Who Volunteers the Most?

Graduates of Protestant high schools, apparently.

Religious Americans participate in charitable or volunteer organizations twice as much as do secular Americans. So says existing research. But a new study suggests that it's not people's religion that prompts them to become model volunteers, but which high school they attended.

According to Calvin College researchers Jonathan Hill and Kevin den Dulk, the type of high school people attend influences them more than any other factor—including religion, socioeconomic status, or family type.

What type makes the most difference? Their study, published this March in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, shows that graduates of Protestant high schools out-volunteer peers from Catholic, secular, public, and home schools—all by significant margins.

The "counterintuitive" findings (researchers expected homeschoolers to be on top) stayed consistent throughout all tests, den Dulk says.

"Educational setting," he said, has a value "beyond religious identity."

The problem is no one knows exactly why Protestant schooling predicts the likelihood of volunteering.

David Sikkink, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame whose research has found similar results, believes that somehow teachers implant a sense of civic duty in students' minds.

Protestant schools tend to be strong communities where students get a sense of "collective identity," he said, "and they get practice committing to the common good of the institutions."

One possible explanation is the type of "opportunity structure" for community service that exists for graduates. Hill and den Dulk speculate that Protestant schools may provide better access to parachurch groups like Youth for Christ or InterVarsity, which are present in both high schools and colleges.

Another explanation could be the way Protestant teachers motivate students. Bill Cochran, director of school ministry for the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, says most of its teachers encourage students to love their neighbors not because it's a civic duty, but because it's a biblical one.

Robert Wuthnow, professor of sociology at Princeton and author of Learning to Care, says it may not matter where a student volunteers. His research indicates that the willingness to volunteer comes from both the quality of the service and debriefing sessions that follow.

"The key factor was coming to think of oneself as a caring person," Wuthnow said. "That meant not just being good-hearted, but knowing that one had some skills that would carry forward."

But the Calvin study suggests that Wuthnow may not be right, according to Hill.

"It's more likely they just get in the habit of doing it and automatically volunteer when there are opportunities," he said. "Schools somehow affect people's habits below the surface."

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Oh Happy Day

Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Mutual delight with God.

Ask a Christian if she’s blessed and she’ll reply—or at least she’ll know she’s supposed to reply—yes. Ask her if she’s happy, and her instinct might be to deny it, whatever the reality. Happiness has gotten a tarnished reputation in Christianity, as if it were the first step toward self-indulgence and moral softness. Those who fancy themselves “deep” might even claim that happiness is actively destructive of godliness: there’s nothing like acute suffering to bring you closer to Christ. If you’re happy, you’re probably not very good at the Christian thing.

God and the Art of Happiness

Ellen T. Charry (Author)

Eerdmans

316 pages

$33.99

Ellen Charry sets out to erase this unhappy Christian relationship to happiness and reframe the discussion entirely. Instead of pitting creation against redemption against eschatology, she integrates the three into a holistic vision. God created a world and its people in which to take delight, and so that they too may grow to take delight in the world and its Creator. God redeemed the world from sin to restore it to its delight and begin the healing process that will be consummated in the life to come. We are made for happiness—in ourselves, in others, and in God. But we have been skittish in talking about how to gain it.

“Christian theology, eager to inculcate humility, has at times failed to encourage the natural skills and strengths humans possess for executing their calling as God’s emissaries in the world.”

This skittishness is demonstrated by the extreme poverty of Christian reflection on the felicitous life. Charry excavates nearly all the sources in the first half of her book. She begins with the philosophical scene onto which Christianity burst: the competing schools of Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Neoplatonism, each of which passed something on to the newborn faith while at the same time being fiercely criticized by it. The next episode in the story centers on the prolix St. Augustine, who treats the topic more than nearly any other theologian in Christian history. Contrary to what one might expect from his searching self-examination in the Confessions, Augustine argues strenuously in favor of self-love: that is, true self-love, divinely directed self-love. The conjunction of knowledge of God through Christ with love for God leads us toward our true happiness—eternal life with the Holy Trinity—and in the meanwhile gives us tools for retraining our souls divided by sin. “To be healed is to be happy.” This is how Charry will ultimately construe her own proposal for Christian happiness.

The next step takes us into the cell of Boethius, an upright Roman Christian wrongly accused and sentenced to death. Facing an untimely end despite a life of virtue, Boethius writes out his own interview with Lady Philosophy, whose tough love prods him past self-pity, toward a confrontation with the fickleness of Fortune, and finally to an assurance of the reward in the life to come. Christologically impoverished and not terribly encouraging in hard times or even helpful in good ones, Boethius’ vision seems to dominate even now when Christians give official voice to their views on happiness.

The picture improves when we skip ahead some centuries to the Angelic Doctor. Thomas Aquinas’ whole theology is oriented toward the beatific vision, which is happiness supreme. Knowledge of God is also union with God; thus true intellectual growth is also moral growth. En route, human beings take righteous pleasure in their “secondary agency,” enhancing the well-being of creation through use of their gifts and skills, helping God to achieve his own ends for the world. “Self-realization is living as an agent of the divine will.” Happiness in this life is practice for happiness in the eschaton, which in both aeons includes a flourishing body and friends.

Charry gives a brief overview of Luther and Calvin before documenting the “rise of psychological egoism” in such figures as Hobbes, La Rochefoucauld, and Mandeville, who could no longer distinguish between divinely formed self-love and sheer selfishness. They also assumed selfishness to be the single most driving force in humanity—Mandeville even suggested harnessing it for the sake of economic growth, and it would appear now that his prediction has been confirmed beyond his wildest dreams. Others tried to paint a less bleak picture of the human situation: Lord Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and to an extent Pascal.

But the figure Charry lifts up for renewed consideration is the Anglican divine Joseph Butler, who strove to combat the moral cynicism of his day by preaching the startling message that “self-love is obedience to God.” Acknowledging sin, Butler argued from an imago dei anthropology that to live well is to fulfill our God-given nature; that we must learn from Scripture and preaching how to overcome our tendencies toward self-deception and self-gratification; and that we can indeed move toward moral integrity to live at peace with ourselves and God alike and with genuine benevolence toward our neighbors. These should not be perceived as being in competition with one another: “One does not subtract some affection for self and give it to another who needs it.” Butler’s arguments cut through the stale contemporary discussion about so-called altruism: loving one’s neighbor is not a matter of self-sacrifice but of self-love—and it is perfectly good for it to be so. Christian cynics about the human capacity for love will be as startled by Butler’s claims as his secular detractors!

After this doctrinal review, Charry moves to the second half of the book, where she coins her term for a long-overdue Christian doctrine of happiness, “asherism,” derived from the Hebrew word asher, “happy.” Her “realizing eschatology” of happiness emphasizes that we begin now what will be completed in the life to come. We need to make a distinction, Charry argues, between divine commands that are “voluntarist” and those that are “asherist”—another unique contribution she makes to this discussion. The former are tests of obedience, often addressed to one person only. The latter are universal in their address and seek to “cultivate moral sensibility in the agent.” Such obedience is not blind but wise; humility and wisdom should not be played off one another. Asherist commands seek also to overcome the individual-community dualism: “personal flourishing overlaps with and eventually merges with corporate flourishing.”

But it should not be thought that asherist commands are somehow universally accessible and obvious in a way that voluntarist ones are not. Quite the contrary, it is with good reason that the Decalogue begins with commandments to love and worship the Lord alone. The specific revelation of the God of Israel opens the way to general knowledge and wisdom about the world at large, not the other way around. Accordingly, Charry exposits the Ten Commandments and the Holiness Code with an eye to the moral development they inculcate to bring the people of Israel into a happy relationship with God and one another. Her handling of the commands to genocide is particularly valuable.

The biblical exegesis continues with Charry’s soundings in the Psalms and Proverbs. She points out that the psalmist’s fear “is not that God will punish him but that he might miss the wealth and sweetness that God’s wisdom promises.” Obedience to the Torah is a witness to the nations; it is also a lure for the wicked, drawing them away from their evildoing by envy of the benefits of the righteous. In Proverbs, the ground of the conversation shifts from righteousness vs. wickedness to wisdom vs. folly. Acknowledging that this gathering of wisdom-sayings can sometimes read like a “moral telephone book,” Charry defends the need to repeat the obvious, because “wise self-use is quite challenging in practice.” The narrow range of self- and community-destructive sins committed one generation after another is proof enough of that.

The attention to wise and righteous living is clear enough in Israel’s Scripture, but does it continue into the Jesus part of the story? Charry argues that it does, and supremely so in the Gospel of John, which “highlights love and obedience to Jesus’ commandments as the way to—or, perhaps better, the content of—eternal life.” Jesus is the embodiment of all the wisdom and righteousness that Israel has pursued for so long: “The fantastic claim that God is a person means that he indwells individuals …. The Johannine vision radicalizes, personalizes, and intensifies the heritage by individualizing salvation.” John’s emphasis on love and joy as well as on personal attachment to Jesus again unites the individual and the community to a relationship of mutual delight with God, as the Father and the Son have with one another.

Charry wraps up her case with some reflections on the limits to achieving a measure of happiness in this life—especially where extreme domestic or political dysfunction reign. But then, how do we even recognize the dysfunction, on what basis do we confess the sin, how do we go about healing, unless we have a vision of what is good, wholesome, and happy? “Christian theology, eager to inculcate humility, has at times failed to encourage the natural skills and strengths humans possess for executing their calling as God’s emissaries in the world.” Theology has likewise often failed to recognize that “[h]appiness is not a matter of manipulating the world to secure our desire, but taking pleasure in being who Scripture teaches we are.” A not insignificant part of that is to be found in the healing of distorted loves that have led to distorted relationships, and the book closes with three striking vignettes of how Christian love and wisdom may strengthen and ennoble those who dwell in them.

Charry is no naïve optimist; she sees plainly the limits of this life. But as long as we remain strangers and pilgrims on this earth, we have good comfort: “The point is not how much we accomplish, but enjoying what God accomplishes with us.”

Sarah Hinlicky Wilson is a research professor at the Institute for Ecumenical Research in Strasbourg, France, and the editor of Lutheran Forum.

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A Theodramatic Metaphysic

Stephen N. Williams

Attending to the character of biblical testimony.

Only one adjective satisfies the demand for a snap response to a book which is (a) written by Kevin Vanhoozer and (b) registers at two pounds and four ounces on the kitchen scales: “Weighty.” The author’s creative use of speech-act theory and advancement of a canonical-linguistic interpretation of doctrine has made him deservedly influential on the contemporary theological scene, and this substantial volume on the doctrine of God will but extend that influence.

Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship (Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine)

Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Author)

Cambridge University Press

539 pages

$110.35

On reading the word “remythologizing,” some will anticipate a theological project inspired by a letter written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which seemed to portend a remythologizing enterprise which he was himself never able to undertake. But Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion and Authorship has nothing to do with Bonhoeffer, although, as in his case, a contrast to “demythologizing” is intended. Vanhoozer holds that, in steering its course, theology must make an early decision to beware both of Bultmann’s demythologizing and of Feuerbach’s interpretation of theology as anthropology. Having so determined, in order thereafter to remain centered on the Bible, without letting these two out of sight, it should pursue its way by attending to the theodramatic character of biblical testimony. The form in which God’s Word comes to us in Scripture is drama, of which God is the author and in which he is an actor, and theological reflection on God is not only well-advised, but actually bound, to be directed by this form, if we are to speak rightly and well of God.

