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A Worried America

My entire working life has been devoted to the study of economic, social and political problems in Sweden, America and the world. In insisting, I express my Lutheran heritage -- though of course the influence of other Christian churches has moved in the same direction. In fact by stressing that social sciences must be moral sciences, I am in line with the classical doctrine as it developed in Calvinistic England and Scotland.

A hundred or 200 years ago my forerunners among political economists could find their valuational moorings in the philosophies of natural right and utilitarianism, which in their turn were based on the associational psychology of hedonism -- and which are now, in my view, defunct. I had to seek other ways of ascertaining and expressing the value premises basic to my work. Without going into the complex methodological problems of what social science research is and should be, I will merely stress that the scientific study of society must allow a proper place for human valuations. It must be a moral science. The scientist has therefore both the right and the duty to draw rational policy conclusions as to what is bad and what is good, and how humans and their society should be reformed.

Devotion to Enlightenment

Let me in this attempt at self-analysis go one step further and try to explore how the development of the world through the more than 50 years of my working life has reflected itself in my conception of this world. My experience can be seen as typical of a whole generation in our Western culture, not least in America.

I lived through my early youth during World War I. Sweden had succeeded in staying out of the war and so was a peaceful country to grow up in. During that war America was not entirely unlike Sweden. Even though, rather late, the U.S. was brought into the war, most young people of our age were not in the fighting forces, and the combat took place far from American shores without rendering much damage to the country. There was neither television nor radio. We read about the war in newspapers, but did not witness the ordeals of Europe in the forceful way that we now experience all the horrors of the world that are continuously. thrust upon us. We could devote ourselves to the task of trying to find an intellectual and moral anchorage.

The period before World War I was an optimistic era of belief in progress. Trust in human progress colored the literature at the disposal of young people. Democracy was not only a fact in some countries of Europe as in America but seemed also to be the inevitable historical trend in the world. As reflected in that literature; it was taken for granted that even, for instance, Germany and Russia would develop into parliamentary democracies. I remember that I myself could play with certain romantic feelings for Napoleon. The idea that one man could ever again emerge as a dictator in a civilized country was unthinkable in the literature we were nurtured on.

The huge underdeveloped regions and the great poverty among the masses there were largely beyond our horizon. The colonial power structure, then assumed to be a firm and lasting situation, functioned as a shield for the conscience, freeing a Swede or an American from feeling remorse for the suffering of the peoples living in that part of the world, about which there was not much publicity anyhow. We succeeded in thinking of them in the romantic terms of their unfamiliar and often beautiful dress, their dances and music, their ruins and temples and their interesting but strange religions and philosophies. This moral disengagement, broken only by the missionaries -- mostly of low-church varieties and not intent upon political change -- lasted until after World War II, when the decolonization movement emerged as that war’s perhaps most important consequence, though it had not been foreseen and had still less been an aim in the developed countries. In any case, to teen-agers in Sweden the global view during World War I was restricted to a view of the independent and advanced countries.

The war going on in Europe was felt to be a stupendous but unique crime which should not and could not be repeated. This armed conflict was called the Great War, or in America the European War. We had not yet got into the habit of reckoning world wars in numbers. The thought was that when the fighting was over, peace and democracy would be secured. In thinking about what was to come when the war was over, people spoke in terms of “back to normalcy,” which meant back to progress in a stable world. After World War II that idea of normalcy disappeared. But at that earlier time this is what people believed in and prepared themselves for.

Within that narrow limitation of our world view in the advanced countries there was space for considerable diversity in intellectual explorations. We could, and did, indulge in the pessimism of a Schopenhauer or in the aggressive egocentricity of a Nietzsche. Some aligned themselves with Marx. I studied him as an important classical author but was more influenced by the French and English utopian socialists who, unlike Marx, were planners in the great tradition of the Enlightenment philosophy. Indeed, it was the Enlightenment philosophers and their followers throughout the 19th century and right up to World War I under whose influence I grew up. It was in this line of thought that the common trust in progress could prevail.

From the beginning, this philosophical tradition, like broad Christianity, gave an optimistic conception of the world. Both trusted fundamentally in people’s opportunity to improve themselves and the society in which they lived. Both recognized evil but saw the prospect of the amelioration of personal and social life -- in religious terms, of “conversion.” This is the spiritual heritage I have preserved, and it has become deeply rooted in my way of feeling and thinking.

‘An American Dilemma’

When later I studied American society from the viewpoint of its most disadvantaged group, the blacks, I formulated my value premises in terms of the ideals contained in what I called the American creed of liberty, equality, justice and the rule of law and not persons. I identified these ideals with enlightenment philosophy, which 200 years ago had provided much of the inspiration for the revolution against the English crown and the founding of the American nation. But I also stressed their roots in Christianity. The last single word in An American Dilemma is “Enlightenment,” as I had decided it must be at the time I was working on the book.

The American creed was not my invention. These ideals were a living reality commonly accepted by Americans on a high level of valuations -- accepted, as I found, by the oppressors as well as the oppressed, and written into the constitutional documents. Indeed, the American nation, more than any other nation I knew, had equipped itself with a definite moral code for human relations that was outspoken and clear. My research was, of course, directed toward ascertaining the facts and the causal relationships between the facts, as they manifested themselves toward the end of the 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s. But these facts were looked upon from the viewpoint of the American creed. That system of ideals determined the questions I raised.

That the prescripts of this national ethos were not complied with but broken in a large-scale, systematic and often horrible way created a dilemma, which again was not my invention but an observable fact. In my research I had to deal with morals, private and public. My study was, of course, not simply moralistic. It became a study of morals, not in morals.

In the late Roosevelt era America was much poorer than now. Large numbers were living in destitution. Unemployment was still very high, though declining. But there was confidence that the nation was steering in the right direction. There was trust in the future and in America’s capacity to improve itself.

At the helm was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who inaugurated social reforms on a broad scale and so virtually initiated America’s approach to the welfare state, important to Roosevelt’s success in bringing the nation along with him was the human touch he displayed in what he said and did. He felt for the poor and downtrodden. And he stressed the need for reforms as a moral issue.

“I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” he said in his second inaugural address. He urged “moral controls . . . over blind economic forces and blindly selfish men.” He talked about “social justice” and saw a “change in the moral climate of America.” He stressed that “the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” And he had Eleanor, that unequaled lady who functioned as a sort of extraconstitutional executive-interpreter, expressing and accentuating this bent of mind.

I saw in the American creed more than a set of instrumental value premises for use in my work. Despite continuing gross noncompliance with its precepts, and despite setbacks and long periods of reaction, I saw the gradual fulfillment of these ideals as a determining trend. And I found reason to believe that this trend would accelerate in the future. This was the optimism in the study.

At that time, however, there had been six decades of relative stagnation in race relations since the national compromise in the 1870s after the Civil War and Reconstruction. In the social sciences, we are too often apt to extrapolate from what has gone before, and most of my colleagues shared a static and fatalistic view of the future. They were mostly inclined to deprecate hopes for the success of reform movements and, generally, of organized efforts to change society. In this field William Graham Sumner’s old dictum that ‘stateways cannot change folkways” remained the basic preconception.

From close observation and analysis of what was happening, particularly in the south where three-quarters of the blacks then lived, I concluded that this long era of stagnation was coming to an end. I even concluded that “not since Reconstruction has there been more reason to anticipate fundamental changes in American race relations; changes that will involve a development toward American ideals.”

Economic conditions for the blacks were worsening, but in all other respects there was a gradual and visible improvement of the lot of black people. This movement had been speeded up by the New Deal. Meanwhile isolation between blacks and whites had been increasing for some time. I could on the basis of my study of ongoing changes predict the black revolt and predict that it would originate in the south.

The Dilemma Revisited

Now after more than 30 years I have returned to the problems of race relations in America with An American Dilemma Revisited: The Racial Crisis in the United States in Perspective. I have taken the findings in the old book as a firm baseline for the study of the dynamics in more recent decades. I decided to use again the ideals of the American creed as the instrumental value premises. In what meanwhile has happened to race relations in America, I find no reason to surrender my contention that a gradually ever-fuller realization of the ideals contained in that national ethos is more than a selected viewpoint when observing and analyzing the facts; it is and will remain the historical trend of change in this country -- in a sense the destiny of America, if America is not going to give up its essential national personality. Here I stick to my basic optimism from the Roosevelt era and, further back, to my devotion to Enlightenment and to the influence of my Lutheran heritage.

Certainly, if we take the broad view, the conditions of life and work for black people have improved much during the past 35 years. There have been setbacks, and the advance has been uneven -- more pronounced for the professional middle class than for the working class. There has been less advance for the poor masses in the growing urban ghettos and for many blacks still working in southern agriculture. Again in the broad view, their facilities for health and education have been improving. Jim Crow in the south, which at the time of An American Dilemma was still a firmly functioning institutional system, has crumpled and disappeared. Legislation and, though less perfectly, its implementation have increasingly awarded blacks their full civil rights. At the same time, public opinion polls demonstrate a continuous improvement in the dominant white population groups’ ideas about black people and how they should be treated. In some respects the south is advancing more rapidly than the north.

What has been happening can from one point of view be described as a change in the fundamental purpose of the liberalization process. What was a fight for civil rights has broadened into strivings for equal human rights. The reforms have come to concern all disadvantaged groups, including women. At the same time, blacks have increasingly become actors on the scene who have to consider strategy and tactics. The problem of race relations is no longer merely a “white man’s problem,” as I could realistically characterize it 35 years ago. Blacks, like whites, are now facing the dilemma, and their own actions have considerable influence on the development of race relations.

The broad view I have hinted at is important. Nonetheless, there is a long way to go before blacks are commonly afforded equal opportunities in the pursuit of happiness. There is still much segregation and discrimination, and even if poverty-stricken blacks are only one-third at most of all the poor in America, poor people are a much larger proportion of the black population than of the white.

A Multifaceted Crisis

Meanwhile, America in the 1970s has gone into a multifaceted crisis. Economically it is manifested in what we have come to call “stagflation” -- high unemployment combined with inflation of prices. As always, it presses with particular hurtfulness upon the poor. We know that black youth in some of the city slums have a real rate of joblessness approaching 50 per cent, leaving them to walk the streets hungry and without a decent means of earning a living. That crime, prostitution and drug traffic are seen as a way out should surprise nobody.

The country has also experienced the catastrophic end of an illegal, immoral and cruel war in Indochina. Meanwhile, it has seen the revelation of a continuous sequence of gross scandals of which Watergate was only the culmination. It is a fortunate and healthy manifestation of America as an open democracy that members of Congress and the mass media do their utmost not to cover up the transgressions of laws and of common decency but to give the whole world and, to begin with, the American nation itself full information.

As a result Americans have, however, to an unprecedented extent, lost confidence in their national institutions. As the opinion polls tell us, never before has people’s trust in the administration, in Congress and in business reached such a low ebb. And the level of participation -- in elections for instance -- is low. Lack of participation and a sense of apathy, particularly but not exclusively among the lower classes, have always been a weakness in the workings of American democracy, but now this unconcern and the absence of a sense of individual responsibility for the nation threaten to become more widespread.

Everyone who has a voice, and particularly the clergy of our churches, ought to uphold the responsibility of the individual citizen for what happens in the country. What America needs is not to forget what has gone wrong but to face the wrongdoings squarely and to insist that they shall not happen again. In moral terms this implies the need for a catharsis.

The shameful McCarthy period, when so many of those higher up kept silent for so long, was ended when ordinary Americans saw on television how that man behaved. I don’t believe something similar to the McCarthy era will happen again. But I would feel surer if I had seen more careful study about how it could ever have happened.

The Vietnam war was not only a gross miscalculation, politically and militarily, but a moral wrong inflicted by a massive use of cruel weapons forbidden by international law, mostly against poor and innocent civilians. Again, it is not enough to forget about it and to keep up a self-righteous and aggressive front toward the world. Americans must honestly face what for a long time they have permitted their government to do. Otherwise they will not be cured of the evil.

Again now, with all the widely publicized misdeeds of elected or appointed officials and important hoards of big corporations, it is not enough to live with the opened-up knowledge of scandals. Serious self-scrutiny by all citizens is imperative. To be a citizen of a democratic nation implies being morally responsible for not letting things that are wrong happen without protest.

And everyone who teaches or preaches or has a responsibility for others who do these tasks has a particular duty to recognize evil and to lead his or her flock also to recognize it and to stand up against it. What is at stake in the present many-faceted crisis in America is nothing less than the nation’s soul.

The International Setting

The crisis in America is taking place in a world threatened by truly frightful dangers. The income gap between developed and underdeveloped countries is steadily widening. Our aid has been marginal and has never implied any real sacrifices. In the U.S., aid has continually been motivated by “the United States’ best interests,” and these interests have been explained in terms of political, military and strategic advantages in the raging cold war. This concern has also determined distribution of aid among poor nations. The statistics on development aid have been juggled, and economists have winked at them. But even accepting the publicized figures at their face value, U.S. aid has been decreasing much more than that of other rich countries.

The popular lack of interest in America for aiding poor countries is to me explained by the fact that ordinary Americans have seldom been appealed to in terms of moral decency and compassion for the sufferings of the poor masses in the underdeveloped countries but merely in terms of national policy interests. When then these policies misfired, as they did not only in Indochina, the lack of interest in helping, poor countries reached its present state.

Meanwhile, poverty among the masses in most underdeveloped countries has been increasing; it reached culmination a few years ago during the oil and food crisis. America was niggardly with its food aid, and its government was pleased that the high food prices improved its balance of trade. Meanwhile hundreds of millions in underdeveloped countries went hungry and tens of millions starved.

The population explosion is still going on and will go on. Family planning will not be effective in stopping it until individual couples have the feeling that they are living in a dynamic society that gives them hope of improving their lot. With this rising population and the lack of radical reform in most underdeveloped countries, particularly in the rural communities where the large masses of these people live, the world food crisis will recur when again the crops are less favorable; the danger is that it will then gradually take on an ever more permanent and disastrous dimension.

Meanwhile, there is a steady deterioration of our environment, poisoning the land, the waters, the plants, the animals and, indeed, our own bodies. There have, been efforts here and there, but on the whole we have not been successful at stopping pollution. A large part of the problem is international and can be solved only by international negotiation and regulation, of which we have seen little. At the same time we are in many respects depleting humankind’s nonrenewable resources. The larger part of this process is carried on by the small minority of people in the developed countries, who consume by far the largest part of these and other resources.

Unconcern for the Underdeveloped

The underdeveloped countries are demanding a new economic world order. Even when in some developed countries (though least so in the United States) governments are expressing sympathy for these demands, they have little response at home among their own people. And in the present situation of stagflation, their policy interests are directed toward their relations with the newly rich oil-exporting countries and with one another. Relations with the great majority of humankind in underdeveloped countries fall into the shadow of unconcern.

Although direct confrontations have as yet been avoided between the developed countries, wars have been going on in the underdeveloped world. They have not been prevented or stopped, as they should have been according to the charter of the United Nations. Many of them, as in the Middle East, have taken on the character of “wars by proxy” between the superpowers, which have armed their sides in the struggle.

Meanwhile the arms race continues unabated. We all know that the costs of armaments amount to as much as the total production and income of the poorer half of humankind. In a strange “cooperation” the superpowers have succeeded in stalling all disarmament negotiations or have made the agreements reached narrowly partial and ineffective.

The arms race is led by the two superpowers  -- the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. Together they account for 60 per cent of the world’s military expenditures and 75 per cent of the world’s arms exports. Both of them long ago equipped themselves with enough nuclear weapons to destroy each other almost 50 times. In a confrontation the rest of the world would also be destroyed and quite probably the earth would become uninhabitable. Toward the end of his life Bertrand Russell calculated at only 50 per cent the probability that humanity will survive the next turn of the century.

The underlying idea of the nuclear arms race  -- that the superpowers need to “balance” each other -- is totally irrational for both of them. They have long ago reached the level of needed “deterrence,” the only rational motive. The military policies of the United States as well as those of the Soviet Union amount to a fantastically gross miscalculation. Either of them could safely have stopped the nuclear arms race unilaterally many years ago. And this fallacious idea of the need to “balance” each other in destructive power has come to be regarded as self-evident to the people of America -- because of what President Dwight Eisenhower in his last message to the American people called the “military-industrial complex” and what Alva Myrdal in her book The Game of Disarmament calls the “arms race within the arms race.

Wars are fought with increasing disrespect for international law established for protection of the civilian population, and war preparations are made with the same disrespect for international law and plain decency. Organized terrorist activities are engaged in, endorsed by some governments and meeting no effective protest from other governments. Torture has become a regular practice in an increasing number of countries -- among them some of America’s closest allies. Violence and crime are increasing almost everywhere. The use of drugs is on the rise.

An Unchanged Credo

This is the international setting within which America’s national crisis is developing. Irrationality and immorality go together. It was the firm conviction of secular philosophy as well as religious teaching in my youth that morals and rational reasoning lead to the same conclusions, and this was the basis of the trust in progress I was brought up with.

I began by relating how I could grow up as a believer in the reform of humans and their society. But I am growing old and nearing the end of my life in a situation rapidly approaching disaster.

My ideals, however, have not changed. Nor am I prepared to give up my basic trust that human beings are good. When a realistic analysis produces a gloomy picture, I am nonetheless not prepared to be a defeatist. My voice and the voices of those who share my anxieties are not strong among those who decide for nations. But till the end they should be raised in defense of our inherited ideals.

In the very last pages of An American Dilemma I referred to the great tradition of Enlightenment and the American Revolution and continued with what I called “a personal note”:

Studying human beings and their behavior is not discouraging. When the author recalls the long gallery of persons whom, in the course of this inquiry, he has come to know with the impetuous but temporary intimacy of the stranger -- sharecroppers and plantation owners, workers and employers, merchants and bankers, intellectuals, preachers, organization leaders, political bosses, gangsters, black and white, men and women, young and old, Southerners and Northerners -- the general observation retained is the following: Behind all outward dissimilarities, behind their contradictory valuations, rationalizations, vested interests, group allegiances and animosities, behind fears and defense constructions, behind the role they play in life and the mask they wear, people are all much alike on a fundamental level And they are all good people. They want to be rational and just. They all plead to the conscience that they meant well even when things went wrong.

Social study is concerned with explaining why all these potentially and intentionally good people so often make life a hell for themselves and each other when they live together, whether in a family, a community, a nation or a world. The fault is certainly not with becoming organized per se. In their formal organizations, as we have seen, people invest their highest ideals. These institutions regularly direct the individual toward more cooperation and justice than he would be inclined to observe as an isolated private person. The fault is, rather, that our structures of organizations are too imperfect, each by itself, and badly integrated into a social whole.

