The Future of Faith

The wellsprings of faith upon which some of us draw may seem dry at times – even for longer than the typical instant of doubt that assaults all believers every now and then – dry, dusty and riddled with the scrapings of centuries of delusion.  Perhaps living in an environment where your views are not contemned on a daily basis would aid the believer in his quest to find inner peace.  Yet such isolation simultaneously robs him of something of undue importance: the humbug of the non-believer.  The non-believer is an exceptional person.  He has understood, to whatever degree, that he is not immortal, neither in body or soul, and has valiantly elected to carry on as if this realization – the most momentous realization at which a man can arrive – should not affect anything, from his morning ablutions to his nightly cocktails.  One wonders what precisely drives such a person to rise from his bed and embrace his routine as the semblance of an existence.  Oftentimes, it is material gain, which is the straight road of perdition; other times, the same mindless musings of which he so timorously accuses the believer ("all this is not real; all this is very real, but death is not real because death is not what we think it is; perhaps we are all already dead"); on other occasions it is the individualist's desire to separate himself from the masses and responsibility towards others.  In my mostly pleasant traffic with self-proclaimed atheists and agnostics, their spineless cohorts, I have found this last scenario to be the most causative.  Religion is a prison, an opiate, a necessary mirage to soothe the simple minds of the loitering rabble; religion enslaves, massacres and lies – as opposed, of course, to science, industrial capitalism, fascism, communism and any other movement that thinks it has all the answers.  One day we shall have the cure for a coryza, and perhaps on that same eventful day our universe will reveal its inner workings to us at last.  Until then, let the deluded and weary take comfort in essays such as the one above from this collection.

The future of faith has everything to do with its past.  For the Abrahamic religions, that past might indeed extend to Adam's navel, or to a tree gilded by a slippery shadow, or the first homicide that released us into a den of thieves and killers,  but science has indicated this is all plain hogwash.  Numerous non-scientists have unwittingly buttressed the anticlerical movements ignited by, among other catastrophes, the French Revolution, and Updike produces to that end a lovely quote from a strange bedfellow's work:

Our walk through Mantua showed us, in almost every street, some suppressed church: now used for a warehouse, now for nothing at all.

I know this book (it no longer sits, however, on my shelf) and should not be surprised.  Christians march to Italy the way Muslims idealize Mecca, and the endless array of fountains and churches, the Vatican, the incomparable art, music and food all glorify the chosen seat of the Faith to millions of yearly visitors.  How piteous, therefore, to consider for a moment the treasons committed and evils allowed in this same holy land.   Updike recounts some of the blasphemies (often at the turn of each century; Updike was writing in 1999) that have usurped enough power and credence to become the rule rather than the outlier, and then gracefully intercedes with his own visit to Italy. He and his second wife take in the beautiful and eternal and nod in assent to both those qualities.  When he opts to stroll through this famous museum, his wife commendably "decline[s] to waste her time on modern trash."  What Updike finds in that shelter of gizmos, rebellion and utter talentlessness is amusing but also sad.  Art is the reflection of a man's soul; from all indications the modern soul most closely resembles a graffitied toaster.

Updike also saunters through childhood memories, some rather frivolous because they are too intimate, and discovers the paradigms that structure his own faith.  He is, after all, the grandson of a preacher and a lifelong churchgoer who, although an adherent to one Protestant church, had been a member of two others.  He wisely passes over this indecision with the tacit admission that each venue serves the same purpose and, as it were, the very same Power.  His attendance, seen by his consorts as "an annoying affectation," puts him squarely in the minority:

Belief in the afterlife is going up, even as church attendance drops.  Attendance has been drifting lower ever since the baby boomers, joining churches as they began to generate families, started to wander away again.  Though for decades polls have pegged the number of regular churchgoing Americans at around forty percent ... [it is estimated] that only twenty-eight percent of Roman Catholics attend Mass on a given weekend and fewer than one in five Protestants are in church on Sunday morning.  Home study and the Sunday-morning religious shows on television are helping empty the pews.  As part of the do-it-yourself trend, the sales of religious books have risen spectacularly, by fifty percent in the last ten years.

