Christ and Quixote (Part 2 of 2)
(to read Part One of this essay, click here)
When his first child is born, Levin, the awkward yet earnest hero of Anna Karenina, feels an initial revulsion to the “strange, limp red creature” lying upon his wife’s breast. But upon perceiving the infant’s diminutive helplessness, he is overcome with a new sort of apprehension, a “consciousness of a new sphere of liability to pain.” To be a parent, as Levin came to realize at that moment, is to be subject to emotions entirely unprecedented in their intensity: “senseless joy,” as Tolstoy puts it, but also a kind of pervasive dread, a constant subtle anxiety stemming from that same awareness of our child’s susceptibility to experience.
In our times, this anxiety is exacerbated by the sheer torrent of unhealthy influences churning always around our children’s minds, the product of our technologically enabled anti-culture. To be a parent today often feels like playing goalie on a team with a horrendous defense, constantly struggling to fend off an unrelenting barrage of dreck and stupidity. This means, for one thing, having to heavily curate the sort of entertainment that makes its way into our homes. Curiously enough, I’ve found that there is one type of show we find ourselves most strenuously trying to keep from our child’s vision: the news. Whatever other kinds of poison are transmitted through the ether, nothing is nearly as toxic as reality. Nothing has the power to compromise a young mind more than a simple, straightforward record of the murders, scandals, attacks, kidnappings, frauds, violence, and oppression that make up a daily account of human affairs.
How often do we acknowledge this corrosive element in ordinary experience? To know is to risk conformity; to know the ways the world gets on is to risk imbibing those ways as our implicit standard. When Fainall, the scheming, duplicitous villain of William Congreve’s famous play, appeals repeatedly to the “way of the world,” we hear in his words the cynicism of a man excusing his own squalid behavior by appealing to the prevalent standard of his social milieu.
To see the insidious ways this knowledge of the real can corrupt a youthful mind, we need look no further than Balzac’s Pere Goriot, which recounts Rastignac’s rise through the fashionable ranks of Parisian society, with the consequent moral erosion of that ascent. At one point in the novel, Rastignac’s relation, the Vicomtesse de Beauseant, articulates the lesson he was meant to draw from his encounter with the city’s decadence. “The world is very base,” she informs him, before continuing: “Well then, M. de Rastignac, deal with the world as it deserves. You are determined to succeed? I will help you. You shall sound the depths of corruption in woman; you shall measure the extent of man’s wretched vanity….The more cold-blooded your calculations, the further you will go.” In this sardonic lesson, the Vicomtesse reveals to us the moral death lying at the end of the wrong sort of knowledge of the world.
“Dare to know!” urged Kant, an admonition he took to be the motto of a mind that has come of age. In this, as in so many other ways, we discover the essential flippancy of the Enlightenment’s understanding of evil. Knowing, like every last human activity, is fraught with danger. Here, as in all other cases, Aristotle’s paradigm applies: we must strive to know when one ought and the things one ought, in relation to what one ought, for the sake of what and as one ought. Otherwise, we may find the drive to know every bit as destructive as our other drives. After all, its not like a desire for knowledge hasn’t been the cause of some fairly serious human calamities in the past.
So, what would it mean to know as one ought and in relation to what one ought? Like the sun itself, reality cannot be gazed upon directly, without risk of permanent damage. Some sort of metaphysical lens must be interposed, through which we can peer safely, and with hope of learning. Richard Weaver, in Ideas Have Consequences, excoriated “the desire of immediacy,” by which he meant a desire “to dissolve the formal elements of everything and to get at the suppositious reality behind them.” This direction of the intellect towards “the thing” rather than “the idea of the thing” could only lead, on Weaver’s account towards a “knowledge of material reality” which is “a knowledge of death.”
What a proper metaphysical lens must supply in the first place is some distance between our vision and the moral phenomena it regards, such that we can critique and evaluate those phenomena. It must provide us with a standard we can take to experience, so that we do not take experience itself for the source of that standard. Notice that this implies a certain kind of idealism. The fact is that there is no viable account of morality that does not imply a kind of idealism, a basic refusal to read moral norms directly off experience. There is finally no middle ground between the idealist and the cynic, the one with a genuine moral perspective and the other with nothing but “realism” to guide him.
