Towards the Recovery of Honor

2008-04-06T05:53:00.001-07:00

THE ART OF VERBAL SWORDSMANSHIP

This version completed March, 1996.

I. The Footing

A little ripple on the surface of recent history occurred when the President of the United States said that he would like to punch a noted journalist in the nose for having made remarks impugning the honor of the First Lady. This little ripple was seconded, a few days later, by Richard Grenier in The Washington Times, who said that he would not want to let this incident pass “without grieving at the disappearance of the noble institution of duelling.”

In the hope that sentiments such as these may swell from a ripple to a tide, I add my assent to the above expression: only adding the caveat, that in the Modern Age the swordsmanship I speak of will -- and in all probability, must -- be carried out with words, not with swords.
It is not that we have ceased to make points -- to convey thoughts that have the power to pierce as well as to enlighten. There is indeed a kind of verbal duelling that is still practiced. The television show “Crossfire” is an example of it. But who really cares about the budget or the ephemera of politics, in which the Conservative View and the Liberal View and the Feminist View etc. are duly debated? Yes: duly and dutiful, but a far cry from the soul’s honor.

The verbal duelling I have in mind has to do with honor. Here the Southern Tradition is a great help. It was a notable Southerner, Richard Weaver, who wrote a book called Ideas Have Consequences. It could have well been entitled, “Towards the recovery of intellectual honor.” For honor must be recovered as an intellectual value before it can be propagated as a moral value; i.e., a code of behavior.

The first idea to be recovered is the idea that ideas do, indeed, matter. The words by which ideas are conveyed refer to real things. Knowledge consists in part in learning the “right names” for things. This is the doctrine known as Realism, and Richard Weaver looked all the way back to the Middle Ages, to the fiery debates between the Realists and the Nominalists, for that first falling-away from the notion of honor. For the Nominalists won the debate; Weaver thought we are still living with the consequences.

For honor does not matter in a world in which words are mere names, arbitrary signifiers. Indeed, how do human actions matter in such a world? What grounds are there for making any distinctions regarding the quality of human action when words and deeds merely portend style rather than substance?

Some of Weaver’s critics have pointed out, that if Nominalism had not gained the upper hand, modern science might not have arisen. For Nominalism loosens the hold of Being in words. It leaves an open space, and gives to human beings a certain power to manipulate symbolism.
Dangerous, yes: tempting, arrogant, deracinating... yes yes yes. But can we deny that it is also liberating? The criticism, of not finding positive justification for science, is not one made by science-worshippers, but by Weaver’s admirers. It seems to be a defect of his theory. And it is true, I think, that if we are to recover that Realism that deals honorably by words, we cannot do so at the expense of the rise of modern science. That is, we cannot, as Realists, leave out any part of the world, just because we may not like it.

Science put man on a different footing with respect to Nature. It was the ‘real-world,’ rather than Being itself, that was to provide the reference. It worked for a long time. In many respects it still continues to work.

But something else has insinuated itself between ourselves and our object. Knowledge came to be seen not as testing by the real world but as power over the real world -- the conquest of nature. The doctrine of “Might makes right” has crept in -- that is, if we can do something, we should do it. Nature, no longer the check upon our actions, becomes the stage for infinite symbol-manipulation. Welcome to cyberspace; welcome to deconstruction and literary theory:

“It was impossible any longer to see reality simply as something
‘out there’, a fixed order of things which language merely reflected.
Reality was not reflected by language, but produced by it: it was a
particular way of carving up the world which was deeply dependent
on the sign-systems we had at our command...”
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory

Here is a kind of gnosticism of language, flitting at the borders of the world. It is an idea of language removed from any notion of intellectual tradition or history. If I speak of the Southern Tradition it is because that tradition is closest to me. But the “Christian Tradition” or the “Tradition of English Poetry” or the “Western Esoteric Tradition” for that matter: all of these “traditions” are a way of binding language to history and geography and the real doings of human beings.

But notice how the literary theorist sidesteps the issue of our participation in history: “Reality was not reflected by language, but produced by it.” Well, who is doing the producing? Certainly not language itself apart from people. That certain understandings become possible in certain periods certainly has much to do with language. But that does not mean that they are wholly arbitrary. It is only to say that the causes for these understandings operate on such subtle levels -- of thinking, of imagination, of the relation between thoughts and events -- that we cannot altogether grasp them at any one time.

No, the ground the Southerner stands on is not natural ground but historical ground. The ground we stand on is not one of arbitrary symbols, mere signs or counters of an ever-shifting nature. It is the geography of historical integrity which can inform the new notion of honor -- the new Realism. And it is this footing we must gain before we defend our honor and our faith. For it is not possible to grasp a sword properly, or for that matter an idea, if our footing is precarious.
The first affirmation of the verbal duellist is, therefore, an affirmation of our place in the world: the affirmation of our integrity as historical beings. This is what gives the grounding to our words, and the force and verve of our challenge.

II. Hunger for Engagement

Many people today do not allow ideas to pierce their souls. I am not speaking of ill-educated people either. What strikes me is not so much a diminished capacity for intellect as a metaphysical lack of appetite. One does not want to be worked upon. One would rather rule over an empire of ideas than subject oneself to any one idea. Hence there is not much passion for following an idea through to the end, for getting to the bottom of things.

Modern theories of society and mental health do not take account of the factor of intellectual hunger, and few there be -- I can only think of James Stephens, the Irish poet -- who have dealt with Hunger as a philosophical problem. In The Crock of Gold the Great God Pan questions a little girl about the two greatest things in the world, and she replies: Hunger and Common Sense. And later Pan replies: No, the Divine Imagination is the greatest thing in the world. But it may be that the way to the Divine Imagination is through the little girl’s Hunger and Common Sense.
For no less an authority than the New Testament informs us of the blessedness of those who hunger and thirst for righteousness’ sake: and the landscape in which they are gathered to hear the divine pronouncement is the landscape of parable and imagination.

To affirm hunger is to affirm life and common sense. Those dieters-to-the-death among us, the anorectics and bulimics, have understood only too well that repletion is no longer connected with hunger. It is a superfluity that hides the starved mentality. Their effort to experience hunger to the depths is a spiritual protest -- much deeper than merely being a response to the decree of fashion that people should be thin. They are on a hunger-strike, not for fashion, but for truth: or rather, against the fashionable notion that derides the search for truth.

In modern society people are basically seen as talking stomachs. How to satisfy appetite is the be-all and end-all of intellectual inquiry. But this theory cannot explain why people in an age of repletion would rather choose hunger.

Hunger is connection. Hunger, intellectual or physical, takes us out of ourselves so that we acknowledge that we are not self-sufficient. Hunger is our one possibility for working out of the toils of egotism, and modern philosophy has no place in its world-view for it. It skips over hunger to get to satisfaction.

One object of verbal duelling is to remind another of his hunger. In this it is unlike the Socratic dialogue. Hunger is not fundamental to it, in the sense that much of the Socratic dialogue is dedicated to the making of distinctions -- to distinguishing one thing from another. This act is supremely important to the act of thinking, to civilization itself. But it can be done only in a society sure of its relationship to civilization -- by people who are already ‘filled.’

The act of making distinctions can only unfold after the fundamental keynote of relatedness has been struck. Such is not our present condition. The part of thinking -- that of making distinctions -- needs to be sustained by the other part, perhaps the better half: that of showing relations. This Relation and Connection I call Honor.

Honor is the stage upon which the scaffold of distinction may safely be built. Was it not upon the stage of relation that the distinctions that unfolded in Genesis took place? All that began begins with, “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” This is the fundamental relation. After that, God gets down to the business of making manifold distinctions: of days, weeks, years, creatures.

Man, too, begins with the relation, the conjunction: “Male and female created he them.” And after that the distinction-making faculty unfolds with the descending articulations of bones, muscles, joints and skeleton coincident with that of speech: for ‘articulation’ refers both to bones and to speaking. Only at the tail-end, or rather the rib-end, of this cadenza of articulation does actual, physical sex emerge. The male-female of the original conjunction has symphonically recessed to make way for the dominant theme: the manifestation into physical life.

Here is the orchestration of Divine Imagination carried out through the instrumentality of substance. To hear it -- to be able to listen -- indicates a hunger of the spirit. And at this stage of the unfolding it may be incumbent upon women to renew the art of listening.

Here is an affirmation for the relative silence of women throughout history, indeed a real affirmation, such as to present a contrast to the envy and resentment of the feminists. What if the relative historical silence of women has existed in order that the faculty of hearing might become spiritualized? It is the principle of reculer pour mieux sauter -- hold back in order to leap forward. Both to hunger and to hear enable us to form an empty space, a silence, fit for reception and waiting. Such a contrast to the spilling of our substance in the moment, the consumption and wastage of the spirit in fitful politics.

Here is an entirely different thought from that offered by the vulgar cause of Feminism. Feminists would detest to hear me say that a woman’s highest possibility lies in Obedience -- to the solar principles of thinking. But the woman who embarks upon the Path of Honor has already left feminism far behind. It is but a new theory of repletion, and she has learned it is much more interesting not to be filled.

III. Ethics of Engagement

An Ancient American once said, “The pen is mightier than the sword.” True: because he knew that the pen is rather like the sword. He, who had to sharpen his quills before he wrote, might have agreed that his flourishes were “Written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond.” Because those flourishes had to do with the honor of the mind: there are rules of honor in fighting as in thinking.

Progress has permitted us the luxury of no longer having to sharpen our quills, and the Darwinian idea of survival has clouded in our minds the notion on what terms we shall do so. That is, honor seems less important than survival. We are left to flounder after a primitive good -- that is, survival. Having thrown everything else over the boat in order to ensure that it keep floating, by a strange logic of reversal the thought of ultimate sinkage becomes a possibility. Survival and annihilation are linked concepts.

The Path of Honor takes account of this “strange logic of reversal” in our world of thought. It says that this strange logic is a characteristic not only of thinking but also of our relation to reality. Is there a middle way between survival and annihilation? -- a middle term by which “strange logic” may be converted into human logic?

Here is the matter of the footing once again -- but this time in an even broader, deeper sense. It is the metaphysical question concerning man’s place in the world.
Modern man does not trust that mankind verily belongs in this world. But the belief that the appearance of human beings upon earth is merely a matter of chance has been deeply questioned by the latest discoveries of modern physics. Even without the anthropic principle -- which links “the nature of the universe with its potentiality for the evolution of men,” (Polkinghorne, 1986) there are too many wonders and close calls for us to view our presence here with complacency.

The astronomy of Ptolemy was earth-centered. The astronomy of Copernicus is solar-centered. The verbal swordsman includes both in his world-view: earth-centered in terms of the matter at hand, the what-is; solar-centered in terms of the rules of engagement. He himself must be the mediating term, the medicinal anthropic principle that heals the poisoned spear that has been thrust into our side.