The rationalism and moralism which is the driving force behind social study, whether we admit it or not, is the faith that institutions can be improved and strengthened and that people are good enough to live a happier life. With all we know today, there should be the possibility to build a nation and a world where people’s great propensities for sympathy and cooperation would not be so thwarted.

And this is still my credo!

The Church’s Role

Let me add a few points about the duties of the church. First, in the present extremely perilous situation of America and the world the servants of the church cannot afford to turn their interest merely to the salvation of the individual, forgetting that society must be radically reformed. The church must stand up for human ideals and their realization through policies by governments local, state and federal, for which they share responsibility. People must be taught to understand that their actions as citizens and members of other organized groups  -- for instance, trade unions -- must be judged from a moral point of view.

Second, as we are all weak against the forces of ignorance and evil, we must join forces with all others who share our moral concern about the development of our society, whatever church they belong to or even if they do not belong to any church. This to me is the most compelling reason for my high appreciation of the ecumenical movement. Questions about dogma or even faith shrink to insignificance in a world where there is uncertainty whether any human beings will be left at the turn of the century.

Third, we must seek to show the courage of our convictions. Within the field in which I am working -- race relations in the United States -- I am well aware that church leaders have continually stood up for the righteous cause and have often persuaded their churches when they meet in assembly to express themselves for principles along the same line, even when that course was not always popular. But I have also seen how in the local situation the clergy have sometimes adjusted themselves to the prejudices of the members of their churches. Thus in many southern cities private academies, established to circumvent the Supreme Court’s decision ordering the end of school segregation, have been founded by churches.

Whereas in Sweden a Lutheran pastor is a highly paid public official, in the U.S. a pastor has to please a local membership in order to get and hold secure employment. The temptation is then great to play down the social gospel and to focus one’s teaching on the salvation of the individual. Knowing the force of remaining prejudices, I am rather astonished that so many local pastors have taken the risk of being far ahead of their church members. But all churches share the challenge of inspiring local bodies to care intelligently about broader national and international moral problems.

‘Gospel Truth’

Such concerns include the poverty problem, both as a national and an international issue. Violence, criminality and drug addiction will have to be discussed not simply as problems of “law and order,” though that is important, but in regard to their more basic causes. Let me add that Mohandas Gandhi’s dictum that one should hate the crime but not the criminal is gospel truth, and that we shall never have a peaceful society until we reform our treatment of criminals along this line.

All this presupposes intensive studies, and the church should consider whether it should not reform the direction and scope of teaching in the divinity schools and theological seminaries. If I were writing not for church people but for social scientists, I would instead stress the need to give human valuations their proper role in research. When social scientists, in their efforts to remain simply “objective,” forget that people have a conscience to which they plead, they are in my opinion unrealistic and are not doing their duty as scientists.

Love, Power and Justice

The past five years have seen a resurgent awareness in evangelical Protestantism relative to the Christian community’s political responsibility. But despite this awareness of political responsibility, maturity and consistency are sadly lacking in the pronouncements of evangelicals on this topic. The evangelical community, to paraphrase social critic Michael Novak, seeks to leap from piety to practice with little reflection on guiding principles and practical goals.

There are at least three basic concepts which require clear delineation as to what is meant in the contemporary evangelical dialogue regarding matters political. These three are power, love and justice.

Politics and Power

The very essence of politics is the use of power -- the power to determine who in a given society gets what, how, when and where. We can talk about means and ends for a society without conceding the necessity (or desirability) that the sword of the state be the implementing agent. But we must be clear, then, in acknowledging that such talk is no longer talk about politics.

We can talk about the “power of God to transform lives,” but we are no longer talking about the political power of the state, which by definition refers to instituted social authority which enables the state to force compliance upon its subjects regardless of their volitional relationship to the state’s demands. One can talk about ‘the fallen powers” or Christ’s victory in resurrection over the “principalities and powers” but that, in and of itself, is not talk about the politics of the Soviet Union or the United States. One can speak of the “sovereignty of God,” but one still has not dealt with the sovereignty of the Cook County Democratic Committee.

That is not to say that such talk is useless or unnecessary. Indeed, beliefs relative to the sovereignty of God, Christ’s conquering of the principalities and powers, or the transforming power of God in individual lives have profound- implications for the way in which we must think about politics. But spoken of in and of themselves, such concepts do little to illumine the path from piety to practice. Indeed, they often serve to obfuscate that path and to mask immoral practices in moral pieties.

There can be no politics apart from the use of power. And yet, as Paul Tillich notes, it is not uncommon to find Christian essayists who develop concepts of “The Politics of God” or “The Kingdom of God” in such a way that they seek a political order in which “powerless love” overcomes “loveless power.” The problem to which Tillich refers is clearly evident in the writings of two contemporary individuals who have had a decided impact on the rising social and political consciousness of the evangelical community -- namely, Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners, and John Howard Yoder, whose book The Politics of Jesus is probably the most profound restatement of Anabaptist social theory in the past quarter of a century.

Yoder and Wallis juxtapose the power politics of the world (i.e., the “powers” of the world expressed in social, economic and political relationships) with Christian love (i.e., servanthood, the cross, self-denial). In the words of Wallis: “It seems to us impossible to be both what the world’s political realities set forth as ‘responsible’ and to take up the style of the crucified servant which is clearly the manner of the life and death of Jesus Christ as revealed in the New Testament” (Agenda for Biblical People [Harper & Row, 1976], pp. 122-i23). Yoder calls the church to “a social style characterized by the creation of a new community and the rejection of violence of any kind” -- by which he means the economic and political orders held in place by the power of the state. “The cross of Christ is the model of Christian social efficacy, the power of God for those who believe” (The Politics of Jesus [Eerdmans, 1972], p. 250).

An Apolitical Strategy

It must be noted that while Wallis and Yoder reject “the way of the world” in their refusal to acknowledge any legitimate use of power, they do not advocate a withdrawal from the world or an abandonment of the church’s mission to the world. In this sense, they differ profoundly from the separatist tendencies of the older fundamentalism. Indeed, they maintain that the subordination of the cross becomes a “revolutionary subordination” in the name of the Christ who has conquered the powers in his resurrection. The acceptance of political powerlessness, for Wallis and Yoder, creates the basis for the manifestation of the power of God as transforming agent. And thus the Christian community bears witness to the world, not only standing in judgment upon it but also prophetically pointing to the path of the world’s redemption.

But what must be recognized is that such thinking provides political critique and judgment while rejecting political involvement and practice as a corrective strategy. For all of its political relevance and all of its political language, it is in the end an apolitical strategy rejecting power, and thus rejecting politics as well. Theirs is a strategy which advocates social involvement, which would effect political consequences. But it rejects political involvement directed toward social consequences.

If the evangelical community is going to develop a political ethic, it must be one in which power is recognized and accepted as a legitimate means to the ends it seeks. To reject power is to reject politics. Such a rejection may not in and of itself be improper -- but we should at least be clear as to what it is we are doing. The confusion has been great, however, because the very individuals who have done so much to renew the social conscience of the evangelical community have also been those who have rejected politics as a means of fulfilling social obligation. And while the evangelical conscience may indeed have been reawakened, it remains -- at least in terms of understanding the linkages between power and politics -- as apolitical today as it was 20 and 30 years ago.

The Characteristics of Love

While insisting that one cannot speak of politics without also speaking of power, we have nonetheless thus far not answered the question as to whether love and power are compatible. For if they are incompatible, and the Christian is indeed called to live a life of servanthood in love toward one’s neighbor and God, then those who reject politics in the name of Christ are correct. It is imperative, therefore, that we distinguish the characteristics of love so that we can examine its compatibility with the exercise of political power.

First, we must acknowledge that love is something voluntarily given. Love can not be forced against one’s will. Acts of the political order, however, invariably contain by definition elements of compulsion and involuntarism. Thus, insofar as the power of the state is associated with involuntarism and the act of love with voluntarism, we must conclude that the state cannot love any more than love can be forced.

Second, love is something that must be personally mediated. Since the voluntary nature of love necessitates the existence of a will by which it can become activated, love is always personal. The state, like any other instituted social order, has an objective existence and achieves its ends indiscriminately. The citizen’s relationship to the state is an “I-it” rather than an “I-thou” relationship, and incapable of the personal mediation necessary for love to become activated.

Third, love is always sacrificial. That is to say that love is always a voluntary (noncompulsory) act in which one wills to allow something to happen at one’s own expense for the well-being of another. Let me give an example. Suppose you are a clerk at a turn-of-the-century “mom and pop” neighborhood grocery store. Suppose a poorly dressed and obviously destitute widow comes into the store to buy a loaf of bread. Fumbling through her purse, she finds the last quarter she possesses with which to purchase the ten-cent loaf of bread. Upon the completion of the purchase, you as the store clerk return 15 cents change to the widow. There is nothing loving in giving the lady her change. The change is hers just as surely as the loaf of bread is now hers.

Now let us suppose that, moved by the widow’s evident poverty, you decide simply to give her the loaf of bread. You have no obligation to do so, you are not forced to do so, but you will to do so. You sacrifice your right to a fair price for the bread to the widow’s advantage.

Fourth, since love is freely given, it goes beyond ordinary moral obligation. To fulfill moral obligation is to respond to moral necessity, and therefore, it is an act of duty rather than of free moral will. It is important to qualify this statement by noting also that going beyond one’s moral obligation necessarily involves first fulfilling one’s moral obligation.

Let us return, for purpose of example, to the store clerk and the widow to illustrate the point. This time, suppose the widow, due to her failing eyesight, mistakenly gives the clerk nine pennies and one dime for the loaf of bread which costs only ten cents. In returning the nine pennies to the widow, the clerk is not demonstrating some form of extraordinary love but simply fulfilling the moral obligation of not taking advantage of the widow’s weakness of sight.

In summary, I have suggested that love is voluntary and freely given; that since it involves moral volition, it must be personally mediated; that love is sacrificial, and thus limited to the extent to which an individual is capable of personally absorbing the consequences of its acts; and finally, that love extends beyond duty or moral obligation (implying that it must first fulfill moral obligation or duty).

The Use of Coercion

But politics, on the other hand, involves involuntary servitude. Its very nature assumes the sanctioned use of coercion and force to achieve its ends. It is instituted in formal organization and operates impersonally. (Otherwise we should say that it operates arbitrarily and is discriminatory.) And the leaders of the state obviously engage in actions for which others are called on to sacrifice. (Otherwise there would be no need for force or coercion, and there would no longer be a need for the state’s existence.) Most of us would he more than pleased with a political order which at least met the demands of moral obligation. Indeed, we would be tempted to rebel if the state sought to require us to exceed moral obligation. For in so doing, it would act as a totalitarian state which recognizes no limits to the power of the state or to the citizen’s obligations toward the state.

To use the power of the state as a means of effecting love among its citizens is therefore not only contradictory, insofar as love cannot be forced or coerced; it also destroys the distinction of “moral obligation” by which the difference between a limited and a totalitarian government is marked.

Given the duality between power and love and the apparent conflict between “loveless power” and “powerless love,” how shall we choose? So long as the choice is put in these terms, it would be difficult to do other than to choose to be a political eunuch in order to become a servant in the Kingdom of God. Surely, God calls us to the higher and more noble path of love over power.

But critical questions remain. By what is love to be informed other than by its willed motivations? If love is the sacrificial act of going beyond one’s ordinary moral duty, how do we define such moral duty so as to know when it has been surpassed and love has taken its place?

It is the concept of justice which creates other alternatives by which the concepts of “loveless power and “powerless love” can be reconciled. And it is justice which enables us to be servants of both power and love.

The Claims of Justice

The refusal to recognize the claims of justice as universal and eternal -- and thus inviolable even in the context of Christian social ethics -- has demanded a high price both in terms of the political relevance of the church and in terms of the church’s own theological integrity. The theology of Albrecht Ritschl, for example, suffered from this error. Ritschl was reduced to juxtaposing loveless power and powerless love. In so doing, he created an entire theological system which contrasted the Old Testament “God of power” with the New Testament “God of love.” In the process he was forced to abandon the concept of God’s judgment and retribution for sinners, was forced to adopt a universalist concept of salvation, and gave to the church a love ethic of which nothing substantive could be said.

At the practical level, the love ethic then becomes irrelevant to the problems of politics because, in the words of Reinhold Niebuhr, “It persists in presenting the law of love as a simple solution for every communal problem” (Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics, edited by Harry R. Davis and Robert C. Good [Scribners, 1960], p. 163). Thus, as we deal with the concept of justice, let us not suppose that it is of lesser relevance or importance for the Christian than the concept of love,

We must begin by acknowledging that the claims of justice are universal, eternal and objective. The claims of justice spring from the personhood of the just God, and they lay claim to all that is contingent upon his creative power.

But given the assertion that justice makes itself manifest in the “creation ordinances” of God, why is it then that humanity has never reached consensus as to the substantive elements and characteristics by which justice can be defined? The most commonly accepted starting point defines justice as the “giving of every person his or her due.” But what is due each and every individual, or each and every group of individuals, is a constant point of contention. It is here, then, that we must make some important distinctions in regard to notions that have clouded evangelical attempts to deal with the problem of justice.

While some thinkers have posited love and power as the only values from which Christian choice must be made in evaluating Christian political responsibility, at the exclusion of the concept of justice, others have included justice -- but in such an ambiguous and ill-defined manner as to make the term as meaningless and without content as discussions relating to the “love ethic.”

The claims of justice, if they are to become operational in a political society, must be defined with some meaningful degree of particularity. “Justice,” in the words of Niebuhr, “requires discriminate judgments between conflicting claims” (Love and Justice, edited by D. B. Robertson [World, 1967], p. 28). Justice as an abstraction is not enough. We must work out an understanding of justice in particulars, lest we fall into the trap of moralizing about politics while having nothing to offer in terms of a moral critique that speaks to particular situations in time and space.

A classic example of this problem is illustrated in the Politics of Aristotle. Aristotle points out that if we define justice as rendering to each man his due, there are nonetheless two logically attractive and yet mutually contradictory principles by which this concept of rendering rights can be interpreted. In the first instance, there are those who argue that since all persons have a fundamental spiritual or moral equality, then that equality ought to extend to all social, economic and political relationships in which they find themselves. In the second instance, there are those who argue that since individuals are unequal in the contributions they make to a society, the inequalities of contribution ought to be recognized in consequent social, economic and political relationships. Both arguments have merit. Indeed, this age-old dilemma is at the heart of much contemporary political debate between democratic socialists and democratic capitalists in modern Western societies.

‘Redemption Ordinances’ in Political Theory

Granting the need for dealing with justice in more than simple abstractions, we face even more clearly the problem that people disagree as to the applications to be drawn from such abstractions (such as that of giving each man his due). Of what good are “creation ordinances” if, through the fall, the human being’s perception of what is just, let alone one’s moral motivation to act on those perceptions, is thoroughly clouded?

Hence, it is not uncommon in Christian political theory -- particularly contemporary Christian political theory -- to reject the concept of a universally known justice via creation ordinances and turn, instead, to the notion of “redemption ordinances.” Given the fall of humanity, these people argue, there can be no sure knowledge of justice aside from the Scriptures and God’s incarnate Word in Jesus Christ. I surely would not wish to argue that the fallen human’s knowledge of or capacity for justice was unimpaired by the fall. But I would like to point out several dangers in the thinking of those who reject the concept of justice based on creation ordinances known to all persons, regardless of their religious persuasion or soteriological and revelational systems.

First, to reject creation ordinances out of hand places our reason as creatures bearing the image of God. (however fallen) into conflict with revelation-ally based knowledge. It is an epistemological problem which extends itself, logically, to asserting that in all areas of knowing, reason has nothing to say aside from revelation. In the realm of culture, it suggests that Athens has nothing to say to Jerusalem.

Second, this position has very serious practical consequences for strategies of political involvement. For if only those within the household of faith and conversant with the revelation of God in his redemptive ordinance can speak with authority on matters of justice, then Christians are unable to communicate or work with non-Christians in political endeavor. There can be no “secular” basis for political involvement by the Christian -- only a religiously informed and motivated involvement which is sectarian by definition. If we deny natural knowledge of the political good, the only alternative for the Christian is to (a) withdraw from politics because it is worldly or fallen, or (b) establish a “Christian” politics which is sectarian in ambition and motivation.

The disjoining of God’s “creation ordinances” and the consequent universal norms of justice attached thereto, from God’s “redemption ordinances,” which establish a unique rationale for a “Christian” politics, has demonstrated itself in various forms in contemporary Christian thinking. Many evangelicals and fundamentalists have sought uncritically to impose revealed norms of religious righteousness on the secular society with little if any justification insofar as how such policies would affect nonbelievers. Hence, crusades to make America a “Christian nation” are not infrequent, and Christian standards of morality and ethics are uncritically (and usually inconsistently) upheld as normative for the secular state.

Many neo-orthodox thinkers, subsuming “redemption ordinances” to “christological ordinances,” have uncritically (and equally inconsistently) sought to apply the “love ethic” of Jesus with little regard for the objectifying norms of justice which must inform the spirit of love. And many Anabaptist and revolutionary thinkers, subsuming “redemption ordinances” to “eschatological ordinances,” have uncritically (and equally inconsistently) sought to apply the ethic of the Christ who makes all things new and has conquered the “fallen powers” into an ethic of revolutionary consequences, disregarding the fact that the powers given to Satan have always been held in check by the Creator God, and that while the conquering power of God has indeed been visibly and dramatically revealed in the resurrection of our Lord, we are told nonetheless that Satan’s powers shall be unleashed in new fury before the final consummation of God’s kingdom.

The Character of Justice

Let me, then, suggest the following criteria in establishing the character of justice. First, justice must be based on universal claims of right. To establish justice on the basis of sectarian authority alone is to do violence to our very confession that all persons bear the image of God, and that all persons carry a knowledge of the good. And consequently it follows that all persons are bound to the demands of justice.

Second, justice must be defined within the context of a given social order, and it must be enumerated in terms of specifics. To base one’s plea on “justice” alone is not enough.

Third. given the universality of the norms of justice and the universality of the consciousness of justice, one can derive procedures and practices which, when honored, increase the likelihood of policies and programs which eventuate in justice. Indeed, this is exactly what our concepts of “civil rights” seek to do in our constitutionally based democracies; it is the recognition that the means employed must not do violence to the ends pursued. (We must point out that nonwesternized societies of a traditionalist character have sought to recognize the same principles of constitutionalism in less articulated ways.)

