Academia and Mental Illness: Some Personal Reflections on the Guardian Article

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academia, Academics, culture of acceptance, depression, guardian, mental illness, OCD

I have a Doctorate, and I managed to get through it alive. For many this, I suppose, would be a metaphor; for those who do or have done a graduate degree with mental illness, it may be a literal fact – and for some, getting through alive does not happen. Our attention has been brought to this most recently by the recent article in The Guardian examining unhealthy attitudes toward mental illness in the academy, which relates the story of J. To determine the exact cause of a person’s suicide is impossible, but, as the author of this article notes, one of the contributing factors in J’s suicide was an academy that has in places fallen into overlooking mental illness and its complicated intersection with graduate school.

As someone who has OCD and depression, I do know what it is like to go through the academic steps needed to get a PhD as well as grapple with such issues, but I have not hitherto written about the intersections of mental illness and the academy in my life. This in part is because it has been mixed; where I have at times felt aware of a certain systemic coldness toward the issue, I have also managed to find individuals and mentors who care. But it is also because the deepest part of what I need to say concerns those things that can’t be handled systemically, the things that remain silent. They probably come out in public academic and administrative matters as quirks or character traits or peccadillos if one (as one is always inclined to do) can sufficiently mask the icebergs of mental illness lying below the iceberg tips that consist in these only subtle clues. But the icebergs are always below the surface with far more girth than we see.

What do I mean by this? What I mean is that beneath the term mental illness there is a complicated web of things that we don’t fully understand, and that affect us well beyond the surface issues that we are forced to deal with when we can no longer suppress them, and it is these we are unwilling to talk about in the academy – perhaps for good reason – because were we to see them clearly, they would terrify us.

Another way of putting this is that the way we deal with mental illness on campuses is by tricking ourselves into the belief that it is a small thing that can be cured very easily. I can understand this impulse – most of us who have experienced mental illness know viscerally the reasons for such a fear and such measures against it – but this really means we end up with a system that favors “treatable” cases and silently weeds out those affected in the most deep and complex ways, those who may not even know how to look for help. Yes, there are systems in place, but my own experience, when helping a friend once deal with a diversity service office regarding depression, is that such administrative offices want a plan rather than an inexplicable mental illness. They want timelines and charts and goals, exactly the sort of things students can’t do WHEN THEY ARE DEPRESSED. If students could fit neatly into this administrative model, they would not have nearly so much trouble working, which would mean they would not need diversity services in the first place. And then there are the signs. Cartoony signs, advertising that all you need to do is talk to someone and it will be better. It may be. It may not be. Both are possibilities, and because mental illness is as much a mystery as it is something we know about and control, this isn’t a promise one can make. My friend felt as if the signs were mocking her – promising something and then offering help that may be no help at all.

And yes, of course, it is assumed that things like diversity services are not there to take care of the root problem – that’s what doctors, psychologists, and psychiatrists are for. Except progress with these specialists varies. When we break bones, some breaks are more serious than others, and some require more drastic surgery or long term treatment. Having policies in place that assume someone can just get mental illness “fixed” ignores this fact – that each case, while having a number of general things in common with other cases, will also be unique according to environment, personality type, friendships, and the skill of the doctor etc. To further the comparison, it would be a lie to put up posters saying that, if you suffer from broken bones, all you need to do is see a doctor and that doctor will categorically fix it. It depends on the break. It depends on how much strength you have. It depends on what medicines you may or may not be allergic too. And you may never fully recover. You might get somewhat better, but you might always walk with a limp.

Then what should we do? I suggest we should do what universities have always been good at doing when not infected by utilitarianism, whether modern or ancient – stand in the presence of complexity and allow it to be complex where it is complex, silent where it is silent, simple where it is simple, and articulated where it is articulated. Don’t come up with a theory to try to “contain” the problem. Instead, let the problem be the thing you are looking at. Because this is one thing I have learned – about my own mental illness – from university, that is, from those gracious persons in the midst of a less caring system willing to teach me what academics is really all about. It is not about having all the answers. It is about listening – and listening carefully – to the problems, whether these are pieces of literature, scientific equations, historical data, or – yes – mental illness. The academy has driven home for me the absolute necessity of being quick to listen and slow to speak. It has not “fixed” my mental illnesses, nor is it its business to do so. But it has taught me some things about them. And most curiously, the places I have learned these things are not from promotional posters or services promoting awareness and implemented into the system. Rather, I have learned these things because various people at the university taught me how to listen. I can only – for my own sake and that of fellow sufferers – wish that those in charge of access and diversity etc. would learn a similar lesson. We have become so used to shouting that we have forgotten how to shut up and listen – and when we pause for a brief moment and claim that we have heard everything there is to hear, we overlook things because we have not been patient; we have not given it enough time.

Is it difficult to do academics with a mental illness? Yes. But I suggest the problem isn’t so much academics as what the academy has become – indeed, if there is a place in society where complexity (of mental and other varieties) can and should be acknowledged and not forced into prepackaged boxes, the university is where it should be. But we have lost our sense of mystery, of standing in awful silence before the complexity of the thing, whatever that thing might be – and with it we have lost our sense of compassion and love.

Let Me Tell You About My Dissertation: Why People With OCD Will Not Always Strike You As Being “OCD” About Things

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Academics, Anxiety, Disorders, dissertation, Health, Mental health, Obsessive Compulsive, Obsessive–compulsive disorder, OCD, Support Groups

I am posting this as something of a public service announcement that, I hope, will help educate people about OCD. There are a variety of typical things we associate with OCD, and these usually involve obsessive cleanliness or neatness of some form – some people in fact incorrectly boast about how “OCD” they are about cleaning their house, at which point I want to ask these people, “Really? Does apparent messiness really send you into a state of panic and anxiety based on problems that do not exist and are dealt with via compulsive responses that will not help? If you were in fact “OCD” about it, you would be too exhausted to boast (and for that matter the feeling of messiness would never go away, no matter how clean things are).” To be sure, there are people whose obsessions and compulsions involve arranging things, or cleaning, or eliminating germs. But if this is the only thing you think of when you think of OCD, there are a significant number of us you are failing to see. What I want to tell you about here is how in fact someone with OCD can, in fact, look exactly like the opposite of what people stereotypically associate with OCD.

The thing to remember about OCD is that those with OCD only feel their particular obsessions and compulsions regarding certain areas of life – in other areas, they can be as cautious or rash as anyone else. And externally, in the areas that their OCD affects, they will usually appear to the casual observer as just overly cautious because most people with OCD are good at hiding it. The question of whether OCD in fact affects their actual results in their area of obsession is debatable. In some cases it will mean a house is spotless by any normal standards even while it appears filthy to the person with OCD, much as a person with anorexia will appear to themselves overweight even when they are not – and are often indeed underweight – by verifiable standards. But in some cases OCD in fact negatively affects the exact thing one is worried about. Let me tell you about my dissertation.

Back when I was preparing my dissertation, I was editing obsessively, reading words over and over again, looking for some tricky, hidden errors that might be missed by everyone else. Finally, in exhaustion, I submitted. But I read my dissertation again just before my defense, and found all kinds of embarrassing errors. Why did I catch them the second time, and not the first time?

Upon reflection, I think the reason is that what I was doing to deal with the anxiety in the first round was obsessing and compulsing rather than editing. I was whipping myself up into a state of frenzy and looking for that one tiny thread that could pull apart the dissertation entire. But when one is looking for apocalypse, one overlooks little things, like spelling and grammar etc. – there is just not enough energy to deal with these things AND that one mysterious thing you are looking for and trying to fix lest it undo everything. In fact, there is barely enough energy to think rationally and be able in fact to tell reasonably what such a gap might look like – one is too busy looking for it to bother defining it.

So what was different the second time? There were no stakes. I couldn’t change anything even if I wanted to. And so I could read more calmly and actually see my dissertation as it was rather than as an object of intense anxiety. The difference is that there was nothing I could do about it, so I was actually reading it rather than trying to save it with an exhausted OCD hero-complex. Paradoxically, though, it was exactly this intense obsession with fixing the dissertation that in fact kept me from seeing the places where it needed to be fixed.

