Page 2969 – Christianity Today (2024)

How would you feel if your 12-year-old ran around the house singing, “I’m Selling My Pork Chops, but I’m Giving My Gravy Away”? Personally, I’m a little nervous about it, though I admire a child with entrepreneurial spirit. It seems to me that a pork chop is only a pork chop until it shows up in a song by Memphis Minnie, the Mississippi-born blues singer who belted out double-entendres before Little Richard was a twinkle (or a leer) in anybody’s eye. If Minnie had been a Girl Scout, she’d have sold a lot of cookies.

Well, I have only myself to blame for the musical happenings around here. Myself and Roy Blount, Jr. Reading his new book, Long Time Leaving: Dispatches From Up South, gave me an appetite for the music he describes so deliciously in essays like “Good Gravy,” “Memphis Minnie’s Blues: a Dirty Mother for You,” and “Love Those Bozzies.” So, by the miracle of iTunes, I dredged up songs by the Boswell Sisters and the metaphorically vivid Minnie, along with my own all-time favorite, Fats Domino, who has recently resurfaced in New Orleans. You can’t keep music like this to yourself; actually, you can’t keep from yelling it out in the shower at the top of your lungs, which is why even the dogs next door to us are now howling about pork chops.

Blount is such a good writer that I almost—ALMOST—paid $35 to go see him at a fundraiser in Birmingham. Most writers have to pay other people to come to their book signings, but Mr. Blount lends his amiable Southern voice to the NPR show Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me, which makes him a celebrity, at least among the kind of people who go to book signings. If I had gone, and had the chance to shake the author’s hand, what would I have said to him?

I probably would have said, “Mr. Blount, nobody’s worth $35, but you’re a heck of a writer. I don’t write as well as you do, but I think I could—if my life were so full of ironies.”

OK, it’s not true that I could ever write as well as Roy Blount, Jr., but it is true that his life is awash in irony. The most ironic thing about him is that he writes so well about places like Atlanta but lives in western Massachusetts. His politics are liberal, he’s spurned the Methodism of his parents, and though he still considers himself Southern, it’s only in the best senses of the word, which are mainly literary and musical-culinary rather than political. He likes Faulkner, Krispy Kreme Donuts, and Ray Charles; he doesn’t care for George W. Bush (a pseudo-Southerner, anyway). Still, he can understand why people wouldn’t vote for a Yankee liberal—somebody like John Kerry, for instance. After all, Reason and Enlightenment only get you so far, and then you’ve got to be able to tell a good story.

Which brings me back to his essay on Memphis Minnie. In looking for a biography of the singer, Blount found just one, Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie’s Blues, by a pair of married scholars named the Garons—and woe, I say woe unto the Garons on the day he crossed their path. Blount calls Woman with Guitar “one of the goofiest damn books I’ve ever read,” “a vaporous mishmash of transmutational femino-Marxist ‘paranoiac-critical’ Franco-Freudian-surrealist theory.” (Tell us what you really think.) Though he praises their discography, research, etc., he despises the “flummery” which they “have heaped upon the supremely no-nonsense Minnie, of all people.” Songs that advise, “Babe, I’ve got to have a socket if you want me to iron your clothes” aren’t really that hard to figure out, are they? “To me,” Blount says, “blues music doesn’t seem so exotic that it requires recourse to France. It may be surreal, but it’s not trying to be.”

Blount writes that Minnie was a talented songwriter who began to perform while she was still a kid around 1910. “Coal-black beautiful,” with “all gold teeth across the front,” she played “in joints, on the street, at house parties and fish fries.” She was big-hearted and wild, and often sang “while chewing Brown Mule tobacco and sitting in such a way as to show off her pretty underpants.” Though she never had the fame of Bessie Smith, she had a great influence on later artists, including Chuck Berry. At the end of his essay, Blount imagines that he has a chance to go back and visit the singer in her old age, that she bakes him some of her famous (non-metaphorical) biscuits, and that he gets the real story of her life. Food, music, and story: the Southern trinity.

Just after I read Long Time Leaving, I picked up Huston Diehl’s Dream Not of Other Worlds: Teaching in a Segregated Elementary School, 1970. Diehl is a professor of English at the University of Iowa, and her book is part memoir, part academic study. Like the Garons, Diehl has not chosen a subject that only a professor could love (I’m thinking of a friend’s dissertation on the varying size of bluebird testicl*s at increasing elevations). And, like Roy Blount, Jr., I have a personal interest in the subject of the book: while Huston Diehl was teaching fourth graders in a yet-to-be integrated public school in Louisa County Virginia, I was a first grader in an integrated Christian school near Richmond.

Like so many academic books (Woman With Guitar, for instance), Dream Not of Other Worlds has a lyrical title. In the forward, Diehl tells about teaching Paradise Lost in one of her first university classes in New York. An African American woman (who had defended the poem up until then) suddenly became enraged at the angel Raphael’s advice to Adam, “Dream not of other worlds, Be lowly wise.”

“I knew immediately,” Diehl recalls,” that, like my African American students in Virginia, she must have been told all her life to ‘Dream not of other worlds.’ … I saw her very presence in my classroom as a triumphant act of defiance against all the people in her life who had tried to stifle her dreams.”

Diehl returns to her year in Virginia, describing herself as an idealistic, 20-year-old northerner with dreams of liberating her students’ minds, opening their eyes to the broader world. After being hired by a disengaged superintendent, she found herself at the head of a class of 38 fourth graders who had never seen a white teacher before. Apart from their natural fears and suspicions, she struggled with a pitiful lack of teaching materials (many students couldn’t afford books), with low expectations from the community regarding how much “negro” children could learn, with her own reluctance to use corporal punishment in a culture that expected it, and with all the attendant problems of the children’s difficult home situations. Above all, she lacked experience. Near the end of the year, with her classroom in chaos, she spoke to the white superintendent again, only to hear him blame the children for her own failures. “I knew in my gut,” she says, “that Dr. Martin was siding with me solely because I was white … . [I]f I accepted [his] backing, I would implicitly be acquiescing to the racist assumptions behind it.”

A couple of things here. First, the kind of race bonding that Diehl describes is something I’ve observed my whole life in Southern white society, and (to my shame) occasionally been party to: someone makes a casual comment about a neighborhood “going down,” or a mall that’s “practically abandoned.” Everybody knows what’s really being said, and nobody demurs. Who wants to be sitting outside the circle while the rest of the tribe has its little war dance?

So I admire Diehl’s fortitude of conscience. I admire, too, her willingness to examine her own shortcomings in such a public way, hoping that good might result. Plenty of people flop early in their careers, and schoolteachers notoriously have terrible first years. Thirty years on, as a respected scholar of English literature, she didn’t have to tell this story.

But Diehl, thinking like a scholar, has goals beyond telling her own story or the story of her classroom. Frequently she pulls away from her narrative to examine the history of African Americans in Louisa County, of racist attitudes regarding education, and of the social and legal inequities that laid the foundation for a segregated South. This information is helpful for historians and researchers, no doubt, Still, I wish she had decided to keep the memoir personal rather than academic. The more detached and scholarly her writing becomes, the more she limits her audience and creates a barrier against the sympathy of the very people she may want to influence. For instance, while she speaks of her African American students with affection, and forgiveness too when called for, she treats the white Virginians in her book as a faceless monolith, a subject mainly for research. Having been one little brick in that monolith, I meekly protest: did you ever try to know us? Then how in the world can you write about us?

Now, Diehl does a better job than the Garons, certainly. A pretty good writer, she doesn’t heap flummery on her fourth graders or (in the words of Roy Blount) take a wildcat (the rural South) and surround it with the bubblewrap of politics and theory. But neither does she burrow down to the heart and bones, the pork chops and gravy, of her own life or the lives of the people in Louisa County.

Diehl tells us that she was in Virginia to be with her new husband Bill, who was also a teacher. But we want to know more. Where did she and Bill live? What did they eat, what did they talk about, what did they fight about? What was it like to be a young woman with a new husband so far away from home? Later, Bill disappears, to be replaced by other husbands. Diehl eventually writes books about English literature and theater; then, just before she turns fifty, she learns she has cancer of the salivary gland under her tongue. Uh, not to be nosy, Professor Diehl, but would you mind telling us more about that? Actually, would you mind giving us the story of your life—I mean the whole story? Because it sounds like a good one. And if you want to make us some biscuits … .

This is the Southern way, and I’m not apologizing for it. Context is good, research has its place, but knowledge is ultimately sensual. To put it another way, Reason and Enlightenment only get you so far, and then you’ve got to eat.

Betty Smartt Carter is a novelist and Latin teacher living in Alabama.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Whenever someone starts talking about “God’s way of X” or “what the Bible says about X,” I’m tempted to turn and run. Especially when X involves food or sex. It’s very hard not to read our own opinions back into the Bible, picking and choosing verses to defend whatever it is we’re defending—I know because I’ve been guilty of it. But here’s one book on Sex in the Bible that does a better job than most at prodding us to encounter the biblical texts in all their strangeness.

“The most interesting thing about sex in Bible,” J. Harold Ellens insists, “is the fact that the Bible does not moralize sex.” Now this may sound like an all-too familiar prelude to some special pleading. Taken at face value, it’s obviously misleading. (Start with that injunction against adultery, for instance, and other inconvenient counter-examples readily spring to mind.) But there’s a good deal more to Ellens’ case than this pronouncement suggests.

The Bible resists our attempts to distill it into a universal rulebook because it’s mainly a collection of stories and poems crafted over a span of centuries by many different authors, often with conflicting implications. When it comes to sexual mores, the Bible is actually full of “situational ethics.” For example, Ellens notes, polygamy is the most common model of marriage in the Bible, and one can still make a strong biblical argument for polygamy in societies where women greatly outnumber men (such as in areas ravaged by war).

Driving home this point, Ellens cites the Old Testament stories where women, most notably Ruth and Esther, employ their feminine charms to seduce men for the furtherance of God’s aims (and their own). Far from being condemned, these women earn nothing but praise from the biblical authors. It’s ironic that Ruth is upheld as a role model for conservative Christian girls today. Instead of “waiting on God” for a husband, she spotted a good man, followed him home from a party, and jumped into bed with him—violating three “Biblical Rules for Dating” at once.

Ellens also devotes a chapter to the Song of Songs, that “uproariously successful erotic celebration of robust sexual play” between partners who are never identified as a monogamous husband and wife (another assumption we tend to bring to the text today). Ellens pokes fun at the celibate theologians over the centuries who flattened the Song into an allegory of Christ and the Church, or Christ and the celibate soul, sublimating sexuality into spirituality to the point of neurosis. Does the poem have an allegorical dimension? Yes—but that doesn’t warrant a reading that treats the plain sense of the text as nothing but an elaborate code. By exorcizing earthly eroticism from the Christian life, Ellens believes, these commentators unwittingly drove people to seek sexual pleasure in harmful ways. “The church owes the world of humans an enormous apology for the centuries-long lie it perpetrated in this regard, and for the psychological and social pathology it produced.”

