Monthly Archives: April 2010

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 25 April 2010 (Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year C)

Acts 9:36-43 • Psalm 23 • Revelation 7:9-17 • John 10:22-30

I really should keep track of how many times I’ve taught different books of the Bible, but I know for a fact that I’ve taught my way through John on at least three separate occasions, and that might be a record for New Testament books for me.  (If there is a contender, it must be Ephesians.)  I tell people whenever I teach that strange fourth gospel that it’s the book that my own seminary assigned to us for translation because the vocabulary and grammar are so simple, but when one gets into the way that the book uses the words, it’s by far a more difficult book than the oft-maligned Revelation.

Beyond being a difficult book, John is one of those “greatest hits” books–just about everyone who can conjure Biblical phrases from memory likely has a handful of John sayings somewhere stored away.  But like Galatians (another notorious greatest-hits book), many people whom I’ve taught over the years have no idea how those “greatest hits” phrases fit into the argument that the book, taken as a book, makes.  Today’s reading, of course, ends with one of those famous lines: “I and the father are one.”  Strangely for someone (like me) who thinks of that sentence as a Trinitarian declaration, the sentence in this passage seems to have to do with snatching rather than with Being.

The Greek verb arpazein is a favorite for John: when the people try to force Jesus to set himself up as King of Jerusalem, the narrator says that the crowd tried to arpazein him.  When Jesus talks about what wolves do to sheep, he uses the same verb.  And in today’s passage, just after Jesus has finished his discourse in which he calls himself the good shepherd who protects sheep from wolves, he says of himself and of his Father that nobody can arpazein what belongs to them.

In other words, the oneness of Father and Son, at least in today’s reading, has to do with a unity of vigilance.

Perhaps anticipating that folks would object, noting that whatever sort of shepherd Jesus was, he certainly wasn’t doing much to convince most of the people of his kingship, Jesus reiterates a move that recurs in John and becomes one of the cornerstones of most Christian theologies of election: he links the response of the people to their status as the shepherd’s sheep.  This ethical move is not unprecedented; after all, the prophets, especially those in the post-exilic period, issued some oracles about Israel’s being divided between the faithful and the wicked, and certainly the encounter in the book of Jeremiah between the eponymous prophet and the pro-Jerusalem Hananiah indicate that divisions among the group of people elected to be Israel are not unknown.  That said, among the other things that make Jesus unprecedented (I realize I’m not going to exhaust that category here) is the fact that, in the synoptics as well as in John, he seems entirely comfortable making his own message an extension of the oracle in Isaiah 6, a sermon that makes deaf even as it announces good tidings that will save those who can hear.

It’s because of passages like this that I can’t fault my Calvinist brethren for developing and maintaining a very robust sense of unhindered divine option when it comes to who hears and who does not.  The sower in the parable, after all, seems aware that he’s throwing some of his seeds on the road (a practice that seems too bizarre to account for by a simple “primitive farming methods” explanation).  The vision of YHWH in Isaiah (later echoed by Jesus in Mark when he gives an account of his use of parables) tells Isaiah not to preach in spite of prior deafness but in order that the people might become deaf.  To deny that the divine voice is also an electing voice seems a profound misreading of the text.

That said, I still maintain that there is a timeful element to these oracles, and that continues to keep me from resting among the tulips with the faithful.  The oracle comes to Isaiah, I have to note, not in a historical vacuum but as Jerusalem has already exhibited deafness to the counsels of the Law with regards to their obligations to YHWH.  And the oracle of Jesus, though it comes to be Christian Scripture, seems in its first utterance to hit ears already devoted to certain visions of what Israel means.  In other words, the election here seems not to be an Unconditional Election but a profoundly contingent one, an election that Jesus explains in another parable about inviting people to a banquet.  Although one could read the initial invitations, the ones refused, as merely a charade that necessarily proceed to the invitation of the blind and the lame, the force of the parable seems to indicate otherwise, that those refusing the banquet are in fact to blame because they could indeed have responded otherwise.

In sum, I’d prefer to keep that strong sense of election but take the parable of the sower (and Jesus’ interpretation thereof) alongside the parable of the banquet, a slightly more complex relationship between human act and divine election (certainly not a caricature in which people “earn divine favor”) but something that I’m confident that God is capable of carrying off.  After all, if God is capable of calling a remnant from among a people ostensibly elect as a nation, what could really cause that God all that much trouble?

So, we got some interesting email comments this week from Sam Mulberry, which Nate explains at the beginning of his own response post. (Go ahead and read it, if you haven’t yet. I’ll wait!) Sam makes some important distinctions between sports and art, the chief of which is the relationship of final outcomes with a shaping will: a game becomes what it will be as the players compete in the moment, and its conclusion isn’t determined by any single human intent; art, too, is realized in time, but also (in some way) present from the beginning within the artist’s imagination. Therefore, while we CHPers may talk of “narratives” in sports, what we really mean are the imaginative ways fans and even analysts make sense of the outcomes of games, seasons, and careers. What appears on an ESPN blog twenty minutes after the game may be a story, but the game itself is not.

Still, as I think Nathan has shown, we spectators seem bent on wrenching intractable events into plotlines, before, during, and especially after the events take place. The statistics and their trends are forgotten, but the plotlines remain. Narrative is an irresistible habit, and our attempts to overthrow a recognized plotline only substitute one less obvious. So, while Sam is right to assert a distinction between sports and narrative art, it’s a distinction we instinctively resist.

But that’s all review of Nate’s post! What I’d like to address is a parallel phenomenon on the narrative pole of our event/art binary: namely, the independence of fictional characters, who, arising in an author’s mind, seem to develop an existence of their own. This may seem strange to anyone who has not attempted fiction, but I assure you it’s a real thing; indeed, it’s a commonplace among authors. It’s also one of the major concepts in Dorothy Sayers’s Mind of the Maker, which I cannot recommend highly or often enough. According to Sayers, “unless the author permits [characters] to develop in conformity with their proper nature, they will cease to be true and living creatures.”

[T]he free will of a genuinely created character has a certain reality, which the writer will defy at his peril. It does sometimes happen that the plot requires from its characters certain behavior, which, when it comes to the point, no ingenuity on the author’s part can force them into, except at the cost of destroying them. (67)

This is what we mean when we say that a character’s action was “in character” or “out of character.” It’s also one of Aristotle’s principles regarding characters in his Poetics:

As in the structure of the plot, so too in the portraiture of character, the poet should always aim either at the necessary or the probable. Thus a person of a given character should speak or act in a given way, by the rule either of necessity or of probability; just as this event should follow that by necessary or probable sequence. (XV)

I must stress, though, that Sayers is not legislating consistency of character as an external standard, in the same way that Aristotle’s insights are often treated (or dismissed) as “rules.” Her observation is from experience: she feels her character’s life pulse beneath her pen’s nib, and knows that, as when one holds a small creature, too much force can end that delicate vitality. We’ve seen this character death often enough in film—a forced romance, an unbelievable change of heart—as we become unhappily aware that we are watching actors recite lines. The spirit has returned to wherever the wind goes, leaving a sad lump of man-shaped clay.