So how does this pan out in the rest of my life? I think it pans out such that I sometimes appear to people as lazy, only approaching something with a half effort. This is because what for most people are just the basic standards of good work are in fact what comes last in my OCD brain. Spelling errors and grammatical errors can always be fixed. But that one elusive argument that might be there and might be one’s undoing – that is something more serious, and it must be found before moving on to more basic issues. So you will see how it is that, though I have pored over my work to a point of exhaustion, these errors will still be there, coming last in the process and undertaken under the shade of a huge crisis of stress. The problem of course is that other people are not obsessive-compulsives – or rather, it is certainly not a problem, but it comes into effect when they gauge my work. There are people who stop paying attention after a few grammatical or spelling errors.

But why, you say, don’t I get proofreaders? First, getting things to them on time is nearly impossible because I am editing and rearranging right up to the last exhausting minute; I never finish things, only cast them off wildly and in a flurry at the deadline. So what I send proofreaders is a draft, if I even have that ready, and even then it will be likely that I have changed a significant amount by the time they get back to me. And then there is the problem of bothering people generally. I do not like to put people out just because I have OCD, and even if I did, I can never figure out the appropriate way to approach or ask them (another OCD thing, having to feel “just right” before doing something, for me particularly when it involves interacting with people).

So why am I writing all this? Three reasons: One is in the hope of helping people realize that OCD is not synonymous with carefulness or preciseness – indeed, obsessions and compulsions may leave no energy for other “more normal” concerns, and so those with OCD can in these areas appear negligent or lazy whereas in fact they are just exhausted. Another is that I hope others with OCD might resonate with this story, and might in fact see that sometimes identifying the toll of OCD in one’s life involves making a distinction between something like real editing and what one thought was editing but was in fact really obsession. Thirdly, I want to end in appreciation of those who do not get credit precisely for this reason, that OCD causes others to judge them wrongly. I know the battlefield for myself, and I know that many of those who judge can’t even begin to understand how very courageous and resolute you are in simply retaining your patch of small and malnourished ground in the battlefield of life. Take a moment to recognize your accomplishments – and there are accomplishments if in fact you have survived long enough to read this – and then keep fighting, if not for yourself, then at least for the sake of others with OCD.

“In Valley and in Plain”: A Job Market Theodicy

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academia, Academics, Dante, Dante Alighieri, Humanities, job market, john milton, Paradise Lost, PhD, Slate, theodicy

A recent Slate article entitled “Thesis Hatement” has sparked some discussion on this blog. As its subtitle proclaims, the article argues that “getting a literature Ph.D. will turn you into an emotional trainwreck, not a professor” and traces the inevitable experience of a newly minted literature Ph.D. Told that if she works hard enough, she will finally land a tenure-track job, she finds this was a lie. She is a mouse trapped in a Kafkaesque maze with no way out—and a hungry cat. (The author, Rebecca Schuman, just finished a dissertation on Kafka.) The theme is familiar across the humanities: it is irresponsible for institutions to continue credentialing people for a career that is no longer available to the vast majority of graduates. It is quixotic for the students to undertake such a program. Don’t do it, and—if you really are “humane”—don’t counsel your students to do it either. Equally familiar are the articles on the other side, which point to the enduring value of the liberal arts in a time of economic trial and call for renewed interest in studying (and funding) them lest we suffer profound long-term consequences as a culture. Already Slate has published a counterpoint, by NYU journalism professor Katie Roiphe, who holds up the literature PhD as useful in many ways besides ensuring a tenure-track job “in a pretty leafy college town.” Foremost among these, says Roiphe, is the development of “a nurturing faith in your private preoccupations, a creative desire that is detached from questions of what other people care about.”

Both articles are depressing, though Roiphe’s is unintentionally so. I suspect that Schuman may not find her increased “faith in her private preoccupations” worth the sacrifices in job security and dignity outlined in her piece—nor is it certain that her newly nurtured faith will withstand the buffeting of market pressures and the ignominy of adjunct work. I want to take another tack, to answer Schuman not only as a fellow student of literature, but also as a fellow “sufferer” on the academic job market, something Roiphe is not.  As a fellow literature student, I am interested more in the narrative backdrop to Schuman’s argument than in trotting out facts and figures and anecdotes to determine how dire the situation is, really, or where humanities PhDs might go if not to tenure-track jobs. As a fellow “sufferer,” I want to avoid whining, on one side, and on the other, an unfeeling dismissal of Schuman’s complaints. While many groups down the ages have suffered a great deal more than humanities PhDs since 2008, there is truth in Schuman’s lament that warrants our attention, both as people committed to liberal arts education, and as people called to respond to suffering with faith, hope, and love.

In this spirit I want to suggest that Schuman’s first mistake was in studying Kafka. There is a nihilism in the picture she paints that goes far beyond the drudgery of a job that just pays the bills. The mouse in the maze, she points out, “wasn’t going in the wrong direction so much as it was walking cat food the entire time. A graduate career is just like this, only worse.” She admits that this is a subjective take on the matter, that nobody outside of academia can understand our desperate need for tenure-track jobs. But a desperate need we have. We cut the same heartbreaking figure as a woman who has become attached to a cold man, sacrificing more and more to win his love, willfully ignoring signs of his indifference because the alternative has become too terrifying to contemplate. Psychologically the same forces are at work: having been lured in by early praise and displays of interest on the part of professors and graduate programs, we invest an increasing amount of heart, with the stakes eventually becoming so high that perspective and reason are lost. Schuman’s answer: don’t start down that road. Do something else.

But I wonder whether any commitment, any investment of heart in a calling or a person, is free from this liability. I wonder, too, how much of the blame for this suffering rests with the sufferer. In a romantic relationship, one person can lead the other on, and no doubt professors and administrators need to think carefully about the ethics of encouraging young people to pursue humanities PhDs and mounting PhD programs. But I am peculiarly qualified to scrutinize Schuman’s side of the story because I share her struggles: we began our graduate careers the same year, and next year looks bleak for both of us, career-wise. We also seem to think alike, because I too approach personal and political problems at the level of literary backdrop (or, if you like, metanarrative). She starts with Kafka; I want to explore a framework here that might offer a more hopeful alternative.

Whose Fault?

If there’s one category into which every book I really love falls, that category would be “literary theodicy”: narrative texts that wrestle thoughtfully with the question of why things aren’t better. These run from the book of Job to Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Milton’s Paradise Lost, C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces and Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation.” Like an old Western, the literary theodicy builds to a face-off in which two main figures gird up their loins, so to speak, and say what has been on their minds the whole time. Unlike most Westerns, in literary theodicy, one of the two figures is God. Usually the argument is not philosophical, but—this is the “literary” part—arises from the story that has been building to that point: to understand why I am grieved, you had to be there and see how it happened. In the case of Job, God’s response is, effectively, “Exactly”: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world?” Works outside the biblical canon, constrained not to speak for God for fear of blasphemy,[1] typically focus on the other figure, the self. “Here’s my story,” they say. “Am I guilty?” The answer is typically a resounding “yes”: Adam and Eve are responsible for the loss of Eden; Ruby Turpin is a wart hog from hell. This is unusual. Stories are usually told for purposes of self-justification; these, by contrast, are works of critical self-examination, even self-condemnation. They call into question the motives and activities of the characters whose stories they tell—and often, by extension, of their authors. An example that springs to mind is The Brothers Karamazov, in which Fyodor Dostoevsky gives the loathsome Karamazov father his own first name. How might the self-examining narrative of a recent literature PhD read?