To this reflective task Kevin Vanhoozer dedicates himself in this volume. If “authorship” and “theodrama” are the concepts or categories that immediately emerge from Scripture, “communicative agency” is the apt metaphysical rubric under which to elaborate them and further our thinking about God. “Remythologizing” amounts to an adumbration of this idea, in the conviction that it is no mere idea, but divine reality, that occupies us. “Mythos” refers to “all the ways in which diverse forms of biblical literature represent, and render, the divine drama“; remythologizing proposes as theologically normative the “christological content and canonical form” of Scripture and outlines, on its basis, a theodramatic metaphysic. The author proceeds by contrasting classical theism with the “kenotic-perichoretic relational ontotheology” which is its modern rival. He agrees that the latter enshrines theological concerns which must be taken positively on board and, late in the day, remarks on a point of convergence between it and his proposal. Yet, taken as a whole, he firmly rejects it and opts for a modified form of classical theism. Barth has led the way, with his Trinitarian and Christological concentration on God’s being as act, but he is to be faulted for failing to do proper justice to the whole of Scripture. More to the present point, it is possible to mint a post-Barthian Thomism—and this is a possibility which Vanhoozer converts to actuality. What deserves criticism is not classical theism as it took shape in patristic, medieval, and post-Reformation thought (whatever modifications it may require) but “perfect being theology,” represented in modern analytic theism, which substitutes an extra-biblical philosophical for a truly biblical mode of thought.

Vanhoozer tests his scheme in two areas: in relation to the question of divine-human interaction, and in relation to the question of divine suffering. His thesis, in relation to the first, is that we should allow, as Scripture does, for a genuine dialogical interaction between God and his human creatures and so deploy, in interpretation, the category of personal communication rather than a notion of divine causality which treats humans too impersonally and instrumentally. As communicative agent, God works by internal persuasion. However, in terms of classical debates between Reformed and non-Reformed theology, this does not entail abandoning belief in God’s effectual calling. Operating with the correct theological categories may involve a modification of characteristically Reformed formulations, but not the surrender of the basic theological insight of that tradition. (One of the merits of Vanhoozer’s discussion is not only its non-partisan quality and tone, but its refusal to be distracted by too narrow a theological agenda in relation to the Reformed/non-Reformed debate.)

The question of divine impassibility is described, perhaps rather surprisingly, as a litmus test for the author’s proposal. Impassibility is grounded in the belief that “God does not suffer the effects of time or creaturely causation.” In maintaining this with respect to God’s suffering, the tradition has been right. But the implications of this are easily misunderstood. God possesses almighty affection, active and voluntary, not passive and involuntary. He cares, which care Scripture spells out particularly in terms of his covenant relationship with his people. If we understand emotions as “concern-based construals”—and the modern reaction to impassibility has unfortunately operated with a post-Enlightenment view of emotion, which couches the terms of the debate with classical theism in a form which do not justice to the latter—we can ascribe to God “thought-feels.”

It seems both brutal and a betrayal of the point and spirit of this theodramatic theology to summarize in terse propositions proposals developed over more than 500 pages. Those familiar with Vanhoozer’s work will know what to expect: a combination of biblical faithfulness with creative thinking; independence, but never arrogance, in judgment; constant, studious concern for the theologian’s task, yet in a way that enables the writer to get on with and not be distracted from the material project in hand; breadth of reading and liveliness of style. Suspicious hermeneuts will wonder if these remarks are designed to preface a statement of disagreement with the theological substance of this volume. Well, this reviewer does not take himself so seriously as to think that his substantive judgment is a significant enough literary event to warrant a self-conscious build-up of this kind. Actually, I find the main thrust of Vanhoozer’s thesis persuasive, certainly when God’s economy is under consideration. What is said about authorship, theodrama, communicative agency, and dialogical interaction appears to me on track, and very helpful for the rest of us, so a single-sentence evaluation would be one of signal appreciation. My account conveys no idea of the fresh insights that emerge in the author’s execution of his assignment or, for example, the significance of Mikhail Bakhtin’s contribution in this volume, when it comes to the conceptualization and application (not the initial derivation) of theological insight.

The privileges of many years of friendship permit, rather than hinder, a supplementary expression of reservations about the thesis. Perhaps this can be contained within two areas. First, there is the move that the author makes from an account of God’s economy to an account of his being-in-communicative agency. It seems to me that at least three things mark the former that do not mark the latter: (a) the verbal nature of God’s communication; (b) its indirect nature, as emphasized by Vanhoozer; (c) its context in a sinful world that needs and receives reconciliation through Jesus Christ. (Vanhoozer will partially demur in regard to the first of these.) But none of these characterize God’s inner life, and so the communicative form of that life is further removed from the communicative economy than Vanhoozer allows. And inferences about what communicative agency involves in that inner life—which he draws with care, anxious to avoid speculation—become more precarious than Vanhoozer supposes. Why exactly are they necessary? If I trust God’s character and words as revealed and spoken to me in Christ and Scripture, to what extent do I need a theodramatic metaphysic that includes more than a minimal account of God’s inner life? This is where, I think, Brunner was very close to the mark in his remarks on the doctrine of the Trinity, but Brunner has not been particularly lively on the theological scene for some time and, on this specific point, more or less unheeded, as far as I can tell. So I am not really persuaded of the analogia dramatis.

Second, a cluster of questions arises around Vanhoozer’s treatment of divine impassibility, its merits notwithstanding. I mention three.

(a) Despite the undoubtedly impressive contribution of Cyril of Alexandria on this question and, granting the complexity of the metaphysical issues involved, I fail to see how Vanhoozer’s position (shared with plenty of others) can be sustained, when he argues that the Son suffered in his person and human nature, but not in his divine nature. To be a divine person, by definition, is to be a bearer of the divine nature; a divine person is such precisely by virtue of possessing the nature that he possesses. In incarnation, the divine nature is given; it is the human that is assumed. How can a person suffer without suffering in the nature intrinsic to that person?

(b) I should want to emphasize more than does Vanhoozer the compassionate relation between God and humans (leaving aside, for a moment, the question of non-humans) outside the covenanted people of God. If our difference must be stated in one quick and summary sentence, I should say that we need to attend more than we often do to the fact that Abraham, prior to God’s covenant with him, was already heir to the Noahic covenant, which links God’s original creation with the redemptive calling of Abraham. Specifically Abraham was the descendant of Shem, whose post-diluvian history is launched under the terms of the post-diluvian covenant.

(c) It seems to me that it is possible to ascribe sorrow, and hence suffering, to God without ascribing change. I can imagine now what it would be like to lose a loved one in the future and anticipate the emotional grief; but I cannot do so perfectly, and my own death may come to pass before the death of the other. However, it is not hard to imagine the perfect eternal anticipation, on the part of a divine being, of a grief arising from human sin. There is no ground for sorrow in God’s inner-Trinitarian relations, so divine suffering is not like divine love, but it may nevertheless be ascribed to him eternally in a way that is perhaps parallel to the way in which we have traditionally ascribed to God knowledge of that which is to come, even though creation is a free act and not an ontological necessity. Passibility would not entail mutability in this case. I am not pressing this as a substantive theological point—my short-term memory is not so bad that I have forgotten Brunner already—but, if we are engaging in metaphysics in the way in which Vanhoozer is doing, it seems to me that this is a possibility to consider.

It may appear that my reservations are ones that could apply to schemes other than Vanhoozer’s and so do not apply distinctively to his project. That is true, but, if they have any substance, this entails that old questions or difficulties remain within a novel theological framework. It would be interesting to know whether the author would conclude that such reservations, in principle, devalue the theological advance that he has attempted, or whether he would say that, even in principle, he is not trying to solve theological problems just by virtue of theological-conceptual change.

In terms of the specficially evangelical heritage, it is interesting to ask to what extent Vanhoozer bears the mantle of Bernard Ramm, whether we are thinking of Barth or of communications theory. More broadly, readers of this volume will include both classical theists and relational panentheists who will consider that Vanhoozer has conceded too much to the other side. Amongst those same readers who will go on to write on and speak of the volume, one can only wish that they (we) might do so in the spirit of the author and with the same eagerness to be a hearer of the biblical Word and words. So thanks—again—Kevin.

Stephen N. Williams is professor of systematic theology at Union Theological College in Belfast. With Gordon McConville, he is the author of Joshua, a volume in the Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary series from Eerdmans.t box 1

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Love Is Stronger than Debt

Eugene McCarraher

Against Chrapitalism.

If the last five years of American politics have demonstrated anything, it's that Marx's dictum about the modern state couldn't be more indisputable: our government is the executive committee for the common affairs of the bourgeoisie. Now more than ever, our liberal democracy is a corporate franchise, and the stockholders are demanding an ever-higher return on their investment in America, Inc. Over the last four decades, the Plutocracy has decided to repeal the 20th century, to cancel the gains and protections won by workers, the poor, and others outside the imperial aristocracy of capital. Enough of this coddling of those Ayn Rand vilified as "moochers" and "looters." Return the country to its rightful owners: the "Job Creators," the Almighty Entrepreneurs, those anointed by Heaven to control the property interests of the American Empire. Endowed with the Divine Right of Capital, they deserve our thanksgiving and reverence, for without them we would not deserve to live, such common clay are we.

The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology

Simon Critchley (Author)

Verso

302 pages

$6.88

Lest anyone think that the re-election of President Barack Obama invalidates this judgment, think again. Mitt Romney may have been a more egregious and openly disdainful lord of the manor, but Obama has compiled an impeccable record of imperial corporate stewardship. Despite all the hype about a rising progressive coalition of non-whites and young people, there is no reason to believe that Obama's second term of office will be any less a model of deference.

The Plutocracy's beatific vision for the mass of Americans is wage servitude: a fearful, ever-busy, and cheerfully abject pool of human resources. Rendered lazy and recalcitrant by a half-century of mooching, American workers must be forced to be free: crush labor unions, keep remuneration low, cut benefits and lengthen working hours, close or narrow every avenue of escape or repose from accumulation. If they insist on living like something more than the whining, expendable widgets they are, reduce them to a state of debt peonage with an ensemble of financial shackles: mortgages, credit cards, and student loans, all designed to ensure that the wage slaves utter two words siren-sweet to business: "Yes, boss." It's the latest chapter in the depressing story that David Graeber relates in Debt: debt as an especially insidious weapon in the arsenal of social control. "There's no better way to justify relations founded on violence … than by reframing them in the language of debt," he writes, "because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong."

Alas, we're living in the early, bewildering days of the demise of the American Empire, the beginning of the end of that obsession-compulsion known as the Amerian Dream. The reasons are clear, if often angrily denied: military hubris and over-extension; a stagnant monopoly capitalism with a bloated financial sector; a population on whom it's dawning that low-wage labor is their inexorable fate; ecological wreckage that can only be limited or repaired by cessation of growth. The patricians' task will be threefold: finessing the increasingly obvious fact of irreversible imperial decline; convincingly performing the charade of democracy in the face of popular vassalage; and distracting or repressing the roiling rage and tumult among the plebs. How will the elites maintain and festoon their ever-more untenable hegemony?

