Reflections on ‘Epic’ Christianity

by Samuel Hux (October 2017)

The Agony in the Garden, Paul Gauguin, 1889

 

 

God knows why people go to church. (Well, if He doesn’t know, who does?) But, by “God knows,” I mean, as in the common usage, that I can’t figure out why.

 

 

Perhaps my experience is limited because of the profession I’ve practiced for decades: college professor of philosophy, literature, and the history of ideas. I taught courses in which religion, whether the official subject or not, could be avoided only by rigorous secular intention. Always, the professedly religious among the students are pleased to be studying scripture from Old and New Testaments and Apocrypha and classical texts such as Dante’s Inferno, a little less pleased (but dutiful nonetheless) to be examining representative selections from Augustine or Thomas Aquinas or Martin Luther or John Calvin or the theological considerations in René Descartes or William James and the like—so long as the discussion is about ethical issues or the more easily graspable arguments for the existence of God . . . but not when questions of epistemology or metaphysics are raised. Then the eyes especially, but not exclusively, of the protestant fundamentalists, glazed over: preface to a radical change of mood, loss of interest, and often impatient anger.

What has any of this to do with “being a good Christian?” they seem to ask. They are here, after all, not to live the life of the mind but to hear something similar to a familiar sermon and receive college credit for having done so.

 

 

If I am agnostic about the efficacy of Christian ethics, let’s call it, this doesn’t mean that I am any less agnostic about pragmatic secular ethics. I could turn that sentence around easily.

Nonetheless, in spite of my generalized experience as suggested above, I have to admit—logic be damned—that I am more likely to trust my life to my religiously-committed friend than to that other. I don’t mean to downgrade or show disrespect for the notion that “being a good Christian” is a matter of behavior. As a matter of fact, I have endorsed something like that notion.

 

The Gentile Question: A Work in Progress, New English Review, August 2017) arguing that the Pauline elevation of Faith over Good Works as the path to salvation was in effect, no matter what St. Paul’s intention, a relative devaluation of ethical behavior; that this exclusion of Good Works from soteriological considerations is analogous to the contemporary prejudice that there is no necessary connection between being civilized and being moral, just as there is no necessary connection between having faith and being moral, so that a son-of-a-bitch, rapist, murderer, what-have-you, could be considered cultivated so long as he practiced or appreciated the finer things (like, at the extreme, some Nazi fiddling Brahms at night after working at Auschwitz during the day); and that—here my thesis becomes either radically brave or perhaps foolishly provocative—the Pauline devaluation of Good Works, thoughtlessly radicalized by thinkers like Luther, bears some responsibility for the contemporary disconnect between culture and ethics. My essay just referenced, that is to say, was an argument that the de-emphasis on ethical behavior as the essence of “being a good Christian” was a mistake.

 

I am about to consider a critique (and perhaps some revisions) of the argument summarized above, the subtitle of which was “A Work in Progress”—and progress does not always move in a linear direction.

 

There is something wanting in the notion of religion as primarily an ethical urge or demand or inspiration. For one thing, the emphasis on moral behavior as the sine qua non makes “being a good Christian” not such a difficult thing to achieve, since even a Hobbesian can, in effect, although for different motivations, achieve it. What we have then is a comical notion: a Hobbesian as “a good Christian.” That’s a rich one! So there has to be something—beyond, obviously, the promise of salvation (“What’s in it for me?”)—that makes Christianity more than a useful doctrine of proper behavior attached to a compelling narrative. And, of course, there is: what I like to think of as the “Epic” quality of Christianity.

 

Christianity is the most ambitious faith there ever has been. Which isn’t to belittle the Hebraic visions of the Old Testament: the accomplishment of monotheism was an enormous task, and the establishment of a Law “unto all the nations.” But Christian ambition was another matter. Its catholicity! By which I don’t mean only its linear universalism. Its Trinitarianism is a catholicism much more encompassing than geography. God a Father, a Spiritual Essence, and a Son: the heavenly reaches, the ineffable and numinous and the mundane all enclosed within one concept. Sometimes it seems to me Christianity says to the world: Give me your tired and huddled masses of certainties, ambiguities, clarities, contradictions, fears, exaltations, disparities and conjunctions yearning to be One.
 