If this is basic to any viable ethics, what then is the special cast of Christian idealism? As has been noted repeatedly, the Christian vision places a special emphasis on the created-ness of all phenomena, with a corollary emphasis on the contingency of all phenomena. This means that when the Christian looks out upon the world, he sees a perpetual chiaroscuro, wherein the luminous being of beings scintillates always against the gloomy vacuity out of which they spring. All things have their goodness at the fore because, first and foremost, they have their being at the fore. If there is one attitude against which the faith is militantly set, with no possibility of compromise, it is the attitude of “nihil admirari.” To the contrary, Christianity tells a man, “marvel at everything, be astonished by everything, for none of this had to be.” Chesterton memorably captures the essence of this Christian wonder in that chapter of his Orthodoxy entitled “The Ethics of Elfland,” where he writes of our “ancient instinct of astonishment,” and the joyful wisdom which grows out of it.
If the Christian vision specially depends upon this intuition of the “not-having-to-be-ness” of things, then clearly the special threat to the Christian vision is a certain kind of cynicism, of the sort that inclines the mind to take all things for granted. What the “ways of the world” imperil is that sense of the aboriginal contingency of things. With the attenuation of this spiritual instinct, our properly grateful and reverent response to life fades away too, with all the subtle and none-too-subtle consequences for our behavior and our character. Thomas Traherne thought and wrote much about this process; in the poem “Eden,” for instance, the poet’s capacity to see the world like “Adam in his first estate” dissipates before “the sloth, care, pain, and sorrow that advance / The madness and the misery / Of men.” And in “Wonder,” a knowledge of “oppressions, tears, and cries, / Sins, griefs, complaints, dissensions, weeping eyes” deprives the poet of that primal vision, when “I nothing in the world did know / But was divine.”
It is precisely this form of cynicism – a taking of the world for granted - that has become prevalent and systematized in the modern world. We might even say that modernity is synonymous with this form of cynicism. The contingency of beings is the one certain thing about them that is bracketed from all our meditations. Objects in the world present themselves as matter – as what was there already, what had to be there, given the starting point of materialism – to be magnified, examined, prodded, dissected, noted, measured, recorded, all so that we can come to understand their mass, velocity, behavior, parts, genus, development, history - but not the one gleaming, inescapable truth about them all, which is that they didn’t have to be there in the first place. Modern thought constitutes one long propaedeutic towards the creed of “nihil admirari.”
And this is why the literature of chivalry, with the impossible magnanimity of its moral code, strikes us as so incomprehensible today, because what that code represented in the first place was a reverent response to the native dignity of one’s own person, and a desire to preserve that inherent dignity in its most unsullied form, without the least compromise made for the sake of chance or circumstance. As Burke wrote, the man of chivalry “felt a stain like a wound;” the least blight on that aboriginal moral integrity entailed a surrender to “the ways of the world,” and thus a small sacrifice of the purity of one’s being. The sublime absurdity at the heart of chivalry stemmed from a drive to enact the primal integrity of one’s created being with every act, every gesture, every word.
What else kept Roland from sounding his oliphant than an unwillingness to place the smallest qualification upon the latent instinct of loyalty? What else prevented Palamon and Arcite from relenting in their pursuit of Emily than a fear of offending against the pure wonder of her beauty? And what is it that consumed Gawain with shame for having shrunk from the axe-blade other than a consciousness of his deviation – as miniscule as could be imagined – from a latent sense of honor? In every instance, the man of chivalry is loath to depart from the native integrity of his character by making the least allowance for the ways of the world. So it is of the first significance that the Green Knight, in absolving Gawain for his supposed transgression, declares that by his confession he has regained that native integrity. “I hold thee here absolved,” he proclaims, “and purged as clean this morn / As thou hadst ne’er done wrong since the day thou wast born.”
In this drive to preserve the integrity of his moral personality, the man of chivalry is both Christ and Quixote, divinely and preposterously straining to adhere to a pure code, without the least deference to the exigencies of life. In this, the man of chivalry is no more than one particular expression of the Christian creed. Armored or unarmored, every Christian is a knight at heart, sallying or commuting forth every morning to do battle with the hook-clawed, fire-mouthed corrosive power of the real. Every Christian is committed to the sublime absurdity of supposing that in a world rife with sin and death, he can, at any single moment, through an act, through a gesture, through a word, “make all things new.”