Remembering Our Names

We Are Each Created for a Life of Consequence

There is a question whether faith can, or is supposed to be, emotionally satisfying. I must say that the thought of everyone lolling about in an emotionally satisfying faith is repugnant to me. - Flannery O’Connor

Something interesting is happening right now. A surprising number of public intellectuals, writers and activists are publicly confessing a faith in Christ. Others, if not quite confessing a faith of their own, are nevertheless publicly stating their belief in the beneficial necessity of Christian civilization. One of the curious and instructive facets of this awakening, if I can call it that, is that most of these writers and thinkers, to my knowledge, are drawn to Catholicism. Lesser numbers to Orthodoxy and Anglicanism but no one, as far as I know, has been converted to modern evangelicalism. Without exception these recent converts seem to be reaching further back in history and ignoring more recent innovations in Christian practice. So one sees the influence of Orthodoxy (e.g. Paul Kingsnorth), Anglicanism (e.g. Mary Harrington), Catholicism (e.g. Matthew Crawford). But noticeably absent from these events are any of these intellectuals, that I’m aware of anyway, who has found his way to, say, the Baptists, or to the local “Community Church”.

I have a theory, maybe more like just some thoughts, for why this might be the case. I don’t know whether I am correct. But there are some things I have been puzzling over for a few years now. Sometimes I write to unpack my own thoughts - to discover what I think about something. This is one of those times.

A few days ago I went to see a musical play rendition of the story found in the biblical book of Esther. The story in Esther is the progenitor of the Jewish feast of Purim. In the story, then as now - alas, some people were hoping to kill Jews. The villain of the story is an official of the Persian king named Haman. Haman is a genocidal monster who schemes to have all the Jews in Persia murdered. Unbeknownst to Haman, the Queen of Persia, from whom the book of Esther draws its name, is actually a Jewess who has kept her identity a secret.

As the story is told, Esther was an orphan who was taken in and raised by a cousin of her parents. The man who raised her and, by all accounts loved her like a daughter, was named Mordecai. Mordecai becomes a special target of the villainous Haman due to his refusal to bow whenever Haman comes around. The reason for Mordecai’s refusal is the subject of some scholarly debate, but the writer of the play takes his cue from a curious and seemingly random comment about Haman added by the author of the book: Haman, the book’s author takes pains to point out, was an Agagite. By contrast Mordecai, the book of Esther says, was in the same family line as the first king of Israel — King Saul.

There really is a point I’m leading up to here, but the reader will have to bear with me.

Agagites were descendants of King Agag, the Amalekite king who reigned around 1000 BC. King Saul defeated King Agag in war, and the Jewish prophet Samuel subsequently hacked Agag to death, consistent with God’s instructions. Instructions which Saul had, to his own detriment, ignored. Over 500 years later, in the book of Esther, it is a descendant of King Agag who is attempting to destroy the remaining Jews.

The playwright of the musical I attended interpreted Mordecai’s refusal to bow before Haman as an expectation that he had of himself as result of being a descendant of King Saul, and as someone fulfilling a role in a narrative arc that was begun by those who came before him. In other words, Mordecai’s refusal to bow was interpreted in the play as an act of piety toward his ancestral fathers. His sense of right and wrong, in his present moment, was thus leavened by his understanding of the role he played in a narrative history that had begun hundreds of years before.

The idea that our lives take place in a historical context, as part of a larger story than merely our own present wants, or even our own needs, is an ancient idea that is being lost in the West. Maybe it’s more accurate to say it is being stolen from the West. Presentism is the notion that all things should only ever be understood in the context of our own modern sensibilities. This is partly behind our cultural determination to remember only the flaws of our forbears, while being sure to blind ourselves to any of our own attributes except our virtues. Ancestors who were irredeemably flawed can have no purchase, of course, on the choices of their descendants. And in our pretentious, modern, caricatured vision of our ancestors, they simply must - without exception - be wholly flawed. Otherwise, we moderns might have a lot to answer for.

A day or two ago I was talking to the teenage granddaughter. I was telling her stories about my own grandfather, my uncle, and myself. As it happens, my own grandfather was a nuclear reactor operator, working on the reactors which produced the plutonium for the earliest American nuclear bombs. His son, my uncle, worked on the Apollo space program. I myself have had the privilege of playing a minor role in building the most powerful supercomputer ever constructed. Upon hearing these stories the granddaughter spontaneously volunteered, “Wow. Maybe I should consider trying to accomplish more with my life than I thought.” In real life, it turns out, understanding the context and actions of those who preceded you has the natural effect of informing your own understanding and expectation of yourself.

Imagine that.