Empires have always evaded but eventually accepted their impending senescence: first, willful, vehement denial, and redoubled, often violent devotion to the imperial customs and divinities; then the slow, entropic apocalypse of demoralization and retrenchment. As imperial twilight descends, a brisk if melancholy market of fashions in acquiescence will undoubtedly arise. Reconciled to the dystopian prospect of a world engulfed in war and famine, the affluent will sport a variety of brands of what Simon Critchley dubs "passive nihilism," a withdrawal from politics into tasteful, well-guarded enclaves of resignation. Radical visions may revive as well, but right now they're dispiritingly feckless. Looking at first like a pentecost of utopia, the "Occupy" movement has dismally failed to gain any popular traction, in part because of the utter mediocrity and incoherence of its demands. "Fairness" is populist pabulum; "we are the 99%" is a slogan, not serious political analysis. The injustice and indignity of capitalism have seldom been so openly wretched, but as Graeber ruefully observes, just when we need "to start thinking on a breadth and with a grandeur appropriate to the times," we seem to have "hit the wall in terms of our collective imagination."

Don't expect any breadth or grandeur from the Empire's Christian divines. Across the board, the imperial chaplains exhibit the most obsequious deference to the Plutocracy, providing imprimaturs and singing hallelujahs for the civil religion of Chrapitalism: the lucrative merger of Christianity and capitalism, America's most enduring covenant theology. It's the core of "American exceptionalism," the sanctimonious and blood-spattered myth of providential anointment for global dominion. In the Chrapitalist gospel, the rich young man goes away richer, for God and Mammon have pooled their capital, formed a bi-theistic investment group, and laundered the money in baptismal fonts before parking it in offshore accounts. Chrapitalism has been America's distinctive and gilded contribution to religion and theology, a delusion that beloved community can be built on the foundations of capitalist property. As the American Empire wanes, so will its established religion; the erosion of Chrapitalism will generate a moral and spiritual maelstrom.

What will American Christians do as their fraudulent Mandate from Heaven expires? They might break with the imperial cult so completely that it would feel like atheism and treason. With a little help from anarchists, they might be monotheists, even Christians again. Who better to instruct them in blasphemy than sworn enemies of both God and the state? Christians might discover that unbelievers can be the most incisive and demanding theologians. As Critchley asserts, " 'God' is the first anarchist, calling us into struggle with the mythic violence of law, the state, and politics by allowing us to glimpse the possibility of something that stands apart." By inciting us to curse and renounce the homespun idolatry of Chrapitalism, Critchley and Graeber can point Christians back to a terrible but glorious moment in their history: when the avant-garde of the eschaton were maligned as godless traitors. We'll need that dangerous memory in our frightful if doubtless very different time.

An anti-globalist firebrand and renowned anthropologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, Graeber has been touted as a guru for Occupy, writing portentously in the Guardian that it represents "the opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the American Empire." Debt should be read as a scholarly barrage in that colloquy on imperial decay. Indeed, Graeber himself tells us that his is an Important Book. "For a very long time, the intellectual consensus has been that we can no longer ask Great Questions." Graeber's Great Answer is a tour de force of interdisciplinary erudition, a sprawling, disheveled, and fascinating mess of a book. After 200 pages of anthropology, economics, sociology, and philosophy—even a bit of religion and theology—the history of debt unfolds as a magpie collection of anecdotes: stories from around the globe about coinage, slavery, markets, trade, and law. The last two centuries get jammed into the last 40 pages; the last 40 years into the final thirty. It's a rambling, ill-focused account, and it's not at all clear by the end of the volume exactly what the Great Answer is.

Graeber's history is less engrossing than his vigorous diatribe against the sado-science of economics—the ethical nexus of Chrapitalism—and his sustained assault on this phony discipline will endure in the annals of schadenfreude. There's been a Himalayan rise in the inflation rate of arrogance among economists since the 1970s, and having failed to see the current turmoil coming, practitioners of the dismal science should be required to eat a daily helping of humble pie. Their account of history (where they pretend to know any) has been discredited for over a century; drawing on an ample anthropological and historical literature, Graeber shows that money and markets emerged, not from Adam Smith's "natural liberty," but from the need of ancient states to provision their expanding temple-military complexes. From its "myth of barter" to its truncated, utility-maximizing humanism, economics, Graeber contends, has "little to do with anything we observe when we examine how economic life is actually conducted." Historically illiterate and morally cretinous, economics—not theology—is the most successful confidence game in the history of intellectual life, a testament to the power of avarice to induce and embellish human credulity.

In Graeber's view, economics' most nefarious impact on morality is its perverse account of social relations, especially those revolving around obligation and interdependence. Graeber distinguishes between obligations—the incalculable owing of favors, as when you give me something, and I owe you something back—and debt as a precisely enumerable obligation, and therefore calculable in terms of equivalence and money. Conceivable only when people are treated not as human beings but as abstractions, equivalence is the categorical imperative of pecuniary reason, and it sanctifies the self-righteous, skinflint buncombe that parades as an ethic of "character." Isn't paying one's debts the basis of morality and dependable personal character? Especially when translated into money, the quantification of debt can justify a lot of indecent, horrific conduct. Can't pay me back? I'll take your daughter, or foreclose on your home, or demand austerity measures that result in famine, disease, or destitution.

Graeber's alternative to debt and its moral atrocities is communism: "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs." (Not, note well, according to their "deserts.") Knowing that he'll face a fusillade of umbrage about "totalitarianism," Graeber insists that communism "exists right now" and lies at "the foundation of all human sociability." Our lives abound with moments of everyday communism: we don't charge people who ask us for directions, and if we do, we're rightly considered jerks. Communism is not "egalitarianism"—which, as even Marx observed, partakes of the boring, inhuman logic of equivalence—and in Graeber's view, it doesn't entail any specific form of property. (An unromantic admirer of peasant societies and their moral economy of "the commons," Graeber appears to endorse what anthropologists sometimes call "usufruct," in which property becomes a kind of trusteeship dependent on the performance of a function.) A communist relationship—between spouses, lovers, friends—is not only one in which accounts are not kept, but one in which it would be considered "offensive, or simply bizarre" to even think of doing so. Love keeps no record of wrongs—or rights.

Thus communism restricts or negates a "freedom" conceived solely as lack of restraint. As Graeber explains, "freedom" has meant several things: release from debts, as in the biblical notion of "redemption"; friendship, as derived from the German freund, connoting amicable solidarity; and unfettered power, or libertas, enshrined in Roman jurisprudence, the right of a patriarch to do anything with his possessions. And as Graeber reminds us, those possessions included his family: famulus meant slave, while dominus, or master, derived from domus, or household. (Remember that next time you're tempted to swoon to claptrap about "family values.") The notion of absolute ownership of things originated in the absolute ownership of people. Roman libertas leavens the mean-spirited ideal of "freedom" in liberal capitalist democracies. As "self-ownership," freedom both makes property a right rather than a function and turns a right into a kind of alienable property. Of course, capitalists have every interest in getting us to see "freedom" this way, since "self-ownership" entails the notion that we can give away, sell, or rent out our freedom. As 19th-century craftsmen and workers understood better than we do today, wage labor is the slavery of capitalism: if you don't own the means of production, you work for those who do—unlike chattel, you enjoy the dubiously ennobling privilege of choosing your master.

Graeber affirms redemption and friendship against the command economy of libertas. Friends and lovers don't treat each other as servants or vendable objects, so freedom should be "the ability to make friends," the capacity to enter into human relations that are uncoerced and incalculable. And since friends are naturally communists, they'll live without thinking of their relations in a way that leads to double-entry bookkeeping; they'll live in the light of "redemption," which isn't about "buying something back" but rather about "destroying the entire system of accounting." To create a more humane and generous world, we must unlearn our moral arithmetic and throw the ledgers into the bonfire. A communist society of friends requires the abolition of capitalism.

Hence the expectation, after 500 pages, of a Great Answer with "breadth and grandeur"—but Graeber fails to deliver anything more than exhortation and tepid reformism. "History is not over … surprising new ideas will certainly emerge," he assures us; popular movements are having "all sorts of interesting conversations." Yet Graeber's own call for "a Biblical-style Jubilee" is magnanimous but disappointingly banal. A wholesale cancellation of consumer and international debt seems bold, but it's fundamentally conservative: it would liberate debtors while maintaining the existing arrangement and logic of capitalism. Property forms do matter; we can't treat them with the cavalier indifference that Graeber exhibits. To end the tyranny of debt, we would have to cultivate a political imagination that sees well beyond a jubilee.

While Graeber asserts that some great conceptual breakthrough could arise "from some as yet completely unexpected quarter," he pretty much dismisses religion as a source of moral and political innovation. Religion parrots the language of money and debt: "forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors" as the Lord's Prayer pleads, and religions often speak of the debt we owe to God or some other cosmic force. "Redemption" meant buying back, and the Atonement is often conceived as Christ's paying a debt we sinners owe to God. And besides, as Graeber observes, Christians don't take their own Savior at his word. Christian bankers and creditors don't forgive their debtors; why should God forgive them their sins? Yet Graeber concedes that Christianity harbors traces of a moral and ontological revolution against the regime of debt. "Redemption" could point to the destruction and transcendence of equivalence; as Thomas Aquinas and other medieval theologians explained, "our relation with the cosmos is ultimately nothing like a commercial transaction, nor could it be." You can pay off the bank or the bartender; how do you square a "debt " to God?

Graeber drops the point and moves on; Critchley makes "our relations with the cosmos" the central concern of his incisive volume. A philosopher at the New School for Social Research, Critchley has written often and profoundly on ethics in the wake of God's apparent death, especially in Infinitely Demanding (2007), where he sought to explain and overcome the demoralization he sees in liberal societies. Tracing what he calls their "motivational deficit" to the "felt inadequacy of secular conceptions of morality," Critchley proposed an account of moral and political agency in terms of "dividualism," where the self is incessantly called and divided by "fidelity to an unfulfillable demand." We can and should never be "at one" with ourselves; we can and never should be "authentic." The energy for political transformation resides in our "endless inauthenticity, failure, and lack of self-mastery."

With his new book, Critchley joins other left radicals—Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, and Terry Eagleton—who seek in theology not some balm for disappointment, but a tonic to sharpen the mind and revive the spirit of anti-capitalist struggle. Presented as a modest portfolio of "experiments in political theology," Critchley's volume is a rich, audacious attempt to plumb the meaning of faith, the most sustained left-atheist engagement with Christian theology since the work of Ernst Bloch. Struck by Oscar Wilde's bracing assertion in De Profundis—"everything to be true must become a religion"—Critchley provides an exacting and indispensable reflection on the nature of political commitment.

From Hobbes and Locke to Rousseau and Marx to Rawls, Nozick, and Foucault, the modernity of modern politics has been thought to reside in the rejection of any conception of political order rooted in nature or divinity. But by grounding the political completely and unreservedly in the human, this apparently "secular" mode of politics requires that the human be "unchallengeable"—in other words, sacred. All political order depends, Critchley maintains, on allegiance to a "supreme fiction" whereby a people becomes a people—an "original covenant," as he puts it. Whether it's fascism, communism, or liberal democracy, modern political forms, Critchley contends, comprise "a series of metamorphoses of sacralization." In this view, the American civil religion is an especially brazen displacement and renaming of sacral devotion.

This is a provocative and unsettling claim, for it counters the tale of modernity narrated as "secularization" or "disenchantment." First told by Marx and Max Weber, it's been given a Christian re-statement most recently by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age (2009). I've long thought that religious intellectuals give too much credence to the "disenchantment of the world," and that they need, not to call for some reactive "re-enchantment," but to tell a new story about modernity. (As readers may know, I'm finishing a book that makes a Critchleyan claim about the history of capitalism.) For those who want to challenge the very narrative of "secularization," Critchley will be an invaluable interlocutor, if not quite a kindred spirit.

