The Courage to be Constant

I thought I’d take a break from all the heavy Klosterman quotes and go with a passage from Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. Horses tells the story of John Grady Cole and his pal Lacey Rawlins as they ride from their home in southern Texas across the border into Mexico in search of work and adventure. Once in Mexico Cole is hired to breed horses for a wealthy Mexican rancher. However, during his stay at the hacienda, Cole develops a romantic relationship with the rancher’s mysterious and beautiful daughter, Alejandra.

In a pivotal scene near the book’s end, John Grady meets with Alejandra’s matriarchal aunt, who has saved his life under the terms that he never see the girl again. In attempting to explain to Cole the gravity of the situation he’s in, she relates the history of her people in Mexico and specifically shares the story of her own forbidden love. A love that ended in alienation and death. In recounting her story the aunt makes this observation:

I wanted very much to be a person of value and I had to ask myself how this could be possible if there were not something like a soul or like a spirit that is in the life of a person and which could endure any misfortune or disfigurement and yet be no less for it. If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to the hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what. Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I’d always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily (p. 235).

I found this to be a particularly powerful book because it told a story where romantic love did not conquer all. Rather, what conquered was family, tradition, and constancy.

John Grady, despite his best efforts to find a way to make his love succeed, ultimately fails and his story ends in a state of lonely wondering. I wonder if McCarthy is onto something rather profound here. We are constantly bombarded by the ephemeral myth that true love can overcome not only the odds, but all meaningful social realities. If your family places certain boundaries upon you, well those boundaries should be crossed if you are really in love. If your station in life will not permit your love, well your station be damned. If your prior commitments to being a certain type of person — whether it be of character or value — if it is for true love, then it is right to abandon even yourself. This myth teaches us that it is only in the arms of the one we “love” that we will find the beatific vision, the sublime nexus of truth, goodness, and beauty. But McCarthy casts a vision of a place where romantic love does not win in the end. This is a vision of life where what truly counts is one’s prior commitments to character and tradition.

It seems this vision of the failure of romance is more true than the myth of conquering romance so prevalent in our culture. And it so in two distinct ways. First, this just seems to be the way things go. When people choose romance over family, tradition, station in life, or character, they inevitably lose more than they gain. There is a suffering that is felt in very deep and lasting ways. And the “true romance” often fades leaving one, in the end, wandering alone. The second reason McCarthy’s vision is more true is that it points to a truer reality: Fleeting romantic sentiments are not nearly as substantial and meaningful, and thus true, as are one’s commitments to family, tradition, station, and character. It turns out that the truly courageous act was for Alejandra to get on her train and leave John Grady Cole behind her. But because John Grady was a good American, who did not understand a courage premised on sacrifice for tradition and character rather than romance, he was left alone and confused.

Where Christ has said, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but forfeit his soul?” McCarthy has added, “Or to gain true love only to wonder the desert alone.” And for this we should be grateful.

Is Christianity Theocratic?

Danny Jenkins raised an interesting point in his response to the Badiou quote about identity politics and capitalistic territorialization I posted last week. His comment was that the Hauerwasian system, “refuses to allow the Christian narrative to capitulate to a standard of rationality foreign to it.” In other words, for Hauerwas (and others of like mind) the narrative of the church is prior to and more fundamental than any narrative “the world” has on offer, which in the west is primarily the narrative of the secular.

I agree with Danny’s appraisal of the “Hauerwasian system,” and because I agree with it I find the relationship between Christianity and the wider public sphere to be a most interesting issue. Because America is a secular nation it is assumed that there is something prior to and more fundamental than any particular religious tradition that allows diverse groups of people to come together and achieve a common good. In the case of the West, that something prior is “rationality.” In his book, Democracy and Tradition, Jeffrey Stout argues that,

Central to democratic thought as I understand it is the idea of a body of citizens who reason with one another about the ethical issues that divide them, especially when deliberating on the justice or decency of political arrangements. It follows that one thing a democratic people had better have in common is a form of ethical discourse, a way of exchanging reasons about ethical and political topics. The democratic practice of giving and asking for ethical reasons, I argue, is where the life of democracy principally resides.

~ Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2003), p. 6.

Key here for Stout is that we, as a diverse members of a democratic society, need to come together and reason with one another about the ethical issues that shape our political life together. There are two important things to note in Stout’s argument:

First, unlike other liberal democratic theorists like John Rawls and Richard Rorty, Stout believes that particular ethical convictions, which are derived from particular socio-linguistic traditions, ought to play a part in America’s democratic deliberation. In this regard, Stout is acknowledging that a person’s conception of the good is, perhaps more than anything else, shaped by their religious convictions. Furthermore, he is acknowledging the merit of “traditionalists” like MacIntyre, Hauerwas, and Milbank who argue that each particular tradition has its own unique rationality inherent to the tradition itself.

Second, despite giving this nod to what Stout refers to as the “New Traditionalism,” he maintains that there there is a form of reasoning prior to and more fundamental than these particular religious traditions. Thus, while seemingly affirming the argument of the Hauerwasian system — that ethical convictions are not derived from universal reason but from particular traditions — Stout goes on to posit a base-level rationality that is large enough to encompass all other traditioned particularities.

