Page 3501 – Christianity Today (2024)

W. Bradford Wilcox, whose assumption-busting book Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands has just been published by the University of Chicago Press, is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, a rising star in his field, and a devout Catholic. He and his wife have adopted three children from Guatemala: he isn’t writing about family life from the standpoint of a detached observer. Michael Cromartie spoke with Wilcox early this summer in Washington, D.C.

You say, “Married men with children who are affiliated with conservative Protestant churches are in some ways traditional family patriarchs … but theirs is a very soft patriarchy. These family men are consistently the most active and emotionally engaged group of fathers and the most emotionally engaged group of husbands in this entire study.” How does conservative Protestantism domesticate men and make them more responsive to the aspirations and needs of their wives and children?

It domesticates men by making them more attentive to the ideals and aspirations of their wives and children, and it does this by providing men with a clear message of familial responsibility, a clear sense of their own status in the family, and equally important, a male ethos where they can encounter other men who are committed to family life. Let’s face it—the church is one of the few institutions in the United States where men encounter other men who are interested in talking about fatherhood and marriage—and interested also in practicing what they hear preached. You don’t often find it at work; you don’t find it in the sports stadium; you don’t find it in the local tavern. But in church what you will find is a message and ethos that is family-focused and gives men the motivation to attend to their families. When you look at measures of paternal involvement—things like reading to your children, volunteering for a Boy Scouts group, coaching sports, and so on—active conservative Protestant or evangelical fathers are the most involved fathers of any major religious group in the United States.

You also observe that “wives of active evangelical Protestant family men report the highest levels of happiness with love and affection.” Is that your finding, or is that from the University of Chicago study on sex in America?

That’s my finding. The University of Chicago study on sex found that evangelical women reported the highest levels of satisfaction with their sexual lives. You have to recognize that, particularly for women, sexual satisfaction is related to a sense of security and commitment. So, you do the math. Women who are married to men who are strongly committed to the institution of marriage are, on average, probably going to experience better sexual happiness because they experience a level of security and comfort that may be missing in more progressive marriages where there’s a shadow of insecurity hanging over the marriage.

You suggest that conservative Protestant institutions have continued to chart a path largely defined by resistance to family modernization. But you also note that you have seen a number of accommodations and innovations in their family-related ideologies. You put it this way: “What is striking about many of these changes, and especially the expressive strategy of encouraging men to be more engaged and affectionate with their families, is that they represent innovative efforts to shore up the family as an institution. Thus conservative Protestant institutions have adopted progressive means in the service of traditional ends.” Explain that.

What we see when we look at the religious scene in the United States is that the churches in which you are most likely to hear about men’s responsibilities in the family are evangelical churches. This is fairly innovative; it would not necessarily have been the case as recently as 30 years ago. I think what’s happened is a recognition among evangelical clergy and laity that the family is in trouble and that one of the key ways, if not the most important way, to respond to the fragility of family life in the contemporary United States is to get men more engaged with their own families. So that’s one way in which things are more innovative in evangelical congregations.

Over the same period, there has been a new focus on the emotional domain—especially an innovative focus on women’s emotional needs and potential coming from key family leaders like Gary Smalley and James Dobson. You have Smalley, for instance, talking about 122 ways in which men can be more sensitive to the needs of their wives.

I’m a bit more ambivalent about this focus on emotional needs, which may work against a recognition that marriage as an institution has a lot of purposes—foremost among them, the spiritual life of the couple and their children. Those purposes can get lost in the emotional focus that we see in some discourse from evangelicals. But the bottom line here is that, I think, because evangelicalism is intent on protecting the family, there is also room to adopt some techniques, messages, and strategies that are in many respects quite innovative. So you have both innovation and defense of tradition.

Can you outline the major differences between what you call the “golden rule liberalism” of mainline Protestant families and the “expressive traditionalism” of conservative Protestant families? What makes them distinct from each other?

