First Things RSS Feed - Gabriel Torretta

Disincarnate Christ

Mon, 01 May 2017 00:00:00 -0400

Silence
by shūsaku endō
foreword by martin scorsese
picador, 256 pages, $16

Zeno’s Sickness unto Death

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 01:22:00 -0500

I do not feel healthy comparatively. I am healthy, absolutely. For a long time I knew that my health could reside only in my own conviction, and it was foolish nonsense, worthy of a hypnagogue dreamer, to try to reach it through treatment rather than persuasion. I suffer some pains, it’s true, but they lack significance in the midst of my great health.

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What’s Wrong With Poetry?

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 00:02:00 -0400

When I was young I reflexively told people I liked poetry. I hardly knew any poets and barely understood those I had read, but poetry seemed to be a necessary affectation for the burgeoning literary snob that I was. I read randomly: Blake and MacLeish, Poe and Dickinson, Whitman and Carroll. I memorized “The Tiger” because I had to, “The Raven” because I was bored in class, and Dickinson because I was bored while sneezing.

I stuck to the poets of previous centuries for the most part, although I was vaguely aware that poets were not an extinct species, that dark corners of the planet still held strange specimens who wrote without meter or rhyme about The Orgasm and the joys of life as a Maoist rebel in Punjab, but I gave them a wide berth for fear that I might catch something and lose my ability to write with capital letters.

I couldn’t tell good poetry from bad, and that made me wary of everything I read. Perpetually afraid of being taken in by the wrong poetic crowd and waking up one day a chain-smoker in tight jeans in a Greenwich Village walk-up, I soon refused to read any poets I didn’t already know. Parched by the heat of suspicion, my love for poetry quickly withered and then fossilized, until I placed it on a shelf with my other forgotten youthful infatuations, like Star Wars and the clarinet.

Graduate school, of all things, rekindled my love for poetry. It was the eighth-century Japanese poetic collection Man’yôshû that started it, and my frustration that all the scholarship I read about the work was completely tone-deaf to its musical artistry. “What about the beauty?” I protested, “How come no one talks about the beauty?”

One day I was teaching a class on the Man’yôshû in the presence of one of America’s greatest East Asian scholars. I waxed eloquent on the historical context of the poems, the way they tied religion to the state, and the government’s use of the collection to solidify national unity in the eighth and nineteenth centuries. At some point the professor interrupted me with the same question I was wont to ask: Isn’t there something to this poetry besides politics?

Only then did I realize that, despite my protests, I was practically deaf to poetry; I talked about poetry because it was Important and defended its aesthetic dimensions out of a contrarian distaste for historical-critical scholarship, but I refused to spend the time to engage that beauty on its own terms. I tried to read more, and managed to fall in love with a few new (modern!) poets, but self-consciousness still hobbled me: Am I getting this? Is this worth spending my time on? Is this deep, or just confusing?

In the end, contemplation is what taught me to read poetry. I am a member of a Catholic religious order, and my life is a steady rhythm of psalms, Bible-reading, and Masses. That’s a lot of time spent praying with words someone else wrote, which at first seems hollow and impersonal. But there comes a point in the life of a young religious when everything changes; suddenly Christ shines through the text, and the ancient words of dead men become intimate missives between his soul and God. This is the gift of contemplation, the habit of seeing God by seeing the things of the world through His eyes.

Poetry requires the same habit of mind. Poetry tries to express an inexpressible aspect of reality by packing it into an impossibly small space so that the meaning of the words fold in on themselves, creating a pattern of layers that begins to resemble the contours of the real object in all of its dynamism. Even for unornamented poems, just reading the words is not enough; poetry offers an encounter with a living reality that the reader must open himself to. Contemplation is the habit of being open to this encounter.

But unfortunately, some of my early suspicions were right: not everything that passes itself off as poetry actually offers an encounter with reality, unless we count the poet’s own pretensions and vanity. And as writers of various kinds continue to jettison the search for meaning and beauty in favor of politics and nihilism, “poetry” can become a code word for “bad prose.”

To illustrate: Michael Solomon has recently taken passages from Sarah Palin’s e-mail dump and turned them into comic “poems” by hitting the ‘enter’ key at portentous moments. Here’s an example:

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An Unprincipled Charity

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 14:30:41 -0400

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Shakespeare’s Measured State

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 08:21:00 -0400

“Law is framed as a rule or measure of human acts,” says Thomas Aquinas, and “different things are measured by different measures.” Human “measures” or laws direct men to the common good; the divine law undergirds it, indicating what it means to be and to be good.

Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure is about what happens when the human measure usurps the role of the divine measure, when the state tries to be church for its people. The result is a darkly comic vision that eerily mirrors the swelling governmental bureaucracies of the Western world.

