Author: jwhorton

Posted on

THE GREAT GATSBY and the Enneagram

I do not know whether to trust the enneagram, and I am no expert on it, but it is compelling. Perhaps it is simply a template we force things into, a mode of understanding human nature we try to prove correct by shaping all the evidence to fit into it. Christians do this with scripture all the time, for example, and scientists do it when the scientific method is not scrupulously followed.

However, sometimes the enneagram is intriguing. It might be used as a literary tool to help us analyze how a given novel works or does not work. While reading The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective by Richard Rohr and Andreas Ebert, and listening to Richard Rohr’s Youtube lectures on the subject, I found myself thinking of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. I think the enneagram can help explain what constitutes the particular power of this novel–one of my favourites.

I have no idea whether Fitzgerald consciously wrote with the enneagram in mind, or whether he had even heard of it. But it seems quite possible that he intuited something about the relationship between these three numbers that gave the book a profound and solid spiritual and psychological basis. It is my contention here that Gatsby, Nick, and Daisy, the three main characters of The Great Gatsby, form not only a love triangle, but specifically what might be thought of as an enneagram love triangle in the form of 3-6-9 respectively. Each character is a fascinating study of one of these three numbers and moves in this triangle towards false consolation or disintegration rather than moving in the opposite direction, towards true consolation, integration, or redemption. It must be noted that Rohr and Ebert point out, “The game of ‘who matches whom?’ can’t be carried over to the Enneagram. There are no ‘super partners’ who automatically make a good match” (228). So I am not asserting that any of these three characters should or should not have been friends or lovers. I am saying, however, that the relationships between these three characters (plus Tom, who is also significant enneagramatically) and what those relationships mean can be elucidated by the enneagram.

First, let us take a look at the enneagram diagram as taken from page 218 of Rohr and Ebert’s book. (I have added the names of the three characters.) Note that this version of the diagram includes arrows which indicate true and false consolations. To move in the direction of the arrow is to move towards false consolation, and true consolation is found in the opposite direction (more on this shortly).

Now for the characters and their corresponding numbers.

Enneagram Three: Jay Gatsby

Gatsby is the quintessential three. The fundamental need of the three is to succeed, and this is certainly true of Gatsby, in a specifically American/capitalist fashion. He is the poor boy who became rich in a very short time, and apparently on his own pluck or efforts, unlike the Buchanans (and to a lesser extent, Nick) who are born into prosperity. Of course, Gatsby has also used illegal and likely unethical methods.

Gatsby’s dream girl may be Daisy, but his dream, his needs and energy predate his meeting of her. For it needs to be remembered of course that the enneagram is not about personality “types” or characteristics, but about needs or energies. Nonetheless, it is characteristic of threes that they are efficient and good at getting what they aim at, and Gatsby is certainly that: until the end, of course.

It is also characteristic of the three to lose him or herself. Threes characteristically do not know who they are. It is rumoured in the book that Gatsby “killed a man once” (44) and I do recall one critic at least (I do not remember who) suggesting that man is Gatsby himself. Tom, stupid as he is in a number of ways, hits upon a truth he only dimly understands (if at all) when he calls Gatsby “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” (130).

Gatsby springs from a “Platonic conception of himself” (98) as if he is not a specific person, but a disembodied, impersonal Platonic ideal. His connection to his parents is very weak, as if he is denying his own past (as he does in changing his name from “Gatz” to “Gatsby,” an act of self-erasure). His mansion is party central to countless people, yet none of them seem to know him. Even Nick, who knows and loves him best, is at a bit of a distance from him, perhaps more like an admiring sidekick than a close friend. But like a true three Gatsby needs to be liked. “He doesn’t want any trouble with anybody” (43) says a woman at one of his parties. Gatsby is the chameleon three who can be whatever he needs to be to get people to like him. When Nick and Gatsby first meet (significantly, Nick has been talking to Gatsby at one of the latter’s own parties without even knowing yet this is Gatsby) Gatsby smiles at Nick with an “irresistible prejudice” (48) in Nick’s favour. This does so much to win Nick over.

Various hints in the text show that Gatsby has been patterning himself off other people: mostly conventional heroes of American history, literature, or folklore, such as Ben Franklin, Tom Sawyer, Buffalo Bill, and Daniel Boone. In other words, Gatsby is not in touch with who he is. Nor is anyone else. Thus, the wild rumours about him, that he may have been a German spy in the war, and so on. There may be more than one reason why rumours constantly fly about who Gatsby is, but one reason is that nobody, not even Gatsby, knows.

Enneagram Six: Nick Carraway

Nick is definitely a six. As such, his fundamental need is for security. While Gatsby will take any risk, and usually succeed, Nick moves to West Egg to start trading in “securities.” Both men participate in the wild world of speculative finance of the 1920s, but Nick in a much more staid and conservative manner. “I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities” (4). Nick intends to make money according to the rules, literally by the book.

While Nick and Jordan are having dinner at Tom and Daisy’s (chapter one) Myrtle Wilson, Tom’s lover, keeps telephoning, creating tension between Tom and Daisy and weaving an unspoken air of scandal about the table. Nick says, “[t]o a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing—my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police” (16). This is the instinct of the six.

“When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever” (2). Responsibility, doing the right thing, making the trains run on time is Nick’s mindset. He is self-aware enough, however, to mildly satirize himself in how he phrases this, as when he refers to the “very solemn and obvious editorials” (4) he wrote at Yale.

The big reason Nick is so attracted to Gatsby is because Gatsby dares to dream big and acts accordingly. On the other hand, in describing his own relationship with Jordan, Nick says, “[h]er gray, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires” (58). For Nick, though he does not say so explicitly, and may not even be conscious of the fact, Gatsby is a hero because he succeeds where Nick has failed. Nick puts safety and mistrust first, and that is his undoing.

But the six’s obsession with law and order is not quite as straightforward as I have been implying. Rohr and Ebert say of immature sixes, “[t]he law, and everything connected with it, fascinates them. Many of them seek occupations where they deal with the law—whether by protecting it or breaking it. Judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, detectives, inspectors, police, writers of whodunits, and criminals take part in one way or another in the SIX game” (134 my emphasis). Thus, we see Nick’s three nature is not simply a kind of moral conservatism. He is fascinated with and attracted to the criminal Gatsby, and is aware of the superiority of the East, as opposed to the Midwest with its “interminable inquisitions” (176). Tragically, it is back to the Midwest and its stifling security where Nick retreats by the end of the book.