The “sickness of cognition” that poisons the modern world has to do with our relationship to what is: that is, the relationship of mind to world through the medium of Language. The Path of Honor is defined as being true to what is: true, steadfast, and unswervingly faithful. Honor seeks to direct the Copernican sunbeam upon the Ptolemaic material by means of anthropic responsiveness: a new three-fold integration.

The problem consists in the determination of what is. The art of verbal swordsmanship, which involves the placement of the maximum load of thought into the smallest possible compass, is viewed as a process between two persons who have voluntarily agreed to engage in a mutual determination of what is according to clearly defined and mutually agreed upon rules. The process of discovering these rules, stating them openly, weighing and evaluating them in the light of fairness to the two parties concerned, may be said to be a large part of the determination of what is.

The object of verbal swordsmanship is not to engage in personal attack, to achieve revenge, to be right, or to win. What matters is the engagement with honor: not to wound or demean the opponent, but to maneuver him into an engagement with truth, i.e., the processes in his own soul. There is no other end in view but the means.

For: remember our threefold integration. We need to approach the matter at hand in the light of honor by means of anthropic responsiveness. It is only through these small mutually-agreed-upon oscillations of process that the ‘matter’ can be determined. We ‘weigh’ by means of light.

This is not to say that the Knight of Honor cannot make mistakes. In such situation, the Knight can accept handicap: i.e., admit that he is wrong. The important point is the recovery of honor: that the Knight be able to deflect the mistake back into the process. Likewise, the same rule applies to the opponent. The acceptance of handicap is made out of deference to the process.
Cases of bluntness, plain speaking, moral righteousness and judgment do not automatically incur handicap. Each incident has to be weighed and evaluated by both parties. Even a well-crafted insult is, from a certain point of view, an admirable thing. But insults, and compliments for that matter, are “points” only insofar as they serve truth. Truthfulness is the only thing that matters. But it is incumbent on the one who accepts handicap to discover the means by which combat can be continued.

The Rules of Engagement follow strict laws of formality, courtesy, logic, consistency and what may be called “moral consciousness” or “moral imagination.” It is recognized by the Knight of Honor that what is being attempted is the handling of ‘esoteric energies.’ It is the aim of the Knight of Honor to become a Master of such energies, and in his practice enable his opponent to contact such energies in himself. This is what is meant esoterically by the phrase the ‘saving of the soul’ of another.

Normally, energy is viewed in the light of ‘efficiency’ -- that is, employ only so much energy as will accomplish the immediate task. Esoteric energies involve the concept of surplus: that is why terseness or brevity is the aim of the deft s-wordsman. Here is another example of the “strange logic of reversal” -- that surplus manifests in terseness. There is an analogy with the beauty and universality of a scientific equation -- the beauty which, according to the physicist Paul Dirac, is an index of its truthfulness. As for terseness, one physicist remarked that the equations pertaining to the script of the world can be written upon the back of an envelope.

It is toward a perception of the supernatural in Man that the Knighthood of Honor is pledged. Only then can we approach truly the what is. For what is is not, in itself, sacred. The pledge of the worth of the what is was granted by the Coming of the Savior into the flesh -- into the world, into the what is. With respect to the problem of truth, it is recognized that on this point even the Savior elected to remain silent. (John 18:38) It is the Savior who deflects dead ends back into processes. Such an example informs the practice of the Knight of Honor.

IV. The First Attempt

Mental effort demands sharpening of the quills of thought. The Deconstructionists have reminded us about this “sharpening of the quills” in a rather odd way -- odd in the sense that their disquisitions aim to strip us of the will to fight. That is, they acknowledge beforehand that all intellectual activity involves an assertion of power. By bringing our attention to the element of swordsmanship in all argumentation, they have thought to disarm us. For, after all, to name something by its correct name is to foil the opponent. To expose is to make a point.

But soon, too soon, they back down from this position of Realism: i.e., the idea that something can be rightly named. They use Realism to check their enemy, and switch to Nominalism when their enemy shows signs of checking them. Their Nominalism comes out in full force when they disparage the whole purpose of the engagement. “The fight for truth!” To them there is no such thing: for truth is a mere name, not a right name. How easily a sinuous language may slide from the substantial and real to the merely stylish and formal: without so much as the bat of an eyelash. Snakes, I am told, have no eyelids. Therefore I will not deal with snakes and Deconstructionists, but with the situation of persons whose first care is for their words, and for the honor of words.

Learning to care about the honor of words is not among life’s first necessities: viz., food, clothing, and shelter. In the process of coming to terms with life’s necessities, however, we are presented at times with occasions that call forth our passions, our reason, our imagination, and yes, our honor. With the possible exception of Reason, these other qualities that engage us figure in no known scheme of political economy devised since the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment settled once and for all the proposition that a great light directed upon a tangible fact will cast a long shadow. We are still living in the reach of that shadow and are somewhat uncertain of the territory circumjacent to it. Aside from our teeming fictions that rise, now and then, to the status of bestsellerdom, we have learned our lesson. The business of the world is Politics and Economics. Period.

Or is it? A man -- I will call him Noted Author -- once made some statements publicly insulting to the Christian Religion. I despatched forthwith to him a letter, which act he correctly interpreted as being “intrusive.”

I admit it. Dear Reader, I was shameless. I told him I considered his remarks unworthy of his soul and of his literary eminence. Descending still further down my sleeve, on which I wore my vices, I preached. I did not say, in that first letter, that I expected him to see beyond the obvious (my preaching) and get my point: i.e., that I was challenging him to a duel.

My mistake, as subsequent events revealed, consisted not in making the first too obvious, but the second too subtle. His reply, somewhat unsurprisingly, was rather nasty. Still, I gave him infinite credit for responding. In any case, in my second letter I acknowedged my faults and thus granted him the right to think of me as numbered among the Benighted. I only remarked that I was sorry that my faults as a messenger led him to decline the challenge of the message.

To this olive branch in the form of clarification of my purpose he disdained to reply: which silence I took to be his way of acknowledging my right to interpret as an act of cowardice.
All in all, the result of this little contretemps, this mini snuff-out of an affaire d’honneur, was disappointing. Had I supposed that Noted Author, a sterling member of the class of the Beautiful People, might agree to debate the truth or falsity of the Christian Religion with a mere cipher of the Benighted Class? I suppose I did suppose it.

My femaleness I considered as of being no account one way or another. Had he perhaps suggested that he could not engage in debate along swordsmanlike terms with a Lady, I, who respect all forms of honor including the old-fashioned ones, would have graciously conceded to such a gentlemanlike notion so sincerely held.

That seemed not to be the case here. I believe he was more shocked that I should refuse to identify myself with the Beautiful People, than that I should wish to call him into account because of words uttered against my Religion. This, I may say, is almost as interesting a response than if he had replied with his objections to Christianity. But it is a response that is challenging in a different way than a response to the issue would have been.

I have no need of recapitulating what Thomas Sowell has so eloquently written of, in his book The Vision of the Anointed (1995) where he contrasts the Anointed and the Benighted, and says that the technique of the Anointed is “to replace intellectual discussion of arguments by the moral extermination of persons.” That certainly was the case here. I can only add this example to Sowell’s brilliant diagnosis of the condition.

We can only bring a counterforce to the “Vision of the Anointed” with the “Practice of the Benighted.” Let the benighted be knighted Swordsmen of the Word: those who, agreeing to abide by rules of honor, issue their private challenges to the consternation of the Chattering Classes.

V. The Question of Gender: Can A Lady Duel?

Duelling has historically been associated with the code of the gentleman. Richard Weaver comments:

“As long as the Western world could maintain a gentleman class...
it retained a measure of protection. For it had here a group not wholly
absorbed or obsessed, who held a general view of the relationship
of things. . . “By far the most significant phase of the theory of the
gentleman is ts distrust of specialization. It is an ancient belief, going
back to classical antiquity, that specialization of any kind is illiberal in
a freeman.” Ideas Have Consequences, 54-55, 56

It is interesting that Weaver mentions that this view, that the gentleman holds “a general view of the relationship of things,” goes all the way back to classical antiquity. Here is our keynote of relatedness once again -- the broad view of things, the general culture.

Of this broad view of things, honor is to be the guardian. But the Gentleman has gone the way of the Generalist -- the way to dusty death. There is no class of persons in modern life who see their task as preservers of general culture. The idea that civilized life or general culture might carry with it the obligation to defend it strikes many persons today as obscene or ridiculous.
Yet the duelling culture has not died altogether. It has been up to the novelist to preserve the art of verbal duelling. Ideas have had to travel the underground route of romance rather than make the overland trip by philosophy.

Some of Jane Austen’s heroines are great verbal duellists. The case that springs most naturally to mind is Elizabeth Bennet, heroine of Pride and Prejudice. Her happiness (though she does not know it) depends in fact upon the acquisition of the art of verbal duelling. She duels for a worthy purpose: not for love at first, but for the truth of love, or the truth in love. Nor will she have love on any other terms. Truly, this is noble.

What Elizabeth must discover -- and after having discovered it, be obedient to it -- is the what is, the truth of the situation. She believes Mr. Darcy to be responsible for Mr. Wickham’s misfortune, and for ruining the happiness of her sister Jane. In making his first proposal to her, Mr. Darcy acknowledges that his feelings came about despite his better judgment. He was aware of her social inferiority.
Elizabeth replies:

“In such cases as this it is, I believe, the established mode to express
a sense of obligation for the sentiments avowed, however unequally
they may be returned. . . But I cannot, -- I have never desired your
good opinion, and you have certainly bestowed it most unwillingly.
. . . The feelings which you tell me have long prevented the acknowledgement of your regard can have little difficulty in overcoming it after this explanation.”

Mr. Darcy says:

“And is this all the reply which I am to have the honor of expecting!
I might, perhaps, wish to be informed why, with so little endeavor
of civility, I am thus rejected...”

Elizabeth then goes on thus:

“ ‘I might as well inquire,’ ” replied she, “ ‘why, with so evident a design of offending and insulting me, you chose to tell me that
you liked me against your will, your reason, and even against
your character? Was this not some excuse for incivility, if I was
uncivil? But I have other provocations..."

Elizabeth then proceeds to detail her objections to the gentleman -- his pride, his disdain for the feelings of others, his interference in the romance between her sister and Mr. Bingley, and finally the matter of George Wickham.

