RSSWhat is to be done?
This post was originally a comment to the Constitutional Church thread, but it was long enough I went ahead and made it a new post.
I am glad the discussion is turning to foundational issues and questions. One of which must be, is half-way from modernity far enough?
Tony, I appreciate and like a great deal of what you have to say. I am, in fact, one of those who thinks something better is possible. I also want to make it clear that I believe the tragic, penitent, Augustinian social order I have been arguing for is “genuinely Christian” in so far as it is properly open to the truth of the cosmos after the incarnational irruption while maintaining proper tension towards the cosmological hangover and its steady, earthly, bodily demands.
And thanks for the correction on Cromwell. I knew that I suppose, but was using Cromwell as sort of symbolic stand-in for the whole circumstance of rebellious parliaments during the Bishops Wars and the Long Parliament. My point vis-a-vis Darryl’s argument remains: without the church instigating and participating in a political revolt, no Westminster Confession. So I see the certain inconsistency some of Darryl’s interlocutors are bothered by in his claiming a patrimony from Westminster yet rejecting ecclesial political action.
Darryl, I agree that Christendom was never unified or harmonious in the way we tend to think about those concepts as political goods. I tried to actually describe that in my post. The “unity” of Christendom was not “Constitutional,” to use my previous language and category, but was on a much more earthy, visceral level of human cobeligerency both against and in partnership with the cosmos, contingency, time, scarcity, fate, and even death. This unity, of course, did not mean that I wouldn’t slit your throat for a good pair of boots.
Where Darryl and I may end up disagreeing is on how willing we are to accept modernity. If it was really “for the sake of the gospel” then you would get no argument from me. However, I do not think you are adequately incorporating the effects of modernity on the gospel and on the health of the church into this particular calculation. As such an insightful and trenchant critic of evangelicalism, which is largely the post-protestant child of modernity, this seems like an odd blind spot to me.
Here is Whittaker Chambers from Witness:
I hurried up to Columbia University to inform my friends on the campus that I had located the Communist Party, had made contact with it, and was, in fact, a registered member. By chance, the first man I met as I crossed the campus was one of my literary friends. I told him the news. As usual, he squinted one eye and lifted the eyebrow of the other, so that he looked as if he were peering through a monocle. “Do you drill in a cellar with machine guns?†he asked airily. It was he who, when I was first seeking enlightenment about Communism, had given me The Communist Manifesto to read. Now I saw that Communism as an idea was disverting. Communism as an idea to do something about was amusing. I turned away. I looked up another friend who was later with the Theatre Guild. More than any other individual, he had been directly responsible for swinging me toward Marxism. Now that I was a Communist, I explained, I would be able to bring him into the party at once. There were some moments of painful embarrassment. He was delighted at my political enterprise, but he had no intention of joining the Communist Party. Nevertheless, his position was awkward and he felt obliged to put me off without actually saying no. The same pattern was repeated with others. For the first time, I understood the contempt with which Communists pronounced the word ‘Intellectuals.’ I thought: “That miscellaneaous mob in the English speaking branch may not know the English language, but they know a good deal about history. They are not as intelligent as my college friends, but they do not think that ideas are ping-pong balls. They believe that ideas are important as a guide to coherent action. They have purpose and they have courage. They are grown men and women, and these are children.†I felt a sudden warmth for my shabby, quarrelsome comrades and a readiness to overlook their failings in the name of their faith and purpose. I began to see less and less of my college friends.
This passage should be instructive to us. Again, I ask the question I asked before and which no one answered (perhaps it seemed too rhetorical, however, I assure you it was not): Why are we talking about this?
As Chambers demonstrates, there are real radicals, and there are people who like to talk. Who in the DRC room advocating radial social change is really willing to put their reputations, livelihood, or even lives on the line? Are those brave theonomists practicing machine guns in the cellar? What would the anti-Constantinians among us have us do, on the ground, as it were? Some with the courage of their convictions advocate a radical political withdrawal which can indeed “work†if it is accompanied by a strictly disciplined life of separation like monastics, the Amish and similar Anabaptists—and if it reaches sufficient numbers to constitute a real political revolt which the rest of the country must reckon with. Is that the desired effect?
