousness and certainty.
Christianity is supposed to be an answer to this. Being Christians should be a joyous experience, full of grace and compassion and hope. It should not be as stultifying and rigid and mean as our politics have become. Cancellation and grievance has no place among disciples. Christianity is not a means to an end. It does not exist to help us achieve whatever political or social goal we have. Our faith is not a utilitarian faith. It’s not about the end point, but the journey. But for too many Christians today, that no longer is true. Christianity becomes important only to the extent that it can serve as a vehicle for social justice, or pro-life advocacy, or any other political ideology. That’s why Beck’s question is so important for Christians to ask themselves:
“You may be good, but are you happy?”
A little more happiness, and a little less stridency, would go a long ways towards healing our world.
The season of Lent is one of the most meaningful times of the year for me. I am a lover of the overall rhythms of the church’s liturgical calendar, and I am especially fond of the movement beginning with Ash Wednesday, through the 40 days of Lent, into Holy Week, and finally culminating with Easter. Its a theologically rich time of year, especially for a theologian like myself whose academic work focuses on suffering, both human and Divine.
Lent commemorates Christ’s 40 days in the desert, where he fasted and withstood the Temptations he had to endure at the hands of Satan. Just as Christ sacrificed and meditated on the failings inherent in humanity, so we are called to a practice of sacrifice and contemplation. This time prepares us to walk with Christ through Holy Week, into his Suffering Death and, ultimately, the Resurrection. Scripture tells us many times Christ foreknew his coming fate, and he must have contemplated it during his days in the wilderness. Being human, he surely felt pangs of great sorrow and foreboding, alongside the assurance he felt in the righteousness of his sending.
The Temptations themselves – temptations to wield economic, religious, and political power – serve as reminders of those things which Christians are called to reject. Just as Christ refused the temptations and instead launched a public ministry predicted on humility, compassion and peace, so we are called to remember our Discipleship by refusing to live as usual, as society expects, during this time. And unlike the weak Lenten “fasting” practiced by much of popular Christianity, this isn’t a call to simply shed the trappings of the world for 40 days, followed by a post-Easter return to life as it was. No, Lent is to be a time set aside for reflection and contemplation on the kind of life we are called to at all times by Christ, the kind of life demanded by the self-sacrificial love of Christ envisioned at the end of these days by Christ’s suffering and death. These forty days are our time to remember our calling as disciples, and to re-dedicate ourselves to that way of being.
Fasting does have its place, however. For Western Christians, we can look to our Eastern brothers and sisters, who engage in a much more committed practice, where not only are diets restricted, but intense study of Scripture and the Church Fathers is accompanied by intensified prayers and spiritual exercises, as well as more time spent in and with the Church. All of this serves to preoccupy the disciple, reminding them of the overwhelming call on their lives made by Christ. We in the West, especially here in America, would be well served to pattern our own observance on these more ancient and more meaningful practices. I certainly hope to do so this year, and in future Lents.
As I mentioned earlier, Lent is a time that I feel especially called to, as a theologian who has spent much time thinking about the nature of human suffering, and the shocking reality of God’s own suffering. Christ suffered from the pangs of hunger for forty long days, not to mention the pangs of temptation he felt. We end this time in the liturgical year by observing and mourning the suffering death Christ endured, as we try to make sense of it for our own lives and our world, before we get to the beauty of Easter morning. The suffering God endured as Christ is central to our understanding of who God is. Our God is a God who suffers alongside us, who can relate to our limited existence because They have experienced it. The suffering of God on the Cross through Christ the man opens up new paths of relationality for us to have with the Divine. Lent is the time when, through voluntary self-abnegation, we ruminate on our limits, and the amazing fact that God emptied God’s self to take on those same limitations, and ultimately, even death.
Lent is my favorite time of year to revisit one of the most important books in my life of faith, The Crucified God by Jurgen Moltmann. In particular, I am drawn to my favorite passage of the book over and over again (which I will quote in full; emphasis all mine):
What kind of a poor being is a God who cannot suffer and cannot even die? He is certainly superior to mortal man so long as this man allows suffering and death to come together as doom over his head. But he is inferior to man if man grasps this suffering and death as his own possibilities and chooses them himself. Where a man accepts and chooses his own death, he raises himself to a freedom which no animal and no god can have.