Does such an argument have any resonance today, in the era of Sex and the City and internet p*rn and Girls Gone Wild? Having sat through enough skewed presentations on sexual purity to earn a free pass out of Purgatory, I can testify that even today the church too often focuses on the bad to the neglect of the good. I remember one high-school youth group presentation in particular, a video in which James Dobson interviewed a serial rapist and killer about the lure of p*rnography. The implication—inadvertent, perhaps, but unmistakable—was that any boy attracted to images of nudity and sex was likely to go on a rampage someday.

Ellens argues that the Bible treats sex as a normal and important part of life that connects us both to other humans and to God. Of course, it can go wrong, as in promiscuity, abuse, adultery, incest, bestial*ty, and rape, all of which make appearances in the Bible. But the problem is not with sex itself.

And yet, more deeply than many other “normal and important” parts of life, sex is interwoven with personhood—hence the seriousness with which the church has traditionally regarded sexual sin. That this emphasis has often clouded our appreciation of the essential goodness of sex is undeniable, just as a distorted emphasis on the reality of our fallenness has obscured the essential goodness of creation. But until the dawning of a new heaven and a new earth, our sexuality will always be a tangled affair.

The Bible reminds us of the enigmatic character of fallen sexuality again and again, in passages that can’t readily be made to fit any agenda. Ellens focuses on three such stories from Genesis—one well-known and two obscure: the seduction of Eve by the serpent (Gen. 3:1-24), the sons of God mating with the daughters of men (Gen. 6:1-8), and God’s slaying of Onan (Gen. 38:7-10).

Ellens reads the story of Eve, Adam, and the serpent as an allegory of human maturation—a story which, unfortunately, implies that sexual awakening unleashed evil into the world. The serpent, he notes, was a common phallic symbol in the ancient Near East, and the fruit a corresponding fertility symbol. While the point of the story is not that sex is bad, Ellens says, still it casts a negative light on the exploration required to transition from childhood to maturity. “Should we look at adolescent alienation, pain, and anxiety as difficult but inevitable stages in the evolution of persons,” he asks, “or as an unfortunate aberration of a sinful or destructive behavior that makes God exceedingly disturbed?”

Here, Ellens can’t help but adding what he wishes the Bible had said:

What if our loving and lovemaking, our sex and sensuality, had been cast from the beginning as the positive and beautiful thing that it is? That would have been the truth, and would have provided our sexual experimentation, exploration, achievement, and union a positive and celebrative aura, marking lovemaking as the supreme expression of the unique nature of human spirituality.

While I sympathize with Ellens, the biblical story reflects a tension that is true to human experience. Genesis holds two things in balance: there is the divine celebration of fruitfulness and multiplying, the consummate delight promised in the story of Eve’s creation (“the two shall become one flesh”); and there is also the Fall. Neither aspect of sexuality can be ignored.

I grew up in a literalist church where a talking snake was a talking snake, and a forbidden fruit was a forbidden fruit. We were taught to take every biblical story at face value—which is probably why I never heard a sermon about Genesis 6, where the “sons of God” swoop down and mate with human women, giving rise to a race of supermen. (This gives new meaning to Touched by an Angel.)

According to Ellens, this troublesome tale actually runs parallel to that of Eve and the serpent, as an alternate account of the origin of evil. Here, sin enters the world through the sexual desire of angels, not human beings. Wickedness abounds among the ungodly offspring of the angels, leading directly to God’s judgment with the Flood.

Nor do I recall any sermons about poor Onan, who refused to produce a child with his sister-in-law Tamar. Knowing well that his offspring would simply provide an heir for his deceased brother, Onan spills his seed on the ground before sleeping with Tamar. Angered, God himself swoops down and slays Onan on the spot. In Ellens’ view, this is a ridiculous story that presents God in a most ungodly light. (God’s response can be inferred from his conversation with Job.)

Despite its weirdness and obscurity, the story of Onan has had a profound influence on church history. “First of all,” Ellens writes, “for centuries Jews and Christians used this scripture as an argument to turn the very natural experience of masturbation into an evil behavior, even a terrifying sin against God.” More than this, early Christian commentators like Augustine and Jerome used the Onan story to condemn coitus interruptus and, by extension, all other methods of birth control.

These early theologians believed that “sem*n is a sacred fluid” and that to deliberately waste or misuse it is a grave sin worthy of damnation. But, Ellens argues, they misread the text. Onan was not punished for separating sex from procreation or for spilling his sacred sem*n: “His error was that he refused to perpetuate the memory, name, and lineage of his brother.”

The consequences of this confusion, in Ellens’ view, have been tragic. “Had it not been for this strange story of Onan, misinterpreted by the church’s theologians for centuries … the Roman Catholic Church could have led the world into a wise and wholesome course of action that would have approved and encouraged preconception birth control and forbidden abortion.”

I can’t summarize Ellens’ entire book, which includes chapters on polygamy, the status of women under Old Testament law, and hom*osexuality—timely subjects indeed. We’re awash these days in “Bible-based” arguments both for and against hom*osexuality, patriarchy, the celibate priesthood, dating, premarital sex, divorce and remarriage, and a host of other sex-related issues. About the only sexual issue in the Bible not being hotly debated right now is the morality of cavorting with angels.

It seems there are at least two ways to respond: by becoming more entrenched in our respective interpretive traditions, or by returning to the biblical texts, in cultural and literary context, with humility in the face of ambiguity. For those inclined to the former approach, Sex in the Bible will be unsettling and subversive. For those inclined to the latter, Ellens is a welcome guide, worth reading and learning from and arguing with and reading again.

Sam Torode is coeditor of Aflame: Ancient Wisdom on Marriage (Eerdmans, 2005).

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Editor's note: Science in Focus is on vacation in August, resuming our regular schedule in September. Meanwhile, we're going to the archives for science-related pieces from the pages of Books & Culture. This week we're featuring a piece by Karl Giberson from the September/October 2007 issue.

In my freshman astronomy class, filled with unwilling non-science majors unhappily meeting an unappreciated general education requirement, I show the PBS video series "Stephen Hawking's Universe." The script for the series was well done, the visuals engaging and enlivened by the occasional appearance of Hawking.

The six-part series and its companion text were not actually about Hawking and were just capitalizing on the cosmologist's rock-star stature. But some of his ideas were discussed—and, wherever possible, the director would arrange a shot of Hawking in his wheelchair, going to his office or scooting across a college campus somewhere, en route to a lecture.

To keep the students awake in a darkened room with reclining seats—and salvage some of the money their parents had ponyed up for their education—I made them write reports on the videos. One student, an aspiring filmmaker, reviewed the video series from a technical point of view as well as for the content I wanted them to learn. He expressed puzzlement about why the PBS director chose to have "some guy in a wheelchair repeatedly crossing the screen for no apparent reason."

The student obviously missed the point, but his question, enlarged, is still a good one. Why has "some guy in a wheelchair"—Stephen Hawking—been repeatedly crossing in front of us, most recently floating weightlessly in space sans wheelchair, for the past quarter century?

A Brief History of A Brief History

Hawking is the best-known physicist since Albert Einstein and one of the scientific community's rare celebrities. His signature work of science popularization, A Brief History of Time, has sold one copy for every 750 people on earth—an astonishing record; it has been translated into 40 languages and has turned its author into a major public figure, capable of filling large lecture halls and even getting multiple guest spots on The Simpsons, the ultimate measure of cultural cachet.

Hawking's extraordinary scientific mind resides in a tragically withered body rarely seen away from his ubiquitous high-tech wheelchair. When he appeared on The Simpsons his wheelchair was outfitted with a propeller that allowed him to fly away at will and a boxing glove on a spring enabling him to mechanically punch people.

A Brief History of Time gave currency to the idea that our universe had no "beginning." This bizarre-sounding claim actually fits with what we know about the origin of the universe, but we know so little about how our universe began that there are, in fact, many "compatible" speculations. Ignorance is consistent with a great many notions.

The argument in A Brief History of Time has an interesting theological spin that accounts for much of the book's enduring fascination. Eliminating the temporal beginning to the universe, says Hawking, rules out any role that God might have played in creating it. Carl Sagan, among others, found this notion delightful, exulting in his introduction to the first edition of the book that A Brief History of Time was about "God … or perhaps the absence of God."

God, of course, has a long association with modern cosmology, and many amateur theologians have waxed eloquent about the way creation connects to the well-defined beginning hinted at by the Big Bang theory. But there have also been theoretical models for the Big Bang without this interesting aspect. One such "no-beginning" idea exploded into broad circulation in 1988 when Hawking published A Brief History of Time. The book, while brief and without equations, was a challenging read. Nevertheless it appeared with something of a big bang itself and became a blockbuster of cosmic proportions.

The success of Hawking's book is itself an interesting story. How did this happen? How did a challenging book on an esoteric topic sell millions of copies? Colleagues began to wonder if they should jump on this newly respectable bandwagon of science popularization; publishers looked about eagerly for a piece of the new literary action. Spinoffs appeared, riding on the book's seemingly infinite coattails. A Reader's Companion appeared in 1992. Hawking wrote his own account of the book's success, "A Brief History of A Brief History," which appeared in Black Holes and Baby Universes, a short collection of essays published in 1993. A Briefer History of Time, described on the cover as "More Accessible, More Concise, Illustrated, and Updated with the Latest Research," appeared in 2005. Hawking's 2001 The Universe in a Nutshell, and a few edited volumes, complete his modest output of science popularization.

Hawking wrote his Brief History to meet financial needs generated by his advancing illness, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), better known as "Lou Gehrig's disease," which gradually destroys motor neurons, in turn limiting one's ability to initiate and control muscle movement. Although the disease leads to complete physical paralysis, the majority of those afflicted with ALS suffer no mental impairment. Hawking, for example, has continued to work productively even after his physical limitations advanced to the point that all he could do was wiggle one finger.

The Making of a Legend

"I suspect that Hawking—who may be less a truth seeker than an artist, an illusionist, a cosmic joker—knew all along that finding and empirically validating a unified theory would be extremely difficult, even impossible. His declaration that physics was on the verge of finding The Answer may well have been an ironic statement, less an assertion than a provocation."