But characters are not always such frail things, and sometimes they fight back. To this, I can bear testimony. I’ve described myself before as a frustrated fiction writer, and this is one of the things that frustrates me. A story I’ve had simmering on a back burner for three years can serve as my case in point. It involves a sequence of improbable (or impossible) events: a Restoration-era Englishman, shipwrecked and cast ashore on Japan, is swept into a quest to kill a surviving dinosaur. (Makes sense to me!) But a problem has arisen: my protagonist steadfastly refuses to rise to the occasion. He has been given a sword, but he is no good with it. Like Lancelot in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, he insists on going about things in his own idiom, but he hasn’t told me what that idiom is. I could “decide” that he will now be the Greatest Swordsman Who Ever Lived, but then he will be a Mary Sue, not who he is. And, though it is hard to explain, he’s convinced me that this is his story, that I shouldn’t just exchange him for another, more predictable hero. So, I wait, letting the story gestate until my protagonist has figured out what he wants to do.

But isn’t the story the important thing? After all, that dinosaur isn’t going to kill itself! The plot must carry on, right? No, it mustn’t—not this plot. This is my Englishman’s story, not the dinosaur’s, and I tell it for love of the protagonist, not just a boyish desire to see samurai battle a dinosaur. It’s because I love my creature, you see: I’m proud of him, and will be still prouder when he comes into his own and I can show him off. Again, Sayers agrees, which convinces me I’m on the right track:

[T]he creator’s love for his work is not a greedy possessiveness; he never desires to subdue his work to himself but always to subdue himself to his work. The more genuinely creative he is, the more he will want his work to develop in accordance with its own nature, and to stand independent of himself. (130)

My Englishman’s recalcitrance is a kind of success, you see. That he fights me shows that he is something more in my imagination than a daydream proxy or a stereotype, and that is satisfying. The Hawaiian policeman, on the other hand, is a failure: though I need him to thwart the scheming shark-god cultists, he remains a limp two-word description. But that’s another story!

After the Christian Humanist Podcast’s episode on sports (available via the RSS feed, if you just click on it…), Sam Mulberry of Bethel University and CWC: The Radio Show emailed us here at CHB with some very interesting thoughts on differences between sports and literature on a metaphysical level.  I’ll say in advance that, when I started this post, I thought I knew what I was going to say, but the thoughts rather got away from me, and as is always the case, I welcome any help that our readers can offer.

Sam’s email to us presented a couple interesting questions, one of which David Grubbs has addressed, namely the question of the author’s will and the nature of action within a narrative.  The other one, the one I volunteered for (and already regret) has to do with the relationships between narratives, events, and statistics.

The nature of narrative is intertwined with the position of human beings in the order of Creation: as creatures who experience Creation as it occurs temporally, we can only “predict” the future by making dicta, or speeches: in other words, we invent a past, put that past ahead of us instead of behind us, and then pretend that we’re narrating that past from out ahead of it.  Such a relationship only sounds strange to folks who have learned to think of themselves as situated simply between a span called “past” and a span called “future” on a one-dimensional construction that we learn to call time-line in history class.  The way we live our lives, of course, betrays more complexity than that: while we do very little to plan for the past (even to write that feels silly), we order our lives under the working assumption that the moment ahead of us is contingent, that multiple possibilities constitute whatever “future” is.  To put it concretely, when I approach a busy intersection in my automobile, I scan the cars around me, knowing that among the possibilities for the next moment, one of them might be that a car might zip out and hit me.  When I plan a lesson, I allow more flexibility one day and less the next, assuming that my students’ agency might take the class here-but-not-there or there-but-not-here.  And when I change my daughter’s diaper, I move with extreme caution, knowing that among the possibilities for the next moment are a puddle’s forming under her body or a puddle’s not-forming.  In the former case, I prefer to have a diaper there as the base for the puddle.

One’s immediate thought might be that events therefore fit into narrative most sensibly in the past and not at all in the future, but again the complex character of time intervenes and makes those simple categories inadequate.  After all, certainly everyone’s heard the rumor that before every Superbowl they print hats and T-shirts with both teams as champions so that people can get their memorabilia as quickly as possible, and one pour soul in my own high school showed up at school, the week after the Cincinnati Reds beat the Oakland A’s in the World Series, wearing an “Oakland A’s: World Series” shirt.  (Apparently back in the early nineties they printed plain old “World Series” shirts then printed “Champions” on the winners’ apparel.)  The point is that on every down of every football game, as every pitcher delivers every pitch in every baseball game, those watching are constructing ideas of what the past will look like a few moments or even a week in the future.  And when this happens rather than that, it’s not as if anyone watching the game carefully is caught off guard very often; we already have narratives ready to deploy, certainly with some changes to account for contingencies that are outside the range of our active imaginations but nonetheless ready to go before the event comes.

Sports writing, of course, lives and dies on the force of these narratives, and the sorts of narratives that each kind of spectator sport develops over time sometimes travel well from sport to sport and sometimes don’t travel well at all.  To give a couple examples, in NASCAR, before the “race to the finish” quasi-playoff system began, sports writers would with regularity tell the reading public that “it’s better to be lucky than to be good,” and they would point out that a hundred different circumstances could determine a win or a loss, and moreover that a consistently good driver, in any given race, might not even finish.  In another context, the NCAA basketball tournament, writers regularly talk about “upsets” as if they were simply brute events, things that happen to this team rather than that in a given week.  Try to imagine “it’s better to be lucky than to be good” or “upsets happen” ever coming out of the pages of Sports Illustrated after Michael Jordan or Tom Brady comes away from a playoff game on the winning side, and you’ll see that explanations for late-season wins just don’t travel.  On the other hand, just about every sports writer that I’ve read participates in the mythology of “heart,” the idea that I always associate with the Rocky movies that, in contests between professional athletes, people who are better at a given game than anyone else in the world in contests with a dizzying array of variables that affect the outcome, there’s some intangible manliness of will that some athletes have and others lack, and that presence or absence of “heart,” not the array of variables or any discernible strategy or smoothness of technique, will determine every close match in every sport.

I’m obviously having fun here at the expense of sports writers and broadcasters, and my fun largely comes from some familiarity with statistical theories.  Statistics come in to correct certain bad ideas about these events and narratives, but as with any replacement idea, they bring their own assumptions to bear on a sporting event.  I learned in a psychology class that statisticians that hitting streaks, field goal streaks, winning streaks, and all other streaks mean nothing when placed on a long enough continuum within an athlete’s or a team’s career.  I learned in statistics class that the gambler’s fallacy means that, on a long enough time line, the Cubs eventually win the World Series, but a long enough time line has nothing to do with this season.  And I learned from watching the Colts for the last ten years that the same two teams with the same two rosters playing in the same indoor stadium by the same NFL rules in October, then in January, will result in the Colts’ winning the October game and anybody else’s winning the January game.  And inevitably, as I find myself thinking that there’s absolutely no good reason to think that one month is a better test of football prowess than another, that “It’s better to be lucky than good,” some yahoo on ESPN tells me once again (as he’s said for a decade) that the team with which I’ve identified since 1984 can’t win “the big game” as if something substantive had indeed changed in the rules, the environments, the rosters, or something else.  In other words, although sports magazines and sports television hosts use (sometimes with gleeful abandon) lots of Arabic numerals and decimal points and parentheses, they remain profoundly disconnected from the real intellectual atmosphere of the statistician, and that disconnect makes them piles of money.