Sixes, therefore, are obsessed with rules, not just keeping but also breaking them, and Gatsby does very much of the latter: crime, adultery, and getting rich without old money respectability. But however much Gatsby stands for everything Nick has an “unaffected scorn” (2) for, Nick is also there to help him on in his illicit endeavours. Though Nick turns down Gatsby’s offer of getting in on some probably illegal speculation, Nick does act as go-between for Gatsby and Daisy’s great first post-war meeting at Nick’s place.

And Nick is also present, disapproving but drinking everything in (including literal drinking, and quite a bit of it) that afternoon when Tom Buchanan compels him to meet his mistress and takes them both downtown to Tom and Myrtle’s love nest. It is shortly thereafter that Nick has his drunken and likely homosexual encounter with Chester McKee (see the end of chapter two, including some double entendre with the elevator boy). Nick, it seems, is breaking the rules himself.

Enneagram Nine: Daisy Buchanan

Daisy is a nine. The root need of the nine is to avoid things. The characteristic root sin is laziness. Nines tend to be unfocussed. At the same dinner party where Nick wanted to call the police, Jordan suggests they all plan something. “’All right,’ said Daisy. ‘What’ll we plan?’ She turned to [Nick] helplessly: ‘What do people plan?’” (11).

Nick eventually dismisses Daisy and Tom as “careless people . . . they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made” (179).

Many have agreed with Nick’s opinion of his cousin, and there is a great deal of truth in what he says. But it is not the whole story by a long shot. Daisy’s story is as tragic as Gatsby’s is in its own way. The evening of the same dinner party mentioned above, Daisy tries tentatively (nines have anything but an insistent presence) to draw attention to her troubles with Tom. Because of her evasive way of expressing herself, and because Nick simply is not perceptive of her needs, he misinterprets her as having “asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged” (17). Nick has gotten it exactly backwards. Daisy has in fact been expressing sarcasm towards Tom and everything (such as white supremacy) that he stands for. Nick also shows no sign of picking up on Daisy’s serious marital situation when she makes light of a bruised finger she blames Tom for. As the unassertive nine she can bring herself only to hint at Tom’s violence in the context of a joke. But Nick does not perceive the gravity of the situation.

What nines and threes have in common is a tendency to lose a sense of who they are. In the case of the three, this is performative: the self is lost amid the roles the three plays in order to be liked and to get along in the world. The loss of self in the nine, however, seems to have to do more with being overwhelmed by other people’s personalities or points of view. As in so many things in the enneagram, a person’s strength is also potentially his or her weakness. Nines are very good at seeing things from others’ eyes and are known to be peacemakers, but also tend to lose a sense of what their own position is. At a climactic scene one hot day in the Plaza Hotel, Daisy is torn between Gatsby and Tom until she becomes simply a “lost voice” (134) with no remaining power of her own.

“Precisely because NINES themselves often have no clear standpoint, they are capable of shifting to, and accepting, any standpoint whatsoever. . . . Many people report that in the presence of a NINE they come to rest in some inexplicable manner and can relax. . . . Their peaceful radiance is disarming” (187-88). Rohr and Ebert also say, “[i]n the presence of a NINE many people find it easy to come to rest themselves. In radical contrast to this, NINES often feel inwardly lashed by fears and restlessness, even when no one notices” (178). Therefor, Daisy’s being overpowered by others is symbolized by her voice, but on the other hand, it is that very voice which expresses the “peaceful radiance [which] is disarming.” Gatsby says famously that her voice “is full of money,” (120) and Nick agrees, but this is not simply a socio-political statement about how important money is in American culture or how it is thought to be able to buy anything. Money comes between the individual and the mystical dimension of life represented by the nine. In this way, what Daisy has to communicate is again thwarted, highjacked by something other than itself.

In chapter eight we get Nick’s interpretation of Gatsby’s version of why Daisy married Tom.

After the Armistice he tried frantically to get home, but some complication or misunderstanding sent him to Oxford instead. He was worried now—there was a quality of nervous despair in Daisy’s letters. She didn’t see why he couldn’t come. She was feeling the pressure of the world outside, and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all. . . . And all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately—and the decision must be made by some force—of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality—that was close at hand.

That force took shape in the middle of spring with the arrival of Tom Buchanan. There was a wholesome bulkiness about his person and his position, and Daisy was flattered. Doubtless there was a certain struggle and a certain relief. (150-51)

Then (as Nick relates Jordan’s tale to us) there is the tragedy of Gatsby’s letter, apparently arriving the day before Daisy is to marry Tom. Jordan finds Daisy drunk and inarticulate. Daisy does not explain what the letter is about, and it is dissolved in the bath. For all the beauty of her voice, Daisy is not able to communicate well—especially about her problems and needs.

Therefor, Daisy is not just a careless, irresponsible airhead. She has the difficulties characteristic of the nine.

Counterphobic Six: Tom

If Gatsby is Nick’s dream self, Tom is Nick’s dark shadow.

If most sixes deal with their fear by attempting to acquire some sort of security, the counterphobic six is prone to dealing with that fear more directly, by attacking the thing feared. Certainly, Tom is the most aggressive character in the book: he injures Daisy physically and seems to have her under control by the end of the novel, belts Myrtle in the nose, and uses Wilson to kill Gatsby. Not long after experiencing “the hot whips of panic” (125) when he realizes he might lose both Daisy and Myrtle, he goes on the offensive at the Plaza Hotel. It is from this point on that most of the violence begins. It is not that Tom is a genius at manipulating people and situations (or a genius at anything for that matter) but somehow all the bodies fall: Myrtle, George, Gatsby, such that only Tom is left with what he wants, and there is nothing for anybody else. Daisy does not get what she wants. Daisy, as we have seen, is not just the “careless” person who walks away from messes she creates. She is now trapped with an unfaithful, unloving man and has lost what may well have been the true love of her life.

Nick and Jordan are not objects of Tom’s wrath, but in the fallout from that fateful evening their relationship collapses. Neither character is a threat to Tom, and Nick may also be a special case: “[w]e were in the same senior society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own” (7). It is as if Tom senses Nick is a better version of himself. However, it is not Nick who wins in the end. The only winner is his dark shadow.

