The Paradox of a Bohemian Community: A Conservative Deconstruction of Rent

 

Among my favorite musicals is Rent. I confess that I feel guilty about some of the more problematic aspects of the musical. It is not as if I actually approve of the life choices made by any of the characters. In my defense, I would like to make the case for seeing the musical from a conservative perspective as an exploration of the intellectual trap of attempting to live outside of any communal standard. 

The characters in Rent are fundamentally narcissists in the sense that they choose to live for themselves over the interests of any community. To be clear, there is a spectrum among the characters with Maureen clearly being the most narcissistic with Mark and Angel being the least. In this, they follow the dictates of 19th-century Romanticism, the main philosophy in the Western tradition that attempts to justify placing the desires of the individual over the moral standards of the community. 

Ultimately, living for oneself is an unworkable idea so the characters attempt to create their own counter community This can be compared to Milton’s demons trying to create their own counter to Heaven, a project doomed by its own inherent contradictions. If submission to God is the necessary component to build heaven, then any community founded on the rejection of God will, by definition, turn into Hell.

The characters attempt to protect the homeless tent city from being torn down by their former friend Benny. The homeless (unless they are following some version of apostolic poverty) are an example of what can be seen, from an Aristotelian perspective, as a non-community. They may live in physical proximity to each other but they lack a set of binding values that allow them to work together for some greater good. Later, the characters try to form a community with each other. This attempt to build a community is fundamentally doomed as the "greater good" that binds the characters together is their commitment to living according to their Bohemian personal standards. 

One can see the logic of Bohemia as leading to one of two intellectual dead ends. The first can be seen in the landlord Benny.

           

On the surface, Benny is a traitor to the Bohemian values of the other characters. He once was like them, but then he exchanged sexual liberation and socialist living for marriage and now works as a capitalist for his father-in-law, destroying the homeless community in order to build the more lucrative Cyber Café. It should be noted that Benny still sees himself as the altruist and he has a highly plausible argument that, in the long run, Roger and Mark have a better chance of pursuing their Bohemian dreams under his "neoliberal" regime. The fact that we have good reason to question Benny’s sincerity both in terms of his marriage and his altruism does not mean that the other characters are right. On the contrary, it is Benny, with his neoliberalism, who is the ultimate Bohemian, living for himself without any care what other people think of him while pretending to have higher ideals. His hypocrisy is the contradiction within Bohemia itself.

The second and truly literal dead end for Bohemia is manifested in AIDS, which physically affects both Roger and Angel. AIDS represents death in its inevitability as well as its fundamental unfairness. With AIDS, some people might die in a matter of months while others may go on for years. Obviously, all people face death. AIDS just forces the characters to face the likelihood of dying young without the hope of pushing death to some far-off old age.

   

Roger hopes to write one song before he dies that will redeem him from being nothing more than a singer who threw away his gifts to heroin addiction and was responsible for his girlfriend's suicide.

 

Conventional people face the problem of death by making themselves part of a community. By being faithful to a spouse and raising one’s children together with them, one ensures that, even after you die, you will have meant something to someone remaining. This family should be embedded within some larger community with a story that plays out over millennia. Finally, this community and its purpose should be based on something supernatural that transcends time itself. (One thinks of the Last Battle where all the good things of Narnia are taken to Aslan's country to continue to exist forever even after Narnia is destroyed.) Even Romanticism could never truly escape this need for community. Even the genius artist who violates community standards in pursuit of their art can only succeed by embodying the essence of some people. Roger has no people to write for who will appreciate his art, leaving him facing death with nothing but regret and guilt for his girlfriend’s suicide.

The musical’s solution is for the stripper Mimi to fall in love with him, coming into his apartment to ask him to “light her candle."

   

With some reluctance, Roger falls for Mimi and this allows him to join with the other characters to resist Benny. This gives us an unconventional community populated by people who, except for Mark, are some combination of gay, drug addict, or HIV positive. The big question of the musical then becomes can love allow such an unconventional community to survive.

In the end, the true challenge does not come from Benny, but from the group's own internal dynamics. Angel's death causes the group to break apart as Joanne stops being willing to put up with Maureen's flirting with other people and Roger comes to suspect Mimi of sleeping with Benny, causing her to relapse into addiction. 

It is here that the musical finds itself trapped between allowing its scenario to play out to its logical conclusion or giving the characters a happy ending. Logically, the community should fall apart as the characters' beliefs do not allow for the formation of a community. As such, the musical should end as a tragedy. This, though, would not affirm the beliefs and lifestyle choices that the musical is attempting to advocate. In the end, the needs of propaganda outweigh the demands of truthfulness. A happy ending is salvaged with Roger returning to Mimi after she overdoses and she is saved, deus ex machina style, from a drug overdose. 

It is interesting to note that the musical has an artistic problem to match its intellectual weakness in that it effectively lacks a second act. The songs that are worthwhile are almost all in the first act. If only musical shorts were a thing then Rent could have been presented up until La Vie Boheme with the gang giving Benny the proverbial middle finger. One imagines Jonathan Larson of blessed memory being forced to add material simply to get to a respectable runtime and hoping that audiences would be so impressed with the first half that they would forgive him for giving them a garbage second act.   

    

Shylock’s Dilemma: To Judge Is to Be Judged

In Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, the Jewish moneylender Shylock demands a pound of Antonio’s flesh as payment for a debt. Considering that Shylock is the villain and a rather unpleasant character (whether or not he is also an anti-Semitic caricature), it is easy to lose sight of how formidable a challenge Shylock presents. His argument is unchallengeable. Antonio freely entered the contract knowing the risks and failed to pay back the loan. Shylock has every right to his pound of flesh and no power on Earth can stop him. Not even the Venetian Court can refuse Shylock as to do so would undermine the very notion of contract, the foundation of the State. To say no to Shylock would simply be to destroy the State and leave Shylock’s right to revenge unharmed. This is similar to the White Witch’s claim to kill the traitor Edmund. For Aslan to deny her a kill would be to go against the Emperor’s magic and destroy Narnia. 