In the mainline, you have a view of Scripture certainly as God’s word, but the literal word of Scripture is not necessarily seen as a concrete guide for family life. So you have to try to uncover a certain spirit of the New Testament, if you will, which will then guide family life. That is more a liberal theological approach. When it comes to family, mainline Protestantism has been intent on signaling its cultural liberalism, its commitment to affirming family diversity, its openness to same-sex marriage, and its commitment to meeting people where they’re at, in terms of their family status. That’s their formal level of discourse.

But at the practical level, if you go to your average mainline congregation, what you’ll find is that they’re really reaching out to married couples with kids, and they’re doing that by basically preaching the golden rule both to adults and, most importantly, to kids through Sunday school, programs, and children’s worship. There’s a kind of two-step dance, where formally they’re in favor of family diversity but when you actually look at who’s in the congregations, you’ll find mostly very conventional families. So people basically want to think of themselves as liberal yet live a fairly conventional family life.

Conservative Protestants, on the other hand, actually have a higher percentage of single parents, step-parents, single adults among them. I think there is a higher percentage of non-traditional families in evangelical congregations for a number of reasons. But one reason is that the kind of intensive experience and community they offer is attractive to people who are in a difficult family situation and are looking for a community that will help them get through their life. And often they’re also looking for an ideal model of the family, which they haven’t necessarily encountered in their own lives—the ideal that is held up in a pastoral way in the evangelical context. There’s a certain irony here: evangelicalism holds up a traditional ideal of the family and yet has more non-traditional families, whereas mainline Protestantism holds up a more liberal ideal and yet has more traditional families in their pews.

Michael Cromartie directs the Evangelical Studies Project at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do Two can be as bad as one, it’s the loneliest number since the number one.—Three Dog Night

Marriage was designed by God in creation to meet certain fundamental needs of the human being. When those needs are richly met, we flourish. Covenant is the structural principle of marriage, holding weak and fickle human beings to the promises they have made. When the marriage covenant is sturdy, it provides a stable and enduring context for the pursuit of the creational blessings of companionship, sex, and family partnership. Strong skill and virtue development in meeting creation-related needs and fidelity to covenant promises can lead to genuinely joyful marital partnerships. Such relationships reach near the pinnacle of what God created humans to be.

But as we all know, the story does not always go this way. In fact, it seems that it does not often go this way. Marriage becomes not a context of joy but of misery. A husband or wife wakes up each morning with heaviness of heart, saddened by the perception that the marriage is not working, perhaps even terrified by the oppression they experience. They are suffering. In some marriages, suffering is a daily and enduring reality. In almost all marriages, there are episodes or seasons of suffering.

Nobody tells the engaged or newly married couple to expect that marriage will bring suffering. Instead, what I call the “Love Incorporated” marriage technique books usually offer 1001 ways to achieve marital bliss. This leaves couples poorly prepared for the suffering that will almost inevitably come. And so, when suffering hits, the couple is bewildered. If the suffering lasts for very long or feels very intense, they may be tempted to abandon the marriage to relieve their pain. But abandoning a marriage brings its own form of suffering, and creates new suffering. Yet is such abandonment in every case wrong?

Experiences in ministry and personal life persuade me that this question—how to understand and deal with suffering—may be the most significant issue to be considered in thinking about marriage today.

Simone Weil made the striking observation that besides the physical element of suffering, and what she called the psychological element of suffering, there is a third element: the social.1 This is the experience of social degradation, ostracism, abandonment, or exclusion from community. German theologian Dorothee Soelle, reflecting on these themes, notes that most biblical accounts of suffering involve a confluence of all three themes. The psalmist (for example, Psalm 22, 73, 81, 116) laments the coming of illness into his life, bringing great pain. He feels a growing sense of psychological or spiritual suffering. And he feels abandoned by friends and intimates, excluded from the community of which he is a part.2 For Weil, affliction is the best term to use for the combination of these three dimensions of human suffering. Marital suffering certainly takes this particularly potent form at times: extreme spiritual anguish, physical distress, and social isolation.