And that disconnect is what I still fail to surmount with regards to spectator sports.  I know that every self-identified sports fan I’ve talked with is certain that her or his metaphysics of sports, narrative, and statistics is the right one, and I know that people who live in cities with recent championships, along with the yahoos at ESPN, tend to ignore the statisticians’ theories about sports performance in favor of the more appealing Rocky-narratives about heart and the big game and all those sorts of things.  I know that whatever happens on the sports field, folks who write about it for a living have to keep the narrative familiar enough to appeal to the fans but new enough that Sports Illustrated doesn’t replace them with a Mad Libs book.  I know that even as the choice between narratives and some details of those narratives remain hanging in the air, everyone who’s watched football or baseball for more than a couple months knows exactly which “slots” to plug the main players, the “role players,” the coaches, the fans, and everyone else into when the event actually passes that mysterious point that we call “right now” and becomes settled-past rather than imagined-past.  I know that, given all of this complexity, I should approach sports, and life, with some degree of humility.

What I can’t figure out is why I like statistics when the Colts lose yet another playoff game but live happily within the Gambler’s Fallacy a couple months later, when Cubs season starts.  I suppose watching sports, even when one doesn’t do as much of it as one used to, makes fools of us all.

[update: Arts and Letter Daily just linked to "The Tea Leaves of Sports Talk," an essay better written than my own, on a similar topic.]

Our theme song this week is Chagall Guevara’s “Murder in the Big House” from their self-titled 1991 album–a forgotten gem.

General Introduction
- The Christian Humanist Circus
- Responses to listener email
- Our attempts at creative writing

Getting Down to It
- Bringing respect to detective fiction
- Let’s leave phrenology out of this

Mysteries in the Hebrew Bible
- Oh, Susanna
- The evolution of Hebrew Law
- Bel and the Dragon

Crime and Punishment in the Old World
- Trial by torture, combat, and ordeal
- Catching the conscience of the king
- Ann Radcliffe as Scooby Doo predecessor

An American Invention
- Poe’s “tales of ratiocination”
- Michial gets to say things in French
- Dupin’s “intuitive science”
- Poe shatters his own conventions
- Relationship between mystery and horror

Sherlock Holmes
- Why do we remember Holmes and not Dupin?
- The romanticism of “The Purloined Letter”
- Sherlock Holmes, Victorian über-mensch
- Some love for Dr. Watson, the reader’s surrogate
- “Hello? 911? This is Robin!”
- Humanizing Greg House
- The homo-erotic turn

The Wounded Detective
- Relationships, not crimes
- Lampshading Bones
- The deep-seated tragedy of The Wire

Father Brown Breaks the Pattern
- Religious not-belonging
- Beating the purely rational
- The devils in the detective’s heart

Justice and Law
- Why PIs don’t trust the police
- A preference for local law enforcement
- The strange conservatism of detective fiction
- Our need for an outsider
- Going maverick—going rogue
- Michial Farmer’s Existential Detective Agency

A New Kind of Detective Fiction
- The Crying of Lot 49
- The fruitless search of Oedipa Maas
- Trying to find patterns in the static

Jessica Fletcher and Lord Peter Wimsey
- Satisfying Sam Mulberry
- Michial gets the sad trombone
- Dorothy Sayers turns down the invitation
- Why detective stories aren’t like real life
- What is it with Catholic intellectuals and mysteries?

Procedurals
- Technology gets ahead of the real world
- Oracular and magic computers
- The King of All Procedurals
- Problems in the real world
- Another Farmerian rant about democracy

Our Recommendations
- Monk
- Kinky Friedman’s Roadkill
- The Wire
- Father Brown
- Lord Peter Wimsey
- Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adler, David A. and Susanna Natti. Cam Jansen: The Mystery of the Dinosaur Bones. New York: Puffin, 2004.

Chesterton, G.K. “The Blue Cross.” The Complete Father Brown. New York: Penguin, 1987. 9-22.

—. “The Hammer of God.” The Complete Father Brown. New York: Penguin, 1987. 118-130.

—. “The Secret Garden.” The Complete Father Brown. New York: Penguin, 1987. 23-38.

Christie, Agatha. Murder on the Orient Express. New York: Berkley, 2004.

Dixon, Franklin W. The Hardy Boys Starter Set. New York: Grosset and Dunlop, 2009.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2010.

Eco, Umberto. Foucault’s Pendulum. New York: Mariner, 2007.

Friedman, Kinky. Roadkill. New York: Ballantine, 1997.

Hope, Laura Lee. The Bobbsey Twins at Pilgrim Rock. New York: Grosset and Dunlop, 1956.

Irwin, John. American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983.

Keene, Carolyn. Nancy Drew Starter Set. New York: Grosset and Dunlop, 2009.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Man of the Crowd.” Poetry, Tales, and Selected Sketches. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn and G.R. Thompson. New York: Library of America, 1984. 388-396.

—. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Poetry, Tales, and Selected Sketches. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn and G.R. Thompson. New York: Library of America, 1984. 397-431.

—. “The Mystery of Marie Rougêt.” Poetry, Tales, and Selected Sketches. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn and G.R. Thompson. New York: Library of America, 1984. 506-554.

—. “The Purloined Letter.” Poetry, Tales, and Selected Sketches. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn and G.R. Thompson. New York: Library of America, 1984. 680-698.

Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: HarperPerennial, 1999.

Queen, Ellery. Ellery Queen: Five Complete Novels. New York: Avenel, 1988.

Radcliff, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho. New York: Penguin, 2001.

Sayers, Dorothy L. Lord Peter: The Complete Lord Peter Wimsey Stories. New York: Harper, 1986.

—. The Mind of the Maker. New York: Continuum, 2004.

Sobol, Donald J. Encyclopedia Brown Boxed Set. New York: Puffin, 2007.

Stout, Rex. The Rubber Band / The Red Box. New York: Bantam, 2009.

Warner, Gertrude Chandler. The Boxcar Children, Books 1-4. Park Ridge, Ill.: Albert Whitman, 1990.

I first read Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita during my second semester of college, reading it furtively and fifty minutes at a time during an Old Testament class. (I would take another course from the same professor a few years later and note, to my shame and guilt, that he’d added to his syllabus a new commandment: “No reading during class.”) I was, to understate the case drastically, not ready for Lolita. If I’d started, as I’d been instructed to, with some of Nabokov’s more obviously experimental fiction (Pale Fire, say, or Ada), I’d have been more inclined to read closely, skeptically. But Lolita, though miles of dark rivers flow beneath its surface, is built on such a straightforward narrative—boy meets girl; boy gets girl; boy loses girl—that it’s easy to lose track of what Nabokov is really up to.