Antonio’s flesh was valuable to Shylock as an excuse to kill Antonio but also to strike at the Christian society around him. It was not be enough for Shylock to knife Antonio in a dark alley with the authorities privately deciding to not pursue the matter. Shylock needed to kill Antonio in public with the court’s full agreement that he was right and that they were powerless to stop him. Thus, any attempt to argue with Shylock or ask for mercy simply demonstrated that he was right and brought him ever closer to his moment of glory when he would be able to sink his knife into Antonio's body with the full consent of a defeated court. This enflamed Shylock's desire for revenge and made him less likely to compromise. 

Portia is able to defeat Shylock, in the end, precisely because she refuses to fight him on his chosen ground. She acknowledges that he has the right to cut a pound of flesh from Antonio’s body. The catch is, of course, that Shylock cannot shed a drop of Antonio’s blood. Portia’s insight is that Shylock, by pursuing Antonio, has also made himself vulnerable to the charge that he is trying to murder Antonio. If Shylock is going to put Antonio on trial for his pound of flesh there is no reason why Shylock should not be on trial for attempted murder, particularly as it was Shylock who decided to initiate this case in the first place. Here lies Shylock's dilemma. He might be perfectly justified in claiming Antonio's flesh but he cannot do so without convicting himself of murder. Thus, it is not enough that Shylock is right. He still loses. (My father should take note that I am conceding a point he has long tried to make to me that sometimes being right is not enough.)

One could ask, how foolish is Shylock to believe that a Christian court was actually going to let him kill one of their own. Of course, they were going to find an excuse to turn this around and punish the Jew. Shylock was blind to this possibility because he thought that Venetian society simply hated him as a Jew even as they needed him as a moneylender, demonstrating their hypocrisy. Since he believed that Venice had no intellectual case against him, it made sense that all he needed to do was come with facts and logic and he would smash through any opposition. No amount of prejudice could deny that Antonio freely entered this grisly bargain and that the State needs contracts to be enforced even unpleasant ones.

What happens, though, once we acknowledge that Venice was not run by hateful Christians, who deep down had a guilty conscious for their intellectually indefensible prejudice? What if it was something far more dangerous; people with a well-worked out narrative in which Shylock the Jew was a harmful outsider and that Venice was better off without him? All of a sudden, Antonio's murder was not an incidental part of Shylock's quest for justice, but the primary issue as it fits into that preexisting narrative about the Jew. Now Shylock was no longer someone who offered a necessary service, but a devil who tricked good Christians into mortgaging their very flesh. Such a Shylock cold be denied his bond with a clear conscience. One could even rob him of his wealth and threaten to kill him if he did not convert and believe that one was righteous for it. On the contrary, it was the people who thought that Shylock had a point and should be shown mercy who were guilty of murder and the moral corruption of the city.

Here the issue of whether Shylock was part of Venice or an outsider becomes important. If Venice could operate without him then Shylock, even if he was unpleasant and disliked, was part of the society no different from, if not the heart, perhaps the large intestine within the political body. As a part of Venice, all promises to him were sacred and must be followed even to the point of death. If Shylock was a foreign parasite then all promises were null and void and he could be lied to much in the same way that, except for radical Kantians, we accept that it is ok to lie to Nazis. Nazis are outside the web of moral responsibility so there never was an obligation to be truthful with them in the first place. By pursuing his pound of flesh, Shylock reminded Venice of why they might consider him an outsider in the first place. Thus, Shylock's argument, though correct, created a catch-22 and was invalidated by his very act of making it.

Shylock is important to our political discourse because all claims of absolute justice amount to a demand for a pound of flesh. The danger of demanding a pound of flesh is that, even when you are right, you are placing yourself on trial with your enemies, those who already possess a narrative to justify killing you, as the judges. To pursue such justice, therefore, requires a mind-blindness to not see that your enemies honestly believe that they are right to kill you and are not simply haters whose prejudices can be overcome by your carefully selected facts. 

Haredi Theology Making Itself Irrelevant: Some Thoughts on Gates of Emunah

As a Maimonidean, I do not just disagree with Haredi theology, I stopped, long ago, taking it seriously. Haredi theology can be divided into two schools; there are those Haredim who are blatantly idolatrous (Chabad) and then there are those, who really do not have any theology at all beyond a vague sense of tribal supremacy. God must exist and have given us the Torah, because if he did not, how can we turn our noses up and talk condescendingly about the "goyim."

A good example of this is Gates of Emunah - The Principles of Faith, based on the lectures of the late Rabbi Shimshon Dovid Pincus. I was struck by his opening chapter as to the extent that, for a work that is supposedly about theology, how little the writer cares about actually making arguments. For Pincus, the arguments for Judaism are so obvious that they do not even need to be stated. Even a child should be able to figure them out. If you disagree with this then it can only be because you are spiritually tainted and maliciously desire to reject God. This leads to a counter-intuitive argument, but one that is distinctively Haredi: "Someone who studies the property laws of maseches Bava Basra is fulfilling the mitzvah of emunah because in this way he draws himself closer to Hashem. He becomes connected to Hashem, so he thereby attains emunah." (pg. 9) For Pincus, faith has nothing to do with abstract arguments or even clearly stating principles to believe in. Study tort law from the Talmud, something that has nothing to do with God and you will have somehow believed; in what, it is not at all clear. Of course, this line of thinking raises an interesting question; why should anyone, after reading this passage, bother to continue reading this book? You should immediately throw away the book as a waste of time and open a Gemara.

To be clear, I do not reject all arguments from subjective experience. I think that there is something to C. S. Lewis style apologetics where we believe in God because our world makes more sense with God in it. It is important to realize, though, that, for Lewis, this argument comes out of a dark and despairing place that recognizes that, at a sheer intellectual level, the argument against God is quite powerful. For example, in the novel the Silver Chair, when the Lady of the Green Kirtle tries to seduce the children into believing that there is no world above, no sun, and not even an Aslan, Puddlglum counters that it is amazing that they managed to somehow make up a better world to such an extent that he would rather die searching for their "childish fake" world above than continue to live in her "real" one.

Part of the irony here is that Puddlglum's argument gains its strength from the fact that logically the witch is right and that he seriously contemplates what it might mean to live in her Aslan-less world. The utter horror at this prospect suggests the faint possibility that perhaps there is something she has missed. It is important to keep in mind, though, that Puddlglum does not refute the witch. On the contrary, it is acknowledged that she has the better argument and that the evidence lies on her side.
It is sometimes easy to forget because we think of Lewis as a children's writer, how really dark Lewis could get. For Pincus to follow Lewis' path, would be to make his readers uncomfortable with themselves, which is the one thing his theology cannot allow him to do. His book exists not to convince his readers about what the right answers might be, but to reassure them that they already have the right answers and need to think no more about them.

