Alan Jacobs

In 1878 a man named William Barnes published a book called An Outline of English Speech-Craft. “Speech-craft" is a word Barnes prefers to “grammar” because “grammar” is not an English word but a Greek one. Barnes’ self-chosen quixotic task — as outlined in his Preface Fore-Say — is to describe English speech-craft using only English words. The task is quixotic because linguists and lexicographers and grammarians typically use words borrowed from Latin and (less often) Greek. They speak of prepositions and participles, of the nominative and the subjunctive, of transitive and intransitive. Here are some of Barnes’s alternative terms — I’ll leave it to you to guess what Latinate terms they are meant to replace:

• speech-breathing
• breath-penning
• pitches of suchness
• outreaching
• unoutreaching
• time-taking
• thought-wording
• sundriness

Notice how many of these are kennings. Notice also that he can't escape the influence of Latin altogether.

3rd Sunday of Advent, 16th December 2018

Old Testament: Zephaniah 3.14-20

New Testament: Phil.4.4-7

Gospel: Luke 3.7-18

The Lord is near. [Phil.4]

And the crowds asked [John]…’What then should we do?’ [Luke 3]

Today is a day for joy. Its traditional name is ‘Gaudete Sunday’, which you could translate as ‘Rejoice Sunday’. It gets its name from the first line of the New Testament reading: ‘Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say ‘Rejoice!’’ That is Paul’s instruction to the people of Philippi; that is what he enjoins them to do in every waking moment. Rejoice! In the watching and waiting of Advent, today points urgently towards the joy which comes towards us. ‘The Lord is near’. He is close now. Before long he will be with us, in our company; before long we will know, just as we are fully known, face to face with our redeemer and judge, Jesus Christ. Rejoice!

Oh, but hang on a moment, you’re thinking. Isn’t today the day we get some preaching about hell? Don’t duck out of it; we hardly ever get any preaching about hell these days, and we were quite curious about what you felt able to say. Is it real; is it not real? Is anyone bound for it, or are we all redeemed whatever we do, think, feel or say? Have we any time or place for hell in our polite, restrained and studiedly incurious Church of England? And what has hell to do with rejoicing?

When I was a very small child, I was walking with my mother by the sea, and I asked her whether hell was real. It was a cold, grey day: we were on a pier somewhere, sharing a paper cone full of tiny shrimps, which tasted surprising; delicious. She paused a long time, and then said, cautiously, ‘Some people say that the hells we experience happen before we die’. She didn’t say anything else. But I thought about that for a long time, I am still thinking about it half a century later, because… it turned things upside down, somehow, if this world was the world with the real horrors in it; and the world to come – whatever else it might contain - was to be a place mercifully free of man’s inhumanity to man.

Put aside the pictures in your mind of the medieval place of punishment; the strange, toothy stick-insect torturers of Hieronymus Bosch, the half-comic prancing devils with their pitchforks, and the patient, agonised, mutilated bodies of the lost. These are human nightmares: they imagine the ways in which God might be cruel in a peculiarly human way. It is true that the ingenuity and passion we expend upon hurting each other participate in the nature of hell. Each time we see another person as less than fully human – a thing to be used or discarded – we draw nearer to its gates. Yet it is not true that ‘hell is other people’. Hell is where we are when other people vanish from our affections, hell is not a hot place but the place where love grows cold; hell comes near when we lose our capacity for sympathetic imagination; when we look around the world we are in and see nothing but endless reflections of our own hungry, lonely selves.

Last week Canon Johnson, pondering the nature of God’s judgement, talked about the experience of being brought up into the light, the place where the secrets of all hearts are revealed. I want to think about that. About what it might be if every part of you were discovered, shone upon: the secrets, the forgotten things, shames and struggles and failed attempts at goodness; resentments and hatreds and griefs; pride and contempt; cruelties of thought, hidden actions, furtive transgressions; and those stark moments of self-knowledge which are too hard to bear and have to be shoved under a muffling cushion of distractions, busy-ness, business, discontent, wandering, or sleepiness. There it sits, this jumble of half-remembered nastiness and misery, telling you at intervals: no one knows how unpleasant you really are; no one’s love could survive what you know of yourself; trust nobody.

But in the steady, bright gaze of this light, the whole lot comes out, tumbling out any old how, tawdry and battered and small. And you are still loved.

And you look at it, and it’s a painful kind of relief, sharp and searing, like grief or the way it feels to sob and sob and let it all go, the way it feels to stop maintaining it all day after day after day, and you think, ‘What now?’’

‘What then shall we do?’

Because you’ve been carrying hell, and it was a dreadful thing, and now it’s all over the floor.

And this is when the Lord does something unbearable. He hands it back to you. He gives you a choice.

He says, ‘What shall I do?