It is quite a catalogue, and time alone, and the favorable turn of events, will allow Elizabeth to view these matters in a different light and with greater penetration. After the debacle of the proposal, Mr. Darcy gives Elizabeth a letter explaining the circumstances that lay behind her accusations. She does not want to believe it -- it is a struggle with herself:

“Astonishment, apprehension, and even horror oppressed her.
She wished to discredit it entirely, repeatedly exclaiming, ‘This must be false! This cannot be! This must be the grossest falsehood!’ and when she had gone through the whole letter . . put it hastily away, protesting she would not regard it, that she would never look at it again..."In this perturbed state of mind, with thoughts that could rest on nothing, she walked on; but it would not do; in half a minute the letter was unfolded again; and collecting herself as well as she could, she again began the mortifying perusal . . .when she read and re-read, with the closest attention. . . again was she forced to hesitate . . . every line proved clearly that the affair, which she had believed it impossible that any contrivance could so represent as to render Mr. Darcy’s conduct in it less than infamous, was capable of a turn which must make him entirely blameless throughout the whole.”

Thus Elizabeth is led to embark upon the long and mortifying journey of acknowledging her former mistakes and prejudices, of granting that a large part of the failure to apprehend the what is lay with herself. She commits herself to the honor practiced by the verbal duellist, who does not spare himself in the confrontation with truth. Elizabeth admitted her handicap; she admitted that, in large measure, she had been wrong. The effect of such an effort of thought upon life is the capacity to overcome, by degrees, one’s own egotism. It is to make the refusal of false repletion.

VI. The Second Attempt

Dear Mr. B:

I was interested in what you had to say about Hartford’s literary clubs in “Won’t You Join Us?” NorthEast, Feb. 11.

As a newcomer to Hartford, I was glad to know of the existence of a group of people who meet to discuss ideas and topics of educational and cultural importance. This seems to be a rarity in America these days. Walker Percy reminds us how few Americans actually read books --

“... let me say a word about the general state of American letters. It is poor. In the first place, only about two percent of Americans regularly read books. Of this two percent, only a small fraction read serious novels. We’re talking about a hundred thousand people at the most. Whereas sixty million watched the episode in Dallas which solved the mystery of who shot J.R.” Signposts in a Strange Land, p. 170.

The tone of your article -- fashionably ironic, deprecating, flippant -- was anything but a serious response to this situation. You seemed more intent on ridiculing a “self-massaging highbrow club” (at the same time letting the reader know that you were honored with an invitation to join the Twilight Club) -- as if to assure us of your impeccable politically-correct egalitarian sentiments. You said, despite all, that you were glad to be a member, but that we, the Excluded Middle (Middle America, that is) would, naturally, want to take “our highbrow, elitist, self-massaging club, fold it four ways and stick it where the moon don’t shine.”

This, Sir, I find offensive. You disparage us as well as those doughty Twilighters who are trying, as best they can, to improve their minds. Or is this effort, too, merely ridiculous? If so, according to your lights, how are people ever to develop beyond the default position of smug complacency? I challenge you, Mr. B., to observe how the liberty of your own mind is compromised, when you could not describe an old custom of voluntary intellectual fellowship without making ritual invocations to Diversity and Inclusion -- in order to appease the Great God Leveller.

I do not think that the Twilighters, by making themselves into a Society, meant to slight me, nor that people who appreciate excellence and taste are to be so cavalierly dismissed as belonging to the set of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Your article pandered to envy and resentment, but I reject it. I like for things to have the integrity of what they are. You belong but you jeer and deride. The cognitive dissonance deafens. How can you bear it? Mr. B., where do you stand?

You may, of course, elect not to accept my challenge. But if you do decide to do me the honor of responding to this letter, I would like you to defend the proposition that all old civilized customs and associations of fellowship are to be rejected out of hand because they do not conform to Standard Lowbrow. Remember de Tocqueville? --

“I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.” Democracy in America, vol. 2, p. 263.

I defend the assertion that the liberty of the members of the Twilight Club to form their own association in however means they choose actually supports and helps to maintain my own liberty. Indeed, I defend the liberty of the mind with the liberty of association. The one is ideal, the other real; and true civilization is the work of this coupling. But what is the contribution to civilization of such cynical complacency as found in your article? What is the fruit of postmodernistic cynicism but complacency? You might want to review what Sam Keen says about postmodern man:

“[Postmodernism] neither embraces nor criticizes, but beholds the world blankly, with a knowingness that dissolves feeling and commitment into irony... It takes pleasure in the play of surfaces, and derides the search for depth as mere nostalgia.” Todd Gitlin, in Sam Keen’s Fire in the Belly, p. 110.

I think that we all ought to have some “fire in the belly” about our current cultural decadence -- which, it seems to me, the literary clubs, for all their foibles and old-fashioned elegance, are trying to resist. Are they not at least trying to affirm the idea that excellence can be distinguished from mediocrity? The value of mental effort? Far be it from me to resent such a statement of purpose! I found the tone of your article -- that excellence itself is to be despised -- far more patronizing and insulting than anything the Twilighters could ever dream of.

Be assured, Sir, of my cordiality within these sincere expressions of my disagreements,
[Signed]

As of this writing I have not so far received a reply to this challenge. Upon reading it again, it seems to me that I might have made the challenge clearer: for example, after the words, “You may, of course, elect not to accept my challenge,” I might have added words to the effect that, “I like verbal duelling; however, this is something I realize that not everyone has the time for.”

The mere proliferation of information and opinion -- of people writing articles, of things said on television and radio, the omnipresent media -- offers to the verbal duellist a world of opportunity. Hardly a week need go by that does not present the verbal duellist with the possibility for making a one-on-one challenge by letter.

But even at this stage I am bid to remark -- after having dispatched only two letters of challenge -- that, depressingly, few seem to respond to the dashed glove of combat. I am sure that the recipients think of me as a sort of nut, albeit a literate one. But I am not concerned with what they think of me, only with what they think.

Perhaps someday one of my letters will strike some future recipient with the charm of novelty. That we are accountable for the ideas we entertain is certainly a novel idea to many. But it may be important to think about the issue of charm, for the likelihood is that I will not succeed in enticing anyone else into combat without it.

VII. Duelling Contests

Americans in recent years have become spectators of duelling contests in the context of Supreme Court appointments. It has not always been so. Two of the greatest contests of our century, the duel between Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan over the teachings of evolution (the Scopes trial), and the duel of Senator McCarthy against everybody else over the issue of Communist allegiances -- these were both concerns that transcended the narrow focus of law.

Yet there is a common thread that runs these four duels: evolution, communism, the nomination hearings of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court. This common thread has to do with the question of whether there is a moral dimension in thought. It is whether the statement, “I think...” puts one into a moral position in relation to the world.

The Scopes trial has to do with man’s place in the world; the McCarthy hearings with man’s place in society. The idea of evolution is not the real culprit -- the Bible is the most evolutionary document in the world, being the history of the transformations of man from the Garden to the Holy City. No, it was the idea of chance that threw the monkey wrench into the monkey trial. For chance is a strange form of determinism that dispenses altogether with the need for thought.
The communism controversy took up where Scopes left off. There can be no distinction made between loyalty and treason when societies differ only as one strain of corn to another. Of what purpose is cultivation, of distinguishing one thing from another, of judging one thing to be better than another? Even the idea of allegiance begins to seem like a sin against the open air.

Some of these themes form the background to the two great controversies that occurred in recent years concerning Supreme Court appointments. By the time President Reagan offered Robert Bork’s name for the judgeship, two great issues had already been decided and negatived: nature and society. All that was left was the law.

For law is man’s bond with nature and society, though anyone who has the temerity to suggest the existence of such a bond is headed for trouble. The bond is twofold: through thought and custom. Robert Bork, in showing the world how he struggled with these bonds, in acknowledging that such a struggle had taken place within him, was already challenging the American Doctrine: which is, mental habits rather than thinking.

When Senator Patrick Leahy (D.--Vermont) used the term “metamorphosis” to describe Judge Bork’s intellectual journey, he was voicing more than the accusation of the timid and static mind to a living and active one. It was a bubble of truth percolating upwards from Leahy’s somnambulistic depths. For metamorphosis never means change in the sense of “more of the same.” Its meaning has the idea of persistent unity through death and rebirth. It is self-transformation through confrontation with tension, polarity, paradox. It is the manner of growth of all living things, and also -- of living minds.

So much of the Bork confirmation hearings had to do with rights: rights of majorities, rights of minorities, rights of women, rights of individuals. But what is the purpose of rights? They exist in order that people may fulfill their human nature without undue constraint from the social order. But the final goal of all unconstraint is the unconstraint of ideas -- that is, liberty of thought. In the last resort all rights are worthless if their fundamental underpinning is removed, the right to liberty of thought.

One’s attitude toward Judge Bork depends, therefore, far more upon one’s attitude toward thinking and the role of thinking in the achievement of identity and fulfillment, than upon whether one is a ‘liberal’ or a ‘conservative.’ What we saw, in the Senate Judiciary hearings, was a man who had achieved a certain identity, a self, put before a Committee whose Democratic spokesmen, at least, kept trying to get him to take off his “mask.”

But thinking, if that is what a man does, is not something that can be put on or taken off like a mask. The yeast of thinking ever works its way into the raw elements of the soul. It is not a man with a mask. It is a man constitutionally incapable of responding to anything except thoughtfully. The novelty of such a persona struck the Democrats as with the force of a disguise.

The hapless Howell Heflin (D.--Alabama) whose interminable fence-sitting finally culminated in a no vote, confessed to needing “a psychiatrist to get inside Judge Bork’s mind.” He could never tell, he said, whether Bork was a judicial extremist or in the mainstream! Another example of unconscious truth spoken by a torpid mind. For certainly the attitude of believing that thinking is a necessity to the manifestation and making-real of a human personality is an extreme notion -- deviating so surely from American Doctrine that only a psychiatrist can figure out what is going on!

My interest in the Bork hearings is not so much legal or constitutional as it is the desire to distinguish true thinking from its counterfeit: thinking as opposed to mental habits, discarnate mental processes. In the habits of mind of the nine Senators who voted against Judge Bork I find evidence of discarnate mental process: a thinking which is abstract, atomistic, or automatic. I will discuss each in turn.

i. Abstraction
Of all the Senators who voted against Judge Bork’s appointment, only that of Sen. Arlen Specter (R.-- Pa.) seemed to carry real weight. Of all the senators, only Sen. Specter seemed willing to engage in close questioning. His no vote was, accordingly, the most disappointing.

In his Oct. 9, 1987, editorial in the New York Times, “Why I Voted Against Bork,” Sen. Specter said, on the issue of majority and minority rights, that “The majority in a democracy can take care of itself, while individuals and minorities often cannot.”

