“Any attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular…Thus every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special and surprising message and in the bias which that revelation gives to life. The vistas it opens and the mysteries it propounds are another world to live in; and another world to live in–whether we expect ever to pass wholly over into it or no–is what we mean by having a religion.”

–George Santayana, Reason in Religion

Ok, this is truly great. Just as one would suspect, the areas where “coke” is the preferred generic term for soft drinks is pretty much a map of the South (the Confederate states, kind of plus Kentucky and almost minus Virginia).

A friend passed this quote to me on the death of the author. It’s timeless.

…. It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts…If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.  But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

          –Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

I’m on vacation, and here’s what I’m reading…

Timothy Keller’s The Reason for God is awkwardly named. It is also well-organized, pithy in its arguments, and broad in its array of references to literature and scholarship. Many in evangelical circles have been comparing Keller’s book favorably with C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, but the comparison doesn’t work for me, and it’s not because Keller’s book isn’t good.

The book is divided into two parts. In the first, Keller examines seven common objections to the faith, running from a chapter titled “There can’t be just one true religion,” to “You can’t take the Bible literally.” In the second part of the book, Keller makes the argument for Christianity as a worldview that makes sense of the human condition in chapters ranging from “the Clues of God” to “The Reality of the Resurrection.”

Keller’s own writing is workmanlike–sturdy and at times not inelegant. His style is very much as I imagine his sermons are: built insightfully around quotes. His real strength is his ability to bring other’s thoughts to bear on the issues at hand as he leads his reader through them. He quotes from a smorgasbord of skeptics and believers: Nietzsche, Sartre, Augustine, Lewis, and my own favorite, Flannery O’Connor.

I read an interview with Keller in which he said that he wrote the book partly because educated members of his congregation were having trouble following the extended argument that is C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity (thus, unfortunately, legitimizing the comparison with Lewis’s book). So, in an age of information bytes and attenuated attention spans, the chapters of the first part of Keller’s book are more like a list, and could be read independently of each other. (I was, however, glad to see that in the last half of the book, where he makes the case for the Christian gospel, Keller’s chapters unavoidably build on each other, mirroring the narrative of salvation itself, which is, as Keller says, a drama in four parts: creation, fall, redemption, restoration).

This, to me, is why the comparison with Lewis is awkward. Keller’s book is useful and intelligent, but it is not literature. I found the book, not surprisingly, very easy to read because of its independent chapters. Obviously, despite my arrogance, I am more a product of my own ADD age than I like to admit. Further, where Lewis depended on extended argument, on a narrative, Keller depends on the soundbyte of writing, the block quote. Where Lewis depended (mostly) on his own reasoning, Keller depends on the summarized arguments of others. Keller’s utilitarian book is as appropriate to New York City as Lewis’s was to Oxford.

But the strength of Keller’s argument and the value of his book derive exactly from this difference, a difference that makes one-to-one comparison unfair. Where Lewis depended on his own masterfully constructed and beautifully expressed arguments, Keller humbly but deftly depends upon the learning and erudition of a host of other writers to support his assertions, lending them a different kind of credibility. Think morality is possible without God? Not so, say Nietzsche and Sartre. Think all religions contain a little bit of truth, or that they’re all relative? You are gently reminded by a bevy of philosophers that this judgment is impossible unless made from a “superior” and alternate truth position of its own. Think sin is committed by crossing a line? Not so, says Kierkegaard. Rather, sin is attributing divine attributes to anything but God. Indeed, Keller the pastor is more of an academic than Lewis the academic–Keller is always footnoting someone else.

It’s unfair to blame Keller for not being Lewis. His book has its own purpose and style. Where else will the people reading Keller’s book encounter these writers and their arguments? The average person that I know in Presbyterian circles (I am a member of the same denomination as Keller) has read C.S. Lewis, but probably not Kierkegaard or Augustine, let alone the array of recent writing that Keller cites. I have read barely half of the writers he quotes, and I came away with a list of people that I want to read, such as Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. That’s a good thing.