Stout’s positing of such a base-level rationality is seen most clearly in his chapter addressing the claims of John Milbank. Milbank, who rejects the narrative of a secularity more fundamental than Christianity, does so on the basis that the secular narrative inherently works to police the narrative of Christianity into a posture of submission. In response to this Stout counters that,

[Secularism] entails neither the denial of theological assumptions nor the expulsion of theological expression from the public sphere. And it leaves believers free to view both the state and democratic political culture as domains standing ultimately under divine judgment and authority. That believers view the political sphere in this way does not entail that others will, of course. But this just means that the age of theocracy is over, not that the anti-Christ has taken control of the political sphere (Democracy and Tradition, 93).

But what is Stout here advocating other than the basic separation of church and state? In the land of religious freedom all are welcome, and even encouraged, to worship in their own manner, so long as they don’t expect any one else to have to share in their religious convictions… of course. And this is where Stout really belies his ideological convictions, for by adding “of course” he is essentially saying “duh!” It is just common sense that no one should have to accept as reality that God is in control. But what this means is that, even though you can believe what you want, it will not have real purchase in the political sphere, at least as a discourse-shaping narrative. Rather, the political sphere requires a narrative that supersedes all religious and traditional particularities, a proposition that, for the radical Christian, is unacceptable. Radical Christianity must reject the “common sense” of Stout’s democratic deliberation, because it requires a subordination of the Christian narrative to the narrative of the state.

Stout claims that this subordiation of the Chrisitan narrative to the narrative of the state does not mean the anti-Christ has taken control. Instead, he argues, it simply means we’ve moved beyond the age of Theocracy. However, I’m wondering if there is a difference. If we have to subordinate our narrative to that of the state or some other form of rationality, thus relegating Christian conviction to the realm of the private, are we not abdicating Christ from the public sphere? Is this not anti-Christ?

It seems that Christian convictions require that we refuse to be just one voice among many within a neutral or secular public sphere. We must refuse a rationality or narrative that is prior to or more fundamental than Christianity. If this makes us Theocratic, then so be it.

Beyond the Narrative? Part 1: The Problem of Joining Hands

When I was in seminary I began a thesis that I never finished. It was going to be on the nature of the socio-linguistic boundary(ies) between the Church and the World specifically within the theology of Stanley Hauerwas. The central question of the thesis was how it was that we communicate the gospel with people outside of our tradition. Put simply, the thesis was on a Haurwasian understanding of evangelism. The problem goes like this: If communication of Christian truth claims requires participation the socio-linguistic tradition of the church (which, among other things, would include significant epistemic assumptions about the reality of God, sin, and redemption) — and if the gospel is something radically different from the ways of the world (meaning, it would seem like foolishness to those who do not share the aforementioned assumptions) — then how can it be communicated? Here is the issue put in Hauerwas’ own words:

Rather than disavowing politics, the pacifist must be the most political of animals exactly because politics understood as the process of discovering the goods we have in common is the only alternative to violence (Against the Nations, p. 7).

It is true that I do not think there is in principle any way to ensure that the Gospel can be made intelligible to someone who is not a Christian, but that does not mean that there is nothing we have to say to each other (Wilderness Wanderings, p. 6).

So my question was simply this: How? If we must work together with those outside of our narrative tradition to find the goods we have in common, and if there is no way in principle to intelligibly communicate the truth of the gospel with such a person, and if we further presuppose that the gospel is integral to our conception of the good, then how do we do find these goods we have in common? If Hauerwas is right, how can we work to build a better world with people who are not Christians?

In the end, and for several good reasons, I abandoned the thesis, but I am again visiting the question due to my reading of Eugene McCarraher. In a couple of different places (here and here) McCarraher argues that “we shouldn’t be chary about joining hands with the disembedded of other traditions.” While I appreciate and want to be enthusiastic about what McCarraher is calling us to here, my Hauerwasian tendencies trigger misgivings about jumping on board. In Resident Aliens Hauerwas (and Will Willimon) assert that,

Big words like “peace” and “justice,” slogans the church adopts under the presumption that, even if people do not know what “Jesus Christ is Lord” means, they will know what peace and justice means, are words awaiting content. The church really does not know what these words mean apart from the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth.

So the question is, if when taking McCarraher’s cue we begin to join hands with those of other traditions who also want to build a world not made in the image of mammon, how do “we” provide content to our use of words like labor, economy, and justice?

The demise of a tradition?

During my “parking lot duty” this morning I read through a few pages of After Virtue. I was looking for the passage wherein MacIntyre defines a “practice” and its role in a tradition. Instead I found this passage, which, again, seems apt:

What then sustains and strengthens traditions? What weakens and destroys them? The answer in key part is: the exercise or the lack of exercise of the relevant virtues. The virtues find their point and purpose not only in sustaining those relationships necessary if the variety of goods internal to practices are to be achieved and not only in sustaining the form of an individual life in which that individual may seek out his or her good as the good of his or her own life, but also in sustaining those traditions which provide both practices and individual lives with their necessary historical context. Lack of justice, lack of truthfulness, lack of courage, lack of the relevant intellectual virtues — these corrupt traditions, just as they do those institutions and practices which derive their life from the traditions of which they are the contemporary embodiments.

Justice, truthfulness, courage, and intellect. These are the four virtues that can make or break a traditioned community. It makes one wonder what sort of predicament we’ve gotten ourselves into.