Frank Schaeffer, his son, is another story.

Frank began his career working for his father, but lived to turn on the movement Francis had created.  He converted to Greek Orthodox Christianity and began writing in support of decidedly non-Christian conservative causes.  In 2007, he published a book entitled Crazy for God: How I Grew Up As One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take it All (Or Almost All) of it Back.

Surprisingly enough, I found this book in the Dordt College bookstore yesterday, and started flipping through it out of curiosity.

The prologue contains this revealing paragraph about the hobbling effect of his upbringing:

“Every action, every thought, every moment I stumble into is judged by some inner voice.  Everything seems to have a moral component: eating — because there are hungry people; sex — don’t even start.  What I write, don’t write, who I talk to, don’t talk to, and how I raised my children, their characters, accomplishments, failures, whether they ‘love the Lord’ or not, everything points to my relationship with God, real or imagined.”

My dad was with me in the bookstore.  Like Frank, I suppose, I owe most of my religious beliefs to my father (and mother).  Unlike Frank, I don’t plan on rejecting those beliefs anytime soon, although I hope to explore them and deepen my understanding of them throughout my life.

I read this paragraph from Frank’s book to my dad.  He looked at me, I looked at him, and we simultaneously said, “Yeah!” Frank’s paragraph is a perfect description of our religious heritage.  Everything in life is directed towards our Lord and Savior.  Every part of our life should be honoring to him.

Frank seems to regard the fact that he was raised with this attitude as a curse, a ghost that haunts him everywhere he goes.  For me, this approach to life is a source of incredible freedom.  Living for something greater than myself, surrendering my life and my choices to a God who loves and cares for me is a relief, a relinquishing of a burden.  Through Christ’s forgiveness, I have freedom from guilt, and through Christ’s law, I have a perfect guide to this crazy world.  Knowing my own selfishness and stupidity as I do, I would not have it any other way.

Of course, in practice, the Christian life is far from simple, but it was still startling to see someone sum up my worldview so well while describing it as a negative.

Thoughts?  I’d love to hear what you guys think about this, especially if you don’t share my perspective.

The mere thought that, supposing I were baptized with any sentiments other than those that are fitting, I should ever come to have even a single instant or a single inward movement of regret, such a thought fills me with horror. Even if I were certain that baptism was the absolute condition of salvation, I would not run this risk, even to save my soul. I would choose to abstain from it until I became convinced that I was not running this risk. One only has such a conviction when one thinks that one is acting in obedience. Only obedience is invulnerable for all time.

On the strength of this scruple — and others — Weil was never baptized, choosing instead to maintain her solidarity-through-solitariness. (In the first letter she asserts that to enter the church would compromise her solidarity with humankind as a whole; in the second letter she asserts that to enter the church would be an unfortunate social participation, impinging upon her vocation of alienation. The two sentiments are identical I think.) I can’t point to a similar result in my own life — I was baptized despite a fear that I might someday look back and discover I had participated in the sacrament for illegitimate motives. I would defend my different response to this fear by arguing that the sacraments are a kind of embodied looking which imply far more of solidarity with humankind (in dependence on God) than of an exclusive solidarity with the “pious.”At any rate, one of the themes present in Weil’s reflections reminded me strongly of another unconventional Christian I recently encountered in literature: Graham Greene’s “whiskey priest.”

This character is featured as the protagonist of The Power and the Glory, a story of negative sainthood. The whiskey priest is a drunkard, a sinful cleric who even broke his vows of chastity, creating an illegitimate daughter. But he lives in a time of persecution, when the government is forcing all priests to renounce their vocation and faith or to suffer execution. The whiskey priest regrets his impiety, castigates himself as unworthy of his office, but nonetheless serves as a vehicle of grace to the individuals whose paths cross his own — he is possibly the only priest who has not fled or renounced. The crowning illustration of his astounding negative spirituality occurs when he accuses himself of uncharitableness because he cannot find it in himself to love all people to the degree that he loves his illegitimate daughter — he is unworthy to be among the pious, to be in the church as Weil would say — but his practical selflessness in continually risking his life demonstrates a powerful and deeply Christ-like love for everyone with regard to whom he accuses himself.

In both the case of Weil and the case of the whiskey priest, the Christian theme of solidarity appears in contrast to the exclusivity of religion. Weil feels that though the social solidarity she so profoundly feels is only an imitation of true religion, nonetheless it would be better for her to maintain that inadequate solidarity than to practice an impurely motivated religion:

Foolish as the theory of Durkheim may be in confusing what is religious with what is social, it yet contains an element of truth; that is to say, that the social feeling is so much like the religious as to be mistaken for it. It is like it just as a false diamond is like a real one, so that those who have no spiritual discernment are effectively taken in.