Let me make clear what I am not saying. I am not saying that humanities PhDs are responsible for our own grief because we should have known better than to study humanities, nor yet that some divine boom is being lowered on us because of our sin (an assumption of Job’s friends and not of the biblical narrator). Christians are convicted of guilt; establishing any clear relationship between particular offenses and particular suffering, though, is notoriously difficult. Here again narrative can shed light in ways philosophy can’t. In one of his stories, Garrison Keillor explores the question of guilt and suffering by inviting us into the mind of a man contemplating adultery. As this man, Jim Nordberg, waits for his romantic interest to pick him up and take him to Chicago, he reflects:

As I sat on the lawn looking down the street, I saw that we all depend on each other. I saw that although I thought my sins could be secret, that they are no more secret than an earthquake. All these houses and all these families—my infidelity would somehow shake them. It will pollute the drinking water. It will make noxious gases come out of the ventilators in the elementary school. When we scream in senseless anger, blocks away a little girl we do not know spills a bowl of gravy all over a white tablecloth. If I go to Chicago with this woman who is not my wife, somehow the school patrol will forget to guard the intersection and someone’s child will be injured. A sixth grade teacher will think, “What the hell,” and eliminate South America from geography. Our minister will decide, “What the hell—I’m not going to give that sermon on the poor.” Somehow my adultery will cause the man in the grocery store to say, “To hell with the Health Department. This sausage was good yesterday—it certainly can’t be any worse today.”

“Far from being hidden,” Keillor concludes, “each sin is another crack in the world.”[2] And what is true of John Milton, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Flannery O’Connor, I find true of myself. Not that I’m a famous author; that I’m guilty too.

These are gloomy reflections for a narrative purporting to be hopeful, but it’s important to know where I stand before I assess my prospects for next year and beyond. Nor do I think that the reality of where I stand “goes without saying”: the point of liturgy is that this particular narrative never goes without saying. The story doesn’t make sense unless all the movements are there. But the liturgy doesn’t end with confession, and neither do these literary theodicies end with utter destruction. In fact, if Schuman’s piece were a true “Jeremiad” (her word), there would be lots of confession of sin and a ray of hope for the future. Jeremiah has much in common with the texts I’ve just been describing: the prophet squares off with God, and God responds convincingly that Israel is responsible for her own desolation. Jeremiah’s most searing question, though, comes after all this: “Hast thou utterly rejected Judah?” Everything hangs on that “utterly.” Many bloggers and analysts are already calling the current generation of humanities PhDs “lost.” Are we utterly lost?

Both Schuman and Roiphe’s accounts of the situation facing the humanities PhD miss the distance marked by “utterly.” Both conflate one chapter of the story with the whole story. Roiphe no less than Schuman assumes that fulfillment for me, now, is the intrinsic good toward which all our efforts tend: that gained, we have won; that lost, we have lost indeed. The climax of Roiphe’s optimistic argument is that you acquire in graduate school “a habit of intellectual isolation that is well, useful, bracing, that gives you strength and originality.” Presumably if you somehow come out of graduate school without this, or if it is beaten out of you by the job market, then Schuman’s maze still obtains. This is one way to understand the human condition, but it is not the only way.

In Medias Res

Books eleven and twelve of Paradise Lost always come as something of a surprise to first-time readers. Having plumbed the depths of hell and soared to the heights of heaven, having managed his ‘great argument’ of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace after casting an eye over the story of Satan’s failed rebellion, Milton takes us through hundreds of lines of reiterated biblical history in the form of a lesson sent to Adam through the archangel Michael. At first moving slowly through events recorded early in Genesis, Michael’s narrative picks up speed (and switches from visual to aural), covering not only the events leading up to Milton’s time but beyond, to the consummation of time itself. This move on Milton’s part has not been met with universal praise. C.S. Lewis, usually an ardent defender of the epic, famously called the archangel’s survey an “untransmuted lump of futurity,” and my students sometimes feel the same. It’s not that the two books are boring—it’s the catalogues of unfamiliar place names that are sometimes accused of that—they just seem somehow unnecessary for moving the plot along. In asking my students why, in light of this objection, Milton might have chosen to lump futurity onto the end of his epic, I sometimes zag over to The Lord of the Rings. “In Tolkien’s fiction,” I ask (now I have their full attention), “why does he call it ‘Middle Earth’?”

A teacher I love once remarked that Dostoevsky writes “conscious of the stories he’s not telling because he’s telling this one.” Tolkien is that and more: he sets his stories in Middle Earth because they only makes sense if the characters (and the reader) live and move in the knowledge that there is a bigger story that started before they got there and will continue after they leave, in which their own peregrinations play a part. So too does Milton place his narrative of the Fall in the shadow of those last two books. Adam and Eve were made to understand that their story was preceded by mighty events in heaven, and they must also understand that they will be succeeded by epochs of human faithlessness and divine faithfulness. Books eleven and twelve extend this sense of “middleness” to the reader, in whatever age she lives: Adam and Eve’s story is our own story, and not in a metaphorical way. Like Adam and Eve, we see only in part, but we see enough to know that bigger things are afoot, that we have a destiny. This consciousness is characteristic of every epic since Virgil, but in the Christian epic—with its imputation of guilt to the hero (Dante’s Comedia begins with a culpably lost pilgrim)—it takes on peculiar poignancy.

There is a theological word for the failure to see the larger story, and that word is “despair.” It is the condition of those in Dante’s hell, the gates of which say lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate—“leave behind every hope, you who enter.” Earlier when I described the need for affirmation from the academy (in the form of a respectable job) as “desperate,” drawing an analogy to a forlorn lover, I was trying to be very precise. The word means, literally, “without hope.” What I want to point out here is that both Schuman’s negative account and Roiphe’s positive one are equally hopeless, in terms of a larger story that might invest their own with meaning. The backdrop to both accounts is very like the backdrop that C.S. Lewis identifies in epic before Virgil, in which, Lewis says,

no one event is really very much more important than another. No achievement can be permanent: today we kill and feast, tomorrow we are killed. An inch beneath the bright surface of Homer we find not melancholy but despair. ‘Hell’ was the word Goethe used for it. It is all the more terrible because the poet takes it all for granted, makes no complaint. . . . [Homer’s] greatness lies in the human and personal tragedy built up against this background of meaningless flux.[3]

Many humanities PhDs have reason to be melancholic. But in the Christian story, darkness is a condition through which one passes, not an abiding reality so comprehensive that the pilgrim doesn’t think to question it. Bunyan’s Christian is tempted to wallow in the Slough of Despond, but called to recognize the Slough for what it is and move forward in faith.

Conclusions

My labor here has been to step back and see the Slough, to assess how my story might be important for reasons beyond self-affirming originality no less than prestige and tenure. Possibly the insights I can draw for my own peregrination in higher learning can be inferred easily enough from the literary reflections above—but for my own sake let me take stock.

(1) If any life in the academy—however exalted—must be located in a larger story in order to have purpose, then any life so located—however lowly, wandering and broken—has purpose. In this world there may remain a need to call for justice, to apologize, to crunch numbers and lobby for change, to educate people young and old about the importance of the liberal arts and those who teach them, but ultimately the worth of those teachers does not hang on whether the world listens. Following from this,

(2) I am responsible to work against the scale of values that sets tenure-track faculty above other members of the community, in both my thoughts and my actions. Many academic Jeremiads focus on violence suffered by contingent faculty because of a lack of attention given them, in Simone Weil’s sense. The fault for this rests not only, or even primarily, on the people who write their paychecks: it rests on all of us. Here again Tolkien is instructive, for he gives particular attention to hobbits, a species not usually thought worthy of attention.[4] Who are the hobbits in the story of the modern academy? A species that stands out in my mind besides the much-bewailed adjunct is the student. Adjuncts are now responsible for a large percentage of the face-to-face instruction received by students in the United States. In behaving as though adjuncts have lost in the game of life, we imply that students are worthless. There are few sights in the academy more heartbreaking than that of a contingent faculty member who has come to accept this view himself, whose students suffer the consequences. I need to remember that if I am a contingent faculty member, either for a season or for the rest of my life, I am doing work of infinite value in caring for the souls in front of me; and

(3) A teacher of humanities who does not understand (1) and (2) should not be teaching in the humanities. We likely pursued our PhDs because we believe that there are things more important than “success” in terms of money and prestige. It’s not wrong to want security, comfort, attention and respect, but neither we nor our students will get as much as we want in the way of these things—so I pray that, if I am going to experience dearth and difficulty, I can at least bear witness to the fact that there are resources to sustain people who lack “success.” In fact, my experience of dearth and difficulty may allow me to testify to hope in ways I could not do otherwise. I am not saying that this potential good justifies the suffering of everyone who has been trampled down in the dehumanizing of the academy; I am saying that, if I let it, my own suffering can be translated into good, both for myself and for my students.