Whatever our real-world goal might be, assuming we have one and are not just talking, I have the distinct impression that most reactionaries and/or radicals don’t see that their real value is in pulling things a certain way so long as it doesn’t go too far to upset the apple cart of general societal order. These things work in cycles: a thoroughly unconstantinian church would need to get more constantian (as it has in the past), and vice versa. If one believes a stasis can and should be reached by right thinking and acting, I say that is naive, dangerous, and wrong.
Darryl’s version of this seems to me to be (forgive me and correct me if I am wrong Darryl) the common appreciation for liberal order which is, essentially, stasis for me if not for thee. The problem with this view of using liberalism to achieve ill-liberal ends is that it fails, like the old Wolters canard about structure and direction, to understand how the medium is the message, the structure is the direction. To use Marxist vocabulary, cult and culture are interpellated (see http://faculty.uwb.edu/mgoldberg/courses/definitions/Interpellation.html). One cannot put liberal procedures to ill-liberal substantive ends. I would like to see Darryl critically engage with theorists like Alan Wolfe and Harold Bloom who have seen pretty clearly how modernity as culture has derailed the cult of Christianity.
Here is what I fear and suspect, in my darker moments, that projects like Darryl’s to make a firm defense of “traditional protestantism” really are: a kind of late modern neo-tractarianism, which is to say another attempt at denial—i.e., shoring up the ruins of churches that have already been overrun.
As such, it is my own view that the pressing questions for us now are not on the order of “what is to be done with our government or our politics†but “what is to be done with the Church†which at bottom comes down to “what is to be done with myself?†My suspicion is that the Anabaptists have the better argument at this historical juncture and we need some real reactionary radicals pulling in an anti-Constantinian convivial carnivalesque direction. This pulling must come with an acknowledgement that the pull does not exist in a vacuum, and opposite pulls are needed, more or less, depending on prudential and historical judgments. No pacifist generals!
Robert Frost once noted that there are two kinds of realists, one who serves dirt with his potatoes to prove that it is a potato, and one who doesn’t mind scrubbing it clean. When it comes to the church, government, society, culture, and myself (pretty much everything), I prefer seeing the dirt and the potato. Call it Augustinian realism. Or anarcho-Christian. Or pessimistic romanticism. Or eucatastrophic.
Which is to say that while we are engaged with the crises and catastrophes (both real and blog-created), a serious, taxing and often debilitating business, we can always look at ourselves and our situation from an imagined eternity where it is, if not farcical, a tragic agon tempered by the comic finish of the marriage feast. In less elevated language, I think the matters debated here are very important so we ought to neither treat this “public square†with liberal glad-handing of contemptuous postures nor should we trivialize the importance of these matters by treating them with an ultimacy of meaning or treating each other with an unbreakable earnestness.
W.H. Chellis
April 10th, 2007 at 8:22 pm
Wow. Caleb at his finest.
Anthony Cowley
April 11th, 2007 at 9:48 am
Hey - Watch it, you’re stepping on my family Jewels:
“In 1941 he (Whittaker Chambers) wrote an attack on Malcolm Cowley called “The Revolt of the Intellectuals,” which opened up the discussion of the role of literary Communists and fellow-travelers beyond the elite readership of the Partisan Review to a mass audience. As Time’s foreign news editor in 1944-45, he filled its pages with grim anti-Communist assessments of events in Europe and China literally over the copy — not to mention the protests — of such distinguished field reporters as John Hersey and Theodore White, who held more benign views of what was going on.”
Malcolm is my dad’s first cousin (mine, once removed). An old lefty fellow traveller, journalist and literary critic who cooperated -to a degree- with the house unamerican activities committee, and was reviled by both left and right. Malcolm’s dad, Dr. William Cowley, was a homeopathic physician here in Pittsburgh, and a very devout Swedenborgian. His uncle had been a pal of Andrew Carnegie in their teen days. Malcolm never was much of a Swedenborgian. I understand that in his retirement years up in Sherman Connetticut, he attended a Presbyterian Church.
I’m doubt Cowley is the one Chambers is referring to as his college friend. Cowley’s leftism became stronger after his return from France, post WW I. He describes all this in his Exile’s Return. Malcom Cowley somewhere wrote that “of all of us” Hemingway was the first to see through Communism. Seems like the back and forth with Chambers went on sporadically throughout their lives (Cowley died in 1989; Chambers in 1961). Cowley was older and much longer lived.