One of the characteristics of the six is loyalty. In Nick, this takes the form of his loyalty to Gatsby. Though this allegiance may be a manifestation of Nick’s false consolation (see below) it is also quite moving, and in some ways a positive thing. We should not forget that a man like Nick might well have resented Gatsby, seeing in the latter a reproach to the former’s own weaknesses. Instead, Nick is willingly generous. It is, of course, Nick’s shadow, Tom, who manifests open enmity with Gatsby. In Tom the loyalty of the counterphobic six takes the form of racism. “It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things” (13).

True and False Consolations

For each of the numbers of the enneagram, there is a true consolation number, and a false consolation number. See again the diagram above. In times of stress or temptation, a number may go with the arrow, moving towards false consolation and disintegration, taking on the more negative characteristics of the number it is moving to. In the case of the 3-6-9 triangle this means a movement counter clockwise. What each number needs to do to become more fully integrated or “redeemed” (as Rohr and Ebert put it) is to go against the direction of the arrow.

Therefor, you might say Nick loses himself in going to Gatsby’s three: by the end of the book, Nick seems like he will never realize his own dreams; in fact, he probably will never even find out what they are because like a three he does not know who he is. He has broken up with Jordan, just as he broke up with a girl in the accounting department simply because her brother did not like him, just as he has or may have had something resembling an engagement with another woman out West. Nick goes half way with women, and might be gay or bisexual, without apparently realizing it.

Gatsby takes on the negative characteristics of the nine Daisy in that once his love is finally rejected he takes to his swimming pool (for the first time that summer) where he is shot dead on his air mattress by the ghostly George Wilson. We never see directly what must have happened there, but it is symbolically a very passive fate (reminiscent of Daisy and Jordan when we first see them on the “enormous couch . . . buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon” (8)) very much unlike Gatsby at his best. Nick tries to imagine Gatsby’s last moments:

If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees. (161)

This is a peculiar passage. Is this world Gatsby is awakening into too real or not real enough? Is he finding out his old Platonic dream world was only ever a dream, or was it more real than reality itself as it would be in Platonic philosophy? This ambiguous state Gatsby seems to be in is very much the nine’s situation. At no point is Gatsby, or indeed anyone, more like Daisy than Gatsby is here. It is in this state of passive vulnerability that he is murdered by the “fantastic figure” of George Wilson, whose gun is very real indeed.

In turn, Daisy moves to enneagram six in the form of Tom, driven by fear. Fear is the thing sixes are always struggling with.

So Nick, Gatsby, and Daisy each move counter clockwise on the triangle, each to his or her false consolation, and with disastrous results. What of Tom? He gets to keep Daisy, which for him is a clockwise move on the enneagram, and therefor one might think it would signify a true consolation. Again, the enneagrammatic idea of true and false consolation does not have to do with who should marry whom. If it did, it would mean sixes should marry nines, but nines should not marry sixes, which is clearly absurd. Tom, as a six, should move to nine, take on the nine’s better characteristics such as peacefulness. Since Tom is a restless, violent character, this makes sense. But Tom does not change, nor does he try to. He does not effect any changes; he simply manages to hang on to what he already had. Daisy tried to make a change and failed. Gatsby pursued his dream and failed, with disastrous results. Nick falls in love with Gatsby, in a sense, and while Nick’s failure is symbolized by his return to the Midwest, at least the dream of Gatsby stays alive. Tom, therefor, though he is the only winner of the four characters, is the most static. Each of the nine numbers of the enneagram is a limited way of perceiving and living life. Each way has its truth, but also its limitations. Tom does not even rattle the bars of his cage or suspect that he is in one. He has only brought the nine, Daisy, who represents his true consolation and an invitation to change, into the cage with him.

This brings us, finally, to Nick’s dream of West Egg.

In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house—the wrong house. But no one knows the woman’s name, and no one cares. (176)

Who is this woman? Well, it may actually be Gatsby. The four men carrying the stretcher suggest Nick, the chauffeur, butler, and gardener who carry the dead Gatsby to his house. Or the woman could be Daisy, who is frequently associated with the colour white. The jewels suggest her wealth, and the drunkenness her helplessness.

But there is one more candidate here. What is meant by “the wrong house?” Surely, when Gatsby’s body is taken from the pool to his house it is not the wrong house. “The wrong house” could suggest that Daisy is going to the wrong house–Tom’s–instead of Gatsby’s. So if the procession should be going to Gatsby’s house (the right house for Gatsby or Daisy) the most natural house to go to by mistake would be the one next door: Nick’s.

This would mean Gatsby or Daisy on the stretcher going to Nick’s house as “the wrong house.” Or is it, in the self-contradictory nature of dreams, the right house, if Nick is the one on the stretcher? Nick acts as his own carrier in this instance, or pallbearer in this funeral like procession, carrying his secret, gay self, not recognizing this self, but in denial about who is on the stretcher, and therefor thinking the house is “wrong.” The drunken, glamourous woman on the stretcher is the nine Nick needs to go to, but instead buries.

Another way of looking at it is this: if it is Gatsby’s house in the dream, as implied by the fact that four people actually did carry Gatsby to his house, then it can be “the wrong house” only for Nick.

SOURCES

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925. Scribner, 2004.

Rohr, Richard, and Andreas Ebert. The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective. Translated by Peter Heinegg, Crossroad, 2001.

Posted on

Book Review: UNIVERSALITY AND IDENTITY POLITICS by Todd McGowan

Columbia Press, 2020

There are conservatives who decry the Left by pointing to its so-called identity politics, and thereby give themselves a name for more tolerant and universalist values.  Todd McGowan’s Universality and Identity Politics, while highly critical of identity politics in any form, will not give such conservatives much comfort or justification.

Although most ventures in identity politics that reject universality are conservative or reactionary, today we associate the term identity politics with leftist groups. This association of identity politics with the Left rather than the Right marks a significant conservative political victory, since the label instantly produces a misunderstanding of the nature of these political projects.  (177-78)

Much of this book argues the point that when one looks deeper at left wing political stances, they are really appeals to universality, and that in so far as they drift into identity politics (or particularism, in other words) they engage in a mistake that betrays what the Left is really about.

Often, what people condemn as identity politics is really universalism in disguise.  One of the key political battles involves distinguishing who is the real exponent of identity politics and who is engaging in a universalist struggle.  The struggle between Left and Right is a struggle between the universal and the particular.  This is how we should define Left and Right.  But in order to see the contours of the struggle, we need to recognize that many of the projects labelled identity politics are often universal and that many calls for unity mask an underlying particularism. (178)

This is an excellent point.  Isn’t patriotism usually a form of identity politics?  Isn’t ‘MAGA’ identity politics in spades?