…a God who cannot suffer is poorer than any man. For a God who is incapable of suffering is a being who cannot be involved. Suffering and injustice do not affect him. And because he is so completely insensitive, he cannot be affected or shaken by anything. He cannot weep, for he has no tears. But the one who cannot suffer cannot love either. So he is also a loveless being. Aristotle’s God cannot love; he can only be loved by all non-divine beings by virtue of his perfection and beauty, and in this way draw them to him. The ‘unmoved Mover’ is a ‘loveless Beloved.’
[…]
Finally, a God who is only omnipotent is in himself an incomplete being, for he cannot experience helplessness and powerlessness. Omnipotence can indeed be longed for an worshipped by helpless men, but omnipotence is never loved, it is only feared. Wha sort of being, them, would be a God who was only ‘almighty’? He would be a being without experience, a being without destiny and a being who is loved by no one. A man who experiences helplessness, a man who suffers because he loves, a man who can die, is therefore richer than an omnipotent God who cannot suffer, cannot love and cannot die. Therefore a man who is aware of the riches of his own nature in his love, his suffering, his protest and his freedom, such a God is not a necessary and supreme being, but a highly disposable and superfluous being.
[…]
The only way past protest atheism is through a theology of the cross which understands God as the suffering God in the suffering of Christ and which cries out with the godforsaken God, ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’ For this theology, God and suffering are no longer contradictions, as in theism and atheism, but God’s being is in suffering and the suffering is in God’s being itself, because God is love.
Today is the day we take the ashes, in remembrance of our own mortality and impending death, but also in the hope that the love of God has overcome that death. God was able to do this through taking on willingly that death, out of love, and thus to show death impotence in the face of what really matters. So, let us remember, as we enter this season of denial, suffering and sacrifice, that through it all, we are called to love one another in a new and radical way, as God loves, not because it is a duty, but because we can know what it means to love and be loved.
In his most recent newsletter, Andrew Sullivan takes on an idea that has gained traction on the woke left: the idea that the classics are somehow conveyors of white supremacy. Here’s Sullivan:
My own classical wonderment came from learning Latin. From the age of 11 to 18, at my selective high school, I studied, translated, and wrote in Latin. My inner gay-boy nerd marveled at its logic and near-total consistency, the matrix of its grammar, and, over time, even the prose style of its greatest writers. I came to chuckle at Catullus, and at the deadpan irony of Tacitus; I learned how to write sentences by reading Cicero. I shared some of the excitement that so many first experienced when these texts were recovered and engaged again in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
This strange, ancient, muscular language was also a key to the texts, rituals, and prayers of my church, opening up another dimension of meaning as well. It felt as if, stuck in a small town in England in the dreary 1970s, I had been given the keys to live in another universe. My one regret was not taking Ancient Greek. Imagine if I could read the Gospels in the original!
But I read in the New York Times this week, as one does, that, in fact, I was deluding myself. Rather than being liberated, as I felt I was, I was actually being initiated into “white supremacy”. And there is now a broadening movement in the academy to abolish or dismantle the classics because of their iniquitous “whiteness”.
Andrew is referring to a recent NYT piece profiling former classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who had a conversion of sorts, away from being a fan of the classics (and a trained scholar) towards becoming an advocate for “dismantling” the classicist emphasis on the ancient texts from Greece, Rome and the Mediterranean that undeniably shaped Western thought. Peralta, and many other activists and scholars, have latched onto the idea that somehow texts like Plato’s Republic or the writings of Cicero perpetuate white supremacy. Sullivan points out this ridiculousness of this claim:
Racial “whiteness” as a concept would, of course, have been all but meaningless to all the ancient writers I grew to love. It’s beyond even an anachronism. How on earth do you reduce the astonishing variety and depth and breadth of texts from an ancient Mediterranean world to a skin color? How do you read Aristotle and conclude that the most salient quality of his genius was that he was “white”?