Lolita, we must note, is quite possibly the most revolting novel of the twentieth century. It is also among the most beautiful. Its staggering power comes from its prose, written in English by a man who grew up speaking three languages fluently. (In fact, though he was born and raised in St. Petersberg, he could technically consider English as his first language; he read and wrote it before he could read and write Russian.) Lolita is not even his first novel written in English; after writing ten in Russian, he wrote two—The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Bend Sinister—in the language of his adopted homeland before he produced Lolita. Still, Lolita feels like the work of a man in love with a brand-new language, an impression furthered by Nabokov’s own description of the novel as “the record of my love affair with the . . . English language.” Indeed, his powers of description and analogy are embarrassing to anyone who hopes to describe and compare:

[G]radually the models of those elementary rusticities became stronger and stronger to the eye, the nearer I came to know them. Beyond the tilled plain, beyond the toy roots, there would be a slow suffusion of inutile loveliness, a low sun in a platinum haze with a warm, peeled-peach tinge pervading the upper edge of a two-dimensional, dove-grey cloud fusing with the distant amorous mist.

This passage of two sentences contains at last nine discrete images; in a lesser writer’s hands they would amount to a literary dissonance, twisting and turning before collaping under their own collected weight. In Nabokov, they blend perfectly, surrendering their discreteness to create a slow, rosy fade from the green and gold “tilled plain” to the translucent whiteness of “distant amorous mist.” Writing qua writing doesn’t get any better than Lolita, and it’s no surprise that one finds echoes of its distinctive tone all through the English-language literature of the intervening decades. (I hear it most strongly, to the point of impersonation, in John Updike’s A Month of Sundays, but it’s there in everyone from Pynchon to Rushdie.

But Nabokov has to write, as Updike puts it, “ecstatically”—the word comes from the Greek ekstasis (ἔκστασις), “to stand outside oneself.” The subject matter fairly demands a standing-outside, not only for author (Nabokov was, it seems, the most well-adjusted of our canonical practitioners of American fiction, miles and miles away from the diseased mind of Edgar Humbert Humbert, whose first-person narration he must nonetheless supply), but also for reader, who is sickened by both the plot of the novel, Humbert’s abduction and sexual relationship with one Dolores Haze, aged twelve to fifteen. We condemn him—we cannot help it; we do it instinctively before we even open the novel. For us to make it through Lolita, we must take Humbert’s advice:

Please, reader: no matter your exasperation with the tenderhearted, morbidly sensitive, infinite circumspect hero of my book, do not skip these essential pages! [He is about to sleep with Lolita for the first time.] Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let’s even smile a little.

That plea leads to a postmodern labyrinth of existence/non-existence so twisted that no amount of string can help me find my way back out of it again. But Humbert is right—we must embrace him, however tentatively, if we are to feel the queer and elliptical power of his story. We must transcend ourselves and the moral judgments we instinctually make of Humbert.

The problem is that neither Nabokov nor Humbert will allow us to do so in any kind of full way. Indeed, our narrator repeatedly goes out of his way to remind us that he is both a paedophile and a murderer, and he addresses us on the first page and many other places as “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury.” We are invited to judge him—he seems, in fact, to demand it—but then begged not to. He begs us for ekstasis, but confounds any attempt at our doing so.

As if that weren’t enough, the novel proper is preceded by a Foreword, ostensibly written by John Ray, Jr., PhD; it is, of course, pure fiction. Ray pushes for judgment, wishing to make this manuscript into a social lesson: “‘Lolita’ should make all of us—parents, social workers, educators—apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.”

Behind this moral stands Nabokov, and he’s either winking at us or sarcastically sticking his finger down his throat. We are smart enough, he seems to tell us, to see beyond John Ray, Jr.’s simple social moralizing, to see it as the mere stringing together of threadbare clichés that it is—and furthermore, we’re smart enough to dismiss this introduction even though we’d like to read the novel the way “Dr. Ray” does. Nabokov thus introduces the “social moral” reading of Humbert’s life in order to dismiss it; and since it’s actually we who must do the dismissing, the point is made all the more strongly.

And yet Humbert Humbert remains a monster, or, as Nabokov himself later put it, “a vain and cruel wretch.” In other words, this beautiful language, the main character’s pleas for understanding, the a priori rejection of moral readings—these do little to make Humbert more appealing; they just make it harder for us to submit our disgust for authorial approval. In this way, Nabokov withdraws from the novel even though he remains a palpable presence in it, not just through the frequently referenced Vivian Darkbloom (an anagram for “Vladimir Nabokov”) but through his position in the white spaces between the printed words, constantly winking at us and wagging his finger. It is to this simultaneous authorial presence and absence, I believe, that people are referring when they offer Lolita as an early postmodern novel.

Lolita’s postmodernism is indeed undeniable and forms a key to any interpretation of the novel. (I will detour here and note that at this early stage in the movement, postmodernist fiction techniques had not yet reached the level of self-reflexivity they would in a novel like John Barth’s LETTERS; Lolita can thus point outside its pages, at least to a certain degree.) Indeed, the horror and disgust we feel at Humbert the child molester is added to by a particularly postmodern uneasiness. To put it simply, Humbert must constantly stay moving, both in a spiritual and a physical sense—but he demands stasis from those around him. His life is Heraclitean, but his soul is Platonic; in other words, he darts around, but the demands he makes on the other characters betray a baseline desire for ultimate spiritual stability. He is a monster because he wants it both ways. He will define the being of those around him, but he will remain quick on his feet so that he will be able to define his own being. This tyranny of definition is the postmodernist’s worst nightmare.

The preface from John Ray, Jr., as you may have guessed, is a red herring. The educated reader—and, movies or not, Lolita has very few uneducated readers—instinctually suspects that he will receive what Nabokov’s countryman Mikhail Bakhtin praises as heteroglossia (разноречие; literally, “different-speech-ness”)—the multiple voices that set the novel apart from other genres. But all we get is Humbert—and even though the book features conversations between him and other characters, he is careful to note (repeatedly) that these are his words, not theirs. We do get Nabokov’s voice, of course, but as mentioned earlier, he’s not much help beyond defusing certain objectionable readings. So this is a monologue, albeit a monologue with unreliable dialogue sprinkled throughout. Humbert completely controls our experience of his world.

And in possession of that control, he dances. He tells his story in diversions, misdirections, flashbacks, puns, double entendres, untranslated French, and purposely hamfisted foreshadowing (“a bad accident is to happen quite soon,” he says at one point). It all adds up to a postmodern jig of sorts, provided we agree with John Barth’s definition of literary postmodernism as “a smiling nihilism.” For the stakes are quite high here—paedophilia, abduction, murder—and Humbert constantly spins around the big black hole in the center. He doesn’t stand still, even or especially when talking about his lover/victim: “She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.” If the young woman herself feels this confusion of identity, we’re not made privy to those feelings. This is Humbert’s construction, his glorious confounding of selfhood.

Likewise, he revels in the opaque layers of artifice he piles onto his story. For example, he tells us of his stepdaughter’s gaggle of adolescent friends: “There was Opal Something, and Linda Hall, and Avis Chapman, and Mona Dahl.” These names are striking mostly for their normalcy, especially compared to those in other postmodern novels. (Pynchon, of course, springs to mind immediately, but also Vonnegut and Ishmael Reed and newer practitioners of the art, such as Jonathan Lethem.) But then comes the knight’s move, a parenthetical aside that says, “save one, all these names are approximations.” The names have all been changed by John Ray, Jr., anyway—and besides that, we have no idea which of these false names would be real—were it not false.

Elsewhere, he calls attention to the fact that we are reading his words, that ink and paper will always be a mediator between us and him: “Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat till the page is full, printer.” This instruction has gone unheeded. These layers of artifice are akin to the bobs and weaves of a championship boxer; the hope is to move quickly enough to be not a stationary figure but a blur: unhittable.