While we usually refute arguments through contradictions or reductio ad absurdum, the proper approach here is to note that Pincus' theology makes itself irrelevant. I am reminded of Allan Bloom's argument against cultural relativism in his Closing of the American Mind. Imagine an idealistic college freshman sitting down for his first English class taught by a committed post-modernist relativist. If the teacher is effective at giving over the principles of post-modernism, our student should immediately abandon his English classes, go to business school and never open a book again. I would add that any intellectually honest relativist English teacher should immediately insist that their students go to business school, end the class and resign from their teaching post. At a practical level, one has to ask, why have elite universities been so ineffective at keeping their students out of the business world or keeping their schools from being turned into profit centers with students as mere customers? Perhaps students and administrators are learning the lessons of relativism a little too well and are better post-modernists than the professors running English departments.

If this Emunah book was honest, instead of Pincus' face, the cover should have a sign saying "do not waste your money buying this book or your time reading it." As with secular relativism, the consequences of taking this theology seriously go beyond financial bankruptcy for lecturers and book publishers. At the same time that Pincus claims that we do not need to study theology, he also laments the superficial nature of the observance of many Orthodox Jews. He blames secular influence but would it not make more sense to say that these Orthodox Jews have been influenced by the "theology" of writers like Pincus and reached the proper conclusions? Whether God really exists, there really is no reason to seriously think about it. Much better to study Talmudic business law, become a rich lawyer and a de-facto atheist. You should just practice Judaism because you like the community and being part of the chosen people helps your self-esteem. If you think about it, the commitments of Jewish rituals are not necessarily much greater than the cost most people pay to be part of a specific club. (Think of what students go through to enter fraternities.)

You might think that I am reading too deeply into things and that Pincus cannot really mean what I think he does. Except that, at the end of the first part of the book, Pincus openly comes out and informs us:

         If we were to speak of the ABCs of being a ben Torah, then the 'A' would be to grasp this point            of, "This is my God and I will glorify him." Someone who grasps this point no longer has to                study the Rambam's Moreh Nevuchim or the Sha'ar HaYichud section of Chovos HaLevavos.

Clearly, the only reason to study modern works of Jewish theology would be to understand the classics as the modern works might present material in a more accessible fashion. If there is no reason to read the classics, why should anyone waste their time with modern works like that of Pincus?

Who Owns Aslan, the Author or the Voice Actor?

There is a public furor shaping up over Liam Neeson, the actor who does the voice of Aslan in the recent Narnia movies, saying that Aslan could be any spiritual leader even Mohammad or Buddha. The Narnia books of course were written by C. S. Lewis as Christian allegories with Aslan intended to represent Jesus. Similarly, I recall back when the first film came out Tilda Swinton saying that she felt her white witch character represented Aryan supremacy as opposed to the Devil as Lewis intended. I would see this as an excellent example of the post-modern question of authorship. According to post-modern thought, a text is its interpretation. From this perspective there is really no such thing as authorship and an author has no special power over his own work. The author is simply the person who incidentally performed the labor of creating the text. He may have his own personal interpretation of his own work, but that interpretation is in no way more valid than the interpretation of any of his readers. Readers in turn are free to craft an interpretation from their own personal act of reading without concern as to original authorial intent.  

So who maintains interpretive control over Aslan, C. S. Lewis, who wrote the novels, or the millions of people who have read them, including Liam Neeson? Legally of course Neeson is free to craft any "false" or "heretical" interpretation he chooses and post-modernism says that he is on solid ground for doing so. I doubt Lewis would have really objected. My sense of the man was that he was not the sort to get worked up about anything. If Lewis had a Christian message to his work, he showed little concern to force that message to others. 

As a Jewish C. S Lewis fan, I feel no emotional qualms about accepting Aslan as Jesus. (I accept both of them equally as not my personal savior.) Part of this I think comes from my experience as a historian. Historians are unable to follow the post-modern path to its fullest extreme. We require texts to have hard meanings, otherwise the historical method would be just another form of subjective literary interpretation. We also do put a special value on authorial intent. Want to understand a text? Compare it to the author's other writing and then to ideas in general currency at the time. Under no circumstances are you to bring into play concepts that did not come about until later; that is an anachronism. That being said we historians do recognize that in practice texts do evolve. People do take texts and refashion them for their own purposes. So part of the story of any text is a "post-modern" defeat of authorial intent at the hands of public reception.

I accept as historical fact that Narnia is a Christian work and that Aslan represents Jesus. Even though I am Jewish, this does not have to get in the way or my enjoyment of Narnia or force me to fashion a Narnia to better suit my own personal beliefs. My pleasure is in trying to understand texts as the author might have and seeing how other people refashion it. If Aslan becomes Mohammad to suit our more ecumenical age, that too is a topic worthy of historical study.     


 

Jack’s Last Battle: Some Final Thoughts on Lost and C. S. Lewis

This past week saw the series finales of two of my long-running favorite shows, Lost and 24. Without them, I will probably get more work done. So here are some final thoughts of these two (usually) brilliant and revolutionary shows.

To deal with Lost first, I have long cherished the fact that they included C. S. Lewis in the guise of Charlotte Staples Lewis among the great philosophers such as Locke, Rousseau, and Hume to be named on the show. So I was particularly intrigued by the fact that they chose to pull off an ending reminiscent of how Lewis ended the Chronicles of Narnia with the Last Battle. Lewis famously (or infamously) had almost all the major human characters from the series killed off in a train accident and taken off to Aslan's kingdom where they all live happily ever after. Keep in mind that we are dealing with a series of kid's books. Most infamously of all, Lewis has Susan left behind, because she had abandoned "belief" in Narnia for her adult cares, mainly nylon stockings. Many have argued that nylons were meant as code for sex and that Lewis was telling kids that if they have pre-marital sex they will go to hell.