‘I won’t take it away if you want to keep it. It can go as soon and as fast as you choose, washed away in the deep waters of baptism, dissolved by innocent blood, broken like a dying body. But if you are attached to it, if you can’t find it in yourself to give it away, it’s still yours. This is judgement; that you have to be ready to give yourself away, even the bits you clung to as being absolutely your own, the nasty bits you didn’t ever have to or want to share. Mercy is on the other side of your pride, your self-respect, your contempt, your greed, your familiarity with your own sins, those sins which know you better than anyone in the whole waking world. Are you ready to give yourself away like that?’

And you say, ‘What do you mean by giving myself away?’

And he says, ‘By being ready to be as small as everyone else. As small as the person you despise most, the person you think barely is a person. By learning to love in places where you have so far barely managed even to take notice. By giving up being afraid that people will find you out. By looking outwards, and discovering what you are being asked to give by discovering what someone else might need.’

And at that point, you really can choose. God never rushes anyone. You can keep your hell, and bolt yourself into it; but the bolts are on the inside. Right up to the last moment of choice, conscious or unconscious, the Lord is near, the one who turns the shadow of death into the morning, his hands ready to take the bundle of nastiness from you and leave you light and clear, winged, transparent, emptied; yet still held and filled, solid and real, rejoicing and strong.

Freedom is always at your right hand, every day. Rejoice! The Lord is near. He is coming, he is close. He will make your heart free. The choice is yours. It is always yours. If what you want is hell, you will not be denied it. After all, you made it yourself. But the light is always waiting beside you, just in case you are ready to turn, and to be rescued, and to consent not just to know, but to be fully known.

Amen.

Well, I was excited about my new newsletter until, four days in, I got the above message. TinyLetter kept asking me incomprehensible questions ("Is there a record available to support that each of these contacts have gone through an opt-in process?” — to which the answer is, Yes, and you have that record, since they’ve signed up through your form) but wouldn’t answer any of mine, and now have fallen silent. So at the moment it looks like the newsletter is dead before it even really gets started. But we’ll see. 

Derrida’s Margins is a remarkable project: a digital unpacking of Jacques Derrida’s library, starting with De la grammatologie. 

It’s an astonishing resource — I’m going to spend hours and hours here. Ninety years ago, John Livingston Lowes published a book called The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination, that purported to track down all the reading that had gone into the writing of Coleridge’s great poems “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan.” It was, and remains, a remarkable work of scholarship, though necessarily highly (and sometimes dubiously) speculative. What we have in Derrida’s Margins is a kind of digital extension of Lowes’s project — and that’s fitting, because Derrida is in some ways the Coleridge of modern literary theory: enormously learned, quirkily imaginative, sensitive to strange connectors and attractors. 

And I am especially pleased that the technical lead on this project is Rebecca Sutton Koeser, a former student of mine! Even as an undergrad Rebecca was equally interested in literary study and computer science; she went on to get her PhD in English from Emory, and has continued to straddle these two worlds. Here’s her account of what she learned in working on this project. 

I left Twitter because I watched people who spent a lot of time on Twitter get stupider and stupider, and it finally occurred to me that I was probably getting stupider too. And after some reflection I decided that I couldn't afford to get any stupider. 

Milo is just KILLING it.

A December volunteer

Richard Schragger and Micah Schwartzman discern a renewal of Christian critiques of paganism and they’re not happy about it. On Twitter, Schwartzman has applied his argument to a recent column by Ross Douthat in what I think are unhelpful ways — but I also think Ross’s column blurs some issues that invite the unhelpful response from Schwartzman. Let’s see if we can do some disentangling.

The key reference point for Douthat’s column and Schragger and Schwartzman’s essay is a recent book by Steven D. Smith, Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac, in which Smith attempts to reclaim and update the argument made by T. S. Eliot in The Idea of a Christian Society that English culture was then (80 years ago) faced with the increasing dominance of a kind of “modern paganism.” Wrote Eliot, “The choice before us is between the formation of a new Christian culture, and the acceptance of a pagan one.”

But what does Eliot mean by “pagan”? Alas, he never clearly defines it. But when he says that he thinks England has reached “the point at which practising Christians must be recognised as a minority (whether static or diminishing) in a society which has ceased to be Christian,” that seems to be what he means by a “pagan society.”

For C. S. Lewis, this is just carelessness. In a passage from a lecture in which he does not mention Eliot but clearly has him in mind, Lewis says,

It is hard to have patience with those Jeremiahs, in Press or pulpit, who warn us that we are " relapsing into Paganism". It might be rather fun if we were. It would be pleasant to see some future Prime Minister trying to kill a large and lively milk-white bull in Westminster Hall. But we shan't. What lurks behind such idle prophecies, if they are anything but careless language, is the false idea that the historical process allows mere reversal; that Europe can come out of Christianity "by the same door as in she went" and find herself back where she was. It is not what happens. A post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce. The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past and therefore doubly from the Pagan past.

And elsewhere in the lecture Lewis says, “Christians and Pagans had much more in common with each other than either has with a post-Christian. The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as that between those who worship and those who do not.”

What’s interesting about Smith’s book is that he knows this critique by Lewis, indeed he quotes it — but then he ignores it, and instead uses “pagan” in the frustratingly loose, and in my view indefensibly inaccurate, way Eliot uses it.