And later:

I have the essential need, and I think I can say the vocation, to move among men of every class and complexion . . . It is because I long to know them so and love them as they are. For it I do not love them as they are, it will not be they whom I love, and my love will be unreal. I do not speak of helping them, because as far as that goes I am unfortunately quite incapable of doing anything as yet. I do not think that in any case I should ever enter a religious order, because that would separate me from ordinary people by a habit. There are some human beings for whom such a separation has no serious disadvantages, because they are already separated from ordinary people by their natural purity of soul. As for me, on the contrary, as I think I told you, I have the germ of all possible crimes, or nearly all, within me.

The whiskey priest, likewise, feels that he is a failure as a priest, as one of the pious, because he cannot maintain a moral fervor for correct internal passions or to achieve self-discipline, while yet evincing a more-than-pious (or truly pious) selflessness that does not seem adequate from his perspective even while it compels our respect and convicts our hearts.

It is not incidental, in light of this shared contrast, this shared negative spirituality, that both the whiskey priest and Simone Weil must be understood in light of Marxism. The whiskey priest’s thoughts and actions are explicitly contrasted throughout the novel with those of a religiously devoted Marxist captain. One of Weil’s original and continuing influences was Marxism. — The anti-religiosity (or true religiosity) of both characters takes the form of a spirituality of suffering, a direct answer to Marx’s accusation that Christianity is an opiate. Far from it. Both the whiskey priest and Weil imitate Christ in rejecting the wine-and-vinegar-filled sponge. They are Christian by virtue of their solidarity with the suffering of the world rather than by virtue of some anodyne they could dispense for that suffering. But this answer bears out the real truth of Marx’s accusation as well. It is by contrast to the exclusivity of commonplace and organized piety that both solidarities define themselves.

One final thing should be mentioned about the spirituality of suffering. Both Weil’s looking and the whiskey priest’s acting are related to Christ’s example not by imitation but by attention. They perceive in themselves a radical lack of righteousness.  Yet in some strange way this very lack becomes the proof of their vocation from God to the unrighteous. In this way, attention, comparison, and the attendant guilt are transformed into imitation. As Christ became sin to represent humankind, Weil and the whiskey priest remain sin to represent Christ.

The most shocking line from Weil’s two letters best summarizes the theme of a spirituality of suffering that I’ve been trying to draw out:

If it were conceivable that in obeying God one should bring about one’s own damnation while in disobeying him one could be saved, I should still choose the way of obedience.

___________________

[...] For a moment, step back with me from specific texts, and consider in general the political and spiritual opposition I have just tried to draw out of Erasmus’s colloqy [A Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake].

I said the earthly city has a political purpose of stability. It anchors the geography around it, such that everything outside of it is described in relation to it. Where locations were formerly designated in relation to various equal points of interest, the land is transformed by the presence of the city into a centric spread, connected by arterial roads to a central heart. The centrality of the city allows industries to lean upon each other, stabilizing the whole by augmenting the power of production and gathering raw material together from many sources. Talent is drawn to the city, which becomes a center of entertainment, of creativity, of the acquirement and dissemination of knowledge, a warehouse of ideas and experiences, rendering outlying places gray, tiresome, and uninspiring.

All of this ingathering and conglomerating serves the basic purpose of rendering human society in its fullness stable. Grand visions, as of a tower of Babel, no longer energize our brick-layers, but a fear of the danger of ungathered living drives us together to build walls against the wilderness. We weave our practices and institutions together until they become interdependent.

Our laws serve this political vision of stability. The laws keep us from destabilizing each other’s lives by disruptive self-assertion. Obedience to the laws, an obedience driven by the desire for stability, is the only condition for citizenship in the earthly city.

Because stability is the meaning of earthly city life, although initially political in scope it becomes spiritual by appealing to the heart, to the center of individual people. The desire for stability in the face of life in the fallen world overwhelms all other desires. The demands of individual relationships and moral convictions must give way before the demands of the city, of the desire for stability. It becomes more important to be a good citizen than a good son or daughter, sister or brother, husband or wife, mother or father. In this way, the political vision of stability can be said to become a spiritual possession, demonic in scope and power. Moreover, we are born into cities, presented with the spiritual vision of stability as a default stance toward life.