—John Horgan in The End of Science. Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (1997)

Hawking's ALS showed up in the early 1970s when he was barely thirty and turned simple tasks like getting into bed into major challenges. Initially he had one of his students live with him and his wife Jane to help him manage personal tasks. Fortunately for Hawking, his great fame guaranteed that there were always students eager to do this—even cosmology has its groupies. By the early 1980s, his disease had so slurred his speech that only people very familiar with Hawking could understand him; many of his public appearances at this time included one of his students, who would interpret his inscrutable monotone mumbling. There was the looming financial pressure of his children's education. And expensive nurses were now required to supplement the care provided by his students and the long-suffering Jane.

Hawking was encouraged to spin some money out of his growing fame by writing a popular book on cosmology, an idea he rejected at first; scientists writing "popular" books were typically regarded by their peers with disdain. He eventually gave in, however, and met with an editor from Cambridge University Press, explaining that he needed to write a book that would make money. The editor responded that Hawking's proposed "popular" science manuscript, with equations on every page, might not turn out to be all that popular. A publishing dictum suggests that each equation cuts a book's sales in half. Applied to Hawking's manuscript, this formula predicted sales in the single digits.

In early 1983, a farsighted editor at Bantam Books in New York lured Hawking away from Cambridge University Press. Convinced that the combination of Hawking's heroic scientific stature and pitiful physical condition was the stuff of legend, he offered Hawking a quarter-million-dollar advance and a favorable deal on royalties. Hawking signed.

The book appeared in 1988, and within a decade had sold almost ten million copies. Meanwhile, Stephen and Jane Hawking's personal life became tabloid fare, even as their marriage began to disintegrate, a development they hid from the press for as long as possible. The ensuing publicity marginalized the heroic Jane (an evangelical Christian, as it happens), whose loving support for Stephen had been instrumental both in saving his life and in enabling his career. In her deeply spiritual memoir Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen, which appeared in an updated edition this spring, Jane laments that she became "an appendage, a peep show—relevant to Stephen's survival and success only because in the distant past I had married him, made a home for him, and produced his three children." They separated in 1991 and divorced four years later.

Knowing the Mind of God

The science "popularized" in A Brief History of Time derives from Hawking's speculative work on the large-scale structure of the cosmos, particularly as it relates to the "beginning." The conventional picture of the cosmos articulated in introductory astronomy books comes from the Big Bang theory and has the universe appearing from some unknown prior configuration about 14 billion years ago. The ubiquitous timelines that lay out this cosmic history in such books generally have a comic-book "explosion" at the beginning (time = 0, or "t = 0" as scientists shorthand it).

The t = 0 "appearance" of the universe has occasioned much cosmological head-scratching. In the early days of the Big Bang theory, when the evidence was less than compelling, many cosmologists rejected the idea of a beginning. The Belgian cleric/physicist Georges Lemaître, who first proposed it, was accused of smuggling a suspiciously biblical "creation" into science. The enthusiastic agnostic Fred Hoyle developed an alternative "steady state" model, hopefully doing away with what Sir Arthur Eddington had called an "unaesthetically abrupt" beginning to the universe.

The discovery of the predicted background radiation in 1965 dramatically confirmed the Big Bang. Modern cosmology was born. Since then extrapolations have tried to deal with the beginning of the universe, sometimes "explaining" it, other times "explaining it away." Maybe our universe is the daughter of a previous universe or a bubble in a meta-universe or a sibling of many contemporary universes. Or, suggests Hawking, maybe there simply is no beginning.

The most exasperating feature of the Big Bang theory is its increasing vagueness as one approaches the point t = 0 on the cosmic timeline. As a description of today's universe the theory works well; there is ample evidence that the universe is expanding in the way the theory says it should; the radiation left over from the initial "explosion" is spread uniformly throughout space, as we would expect. And, when we look billions of light years "out" into space and see things as they were long ago, they are different in ways that fit with the Big Bang. All of this is comforting, for those who take comfort from such things.

But the picture grows murky as we approach the beginning. On the observational side, we simply cannot look out far enough to see light from 14 billion years ago. We can't even get close, so we are very much in the dark, so to speak, when it comes to observation of this critical point in the history of the universe.

There is, however, a glimmer of light on the theoretical side. Mathematical models of the early universe predict, in a rather straightforward way, astonishingly great densities of matter and very high temperatures. Microcosmic versions of such extreme environments can be created in the laboratory and tested against theoretical models. And the match is excellent for those early stages of the universe that come after the moment of origination.

But what about the actual point t = 0? This cannot be reproduced in the laboratory. Nor does there exist a compelling, generally accepted theory of exactly what this stage would look like.

Absent both observational data and compelling theoretical models, we have an explanatory vacuum—and cosmologists, like nature, abhor vacuums. This particular vacuum is filled with ingenious speculations, including those of Hawking.

The technical version of Hawking's speculation was published in collaboration with James Hartle in the Physical Review, the world's leading physics journal. After a densely mathematical, conceptually opaque presentation of the problem of the temporal and spatial "boundaries" of the universe, they conclude, so cryptically that readers can be forgiven for thinking they understand: "This means that the Universe does not have any boundaries in space or time … . There is thus no problem of boundary conditions."

Hawking repeated the final words of the paper until they became rather famous: "If this were the case, one would have solved the problem of the initial boundary conditions of the Universe: the boundary conditions are that it has no boundary." Note the all-important-but-easily-overlooked conditional, "If this were the case."

Hawking and Hartle's result is remarkable, but it must be placed in context. Interesting ideas in mathematical physics always contain assumptions and simplifications. As remarkable as the fit between the natural world and mathematics might be, the fit can rarely be made without simplifying assumptions; even the simple calculation of the rate at which a body falls to earth must assume that the earth and the body have all of their mass located at their centers of gravity, and that all other gravitational centers are infinitely far away. Such assumptions are necessary to make the "real world" match the "theoretical world," which it often does astonishingly well.

With theories—hypotheses would be a better word—such as Hawking's the-universe-has-no-boundary, however, there are no empirical tests that can be made—not now, probably not for decades, and maybe never.

Nevertheless, we must not dismiss the no-boundary idea simply because it is presently untestable. The mathematical model that eventually gave rise to the Big Bang theory, for example, was itself once untestable and was ridiculed by critics as "supernatural." Many ideas in science originate in this way, but, prior to validation through observation, they coexist with other possibilities on a more-or-less equal footing. (For readers who can recall solving the quadratic equation in high school, there is a helpful analogy. The quadratic equation always has two solutions—two different values for "x," both of which are "correct" in that they solve the equation. In the simple quadratic equation, x2 = 4, the two solutions are x = 2 and x = -2. If the quadratic equation applies to the real world, however, usually one of the two solutions will not work and must be discarded as "non-physical." In this case the quadratic equation could be an expression for the area of a square with sides of length "2." The solution x = -2, implying negative lengths for the sides of the square, makes no sense.) Mathematics usually provides more possibilities than those that correspond to physical reality; we should thus withhold our applause for any particular mathematical result until such time as it turns out to match the real world.

In the glossary to his Brief History, Hawking says that the no-boundary condition is "The idea that the universe is finite but has no boundary (in imaginary time)." Hawking's proposal works "in imaginary time," something that sounds more indigenous to Narnia than physics. To explain how t = 0 is not a boundary in time, Hawking compares it to the North Pole of the earth, where the latitude equals 0. Every point on the earth except the North Pole has points "north" of it. But treating the earth as a uniform sphere, the North Pole is a point like any other. Hence the "uniqueness" of the North Pole is just an artifact of the way we label latitude. Nothing "begins" at the North Pole, except our coordinate system.

In Hawking's model, asking what happened before the Big Bang is vaguely like asking what is north of the North Pole. The inquiry is meaningless: there is no mystery at the North Pole; we can walk across it without noticing anything odd whatsoever.

This analogy breaks down, however, when we note that Hawking's proposal works only in "imaginary time," which may or may not be a meaningful concept. If we can convince ourselves that it is OK for time to become imaginary as we approach the moment of the Big Bang, Hawking's proposal does indeed do away with the "beginning." But, absent some fancy new imaginary clocks keeping track of imaginary time, skeptics—including Hawking's colleague Sir Roger Penrose—may be forgiven for preferring to take their time straight.

Where's the Beef?

"I'd like to emphasize," Hawking has written, "that this idea that time and space should be finite 'without boundary' is just a proposal: it cannot be deduced from some other principle. Like any other scientific theory, it may initially be put forward for aesthetic or metaphysical reasons, but the real test is whether it makes predictions that agree with observation. This, however, is difficult."

And yet for all the becoming modesty of this disclaimer, Hawking has repeatedly made extraordinary claims for his proposal, the knowledge of which—as he has famously suggested—allows one to enter the "mind of God." He speaks of a time when everyone might understand such a wondrous theory, allowing us to all "take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God."

Hawking's invocation of God is curious, and one cannot but wonder if it is simply a gratuitous insertion to make his books provocative, which is to say marketable. Putting "God" in your books is the opposite of putting equations in; it enhances sales. Putting "God" on the cover of a science book is akin to putting swimwear models on the cover of Sports Illustrated: the juxtaposition is deliberately provocative. The past few years have seen a number of science books capitalizing on the market value of God: Paul Davies' God and the New Physics and The Mind of God; Leon Lederman's tongue-in-cheek The God Particle, and far too many more to list here. Hawking's own most recent work is an edited volume titled And God Made the Integers. I must confess to convincing Oxford University Press to put "God" in the subtitle of my recent book, The Oracles of Science: Celebrity Scientists versus God and Religion. And I tried, unsuccessfully, to convince HarperOne to title my forthcoming book "God Loves Darwin, Too."

It would be one thing if Hawking, like Lederman, were just having fun or, as John Horgan suggested, acting the provocateur. But the tone of A Brief History of Time, with its anecdotes about discussions at the Vatican, suggests that Hawking really believes that his no-boundary idea has profound implications for the role of God in the creation of the universe, and many serious readers have taken his claims at face value; indeed, Hawking features in contemporary cultural discourse much as Heisenberg and his Uncertainty Principle did a generation ago.

Hawking's theological naivete is almost funny. He appears not to know that the heart of the Judeo-Christian doctrine of creation is that the world derives its being from God, not that God "started" the world, like some kid building a model airplane. Everyone from Augustine and Aquinas to Barth and Pannenberg has addressed this important distinction. The suggestion that a physical theory ruling out a well-defined "beginning" to the universe removes God from creation is the sort of simplistic misunderstanding that might be tolerated in philosophy students' first term papers, but certainly not their second.

And what of Hawking's claim that knowledge of the profoundly misnamed "Theory of Everything" would be like entering into the mind of God? Really? Is this what God thinks about? What God is this? Is there actually a church somewhere that puts equations on a big screen and invites worshippers to view them as a prelude to worship? Is this the same God whose existence Hawking disproved a few pages earlier?