Anyone familiar with Lewis' wider body of work, not just Narnia, would tell you that, for Lewis, it really is about the small things, such as nylons, to such an extent that if Lewis had written that Susan was not going to be saved because of her sex life, sex is really code for all the petty vain things, like nylons, that are really at the heart of the matter. In Lewis' theology, it is always the small sins that are important and which damn us. The big sins are merely the end result of all the small sins. For this reason, it is of little importance that, in Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Edmund betrays his siblings to the White Witch. The real issue at hand was Edmund's pride and jealousy, present from the beginning of the story. A chastened humble Edmund is a savable Edmund, regardless of the consequences of his misdeeds. On the contrary, having to live with the consequences serves all the more as a chastisement to cure the original sin. The real problem with sex is not the act itself. The real issues (at least potentially) at hand are the pride that led one to think they are above conventional morality, the desire, not so much for physical pleasure, but to be part of the inner circle of people in the "know" and the rebellion against conventional morals. As Lewis points out in his essay, the Inner Ring:

Freud would say, no doubt, that the whole thing is a subterfuge of the sexual impulse. I wonder whether the shoe is not sometimes on the other foot. I wonder whether, in ages of promiscuity, many a virginity has not been lost less in obedience to Venus than in obedience to the lure of the caucus. For of course, when promiscuity is the fashion, the chaste are outsiders. They are ignorant of something that other people know. They are uninitiated. And as for lighter matters, the number of people who first smoked or first got drunk for a similar reason is probably very large.

A person could easily come to regret a sexual action, in of itself, and repent. It is not so simple to repent from the pride that led to it. Without facing the issue of pride there can be no meaningful repentance for sex and the deed will be repeated and worse things will follow.

The major mystery with Lost in the final season was what to make of the alternative parallel universe, populated by versions of the main characters, that came into existence, seemingly after Juliet Burke set off a nuclear bomb on the Island at the end of season five. I was hoping for Desmond Hume to bring back John Locke from the alternative universe to save the Island from the smoke monster, who had taken the form of Locke. (Hats off to Terry O'Quinn for the range he showed over the series, playing the noble John Locke with his struggles with faith in the Island for four seasons, the smoke monster pretending to be Locke for one season, and the utterly satanic yet chillingly charming smoke monster this last season. Whatever qualms I may have with the quality of the writing of this show at times, I cannot stress enough how talented a cast of actors Lost had.) The alternative universe Locke would be followed by the rest of the people in the alternative universe, who sacrifice themselves and the happier existences of the alternative universe to cross back over and save the Island.

I was always far more of a John Locke fan than a Jack Shephard fan. Shephard might be important as the political leader of the survivors, establishing a community, but it was Locke, who confronted the big questions of meaning and the purpose of the Island. (I never cared about the Jack-Kate-Sawyer love triangle.) I would compare the relationship between Shephard and Locke to the relationship, I once discussed, between Peter and Ender Wiggin in the Ender series. Instead of letting this play out, the writers decided to let Jack take on what should have been Locke's role as the faith leader to save the Island.

To top it all off, in the end, the alternative universe ends up playing no role in the final conflict with the smoke monster. It is a gateway world where all the characters who died during the show along with the characters who survived but will one day die have been gathered together to fix their relationships before moving on together. The "Jew" Benjamin Linus is even given a truly moving repentance scene that Lewis would surely have approved of. Linus asks Locke for forgiveness for trying to kill him; the sin he focuses on is not murder, but the jealousy that drove him to it. That being said, this gathering together was a cop-out that dodged the major issues and failed to give six seasons of mystery the ending it deserved. Whatever else you can say about what Lewis did to Narnia in the Last Battle, and it certainly is the most difficult of the seven books, at least his narrative made sense.

In Search of a Sense of Wonder in Fantasy: Some Thoughts on Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut

Teel McClanahan III was kind enough to send me his novelette Lost and Not Found - Director's Cut. I read many novels and the occasional short story, but the hundred page novel is an experience in its own right that does not come around very often. This is certainly not an easy genre to work with. I can think of only one truly great short novel, Stephen King's Shawshank Redemption. The pitfall of writing at this length is that it is too long for the simple short story concept and not long enough to establish the character and plot of full length novels. This certainly applies to McClanahan's whimsical account of an unnamed former lost boy, who returns to Neverland as an adult and runs off with Tinkerbell. I was intrigued by the main character and some of the world's McClanahan describes, but there is no real plot or character development to allow for a meaningful story. While it might be acceptable to the world of post-modernism to eschew plot and character, as a reader of fantasy, I have distinctively old fashioned tastes and literary values. Most of all I desire from fantasy a sense of magic and wonder, something that establishment post-modernism can only look askance at.

McClanahan's attempt rethink the Peter Pan story has its parallel with the movie Hook and Dave Barry's Peter Pan prequels. His deconstruction of fantasy has its parallel in Neil Gaiman. Post-modernism and deconstructionism get a bad rap as a means for academic elites to sit on their thrones and arrogantly heap scorn over anything that does not fit in with their politically correct values and sense of what counts as literature. The thing that I admire so much about Gaiman, with his Sandman graphic novels and American Gods, is that while he is busy deconstructing mythology he does it from a perspective of love and admiration for it. One never gets the sense that he is talking down to his material. Rather it is his desire to find a way to make mythology meaningful in a post mythological age. I would contrast Gaiman with Gregory Maguire and his Wicked series. While I loved the musical version of Wicked, I find his books to be effused with this arrogant cynicism. His deconstruction of the Wicked Witch of the West seems to stem not just from an innocent desire to rethink the world of Oz, but as a put down to L. Frank Baum as a sexist male. To me, fantasy is about a sense of wonder. Even if we go into dark places; it should be as a sense of tragedy. If the hero is going to go down it should be in saving the world that he loves and that we the reader love in turn. A good example of this, again in a fantasy with a strong deconstructionist element, is Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series. Snarky moralist preaching of either the traditional or post-modern kind has no place in fantasy. While I love C. S. Lewis, this is the major weakness of the Narnia series. I think Lewis serves as a good lesson here, though, in that he can get you to overlook his Christian moralizing with the sheer sense of wonder he offers in Narnia. (That and a killer sense of satire that allows you to take his preaching with a wink and a nod.)