In contrast to the spiritual vision of stability, Christianity urges a spiritual vision of mobility. We have in the church the citizens of  a city unbuilt. The church stands in opposition, politically, to the earthly city precisely to the degree that the earthly city stands in opposition, spiritually, to it. To allow the desire for stability to overpower all other desires—which is precisely the tendency inspired by the structure of the earthly city that I have described—is a kind of idolatry for the Christian. Consequently, although to be a Christian does not preclude living in an earthly city, still to be a Christian means resolutely resisting spiritual possession by the earthly city’s ideal of stability. Because this kind of spiritual vision possesses one as a result of the structural tendencies of the city, the Christian inevitably subverts the earthly city where she dwells simply by refusing to submit to its spiritual dominion.

The whole purpose of this extended exposition of the meaning of the earthly city and its political opposition to the church was by way of defining the context of pilgrimage as a category for interpreting specific Christian ideas and practices. When I speak of the ensuing texts as interpreting Christianity in terms of pilgrimage, I mean that they interpret life in terms of this opposition between the spiritual visions of the earthly city and the church. [...]

It was strange feeling our way toward an appropriate method in which to use our ten minutes. We decided to silently pray over the psalm (Psalm 1) for about five minutes and then to share our thoughts with each other, and then to spend some time in short, intermittent prayer over what we had read and thought and heard and wondered.

We were awkward, and probably both a little uncomfortable, but both of us took something away from the time—each of us had a central impression, and we were both encouraged in our practice to notice that Psalm 1 itself is actually recommending the kind of discipline we were starting. How appropriate! My take-away was a sense that the opposite of fruitful implantation by the stream of God’s law was disintegration—the chaff that blows away in the second half of the Psalm—and that the only way to avoid disintegration was to hold onto the unity of the calling of God. Failing to relate everything that I do to that central calling will result in my drying up, chaff-like, and blowing away. My brother’s take-away was an image: a tree that had withered except for a single green leaf. He was struck by the idea that even if our lives do seem to be disintegrating, and we do seem to be failing to relate everything to our central vocation in Christ, we can rest in the assurance of vegetable prosperity, we always have a green leaf, we will always bear fruit in our season.

I was a bit upset with myself at first for seeking this “take-away”—it seemed facile when I first reconsidered it. But I think now that it would only be facile if I meant by it that my meditating should wrap up at the end of the ten minutes and issue in a thesis statement. It shouldn’t. If it does I probably haven’t quieted my heart. But it probably should leave me with the memory of something, something that I can rest in and turn around in my mental hands like a gem with interesting facets, whenever I have quiet moments without work at hand. Otherwise it’s quite possible that my ten minute morning meditations will become a compartment unto themselves, a place where “spirituality” occurs and then I leave the Spirit safely packed away on a shelf until I want to take him down again. As if that would work. Instead, I want the rhythm of these two times to be part of the day, in fact the poles around which the day rotates. I want to look forward to these time and to remember them, allowing my thoughts and actions to radiate out and toward them rather than to be separate and untouched by them.

I have been using the Meditations as an example of moral reasoning (in structure more than content). So far we have considered two pre-requisites for such reasoning: first, the self-analysis which admits the historical and communal nature of one’s own moral vision; second, the consolidation of that moral vision into a definite ideal pattern of moral behavior.

But we haven’t fully set up the appropriate context for moral reasoning yet. One thing is lacking. Motivation.

Consider the following metaphor: Imagine the moral agent to be an atom in a totally material universe. (This metaphor would have offended Marcus, who like a good Stoic opposed the materialist view of philosophers like the Epicureans by positing a totally deterministic divine providence.) So far we have considered the location of the atom (which can only be determined in relation to whatever this universe contains) and the orientation of the atom (the direction it will travel in when it moves). Our goal is to get the atom moving. What we lack is a motivation for our atom, a push or pull that will set it moving.

For Marcus, that motivation is death.

The following two passages occur in books 2 and 4, respectively, of the Meditations:

(1. Now is it high time to perceive the kind of Universe whereof you are a part and the nature of the governor of the Universe from whom you subsist as an effluence, and that the term of your time is circumscribed, and that unless you use it to attain calm of mind, time will be gone and you will be gone and the opportunity to use it will not be yours again.

(2. Don’t live as though you were going to live a myriad years. Fate is hanging over your head; while you have life, while you may, become good.