All this would indeed be humorous if it were not in a book that has sold ten million copies. Hawking has done a great disservice to those purchasers of his book who have actually read it. He has misled them about the religious implications of science and the apparent motivations of scientists; he has made bogus claims about theology; he has juxtaposed science and theology as if they compete to explain the same things. Hawking's enthusiasm about doing away with God does not reflect the views of the scientific community, where there is widespread belief in God, and widespread disinterest in using science against religion.

Hawking is a major public intellectual, a leading scientist with a flair for popular exposition and a platform from which to explain science to an educated populace. He and his scientific allies—Richard Dawkins, Edward O. Wilson, Peter Atkins, the late Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Weinberg, Stephen Pinker and so on—shape public perceptions of science through their popular presentations, in books, articles, and public appearances. Their collective message—drilled home in many different ways—is that science is hostile to religion, scientists don't believe in God, and science competes with religion to explain natural phenomena.

None of these statements is true.

Hawking's iconic wheelchair has been crisscrossing the world's stage for some time now. And his stature as an ambassador for science has grown steadily, even as his physical frame has withered. He is, to be sure, a hero. But we must avoid the temptation to gloss his philosophical ideas with the mythological heroism of his personal life. He is, when all is said and done, a great scientist who knows nothing about theology, but loves to talk about God.

Karl Giberson is the co-author of the newly released Oracles of Science: Celebrity Scientists Versus God and Religion. (Oxford Univ. Press), from which this essay was adapted. He is professor of physics at Eastern Nazarene College.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The waning phase of the acrimonious Bush era features a newly aggressive secularism, reflected in bestsellers that cast sophom*oric scorn upon believers of all faiths. According to a New York Times Book Review critic, it looks like America’s ballyhooed culture war is petering out as the Religious Right suffers “the thrashings of a dinosaur that can do a lot of damage even in its final throes.”

Or on the contrary, have evangelicals “joined the American elite,” as the subtitle of a forthcoming book from Oxford University Press contends? Indeed, as a couple dozen other books warn, have believers grasped so much power that “fascists” or “Christocrats” or “Christianists” or “theocons” threaten to supplant American democracy with theocracy?

There is related confusion over religion’s legal status. In his impassioned book The Last Freedom: Religion from the Public School to the Public Square, Joseph P. Viteritti, director of Hunter College’s graduate program in urban affairs, asserts that religious freedom is being suppressed by cultural elites—an assessment echoed by many observers. But from other circles we get a sharply contrasting view: in God vs. the Gavel (Cambridge Univ. Press), for example, Marci A. Hamilton of Yeshiva University’s law school argues that religious liberty has gotten out of hand as agitators twist the Constitution to unfairly claim “broad sway to violate the vast majority of laws.”

With one-vote U.S. Supreme Court majorities on so many religious and moral disputes, the next president’s nominees are likely to tip the balance. Viteritti counts among the experts who are dissatisfied with the Court’s religion jurisprudence these past 60 years, though they reach no consensus on a solution. The prime example of this literature is Separation of Church and State (Harvard) by Philip Hamburger of the Columbia University Law School, who believes that the First Amendment, though written in order to limit government intrusion, has been interpreted so as “to constrain religion.” In Religious Freedom and the Constitution (Harvard Univ. Press), Princeton University Provost Christopher L. Eisgruber and Lawrence G. Sager, law school dean of the University of Texas at Austin, argue that the familiar demand for a high wall of separation between church and state is “silly and incoherent.” They advocate instead “equal liberty” that gives religion neither special privileges nor disabilities. In Divided by God (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Harvard Law’s Noah Feldman would tolerate bland public religious symbols (e.g., “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance) but takes a tougher line against any public aid to “faith-based” schools or charities.

The Constitution famously forbids federal laws “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Viteritti thinks the idea that this requires complete church-state separation would have been “unfathomable” to founders Jefferson and Madison. In outlawing Mormon polygamy in 1879, the Supreme Court ruled that while freedom of belief is absolute, religious actions may be curbed if they subvert the social order. In a 1940 Jehovah’s Witnesses case, the Court for the first time extended the Constitution’s religion demands to state and local governments. After that, Viteritti contends, the Court used the “establishment of religion” clause to protect purported interests of government or non-believers over against the “free exercise” of religious believers. A 1947 dictum held that governments cannot “pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another.” A 1971 elaboration stated that laws must have a “secular legislative purpose” and a “primary effect … that neither advances nor inhibits religion,” and cannot foster “excessive” entanglement between church and state. Coherent application of those standards has proven elusive.

Viteritti agrees with Marci Hamilton in opposing use of religious freedom gambits to shield sexual molestation or medical neglect of children. But Hamilton also rejects freedom claims in less dire situations. She especially laments the 1963 Sherbert decision, in a Sabbath observance case, which fixed the principle that government needs a “compelling state interest” to override religious freedom. The subsequent Yoder ruling (1972) applied that doctrine to grant the Amish the right to avoid compulsory high school attendance. Hamilton praises—and Viteritti opposes—Justice Scalia’s 1990 Smith decision, which scuttled the “compelling state interest” rule and said religious individuals and groups must obey laws that generally apply to others. With the “free exercise” guarantee thus weakened, successful religious lawsuits since have largely cited other constitutional rights (free speech, freedom of association, equal protection, due process).

Viteritti, a political scientist who has been appointed by leading New York Democrats to various advisory panels, plunged into the church-state vortex in 1999 with the influential Choosing Equality: School Choice, the Constitution, and Civil Society (Brookings Institution). Like Last Freedom, the earlier work argued for the constitutionality of tax-supported vouchers so disadvantaged children in inadequate urban schools can afford tuition at religious or other private schools. This is not aid to religion as such, he argues, but provides needy parents educational choices as a matter of equal justice. Regarding choice of social services, Viteritti cites research indicating that clients vastly prefer “faith-based” providers and says they should also receive public aid.

The Viteritti doctrine would “grant people of faith the most generous scope of freedom possible without infringing on public order” or limiting peoples’ right to believe or to disbelieve. He wants to maximize freedom of conscience and “minimize situations in which the state uses its authority to force people to do something they think is wrong.”

The underlying problem, Viteritti contends, has been a “negative predisposition toward religion in the courts.” A “snobbish bigotry,” rooted in fear and ignorance, infects not only judges but other cultural elites. He believes that a wide swath of intellectuals, opinion leaders, and influential media mistakenly suppose that Americans who take religion seriously “are irrational and uninformed, a stupid lot who must be treated with suspicion.”

Unlike the anti-theocracy crowd, Viteritti therefore concludes that the risks from “antireligious sentiment now outweigh the risks that emerge from the outbreaks of religious zealotry that have dotted the political landscape; to put it more bluntly, the threats from the left are more dangerous than those from the right.” He finds that most Americans fall into an ambiguous “hollow middle,” rejecting both rigid secularism and overly intrusive religion. Yet Americans generally favor religion’s role in society, unlike the Supreme Court and government, which Viteritti says engineered secularization of public life and the public schools during recent decades.

On schools, Viteritti would allow students to opt out of reading assignments or sexual explorations that seriously offend their parents’ values. Though he insists on the teaching of Darwinian evolution, he says government “has no business officially using science as a tool for refuting religion”; schools should recognize non-scientific ways of comprehending nature. He leaves vague just how to achieve this balance.

One alternative for believers, of course, is to attend religious day schools. Viteritti thinks that if they receive public funding they must be accountable to the public, with these implications: The government should not force schools to secularize their curriculum or faculty, but should bar admission of students on the basis of religion. He sees little reason to oppose gay marriage and likewise thinks schools should not discriminate in staff hiring on the basis of sexual orientation, instead observing a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Dismissal of hom*osexuals—as of heterosexuals—would be justified only if they admit to and openly flaunt a lifestyle opposed to a school’s religious standards. Neither religious conservatives nor secular liberals will agree.

And the gay question may prove considerably more troublesome for free exercise than Viteritti admits. That is the view of Marc Stern of the American Jewish Congress, who is among the ablest attorneys advocating strict separation of church and state. In a paper featuring 237 legal citations and footnotes (at becketfund.org/index.php/article/494.html), Stern details sweeping vulnerabilities that religious groups and individuals, especially parachurch organizations, could face as same-sex marriage is legalized. He concludes that special legal exemptions will be necessary to protect followers of Protestant, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Mormon, Jewish, Muslim and other traditions that oppose same-sex behavior. Already, university Christian clubs have come under fire for this reason.

However the gay issues play out, lower schools will continue to be the central arena of conflict. To Viteritti, public education is no longer neutral but reflects an “obstinate secularism” that has “little tolerance for religious or philosophical pluralism” and thus threatens the freedom of believers. If his perception is correct, this presents a stupendous problem for a pluralistic democracy.

Richard N. Ostling, a longtime religion writer with Time magazine and the Associated Press, is the coauthor with his wife Joan of Mormon America: The Power and the Promise (HarperOne, rev. ed., 2007).

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Every year or two, we are reintroduced by our leading historians to one or more of the nation’s founding fathers. One year John Adams and his wife Abigail came as a revelation, another brought a new slant on Thomas Jefferson. Even more than Ben Franklin, who celebrated his 300th birthday last year and was the subject of a bestselling biography, the Founding Father of the moment is Alexander Hamilton. Well served by his star turn in Joseph Ellis’ The Founding Brothers, Hamilton took center stage alone in Ron Chernow’s superb 2004 biography.

Hamilton’s story makes clear that the genius of the founding generation lay not just in the unlikely military success of the Revolution and the political brilliance of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (although Hamilton participated in these too, serving as an officer in Washington’s army and penning many of the Federalist papers defending the Constitutional experiment). The third leg of the three-legged stool—the least appreciated—was finance. Establishing a credible national currency and a relatively stable banking system enabled the new nation to attract foreign investment and to finance the “nation of shopkeepers” that Tocqueville would discover during his wanderings several decades later.

Just about everything that went right with America’s markets and finance can be attributed in one way or another to Hamilton. To refute Jefferson’s claim that Congress did not have the power to establish a national bank, Hamilton concocted a theory of implied powers that persuaded President George Washington to sign the Bank of the United States, the first of two national banks, into existence. Hamilton also insisted that the new national government should assume, or repay, all of the old obligations of the states, even the debt owed to foreigners. To achieve this objective, he brokered one of the most remarkable political deals in American history: in return for a promise that the nation would establish its capital on the Potomac, not in New York or Philadelphia, Jefferson and Madison agreed to support assumption. A report by Hamilton also led to the founding of the mint and established the dollar as the nation’s unit of account.

