Will Barrett, the protagonist of Walker Percy’s novel The Last Gentleman, complains that he cannot figure out “how to live from one minute to the next on a Wednesday afternoon.” Even Christians, with a solid theological and philosophical grounding, can find the question troubling. So you believe in God, and you believe the Second Person of the Trinity became incarnate and died for your sins. You’ve been baptized. You’ve been saved. Now what?
Here is where Percy’s existentialist-inclined Christianity comes in, and his famous paean to the South’s whiskey. In his essay, “Bourbon, Neat,” Percy’s literary mind was perceptive enough to find the connection between taking an evening drink and finding meaning in a daily life. The mind inclined to the questions of existentialism, like Percy’s, struggles with a particular problem: the question of how to be in a particular time and place. Percy slyly suggests that bourbon is the answer. No, not in the sense of drowning sorrows in alcoholic stupor, but in recognizing that it is in concrete things and acts that we are able to be in the world. “What, after all, is the use,” Percy asks, “of not having cancer, cirrhosis, and such, if a man comes home from work every day at five-thirty . . . thinking: ‘Jesus, is this it? Listening to Cronkite and the grass growing?’”
No, this isn’t it, says Percy. It isn’t all just about the fatal acts of nature and the crass manipulation of mass society. It is distinctively personal acts, like having an evening glass of bourbon, that construct a life. It is this aesthetic, this incarnation, simply this way to be, which gives a glass of bourbon its real value. But this incarnation of being extends beyond evening drinks, and informs every action we make in our lives. Take affection, for instance. Husbands and wives do not merely sit across the room maintaining a cerebral love for each other. Affection is made concrete with actions. Handshakes between colleagues, hugs and kisses between friends not only display, but actually create or make real the respect and affection between people. The true value of a family dinner lies at this level: we are a family because we eat together; we eat together because we are a family. It is in this act that our being as a family is made real, not fantasy. To take what may be the most powerful example, marital love is incarnated in the marital act. The coy euphemism “making love” has more truth to it than we may realize.
Looking to the concrete helps us discover the Christian notion of sacramentality. It is in water that we are born again; it is with bread and wine that we encounter Christ in the flesh in today’s world. It is these things that make our Christianity more than an academic exercise. So Percy would answer Barrett’s question by saying: just do it. It is Wednesday afternoon and you are a Christian: sing a song of praise, or go to Mass and eat God’s flesh. You are a loving husband, so kiss your wife. You are a father: play catch with your son or help him with his homework. You are a man at the end of a day of work: make a cocktail. If you want to be these things—a husband, a father, a son of God—there are things to do to make it real.
Christians must choose, among myriad options, how to be in specific ways in the world. But how do we know what to choose? Percy’s own conversion was motivated by his reading of the Catholic realist Thomas Aquinas, in addition to the Christian existentialist Kierkegaard. Rejecting the nihilistic varieties of existentialism, Percy recognized that there is an absolute truth surrounding the multiple ways to choose to be. Some ways are in more conformity with truth and happiness than others.
The Christian answer to the dilemma of how to be lies in the concept of grace and vocation. Here is where the Holy Spirit comes in. Vocation is the Christian call to be in a specific way in the world. It is a call to truly be, in a concrete way, who God has called you to be. It is not to be a robot obeying a program; it is to be an eagle joyfully choosing to fly or a mole enthusiastically choosing to dig, because that is what you are, what you are good at, what you love. It is an existential choice, but one that is grounded in God, outside of the isolated self.
The apostles recognized this call to distinctive ways of being. The New Testament epistles are replete with exhortations to recognize that each has been given a different gift to serve the Church. This is also a key to understanding the gift of the Spirit. Earlier I asked—Christ saved me, now what? The Holy Spirit is the answer to that question. Upon encountering fellow Christians early in the Acts of the Apostles, the apostles are astonished that the new converts know nothing of the Spirit, which the apostles view as crucial to the faith. Our faith is rightly Christocentric, but the Spirit is truly God too. Christ has saved us, and it is in uniting ourselves with him that we grow in salvation. The Spirit, however, enables us to be and to be as Christians in particular ways in the world.
To return to more earthly spirits, bourbon is for Percy a way to be for a moment in the evening. Why might one take an evening cocktail? Baser reasons are: an addiction to alcohol, or the desire to appear sophisticated. Better reasons, according to Percy, are the aesthetic experience of the drink itself—the appearance, the aroma, the taste, the cheering effect of (moderate) ethanol on the brain. Another reason is that a drink incarnates the evening; it marks the shift from the active workday to a reflective time at home. One simply must choose a way to be at a five o’clock on a Wednesday evening. Instead surrendering to TV, Percy recommended making a proper southern julep. I prefer my bourbon as an old-fashioned, a drink that reflects the colors of an autumn day. “Love God and do what you will,” Saint Augustine advised. This presumes that you have allowed God’s grace to order you to love properly, and you have taken proper note of your own God-given gifts and dispositions. Then, praise God, and be.