Because suffering is a subjective and personal experience, it is often the case that the spouses do not experience the exact same level or type of suffering, even though they are enduring the same marriage. Harsh words may hurt one spouse more than the other. Chronic lack of communication, or lack of sexual intimacy, or lack of spiritual partnership, could be experienced as deeply painful by one spouse and not by the other. An act of sexual infidelity or violence may be experienced as creating an unbearable suffering, or it may not, depending on the way individual spouses interpret and react to these particular painful events.

This reminds us that the suffering evoked by spiritual pain is particularly subjective and profoundly affected by social factors. Imagine a culture in which extramarital sex is a routine and expected behavior, as in some contexts it has been. The discovery that one’s spouse had an extramarital sexual relationship would likely evoke far less suffering than if the same event occurred in our own society. Suffering has a social dimension. The early medieval philosopher Boethius said, “nothing is miserable unless you think it so.” Where we learn to “think it so” is in society.

Contemporary western societies are particularly averse to pain. We have developed the most advanced painkilling drugs in human history, and use them constantly. We are, in Elizabeth Wurtzel’s famous phrase,

the “Prozac Nation.” Some push for legalized euthanasia because of the exaggerated fear that even the best painkillers will be insufficient at the end of life. It is not too pessimistic to say that we are by now a soft people. The generation that survived the Depression and triumphed over the Nazis gave birth to children and

grandchildren who often think they need narcotics or antidepressants to get through the day. In such a society, our pain tolerance is low indeed.

Less dramatically, the experience of marital suffering is linked to marital expectations or desires.3 Short of objective physical or emotional violence, we suffer in marriage when the experience we are having falls short of our expectations. The question then that must be asked is this: what kinds of expectations of marriage are appropriate to the covenant promises actually exchanged? Excessive desires set the spouses up for the perception of suffering, in situations that would not have been perceived this way in earlier eras.

As any physician or psychiatrist could tell us, the suffering person seeks relief. Whether the pain is physical, spiritual, or both, when we suffer we want it to end as soon as possible. If the pain is bad enough, we will consider nearly any path that can bring relief. If the suffering experienced in marriage is bad enough, people will seek relief as well. This is part of what it means to be a sentient creature, and especially a human. It also speaks to the compelling nature of the needs we seek to meet in marriage. The mistake many people make, however, is in concluding that divorce is the best way to bring suffering to an end—when it may not be the best way, and it may not bring suffering to an end at all.

Sources of Suffering in Marriage

When Jesus taught that divorce is to be a very rare exception, and that illicit remarriages are adulterous, his disciples said: “If this is the situation between a husband and a wife, it is better not to marry” (Mt. 19:10)—and Jesus never disagreed, only responding with a description of the various ways that people become “eunuchs.” When Paul reflected on marriage, he wrote: “Those who marry will face many troubles in this life, and I want to spare you this” (1 Cor. 7:28b). These are not especially romantic declarations about marriage.

People need to be taught, as they were in more sober times, that a measure of suffering is an inevitable feature of marriage. Swept away by the candlelight-and-roses vision of marriage promoted by every bride’s magazine on the newsstand, we have misplaced this homely truth. Even Christians, whose doctrine of sin ought to help us know better, have forgotten to teach that marriage will not just fail to prevent suffering but actually bring suffering our way. “Not only does marriage fail to mitigate the struggles of life … it actually deepens them, rendering them even more poignant, because more personal.”4

Suffering can enter a marriage through several channels. I break down these sources of suffering into two main categories: causes external to the marriage itself, and those that are internal to the marriage.

The traditional wedding vows reflect the awareness that every marriage is threatened by external enemies. Two types of enemies are named in the vows: poverty and illness. When the couple says “for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health,” they are promising to remain loyal to their marriage covenant regardless of the trials created by poverty or illness. These particular concerns reflect the conditions of an earlier, more agrarian era. The worst thing likely to happen to the medieval farmer’s family is either a bad crop (threatening starvation), or illness (threatening loss of help in family labor and loss of life).