(4) Ultimately, that good can’t be held back by my circumstances. I want to end by turning once more to the end of Paradise Lost, to the moment when Adam and Eve are exiled from Eden. This thwarting of well-laid plans comes with ignominy, uncertainty, and difficulty of the direst sort. But Michael offers Adam these words, which follow us in our story too, at whatever stage in our lives and careers:

Yet doubt not but in valley, and in plain
God is, as here; and will be found alike
Present; and of his presence many a sign
Still following thee, still compassing thee round
With goodness and paternal love, his face
Express, and of his steps the track divine.

---

[1] An exception is William Paul Young’s The Shack, on which see Katherine Jeffrey’s review in the January 2010 issue of Books and Culture.

[2] Quoted in Ralph Wood, Contending for the Faith, pp. 151-52.

[3] A Preface to Paradise Lost, pp. 29-30.

[4] I’m grateful to Churl for this observation.

Prophetic Awkwardness, The Common Riddle, and the Justification of the Academy

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academia, Academics, C.S. Lewis, Christ, Christian, Common good, God, Logres, PhD, Prophecy, Prophetic Critique, Socrates, That Hideous Strength, University

Chinglican is probably right in his response to my prior post; more or less, he took the conversation in the direction I alluded to and then left open when I said that these matters require a broader discussion of ends and means. And much of what he laid out is probably a good reason for doing academics. As he said of my research, it is most certainly not apolitical. And probably being prophetic and caring about the common good is a good idea. Indeed, had I been pressed, this probably would have been something of the direction I might have taken the conversation myself, and probably the way that many Christians would take the conversation. So why didn’t I do that in the first place?

To tell the truth, it is because I have to a certain degree become allergic to words and phrases like “the common good” and “prophetic critique.” What is meant at the root of them is surely important. But nowadays it seems like everyone and their dog is making “prophetic critiques” right, left, and centre; and I often feel that some who talk about the “common good” really mean something else, perhaps something more common than good. Put another way, Chinglican situates the university as a body independent of various institutions that can potentially abuse power, and therefore as a legitimate critic. The problem I have though is conceiving of a university context that is in fact independent; it is not after all as if the university structure hovers above the socioeconomic and religious reality like some worldly version of the church triumphant (as understood by Protestants), nor are those who run the university beyond the temptation of twisting power manipulatively. Universities may be watchmen, but who watches the watchmen?

So how would I put the matter differently? First off, I would say that, if we are using terms like “prophetic” and “common good,” the task for Christians (and any other well meaning people for that matter) is not simply to put them out there as justifications for the academy, but rather to live in such a way that they emerge from their quotation marks – that is, such that they actually become plausible options for believing in. Yes, it is true that my generation is cynical – indeed, very cynical – but I think it is a mistake to simply blame this on a fully deliberate choice or a pervasive nihilism. These things may indeed be there, but at the very bottom of cynicism is generally an experience of deep betrayal – indeed, I would suggest that, far from being the least hopeful of people, those who are cynical about things embody a very deep hope that has been crushed. Conversely, pragmatists are not those who are particularly optimistic about the world, but rather those not optimistic enough – they cannot be bothered to take a moment and mourn for what might have been. To talk plausibly about the “common good” and “prophetic critique” we will, I think, need to live in such a way that even the most cynical – to the degree that this cynicism is symptomatic and not chosen – can begin to believe that these words might have meaning.

Secondly, I suppose I would make a distinction between my vocation as an academic and what we might call the bodied effects of this – i. e. the job I have etc. A helpful way of looking at it perhaps is what C. S. Lewis in That Hideous Strength describes as the struggle between Logres and Britain that goes on throughout society. Here, we have not so much an independent body evaluating the behavior of other parts of society as much as we have a loose collective of people working – certainly for the common good – but in a very bodied, disparate, cross vocational, and often frustrating way. Indeed, in this book, the real prophetic critique and interest in the common good comes out of Logres, but the company most likely to use terms like these (and speak of independent knowledge) are their opponents – indeed, they have managed to produce a head independent of a body and other earthly props. This distinction allows me to both agree with Chinglican and what I said prior – I am not wedded to the academy, per se – but it may be the arena where I enact the thing that is in fact undeniably part of who I am, my vocation. The company of Logres exists regardless of where each member works.

So, given my pessimism about these words and phrases, what would I talk about instead of prophetic critique and the common good? I would talk about prophetic awkwardness and the common riddle. With regard to the former, it seems to me that the two greatest instances of what we might call “the prophetic voice” – Christ and Socrates – hardly garnered the kind of favor and “cool points” we think of when we think of radical and prophetic people. When you encounter a prophet, he or she may not make you feel like an oh-so-good-radical doing oh-so-good things for an oh-so-messed up world. Rather, encountering a prophet might make you distinctly uncomfortable. It may even make you feel murderous.

And what I mean by “the common riddle” is something like what Augustine means when he talks about the restlessness in our hearts. There is a tendency for people to approach the so-called common good in the so-called common square with ready-made solutions – we have seen the common problem and we have the common fix. But I would suggest that if we do not have some degree of uncertainty or tentativeness in our minds regarding this fix, it is probably in fact not one – it is rather a way of papering over problems we don’t want to see. What Augustine knew is that our hearts our restless until they find rest in God. And this means that restlessness and problems, rather than something to be covered over, are something to be pursued. I worry that too many people, in pursuit of the so-called common good, sacrifice common mystery, which is in fact this restlessness. And the irony of course is that in fact the only way to get a truly common good – a good for both city of God and city of man – is by following this restlessness to its proper end.

 

Why I Am a Doctoral Student: A Response to the Slate’s Thesis Hatement and Thesis Defense

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academia, Academics, Anglo-Saxon, Doctor of Philosophy, Doctorate, Facebook, J. R. R. Tolkien, John Donne, PhD, Slate, Thesis Defense, Thesis Hatement, Tolkien

According to the recent Slate article “trending” among academics on Facebook, we should resist the temptation of getting a PhD in literature. This for the reason that the job market for graduates is terrible. As a literature scholar who is quasi on the market myself, I have experienced enough of this, and I will no doubt experience much more. In response to this, another Slate article suggests that there are particular skills one gets from a Ph.D, even if one doesn’t get an academic job. But in my opinion, this response is in places a little one-sided; it kind of makes the lifestyle of the graduate student sound like that of a poor bohemian activist. You may not end up an academic for the rest of your life. But the skills you learn can be applied in a variety of professions. And you might as well enjoy “that brief, blissful time cultivating your Idea.” Or, as the article concludes, “The inefficient path has its joys and largesse.”

The interesting thing about both articles is that both seem to gauge the worth of a Doctorate by what it does for one’s self. They are in many ways self-focused, cost-benefit analyses, one concluding that the price is too steep, and the other concluding that, all things considered, the price is as reasonable as many other life choices. But here’s the question I have. What if you are not one of those students who thinks they are going to change the world? What if you are writing your dissertation knowing that there is a good chance that the most people will care about it is a few months before your defense, and that because it is part of their academic duty? What if what you say won’t change the world, even when all your peers are going around (allegedly) doing life altering things for {insert favorite special minority here}. What if it is fairly clear that you will probably not get a job in your field, and if you do you are lucky? And let’s raise the stakes. What if the work you are doing does not come easily? What if it is painstaking and mind-breaking, hardly the kind of romanticized flight of fancy that people imagine when they think of someone doing a degree in something as “useless” as literature. What if, to make matters worse, you have moderate levels of OCD and depression that complicate these things. The second article defending the PhD begins to look a little too romantic. And the other more pessimistic article begins to look like the only option – the only option, that is, if one factors out love.