But how did the Left end up so often carrying the particularist football? a football which, as McGowan repeatedly asserts, does not rightly belong to its true self?  We shall return to this issue, but first we must clarify what McGowan means by universality.

In an interesting move, both counter-intuitive and strangely liberating, McGowan does not found the idea of universality on the predictable idea of a ‘common humanity’ or something of the sort.  The central idea is that universality is founded on what we all have in common: that we are all inevitably left out or alienated one way or another, even if not equally or in the same ways.

Universality cannot have a direct manifestation because it is constitutively absent and emerges in the form of a lack. (10)

Universal solidarity doesn’t leave anyone out because it takes those who don’t belong as its starting point. (68)

The shared absence of the universal rather than the shared possession of it bonds particulars together. (23)

Universality is the lack in every particular. (45)

Though I am not sure universality can be defined this simply, McGowan’s notion of universality is a powerful one.  It may also help us all deal with the fact that while Left causes may be universalist, the temptations to particularism are within everybody.

Indeed, identity itself is seen as problematic in this book.

Identity is an obstacle to overcome rather than a foundation from which to base one’s politics.  (18)

Must we, then, have no identity?  For many, this will be a hard pill to swallow.  But McGowan takes things a bit deeper here, presenting us with no simple banalities about us all being “the same under the skin” and so on, but instead positing a distinction between who one is, and what one is:

Rather than affirming my group identity, the universal reveals that I am not my identity, that there is a divide between who I am and what I am.  It is this divide that makes political acts possible at all. When we lose sight of it and believe ourselves to be what we are, we may achieve some recognition, but we lose contact with the possibility of emancipation. (199)

I wouldn’t have minded if this book had gone further and discussed more the nature of personal being, if one may call it that, as opposed to identity (in other words, the who as opposed to the what).  That being said, it is clear that one thing that comes under attack in this book is the conservative conception of self as the self-sufficient monad:

According to this position, individuals exist in a meaningful way outside the universality that constitutes them as individuals in the first place.  Once one accepts this premise, the struggle is already over because universality will always appear as an impingement on the privilege of the individual.  No argument about universality will ever ultimately prove convincing for those who see the isolated individual as the political starting point.  The conservative victory occurs with the dominance of the image of two (or more) particular forces fighting it out for political supremacy.  (33)

An insightful part of this critique of the conservative conception of the self is McGowan’s indictment of capitalism.  ‘Capitalism,’ according to him, ‘engenders identity politics’ (24).  In capitalism, the commodity form is capitalism’s structuring principle.  ‘Individuals display their devotion to capitalism not by openly proclaiming it but by retreating into their isolated particularity’ (120).

Indeed, identity politics is not only practised by capitalism, it is essential to it.  Capitalism inflicts upon the individual an empty isolation, an emptiness that craves to be filled with an identity.  Without this kind of pacification, the working class would not accept the inequalities of the system.  ‘The appeal to identity is capitalism’s secret sauce’ (147).

On the other hand, to come back to my earlier question, do we simply give up our identities?

… it is impossible to live without an identity.  Even though identity is always ideological insofar as it obfuscates the self-division of the subject with an image of wholeness, it is nonetheless unavoidable.  By emptying out identity through reducing subjects to a pure particularity, capitalism puts them in an untenable situation.  This is why so many under capitalism seek an identity to give their subjectivity some content, and they often find it in religious, ethnic, or nationalist projects. (121)

Again, we have this quandary of the self.  How does the who-I-am live with the necessity of the what-I-am, even though the latter seems to bind us to inevitable delusion of one sort or another?  More exploration of this problem would have been good, though that might have made the book go a bit far afield and lose its focus.

But let us now return to the issue of how the Left came to end up in the realm of identity politics rather than its proper home of universality.

The suspicion about universality that the twentieth century produces creates a fertile ground for identity politics.  That is, it derails the leftist emancipatory project from its proper course and shifts its struggle to the conservative terrain of identitarian battles.  The dangers of twentieth-century totalitarianism were particular dangers.  To theorize them as universal is to unwittingly turn the tide of history in their direction.  (117-18)

McGowan argues that since World War Two the Left has joined the Right in condemning universality, rather than particularism, as the dominant problem.  The Terror in the French Revolution, the depredations of Stalinism and Nazism, have been interpreted by many throughout the range of the political spectrum as the results of universalist practices, wherein the nightmare is caused by belief in values that apply to all, and which end up being forced on all.

But this interpretation of universality as the enemy is false, according to McGowan.  Particularly interesting are his observations on Nazism here.  Far from being rooted in some form of universality, where all are made to fit the same mold, Nazism practices at its root an intense particularism (such as racism and anti-Semitism).  The universalist always wants converts and does not need enemies.  The Nazi, on the other hand, is inconceivable without them.  For the Nazi to be a Nazi, there must be those who are not, and can never be included in the Nazi ‘us.’

And this is also where Nazism and communism differ.  Nazism’s nature is particularity.  Communism is by its nature universalist.  The Stalinist regime’s problem was false universality.

Stalin’s crimes were not crimes of the universal, nor were they just the crimes of one murderous leader.  They were the result of an erroneous conception of universality, a belief that universal equality was an end to be fully realized through invention rather than a value discovered as the basis for the struggle for it.  It is not universality but the Stalinist misconception of universality that led straight to the gulag.  Stalin believed in his own particular capability to realize universality, but this belief in his own particularity would not have been so deadly had he not combined it with the dream that the revolution would permit everyone to belong.  (107)

This situation, McGowan points out, is very different from the reigning interpretation of Stalinism, where the heart of the problem is seen as an insistence on universality to the point of erasing the particular.

Also:

When one conceives of universality as a realizable future that leaves no one out, it demands the erection of enemies that stand as obstacles to this realization.  These enemies of the revolution are necessary to explain why we haven’t yet achieved universal equality.  They will remain necessary as long as we fail to confront the impossibility—and undesirability—of a fully realized, all-inclusive universal.  The fact that Stalin’s universality depends on enemies indicates that it is something less than genuine universality.  Universality cannot have enemies and remain universality. (109)

I must admit that the discussion of the perversion of universality and communism under Stalin is illuminating, but not quite as illuminating or convincing as the discussion of Nazism.  Does the conception of universality as realizable necessarily require the erection of enemies?  I do not ask rhetorically.