Such statistics belie the general tone of the essay, which is subjective, personal and saltatory.  In fact, upon close inspection the whole affair reads as a disorganized clump, a tumbleweed grasping or lunging at random ideas of beauty and redemption (the most sensational being a Florentine thunderstorm).  This confession from the "New Yorker's token Christian" is not nearly as organized as the systematic brilliance of this theologian or this great thinker – but religion commingles the unshakeable pattern of reason with the wildly sentimental disarrangements of the Romantic.  In other words, if you can experience both within a short time, you can assert without fear of perjury that a sense for the religious is not alien to you.  Updike also has an eloquent observation about his father's faith:

Where many fathers – some of them described in late-Victorian novels – conveyed to their sons an oppressive faith that was a joy to cast off, my father communicated to me, not with words but with his actions and his melancholy, a sense of the Christian religion as something weak and tenuous and in need of rescue.  There is a way in which success disagrees with Christianity.  Its proper venue is embattlement – a furtive hanging-on in the catacombs or at ill-attended services in dying rural and inner-city parishes.  Its perilous, marginal, mocked existence serves as an image of our own, beneath whatever show of success can be momentarily mustered.

That we are embattled needs little discussion; that success is too often defined by everyone's definition except your very own continues to baffle people until they become old, grey and unsuccessful.  But that the way of the Lamb can use whatever strength we can grant it should be reason enough to wonder about the meek and our future inheritance.

Aes Triplex

After a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through.  By the time a man gets well into the seventies, his continued existence is a mere miracle; and when he lays his old bones in bed for the night, there is an overwhelming probability that he will never see the day.  Do the old men mind it, as a matter of fact?  Why, no.  They were never merrier; they have their grog at night, and tell the raciest stories; they hear of the death of people about their own age, or even younger, not as if it was a grisly warning, but with a simple childlike pleasure at having outlived someone else; and when a draught might puff them out like a fluttering candle, or a bit of a stumble shatter them like so much glass, their old hearts keep sound and unaffrighted, and they go on, bubbling with laughter, through years of man's age compared to which the valley at Balaclava was as safe and peaceful as a village cricket-green on Sunday.  It may fairly be questioned (if we look to the peril only) whether it was a much more daring feat for Curtius to plunge into the gulf, than for any old gentleman of ninety to doff his clothes and clamber into bed.

Those of artistic bent face a quandary that, compared to the perdition looming over so much of the world's population, may seem petty.  When we are young and unsung there are few who will heed our opinions.  Our parents and teachers smile at our sudden discovery of age-old platitudes, while the women we seek to impress cannot possibly be impressed with the unsteady observations of callow manhood.  As time progresses we marry and procreate, become greater experts in whatever field we have chosen either provisionally or as a simple means of sustenance until we blossom as artists, and if we are not careful, we wake up one morning and find ourselves no longer young.  Around us walk members of a whole new generation that consider us nothing more than martinets of stale values and ideals; if they're particularly rebellious, they will even deride our playfulness as inappropriate.  To all this, of course, we nod our heads and remember our own churlish gibes at our elders, part and parcel of becoming authorities on what it means to live.  Yet what no one can hold forth on with any credibility is the end of days, how life resolves itself either into nothingness or something greater still.  And how we should approach our evenings is the subject of this famous essay.

The most important thing about death is that we have no contrast for its understanding.  Life as we know it is not really life, but the pursuit of living – be that living wildly or quite prudishly with one eye cast above to the gathering clouds.  We continue nevertheless to prattle on about life in the most abstract terms as if it were a recipe or an amorphous mass of an invisible element, which is precisely what bothers Stevenson:

In taking away our friends, death does not take them away utterly, but leaves behind a mocking, tragical, and soon intolerable residue, which must be hurriedly concealed .... and, in order to preserve some show of respect for what remains of our old loves and friendships, we must accompany it with much grimly ludicrous ceremonial, and the hired undertaker parades before the door.  All this, and much more of the same sort, accompanied by the eloquence of poets, has gone a great way to put humanity in error; nay, in many philosophies the error has been embodied and laid down with every circumstance of logic; although in real life the bustle and swiftness, in leaving people little time to think, have not left them time enough to go dangerously wrong in practice.

A cursory glance at these words and further inspection of the essay should not result in the indifference so commonly incident to daredevils and other defiers.  Practice has been to worship those we loved, and that practice will never stop, at least inwardly.  But as children, a stage of life that greatly concerned Stevenson, we are told and shown a plethora of rituals that, as we age, do not necessarily become more intelligible.  Surely a blessing for safe passage is clear even to the greenest among us, but what of wakes, cremation, or burial among the filth we scrape daily off our shoes?  What possesses a society to exalt the enskied spirits of our beloved if we rudely dispose of their former forms?  This is no place for comparative anthropology on death rituals – a subject that always seems to infiltrate college curricula – so let us but roam amidst an infirm Scotsman's preset boundaries.