Lost and Not Found falls into the camp of Maguire. McClanahan walks into the world of Neverland not out of a childlike sense of wonder, but out of an adult's cynicism. I do not get this sense that he loves Neverland or Peter Pan. On the contrary, Peter is a contemptible child and Neverland, a child's world, is to be replaced by something more "adult" like Haven. The one thing about Neverland that he seems to like is Tinkerbell. If I were to sum up the novel it would be as his personal sexual fantasy with "Tink." (I assume it is not for nothing that the main character goes unnamed.) Not that McClanahan's love scenes, while numerous, are that graphic. That being said, they felt out of place and wrong and in that sense pornographic.

As a lover of fantasy literature, I look forward to the day when fantasy achieves the literary respect it deserves, when Lord of the Rings is seen as not just great fantasy, but one of the greatest works of twentieth century literature period. As much as I want this, I would not have it by selling out to post-modern deconstructionism. Fantasy should be the bastion to stand against such cynicism. If that means that we never get the respect of the "literary" types then so be it.

Meeting Patrick Rothfuss

Last night I went with Lionel Spiegel to meet Patrick Rothfuss, who was speaking at a Borders in Northern Virginia. For those of you who are not familiar with him, Rothfuss is one of the leading fantasy writers today. My only hesitation in putting him in the league of Tolkien as one of the greatest fantasy writers ever is that he has only written one book so far, the Name of the Wind. I will say that Rothfuss' Kvothe is the most interesting lead character in a fantasy since Thomas Covenant. Fantasy is a genre that usually focuses on building interesting worlds, populated by odd side characters to take over the story, leaving the main character trapped in the role of hero. It is Rothfuss' gift as a writer that can create a world as interesting as he does with so many great side characters and still have them play second to Kvothe.

I went to the bookstore simply for the pleasure of meeting a man whose work I so admired in the flesh and to hear him talk about his work, perhaps even to catch an unguarded slip as to what is going to happen in his next book, Wise Man's Fear, which fans have been waiting three years now for. What I was completely unprepared for was how much fun Rothfuss was in person as he mixed responding to questions with reading various pieces of his, including a pathologically hilarious gerbil story and yes the prologue of his next book. Writing is a solitary task and one has no reason to expect authors, even those who can create personable characters, to have it themselves. Watching Rothfuss, I was struck by the fact even if he lacked the romance cover long red hair of Kvothe, (in fact the original cover for the book was dropped because it looked too much like a romance novel) here was Kvothe, with all of his wit and charm, in the flesh. Even if I am unable to convince you to try reading a nearly 700-page work of fantasy, I would still recommend, if you have the chance, going to see Rothfuss on his book tour. He is worth it all for himself and if I cannot convince you to read him, seeing him perform might.

I will be circumspect as to what Rothfuss spoke about as he asked at the beginning that there be no video recordings for fear that something could come off the wrong way and end up on Youtube. (The speech was an adult affair, though hardly smut for smut's sake, and not for children, even if Name of the Wind is perfectly fine.) There were a few things that I think should be alright and worth mentioning. Rothfuss spoke passionately about the value of fantasy as speaking its own truth even as a work of fiction. He challenged the assembled group of, assumingly, fantasy lovers, as to what meant more to them, Narnia or Peru. (Asking forgiveness from my friend who studies Early Modern Peru, I must confess that I raised my hand for the former.) I asked him what he would advise aspiring fantasy writers as to how to avoid the trap of rewriting Tolkien and turning out clichés. (Another of Rothfuss' strengths is how he took a story with a hero going to magic school to learn to be a wizard that could have so easily turned into a cliché and made it stand on its own as something clearly within the fantasy tradition and yet so original.) His advice was to start off at the age of twelve and read a fantasy book a day. (At least that is what he did.) If you understand the genre you can work with it, know what has already been done and avoid repeating it.

If I have talked about how talented Rothfuss is, I would end by noting what a nice person he is as well. After speaking, he posed for a picture with the entire crowd and stayed to sign books. It was close to an hour by the time I got to him and there were still plenty of people behind me. These are people who have already bought the book and will likely buy the sequel no matter what. Rothfuss has nothing to gain, particularly as he does have better things, like his newborn son and the mother of his child, to deal with.

I went back and forth as to whether to bring my copy to be signed. I picked it up off a library used pile. In the end, I agreed to bring it; Rothfuss was a fellow follower of the vow of poverty known as graduate school and I do have Wise Man's Fear on pre-order whenever it comes out. Rothfuss was kind enough to sign it to Izgad. (It is easier to say and remember than Benzion.)

The Fantastic Faith of Guillermo del Toro

USA Today has an article on director Guillermo del Toro about his upcoming film, Hellboy II: The Golden Army. While del Toro is best known to American audiences for such action movies as Hellboy and Blade II, he also directed the Spanish language film, Pan’s Labyrinth. To those of you who have not heard of this film or who might have been put off by the fact that it is in Spanish, Pan’s Labyrinth is probably the most religiously profound film to have come out in recent years. In certain respects it did a better job at channeling C. S. Lewis than even the recent Narnia films.

Del Toro seems to have a complicated relationship to religion. He was raised by a grandmother who was a deeply religious Catholic and rebelled against it. That being said his films have a deeply religious side to them as if they are attempts by del Toro to come to terms with his own faith or even to salvage it. In explaining the nature of his work, del Toro comments that: "The fantastic is the only tool we have nowadays to explain spirituality to a generation that refuses to believe in dogma or religion. Superhero movies create a kind of mythology. Creature movies, horror movies, create at least a belief in something beyond."

This should serve as a heads up to those who would diminish fantasy and fail to understand its importance to religion today. We do not live in a world in which one can demand belief, certainly not by mere authority. Fantasy is a useful spiritual outlet precisely because it does not demand belief; one is free to take it as it is, as a mere piece of fiction, to do with as one wills. Though, as Harry Potter demonstrated, such mere fiction has the ability to radically alter people’s lives, by awakening a longing for something outside of themselves. No religion can survive on authority alone. The Bible is meaningless simply as the word of a god, who will throw you in a lake of fire if you do not believe in him and his book. As a book which one is free to take nourishment as one wills, the Bible can sustain like no other. Yes, even more so than Harry Potter.

I look forward to seeing del Toro’s future projects, particularly his adaption of the Hobbit, which is slated to come out in 2011.

Till We Can Face the God of C. S. Lewis (Part II)

(This is a continuation of an earlier post.)