Still, Critchley's account of "the sacred" remains utterly human and terrestrial—it echoes a lineage that extends from Ludwig Feuerbach to Norman O. Brown—and it underlies the promise and failure of his attempt at a political theology without God. Honoring its "infinite demand," the dividualist self commits to a truth that is fundamentally religious—a "troth, the experience of fidelity where one is affianced and then betrothed." This is a powerful and persuasive phenomenology of faith as unswerving devotion. But from whom or what does this infinite demand to which we betrothe ourselves originate? Critchley summarily rules out any origin "external to the self … any external, divine command, any transcendent reality." It seems that in Critchley's telling, we marry ourselves. Polonius is right: to thine own self be true.

This religious fidelity to ourselves behooves both love and communism. In two chapters on Pauline theology and the late-medieval movement of the Free Spirit, Critchley hints at a radical politics sustained by faith and suffused by love. Perusing the writings of Marguerite Porete—a learned, lyrical Beguine mendicant who died at the stake in 1310—Critchley affirms her belief that sin could be overcome in this life through a mystical, quasi-erotic union with the Spirit, and that such a union requires what Simone Weil called a "decreation" of the ego in the transformative crucible of love. Love, for Porete, is a strenuous, intrepid pilgrimage into self-annihilation; "love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty"; in Critchley's words, love is "the audacity of impoverishment," an exhilarating, paradoxically enriching loss, an abandonment of all security for the sake of communion—friendship—with divinity.

Thus, as Critchley interprets Paul, "who I am is not in my power"; called and divided, my identity requires "a certain affirmation of weakness." The self is not a seizure and assertion, but rather "the orientation of the self towards something that exceeds oneself." Freedom is not, as in Roman and liberal capitalist libertas, some "virile assertion of autarchy," but rather "the acknowledgement of an essential powerlessness." Freedom comes through submission to the anguish of love; it is not the possession but the endurance of all things. "Love," Critchley writes compellingly, "is not as strong as death. It is stronger."

For Porete and the Free Spirit, love and poverty—tokens of friendship with God—entailed a "faith-based communism," in which the wealth of God is held in common by all, without regard for class or status. (As Graeber emphasizes, friends and lovers are communists.) At the same time, "there is no longer any legitimacy to moral constraints … that do not directly flow from our freedom"—freedom understood as friendship with God. In Pauline terms, love is the law of our being.

Though (wrongly) condemned by the Inquisition for sexual libertinage, the Free Spirit was less about doing than about changing what you want. A revolution of desire must both precede and accompany a revolution of politics. The Free Spirit explored the outer limits adumbrated by Paul and the earliest Christians—"rejects and refuseniks, the very filth of the world," as Critchley glosses Paul, who produced a "political theology of the wretched of the earth." Reading Paul (properly) in an eschatological light, Critchley sketches what he calls the Christian meontology: "an account of things that are not" together with an account of things that are, but are passing. (Like, say, the American Empire.) Meontology is the historical and political analogue to dividualism: we are called and divided from the present, beckoned to "see the world from the standpoint of redemption." We are to live as if the new world already is, and as if this world were already not—not cutting deals with the transient and god-forsaking powers and principalities of the age. Living as a vanguard, Christians reside—or better, travel—within the radical insecurity of time, since the parousia could occur at any moment and render all our calculations foolish.

Critchley clearly believes that the contemporary left must recuperate something of this eschatological faith, but his political theology founders on his avowed dismissal—and misconstrual—of Christian ontology. "To be is to be in debt," he writes, and "original sin is the theological name for the essential ontological indebtedness of the self." There are two problems with this account of ontological "debt." If, as Critchley holds, there is no "transcendent reality," then to whom or what do I "owe" this "debt"? To the "infinite demand" of whom or what do I owe my faith and commitment? If Critchley's "dividualism" is right, I owe it to myself—but I suspect that any debt that I owe to myself will be a fairly easy tab to settle, with ever-negotiable terms of repayment to myself as my lenient creditor.

In other words, I'm sinful—and here Critchley makes another mistake. Sin does not name our "ontological indebtedness"—this makes existence sinful in itself, which makes the calamity of sin incomprehensible. Graeber comes closer to getting it right when he remarks that sin "is our presumption in thinking of ourselves as being in any sense an equivalent to Everything Else that Exists … so as to be able to conceive of such a debt in the first place." Sin is not only a refusal to acknowledge our "indebtedness"—it's the very idea of our indebtedness itself, the notion that our ultimate relation to God is that of dependence, not of loving friendship. It's not just that we desired to be independent of God; it's that we didn't trust God, didn't desire his friendship. So when Critchley writes that Christian love rests on a conviction of "the absolute difference between the human and the divine," he forgets the Incarnation, where the divine entered into the human, and the human was raised to the level of divinity. (Following Paul, the Church Fathers would elaborate the Incarnation in the doctrine of theosis, or the deification of humanity.)

Being Christian consists in realizing that we don't "owe" God a single thing; it's not as though, in giving, he's parted with something, and become poorer or more diminished because of it. I would argue that this perversion of our relationship with God lies at the root of the American Dream, the delusion that the endless pursuit of libertas and wealth is an offering to God. Turning God into a ruthless creditor, we pile up money, achievements, property, and empire to settle the debt. And when the money runs out, the achievements fade, the property depreciates, and the empire crumbles, we wail about losing his favor, as if he's found us unworthy of lending on account of a low cosmic credit score.

In his magnificent sermon, "Poverty and God," the late Father Herbert McCabe reminds us that God is our Creator, not our creditor, nor some demanding investor in our earthly pursuits. "God makes without becoming richer … it is only creation that gains by God's act." (As Henry Miller once put it, "God doesn't make a dime on the deal.") Thus, God is literally poor because he "has no possessions … nothing is or acts for the benefit of God." We can't "give back" to God, or win his love with an impeccable credit history. His delight is to be with, not hound his children, like a rude collection agent; what parent thinks of a child's life as a loan to be repaid or a debt to be squared?

Come to think of it, the God of Jesus Christ has no business sense at all, and violates every canon of the Protestant Ethic. He pays the same wage for one hour of work as for ten, and recommends that we lend without thought of return. (Finance capital could not survive a day with this logic, which is one excellent reason to recommend it.) He's an appallingly lavish and undiscriminating spendthrift, sending his sunshine on the good and the evil. He has a soft spot for moochers and the undeserving poor: his Son was always inviting himself into people's homes, and never asking if the blind man deserved to be cured. How can you run a decent economy this way?

He calls us his friends, and friends share all things; as Thomas Merton knew, "to be a Christian is to be a communist." And divine friendship is to live without debts by "throwing ourselves away"—giving (not charging) according to our ability, and receiving according to our need. "To aim at poverty," McCabe said, "to grow up by living in friendship, is to imitate the life-giving poverty of God, to be godlike." By comparison, the American Dream is a shabby hallucination. As the American Empire totters and slides into history's graveyard of hubris, the glorious poverty of friendship will be our only hope of moral renewal. It's a model of another, very different empire, one innocent of creditors and debtors: the people's republic of heaven, the realm of divine love's utterly unearned, unarmed, and penniless dominion.

Eugene McCarraher is associate professor of humanities and history at Villanova University. He is completing The Enchantments of Mammon: Capitalism and the American Moral Imagination.

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Taste and See

Stan Guthrie

The unpredictable impact of Jesus.

When Jesus said we will know a tree by its fruit, he was referring to individual morality (see Matt. 7:15-20; Luke 6:43-45). Good trees produce good fruit, evil trees produce evil fruit, and never the twain shall meet. Yet given the charge by the late Christopher Hitchens and other New Atheists that “religion poisons everything”—that religion, including and especially Christianity, is a bad tree—Christians are right to search for and highlight the good fruit that drops from the tree of Christian faith and nourishes not just individuals but also whole societies.

Who Is This Man? Study Guide: The Unpredictable Impact of the Inescapable Jesus

John Ortberg (Author)

Zondervan

96 pages

$15.16

Christianity, its defenders never tire of asserting, has given the world such good fruit as political freedom, education, the uplift of women, concern for the poor and disabled, and so on. Is there room on the shelf for yet another volume on the good fruits that have fallen from the Christian tree? John Ortberg, pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church, thinks so, and Who Is This Man? The Unpredictable Impact of the Inescapable Jesus is the result. Ortberg seems to be targeting the friendly outsider, whom Anthony Burgess once described—in a review of the work of C. S. Lewis—as “the half-convinced, … the good man who would like to be a Christian but finds his intellect getting in the way.”

In differentiating his book from some of its worthy predecessors, Ortberg draws a thought-provoking contrast between the expectations of a neutral observer at the dismal conclusion of Jesus’ three years of public ministry and the outsized, global impact of the Carpenter from Nazareth today. “Normally when someone dies, their impact on the world immediately begins to recede,” Ortberg writes in his opening chapter, yet “Jesus inverted this normal human trajectory, as he did so many others. Jesus’ impact was greater a hundred years after his death than during his life; it was greater still after five hundred years; after a thousand years his legacy laid the foundation for much of Europe; after two thousand years he has more followers in more places than ever.”

And Ortberg continues to draw effective contrasts: ancient views on human disposability vs. Jesus’ teaching about the dignity and worth of the individual; ancient views on loving one’s friends and hating one’s enemies vs. Christ’s command to love your enemies; the Roman belief that religion must serve the state vs. the Lord’s recognition of two realms, for God and Caesar; the prevailing pagan view of marriage as mainly a social arrangement for the rich vs. Jesus’ statement that marriage is primarily a God thing; and so on.

Ortberg fleshes out these insightful contrasts in chapters on Jesus’ transforming influence on human dignity, art, marriage, treatment of enemies, and his incomparable example of humility. (His conjectural exposition of the Lord’s parallel treatment of the Jews and the pagans in the Decapolis on “the other side” of the lake in Mark 6 and 8 is fascinating.) He especially shines when describing how Jesus overturns—as at the money-changers’ tables—the world’s perceptions about greatness. Speaking of Christ’s self-giving love, Ortberg mentions an extra-biblical Jewish story of some disciples who “love their rabbi so much that they try to wash his feet. But there are no stories of a higher-status person washing the feet of a lower-status person. We never read of a rabbi washing his disciples’ feet. Except this rabbi, who by the way said he was the Messiah.” Who Is This Man? is sprinkled with such sparkling vignettes. Ortberg’s pithy explanations of the ancient world move the text along briskly.

In contrasting the teachings of Christ with the ancient mindset, however, sometimes Ortberg seems to give short shrift to the Lord’s Jewish outlook and heritage. The author, for example, contrasts the rampant, outward-focused religious hypocrisy of the ancient world with the demand by Jesus that people clean both the inside and outside of their religious cup—that our good-looking fruit cannot be rotten to the core. Yet Jesus’ demand for inner righteousness quite properly reflects the prior call of Israel and Judah’s prophets for religious integrity:

I hate, I despise your feasts,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them;
and the peace offerings of your fattened animals,
I will not look upon them.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
to the melody of your harps I will not listen.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
—Amos 5:21-24, ESV

Jesus, after all, came not to abolish the Law but to fulfill it. Occasionally, in a worthy attempt to present the Lord as sui generis, Ortberg’s portrayal could be seen as disconnecting him from his Jewish roots. Perhaps a few more overt tips of Ortberg’s cap to the Jewish tree would put the fruit of Jesus in better context.

A few more quibbles about this readable, engrossing, work: Ortberg says next to nothing about the church’s various black eyes—its pogroms, Crusades, witch trials, and the like. That’s why I believe this book is geared toward the friendly outsider who might slip into a pew at Menlo Park Presbyterian—not toward a hypercritical New Atheist. The book also has a few more typos than I would like, and its informal and occasionally confusing use of sources produced in me a minor sense of frustration. When an author is citing “evidence that demands a verdict,” it is crucial to make the sources of that evidence as accessible as possible.