Keller’s book may be an appropriate counterpart to Lewis’s Mere Christianity for our age–but only for our age. While Lewis will still be read in a hundred years because of it’s timelessness and independence of argument, as will many of the other writers that Keller cites, The Reason for God will be read for a decade before parts of it begin not to make sense. Keller understands this, I think, when in the introduction he locates the book at a specific historical moment in which both belief and skepticism are rising in influence. It will not always be so. Soon, as well, the list of objections that Keller responds to in the first part of his book will be different, leaving only the second part, the gospel narrative, as timeless (his explanation of the trinity, in particular, is wonderfully written).

This is the reason Lewis should still be read and is, indeed, irreplaceable. Instead of grappling with contemporary objections first and then sending the gospel through the breach, Lewis weaves his answers to skeptics into his narrative of the gospel, a story which is the only timeless answer to all skeptics of every age. The beauty of Lewis’s book is in itself an argument for its truth.

The Reason For God is a one-stop shop for the contemporary intelligent inquirer, written at a time when people are, indeed, as Keller argues, taking religion more seriously. It is a department store full of available arguments against common contemporary objections. This is what it is meant to be, and it accomplishes it admirably…for now.

An International Herald Tribune article points out that housing prices in the suburbs are falling faster than prices in the urban core, possibly because of rocketing fuel costs. Will fuel prices remake our cities and kill our suburbs?

‘You are fond of history! — and so are Mr. Allen and my
father; and I have two brothers who do not dislike it. So
many instances within my small circle of friends is remarkable!
At this rate, I shall not pity the writers of history any
longer. If people like to read their books, it is all very
well; but to be at so much trouble in filling great volumes,
which, as I used to think, nobody would willingly ever look
into, to be labouring only for the torment of little boys and
girls, always struck me as a hard fate ; and though I know it
is all very right and necessary, I have often wondered at
the person’s courage that could sit down on purpose to
do it.’
‘That little boys and girls should be tormented,’ said
Henry, ‘ is what no one at all acquainted with human nature
in a civilised state can deny; but in behalf of our most distinguished
historians, I must observe, that they might well
be offended at being supposed to have no higher aim; and
that by their method and style they are perfectly well qualified
to torment readers of the most advanced reason and mature
time of life.’

–Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

The fact that, as a historian, I find this funny, means that it’s more than a little true…

An edited version of this review appeared in the April, 2008, edition of Touchstone

In his two characters, McCarthy presents us with a study of the tension between moral pragmatism and moral purity. In the father, McCarthy has written a character burdened with a responsibility–caring for his son–that complicates his moral choices. He is frequently presented with decisions that demand pragmatism in exchange for their survival, and yet even in transgressing boundaries he seems to acknowledge their fixedness. He justifies this to his son: “You’re not the one who has to worry about everything.” Not surprisingly, the father is a more understandable and empathetic character than the son.

In the son, McCarthy has written a character of elemental innocence that throws the pragmatism of the father into sharp relief. The son is strict with himself and his father, always asking if the owners of the houses they loot for food and supplies are alive (in which case they would be stealing) or dead. He is compassionate towards others even when that compassion runs counter to their need to survive. “He was just hungry,” he says, begging his father not to leave a thief without clothes or food that they desperately need themselves. He is certainly a type of Christ figure, but his innocence is human–rooted in his ignorance. He can offer no solutions to the often intractable problems that he and his father face, he can only offer the simple, innocent, and blind response of conscience, which sees only right and wrong, not the necessary.

It is his son’s innocence, along with his life, that the father struggles to preserve as they make their way south. The physical journey that they are making to save their lives becomes a metaphorical journey to preserve something else, something that the father and son call “the fire.” In a moment when it is uncertain whether the father can go on, the son begins:

I want to be with you.
You can’t.
Please.
You can’t, you have to carry the fire.
I don’t know how to.
Yes you do.
Is it real, the fire?
Yes it is.