Fourth, we must recognize that the norms of justice are objective and that they exist independently of human volition. Hence, claims can be made in the name of justice, and claims can be rejected in the name of justice. Whereas love must be volitionally given, justice demands to be recognized independently of human volition.

Fifth, since the “God of love” is also a just God, love and justice cannot stand juxtaposed. Love may go beyond justice -- but it can never seek less than justice. Love may inform and inspire reverence for justice -- but it can never be an excuse for absolving the claims of justice.

Sixth, since justice is an objective quality establishing rights and obligations, calculations can and must be made by individuals and societies as to how their actions serve the claims of justice. Given the fact that not all persons willingly seek justice, power can be used legitimately if and when it serves the cause of justice. While we have suggested that love cannot use power to achieve its ends, justice must use power to achieve its ends.

Such distinctions are necessary -- not only because to call upon the state to love” is self-contradictory, insofar as the state’s actions are rooted in power and not voluntarism, but because the claims of love are rooted in sectarian acknowledgment as opposed to universal norms of justice. As the church proclaims the gospel, it sensitizes the community at large (as well as the Christian community) to the demands of justice. Hence, while justice remains the servant of love, it is love which serves as the enabler of justice.

Further, to seek to use the state as an instrument of love implies not only a sectarian state but a totalitarian state. For it is the discriminating norms of justice which are used to delineate the questions as to what is mine and what is thine. To deny justice in the name of love is to deny the very civilities which are at the root of constitutional government itself.

By adding the concept of justice to those of love and power, new alternatives for evangelical Protestantism’s thinking about politics are created. Politics, rooted in power, nevertheless fulfills a legitimate function when it serves the claims of justice. Love, while rejecting power and going beyond the rights and duties established by justice, establishes a will for justice and a moral motivation which crowns the just act. Love, while personally mediated, complements justice with its objective demands.

Bellow’s Gift

The Nobel Prize is only the latest honor for Saul Bellow, who has already won three National Book Awards and so now becomes the most rewarded American novelist, as he has long been the most rewarding. The Stockholm committee said that he deserved the award "for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work." Bellow, a shy man, quipped to a reporter: "The child in me is delighted. The adult is skeptical."

A Spirit of Play

One of the marks of Bellow’s literary style is a childlike playfulness -- what Schiller called naïveté, an innocent delight in existence, as distinguished from sentimentality, mature reflection on experience. This spirit of romp exists in tension with a deeper seriousness, just as an odd solemnity is noticeable when children are at play. Bellow’s novels are never dour. The words tumble over each other, as though he had a ball making them all up; the reader settles down happily with the book in the knowledge that a party is brewing.

In one of his typical novels the characters dash in and out, play a few frantic scenes and then disappear, leaving the pages to an even more madcap crowd. The plot begins like an epic -- in the middle of things -- plunges backward like Proust to recapture some fragment of the past, careens forward, and suddenly stops as though the whole project had been abandoned.

The protagonist of Humboldt’s Gift, Charlie Citrine, is a successful playwright and biographer who returns to the Chicago of his boyhood; muddles about in the urban scene while trying to straighten out a marital problem; leaves for Spain with a large friend, Renata; is deserted by her; returns to America to bury his old friend Von Humboldt Fleisher; and receives his bequest. The whole has an amiable quality, as though someone is remembering the bar mitzvah party of a neighbor’s kid.

Charlie, an egghead putz, loses $450 in a poker game and gives a check for the amount to a local tough named Rinaldo Cantabile. When he finds out later that Rinaldo won by cheating, he stops payment on the check. Rinaldo’s goons retaliate by smashing up Charlie’s beloved Mercedes and threaten more serious revenge if the debt is not honored. Charlie hands him the money in cash. Rinaldo forces Charlie to accompany him, and they drive to a skyscraper under construction on Michigan Boulevard. They take the workmen’s elevator to the 50th or 60th floor, and while Charlie hangs onto a girder in fear against the strong wind, Rinaldo sails the $50 bills out into space. Rinaldo has lifted his finger to the whole snooty universe, and Charlie is fascinated. "How shall I describe my feelings?" he asks. "Fear, thrill, appreciation, glee -- yes I appreciated his ingenuity."

In the Bellow universe nothing is really tragic -- that is, if tragedy means that someone of great estate has had a dramatic fall because of some flaw in his character. In the Bellow cast no one is really great, and all characters are flawed; the natural response is comic. If one could imagine a debate between Karl Marx and the Marx brothers, perish forbid, Bellow would side with the Marx brothers. He affirms life rather than any abstract conception, and in this respect he is much like Charlie’s friend and mentor, Humboldt.

The writer Delmore Schwartz, who almost certainly was one of the models for Bellow’s Humboldt, liked to say that life is a wedding, by which he meant that the universe is meaningful, and one can happily take his place in it like the figures in Brueghel’s painting. Bellow’s novels convey this sense of fun -- the same, one suspects, that Shakespeare felt when he was getting up his play on Midsummer’s Eve, and that Oscar Wilde felt arranging a conversation over some cucumber sandwiches, and that Strauss felt when he wrote the notes for Klagenlied für der Rosenkavalier. The word that comes to mind is larky, and the reader who tires of Bellow’s japes would tire of London.

Making Sense of the Universe

Bellow is part child, and so in some wise should inherit the kingdom of heaven. In this mood he writes like a bemused spectator, watching the zany antics of an adult world. The attitude helps him endure what would otherwise be painful. As the philosopher Yogi Berra said, "A man must have a lot of boy in him to catch both ends of a doubleheader."

But observe now the manly side of Bellow, the part which refused to be pompous just because a committee in Stockholm decided that he wrote well. Behind the drollery is a vein of sadness, perhaps even of terror. For what if the ancient Jewish passion for making sense of the universe -- the impulse which gave the world monotheism -- must now be abandoned, and the decision made that there is no grand design at all? What if we are all playing solemn parts in the idiot’s tale?

During the Holocaust a sensible and kindly people set out without passion to slay 1 million children. The fact is too incredible to fit into a meaningful universe, too evil for anger, too insane for comprehension. After the Holocaust the possibility remains open that the universe is irrational, and no event can be called worse or better than any other. One can only manage a laugh at an occasional bit of sanity salvaged from a general madness.

Yet a novelist must grope for meaning; it comes with the territory. An artist shudders at a cascading miscellany and has no peace until he has managed some kind of magical shape which is inevitable and at the same time unexpected. By a prodigious exercise of power, unknown to the bourgeois world, he tries to give form to some corner of the universe. He must have participated deeply in the suffering around him, and he must also have managed some coherent utterance about it. Even Delmore Schwartz did not think of himself only as a guest at a wedding. As Alfred Kazin wrote of him after he died, Schwartz, like the Greek tragedians, uttered the cry of a hurt and puzzled humankind. He had, said Kazin, "above all the old, brave, still undefeated sense of the artist as humanity’s agonist -- how these things move me.

Despite his disarming drollery, Bellow has also accepted the role of agonist, and the Nobel committee rightly pointed out his "subtle analysis of contemporary culture." As a novelist he remains something of a sociologist, though, to be sure, without graphs and statistics. Bellow has agreed that a novelist is inevitably a moralist. Writing in the March 1973 Atlantic, he posed the critical question which the novelist must answer: "In what form shall life be justified?" Whereas Milton tried to justify God, Bellow tries to justify humanity. Over and over he seems to ask what it means to be a human being. In a vivid progression of novels -- Dangling Man, Seize the Day, The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, and the Nobel prizewinner, Humboldt’s Gift -- the same question prompts the monologues. The laughter comes because so many people have made up crazy answers for themselves; the hurt remains because the answer has not yet been found.

Bellow’s Women and Men

Now that those who are "with it" no longer look to the Old Man of the Mountain for his ancient help, everyone seems to experiment with some kind of substitute which he thinks will order the universe and bring happiness. Charlie Citrine is an easy mark for women. Bellow’s women are saftig, full-bottomed, musky; they do not really have to try hard to seduce their nymph-haunted suitors. "When I loved Naomi Lutz," says Charlie, "I was safely within life." The women are much alike: Sono, the Japanese doll who washes Herzog’s back, is like Denise, Charlie’s first wife, and also like Renata, his second. In their soft embrace he thinks he has found dos ewig Weibliche, the woman at the bottom of the sea, Gea the Earth Mother. But the feeling of drowsy safety is deceptive, and before long the lover is a Schlemazel. Bellow’s women regularly turn their men into cuckolds, and though the girls come on seductively we who have been through the other novels know that they have daggers in their garter belts. Renata leaves the hapless Charlie for an undertaker. There is much to be learned from them, as there is much to be learned from Lydia, the tattooed lady, but there is no lasting peace. No safe ordering here, no filling of the space in the heart which St. Augustine said was left by God.

There is, of course, the different company of men. For some reason which puzzles even himself, Charlie prefers to associate with underworld figures rather than with eggheads or businessmen, and he plays poker with hoodlums. He admires Rinaldo Cantabile, perhaps because of his expressive power, his refusal to be pushed around, his spit-against-the-wind manliness. Violence has a certain charm for novelists, and gangsters who are full of exuberance and insolence make better copy than accountants. But Charlie does not want to imitate Rinaldo. "Violence," as Herzog says in the earlier novel, "is for the goi." But Charlie likes Rinaldo, as he likes the drip Thaxter, Pinsker the LaSalle Street lawyer, and Urbanowitz the crooked judge, all up to their elbows in some sucker’s money. They are absurd, of course, but they have style, and they are not tedious.

The World of the Spirits

From the theological point of view, the most interesting of Charlie’s. efforts to find order in the universe is his flirtation with anthroposophy. This substitute for mainline religion was the creation of Rudolf Steiner, who turned a fertile imagination on neo-Indian materials, theosophy and baroque idealism. Around the turn of the century this son of an Austrian stationmaster fluttered the European intellectual dovecotes. The essential points are that humanity rather than God becomes central, and the distinction between mind and matter is denied. We live in what seems a sensible and solid universe, but the truth is that around this banality there is a far richer spiritual universe, thronged with spirits like the Rosicrucian ones which, according to Alexander Pope, performed a rape on Belinda’s hair.

There are ways of penetrating to this busy and secret world. Meditation will do it, and so will sleep, because in dreams we leave our sodden bodies and commune with astral beings. In the daytime they are also available, hovering unseen over the suburbs and the civic plaza.

Charlie Citrine, anxious to find something beyond the daily unpleasantness, thinks there might be a clue here. He learns about it through Doris Scheldt, the daughter of an anthroposophist; practices meditation with indifferent success; and plans in the end to learn more of the cult at Dornach, headquarters of the society. What Bellow thinks about Steiner is hard to ascertain. Readers and critics must be reminded that Citrine is not Bellow, any more than Iago is Shakespeare. Charlie is taken in, but is Bellow as well? Steiner has had a distinguished following, including the artist Kandinsky. The Inkling luminaries Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis found his search for the supernatural impressive, but pooh-poohed his discoveries. Owen Barfield thought that metaphors were the linguistic evidence of Steiner’s hidden unity of all things. In Humboldt’s Gift, Kafka is described as being interested in Steiner, but in the end turned off because he saw Steiner picking his nose with his finger. Actually Kafka was undecided. When his friend Janouch asked him if Steiner was a prophet or a charlatan, Kafka replied, "I don’t know. I’m not clear in my mind about him."

Steiner’s kinky religion is not likely to play a prominent part in the coming Great Church, and it is not likely that Bellow approves of it either. It must have seemed to him another example of a foolish attempt to tidy up a messy universe with a glib and unlikely formula. The mystery must not be profaned. When the culture-vulture Pierre Thaxter asks for a major statement, Charlie replies:

You mean something like a life reverence, or Yogas and Commissars. You have a weakness for such terrible stuff. You’d give anything to be a Malraux and talk about the West. What is it with you and these seminal ideas? Major statements are hot air. The disorder’s here to stay.

This sounds like the real Bellow, who had his Herzog sneer about "the canned sauerkraut of Spengler’s ‘Prussian Socialism.’"

Embracing Life

The warning should be heeded by religious people, who have a tendency to take refuge under some single, enveloping principle, like Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog. But if seminal ideas and major statements are to be avoided, what, pray tell, remains? Bellow replies: "Life itself remains." Survival may be a sufficient objective to a generation which remembers Dachau and Hiroshima. Sprawling, inconsequential, weird, wasteful and very funny, life itself can be embraced even though no one understands what it is. Seize the Day was Bellow’s brave formula in 1956. Sheer affection for life and the passing panorama has helped him to cherish the details, sights and sounds that are the stuff of great fiction.

Yet in this preoccupation with life as a series of happenings, there is also a wistful deference to the unknown, and a backward glance at a mythical home which now is lost. Humboldt’s prototype Delmore Schwartz said so in his poem Genesis:

God is a dream! And this is what

I do not know and have to know. O if

I only knew that!

At the end of Humboldt’s bequest to Charlie, he wrote this: "Last of all -- remember: we are not natural beings but supernatural beings." The reminder is not lost on Charlie. Speaking to his wife, Denise, he says, "What does religion say? It says that there is something in human beings beyond body and brain, and that we have ways of knowing that go beyond the organism and its senses. I’ll always believe that."

This is not a ringing orthodoxy, but some such attenuated credo might well prove to be the distinctive piety of our time. The belief explains why Augie March kept looking for what he called "the axial lines," why Sammler kept trying to find out the terms of his "contract," and why Henderson tried to find out what it was he was looking for. One should no doubt think twice about offering up someone else’s confessional, but it seems likely that the prayer Moses Herzog offers to God could be spoken by Bellow as well: "How my mind has struggled to make coherent sense. I have not been good at it. But I have desired to do your unknown will

In any case, the solemnity of that would not be lost on Bellow, nor the sad little fun at trying to obey an unknown will. Whatever the ambiguity of the cosmic clues, Bellow is optimistic about humanity’s future and has only scorn for Weltschmertz. At the end of Humboldt’s Gift, Charlie and a friend are in a bleak New Jersey cemetery where they have buried Humboldt. They see a tiny flower poking its way through thin soil and heralding the coming spring. "What do you suppose they’re called, Charlie?" the friend asks.

"Search me," says Charlie. "I’m a city boy myself. They must be crocuses."

Brideshead Revisited: A Twitch Upon the Thread



The recently completed 11-and-one-half-hour Public Broadcasting System series based on Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited proved a smash hit. Across the country bridge parties and pancake suppers were rescheduled so as not to compete with Charles Ryder’s memories. Americans beginning to feel Poverty her Pinch have thought it great indoor sport to watch plover eggs being eaten at Oxford, fobs cavorting in world capitals, and dinner being served in one of the great homes of England. But this book is not romantic slosh. We see a family disintegrating, a general strike ravaging the streets of London, the upper classes being cruel and adulterous.

There have been viewers, of course, who switched off the program, deciding that such a dish of snobbery, alcoholism and decadence was too gamey to serve up in the living room. Evelyn Waugh himself thought of his novel not as entertainment but as a camouflaged sermon, a case study of mercy being rejected and then accepted in the end. Its real point, he said, was “to trace the divine purpose in a pagan world.” The book’s subtitle should warn the reader: “The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder.” Though he would have flinched to hear it, Evelyn Waugh can be thought of as a spoiled priest.

In a letter to A. D. Peters, his literary agent, Waugh said, “I hope the last conversation with Cordelia gives the theological clue. The whole thing is steeped in theology, but I begin to agree that the theologians won’t recognize it.” Nor did non-Catholic reviewers of the book recognize it. Cordelia speaks first of the closing of the chapel at Brideshead after the funeral of her mother. She tells Charles that she watched while a priest went through the prescribed steps in desacralizing a holy place, finishing by emptying the tabernacle and leaving the door ajar. “I suppose none of this makes sense to you, Charles, poor agnostic. I stayed there till he was gone, and then, suddenly, there wasn’t any chapel any more, just an oddly decorated room.”

Then she tells Charles of the one escape possible from a world fallen into the hands of human beings: divine mercy. She reminds him of the evening at Brideshead when her mother read aloud from a detective story written by G. K. Chesterton, and was interrupted by Sebastian making his first drunken appearance. “Father Brown said something like ‘I caught him’ [the thief] with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.” Brideshead Revisited, if the author’s intention matters, is a story of some fishes lost in a great sea until they are finally hauled to safety by a jerk of the pole in the hands of the Fisher King.

That is why the concluding episode, the deathbed conversion of Lord Marchmain, is the denouement pointed to by the perceptive Cordelia. Lord Marchmain returns to Brideshead to die after his Byronic exile in Venice. He is unrepentant for his adulterous life and proposes to leave his estate to the adulterous Julia and Charles. Despite the objections of Charles and the doctor, Julia sends for a priest. Lord March-main at first refuses to see him, thinking he has still some time to live, but when he knows that he is soon to die, he accepts the ministration of the church, receives the absolution, and manages to make a feeble sign of the cross. This act of the will shows that grace has been effectual, and that by a twitch of the line he has died safely in the arms of the church.



Waugh’s friend Ronald Knox did not much care for Brideshead Revisited, but he did like the ending. He admitted to Waugh what he had said to himself: “I wish Evelyn would write about characters whom one would like to meet in life. . . . But once you reach the end, needless to say the whole cast -- even Beryl -- falls into place and the twitch of the happening in the very bowels of Metroland is inconceivably effective.” Waugh wrote back saying, “I am delighted that you have become reconciled to B.R. in the end. It was, of course, all about the death bed. I was present at almost exactly that scene.”

The scene he had in mind is described in detail both in his Letters and in his Diaries. Hubert Duggan, a delicate Regency dandy and fellow pass-grade at Oxford, stepson of Lord Curzon, chancellor of Oxford, had come to his deathbed after a life of dissipation. Despite the objections raised by some of the family, Waugh had brought a priest to his bedside, and had been rewarded when a flicker of Hubert’s eyes showed that he had gratefully received the divine mercy. As at Brideshead, Evelyn reported that “there was a good deal of family embarrassment, with Marcella and Ellen on one side with a disgusting Canadian doctor, and Lady Curzon and I and the angels on the other side.”

In a letter to Lady Mary Lygon, Waugh speaks of his central conviction: “I believe that everyone in his (or her) life has the moment when he is open to Divine Grace. It’s there, of course, for the asking all the time, but human lives are so planned that usually there’s a particular time -- sometimes, like Hubert, on his deathbed -- when all resistance is down and Grace can come flooding in.”

