paul j. griffiths

Two literary testimonies to human excess, one chastely restrained and the other libidinously expansive, have been occupying me this Advent-Christmas season. That seems appropriate: they approach in their depiction of how excessively, transcendently odd we are as creatures that found in the scriptural lections, daily and Sunday, of the season. Each of the books I have in mind is by one of the more interesting novelists of the last fifty years: William Trevor, born in 1928 in Ireland; and William T. Vollmann, born in 1959 in the USA.

Trevor’s new-ish (summer 2009) novel Love and Summer is an almost-perfect model of restrained, elegant, and very dense prose. That’s not to say his prose is hard to understand: it’s crystalline. It is to say that much is packed into it, and that if you read it attentively (and it will hardly let you do anything else) you’ll often have to pause to absorb the vistas that opened by a phrase. It’s a romance in which there are many loves, all unhappy if Hollywood or Disney provide your standard of what counts as a happy love, but each providing a vignette of what human love is and must be if the Christian account of things is right. That is, riven by its own excess, so intense that it cannot satisfy itself. The principal love story is that between Ellie and Florian, she an orphan raised by nuns, he the offspring of decayed Irish gentry. They’re in Ireland, perhaps mid-twentieth-century: it hardly matters when. Ellie is married to a man who accidentally killed his first wife and child; Florian is a creature of romantic memories (an Italian cousin) and literary hopes (stories in the head). They meet, they love, they part, neither able to fulfill the other’s hopes. The same, with variations, is true of the other lovers: the woman who was abandoned by her first and only lover; the man hopelessly in love with an imagined past; the reality of the lovers and their beloveds visible, palimpsest-like, through their hopes and imaginations. Everything is suggested, nothing made explicit: Trevor makes you work, but it is lovely work, sweetly intense, the work of entering an imagined world which is this one, sublimed.

For contrast, Vollmann’s 2005 novel Europe Central. Where Trevor values compression and suggestion, Vollmann prefers to leave nothing unsaid. Europe Central is probably something over 400,000 words long, and it is far from his longest book (that honor may belong to the recent Imperial, which I’ve not yet read). The book is about the European continent during the twentieth century, and especially about the Russo-German war of 1941-45; or, it is about totalitarianism, Stalinist and Nazi; or, it is about Shostakovich, the principal Russian character in the book; or, it is about violence and despair; or, all of these. Vollmann’s interests have long led him to write about our proclivities for excess in our mistreatment of other human beings, and the big canvas and high intensity of the place and time he treats provide an ideal focus. Almost every character in the book really existed, but Vollmann’s depiction of them is not what would be recognized as factual by a scholar-biographer. He’s after something more interesting than that, something very like what Tolstoy was after in War & Peace: the truth of war, hatred, fear, violence, and large-scale slaughter. He does it in prose that is, to my taste, considerably over-heated; and in that respect he is more like Augustine (in De civitate dei) than like Tolstoy. But he too achieves something quite remarkable, which is to get you, if you read him in the kind of half-bludgeoned trance he seems to want to put you into, to enter and understand the world lived in by mass-murderers and racists, of collaborators with evil, of those who come to see evil as good, of those who resist evil by inner migration, and of those who think they do but really don’t. And above all, he shows what the movement of steel and fire and bullets and gas and bombs forward and back across Europe between 1914 and 1945 was (or might have been) like, and in showing that he provides a figure of the fallen world, which is ours, and neither are we out of it.

Both Vollmann’s and Trevor’s characters dream as humans do, wanting what they cannot have, conjuring phantasms, and acting as if they were real. Their world, like ours, is one of violence and disappointment beyond the measure of reason, a place of the inevitable excess of these horrors, at least until Christ should come again. But each of these writers, in very different ways, shows also that there is more in the world than that, even if there is always that. There is also the beauty of the world, never erased, not even in the gas chambers, the torture pits, and the loneliness of abandonment. Christ’s blood streams in the firmament, even for those, like Faustus who have sold their souls to an imagination of Christ’s absence.