As a purely abstract proposition, this is no doubt true. But the point is, and was, that in America today, the majority often feels that it cannot take care of itself. In essence this goes to the issue of judicial imperialism, which Judge Bork contended so valiantly against. If judicial imperialism exists, this indicates that the majority cannot take care of itself, for by definition judicial imperialism is a usurping of power from the people and their elected representatives. But if judicial imperialism does not exist, why is such a fuss being made over Robert Bork? You can’t have it both ways.

Sen. Specter’s point therefore begs the question: for the question is, indeed, whether the majority can take care of itself. But in a more fundamental sense as well Sen. Specter’s point is an abstraction, removed from social conditions as they are today. The glue of social cohesion, that once made the ‘majority’ a recognizable entity, no longer holds. Tradition, religious and moral sentiments: these exist, to be sure, but they are no longer real arbiters of anything. Nowadays all real questions are decided by the law courts. Even churches must go to the law on bended knee. A majority that has to buttress itself at every turn with recourse to the law is a majority in a state of disintegration.

But Sen. Specter’s view of majorities was echoed down the line. All of Judge Bork’s opponents dealt with the question of majorities in a way that was either faintly or openly contemptuous. Faintly, when the hammering at Bork dealt with the question of minorities and their rights; openly, as in the case of that cadre of law professors from Harvard, whose only term for the majority was the pejorative “Moral Majority.”

ii. Atomism
Senator Edward Kennedy (D.-- Mass.) unknowingly exposed the atomism and disjunctiveness of the trivial mind when he said to Attorney Elliott Richardson, who spoke on Bork’s behalf, something to the effect that “you want us to look at the forest instead of the trees.”

But the Democrats gave a whole new meaning to the term “intellectual incoherence.” Take Sen. Joseph Biden (D.--Del) Chairman of the Committee, in his closing statement. He boiled down the difference in his view of rights from that of Judge Bork’s view in this wise: “I believe that we have rights just by existing, but Judge Bork believes that we have only those rights that are conferred by the Constitution.”

But Senator Biden’s remark reveals that he is coming from utopia, not the real world. Of course we have rights by existing. But it is a moot point, for none of us exists alone. The fact of our communal existence together is the only real starting point for an understanding of the Constitution and our rights. Senator Biden’s point would lead us to dispense with the Constitution altogether -- which may be what the liberals want -- but it was not the supposed subject of the Bork hearings. The supposed subject of these hearings was about differing views of Constitutional interpretation, not about Constitutional interpretation versus something else.

But the problem originates in the atomistic thinking so characteristic of Judge Bork’s opponents. One can either see the Constitution as a document primarily guaranteeing our rights, or one can view it as a document setting forth the conditions for a limited government. That government should be limited is actually the best guarantee of our rights. But of course the advocates of illimitable rights do not see it that way. In America today rights have become the equivalent of bread and circuses, and in the Bork hearings they were the sop thrown to the mob outside the walls.

iii. Automatism
The question of rights brings us finally to the axiom of contemporary liberalism, which is the proposition that an increase of rights for some will automatically increase the rights for all. Judge Bork, by assailing this proposition, brought down upon his head the wrath and incomprehension of minds unaccustomed to examining ideas purely on their own merits. Even Sen. Specter who, notably, was not given to making unfair charges, misunderstood Judge Bork on this point. In his editorial, Sen. Specter wrote: “I was further troubled by his writings and testimony that expanding rights to minorities reduced the rights of majorities. While perhaps arithmetically sound, it seemed to me morally wrong.”

But Judge Bork was not saying that he believed this idea was good -- he was merely saying that he believed it to be true. If an idea is true, it does not demand from us, initially at least, that we take a moral position about it. It demands merely that we acknowledge it and take account of it. The moral position implicit in our acknowledgement of an idea is not whether or not we agree with it, but whether or not it becomes part of our view of reality. Morality thus arises out of whether our view of reality is more comprehensive, or less so: which is to say, in essence, that morality arises out of thinking.

Again and again, in this instance as in so many others, we are driven back to take stock of fundamentals: what is thinking? What is reason? What is morality? What seems to have happened, in the Committee hearings, is that the Senators thought they were disagreeing with Judge Bork’s opinions. But what they were actually objecting to was Judge Bork’s reasoning. Judge Bork attempted to put forth reasoned opinions. But it was in an atmosphere in which reason itself was no longer considered to possess moral value.

Well, one may ask, what is the moral value of saying that the liberal axiom -- that an increase of rights for some leads automatically to an increase of rights for all --is not true? Why recognize the contrary proposition as a fact of political life?

For one thing, this is what the Constitution does. To say that an increase of rights for some leads to an increase for all, blurs the constitutional distinction between majority and minority altogether. Such thinking renders the distinction void and impotent, and nullifies the fine balancing act which is constitutional interpretation. More and more rights for everybody -- so goes this automatism of thought -- so that we can all become happier and happier!

Judge Bork attempted to illuminate the point during a question session with Sen. Paul Simon (D.-- Illinois). He gave the example of a community that passes an ordinance banning the public expression of obscene language. Quoting Chesterton, that it is the right of a free people to pass their own laws, Bork said that in this case the community banned something they considered to be a moral harm. Then, the Supreme Court comes along and strikes the ordinance down on the grounds that “One man’s vulgarity is another man’s lyric.” Thus the Court has deprived the people of the community of their right to make their own laws.

This concept proved too difficult for Sen. Simon. Unwittingly playing the part of Simple Simon, all he could do was repeat words to the effect that, “But I think that if you extend liberty to some, you extend it to all!” But is the concept really that difficult? The liberty of a community to ban public obscenity and the liberty of some to practice it can hardly be the same liberty. They are not only not the same thing. They are clearly opposed to each other.

Judge Bork wrote in more detail about this case, which was an actual one, in his Francis Boyer lecture, Tradition and Morality in Constitutional Law. He took issue therein with the new theories of moral relativism which have become dominant in constitutional thinking. He says, if one cannot judge something to be obscene, how can one distinguish, for example, the reckless driver from the safe one? “The answer in both cases,” he writes, “is, by the common sense of the community.” And continuing, he says: “A society that ceases to be a community increases the danger that weariness with turmoil and relativism may bring about an order in which many more, and more valuable, freedoms are lost than those we thought we were protecting.”

It is a pity that the man who wrote those words could not be met, in the hearings on his nomination to the Supreme Court, with something approaching a fair understanding. Here is the tragedy for America in these hearings: the total obliteration of the distinction between reason, grounded in moral principles, and ideology. For it is not the thinking mind but the ideological mind that runs along the ruts of abstraction, atomism, and automatism. For certainly a reasonable man is fallible. But at least he is awake. Sleeping men hardly know the difference.

Finally, it must be said that events, and the time in which they occur, take place in a context in which deeper meanings may be read. The Bork confirmation hearings took place at the same time as the bicentenniel celebrations of the Constitution. But what happened is that the cognitive frame of mind needed to understand and maintain the Constitution went down into ignominious defeat. Not to worry. It’s the celebration that counts.

* * *
I would like to insert a relevant footnote to the preceding. In a recent issue of The New York Review of Books (March 21, 1996) the legal scholar Ronald Dworkin has an article, “The Moral Reading of the Constitution,” in which he claims that the “moral reading” of the Constitution “has inspired all the greatest constitutional decisions of the Supreme Court... But it is almost never acknowledged as influential even by constitutional experts, and it is almost never openly endorsed even by judges...”

Here indeed is an acknowledgement of the situation of thinking in American intellectual life. Thinking and morality are not the same. But if the effort to think is a moral act (even if the actual content of the thoughts has no direct bearing upon morality) it follows from this that the refusal to think is an immoral one. Hannah Arendt came to such a conclusion in her study of Adolf Eichmann -- a remarkable insight not developed in her subsequent philosophizing.

Dworkin points to the tension in constitutional interpretation between the “moral reading” and the “originalism” as espoused by Robert Bork. He remarks that: “One distinguished constitutional lawyer who insists that there must be an interpretive strategy somewhere between originalism and the moral reading recently announced, at a conference, that although he had not discovered it, he would spend the rest of his life looking...”

Here is a man after my own heart. I respect the man who announces to the world that he is empty, that he is on a quest, and that he is not to be dissuaded from it. I would only hope to say to him that an answer might be found in the very small, close examination of the process of thinking. We need to think about thinking itself.

“Thinking about thinking” is the missing piece between thought and morality, between the “moral reading” and “originalism.” And we can only start “thinking about thinking” when we accept that our intellectual traditions have become exhausted and that our universities, for example -- have betrayed us. The house of intellect has become a house of cards, and we need to get back to the basics of distinguishing good thinking from bad. In this way we fuse morality back into the process of thinking -- not into its result.

VIII. Duelling Contests, continued.

The contest between Clarence Thomas and his accuser, Anita Hill, took place in the five-hundreth year commemoration of the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, October of 1992. There is poignancy in this conjunction of events -- as if race were more fundamental a factor in the American founding than even the efforts of the Founding Fathers to form a constitutional republic.

Constitutional founding has to do with thought; race has to do with life. The basic question has to do with the relation of thinking to instinct, to life. The bond between these two forces is morality, when the activity of thinking is understood to comprise a moral dimension.

But in America this bond is forbidden fruit. For, as we have seen, in American life the bond between thinking and the moral dimension has been dissolved. Ostensibly the issue in the Clarence Thomas hearings was that of sexual harassment. But in a world in which the act of thinking takes place in a moral vacuum, the fact of sexuality itself is bound to seem an offense. For there is no way that a man can be with a woman, or a woman with a man, that is not otherwise than invasive, confrontational, challenging, unsettling. Such is the nature of instinct.

Sexual harassment may be taken as the metaphor of thinking in such an age, in which moralism parades as morality, and mental habits parade as thought. For ideas are invasive, confrontational, challenging, and unsettling too, where there is a real connection between the self, the ideas, and the world. This is the premise of verbal duelling -- that, as W. Walsh put it, “The intelligible is the source of the responsible.” Notice how lightly, how thoughtfully, the intelligence touches upon morality in that statement!

But in America, no thought is given to the problem of channelling the instincts because the connection between instinct and thought has been declared to be abolished. Thus do we prostrate ourselves to instinct in our pop culture, or take our revenge against it in the moralism of our political culture.

Not a happy situation, to be sure. We owe to the feminists, Anita Hill’s supporters, the genuine discovery that sexuality resembles thought. They made this discovery unwittingly, though it evolves naturally from the premises. For sex is from secare, to cut, to divide. Here we are with our endless cutting and dividing and distinguishing and separating. Where, oh where, is the unity of Relation that can make all these divisions tolerable?