 

The “creature-consciousness” or self-depreciation one feels before the Holy “is beyond question not that of the transgression of the moral law [but rather] it is the feeling of absolute ‘profaneness.’” One feels shame and desires atonement not because of what one has done but because of what one is. To see it otherwise is, for Otto, a diminishing of the experience to the merely moral. That’s my phrase, but one can almost imagine Otto using it, as when he objects to notions such as “redemption” and “atonement” being transferred downward “from their mystical sphere into that of rational ethics and attenuated . . . into moral concepts,” thus being moved “from a sphere where they have an authentic and necessary place to one where their validity is most disputable.”
 

I do not mean to reverse, totally, my priorities. I still think the elevation of Faith above Good Works has had some unfortunate consequences. And the liberal theology (a sort of Pelagianism and Arminianism in effect), which I have assigned to the “lesser,” is among other things an attempt to elevate Works at least to the level of equal status with Faith. Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in The Nature and Destiny of Man that “it is not unfair to regard all Christian thinkers before Augustine as more or less Pelagian,” in spite of Paul. So liberal theology—the extreme view of religion as ethical urge or demand or inspiration—may even be, from one perspective, an attempt to return to old-time (but post-Paul) religion. I confess my attraction to “epic” Christianity not as a disavowal of the priorities, but to say that even I feel its great persuasive power, respond to its resonances, am intrigued by and fascinated with an aspect of religion so much more compelling intellectually than economies of Good Works, which seem by comparison, when one comes right down to it—uninspired, uninspiring, and not much more difficult than learning good manners.
 

I don’t have to be Soren Kierkegaard to suggest that something that’s too easy courts being too bloody familiar which is in danger of being no more surprising or mysterious than state, neighborhood, or family: one of the institutions of the quotidian slightly more special than most but still taken rather too much for granted, like social security, Mom and Dad, and Betty Lou.
 

What I am saying—let me not mince words—is that there is something about the liberal-theological “reductive identification of Christianity with a set of moral codes,” that is especially, when compared with its Pauline opposite, something so . . . puny. Or perhaps banal is the more respectable word.
 

“Compared with its Pauline opposite,” I have said. The Pauline principle of justification by Faith alone is but one component, of course, of the doctrine of Original Sin and human responsibility, “the seemingly absurd position that man sins inevitably and by a fateful necessity but that he is nevertheless to be held responsible for actions which are prompted by an ineluctable fate,” as Niebuhr put it.
 

Consider the fact that the Pauline doctrine is an implicit recognition that ethical behavior, Works, doesn’t necessarily win for you: the terrible discrepancy between what you do and what the results for you are. Or consider the fact that even though the doctrine—holding that one is not free of his own will to do good, and so cannot act his way into God’s graces, and so needs the free gift of Grace which provides him the saving Faith—does lead of course to the great love story, that God would will to become weak enough to die for the undeserving, it nonetheless retains its brooding darkness despite the love at the end of the tunnel. For whether man is enslaved to sin by his essential nature, or by “an adventitious quality or accident” attendant upon his fall from his prelapsarian nature (Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion), or whether as by Catholic doctrine he is enslaved to sin not precisely by his essential nature but by his loss of the donum superadditum, the surplus gift from God in addition to nature (Aquinas), he is going, by his own unaided will, to sin inevitably . . . even if all the theological adherents of Original Sin do not wish to say by necessity. Then the burden of the command of responsibility and the knowledge of the impotence to avoid that for which one is held responsible, and the guilt which comes with the recognition that one’s inevitable undeservingness is paid for by the gratis act of love which is the Cross . . . all this adds up poetically to a resounding Truth: that human life is in its profoundest rhythms tragic.
 

The classical Pauline doctrine, for all its logical difficulties is, at least, attuned to that great truth, that life is tragic. So, seen from this perspective, all one’s quibbles are petty compared with the deep recognitions in Pauline theology, a body of thought which can damned well take your intellectual breath away. Epic? Yes.
 

I trust, I hope, these reflections reward, somewhat, the attention of the reader. As for my more professedly religious students, their eyes would have glazed over pages ago.

 

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Samuel Hux is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at York College of the City University of New York. He has published in Dissent, The New Republic, Saturday Review, Moment, Antioch Review, Commonweal, New Oxford Review, Midstream, Commentary, Modern Age, Worldview, The New Criterion and many others.
 

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