Michael Baruzzini writes from Colorado Springs.
Comments:
The question "what am I going to do with myself on a Wednesday afternoon?" cannot co-exist with the question "what is the Holy Spirit calling me to do right now?" Because 'myself' cannot be the focus of Christian life. Following Christ means you "deny yourself, and pick up your cross."
A wise priest once told me you can't say, "Thank you Jesus for saving my soul! But while you go carry the cross, I'll be over here doing my own thing."
Know what I shall be doing next Wednesday. Of course being an Englishman, I shall have to find something suitably sophisticated to replace the coarse bourbon!
Toby: Not sure which Percy I'd recommend first, they're all good. My own introduction was through 'Love in the Ruins'.
Craig Roberts: I agree that the problem is characteristically modern, but I think you are seeing a disagreement where there is none. The joyful good news for those with questions like Barrett's is that the Christian life is in fact centered outside of the self's futile desires, and is based instead in God. God calls us to a new way of life -- a new life that is not just abstract, but carries with it real concrete ways to be every day, and which transforms everything. Penance, Mass, works of mercy, and even simply appreciating the sublime beauty of a moment in the evening. All are part of the Christian life.
“Catholic realist Thomas Aquinas, in addition to the Christian existentialist Kierkegaard.”
Err, Why is it ‘Catholic Thomas Aquinas’ but not ‘Lutheran Kierkegaard’?
To the question, "now what?" St. Paul would say, "work out your salvation with fear and trembling." It is only this way that we can guard against presumption and root our joy in the Lord's mercy instead of our own wishes.
Probably due to the ineluctable fact that Lutheranism having largely caved to secular piety, has become a cipher among orthodox churches.
Bourbon is a lot like Christianity. To those uninitiated with the spirit world it seems bitter and overly harsh. To those that have acquired a taste for it, it has a sweetness and complexity that is sublime. Both contain the potential for intoxication and abuse.
But then again bourbon is nothing like Christianity because bourbon is a matter of taste, and Christianity a matter of Truth. Forgive me for over indulging.
As you can see your article has given me a lot to think about. Thank you!
If no, then what does "saved" in this life really amount to? "Take up your cross and follow me" makes much more sense to me.
Otherwise a very fine article, even if I'm partial to Cuba Libre.
This is a lovely piece, and there is much good in it. But since the Internet is for arguing (kidding! mostly!), I'll go ahead and bleat. Percy most certainly does not praise the appearance, aroma, and taste of the drink. In fact, I'm pretty sure he condemns it: "The pleasure of knocking back bourbon lies in the plane of the aesthetic but at the opposite pole from connoisseurship. My preference for the former is or is not deplorable depending on one’s value systems – that is to say, how one balances out the Epicurean virtues of cultivating one’s sensory end organs with the greatest discrimination and at least cost to one’s health, against the virtue of evocation of time and memory and of the recovery of self and of the past from the fogged-in disoriented Western world. In Kierkegaardian terms, the use of bourbon to such an end is a kind of aestheticized religious mode of existence, whereas connoisseurship, the discriminating but single-minded stimulation of sensory end-organs, is the aesthetic of damnation.”
I don't think Percy's essay on bourbon is about distinctly personal acts. I think it's about taking a shot (pun intended) at the floating ghost of modern malaise. Recall his use of Faulkner in the illustration of the aestheticized religious mode of existence: "Imagine William Faulkner, having finished Absalom, Absalom!, drained, written-out, pissed-off, feeling himself over the edge and out of it, nowhere, but he goes somewhere, his favorite hunting place in the Delta wilderness of the Big Sunflower River and still feeling bad with his hunting cronies and maybe even a little phony, which he was, what with him trying to pretend that he was one of them, a farmer, hunkered down in the cold and rain after the hunt, after honorably passing up the does and seeing no bucks, shivering and snot-nosed, takes out a flat pint of any bourbon at all and flatfoots about a third of it. He shivers again but not from the cold.” A flatfooted third of a pint has little to do, I think, with distinctive personal acts. It has to do with war against despair.
Nor does he recommend making a julep. He says that they aren't drunk much in the South, and that his first one came in New York City. The recipe included in Signposts in a Strange Land comes with this disclaimer: "Reader, in case you don’t want to knock it back straight and would rather monkey around with perfectly good Bourbon…”
I flirt regularly with the aesthetic of damnation. I love the ritual of making a Manhattan. But I don't think Percy went in for that sort of thing.
Cheerfully, grumpily yours,
matthew
I understand. Yet remember that there are Orthodox Lutherans and then there are the Lutherans one hears about in the press.
I therefore raise my glass with Michael---though prefer a hint of Rum in my Diet Coke.
L
This is outstanding. Thanks for sharing. I'll hoist my Myers's and Diet to this article tonight.