The plot itself is a method of escape. It comes in five major divisions (though Nabokov himself gives us 69 chapters in two sections); we might designate them as follows: (1) early and professional life; (2) living with the Hazes; (3) on the road; (4) Beardsley; and (5) Lolita’s escape. (In Nabokov’s divisions, numbers 1 and 2 belong to the first section, and the rest belong to the second.) About the time we seem to be settling comfortably into a period of Humbert’s life, he abruptly changes. So, for example, as we grow used to the tedious puzzles of his academic life, we find ourselves—out of nowhere, almost—living with Charlotte and Dolores Haze. After Humbert marries the mother and waits for the daughter to return from camp so he can begin his systematic defilement of her, we think we can see where this is going: Lolita will be a novel about the suburban monster next door.

But Charlotte suddenly learns of Humbert’s plan, and in what must be the least-satisfying deus ex machina in history, she is abruptly killed, at which point Humbert takes off for the highways and byways of America, with Dolores in tow. They are “lovers,” at this point, to the degree that a middle-aged man can be the lover of a twelve-year-old girl, and Lolita has become a road novel. But even that isn’t enough movement—to keep the pace, Humbert must paradoxically slow down, and he takes a job at a college, where he and his stepdaughter settle into “normal” life. This, as you might have guessed, doesn’t last, either.

All of this is to say that Humbert keeps moving—and yet he doesn’t want to. He is in love with a material form that is by its very definition ephemeral; one can be a nymphet for only so long before one grows into one of the adult women that so disgust Humbert. The solution, of course, is to make a Platonic idol out of Dolores Haze: “I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.” That’s why it’s not really right to refer to Dolores as Lolita except through Humbert’s eyes—“Lolita” is the spiritual ideal of The Nymphet; Dolores Haze is a temporary manifestation. To love the spiritual ideal through Dolores’s bodily reality, Humbert must discard Dolores as a real individual. And so he does.

While he pursues the static spiritual ideal, he keeps moving, and in order to keep others from catching him, he demands the uttermost stillness from them. Thus, characters like Charlotte Haze and Valeria, his first wife, become little more than stock characters. His neighbors in the Haze home and at Beardsley have no real personalities—they are the essence of what my elementary-school teachers called “static characters.”

But the most obvious example of Humbert insisting on stasis comes when Dolores wants to study acting. “I detest the theatre,” Humbert tells us,

as being a primitive and putrid form, historically speaking; a form that smacks of stone-age rites and communal nonsense despite those individual interjections of genius, such as, say, Elizabethan poetry which a closeted reader automatically pumps out of the stuff.

The irony is that he demands a sort of static acting—perhaps the best way of putting it is to say he expects an acting free of improvisation—from those around him. Dolores, of course, must constantly pretend that she is not being subjected to what she clearly views as rape by her stepfather. Elsewhere, he says of his first wife that she “even showed something like irritation at times, which was quite out of keeping with the stock character she was supposed to impersonate.” We can conclude, then, that what he objects to is not acting qua acting—it’s the actress having control over her acting, choosing her own stasis or lack of it.

As it turns out, he has reason to fear this. Dolores Haze escapes him by virtue of the acting she convinces him to let her do. “By permitting Lolita to study acting,” he moans, “I had, fond fool, suffered her to cultivate deceit.” (I need not point out that “fond fool” is itself a phrase from the theatre, specifically Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale.)  More to the point, the “deceit” the theatre brings about allows her to live a life outside of Humbert; after she refers to her childhood, he thinks, “It was the first time . . . she spoke spontaneously of her pre-Humbertian childhood,” adding, “perhaps, the theatre had taught her that trick.”

The message is clear—to the degree that Lolita, the product of a man who declared that he “detest[ed] symbls and allegories,” can be said to have a message—and it is a distinctly postmodern one. The world, Nabokov seems to tell us, is full of predators who wish to impose their understanding of the world upon us, to pin us like a butterfly in a display case; we must learn to lie, learn to keep moving ourselves, in order to escape them.

With this in mind, the Christian may have more to fear from the philosophical implications of the novel than from any plot-level disgust over paedophilia, but that’s a subject for another post.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 18 April 2009 (Third Sunday of Easter, Year C)

Acts 9:1-6, (7-20) •Psalm 30 •Revelation 5:11-14 •John 21:1-19

I’ve been asked to preach not this Sunday (April 18) but next Sunday (April 25), so this reflection will be brief so that I can spend more time on the texts that I’ll actually be preaching soon.

This week’s texts are another set in which people don’t recognize Jesus after the Resurrection.  I had a conversation with a friend at Athens Christian after I taught my adult Sunday school class about why those stories are so prominent in those sections of the New Testament, and I’m going to try to reproduce my answers to him here (in a form that’s more like my writing style than like my spoken style, just to be clear).

First, I do want to commend the sort of close reading that notes this common thread in the New Testament texts.  Other than the man who sees people as trees before finally clearing things up, there aren’t any mistaken-identity stories that I can think of before the Resurrection.  (I’m certain that someone will think of one and post it in the comments section of this post, and I welcome that.)  But Luke-Acts and John agree that, after the Resurrection, people are incapable of recognizing Jesus until something happens, though in each case that something is a bit different.

When I think about this phenomenon, I have to make note that, although some sort of visible alteration is a possibility, the “reveal” moment almost never comes in these stories when some new sensory datum comes into the picture.  The Emmaus journeyers had already spoken with the risen Jesus, as had Mary when she mistook Jesus for the gardener.  In the final chapter of John Jesus had already called to the disciples (and called them “Children,” no less), and in Paul’s case, he’s already in the midst of the blazing light, the most obvious sensory experience in the story and enough of a shock to draw the noun kyrios from him even though he’s not sure how YHWH is manifesting God’s self just yet.  Instead, each of these stories lets the clueless characters in when some sort of secondary phenomenon occurs: in some cases Jesus calls the disciple by name, and in another the Eucharistic meal becomes the moment of clarity.  As the disciples are on the sea in John, Jesus’ call to cast the net otherwise, an echo of a story in Luke rather than something antecedent in John, but something that the disciples nonetheless recognize as the command of their kyrios. In Saul’s case, of course, Jesus just comes out and says his name.

It’s possible that, of all the details of Jesus’ post-resurrection life and post-ascension activity, these were the only ones that folks remembered, that out of everything that happened for those days when he appeared to so many they could only remember mistaken identity tales.  I’ll grant that theory’s possibility but not its probability: I’m more inclined to see the written New Testament’s’ focus on these things as pastoral moves.  As the years pass and the original disciples, those who walked with Jesus, one by one die, no doubt the people commissioned to carry on and to proclaim a gospel of a victory they’ve heard about but not seen become anxious about doing so.  After all, those who were on Palestinian roads with the Nazarene Messiah would be able to recognize the one who called them friend, but what of those who only have the friends’ stories?

These mistaken-identity stories, I’m convinced, present one set of answers to those anxieties.  When one wonders whether a voice is from Jesus or from a devil (or, I suspect more frequently, from one’s own ego), look to the Eucharist.  Listen for those who are commissioned to know the flock by name.  Follow those calls that are consistent with the ways of the Prophets.  Listen to the voices of the persecuted.  These are not foolproof by any means, but if these stories are true stories (and they are true stories), neither was seeing the raised-again Jesus in the world of time and space foolproof.

