Pointing God's Pilgrims Home

by Cicero Bruce

Aliens in America: The Strange Truth About Our Souls. By Peter Augustine Lawler. ISI Books. 298 pages. $24.95.

In Aliens in America, Peter Augustine Lawler argues convincingly, if disturbingly, that Americans, having been seduced by the latest manifestations of philosophical nominalism and by the new utopianism of biotechnology, are blindly and in dangerously large numbers opting to be something other than fully human. He cautions that we may be living near the end of an epoch, at a time when human nature, as we have traditionally understood it, is under attack by those who would, in the name of equality and for ostensibly humane reasons, either explain it in terms other than those of a proper philosophy of being, or transform it through biochemical alteration.

Aliens in America is steeped in the wisdom of St. Augustine. According to this formative voice of the early Church, man was created to be — at best — ambiguously at home in the world. As Augustine himself discovered after much searching and contemplation, nothing in this life satisfies completely of itself. Still, man longs to be satisfied and complete. What we desire, says Augustine, is to be at home with the Creator, in whom we have our first and final cause. We are sojourners in a distant land, as he puts it in The City of God, from which “we must fly to our fatherland. There is the Father, there our all.”

Also predominant in Lawler’s important book is the thought of Catholic novelist and philosopher Walker Percy. Like Augustine, Percy was a sapient mediator between the seen and the unseen. To 20th-century nominalism he opposed Thomistic realism. He wrote, it seems, with a pen in one hand and an “Ontological Lapsometer” in the other (to recall the invention of Dr. Thomas More, the protagonist of Love in the Ruins). Indeed, “his great legacy is his books,” remarked his friend Robert Coles in a fond remembrance piece written for the NEW OXFORD REVIEW (May 1992). Said Coles: “I pray that more and more of us will meet him that way, be touched and edified by his singular presence, which remains with us that way, even as his soul, surely, rests in the final comfort of its Maker.”

If he has read it, Coles must relish Aliens in America, for Lawler adverts, in literally every chapter, to Percy’s instructive essays and fiction. In fact, while it intentionally and mockingly calls to mind the trendy Broadway show Angels in America, the title of Lawler’s book really comes from a question that Percy had about the popular scientist Carl Sagan: “Why did Sagan spend his time searching the cosmos for aliens when beings stranger than any extraterrestrials we could imagine are right here on earth?”

The answer to Percy’s question is obvious, Lawler contends. Sagan, one of several contemporary thinkers whom Lawler scrutinizes, has clearly misunderstood his innermost longings. While betraying a natural aversion to the world, his fascination with life elsewhere and his belief that earth can sustain life here only for a few hundred more years mislead him to seek a new home for humanity on some distant planet or star. To be sure, Sagan’s cosmic wanderlust is human and healthy, observes Lawler. But as a thoroughgoing materialist and a proponent of atheistic scientism, Sagan desires not to transcend the world spiritually but to carry it with him bodily. Nor does he aspire to any definite end; for him the traveling is all that counts.

The Tribunal of Great Writers

by Cicero Bruce

Why Literature Matters: Permanence and the Politics of Reputation. By Glenn C. Arbery. ISI [Intercollegiate Studies Institute] Books. 255 pages. $24.95.

An overwhelming majority of those who teach literature and thereby determine what imaginative works will -- or will not -- be taught in subsequent decades have forgotten, or deliberately ignored, the purpose of literature. Many teachers are simply unable to distinguish writing that is forever contemporary from that which speaks only to an age or generation. Now more than ever in the past two-score years, literary scholars and critics, whose publications inform the classroom curriculum, are pursuing literature not as an end itself, but as a means to advance social agendas and academic careers. Professors of English at supposedly respectable universities across the country continue to promote the very theories and practices that have been undermining their profession since the deconstructionists first besieged it in the early 1970s. Such is the situation that troubles distinguished poet and critic Glenn C. Arbery, author of Why Literature Matters.

The destructive forces that Arbery opposes in this important book have lately manifested themselves in multiculturalism, a radically egalitarian ideology that predominates practically everywhere in higher education. Multiculturalism, as Arbery correctly observes, insists that all cultures are equal and denies the existence of a supervening high culture by which cultures are comparatively and normally appraised. With regard to literature in particular, multiculturalism, says Arbery, caricatures the time-tested process of assigning rewards according to what Aristotle called "distributive justice." It contradicts what every accomplished writer knows: that he is finally accountable to that tribunal of great dead writers who judge his work without regard to his race or ethnicity, neither of which has anything to do with literature qua literature, or with literary eminence.

