The question at the center of it all was and is how societies cohere, and what in them promotes human flourishing. The United States, by the theoretical lights of the old anthropology, was impossible. It was the great instance of a society that was not organic, not rooted in ancestral soil and ancestral blood but instead a quasi-nation fabricated from materialism and from certain discredited Enlightenment ideas. When I was in school it was a commonplace among foreign observers and certain American savants that we did not and could not have a national character or culture. We could not even know what it was we lacked, that being profundity, which, to the deracinated, is only a word. We were theoretically impossible, like so many of the planets that circle other suns. But there they are, and here we are, endlessly circling a few old texts and an idea or two, stable through continuous change while other countries falter. Our culture has inordinate reach and very substantial prestige. Our national character is as distinctive as any.
Nostalgia falsifies. It encourages the notion that we must once have had the authenticity and fellow feeling supposedly to be derived from a common stock. Colonial New England was as near as America has ever come to ethnic and religious homogeneity, and here is how the theologian Jonathan Edwards, in 1746, described religious culture among his contemporaries: “The daughter of Zion (the church) in this land now lies on the ground, in such piteous circumstances, as we now behold her; with her garments rent, her face disfigured, her nakedness exposed, her limbs broken, and weltering in the blood of her own wounds, and in no wise able to arise.” Religious life went on, of course, in New England as elsewhere. Edwards says, “God’s people in general have their minds unhinged and unsettled, in things of religion … and many are brought into doubts, whether there be anything at all in religion; and heresy, and infidelity, and atheism greatly prevail.” These would be the Nones. Our laws and customs allow for our being a contentious people, yet wherever disputes arise panic ensues. We really should take whatever comfort we can, and draw whatever conclusions we must, from the fact that we are prone to alarm, a little inclined to frighten ourselves on slight pretexts.
Marx laments that the solidarity of the English working class was drained away by the California gold rush. In the early twentieth century the German language competed seriously with English to become the national language until the World Wars suppressed it. We speak of our history in ways that imply continuities where there were in fact continuous intrusions of external events, wars, famines, and persecutions abroad, as well as the effects of internal developments, for example, the cotton trade and the forced immigration of Africans as slaves, the recruitment of foreign labor to build the railroads or work in the steel mills and coal mines. All this is subsumed under American history, as it should be. But the word American encourages selective memory, and the Africans, Chinese, Polish, and Welsh are lost to the notion of a population always English-speaking, always western European. The Midwest is seen as homogeneous—German Catholics, German Lutherans, German Mennonites. The lions have lain down with the lambs.
The miracle of this country is that, by world standards, it is a union, stable and coherent, even as its heterogeneity increases in every generation. To call this a miracle is only to say it is a fact that at this point lacks explanation. The idea of the organic society, united by blood, faith, language, and culture, attractive as it may sound, actually tears societies apart, since some intolerable difference can always be found, some old wrong remembered. These have been the grounds for separatist movements in Britain and Europe, for conflicts in India and the Arab states. Those who invoke the idea of a “real America” would like to import a problem history has so far spared us. Take just the assertion that America is a Christian country. There is a history of appalling conflict among the churches and sects called Christian, which, by the grace of God, they left on the battlefields and scaffolds of Europe when they came here. The moment Christianity is established we will begin to notice that it is extremely various, and we will begin to think about who the real Christians are, a group more than liable to exclude me, of course, since my coreligionist the president is excluded already.
Those ideas that have so far held us together are very beautiful. That is their power. That they could have had the authority for us they have had is a thing worth noting, even while the crudest passages of our history make it clear that we can resist them fiercely and distort their meaning utterly, and that at best we are slow in understanding how very much they imply. Surely they offer more basis for a generalization about human nature than any number of cave paintings or kinship systems precisely because they are not local and they are not relics or survivals. They enlist the loyalty and fire the aspirations of a vast and various and continuously changing population through generations and centuries. Insofar as we feel the difference between what our country is and what these ideals proclaim—human equality realized in sacred and inalienable rights—they are always in advance of us. It is in this sense that the genius of our past is the promise of our future. It is in this sense that we can always speak of hope.
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My respect for Barack Obama is vast and unshadowed. Given the information, advice, and reflection his decisions have proceeded from, I might have made other choices from time to time. But this by no means casts doubt on his wisdom or motives, any more than it endorses mine. A modern president is alone with endless decisions, many very grave. It is an accident of history that the weight of the world should fall on his or her shoulders, a consequence of our relative stability in a disorderly world and of the basic effectiveness of our political system, which have been indispensable to our “greatness,” if one is inclined to use the word. To have been unfailingly dignified, gracious, competent, and humane under such pressures is a very moving achievement, an endurance that is more than heroic. That this president had no help from his opposition, that they did what they could do to shake and discredit him, to weaken him in this country and therefore in the world, and that he kept his poise through it all and met the demands of his office with deliberate, gentlemanly calm is a gift to our history, an example every one of us can learn from. It is true that he righted the economy, reformed health care, and protected our domestic tranquility as effectively as the availability of homicidal weapons will permit—all great achievements. He has had little help from certain of his friends, who think it is becoming in them to express disillusionment, to condemn drone warfare or the encroachments of national security, never proposing better options than these painful choices, which, by comparison with others on offer, clearly spare lives. The president has done nothing more important than to stand against, above, the vulgar, mean-spirited noise that disheartens the public and alienates good people from politics, which is the one true, essential, and indispensable life of democracy.