Death has its admirers, normally those among us who either seek exculpation from their sins or a release from what they perceive as unending torment.  The monk who beseeches his Lord to do away with his sullied body so that his soul may be clean is worthy of both our respect and pity; and those poor mortal coils who take matters into their own hands deserve even greater remorse.  But Death lingers on as the most impenetrable of human mysteries because it sustains more readings than life.  Ask a physician about our terminus and he will point to diagrams and x-rays; ask a theologian and he will nod in grave acceptance of our Fate; ask a soldier and he will see battlefields strewn with his companions, fallen but never forgotten; ask a very old man and you may notice a sadness as all of life flashes behind his eyes.  As the highest form of human expression, it is literature which assumes the task of imagining death most explicitly, and we do so by "rising from the consideration of living to the Definition of Life."  Death becomes what will be taken away and, in the view of some, never replaced:

Into the views of the least careful there will enter some degree of providence; no man's eyes are fixed entirely on the passing hour; but although we have some anticipation of good health, good weather, wine, active employment, love, and self-approval, the sum of these anticipations does not amount to anything like a general view of life's possibilities and issues; nor are those who cherish them most vividly, at all the most scrupulous of their personal safety.  To be deeply interested in the accidents of our existence, to enjoy keenly the mixed texture of human experience, rather leads a man to disregard precautions, and risk his neck against a straw.  For surely the love of living is stronger in an Alpine climber roping over a peril, or a hunter riding merrily at a stiff fence, than in a creature who lives upon a diet and walks a measured distance in the interest of his constitution.

Death, we recall, "outdoes all other accidents because it is the last of them"; after that some might say that there are no accidents, only destiny.  Yet as we pass middle age and move gently into that good night, we may have prudence and caution as our only bedfellows.  We may desist in any acts of generosity and instead devolve into an insular being surviving against the rest of the predatory world.  That survival has so casually come to replace life in common parlance among men of science says much about the world that now surrounds us: we have relinquished any hope for salvation and put our efforts into genetic experiments that may prove to be the greatest catastrophe we will have ever wrought upon mankind.  Already in Stevenson's age  and shortly thereafter there appeared scientists (including this scholar who inspired more than one literary understudy) who felt untouched by God's hand and yearned for a reality they could fashion in the image of our most perfect beast.  What you may think of these would-be creators will probably reflect what you think about our ultimate destination – but that is a subject best left to one's own conscience.

The title of the essay is from a citation by this Roman writer, but applied in anecdote to an English lexicographer and critic whose weighty step still resounds in our best libraries.  One may chuckle at the famously elephantine Johnson garbed in three layers of brass, but one should remember where he was at the time: roaming the Scottish highlands, ill of health, and accompanied, as one now imagines always to have been the case, by another Scotsman named Boswell.  A model of "intelligence and courage" to expose oneself to such a climate when many a physician had already surmised the end to be near.  But for some of us, our beginning is in our end. 

The Faith and Industrial Capitalism

Everything about Industrial Capitalism – its ineptitude, its vulgarity, its crying injustice, its dirt, its proclaimed indifference to morals (making the end of man an accumulation of wealth, and of labor itself an inhuman repetition without interest and without savor) is at war with the Catholic spirit.

                                                                                                                         Hilaire Belloc

From the title of the above essay in this collection and the opening citation, it may be concluded that we mean the doctrine of the Catholic Church against that of another entity, namely the belief in the power of enriching oneself without limit or conscience – but the true issue lies elsewhere.  The true issue has as little to do with the Catholic Church, or any Church, as it does with the motors and levers of factory growth and maintenance, or even with the gold bullion that factory owners tend to hoard.  We cannot deny a person his ambition to make his life better; indeed, the vast majority of emigration is fueled by precisely that desire.  Nor can we correctly persuade him to forsake almost every penny he has earned for the benefit of a society that did little in his promotion.  He will bellow and bay at our demands for his contribution to the nation that did not want him or his forefathers to cross its border, and will be equally vicious at any charges of chauvinism or selfish interest.  He was poor; he departed a life whose fate was already determined; and he arrived in a land of opportunity, which for a person of proper attitude and energy can be practically any land.  In this land he built a fire.  On that fire he did not roast the morsels that mendicant activity might have secured, or even the stale bread that a laborer gains at the end of another black day.  Instead, he forged an iron scythe and with that scythe he revolutionized the harvest.  And soon enough his invention became the most profitable means to reap what he or any of the enterprising and ruthless persons who copied his scythe certainly did not sow.