Particularly good, however, is the discussion of how Nazism has been strangely de-politicized in our culture.  This book points out that what Nazis hated about Jews and communists was their universalist tendencies, and that this fact is largely ignored.  (This is in contradistinction to earlier, specifically Christian manifestations of anti-Semitism that faulted Jews for being too insular, too particularist.)  McGowan also points out that the first people sent to the concentration camps (before death camps were established) were political enemies of the Nazis such as communists.  ‘But communists do not figure in the most widely disseminated depictions of the Holocaust’ (94).  Why?  Because to highlight Nazi persecution of the political Left would show that Nazism was not an attack simply on Jews but on universalism.  ‘Nazism saw communists as every bit as much the enemy as Jews.  Both were political enemies, not just the victims of a universal evil’ (94).  This goes against the dominant idea that it is universalism which is the problem, not the attack on it.  One might also add that in the current regime of cultural capitalism it will not do to foreground the fact that the Left in Germany stood up against the Nazis earlier and with far greater determination than any other segment of the nation.  (I have often noticed a strange double think in the mainstream literature about the Weimar Republic: liberals or conservatives in Germany who opposed the Nazis are rightly called heroic, while Left opponents of fascism, when they are noticed at all, are accused of ‘provoking’ the Nazis by their opposition.) 

Though McGowan’s is definitely an idealistic work (as universality cannot help but be) there is a distinctly anti-utopian element in it.  One wonders what McGowan would make of Christianity’s unabashedly utopian character in this context, for he does take a very positive stance towards Christianity as radically universalist (citing Paul in Galatians 3.28, for example).

This concern is to go afield of what the book discusses perhaps, but from my own Christian perspective I cannot help but note that the two great universalist systems, Christianity and communism, though they should be natural allies, are more often than not enemies.  I would suggest that their union would be the particularist’s greatest nightmare, but a consummation devoutly to be wished.  However, here we come up against McGowan’s anti-utopian stance again:

… the struggle does not aim at a universality to come….There can be no fully successful installation of the universal that doesn’t fundamentally betray universality. (75)

The universal is just another name for the impossibility of complete belonging. (79)

Statements like this are certainly compatible with some versions of socialism or communism, but not, in the long run, with Christianity.  But this may not be a problem.  From the standpoint of Christianity, and I would say from Judaism and Islam as well, the concept of faith means, among other things, that one need not give up an ounce of utopian hope: if perfection, in universality or anything else is not possible for humans, there is also the power of God in play, ‘whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine,’ says The Book of Common Prayer, quoting Ephesians.  The religious need not make the mistake of Stalin.

Might I suggest that Christianity and communism are, as McGowan points out we all are, alienated: the latter from a transcendent realm of hope and power greater than human efforts, the former from a world it purports to save, usually claiming to be above politics, even when supporting the status quo.

CONCLUSION

This book, in short, is a knockout.   It is a sound criticism of identity politics (whether presented as Left or Right) which gives no aid or comfort to the Right’s barrel-organing or childish catcalls about ‘special snowflakes’ and so on.  This is a book that can be read profitably by liberals, conservatives, and leftists.  It is a challenge to those who, wittingly or not, hold to particularist values.

Posted on

GOOD-GOD/BAD-GOD: THE JUDGE OFFERS HIS “LOVE”

Let me dare the following rant, at the risk of feeling ashamed of myself later.  For religion has its religiously correct attitudes which reign us in, and in the name of avoiding sin we curb thoughts that may need to be aired, to be pondered, lest we miss something.  People complain of “toxic positivity” in our culture, and sometimes rightly.  Religion has its own versions of this, wherein some thought or feeling that steps outside the doctrinally correct is immediately stifled.  The good Christian folds his hands prayerfully and smiles grimly inside, intoning, “think doctrinally correct thoughts, think doctrinally correct thoughts,” like those lamentable characters in that horrific story, “It’s a Good Life,” thrusting all rebelliousness from their minds lest their omniscient tyrant hear them.  Must Christians hunch their shoulders through life in mortal dread whenever the traditional wisdoms are questioned?  And for Christ’s sake anyway, what has he to fear from my thoughts or words?  You may say WE have something to fear of our thoughts and words, very well.  We also have something to fear of NOT saying them.

Thus:

You can’t tell people that if justice were done they would be tortured forever, and then in the next breath tell them you love them.  Humans are not made this way.  Here is what God, according to some Christians, is saying to us constantly: “you are a worthless sack of shit, and I love you.”  No.  This does not work as love.  This is the manipulative, Good-God/Bad-God.  And there is no sense saying we SHOULD be able to humbly accept the love of someone who thinks we deserve eternal torture, that we are being PROUD: the fact is, we don’t, and we can’t.  How can you oblige someone to do the impossible? (even assuming the impossible should be done in this case even if it could).  And obligeing us to accept in gratitude the gift along with the supposely graciously suspended judgement does not work.  If we are wholly evil, and nothing but wholly evil (and we must be to deserve eternal damnation) there is nothing there to love.  And there is no point saying, “God does not love us for something in ourselves, but because it is his nature to love.”  This is blather.  “Love” is not an intransitive verb.  It has an object.  And if this is not the case, we must say simply, “God loves,” but we cannot truly say “God loves us,” if indeed, there is nothing good there to be loved.  For how can God love evil?

Nor must we say therefor that we seek to be loved through merit, because parents love their babies, and what merit has a baby performed?  The baby is in some way good in their eyes, and we tend to agree with them.

No matter how evil we are, no matter how much we need the mercy, if there is not someone beneath the rust of spiritual ruin to receive that mercy, then who is it who is being loved?  Perhaps God simply loves himself then?  Then who are we?

There is no point exorting humans to be good and then saying they can’t do it, and judging them for inevitable failure.  “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory”; does not reason pipe up here and say that if not one has been righteous there is more going on than countless billions of people, all of whom just happen to be evil?  Might there just be something systematic about this evil none of us could escape of our own efforts?  Liberals have been mocked for being soft on criminals, saying they are in some way “victims of society.”  But what kind of “society” is it, when every bloody citizen of it is a criminal?  I think there is a wee bit of a structural problem here that nobody can escape.  Sin is that structure.

