Mortal Goods:
Reimagining Christian Political Duty
by ephraim radner
baker, 280 pages, $36.99
What is the purpose of the Christian life? Or of any life? Ephraim Radner proposes an answer: “mortal goods.” These he defines as “the sustained realities and possibilities of birth, growth, nurture, generation, weakening, caring and dying.” The tending and conservation of these goods, Radner argues in this new book, form the natural limits of Christian political duty. Set against them is the great temptation of “betterment”—the superficially seductive idea of historical progress, of “leaving a better world for our children.” In the face of such blandishments, Christians should cultivate political “indifferentism.” The Christian’s journey, for Radner, is less a goal-directed “pilgrimage” than a “sojourning” as “strangers” in the world.
Skepticism toward political utopianism and idealism is a perennial feature of the English-speaking conservative tradition, and it has only gained more traction, and apparent justification, from the follies of modern progressive ideology. Radner (a columnist for this journal) applies this skepticism to Christian theology itself, taking aim at some very big intellectual beasts indeed. Both Aristotle and Aquinas, he believes, suborn our mortal existence to a vision of moral and spiritual perfection that we cannot attain in this life.
Radner’s argument draws on his own experiences. He grew up with an optimistic, progressive worldview; he was “raised to make a difference.” But when working as a missionary in Burundi, he discovered that beautiful ideals will drive you mad. He wants to pass on to his children something different: One should “cherish your earthly toil as the breath of grace” and value “the ordinary” and “the normal,” in place of Sisyphean visions of progress or self-perfection.
Radner is a fine writer, and he speaks with real power and insight about the precarity of human life, the confusion of political reality, and the existential intensity of our mortal loves and foibles. Mortal Goods is a book, ultimately, about chaos—about finite, precious lives caught in the storm of events. Nobody who has lived any kind of life, or indeed anyone who follows the news, could do much to dispute this framing. And yet Radner’s account is surely incomplete.
For one thing—and despite Radner’s humanistic recommendation of this earthly life as God’s gift—Mortal Goods is pervaded by an air of gloom. In the medieval figuration of the world as the “wheel of fortune,” there was a keen sense of the tragedy of life but an equal glimmer of the comic, a sense of laughing at our “mortal goods”—of not taking life too seriously, of treading lightly the path of the pilgrim on the way to heaven. Radner makes the case, and very persuasively, that an idealistic Christian politics that seeks to render elites virtuous, or to order justly our hypercomplex managerial society, is by its nature absurd. But is absurdity an argument against attempting it?
More fundamentally, Mortal Goods says too little about the spiritual goods that accompany our mortal lives. Christianity is not just, as Radner puts it, a matter of “endurance”—it is a thing of wonder, a supernatural beauty that enchants the world. “I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.” The New Testament is powerfully marked by these moments of joyful unveiling, of divine light shining forth to a scarce believing world. The star blazes above Bethlehem, Christ appears transfigured upon the mountaintop—and rises from the dead, his wounds visible.
The trouble with mortal goods is that they are defined by death: not only finitude, but entropy and the burden of sin. They may well be goods, but they are damaged goods. It seems a shame to speak, as Radner does, of mortal gifts like birth, coupling, and death, but to say nothing of the sanctification of these gifts in the sacraments of baptism, marriage, and anointing. Radner describes how “the mortal goods of our offerings” are
contained within the history of Jesus’s life: conception, social confusion and its navigation, paternal embrace, birth, rearing and growth, prayer and learning, toil, a constrained and brief vocation, joys and disappointments, knotted relationships, singleness in this case, fervent trust, betrayal, suffering, astonishing hope and its assault, familial concern, and finally death, accepted and offered up.
What’s missing from this list? Resurrection.
This is Christ’s promise of a new creation, in which we shall dwell forever and be raised up, as Paul tells us, with “spiritual bodies.” Indeed, “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption.” Mortal goods are not, it seems to me, enough.
We can’t and shouldn’t dismiss Radner’s misgivings about the likely results of politics: Corruption, confusion, and chastening disappointment seem the probable consequences of any grand endeavor. But that leaves open the question of what kind of political engagement Christians should attempt. Radner takes for his ideal the figure of the “Holy Peasant,” a compelling image with deep traction in the Christian imagination. Radner’s Holy Peasant confines himself to a kind of household politics, concerned with “mortal goods” and the “moral economy” of his life as a laborer, friend, and family man. Peasants get drawn into politics only against their will: In the peasant revolts that swept across late medieval Europe, “actual subsistence” was at stake “in the face of onerous taxation, famine, and poverty.” Indifferentism, he acknowledges, “has limits,” though they are reached only when mortal goods come under threat. This appears to leave us with a politics of cyclical reaction: One is perpetually rising up against tyrannies one did not bother to oppose the rise of, and never developing political movements of one’s own.
In any case, there are peasants and peasants. The English peasant of the fourteenth century, when he revolted against his masters, was not concerned about mortal goods only. One of the leaders of the revolt, the radical preacher John Ball, made clear that his objections were more fundamental. “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” Ball asked. For him, Christian truth militated against the social order of his day: “The time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.”
Far worse economic conditions and threats to survival had predominated in earlier centuries, without much sign of rebellion—indeed, it was in times of material privation that thousands embraced serfdom as a means of attaining land and security. This system was unwoven not because the peasants were poor, but because they had become rich, intellectually curious, and politically engaged. They wished to escape serfdom, as many peasants had already, by buying their liberty and becoming free yeomen with political rights, freedoms, and privileges.