I was glad that Pastor Ortberg closed Who Is This Man? with a call to the reader to “put what Jesus said to the test. Run an experiment. We all learn how to live from somebody: our parents, our peers, favorite writers, our appetites, our boss, or a vague combination of these. Try learning how to live from Jesus. Come and see. Whatever your ideas about religion might be, you can try being a student of Jesus. And that’s a very good place to start.”

In other words, taste the fruit.

Stan Guthrie is an editor at large for Christianity Today magazine and author of A Concise Guide to Bible Prophecy, coming this summer from Baker Books.

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Informal Colloquies

Michael Robbins

The crumpled tissues and loose change of the vernacular.

Contemporary American poetry has a crush on the crumpled tissues and loose change of the vernacular—idiom, platitude, cliché. Consider some recent book titles: Quick Question (John Ashbery); Nice Weather (Frederick Seidel); Just Saying (Rae Armantrout). These are examples of what the linguist Roman Jakobson called the phatic function of language—interjections, small talk—designed to check if the channel of communication is working. The Romantic-modernist revolution that opened poetry to "the language of real men" (Wordsworth) and words that people "actually say" (Pound) culminates in poems with lines like "Thanks, Ray, this is just what the doctor ordered" and "Don't come in here all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed."

Meme (Kuhl House Poets)

Susan Wheeler (Author)

University Of Iowa Press

87 pages

$11.72

These last are from Susan Wheeler's "Maud Poems," the first of three elegiac sequences that make up her fifth collection, Meme—not that they're elegies in a traditional sense. "The Maud Poems," for instance, combine stock expressions favored by Wheeler's mother, distillations of a lifetime's worth of penny wisdom borrowed from other mouths, with lyric effusions of starkly different register: "she's already spilled the beans" is set against "an owl, recalcitrant / in its non-hooting state."

There is no condescension here—who among us, reduced to our most hackneyed formulae, would come off better? By highlighting precisely what was least individual, most communal, about her mother, Wheeler reminds us that it is our initiation into language that makes us human. Maud's idioms mark her as a person of a certain age, a particular temperament—"Well, they went bloody blue blazes through their last dollar before you could say boo"—while her daughter's idiom appropriates them for art. There is something of the impulse of Language poetry here ("Attest—ament, filament, adamant, keen"; its closest relative might be Lyn Hejinian's My Life).

The book's title refers to a pseudo-concept popularized by intellectual featherweight Richard Dawkins. A meme is supposedly the cultural analogue of a gene, transmitting cultural information, responsible for the spread of songs and catchphrases and jeggings. In Wheeler's lexicon, it represents the idea that language is a virus, and the wasting away of generations is how it transmits. It's not perfect; its basic reproduction rate varies. As David Shields puts it in How Literature Saved My Life, "Language is all we have to connect us, and it doesn't, not quite."

And Wheeler's got it bad: in Meme, I'm pleased to report, she's even bringing the limerick back:

I picked up a gal in a bar.
She said she'd ignore my cigar.
But when I was done
Relieving my gun
She said I was not up to par.

Wheeler has always been bouncier than most of her like-minded frenetic post-Language peers. Alert to what the toxic glow of Fruity Pebbles tells us about capitalism, she loves a good bubblegum jingle. In certain moods she's closer to Frederick Seidel than Susan Howe, penning cracked power ballads her parents might have danced to on a boardwalk in an alternate universe:

If I had a way to make you live with me again
—Even as a rabbit, or a wren (if all that's true)—
I wouldn't see at all that girl against the wall.
You've a right to cause me trouble now, I know.

What's troubling about these poems is their implication that language is a function of mourning, rather than the other way around—that, as Nietzsche said, "What we find words for is something already dead in our hearts." Or as Wheeler's Emersonian sensibility has it: "Want to go watch a kibitzer crumble / In the puke-green pour of the moon?" Her grief gets physical, and while it might evade adequate expression, it remains indexed to the motion of words:

I am tired. Today
I moved a book from its shelf
to the bed. The span
of its moving was vast.

A lifespan—a kind of book—is vast; it is a brief movement across a room.

Like Ashbery, an obvious influence, Wheeler kibitzes and chats while her informal colloquies crumble and deliquesce. And like Ashbery in recent years, Wheeler occasionally dips into a melancholy and pseudo-archaic register:

When will you go away,
oh piercing, piercing wind?
When will at rest I be again?
Oh sleep that will not rain on me,
oh sleep that nothing brings.

Oh, when will a face appear
that cancels full th'other?
Or will there be no more for me
of anodyne palaver?

Westron wynde, when wilt thou blow, the small raine down can raine. This kind of ventriloquism, not quite leached of irony but still evocative of less relentless pleasures, is voguish at the moment. Tom Pickard is, in my view, the master. In "Hawthorn," from Ballad of Jamie Allan, he writes:

there is a hawthorn on a hill
there is a hawthorn growing
it set its roots against the wind
the worrying wind that's blowing
its berries are red its blossom so white
I thought that it was snowing

It would be lovely to have more poems from Wheeler in this mode, or at least more that exploit her winning facility for rhyme, and perhaps fewer that till the exhausted soil of "experimental" fields:

Anabaptists
1. field field to
2. lip on a / in a daisy
3. pond muck
Curtailing assumptions such that
1. frog muck
2. panopticon the hazards
3. signage escalator mutant tut

After such escalator mutant tut, what forgiveness? I know it's bad form to say so, but fifty years after The Tennis Court Oath, this sort of thing is just possibly beginning to seem a bit rote. Certainly someone as lyrically capable—and as capable of lyrical subversion—as Wheeler needn't clutch so at the au courant. "It was the winter of the Z-pack" is startling in its sabotage of romantic anticipation. The lyric speaker of these poems gets "smashed by a Prius on a wild goose / chase" and still manages to affirm the sight of a "halo against the light."

But her openness to the possibilities of poetry regardless of tribal affiliation is one of Wheeler's virtues. "Such is the state of our poetry caught in my throat on its way / to my mouth, why not do everything," she writes toward the end of the book, before concluding: "but of course we do nothing." When third-hand experimentation is the norm, in life as in poetry, everything can look an awful lot like nothing. In these spring-loaded poems, Wheeler honors the less than everything that gets done in a life by infusing elegy with verve, anachronism with new-minted coin. "Let's make like we're not through," she writes, and it's all any of us can do—go on making things, making likenesses, as if we were not already finished, not already broken up, not already out the other side, like so many people we knew, like all the things they said.

Michael Robbins is the author of Alien vs. Predator (Penguin).

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Awesomely Alternate Randomnesses

John H. McWhorter

What we learn from California Indian languages.

When Europeans encountered what is today California, that area contained 78 different languages. Not "dialects" of some single "Indian tongue," or even just three or four, but 78 languages as mutually unintelligible as French, Greek, and Japanese.

California Indian Languages

Victor Golla (Author)

University of California Press

400 pages

$91.79

Victor Golla's California Indian Languages is a lush and handy primer on what is known about all of these languages, but a volume like this is as much an elegy as a survey. Not a single name of any of these languages would ring a bell to laymen—Pomo? Miwok? Wiyot?—and this is partly because almost all of them will be extinct within another generation. As of 2010, for only a few dozen were there were fluent speakers alive, and most of them are elderly. European languages, especially English, intruded upon Native Americans' linguistic repertoire starting centuries ago, and eventually were often forced upon them on the pain of physical abuse in schools. Today, English is the everyday language for almost all Native Americans.

Once even a single generation grows up without living in a language, it is almost inevitable that no generation ever will again. The ability to learn a language well ossifies after the teen years, as most of us can attest from personal experience. If we do manage to wangle a certain ability in a language as adults, the chances are remote that we would use this second language with the spontaneous intimacy of parents and children at home. The generation of, say, Miwoks who only know a few words and expressions of their parents' native language—or enough to manage a very basic conversation but that's all—will not pass even this severely limited ability on to the next generation.

Yes, there are programs seeking to revivify these fascinating languages. Some groups have classes. In others, there are master-apprentice programs, in which elders teach younger people the ancestral language within a home setting. One reads about such efforts in the media rather frequently nowadays, in the wake of various books over the past twenty years calling attention to how many of the world's languages are on the brink of disappearing. By one estimate, only 600 of the current 6,000 will exist in a hundred years.

Golla's book, unintentionally, suggests that happenstance aspects of linguistic culture in indigenous California made the task of reviving these languages even harder than it might be otherwise. Ironically, one of the factors was something that many would find rather romantic in itself: Native Americans in California considered languages to be spiritually bound to the areas they were spoken in. This seemingly innocuous aspect of cosmology had a chain-reaction impact on the future of the languages.

First, in this world it was considered culturally incorrect to speak any but the local language when in its territory. This meant that those who traveled to another place—and few did, given this strong sense of local rootedness—made use of interpreters rather than learning the other language themselves. Hence California Native American languages were rarely learned by adults.

As it happens, when adults learn a language in large numbers and there is no written standard or educational system enshrining its original form, it becomes less complex. English lacks the three genders of its sister language German because large numbers of Vikings invaded and settled the island starting in the 8th century and married local women. They exposed children to their approximate Old English to such an extent that this kind of English became the norm. I am writing, then, in a language descended from "bad" Old English.

That this kind of thing happened so rarely in indigenous California had a secondary effect: the languages tend to be more complex than anything an English speaker would imagine. Taking lessons in Yokuts, spoken in the southern Central Valley, you would learn that the past tense ending is -ish. So: pichiw is "grab," and pichiw-ish is "grabbed." But it turns out that grab is unusual in Yokuts: not just some but most Yokuts verbs are irregular. Add -ish to ushu "steal," and it morphs into osh-shu, with a new o instead of u and a double sh. Add -ish to toyokh "to doctor" and it's tuyikh-shi. You have to know precisely how each verb gets deformed—and that's just two verbs.

In Salinan over on the coast, there's no regular way to make a plural: every noun resembles the handful in English like men and geese. House is tam, houses: temhal. One dog: khuch. More of them: khosten—and this is how it is for all nouns. All of the California languages are like this in various ways. A grammatical description of any one of them is, in its way, as awesome as a Gothic cathedral.

But this means that, past childhood, learning these languages is really tough. English speakers find it hard enough to get past Spanish putting adjectives after nouns and marking its nouns with gender. But when we get to languages where instead of just saying go or put you have to also append one of several dozen suffixes indexing exactly what the goer or putter was like and the material nature of what was gone or put—e.g., in Karuk, putting on a glove requires a suffix marking that what happened was "in through a tubular space"—we are faced with a task few busy adults will be in a position to master.

Many years ago I was assigned to spend a few weeks helping speakers of one of the varieties of Pomo recover their language. We had a good time. However, here was a language in which to say "She didn't stay very long and came back," you have to phrase it as, roughly, "Long time it wasn't, she sat and back here-went," putting the verb at the end instead of in the middle and also mouthing sounds unfamiliar to speakers of English or even Spanish (or Russian or Chinese!). I couldn't help thinking that for them—or me—to actually breathe life into this language now surviving only on the page was not going to happen. And they knew it. One told me that she was just hoping to be able to know enough of the language that her descendants could feel a connection to the past and their place in the world.