Samuel Johnson would have approved. In the Life he reproves the skeptical Boswell and warns him about judging: We are not, he says, “to judge determinately of the state in which a man leaves this life. He may in a moment have repented effectually.” In support he quotes a verse from William Camden’s Remains (1623), which speaks of a dissolute man who was killed when he fell from his horse:

My friend, judge not me,

Thou seest I judge not thee;

Betwixt the stirrop and the ground,

Mercy I askt, mercy I found.

 

Camden said he had borrowed the idea from St. Augustine, who had written, “The mercy of God [may be found] between the bridge and the stream.”

Some of Waugh’s readers did not share his enthusiasm for deathbed conversions. His antipopish Protestant friend Henry Yorke, author of the novel Living, thought the conversion scene a mistake. “The end,” he wrote to Waugh, “was not for me. As you can imagine my heart was in my mouth all through the deathbed scene, hoping against hope that the old man would not give way, that is, take the course he eventually did.” A worldling friend, Edmund Wilson, who had once hailed Waugh as the hope of the English novel, was disgusted: “The last scenes are extravagantly absurd, with an absurdity that would be worthy of Waugh at his best if it were not -- painful to say -- meant quite seriously.”

The subject of deathbed conversions was hotly debated in 17th century England. Everyone conceded that it was possible. The story Jesus told of the workers who arrived late in the vineyard and yet received the same pay as others could be adduced as scriptural authority. And there was, of course, a clinching argument. Only one human being had ever received Christ’s astonishing promise: “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.” He was a dying thief on a cross.



The possibility of last-minute forgiveness was beyond dispute, but the Anglicans, anxious to establish an identity independent of Rome, insisted that a prescriptive understanding of moral obligation was essential to the experience of repentance, which the gospel makes conditional for the gift of grace. Deathbed repentance was dubious, and was really more like what the moral theologians called attrition -- imperfect repentance. Dying people could be more afraid of judgment than they were filled with love of God. The act of acceptance -- making the sign of the cross or blinking one’s eyelids -- was surely not the same as repentance, and administering the sacrament after death, of course, asked for no act of will at all, and was scarcely defendable even if one made the curious concession to time that the body must not be cold.

But the most serious criticism of the Carolines was that extreme unction minimized the need to live morally. They would not have been surprised to read that Sebastian would continue his drunkenness as an underporter in a Tunisian monastery, knowing that at his end a priest would be at hand to offer absolution. And Julia would continue her sinful ways with the same consoling belief. H. R. McAdoo, archbishop of Dublin, sums up the dissenting opinion: “The core of this apple of doctrinal discord is simply that if a man may defer his repentance until he finds himself in danger of death, the necessity for leading a good life disappears.”

The irony of this situation would not have been lost on Waugh: after the dust clears, the Reformed theologians are pleading stoutly for works, and the Roman theologians are arguing just as energetically for sola Christi. The Catholic layperson ignores the debate, knowing that extreme unction is of great comfort to the dying person as well as to those left behind. The theologians know that the doctrine protects the timeless power of God, who can express his love without asking a by-your-leave of any mortal. According to a leading Roman Catholic theologian, Charles Curran, ever since Vatican II the emphasis in his church has been on the use of unction for illness, though the last desperate remedy of unction in extremis has not been abandoned.

In any case, it seems fitting to report that on Easter morning 1966, Evelyn Waugh collapsed and died after attending solemn high mass (in Latin, of course) at his parish church in Somerset. He will be remembered for his holy laughter, and for those beguiling stories which hold out hope even for sophisticated sinners. In his novel Helena he has the saintly mother of Constantine pray “for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be forgotten when the simple come into their kingdom.”

Isaac Singer at Jabbok’s Ford

When Isaac Bashevis Singer wow the 1978 Nobel Prize for literature, his status seemed to change from that of coterie hero, loved by a dwindling but enthusiastic Yiddish-speaking public, to that of world hero. But the subject matter of his work did not change. It has always been about the adventure of being a Jew exiled in a strange land. Now, at age 74, he is seen to be not really parochial at all, but a spokesman for a universal adventure: the effort of a single human being refusing to yield his identity in the face of an Absolute Power. It is a tribute to Singer’s broad appeal that he makes all his readers feel as though they were living on Krochmalna Street in the Warsaw ghetto.

A Basic Riddle

A shelf full of books -- eight novels, seven collections of short stories, three memoirs, and 11 works for children, to be exact -- explore the same theme as his recent novel Shosha: the theme of cosmic exile, wherein God has forgotten his graciousness. Singer’s problem is how to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land. The existence of the homeland is never doubted by exiles; nor is the existence of the Lord, though he may be ignored or forgotten. “In my belief in God,” writes Singer, “there is only one thing which is steady: I never say the universe is an accident.” Paley’s watch may lie rusting in the sand, but no one can fail to see that it was made by a watchmaker. Generations of Hebrew monotheism lie behind this sturdy faith, and in addition there is a Singer family tradition: Isaac is the son as well as the grandson of rabbis, and as a youth he studied in rabbinical schools. He did not have a progressive type of education, as is suggested in the opening Sentences of Shosha:

I was brought up on three dead languages -- Hebrew, Aramaic and Yiddish. . . .The cheder where I studied was a room in which the teacher ate and slept, and his wife cooked. There I studied not arithmetic, geography, physics, chemistry, or history, but the laws governing an egg laid on a holiday and sacrifices in a temple destroyed two thousand years ago.

But the central lesson of this well-learned cheder was not anachronistic: God’s in his heaven, though all is not right with the world.

The basic riddle which prevented Singer’s easy acceptance of an optimism such as Browning’s was the impotence of the good against the evil forces in history, as well as the endless postponement of the Messianic solution. However secure might be the existence of God, his attributes are obscure, his actions strange. The gentle and credulous Shosha quizzes her lover on the point:

 “Arele, Leizer the watchmaker said that you are an unbeliever -- is this true?”

“No, Shoshele, I believe in God, but I don’t believe that he revealed himself and told the rabbis all the little laws that they have added through generations.”

It is hazardous to read autobiography into fiction, but in this case we can be sure we have Singer’s own view. In an interview with Richard Burgin for the New York Times, he said the same thing: “I believe in God, but I have my doubts about revelation.”

In the absence of any authentic revelation, all human understanding becomes riddled with ambiguity. It is difficult, above all, to figure out the meaning of innocent suffering, the spectacle of unmerited retribution to which Dostoevsky kept returning under the rubric “the tears of a child.” Can the world be said to be under the sovereignty of God if there is so much cruelty and pain? Singer thought the question hard to answer, as did Voltaire, and Singer could not say that this is the best of all possible worlds.

“The problem of problems to me,” he wrote in A Little Boy in Search of God, “is still . . . the suffering of people and animals.” Haiml, one of the street philosophers of Shosha, concludes that “there can’t be any answer for suffering -- not for the sufferer.” What importance has a verbal account, no matter how plausible, compared with blood clotting on a bandage, or bodies dumped into a common grave? The quintessential suffering is, of course, the Holocaust. This demonic happening was so terrible as to be opaque to the imagination; thus Singer is forced to deal with it indirectly. He writes of Poland in the early 1930s, with the Nazis expected momentarily; and years later he writes an epilogue, remembering that the Nazis were there. But their actual presence is unspeakable, an indescribable evil complementing the unspeakable Tetragrammaton.

Nevertheless Dachau and Buchenwald are always there -- obscene shapes lurking on the pages of history, deep rivers of suffering flowing beneath the surface like the stream of Beatitude. The bills for it all are still coming in. In Singer’s books we see that the Holocaust destroyed not only 6 million lives, but also the possibility of a rational universe for its survivors.

An Ancient Complaint

Those who have a deep faith in the Creator, and who also detect a ghastly flaw in his creation, must conclude that God is unjust. And this is what Singer decides. “If I could,” he writes in his still untranslated Rebellion and Prayer, “I would picket the Almighty with a sign, ‘Unfair to Life.’” After centuries without a homeland, climaxed by the Holocaust, the notion of a chosen people seemed only ironic. If there was a royal priesthood, it was an honor to be paid for by grotesque suffering, and God deserved to be told so.

The idea of a poor mortal confronting and shaking his finger at the Ancient of Days as though he were an errant schoolboy is almost impossible to hold steadily in mind. Surely such a thought carries insolence to its limits. But however absurd, there is biblical precedent for this sense of injured megalomania. There is the archetypal story in Genesis 32 of Jacob wrestling with an angel at Jabbok’s ford. The book of Job is an anguished consideration of how one might reconcile religious faith with moral outrage, and Job’s wife had reason for telling her husband to curse God and die. If one has a vague sense of the afterlife., during which the inequities of this life may be removed and if there seem to be no obvious rewards for virtue here and now, how can one blame the pious Jew of the Old Testament for being troubled? “Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper?” asks Jeremiah.

The question has worried all the great religions. John Milton wrote Paradise Lost in order “to justify the ways of God to man.” He thought that because man was guilty of original sin, God’s punishment was justified. The Victorian poet Edward Fitzgerald was not convinced: if God created man, how could he find fault with his own handiwork? He interpolated the following verse into his translation of The Rubaiyát of Omar Khayyám:

O Thou, who Man of baser Earth did make,

And e’en with Paradise devised the snake:

For all the sin wherewith the Face of Man

Is blackened -- Man’s forgiveness give -- and take!

 

Nor was A. E. Housman convinced:

Malt does more than Milton can

To justify God’s way to man.

 

The Victorian crisis of belief is apparent also in the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins. This poet wonders what sense can be made of the death by drowning of five nuns on their way to a mission field, but his first major poem, The Wreck of the Deutschland (1876), shows his determination to overcome his doubts:

Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung:

Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful then.

 

However, in 1918, near the end of his life, discouraged and ill in Dublin, he could only echo Jeremiah:

Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,

How wouldst thou worse. I wonder, than thou dost

Defeat, thwart me?

 

This time he has no answer except to plead, “Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.”

Thus the cry of protest to God has ample prece~ dent. Another position, more philosophical perhaps, and indicating a more resigned mood, is the familiar one taken by the negative theologians: God is audessus de mêlée, a mystery beyond our simple categories, above human censure as he is above human praise. 1-le is Aristotle’s Prime Mover, setting the planets spinning like bowling balls down their great alleys, but not caring how many pins are struck. Shosha quizzes Arele on the point:

 

“God is not good?”

“Not as we see it.”

“He has no pity?”

“Not as we understand it.”

“Arele, I’m afraid.”

“I’m afraid too.”

 

Shosha is afraid of Arele’s smart-aleck theology; Arele is afraid of living in a puzzling universe, vulnerable in the presence of a tyrant who demands obedience from those who do not even know his will. The Psalms sometimes treat this situation more gently, calling out to God to awaken and be about his day’s business; but sometimes, too, the Psalms are bitter, as in 50:12, which presents a strange God speaking sardonically to his children: “If I were hungry I would not tell thee.” Singer’s rebellion is sometimes against a sleeping God, and sometimes against a God whose ways are immoral. The writer could, of course, have learned this attitude from his study of Spinoza, the philosopher for whom he expresses greatest sympathy. Showing in marked degree the traditional Jewish fear of anthropomorphism, Spinoza said that God is causa sui, beyond our little modifications such as mind or will. All one can really say of God is that he is.

Some sense of a silent God is no doubt part of every great theophany and is also, if Rudolf Otto is to be believed, the inevitable ground of holiness. Karl Rahner, in Encounter with Silence, reports a sense of vacuity experienced at times by every believer:

“You are so distant and mysterious,” he says to God, echoing this famous passage in Kierkegaard: “When I pray, it is as if my words have disappeared down some deep well, from which no echo ever comes back to reassure me. . . Why are you so silent?” And one must recall Paul Tillich’s interest in the primal abyss, Meister Eckhart’s Ungrund, the vast emptiness from which all being emerges. In A Search for God in Time and Memory, John Dunne also speaks of “the dark god Abba,” to whom Jesus prayed and who rules-over all that exists.

What about the systems of theology which speak of God’s positive attributes and find all his ways just? Singer thinks these systems are human fabrications, dogmatic ingenuities which tell us more about people than they do about God. “One day,” says Arele’s Warsaw friend, Dr. Morris Feitelzohn, “all people will realize that there is not a single idea that can really be called true -- that everything is a game -- naturalism, religion, atheism, spiritualism, materialism, even suicide.” Sharing the metaphysical skepticism of the Vienna Circle, and especially echoing Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theory of “language-games,” Singer thinks of the world as a playground, a huge Coney Island, where every possible value -- whether sponsored by a Hitler, an Einstein or a Stalin -- must be taken no more seriously than a bit of playfulness.

From Anger to Rapture

What judgment can one make about this world view, or, to put the question in T. S. Eliot’s terms, “After such knowledge what forgiveness?” The notion of the playful lie clearly lacks the “high seriousness” Which Matthew Arnold demanded of any plan which could save us from chaos. The game theory seems an embarrassing frivolity in a world where not long ago corpses were piled like cord-wood. But the notion has a respectable history. Singer speaks approvingly of Hans Vaihinger, who argued that ideas recognized as being theoretically untrue might nevertheless have practical value. The good person may act out goodness as if that quality had ontological status. The case put by the fictionalists is that ideas cannot give us a portrayal of reality, since they have nothing to do with the thing an sich. But they can be useful in helping us find our way in a bewildering world. We are reminded of the boy who rode about in the wagon of his grandfather, a rag-picker, in the movie Lies My Father Told Me. “Do you believe in miracles?” the boy asks. “No,” the old man replies, “But I rely on them.”

There is in everything Singer writes a heartwarming generosity toward others, a refusal to judge -- which must come from his doctrine of the plenitude of creation and the existence of so many claims to validity. Even Hitler has his place. When Shosha asks Arele why God does not punish Hitler, Arele replies, “Oh, He doesn’t punish anybody. He created the cat and the mouse,” It is as though Singer has adopted one of the most curious of the principles from the natural-law tradition: “Only that ought not be which cannot be.” If one were to place at one pole Walter Lippmann, who spoke of Hitler as Antichrist, one would have to place Singer at an opposite pole, next to Hannah Arendt, who also believed in the banality of evil. It is moving to see victims try hard to understand their oppressors, but there ought to be room for moral indignation which is directed at humanity as well as against God! A more convincing advantage of Singer’s eclecticism is his insistence that each of us be allowed to create a personal fable, untroubled by moral bullies with their easy absolutisms. “The basis of ethics,” says Singer, “is man’s right to play the game of his own choice.”

It should be remembered that Singer is not a theologian, and certainly not a preacher. He is a storyteller. A raconteur is tempted to use whatever theology is likely to advance a tale and to hold the listeners’ attention. Singer has stressed that his feelings about God vary from anger to rapture. He is always aware that there is an evil force in the world antecedent to human willing, and he knows something about dybbuks. His own shtetl imps which sometimes bound about his New York apartment are very like the shadowy rascals at whom Luther threw an inkwell. They have power but we are not helpless before them, having the gift of free will and some room in which to use it. What seems a Yiddish common sense saves Singer from the darker possibilities of his theology. He knows that if everything is a game, some games are better than others. Shosha’s shy innocence, the girlish purity which forbids her even to speak about “you know what,” is chosen over the broad hospitalities of Dora, the communist trollop who offers herself to each man according to his ability. Haiml draws out the sensible possibilities of the game theory: “If all life is nothing but make-believe, let us believe that every night is the, second night of a holiday.” There are spaces of pleasantness in the gathering sorrow. “If there is no merciful truth,” says Haiml, “I take the lie that gives me warmth and moments of joy.”

The catch is that these moments are as rare and fleeting as are Walter Pater’s aesthetic moments. Lasting bliss must wait for the coming of the Messiah, but this coming seems scandalously delayed. Singer’s pessimism reminds one of the Hasidic story of the sentinel who was hired to sit outside the city gate and to come running with the news of the Messiah’s arrival. He sat patiently at his boring post, and came at last to the elders to complain that his pay was very poor. “It is true,” the elders agreed. “Your pay is poor, but you must remember that you have steady work.”

‘Nameless Grace’

Meanwhile for Singer, until the day of the coming there is the vivid passing scene, full of interest even when also full of tragedy, worth taking part in, worth telling stories about. It is of course possible to love what one cannot understand. To a marked degree Singer possesses the Hasidic sense of the excitement hidden in the commonplace, the theology which recognizes a cosmic act in the proffer of a glass of water, the secret splendor in common lives which distinguishes great fiction from gossip. Not the least of these common vitalities is love -- the kind of fleshly love. Singer likes to describe: a breathless search, over the hills and valleys of the body, a wild tossing in bed which looks like anger but is really exuberance at being alive. But he speaks also of another kind of love, the tender, lyrical kind which leads Arele to marry the ill-favored Shosha. One finds in so much of Singer’s works this vast sympathy for the insulted and the injured, as though the Messiah had already come.

Whatever limitations one might find in the work of the Nobel prizewinner, he has wrestled long and well against hopeless odds, and his accounts of the match emerge from a depth not discovered by equally good writers who have not known the blessing. Such wrestling is costly (“And as he passed over Penuel the sun rose upon him, and he halted upon his thigh”). One should expect to be wounded after such an encounter, and have perhaps ever after the piety of the anawim, the voice of those broken in spirit. Singer’s fortunate readers can only hope that his strength will not soon fail. As the long night ends, surely such an awakened spirit will see that the man he wrestled with was an angel, and that there is movement in the divine life. He might even make Martin Buber’s discovery his own: “to sense in the nameable torment the nameless grace.”

Robert Lowell: Death of an Elfking

The fires men build live after them,

this night, this night, I elfking, I stonehands, sit

feeding the wildfire . . .

Robert Lowell.

When Robert Lowell died on September 12, he was riding in a taxicab from Kennedy Airport to Manhattan. There is little question that the most distinguished poetic voice of our time had been stilled. He was on his way home from a visit to Ireland, where prose has never been granted absolute priority, where leprechauns are taken seriously, and where a poet has a chance of being understood if he says that the plucking of a certain flower brings death to a princess in a castle beyond the sea. The cabbie who was the last person to hear Lowell speak could not have known that the passenger hulking in his rear seat was really Druid royalty, and that future generations would warm their hands at bonfires he had built. As Randall Jarrell said, “A few of these poems, I believe, will be read as long as men remember English.”