The play opens on a lax Vienna, whose carefree ruler, Duke Vincentio, has allowed morals to grow flabby by not enforcing vice laws. The Duke realizes he can’t rein in the wild horses he let loose, so he appoints the unimpeachably upright Angelo to corral the city’s roving morals. The Duke then vanishes but stays in the heat of the action, disguised as a Franciscan priest.

Unfortunately for Vienna, Angelo proves himself both merciless and corrupt. He decides to make an example of Claudio, an ardent young man who has gotten his fiancée in the family way, by condemning him to death for violating the fornication law. Claudio’s sister Isabella, a postulant in a convent of Poor Clare nuns, gets an unwelcome surprise when she pleads for mercy for her brother: Angelo will only give Claudio his freedom if she gives Angelo her virginity.

Here the disguised Duke steps in, carefully guiding the course of events by acting as spiritual advisor to all and sundry, orchestrating an oh-so-Shakespearean riot of faked executions, mistaken-identity nighttime trysts, and role reversals, culminating in a public David-and-Nathan revelation where Angelo’s lies are revealed, Isabella’s chastity is preserved, Claudio’s life is spared, the Duke returns to his throne, and everyone ends up married to everyone else.

The superficially happy ending does not resolve the moral tensions of the play, however. At any moment during the preceding five acts, the Duke could have revealed himself and stopped the agonizing chaos of betrayals, threats of death, and trials of virtue, but instead he plays the puppeteer, dancing the characters along to the ends he desires. The play sheds light on the Duke’s moral ambiguity by emphasizing the dangers of dying unshriven, when the Duke’s priestly imposture endangers the souls of the condemned men whose confessions he plays at hearing.

The crises of the play are driven by the Duke’s desire to be both church and state to his people. He creates moral dilemmas that can only be resolved by the combined action of his two personas: priest and ruler. The result is seemingly the best of both worlds”the justice of the state and the mercy of the Church.

But in the end the state cannot give true mercy”only measure for measure. The Duke wears the robes of the Church but can only act according to human notions of justice, making sure everyone gets his just deserts. The play’s one act of true Christian mercy—when Isabella pleads for the Duke to spare the life of Angelo, who she believes has killed her brother—also gets suborned to the power of the state when the Duke closes the play by extending a curious offer to this postulant nun: matrimony with him. Although the play does not divulge her answer, the Duke assumes the affirmative.

The Duke must bring all things into the natural realm that he controls—even Isabella and her free Christian mercy. Everything must be done measure for natural measure, which requires all couples to be paired off in matrimony.

But is this a happy event? Considered superficially, the play has a comic ending”all the characters are joined in marital bliss, there are no unjust deaths, the innocent are freed, the guilty are duly punished, and a just and righteous ruler returns to the throne wiser for his absence. But a dark shadow looms over the joy, as the Duke’s actions seal the total dominance of the state in the life of the Viennese; the Church, morality, and even individual freedom are only tools grasped in what Philip Shaff once called “the cold step-motherly arm of the nominally Christian state.”

This is where America finds itself today. Now that separation of church and state has come to mean a public square naked of all religious claims, the state has filled in the gaps by arrogating to itself the functions of a religion. The state is the premier moralizer of the day, as any resident of New York knows, proclaiming the new morality with banal new revelations like taxes on cigarettes to the tune of seven dollars a pack, bus stops plastered with public service announcements about safe sex for “eldersexuals” (don’t ask), and restaurants blissfully purged of those murderous trans fats.

But the state no longer rests content with regulating moral issues; the last few decades have seen a spate of governmental attempts to tinker with reality itself. Consider any of the state’s blithe pronouncements redefining what it means to be human: a fetus is not a human until it’s illegal to abort it, terminally ill people are happier dead than alive, humans are able to be satisfied by any conceivable sexual coupling, marriage is whatever the state says it is, and on and on. Man’s measure has subsumed God’s measure.

The risk for us is the same as it was for the Viennese in Shakespeare’s play. Even when the state claims divine authority, it can only act in fallible, human ways. No amount of legislation can actually change what it means to be human, but the more a state tries to alter our nature by legal fiat, the harder life becomes for ordinary citizens, who now must act as if a life in utero were not a life, or as if the union of two men were the same as the union of a man and a woman.

Man must live by two measures, human and divine. The Duke’s world and ours—in which the human has subsumed the divine—seems free and easy at first glance, but behind the comic veneer lies a dark realm of unresolved suffering, as man’s laws alone cannot heal the frailness of man’s nature. As the troubled, vicious Angelo opines, paraphrasing St. Paul:

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Queering the Statue of Liberty

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 11:25:17 -0400

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The Married Lifestyle

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 00:01:00 -0400

Linguistic battles are difficult when the words are obviously different (gender vs. sex, pro-life vs. anti-abortion, etc.). They are much harder when the word stays the same, but the meaning changes. The same-sex marriage movement reveals that “marriage” has already undergone a meaning shift. Recognizing”and addressing”the character of that shift has to be a major part of how we defend marriage today.