Hamilton was truly without peer, but a handful of others also played essential roles in the first decades of the nation’s financial life. In Financial Founding Fathers, Robert Wright and David Cowen seek to resurrect these mostly forgotten figures and to foreground the role of banking and finance in America’s emergence as a great power. The story begins and ends with the best known of the authors’ characters, starting with Hamilton and concluding with Andrew Jackson and his foil Nicholas Biddle, who battled over the decision whether to extend the charter of the second national bank. (As promised in his 1832 election campaign, Jackson killed the bank, withdrawing government deposits even before the bank’s charter expired in 1836.) In between, Wright and Cowen feature six less familiar figures, a few of them heroes (Albert Gallatin, Thomas Willing, Stephen Girard), one a villain (William Duer), the remainder a complex mix (Tench Coxe, Robert Morris).

The opening chapter suggests that Wright and Cowen will explore their subjects’ religious commitments. The words “In God We Trust” on our coins, they write, “remind us that money, finance, the early nation, and religion are intertwined … . In fact, the source most widely cited by the Revolutionaries was not John Locke or Montesquieu, but Deuteronomy.” The authors also assign a religious label to each of their subjects. Hamilton is the “Creator,” Tenche Coxe the “Judas,” Gallatin the “Savior,” Willing and Morris “Angels Risen and Falling.” But the religious motifs are a tease, thrown in simply to provide a narrative framework, finance as a morality tale. Virtually the only other reference to religion or religious commitments in the entire book is the authors’ observation that “Jackson dueled repeatedly, took bullets, and somehow, perhaps by the grace of God, survived.”

The structural conceit is forced (Girard, the “saint,” named his ships for French revolutionary agnostics like Voltaire; “Judas” betrayed the “Creator,” not the “Savior”; “Risen and Fallen Angels” is a stretch on both earthly and heavenly levels). It also clashes with the book’s other relentlessly repeated, central metaphor, the “golden goose.” Throughout the book the authors use the golden goose as a “metaphor for the financial system, the institutional financial intermediaries (banks and insurers) and markets (for equity and debt) that made the nation and its inhabitants rich by efficiently matching entrepreneurial energy to investor savings.” Hamilton created the golden goose, and his successors sustained it. By the end of the story it has grown strong, “from gosling to magnificent bird” we are twice told.

If any one of the figures showcased in this wonderfully insightful book is poised for rediscovery, surely Albert Gallatin is the man.

ÂIt was hardly preordained that the Creator’s goose would survive, however, and the authors vividly portray both the personalities and the stakes involved. Although Robert Morris later landed in debtor’s prison, he used his personal credit to help establish the First Bank. If Jefferson’s financial advisors had shared his dim view of the First Bank, he might have killed it even before its charter expired in 1811. But both Tenche Coxe, who switched from Hamilton’s Federalist party to the Jeffersonians, and—more important—Albert Gallatin, Jefferson’s Treasury Secretary, understood the importance of the bank. Even apart from the political battles, ne’er-do-wells like William Duer (the “Sinner”)—who used his post as Hamilton’s assistant Treasury Secretary to line his own pockets and whose failed attempt to corner the market for U.S. government debt triggered a depression in 1792—threatened at times to derail the entire system.

Interwoven with the nine biographies are succinct explanations of early American finance and business. Far more elegantly than I can, Wright and Cowen explain how the First Bank carried out the monetary policy endorsed by the Treasury Secretary, providing liquidity—an ample supply of funds—during times of financial panic. The bank also served as “lender of last resort” for troubled financial institutions, as when it headed off a potential run on the bank of Columbia in 1801 by depositing (on Gallatin’s instructions) substantial government funds in the bank.

Centralized banking was sweetness and light, but the authors do not simply praise its advocates and excoriate the other side. Nowhere is this more evident than in a fascinating section contrasting Jackson and Jefferson. Jefferson’s quest to kill the bank might have “meant an abrupt end to the American economic miracle,” according to Wright and Cowen, and he relied on a Constitutional argument (the government’s limited powers) that he conveniently ignored in other contexts. But Jackson stuck to a single, coherent philosophy. He consistently opposed federal investment in private corporations (such as the two national banks, which did the government’s bidding but were privately owned) and for local projects, while supporting active federal investment in truly national projects. Indeed, the authors hint that Jackson’s successful campaign to end the Second Bank may even have been justified. The markets were strong enough by 1836 to survive without central banking, and the bank and its arrogant president Nicholas Biddle were a potent symbol of the gap between the rich and ordinary Americans. Because it eased class tensions, “Jackson’s victory in the Bank War was a major contributor to the country’s relatively tight embrace of free market capitalism.”

If any one of the figures showcased in this wonderfully insightful book is poised for rediscovery, surely Albert Gallatin is the man. An orphan (as were Hamilton, Morris, Girard, and Jackson) from Geneva, Gallatin dazzled Washington and Patrick Henry in Richmond but wanted to make his way on the American frontier. After he had settled in Western Pennsylvania, Gallatin’s fellow farmers sent him to Congress. There, his repeated demands that Hamilton release more information about the government’s finances so incensed Hamilton that he tried to link Gallatin to the rebels whose violent opposition to a proposed whisky tax became known as the Whisky Rebellion. When Jefferson triumphed in the 1800 election, Gallatin was the obvious pick for Secretary of the Treasury, a position he would hold from 1801 to 1814, still the longest tenure ever. Although deeply Jeffersonian on most political issues, he defended centralizing banking, resisting

Jefferson’s pressure to destroy the First Bank lest it “penetrat[e] by its branches every part of the union” and “upset the government.” While the government could rein it in if necessary, Gallatin argued, the bank had effectively stabilized American finance.

Not since the 1950s has there been a major biography of this political liberal who nevertheless supported, defended, and artfully employed the financial system his nemesis Hamilton had put in place. It is tempting to call him the Robert Rubin of his time, but more accurate to say that in Rubin’s best moments as Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration, there were hints of Albert Gallatin. In this era of vast and increasing income inequality, with little evidence of fiscal responsibility anywhere in Washington, that is high praise indeed.

David Skeel, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author most recently of Icarus in the Boardroom: The Fundamental Flaws in Corporate America and Where They Came From (Oxford Univ. Press).

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In 1842—long before his self-reinvention as the Bard of America in Leaves of Grass—an aspiring author named Walter Whitman published a novel called Franklin Evans in a New York weekly called The New World. The editor of The New World, Park Benjamin, made his living by pirating English books, including Charles Dickens’ American Notes, which he reprinted as “extras.” Whitman’s novel, however, was billed as an “Original Temperance Novel,” and original it was—if, that is, one discounts the interpolated stories Whitman used to pad the narrative. His readers seem not to have minded, quickly buying (if Whitman’s biographers are to be believed) some 20,000 copies.

Franklin Evans is the story of an innocent country boy who travels to the city and succumbs to the Demon of Intemperance. Eventually, Franklin loses his wife, his employment, and his freedom (having fallen in with a gang of thieves). After his release from prison, he signs the Old Pledge, promising to abstain from distilled spirits, but not from wine. Alas, the Old Pledge proves to be insufficient after Franklin moves to Virginia, where his wine-drinking leads inevitably to a taste for strong liquor and an unfortunate marriage to a “creole” slave. When he realizes what he has done, he takes up with a wealthy widow from the North, whom his wife poisons out of jealousy before committing suicide. At long last, Franklin is moved to sign the New Pledge of total abstinence from alcohol.

In his old age, Whitman liked to joke about Franklin Evans. He told Horace Traubel that he had dashed off the novel for money “with the help of a bottle of port or what not.” Another version had Whitman penning the novel in Tammany Hall with the help of gin co*cktails from the nearby Pewter Mug. Such anecdotes, however, are not to be taken seriously. Evidently, Whitman preached (and practiced) the virtue of temperance throughout his life. As a journalist, he reported favorably on a number of Temperance events in New York City (notably the meetings and parades of the working-class Washingtonians, who were to the older American Temperance Society what the Methodists were to Episcopalianism). And he published a number of other Temperance tales, including an unfinished sequel to Franklin Evans called The Madman.

What is true is that Franklin Evans, with its slapdash construction, purple prose, and conventional moral, had no place in the myth Whitman had spun for himself with Leaves of Grass. It’s easy to understand why he omitted the novel from his Complete Poems and Prose (1888). In fact, most of his readers had no access to the text of Franklin Evans until 1921, when it was republished by Emory Holloway, the first editor of Whitman’s uncollected work, who subsequently prepared a trade edition of the novel for Random House (1929). Apart from Thomas Brasher’s 1963 annotated edition in The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, the only other printing of Franklin Evans was a 1967 college edition prepared by Jean Downey.

Until now, that is. Forty years after Downey’s edition, Duke University Press is issuing a new paperback edition of Franklin Evans, edited by Christopher Castiglia of Loyola and Glenn Hendler of Notre Dame, who contribute a long, academic introduction to the volume. The first part of their introduction is historical, supplying interesting details regarding Whitman’s early years, urban life in New York City, and the Temperance movement. The second part offers a close reading of the novel as a reflection of America’s “incoherent ideologies” of class, gender, and race. To sweeten the deal, the editors have appended a pair of Whitman’s other Temperance tales, the unfinished Madman and “The Child and the Profligate,” along with an 1842 Temperance address by Whitman’s future “Captain,” Abraham Lincoln.

Why has Duke decided to republish a fourth-rate potboiler like Franklin Evans? The answer, surely, is academic fashion. If a single scholar can be held responsible for the revival of interest in Franklin Evans, it is David Reynolds, who first called attention to the literary significance of Temperance fiction in his landmark study Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (1988). Reynolds’ argument was that the celebrated moral ambiguities of the canonical writers of the American Renaissance—Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, et al.—were anticipated by the “Immoral” or “Dark” Reform fiction of the era, fiction that subversively sensationalizes the very evils—drink, prostitution, slavery—it purports to denounce. In Reynolds’ view, Franklin Evans falls squarely into the category of “Dark Temperance.”

Reynolds returned to the subject of Whitman’s Temperance fiction in Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (1995) and The Serpent and the Cup: Temperance in American Literature (1997), a collection of critical essays he edited with Debra Rosenthal. The Serpent and the Cup concludes with a pedagogical essay by Joan Hedrick (the biographer of Harriet Beecher Stowe) on “Drink and Disorder in America,” a class she taught at Trinity College in 1996. While Hedrick did not include Franklin Evans in her syllabus, such interdisciplinary classes—which often appear under the rubric of Gender Studies—are no doubt the target audience for Duke’s new edition of the novel. The question is why anyone who is not assigned Franklin Evans in college should bother to read it.