What are we to say to God, then?  “Love me according to my deserts?”  God does not love according to deserts, does he?  Was this not the mistake of the pharisees?  Thinking they could buy or earn God’s love?  Is it not free?  And we don’t quite bloody know, each of us, exactly what our deserts are anyway.  Certainly we cannot claim somehow to have earned eternal bliss.  Nor can we claim, in truth, we SHOULD have.

Good-God/Bad-God is Blake’s Nobodaddy, hypocritically pretending to love freely while all the time reminding you of what a rotter you are.  “Just think what I MIGHT have justly done to you,” he mutters under his breath.

Enough!  Enough!  All this nonsense, and maybe this meditation itself, is simply another attempt to keep justification hovering in the background as a dark and powerful shadow, even as we try to accept with trembling gratitude the Master’s love.  “Oh Lord, please judge me positively for eschewing my worthiness…”!  Yes, let us say we are too proud to accept unmerited love, then.  But we are too filled with self-loathing also to accept that love.  Ah, but the sages, say, that self-loathing is a form of pride.  Perhaps it is: a form of pride we learned from those same sages teaching us humbly to loathe ourselves!

No, what is needed steps outside, beyond even what I am saying here.  What is required is a miracle.

Posted on

GOD’S LOVE VERSUS HELL

We are told that God loves all, but saves only some.  How is this?  Does it not take away from the faith in God’s love we might otherwise have?  The way Christianity is usually preached, a Christian might say truly, “God loves me I know, but I am still afraid.”

So what is it that is more powerful than God’s love?  “If God be for us, who can be against us?” asks Paul in Romans 8.31.  What is the enemy that threatens us with real danger of eternal death despite the power of God’s love?

It is our own “free will,” apparently, which might reject God’s grace.

And how do we know if we have done that?  Oh, the answers vary widely from those who say, “don’t worry, if you had done anything as drastic as that, you would know it” to those who say or imply that as long as we are living lives of sin, we have not accepted Christ, and are not saved.  (And how little sin do you have to commit before you are no longer living a “life of sin”?)

Thus it is that the power of a conviction of God’s love can be set at naught.

Belief that some will go to eternal hell negates the power of God’s love, stops it from being a force in our lives, relegates it to a little corner in a dark room, shaking alternately with fear and feeble hope: “yes, God loves me, but…” is its plaintive cry.

We cannot believe in God’s love strongly if we cannot believe in our inevitable salvation.  Hell hanging over our heads thwarts everything God has to give us.

Posted on

CAPITALISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF HELL

One of the many crucial points where religion and politics inextricably if not explicitly meet is in The Screwtape Letters (1942) by C.S. Lewis. Here, Screwtape, a senior devil giving instructions to a junior devil (his nephew, Wormwood) says the following:

The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that oneself is not another self. My good is my good, and your good is yours. What one gains another loses. Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space it occupies; if it expands, it does so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them. A self does the same. With beasts the absorption takes the form of eating; for us, it means the sucking of will and freedom out of a weaker self into a stronger. “To be” means “to be in competition.” (Chapter 18)

C.S. Lewis did not write about politics very much, but it would be difficult not to see a connection between the philosophy of hell to the philosophy of capitalism, which, by its own admission, is all about competition.

Capitalists are not likely to put things quite so brutally as Screwtape does here—at least, not in public. What capitalism adds to this philosophy is a quaint, but ardently insisted upon frisson, which is that this competition will bring about the maximum possible good for the greatest number.

Screwtape would laugh out loud at that. One might divide capitalists into the naïve ones, who believe the frisson, and the cynical ones, who know it is rot but do not care. And I think that capitalism has mostly been cynical, rather than naïve.  As time goes by, the cynicism becomes more obvious, more brash, more contemptuous, and the naïve capitalist must turn cynic or drop the damnable capitalist ideology altogether.

Karl Marx himself, hardly a naïve individual, admitted clearly that capitalism had unleashed tremendous forces of production. But the tremendous wealth generated came at the even greater cost of human misery.

And it is one of the peculiar contradictions of capitalism that once you say a better way must be found, you are mocked for your naivete.  Apparently, anyone who opposes predatory cynicism is obliged to conceive of human beings as angels.  But capitalism, while mocking this alleged naivete, expounds a practice wherein apparently, the greatest good for the greatest number will be found by placing naked and untrammelled self-interest before all.  You may as well say that the best way to get where you want to go is to put a brick on the accelerator of your car and take your hands off the steering wheel.

Christianity is the long revolution against the zero-sum game that Screwtape proposes is built into the nature of reality.  The final triumph of Christ is the final defeat of this ideology in theory and practice.

So can Christianity still maintain its traditional doctrines about a hell of eternal torment?

I think not.  That is the Good News.  Hell is the first and last bastion of the zero-sum game.  Christians who still believe in hell as an eternity of torment or an eternity of annihilation are still clinging to the zero-sum game.  Nor can this game be defended by saying that within the traditional doctrines nobody is damned because of lack of room in heaven.  For as long as it is believed that the creation of humans must entail the risk of hell for each one of us (and that the risk was needed to make salvation meaningful) the inevitability of hell for some is built in, and therefore, so is the zero-sum game, the principle of hell.  Christ’s sacrifice becomes inadequate for salvation.  Instead, the agony of the damned becomes necessary to the bliss of the saved.  To believe in hell, therefore, is to take one’s orders from it, to be living under the same power that runs capital.

Posted on

REALISM HATS

A baseball cap or a cowboy hat are what you wear if you are nobody in particular.  You want to belong.  You’ll be as generic as possible to do that.  You are proud not to be different.

Those different people must be put down.

Hatlessness is okay, but eventually will grow suspect.  Even baldness has been turned into a hat.

That man over there in the slightly shabby clothes with over a million dollars in his bank account, he is not one of the elite.

Oh no.

He likes to go on about them.  The Elite.  Something about “Wine and cheese and Perrier water.”

He knows the script.  He helped to write it and forgot he was reading it ever afterward.

The hats are lining up.  They are taking sides.  All are “regular people” who need to “get on with their lives.”

Don’t ask them where they need to get on to.  This exceeds the event horizon.

They either have money or work faithfully for those who do.

It’s the money talking.  Even from people who don’t have any.

And beneath the money–for money is nothing at all, just like evil, but so very powerful–is the labour talking.

The groaning, back breaking, heart breaking, self-pity making labour.

The rat in the cage.

Oh proud rat.  You are not amongst the Elite, are you?  Of course not.  Good fellow.