Instead of certainty, instead of a constant worry that one will miss Jesus or follow not-Jesus, the New Testament texts give us these comic tales of those who had far less reason to miss the point, missing the point.  And every one gets a second chance.

Praise be for forgiveness–for blindness when we should see, for weakness when we have the strength, for brevity for the worst reasons.

Worried about that English lit test coming up?  Too busy to concern yourself with all that “Old English”?  Here’s a handy reference from GraphJam to help you out!  I don’t know that we’re offering windbreakers or anything fun like that, but if you can identify all of these without a Google search, you’ve bested someone who took his Ph.D comps in Renaissance Drama just two years ago.

If you have some device for gathering RSS feeds (I use Google Reader), I recommend Graph Jam for a quick laugh on occasion, something not quite as involved as Passive-Aggressive Notes but a bit more so than Fail Blog.  Good stuff all around.

(Please note that we Christian Humanists do not officially approve of GraphJam, SparkNotes, watching-the-movie-instead, or other cheap substitutes for reading one’s Shakespeare.)

Yesterday, April 8, was the feast day of a saint: St. Julie Billiart. I’d not heard of St. Julie before: she’s not medieval, so one won’t find her in the Golden Legend or other well-known sources of ancient and medieval hagiography. In fact, she’s quite a modern saint, born in 1751 in a little village in the Picardy province of France. She died on April 8 in 1816, so that her feast (like that of all saints) is a celebration of her dies natalis, her “birthday” into a glorified life.

Her village, Cuvilly, was small and rural; today it still sits in a patchwork of fields, perhaps not much larger that it was two hundred years ago. Though one of the youngest in a large family, Julie stood out from a young age because of her enthusiasm for sacred knowledge and her diligent practice of all she learned. Still, her opportunities for education were limited to the catechism, a local grammar school, and the instruction of her parish priest. Julie’s world got even smaller when she was twenty-two: someone with a grudge against her father took a shot at him, and Julie’s legs were paralyzed by the shock. She spent the next twenty-two years confined in bed as a shut-in.

A tragedy, we say, and doubtless it was, too, in the eyes of her family and friends. Piously we might call it a hardship to be endured with patience. Certainly, she made good use of her time, catechizing to village children, crocheting lace for the altar, and praying for hours on end. We might consider such things a consoling diversion. But, privately, I feel my throat tighten at the thought of such enclosure. Already her life was unthinkably claustrophobic by our standards: a parochial existence of limited space and limited knowledge. Imagining myself in such a situation, my attitude settles naturally into stoicism and other consolations philosophical, but I do not smile.

But Julie did. That is what she’s called, the Smiling Saint. It’s a feature in all her portraits, her trademark: St. Catherine has her wheel, but St. Julie smiles.

St. Julie’s confinement and her joy remind me of another Julie: St. Julian of Norwich. Julian was medieval–ca. mid-to-late 1400s–and she was English. She wrote one of the masterpieces of medieval English mysticism, The Revelations of Divine Love, which ended up on my Middle English Lit comps list.

Julian’s story is an instance of the strangeness of medieval Christianity to 21st century Protestants. Desiring to understand Christ’s suffering, Julian prayed to be stricken ill. This God granted, and as Julian lay dying, she called for a priest.

My Curate was sent for to be at my ending, and by that time when he came I had set my eyes, and might not speak. He set the Cross before my face and said: I have brought thee the Image of thy Master and Saviour: look thereupon and comfort thee therewith. (III)

In that moment, her eyes fixed on the cross, Julian had visions–sixteen in all. And then she made a full recovery. In similar circumstances, I imagine I (and most people) would have rushed to share my revelations with everyone else: “Hear what God told me!” Julian did not. It is one thing to see a vision from God, but it is quite another to understand what one has seen. Julian, knowing herself to be a “simple creature unlettered”, did not trust her own meager knowledge to interpret the revelation properly. Instead, she waited, reading books and contemplating her memories of the visions, until she felt ready to explain them fully. This took twenty years.

What’s more, she did it as an anchoress: one who vows a life of contemplation and devotion in both seclusion and total enclosure, within a tiny cell in the wall of a church called an “anchorhold”. An anchoress kept a strict rule of life, though she was not cloistered in community: her authority was her father confessor, and all divergences from her prescribed routine–including fasting–required his permission. In fact, Julian’s name is a sign of her status: her anchorhold was in St. Julian’s Church in Norwich, so she adopted the church’s name as her own. No record remains of her identity prior to becoming the anchoress of St. Julian’s. Her physical location within that particular church became also the locus of her personal identity: as an anchoress, who could be visited but never seen, she was a voice speaking through a veiled window, almost the voice of the church itself. So she was Dame Julian of St. Julian’s: truly, without irony, the Church Lady.

Again, I shrink from such confinement. I often (too often!) complain about my office in the Park Hall dungeon. I’ve dubbed it my Chinese takeout box, because it is square and taller than it is wide. I’ve got no windows, no view of the world beyond the hall outside, which is itself a little-traveled backwater. But I do have a computer: my portal to the limitless frontiers of the Internet. And, more importantly, I can leave whenever I like. I don’t need the First-Year Comp office’s permission to go outdoors. The notion of an anchorhold is a bit terrifying, like being buried alive. In fact, that’s what it was:

Though there are a number of variations, the enclosure ceremony usually includes the following elements: an anchorite receives last rites, has the Office of the Dead said over her, enters her cell, and is bricked in, accompanied at each stage by various prayers.  (“Ancrene Wisse, Introduction”)

The anchoress was dead to the world, dead to herself. Again, envisioning myself in such a state, I see austerity, self-discipline, and a zealous penitence. I do not see joy.

But look to Julian’s words, dear reader, and ask if such a thing could be written out of stoicism:

[...] there be deeds evil done in our sight, and so great harms taken, that it seemeth to us that it were impossible that ever it should come to good end. And upon this we look, sorrowing and mourning therefor, so that we cannot resign us unto the blissful beholding of God as we should do. And the cause of this is that the use of our reason is now so blind, so low, and so simple, that we cannot know that high marvellous Wisdom, the Might and the Goodness of the blissful Trinity. And thus signifieth He when He saith: thou shalt see thyself if all manner of things shall be well. As if He said: Take now heed faithfully and trustingly, and at the last end thou shalt verily see it in fulness of joy. (XXXII.)

This is Julian’s attitude: not teeth-gritting endurance, but “blissful beholding” and, in the end, “fulness of joy”. And how can she have such joy in such literally straitened circumstances? Because she trusts in the “Wisdom, the Might and the Goodness” of God that “all manner of things shall be well”: evil shall be resolved, even the little evils she knows and now experiences. This is what Christ speaks to her, even as He hangs on the cross, suffering Himself: “All shall be well.” Trust that it will be so, and then comes the joy that passes understanding. St. Julie Billiart had that joy too, I believe. Though she did not leave, so far as I know, the extensive theology that St. Julian did, there is one pet phrase of hers that is commonly cited: “Oh, qu’il est bon, le bon Dieu!”