I

Waking famous like Lord Byron, Lowell won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1947 after the publication of Lord Weary’s Castle, and he won it again in 1974 for The Dolphin. But these heady accomplishments seemed only what might be expected from the inheritor of an aristocratic American bloodline. In Boston the Lowells were in the small group that could speak casually to the Cabots, though perhaps not so easily to God. One of Robert Lowell’s ancestors, Mary Chilton, is said to have been the first woman to step off the Mayflower in 1620. James Russell Lowell was a great-great-uncle. Settled heavily on another branch of the family tree was Amy Lowell, and on still another branch perched A. Laurence Lowell, sometime president of Harvard. Robert’s mother was a Winslow, descendant of one of the early governors of Massachusetts. She also had a bit of Jewish ancestry. It is tempting to speculate that this tiny intruder in a Mandarin DNA molecule gave her son his offbeat fascination with a family which at the same time he wanted to repudiate, as well as his sense of the infinite possibilities of existence which he also knew could never be fulfilled.

In any case, Robert Lowell was a New England aristocrat with a difference. He started out conventionally enough as a fifth-form schoolboy at St. Mark’s, the Episcopal school at Southborough, Massachusetts. His classmates called him “Caligula” or “Cal” for short, because of his size and because his shyness was concealed by an overbearing manner. What was said to him at the dinner table he later recorded in a poem:

 “Why is he always grubbing in his nose?”

“Because his nose is always snotty.”

 

Cal was kidded with the kind of fierceness and cruelty only adolescents are capable of, and while he could not help admiring the ingenuity of astonishing epithets for him (“Dimbulb,” “Fogbund,” “Droopydrawers”), he was deeply hurt and carried the scars for life:

I was fifteen;

they made me cry in public.

Luckily for him one of his tutors was the poet Richard Eberhart, who taught Robert the secret known to poets and to nightingales: that pain can be managed when it finds a perfect expression.

The next step in the grooming of a Boston blueblood is, of course, Harvard -- the inevitable way station on the road to a house with purple windows in Louisburg Square. But Harvard and Lowell did not do well together. He thought it a good idea to run off to Europe with a lady friend, and when his  father reacted angrily, Lowell knocked him down and later remembered him sitting on the floor. Harvard’s resident poet, Robert Frost, told Lowell that he had too little compression. Knowing now what he wanted most to do in life, Lowell set out for Gambier, Ohio, to learn how many words were needed for a song. That one should go to Ohio to learn this astonished Beacon Hill, but it made sense.

Kenyon College at Gambier was the center of the New Criticism and the home of the journal which for two decades dominated literary circles -- the Kenyon Review. When the young Lowell arrived, his eyes in fine frenzy rolling, the Kenyon cognoscenti recognized him for what he was -- a true poet, despite his ancestral baggage. In later life Lowell said that he was the kind of poet he was because of Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom and Randall Jarrell.

During his last year at Kenyon, Lowell married the first of three wives and became a Convert to Roman Catholicism. The couple moved restlessly to Louisiana, back to Kenyon, and then to New York’s Greenwich Village. When World War II broke out, he thought that his country was attacked, and so tried twice to enlist -- unsuccessfully. But he became very angry about U.S. military tactics, especially the bombing of cities, and when he was drafted he refused to serve. He wrote a letter to President Roosevelt explaining “how painful such a decision is for an American whose family traditions like your own have always found fulfillment in maintaining our country’s freedom and honor.” Sentenced to a year and a day in prison, he spent five months in Manhattan’s West Street Jail. Always a victim of inner turmoil, he was several times treated for short periods in a psychiatric hospital.

II

Lowell’s early poetry used Christian symbolism but in a curious form: he expressed his anger because the world was not as Christian as he thought it ought to be. God was celebrated in his absence. The faiths that talked simply of his presence were the objects of Lowell’s wrath -- especially Calvinism. His jibes at the early New Englanders remind one of Thomas Macaulay’s famous sneer: “The Puritans hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.” However, this was not exactly Robert Lowell’s complaint. He has Thomas Merton of unredeemed Merry Mount say, “I know you Puritans. You only care for profit; your holy thirst for mink and beaver skins drives you mad.” The charge echoes Max Weber’s thesis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that there was a generic connection between the asceticism which Calvinism fostered and the rise of capitalist institutions.

Lowell’s protest against New England Calvinism was only one aspect of his rebellion against his ancestors. He might have been expected to be just as sentimental about Boston as E. A. Robinson was:

For there’s a town my memory uprears,

And always in the sunlight by the sea.

 

But for Lowell, Boston had only a “savage servility”: a parking lot was being dug under the Common, and the Public Gardens, once reserved for the upper class, were now taken over by the “mid-Sunday Irish.” He railed against authority in general: kings, bigots, parents. The Allied war effort seemed to him to be obscene, life imitating Guernica, chaos come again.

The central theme of the early poems is that although men and women were made in God’s Image, that likeness has been lost. The subject is a familiar theological lament since St. Augustine’s regio dissimilitudinis; but Lowell felt it like a sickness, or like a kick in the groin. In his first book, Land of Unlikeness (1944), bitter images describe the terror of a world from which the Christian experience has disappeared. His next book, Lord Weary’s Castle (1946), develops the theme of the squandered inheritance. The title comes from an old ballad:

It’s Lambkin was a mason good

     As ever built wi’ stane:

He built Lord Wearie’s castle

     But payment gat he nane.

 

The creator of the world is Christ, who cannot be faulted for his creation. But the world has fallen into the hands of men, and they have failed to pay the builder his due.

After Lord Weary’s Castle, Lowell’s verse became suddenly more earthbound, abandoning the cosmic riddle for what Heidegger called the ecstasy of time. Lowell’s own phrase for the new mood was an oxymoron: “the monotonous sublime.” Instead of bemoaning the absence of an embracing principle. he would pick over with gentle irony the scenes of his childhood, translate or rewrite some of his own poetry or that of others. Life Studies (1959) won the National Book Award; Imitations (1961) won the Bollingen translation prize; and Notebook (1967-70) was received with enthusiastic gratitude. His poetry was patterned of intense, unashamed bliks, private views, into his own experience, but the praise that followed showed that he had also hit upon universal themes, There was always, of course, a handful of critics who thought Lowell overrated.

The change in poetic style was occasioned by or at least accompanied by his withdrawal from the arms of the Roman Catholic Church after The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951). From then on he hailed as a victory what he had earlier described as a disaster: the inability of the spiritual substance to find its own historical setting. From now on he would be what Archilochus and Isaiah Berlin would call a fox rather than a hedgehog: that is, he would give up subsuming all experience under a single, central vision or a single universal principle, as Dante had tried to do. Now he would imitate the fox, eluding the chase by improvisation, using whatever tactic might prove necessary to fit changing circumstances, doubling back, hiding, moving through water, and reveling in a thousand stratagems, not unlike Shakespeare.

Every artist and every poet is in this sense foxy, working with concretion rather than with universal principle; but Lowell outdid them all in his use of audacious particularity. He was reconciled to life, even if that meant an unremembered death. In ‘For the Union Dead,’ a savage, beautiful poem inspired by the statue erected for Colonel Shaw on the Boston Common, he explains why he admired this Civil War commander of a black regiment:

He has an angry, wrenlike vigilance,

a greyhound’s gentle tautness.

 

The colonel is Out of place in the Boston Lowell knew:

                                                               He rejoices in man's lovely

 peculiar power to choose life and die.

 

Lowell had now come to terms with what is, rather than what might be or what should have been. In a poem called “Obit,” which closes the sonnet sequence of Notebook, we get almost his final word:

 

Before the final coming to rest, comes the rest

of all transcendence in a mode of being, stopping

all becoming. I’m for and with myself in my otherness,

in the eternal return of earth’s fairer children,

the lily, the rose, the sun on dusk and brick,

the loved, the lover, and their fear of life.

 

There are echoes here of Mircea Eliade (“the eternal return’), Albert Schweitzer (reverence for life), and Jean-Paul Sartre (“for and with myself”), but perhaps most of all the kind of “Catholic mysticism” which Lowell admired in Gerard Manley Hopkins. This is a kind of mysticism which does not preach or scold, or point a moral, but accepts the richness of experience, reveling in the drift and color and texture of the commonplace. Some of Lowell’s notable achievements, like “Skunk Hour,” “Mother Marie Therese” and “Colloquy in Black Rock.” present moments of existence which seem to have revelatory power, secular epiphanies akin to what scholastic philosophers called acts.

III

In Lowell’s latest book, Day by Day (1977), language became simpler, his prevailing tone conversational, as though he had finally come around to Robert Frost’s down-east manner. But there was little feeling that the mystery had been solved. There remained the problem of human relationships, and after Lowell’s third marriage the puzzle of women leaving:

Our cat, a new mother, put a paw

under my foot, as I held a tray,

her face went white, she streaked screaming

through an open window, an affronted woman.

 

He had Prometheus tell the chorus, “I have little faith now, but I still look for truth, some momentary crumbling foothold.”

The brilliance and at the same time the sadness of Lowell’s verse may be illustrated by one of his justly admired poems, “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket.” The poem is an elegy, a song of mourning for the death by drowning of his cousin, Warren Winslow. It begins with an epigraph from Genesis 1:28: “Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea . . .”   But men have no such dominion; the sea has dominion, as the Quaker fishermen and Ahab’s whalers knew. In a manner reminiscent of T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets, Lowell invokes the strangeness and the power of the whaleroad:

                               Sea-gulls blink their heavy lids

Seaward. The winds’ wings beat upon the stones, 

Cousin, and scream for you.

 

The terrible depths of the ocean are more real than any pious phrases spoken over them, Foundering Quaker sailors died even while they were on their knees praying for rescue, victims of a greater God, IS.

The capitulation of this poem to existence may be contrasted with the optimism of Milton’s classical elegy, “Lycidas.” Milton was grieving for the death by drowning of his schoolmate, Edward King, on his way to Ireland in 1637. But if one believes in the resurrection of the body, tears should be brief:

       Weep no more, woful Shepherds weep no more,

For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,

Sunk though he be beneath the watry floar.

 

Edward King is safely in heaven, “Through the dear might of him that walk’d the waves.” Saints greeted him there, ready to “wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.” The same consolation is found in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” written to mark the drowning, of five Franciscan nuns while crossing the English Channel in 1875. Hopkins knew as well as Lowell the sinister strangeness of the sea and shuddered like Lowell at its dark power, so inaccessible to human thought. But Hopkins also had the hope which Lowell had lost -- the consolation of Israel:

 

     Thou art lightning and love, I found it, a winter

               and warm;

          Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung:

Hast thy dark descending and most art’merciful then.

 

The only defense Lowell had against “the whelming tide” was a poet’s unabashed vision, which could stare the terror in its face and finds words for it:

A nihilist has to live in the world as it is,

gazing the impossible summit to rubble.

 

Having religious longings of a sort (he swore that the later poems were as religious as the early ones, though secretly so), he wrote like a helpless saint; but having faith smaller than any mustard seed, he saw no chance of moving mountains except by courage and incantation. It was as though he had adopted the Jesuit “composition of place” but without the Jesuits’ Lord of the place. His later piety was really chagrin at the absence of piety, rather like the later Bertrand Russell’s disbelief and longing to believe. In “Goethe,” Lowell quoted the German writer approvingly:

 “The more I understand particular things,”

he said, “the more I understand God.”

 

And in “Margaret Fuller Drowned” Lowell recalled that she had said, “Myself is all I know of heaven.” The familiar ascetic practices failed to bring Lowell back to his belief, as he reported in “Thanksgiving’s Over”:

I sat. I counted ten thousand, wound

My cowhorn beads from Dublin on my thumb,

And ground them. Miserere? Not a sound.

 

What gave him comfort at the beginning and at the end was writing some of the loveliest songs in our language, conquering the nightmare as Hölderlin said it could be conquered -- by giving it its right name. As he wrote in “Fishnet”:

The line must terminate

Yet my heart rises, I know I’ve gladdened a lifetime

knotting, undoing a fishnet of tarred rope.

 

Those nets will hang drying in the sun as long as readers can be found who respond to an exquisite intelligence, trying with ruthless candor to find words for a nameless pain. What Lowell wrote in “For John Berryman” after his friend had plunged from a bridge in Minneapolis was true:

I feel I know what you have worked through, you

know what I have worked through -- these are

     words . . .

John, we used the language as if we made it.

 

They did. Since Berryman’s death, since Robert Lowell slumped in the back seat of a New York cab, the world’s language seems impoverished. Robert Lowell’s funeral service in the Church of the Advent, Boston, was like a requiem for an elfking at the edge of an enchanted forest. The bard in the coffin seemed at once very strong and very vulnerable. A distinguished company of poets and writers had gathered for the last rites, members of a coterie older and more exclusive than the Lowells of Boston. There was general agreement that there would have been time later on for news of his going, and that he should have died hereafter.

A Leap of Faith, a Leap of Action: Excerpts from a Memoir

 

In order to get as much advanced standing as possible, I shamelessly bypassed the Yale admissions office, accepting the offer of Henri Peyre, the chairman of Yale’s French department, that he accompany me on a visit to Dean De Vane, who presided over the academic affairs of the college. Monsieur Peyre boldly proposed that I be admitted to Yale as a junior. At first Dean De Vane demurred; but he eventually agreed that my year at the music school, my fluency in French and Russian, my knowledge of Russian history and literature, and my status as a veteran might entitle me to enter Yale as a junior; but only in the fall, and only on the condition that I average B or better in the summer session. I hastened to accept the offer, the liberality of which I later came to realize was typical of him. He also agreed that it would be quite appropriate in my case to suspend the usual requirement that all entering students live in the college.

I had no regrets then or thereafter that music had moved to a more private area in my life. Perhaps I could have had a career as a concert pianist, but no matter; music had been crucial to me and always will be. In times of utter desolation, God alone has comforted me more; and when the world seems bent on madness, its music as much as its literature reassures me of its sanity.

I fared well during the summer session. In particular I was inspired by Hans Kohn, who attacked the subject of nationalism with the vigor and urgency of a scientist seeking the cause and cure of cancer. I even managed to come to grips with economics, although purely by dint of hard work.

To this day no subject intimidates me more, not even philosophy, although I recognize that like philosophers, economists occasionally promise more than they can deliver.

Wrestling with the Questions

Anticipating a career in diplomacy, I registered in the fall as a political science major. But soon I began to discover my true motive for entering college. More than I realized, the experience of the last four years had raised profound questions about the human condition. I had seen too much evil for my boyhood idealism to survive. I had seen that the stream of human life was sullied and bloodied. Dreams of peace and justice, dreams that I -- and communist children alike -- had been fed, were dangerous delusions in the hands of those who had the power and ambition to try to realize them fully. At their best, communist leaders were examples of what Anatole France must have had in mind when he said, “He who wishes to become an angel becomes a beast” (Qui veut se faire ange se fait bête).

So increasingly I found myself drawn to those most interested in the subtleties of good and evil, and they were not political scientists. I suppose I could have turned to Freud and Jung; but those on the contemporary scene who spoke most directly to me were, on the one hand, the atheistic French existentialists, particularly Camus, Sartre and Malraux; and on the other, the American theologians Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul Tillich. I met the existentialists in Henri Peyre’s class on contemporary French literature. Peyre himself was an extraordinary teacher. With Tolstoy he believed that certain questions are put to human beings not so much that they should answer them but that they should spend a lifetime wrestling with them. And Peyre wrestled. He doubted the existence of God out of a passionate love of the truth, not out of a pathological need to avoid commitment.

But attracted as I was to Peyre, both as a person and as a thinker, and convinced as I was that Sartre and Camus were asking all the right questions, still I couldn’t help thinking that their answers lacked weight. Their despair was real but the stoicism with which they met it struck me as romantic, lacking strength. The theologians seemed to be in touch with a deeper reality. They too knew what hell was all about, but in the depths of it they found a heaven which made more sense out of everything, much as light gives meaning to darkness.

For a long time I myself, however, remained in the dark. For one thing, I was put off by the churches which were just then beginning to desert the city in droves, fleeing to the suburbs in search of their middle-class constituents. For another, I was unimpressed by many of the Christian students I met. Their answers seemed too pat, their submission to God too ready. It seemed to me that as with parents so with God; too easy a submission is but a façade for repressed rebellion. Their serenity notwithstanding, I suspected that deep down many of these students were angry, and in the case of one small group of fundamentalists I was right. Sensing my yearning to believe, they kept trying to badger me into a conversion. They were obnoxious, and themselves looked very unredeemed. Finally I told them that I thought they had just enough religion to make themselves miserable, and to leave me alone. At that, one of them said, “All right, Bill, but you will always be on our prayer list.” The sweetness with which he said it so thinly veiled his hostility that I couldn’t help answering, “And how does your prayer list differ from your shit list?”

Insights into Faith

Yet every time I was ready once and for all to deny the existence of God, to throw in my lot with Camus (whom I admired above all the existentialists), at such moments I would always have an unsettling experience which would start me wondering all over again. One in particular I remember. In my senior year a good friend was killed in an automobile accident. Sitting in Dwight Chapel waiting for the funeral service to begin, I was filled with angry thoughts. My friend’s death seemed to be one more bit of evidence to prove the fatuousness of believing in an all-powerful, all-loving God when, as any sensitive person could see, the entire surface of the earth was soaked with the tears and the blood of the innocent.

Maliciously I had noted outside that the priest had a typically soft face over his hard collar. Now as he started down the aisle toward the altar he began to intone unctuously Job’s famous words: “The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” From the aisle seat where I was sitting I could have stuck out my foot and tripped him up, and might easily have done so, had my attention not been arrested by a still, small voice, as it were, asking, “Coffin, what part of that sentence are you objecting to?” Naturally I thought it was the second part, “the Lord hath taken away,” spoken all too facilely by the priest. But suddenly I realized it was, the first. Suddenly I caught the full impact of “The Lord gave”: the world very simply is not ours; at best we’re guests. It was not an understanding I relished nor one, certainly, to clear up all my objections to my friend’s death. But as I sat quietly now at his funeral, I realized that it was probably the understanding against which all the spears of human pride had to be hurled and shattered.

Then, thank God, the organist played Bach’s great chorale prelude, “Christ Lag in Todesbanden.” It was genuinely comforting. And it made me think that religious truths, like those of music, were probably apprehended on a deeper level than they were ever comprehended. Like music, revelation was not so much the solution of mystery as it was the disclosure of new mystery. So the leap of faith was not a leap of thought after all. The leap of faith was really a leap of action. Faith was not believing without proof; it was trusting without reservation. While such insights were hardly enough to convert me, the experience set me to wondering all over again.

* * *

The day before the October 23, 1967, March on the Pentagon, Mr. Coffin, Dr. Benjamin Spock, and eight other activists met with an official in the Justice Department and turned in the draft cards of young war resisters -- an action that was to result in the indictment of five of the group on conspiracy charges.