This struck me as a healthy and achievable goal. Books like Golla's, demonstrating the amazing complexity of these languages, also show that we must alter our sense of what it is to "know" a language. When someone says they play the piano, we do not assume they play like Horowitz. In the same way, in a new world there will exist languages that thrive as abbreviations of what they once were, useable by modern adults who seek a cultural signpost rather than a daily vehicle of communication. Anecdotally, this is already effectively the case with revived languages such as Irish Gaelic and Maori. Their new speakers, using the languages in cultural activities and even in the media to an extent, nevertheless use English much more. They are rarely speaking the language in as full a form as their ancestors did. Yet no one would suppose that this invalidates the effort.

It is unlikely that 6,000 languages will continue to be passed down in fuller form than this, and they will often survive in an even more restricted sense: flash cards, expressions, songs, perhaps some strictly "101" grammar. The difficulty of mastering languages beyond childhood is but one reason why. Amidst globalization, a few widely spoken languages dominate in print, media, and popular music and are necessary to economic success. In this, they inevitably come to be associated with status and sophistication.

The educated Westerner, and especially the anthropologist or linguist, cherishes the indigenous as "authentic" and as a token of diversity in its modern definition. These are laudable perspectives in many ways but are not always shared by those to whom an indigenous language is simply the one they learned on their mother's knee, as ordinary as English is to us. Such a person may not feel especially authentic or diverse to themselves. Often they prioritize increasing their income and embracing the wider world—especially for their children.

The flourishing of 6,000 languages points us back to a much earlier stage of humankind in which all people were distributed in small groups like those in indigenous California, where the basic unit was the "tribelet" of a few hundred people. In the modern world, for better or for worse—and quite often worse—people are coming together. The only question would be why there wouldn't be fewer languages. However, if most of the world's languages cannot continue to be spoken, surely we must utilize the advantage of writing to document what once was.

The fashion is to justify this on the basis of the languages recording the unique worldviews of their speakers. But that notion is more fraught than often supposed. Say we celebrate Karuk for showing that its speakers were especially sensitive to things like tubular insertion. Is the American white kid somewhere in Indiana really less attuned to the snug feeling of getting his fingers into gloves than a Karuk kid in California once was, even if English doesn't have a suffix with that meaning?

Rather, languages randomly mark some things more than others. Call California Native Americans fascinatingly connected to space and direction, but then be prepared to call them blind to the difference between the hill versus just a hill—most Native American languages leave that particular distinction largely to context. We assume Native Americans felt that nuance as deeply as we do even if their grammars do not happen to explicitly mark it with words or suffixes. Just as obviously, for Yokuts to have almost no regular verbs says nothing about how its speakers process existence.

Dying languages should be documented not as psychological templates but as awesomely alternate randomnesses from what European languages happen to be. Golla's book is valuable also, then, in its diligent chronicle of the researchers over the centuries who have dedicated themselves to the task of simply getting on paper how these languages work. One of the most resonant photos in the book—from almost a hundred years ago—is of founding California language scholar Alfred Kroeber, longtime anthropology professor at the University of California at Berkeley, who got down the basic structure of dozens of California languages during his career. The snapshot, unusually for an era in which smiling for photographs was not yet common coin, captures a man grinning in the great outdoors—a man who clearly relished his mission.

And quite a mission it was. A language is a markedly huge business. First there is the basic grammatical machinery of the kind described above—but then there are the wrinkles. In English, we say one fish, two fish, okay—so fish is irregular: no two fishes. But then what about the Catholic Feast of the Seven Fishes? Try explaining that to a foreigner—such as to a Japanese one I know who also, despite her very good English, mentioned an obese man whose "meat" was hanging over the edges of a chair. We natives would say "flesh"—but why? "Meat" makes perfect sense: that we happen to prefer to say "flesh" or "flab" is just serendipity. You can say I'm frying some eggs, or I'm frying up some eggs. They don't mean the same thing—note that the version with up implies that the eggs will be ready for you to eat soon. But if you were teaching someone English, how likely would you be to get to that nuance?

To speak a language in full is to have full control over little things like that, and it's the rare outsider whose grammatical research can get down to details this fine. Even when well documented with a grammatical description and a dictionary, a great deal of what a language was has still been lost, just as a cat's skeleton cannot tell us that cats hold their tails in the air and curl up when they sleep.

For reasons of this kind, some insist that all efforts be made to keep such languages actually spoken, as "living things" rather than archival displays. However, Golla's book gives ample coverage to revival efforts, and the sad fact is that there is not a single report of a language that was once dying but has now been successfully passed on to a new generation. For all but a few lucky cases where happenstance has kept the language alive to the present day, documentation may be the best we can do.

In this light something bears mentioning that linguists traditionally step around. It is often implied that a great diversity of languages being spoken in the world is beneficial in the same way that genetic diversity is within a population. This, however, is more stated than demonstrated. If there had only ever been one language among all of the world's peoples, and all people could converse wherever they went, how commonly would people have regretted that there weren't thousands of mutually unintelligible languages? All humans could converse—who would have deemed that a disadvantage? Or, who would have said that it would be better if all humans had some other language alongside the universal one that only some people knew?

That is, amidst the downsides of language loss—including that most of those that die will be the smaller, indigenous ones—there are some benefits to there being fewer. A statement like that is understandably difficult to embrace for people watching generations of their own people grow up without something as central to cultural identity as their own language, as well as for scholars and activists who are equally dismayed at same. However, at least we have the technology to get on record a good deal of what the lost languages were like, and California Indian Languages is a perfect introduction to this record as it currently exists for 78 vastly different ways of talking.

John H. McWhorter teaches at Columbia University and is a contributing editor of The New Republic. He is the author most recently of What Language Is (Gotham).

- More from John H. McWhorter

The Subtleties of Spin

Alister Chapman

Cricket and the aftermath of colonialism.

In 1989, the Derbyshire county cricket team played a local high school. Think Red Sox against Greenfield High. The professionals batted first, scoring a formidable total in a game where each side would bat one inning. (In cricket, runs are more easily come by than in baseball, and a team bats until all but one of the players are out. Scores of 300 or more are common.) When the school came out to bat, all eyes were on Derbyshire’s Michael Holding, a fast bowler who played for the world-beating West Indies. In a game where there is no equivalent of the pitcher’s mound, fast bowlers will run in before they bowl, gathering pace for thirty yards or more before hurling the ball towards the heavily padded batsman. That the ball typically bounces before it reaches its target makes things even more interesting, with bowlers like Holding able to bowl the ball short and make it fly up toward their opponent’s head. Holding had mercy on the schoolboys, however, trotting in and sending down very playable balls.

Legend of Pradeep Mathew

Shehan Karunatilaka (Author)

Graywolf Press

414 pages

$16.74

It wasn’t long before Derbyshire had dismissed the school’s best batsmen, and the tail-enders were coming in. Last of all came the youngest and smallest of the lot. He was in the team as a bowler, but one very different from Michael Holding. For while Holding used speed and power to beat the batsmen, the boy used guile. He was what is known as a spin bowler. Spin bowlers take just a few steps before they release the ball, but a variety of grips on the ball and a flick of the wrist can make for surprising results once the ball is in the air and especially after it has hit the ground. Spin bowlers are cricket’s artists.

On that particular day, this young spin bowler had claimed the most famous scalp of his career: Michael Holding. But when the boy came in to bat, Holding saw who it was and decided to play with him. He walked all the way to the back fence and steamed in to bowl. The ball he released was, in the end, just as gentle as those he had been serving up all afternoon. But I doubt it was as much fun for the boy as it was for Holding.

Those who were there that day could see precisely what was going on. But, as in baseball, a lot of what happens in cricket happens so far from the crowd that they have little idea. The subtleties of spin are almost always lost. People can see that there is a contest between the one who throws the ball and the one who has to hit it, but that’s about all. Cricket is a different kind of spectator sport from, say, basketball. The game is important, but the experience of being there just as much so.

In England, cricket is a game for watching on a lazy afternoon. You can turn and chat to your neighbor without worrying that you’ll miss too much. Or you can sit quietly and watch the players run back and forth, white on green, and absorb the atmosphere. Nostalgia comes easily, with memories of the peaceful green spaces of youth. Prime minister John Major once mobilized anxiety about European integration by painting a picture of an unchanging Britain of “long shadows on county grounds [and] warm beer.”

But where Michael Holding grew up, things were different. Cricket had been introduced to the Caribbean by English colonizers, who cast themselves as gentlemen but ran slave plantations. For the black population of Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, and Tobago, cricket offered further English discipline and English fair play. The play, however, was not always fair. Colonial clubs operated color bars. International teams had quotas for whites. With the dawn of international cricket, rules were made in England and sometimes for England. In Kingston, cricketing memories were sour as well as sweet. And as cricket spread throughout Britain’s empire it became a tool of local discrimination too, with princes in India lording it over the Indian game just as the English elites did back in England

Eventually, the colonials beat the conquerors. First were the Australians: the most famous trophy in cricket is a tiny urn containing the ashes from a wicket ceremonially burned after the Australians won in London in 1882. But then it was the turn of India, South Africa, Pakistan, the West Indies, New Zealand, and Sri Lanka. Cricket became a matter of national pride. The rivalry between Pakistan and India is immense. In 1990, the sport caused ethnic and political tension in England when a government minister suggested a “cricket test” of national loyalty: immigrants who continued to support the team from their country of origin rather than England were to be deemed insufficiently British.

The global home of cricket is now the Indian subcontinent. London’s Guardian reported that a billion people watched the India-Pakistan semi-final in the 2011 world cup. Tens of millions watch the Indian Premier League, which has adopted a shorter form of the game where matches last less than three hours. The crowds are not sipping tea and listening to birdsong. Advertisers compete to sponsor teams, with logos emblazoned on multi-colored shirts. Players make more per week than in any league except the NBA.

It is appropriate, then, that the latest important contribution to the literature on cricket comes from this part of the world. Shehan Karunatilaka is a Sri Lankan living in Singapore. The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, his first book, tells the story of a journalist’s desire to write a book on Pradeep Mathew, a fictional Sri Lankan spin bowler. The journalist, W. G. Karunasena, is an alcoholic. His work on the book is a race against liver failure.

Karunasena saw Mathew’s brilliance while reporting on Sri Lankan cricket, but was puzzled by how few games he had played for his country—and by his mysterious disappearance. The book is a quest to uncover the mystery. It is not a happy story. Mathew left the game and went underground after extorting money from a corrupt official—a nod in the direction of the gambling that has tarnished the image of the game, not least in the Indian subcontinent.

Just as sad is the ethnic prejudice that runs through the book, with Mathew facing opposition as a Tamil from the Sinhalese who dominate cricket in Sri Lanka. Karunatilaka highlights England’s sins—”England will spend centuries working off their colonial sins by performing miserably at sport”—but Sri Lankans don’t come off much better. Tamil terrorism forms part of the backdrop for the story.

Yet the book is also filled with humor and warmth. Karunasena’s friends are kind, quirky, and often witty. His wife is devoted, and even his estranged son returns home. Beauty comes from cricket. Karunasena loves his family and friends, but sport is less complicated and offers more moments of perfection and rapture. In a crude paragraph early in the book, Karunatilaka tells his readers that if they have never seen a cricket match or have and wish they hadn’t, “then this book is for you.” But people outside the cricketing commonwealth will find it hard to put the pieces together. References to Botham, Boycott, Bradman, Khan, Muralitharan, Tendulkar, and Warne will be lost on readers who didn’t grow up spending happy hours watching the game on TV. Anyone who enjoys sports, however, will be able to appreciate Karunatilaka’s delighted descriptions and diagrams of spin bowling. The floater, leg break, googly, flipper, armball, lissa, carrom flick, and (most special of all) the double bounce ball are all here, explained with awe and wonder. Mathew can behave like an idiot, but he bowls like a god.

