Eric The Blue

Limbo

Its capacity for unconscious self satire undiminished, the Catholic Church now concludes that "limbo," formerly the depository for the souls of unbaptized infants, is off the map, theologically speaking.  So says the Church's International Theological Commission, a Vatican committee which has I guess been studying this question since before the current pope was pope.  According to "The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptised," limbo offered an "unduly restrictive view of salvation."  There are, it turns out, "theological and liturgical reasons to hope that infants who die without baptism may be saved and brought into eternal happiness even if there is not an explicit teaching on this question found in revelation."

It's too late for me, being 48, but I suppose this is good news for some part of the population.  The gray areas nevertheless remain.  Infants in, three-year-olds still out?  And Socrates:  in or out?  Subjects perhaps for the consideration of commissions not yet convened.

To this outsider it seems impossible that the work of the individual committee members could have been accompanied by a clear conscience. 

Patriotic Gore II

I've made it to the end of Patriotic Gore.  Louis Menand, writing in the New Yorker, calls attention to this single-sentence paragraph, at the end of a long section in To the Finland Station detailing the tribulations of the Marx family:  "Such pain and such effort it cost to build a stronghold for the mind and will outside the makeshifts of human society."  An almost identical moment is, for me, one of the finest things in Patriotic Gore.  Wilson has finished describing, patiently and with evident sympathy, in a chapter on "diversity of opinion in the South," the views of several relatively obscure southern writers who attempted to place the institution of chattel slavery in the best possible light.  The discussion has proceeded by means of long paragraphs made of long sentences in Wilson's elegant, heavily subordinated, yet somehow conversational style.  Now he is done and indents for the last sentence of the chapter:  "To such mental and moral confusion were the thinkers of the South reduced by their efforts to deal rationally with the presence among them of four million kidnapped and enslaved Africans of a different color of skin and on a different cultural level from their own."

The introduction isn't bad, either--recommended for the times.

Unrealized possibilities

An editor of my college anthology of American literature says, of John Updike, that he is the great chronicler of “middleness” in American life, and explains: “[f]alling in love in high school, meeting a college roommate, going to the eye-doctor or dentist, eating supper on Sunday night, visiting your mother with your wife and son--these activities are made to yield up their possibilities. . . .”

For some reason these words, read years ago, emerged from some recess of my mind the other day when, finding myself alone in a room in a medical building with written instructions concerning how I was to masturbate into a sterilized container, I determinedly set about my business. I have sometimes excused myself of stupidities by telling my wife that I know about life only from having read about it but here, it occurred to me, I had at hand (so to speak) an experience of “middleness” that has gone untreated in the works of Updike.

The room was ten by twelve feet and painted a pastel color. There was on one wall a picture, main exhibit a sailboat, that must have been influenced by the impressionists. The four corners of the room were for the door, a table built into the wall, a washstand, and a reclining easy chair. On the wall opposite the door was a window with vertical slats for blinds. A small boom box sat on the table and there were two compact discs laying to the side: the one on top was “greatest hits of the 70s.” A male nurse, having drawn some blood, summarized the written instructions and prepared a label for the container, which on the side had markings, like a measuring cup, to indicate volume. With a small gesture he called my attention to a covered magazine rack sitting beside the easy chair where, he said, I would find “reading material.” After he left I realized that the purpose of the boom box must have been to cover the sounds of medical employees who in the hall outside could be heard relating their weekend activities.

I was more curious about the “reading material” than the title of the other compact disc. The magazine rack contained a thick file folder, such as a law firm might use to store the documents relating to a particular case, that was secured by a string that stretched around a clasp. The folder had the words SEXUALLY EXPLICIT MATERIAL, which turned out to be four of the most recent issues of Penthouse and a Playboy from 2004. The thought occurred to me that this might indicate the clinic had changed vendors. Was there possibly a suggestion box? Feeling ridiculous, as well as a twinge of performance anxiety, I turned the pages and wondered about the previous “readers” who had worn some pages more than others. In time my thoughts turned to other subjects and my anxiety subsided sufficiently for me to complete the task in the prescribed manner. I placed my container in the incubator, which rested on a small stand to the side of the boom box, and walked out the door, down a short corridor into the waiting room where my name had been called perhaps twenty minutes ago, and then out the waiting room door to a stairwell leading to the outdoor world of a weekday morning.