Recently I’ve been re-reading The Lord of the Rings trilogy. At the penultimate climax of the events, the men of the West mount an almost certain-to-be suicidal assault on the Black Gate - the very fortress of darkness and evil. The dark Lord Sauron sends an emissary out to treat with the forces of truth and beauty. Tolkien describes the emissary as a man who was cunning, “more cruel than any orc”, someone enamored with evil knowledge, and who “knew much of the mind of Sauron”. And then Tolkien says this about him:

and his name is remembered in no tale; for he himself had forgotten it

Tolkien makes the chilling point here that, when you have forgotten your own name, you have lost the actual memory of what is true and good. I think he is suggesting that one of the effects of immersion in, and alliance with, evil is that you are eventually cut off from the memory of where you came from and what you are for. (I have seen this very phenomenon with my own eyes.) As I read Tolkien’s words, I was reminded of the current practice, by transgender activists, of jettisoning their given names and insisting that those names never again be used.

All of these events - my attendance at the play, my discussion with the teenage granddaughter, my reading of the Lord of the Rings trilogy - all of these occurred within a few days of each other.

And then just yesterday I stumbled across a pre-released chapter from an upcoming book by Jordan Peterson. You can find the chapter here. I don’t know what the book is entirely about, but the specific chapter he released is on the propagandistic nature of the AI language models that are being thrust upon us. Peterson is outraged at the way the makers of these models have manipulated them in ways that favor and flatter the cultural revolutionaries of the totalitarian left. In Peterson’s chapter, he gives examples of AI model outputs which re-envision historically male heroic archetypes as women, while interpreting all human relational dynamics in terms of the power dynamics between oppressors and the oppressed. Peterson’s outrage is palpable at what amounts to models that have been intentionally trained to facilitate the cancellation of the Western cultural imagination. He foresees that disaster will follow for any culture that, to use Tolkien’s phrasing, forgets its own name.

So what does any of this have to do with the recent trend of public intellectuals gravitating toward Catholicism et al? Well, I think that Catholicism especially, but even Orthodoxy and Anglicanism to a great extent, offers a more fully formed and explanatory worldview regarding the current points of cultural tension than does, say, modern Evangelicalism. The major civilizational flash points we are witnessing are really disputes over what we are going to believe about the narrative historical context in which we live. We are in a dispute over what it means to be human - what we are and what we are for. I find that Evangelical writers and thinkers tend to perceive most questions more narrowly through the lens of personal salvation. The theological mechanics of salvation, along with the downstream psychic benefits, occupies most of what I find among the Evangelical writers I have read. Even those writing explicitly on cultural conflicts (e.g. homosexual marriage) tend to conceive of it primarily in the context of its effect on an individual’s standing as a Christian.

In a very real sense, however, our cultural conflicts boil down to a kind a narrative civil war over the assumptions we are going to make about human createdness. Moderns bristle at the necessary implications of having been created and the impossibility, therefore, of being self-defining. If we are created, then the circumstances of our existence have been imposed upon us, and we are incapable of redefining our own essence: created beings are inescapably an artifact of their creator’s will.

C.S. Lewis foresaw much of this current conflict, which he unpacked in his novel, That Hideous Strength.

“Supposing one were a thing after all--a thing designed and invented by Someone Else and valued for qualities quite different from what one had decided to regard as one's true self?”

Lewis’ question, which he placed in the mind of one of the characters in his novel, is a helpfully succinct articulation of the essential point of tension that is roiling Western culture. It is probably not for nothing that Lewis’ novel is right now enjoying something of a renaissance of attention being paid to it. If you haven’t read

N.S. Lyons

on the prescience of That Hideous Strength, run - don’t walk - to his Substack. A related and extended podcast discussion of the timely relevance of Lewis’ novel can be found here. (Full disclosure: this author participated in the podcast.)

To put all of this in more tidy academic terms, most evangelical writers seem primarily concerned with therapeutic soteriology and not so much with Christian anthropology. The Catholic writers I have read place more emphasis on, and have a more well-developed, biblical anthropology than do the Evangelicals. Since the culture war in the West, at this particular moment, is essentially a conflict over anthropology, it seems possible that the recently converted intellectuals/writers/activists may be finding more answers to their most urgent questions within the Catholic tradition. That could explain what I’m seeing.

It is noteworthy, I think, that the secular police state views traditional Catholics as a threat to their agenda but, with a few notable exceptions, seems to view evangelicals as hapless innocents. What is it about the Catholics that makes them so consistently attract the right enemies?

What the Enemy has accomplished by sowing confusion on the question of anthropology is, effectively, to cause us to forget our own names. We are losing sight of the true historical narrative which has ever provided an interpretational lens for understanding who we are, and what we need to do. By the relentless and propagandistic denigration of our forbears, we are being cut off from any historical continuity within which to understand our own lives. Our understanding of ourselves is being isolated - imprisoned within the present. Our cultural compass is thereby being continually eroded. For many, even now, their compass points them toward no pursuit more ennobling than their own psychic comfort. What could have been lives of consequence are instead being funneled toward nothing more consequential than the gratification of momentary appetites.

And what could possibly be more dehumanizing than that?