Although I spoke briefly the next day, this time in front of the Lincoln Memorial, I couldn’t stay beyond the rally for the march on the Pentagon. Weeks before, I had agreed to baptize the Lewises’ baby in New Haven that afternoon, and the following day had to preach at our regular Sunday service. Incidentally, the moment at the rally that remains most vivid in my mind is the one in which a semi-demented man charged up the steps and knocked down all the microphones. As the marshals of the rally rushed to restrain him, there arose from the crowd cries of “Careful, careful. Don’t hurt him.”

When I returned from church on Sunday I found a note to call James Reston in Washington collect. Although a regular reader of his column, I had never met Mr. Reston. What he wanted to know was how I felt about the march and its many participants who were still facing and talking to the soldiers surrounding the Pentagon. I answered that I thought I had been overapprehensive, that from all reports the crowd was showing remarkable restraint. But whereas I felt good about the march, Mr. Reston felt only depressed. He said that he had read and liked my comments on the steps of the Justice Department but was afraid that our dignified demonstration had been swamped by the more sensational aspects of the weekend, for which, he added, “we in the press bear a large measure of responsibility.” Then he said, “Tell me, Mr. Coffin, what do you think I should write about in tomorrow’s column?”

Thinking this a wonderful approach to column writing, I suggested that he write about the problem of young Americans who had a lot of good things to say but could find few ears to hear them.

He answered, “You don’t have to talk to me about that, Mr. Coffin. My son has just finished telling me at lunch that he feels he has no recourse other than to violence.”

We talked of many things before the conversation ended on an unexpected note. “You know, Mr. Coffin, at heart I’m just a Calvinist like you.”

“No, Mr. Reston,” I answered jokingly. “You’re no Calvinist, you’re just gloomy. Calvinists are animated by hope.”

A Flurry of Jitters

The next day Mr. Reston had not succeeded in shaking his depression. I had barely finished his column when the telephone rang. At the other end was the editor of the Yale Daily News. The FBI, he said, was all over the campus interviewing the students whose draft cards we had left with John McDonough only three days before. They certainly wasted no time, I thought. What was less clear was whether they were preparing indictments or simply giving everyone a brush with reality. I told the editor to announce a meeting that night to apprise everyone of his rights.

That evening at seven o’clock the crowd that gathered in Dwight Chapel was understandably nervous. It was one thing to know you might be arrested; it was another emotionally to appropriate the knowledge. Fortunately, many friends were on hand to give the resisters the support they needed. Not all were convinced by Charles Reich and Clyde Summers, two law school professors who expressed the opinion that on their side the resisters had not only their consciences but the United States Constitution. Summers told them they had no obligation to say anything to the FBI, suggesting they be careful, even there in the chapel, as agents were undoubtedly in attendance. That caused a new flurry of jitters, a wave of whispering and looking around.

“There’s one of them,” said the undergraduate sitting next to me, pointing to a large man in a raincoat standing placidly at the rear of the chapel.

“No,” I answered, “that’s a divinity student who turned in his card.”

“Oh,” he said. But in a moment he was back. “That one over there -- the little fellow with the bald head -- he’s one.”

“No, no,” I said. “He’s the Lutheran pastor at Yale.”

Just being together for a while was the important thing, enough to pick up everyone’s morale. The next day there appeared on the bulletin board of the divinity school these words written in large letters: Dear FBI: “Let your foot be seldom in your neighbor’s house, lest he become weary of you and despise you.” Proverbs 15:17.

There was also a note from the dean, Colin Williams, requesting all students to refer the FBI to him so that he could inform them that they were trespassing and interrupting the important business of education. By Wednesday the agents had disappeared, although they continued to call parents and draft boards. It sounded more like harassment than anything else, but there was no way to be sure. As a result there were a few nervous fathers and mothers among the 3,000 who showed up that Saturday for the annual parents’ day gathering in Woolsey Hall. Standing in the back I suddenly heard President Kingman Brewster say:

“The chaplain’s efforts to devise ‘confrontations’ and ‘sanctuaries’ in order to gain spot news coverage seems to me to be unworthy of the true trial of conscience which touches most of your sons and preoccupies so many. . . . I do not think your sons are well served by strident voices which urge draft resistance as a political tactic.”

I had had no prior warning and winced even more when he continued:

“This is especially distasteful when those who urge the resistance are too old to be able to share fully the personal and moral consequences of refusing to serve. . . .”

Good Lord, I thought, doesn’t he know how hard we’ve tried to share these consequences?

I felt better when he cautioned, “We must not soft-pedal the toughest moral problem of our times out of timidity or in the name of public or alumni relations. I have great confidence in your sons’ ability to keep their own counsel and to sort out the true from the false if they are allowed to make up their own minds. I would have no confidence in them at all if they were protected from exposure to all argument and sheltered from the risk of error.

That, I thought, was a proper position for a university president to take. What pleased me most was his statement that the university “would not only permit but would honor and respect those who, not for political effect, but for personal, private reasons witness their conscience by a willingness to pay the price of their disobedience.” I couldn’t see what was wrong with “political effect” -- if only we could have some! -- but at least the university was doing more than the government.

Then, surprisingly, he said: “Even though I disagree with the chaplain’s position on draft resistance, and in this instance deplore his style, I feel that the quality of the Yale educational experience and the Yale atmosphere has gained greatly from his presence. Thanks in large part to his personal verve and social action within and without, the church reaches more people at Yale than on any other campus I know about. More important, the rebellious instinct which elsewhere expresses itself so often in sour withdrawal, cynical nihilism and disruption is here more often than not both affirmative and constructive, thanks in considerable measure to the chaplain’s influence.”

He ended, “I am sure your sons will look back upon Yale as a better place to have lived and learned because of the controversies, including the draft resistance controversy, which so tax the patience of so many of their elders, including their president.”

A ‘Tiffy’ Relationship

Knowing that the press would love the prospect of a good fight and be clamoring for a response, I ducked out as soon as he had finished and went to wait for him in his office in Woodbridge Hall.

At this point I might say that ever since he had succeeded President Griswold five years earlier, President Brewster and I had enjoyed a relationship that might be called tiffy. Usually our disagreements took place in the privacy of his living room. Only once did we have a public fight, at a small meeting of faculty members in the corporation room across the hall from his office. Suddenly losing his temper he had shouted, “Your remarks are certainly ungrateful addressed as they are to one who spends an inordinate amount of his time defending you to Yale alumni.” That was all I needed to shout back, “The amount of time you spend defending me to the right, I spend and more defending you to the left, and I’d be more worried if I were in your shoes.”

At that he had stormed out of the room, leaving the professors sitting around the table in shocked silence. Then the college dean, Georges May, had said in his lovely French accent, “Gentlemen, Kingman and Bill are “simply going through in public what they go through in private all the time. I suggest we continue with our meeting.” Five minutes later Kingman was back, as cool and collected as ever.

Despite our disagreements I had enormous respect for Kingman. I called him “Chief” and meant it. And I knew the affection I had for him was returned.

Now as he came back to his office I asked him, “Can I tell the press that you are willing publicly to debate these matters with me?”

“No, you may not,” he said firmly.

“But, Kingman,” I insisted, “you’ve made an issue of several things and when you’ve got an issue you can educate. You can’t let an educational opportunity like this go by.”

He could see the point and he was not a timid man.

“You can tell the press I’m seeking a proper forum for further discussion.”

Fair enough, I thought. So before leaving his office I wrote a statement for the press and made several copies. Then I walked down the block to where, in front of my home, the grinning newsmen were waiting. “Hey, Bill, where does it hurt? What have you got to say?” I handed them the statement:

“For Mr. Brewster’s kind words on my behalf I am very grateful. For the others -- well, I’m grateful for a president with whom one can disagree and still remain good friends. President Brewster has expressed to me his interest in taking part in a public discussion of the issues he has raised. This I think would be a fine idea.”

“Come on, Bill,” they said. “That’s no good. Haven’t you got something more to say? He went for everything you stand for.”

“No,” I said, “my quarrel is with President Johnson, not with President Brewster.” It sounded a bit grand, but then I was having trouble disguising my true feelings, which were far angrier than I let on. In fact, I was furious. It seemed to me that Kingman was simply swaddling his uncertainty in rectitude. Like so many people unable to make up their minds about the war, he had preferred to attack the immorality of those protesting it. He hadn’t even called it “this terrible war” -- with a shake of the head -- as did so many of the undecided. And President Johnson, Lord knows, had coerced far more consciences than I. But the students, I knew, would take Brewster on, which they certainly did, in editorials and letters. Most regretted he had not dedicated his speech to supporting the resisters. A few denounced his “unremitting dedication to the radical center.” Of course he was also highly praised by many parents, alumni and the two New Haven papers, which probably bothered him, as both are owned by one exceedingly reactionary family.

‘A Boar Is Loose. . . .’

What irked me the most, of course, was that Kingman had not been totally wrong in what he had said about my style. The year before, not having seen Reinhold Niebuhr for years and knowing him to be very sick, I had visited him in Stock-bridge. As I entered his room, he had smiled at me from his bed and said, “Ah, Bill, I heard a speech of yours the other day on the radio. You reminded me so of my youth -- all that humor, conscience and demagoguery.”

I found it hard to resist a bit of rhetorical showboating. Also, when angry, I got strident. A freshman, Larry Dunham, had once given me some excellent advice I didn’t always follow. “Bill,” he said, “when you say something that’s both true and painful, say it quietly.”

Under the circumstances, however, there was no point in being too harsh on oneself, and as 1967 marked the 450th anniversary of the Reformation, I consoled myself with the thought that Luther had had similar problems. The pope had said, “A boar is loose in the vineyard of the Lord.” But if the pope could deplore his style, to use Kingman’s phrase, Luther could rightfully claim that there was more truth in his little finger than there was in the entire Vatican. When I made that point in a sermon on Luther the following Sunday, no one in the congregation smiled more appreciatively than Kingman. I knew he would have been disappointed had I backed down.

But he himself was not about to back down either. To commemorate the Reformation, the student deacons had voted unanimously to nail a proclamation to the door of Battell Chapel declaring it a “sanctuary for conscience.” They wanted our church to be the first in the country. And the Yale chapter of the resistance was busy planning a service similar to the one in Boston to collect more draft cards. When Kingman got wind of these two actions planned for the church, he called in the faculty deacons. When I got wind of his summons, I insisted on being present.

We met in a small parlor of the large house which is the president’s official abode on Hillhouse Avenue.

“That chapel belongs to Yale,” he said firmly, “and I don’t want illegal acts taking place on university property.”

“That’s some theological definition of a church!” I retorted. “I thought it belonged to God and, if not, then to the duly elected members of the governing body.”

After we had both cooled off a bit, he agreed that decisions regarding the use of the church could not properly be made by university officials no matter who owned the property. So each of us set about winning over the faculty deacons to his point of view. To my amazement, he won. Furious, I accused them of behaving more like “true blues than true Christians.” They squirmed, but weren’t about to change their minds. Finally one of them said quietly, “Bill, on this issue we’re not as certain as you and the students are that your wills are that clearly aligned with the will of the Lord.”

Kingman smiled. I realized I was licked. There was nothing to be done except to change the constitution of the church so that in the future students could have more say in its decisions. So there was no sanctuary for conscience at Yale, not for another four years. And when on December 4 twelve hundred people filled the church to support 48 new resisters, their cards were not placed, as we had hoped, on the altar. After the service they were given to Father Burns, Rabbi Robert Goldberg and myself standing on the steps of the New Haven courthouse. Still, the service was moving. In a voice choked with feeling, Rabbi Goldberg, of Temple Mishkan Israel in New Haven, told the old and new resisters: “History will cherish your conscience if you bring this war into disrepute. Your courage is great. You may go to trial but never to a future Nuremberg.”

I knew we were moving fast toward some kind of showdown. Draft cards were pouring into the FBI from all over the country. General Hershey took it as a personal affront, roaring like a wounded bull, which only delighted the non-card-carrying members of the resistance. At a Boston press conference Michael Ferber said, “Every time the general opens his mouth he gets another couple of hundred draft cards.”

But private citizens too were incensed. My mail was filled with obscenities and the hate callers were busy again on the phone. This time the kids were old enough to answer. Often they’d be told, “Tell your daddy we’re going to kill him.”

The Indictment

One Sunday in December I went early to church, as I usually did, to make sure the candles were lit, the hymns posted. No one was there except the choir, whose final minutes of practice I always like to listen to. Then I discerned two shadowy figures in the back and remembered suddenly a call earlier in the week that had awakened me about 3 A.M. “If you preach on Sunday, Reverend,” a voice had growled, “we’ll kill you.” I had answered, “See you in church,” and hung up.

Approaching the two figures, I recognized them as campus cops. They could only have known of the call because my phone was tapped, and the FBI listening in had kindly passed on the warning to the campus police.

“Don’t worry, Bill,” they assured me. “We’ll take care of everything.”

But I was worried. Suppose our 90-year-old professor emeritus of philosophy, who had a weak bladder, got up to go to the bathroom. I pictured him felled by flying lead.

I insisted they take off their shoulder holsters, which normally they never carried. “If anyone stands up,” I said, “I promise to duck.”

After the processional had brought me to my seat near the pulpit, I cast a casual eye over at the choir seated next to me. There among the second basses, robed like the rest, looking straight at me was one of the meanest-looking characters I had seen since the teach-out at Waterbury. When I preached, my back would be turned to him for a full 20 minutes. I remember praying, “Lord, if you want me, I guess you can have me.”

Nothing happened, but after the service I asked the choir director, Charles Krigbaum, “Who was that strange fellow among the basses?”

“I have no idea,” said Charles. “I assumed he was a friend of one of them. I noticed that he didn’t even sing the hymns. He just kept looking at you.” Suddenly the man himself appeared. “Who are you?” I asked.

“Don’t worry, Reverend,” he said. “I’m a city detective and I’m going to be following you around. Just a little safety measure.

“That’s nice of you,” I said, “but the last thing I want is a bodyguard.”

“You’ll have to talk to the boss,” he answered. “I will,” I said and that afternoon persuaded him that no serious murderer would telephone his intentions.

But I was not through with agents of the law. The very next afternoon when I returned to my office after lunch, Charlotte said two FBI men were waiting to see me. With my mind on other things I assumed they were, as they frequently were, to conduct a routine check on some Yale graduate applying for a government job. Still, two at once was unusual. Opening the door I recognized them both. “Well, gentlemen, who’s the suspected homosexual alcoholic?” I joked because I never liked to answer questions about homosexuality, figuring a person’s sex life was none of the government’s business. I understood, however, the government’s fear of blackmail, although I thought a better candidate for blackmail was a man with a weakness for gambling on borrowed money. Actually, if a student ever talked to me of his homosexuality, I asked him never to put me down as a reference for a government job.

The agents laughed, but only weakly. “Actually, Bill,” one of them said, “we wanted to ask you about some of your recent activities.”

So it’s come to that, I thought. I felt a twinge of fear but also a sense of satisfaction. Maybe our efforts hadn’t been in vain.

“Come on fellows,” I said. “You know I’m not about to tell you anything. Besides, my activities are hardly secret. So suppose you tell me how you feel about the war?”

“We’re not supposed to have feelings about that; we just do our job.”

“Well, how do you feel about doing your job?”

“Not too good right now.”

“You know,” I said, as the thought struck me, “at this moment I really think I’m better off than you are.”

They smiled. “Good luck, Bill,” they said, and with a handshake they left.

I turned to Charlotte. “I guess it won’t be long now.” I was pleased that my feeling of satisfaction persisted.

Three weeks later, January 5, 1968, Benjamin Spock, Paul Goodman, Marcus Raskin, Michael Ferber and I were indicted for conspiring to counsel, aid and abet draft resistance. I suspected that Ramsey Clark felt that the five of us had to be pushed off the sled to feed General Hershey. But I didn’t think it was his idea to hand-deliver copies to the press and then mail the indictments to the homes of the defendants. Talk about style!

Continuing the Resistance

As for Kingman, he knew the difference between an indictment and a conviction. I was innocent until proven guilty; the corporation had no need to act. True to his word, he arranged with David Susskind for an hour of lively if inconclusive discussion, with J. Irwin Miller and many students taking part. What I remember clearest was being overwhelmed by waves of encouragement. Hundreds of faculty signed a public statement of support, and dozens of letters arrived daily, reflecting a deeply felt need to be grateful for something at a time when, at least on the national scene, there were so few things one could be grateful for.

In March President Johnson stunned everyone with the announcement that he would not seek reelection in the fall. When I heard it on the radio, I remembered that the faculty statement of support had included a prophetic quotation from Harlan Fiske Stone: “All our history gives confirmation to a view that liberty of conscience has a moral and social value which makes it worthy of preservation at the hands of the state and it may well be questioned whether the state which preserves its life by a settled policy of violation of the conscience of the individual will not in fact ultimately lose it by the process.

It was just such a policy that cost Johnson his political life. Despite his announcement, the resistance continued its activities, turning in draft cards on Yale property, with no objections now from Kingman. Only Abe Goldstein objected when he found out I was still receiving draft cards. “You now have an opportunity to get a court test of the legality of the war and the right to selective conscientious objection. You don’t want to prejudice that by looking defiant at this time.” But what could I do: make speeches from the platform on Beinecke Plaza and then, when the new resisters came forward, stand there with my hands behind my back? Besides, I was fearful that Johnson, robed in new garments of self-abnegation, might one day turn to the American public and announce that he had exhausted all diplomatic resources -- when in fact he hadn’t begun to use them.

The resistance, I felt, had to continue. The war, I was sure, was going to end only when enough Americans got weary of it, or weary of all the opposition to it. I still couldn’t bring myself to accept Mai Van Bo’s contrary conclusion: “The issue will be settled on the battlefield.”

Cats in a Wood Stove: Reflections on Building a New Social Gospel

In October 1975 Peter Marin, writing in Harper’s, created quite a stir when he described the human potential movement as “the new narcissism.” I fear that the church today leaves itself open to similar criticism. Disciples of the social gospel still write challenging articles in liberal magazines; national church staffs sponsor conferences on the liberation of the oppressed; seminaries buzz with talk of social justice. But these days precious little of that concern shows up in the program of the local church or on the conscience of the individual Christian. Moreover, clergy have learned not to let anyone lay guilt trips on them about their responsibility to help save the public schools, secure decent salaries for domestic workers, free prisoners who ought not to be incarcerated. We are, I fear, lapsing into well-defended ecclesiastical narcissism. We take care of ourselves -- tending our sick, stabilizing our marriages, providing a much-needed community for our members, worshiping enthusiastically on Sundays -- but about the “sickness of Joseph,” the tyranny in our land, we care not at all, or so it must seem to those outside the church.

