Power Plays
Power, Pathology, Paradox: The Dynamics of Good and Evil, by Marguerite Shuster (Zondervan, 288 pp.; $22.95, cloth). Reviewed by Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, professor of interdisciplinary studies, Calvin College.
When I became a Christian in 1971, most of my non-Christian friends reacted either with embarrassment or outright hostility. But not all. The most unexpected response came from a friend who was a second-generation Marxist with secular Jewish roots—someone from whom I would have expected flat rejection of any world view that acknowledged a supernatural realm. Instead, she told me in sober, hesitant tones about an event that had occurred in Mexico a few years before.
She and several other skeptical friends decided one afternoon to climb to the top of a steep bluff the locals pointedly avoided on the grounds that it was inhabited by evil spirits. Their ascent took only a couple of hours; but their descent took until well after midnight. As she explained, it was as if some terrifying, antigravitational force fought them at every step. Then came her bombshell conclusion; “Ever since that day, I’ve had to admit to myself that though I’m still a Marxist, I can never again be a thoroughgoing materialist.”
Contrast this with a scenario in an evangelical seminary just a few years later: an elite club of bright students meeting to discuss one anothers’ papers. Somehow, this particular evening, the conversation turned to the topic of demons. Of some eighteen students present, only two or three (among them, significantly, one raised on the mission field) believed that demon possession is possible. The rest psychologized it away in tones of amused disbelief. Like so many other Christians in the Western world, they seemed functionally materialist in their world view.
In The Peck Genre
Since that time, the “practical materialism” of many educated Christians has been challenged by books such as Scott Peck’s People of the Lie. A distinguished psychiatrist who became a Christian in midcareer, Peck argued persuasively for the inclusion of “evil” as a diagnostic category, and recounted how he gradually came to conclude that for some types of problems, religious exorcism should be sought instead of, or in addition to, psychiatric treatment.
Marguerite Shuster’s Power, Pathology, Paradox is more or less in the Peck genre, although more nuanced and conservative in its underlying theology, and less rich in its use of case studies. In fact, Peck was familiar enough with it in its original (Fuller Seminary) thesis form to have footnoted it in People of the Lie, and he has given enthusiastic endorsement to the book.
Shuster’s title reflects its three main sections. In the section on power, Shuster defines the term as “a union of structure and will.” For her purposes power does not exist without a direction-setting, decision-making consciousness. Human choices are never neutral, though people can try to evade responsibility and meaning by positing a mechanistic universe; or they can try to limit responsibility and meaning by seeing human choices as ends in themselves.
But willy-nilly, the chooser—the person exercising power—is always participating in a greater, spiritual dimension, whether of God or of the Evil One. Our material and social worlds are only superficially that; in reality, they partake of principalities and powers. The reader will recognize Shuster’s affinities with writers like C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams, but the biblical and systematic theology with which she makes her case is much more sophisticated and abstract.
In the section on pathology (in my view the most valuable part of the book), Shuster sets forth the intriguing hypothesis that all pathology arises out of powerlessness, and leads to compensatory power seeking. (Hence the rigidity and lack of spontaneity that characterize so much neurotic behavior.) But in so striving for power, the person risks playing right into the hands of the Evil One, who is characterized by “raw power” devoid of any positive ends.
“Thus pathology—an area of impotence—may be viewed as demonic in its origins and as tending to provoke re-constitutive efforts that are [themselves] essentially demonic. The psychotherapist may easily be trapped into promoting ‘cures’ that are ultimately as bad as the disease. The dilemma is how to remedy powerlessness without succumbing to power-seeking.”
The final section, on paradox, pleads for a radical, “paradoxical” view of health in which, rather than fighting Satan with his own tools, his power is countered by the Word (creational and incarnational) and the Spirit of God operating not through human strength, but through weakness: “Evil is defeated at its roots when we are enabled not to do it, when we are strengthened to bear the suffering of others.… [This] challenges every view of health that would exalt it to the level of a minor deity or would make its major prerequisites autonomy, independence, self-fulfillment, self-esteem, and the like, as over against a focus on right relationships with God and one’s brothers and sisters.”