Needless to say, no modern editor or critic has recommended Franklin Evans for its literary merit. Holloway claimed (rather unpersuasively) that the novel’s interest lies in the biographical light it throws on the secretive nature of the poet who wrote Leaves of Grass. Reynolds contended (rather more persuasively) that the novel was a tongue-in-cheek experiment with the “Dark Reform” rhetoric Whitman would put to more effective use in Leaves of Grass. Castiglia and Hendler, however, are content to let Franklin Evans stand on its own merits—or its own demerits, we should probably say. “Franklin Evans is a particularly important historical document,” Castiglia and Hendler assert, “precisely for the reason critics and editors have left it unread for decades: it is an incoherent and often aesthetically dissatisfying text.” The novel’s artistic flaws are important, that is, because they point up “the difficulties Franklin Evans and its hero have in maintaining inviolable distinctions between races, genders, or classes.”

Near the end of the novel, for example, Whitman interrupts the story of Margaret, Franklin’s creole wife, to tell the tale of “the Last Vassal of the Snake-Tempter,” a none-too-subtle revision of “The Last of the Sacred Army,” a tale about the last veteran of Washington’s army that Whitman had already published in The Democratic Review. Recast as a product of Franklin’s “mania,” the tale depicts the induction of the Last Vassal—that is, the Last Drunkard in America—into the Army of the Regenerated, whose emblem is a “fair female, robed in pure white,” bearing a cup of water, the antithesis of the dark-skinned Margaret. Rather than dismissing the tale of the Last Vassal as a product of shoddy workmanship, Castiglia and Hendler welcome it as evidence of the racialized nature of Temperance rhetoric.

Unfortunately, Castiglia and Hendler are so preoccupied with racism and imperialism that they ignore the obvious Christian influences on Whitman’s eschatological “Last Vassal” tale. The same goes for other chapters in which Franklin’s struggle with the Demon of Intemperance is couched in overtly religious, if not specifically Christian, language. Near the end of the novel, for example, Franklin stumbles across Colby—the friend who first introduced him to drink—lying drunk and dying in the gutter. “How had it happened,” Franklin asks himself, “that I myself did not meet with the same degraded fortune? Was it not indeed miraculous … ? I blessed my Maker as I thought of these things, and besought His favor on that holy Cause of Reformation, where I had myself cast anchor.”

Admittedly, it’s hard to know how seriously the young Whitman took such religious sentiments; in Temperance fiction, their expression was thoroughly conventional. But that simply makes Castiglia and Hendler’s neglect of religion all the more puzzling.

This huge omission notwithstanding, Duke’s new edition of Franklin Evans will be welcomed by students of Temperance literature as well as by Whitman aficionados. For the latter, the question posed by Franklin Evans has always been, How did the hack who wrote Franklin Evans turn himself into the genius who composed Leaves of Grass? Reynolds’ answer (as we have seen) is that the two books drew from the same well—the subversive rhetoric of “Dark Reform.” For my part, I must confess, slogging through Franklin Evans raises a more troubling question: Is Leaves of Grass itself as great a work as we have been led to believe?

Mark Walhout teaches English at Seattle Pacific University.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Grant, for argument, that life is pointless—that purpose and moral order are mere projection, God just a big piece of embroidery. Still, there remains this odd human genius for projecting and embroidering. We call it “adaptive,” and then blame it for making us ill-adapted. We call it “comforting,” though it is most often felt as a burden, a sharp twinge, a weight of dignity. It sits out there, beyond all our tedious explanations, mysterious as Stonehenge. If you’re a novelist, why not celebrate it?

This is the question that Cormac McCarthy’s work has often raised for me. Clearly the man doesn’t believe in God, and I’m not about to make him. But granting that for McCarthy there is nothing here beyond what’s here, he has sometimes seemed insufficiently bedazzled by what’s here; the rigor and uncompromising honesty of his vision have been, at times, indistinguishable from sadism and nihilism.

This tendency reached a peak of sorts with 1985’s Blood Meridian, a blood-soaked revisionist Western set in 1840s Texas. Blood Meridian, regarded by many critics and fellow-novelists as McCarthy’s masterpiece, suggests that wanton murder and self-destruction are definitive of humanity. Total depravity? You’d better believe it. Under the weight of this oppressive gloom, a kind of Calvinism minus God, even McCarthy’s brilliant prose begins to sag, as when he writes of a mountain range that seems to be carved from “some other order whose true geology was not stone but fear.” Blood Meridian was followed by the Border Trilogy, three novels that recast banal (“mythic”) stories into an overstuffed (“Faulknerian”) style that frequently devolves into mannered stuttering. The first two novels—which are likable enough and even moving, if you can ignore the affectations—serve as set-up for Cities of the Plain (1999), in which McCarthy broods on the end of the cowboy lifestyle and the misuse of the West as nuclear testing ground: America as Sodom and Gommorah.

The crowning annoyance in this phase of McCarthy’s career was No Country for Old Men (2005), a juiced-up police-procedural in which a hardworking Texas cop hunts a vicious killer. The novel makes an interesting parallel with Child of God (1974), a grim early work in which a hardworking Tennessee cop, well, hunts a vicious killer. The difference is that in the earlier novel, the killer, Lester Ballard, was the protagonist of his story—a child of God, the title insisted, however much debased—and McCarthy’s purpose in examining him was to see the way certain human traits persisted even under appalling derangement. No Country’s villain, Anton Chigurh, leaves no such impression. He makes grandiose speeches before shooting people, like a minor Dennis Hopper villain reading from Job, but his inhuman, ghostly efficiency renders him less a character than a symbol of the wantonness of the drug economy. As for the police chief, he is not so much a person as a collection of homilies. Novels obsessed with abstractions tend to replace character with exempla. Perhaps this is one reason for McCarthy’s somewhat awkward use of the police chief’s right-wing monologues as the backbone for the novel: the main character, denied meaningful action, must express himself through talk. Meanwhile, McCarthy’s loving focus on his villain’s sadism, in a novel that more or less mocks the impotence of its other characters, raised the suspicion that he was acting in collusion, so to speak, with the universal death that (for him) forecloses the possibility of human significance.

But then a surprise. The Road, McCarthy’s tenth novel, offers the ultimate logical extension of this schtick—and a way out of it. It is McCarthy’s finest novel since Suttree (1979), and it also, not coincidentally, marks the return of the humanist McCarthy, whom we haven’t seen since that novel. (The Border Trilogy, I would argue, was not so much humanist as sentimental.) Just as No Country used elements of a popular genre—the police-procedural—The Road offers us a deepening of the pop-apocalyptic vision of such ’70s drive-in horror classics as Dawn of the Dead: scarred victims wander through a desolate landscape, near starvation, on the run from mindless cannibals. Like these films—and like Robinson Crusoe—the story uses the near-exhaustion of all resources to pose questions about what it is humans are, what we can and can’t live without. Society is not in decline here; it has collapsed completely, freeing McCarthy to celebrate once again the compassion and humor and imagination with which people negotiate their doom.

A man and his son wander through an ash-blackened America, having somehow survived a nuclear attack that has wiped out civilization. They eat rarely and hurriedly, avoiding the gangs of looters who roam the countryside, raping and murdering and cannibalizing at will. McCarthy’s style is spare and tight, rising occasionally to moments of grand sermonic poetry or, less often, to a bray; toward the beginning many of the sentences are fragments, as if to say: only this is left. The book takes a while to get into. The short paragraphs have a stop-and-start quality, exhausting themselves, like doomed engines turning over for the next-to-last time, just as the boy and his father are always eating the last of their rations. The characterization is at once simple and convincing; the boy, especially, has an occasional petulance about small points, a touching punctiliousness, that reminded me of my eldest nephew.

Throughout the book, the man (he is never named) seems to conduct a running inner argument with the boy’s dead mother, whom we know through flashback. After delivering her baby, she decides not to go on:

Sooner or later they will catch us and they will kill us. They will rape me. They will rape him. They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you wont face it. You’d rather wait for it to happen. But I cant. I cant. She sat there smoking a slender length of dried grapevine as if it were some rare cheroot. Holding it with a certain elegance, her other hand across her knees where she’d drawn them up. She watched him across the small flame. We used to talk about death, she said. We dont anymore. Why is that?
I dont know.
It’s because it’s here. There’s nothing left to talk about.
I wouldnt leave you.
I dont care. It’s meaningless … . You talk about taking a stand but there is no stand to take.

And, telling him she has no dreams and no hopes except “eternal nothingness,” she kills herself. For the rest of the novel he worries that she was right—that it is all meaningless, and that his hope of eventually finding something to survive for—a hope he shares most of with the boy, sparing little for himself—is mere cowardice, a flinching away from the brute necessity of mercy-killing his son. He carries a gun with exactly one bullet, always worried that he should have used it already. As if to compensate, he tries to empty himself of any hope or desire; he tells himself that “the right dreams for a man in peril [are] dreams of peril,” that the rest is loathsome escapism. But his son is not interested in survival on just any terms—he will not, for example, survive through cannibalism or theft, and he constantly shares their dwindling food supply with strangers. So for the boy’s sake the father must perpetuate a narrative in which the two of them will not only survive, but in which they are “the good guys.”

Human conscience and imagination, those linked capacities that allow us to perceive the field of meaning in which we operate, are unexpectedly and movingly celebrated here. McCarthy shears away everything, places his characters on the very outskirts of human existence, so that these very capacities stand out in all their grandeur, their resilience. “There were times,” McCarthy writes at one point, “when he [the father] sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it was not about death. He wasn’t sure what it was about but he thought that it was about beauty or about goodness.” Human beings go down to the wire in this novel not as idiots who delude themselves into imagining they matter, but as magnificent beings saved and enlarged by their own chimera—if it is a chimera.

At one point the father says a quick incantation, and McCarthy writes, “This blessing is no less real for being shorn of its ground.” This is the key insight of the novel. McCarthy seems to have wavered at times between allowing human goodness, sympathy, generosity, and imagination the magnificence on their own terms that they possess, and cheering on the universal extinction which, in his view, has shorn these things of their ground. In this novel he comes down firmly on the side of humanity. It is generosity and emotional courage on McCarthy’s own part that allows him to envision such a future without abandoning his loyalty to the father and the son, and it is extraordinary imaginative power that allows him to make such an alien vision so devastatingly present and believable for the reader. All of this allows the novel to triumph over its occasional longeurs, and over McCarthy’s occasional stylistic overreach (at one point he describes “raw cold daylight … gray as his heart,” for Pete’s sake). The Road has been called a depressing book, yet it’s the truest compliment to the human spirit that I’ve read in a while.

