Thanks for the article, Marcus. I'm not sure that Shadroui has taken the
language theory too far--I'm still mulling that one over. Although, I do find it
odd to leap into the fray regarding a film that one hasn't seen. In the
meantime, I'm remembering my own experience seeing the film and thinking of
Medieval Mystery plays, which strove for the same effect through much the same
means (minus special effects, but that audience was less jaded) that Gibson did.
The intent of such plays (The York Play of the Crucifixion, for example) was to
forcefully make clear to the audience that each one watching the play was
responsible for the agony of Christ, and that each sin committed was
commensurate to re-crucifying Him. Giving the lukewarm quality of much
of today's Christianity, maybe the seeing the film, as a triadic experience,
isn't a bad idea for professed believers
Nice to see a bit of life on the list.
Rhonda
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 2004 6:20
AM
Subject: Re: [percy-l] New reader
Yes, welcome to the list.
Here's an article that might
stir us out of our doldrums.
Shadroui uses Percy to beat up on Christopher
Hitchens'
atheistic attack on Mel Gibson's The Passion. I
think
Shadroui takes Percy's language theory much further
that
Percy ever did and I have trouble with anyone who describes
Joe
Scarborough as a "fair-minded host."
I am always cautious about
invoking Percy in the culture
wars (because Percy had a way of taking
unusual approaches),
but here it is.
Marcus Smith
http://www.intellectualconservative.com/article3253.html
Christopher
Hitchens and the Issue of Faith
by George Shadroui
22 March
2004
Christopher Hitchens' criticism of The Passion strikes one
as the
rhetorical excess of someone predisposed to
disdain
Christianity.
Christopher Hitchens, observed one critic
recently, is a
foul-mouthed man of little faith obsessed
with
homosexuality. One can appreciate this response to the
apostle of
atheism, but it misses a great deal as well.
Hitchens has always gleefully
sought to puncture the beliefs
of those who in his mind hide nefarious
motives behind
sanctimonious claims.
This is why he skewered Henry
Kissinger. How is it, Hitchens
asked, that a man whose policies led to the
deaths of
hundreds of thousands of people, who acquiesced to the
violent
overthrow of a legitimately elected government, and
who lied about much of
it, could be so honored? (Bear in
mind I am presenting Hitchens' case, not
agreeing with his
conclusions).
Likewise, Hitchens went after Mother
Teresa, a saintly woman
by virtually all accounts, but who nevertheless had
to walk
the same hard landscape as the rest of us. It was
simply
unconscionable to Hitchens that she might keep company
with
corporate CEOs who behaved sinfully. No saint was she,
argues
Hitchens, but rather a scam artist. At this point, I
do not think it would
be unfair to suggest that Hitchens
would have likewise chided Jesus for
supping with the tax
collectors and for claiming to make blind beggars
see.
And so we come to Mel Gibson, and his movie about the
final
hours of Christ. Hitchens walked quite willingly into the
lion's
den on Scarborough Country over a week ago when he
threw not only the
kitchen sink at Gibson, but the entire
inner furnishings of his rhetorical
warehouse. Gibson, so
spoke the apostle of atheism, is an anti-semite and
the film
he made about Jesus' final hours is nothing more than a
piece
of pornography specially wrapped for those who love to
watch men flogged as
an exercise in sexual depravity.
Joe Scarborough, a fair-minded host,
gave Hitchens all the
time he needed to enflame an already grossly
over-reacted to
cinematic moment. In addition to attacking Gibson,
Hitchens,
no doubt remembering his lessons in Marx, labeled faith
in
transcendence infantile. Defenders of the film called
Hitchens an
outrageous anti-Christian bigot. Peggy Noonan
later in the show called the
uproar about the film a miracle
of sorts. Better to debate this issue than
the latest absurd
actions by this or that celebrity. A silver lining in a
gray
sky, to be sure.
I have not seen the film, but I must concede
that the scenes
widely shown on television, tempered my enthusiasm.
Even
those who have praised the movie have volunteered that the
violence
is difficult to take. My own taste for religious
films runs more along the
lines of Jesus of Nazareth, the
remarkable epic made in the mid 1970s that
depicts Jesus as
a man of wit, compassion and strength of character
whose
mystical appeal was rooted both in earthly presence and
divine
grace.
Hitchens is a paid provocateur who has trouble, from time
to
time, governing his tongue and his pen. He is nevertheless a
man of
great rhetorical skill and intellectual insight. And
he was not alone in
finding the film offensive. I doubt
anyone would confuse Bill Buckley's
religious commitments
or his political affinities with those of Hitchens,
but
Buckley, too, found the film gratuitously violent in places:
"It
isn't only the interminable scourging, which is done
with endless
inventories of instruments. The Bible has
Christ suffering the weight of
the cross as he climbs to
Golgotha, but that is not enough for Gibson. He
has stray
soldiers impeding Christ every step of the way, bringing
down
their clubs and whips and scourges in something that
cannot be understood
as less than sadistic frenzy."
That Gibson might have overdone the
violence would make him,
well, like a great many others who direct films.
But to
suggest, as Hitchens does, that the film was
anti-semitic
pornography? This strikes one as the rhetorical excess
of
someone predisposed to disdain Christianity.
And Hitchens is
precisely such a person. He is totally
immersed in a materialist worldview,
which explains his
infatuation with socialism and his disdain for
anything
smacking of religious insight. He fancies himself, also,
the
debunker of scams and the savior of modern-day lepers -
homosexuals
receive an inordinate amount of his sympathy,
though, to be fair, he has
been outspoken as well about the
afflictions of slavery and imperialism and
the ruthless
practices of Stalinism.