The British High Court ruled yesterday (16 December 2009) that a partly state-funded Jewish school in the UK may not use Jewish law to determine who is a Jew. The school had, in response to lower-level court decisions of a similar sort, already replaced the Orthodox matrilineal-descent criterion with a battery of religious-practice criteria. This High Court ruling makes that change irreversible: any educational institution in the UK whose admissions policy appeals to Jewish law to determine who is a Jew is henceforward in breach of UK law.

This decision is not exactly surprising. The UK is several steps further along the road of deploying civil and criminal law to constrain the free exercise of religion than is the US; and there is a long and distressing history of anti-semitism there, especially active at the moment on the British left, that makes a decision like this with respect to Jews easier than it might be with respect to Catholics or Muslims. But even if not surprising, the decision is dramatic: it shows very clearly, elegantly even, that liberal democracies are normative systems whose self-understanding requires them to tell religious people how to interpret their own doctrine and discipline. The British judiciary has now told Orthodox Jews in the UK that they may not decide for themselves who is a Jew: the courts will do it for them. (The British legislature, to its credit, opposed this decision.)

Catholics should care about this for at least two reasons. The first is that we are more intimate with the people of Israel than with any other community: without them we cannot exist, and their interests are more nearly ours than are those of any pagan state. The second is that this UK court decision shows clearly the tendency of pagan states (and the USA is one every bit as much as the UK) to arrogate to themselves the right to interpret the doctrine and discipline of the churches, and to use the law to enforce those interpretations when they conflict with those the churches offer.

Catholics of course have no business offering opinions about who is a Jew. We do, however, have a duty publicly to oppose pagan states when they require that Jewish judgments about that matter be subordinated to their own.

It is hard not to despair of democracy. To observe from afar the work of our elected representatives in House and Senate on health care reform is to watch an expensive exercise in futility. Real reform would involve separating the provision of care for the body, which everybody needs and everybody should get, from the fictions of insurance and the vagaries of employment. This has long been off the table. It would also involve accepting as axiomatic that everyone who is here merits care, and that none who are here should be deliberately killed by providers of care. But it is now broadly agreed that these things, too, are beyond debate. The result is that we will (quite certainly) tinker with our insurance- and employment-based system rather than replace it with something better; that we will (almost certainly) continue to exclude the undocumented from access to proper care; and that we will (very likely) make it easier to use public money to kill the unborn than is presently the case.

As the good and defensible options vanish from the table, often so quickly that it seems they were never there, the intensity of discussion about the form and shape and texture of what is in principle indefensibly bad increases. That is democracy as it ordinarily functions.

Perhaps some things will be mildly better after the reform. Perhaps more Americans will find the help they need in healing their sick bodies than do now. And if that turns out to be so, it should be celebrated. But any such celebration should be laced with tears: we will have made things worse as well as better (if better at all), and we will have done so because we cannot, collectively, see clearly,  a lack of clarity to which democracy as practiced here in this bloodsoaked land has made and is making direct contributions. Sackcloth & ashes & fasting & lament are all that is left to the Church. Contributing to public debate has done, for the Church, as much as it usually does, which is nothing at all.

On 17 November, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops approved and promulgated a text called Marriage: Love and Life in the Divine Plan. By design, there is nothing new in it: it restates the Catholic doctrine of marriage in a pastoral key, and is intended to help those who are married, or who have the task of advising and guiding those who are married or are planning marriage, to understand better what they are undertaking. There are some beautiful things in it: sometimes (not often enough, but sometimes), the language soars, as when we read that marriage is “to be a school for nurturing gratitude” — gratitude, that is for the gifts of God, for the goods and delights of marriage, and for the fact of one’s spouse. Yes; a difficult lesson and a hard school, but, nevertheless, yes.