Excellence And Overkill
In many ways, this book is a scholarly and theological tour de force. Shuster’scommand of the psychological and theological literature is impressive. So is her knowledge of current trends in the philosophy of science. The book’s contents, however, are more than a little marred by its style. To begin with, Shuster gives the reader a full 90 pages of preamble before she even embarks on the themes mentioned in the title.
This first section, entitled “The Elusiveness of Reality,” seems primarily to be an apologetic for the irreducible existence of mind and will, and their connection to an even higher spiritual realm. Her argument ranges across postpositivist philosophy of science, through the empirical literature on the paranormal, to a clinical and theological treatment of demon possession. It makes for fascinating reading, but it is an exercise in overkill.
Second, I am not sure the author ever decided just who her target audience was to be. The first section of the book certainly has the flavor of a doctoral dissertation, and it really requires some knowledge of social science to digest with any ease. The following sections on power, pathology, and paradox more and more take on the ring of sermons, as scholarly argument gives way to confessional proclamation.
Throughout all four sections, Shuster inserts witty but highly intellectual dialogues, reminiscent of The Screwtape Letters, between an “Inquirer” (her own alter ego?) and a “Stranger,” who plays devil’s advocate to all her arguments and is unmasked, finally, as the Devil himself. Shuster seems to want to say something to everyone—and the result may merely be confusion.
Finally, the book lacks the gripping quality we have come to associate with Peck’s work. Aside from occasional dialogues between the “Stranger” and the “Inquirer,” the book is heavy on abstraction, light on case studies, and prone to confusing digression.
Nonetheless, for Christians seeking a sophisticated treatment of the relationships among mind, body, will, spirit, and psychopathology, Shuster’s book is worth the effort it will take to digest it. It is a welcome addition to a growing corpus of scholarly and semischolarly books written by social scientists who, like my Marxist friend, have learned to take the supernatural seriously.
Annie Dillard’s Eyes On Loan
An American Childhood, by Annie Dillard (Harper & Row, 255 pp.; $17.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Philip Yancey.
Annie Dillard writes as if she has not heard all the doomsday talk about people turning from books to TV and VCRs. She writes as if, astonishingly, she believes people still appreciate a clean paragraph, a witty turn of phrase, a precise word set like a precious stone in a gleaming sentence.
She writes an entire book about childhood and adolescence without once using such essential terms as “role model,” “significant other,” “inferiority complex,” and “puberty.” In short, she writes as if a human being is not a predictable product of environment but rather a wondrously free explorer. And, to top it off, she chooses as her frontier of exploration the somber, ordinary streets of middle-class Pittsburgh.
An American Childhood charts new territory for Annie Dillard, and those readers who know her through the Pulitzer prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek or its denser companion Holy the Firm are in for some surprises. Gone are the abstruse philosophical speculations. Instead, Childhood cloaks its depth in simplicity, and thus may be the most “accessible” of Dillard’s works to date. The writing is lyrical, smooth, hard-edged and yet humorous. It represents an experiment in kenosis, in self-emptying, for she is attempting to reproduce the emerging consciousness of childhood.
Inside The Skin Of A Five-Year-Old
There are two ways to write autobiography. A person like Malcolm Muggeridge surveys his life from the grand, sage overlook of enlightened old age. He interprets the younger years from the perspective of the older (the title itself gives him away: Chronicles of Wasted Time). Dillard takes a different, and far more risky, approach. When she writes about a five-year-old’s nighttime fears, or the tactile impressions of her mother’s hands, she attempts to climb inside the skin of her five-year-old body again and tell us what it was like. Similarly, when she writes about teenage years, she sulks and pouts and lashes out at the ignorant, oppressive world around her.