By this I do not mean some sentimental attachment to things; and I am certainly not saying we need to study these things to save our country, or our generation, or Western civilization, or oppressed minorities, or whatever else wants saving. Some of these things are beyond saving; some have become not worth saving; and some should be left to the choices they have made, free will being what it is. In some cases, where saving needs to be done, it may not be our discipline or the academy entire that is the solution. I am not even here talking about self-love, unless in terms of the way that a Doctorate disabuses us of our pretensions about how much we matter. No, what I am talking about is that thing that at bottom that cannot be explained, the thing that draws us to care for certain things and people at the cost of great sacrifice over against the jeers and laughs of the rest of the world.

Of course, both of the articles I draw attention to are in some ways grounded in a kind of love. At their worst they may be grounded in selfish ambition, at their best, perhaps a love of humanity and progress, a sense that we can actually contribute something to the world around us, and that a Ph.D. may or may not further this. Neither author seems set against sacrifice – each just wants it to be pointed in the right direction. But neither explains the love. Neither explains why we feel the need to care for modern humanity, or progress, or success, or any of those things. They are cited as categorical goods, but I’m not sure what scale is being used to determine this.

Having said this, I am not in any way claiming that I will replace these unexplained assumptions with anything terribly clear. But knowing that they are unexplained assumptions does level the playing field a little. The modern person will make sacrifices and take pains to succeed in a system he or she does not know how to justify. And the doctoral student studying obscure works does something very similar. The real question, of course, is about the end and purpose of life, something we postmoderns are far too fashionably cynical to engage seriously. And for my money (or lack of it!), whatever the results, I guess that the reason I have done a Ph.D. is for love – not so much the “I feel in love with a poem and got all swoony” kind of love, but the John Donne “Batter my heart” kind of love, the love that costs. If my relationship with literature were a marriage of convenience, I would have walked away long ago.

At bottom it is very hard to explain. Why do I feel the need to love dead Old English people by listening carefully to them, trying to hear what they are saying and not what I want them to say? Why does it bother me when they are misrepresented and caricatured? Why have I been drawn to love a particular tract of the universe carved out by Anglo-Saxon sages and so unfashionable in an age that has lost its appreciation of wisdom? I know and I don’t know. There are myriad reasons, too many to count, in some ways. But there is also the mystery. This is something I have been given to do. No one promised that one would be able to justify the ways of one’s vocation.

Does this mean that I think that what I am doing will have no effect or implication for modern thought? Of course not. But it does give me a reason to keep going whether or not I see effects or implications. Some things that we think important will eventually be shown to be empty. And some things we think empty will eventually be shown to be important. And it is hard to tell at the moment which are which. Part of the problem is that I cannot make promises about how “revolutionary” my work will be. If I am doing proper research, I do not know how it will come out, and so I cannot say how it will affect the world.

Perhaps the best way to sum up how I feel about these things is to turn to J. R. R. Tolkien, a paradoxical figure because he had a degree as useless as mine and has probably done a good deal more for the modern world than most practically minded people. This, though, is not why I appeal to him, but rather because I like his model of love for little things that don’t matter. In his most popular work, Lord of the Rings, this is seen in Gandalf’s interest in Hobbits, the creatures so insignificant that they are generally not mentioned in the broader histories, and are certainly not the interest of those who care about things that matter, like Saruman. But Tolkien also explores such love in one of his lesser known but one of my favorite works, “Leaf by Niggle.” The story is basically about two neighbors who get on each other’s nerves and potter away at their respective interests; Parish like gardening, and Niggle, the main character, is a painter. The story is about how both characters end up in purgatory/heaven and learn to appreciate each other. Both of their earthly interests are seen to have been an anticipation and longing for a heavenly reality. But what I find most interesting is the fate of Niggle’s art at the end of the story. Though the love he shows in his painting is in fact good and perhaps even part of salvation, his painting is only mediocre, and its fate is to be destroyed except for a small piece that ends up as a misunderstood curiosity on a museum wall. His love mattered in a way that could not be gauged on this side of the world – much like the love one might put into the subject of one’s doctorate. I am not of course claiming that doing a Ph.D. is the only way to practice this kind of love, but it is one way, and a way that is simply not being acknowledged in the ongoing debates over the worth of higher education.

Theological Education and the Public Pastor

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academia, Academics, African American theology, Barack Obama, civil religion, civil rights, congregationalism, ecclesiology, ecumenism, Eugene Cho, Evangelical, feminist theology, gender, homosexuality, James Cone, Louie Giglio, Mark Driscoll, martyrdom, queer theology, Reinhold Niebuhr, seminary, St. Stephen, Theology

On January 22, 2013, Barack Hussein Obama was inaugurated for a second term as President of the United States of America.  The inauguration itself had been the subject of some evangelical controversy.  On January 9, Think Progress posted a sermon by Pastor Louie Giglio that he had preached in the mid-1990s. The sermon’s title said it all: “In Search of a Standard – Christian Response to Homosexuality.”

Giglio, the founder of the Passion Conferences and pastor of Passion City Church in Atlanta, promptly bowed out of the inauguration on January 10.  He was then ridiculed by the secular media, defended by evangelicals, and finally given The Last Word‘s “Rewrite” by progressive Catholic and MSNBC news host, Lawrence O’Donnell.

The evangelical drama wasn’t over yet.  After the Giglio débacle unfolded, Obama announced that he would put his hand on two Bibles as he took the presidential oath: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Bible and Abraham Lincoln’s Bible.  That went pretty smoothly.

But then, there was this tweet from within the heart of the evangelical world from Pastor Mark Driscoll at Mars Hill Church:

Praying for our president, who today will place his hand on a Bible he does not believe to take an oath to a God he likely does not know.

— Mark Driscoll (@PastorMark) January 21, 2013

Of course, Driscoll might contest that he could be characterized as being “the heart of the evangelical world” because he is from Seattle, but suffice it to say that it seemed like the Giglio drama was reignited. Driscoll perplexed the secular news media, was defended by fans on his social media pages (while called expletive names by others), was deconstructed by the Naked Pastor, and provoked not-a-few facepalms from Christians who deemed themselves thoughtful.  Here’s Eugene Cho, just across the bridge from Driscoll, for example:

On MLK Day, you want me to honor his legacy by responding to a privileged white dude pastor who rarely-if ever-engages civil rights? No thx.

— Eugene Cho (@EugeneCho) January 21, 2013

What was fascinating was that, in a piece completely unconnected with these incidents, the same Mark Driscoll posted a response to a young man seeking to know whether he should major in ministry during his undergraduate education.  Driscoll’s answer, using the typical Driscoll-isms of masculine appeal to “men are like trucks; they drive straighter with a load,” turned into an all-out exposé of the contemporary seminary as a debt-inflating institution with which young men exploring a ministry option should be very cautious to engage.

True as Driscoll’s advice may have been, however, I found myself wondering about Driscoll’s musings on theological education in the context of the public pastoral débacles of the last two weeks. I mean, it seems these days that it might be better to read a few books than spend money on seminary curriculum built around Scriptural exegesis, church history, systematic theology, and a few practical ministry courses, plus an internship in which you pay the seminary to work for a church. I mean, if you can teach yourself these things, why waste your money and four years of your life? But I wonder if Driscoll’s advice, as responsible as it sounds, might be short-selling his readers.

Indeed, had Driscoll himself received broader exposure and critical pedagogical guidance to a wider set of theological traditions, his critique of Obama might have been more acute. Of course, I am assuming that one receives a broad exposure to a wide array of theologies in seminary, which, from my experience as a dropout from two theological institutions, is probably not a safe assumption to make about many schools. However, there may be a case here that it is precisely pedagogical guidance to the breadth in historical and contemporary theological conversations that should be the added-value of a seminary education over reading a book and that seminaries should be making sure that they are providing this service if they aren’t doing it already.