This is what is left. The fire. Just as he refuses to allow the reader to draw easy conclusions about the decisions faced by his characters, McCarthy leaves “the fire” largely undefined, but not indefinable. The fire is what is left when men destroy everything but themselves and drift unmoored from the restraints that civilization places on them. The fire is our most precious and, paradoxically, our most enduring possession. I would say the fire is something akin to mankind’s conscience, which, though it works in each of us individually, is also the common property of all mankind whether they follow it or not. The father’s effort to preserve his son lends weight to this view, for a pure flame is the most precious thing of all, a thing to be preserved at all costs. McCarthy is not the sort of writer to link this fire woodenly to God, and the fire’s source remains as ambiguous as its character. Still, the fire plainly resides in mankind, and near the end of the book when a wise and good character reminds the son that “the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time,” we are, I think, invited to consider the source and character of the fire.

Roughly contemporaneous with the publishing of The Road, we have seen the reemergence on an international scale of a character that used to be called the village atheist. Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion, Sam Harris published The End of Faith, and Christopher Hitchens published God is Not Great. Of these, Hitchens has been most vocal in proclaiming a facet that is common to all three–they believe in the possibility of a Godless morality. The authors profess not only that belief is harmful, but also that morality is possible and preferable without God. Such a morality would be socially constructed, of course, and would assumedly have as its ultimate referent the culture that produced and practiced it. But for these authors, this is infinitely preferable to the idea of an absolute moral law that has as its referent an absolute lawgiver.

We should contemplate, then, what it means that Cormac McCarthy wrote The Road, and what it means that he won the Pulitzer Prize for it. As Christians, we are quick to bemoan the strength of post-modernism and to find all around us the relativism that it breeds. Inevitably, we have imagined the monster as worse and more powerful than it really is. The fact that The Road won a Pulitzer is as much a testament to the enduring and self-apparent wisdom of Truth as it is to McCarthy’s inimitable prose. Like McCarthy’s fire, the Truth is, and remains, because it first was and always has been. We should have more faith in this than we sometimes do.

An edited version of this review first appeared in the April, 2008, edition of Touchstone

As I read The Road, I kept imagining two people sitting on a darkened stage with the ruins of the world around them, one saying “everything is gone,” and the other asking “what is left?” McCarthy is probably best known for All the Pretty Horses, and for his unflinching commitment to portrayals of human depravity. Among those who have read McCarthy’s other work, his newest novel is either the best work of an aging American master or the betrayal of an existential vision so severe that he is easily in the running for authoring the most violent novel in the American canon (Blood Meridian). I believe it is an aging McCarthy’s answer to the question “what is left?” that has provoked conflicting responses from his readers and that most deserves our attention in this Pulitzer Prize-winning book.

Taking place in what appears to be a nuclear winter following a global disaster, The Road follows a man and his son fleeing south through the smoldering remains of the world for reasons unknown to us, and possibly unknown to them. Everything about the novel is stark, and yet McCarthy consistently achieves rich descriptions of a dead world using the combination of a sparse, muscular style and a truly evocative vocabulary. In fact, one of the wonderful harmonies of the book is the marriage of McCarthy’s writing style with his setting. In his Border Trilogy, the deserts of the southwest provided a similar landscape, but in The Road McCarthy’s style finds its true home, and the phrases practically detonate on the page. His characters find a bottle of water, and McCarthy describes this mundane object–“The water was so clear. He held it to the light. A single bit of sediment coiling slowly in the jar on some hydraulic axis.” And again, as he imagines the dead inhabitants of a town–“Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.” This last phrase, say it slowly, showcases McCarthy’s feeling for meter and rhythm. Many times in The Road he slips easily from prose into a kind of poetry.