After it was all over Anita Hill could say, of the Senators who questioned her, that “Because I and my reality did not comport with what they accepted as their reality...” (American Spectator, December 1992) Here is a soul divided into a multitude of fragmented parts. She could more truthfully have said, “My name is legion,” like that demon-possessed man spoken of in the New Testament. American “private morality” has collapsed into private realities. The collapse revealed the terrifying absence of common ground.

Thus do I say that the real issue of the Anita Hill business was not sexual harassment but a modern variant of demon possession. It is the inability of different persons to agree upon a common world of fact.

Anita Hill felt that it was her “civic duty” to speak out on the issue of sex harassment. But what of her human duty? Was it human of Anita Hill to have harbored a grudge against Thomas for so long, to have benefited from the jobs he offered her, the good recommendations he gave her, to have enjoyed the status and prestige which association with him offered, and then turn around and drive a knife into his back at the eleventh hour of his confirmation proceedings?

Is this how a “normal” person acts? I think not. It is not only that at this stage of our national life even the refusal to stab a friend in the back may be taken as a supernatural virtue. The idea of virtue itself rests upon a notion that there are circumstances in which the human will can be appeased or mollified. There are grounds upon which people may meet to raise the flag of truce... But such grounds, in Anita Hill’s accusations, were disputed. “There’s right, there’s wrong, there’s real,” as someone remarked of these proceedings.

Ah, but she suffered so much, the feminists cried, deploring those senators who attempted to probe Anita Hill’s motivations. They exclaimed her charges had not been taken seriously. They cried she was being treated unfairly when some senators asked tough questions as to why Anita Hill followed Judge Thomas from one job to another, why she went out of her way to maintain contact with him. Such a suffering of sexual harassment, they cried, must outweigh all other considerations -- such as honor, friendship, due process, procedural protections, statutes of limitations!

Finding common ground is the first necessity for the reacquisition of a concept of virtue that possesses any power to appease the human will. In such a common ground lies the only hope by which the unequal struggle of human sexuality (unequal for both men and women at different times and in different ways) can be transformed into something worth affirming. For otherwise, all manner of hell is let loose, not the least of which is the fury of scorned women.

IX. An Early 19th Century Duel between a Lady
and a Gentleman.

Abigail Adams, the wife of the second president, John Adams, was a great lady duellist. She challenged the third president, Thomas Jefferson, and the letters they exchanged are appended to the two-volume set of letters between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, The Adams-Jefferson Letters.

My attention was drawn to Abigail Adams through Fawn Brodie’s biography of Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. This book was published by W. W. Norton & Company in 1974. This book is upwards of 500 pages, written by a professor of history at a California university, heavily footnoted, bibliographied, and indexed, and published by a reputable commercial firm.

All of these filters seemed to guarantee that some residue of historical truth would seep through. I had no idea of the book’s reputation nor any reason to distrust its presentation or its arguments. After all, books do not carry warning labels, though perhaps this job could be added to that of the weary office of Surgeon General. But Fawn Brodie’s book presented the occasion for a contemporary, and ongoing, duel among scholars regarding the reputation of Mr. Jefferson.
It all began back in 1802, when an unscrupulous newspaperman, James Thomson Callender, published stories about Jefferson’s slave mistress, Sally Hemings. Jefferson was president at the time. In the previous Federalist administration of John Adams, Callender had viciously attacked the Federalists, been tried under the Sedition Law, imprisoned, and fined. As president, Jefferson repealed the Sedition Law, released Callender from prison, and promised to pay his fine.

The money was slow in coming. In the end Jefferson paid some of it out of his own pocket. In the meantime Callender was nursing his grievances and duly responded by attacking Jefferson, circulating as facts certain rumors then current in Charlottesville.

It is true that children of mixed race were being born on the Monticello mountaintop. In The Jefferson Scandals (1981) Virginius Dabney examines the case and gives a convincing argument why the paternity of these children should not be ascribed to Jefferson. He invited Mrs. Brodie to respond to his arguments, but by the time his book was published, this lady had unfortunately died.

Fawn Brodie’s belief that the stories published by Callender were true thus remained unchanged thanks to the silence of the grave. In her biography of Jefferson she argues that Jefferson had an affair with Sally Hemings lasting some thirty-eight years, beginning from the time of his diplomatic residence in France.

Here is Jefferson the frustrated widower who finds solace and “years of private happiness” in the arms of his faithful slave, dusky Sally.

It’s beyond belief, of course, but a mountain of historical untruth is easier to swallow than a molehill. But Jefferson’s was not the only character ground to bits by Fawn Brodie’s ax. In a minor but very revealing way Abigail Adams was also defamed by Brodie, and it is this I want to address.

Jefferson the third president and John Adams, the second, were of opposing political parties. These and other differences drew them apart, and for many years they did not communicate. They had had, in previous years, especially during their respective sojourns in Europe, a cordial relationship.

When Jefferson’s daughter Maria Eppes died in 1804, aged 25, Abigail Adams wrote to Jefferson a letter of condolence. A correspondence then ensued, very honest and forthright between the two, and unknown to John Adams. Fawn Brodie: “Abigail, no doubt taking enormous secret delight in carrying on a political debate with the President of the United States without her husband’s censorship.” Remember, dear Reader, that Abigail Adams was not an adolescent girl, but the wife of a former president and mother of another. Thus does Fawn Brodie cast aspersions.

Jefferson, in responding to this letter, made a “restrained but certain gesture” (Brodie’s words; no quarrel there) towards repairing the friendship. He mentioned at the end it was only Mr. Adams’ midnight appointments of district judges, just prior to his own administration, that he, Jefferson, considered as “personally unkind.”

In response Abigail Adams explained the circumstances of these appointments, exonerating of her husband of any personal animus against Jefferson. She then said, “I have never felt any emnity towards you Sir for being elected president of the United States. But the instruments made use of, and the means which were practiced to effect a change, have my utter abhorrence and detestation, for they were the blackest calumny, and foulest falshoods. . .”

The reference is to Callender, who began his rabid attacks against the Federalists in 1797. Abigail Adams reproached Jefferson for liberating “this wretch,” Callender, from prison and for remitting his fine. “When such vipers are let lose upon Society, all distinctions between virtue and vice are levelled.” She noted too that, “The serpent you cherished and warmed, bit the hand that nourished him.”

This hardly sounds like the reproach of one likely to give credence to Callender’s stories, but to Fawn Brodie apparently it does. Brodie omits altogether Abigail Adams’ criticisms of Jefferson with respect to his annulment of the Sedition Law. Jefferson, in his reply, did put this action of his in a more plausible light.

Mrs. Adams in reply did get down to the one thing she found it hard to forgive Jefferson for, and that was his removal from minor offices of a group of persons among whom was her son, John Quincy Adams. Jefferson in reply clarified the circumstances of this business, -- saying that he had no knowledge that young John Quincy held this office -- to which in response Mrs. Adams was able to say at last that her fears of personal unkindness of Mr. Jefferson with respect to the Adams family were “all together unfounded.”

To Fawn Brodie the entire correspondence seems to hinge upon Jefferson’s guilty secret. Here is her final quotation from Abigail Adams:

"...Having once entertained for you a respect and esteem, founded upon the Character of an affectionate parent, a kind master, a candid and benevolent Friend, I could not suffer different political opinions to obliterate them from my mind, and I felt the truth of the observation, that the Heart is long, very long in receiving the conviction that is forced upon it by reason. Affection still lingers in this bosom, even after esteem has taken its flight..."

Fawn Brodie sums it all up as follows:

"Callender, it seems, had opened to her the terrible truth -- Jefferson was not an affectionate parent nor a kind master nor a candid and benevolent friend. What she feared when she first saw Sally Hemings in London had come to pass; Jefferson had betrayed his slave, his daughters, and his friend, Abigail Adams, who had genuinely loved him.Thus she cried out in protest, not only for herself and for white women generally, but also for every married woman to whom this gentle, gallant widower had managed to communicate the feeling that she was peculiarly important in his life..."

Here is Abigail Adams reduced to a character in a soap opera suffering the pangs of unrequited love, Jefferson the Don Juan of two continents leaving a chain of broken hearts behind him, his daughters the victims of paternal neglect, and the affairs of state nothing more than a melodrama of blighted affection.

To return to the real world, allow me to quote the very next sentence of Abigail Adams’ letter, which follows upon the word, “flight,” quoted above:

"...It was not until after circumstances concured to place you in the light of a rewarder and encourager of a Libeller whom you could not but detest and despise, that I withdrew the esteem I had long entertained for you..."

There you have it. Abigail Adams’ intelligent comments on national affairs have been distorted to a degree that can only be considered willfully malicious.

The issue was the Sedition Law. Abigail Adams “expressed the Federalist argument that freedom of speech and of the press could be defined only by the English common law, and that the First Amendment had not deprived congress of the power to pass a sedition law. The Republicans [i.e., the party of Jefferson] argued that the First Amendment ‘not only rejected the English common law concept of libels against the government, but also prohibited Congress from adding any restraint...’ Smith, Freedom’s Fetters, 136, 140. This note concludes the correspondence between Abigail Adams and Thomas Jefferson, in The Adams-Jefferson Letters, University of North Carolina, 1959, Lester J. Cappon, editor.

The concerns of Abigail Adams have, in Fawn Brodie’s book, been dragged down to the level of James Thomson Callender’s slanders. Those concerns are an early statement, in the context of politics and government, of the essential motif: whether thinking has a moral dimension. Abigail Adams thought that Jefferson’s adherence to the doctrine of the freedom of speech guaranteed by the Bill of Rights was too rigid and unbending. Indeed, the phrase “freedom of speech” can be used to discount the moral effects of certain forms of expression, and thereby to undermine the purpose itself of thought and expression: which is, indeed, to have an effect, an impact.

It is thus not those who resist the idea that slander ought to be protected speech who stand by the side of philistinism and narrow-mindedness. Those for whom “Freedom of Speech” is everything are the real emasculators of thought -- the real dogmatists. Those who recognize that thought has impact are more often willing to place some constraints -- if not upon thought, then at least upon expression. Who is the liberal, who the conservative? Do those terms even begin to encompass the ironic implications involved in these positions?

Abigail Adams saw these implications, and she carried out her battle with Mr. Jefferson in the spirit of true knighthood. I commemorate her as a worthy Lady Duellist.

X. The Glow-Worm: A 15th Century Duel

When I was in library school, I took a “History of the Book” course under Dr. Barry Neavill, a scholar in the field of bibliography. Before the invention of printing in the mid-fifteenth century, books were written by hand. I became an enthusiast of the early Renaissance period in Florence, which was a center for the development of script. The humanists, as they were called, -- the scholars and literary men who were spearheading the revival of classical studies -- were those actively experimenting with writing styles. The humanistic book-hand became the precursor of the later italic and roman type fonts of the printed book.