I found myself enjoying An American Childhood on three levels. First, on a factual level, it gave me insight into the author, one of the most refreshing writers and thinkers of our time. We learn that her father, in a fit of adventure, quit his job and pointed his motor-boat down the Mississippi River toward New Orleans; that Annie got kicked out of school for smoking and landed in a hospital as a result of drag racing; that her love for the world of nature had to compete with her love for baseball and the French and Indian wars. “Works only on what interests her,” scolded one of Annie’s high school teachers. Fortunately for us, nearly everything seemed to interest her.
On a second level, I savored the fine craft of her writing. A few samples:
- On the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Platonism as it had come bumping and skidding down the centuries and across the ocean to Concord, Massachusetts.”
- On middle-class families: “[They] accumulate dignity by being seen at church every Sunday” and “by gracefully and persistently, with tidy hair and fitted clothes, occupying their slots.”
- On adolescent boys: “froggy little beasts” who somehow “elongated and transformed into princes and gods.”
- On the Giacometti sculpture Man Walking: “so skinny his inner life was his outer life; it had nowhere else to go.”
- On the sound of ocean waves breaking: “like poured raw rice.”
Even In Pittsburgh
But in the final analysis, a book like this must succeed o on a more personal level. The best measure is to read it yourself and note how much of your own Childs’ hood swims to the surface. Arthur Miller once said his plays worked only if they caused the audience to see within themselves and exclaim, “That’s me!” I had that strong sensation throughout this book. It is a celebration of life: the ordinary, humdrum life that may go unnoticed by an observer less skilled.
Annie Dillard has finely honed the skills of observation, and in An American Childhood she lends us her eyes. The book opens with a quotation from Psalm 26: “I have loved, O Lord, the beauty of thy house and the place where dwelleth thy glory.” Behold, it dwelleth even in Pittsburgh.
God Dwells In Operating Rooms
Taking the World in for Repairs, by Richard Seller, (Penguin, 239 pp.; $6.95, paper). Reviewed by Rodney Clapp.
Doctors confront death nearly every day, and thus, obliquely, the meaning of life. Religion and medicine can never be finally separated—precisely because of medicine’s potency and its power to quicken human dreams for well-being and even immortality.
Richard Selzer, a professor of surgery and writing at Yale University, lives with an acute awareness of this potency. His sensitivity shows in such earlier works as Mortal Lessons. But it has never been as abundantly clear as in his latest book, Taking the World in for Repairs, published in hardcover by Morrow and newly available in a Penguin paperback.
Through a collection of 12 essays and short stories, Selzer both tells and shows how medicine cannot escape religion (and superstition). “A hospital is only a building,” he admits, “until you hear the slate hooves of dreams galloping upon its roof. You listen then and know that here is no mere pile of stone and precisely cut timber but an inner space full of pain and relief.”
Nor, in an essay titled “My Brother Shaman,” does he shy from the similarities between premodern medicine men and modern doctors. In using its rigorous training as an initiation, in refusing to admit none but the initiated into the operating room (the holy of holies), in the ritual cleansing and donning of special raiment, surgery remains a priestly “pantomime marked by exorcism, propitiation and invocation. God dwells in operating rooms as He does everywhere. More than once I have surmised a presence … something between hearing and feeling.…”
In such a charged atmosphere, the modern physician enjoys tremendous privilege and suffers tremendous burden. Selzer’s title essay recounts the work of a team of doctors who visited Peru for a few intensive weeks of repairing cleft lips and palates, fused fingers, and other maladies. The doctors rejoice when they examine a girl with a webbed hand and determine they can reconstruct fingers. “We smile as though we have just received the best news. And we have. All this while, the girl has been eating our faces with her eyes.”
But the doctors also face acute disappointment. They have only so much time and can give the gift of new hands and mouths to only so many people. When the makeshift clinic turns away one web-handed girl, unable to fit her into the schedule, “Something pale and vague flits from the face of the girl. I think it must be hope. Her head drops down and away. She is trying not to show what is churning inside. But courage has its limits, in Peru as everywhere else, and there are tears. With her single finger she reaches up to wipe them away.”