Now property in and of itself has long been a principle espoused by the Catholic Church.  After all, it was the Church itself that owned a large amount of Europe before the Reformation, and what was once servitude developed in time into something positive and even dignified – there are, admittedly, few things less dignified than servitude.  Belloc phrases it thus:

The antique world was a servile state; the civilized man of the Graeco-Roman civilization based his society upon slavery .... The Church did not denounce slavery, it accepted that institution.  Slaves were told to obey their masters.  It was one of their social duties, as it was the duty of the master to observe Christian charity towards his slave.  It was part of good work (but of a rather heroic kind) to give freedom in bulk to one's slaves.  But it was not an obligation.  Slavery only disappeared after a process of centuries, and it only disappeared through the gradual working of the Catholic doctrine upon the European mind and through the incompatibility of that doctrine with such treatment of one's fellow men as was necessary if the discipline of servitude were to remain efficient.

Whatever one may think of the Ancient world – and many prefer it still to our current reality – the claims that Belloc makes are undeniable and decidedly pervasive.  Yet to debate whether the Church was primarily responsible for the liberation of the average man from the yoke of decadent overlords is again missing the point by a significant margin.  Christianity does not need a church to implement its ideals; and as its detractors never tire of emphasizing, it often implements policies by which no true Christian could ever abide.  What the Church facilitated, in a form intelligible to the persons who existed at the time as well as to subsequent historians, was a code that could be specifically called Christian and more accurately called moral.  Much of recent philosophy has been devoted to showing that we need no Church or even an Anointed to be moral, which is at once true and untrue.  We can indeed be moral if we understand what pity and love really mean; when we see the history of man, however, we might see something even Greater.  But what we cannot reconcile is the urge to enslave others to make us millionaires with our duty to treat all like equals, equals in dignity, equals in respect, and equals under the law of free will to decide our own fate.  

The antidote to Capitalism was the most radical political movement of the twentieth century, and despite its alleged novelty, there is nothing new to Socialism or Communism or Marxism-Leninism or whatever you wish to call it.  Socialism is the realization that very rich people do not really pay more taxes than an aggregate of citizens making the same amount of money, nor do very rich people really serve any purpose at all apart from enriching themselves further. Socialism is also the realization that trickle-down economics, one of the biggest travesties that economists have ever created, is absolute hogwash.  What trickles down is what the very rich don't need – and you'd be surprised at what they decide they do need – leaving those tasks well below their perceived level or class; you know the kind, the menial errands of the disenfranchised and servile.  But neither is Socialism the answer for a person of moral principles:

What is vaguely called 'Socialism' of which the only logical and complete form worthy of notice in practice is Communism, directly contradicts Catholic morals and is at definable and particular issue with them in a more immediate way than is capitalism.  Communism involves a direct and denial of free will; and that it has immediate fruits violently in opposition to the fruits of Catholicism there can be no doubt .... To promote conflict between citizens, to engage in a class war with the destruction of capitalism as the main end is also directly in contradiction with Catholic morals .... We may say: 'You have a right to fight to prevent the conditions of your life becoming inhuman,' but we may not say, 'You have a right to fight merely because you desire to have more and your opponent to have less.'  

Some rather petty minds may conceive of free will as the right to take what is theirs and leave what they do not need, but that axiom will quickly remind you of another theory.  We may also remember the paradigm case of this English dramatist about two thieves, one of whom was offered Paradise and was saved.  And that other one?  No need to make any presumptions.    