At that time -- from about 1350 to 1450 -- the revival of classical studies was a matter of some controversy to the Church. That people should read and study the classical pagan authors as a matter of course was not widely accepted. Although many of the respected in the Church were classically educated, such an education took place after a solid grounding in the faith. How the development of the humanistic script played out in the context of this Christian and pagan-classical dialogue became the focus of my particular interest.

The early humanists, scouting the territory for classical manuscripts, found many old texts written in the time of Charlemagne. The humanists were very taken with the beauty and legibility of this old Carolingian script. The “Carolingian renaissance” refers to that earlier revival of learning that took place at the court of Charlemagne; the learned persons who gathered at Charlemagne’s court were greatly occupied with the production and transcription of texts.

The script in usage at the time of the humanists, six hundred years after Charlemagne, was Gothic or its more rounded cousin, Italian rotunda. Anyone who has ever seen a text written in the crowded Gothic script will understand why the poet Petrarch complained, in 1366, that it was so difficult to read.

The Carolingian hand was the fruit of another renaissance, but one quite different from the later Italian one. Walter Ullmann, a medieval and Renaissance scholar, in his essay “Medieval Origins of the Renaissance,” in The Renaissance: Essays in Interpretation (1982) remarked that “It is certainly one of the most remarkable features of medieval and Renaissance historians that they disregard the consequences of man’s own regeneration or renaissance, which he experienced on becoming a Christian.” He describes the Carolingian age as one in which “a whole society was to be collectively reborn on the model of individual baptismal rebirth.”

A very different theory of man and society was working its way through the humanistic renaissance. In the six hundred intervening years, Aristotle had been worked very thoroughly through the mental mills of the Scholastic philosophers (fl. circa 1100-1300). With reference particularly to Aristotle’s Politics, Ullmann commented that “It was the mature expression of a world order conceived in physical terms... man... reacquired a status which through baptismal rebirth he had lost... Within the secular-mundane public order, this renaissance postulated full attention to man as a natural product, as a man of flesh... After centuries of hibernation, unadulterated natural man had acquired an appropriate place in the cosmological order.”

To Petrarch, these “centuries of hibernation” were called the “Dark Ages” because in that era, “it was not man himself who directed the path of history. It was baptismally reborn men... who were moved (or said to have been moved) by divinity and by norms not of their own making.”
What, then, Ullmann asks, was that which in the Italian renaissance was reborn? It was not just classical studies. “The object of rebirth was nothing other than man himself.”

Evidently, a new theory of civilization had to be devised. A new explanation was needed for collective life, for how people get along in society, for what constitutes a citizen.

Hence humanistic studies. To our ears humanistic studies refer to nonscientific ones -- the humanities simply, literature, language, history, philosophy, etc. But to the humanists, the studia humanitatis were simply those distinguished from the studia divinitatis. Humanistic studies were concerned with “the human substance of unregenerated man.”

Nowadays, of course, we think of humanistic studies as belonging to a more regenerate part of human nature, the part that can acquire a liberal education, think freely on most subjects, and acquire an open, inquiring mind. The change in meaning is very significant and illustrates the new theory of civilization that was taking shape. It was to be the quest for learning and the re-appropriation of the classical past which would lead man to transcend his instincts and become a citizen of his city and the world.

This is the context in which we need to understand the pagan-Christian dialogue. The question was not merely whether people should read pagan works. It was rather -- What is man? And how should society be organized? What is to be the animating idea of the new civilization?

One of the persons troubled by the progress of classical studies was a monk living at San Miniato near Florence. He wrote to a pupil of Coluccio Salutati, one of these humanists, trying to dissuade him from pursuing these studies. Salutati (1330-1406) is credited with being one of the founders, if not the founder, of the revived Caroline script. Salutati’s reply to this monk, on January 25, 1405, is, according to B.L. Ullman, one of the important documents of early humanism. (Confusingly, two Renaissance scholars have very similar names. This remark from B.L. Ullmann, Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 1955.)

Coluccio in this letter devotes close attention to the question of metaphorical or figurative language. (Some of Culuccio’s letters are gathered in Ephraim Emerton, Humanism and Tyranny in the Italian Trecento, Harvard, 1925.)

“Do you not see that sacred literature, the whole body of Holy
Scripture, is, rightly considered, nothing else in its method of
expression than poetry? For, when we are speaking of God or
of incorporeal beings, nothing is literally true, but beneath that
surface of fiction there is nothing that is not true.”

Coluccio comments, for example, on the passage in Scripture where it says “The spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,” and says, “How can a corporeal act be reported of the spirit of God which is an incorporeal thing?”

We are seeing, as if through a microscope, the decline of the ancient ‘participation’. Thoughts are diverging from things. Indeed, figurative language would be an important tool for persons who no longer inhabit a participated world. The literal interpretation of Scripture is indeed an absurdity in such circumstances. Owen Barfield reminds us that in a participated world phenomena carry “the sort of multiple significance which we today find only in symbols.” (Saving the Appearances, 1965, p. 74.) But already by Coluccio’s time this participated world was considered old-fashioned.

And again, the loss of the old participation would give added force to the humanist arguments about the worth of classical studies. These studies, embracing rhetoric, poetry, and all types of figurative expression, would only serve, in their minds, to preserve the Christian faith. For the truths of dogma would be reached over the bridge of metaphor.

Upon reception of Coluccio’s letter, the monk of San Miniato turned for reinforcement to another monk, one Giovanni Dominici -- a man, says Emerton, “of wide learning but of the old school.” Dominici, a Dominican monk living at Santa Maria Novella in Florence, believed that pagan literature should be studied only by persons sufficiently grounded in the faith. He was a zealous promoter of the idea that the education of youth should be a Christian enterprise. Only after the establishment of Christian character could youth be entrusted with the ‘dangerous charms’ of the pagan authors.

This monk, Father Dominici, wrote a long treatise in 1405 which he dedicated to Coluccio Salutati. In responding to this challenge, the worthy monk sat down and wrote nothing less than a whole book -- an act which merits if nothing else a page or two in the annals of verbal duelling. Called the Lucula noctis, “The Glow-Worm” (or alternatively, “The Fire-Fly”) it is a work of 47 chapters, each chapter beginning with a letter in the sequence Lux in tenebris lucet et tenebre eam non comprehenderunt. In 1908 this work was edited for the first time by a French Dominican in honor of his fifteenth-century colleague, a text later published in 1940 as Iohannis Dominici lucula noctis in the Notre Dame series of medieval studies.

According to Emerton, “A cursory examination of the ‘Glow-worm’ leads one to have every sympathy with the modern editor, whose loyalty to the memory of his Dominican colleague cannot conceal the tedious barrenness of his task. A glimmer of sense in the darkness of a huge mass of unrelated metaphysical elaborations indeed is this last protest of a defeated cause.”
But if nothing else, in the annals of duelling lost causes hold an honored place. According to Edmund Hunt, editor of the Notre Dame edition, Dominici in Scholastic fashion set out all the humanist arguments before proceeding to combat them. Coluccio, at any rate, admired the thoroughness with with Dominici set out the humanist arguments, and he responded --

“Vidi, venerabilis in Christo pater, librum tuum verum liquidumque
meridiem, qui tenebris non admittit, non, ut ex humilitate nuncupas,
Luculum noctis...opus quidem ingens..."

“I have read your book, venerable Father in Christ, and find in it
a veritable splendor of noonday in which is no darkness at all,
and not, as you in your modesty call it, ‘A light shining in the
darkness,’ ... truly an enormous work...

Other scholars have commented on The Glow-Worm, from which in closing I quote a few representative passages. Nancy Streuver (1970): “... the attack of Giovanni Dominici on poetry which Salutati attempted to repel is one aspect of a conservative reaction to the growth of a lay culture...” B.L. Ullman (1955): “The war against medievalism was in part fought on this front and the direction that the Renaissance was to take was partly determined by these early forays.” Charles L. Stinger (1977): “[Dominici’s] lengthy attact on classical studies... used a systematic Scholastic format and rigorous dialectical argumentation to assert as illicit any education based on the classics... This extended controvery over the study of the classics marks a decisive phase in the growth of humanism...”

But in my view only Walter Ullmann got to the nub of what was going on. This is from his essay previously cited (1982):

“The opponents of a new scheme sometimes highlight its essence much better than its own advocates, because they apprehend the implications much more directly... A good example at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is the fiery, anti-humanist Cardinal Johannes
Dominici: he had no quarrel whatsoever with the ‘revival of the classics’ or the imitation of classical writings, or aestheticism and the like, but concentrated his fire on the real issues of humanism, its secular-mundane-human aspects which involved an entire reorientation and intellectual revolution, with far-reaching consequences in the social and political fields. Here too there is a passionate advocacy of the cherished and time-honored principles of totality, unipolarity, and universality.”

XI. Charm: The Metaphysics of Duelling

I promised to think about charm. The good monk Fra Dominici failed to measure up in this respect, according to Ephraim Emerton, who characterized The Glow-Worm as a tedious mass of barren metaphysical speculation.

As one unfortunately deficient in Latin, I am not in a position to agree or disagree. It would be interesting to inquire of Mr. Emerton whether he thinks that metaphysical speculation is by nature charmless, or whether the charmlessness of The Fire-Fly is due to a reason other than the preoccupations with metaphysics.

One thing that almost all modern persons seem to agree on, is that metaphysical philosophy is obsolete. Like getting around on horseback, modern man with his internal combustion engines has no need of it. The only places where one is apt to encounter metaphysics are in the pages of New Age publications and advertising flyers, where for a hefty fee one may sit at the feet of someone who can tell you that All is One. Gurus are the only people who still teach metaphysics with a straight face, and usually for no additional fee they will throw in meditation and angelology to boot.

But, given the low repute for metaphysics in the world at large -- that meaning the world of fashionable opinion -- it is no wonder that, like theology (the only branch of knowledge lower on the scale even than metaphysics) it has emerged in a multitude of disguises. Metaphysics comes masked in the language of science, as political ideology, as literary theory, as reigning doctrine, -- which no one thinks to question with the honest tools of thought. How can one question the metaphysics of people who eschew metaphysics? At best they will let you argue with their facts or interpretations. What is the swordsman to do, given these shifting sands?

Where metaphysical assumptions are not debated -- that is, the Big Questions --all debate is in danger of becoming dishonorable. It becomes a contest for power rather than truth and contributes to inflexibility and hardening of the mind -- a condition which not even the most strenuous, purposeful and tactful swordsmanship can rectify. Because the presupposition of all verbal swordsmanship is that ideas have the power to change people’s minds -- a presupposition that both parties must share: the verbal duellist by his affirmation of it and the opponent by his resistance to it. But even to gain open resistance is to gain a great deal.