A major point, that you have to keep in mind, is that Lewis turned the myth of Cupid and Psyche on its head, making Orual the main character. (If I am not mistaken her name comes from the Hebrew “curse of God.” Lewis uses Hebrew a number of times. In Narnia, there is a character named Emeth. In Pilgrim’s Regress, there is a mountain Jehovah Jirah.) He would not have done that unless he identified with her very strongly. Psyche is a goddess born into human flesh. She is perfect, but, in of herself, uninteresting. She is useful to the story only in terms of how others, particularly Orual, react to her. Psyche, the goddess, bears no relationship to us human beings, and cannot be imitated. Orual, a flawed and ultimately tragic human being, reacting to the divine inherent within Psyche, is of great interest.

Tobie makes the mistake of “skipping” to the end and saying that Orual was selfish. Yes, Orual was selfish, but that is almost beside the point. Her selfishness and her love were the same things. It is not that her love was simply a mask for her selfishness or that her love was somehow inauthentic. Her love was pure; she loved Psyche not for anything Psyche could give her, but for who Psyche was. The problem with Orual was that she could not see that her very love was an act of selfishness and that is what made it so dangerous. It is because she so truly loved that she was blinded to this selfishness. How could love be bad? This is a major theme in Lewis’ thought. It is precisely the “higher” desires that can be the spiritual downfall of the person. It is easy for a person to accept that a desire for money, sex and power can be bad and that people who pursue them are being selfish. When you are dealing with things such as love and honor you can always that you are acting “in the name of heaven.”

Orual is spiritually far superior to the other “human” characters, such as the Fox and Bardia. The Fox is a philosopher. He denies the literal existence of the gods, at least the sort of gods that would interest themselves in human affairs. Lewis, quite subversively, makes the Fox a powerful moral figure. He lives and dies based on Stoic principles, always striving to act according to reason. For all of his moral greatness, though, he is unable to appreciate the spiritual dimensions, right before his eyes. As he tells the heavenly court:

I taught her [Orual], as men teach a parrot, to say “Lies of poets,” and “Ungit’s a false image.” I made her think that ended the question. … I never told her why the old Priest got something from the dark House that I never got from my trim sentences. She never asked me (I was content she shouldn’t ask) why the people got something from the shapeless stone which no one ever got from that painted doll of Arnom’s. Of course, I didn’t know; but I never told her I didn’t know. (pg. 257-58)

Bardia is the exact opposite of the Fox. If the Fox stands for reason then Bardia stands for faith. He accepts as a matter of course that the gods exist and that the gods are concerned with human beings. The problem with Bardia is that he lacks the critical element. Since he is incapable of doubting the gods’ existence he is incapable of questioning the gods, if they are righteous, if they have the right to interfere with humanity or if humanity would be better off without the gods. Ironically enough, since there was never a time when Bardia did not serve the gods, Bardia, unlike Orual and the Fox, never gets that moment of salvation, to submit himself to the gods and accept their grace.

Orual is the combination of the Fox’s reason and Bardia’s faith. She is spiritually aware enough to be unable to rule out the possibility that the gods exist or to make them none issue in her life. Unlike Bardia, though, Orual has the intellectual awareness to doubt the gods’ existence. More importantly, because Orual doubts, she is capable of challenging the gods and rejecting them. It is precisely this “satanic” character who ultimately proves to be the one found worthy of salvation, once she decides to accept it.

Psyche suffers for Orual’s sake. One can look at it as Orual being so evil that Psyche had to suffer in order to save her. One could also look at this as Orual is so great that the gods saw fit to send Psyche down to this earth and had her undergo trials and tribulations all so that Orual might be saved.

Till We Can Face the God of C.S Lewis

Tobie recently put up a post on Till We Have Faces. (See here.) Most people only know C. S. Lewis from his Narnia chronicles. This novel, though, is my personal favorite work of his. This is a very different book than Narnia; it is much more mature and it is quite dark.

One of the things that I love about C. S. Lewis is that he was willing to face up to some of the dark implications of believing in God. Unlike most outreach specialists, Lewis did not take the line that God exists, he loves us, we are going to be saved by believing in him and therefore everything is wonderful. Lewis, throughout his work, questioned God’s goodness and wondered if mankind would be better off without God’s active involvement. This was more than just a literary or rhetorical device, one gets the sense from reading Lewis that he really struggled with these issues and, down to the very end of his life, had his doubts. (Read, for example, A Grief Observed)

Lewis’ dark side finds its expression in Till We Have Faces in the figure of Orual, Lewis’ Nietzschian super-heroine. Anyone who thinks that Lewis was a misogynist, whose female characters were either evil witches or meek, obedient, good little girls, clearly has not considered this novel.

Orual is one of the evil sisters from the Cupid and Psyche myth who cause Psyche to disobey her husband, the god Cupid, by looking at his face and be banished from him. In Lewis’ hands, though, Orual becomes something far more complex than a jealous fairy tale sister. This novel is her defense and her prosecution of the gods. She argues that it is the gods who have sinned: what sort of god gives random commands, that serve no purpose, and damns those who fail to keep them? What sort of god hides his face and only speaks in hints and riddles? Ultimately what she did to Psyche was justified because the gods had no right to take Psyche, the person she loved most in the world, away in the first place. Who gave them the right to interfere with her life and steal her happiness?

For they [the gods] will neither (which would be best of all) go away and leave us to live our own short days to ourselves, nor will they show themselves openly and tell us what they would have us do. For that too would be endurable. But to hint and hover, to draw near us in dreams and oracles, or in a waking vision that vanishes as soon as seen, to be dead silent when we question them and then glide back and whisper (words we cannot understand) in our ears when we most wish to be free of them, and to show to one what they hide from another: what is all this but cat-and-mouse play, blindman’s buff, and mere jugglery? Why must holy places be dark places? (pg. 218)

It was Lewis’ genius that he almost succeeds at getting us to agree with Orual. Ultimately Lewis’ answer to Orual is that the gods could not face her until she herself had a face. She needed to turn inward and face herself; to come to terms with the fact that she had hurt the people she loved most in the world with her love and because she loved them. In the end, Orual submits herself to the gods and in return is given the gift of grace by Psyche.