And that, for Karunasena at least, is life. Answering the question of whether sport has any use or value, he says:

Of course there is little point to sports. But, at the risk of depressing you, let me add two more cents. There is little point to anything. In a thousand years, grass will have grown over all our cities. Nothing of anything will matter.

Left-arm spinners cannot unclog your drains, teach your children or cure disease. But once in a while, the very best of them will bowl a ball that will bring an entire nation to its feet. There may be no practical use in that, but there is most certainly value.

Or, as the dying journalist puts it near the end, “Unlike life, sport matters.” Karunasena becomes a picture of human existence. He gives up drink for a while, but then gives in. His book is unfinished; the mystery is solved only after his death.

Many will enjoy the rich picture of modern Sri Lanka that emerges in The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, despite its sad anthropology. But if you want to learn about cricket, you might do better to pick up the Duke University Press edition of C. L. R. James’ 1963 classic Beyond a Boundary, which comes with a three-page explanation of the game at the beginning. James was raised in Trinidad, where he experienced both the joy and the injustice of cricket. He excelled with ball and books, moving to England where he became a cricket correspondent for the Guardian and a left-wing social critic. Beyond a Boundary tells his story and that of West Indian cricket. There is much to lament. But there is hope, too, the final page relating the story of a quarter of a million Australians taking to the streets to bid farewell to a touring West Indian team. The vision of cricket as a force for international good was warped but not all wrong. The dying Karunasena recognized that, too.

Alister Chapman, associate professor of history at Westmont College, is the author of Godly Ambition: John Stott and the Evangelical Movement (Oxford Univ. Press).

- More from Alister Chapman

Fathers and Daughters

Alan Jacobs

What is a “graphic novel”?

Most of my fellow teachers of literature know that students often think of almost any book-length narrative work as a "novel." A paper might begin, "Augustine writes in his novel The Confessions …" or "Homer's Iliad is a novel that …." This is not a major intellectual failing, of course, but it should remind us of the extent to which the novel has become so dominant a genre that common readers think of it simply as narrative, or lengthy narrative, itself. It should also be a reminder to teachers that time devoted to explaining the history and uses of literary genre is time well spent.

Dotter of Her Father's Eyes

Mary M. Talbot (Author), Bryan Talbot (Artist)

96 pages

$14.56

This particular inexactitude happens in non-academic settings too, and indeed a new version of it has recently arisen. Stephen Weiner's Faster Than a Speeding Bullet: The Rise of the Graphic Novel refers to Art Spiegelmann's Maus—an account of the author's father's experience in Auschwitz—as a graphic novel. Similarly, we might consider Dotter of Her Father's Eyes, a recent book by Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot. On Amazon.com you may find it in the "Graphic Novel" category; its Wikipedia page, at least as I write, begins "Dotter of Her Father's Eyes is a 2012 graphic novel"—but then goes on to add, in the next sentence, "It is part memoir, and part biography of Lucia Joyce, daughter of modernist writer James Joyce." That the second sentence is not seen to contradict the first one reminds us once more how the word "novel" is commonly used; but it also reveals the limitations of our descriptive and critical vocabulary for this new form. The genres of graphic narrative proliferate beyond our ability to account for them.

Major comic artists like Will Eisner—in his Comics and Sequential Art and Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative (1985)—and Scott McCloud—in his Understanding Comics (1993) and Making Comics (2006)—have done yeoman work in explaining, for a wide readership but especially for would-be artists, the visual languages of graphic storytelling. Those are superb and, for anyone seriously interested in the subject, indispensable books. There is also a burgeoning academic and critical literature on graphic storytelling, as exemplified in The Comics Studies Reader (2009), edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester. But we still struggle, I think, to know how best to write about graphic narrative—especially in that odd genre called the "book review."

A reviewer will want to say something about the shape of the story: its plot and structure, the way it organizes time and event. The adequacy and appropriateness of the language should be considered, as should those of the artwork. By "appropriateness" I mean, to use an old word, decorum, fitness: Do the language and the images fit the shape of the story? If they do not, does that indecorum seem meant? Is the resulting tension productive, or not? And then the reviewer should ask how the language and artwork interact. (These questions will vary in inflection and emphasis depending on whether the narrative is the work of a single artist—as in the case of William Blake's illuminated poems, or the recent work of Alison Bechdel or Chris Ware—or the product of collaboration, as is the norm in the world of "comics" narrowly defined.)

The graphic narrative is, then, a device with many moving parts. Randall Jarrell once defined the novel as "a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it"—not so far from the implicit definition of my students—and a graphic narrative might be even more naturally inclined to error. And everything I have said so far applies to fictional narratives: if the tale graphically told is historical or biographical, as is increasingly common these days, then one must also ask whether it is faithful to what we know, from elsewhere, of the story it tells. Yet another way for a book to have something wrong with it.

All of this throat-clearing brings us back to Dotter of Her Father's Eyes. It is a double story, whose protagonists are Lucia Joyce, daughter of James Joyce, and Mary M. Talbot herself, in her early years as Mary Atherton, daughter of James S. Atherton, whose The Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1959) was one of the first major studies of that most daunting of masterpieces. (Dotter of Her Father's Eyes takes its title from a phrase in the Wake.)

The first thing that must be said about Dotter is that it's one of the most visually rich and sophisticated graphic narratives I have ever seen. Bryan Talbot renders the scenes from Mary Atherton's childhood in sepia tones, though patches of bright red or green are used occasionally to heighten certain moments; the life of the Joyce family is rendered in muted and mostly dark blues; and Mary's emergence into adulthood from the oppressive authority of her father is signaled by the use of fully-colored panels. Typewriter-style typefaces appear in conjunction with, often in contrast to, the familiar style of comic lettering; and scattered through the book are photographs, chiefly of documents pertaining to James Atherton. A particularly interesting example comes on the last page of the narrative: a weathered card on which is typed the chorus of the old ballad "Finnegan's Wake" lies atop Atherton's University of Liverpool registration form, which in turn covers much of the last page of Finnegans Wake, which begins: "sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father." Layers upon layers, both literally and metaphorically.

The James Atherton presented here was never mad, but he was often angry: he is most present in his outbursts, verbally and sometimes physically violent, and otherwise in the determination with which he cut himself off from his family in order to work without interruption. It is clear that Mary Talbot found her father "feary" indeed, and her difficulties with him, and her pleasure in the rare moments of his kindness, make up her whole account: her mother appears here only as a kind vagueness. In the parallel story, James Joyce is never angry but is often distant: he seems puzzled by his daughter on the rare occasions when he drifts into her life, typically to adjudicate hostilities between Lucia and her mother Nora. Nora is the story's chief villain, constantly mocking and belittling her daughter, while the great writer is comparatively kind and gentle—but utterly unsupportive of Lucia's love for dance: "Lucia, Lucia. Be content. It's enough if a woman can write a letter and carry an umbrella gracefully."

This is a plausible portrait of Joyce, who seems to have married Nora Barnacle at least in part because of her ordinariness, her lack of interest in his own intellectual pursuits, and who was not above making fun, in Ulysses, of Molly Bloom's mental shortcomings. ("She had interrogated constantly at varying intervals as to the correct method of writing the capital initial of the name of a city in Canada, Quebec …. In calculating the addenda of bills she frequently had recourse to digital aid.") What is less plausible is the dominant portrait in Dotter: Lucia Joyce as a seemingly normal and healthy young woman who is legitimately frustrated by one relatively minor issue—romantic rejection by her father's secretary, the young Samuel Beckett—and one major one—her parents' refusal to support her calling to be a dancer. Her family's decision to place her in a mental institution seems, then, not only cruel but utterly inexplicable.

Bryan Talbot draws Lucia—it is hard to overstress the importance of this—so that she never looks like a seriously disturbed person; even her anger seems moderate, until the very end, and any extremity of response is presented as fully understandable in light of her family's treatment of her. The text and the imagery of this book are at one in pressing us to believe that Lucia was simply a gifted young woman whose parents, one in hostility and one in indifference, frustrated her career and then, when that angered her, allowed her brother to toss her into a mental institution, where she remained until her death in 1982. This could be a true story but is on the face of it deeply unlikely, and the book needs to do more to justify its interpretation, since it portrays the whole Joyce family as monstrous.

The historical record that we possess suggests a more complicated and more interesting story. Lucia grew up in chaotic circumstances, with frequent moves to dodge creditors that led the family on a constant odyssey across Europe and through different social, economic, and linguistic environments. Precisely how this affected her, and what vulnerabilities were part of her makeup from birth, we simply don't know, but her behavior seems always to have been odd. As a child she was prone to long periods of staring off into space, and as a young adult was mercurial at best: jumping impulsively from one style of dance to another and from school to school to school, repeatedly snipping the telephone lines when she felt her father was getting too many calls and therefore too much attention, and, finally, throwing a chair at her mother—the event that precipitated her brother Giorgio's decision to institutionalize her.

For all his indifference to Lucia's love of dancing, for which he was surely culpable, Joyce never thought that she was anything other than an extraordinary person: "Whatever spark or gift I possess has been transmitted to Lucia and it has kindled a fire in her brain." He knew that she was troubled, but refused to believe that she was mentally ill—though once, when he heard that she had attended Mass, he exclaimed, "Now I know she is mad." Given his own calling, he was especially sensitive to what he discerned as a peculiar linguistic power in her: "She is a fantastic being, speaking a curious abbreviated language of her own," he wrote to his patron and publisher Harriet Weaver. "I understand it or most of it." To another correspondent he wrote, "Lucia has no trust in anyone except me, and she thinks nobody else understands a word of what she says." And he even trusted her own self-understanding, as he told Weaver: "Maybe I am an idiot but I attach the greatest importance to what Lucia says when she is talking about herself. Her intuitions are amazing."

Carol Loeb Shloss, in her 2003 biography of Lucia, portrays Joyce as effectively a parasite, sucking the linguistic life out of Lucia and claiming it as his own in Finnegans Wake. (Shloss sees even Lucia's dancing—visitors to the Joyce household noted that she would practice in the same room where her father was writing—as providing rhythmical inspiration for his intricate and fanciful book.) This account has been called into serious question and makes Joyce scarcely less monstrous than he would be if he had allowed his daughter to be institutionalized for no reason stronger than a temper tantrum. But as an explanation it draws clearly on what we know, in that it shows a father deeply involved in his daughter's life and acknowledges that Lucia was anything but the cheerfully normal person we see in Dotter of Her Father's Eyes.

It's hard not to feel that the Talbots' portrayal of the Joyce family is shaped to bring it closer to the life of the Atherton family. James Joyce appears here as a distant, bemused half-presence—a little like James Atherton minus the terrible temper—but in real life was immensely and irresistibly charming to family and friends alike, though wildly erratic. One cannot doubt that his work on Finnegans Wake led him to neglect his family, and that Lucia resented this; but when he was present to her, his love and concern were evident, and he tirelessly sought to get her the best possible treatment. One of his friends estimated that in the last few years of Joyce's life three-quarters of his income went to her care, and he wrote detailed accounts of her condition for her therapists and doctors. He seems even to have thought of the Wake as a kind of counterspell to undo Lucia's madness, if madness it was: patting the manuscript of the work in progress, he once said, "Sometimes I tell myself that when I leave this dark night, she too will be cured."