Arbery regrets that masterpieces such as Moby Dick are often taught today merely because their racial dynamics can be reductively exploited in the classroom to instill "correct" attitudes. He would have us remember, though, that in the end a classic attains permanent reputability not because it proves useful to one regnant ideology or another, but because it presents us with a unifying vision of nature and man's place in it. This vision views man as a created being contingent upon something greater than himself and conveys an experience of what Arbery calls "a common glory that intimates something otherwise unsayable about the nature of the Word through whom all things were made."

There have been a number of other recently-published volumes lamenting the demise of literary study as a once reverent, ennobling discipline. Two that Arbery mentions in his introduction are Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities (1997) and At War with the Word: Literary Theory and Liberal Education (1999). In the first, John Ellis concludes that the messianic proponents of multiculturalism, deconstructionism, and the political trinitarianism of race-gender-class theory have so entrenched themselves in English departments everywhere that the road back to a meaningful literature program on college campuses will be long and difficult, if even possible. In the second, R.V. Young defends the traditional understanding of art as a means to engage students with timeless and consequential ideas that find concrete expression in serious literature.

As Arbery describes it, the stance that Ellis and Young take in bemoaning the apparent decimation of the humanities in the culture wars is like that of two Trojan warriors gazing wistfully upon Priam's burning city, which once seemed impregnable. Clearly Arbery sympathizes with Ellis and Young, but he believes the city may not, after all, be worth saving: "Unless literature itself, not the academic industry around it, not the competition for tenured positions or endowed chairs, is the central concern, then perhaps the academy deserves to fall." For Arbery the academy has largely fallen already, and he argues that the thing to do now is not to prop it up again, but to acknowledge the fortune beyond the ruins, or what he calls the "greater good" toward which things may often fall, as in the case of Troy, which fell toward Rome, or of mankind, which fell toward Calvary.

A Call to Con­tem­pla­tives

by Ci­cero Bruce

The Church and the Land
by Fr. Vin­cent Mc­N­abb.
IHS Press (Nor­folk, Vir­ginia), 195 pp., $14.95 paper, 2003.

Few in our time have heard of Fa­ther Vin­cent Mc­N­abb—Irish­man, Do­mini­can the­olo­gian, lead­ing light among the Dis­trib­utists, and man of par­a­dig­matic char­ac­ter. Nor would many today rel­ish what he had to say if, by some chance en­counter, they were in­tro­duced to one or more of his thirty books and nu­mer­ous ar­ti­cles. For he was no apol­o­gist for the way we live now. In truth he re­pu­di­ated it. He ar­gued prophet­i­cally that, since the In­dus­trial, French, and Sci­en­tific Rev­o­lu­tions, life in the West, hav­ing cen­tered it­self doggedly around the city and its mech­a­nis­tic val­ues, has lapsed into a stu­por of eco­nomic and moral con­fu­sion.

Nowhere did he make this ar­gu­ment stronger than in The Church and the Land, orig­i­nally pub­lished in Lon­don in 1925, and lately re­cov­ered and made avail­able under the aus­pices of IHS Press. In pen­ning and prof­fer­ing this “unity of thought and pur­pose,” as he de­scribed it, Mc­N­abb was not hop­ing “merely to make men read a book of his.” He was se­ri­ously seek­ing to in­cite the Catholics of his day “to ac­cept a chal­lenge and even to or­ga­nize a cru­sade.” The end of that cru­sade, the ob­ject of McNabb’s chal­lenge to the faith­ful, was a re­turn to con­tem­pla­tive rural life.

Back of Mc­N­abb’s chal­lenge was the his­tory of the British land­lords, who, by the eigh­teenth cen­tury, had be­come mere money-minded squires bent on com­pet­ing with urban man­u­fac­tur­ers by em­bark­ing upon schemes of “agri­cul­tural im­prove­ment.” Fore­most among these schemes were the en­clo­sures, the pri­mary in­ten­tion of which was to max­i­mize the rents of the lords’ lands. From the point of view of mere agri­cul­tural ef­fi­ciency, per­fected meth­ods of cul­ti­va­tion were a boon, in­so­far as they in­creased pro­duc­tion of es­sen­tial food­stuffs. But in the words of one of Mc­N­abb’s fel­low con­trib­u­tors to The Found­ing Pa­pers of the Catholic Land Move­ment (an­other vol­ume now avail­able through the reis­su­ing ef­forts of IHS Press), the agri­cul­tural pol­icy of the land­lords re­sulted fi­nally in oust­ing “the old small yeomen in favour of the later big ten­ant farm­ers.”