Oh, how good He is, the Good God!

I’m sure this is going to be more and more common a phenomenon as the years pass: I’ve now got two Facebook friends who are dead.

Certainly I can’t be the first to whom this has happened.  In fact, Spark, one of the CBC podcasts I listen to, devoted an entire episode some months back to the persistence of Internet identity after the mortal who generated that identity has died.  Not surprisingly, some folks have already started to make money from people’s desires to send messages to loved ones, to transfer Internet passwords to one’s survivors, and do other post-mortem Internet things.

Two Facebook Friends

Back in 2009, the first of the two died, someone whom I’d known somewhat in person, first in Johnson City, TN (he was the director of admissions at Milligan College while I was there) and later in Athens, GA (he became an administrator in the Graduate School at UGA about the time I moved to Georgia).  We knew each other in Athens as folks who were acquaintances “back home” know one another: when we would run into one another around town, we would ask each other about news from Tennessee, remember the old days with the Buffaloes, and talk in general terms about our families, jobs, and other such things.  I don’t know that we ever talked about books we were reading or about personal challenges or any of that; we were just casual passing acquaintances, the sort that one picks up here and there over the years.

Now, a year or so after his death, Facebook has the strange habit of putting his picture high on the list whenever it asks me to send results of this or that silly quiz to my friends, and his face reminds me that there was some sort of connection between us and that now, with his face staring out of my computer at me, we have a different sort of connection.

Just a few days ago another Facebook friend, another Michael, Michael Spencer, the Internet Monk, died.  My experience with this Michael was entirely different, entirely mediated by the Internet.  I read his blog for a while, commenting on occasion and receiving responses not always but sometimes.  I listened to his podcast while he was recording it.  I noted back in December 2009 that he and I were both recording our Christmas episodes with colds. As far as I know, he approved my request “to friend” him on Facebook without knowing who I actually was.

What stands out as the main difference between my two Michael experiences, though, is not the fact that I’d never met the Internet Monk in person (I hadn’t) but that with Spencer, I knew that I was on some sort of intellectual adventure with him, both of us trying to make sense of the options open to Christians in our own historical moment, engaging with a strange cast of characters including but certainly not limited to N.T. Wright, John Shelby Spong, Mark Driscoll, Brian McLaren, Joel Osteen, Desmond Tutu, and all of the other public figures, folks who have the potential to reach millions of Christians very quickly by means of light-speed communications technologies.  We were both readers, both folks who would rather confront the status quo with joking winks than growling invective, both of us using relatively educated theological vocabularies with relatively thick coal-mine-midwesterner accents.  I knew all of this about Michael Spencer because part of his public project, part of his persona, was something like my own; as far as I could tell from the Internet Monk Radio podcast, he was, like me, trying to continue the work of what Flannery O’Connor called the “hillbilly Thomist[s].”

The Internet and the Anxiety of the Superhuman

What’s great about the Internet is what makes the Internet most horrifying.  Such is not a new insight; Neil Postman was warning for years before his own death (before the advent of Facebook, not that he would have used it) that every new medium for communication involved its own “Faustian bargains,” that teachers should think very carefully before deciding that computers are in reality good for education.  (My answer to Postman, which I articulate in practice rather than treatise, is that he’s right but that teaching reimagined can happen quite fruitfully mediated by computers rather than the no-less-technological technology of uniform printed textbooks, which by all accounts should have knocked the profession of lecturing/teaching out cold.)  In the case of the Internet’s influence on human connections, every story of a married couple who “met on the Internet” (something that had a strong stigma attached to it when web browsers became ubiquitous in the mid-nineties but now seems as normal as and perhaps even more normal than meeting someone in a bar) has its counterpart in stories of people who stop connecting with the embodied human beings around them in favor of online community.  The Internet has a certain sort of power that I don’t have a good name for, but I think it has to do with the speed and the range with which one can connect to human beings who as a race have become accustomed over the centuries to meeting and knowing a relative handful of people, the ability rapidly to extend one’s powers of connection well beyond human capacity to sustain connections.

The intellectual conservatives (and I count myself as one, with my fingers crossed as normal) often write about the theological concept of natural law in terms of imagining the world in “human-sized” terms: a proper human community, they maintain, is not limited by a number as Plato and Aristotle speculated but by the distance that a human being can reasonably walk or bicycle in order to conduct one’s life.  This conception of natural law, taking into account something like Heidegger’s formulation of Dasein, runs into problems, in those theories, when one’s dwelling becomes radically separated from one’s workplace or one’s marketplace or one’s worship-place.  I can resonate with these critiques (even as I commute fifty minutes each way to work–no, especially because I do so), and I have to think that telecommunications makes even more of an impact, and involves even more Faustian bargains, when one’s ability to transmit text, voice, and image becomes unhitched from the ability for a human being to walk up to someone with a letter in hand, to shout to one’s neighbor, or to point to a picture and expect that someone nearby will see that one is pointing.

So the Internet, imagined in these terms, while it does not expand human capacities to sustain friendship (our real capacity for human connection is still roughly small-town-sized), opens up human beings’ potential to connect with millions of people, making possible a radical sense of option for friendship and therefore giving us occasion for an anxiety that our forebears likely did not even imagine, namely the anxious sense that one is neglecting hundreds, perhaps thousands of people at a time, unable with our limited time and emotional resources to serve every one of our far-flung acquaintances with anything like the dignity that a human being deserves.

Faustian bargains are not without benefits, of course, and I’m not going to become one of those bloggers who blogs about the evils of blogging.  On the contrary, I think that my own link to Michael Spencer, not to mention those to Michial Farmer and David Grubbs and Jeff Wright and Mike Clawson and to everyone else who’s influenced my own thoughts on important questions, and whose company I’d miss out on if not for Internet connections, is a bit of technological wealth that God has given to folks in my particular historic moment, and we’d be a great fool to bury that wealth in the ground.  Rather we should do what Christian Humanists try to do, namely to seize the kairos and try to put such things in some sort of order that glorifies God.  The question is not whether to carry gold out of Egypt but how to adorn a Tabernacle with it rather than shaping a molten calf.

Aristotle on the Internet

Looking to the ancients for some guidance (as we Christian Humanists also tend to do), I think of Aristotle’s discussion of friendship in the closing books of Nicomachean Ethics.  In Aristotle’s formulation, there are three sorts of friendship, and as Aristotle does, he orders them in terms of the ends they serve.  The lowest sort of friendship (but not a bad one–the Greek philosophers were far less apt to reject things categorically than have been their Christian-era counterparts) is one whose end is some sort of extrinsic benefit.  Aristotle is willing to call my relationship with my car mechanic friendship, and my own experience bears that out: although we don’t actually talk Aristotle together, and although I must confess that I live daily in the hope that I won’t see him that day, I do trust him, enjoy his company (it’s the silver lining when I’m forking over money that could buy more books), and otherwise enjoy some of the goods that one can call friendship without crossing my fingers.  (I don’t always cross my fingers, after all.)