Here’s a blurb about him from http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAcowleyM.htm
Malcolm Cowley, the only child of a homeopathic physician, was born in Belasco, Pennsylvania, on 24th August, 1898. A successful school student, Cowley won a scholarship to Harvard in 1915. While at university Cowley contributed to the Harvard Advocate and attended lectures by Amy Lowell.
In 1917 Cowley left Harvard to drive munitions trucks for the American Field Service in France. While on the Western Front Cowley wrote articles about the First World War for The Pittsburgh Gazette.
Cowley returned to the United States in 1918 and the following year married the artist, Peggy Baird. He continued with his studies and graduated from Harvard in 1920. For the next few years he wrote poetry and book reviews for The Dial and the New York Evening Post.
In 1921 Cowley moved to France and continued his studies at the University of Montpellier. He also found work with avant-garde literary magazines such as Broom and Secession. While in France he became friendly with American expatriates such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound.
Cowley returned to the United States in August 1923 and went to live in Greenwich Village where he became close friends with the poet Hart Crane. As well as writing poetry Cowley found work as an advertising copywriter with Sweet’s Architectural Catalogue. He also translated seven books from French into English.
In 1929 Cowley published Blue Juniata, his first book of poems. Later that year he replaced Edmund Wilson as literary editor of the New Republic.
Cowley’s marriage broke up in 1931 and Peggy went to live with Hart Crane. This ended in tragedy when Crane committed suicide by jumping from the ship Orizaba on 27th April 1932. Two months later Cowley married Muriel Maurer.
Coming under the influence of Theodore Dreiser, Cowley became increasingly involved in radical politics. In 1932 Cowley joined Mary Heaton Vorse, Edmund Wilson and Waldo Frank as union-sponsored observers of the miners’ strikes in Kentucky. The men’s lives were threatened by the mine owners and Frank was badly beaten up. The following year Cowley published Exile’s Return in 1933. The book was largely ignored and sold only 800 copies in the first twelve months.
In 1935 Cowley and other left-wing writers established the League of American Writers. Other members included Erskine Caldwell, Archibald MacLeish, Upton Sinclair, Clifford Odets, Langston Hughes, Carl Sandburg, Carl Van Doren, David Ogden Stewart, John Dos Passos, Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett.
Cowley was appointed vice president of the League of American Writers and over the next few years Cowley was involved in several campaigns, including attempts to persuade the United States government to support the republicans in the Spanish Civil War. However, he resigned in 1940 because he felt the organization was under the control of the American Communist Party.
In 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Archibald MacLeish as head of the Office of Facts and Figures. MacLeish recruited Cowley as his deputy. This decision soon resulted in right-wing journalists such as Whittaker Chambers and Westbrook Pegler writing articles pointing out Cowley’s left-wing past. One member of Congress, Martin Dies of Texas, accused Cowley of having connections to 72 communist or communist-front organizations.
MacLeish came under pressure from J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, to sack Cowley. In January 1942, MacLeish replied that the FBI agents needed a course of instruction in history. “Don’t you think it would be a good thing if all investigators could be made to understand that Liberalism is not only not a crime but actually the attitude of the President of the United States and the greater part of his Administration?” In March 1942 Cowley, vowing never again to write about politics, resigned from the Office of Facts and Figures.
Cowley now became literary adviser to Viking Press. He now began to edit the selected works of important American writers. Viking Portable editions by Cowley included Ernest Hemingway (1944), William Faulkner (1946) andNathaniel Hawthorne (1948).
In 1949 Cowley returned to the political scene by testifying at the second Alger Hiss trial. His testimony contradicted the main evidence supplied by Whittaker Chambers.
Cowley published a revised edition of Exile’s Return in 1951. This time the book sold much better. He also published The Literary Tradition (1954) and edited a new edition of Leaves of Grass (1959) by Walt Whitman. This was followed by Black Cargoes, A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (1962), Fitzgerald and the Jazz Age (1966), Think Back on Us (1967), Collected Poems (1968), Lesson of the Masters (1971), A Second Flowering (1973), The Dream of the Golden Mountains (1980). Malcolm Cowley died on 28th March 1989.
Okay…enuf!