Andrew is right, of course. The idea that these texts are problematic because of American-style racism – a phenomena that really took off a millennium-and-a-half after these works were created – is ludicrous, and more importantly, dangerous. Racism is a real and persistent problem in our world today, a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and pseudo-scientific theories. It arises from the needs of American political and economic institutions built in the 16th and 17th centuries, whose legacies are own systems are built on top of today. Turning attention away from these purveyors of injustice, and spending time trying to tie Aristotle’s contextual and ancient justifications for slavery to the racism of post-bellum America, is not just intellectually dishonest, but also a distraction and turn-off that the fight for racial justice in America just simply can’t afford.
None of this should be construed as a denial of the history and effects of racism in America today. I’ve been very clear on this blog about my support for the work of racial justice. I want that work to succeed. But this is not the way to do it. All this kind of performative wokeness does is discredit itself for its intellectual dishonesty, distracts from the important issues facing minorities and their communities today, and turns off potential allies that we need for progress to happen. Not to mention, it also spiritually and intellectually impoverishes our culture to cut out entire swathes of scholarly work and history on the basis of authorial identity alone. And it perpetuate the worst kinds of stereotypes about the fight for racial justice, confirming for those who are wavering that what progressives and liberals really want is not a better society, but instead no society at all, at least not for those considered “sinners” according to the dogma of the woke fundamentalists (and who among us isn’t?)
I am spending this year slowly reading Augustine’s City of God. I look forward, after that, to digging into Aristotle and Aquinas, as well as some Marcus Aurelius and revisiting Plato’s Republic for the first time since undergrad. I received a new translation of Homer’s Odyssey for Christmas that I’m looking forward to. I’ve relied heavily the last few years on Hauerwas, Moltmann, Tillich, Barth, Wittgenstein, Tolstoy, MacIntyre and Bonhoeffer. And I’ll top all of that off by offering up a reminder of my love for St Paul. I read and engage all these figures not because I’m trying to court white supremacy. I read them because, like it or not, these are the voices and ideas much of modern society, and even more importantly, Christianity itself are based on. You can’t think and write and talk about philosophy and literature and culture and faith and theology without these voices; they shape Christianity and the ways all of us think in foundational ways many people don’t even realize. They have influenced the world in ways we can’t escape, nor should we want to. And we can advocate for considering and reading and engaging more diverse voices today without throwing out these giants that those diverse voices rely on too (whether or not they like it or admit it.) Far from being problematic, these texts are in fact beautiful, and powerful, and can be impactful resources for fighting injustice and inequality. Anyone who tries to make the argument that the classics somehow stifle the fight for freedom and rights today has clearly never engaged the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, upon whom the very concepts of liberty and political rights as we understand them depend for their very existence.
I had a conversation the other night with a friend where we were reflecting on the decline of the academy and the liberal arts. One thing this friend noted from his time at seminary was the shocking fact that many of the students he attended with never in three or four years had to read Augustine. In many (if not most) colleges and universities today, students not only don’t engage the classics, but in the narrow pursuit of technical vocational competency, most never have to engage cultural and literary touchstones and classics. This is an incalculable loss to our body politic and our cultural heritage. We cannot form the kind of educated and informed populace necessary for the flourishing of democracy, and the ideals of equality and justice, that so many long for, without drawing on the power of the traditions that formed us in the first place. And its not just a loss because of the political impact; it’s a loss because simply because these works are good and beautiful, and to miss out on the good is always a tragedy. Beauty is a good in and of itself (as any one who has taken the time to read Aristotle or Augustine would learn).
I’ll give Andrew the final word on this note, as he highlights the importance of these ancient voices for figures like MLK and Malcolm X:
What King grasped, it seems to me, is the core meaning of a liberal education, the faith that ideas can transcend space and time and culture and race. There are few things more thrilling than to enter a whole new world from another era — and to see the resilient ideas, texts, and arguments that have lasted (or not) through the millennia. These ideas are bound up, of course, in the specific context and cultures of the past, and it is important to disentangle the two. But to enter the utterly alien world of the past and discover something intimate and contemporary is one of the great joys of intellectual life. MLK wasn’t the only classics student among the great civil rights leaders. Malcolm X was too.
May we have the courage and the wisdom these men had to draw on our shared cultural legacy as we continue trying to build a better world.
Justin DaMetz 