The important thing is that you either wear livery or are the owner of it–the “brand.”

#

Let’s go down a level or two.  Beneath the labour, even.  The Marxists go this far, much further than their enemies, but usually not far enough.

“In the sweat of thy face…”

Back to the Springtime of humanity.

Back to the origins of “things as they are,” back to the origins of “Reality,” now worshipped as a god, self-plucked from the void and much to be venerated by his followers, the “Realists.”

The baseball cap and the cowboy hat take council together.

(But the Lord shall hold them in derision.)

Back to the birth of the “necessary evil” without which there can be no good.

So we are told.

#

The baseball cap and the cowboy hat take council together.  Their inanities are deadly and they know it.

But these are “good people” trying to “get by.”

Posted on

MARX, DAMNATION, AND THE BOGUS AUTHORITY OF CAPITALISM

This is from the first volume of Marx’s Kapital, Chapter 14:

The division of labour within society brings into contact independent producers of commodities, who acknowledge no authority other than that of competition, of the coercion exerted by the pressure of their reciprocal interests, just as in the animal kingdom the “war of all against all” more or less preserves the conditions of existence of every species.  The same bourgeois consciousness which celebrates the division of labour in the workshop, the lifelong annexation of the worker to a partial operation, and his complete subjection to capital, as an organization of labour that increases its productive power, denounces with equal vigour every conscious attempt to control and regulate the process of production socially, as an inroad upon such sacred things as the rights of property, freedom and the self-determining “genius” of the individual capitalist.  It is very characteristic that the enthusiastic apologists of the factory system have nothing more damning to urge against a general organization of labour in society than that it would turn the whole of society into a factory.

A more recent capitalist objection to conscious regulation of production is the usual harping on about the failures of the Soviet command economy, such harping revealing a studied lack of imagination: as if the only conceivable alternative to market-as-god must be the undemocratic bureaucracy-as-god.

But more importantly, translating Marx’s view of capitalist competition into religious terminology, one might say this competition is the capitalist form of idolatry.  The effect is not simply that this false god, competition, demands and gets his supposedly rightful place in the scheme of things, but that he demands the right to invade and conquer and transform into his own likeness all non-competitive relationships.  Competition does not demand to be a god among gods, but the god, before which there shall be no other.

This is one reason why I speak so often about hell.  Ultimately, beneath a belief in infernalism is a kind of spiritual competitiveness, a demand that the universe be functioning as a system of scarcity (economics often being defined in the capitalist mindset as “competition for scarce resources”) which necessitates, even justifies competition.  “If there is enough salvation to go around for everyone, if we all will get God’s undying love forever, how could that love be worth anything?” is the plaintive and unspoken cry of the infernalist.  While accusing universalists of presumption (as if trust in God’s love simply had to be presumption, for some reason) the infernalist reveals a pride which does not want any salvation so bountiful that everybody gets it.  Where is the distinction in that?  Where is the achievement?  While the infernalist may go on about her unworthiness to be saved, her redemption being the product of God’s grace alone, she secretly feels she really has accomplished something, if she ends up in eternal bliss while others end up in the fiery pit.

This soteriology is a zero-sum game which pretends to be something better.  For the infernalist is not usually so vulgar as to say that there are only so many seats in heaven and a certain number of individuals must therefor be damned no matter what happens.  Theoretically, according to many infernalists, everyone has the power to accept God’s grace and thereby be saved, and therefor there is no reason why not everyone will, in fact, be saved, other than that there will likely be those who reject the grace, entirely of their own free will, of course.

But the infernalist well suspects in his schema that there will not only be the damned, but likely quite a few of them.  Human “freedom,” as he conceives it, is not only necessary to make salvation worth anything (God does not want predetermined “robots” in heaven, is the claim) but also pretty much makes universal salvation impossible.  If we are not free to choose damnation, salvation is nothing.  And if we are truly free to choose damnation, it is pretty much inevitable in this schema that some shall.  In this outlook, therefor, God is relieved of any blame for having limited the number of the saved, while the infernalist gets the proud and secret satisfaction of rescuing heaven from meaninglessness: without the damnation of some, the salvation of any is worthless.  The demand of pride that zero sum philosophy prevail over the universe is satisfied, while the Creator is held blameless of any limits placed on his generosity.  The hypocrisy is blatant.

Competition in the economic or soteriological sphere creates a need for hell: economically, or eschatologically.  And it may well be the case that Christianity’s training of humanity to accept hell on an eschatological level made it easier to accept hell on the factory floor or in the office cubicle.

Posted on

TWO CHRISTIAN TEMPERAMENTS

There is one Christian temperament, which might be characterized as apocalyptic, and which demands that there be a point, a wall, into which the wicked must run sooner or later and be permanently defeated.  Broken, humiliated, spiritually crushed by the truth they hate, unrepentant sinners are either annihilated or sent to a place of unending punishment.

Then there is another Christian temperament that insists, “God shall be all in all,” and that all is quite literally ALL: this temperament does not wriggle out of ALL in a lawyerly way by saying the damned are not part of ALL, or preach that weaselly nonsense about how God loves the damned and that it is this very love which will torture them forever, since they reject it.  (Talk about passive/aggressive!) As Rob Bell puts it, Love Wins.  Who knows?–perhaps love wins even retroactively, such that evil will never have existed.  Could this be the (granted, quite unimaginable, quite absurd) answer to the problem of evil?  Perhaps.

I confess I am, unfortunately, of the former temperament much of the time.  I do not know whether the enneagram is reliable or useful, but I am probably a one (and if not that, almost certainly a nine).  So I often have the pharisaical and unchristian weakness to desire the unrighteous be crushed rather than that they repent and be forgiven.  Fortunately, I also have the critical strengths of enneagram one, and measuring Christianity rigorously against itself, I come to the conclusion that the ALL in ALL (universalist) conclusion is the Christian truth, even if my vengeful heart is not always in it.  (I have selfish motives for universalism, I admit, though they are not relevant to the truth.  In other words, if universalism is not true, how do I know if I am saved or damned?  Infernalism is wretchedly coy on this matter, to be sure.)  My beliefs, my deeper understanding, are better than the passions of my angry heart.

Let the infernalists not say we universalists are naïve.  This accusation seems to be the position of N.T. Wright in his chapter on hell in Surprised by Hope.  This is, on the whole, a very good book, by the way.  But his defense of infernalism is pablum.  Perhaps I will blog about this at a later date.