The middle sort of friendship, the variety that has survived most intact in the age of capitalism, is the friendship of affection, a friendship that treats the other person as an end in herself or himself.  Again, following Aristotle’s lead, I think that this sort of friendship is a genuine good: I like to think that, even in those moments when my wife Mary’s deliberations upon public school policies don’t directly interest me (since I teach at a Christian college, after all), still the joy I experience merely being in her presence is a genuine good.  Likewise, although my son Micah and daughter Miriam don’t have much interest in the intersections between rhetorical theory and post-Yale-school Christian theology, I have to think that my time with them is one of the better parts of my life.  (This, incidentally, is where Aristotle’s insistence that the best sorts of friendship must be between equals falls apart in the actual experience of enjoying one’s fellow human beings.)

What Aristotle would call the highest form of friendship is the sort of friendship that I can claim with Michael Spencer, namely the mutual pursuit of human excellence.  I’m certain that Michael and I would differ from The Philosopher when we articulated what the highest goods of the human being might be (Aristotle, as far as I know, had never had an encounter with a Jew, much less given any thought to the claims that the Jews’ God might have on his existence), but we can agree that when human beings share genuinely in the pursuit of what’s best about human existence, that constitutes a connection that an honest person must call blessed.

But to repeat what I noted earlier, the sort of blessedness that has resulted from my own connections with Michael Spencer and John Mark Reynolds and Tripp Fuller and Jeff Wright are in fact unimaginable in Aristotle’s vocabulary.  (That’s why intellectual historians describe certain changes but not all changes as revolutionary–they defy the ability for folks before the revolution to think about folks after the revolution.)  Aristotle’s (perfectly reasonable) working assumption is that intellectual friendship, the friendship of excellence, happens between men who are already part of the rich life of the polis, folks who have families and who see those families regularly.  In the Internet age, that’s not necessarily the case: the fifteen-inch (diagonal) screen of my laptop computer is in a real sense a window into a world almost entirely unconnected to Statham, Georgia or to Emmanuel College or to Athens Christian Church.

Aristotle, Faust, Gilmour

And that’s where my own inability to be my own moment’s Aristotle becomes most evident: on one hand, I’m tempted to declare that, for people engaged in the goods of intellect, a certain duality of one’s life is not inevitable (not everyone has to be on the Internet, after all) but certainly a good worth a controlled Faustian bargain.  (I know that Marlowe would laugh at my pride in assuming that Mephistopheles can be a controlled bargain, but I say so anyway.)  If one can maintain the sort of balance that work-away-from-home already requires, participating in Internet-mediated conversation while resisting the Siren’s call to abandon family and congregation and neighbor, that can’t but be a good thing. The ability to connect textually and by other digital means with those folks on the same intellectual quests, this part of my person wants to object, stands to enrich one’s contemplation of reality and deliberation on the good life, and there’s historical continuity with ancient letter-writing, Enlightenment-era pamphleteering, and other means that human beings have used to maintain intellectual friendship in the face of human limitations.

On the other hand, as Michael Spencer himself warned more than once, to the writing of blogs there is no end.  I realize that such might seem like a rotten thing to write mere days after one of my favorite bloggers and podcasters has died, but when I see the thought in his own work, I feel like I ought to take it seriously.  Even noting the irony that I got most of my ideas about localism from books written by people I’ve never met and on blogs that I’ve accessed through that magical laptop rectangle, I still have to take seriously the possibility that I’m exchanging, even when online interaction is at its best, the spheres with which I should interact, if I take certain articulations of natural law seriously, for a farcical attempt to escape my own bodily limitations.

Where do these deliberations leave me?  Writing a blog post, of course.  Many have noted the irony that Plato’s suspicion of writing is preserved in written form in the Phaedrus, and Alasdair Macintyre has noted the further paradox that in order to articulate a theory of morality that prefers sentiment to logic, one must do so in linguistic and logical media.  So, for the moment, I’m not so brazen as to say that I embrace the contradiction, but I do continue to try the sort of work that Michael Spencer was doing, aware of the strangeness that surrounds me even as I tap out post after post.

I’m not going to pretend that I’ve mourned Michael Spencer, even though I did mourn Michael Johnson.  The sort of friendship that mourns death is the sort that remembers bodily presence, and no amount of Derrida is going to convince me otherwise.  Though I’m going to miss Michael Spencer the Internet Monk, I’m not going to try to eulogize Michael Spencer the man.  That’s for his own family and the friends whom he knew by name.  I’m still enough of a localist that I try to save such sadness for family and (embodied, not Facebook) friends.  But just as his Internet-protocol-mediated voice and text have inspired some of my own work, so will his memory, though it’s a memory of a face on a screen and a voice over my car’s speakers, continue to inform the ways that I conduct myself as a Web-intellectual.  I’m no Aristotle, so that’s the best that I’m going to be able to muster at the moment.

There’s no such place as “high above the evangelical circus,” but in some sense I’m still dwelling there, and in some other sense so is Michael Spencer.

[Addendum: You can read several thoughts on Michael Spencer's life and passing here.]

The music this week, at Nathan Gilmour’s request, is John Fogerty’s “Center Field.” What squadron is Fogerty’s favorite?

General Introduction
- A tribute to the Internet Monk
- What’s on the blog?
- Buy our merchandise!

Our Experiences
- Nathan’s seminary basketball league
- The saddest story you’ve ever heard
- What do we like now?
- Why we miss Dennis Miller

Why Do People Like Sports?
- Defining our terms
- Baseline aesthetic pleasure
- Sports and youth
- Having it either way

Sports vs. Art
- Is it right to call sports an art form?
- Active life vs. contemplative life
- English-department disdain
- A glimpse into the Grubbs marriage
- Sports as a cure for melancholy

Is It More Noble to Play Than to Watch?
- Second-hand transcendence
- Looking for narratives
- David waxes poetic
- Why Nathan doesn’t watch sports

Let’s Talk Walter Benjamin
- Stage acting vs. screen acting
- How producers control the narrative
- Why do people go to games?
- The intellectual detachment of minor-league baseball

A New Kind of Battlefield
- Wrestling and boxing
- The line between a race and a fight
- Olympics as sabre-rattling
- Competition without hatred

Music and Sports
- The long heritage of baseball songs
- Old man baseball
- Ease of translation
- “A Dying Cubs Fan’s Last Request”
- Leisurely pace
- What do you call a three-voice rant?
- Self-selecting stereotyping

Sports and Literature
- Chivalric romances
- Icelandic sagas and their football/baseball blend
- Homer and sports
- Jewish-American fiction
- Robert Coover kills imaginary imaginary characters
- Rabbit, Run’s groping for transcendence

Hometown Pride
- Loyalty, rivalry, and why New York, California, and Texas are evil
- Sports as regional definition
- Why we need detachment
- Hereditary rivalries
- David roots for the referees
- Your Zemeckis bash of the week
- Oh, those sophisticated Brits!

Closing Thoughts
- David makes his peace with sports
- Nathan hates sports video games
- (Michial plays Ken Griffey Jr. Major League Baseball while editing this show.)
- Take it more seriously. Or less seriously.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings. Ed. Michael W. Jennings, et al. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2008.

Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Fairford, U.K.: Echo, 2007. Two volumes.

Coover, Robert. The Universal Baseball Association Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. New York: Minerva, 1992.

Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Peter Jones. New York: Penguin, 2003.

—. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 2006.

Malamud, Bernard. The Natural. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.

Updike, John. Rabbit, Run. New York: Knopf, 1996.