Such, such are the possibilities unrealized in the fiction of John Updike.

Who can believe it?

Easter. The invitations to church and brunch, the closed stores, the media reports on the activities of the pope and of "local pilgrims" such as the gravely ill for whom the Easter story has "special meaning"--together, they make one rehearse why one remains on the outside.

The story makes no sense.

We are sinners. Yes, there is evidence of that, though I think there are superior, non-theological ways to understand the diverse phenomena grouped beneath the "sin" heading. Nevertheless let us stipulate that we are sinners. In order that we be redeemed from our sorry state, God becomes a man, lives among us for some thirty years, preaches and teaches, is crucified, dies, and is buried. Only he doesn’t stay dead. He rises again and walks the earth for another month or so before ascending to heaven in the seam of a cloud. At this point, we are still sinners, but for reasons never set out with any clarity it’s now okay--or, at least, it’s okay if we believe this story. If we don’t, there is literally hell to pay. It would be terrible if it were true but there is no good reason to think that it is.

Patriotic Gore

I've been reading with great pleasure Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore. The subtitle--Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War--makes for an effect of double take when one arrives at the Table of Contents and finds no sign of Whitman or Melville but, for example, a long chapter devoted to Alexander H. Stephens, diarist, vice-president of the Confederacy, senator from Georgia in the period of the reconstruction and author of A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States; Its Causes, Character, Conduct and Results Presented in a Series of Colloquies at Liberty Hall.

Stephens thought Lincoln was a tyrant and Wilson is generally sympathetic to that view. He suggests that the worst thing to have happened to Lincoln, save the assassination, was to have fallen into the hands of Carl Sandburg, and that there has "undoubtedly been written about him more romantic and sentimental rubbish than about any other American figure, with the possible exception of Edgar Allan Poe." Wilson substitutes for the cultural icon the Lincoln described by contemporary intimates, like his Springfield law partner William Herndon, and the portrait that emerges is of a brilliant and ambitious man, somewhat aloof and vain of his own powers, cold, calculating, skeptical.

The skepticism included the realm of religion. When in 1846 Lincoln ran for Congress, his opponent, a Methodist minister, leveled against him the charge of “infidelity.” Lincoln’s rejoinder, in the form of a campaign handbill, allows that while “not a member of any Christian Church,” he has however “never denied the truth of the Scriptures” or “spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general.” He admits, by way perhaps of accounting for the rumor of his heresy, that as a much younger man he discussed and entertained heterodox philosophic notions.

The handbill is interesting mainly for what it seems to take care not to say. Lincoln gives no explanation for not being a church member, a current fact. He has never denied the truth of Scripture but does not now positively affirm it. He says that he has never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion but does not say that he believes in it now. He does not now disavow the skeptical views to which he says he was attracted as a younger man. David Bromwich, who has covered some of the same ground as Wilson in a recent series of articles for the New York Review of Books, concludes: “Even in this critical position, with his back against the wall, Lincoln took care not to say that he was a believer.”

This must be hard to take for many of those responsible for forcing upon our country and the world the disastrous presidency of George Bush. In a familiar recitation, the United States has forsaken its religious roots, forsworn a formerly religious culture, and the resulting triumphant secularism is the source of all our considerable woe. But it seems to me that the trend is in the opposite direction. The country’s founding principles are rooted in rationalism and Enlightenment idealism, not the regularly invoked “Judeo-Christian tradition,” and it is likely that Lincoln would be forced today to join a church before seeking high office.

So who and what are these “conservatives” talking about? Not Jefferson or Franklin and certainly not Thomas Paine. Not Lincoln, either. And not the books of Mark Twain, “the Lincoln of our literature”--nor, for that matter, the part of our cultural heritage created by Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, Dickinson, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser and Ernest Hemingway. The voices on the godly right are many and upraised, alternately plaintive and angry, but their claims seem unconnected to history and the facts of the case.