Take, for example, a hypothetical situation in which Driscoll, instead of being only narrowly exposed to a narrow system in evangelical theology during his theological training, might have critically engaged critiques of Obama and his theological guru, Reinhold Niebuhr, launched by James Cone and Cornel West, both faculty specialists in African American theology at Union Theological Seminary. (Sure, Driscoll has occasionally confessed to reading feminist theologians and not enjoying them, but one wonders if more pedagogical guidance here would have been necessary.) West’s critique of Obama sounds eerily similar to Driscoll’s, but with a bit more teeth:

I mean, that sounds so similar to Driscoll: West is saying that if Obama does not carry out policies of justice for the least of these in poverty-stricken America, he doesn’t have a right to put his hand on a Bible that is filled with verses of justice that speaking of a God of justice in which King believed.  If West critiques Obama directly, Cone takes on Obama’s major theological influence, Reinhold Niebuhr, in his recent book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, where he suggests that being influenced by Niebuhr does not equate being rooted in the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.:

There was, however, an important difference between Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King Jr. that partly accounts for why King became a martyr in the civil rights movement while Niebuhr remained safely confined in his office at Union Seminary teaching Christian social ethics, never risking his life in the fight for justice.  Unlike King, Niebuhr viewed agape love, as revealed in Jesus’ cross, as an unrealizable goal in history–a state of perfection which no individual or group in society could ever fully hope to achieve.  For Niebuhr, Jesus’ cross was an absolute transcendent standard that stands in judgment over any human achievement.  The most we can realize is “proximate justice,” which Niebuhr defined as a balance of power between powerful collectives.  But what about groups without power?  Niebuhr did not have much to say to African Americans, a 10-percent minority, except to recommend nonviolence, which he believed might advance the cause of civil rights, while never winning full justice.  Niebuhr’s moderate view was not one to empower a powerless group to risk their lives for freedom.  That might have been why he did not talk to militant black groups or black nationalists in Harlem.  He had very little to say to them.  (James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2011, p. 71.)

Yes, that sounds like Obama-style pragmatism to me too.  No, I’m not saying that Driscoll needs to become African American; that makes about as much sense as when St. Paul tells circumcised Christians not to seek to be uncircumcised (one wonders: were they really thinking about it?).  I am saying, though, that in light of Eugene Cho’s response, Driscoll might have some theological reflection to do about the connection between his neo-Reformed evangelicalism and racial justice. As radical as this may sound for an evangelical, it is not impossible.  Witness, for example, Tim Keller’s attempt that was itself a response to John Piper’s attempt:

Recalling Michael Emerson and Christian Smith’s (2000) Divided by Faith, the Cone and West aficionados may wince a bit at these appeals to personal repentance and blunt critiques of ethnic churches that come out of an evangelical obsession with individual responsibility at the expense of structural forces. But come on; at least they’re trying, and maybe we should encourage them…especially by helping young clergy reflect on this in seminary.

In addition, getting back to Giglio, one wonders if a more intelligent exchange might have been had if only he had been exposed to feminist and LGBT theology during his theological training.  Indeed, the fact that Giglio felt that he had to bow out of the public stage meant that he didn’t know how to think anything else except for what the Gay Christian Network founder, Justin Lee, calls the “gay-vs.-Christian” dichotomy.

Again, in the same way that I juxtaposed Driscoll with Cone and West, I’m not saying that Giglio would have to become a feminist or LGBT theologian, or that he even needs to change his view on sexual ethics (he could remain what Justin Lee calls a “Side B” Christian).  I’m saying that if he might have had a few more tools in his theological toolbox than what he had already, that is, if he had been aware of the fabulous work out there, say, written by Patrick Cheng, James Allison, and Sister Margaret Farley (I mean, after the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith did their thing, who in the theological world hasn’t heard of Margaret Farley), Giglio would at least know that he has to engage this stuff.  Or, on that note, what about thinking through what evangelical ethicist Lewis Smedes at Fuller has to say about homosexuality as an identity not actually being found anywhere in Scripture in the revised edition of Sex for Christians? I mean, the sermon is about “biblical standards,” which suggests that at the time, Giglio thought of homosexuality as a loose lifestyle funded by a wealthy lobby to make some kind of sexually hedonistic Epicureanism an acceptable alternate lifestyle with no real moral standards or constraints on pleasure-seeking, which in turn has to be confronted with the truth that there are moral standards and those are found in Scripture (although the moral standards bit was probably learned from Part I of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity).  I mean, whatever one’s theology of the body is, with the passage of two decades and a bit more reading, a bit more clergy development, and a bit more counseling, one should know that that portrayal was probably a tad too monolithic. Had he had a few more tools, his response to being called out by Think Progress might have at least been a little more interesting.

In other words, what I’m saying is that there is a very broad theological conversation that is happening, and that part of the point of theological education is to induct people entering ecclesial service into that dialogue. Sure, OK, some people may think I’m dreaming; after all, isn’t pastoral work about walking with the people, counseling them, providing pastoral care, being part of the major events of their lives (birth, baptism, confirmation, wedding, funeral,etc.), and equipping them to live Christian lives?  Yes, it is, and part of that happens to be precisely to equip them to be the church, and part of being the church is to be in communion with the church catholic that is having these conversations. And part of the way of training young ecclesial leaders on how to get in on the conversation is pretty standard pedagogical practice: give them a road map to the literature, make it required reading, and make your assignments about critical engagement! Of course, is this how theological education currently works? Likely not. I’m just saying that it’s an imperative.

But, of course, Driscoll’s post on theological education highlights three things that probably need to change before this is possible: 1) the cost of theological education, 2) the utility of theological pedagogy that would be of added value to personal theological reading, and 3) the support of churches for young clergy pursuing theological education.  In other words, can theological education actually be available to young clergy who will likely not be able to repay their debts?  Might churches be able to pool resources, even relying on the church catholic instead of struggling along as autonomous congregations, to train young clergy?  Will seminaries be able to demonstrate that they can provide theological training that cannot be obtained by simply reading a good book by themselves?

Come to think of it, these questions may well strike at the heart of our ecclesiology.  They inquire as to whether our belief in debt forgiveness as in the Lord’s Prayer, the parables of forgiveness, and the messianic announcement of the Jubilee actually matches our practice.  They probe our models of congregational autonomy when, say, Paul’s collection for the church in Jerusalem appealed to anything but congregational autonomy; those who disagree will find 2 Corinthians a very challenging read.  They challenge our understanding of education altogether, making us wonder when information accumulation replaced the discipleship and formation that seems to have been a long point of orthopraxy in the Christian tradition (thinking beyond Paul and Timothy, for example, one finds examples in Justin Martyr, Origen, Benedict, Francis of Assisi, Ignatius of Loyola, Francis de Sales, Basil Moreau, etc.).

That said, the Giglio and Driscoll débacles of the past two weeks highlight once again the real problem of evangelical leaders who are thought to be able to do theology until they are challenged on theological grounds.  This is a problem because for all that is said about the persecution of Christians by a secularizing public sphere, to be martyred for less-than-informed remarks isn’t exactly how martyrdom in Scripture works, at least not in the Acts of the Apostles.  Sure, OK, out-of-context soundbites were twisted in efforts to drag Stephen, Peter, John, and Paul before synagogue leaders and the Sanhedrin. Stephen, for example, was taken brutally out of context when the Freedmen’s Synagogue said that he was telling Jewish Christians to abandon Moses.  But Stephen did not resort to whimpering about being taken out of context because he was too busy being a deacon-waiter or saying that that was not the focus of his message in the first place.  No, he faced the Sanhedrin and retold the entire tradition through the hermeneutic of the people of God embodying stiff-necked opposition to the Law and the Prophets so that they ultimately lynched the culmination of the Scriptures.  Acts 7 is actually a fascinating theological read, and ultimately, it suggests that people like Stephen were martyred because they understood the breadth of the tradition so well that they told such convincing theological stories with such an acute, subversive, and creative Christian hermeneutic that they couldn’t be silenced except by brute force.  I’m not convinced that Giglio and Driscoll have done that.

A PhD Hermeneutic for a Few Pop Songs

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academia, Academics, Alice Walker, America Magazine, Asian American, Backstreet Boys, Basil Moreau, Chinese, Christianity Today, Congregation of Holy Cross, Disney, Don't Stop Believing, Evangelical, Evangelicalism, Francis Xavier, Fun, funny, Glee, hermeneutic, humor, James Martin, Jesuit, Journey, joy, Karl Rahner, Little Mermaid, One Direction, PhD, pop, Some Nights, St. Andre Bessette, Vatican II, womanist theology

Today is St. Francis Xavier Day, and in the spirit of engaging “the world” as the Jesuits still do, say, at The Jesuit Post and at America Magazine, I’d like to share a PhD hermeneutic for some pop music I’ve got stuck in my head.