And is the father’s blessing, truly, shorn of its ground? Where McCarthy’s earlier work uses God rhetorically, as a name for all the things the characters want to punish for not existing, God is virtually a character here, whether real or not. The father curses God often, in his mind (and it’s tough to blame him), but he also invokes God frequently in his talks with his son, even saying that he’s been assigned the task of father-protector “by God.” As in Guillermo Del Toro’s wonderful movie Pan’s Labyrinth, it’s open to question whether the myth the main child-character lives by (in this case, that God loves him and he is one of the “good guys”) is denied or affirmed by what happens in the “real world” of the story.

Late in the novel, McCarthy describes the boy, strikingly, as “a tabernacle in the dark,” and he alludes at several significant moments to the Genesis notion of breath, passing from God to humanity and down through generations. It is because of this pervasive presence-that-isn’t-there that the novel, in my view, earns its somewhat surprising ending, which has wrongly been called a case of deus ex machina. (Deus does not suddenly pop up at the end of the book, like a jack-in-the-box.) The Road may be intended as a denial that divinity is to be found anywhere except in the nobler capacities of humanity; to me, it was a powerful reminder that divinity can be inferred, as Calvin inferred it, first of all from the wonder and the beauty and the horror—the all-significant story—that we inhabit.

Phil Christman is a graduate student in the MFA program at the University of South Carolina.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Excuse me, which way to the well at the world’s end? If you are like C.S. Lewis, the question—;even when sprung at you in such prosaic fashion—;will send a pleasant shiver down your spine. But never mind that: what is the answer? North—;surely we can allow nothing else—;north. Both Lewis and William Morris, author of The Well at the World’s End, were captivated by the romance and the myths of the North. (It may be less well known that Morris took a step beyond the world’s end with a novella, The Wood Beyond the World, which describes some southward trekking that appears nonetheless to be going on out there somewhere in the north or northwest.) And what do you find there? Bears. Not only bears, but certainly bears. Morris told us about them in the 19th century. Now The MacBears of Bearloch have been discovered up north too. Not the least interesting aspect of this discovery—;and one reason why we draw it to readers’ attention—;is that they have been discovered by one of the finest biblical and theological scholars around, usually on the trail of such things as apocalypses and pseudepigrapha, in a more easterly than northerly direction from where I’m standing. The front cover will not, but the spine will tell you that the person in question is Richard Bauckham.

The blurb says it adequately. These bears “live beside a secret loch in the forgotten lands of the north.” What are they up to? Not enough, according to Grampa MacBear. It is bad enough, of course, to think, let alone say, that; indeed, fatal in a children’s story. Consequently things start happening. While land masses move mysteriously and sea creatures transmute amazingly, a kidnapping takes place. This, we might suppose, is the heart of the tale; but not quite. Set the scene; create an expectation; take the reader off on another trail while he or she is already in a state of low alert; keep him or her subconsciously waiting, perhaps forgetting, while you convert low alert to a distracting worry about the much bigger issue of kidnapping; resolve that one happily (I know—;this reminds of you of a bit of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony); return the reader, relieved and ready to celebrate, to the original preoccupation. Which is? The haiku contest, and who will win. The outcome of the haiku contest concludes the book.

The book is not described when some of the story-line is described; the telling and the everyday bits and the characters are the thing in this merryish world of animals (not just bears) and even three humans (conservationists, it should be noted). There is convergence and unity—;animals, environment, humans—;that faintly replicates the kind you get in fairy-tales, whose secret (if I remember my Tolkien aright) is the desire of humans to hold converse with beasts. If Kant, in words which I wrench out of context, said that the beautiful is the symbol of the good, then I suppose that unity is the symbol of the moral. Does Richard Bauckham moralize? It depends on what you mean; the word is rather pejorative. But in this book something good certainly befalls character or at least the expression of character. And religion? Well, read the first paragraph of page 62. What do you think? Now read it again through the eyes of the child, as though it were dedicated to you when you were a child (again, if I remember my Antoine St. Exupery aright, though his point, in the dedication of The Little Prince, is subtler).

This book begins a series, and I am very glad that we have discovered its little world; we shall profit and enjoy, not least from the humor. Look out for it. As for whether it has faults, ask the children; they are the authorities here. Still, and with a heavy heart, I must point out one particularly egregious error: the haiku that won the contest, whatever its merits and the merits of those of runners-up announced and read out before the tense finale, was not the best. The deserving haiku, not even recorded by the author, reads as follows:

Digwyddodd ger y dwr
y lli yn llonydd
gwialen griseldaidd

One fears that it was overlooked by the author because he did not have the humility to admit that it was written in a language that he has not remotely mastered. One hopes that he does not conduct his New Testament scholarship along those lines. One rejoices that such ignorance is not a blemish that will be attributed to any reader of Books & Culture.

Stephen N. Williams is professor of systematic theology at Union Theological College in Belfast. He is the author most recently of The Shadow of the Antichrist: Nietzsche’s Critique of Christianity (BakerAcademic).

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Li Shangyin, First Month at Chongrang HouseLocked up tight, barred gate on gate,cased in green moss,hallways deep within, tower remote,here I pace back and forth.I know beforehand the wind will rise,a halo around the moon;and still the dew is too cold,the flowers have not yet bloomed.

A bat brushes the curtain sash,I end up tossing and turning,a mouse overturns the window screen,somewhat startled, wondering.I snuff the lamp and all alonetalk with the lingering scent,still singing unaware“Rise and Come by Night.”

Stephen Owen has written a monumental series of studies devoted to the poetry of China’s Tang Dynasty (ad 618-907, with an interregnum between 690 and 705): The Poetry of the Early Tang; The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High Tang; The End of the Chinese “Middle Ages”: Essays in Mid-Tang Literary Culture; and now The Late Tang: Chinese Poetry of the Mid-Ninth Century (827-860). In these books Owen surveys for English speakers a period widely regarded as the greatest in Chinese literature. In addition to several other freestanding books, worthy of note in their own right, Owen has another other major work, An Anthology of

Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911. In just under 2,000 amply annotated pages, he makes a kind of epic, in translation, of the entire Chinese poetic canon.

His books are not prose settings for Chinese poems in English that speak for themselves, the way Ezra Pound’s “translation” of Rihaku’s “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” stands on it own. Instead, they are prose explorations of poetics, of the ways poetry is made, and read, in a

far-off time and place. A highly specialized inquiry? Yes, yet Owen’s scholarship resonates nonetheless. When he talks about the difference between contemporary reputation and canonic stature, about the tendency of poetry to either tie itself too closely to the immediate or to cut itself off from extra-literary concerns, to aim high or pitch low, he could as easily be talking about present-day tensions between rhetoric and common sense, technique and truth, tradition and inspiration, art and earnest.

Until the sea change of the Tang, Chinese poetry was measured by and read in light of the Confucian Book of Songs. The “Great Preface,” which every aspirant to Imperial service would have had by heart, states that “the sounds of an age of order are peaceful and happy—its government is in harmony.” By contrast, “the sounds of a world in disorder are bitter and full of rancor—its government is perverse.” Therefore, as a practical matter, “to understand how things have succeeded and how they have failed, to move Heaven and Earth, and to stir supernatural beings, there is nothing more appropriate than poetry.”

The Late Tang closely considers the styles, genres, and literary schools that developed as the Great Age of Chinese Poetry ripened into the matured, self-conscious art of the middle 9th century. Five poets—Li He, Du Mu, Cao Tang, Li Shangyin, and Wen Tingyun—dominate Owen’s account, with Li Shangyin receiving the dragon’s share of ink. In poems and prose, these poets reflected upon their inherited tradition, and upon each other.

The Annals of the Grand Historian of China writes history two ways. In one, narratives recount the fates of nations and dynasties through the words and actions of individuals; imagine Herodotus, Thucydides, and Tacitus combined. A Plutarchan second cycle consists of famous lives, sometimes of large figures in the narrative, sometimes of minor players in affairs, but important in other ways. Famous is not the same as good. Also, the Grand Historian, Ssu-ma Ch’ien, makes a chapter of his own unfortunate career.

Owen notes that how a poem is read depends in part on whose name is attached to it. As Chinese poetry evolved away from the anonymous Book of Songs and came to describe more and more the world of the poet, a poet’s biography became more than part of his material. The life story also colored how a poem was read. This prose setting, for individual poems as well for lives, offers access to the living part of the poetry in translation, whether or not one can hear an actual voice. For readers with no Chinese, like myself, the stories are the equivalent of oral tradition.

This may be why, as spirited English, prose Chinese succeeds where verse for the most part doesn’t. Ezra Pound probably wrote such beautiful “Chinese” poems because he was convinced that the ideographs were pictures of things, which he could interpret by looking. Yet his “Canto XIII” (“Kung walked / by the dynastic temple / and into the cedar grove”), which collages Confucian Classics dialogue with scenes from an Idaho boyhood, is very close to measured prose, like passages in Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode.” The balanced language of Pound’s “Chinese” Cantos suggests that there once lived people who knew more than we do and were better than we are (a Chinese of the imagination). Standing tradition on its head, Pound’s English implies a literature, a history, an ethic of other possibilities, out there in the white spaces beyond the margins.

Paradoxically, the past century of scholarship devoted to opening Chinese, while often engaging and clear from moment to moment, adds up to a larger confusion. In every sense, China is just so big. It doesn’t help that, over the past 40 years, the transcription conventions have changed. Ssu-ma Ch’ien is now Sima Qian. Of the High Tang poets, Li Po (Pound’s Rihaku) became Li Bo, then Li Bai; Tu Fu (China’s Greatest Poet) now is Du Fu; Po Chü-I passed through Bo Chü-yi to Bai Juyi; only Wang Wei has remained Wang Wei.

This shapeshifting is but one instance of what Owen calls “Chineseness,” a firm reminder that even the most serious and respectful English Orientalism lies close to the border of inscrutability, take-out menus, and Surrealist exquisite cadavers. In The Great Age of Chinese Poetry, Tai Shu-lun offers some High Tang literary advice: “The scene a poet creates is as when the sun is warm on Indigo Fields and the fine jade gives off mist: you can gaze on it, but you cannot fix it in your eyes.”

Take the story of Li He’s literary remains. He died in 816, at 26, without offspring. The poet’s literary executor, Shen Shushi, kept Li’s collected poems but forgot he had them, trundling them about absent-mindedly with his baggage for 15 years. One night while staying at his brother’s place, drunk and restless, Shen came upon Li’s manuscript. Stung by guilt, he sent a midnight message to a young writer in his brother’s service, and asked him to write a preface. The writer, Du Mu, at first refused. Under pressure he finally agreed, and included the tale of the manuscript in his essay.

Du Mu was a serious young man, and reproved Li He for exceeding the order of things (li), in a catalogue that begins with “A continuous stream of clouds and mist has not such a manner as his … waters stretching far off into the distance have not such a mood as his; all spring’s flowering glory has not his gentleness”; and goes on through the attributes until “the leviathan’s gaping maw and the leaping sea turtle, the bull demon and the snake god, have not his sense of fantasy and illusion.”