In the end, Dotter of Her Father's Eyes tells with extraordinary visual sophistication a tale that, structurally and verbally, doesn't quite hold together. That Mary Talbot's father was a Joycean; that he was a difficult and even abusive man; that he sometimes used Joycean language when speaking to her (borrowing a phrase from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he called her "baby tuckoo" when she was small); that she too studied dance for a while—these correspondences, while they clearly created in Talbot's mind a strong link with Lucia Joyce, do not seem to me strong enough to make the parallel tales meaningfully parallel. It's a highly promising experiment in the visual presentation of intertwined life stories, and as such may bear rich fruit in the future; but its simplification of the immensely strange and convoluted relationship betwen James Joyce and his gifted but wounded daughter is unfortunate.

In 1936, after Lucia had begun her long circuit of moving from hospital to hospital, James Joyce panicked at the thought of what might happen to his daughter if the coming war were to separate them. He wrote to friends to ask for their help—any kind of help: "If you were where she is and felt as she must, you would perhaps feel some hope if you felt that you were neither abandoned not forgotten." (One word echoes repeatedly through his late letters about Lucia: "abandoned.") On the penultimate page of Finnegans Wake, a few lines before the passage about "my cold mad feary father," there are lines that some have read as words of hope for poor lost Lucia: "How glad you'll be I waked you! How well you'll feel! For ever after." But Lucia herself, in 1941, when she was told that her father had just died, replied, "That imbecile. What is he doing under the earth? When will he decide to leave? He's watching you all the time."

Alan Jacobs is professor of English at Wheaton College. His edition of Auden's For the Time Being is just out from Princeton University Press. He is the author most recently of The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Oxford Univ. Press) and a brief sequel to that book, published as a Kindle Single: Reverting to Type: A Reader's Story.

- More from Alan Jacobs

Charles Williams, Playwright

Philip Jenkins

A neglected aspect of the “other Inkling.”

Can you imagine suddenly discovering a trove of major new works by one of the greatest Christian authors of the last century, a worthy companion of C. S Lewis and T. S. Eliot? In a sense, we actually can do this, and we don’t even need to go excavating for manuscripts lost in an attic or mis-catalogued in a university archive. The author in question is Charles Williams (1886-1945), well-known to many readers as an integral member of Oxford’s Inklings group, and a writer venerated by Lewis himself. (Tolkien was more dubious.) T. S. Eliot offered high praise to both the work and the man. Among other admirers, W. H. Auden saw Williams as a modern-day Anglican saint, to whom he gave much of the credit for his own conversion, while Rowan Williams has termed that earlier Williams “a deeply serious critic, a poet unafraid of major risks, and a theologian of rare creativity.” Some thoroughly secular critics have joined the chorus as well.

Williams exercised his influence through his seven great novels, his criticism, and his overtly theological writings—although theology to some degree informed everything he ever wrote. Some, including myself, care passionately about his poetry (I said “care about,” not “understand”). Amazingly, though, given his enduring reputation, Williams’ plays remain all but unknown and uncited, even by those who cherish his other work. Now, these plays are not “lost” in any Dead Sea Scroll sense: as recently as 2006, Regent College Publishing reissued his Collected Plays. But I have still heard erudite scholars who themselves advocate a Williams revival ask, seriously, “He wrote plays?” Indeed he did, and they amply repay reading, for their spiritual content as much as for their innovative dramatic qualities. Two at least—Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury and The House of the Octopus—demand recognition as modern Christian classics, and others are plausible candidates.

As a dramatist, Williams was a late bloomer. Although he was writing plays from his thirties, most were forgettable ephemera, and his most ambitious work suffered from his desire to reproduce Jacobean styles. In 1936, though, as Williams turned fifty, his play Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury was produced at the Canterbury Festival. This setting might have daunted a lesser artist, as the previous year’s main piece was Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, which raised astronomically high expectations. Thomas Cranmer, though, did not disappoint. Cranmer was after all a fascinating and complex figure, the guiding force in the Tudor Reformation of the English church and a founding father of Anglicanism. Yet when the Catholic Queen Mary came to the throne in 1553, Cranmer repeatedly showed himself willing to compromise with the new order. He signed multiple denials of Protestant doctrine before reasserting his principles, recanting the recantations, on the very day of his martyrdom. Famously, he thrust his hand into the fire moments before he was executed, condemning the instrument by which he had betrayed his beliefs.

Williams’ play is a superb retelling of the history of the English Reformation, but most of the interest focuses on Cranmer himself. Williams studies the journey of a soul en route to salvation despite every effort it can make to resist that outcome—what he calls “the hounding of a man into salvation.” This powerfully reflects the belief in the working of Grace, of the Holy Spirit, that is such a keystone of Williams’ theological framework.

We follow Cranmer along his way through the acerbic commentary of the Skeleton, Figura Rerum, one of the mysterious characters Williams repeatedly used to reveal the inner spiritual aspects of the drama. Although they appear on stage, they normally remain unseen by most or all of the human characters. But the Skeleton is much more than a chorus or commentary: rather, he represents both God’s plan and Cranmer’s destiny, “the delator of all things to their truth.” He is also a Christ-figure, who speaks in mordant and troubling adaptations of Jesus’ words from the Gospel of John: “You believe in God; believe also in me; I am the Judas who betrays men to God.” He is “Christ’s back,” and anything but a Comforter. The Skeleton, moreover, is given some of Williams’ finest poetry, lines that stir a vague recognition until you realize the intimate parallels to Eliot’s yet-unwritten Four Quartets.

Despite Cranmer’s timid and bookish nature, he is led to a courage that will mean both martyrdom and salvation, and will moreover advance God’s purpose in history. Ultimately, having lost everything and all hope, he throws himself on God’s will (in one of Williams’ many echoes of Kierkegaard). “Where is my God?” asks a despairing Cranmer. The Skeleton replies,

Where is your God?
When you have lost him at last you shall come into God.

…

When time and space withdraw, there is nothing left
But yourself and I; lose yourself, there is only I.

But even at this moment of total surrender, the play offers no easy solutions, and no simple hagiography. In the last moments, with death imminent, Cranmer even agrees to the Skeleton’s comment that “If the Pope had bid you live, you should have served him.” If he is to be a martyr, that decision is wholly in God’s hands: “Heaven is gracious / but few can draw safe deductions on its method.”

The success of Thomas Cranmer marked a shift in Williams’ interests to drama. Over the next nine years, up to his death in 1945, he would publish only two novels, as against eight other dramas that, together with Cranmer, would make up his Collected Plays. Like his friend Christopher Fry and other English dramatists of the age, Williams sought to revive older forms, including mystery plays and pageants, and some of these works are among his most accessible. Seed of Adam and The House by the Stable are Nativity plays, but as far removed from any standard church productions as we might expect given the author. In Seed, Adam also becomes Augustus, and the Three Kings represent different temptations to which fallen humanity has succumbed. In the pageant Judgement at Chelmsford, episodes from the span of Christian history provide a context for one very new and thoroughly modern diocese largely composed of suburban and industrial regions, and already (in 1939) facing the prospect of destruction by bombing. Yet Williams unites ancient and modern, placing Chelmsford firmly in the Christian story alongside Jerusalem and Antioch: all times are one before the Cross.

But if all the plays are worth rediscovering, it is his very last—The House of the Octopus (1945), a theologically daring story of an encounter with absolute evil—that best makes the case for his stature as a first-class Christian writer. Remarkably too, this play gains enormously in hindsight because of its exploration of ideas that seemed marginal to Christian thought at the time, but which have become pressing in an age of global church expansion.

The House of the Octopus offers a highly developed statement of Williams’ elaborate theological system, which we can trace especially through the earlier novels. His key beliefs involved what he termed substitution and exchange, in a sense that went well beyond the customary interpretation of Christ’s atonement. For Williams, human lives are so intertwined that one person can and must bear the burdens of others. We must, he thought, share mystically in one another’s lives in a way that reflects the different persons of the Trinity: they participate in what Williams called Co-inherence. Moreover, this mutual sharing and participation extends across Time—to which God is not subject—and after death. In his novel Descent Into Hell (1937), a woman agrees to bear the sufferings and terrors of a 16th-century ancestor as he faced martyrdom in the Protestant cause; he in turn perceives that loving aid as the voice of a divine messenger—and he might well be right in his understanding.

Stricter Protestants found Williams’ vision of the overlapping worlds of living and dead unacceptably Catholic, if not medieval, and accused him of heresy. Wasn’t he teaching a doctrine of Purgatory? Williams was perhaps taking to extremes the Catholic/Anglican doctrine of the communion of saints, but he was guided above all by one scriptural principle, expounded in Romans 8: the denial that anything in time and space can separate us from God’s love.

If some of Williams’ visionary ideas fitted poorly in the England of his day, they could still resonate in newer churches not grounded in Western traditions. House of the Octopus, for example, used a non-European setting to suggest how familiar dogmas might be reimagined in other cultures. The play is set on a Pacific island during an invasion by the Satanic empire of P’o-l’u. Although the situation strongly recalls the Japanese invasion of Western-ruled territories in World War II, and the resulting mass slaughter of Christian missionaries, Williams never intended to identify P’o-l’u with any earthly state. This is a spiritual drama, and the leading character is Lingua Coeli, “Heaven’s Tongue,” or the Flame, a representation of the Holy Spirit, who remains invisible to most of the characters throughout the play.

When alien forces occupy the island, they immediately demand the submission of the native people, who have recently become Christian converts. Terrified, one young woman, Alayu, denies her Christian faith and agrees to serve instead as “the lowest slave of P’ol’u,” but even that apostasy does not save her life. And this is where the theological issue becomes acute. The Western missionary priest, Anthony, is convinced that Alayu’s last-minute denial has damned her eternally. The local people, however, realize that salvation absolutely has to be communal as well as individual:

We in these isles
Live in our people—no man’s life his own—
From birth and initiation. When our salvation
Came to us, it showed us no new mode—
Sir, dare you say so—of living to ourselves.
The Church is not many but the life of many
In ways of relation.

Wiser than Fr. Anthony, they also know that death itself is a permeable barrier, and so is the seemingly rigid structure of Time itself. As a native deacon asks, could not Alayu’s original baptism have swallowed up her later sin?

If God is outside Time, is it so certain
That we know which moments of time count with him,
And how?

Alayu is saved after her death, through the support of her people and the direct intervention of the Flame. Formerly an apostate, the dead Alayu becomes a saint interceding for the living. As the native believers tell the horrified missionary, “Her blood has mothered us in the Faith, as yours fathered.” When Anthony in turn faces his own torment and martyrdom—and the danger of apostasy—it is Alayu who will give him strength: “He will die your death and you fear his fright.” Fr. Anthony learns that the Spirit’s power is far larger than he has ever dared believe. And he also realizes how deceived he was to think he could have kept his status as paternalistic ruler of his native church indefinitely, among believers who had at least as much direct access to the Spirit as he did himself.

Although Williams was claiming no special knowledge of newer churches and missions, recent developments have given his work a strongly contemporary feel. The ideas he was exploring in 1945 have become influential in those rising churches, especially the emphasis on the power of ancestors and the utterly communal nature of belief. In such settings, the ancient doctrine of the communion of saints, the chain binding living and dead, acquires a whole new relevance, and a new set of challenges for churches that thought these issues settled long since.

Like his other writings, Charles Williams’ plays offer plenty to debate and to argue with—but his ideas are not lightly dismissed. Some of us have been wrestling with them for the better part of a lifetime.

Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. He is the author most recently of Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses (HarperOne).

- More from Philip Jenkins

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