Hitchens caused a stir a while
back when he came out in
support of the Bush administration's war on
terror,
leaving his long-time leftist allies angry and bemused, or
some
combination of both. Bear in mind, of course, that for
Hitchens this is a
war against religious fanaticism, which
partially explains his enthusiastic
reaction. He is right
about Islamic fascism, but even so, for a man of
deep
critical skills, Hitchens, we fear, has not seriously
explored the
issue of faith. Let us try to escape the
confines of his Darwinian world
for a few moments.
C.S. Lewis and J.R. Tolkien, two giant intellects
who
embraced faith, offered this: faith may well be a metaphor,
but
metaphors unveil truths that would be otherwise hidden
in the forests of
every-day parlance. That is why poetry can
move us. Metaphors are not
always literal, yet they produce
images remarkable for their power and
insight. Does this
make them less or more true? Language can be a
mystery
almost as deep as life itself.
Walker Percy, in his essay,
The Fateful Rift: The San
Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind, suggested that
language is
a triadic exercise, while other forms of knowledge in
our
natural world are dyadic. (He borrows this idea from Charles
Pierce,
the pragmatist philosopher.) The human capacity to
form language enables us
to address not only our everyday
needs, but also to frame grand conceptual
questions about
existence and the universe itself.Percy sought to
refine
Descartes. The fundamental formulation isn't "we think,
therefore
we are," but rather we communicate therefore we
are more than dust. Our use
of language requires the
interplay of creator, audience and thought itself.
It is one
of the great mysteries, Percy argues, and it carries us
back
to a truism that the paths to God are infinite. His own
_expression_
of his religious views was whimsical and yet
somehow more profound than
Hitchen's easy atheism.
"This life is much too much trouble, far too
strange, to
arrive at the end of it and then be asked what you make
of
it and have to answer, `scientific humanism.' That won't
do. A poor
show. Life is a mystery, love a delight.
Therefore, I take it as axiomatic
that one should settle for
nothing less than the infinite mystery and the
infinite
delight; i.e. God. In fact, I demand it. I refuse to settle
for
anything less. I don't see why anyone should settle
for less than Jacob,
who actually grabbed ahold of God and
wouldn't let go until God identified
himself and blessed
him."
G. K. Chesterton and Malcolm Muggeridge,
who were Hitchens
sorts in their early years, found themselves circling
always
back to the realization that truth emerged not from the
hustle
and bustle of human beings caught in the material
web, but from words -
words spoken 2000 years ago.
Muggeridge, about whom Hitchens has written
some nice
things, suggested that faith leads us to a glimpse of
eternity
and that doubt is integral to faith. Only atheists
are certain, Muggeridge
suggested, which claim Hitchens
proves.
And yet, men and women far
greater than Hitchens have
concluded that if there is divine truth
available to human
discovery, it is certainly revealed in the Sermon on
the
Mount. We can stack up the genius of a hundred generations
and not
come to the insight of a single parable spoken by
Jesus. His metaphors
remain light-shedding guides and they
are open, with all respect to my
fundamentalist brothers, to
critique, interpretation and layers of mystery.
And yet the
deeper you explore in humility and grace, the closer
you
come to inspired understanding.
How ironic that Hitchens, who
would claim to be at least
partially a child of the Enlightenment, cannot
see that the
mission of Jesus came to fruition not in the medieval
mind,
but precisely in the Enlightenment he celebrates. That
each
individual has value in the eyes of God was a notion that
began to
shape the political context only when Enlightenment
thinkers successfully
challenged the notion that God worked
directly through a single man -
whether he be Ceasar, the
Pope, or a given Monarch. God lives in everyman,
and men
should not be entangled in the yoke of bondage.
It is not
the teachings of Jesus that have caused the
repression so obvious in
Christendom and other religions,
but the failure of human beings to allow
their faith to
transcend human passion, ego and tribalism. The record of
my
faith is mixed, generosity, compassion and love on the one
hand,
schism and sin on the other. Even so, whatever the
sins of Christians, it
remains soberly true that the most
atrocious killing machines in history
were run by modern-day
atheists.
Percy and other great Christian
writers were on to
something, I think, when they argued that language, the
tool
of Hitchens' trade, offers a glimpse at the eternal even
if it does
not guarantee human wisdom. Should Hitchens, wit
and writer that he is,
ever entertain a moment of doubt, he
might yet find himself reading with
renewed insight this
sentence: in the beginning was the word.Thus does
a
different kind of journey begin.
George Shadroui has been
published in more than two dozen
newspapers and magazines, including
National Review and
Frontpagemag.com.
----- Original
Message Follows -----
From: JHForest AT cs.com
To: percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject:
Re: [percy-l] New reader
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 05:59:58 EDT
> In
a message dated 6/22/2004 5:48:42 AM Romance Daylight
> Time, billjee AT hotmail.com writes:
>
>
> > I am a new subscriber to the list. I first read Lost
in
> > the Cosmos in college a few years ago and was hooked.
I
> > hope to learn more about the man and his thinking
>
through this discussion forum.
>
> Welcome to the List! It has in
fact been a rather quiet
> list lately -- the end of the school
year, etc.
>
> What Percy books have you read since Lost in the
Cosmos?
>
> Jim Forest
>
> * * *
> Jim &
Nancy Forest
> Kanisstraat 5 / 1811 GJ Alkmaar / The Netherlands
>
Jim's e-mail: <jhforest AT cs.com>
> Nancy's e-mail:
<forestflier AT cs.com>
> tel:
(+31-72) 511-2545 / fax: (+31-72) 515-4180
> Orthodox Peace Fellowship
web site:
> http://www.incommunion.org Jim &
Nancy Forest web site:
> http://www.incommunion.org/home.htm
* * *
>
>
> --
>
> An archive of all list
discussion is available at
> http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail
>
> Visit the Walker Percy Project at
> http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy
>
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