A good example of the hardening that sets in with the refusal to entertain the Big Questions can be found in Susanne K. Langer’s book, Philosophy in a New Key, 1979, p. 108-109:

“...This throws us back upon an old and mystifying problem. If we find no prototype of speech in the highest animals, and man will not say even the first word by instinct, then how did all his tribes acquire their various languages? Who began the art which we now all have to learn? . . . .
This problem is so baffling that it is no longer considered respectable.”

Certainly one way of dealing with baffling problems is to refuse to deal with them at all. To have entertained the question Miss Langer asked would have entailed a challenge to the reigning doctrine of naturalism, which asserts that the primitive and simple can evolve into the complex and ramified. But like the stolid matron who threw out the baby because the bathwater was dirty, the modern intellectual is attentive at all times to proprieties, not realities. Paradox, belief, reverence, conscience, imagination, feelings of mystery, gratitude, appreciation, reverie -- these are all improprieties, to be done out of the house by this new breed of loaf-baker who is four-square prose in all her corners.

No wonder the world grows so dull. I provide a few choice samples, each one containing a world-view that would give the verbal duellist ample scope for his talents.

“... a modernist understanding of culture as a contract among speakers who agree to use common normative language that has only an illusory connection to any truth outside itself.”
A. Delbanco, The New Republic, Nov. 23, 1992

“Every individual is virtually an enemy of civilization.”
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

“There is no color in nature, no sounds, no tastes. It is a cold, quiet, colorless affair outside us . . . it is we who transform molecules. . . these things are dimensions of human experience,
not dimensions of the world outside. . . We don’t actually experience the outside world -- we grab at only a very refined portion of it, a portion selected for the purpose of survival . . .”
Robert Ornstein, psychologist, quoted in Memory’s Ghost, by Philip J. Hilts, New York, 1995.

These are examples of unleavened intellect that are now the staple of the modern diet. As metaphysics they are charmless and indigestible indeed. Ample material for the talents of the verbal swordsman, who is not interested in imposing his will upon the world, but in allowing the world to speak itself through him. It is an altogether different music.

XII. Charm, continued: The Metaphysics of Formality

Modern people have agreed that it is better to be informal and casual than formal and dignified. This belief follows directly from our refusal to entertain metaphysics. Casualness and spontaneity are anti-metaphysical.

The verbal duellist challenges this doctrine by regarding reality as anything but casual and the language he employs as ever capable of being polished and perfected as a fit tool of accuracy and expression. His language is formal, dignified, colorful, courteous, forceful, highly literate, and even charming. He is thus like a china-shop in the bull-ring of ideas.

Charm, generally speaking, can only occur in participatory universe. When two things meet and form a third, that is charming. Courtship and the formation and the wetness of water follow this law, which is why they are both charming. But a single individual, or isolates like hydrogen and oxygen, are not charming. They simply are what they are: which is to say, they are not what they are. For how can a being be when “not-ness” is everything else? What are you, if you are altogether surrounded by a not? You cannot be. You can be only when you have a bond, a link: an “is-ness” which is your drawbridge out of the not.

This is called, in philosophic terms, predication, and a mighty important thing it is too. Hillis Miller, the deconstructionist, says that “is” derives from a Sanskrit word meaning “lost in a forest.” How typical of the deconstructionist to produce an etymology that no one else has ever heard of. My copy of Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary informs me that “is” derives from a word that means “dwelling.” This makes a lot more sense. “Is” is our pathway to shelter, to a dwelling-place. That we may make a multiplicity of dwelling-places in the course of a day or a century does not militate against the integrity and utility of our shelters. It only suggests that nomadism is a feature of our intellectual history as of our social: thinking, like certain wandering desert tribes, resists the too-fixed abode.

To say that styles of dwelling-places change over the years is also not equivalent to saying that language, being a tissue of metaphor, refers to nothing real. It is only to suggest that we dwell in a tent until the roof leaks; but the point is not to be tentless. St. Thomas Aquinas was aware of the dimension of linguistic or perceptual subjectivity: “quicquid recipitur, secundum modum recipientis recipitur,” “Whatever is received, is received according to the mode of being of the receiver;” and “cognitum est in cognoscente per modum cognoscentis,” “What is known is in the mind of the knower according to his mode of being.”

St. Thomas here enunciates the law of charm, of participation; and identity is nothing without charm, which is to say, identity is null without participation. The law of charm is the real reason why things get started and keep going in this world. It is the movement of participation from stability into identity, from the universal into the particular -- the golden thread that runs through language as the world.

Consider the example provided by Wilbur M. Urban, author of Language and Reality (1939) -- “Mary sleeps.” This would seem to be a particular, he says. But no: Mary perceived must be Mary walking, running, writing, etc. “The individual Mary is a universal, as a connecting link of her own varying states.”

It was the earlier nominalism that denied the reality of universals. The new nominalism -- Urban presciently says, for remember, this was years before Deconstruction -- denies the reality of individuals. It eventuates in a “pan-fictionalism, according to which to name a thing is to turn it into a fiction.”

We know how the Deconstructionists have played havoc with history -- “... recent theories of textuality have disabled the inside/outside and cause/effect paradigms that once dominated accounts of literature’s relation to social history . . . the history of style turns out to be the style of history itself . . .” Miller and Jay, in “The Role of Theory” in After Strange Texts.

Denis Donoghue describes this new deconstructionist history: “There must be no talk of self, identity, mind, imagination, or will: these are sentimentalities, tokens of an axiomatic humanism.” ( “The Limits of Language,” in The New Republic, July 7, 1986.) For people who abhor metaphysics, this is swallowing a lot indeed.

These new nominalists are correct in knowing that language has the power to charm. Many of them write charmingly under the belief, however, that charm has nothing to do with “reality.” There, their nominalism draws the line. Charm for its own sake, isolated charm: a contradiction in terms. It’s a sticky web, woven by the agile fingers of the Deceiver.

Lucifer knows about charm of language and he has taken it upon himself to appropriate all charm for himself. He is the charming devil, he is the one with devilish charm. Did he not promise to Christ the vision of all the kingdoms of this world in a moment of time? Was that not the temptation to see all of history merely as the “history of style”?

Satan, on the other hand, knows what knowledge of the law of charm would do to his kingdom. It would destroy it. Full knowledge of the law of charm -- the law of participation -- would cause all of his victims to become self-responsible citizens. For this reason he has stolen all the charm from men’s minds and buried it under the polar ice caps.

Only Christ knows the full story of the law of charm. And because he exemplified and embodied it to the full, being both Man and God, he could tell it, or let it be told through him. Spiritual truth, when read by man, is read in reverse -- once again, an example of the “strange logic of reversal.”

That is why the true story of the charm of the universe was told in terms of the most unimaginable suffering, of the deepest and most penetrable crucifixion.

XIII. Winning and Losing

“It matters not if you win or lose, but how you play the game.” This was an old maxim of honor which was meaningful to the extent that there was a place, in the society of Ladies and Gentlemen, for honorable failure. It was not losing, but cheating, that caused one to be expelled from the right society -- like that well-born rogue in turn-of-the-century Philadelphia who was banished from that city for cheating at cards. He ended by making a name for himself in Savannah, hardly the Wild West, liberal enough to overlook the peccadillo but genteel enough to appreciate the pedigree.

Honor, being allied with the blood, bridged both failure and success. It takes, as someone remarked, three generations to make a gentleman. Time is factored into the bloodline, in much the same way that it is factored into the making of cheese or wine. It is mellowness that yields the best flavor.

The modern swordsman is unprotected by such customs having to do with life and bloodlines. It may be a trivial observation, but two of the most popular mass-circulation magazines in America are named Time and Life. Time and life, fallen from the mode of custom, came back in this way as mediators of the popular culture. But what was banished inwardly awaits rediscovery by the intellect. It has not yet happened; the big question remains whether it will ever happen.

* * *
In the Garden of Eden are two trees: the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. The history of our First Parents with respect to these trees has been recounted elsewhere. When the First Man and Woman quitted the Garden in order to toil in the fields of history, the gate behind them was shut, guarded by the Angel with the Flaming Sword. That was God’s way of reminding the First Couple and their progeny that the way back to the Garden is barred except through the most strenuous efforts of thought -- and even then there are no guarantees. It is not really possible to return.

But as long as the Code of Honor formed the nest for the eagle of cognition in the boughs of the Tree of Life, the eagle could not do too much damage. Wars and rumors of wars, to be sure: but not the end, not the annihilation of everything. But the American Eagle has flown the nest, and the question is, whether Honor, loosened from life, can be grafted to Cognition. What cognition has to grapple with is the idea of continuity itself.

The divergence of Thought from Life has come to a head in our time over the abortion issue. That the freedom to destroy one’s young should be touted as a constitutional right, that it should be hailed as a grand new liberation, surely must rank in the wonders of independent thought. Independent from everything, that is: anti-thought, the idea of “not-ness” masquerading as thought. Modern cognition has long been accompanied by the notion of liberation from history. The moderns, so it is believed, discovered Reason and therefore Progress. Nothing therefore need impede the march of Better to Better.

There is nothing wrong, perhaps, in wanting to achieve a better, richer, fuller life, for oneself, or for society as a whole. But the reformation of society to that end without consideration of the continuity of generations leads to obliterating the distinction between means and ends.

The Communists had a saying which achieved a high measure of popularity -- “You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs.” This saying was meant to illustrate the proposition that the ends justify the means -- that you cannot build a better society without crushing a few million people in the process.

Unfortunately, the Communists failed to consider what happens afterwards. What happens six hours later, when you are hungry again, and there are no eggs to be had? It is the idea of continuity which prevents the idea of progress and reform from degenerating into the imposition of intellectualism upon society, which is what Communism really is.

Cognition without ideas relating to continuity, birth, death, resurrection, metamorphosis, becoming, growth, etc. becomes mere intellectualism. There is no life of the mind in such circumstances. The totalitarian intellect destroys all that would give it fertility and life: memory, honor, faith, eccentricity, charm, rootedness, manners, distinction, difference.

Thus is abortion the political expression of this totalitarian intellect, in which the idea of “un-bornness” is equated with that of “context.” For what is a human being, apart from the context of family life, law, language, civilization, culture. Not much -- not much more than a “piece of tissue.”

Roe v. Wade gave to the woman the right to choose whether the child would live. The role of the male, the vote of the male in the decision, was completely disregarded. Giving men no say in an abortion decision was an anti-biological, anti-family idea, an insidious intrusion of the State into the male-female partnership.