Because Smith uses the term “pagan” in this way, Schragger and Schwartzman assume that every Christian critic of paganism does the same. In this respect they’re careless, and indeed, I don’t get the sense that they’ve paid much attention to the writings they’re denouncing. In their first footnote, where they purport to list such critiques, they name an essay by Adrian Vermeule in which the term “pagan” is used only in a historical sense, and they don’t even get the title of Rod Dreher’s book right. In Schwartzman’s Twitter critique of Douthat, he assumes that Douthat is using “pagan” to mean “non-Christian” — but it’s not obvious that that’s right.

In fact, Douthat (following Smith in this) demonstrates awareness of multiple forms of post-Christianity:

• “First, there is a tradition of intellectual and aesthetic pantheism that includes figures like Spinoza, Nietzsche, Emerson and Whitman, and that’s manifest in certain highbrow spiritual-but-not-religious writers today. Smith recruits Sam Harris, Barbara Ehrenreich and even Ronald Dworkin to this club; he notes that we even have an explicit framing of this tradition as paganism, in the former Yale Law School dean Anthony Kronman’s rich 2016 work ‘Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan.’”
• “Second, there is a civic religion that like the civic paganism of old makes religious and political duties identical, and treats the city of man as the city of God (or the gods), the place where we make heaven ourselves instead of waiting for the next life or the apocalypse.”
• Third, “there are forms of modern paganism that ... offer ritual and observance, augury and prayer, that do promise that in some form gods or spirits really might exist and might offer succor or help if appropriately invoked. I have in mind the countless New Age practices that promise health and well-being and good fortune, the psychics and mediums who promise communication with the spirit world, and also the world of explicit neo-paganism, Wiccan and otherwise.”

But like Smith and Eliot before him, Douthat (as I read him) seems content to describe all these as forms of paganism, rather than what they actually are, which is three wholly different ways of looking at the world. I think faling to maintain these distinctions leaves us vulnerable to misunderstanding all three movements. And when Christian critics of such movements blur those lines, that leads to a further blurring by those, like Schragger and Schwartzman, who mistrust those Christian thinkers. I think all this blurring leaves us with two big problems.

First, it leaves us unable to respond appropriately to something really interesting, which involves Douthat’s third category: those who — from the right and the left, as I noted yesterday — are genuinely attempting to renew paganism as such, are striving to disprove Lewis’s account of “the false idea that the historical process allows mere reversal.” How many of these people are there? And how successful are they likely to be in their project of restoration?

Second, we’re faced with a kind of Jewish problem, which is what Schragger and Schwartzman, in their essay are primarily interested in. S&S argue that when people like Eliot and Smith and Douthat seek the renewal of some kind of Christian society — Douthat recently wrote, with tongue just barely touching his cheek, that his ideal ruling elite for the Americas is “a multiracial, multilingual Catholic aristocracy ruling from Quebec to Chile” — and present that society as an alternative to paganism, then that tends to cast Jews as pagans. (This is especially true of what Eliot called “free-thinking” Jews, that is, people who are ethnically Jewish but lack religious belief.) Here again some distinctions need to be made, this time among several groups who resist the secularization of Western societies:

• Those, like Eliot, who seem interested in the cultural and indeed legal dominance of a kind of generic Christianity (it’s hard for me to see just how specifically Anglican Eliot’s ideal is);
• Those — like Milton Himmelfarb (whom S&S quote) and Will Herberg (whom they don’t but should) — who appeal to a highly generalized “Judeo-Christian” inheritance which they typically want to be dominant in civil society but not enshrined in law;
• Proponents of Catholic integralism —perhaps including Douthat, whose comments on integralism over the years have oscillated between wariness and admiration — who want Roman Catholicism to regain what they believe to be its proper temporal as well as spiritual power.

For the first group, it’s hard to see how Jews don't get lumped in with pagans; for the second group, Jews and Christians are theoretically cooperating in the project, though given the numerical disparity between the two groups, keeping the Judeo- in Judeo-Christian might well be a challenge; and for the third group, all of us non-Catholics are effectively pagans, as I have argued.

Maybe it’s because I suffer from nostalgia for the philosophical thinness of liberal proceduralism, but I’m suspicious of all these models. They all, it seems to me, think about politics from the position of power, from some imagined world in which Our Boys are the ones making decisions. In contrast, I find myself recalling and admiring — as I often have in the past — George Washington’s great letter to the leader of the Newport synagogue in which, responding to their gratitude for his tolerance of their religion, he says, “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent national gifts.”

Graeme Wood:

Less persuasive, though, are Sullivan’s two other claims about New Religions, in the American context. The first is that liberalism lacks meaning and various forms of illiberalism (nationalism, theocracy, authoritarianism, etc.) do not.... Nazi philosophers favored meaning (“the triumph of the will”) and said that procedural liberalism, divorced from nationhood, was a Jewish, internationalist poison that would weaken the only true source of German power.

You know who else was a critic of liberalism?

Mail!