An Infidel’S Pilgrimage
With his compassion and eloquence, Selzer makes us aware just how strong every physician’s impulse toward prayer must be. How may one be part of working such joy as that of a girl’s new fingers, and not cry out in gratitude? And how may one tell another girl she will not have new fingers, and not beg for help and justice from a source greater than one’s own pathetic powers? In the book’s opening piece, Selzer exposes his own tendency toward prayer and his yearning for faith.
“Diary of an Infidel” records a pilgrimage to the Abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. Selzer, it appears, is a kind of Augustinian agnostic, thinking people are either predestined to believe or not to believe at all. For him, faith is something either given or not given, “like perfect pitch.”
Selzer’s narrative abilities turn “Diary of an Infidel” into a suspense story. Will he, or will he not, receive the gift of faith? The monks are subtle evangelists indeed, and the more threatening for it: “Each time [a monk] leaves my room I turn the crucifix on my desk thirty degrees so that, sitting there, I am out of the line of fire. Each time he comes his first act is to turn it back until once again I am a bull’s eye.”
Selzer looks longingly on the happiness of the novices, which can “come from no human source.” And belief nearly overwhelms him as he watches a monk passionately at prayer: “Does he hear the shouts of Roman soldiers, the footsteps of women on the via dolorosa, the hammering of spikes. What must it be like to feel trailing at one’s feet the whole of the gorgeous Christian epic—immaculate, murderous, risen? It is a triumph of the imagination.”
Devout Doubts
But Selzer finds reasons to doubt. The monks balk at medicine. They glory in earlier days when bodily mortification was especially violent. They exemplify a brutal faith, one demanding renunciation of body for the sake of soul, of family and friends, of nature’s wonders. And, dangerously unpredictable, the faith housed by the monastery looms like “an orange cat who might claw the one who reaches out or settle to its belly and purr. You never know. Winning faith is like trying to tame a wild animal.” In the end, Selzer does not learn to pray and cannot believe. So he will simply return to his life—“I shall go on doctoring lest I be tempted to lie down and cherish my sorrows.” He will watch birds, treasure laughter and memory. “And I shall try to find human beings to hold in my arms.”
In his classic The Patient As Person, Paul Ramsey remarks that physicians are the true Hebrews of our age. They recognize the indissolubility of the soul and the body. They affirm the goodness of creation, in nature and in humanity. In Selzer’s case, and again like the Hebrews, we may add a sense of the perilousness of belief: Yahweh is no tamer than a wild animal.
Dr. Richard Selzer does not believe. Yet, if there is such a thing, he is a biblical skeptic. He doubts devoutly, and will enrich any believer’s faith.
God gives us his treasure in “earthen vessels”—Methodist circuit riders and Anglican envoys, monks and basketball stars, members of Parliament and Presbyterian theologians. And we unearth the treasure in diaries, book introductions, personal memoirs, and even biographies. Here Larry Sibley, who teaches practical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary, reports on recent books that put God’s treasure on display.
Border-State Diary
The Heavens Are Weeping: The Diaries of George R. Browder, 1852–1886, edited by Richard Troutman (Zondervan, 575 pp.; $19.95, cloth).
One of the best ways to read history is in diaries—personal journals that have survived from generation to generation. George Browder, a Kentucky farmer and Methodist circuit rider, wrote the diaries on which The Heavens Are Weeping is based before, during, and after the American Civil War. Reading the daily entries, one enters a different world, and emerges with an expanded sense of the people of God.
We see a farmer and pastor balancing two careers: Concerned for his family and the people at the preaching-points under his care, Browder had a difficult but comfortable subsistence from tobacco and other cash crops.
Living in a border state only heightened Browder’s difficulties. Although in many ways more sympathetic to southern reasoning, Browder was on principle doggedly submissive to the northern authorities. His diaries record the dilemma of a man who wanted to submit to civil authorities, even to the extent of registering for conscription, but who hoped he would not have to serve in the Union army.