I was inspired to write this short post while outraged by some of the latest fascist shenanigans of Trump followers, and my apocalyptic side was triggered quite violently.  Let these murderers of the truth be sent screaming hysterical and naked into the fiery pit, says one side of me–but it shall not be forever—says the better part.  God shall have them all at his side, eventually, and eternally, whether I want it so or not.

How Christianity tears a believer apart!

Posted on

PROBLEMS WITH THE FREE WILL DEFENSE OF INFERNALISM (#1)

I’m not going to undertake here a thorough refutation of the free will defense of infernalism,  but just present a few thoughts.

The free will defense of infernalism states that in order for humans to truly love and be loved, we must have free will.  In order for us to be more than robots, we must have the ability to choose freely whether to love God.  And therefore, if we truly are free, some of us may well choose to reject God, and that must mean we get hell.  C.S. Lewis said, “some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot” (“The Shocking Alternative” from Mere Christianity).

But what is seldom pointed out is that if free will is so important to our value in the eyes of God and to our eternal fate, why does each of us have so little of it?  I do not argue that we have no free will, simply that our free will is only partial, incomplete.  I consider it a fairly obvious axiomatic truth that we have some power of choice, at least.  Others may disagree with me and say free will is entirely illusory, but if they are right, everything I or they say on the matter is moot anyway: I have no choice over what I am saying here, and you have no choice how or whether to respond to it.  There is no point worrying about the matter.  (However, if those who say we have no free will are right, we have no choice anyway whether we worry about these things or not, and so on.) 

That being said, how much free will do we have?  It seems each and every one of us has chosen sin to the point where we deserve perdition and can avoid it only by the grace of God.  It seems to be a standard theological claim that without the resurrection and grace of Christ, we’d all go to hell, and we’d all deserve it.

Funny how literally billions of people, all quite free, just happen to fail to make the right choice.  If you gave an exam to billions of students and every last one failed, you might come to the reasonable conclusion the exam was unfair.  (On the other hand, if we really do want to blame the billions of students instead, keep in mind the professor who wrote the exam up is the same one who tried to teach them in the first place.  We would have reason to question his competence.)  In fact, we are told not only that it is impossible for us to be sinless by our own efforts, but that it is the sin of pride to see it otherwise.

In other words, we are all inevitably damned by our own free will.

“For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”  Indeed, I believe this quotation to be true.  And if we were able to count up all our various crimes we might each of us truly say, “I might have sinned even more, but I chose not to; I might have sinned much less, but I chose not to,” and so on.  I do not understand sin as sin in the most serious sense without the concept of free will.  One might err in a state of unfreedom, but one must have some freedom to truly sin.  But the record would seem to indicate that without exception we all freely choose to do what must make us deserving of damnation.  (Of course, if we take up the idea instead that we are born deserving damnation because of the sins of distant ancestors, so much for the idea of free will.  Clearly, we have no more freedom than robots after all, and the free will defense of hell falls.)

Either way, it seems this “free will” is a trap.  Nor is this changed by the fact that any given sin of ours on any given occasion could have been avoided.  It seems we all inevitably freely choose to sin from time to time (that is, if the sin is not inevitable on any given occasion, it will inevitably and frequently come nonetheless, and freely) and therefor become hell fodder.

The free will defense of hell tells us therefore that we need this free will in order to truly enter heaven, but that this same “free will” inevitably leads to us deserving the opposite.

Now, if we are in the midst of this paradox, that of inevitably freely choosing to sin, but we are told we still have enough free will to warrant our crimes serious enough to receive damnation, why might we not turn this on its head?  Why not say that we shall all inevitably freely choose to accept the love, grace, and forgiveness God offers us and thereby be saved?  C.S. Lewis and the infernalists object to this, but I don’t think they can do so without having to note that the same God who so cherishes our freedom in order to make meaningful eternal union with him possible, seems to have presented us in the meantime with a very strange sort of freedom indeed.  When we are offered the grace of salvation we must be free to reject it or that grace is naught, it seems, but the same free will so necessary to our salvation earlier bound us powerlessly to be damned.  We are forced to need salvation, but not forced to get it.

Let me put this another way.  If we can claim we were free when we inevitably damned ourselves, why can we not be predestined (all of us) to receive salvation and say we accepted that in freedom also?

I said earlier that we must have freedom to truly sin.  But is it not also the case that we must have as well unfreedom in order to sin?  That is, must we not also be tempted to sin?  And is not temptation, especially when we consider that it conflicts with our better impulses, a form of unfreedom?  Who, being free from temptation, would choose to be tempted?  Is the recovering alcoholic, torn between putting her life together and having another, potentially disastrous drink, more free that someone who just doesn’t want that drink at all?  To be tempted is to have a will or desires divided against themselves, and this does not sound like freedom to me. 

But this is where the story of Adam and Eve, quite frankly, screws us up.  The way it is so often read leads us to think their fall into sin actually makes sense.  They knew they should not eat the apple, but they were tempted, and fell.  We all have this experience.  But that is because we are free, but less than perfectly free.  Would not a perfectly free Adam and Eve not be tempted to begin with?  To understand their story, we would have to look at them through pre-lapsarian eyes, which is something we do not have (and hence, perhaps also a reason why Lewis could not imagine the creature he said he could not imagine).

In other words, sin, though real, does not make sense.  And that is why hell does not make sense either, because it cannot exist without sin.  (You may counter that if sin exists despite not making sense, hell might then exist anyway, but I would ask you on what basis.  The existence of sin is experiential.  On the other hand, many of us have suffered greatly, but I take it we have no direct evidence of the hell the infernalists are talking about.)

Alas, I feel as if there are further and more elusive developments to make on all this, but I must end here for now.  There is something about philosophy and theology that always seems to avoid complete closure.  This essay threatens to become a book.  Indeed, one reason I blogged little until recently was my fear I could say nothing without saying everything, and that doing so was impossible anyway.  But I then decided to accept the necessary lack of thoroughness needed to get anything done.  Better a series of imperfect blog posts than that handful of long and perfect articles that are never written.

Posted on

I’m Only Real

I’m only real
When I’m alone
I always cease to be
When giant faces loom about
To blink and
Silence me;

It is not fear
It is not dread
There’s simply nothing there
There is no bit
Of  “I am me”
I am not anywhere.

So look you sir
Now I’ll go pray
To get and keep a soul
To each his business
And desire
quiet I must be.