Science as the Enemy of Truth

Readers of the pages will understand that I have few qualms about the development of modern technology: there are so many wonderful aspects to our existence, devices that ease our every movement and task that I would be rather grim to rail against the riches that science has brought to man's thatched hut.  Yet what science is and is not remains a pervasive misconception.  Among many of my fellow earthlings the misconception can be summarized very pithily in the axiom: what science promises, faith removes.  Faith, as the persons who promote such an axiom will tell you, is nothing more than a panoply of superstitions to while away our ignorance, children's tales to explain to unripe minds what will become readily evident at a later age.  From this reasoning, anyone who subscribes to the tenets of faith believes in fairy tales because his mind cannot or will not accept the logical precision and explanation of the world in which he exists.   It might have been profitable at one time, indeed almost necessary, to flood the masses' consciousness with dreams of an afterlife and a grandfatherly caretaker who will reward the good and consign the bad to some fiery demise, and this charade was sufficient to lend hope to the farmer's russet brow and keep them in thralldom to the moneyed.  But since the middle of the nineteenth century we have lifted the veil of our foolishness and begun the steady march towards total and complete knowledge.  Gone are the mysteries of the Trinity, the whimsical writings we call the Scriptures, the agonistic effort to do good amidst the scoriae of a fallen world.  Every last corollary of Christian teaching, every last rose window within every last nave in every last chapel in the universe is a two millennia-old lie.  We have all been duped by our own fears, and should now break free and celebrate the liberty that science has bestowed upon us in the form of atheism, selfishness, greed, and living for the here and now at the expense of the there and then.  If all this sounds a bit too easy and congratulatory, that's because it is.  And what science is, is not, should and should not be are all addressed in this essay from this superb collection.

Belloc will be the first to admit that the essay's title is in fact a contradiction in terms.  Science, in its former identity, used to mean exactly what any Latinist will tell you it means: knowledge and the glorious and relentless pursuit thereof.  There is no shame in saying that knowledge has overcome many of our quainter understandings of the world; yet it has also reinforced the impression held by those of faith that although we cannot hope to comprehend even a fraction of the awesome realm that we call reality, something inside of us suggests that we may be privy to much more than we suspect.  And so, while the pundits of evolutionary clarity continue stumbling through their caverns and fossilized fictions, we are left with science as a form of petty oneupmanship that really defeats its inherent purpose:

Many men of today would by implication at least show their agreement with that phrase, "Science is the enemy of Truth"; and the number of those who feel this more or less consciously is increasing.  On seeing a passage beginning, "Science has proved ..." or "There is no scientific evidence for ..."  or "Examined in a strictly scientific spirit ...." and so forth, men are becoming more and more predisposed to quarrel with what follows.  They are filled with an "I know all about that!" feeling.  On hearing of some method that it is "scientific" they are at once prepared to find it leading to ridiculous conclusions.  They do not feel instructed; they feel warned.  Habits of eating, clothing and everything else suggested in the name of "Science" they constantly discover to be inhuman, degrading or simply silly.  The term "Scientific" applied to some recommended habit is beginning to have something grotesque about it, as likely to be in opposition to the general conclusions of mankind and our human common sense.  As for the name "Scientist," it has fallen on the worst fate of all.  It is becoming something of an Aunt Sally, and to call a man a Scientist is perilously near making a laughing-stock of him; unless you add the word "distinguished," which turns him into a statue.

No clearer proof of such a morass of competitive minds who seek victory instead of truth can be found than the continuous (and almost daily) "scientific studies" that contradict other scientific studies and, eventually, themselves.  They will tell you that drinking alcohol is both good and bad, depending on the quantity, quality, and whether you eat, sleep and exercise regularly – as if this needed millions of research funds to determine.  They will tell you that love doesn't exist in its Romantic form and is nothing more than a series of chemical reactions, and then later backtrack and espouse love as a psychosomatic healer of physical pain – which again evinces nothing new under all the suns of the universe.  

Yet the main fault with all the science-seekers that continue to do some good work in terms of technological advancement and some very atrocious work in terms of philosophy is the smugness that accompanies these additions.  As much as people may complain of proselytizing on the part of certain church advocates, there is no louder howl to be heard than from the militant atheists who have concluded before ever reading Augustine or Swedenborg, or even more recent thinkers such as Tillich, the younger Niebuhr or Belloc himself, that nothing can happen that they could not know about or understand.  They will attempt to defend themselves by stating that we know very little about the universe – a wholly true statement – and yet they know quite enough to aver that God cannot possibly exist.  Is not the question of God the most important and elusive piece of knowledge that mankind could ever have?  When confronted with this ridiculous contradiction, they swat away any doubters by employing the very same tactics of which they accuse the clergy.  Namely, that only the enlightened can possibly understand the shape and shifts of the universe, and that any suffering they might incur owing to their work (both terms used rather loosely) earns them the moniker of "martyr":

There is ... no more absurd example of "Scientific" mumbo-jumbo than this ... A "martyr to science" should properly mean one who bears witness to scientific truth by submitting to suffering rather than recant his conviction.  In this sense men are indeed martyrs to scientific truth who sufficiently anger the Scientists by pointing out their mistakes .... But our new priesthood does not use the word "martyr" in this sense at all.  They apply it to a man who is blown up in the course of a chemical experiment, or who dies of a disease caught in a medical one.  And as for "the gulf between the clergy and the laity," which was made such a grievance of against real priests, it is nothing to the gulf between the ignorant herd and Scientific Persons.  They show a corporate and almost universal contempt for the man who has not had the leisure to go through all their studies, but who can bring valid criticism to bear on their own laughable conclusions; they do not meet his criticism in its own field, they appeal to Status, to their own necessary and unapproachable superiority.