The Road is not an easy book to read. It is unrelentingly dark and often searing in its descriptions of the violence and depravity that the remnant of the human race engages in. McCarthy rarely dwells on these horrors, but as father and son make their way south we are treated to glimpses and intimations of the very worst things that human beings do to each other. The depravity in McCarthy’s book, however skillfully rendered, would be nothing but an exercise in excess if it did not allow him to portray an alternative vision that derives much of its power and beauty from the contrast. The relationship between father and son in The Road is, I believe, McCarthy’s best creation in any of his books. In the midst of a nearly unbearable outer darkness, McCarthy gives his readers refuge in the profoundly simple exchanges between a father and a son that have repeated since time began.

The desolation of a post-Apocalyptic world is the perfect space for McCarthy to explore questions that would only be complicated or obscured by any other setting. Whether we like it or not, the complexity of modern life often requires a kind of moral calculus from us as we weight the different variables appropriately and come to a range of morally acceptable options. In The Road, McCarthy brutally dissects these sorts of decisions, and one gets the feeling that his choice of setting is in a way utilitarian, allowing him to ask complex questions that are nevertheless stark in their moral content. Questions such as–Is one allowed to let another human being starve in order to feed one’s child? Is it wrong to kill a person if by that act you spare them from a certain and more horrible death? Is suicide acceptable when you do it to preserve food and therefore life? Is suicide acceptable when life is, by any standard, not worth living? What is life for? These are the sort of questions that crowd McCarthy’s world, questions that his characters are forced to answer without the luxury of equivocation, in a world stripped of the materials that modern people use to fashion cover for their compromises.

From the 1806 minutes of the Mountain Creek Baptist Church in Anderson, South Carolina:

Thomas McGregor made report to the church, that he had been drinking too much. And in the time of his drinking he took a pen knife off of the counter and put it in his pocket. And then denied that he had it until search was made and it found in his possession. But he made acknowledgment. And the church restored him.

Well, we all know what it’s like to drink too much and want your nighbor’s pen knife…

“The victim’s cello was still inside the car.” That seemed right. He was one of the most brilliantly talented people I have known. When I read it I wondered unconsciously if it could be the same cello I had seen him play Hendrix tunes on in high school.

His death fanned memories to life. I remember how he played basketball, how determined he was, how his tall, skinny self seemed to flow in between the defenders to get the shot. I remember how he played one game with a metal pin stuck through his shattered middle finger to stabilize it. And I remember how he didn’t think it was a big deal.

I remember him playing Hendrix’s “Red House” on the piano, while I tried to keep up on guitar.

I remember how he looked perpetually disheveled, how he was always running late, always charmingly distracted, always smiling. Always the one to laugh first and loudest. Always headed somewhere.

And then he would focus. Seeing him play the cello was to see very nearly a different person, hunched over his instrument, eyes locked on the music, his long, thin fingers pulling music out of the strings and wood of the cello. And then, after the last note, a smile would signal the return of his old person. I hadn’t seen him in years.

The comment section of the online article was a compendium of reactions.

“There are folks in this world whom you think you know but have many demons. It is so sad.”

“…I do wonder about what his reason was for being in that complex at that time of night. It is not a place to be if you don’t live there.”

“I knew him since he was five years old…”

“…He went to our church and we all got to know him real well. He performed for us many times. I very seriously doubt he was into anything bad, as he was a very serious believer.”

“As long as this ineffective, idiotic ‘war on drugs’ continues, so will incidents like this.”

There are many ways to try to understand the thing, to give it meaning. From afar, its meaning might seem to be a social one, the meaning that the last comment above lays on it. But the closer to the thing you get, the more it becomes evident that the only important meanings involve loss. A family lost a son, a brother. A symphony lost a cellist. An audience lost his music. He lost his life.

The details offer a false promise of explanation. A 1998 Camry, 12:05 AM, two gunshots, a cello in the backseat. But the way he lost his life means little except perhaps that he, like all of us, struggled with his humanness and sometimes lost. None of us win that battle all the time. I am sure that he won sometimes, as well. 

For myself, I will remember the cello in the back seat, and that he performed with the symphony a few hours before he died. 

He was unique, and human, and he played the cello.