I first learned the word “hermeneutic” from a freshman theology teacher at the Holy Cross Catholic high school I attended. We called him “Papa Bear.”

On the first day of class, he wrote the word HERMENEUTICS on the board. He asked us what it meant. Somebody shouted out, “J the C!” {See, he had mentioned that the right answer to every question in Catholic theology boiled down to ______ the ________. We filled in the blanks while playing hangman, and after a long time, we came up with “J the C,” which stood for “Jesus the Christ,” which only goes to commend Papa Bear for imparting the Christocentricity of Vatican II to us.)

Anyhow, “J the C” may have been the right answer for a Christocentric hermeneutic, but it certainly did not answer the question of what hermeneutics was. When all of us were finally stumped, he told us that it meant something along the lines of the interpretation of texts. (We were fed Gadamer early.) He then added, “When you go home to your family dinners tonight, stand up and tell your proud mom and dad, ‘Mom, Dad, I’m a hermeneutician.” I was one of two kids who did that. My theologically educated father said, “Get outta here.”

More years at that Catholic school would lead to further training in hermeneutics, including by a feminist theologian who taught us Genesis, Ruth, and Esther alongside Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. (She never told us that if we were using Walker, this should technically have been called womanist theology.) Imagine how tickled I was to find that the evangelical Christianity Today blog for women was called Her.meneutics.

The Congregation of Holy Cross has a lot of similar things to the Jesuits, not least with Blessed Basil Moreau‘s ultramontane sensibilities, i.e. he was loyal to the See of Rome over movements to form a national church in France, which echoes all sorts of ultramontane stuff in The Spiritual Exercises that progressive Jesuits, experimenting Protestants, and all other Rahner fans who use them conveniently ignore. It was also an order that was conceived as a family of priests, monks, and nuns who opened schools for kids who were too poor to go to school in the wake of the French Revolution and ended up starting (no joke) American universities like the University of Notre Dame. It’s fitting that our first saint was thus St. André Bessette, an illiterate monk/healer/”miracle man” who was the doorkeeper for the longest time for Montréal’s redux of the Congregation of Holy Cross, which ended up being built into St. Joseph’s Oratory.

I owe my knowledge of the meaning of the word hermeneutics to the Congregation of Holy Cross.

So on this St. Francis Xavier Day, in celebration of the worldliness of the Jesuits, in gratitude to the Congregation of Holy Cross for teaching me hermeneutics, and with a nod to the work of Fr. Jim Martin, SJ, in Between Heaven and Mirth, I’d like to share with you some of my hermeneutics for a few pop songs.

I’ve been listening to these songs at various stages of working on my PhD. I’d like to apply a PhD hermeneutic to them, insofar as this will be an exercise of interpreting the songs in light of my PhD experience. (We call this positionality.) It is, in short, pop songs through the hermeneutic of the PhD.

PHD Movie Trailer from PHD Comics on Vimeo.

Here goes:

1. Comprehensive Exams: “Part of Your World” from The Little Mermaid

But who cares, no big deal…I want more [books]…

Alternatively, after three months of hibernation: I wanna be where the people are, I wanna see, wanna see them dancin’, walkin’ around on those–whaddya call ’em?–oh, “feet”…

Katy Perry’s thrown in there because when you’re in the midst of an all-day exam and midnight is approaching: …let’s go all the way tonight, no regrets…

2. Research Prospectus: “What Makes You Beautiful” by One Direction

Differentiating antecedents for the you‘s, the first two for the committee, the third for the topic: If only you saw what I could see, you’d understand why I want you so desperately…

3. After many months of fieldwork: “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey

Remembering ethnographic minutiae: Hold on to that feeling.

4. Thesis Writing: “Some Nights” by Fun.

I still see your ghost [the previous argument’s]; oh, Lord, I still don’t know what I stand for…

5. TA Marking/Grading: “I Want It That Way” by The Backstreet Boys

Most frequent comment: Tell me why.

Yes, Mom, Dad, I am still a hermeneutician.

[CUE BOND THEME]

An Apology for My Post on the U of R English Department: Thinking About Christian Things With Anglo-Saxons, Christian Humanists, and Gerard Manley Hopkins

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academia, Academics, Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Saxon Christianity, Beowulf, Christian, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Creation, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Liberal Arts, Old English literature, U of R, University of Regina, Viking

As someone who often wishes that the Exeter book compilers had left a note explaining the connections between the works they compiled, I feel that it is only fair not to leave anyone reading this blog in the dark about the puzzlement of my last post: “What does the University of Regina Arts department have to do with the stated purpose of this blog? How is that in any way a “Christian thing”? I would like to respond by talking about three instances of literature that, for me, embody the way Christians should interact with the liberal arts. In all three instances I see the attempt to protect the Liberal Arts, and by extension what is good, true and beautiful (or all three together) in creation.

It is I think first worth noting that all three of these approaches are grounded in a strong sense of the goodness of creation. Imaginary art is, it seems to me, a subsidiary creation dependent on the primary creation, and if this creation is not good (as declared by God in Genesis) and not redeemable (as declared in Christ’s resurrection), then what is secondary to it is also not good. Though I think Plato himself was more sophisticated about it than he often gets credit for, his expulsion of the poets from the Republic is the natural outworking of a philosophy or theology that is trying to escape creation, and after Plato it appears in much less sensible forms in gnostic theology. All this to say that the poets I am about to discuss, working within a long tradition of Christian theology, presupposed the goodness of creation, and so understood matters like the liberal arts as the task of working with the things of creation. One did not of course even need to know about Christianity to discover this goodness – it is of course as accessible as creation itself, so that even pagan and secular observations of this goodness were readily adopted by Christians where they in fact reflect goodness, truth, or beauty – though with the caveat that such natural philosophy only goes so far.

What I see in the three examples I am about to discuss is the strong belief that protecting creation and its aesthetic subsidiaries is one of the most important tasks of the Christian. It is so because both creation and the arts are easily lost, whether in fact physically marred or rhetorically appropriated for unjust or selfish purposes. The Christian call to Charity encompasses a deep love of creation and the things humans have found in it and formed from it, insofar as these things are in fact the product of the deep God-given capacity for imagination woven into our hearts and not the shallow parody instigated by sin (the “vain imaginations” so often lamented in the Bible). The love of the Arts is thus in fact an extension of our love for our neighbour.

I do not know the names of those involved in my first example, which is Old English poetry. The names of those who originally thought of these poems, passed them down orally, and then finally wrote them down remain anonymous. But what has been passed down – and what we know about the context in which it was passed down – makes for a riddle that testifies to a Christian love of variegated literatures. It is almost undoubtedly certain that, in their final forms, the Old English poetry we have was preserved by clerics in monastic scriptoria. This of course leaves us with the puzzle of what monks were doing with Beowulf or the double entendre riddles, though the latter is hardly a new puzzle as the Biblical canon itself contains the Song of Solomon. Of course, it is impossible to know beyond a doubt what these monks were doing with these texts, and some criticism inflected through a particularly modern kind of lens sees this as evidence that Anglo-Saxon Christianity was not in fact as Christian as all that – the monks of course had to be monks because of the institutional oppression etc., but below all this their libidinous id longed for these more bawdy earthy things, so they are testimonies to a heroic proto-secularism practiced under the very thumb of the church. The alternative, however, and the explanation I would suggest, is that what we are encountering here is not poor oppressed monks just trying to have some fun, but a sophisticated theology that loves things, even the things of one’s enemies, and so considers them worth preserving – perhaps one can find something in them (and if this sounds far-fetched, consider that Beowulf itself is a story telling the heroic past of the Vikings responsible for attacking the Anglo-Saxons). I don’t of course want to pretend that these monks were sophisticated 21st Century liberals, but, considering the alternative – the Viking raids that, at least in Anglo-Saxon accounts, were no respecters of persons, things, ideas, or books – they did pretty well. Between the constant threat of Viking raids and the great expense of books, the preservation of things – not only Biblical Commentaries and theological works, but poems – was a great and risky sacrifice worth making because the things preserved were made from the stuff of creation, and the stuff of creation is good.