Now one would not hesitate to trust a chemist rather than a coffeehouse barista as to an evaluation of rat poison or a metallic alloy.  But I would rather have the barista make my cappuccino for the simple reason that he will know more about the chemical processes and foibles involved therewith than any chemist.  And herein lies the problem with materialistic science: there will always be someone who knows better.  The problem is not unlike the quandary of the rich man who wakes up one day and realizes that he will never become the richest man in the world: the only way he can ever be considered rich is to hobnob with those who have less than him and thus, quite logically, he spends a disproportionate amount of his time making sure that everyone knows quite how wealthy he is.  The same pockmark identifies the man of science who will devote all too many hours to highlighting the ignorance of others on, ironically, either petty things that do not matter one way or another (the chemical composition of an obscure plant, for example) or things he hasn't the foggiest notion about (the nature of God, the number of stars in a galaxy invisible to the human eye, what was taking place on earth five billion years ago).  Purely empirical knowledge like money can only be relative, because regardless of what noble intentions may have existed at the onset the quest for purely empirical knowledge will always devolve into a competition.  And apart from a few "elections" in some recent totalitarian states, no one to date has yet to win a competition in which there were no other participants.

Science in itself is a marvel, but science in itself is not the subject of Belloc's title.  What he refers to and states explicitly is the modern scientific spirit of snobbery, oneupmanship, ego maintenance and glory.  Not one of those characteristics should distinguish a true scholar.  And while Belloc exaggerates mildly when he claims that "anyone can, with patience, do scientific work," he is at the same time generally correct: we all do scientific work to form conclusions about what is hot and cold, safe or dangerous, painful or pleasant.  The person who sees a gang of toughs in an evening alleyway does not need to stroll in their direction to understand he is risking his well-being; nor does a child who has only beheld from afar a fireplace's crack and spittle need to immerse his hand in flame to see what might come of it.  Our method of reasoning perception, what science often claims belongs to it and it alone, is how we deal with the majority of our reality's moments, but this is coupled with a large amount of faith.  We believe that certain things will and will not occur that have nothing to do with empirical observation.  We believe that our spouses, who are apparently only attracted to us by chemicals, will not find the chemicals of others more attractive even during long periods of separation from our chemicals.  We believe that our government will do everything in its power to avoid a nuclear war, or war in general, although we have little material evidence that would persuade us of its unswerving commitment to that end.  But with the scientists who have come to outyell all other voices of reason, we encounter a particularly virulent form of egoism that has spelled the downfall of many of their predecessors:

[The] Scientist has acquired a habit of achievement in knowledge: in knowledge not possessed by the mass of other men.  This breeds in him a natural pride, and from that root, I think, spreads that extraordinary presupposition I have noted, unconscious, but very much alive, that the scientist is possessed of universal knowledge .... [and so] a cause of the Modern Scientific Spirit's disease would seem to be the exclusion from consciousness of all that is not measurable by known and divisible units, because the scientific method can only deal with results recorded in known and divisible units.  Thus, the physical scientist tends through habit to a state of mind in which qualities not so measurable seem negligible or imaginary; hence the loss of the sense of beauty -- the loss of all that is qualitative; the loss of distinction and of hierarchy in sensation.

This is where science ends: at the doorstep of a lab of no color, shape or distinction.  Science travels a long path and completes tasks to make our lives easier, safer and healthier, but it must know its limits.  It cannot explain the sensations we feel when we look upon the starry sky, the curdling ambition that restrains us in our speech and manners for fear of offending some greater party, our sympathy for those who will never love or even know us, those whose predicaments we will never personally confront,  those who exist as blurry forms on the periphery of our privileged paths.  There can be no scientific explanation for the feelings that rise in our throats when we see what we have and what they do not, when we contemplate the suffering that has ravaged the world in every century to the detriment of the majority but not of us.  There is no logical explanation for us, nor can science ever hope to develop one.  Except, of course, if what we understand as science is extended back to its original sense to what we might learn from the realms of the unseen and unprovable.  And we see and what we can prove are often two wholly different things.