Li Shangyin read Du Mu’s account of Li He’s strangeness and responded with a “Short Biography of Li He.” The biographer interviewed Li’s sister and discovered a young man who excelled at both “painstaking composition and writing swiftly.” Han Yu (a major figure in the transition from High to Late Tang) understood the boy, who never brooded over his poems. Li He rode around on a donkey, writing poems which he threw into a bag. “When he went back in the evening,” Li Shangyin reported, “his mother had a serving girl take the bag and empty its contents; when she saw how much he had written, his mother burst out with: ‘This boy won’t stop until he has spit out his heart.’ Then she lit the lamps and gave him his dinner.”

Poets always think about immortality, even when they court it f*cklessly, like Li He. Du Fu wrote about “a fame that lasts a thousand years.” Li Po’s River Merchant’s Wife says:

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.

And manuscripts were only one way to transmit poems or to speak about poetry in those late days before the 10th century, when redactors began to collect poems into books and fixed the canon.

Early in the 9th Century, the poet Han Yu was asked to compose an inscription for a stone monument commemorating a military victory of his patron, Pei Du. Rivals at court thought Pei Du’s role was exaggerated in the poet’s account. The stele was toppled, its inscription erased and replaced with another. Yet Han Yu’s celebration of the victory endured as one of his most famous works. Li Shangyin’s poem “Han Yu’s Stele” is written in Han Yu’s voice. The poet recalls the composition and destruction of his stele in the third person. Owen cautions that the poem does not welcome translation. Yet something of its complexity, the pressure of time and desire, survive the unmusical English telling. Here is the description of a poem’s fate:

His [Han Yu’s] text that represents this Culture
is like the Primal Essence:
well before this it had already
entered people’s innards.
Tang’s basin and Kong’s tripod
had their inscriptions;
we no longer have the vessels today,
but their words have been preserved.

and here, a manifesto of poetic ambition:

I wish to make ten thousand copies
and recite it ten thousand times,
saliva dripping from the mouth’s corners,
my right hand calloused.
Pass it on for generations
seventy and two,
to use it in the Feng and Shan rites, jade tablets
and the foundation of the Hall of Light.

Laurance Wieder recently returned from a medieval Hebrew poets and Jewish mystics tour of Andalusia. There, he discovered that he can not see that which he can not name.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In his essay “Hamlet,” T. S. Eliot not only introduced a new term to the literary-critical lexicon—objective correlative—but also performed an audacious act of literary revisionism by questioning the aesthetic merits of one of Shakespeare’s most widely admired plays. “Few critics have ever admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary,” Eliot begins, and goes on to argue that this play fails precisely where Macbeth had succeeded: it does not build the necessary basis of symbolic action upon which to predicate Prince Hamlet’s emotional outpourings and his descent into madness. It lacks, in Eliot’s now famous formulation, an objective correlative between its action and emotion, “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of the particular emotion; such that when the facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”

Adam Kirsch’s The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets uses the same concept to perform a less radical act of literary revisionism. Kirsch wants to resituate the so-called “Confessional” poets—John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, and Delmore Schwartz—as Eliot’s “rebellious heirs,” prodigal modernists rather than sensationalists who commodified their most painful, private experiences. The vital link between this group and their immediate forebears, Kirsch argues, was their mastery of the art of the objective correlative, which enabled them to “transform experience into art” in a much more valuable and permanent way than their common caricature would allow. “The suffering that afflicted this group of poets,” writes Kirsch in explanation of the book’s title, “becomes significant only because they examined it with the surgeon’s rigor, detachment, and skill.”

If there is any doubt about what this “common caricature” entails, a brief anecdote might help. Imagine the otherwise gentle, soft-spoken poet Robert Bly shouting to a group of college students, “I don’t want to see any more poems about your grandfather! Don’t even think about your grandfather when you write poems, at least not if you’re planning to turn them in!” By 1994, when Bly actually did shout these words to a class he was teaching at New York University, many poets had come to resent the shameless self-revelation and over-reliance on autobiography characteristic of much contemporary poetry and especially epidemic in the “workshop.” Many blamed the Confessional movement for this turn, which they considered narcissistic in the extreme, and had perhaps subconsciously begun to write off poets such as Lowell, Plath, and Jarrell. Bly, with a cooler head in a subsequent class, characterized the poetry of the younger Confessional poet Anne Sexton as, “I’ve been traumatized; let me tell you about it. That’ll be five dollars, please.”

With that in mind, the ways in which the original Confessional poets diverged from modernism might be obvious. They no longer bought into Eliot’s notion of poetry as an “escape from personality.” They resisted the idea of the poem as pure object, its text entirely separate from its author. They felt no need to make poems that were purposefully cryptic or so verbally embroidered as to be almost illegible. They leaned away from élitism and high culture and toward a demotic, Whitmanic mode. But, argues Kirsch, born as they were into a literary-cultural milieu dominated by New Critical doctrines, they did carry a modern sense of artfulness and perhaps even artifice into their creative work. Berryman and early Lowell are a testament to this, writing with a formal intensity bordering on madness. The Confessional poets also wrote about many things besides their personal lives and troubles—Lowell’s later work is marked by political concerns, for example. These poets’ debt to modernism was so sure, in fact, that “the word ‘confession’ obscures much more than it reveals,” Kirsch suggests, especially when it is applied to Lowell, whose work was “not personal and memoiristic but allegorical and cosmological.”

Each chapter of Wounded Surgeon is devoted to one of the six poets under study, situating the poet biographically and thematically within modernism and then, through close reading, explaining how the poet both retained aspects of the modernist legacy and developed a new, more personally revealing style. Kirsch does a fine job interlacing historical detail, explications of poems (his strongest suit), excerpts from letters and memoirs, and his own prose constructions to trace each poet’s orbit around modernism.

That the first and longest chapter is on Robert Lowell suggests that he is the linchpin of Kirsch’s case. Lowell’s lifelong admiration for Eliot, his studies with Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, and his public role as poet-statesman place him well within the modernist pale. “Grotesque violence,” intense religious symbolism, and an eclectic but obsessive sense of form remind Kirsch of Eliot, and rightly so; Lowell once described Four Quartets (the book from which the phrase “wounded surgeon” comes) as “the most remarkable and ambitious expression of Catholic mysticism in English.” Kirsch’s compelling readings of Lowell’s early to middle writing, and especially of Lord Weary’s Castle and Life Studies, support the argument that Lowell was indeed making use of the objective correlative, but doesn’t the case rather make itself? In fact, Lowell employed modernist tactics at least through Life Studies, the book which, with an introductory poem about his grandfather, reveals the first sign of a new direction for Lowell.

The question of Lowell’s direction really arises during and after For the Union Dead. A classic of the Confessional canon, its poems have been endlessly imitated since it was published in 1964. “Fall 1961” laments atomic war and, in the same breath, Lowell’s disappointment with his father. In “Middle Age,” Lowell confronts the ghost of his father. “The Scream,” containing a number of Lowell’s childhood memories about his mother, ends with the stanza: “A scream! But they are all gone, / those aunts and aunts, a grandfather, / a grandmother, my mother— / even her scream—too frail / for us to hear their voices long.” It is a short distance from this sort of strained familial pathos to later hyper-confessional work—by Sharon Olds, for instance, whose The Father obsesses about everything from her father’s death-bed to the texture of his skin. Instead of explicating For the Union Dead in terms of the objective correlative (which perhaps he cannot), Kirsch writes: “[M]ost of the poems are presented as first-person utterances in immediate reaction to experience, as though we were hearing the poet in real time. The form is correspondingly stripped down, and tries to impart a sense of drama through repeated questions and exclamations. The result is a thinner and less powerful collection.”

The chapter on Elizabeth Bishop, highlighting her well-known relationship to Marianne Moore, concedes that she was “never as much under the spell of Modernist doctrine” as some of the other Confessionals. Indeed, the young Bishop idolized Moore; Bishop’s early work is characterized by an objective style, with only occasional, veiled references to an emotional response. Kirsch dutifully applies his thesis to these poems, arguing that they “do not just employ symbolism—they are themselves symbols, of the kind that T. S. Eliot named objective correlatives.” Checking this statement against Eliot’s definition of the term—”a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of the particular emotion”—it is hard to see how one might read a poem as a standalone objective correlative. The term implies that both the “objects” and the “emotion” are present in the text. Outside drama criticism, indeed outside criticism of longer works altogether, the term begins to lose meaning. If Eliot meant the term to be applied so broadly, one would have to include William Carlos Williams’ “Red Wheel Barrow” and Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” as standalone objective correlatives. A better critical description of these works, and of Bishop’s early poems, is that they are imagistic. An even better description for Bishop’s work, and a cause to wonder why Kirsch sticks so doggedly to his thesis, is that it is a “scream translated into a clang”—a phrase he derives from Bishop’s short story “In the Village.”

In the end, it is not Kirsch’s ability to drive his stated thesis through the collected works of six poets that is Wounded Surgeon’s most impressive achievement; rather it is his patient and observant reflections upon the poems themselves, wherever they lead. He begins the third chapter with the mandatory identification of Berryman as a disciple of Yeats, and after arguing that Berryman’s art was to transform his own life into “something nobler and more deliberate”—not just to recount it or confess it—he launches into 45 pages of exquisite explication, heedless of the objective correlative he had made so much of at the start. We learn that Berryman’s two volumes of Dream Songs represent a watershed for personal poetry; here, the poet is the subject of painful self-exposition, his modernist mantle all but shed. It should come as no surprise that in the end Berryman, a poet for whom art and real life had become too closely intertwined, discarded the “mask” of Henry, his poetic alter ego, and committed suicide.

The final three chapters, covering Jarrell, Schwartz, and Plath, work the same tack between the poets’ historical obligations to modernism and their tendencies toward a more personal, colloquial, and affective poetics. Kirsch succeeds in demonstrating both, and forcefully. However, he fails, ultimately, to rescue these poets (and their followers, who go unmentioned) from the caricature described above and to reposition them as literary pioneers who “tested, resisted, and transcended” the values of modernism. The reader is tempted to conclude instead that these six poets tested and, to varying degrees, rejected the values of modernism, moving American poetry away from crafty artifice that acknowledged a literary public and toward a more self-oriented, explicit poetry that suited the sexual revolution.

Aaron Belz teaches English at Saint Louis University, where he is finishing a dissertation on the influence of popular comedy on modern American poetry. His reviews, essays, and poetry have appeared in journals such as Boston Review, Fence, Wired, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and First Things. He is the author most recently of The Bird Hoverer (BlazeVOX Books), a collection of poems.

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