“Marriage” in its Judeo-Christian context means the self-gift of a man and a woman to each other, so that God might bring each to Himself through the other. A man and a woman who get married vow that they will embrace the natural consequences of their life together as a gift from God, be they joyous or tragic: abundant children or the pain of sterility, lobster dinners or store-brand fish sticks, death in sleep at 90 or cancer at 30. It’s what Catholics call a vocation, a specific path to holiness that structures an entire life and everything in it.

But as any pastor who prepares couples for marriage can tell you, that vision of marriage is about as far from most couples’ minds as Mars is from Venus. If marriage is a gift of self, we now make sure to leave the tags on and keep the receipt.

What we expect from a marriage has changed: no-fault divorce helped change when we imagine a marriage ends, contraception helped change how we imagine a marriage should give life, and pornography helped change what we imagine should be done to and by whom in a marriage. In all three instances, what was part of an entire pattern of life that included but surpassed my momentary tastes has been broken apart into small fragments that I can change to suit my whims.

Once marriage was a vocation; now it is a lifestyle. As such, it is little more than a legal sanctioning of two people’s sexual complementarity, usually involving an emotional bond, a general notion of physical exclusivity, financial intermingling, and the option of children. When any of these separable components interferes with the root purpose”personal satisfaction”then it has to go. And then worse problems intervene: career conflicts, squabbles about money, sexual apathy or disloyalty, or just the general feeling that the inevitable tensions and sacrifices of marital union aren’t worth it. So, divorce. Now the two people are free to live their lives independently again.

Enter same-sex marriage. If marriage is just a lifestyle option, same-sex marriage advocates are right to say that the option should be open to all on the same terms. If two people can satisfy each other sexually and emotionally, the argument goes, they can get married. After all, sexual intimacy and the emotional bond it can create often lead to monetary mingling and the wistful desire for permanence and maybe even children. If men and women can fall into marriage along that path, why not men and men or women and women?

Sex columnist Dan Savage argues that the way to save marriage as an institution is to focus even more intently on personal satisfaction, which he naturally imagines in the Maxim mode. He urges Americans to drop the baggage about male and female and consider what’s really important to a marriage: sexual satisfaction. Because good sex is the one non-negotiable of the marriage lifestyle according to Savage, anything that makes sex better for one member of the marriage makes the marriage better, whether it’s the occasional fling, whips, or a cake in the face. A marriage that fetish-plays together (or separately), stays together.

Of course this is hardly the vision of marriage predominant in America today. Thankfully many men and women, atheists and believers alike, desire a more virtuous practice of marriage. But we often lack confidence in our own aspirations. Even well-intentioned Christians hedge their bets with pre-nuptial agreements, “trial marriages,” or cohabitation, with one eye on the ever-present escape hatch of divorce. That is why Judeo-Christian defenders of marriage are so often met with frothing rage or blank stares. When we invoke the sacramental bond of marriage, we are literally speaking a different language than most of our contemporaries.

Social conservatives risk giving up the game by attacking the excesses of Savage Love and same-sex marriage with utilitarian, sociological arguments about the benefits of mixed-sex, two-parent homes. Books like The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier, and Better off Financially serve a purpose”showing that the redefinition of marriage fails on its own terms”but they cannot address the orientation to personal satisfaction that has crept into our understanding of marriage in general. Speaking of marriage as the best lifestyle among many lifestyles might help change social policy, but it won’t change the convictions that underlie our marital misunderstandings.

The opposition to same-sex marriage must be part of a larger movement addressing the root causes that led Americans to quietly redefine marriage as a lifestyle choice long before homosexual marriage was on the table. Even passing a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman will have little effect unless it is accompanied by a renewed awakening of the intrinsically unitive and fruitful vocation of marriage.

Those who oppose same-sex marriage directly are doing laudable work. But the men and women who work to restore sanity to divorce laws, change the ubiquitous contraceptive mentality, and abolish pornography are also battling for marriage, and their work may prove decisive. And perhaps most decisive is the quiet witness of men and women living their marriages to the full.

Marriage is not just a word, endlessly redefined by slipping social values and ideology. Marriage is not a lifestyle, blithely focused on my organs and whims. Marriage is a mode of being. Only as such can it be saved.

Gabriel Torretta, OP is a summer fellow at First Things and is studying for the priesthood in the Dominican Order.

RESOURCES

Mark Oppenheimer, Married, With Infidelities

Matthew Schmitz, A New Movement for Marriage

Matthew J. Franck , Religion, Reason, and Same-Sex Marriage

Robert P. George, What Marriage Is”And What It Isn’t

Gary A. Anderson, A Marriage in Full

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Evangelical Atheists vs. Humanity

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 11:12:43 -0400

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…But There’s Nothing Wrong with Abortion

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 10:38:44 -0400

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The Same-Sex Marriage Bill Catholics and Republicans Passed

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 14:29:08 -0400

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