The Kreutzer Sonata

He shook my hand and smiled at the same time, a smile which seemed unabashedly mocking, and then began to explain to me how he had brought the notes to prepare for Sunday and that they were in disagreement as to what to play: should they tackle something more complicated and classic, namely Beethoven's violin sonata, or resign themselves to smaller, trivial pieces?

In the last century and a half – since, as it were, the dawn of science's urge to explain everything – we have come to impute our irrationalities to faults of nature.  No longer are we responsible for the evil thoughts we harbor (childhood anxieties writ large) or the actions that we take against the freedoms and rights of others (we only care about ourselves, anyway), nor the crimes for which we are ultimately tried and acquitted because we are insane.  Insane has come to mean irrational, and anyone who is irrational is clearly not in control of what he may inflict upon his fellow humans and their environment.  I cannot speak for all my readers, but you may want to consider what part of your day you actually spend in unadulterated rationality.  Are the caffeine and alcohol you imbibe or grease you consume helping you live longer and in better health?  The casual encounters with persons whose sexual histories could not possibly be known to you?  The wild thoughts scattered throughout your day about promotions, raises, sports teams, past relationships, annoyances, physical tics, and other neurotic trivialities that seem to be the hallmark of modern societies of privilege?  If we were truly rational, we would be very careful with what we eat, choose one mate and stay with her forever, exercise regularly, stop worrying about whether we will make our payment on our car or home, and be nice to everyone and everything, because over time most intelligent people come to see that so-called 'rational behavior' comprises only caring about your survival to the possible detriment of everyone else's.  Yet for people of faith, faith and rationality are synonymous.  They are synonymous not because we are too foolish to think for ourselves, but because believing in something greater than yourself becomes, with the proper spiritual insight, the most rational thing you could ever do precisely because there is no reason to do it other than itself.  Belief is how we form friendships, think of country, nation, and heritage, and, perhaps most importantly, how we love.  We love without evidence, because there can be no evidence for the intangible twine that binds one soul to another.  I may believe someone loves me, but I am guided in my belief by a covenant that what that person and I have is sacred and can defeat time, space and every other obstacle to immortality.  A fine way to segue into this controversial novella.

The narrator and the reader will spend their time fascinated by one lowly man, Pozdnyshev, whom the narrator meets in a train compartment as marriage and love are being discussed.  The time is the late nineteenth century and Romanticism has been replaced by railroads, distant love by the all-too-familiar commute of the factory worker.  What love used to be – wild, enchanting, a font of salvation – has now become a series of morose gestures packaged in the understanding that we must continue evolution from amoeba to ape to human to enough humans to conquer the globe with the breadth of our immediate desires.  And Pozdnyshev has indeed been very unlucky in love.  His views stem from a long marriage to a woman he once loved and the five children she bore him.  They married when he was still young and after he had had his fill of public houses, and they quickly settled into the habits of a typically haute bourgeoisie household.  Soon all aspects of what should have been love and affection begin to shrivel and flake, and it is, surprisingly enough, family life and marriage that are to blame.  Pozdnyshev comments that, "the attraction to children, the animal need to feed, nurture, and defend them, was present in my wife as in so many women as nothing more than precisely an animal instinct and the complete lack of imagination or reason."  The reproduction of the human race is exactly what Pozdnyshev sees as its downfall: an attempt to immortalize the flesh instead of the soul, a very topical retort in the late nineteenth century.  But this is not the crux of his issue with his family.  No, his problems commence when his wife decides to return to playing the piano.  

Little by little, it is this common if somewhat privileged life (the Pozdnyshevs reside in a much more splendid house than your average city dweller) that Pozdnyshev comes to see as a "vile lie."  And with his whole existence now subject to scrutiny in every detail, it is hardly remarkable that he hears more than one layer of meaning in his wife's everyday statements:

She began thinking of another love, one pure and new, or at least that's what I thought.   And here is where she began looking about as if in expectation of something.  I noticed this and could not help but feel an onrush of panic and anxiety.  She would talk to others, people she would happen to meet or accost, and I understood that what she was saying was actually directed at me.  She expressed herself boldly with nary a thought for the fact that merely an hour ago she had endorsed a wholly opposing position; she spoke half in jest about a mother's concerns – and any mother who says she doesn't have such concerns is lying – about devoting herself to her children while she is still young and while she can still enjoy life.  She looked after the children less, but not with the despair of before, and spent more and more time tending to herself, to her appearance, although she tried to hide this, as well as to her pleasures and her self-perfection.  It was then that she returned to the piano with great interest, the piano which she had once completely abandoned.  This is where it all began.