A second major consequence of Roe v. Wade was that the State would no longer consider itself duty-bound to protect the weak. It thus pulled the rug out from under its own moral justification for existing. It was not only that a phase of human life was declared beyond legal protection. In principle it was weakness itself which was declared unworthy of protection. Roe v. Wade enshrined anarchy as law when it gave the strong the right to destroy the weak.

Thus did America forsake the rule of law when it welcomed abortion rights to its bosom. It is the war of all against all: putting women above the law, men outside the law, and unborn children beneath the law. Abortion has been, and will continue to be, the focus of many of our national duels. It is the political revelation of the cognitive process in the act of destroying itself.

XIV. The Third Attempt

Ms. Jane Kramer
c/o The New Yorker Magazine
25 West 43rd Street
New York, NY 10036

Dear Ms. Kramer:

I read your article, “The Invisible Woman” in the recent Feb. 26-Mar.4 [1996] issue of the New Yorker with great care and attention. I am writing to you now because you made the statement that “It occurs to me that I would like to take on some of these dreadful, right-wing women -- to do something solid and tough, something to expose them.”

I find this challenge to verbal duelling irresistible -- in fact I have just written a book on this subject -- which is neither here nor there. I am not in the pay of those right-wing lobbies which you scorn. Nor am I interested in attacking you personally or in “exposing” you -- merely wondering whether two women of fundamentally opposed views can meet on the field of honor and conduct a debate on ideas purely on their own merits.

The verbal duelling I have in mind consists in the concise examination of maybe one or two ideas at most per letter -- the number of letters to be decided voluntarily by both parties. The correspondence, likewise, can be terminated at any time, for it is, indeed, a challenging, demanding art, not to be undertaken by lazy persons. I hardly think that you are lazy, given your publications and evident writerly productivity. Nor do I think that either as a woman or a writer that you are “marginal.” You write for The New Yorker, which may be the best, and is certainly one of the best paid, magazines in the country. Try thinking as I do. Then you will understand what it means to be “marginal.”

These, however, are but minor bones to pick. The main point on which I am in contention at the moment is your belief that the distinction between public and private is oppressive. My dear Ms. Kramer, the abolition of all distinction between these realms is totalitarianism. But such is the real tendency of the feminism which you so uncritically embrace.

Our Lord testified to the distinction between the personal and the political when he said: Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, unto God the things that are God’s. It amazed me how you could visit an Arab country, mention that a “Nazarene” meant a Christian -- and therefore a free, woman, and yet overlook so fundamentally the contribution of Christianity towards the liberation of women.

This is certainly not the only, but it is no doubt the main difference in our views. On the other hand I did detect in your article moments where I felt real spiritual strength coming from you, on issues related to overblown self-esteem and the absurd excesses of the feminist multiculturalists. It is toward this level of true ego-strength that I address you in the hope that you will have the courage to respond to my letter in the impartial but principled spirit in which it is offered.

Sincerely yours,
[Signed]

This verbal challenge is unique in that I did not originate it. I was responding to a challenge she expressed in her article. Whether or not I receive a reply remains to be seen.

[Note: April 6, 2008: I never received a reply from Jane Kramer.]

XV. Unconsummated Duels

There are duels that never take place or that occur only in imagination. The challenges I addressed to three opponents were unresponded to -- one being answered, it is true, but not on terms I would characterize as honorable duelling; the others not answered at all.

This raises the question of whether Unresponsiveness is a characteristic of our age -- not as a psychological quality but as metaphysical condition. The responsiveness I mean is a metaphysical position with respect to the world of thought.

There is a difference between a psychological and a metaphysical need. Responsiveness to the world of thought is a metaphysical need having to do with the perception of the seamless nature of that world. Responsiveness in a psychological sense discharges itself in the need for intimacy, for “sharing.” In a metaphysical sense it may take the form of announcing opposition, of demanding clarification. It seems to be the opposite of “sharing.”

That is because, in perceiving the seamless nature of thought, the verbal duellist may encounter “holes” in that fabric of thought, places where the fabric of thinking may need to have something restored to it. But as I have discovered, most of the people to whom I have addressed these challenges of restoration have not been willing to engage. This raises the question, for me, of the nature of the unconsummated duel. According to my premise, the seamless fabric of thought may yet benefit from my having added my own thoughts to the matter at hand. Unfortunately I do not gain the satisfaction of a duel honorably carried out. But perhaps in some sense the thought-world is better for my having tried.

The people who refuse to meet my challenge are all contemporaries. Theoretically it is possible to define the point of honor, dispatch a challenge, and carry through with a duel with a contemporary. But it is not possible to do this with human beings who lived before us -- who are not contemporaries. For some people, and for some circumstances, it is history itself which is the stage of the unconsummated duel.

Let us look, then, to an historical example of the unconsummated duel, and see what we can find. There is the interesting case of Julian the Apostate who, when he died, is said to have uttered the words: “Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!” His was a duel with Christ -- with the victory of Christ in history. Here indeed is a worthy unconsummated duel -- a duel over a grand cause!
Julian, half-brother to Constantine the Great, felt the loss of the old empirical mysticism of the pagan cults very keenly. Upon Constantine’s death in 337 A.D., the palace of intrigue in Constantinople, the seat of the Empire, geared up to mass slaughter. All of the male relatives of the royal family were murdered with the exception of Julian (then about six years of age) and his half-brother Gallus. All of the others were considered to present a threat to the throne.
According to the Chambers Biographical Dictionary, Julian, “Embittered by this tragedy, lost all belief in Christianity.” By then Christianity had become the official religion of the Empire. The happiest moments in Julian’s later youth occurred when he spent some time in Athens studying Greek philosophy. Later recalled to the life of a soldier, he went to the north of Europe and subdued the Frankish tribes along the Rhine. At Sirmium on the Danube he declared himself a pagan.

History did not stop for him; in 361 he became Emperor -- “which opened up to him the government of the world.” He adopted a policy of toleration towards Christians and Jews, but tried to reinstate the Mysteries to their former place of honor.

It did not work, and his life was short. He was mortally wounded by a spear-thrust to his liver -- some say by one of his own men -- while on a military campaign in Persia in the summer of 363.
The Jesus of history could not satisfy the burning thirst of this worshipper of the sun-god, who was allied, in mysterious ways, with the Old Gods Underground. Jesus had claimed history: but what was to become of nature and the cosmos? Julian tried to coax from grove and grotto the old superearthly music. He became an initiate in the Greek Mysteries of Eleusis, whose secrets, we are told, were to be revealed only on pain of death.

But the world had been turned upside down -- or perhaps inside out -- and Nature was god-haunted now, not god-filled. In the salveless, dissatisfied soul of Julian, the Old Gods Underground flared up one last time. But it was the end.

It was already past the end. Expansion cannot get along with contraction; and Julian did not like Paul the Apostle, who proclaimed the teaching of the new Christian inwardized consciousness. Thus in a manner of speaking Julian’s was a three-way duel: with Christ in the background, but against St. Paul in the forefront. Though also, in a manner of speaking, a one-way duel, as St. Paul lived three hundred years before him. It would as though one of us were to pick a quarrel with the men of the Enlightenment -- which, as it happens, happens all the time.

This Paul, or Saul as he was then called, could not know that as he plodded in the sands toward Damascus that the old pagan ekstasis -- that is, the soul’s leaving the body during clairvoyant perception --was about to be superseded by the new principle of indwelling brought on by Christ. And that, moreover, he, Paul-to-be, was to become the chief instrument whereby this transformation would be accomplished.

He was on his way to Damascus still “breathing threats and murders” against the Christians, to carry on his persecutions. He never made it. Rather, he was overthrown, his purposes ground to bits and scattered. The gnostics had a saying about being crushed in the teeth of wild beasts, to emerge as the pure bread of Christ. Maybe those teeth belonged to his own murderous self; but in any case it is a vivid image for Paul. From this cryptic beginning he emerged to become, according to Albert Schweitzer, “the patron saint of thinking in Christianity.”

Through Paul, conscience, synderesis, “the essence of the soul which unites with God,” and syneidesis, “the awareness by man of the cooperation of invisible higher beings” (Emil Bock’s definitions) were enunciated. “For his [i.e. Paul’s] Christian mind the historical Event of Christ’s death-resurrection has the power of myth to transform man’s life, lifts history to a new level while remaining absolutely historical,” says Andrew Welburn. Resurrection becomes the principle of transformation. It was, says Welburn again, a concept “far more subtle and intelligent than the bizarre doctrine of the standing corpses of the later Church.”

Perhaps only Death itself -- or rather, Resurrection -- could become the mediating principle between two such opposing parties -- the Apostle and the Apostate, Contraction and Expansion. Only an esoteric deepening, the inwardizing of pagan empirical mysticism allied with historical consciousness, could bring the reconciliation Julian never experienced. His short life is a monument to the unconsummated duel.

XVI. The Angel with the Flaming Sword

I still have not said much about winning. I would be committing a sentimental falsehood if I offered an easy promise of victory. “In sorrow wilt thou bring forth children,” says God to Eve. “In striving wilt thou bring forth failures,” says the Angel with the Flaming Sword to his followers. But I would be likewise sentimental and false if I pretended to despise winning.

The sickness of the modern world of cognition is such that winning a verbal confrontation has a whole new meaning. To win is to get someone to engage with you. To win is to get someone to play the game according to the rules. To win is to get someone to see that walking away from the engagement is losing.

The Angel of the Flaming Sword accompanies us all through history as St. Michael -- “the great prince of all the angels and the leader of the celestial armies.”

Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable continues with this description -- “In art St. Michael is depicted as a beautiful young man with a severe countenance, winged, and clad either in white or armour, bearing a lance and shield, with which he combats the dragon. In the final judgment he is represented with scales, in which he weighs the souls of the risen dead.”

Indeed, St. Michael’s sword is the sword of pure intelligence:

“Its purity is that of pure light. It has a sure force which contains in itself no violence, a freedom which radiates sincerity yet contains no license, and endless power of giving, in which is no weakness.” F. Rittelmeyer, Meditation.

Honorable swordsmanship exists in perfect counterpoint to the evil in the world that it is combating. Evil is the triumph of a momentary success which cannot last. Verbal swordsmanship, an effort which more often than not is crowned with failure, forms that history of memorable and remembered deeds which is the reservoir that civilization draws upon. It is its spiritual capital, the transformations of failure into fruitfulness.

The iron in our physical bodies is the result of self-sacrifice. It is one of those heavier elements that is created only when a star heats up to the point where its own destruction results. The supernova explosion allows for the creation of elements needed for a second generation of stars.
Likewise, the spiritualized iron of St. Michael’s intelligence has been forged in stars that lived long before our own sun. His sword of intelligence is planted in the earth where sacrifice can be mysteriously transformed into fulfillment. For this reason verbal swordsmanship lasts forever. And may this thought be

The End
of this book.