I disagree with Tobie, that Lewis is arguing that we blindly submit ourselves to God, accept his will and surrender our own personalities. Lewis’ theology was far more complex than that. For Lewis, the starting point is the fact that we have strong personalities and that we struggle with God, even to the point of hating him. It is only once we have established this adversarial relationship that we can turn around and give ourselves over to him with all of our doubts and issues. It is a dialectical relationship between fighting and submitting, with no easy answers or quick roads to salvation.

The Continued Adventures of HaRav HaGaon HaTzadik Thomas Covenant HaKofer: Rebetzin Kofer to the Rescue I.

I met my best friend, AS, a few years ago. Some people whom I had just met invited me to come along to some friends of theirs to watch Star Trek. The couple, to whose house we were going to, had a son, which these people thought I might get along with. I walked into the basement and behold there was the Extended Edition of the Lord of the Rings Movies. So that was already one thing we had in common. It took a few more seconds to move from Lord of the Rings to a whole range of other things that we had in common. For example, we both have the habit of making passing references to obscure topics that for some strange reason most other people are not familiar with.

It was AS who introduced me to the work of Stephen Donaldson and his fantasy series, the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. The original books were written back in the late 70s and early 80s. They consisted of two trilogies, the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever and the Second Chronicles of Thomas the Unbeliever.

The story is about a man named Thomas Covenant who suffers from leprosy. Covenant found out that he had leprosy when he was taken to a hospital after a cut on his hand, which he had not even noticed turned gangrene. This accident lost him several fingers. When his wife found out about this she abandoned him, taking their young son, Roger with her. Covenant, in order to cope with his predicament, needs to believe two things about himself. One, that nothing that has happened to him is his fault. Two, that he does not have the power to cure himself.

Covenant finds himself mysteriously transported to this magical place known as the Land. Covenant, with the aid of his wedding ring which is the focus of wild magic in the world, must defend the Land against the evil Lord Foul the Despiser. Now wait you say, this is Narnia and Lord of the Rings and just about every other work of fantasy ever written. Covenant must learn to believe in himself, cast off his notions of what is real and not real, have faith and all will be well. Or at least that is what you would expect. This story, as the title indicates, is not about belief but about unbelief. Covenant does not believe that the Land is real and persists in actively disbelieving in it, earning him the title Unbeliever. It is crucial for Covenant to maintain his disbelief because to believe in the Land and in himself as its savior violates the very principle upon which he has built his life, the belief in his own helplessness. As the series goes on it becomes imperative for Covenant to continue to disbelieve in the Land even as he falls in love with it and finds himself risking everything to save it. It is because Covenant refuses to give in to simple belief that he has the power to stand against Foul.

The spirit of the series can best be summed up in the tagline to the third book, the Power that Preserves, which is: “Be True Unbeliever.” AS and I have adopted this as the official salute between ourselves.

It would be easy to categorize the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant as a work of atheistic fantasy similar to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant though is far more nuanced than a simple attack or confirmation of faith. It is about the dialectic between faith and disbelief. If the series is a polemic against anything it is against absolutism and the demand for simple, concrete answers.

It is for this reason that AS and I so strongly identify with this series. We are both deeply committed religious individuals. Our faith though is about questioning and challenging things. God is the person we love to yell at and Judaism the religion we love to criticize. Aside from Judaism, we love to talk about sci-fi, fantasy, and Christian theology. He does nineteenth-century evangelicals. I do medieval Catholicism. This is not an easy balancing act, but we keep each other strong in the faith.

(To be continued)

Hogwarts School of Force Studies and Pantheistic Heresies

Atheists such as Richard Dawkins are in the habit of accusing religion of promoting superstition. As a theist and as a practitioner of Orthodox Judaism, I have to admit that there is some truth to these charges. I regularly find myself embarrassed by what seems to pass as religious doctrine these days. As fans of the recently completed Harry Potter series know so well, many religious fundamentalists, in both the Christian and Jewish flavors, have, for years, been waging a campaign against Potter claiming that it promotes witchcraft. As offensive as I find this perspective to be, I believe that it highlights certain trends within even fundamentalist strains of religious thought that run counter to the usual religion promotes superstition narrative so beloved by Dawkins and company.

What we have here are religious fundamentalists who not only are not supportive of a work that supports belief in the supernatural but actively seek to suppress the work. For some strange reason, religious fundamentalists are scared that if their children read Harry Potter they will come to believe in the supernatural. Why are religious fundamentalists not lining up behind Harry Potter as a tool to get children to open their minds to non-naturalistic perspectives? The answer is that fundamentalists are concerned that if children get turned onto the supernatural it will be the wrong sort of supernatural, one that lies outside of their established religion. I would see this attack on Potter as symptomatic of two things within religious fundamentalist thought. That the established religious authority must be protected, not just from the claims of scientists, but also from claims of the supernatural variety. Also that the religious beliefs of fundamentalists have nothing to do with theology but are mere adherence to a given established religious authority.

C.S Lewis was someone who was genuinely comfortable living in the shadow of the supernatural. One of the reasons why he wrote the Chronicles of Narnia was to make children comfortable with the idea of the supernatural. As the professor explains to Peter and Susan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, whether or not Lucy had really entered another world, there is nothing about such a claim that goes against reason. Logically speaking there are three possibilities. Either Lucy made up Narnia, imagined it or she is telling the truth. Since Lucy is known to be an honest person and has not been known to be delusional the only rational conclusion is that she is telling the truth and Narnia does in fact exist. Lewis was responding to David Hume’s argument against miracles. According to Hume, one should assume that since the vast majority of miraculous claims are false one should simply take as an operational assumption that even those miraculous claims which have not been disproven are also false. Unlike our fundamentalists, Lewis was more concerned with convincing people that naturalism was irrational and that only by assuming the existence of a deity, could the authority of reason be defended, than he was with establishing the authority of one particular church or text as being unchallengeable.