Whatever one may think of The Kreutzer Sonata, this passage contains its essence, but not in the form assumed by the cursory reader who might believe that Tolstoy is valuing family over individualism.  Once upon a time, a rakish and rather immoral young Lev regaled himself on the sweetness of life, on Wein, Weiber und Gesang, as Pozdnyshev himself comments, and forgot his greater purposes.  After a long, troubled, and fecund marriage to a woman who simply could not compare to his interest in writing, Tolstoy abandoned everything and condemned both facets of his previous existence: that of a Lothario and of a family man.  Neither one is praised because both in tandem represent the two easy options for modern human beings, be it the comfort of home and its concomitant security, love and plain living, or the lascivious freedoms and lightness of a life without any responsibility to anyone except yourself.  What Tolstoy comes to advocate is a life of abstinence and self-discovery in unison with one's spiritual beliefs – a noble cause if one taken to an unnecessary extreme by a mind that was always prone to extremes.  Pozdnyshev has lived both parts of Tolstoy's life and, while it is unproductive to weld fiction to fact, has decided on the basis of one important event to join his creator in hermitage.  That event is the arrival of the music teacher Trukhachevsky.

His father was a petty merchant; he was the youngest of three boys and the only one sent to his godmother in Paris to study at the conservatory.  And yet Trukhachevsky wasn't even a professional musician, but a "semi-professional."  He was not particularly handsome, but he did not need looks to attract a woman, he needed music.  And to Pozdnyshev there was something positively demonic about music:

They say that music has an elevating and sublimating effect on the soul.  Untrue!  Utter nonsense!  It most certainly has an effect, a terrible effect, not of sublimation nor of denigration, but one of disturbance.  How should I put it ... music forces me to forget myself, my true position in life, and under music's spell I seem to feel what I actually do not feel and understand what I don't really understand, and be able to do what I in fact cannot.  I would explain this phenomenon by saying that music acts like a yawn or like laughter; I am not sleepy but I yawn looking at someone yawning; and there is nothing to laugh about and yet I laugh when I hear someone laughing.

In other words, music, because of the rigidity of its form and the ineluctability that is its nature, must be understood by the common man as something to be understood, something that is done, something that everyone does.  It is, for Pozdnyshev, the bellwether of common values, easy morals, and plain decisions that shape the vast majority of human lives, and his wife is about to be cheapened by all these banalities and perhaps slip into that most banal and horrific crime of all, betrayal.  This is why Pozdnyshev finds the most insufferable circumstances that plague men of jealousy to be "those well-known bourgeois conditions in which the great and dangerous proximity of man to woman is permitted."  These circumstances are numerous: doctor's visits, balls, art lessons, and that most pernicious of all situations, music.  His wife's return to her piano, her neglect of her children (in her husband's estimation), and most of all, her interest in something greater than herself and her family all damn her to a crime that she may or may not have committed, although on more than one occasion we are presented with some ocular proof and left to ponder the ending without either possibility being confirmed.

Yet this story is not really about jealousy, it is about the decisions of man.  While his monumental novels are widely praised, Tolstoy is the type of writer who thrives on two great facets for short story writers: directness of characterization and a certain momentum that gets derailed in longer narratives.  In that vein, many have quibbled that The Kreutzer Sonata is one of his weaker works, owing in no small part to the moral framework that seems superimposed.  But the work must be commended on its clarity: the concatenation of small details of jealousy, one of the easiest emotions to write about because it is, with hatred, one of the most consuming, is made more remarkable by how similarly most tales of jealousy progress.  Jealousy allows one to find everything wrong and nothing right; to depict the world in conspiracy against you; and to portray the greatest crime of all, the one for which Judas and Pilate were sentenced to the last circle of hell.  There are many stories that start with ridiculous, almost insane premises, but very few follow them to their illogical ends.  More often than not, the reader is emotionally manipulated into seeing a world that appears far removed from contemporary reality and then provided with a last minute explanation for this odd state.  But bold is the tale that shirks the need for a comprehensive ending and sticks to its guns.  Or, in this case, its daggers.