Today’s issues are less clear-cut than civil rights or the war in Vietnam; there are no great leaders to rally us, no powerful self-interested groups like the draft resisters of the war period with which to ally ourselves. In recent years I have experimented with different kinds of involvement in social issues -- with limited success -- and I have done some thinking about what form a new social gospel movement might take. What can we learn from past successes and failures? What might we do that has not been tried before? Here are some thoughts on the matter.

A Caring Movement

This new movement should consist of people who care about each other. Too many of us involved in the civil rights and antiwar movements wrecked our marriages and other relationships. We did not care properly for ourselves or for our loved ones; the task consumed all our energies. We did not allow for the kind of personal growth that Gail Sheehy describes in Passages; most of us burned out. Only the toughest survived intact. We used to smirk and say that the typical church “coddled the saints.” I wish we had coddled each other more, tenderly ministering to one another after our experiences in the harsh wilderness. The movement I envision will include not only the toughest, and the people in it will have to dig in not for just one issue but for a lifetime of commitment.

I find the human potential movement and the church itself helpful in their insights on how to build a supportive community. Both have discovered the value of the small group. Everyone in the new social gospel movement should have the opportunity to belong to a support group that meets regularly. These groups will take quite different forms, but they will be communities where people can let themselves get angry, acknowledge their weaknesses, celebrate their victories. Many groups will consist of nonreligious as well as religious people, but all will function as little churches, with members coming together for refreshment and going out to serve. Perhaps they will learn to sing together as well as to talk.

If our caring for each other is to be that of equals, our decisions regarding social issues must be participatory. Thus, our movement will not consist of the charismatic and the passive, of shepherds and sheep. The “kingdom of priests” motif will be more appropriate. Besides, John Dewey is right: over the long haul, people support what they help to create; they will carry out someone else’s plan for only so long. Neither do I see the movement as monolithic (with its own elaborate bureaucracy) but rather as small units bound together by common hopes and dreams, engaged in a common task. We will think of ourselves as people who are in a movement rather than as a movement made up of people.

An important way to show our caring will be to help each other set realistic, achievable goals, so that when we finish what we set out to do, we can give ourselves the credit due. There will be times when we have to act with no sense of completion, no sense of reward. There will even be times when we act because we are prodded by guilt. But generally, our action must come not from a sense of self-sacrifice or guilt but from a sense that we are doing what we really want to do, what we are called to do. The more we can experience success in our work, the better we will feel about it, our mission and ourselves.

A Theology Firmly Grounded

Not everyone in the new movement will be religious, but for those who are, there must be a theology that draws on the past as well as the present. Paul Tillich wrote, “The very concept of the new which belongs to creative causality implies the transcending character of the historical movement.” It has often been pointed out that Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King were successful because they built their nonviolent movements on the religious heritage of the people they led. The old and the new, came together in these men.

The past need not be a trap that chokes imagination and creativity; when properly opened for us, it can be enriching and affirming; perhaps best of all, it can help us to see the special possibilities and inevitable limitations of our own time and place. As an Episcopal clergyman, I have naturally looked to my own religious heritage for grounding and there found F. D. Maurice, a remarkable 19th century social critic, theologian and antagonist of the church-centered Oxford Movement. Deeply rooted in his own tradition, terribly Anglican in his thinking, he initiated the short-lived but influential Christian Socialist Movement. Maurice said it was that movement’s task to help make socialists Christian and Christians social. He appealed to Scripture, to ancient rituals, and to the teachings of the Church of England to argue for his radical Christian ideas.

The theology of the new social gospel movement will be as diverse as its members. I believe, however, that any theology for Christian social activism must be built on certain principles. For me, one of these principles comes from F. D. Maurice and St. Paul, a second comes from the four Gospel narratives, and a third comes from the neo-orthodoxy of Reinhold Niebuhr.

Maurice argued that “cooperation is the law of the universe.” He held up the family as a model for social living. To learn how the church or the nation can best work, we must look at the family. Children compete fiercely with one another as they grow, but in a family that works, their competitive drives give way to cooperative ones so that a victory for one member of the family becomes a victory for all and a defeat for one is a defeat for all. St. Paul used the human body as a model to say the same thing. Cooperation is the law of the universe: this is the first uniting principle for a social gospel movement. It is on this principle that the small groups within the movement should also be built.

Marxists can talk about using force to build cooperation; Christians cannot. Force has at times been used to correct wrongs, but force will not gain the kind of cooperation St. Paul points to; it takes something else for that. Force was necessary to desegregate southern schools; but only now are teachers and students learning how to integrate -- to cooperate. The “something else” is love -- what Kierkegaard, following Plato, once defined as “the unity of hostile elements.” Love is always trying to break into our lives, but it becomes a reality for us only when we recognize that we need each other, different though we may be.

Cooperation as the law of the universe will lead us to restructure the school system so that teachers and students become part of a learning team, not unlike a family, with the task of helping each other learn what needs to be learned. This principle will lead us to cooperate with our environment, to build an economic system in which workers have a share in ownership and management; it will lead us to manufacture products that enhance life instead of causing tooth decay and lung cancer.

Competitive drives are not in themselves evil; they are what give us our “fight.” St. Paul, who spoke of running races and winning victories, was perhaps as competitive as anyone. Like him, we must learn how to use our competitive drives to contend against the works of Satan -- such as, for example, our present capitalist system, in which one moves up by putting others down.

Advocacy on Behalf of Others

A second uniting principle for the new movement comes from the Gospel narratives: we are called to be advocates for those who can use our help. It is a great thing to know that there is someone on your side who is actively trying to gain for you the thing you most need in life. For Peter’s mother-in-law, it was release from a fever; for the tax collector, it was acceptance as a human being; for the 5,000 it was bread; for the woman taken in adultery, it was forgiveness and the word to “go and sin no more. Not surprisingly, in John’s Gospel, Jesus promised that after he departed, the Advocate -- someone truly on our side -- would take his place.

It is difficult to know, however, for whom we should act as advocates and how we should express that advocacy. The missionaries sent out by churches in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century were too often advocates for their own agendas rather than for the people they were called to serve. If we take seriously cooperation as the law of the universe, we will listen closely to what the people we serve are asking for. Furthermore, we must be open to what they have to teach us. The head cannot say to the hand, “I know what is best for you; do as I say and you will be healed.” Rather, there must be listening and responding, giving and receiving, a mutuality in our service.

In working in prisons, I have been amazed to discover the difference in how the prisoners define their needs and how I want to define them. I want to talk forgiveness; they ask for accountability. I want the physical conditions of the prison improved as a first priority; they are interested first of all in being treated as individuals. I want to talk social justice; they want to talk religion. I want to do for them: they want to do for me.

I do not mean to imply that we will offer only what those whom we serve think we should offer -- real needs are not always felt needs. Jesus, after all, intervened where he was not wanted on several occasions -- to heal the Gerasene demoniac, for example. His stance was not to be his brother’s keeper, but in order to be a brother to his brothers and sisters, he would risk intervention. In my experience, if you can convey to people that you are really on their side, they will give you room to maneuver in deciding how to respond to their situations; they will even allow you to fail.

Who are those who need our help? Essentially they are the ones who are not strong enough to be advocates for themselves: prisoners, very old and very poor people, household workers, most people who live in Third World countries, retarded children and adults, schoolchildren, immigrants, farm workers, unemployed persons, the institutionalized mentally ill, sometimes women, sometimes gays. The stronger an oppressed or forgotten group becomes, the more we can and should step back.

The Power of Evil

The third uniting principle comes from Reinhold Niebuhr and other theologians who lived through the Nazi years: it is a realization of the power of evil, not only in other people but in ourselves, in our own church, even in our own cherished support group. In Beyond Tragedy, Niebuhr wrote:

It is interesting how clearly the prophets saw the relation to each other of power, pride, and injustice; and how unfailingly they combined their strictures against the religious sin of pride and the social sin of injustice. Modern exponents of the “social gospel” are usually not as penetrating in their insights. They see only the sin of injustice and not its source.

Perhaps we are not as penetrating in our insights on sin because we need to feel that we are making progress in our work, that our efforts can really change the world. It is indeed hard to face up to the power and pervasiveness of evil.

In the same essay Niebuhr challenged the church: “Thus the Church can disturb, the security of sinners only if it is not too secure in its belief that it has the word of God. The prophet himself stands under the judgment which he preaches. If he does not know that, he is a false prophet.” Our movement must listen closely to the prophetic voice that judges us, individually and collectively. My candidate for a “prophet to the liberals” is Will Campbell, publisher of the journal Katallagete and author of the highly acclaimed Brother to a Dragonfly, an autobiographical book about the lives of Will and his brother, Joe, as they leave their father’s small cotton farm in Mississippi -- Will to become a civil rights worker for the National Council of Churches, Joe to become a small-town pharmacist.

Campbell is a good candidate for the role of prophet because he is one of us, and yet he stands outside our circle. He understands and appreciates us, but he has an uncanny way of sniffing out our self-righteousness and hypocrisy. A decade ago I laughed heartily at a CBS commentary on the Ku Klux Klan that showed one scraggly candidate for the Georgia Klan, at an initiation ceremony that called for a military formation, turning right when the order “left face” was given. In his recent book, Campbell tells of seeing this same film at a conference of the National Student Association. The sight of the klansman who turned right, bringing confusion to the formation, elicited from the large student audience viewing the film -- just as it had from me -- “cheers, jeers, catcalls, guffaws.” Campbell writes of them, me, us: “I sensed there wasn’t a radical in the bunch. For if they were radical, how could they laugh at a poor ignorant farmer who didn’t know his left hand from his right? If they had been radical they would have been weeping, asking what had produced him.” Now there’s a voice I need to hear.

Working on the Job and as Volunteers

When church people do get around to talking about how they can work for social justice, too often they are thinking only of volunteer work. Where one works in full-time employment and how one approaches that work is of crucial importance for the new social gospel movement that I envision; volunteer work is not enough. For example, one of the great problems of the criminal-justice system is that not enough reform-minded people enter the field. Such persons should be serving as police, security. . . personnel, defending and prosecuting attorneys -- not only as counselors and workers in halfway houses, the more usual positions for the reform minded. When citizen groups bring pressure for reform, there should be sympathetic workers inside the structures to respond.

I want our people to seek teaching jobs in public schools, both as full-time teachers and as teaching assistants, jobs as orderlies, nurses, counselors and doctors in mental hospitals, jobs at community centers, at city hall -- the list is endless. I hope that many of our members join the hourly-wage labor force and become active in unions. Those who work with their hands as well as their heads will provide an essential “down-to-earth” quality to our movement, which might otherwise become elitist.

There are certain key jobs that should be sought: teaching in schools of education, serving as organizers in unions, as lawyers and doctors for the poor, as clergy in various kinds of churches, as city planners, as journalists. But in today’s world many of us will have to work wherever we can find work, though some jobs would have to be refused: being a bomber pilot in another Vietnam-like war, working in a corrupt business, or serving in a church that still practices racial segregation.

If our people can develop a strong sense of identity with their support groups, with their theological past, and with the movement itself, they will be able to go into most jobs with the social gospel as their chief and not-so-hidden agenda. An installment loan officer in a bank, for example, will see his or her primary job as making responsible loans and giving sound financial advice to consumers, with their interest in mind more than that of the stockholders. Such a loan officer may not rise to prominence, but in the new movement it is serving the people, not rising in the hierarchy, that counts.

In a speech a few years ago, black activist Jesse Jackson described what needs to happen in the movement. He told how, as a boy growing up on a farm in South Carolina, he was delighted when his father came into a little money and could buy a new kitchen stove. The old wood stove was put outside in the chicken yard. One day a female cat found her way into that old wood stove that was warm from the sun and there gave birth to a litter of kittens. “Now,” said Jackson, “just because those kittens were in the stove, it didn’t mean they were biscuits.” They were still cats. In whatever work we do, we need always to be clear about who and what we are, like cats in a wood stove.

Besides taking our social gospel with us into our everyday jobs, we should all do volunteer work in the movement -- the amount depending on our responsibilities at home, the demands of our employment, our other interests. Volunteer work can be extremely important; it can also be a waste of time. We should spend some time together carefully planning how we can most effectively volunteer. Serving as a member of a board that supervises the work of a people’s advocacy program, for example, offers great possibilities. The chances are that the better the staff does its job, the more it will be criticized and the more gun-shy the board will become. A single board member determined to back an outspoken staff working for social justice can make all the difference in the world to staff morale and to a program’s effectiveness. A volunteer who visits prisoners once a week can make a vast difference to one or more individuals locked away from human concern. A volunteer who addresses and stuffs envelopes for a local election can make the difference between light and darkness in one community.

Style of Involvement

We have at least three options for our style of involvement: confrontation (prophetic action), argumentation (evangelization), and finally building attractive models (being “a light to the gentiles”). Niebuhr once wrote of the prophet: “When a man speaks in the name of God and prefixes his pronouncements with a ‘Thus saith the Lord,’ he is either a fool, or a knave, or -- a prophet.” The more confrontational an action is to one’s society, the greater is the claim that one is speaking in the name of God. When one decides not only to challenge the law of the land but also to violate it by doing things that will result in arrest, one is calling on a “higher law.” Protesters in both the civil rights and the antiwar movements sang “God Is on Our Side” to the tune of “We Shall Overcome.” Christians, of course, can never know in an absolute way that God is on their side, but they can know enough to risk prophetic action when the situation seems to call for it. Our support networks can be enormously helpful to the person who chooses to confront the system. We can minister to the wounds, we can stand by the family, we can help the person find a new job -- and we can gently challenge the action if it appears to be that of a fool or a knave rather than that of a prophet.

Church people have a long tradition of evangelizing, of convincing others that their news is indeed good news. We of the new social gospel movement can draw on the insights and power of this tradition as we argue for our positions. The trick is to put ourselves in the shoes of our listeners and to speak in a language that is comfortable to them even if the content is disturbing. I used to go to our state capitol to make speeches on prison reform to the legislators -- speeches in which I quoted Scripture to denounce both our corrections system and the legislators who were responsible for it. The problem was that my action was confrontational when I thought it was argumentative. I could have said the same things in such a way that some legislators could at least have heard the message. In order to evangelize for our positions -- whether at press conferences, in boardrooms, in sermons, at legislative hearings, on the job, at the coffeehouse, or across the fence -- we must learn to present our arguments so that those who hear them have the choice to see them as compelling.

Building attractive models could well be our most useful style for the end of this decade and into the next. We do so many things in this country poorly that perhaps what we need most of all is small groups of people trying out tasks in fresh and innovative ways -- ways that work. Instead of confronting the public school system or arguing before school boards for better teaching methods, we might do best by setting up small schools in which we try out our methods. If that is too ambitious, we can at least organize groups of teachers who will develop innovative techniques in their classrooms. We can establish model halfway houses, hospices, small cooperative businesses and industries.

There is something appealing about “being a light to the gentiles”: we do not have to call on the name of the Lord, nor do we have to say that our way is better than someone else’s. Instead we seek to build something that works so that we can then say: “Here it is; if you want to make use of it, take it; it is yours.” Not everything we do in our movement will be done in groups; we will be known for who we are and what we do as individuals as well. As individuals, we can make a personal witness to our principles. Others can judge our “light” for themselves.

Gerhard von Rad has defined the Old Testament prophet as one who “participates in the emotions of God.” Whatever style of involvement we choose, it is important that we put ourselves in situations where we experience face to face the sickness of our society. We may choose action that is not confrontational, but it is essential that we let ourselves feel what the prophet feels. It is not enough to talk objectively about what is right and what is wrong; we must, following Kierkegaard, love the good and hate the evil,

In the latter days of the civil rights movement, many of the black leaders made a mistake, I think, when they told us whites to leave the fray and go back to work among our own people, for “they are the ones that need the help.” The problem was that once we went back to our own people, often in distant suburbs, we too easily forgot the injustices of society and went on to other things that were not especially related. Thomas Merton could live in seclusion and yet feel the human suffering in the world, but most of us do not have that kind of self-transcendence; we need to see it face to face. I realize that we risk intruding into others’ lives, but I would rather intrude a bit than to live in happy isolation.

Finally, I hope that we will not become fanatics. I hope we will maintain and develop interests entirely outside our social concern and cultivate friends who are not social activists. If we become too dedicated, too heavy in our morality, too serious in our work, we just might become self-righteous and arrogant -- not to mention boring. Karl Marx is a good example for us. Upon finishing his day’s work in formulating the philosophy of revolution, he would go home to spend his evenings reading Shakespeare with his family. Unlike Jesse Jackson’s cats, we have only one life. We must take care of that life if we are going to give -- in a sustained way -- to others.

A Pedestrian-Idealist’s Approach to Education

When I was invited to help a small group of English teachers and counselors at the University of New Orleans develop a philosophy of education within which to construct a total curriculum for 150 of the university’s remedial students, I jumped at the opportunity. At the time, like many college chaplains, I was tired from trying to coax students to come to the religious center for hamburgers and colas, “encountered-out” from too many meaningful group experiences, hoarse from civil rights, antiwar and ecology pronouncements. Working with this group would enable me to think through education from a Christian perspective. Could we develop a plan for the remedial students that reached for the Christian ideals of love, truth and justice and, at the same time, actually helped people in their daily lives? I have always pictured Jesus as incorrigibly pedestrian -- he walked the roads of Galilee in order to meet the basic, sometimes humdrum, needs of ordinary people -- and as wildly idealistic: he preached a kingdom of love. Could our educational plan be true to him?

Our group of planners was an ideologically diverse lot: Marxists, human-potential buffs, lovers of language and wisdom, and me, a pedestrian-idealist. In our long meetings we were always faced with chaos, but we always knew we had the possibility of synthesis, of bringing different ideas together in a new way. One factor that helped us tremendously as we developed our plan was the knowledge that we would be the ones to try it out. We would be the teachers, counselors, administrators. If the plan failed, it was we ourselves who would have to look in the faces of the bewildered, angry, bored, disappointed students.

The remedial students at UNO come principally from the much-criticized, little-supported New Orleans public schools. Most of them are black and poor -- the old story. In the past their failure rate has been high. Less than one in 30 has made it through to graduation day. Typical remedial students enroll with great hopes -- usually they are the first ones in their families to go to college -- and, before they know what has happened, they are dropped from the university. Participants in the curriculum planning group, with extensive experience in working with remedial students, believed that things could be different.