My second examples are the Christian humanists of the Renaissance. My own primary engagement with Christian humanism has been through Donne and Milton, so I will speak what I know from these poets and see whether it accords with More and Erasmus etc. once I have read them. Sidney would fit well here, too, though his work is not fresh enough in my mind to comment. Where the monastics were more involved in the physical preservation of things to do with the arts, the Christian humanists, I would argue, were interested in saving them from the power plays of church and state. We are in our own age very well aware, thanks to Foucault, of the ways the arts can become instruments of power. What we are not very well aware of is that in order to usurp the mantle of beauty, goodness, and truth, a tyrant must as far as possible eliminate the real things – the first casualty of hypocrisy is reality, and I think most of the people of my generation have swallowed whole the idea that all there is is hypocrisy and power plays. What the Christian humanists saw was that, among other things, one of the primary ways of protesting such tyranny and hypocrisy was to preserve goodness, beauty, and truth; it was in any case much better than simply deposing the tyrant, for without such goods another would rise in his place. Loving and protecting the weak and vulnerable reality preserved in the best instances of the arts was the first line of defense against the Leviathan of the nation state. And again, in the best instances of the arts, one could hear the stones – that is, the stuff of earth and nature – cry out at moments when the church herself remained silent.

Perhaps you are wondering where exactly in the Christian humanists I see this protection of goodness, beauty, and truth from abusive power. I think probably the best example, of the people I have read, is Donne. We can see this in all his work – his refusal in sermons to cater to a populist mentality; his scansion of the universe in the Devotions informed by personal digestion of large amounts of philosophy, theology, and poetry; and of course his poetry. Indeed, I would suggest that metaphysical conceits are one of his most prominent means of doing this – through these he forces us to consider, and consider carefully, things that we are used to instrumentalizing and objectifying. By forcing us to step back and look at the reality he helps us observe, he causes us to realize that the things we take for granted are in fact so many sites of choice – things could in fact be imagined other than the way we see them, and things could in fact be done differently.

The other place I see this protest against power is in Milton. One of the more contemporary reads on a Leibnizean theodicy is that, in the form it appears during the Enlightenment, it is not so much a philosophical answer to a philosophical problem, as it is a way of justifying the  cruel negligence of early capitalisms – if free will is a justification for God to wind up the world and let it go, evil and all, it is surely a justification for those with power and money in capitalism to do the same. Make an economy that works, and the invisible hand will take care of the rest – no need for the kind of intervention demanded by ethics or the Christian idea of incarnation.

Milton is of course pre-Leibniz, but I feel as if he anticipates this sophistic use of theodicy and fights hard against it. Part of the way he does this is by writing poetry rather than philosophy; by writing poetry, he acknowledges the felt needs and desires other than bare reason that must be acknowledged when discussing theology. And though some think the many stammering caveats, safeguards, and loopholes that he works into Paradise Lost make for a confusing system that can be dismissed as a Puritan neo-Scholasticism, his reason for doing this is because (if you will pardon a pun) he wants to make sure nothing gets lost. He does not want an easy theodicy, or an easy defense, or an easy dramatic flair that will win his audience over should reason fail. The task he undertakes is gargantuan and in those places where he fails his failure is because it is impossible to fit the better and more complex answer to theodicy – hundreds of years of Scriptural/Christian tradition – into a single poem written by a single person. But behind all the stories of the crabby, misogynistic Milton strutting about like a know-it-all is someone who sees the complexities of a world God made, and sees these complexities in danger of being pared down into the simplistic instruments that would write the history of modernity in blood. And for all his crabbiness, Paradise Lost is his response.

Perhaps the best way of imagining this Christian humanist impulse is the figure of Thomas More. Undoubtedly, someone so vastly intelligent and well-educated could  have easily have achieved promotion rather than execution if he had been willing to bend his knowledge and rhetorical skills to answer the will of Henry the VIII. He refused, however, and it cost him his life. He refused to deploy the arts as a handmaid to deception, trickery, and untruth, and so preserved his own and their integrity.

The third person I want to talk about is Gerard Manley Hopkins. The power that Hopkins resists is that of a weary imminence, the sort of thing that came about imaginatively after the shock of the this-worldly Romanticism had worn off and been institutionalized by Victorian society. This had the effect of making it very difficult to talk about the wild otherness of God in polite society; matters of faith were confined to certain forms of discursive piety in which they could readily be contained, and they were not to mix with the more important matters of business, finance, and politics. The world predicted in Pope’s Essays on man – where “the proper study of mankind is man” – had come to be, and its absorption of faith in the broader societal milieux was a far better means of controlling it than active suppression or persecution.

Of course, Hopkins is by no means the only one to protest this; others attempting to re-sacralize this Victorian world include members of the Oxford movement, George MacDonald, Oscar Wilde, G. K. Chesterton, and presumably a good number more that only a Victorian specialist would recognize. But I will speak of Hopkins because I have studied him. Accompanying the this worldly turn of most poetry in Hopkins time was that curious idolatry of art known as doing “art for art’s sake.” Hopkins had no idea what that might mean and to be quite honest neither to I, but it conjures the image of a narcissistic asceticism lusting after its own image in a mirror. The opening lines of one of the only poems actually published during Hopkins’ lifetime – The Wreck of the Deutscheland -is a direct challenge to this autoerotic poetry: “Thou mastering me, God…” In a world far more interested in a faith kept neatly separate from (or contained within) the matters of the nation-state, Hopkins cry was from the exilic Ecclesial ship being martyred on the reefs and rocks of a smug modernity. What sets Hopkins apart for me as a particularly inspiring example is how this cry and challenge came not in spite of religion with its institutions and liturgies, but in fact through it. Hopkins is not a Blake for whom religion becomes a language wherewith to express his emotions. He is tied to the strictness and rigor of the Jesuit order, and his matter is mined with effort from the depths of Catholic tradition. He needed Scotus – more of a rebel and less of a systematician than Aquinas – to challenge his society, and it is perhaps fitting that his challenge came out of a Catholicism once banned in England. He refused the shallow categories and languages of his time that permitted theology only to speak when spoken to – God was not for Hopkins the distant psychological vaguery of Tennyson, but was rather, like His mother, as close and palpable as the air we breath. Hopkins refused to stop speaking well of God when doing so in anything other than benevolent platitudes was growing less and less fashionable. In a sense, he covertly discovered what both the Christian humanists and the Anglo-Saxon monks took for granted, that when one seeks first the kingdom and God’s righteousness one finds the arts added to one’s bounty as well. Conversely, poetry that neglects God eats itself from the inside.

I realize that, in the above examples, I have said a number of things that very few English scholars would agree with wholeheartedly, and in part I understand very well why. I have seen concepts like truth, beauty, God, and the common good twisted and manipulated for use by selfish and cruel people, and one becomes reluctant to speak of them after a few experiences with such people. But I would like to hope that what I encountered in these experiences were not the real things, but parodies, and it is not these parodies I mean when I speak of these qualities. I also realize that, in a summary as general as this, I am at some points not careful enough in my assertions; I fear particularly regarding my statements on the Victorian period. I am not a Victorianist, though I know a number of them, and it would would be a dreadful thing to wake up one day and find myself being pursued by a gang of Victorianists. To be more serious, though, I am happy to take correction from any quarter provided it can be substantiated, but I do think that more than ever in a world that leaves such general overviews to the image-factories of shallow politicking, it is probably right to provide an alternative, even if an overview such as this is only a starting point rather than an end point.

This, finally, is the reason that I do in fact consider it a “Christian thing” to defend the University of Regina English department. The department itself is not of course Christian or any other religion for that matter, nor should it be. It is comprised of varying people from varying perspectives, some of faith, and some not. But having taken classes in this department, I do see happening many of the same things that people like the Anglo-Saxon monks, the Christian-humanists, and Gerard Manley Hopkins were trying to protect. And it would be a shame if these were lost to powers more interested in image than truth.