I have had a singular relationship with President Obama. I cannot imagine a greater honor than his having called me his friend, but if I call our relationship more than meaningful acquaintance I might suggest a degree of personal familiarity that I cannot claim. We have had conversations. His expressed interest in my work has had a marked effect on my career, very marked in Europe because he is held in such high regard there. The association of his name with mine abroad has let me see him as he is seen where the miasmas of polemic do not obscure him, as a gracious, good, and brilliant man. There he is a vindication of American democracy, while here every means has been tried to deny the public the consequences of having chosen him.
Having spoken with the president, having had some direct experience of his humor, his intelligence and courtesy, and his goodness, I consider it probable that those who have opposed him so intractably did so because they knew how remarkable a leader he could be. They were threatened with the possibility of a great president, one who could lead the country in a direction they did not favor and give prestige to a vision they did not share. At the incalculable cost to the country of exciting racial animosities in response to his historic election, they have damaged him a
s they could. So this other greatness, his accepting the discipline that comes with a reverence for the people and the country, has been thrown into prominence.
There is a beauty at the center of American culture which, when it is understood, is expressed in a characteristic eloquence. Every new articulation renews the present life of the country and enriches historic memory to the benefit of future generations. Barack Obama speaks this language, a rare gift. He is ours, in the deep sense that Lincoln is ours, a proof, a test, and an instruction. We see ourselves in him, and in him we embrace or reject what we are.
The Beautiful Changes
The Veritas Forum at Northwestern University: April 15, 2015
One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides
The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies
On water …
—Richard Wilbur, “The Beautiful Changes”
I have come to the conclusion that reality in its nature precludes nothing, that its operations might be taken to reflect God’s freedom on the one hand and his courtesy on the other—freedom to act outside the notion of possibility we abstract from the lawfulness of the world he gives us to inhabit, and courtesy that makes the world in fact lawful, allowing us to be capable within the limits of given reality to build and plan, to see our intentions through to their effects, to pass through the strange, rich stages of mortal life. God’s freedom is expressed in what is usually called miracle. But I think the world of human experience itself should be thought of as miraculous as well, root and branch, more miraculous in nothing than in the lawfulness that differentiates it so sharply from the seeming antinomianism of deeper reality. The dazzlements of the subatomic notwithstanding, nor the torrential expansion of space-time, the world of our experience feels knowable, stable, and predictable, and it usually is. In saying this I wish to establish first of all that divine freedom preexists and infinitely exceeds the reality we know, and that our reality is an act of divine restraint, a covenant made with earthly life that puts self-imposed limits on a power that would otherwise overwhelm us, would effectively annihilate us.
This little garden, earth, implies an act of creation which was radically, for us incomprehensibly, free. It implies an act and an intention that are expressed in the world of our experience designedly or arbitrarily—it would be given certain features and qualities, to the exclusion of an infinity of others that, if they had been chosen, would have had a part in it. Its given qualities are therefore no basis for reconstructing the creative act itself, however expressive they might be of the intent behind it. In other words, what seems to us possible and reasonable on the basis of our experience cannot be understood as conditioning or limiting reality beyond the structures of our experience. This fact is as true and important for a physicist as it ought to be for a theologian. The physicist would, of course, put aside any thought of intent, any teleology, but the theist need not, must not. And as much as I respect science and its methods, here the theologian can claim a great advantage, conceptually speaking. She need not struggle to breathe life into a purely materialist cosmos. She need not attempt a grand unifying theory out of the heterogeneous parts of known reality. She need not leave unaddressed the fact of the extraordinary role of human consciousness in the cosmos, of which physics is one great instance. On the other hand, she is free to absorb into her account of reality elements that are anomalous, not to be arrived at by positivist reasoning. So imperious is the materialist approach to reality that it considers whatever it cannot capture by its methods as effectively nonexistent, for example, the human self, the human mind. It marginalizes to the point of disappearance things we generally consider abstractions, for example, justice, wisdom, and beauty. The theologian may and must grant these even an especial reality.