As much as this may sound counterintuitive, organized religions and in particular members of religious hierarchies serve to limit and even suppress, popular superstitions. While all religions are built around supernatural claims, which supposedly happened sometime in the past, the existence of present-day miracles, and in particular present-day miracle workers, present a direct challenge to established religious authorities. Think of miracles as power structures from which authority can be established. The moment someone comes along and establishes their own line of miracles they have established their own rival power structure. Religious authorities claim that their power structure was established by God through the hand of a miracle worker, such as Moses, Jesus, or Mohammed, who demonstrated his authority by performing miracles. The religious power structure, through the medium of tradition, claims to be the inheritor of the authority of these miracles. If I lay claim to having performed a miracle then I can claim to be acting on God’s authority and challenge the authority of the given religious power structure. I can claim to be the true inheritor of the authority of the original miracle or I can start a brand new religious power structure.

An excellent illustration of this is the Talmud’s story of the debate between Rabbi Eliezer b. Hyrcanus and the Sages over the purity of the ovens of Aknai:

Said he [R. Eliezer] to them [the Sages]: “if the halachah [law] agrees with me, let this carob-tree prove it!” Thereupon the carob-tree was torn a hundred cubits out of its place … ‘No proof can be brought from a carob-tree,’ they retorted. Again he said to them: ‘If the halachah agrees with me, let the stream of water prove it!’ Whereupon the stream of water flowed backwards. ‘No proof can be brought from a stream of water,’ they rejoined. Again he urged: ‘If the halachah agrees with me, let the walls of the schoolhouse prove it,’ whereupon the walls inclined to fall. But R. Joshua rebuked them saying: ‘When scholars are engaged in a halachic dispute, what have ye to interfere? … Again he [R. Eliezer] said to them: ‘If the halachah agrees with me, let it be proved from Heaven!’ Whereupon a Heavenly Voice cried out: ‘Why do ye dispute with R. Eliezer, seeing that in all matters the halachah agrees with him!’ But R. Joshua arose and exclaimed: ‘It is not in heaven.’ (Deuteronomy 30:12) (Baba Mezia 59b, Soncino Talmud Nezikin I pg. 352-53)

The end of the story is that the Sages did not accept the opinion of Rabbi Eliezer and eventually excommunicated him for his refusal to back down. The point of this story is that Jewish law is based on rabbinic tradition and dialectic but not around miracles and prophecy. If we are going to allow miracles and prophecy to play a role then all you need is for someone to claim that he is a prophet who can perform miracles and that person and his followers would be able to justify holding out against the entire established rabbinate. This type of reasoning would be the end of rabbinic Judaism and for that matter any other established religion.

Side by side with the church’s history of attempting to suppress scientific thinking is their war against magic. For example, during the Renaissance, the Catholic Church went after Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) for his work on Hermeticism and Kabbalah despite the fact that Pico wished to use these things to defend Christian dogma. According to Pico, the most effective means of demonstrating the truth of Christianity was through the study of magic and Kabbalah. Even though Pico’s arguments for the use of magic and Kabbalah may have sounded pious, they contained a direct challenge to the Church. If magic and Kabbalah could teach all that one needed to know about Christianity then why would someone have any need for the New Testament, the church fathers or the entire church tradition for that matter? Once you have built Christianity around magic and Kabbalah, like Pico did, then it is not a very far jump to Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), who rejected traditional Christianity arguing that Hermeticism was the true Christianity and not the Gospels.

The 17th-century false Messiah, Sabbatai Tzvi (1626-76), is another example of the sort of anti-rationalist thinking that can be nourished in the absence of an effective established religious structure. He claimed to be a prophet and a miracle worker, but he also, as the Messiah, claimed the authority to overturn Jewish law. Sabbatai Tzvi did not come out of mainstream rabbinic culture and one must him as a direct assault upon that culture. Early in his career, he was chased out of his hometown of Smyrna and from other places as well. He eventually though was able to win or at least silence the established rabbinate of the day. He did this not by insinuating himself with the established rabbinic culture, but by, with the help of Nathan of Gaza, creating a mass popular movement, outside of any sort of rabbinic control. Even after Sabbatai’s conversion to Islam and even after he died, the Sabbatean movement remained a powerful source of counter-rabbinic Jewish thought.

As Dr. Matt Goldish argues in his book Sabbatean Prophets, Sabbatai Tzvi arose during a time period that saw a growing acceptance of lay prophecy within both Christian and Jewish circles. The idea behind lay prophecy is that the individual can come to know God’s will by reading scripture or simply through the purity of his own heart and one does not need to go through the established religious structure. One can see this type of theology must clearly within Protestant circles, but this was also going on amongst Catholics as well. Unlike established religious power structures, lay prophetic movements rely on the miraculous claims of a religious leader living in the here and now.
Ultimately established religious authorities have as much to fear from miracle workers as they have to fear from the claims of science. As such they have no choice but to suppress them.

Not that I am excusing the actions of those who went after Potter or letting them off the hook. I have no illusions that they are acting out of any love of science or reason. There is something that I do find perplexing about the whole opposition. It would seem that Potter got into trouble not for the kind of things taught at Hogwarts but because it used the words magic and witchcraft. Let us imagine that instead of the words magic and witchcraft, Rowling had decided to use the words Force and Jedi. Hogwarts is a school for children who are sensitive to the Force. At Hogwarts, children learn to channel the Force and use it for such diverse activities as transfiguring objects and charming them. Students at Hogwarts take such classes as Defense against the Dark Side and Care of Force Sensitive Creatures. Upon graduation, students become Jedi Knights and work for the Ministry of Jedi.

To the best of my knowledge, George Lucas’ Star Wars films never aroused even a small fraction of the religious opposition that Potter has, neither for the original films nor for the more recent prequels. The case of the prequels is particularly relevant as they came out at the exact same time as the Potter books. Personally, if I were to cast my net for stories to corrupt little Jewish and Christian boys and girls, I would be far more concerned with Star Wars than with Harry Potter. Star Wars is blatant Pantheism. The Force, we are told, is within all things. It has a will but it does not seem to be a conscious being, nor does it seem to actually give commandments. This is a pantheist god, the world spirit that is within everything. This is the sort of deity that Spinoza or Hegel would have been comfortable with. For that matter, this is the sort of deity that even an atheist could believe in.

What does it say about the theological IQ of our religious fundamentalists when they are willing to fight over a semantic issue such as the use of the words magic and witchcraft but seem to be completely clueless when it comes to a real theological issue such as Pantheism? Clearly, these people do not have any genuine theological beliefs. All that they have is a religious power structure, whose authority they will defend to the end. They are as much of a threat to belief in God as any materialist.