For the most part, though, the text restates with care and accuracy, for an American audience, the Catholic understanding of marriage, in language more appropriate to the lecture hall or the presbytery than to the bedroom or the kitchen table. The Song of Songs, surely the best scriptural work on one of the fundamental reasons why people get married — that they are intoxicated with one another and want nothing more than the deepest intimacy with one another they can imagine or hope for — is quoted in only one paragraph. Wouldn’t a passionate meditation on the Song have been a good place to begin?

One thing the text does make clear is the deep difference between a Catholic understanding of marriage and that enshrined in American civil law. That difference is now so deep as to be almost unbridgeable. For Catholics (or at least for Catholic doctrine), marriage is sacrament and gift, participatory in Christ’s intimacy with the Church, and a proper foreshadowing of the intimacy with which we shall one day know and be known by the Lord. For American civil law, marriage is a form of contract, and one with the interesting property of being dissolvable at the will of either signatory. (Most contracts aren’t like that: try telling your bank that you’d like unilaterally to dissolve your mortgage contract.) Given such a difference, to use the same word, ‘marriage’, for both is simple equivocation. Such usage sows confusion on all sides. Imagine how confusing things would get if we thought that in advocating changes in the rules of what the Americans call ‘football’ we would have an effect on the rules of what the English call ‘football.’ The current debate about civil marriage law and ecclesial practice in the US is just about that confusing. It’s time for all sides to acknowledge this, and thereby to dissolve most of the apparent disagreements about who should get married and under what circumstances.

Francis George, OMI, is Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago, and currently President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. He is a thoughtful man, highly intelligent, widely and deeply read, occasionally irascible, and among the principal intellectual voices of the American Church. Earlier this year he published a book, The Difference God Makes: A Catholic Vision of Faith, Communion, and Culture. In it he addresses many topics — liturgy, evangelism, culture, philosophy, poetry — in a single, passionately Catholic, voice. Much of what’s in the book has been published before, and most of it breaks no new ground on the particular topics it addresses. Reading the essays one after another, however, yields a very strong impression of the power of the Catholic intellectual tradition as universal and synoptic: everything can be embraced by it and transfigured by it, and there is evident in these essays a fundamental stance, one of faithfulness to Jesus and love for his Church, from which it is possible to see otherwise invisible things.

In the Cardinal’s essay on lay Catholics this transfiguring vision is very clear. Both the faith, George writes, and the ambient culture of the United States, are normative systems: that is, each of them makes complex claims to truth and instructs us in how we should live. Each of them, moreover, has an account to offer of the other. Secularized American culture tells Catholics that their Catholicism is a hobby, a matter of private preference without significant import for their lives as Americans; and the Catholic faith describes secularized American culture as simultaneously demonic and a proper object of love, to be perfected for Christ so that it can be delivered to him when he comes again in glory. We American lay Catholics have listened hard to the normative voice of American culture and learned its lessons well. We have not understood so well the lessons the Church has to offer us about our culture. The result is that American Catholics are, by and large, in babylonian captivity without understanding that we are.

Cardinal George makes these points not to lay blame or to criticize. He’s interested, rather, in the possibilities for exhortation that issue from the clarification of differences. Among the exhortations he offers in the lay catholics essay is that we, we lay Catholics, need to learn to love today’s city, our beautiful and deadly country with its strip malls, its murder, its casual violence, its ugliness, its neonlit depravity, its aspiration to world domination, its history of slavery and genocide — to love it with a disinterested love that will make it possible for us as Catholics at once to learn from it, to appreciate the trace of the Lord’s presence in it, and to evangelize it and perfect it as an offering to Christ. This is a difficult vision, at least for me, because I have a dialectically Jansenist heart that blinds me to beauty’s trace all around me (yes, even in that neonlit depravity, even in that violence and death) and urges me to turn my eyes from it toward the consecrated host. The Cardinal’s exhortation reminds me that it is my task, as it is that of all lay Catholics, to look with the eyes that Jesus has given me (“who made the eyes but I?” George Herbert has Jesus ask in ‘Love III’) not only directly at himself but also, exactly with those transfigured eyes, at what is around me.