Some part of a definition of beauty ought to be that it is an aspect of experience that can, and possibly should, compel attention and also reward it. To say this is to grant it an objective existence of some kind, a place in the economy of needs and rewards that bonds humankind to the world, that engrosses the mind in experience. Yet the idea of beauty varies from one perceiver to the next, one decade to the next, and from culture to culture. At the same time, it is so important in the shaping of human life that the sense of it may do more than any other influence to make a culture distinctive. The Parthenon, St. Basil’s Cathedral, the Taj Mahal variously and authoritatively epitomize the aesthetics of a singular place and period. Sometimes with a little instruction we can recognize varieties of beauty we could never otherwise approximate or even imagine. If existence were designed to engraft us into the world, to charm and engage us, what could be better suited to accomplishing this than beauty, with its inexhaustible openness to variation, with its frangible and circumstantial rules and limits, which enable invention and tantalize perception? The theologian can say that beauty eludes definition because it expresses the grace of God, like other elusive things, say, time and light. It takes its nature from its purpose, its intended effect. Photons famously elude definition—I am not transgressing against reason when I say that essential aspects of reality confound our categories or that they are mutable in relation to their perceivers. I am simply allowing my account of reality some of the breadth appropriate to its subject.
Much thinking about human things has been captive for a very long time to the methods and biases of anthropology. And anthropology has been governed by the assumption of an original simplicity in all things human, complicated over time, at least among the majority of the species, until we arrive at modernity. A misunderstanding of non-Western languages was based on, and has encouraged, the idea of an original simplicity. It appeared to justify the notion that their speakers were themselves primitive. But no matter how serious the problems with this schema, no matter how much complexity is always discovered in supposed simplicity, this model has never really been replaced.
Both language and beauty have mutability and accommodation as qualities that are essential to them. Both shape and are shaped continuously as they are realized in our reflections, choices, and creations. Like the genome, both are uncannily well suited to exist, to flourish, in time. Futurity is implied in them in the fact of their constrained mutability. If the starting point for language was not an original simplicity, a business of threats and warnings, perhaps, how else is language to be accounted for? What magic or miracle could have intervened to yield the very great complexity that characterizes human utterance as we know it? This is a real question. The theologian might say that language is essential to human nature, and that it bears relation to the expressed intent manifest in all creation. In the beginning was the Word. This is a statement of faith, granted. Still, it is fully consistent with the great potency of language. If our interest is in the given world, the world of experience, then unserviceable theories of origins ought to be put aside in favor of attention to the things themselves, leaving accounts of beginnings to the sacred unknowable—or to the empirically unknown and perhaps unknowable. Surely no theory should persist simply for want of a better one, when the theory clearly distorts its purported subject.
Beauty is equally inaccessible to positivist accounts. It has no consistent usefulness, is the product of no fixed colors or proportions, is not reliably associated with well-being. It is indeed in the eye of the beholder, an eye that can be helped by instruction and experience, is in any case much influenced by them, and may, by its decisions, refine and extend the consensus surrounding the beautiful, at least within the limits of a culture and period.
* * *
I may seem to be comparing unlike things. While forms and manifestations of language are very real and constantly present to us, beauty is ordinarily treated as an abstraction, this despite its unquestionable power in our experience. I do not say “a conception of beauty” because there is an urge or a tropism that lies behind all conceptions of beauty, wildly as they differ, and it is this that interests me.
I have come to doubt the usefulness of abstraction as a category,
not only because of its suggestions of static unworldliness but also because it distracts attention from the active and vital properties of these entities that so variously weave our lives into them as they preserve and transform history, culture, speculation, and belief, as well as the interior narratives of all our individual lives. Justice, another great abstraction, is defined differently in every age and culture, and is felt as a reality billions of times a day as it is approximated or satisfied or offended, or as it is modified in light of circumstance. It has a very great practical power in any moment, though it too is subject to change, whether through increases in refinement or lapses into malice or revenge. A creation that was arbitrary in the way I suggest might include the fiat “let there be justice” or “let there be beauty,” each having the properties I describe intrinsically, not as proceeding from circumstance, or as having somehow evolved from material conditions with which they have no kinship.
Science tells us that any number of universes are possible in theory, and that life is so adaptable it could occur in forms unimagined by us. So science and theology can agree on one great point: Our reality has properties that could have been radically unlike those we know and experience. If Being is a cascade of accident, each moment determining the particulars of the next and therefore excluding other possibilities, we are still left with the fact of the very remarkable substances and energies that are and have been so beautifully configured at every scale. Be that as it may. Theology on the other hand asserts intention rather than accident, and in doing so it captures an essential characteristic of reality, that is, its coherency and mutability, its temporal being as both—and simultaneously—self-identical and subject to and capable of varieties of change too numerous to reckon. The biblical creation narrative allows us to say that the world was made to have the qualities of life, that is, to exist in time, to change and be changed freely, within real but rarely absolute limits. Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. Nations and languages arose out of the growth and dispersing of population. Profound differences did not impinge upon essential identity, as science can tell us, though historically and at present the differences seem to matter most to us. There is a mighty paradox in identity. The infant and the old man are one self. The life-changing event can only modify a particular life, which came before it and will continue after it. Yet the change is real, even profound. And beauty, intrinsic and perceived, attends on every change, transforming itself, refining itself to engage the altered mind again. This renewed encounter with beauty is often experienced as a manifestation of grace. Beauty awaits our notice, while, as experience, it is eloquently modified by our histories and temperaments, speaking to us one by one, soul by soul.