The peasants’ other motive, no less urgent, was the cause of Church reform. Ecclesial corruption and the moral purity of the Church touched the lives of the peasant both practically and spiritually. The paradigmatic Holy Peasant is of course Piers Plowman, the subject of the poem of the same name, whom John Ball invokes in a letter: He “biddeth Peres Ploughman go to his werk, and chastise wel Hobbe the Robbere”—the latter likely representing a corrupt official of Church or crown.
Created by William Langland, Piers is described by the Catholic historian Christopher Dawson as “a voice from the underworld of common people, speaking their language, using their imagery and sharing their ideals.” In Langland’s great allegorical poem, the closest that we can come to understanding the mind and spirit of the medieval peasant, we certainly find the “good life” as outlined by Radner. This is the figure of “Do-well,” “Who so is trewe of his tunge / And of his two handes / And thorugh his labour, or thorugh his land . . . Taketh but his owene.” To “do well” is to do an awful lot, and more than many of us ever manage. It is to tend our mortal goods, to be a good friend, husband, father, neighbor. But superior to this is “Do-better,” who “dooth right thus / Ac he dooth muche moore” and “helpeth alle men.” Even better than both is “Do-best,” who “bereth a bisshopes crosse”: He “halie men fro helle” and “putte a-down the wikked.”
“Do-best” belongs to our shared life as members of the Church, and to those who lead it. The Church forms, as Augustine laid out, a rival political community, invisible and eternal. It does not deny to the earthly city its duties, but over- and underlays the earthly city with the heavenly, subtly transforming it by the most important political act of all: teaching. This teaching is not bounded, as we imagine it, by our norms of detached discourse, but rather extends to the formation of character, especially through law, both secular and sacred.
The purpose of Christian politics is not, primarily, the securing of “mortal goods,” but the still more fundamental matter of salvation. The essential Christian political duty is to form the body of Christ—a political community, in the classical sense, united by common loves and sentiments, bound together both mystically through the Eucharist and morally by living in charity with one another. Like the classical polis, the ecclesial community comprises assemblies that embody citizenship at the human scale—the parish. But because of its mystical and liturgical unity, it is also a kind of “imperial” as well as “republican” body, united by its fealty to Christ, as well as by its common “angelic” citizenship in the invisible Church. Only by this theopolitics, which reconciles body and soul, do-well and do-better, mortal and spiritual goods, can Christian life, and political duty, be fully lived out.
Admittedly, as Radner observes, there is a great gulf between the classical political community, the polis, and a modern state, which even in its most modest form numbers its citizens in the millions, and which must manage the complexity of a modern economy. This book makes a compelling case that such a state seems doomed to be dehumanizing, and to exclude even the possibility of virtue.
But this situation is not as novel as it appears. By the time of Christ, the political community had long decayed, from Athenian democracy by way of the Roman Republic into just such a condition of managerial, dehumanizing politics. Great material powers were exercised in this age, even as the humanistic core of the civilization withered away, alienated from a distant imperial court largely concerned with the levying of taxes and the maintenance of armies.
It was this world that confronted Boethius, one of the last of the Romans, a fifth- and sixth-century senator, consul, historian, and philosopher who threw himself into the politics of his time. For opposing the corruption of the Ostrogothic Kingdom that occupied Italy, Boethius was condemned to death as a traitor. In his year on “death row,” he wrote The Consolation of Philosophy. Boethius was fast running out of mortal goods to tend, the victim of a cruel fate that was tearing them all away. What consolation could philosophy give?
The coming into being of all things, the whole course of development in things that change, every sort of thing that moves in any wise, receives its due cause, order, and form from the steadfastness of the divine mind. This mind, calm in the citadel of its own essential simplicity, has decreed that the method of its rule shall be manifold. Viewed in the very purity of the divine intelligence, this method is called providence; but viewed in regard to those things which it moves and disposes, it is what the ancients called fate.
In the hinge of a few lines, Western thought and culture swings wide, and the fatalism of the pagan world is rejected. Boethius does not imagine that he can escape his tragic circumstance, but he has a choice: fate or providence.
Our mortal goods are the gifts of a capricious fortune, and happiness is to be discovered only in letting them go as freely as we receive them. Thus far Radner would presumably agree. But if our Christian life is “offering up” these unmerited gifts, what is the source of “permanence” that must surely inform the “endurance” that he calls on us to embody? The chaos Radner describes seems hard to distinguish from the blind fate of the pagans. Boethius proposes that we see behind it the work of an all-knowing and benevolent providence. Thus the chaos of the world, though it will not be made perfect in this reality, does serve a purpose of “betterment”—it teaches us what is essential and what is not; to love what is eternal steadfastly and to grasp the transitory lightly.
Radner acknowledges Christianity’s influence in “softening” and “humanizing” the Roman imperial tradition, while lamenting that that influence ran in both directions. But the point is that Christians did not seek simply to moderate, ignore, or even instrumentalize their political context: Instead, they openly challenged it. Eusebius describes how one Christian deacon, unable to bear the sight of crowds going to sacrifice at the behest of the emperors Diocletian and Galerius, “rebuked them with a loud voice,” and later had his tongue removed in the presence of Galerius. This was a question not of “mortal goods,” but of the imperial cult itself. When Christians refused to sacrifice to the emperor, it was more than just a rejection of idolatry. It was a recognition that Christ, not Caesar, is King.
Sebastian Milbank is executive editor of The Critic.
Image by British Library on Picryl, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