A $75,000 federal grant to implement our program, to which we gave the innocuous name College Life Project, enabled us to get under way. We were able to keep the classes small, to offer block scheduling so that the students would attend most of their classes together, to provide math and English tutoring for everyone, to offer seminars for each group of students to teach them survival skills and help them develop a supportive community among themselves.

What I want to try out here is not so much a description of the College Life Project but rather the philosophy underlying it. Is it a Christian philosophy? Could it be called a theology of education? Our ideas are presented under eight headings.

The Drama of Education

First, we hope to discover and reinforce the drama in the students’ lives -- students who come to us with little confidence that anything they have to say in a classroom is worthwhile. They devalue their own life experience; often they are ashamed that they have been poor and outside the advantages of the America they watch on television. In concentrating so heavily on the mechanical aspects of writing, in teaching content areas so far removed from inner-city life, our high schools have seldom helped students see potential strengths in their own lives. The results are near (or close to) disaster. In the words of one of our program’s English teachers: “It is mighty hard to teach students the correct way of writing when they believe that nothing they have to say is worthwhile.”

But there is drama, mystery, excitement in the lives of our students. They are like the people of the Bible -- their lives are worth telling about, worth writing about. In one of our designs, students take a fantasy trip, down a country road to a meadow where they discover themselves at age six. Here is what one student wrote about the experience.

I am walking down the road of my life. Its sights and sounds are very vivid as my mind wanders aimlessly. It is very cool. A light mist brings on the appearance of another world. As I walk along the edge of the road, the crunch of the pebbles beneath my feet are barely audible. A slight breeze whispers through the tall pines causing the needles and the tall grass beneath the trees to sway in rhythmic motion.

The sun is a brilliant orange as it has just cleared the horizon. I know the cool moisture in the air will soon take leave. The birds sing in unison but with different calls, letting me know that they are after breakfast. It seems as if I’m walking through a tunnel of serenity because all is so peaceful here. Because of the upgrade I’m taking my time breathing deeply of this dream. The fragrance of the pines and the green grass give off an aroma to be unmatched by any man-made perfumes.

As I walk farther down the road I notice a clearing to the right. As I near it, I see a little boy standing beside the road as if he is waiting for someone, but he doesn’t look my way. I am only a short distance, away now and I can see that. the clearing is paved with concrete. The little boy is wearing old clothes like I used to wear when I was a kid, hand-me-downs. Then he turns around with a blank expression on his face, and suddenly it hit me, he looked exactly like me in every detail. He reached out his hand in a begging gesture. Because my senses were trained entirely on him, I had not noticed what was to my right. It was a ghetto. What a trip. I kept walking fast.

After writing this account and reading it to his classmates, the student realized that he did have something to say. The teacher was then in a good position to help him say it in a more effective and correct way.

A Community of Persons

Second, we hope to build a sense of community in the classroom so that the students feel at home with one another and with the teacher. ‘The ideal of the university,” says philosopher-educator Robert Paul Wolff, “is a community of learning. This phrase expresses the central fact that a university ought to be a community of persons united by collective understandings, by common goals, by bonds of reciprocal obligation, and by a flow of sentiment which makes the preservation of the community an object of desire.” Community-building as part of the education process is advocated by practically all educational reformers. But I find few educators who pay much attention to how to go about building community in the classroom or, on campus. They seem to believe that, if the teachers stress the importance of community and seat the class in a circle, it will happen automatically. In my experience, building community is a discipline all its own. To my knowledge, the only two organizations in our society that really think through the hows of community-building are the church, which has been at this task continuously for the past go centuries, and the various branches of the human-potential movement.

Our program has borrowed insights from both. What my church calls “shared ministry” becomes ‘shared teaching” in the College Life Project. With William Schutz, author of Joy, we believe that people bring to a group various needs that must be met: the need to be included, to have some control over the life of the group, to experience affection from some of the group members. Through the use of various exercises, primarily in small groups, we try to help teachers and students meet these needs and thus bring them together as part of the same learning team. When we were still in the planning stage, we received the following letter from a student:

I would like to request that there be more opportunities and activities for students and faculty to become more united. I feel like classes are not as exciting and enjoyable as they could be if people knew each other. Teachers rarely get tight with students because they only know the students’ numbers and don’t even know the names. I feel it is important for a school to have a student-teacher and student-student relationship. Therefore if you could consider a way to get us united, this school would be really dynamite to attend.

Third, once the community-building process has begun, we try to give the students skills and incentive with which to teach each other. During my long years of schooling at college and seminary, what I found most frustrating was that I lacked opportunity to give. I had good teachers and much opportunity to receive, but there was little chance for me to make my offerings. Just as I believe that the need to love is as great as the need to be loved, I believe also that the need to give is as great as the need to receive.

In our program we encourage as much as we can the teaching of students by students. There are more than 30 upper-class students serving as math tutors, and faster students in the program are expected to help the slower ones. We want all of our students to know that they have something special to give to their classmates. Christianity and Marxism come together in the belief that each should, according to his or her ability, give to others according to their needs.

Having students teaching students not only contributes substantially to everyone’s learning but also offers them a chance to give their gifts and thus to build self-esteem. To the degree that it works, this approach goes a long way toward changing the usual competition of the classroom -- which over the long haul yields, thorns and thistles -- into a form of cooperation in which students get their kicks out of the classmates’ victories as well as their own.

Individual Uniqueness Within Community

Fourth, at the same time the students are developing more and more of a sense of community, they receive support for that aspect of themselves that lives outside community: that is, their uniqueness. When talking in small groups, each student -- over a long period of time -- will tend to say pretty much the same things again and again. But in their writing, students are much more likely to show their uniqueness. Our teachers affirm that uniqueness, stressing that the differences people bring to a group are what make the group exciting, alive.

In the following examples of student writing, such diversity is indicated -- a diversity that can bring strength to community. The students who wrote these paragraphs were all in the same class and were writing about their own neighborhood:

Only in swampy St. Bernard can there be a neighborhood like mine. Behind my house there is a canal with a levee behind it. . . . The canal is fairly big, full of snakes, turtles and a lot of junk. In the summer the water lilies grow until the black ugly canal looks like a beautiful field of green. But when winter comes the lilies die, leaving a combination of odors.

When walking though my neighborhood in the early morning, I have to walk over all the wine, beer and soft drink bottles in the street. I have to walk over all the trash and garbage. I have to watch out for all the fools swinging around the corner at high speed. In the afternoon I have to walk over the broken glass pieces that were bottles that morning.

We have a trained rooster in our neighborhood that knows how to watch for cars before crossing the street. When he is called, he comes just like a trained dog or cat.

In the spring when the farmers are beginning to prepare the ground, there are many white egrets swooping down behind the tractors preying on bugs and insects harmful to crops.

And then a student made my point -- that uniqueness strengthens community -- better than I:

I like my neighborhood because of the different nationalities of people who live there, but I dislike the lack of care given to it. . . . My neighborhood is made up of blacks, whites, Mexicans, Japanese and Italians. We share our language and arts. We listen to each other’s music. We combine our cooking skills and make fancy breads. We all get along good together. . . .

My neighborhood is very run down. The streets need to be repaired and the sidewalk paved. Most of the houses are not painted and have broken panes. The air smells of trash that the garbage men leave behind. But this is not our fault, the landlord won’t make repairs.

There is no racial discrimination in my neighborhood. It makes me feel good to know that somewhere in the world there is a neighborhood like mine, full of love. We plan to keep it that way.

We would like our classrooms -- as slick as this student’s neighborhood is shabby -- to partake of that kind of unity; we would like our students to find their own synthesis amid diversity.

Accomplishment and Fulfillment

Fifth, for those who must leave UNO before they graduate, we hope to substitute for the prevalent idea of ‘failure” that of “work completed.” Even if the College Life Project is very successful, not all of our students will get through. We will in fact be lucky if ten out of every 30 students make it to graduation. In terms of our philosophy of education we are just as concerned about the 20 who are not graduated as about the ten who are.

At UNO like most schools, students go as far as they can; if they cannot go all the way, they “fail out.” The idea of failing out needs to be turned around. What could be more devastating to a serious student than, after a semester or a year or more of hard work, to fail? F’s as usually handed out are works of the law; they leave people believing they have failed as people as well as students -- they are enough to make St. Paul wince.

What is needed is to help people take pride in the work they have accomplished. “At the setting of the sun” (in the words of one of our hymns) we all need a little praise, someone to say: “Servant, well done.” Much of the work our students are doing in math, English and social science actually represents great strides forward for them. Many are learning arithmetic for the first time; most are developing better reading habits and writing skills; all are learning something about New Orleans and its peoples. There is no need for them to leave UNO with a sense of failure; a “servant, well done” attitude is much more appropriate.

At the end of the two years of our College Life Project, we will give everyone who is still with us a graduation certificate. Some of the certificates will say: “Work completed, with the recommendation for further study”; others will simply say: “Work completed.” If we are successful, both will be valued.

Encountering the World of Art

Sixth, we want to offer a curriculum that has a balanced emphasis on “art for art’s sake” as well as on practical matters. When I asked the students in one of the College Life, seminar groups I lead for a definition of art, they gave these answers: “Art is something that expresses your feelings for you when you can’t do it so well yourself”; “Art makes your mind wander”; “Art makes you want to write.”

Educational reformers do students from economically poor homes a disservice when they stress only the side. of college education that will help in a practical way. College is a time when students  -- poor and rich alike -- should be introduced to the world of art with all of the enthusiasm and power a teacher can muster. The definitions of art the seminar students gave indicate the kind of sensitivity possessed by many in the program -- a sensitivity that can grow and flower. Like learning, the appreciation of art has a value in itself. Our students may respond to the art of Richard Wright more than that of John Milton, but, we are convinced, they -- as much as students anywhere -- have the capacity to soar, to “wander” before the beautiful.

At the same time, we know that our students do need to learn practical skills that will help them when they leave UNO. They need to know how to keep a budget, look for a job, speak to a personnel manager, assert themselves in writing -- whether to a newspaper or a city council or for a union newsletter. At times we must get downright practical in our program, but I hope we never lose our emphasis on art for art’s sake; that would be losing part of our soul.

The Teachers Together

Seventh, we hope to develop a sense of teamwork among the teachers and staff in the program. Given the type of teaching method we use -- the teachers’ personal involvement with the students in their learning -- it is equally important that a professional identity along with appropriate distance from the students be maintained. It has been said of A. S. Neill, the founder of Summerhill (the original free school): “He accepts the children, forgives them, trusts that they with any luck at all will turn out okay. But he doesn’t need them, and he doesn’t need them to need him. At the root of his love is a benign indifference.” The teacher who will be able to bring his or her special offering to the classroom must not need the students in a dependent way, nor need them to need him or her.

The teachers and staff in the College Life Project all meet together weekly in separate small groups. These serve as support groups, as outlets for teachers and staff to exchange ideas, to air their frustrations, to develop and maintain their professional identities. The meetings are often stormy, but our stake is high. When differences arise, we keep talking until we work out something we all can live with.

Eighth, we want the curriculum to be as integrated as possible so that what the students are learning in English, for example, will not be totally unrelated to what they are learning in history or social science. Furthermore, we want to help our students integrate their school learning with their personal lives. College courses should give meaning to life instead of just being viewed as something one disciplines oneself to get through. John Dewey said:

A divided world, a world whose parts and aspects do not hang together, is at once a sign and a cause of a divided personality. . . . A fully integrated personality, on the other hand, exists only when successive experiences are integrated with one another. It can be built up only if a world of related objects is constructed.

Jesus put the same thought more vividly: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

In the College Life Project, courses are constructed so that they fit together as much as possible. A paper assigned in a political science class can be written with the help of the English class. A statistical problem introduced in social science can be studied in mathematics. Then, in the seminars, students are encouraged to relate what they are learning in school to what is going on in their lives. They, of course, must be the ones who finally integrate the learnings of school and home, but in our program we try to help.

As in any new program, we have a lot of problems in College Life, but overall it seems to be working. The students are working; the teachers and students are talking; significantly larger numbers of students are passing (at least for now); and there is some appreciation of art.

What is the verdict? Are we being blessed with a little balm in Gilead, exhibiting some progress? Or are we, in our enthusiasm, just postponing a familiar despair? Whatever the case may be, I write now, while hopes are high, thoughts arise, and dreams are still young.

 

A Breath of Fresh Fantasy

George Lucas’s Star Wars is a peach of a movie. Undoubtedly you already know something about it, either through the mass media or by word of mouth, and if you haven’t seen it yet, you will. It’s going to be as big as The Godfather and Jaws, if not bigger, and the reasons why it will please so many people are obvious: it’s exciting and it’s fun. The pace of Star Wars is rapid fire for most of its hour and 57 minutes, and the script is filled with a verbal and visual wit that has been rare in Hollywood movies since the screwball comedies of the ‘30s.

Lucas, who describes the film as “space fantasy” rather than science fiction, spent four years and $9 million creating the follow-up to his immensely successful American Graffiti. Star Wars is an adventure yarn of the “save the world” type. Militaristic villains, led by the Grand Moff Tarkin (Peter Gushing) and the evil Darth Vader, have taken control of the universe, forcing the true royalty into the role of rebels. The rebels’ only chance is to get the secret blueprints of the usurpers’ command post, a Manhattan-size space station called the Death Ship, into the hands of the rebel army.

Unfortunately, the Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), who is carrying the plans to her father, is captured by Darth Vader, but not before she deposits the information in the computerized Droid, R2-D2. R2-D2 and his robot companion C3PO escape to the remote planet of Tatooine, where they happily fall into the hands of the ingenuous Luke Sky. walker (Mark Hamill), a WASPish youth who is bored with life on the space-wastes (actually the Tunisian desert), and is ripe for adventure. He teams up with the venerable though retired knight of earlier battles, Obi-Wan Kenobi (brilliantly played by Alec Guinness), and together they become the hope of the empire. I don’t have to tell you how it turns out.

There is a self-conscious use of archetypes from other genres that contributes to making Star Wars such an enjoyable experience. Obi-Wan Kenobi is an amalgam of the ascetic monk of religious epics -- dressed in Franciscan robes and living in a desert hermitage -- and the John Wayne hero of EL Dorado, passing on gun-lore to the neophyte Luke, who is destined to carry on after he’s gone.

Han Solo (Harrison Ford), the outlaw smuggler who agrees to transport the motley crew of Obi-Wan, Luke and the Droids, is both a space cowboy, down to the swagger and the holster on the hip, and the Humphrey Bogart of To Have and Have Not, a hard-boiled adventurer whose cynical shell dissolves in the climactic battle sequence to reveal a romantic bravado that saves the day. He’s also reminiscent of the high-school hot-rodders of American Graffiti, with a souped-up jalopy of a space ship that readily outraces the Imperial fighters.

Star Wars offers tasty morsels of the western, monster movie, swashbuckler, historical epic and sci-fi thriller all in one package. The movie escapes being “camp” because, like the filmmakers of the French New Wave, Lucas displays a fondness for the formulas he satirizes. Unlike Mel Brooks’s comedy Blazing Saddles, in which Brooks plays against the genre by making it clear that he’s spoofing it, with the black sheriff and the horse KO’d by an uppercut to the nostrils, Lucas goes with flow of his story. We recognize the various characters In Star Wars as friends we’ve met before.

Probably more impressive than the direction of the film is Lucas’s achievement with the script. I suspect that a lot of the recent spate of sci-fi films -- Logan’s Run, Demon Seed, A Boy and His Dog -- failed because their scripts were leaden, flat and without humor. Lucas’s dialogue, on the other hand, fairly bursts with good-natured corn. When Luke, Han, and Han’s sidekick Chewbacca are fruitlessly trying to shoot their way out of a cellblock with Princess Leia, the feisty female coolly takes charge, chiding Han for his impetuousness and lack of finesse. While the lethal rays of enemy blasters strike all about them, Han remarks in an aside to Luke, “Either I’m going to kill her or I’m beginning to like her,”

R2-D2 and C3PO are the real charmers in the film, providing a steady stream of comic relief. Their Mutt-and-Jeff banter in Upstairs, Downstairs dialect gives us the sense of an unruffled continuum of interpersonal relationship amid the high-and-mighty conflict for control of the universe. Lucas never misses a chance to inject an anomalous touch. After the climactic battle, in which R2-D2 has had more than a few circuits roasted by enemy pursuit ships. C3PO watches forlornly as mechanics remove the wounded Droid from the victorious fighter. Though assured that a few hours in the machine shop will make R2-D2 good as new, C3PO anxiously tells them, “I will happily donate any internal organs, terminals or wires, if it will be of help.”

Though we are immediately able to assess what it is in Star Wars that entertains nearly everyone who sees it, it is a task of a wholly different degree to analyze what it means. Entertainment of the storytelling variety has a function beyond “escape from” the pressures and ambiguities of “real life” It is what we escape to that matters and can tell us in deep ways things about ourselves that are not readily apparent, caught as we are in the hither and thither of everyday life.

The important question to try to answer is this: Why do we need fantasy? John Cawelti, in his recent book Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (University of Chicago Press. 1976), concludes that popular formula stories meet two basic human needs -- excitement and security. Our identification with the protagonists in their harrowing adventures provides us relief from the boredom of everyday existence. At the same time, though we continually teeter with Luke and Han on the, abyss of death, we know from repeated forays into this region that things are going to work out all right, that Grand Moff Tarkin and Darth Vader will be defeated and the salutary order of the republic restored.

Our era is dominated by a taste for realism, and we feel ourselves constrained to judge a work of art against the measure of how “real” it is. What we often lose is our ability to appreciate the value of an idealized world wherein we are able to raise ourselves above the follies of our own predicament. Realism generally turns out to be very conservative, positing at best a grudging contentment with things as they are. Fantasy, on the other hand, is the truly revolutionary form because it celebrates the possibility of a different and better world.

To judge from the vast numbers thronging to see Star Wars, there is a need for fantasy that has gone unquenched in recent years. The public events of an obscene war, presidential corruption, worldwide inflation and arbitrary tenor have been thrust back upon us in the stark depression of Godfather I and II, the bathos of Love Story and the Pyrrhic victory of The Exorcist. Star Wars strikes so many of us as a breath of fresh air not only because we need to believe that the good can triumph but because lately we have had such difficulty in identifying the good and distinguishing it from the evil. The penchant toward realism has given us a popular culture that has made us feel trapped in a dungeon, assuring us that this is the way the world is and must be. The alternative vision of Star Wars, a vision of fantasy as opposed to realism strikes us with the force of stepping from the cave into bright sunlight.