These passages are representative of numerous instances in which Marcus urges himself to actually move along the path he has charted out for himself. In a deathless world, Marcus might say, knowing the genealogy of your moral vision and passionately upholding a moral pattern won’t necessarily ever result in moral behavior.

For Marcus, because now is all there is, and because the hereafter offers no definite possibility for the process of becoming good, goodness is to be sought in the present.

While I would disagree with Marcus regarding the nature of the present, the promise of the hereafter, and what it means to become good, I find his motivation to live toward dying wholesome for the activity of moral reasoning.

As an aside directed specifically at certain religious perversions, note that the motivation to live toward dying is not the following: motivation to live a certain way out of fear for judgment hereafter; motivation to live a certain way in order to cause the present to become the hereafter.

Instead, to live toward dying is to live a certain way because the time in which that way of life is possible is circumscribed—to embody the principle in two cliches, the window of opportunity demands that we seize the day. To live toward dying is to live, one might say, with the grain of the universe.

Clearly I summon a whole constellation of ethical concepts with that last paragraph, but I urge my readers not to be distracted from my main point. I will re-summarize: from Marcus Aurelius we can learn to locate ourselves within an historical and communal moral context, to orient ourselves toward a definite moral pattern, and to galvanize ourselves by conceiving of goodness as a process tied to mortality.

One of the most popular articles on one of the most popular self-help websites is entitled How To Become An Early Riser. Steve Pavlina has gotten a lot of mileage from that article—and it’s not because he tapped a volcano of interest that had been building up until he released it. Getting up in the morning is a pretty universal subject for concern.

Marcus Aurelius was concerned about it. At the beginning of the fifth book of the Meditations, he advises himself the following:

At dawn of day, when you dislike being called, have this thought ready: “I am called to man’s labour; why then do I make a difficulty if I am going out to do what I was born to do and what I was brought into the world for? Is it for this that I am fashioned, to lie in bedclothes and keep myself warm?”

“But this is more pleasant.”

“Were you born then to please yourself; in fact for feeling, not for action? Can’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees each doing his own work, helping for their part to adjust a world? And then you refuse to do a man’s office and don’t make haste to do what is according to your own nature.”

“But a man needs rest as well.”

I agree, he does, yet Nature assigns limits to rest, as well as to eating and drinking, and you nevertheless go beyond her limits, beyond what is sufficient; in your actions only this is no longer so, there you keep inside what is in your power. The explanation is that you do not love your own self, else surely you would love both your nature and her purpose.

Much more wisely than Steve Pavlina (and with considerably fewer words), Marcus takes the problem of waking up and connects it to his fundamental moral principle. For him, waking up is not just a matter of technique but of conviction. Here his much vaunted Stoicism makes an appearance. He refers to Nature as the thing which assigns a purpose to his activities and a limit to his pleasures. Clearly he doesn’t mean nature in the sense we might refer to nature. We typically mean, at maximum, what is; for Marcus, however, Nature is more of a pattern for perfection visible in the grain of what is but easily and often departed from, especially by men. As you may have noticed his argument that man was made for action is based on analogy to the life-patterns of various other creatures.

He concludes, therefore, that morning laziness is an example of revolting against nature (”and her purpose”).

In the last essay I pointed out Marcus’s act of self-location. He tries to understand himself historically and communally, analyzing rather than justifying himself. In this essay I want to point out Marcus’s act of self-orientation. He tries to organize his moral efforts according to a definite pattern. Self-consciously, he uses this pattern as the motivation for difficult habit-forming.

As any consistent reader of this blog knows, I stand somewhat ambiguously in relation to Nature (and nature). While I will champion the superiority of Nature (as God fashioned it without sin) to nature (as we find it, corrupted and debased), I am by no means convinced that the resolution is a simple re-ordering of things according to Nature. Instead, I believe in a pattern higher than Nature or nature—the pattern of Christ, whose character was formed, like ours, in the tension of a world that is not Nature. It won’t do for us to pretend that Christ is simply Adam as he could have been, when our imitation of Christ consists in bearing a cross that Adam could not even have conceived.

But once again, without necessarily acquiescing to the particulars of Marcus’s moral vision, we find the outline of his process a fundamental precursor to any moral reasoning.

We’re all a little schizophrenic in the morning. The part of us that likes to snuggle revolts against the part of us that set the alarm. Consequently, waking up is a perfect proving ground for a moral vision. Only what can call upon the allegiance of our whole selves can motivate us to actually get out of that bed.

We should all take some time out to meditate on why we get up in the morning.