Unemployment and financial pressures remain a major source of difficulty in marriage even today. Illness or incapacitation of a spouse or child likewise creates one of the major forms of marital suffering. Most readers will know of a marriage that did not prove capable of enduring such afflictions.

Numerous other factors extraneous to the marriage itself can create marital suffering. These can include illness or bereavement in the family or extended family. Job stresses that threaten to grind up the human spirit of one of the spouses are a major issue. A move demanded by school or work can be quite stressful. This list could be extended. Suffice it to say that most marriages will face such external sources of suffering at one time or another.

But improved economic and physical conditions in contemporary society mean that the internal sources of marital suffering are by now more significant. This is not a coincidence. Little irritations in the marital relationship don’t matter when the Nazis might land on Long Island any day, or when we’re not sure where the next meal is coming from. Lacking such pressures and fears, we have the tragic liberty to turn on each other or self-destruct.

Internal sources of suffering in marriage come in three primary forms. They may have to do with my partner, with me, or with the dynamics of our relationship.

Many marriages fail because of the moral, psychological, or spiritual problems of just one of the spouses. It is extraordinarily tragic, but all too common—a promising marriage between two people who love each other deeply is brought down not by any external stress but by the immoral or sick behavior of one of the partners.

A cousin of mine suffered the failure of her marriage due to her husband’s unshakable addiction to child p*rnography. Another marriage was brought down by a cocaine habit. A family member married a man who stole from her and opened credit cards in her name without her consent, ultimately bankrupting her. Drugs, alcohol, p*rnography, and gambling are among the major addictions that cause marital suffering, and are leading causes of divorce.

Psychological maladies of other types cause great suffering. I once counseled with a couple whose marriage was threatened by one partner’s chronic anxiety, anger, and simple inability to live peaceably. Here was a man whose wife, while not perfect, was more than adequate. However, quite tragically, he was unable to be happy; he could not receive the joyful partnership that was possible. He simply was not capable of living in peace with anyone, beginning with himself.

Another friend was heading toward marriage. However, her boyfriend lost his job and seemed not particularly energetic in pursuing another one. Month stretched into month, and it became clear that he was not so much lazy as incapable of functioning at a level required for minimal success in a competitive society. In this case, marriage was averted, but if this couple had been married his inability to function fully would have created considerable suffering that might have destroyed their marriage.

It is often falsely claimed that “it takes two” to bring down a marriage. It is truer to say that it takes two functional and sound people to create the possibility of marital success. All it takes is one addicted, or mentally ill, or poorly functioning, or morally bankrupt person to make marriage a living hell. That person might be my partner, or it might just be me.

The other internal source of marital suffering can be found in the inner workings of the marriage itself. Two morally and psychologically sound people can run into trouble in managing the marital relationship, which is its own entity with its own dynamics. One way to organize our thinking about this kind of suffering is to relate it back to the creation goods and covenant structure of marriage.

Suffering comes in marriage when aspects of companionship, sex, or family partnership fall far enough short of expectations as to create the experience of pain. Perhaps there is a failure to share adequately in the labor of running a household or meeting its expenses. Maybe there is a lack of time spent together in leisure. Perhaps the sexual relationship lacks passion or mutual satisfaction. The friendship dimension of marriage may have eroded. Or maybe chronic conflicts arise over how the children should be disciplined or educated. Marriage was created to meet very basic human needs in these areas, and such failures will elicit suffering.

Violations of the meaning of the marriage covenant itself will also create suffering. Any crossing of boundary lines related to sexual fidelity will be painful, even if it does not involve the act of adultery. Threats of walking out or loose talk of divorce can challenge the covenant promise of permanence. Failure to care compassionately for a spouse in time of illness or bereavement, or to work together in partnership during times of extra financial stress, can also cause great suffering. Mistreatment of children by one spouse can threaten the marital covenant itself. Most profoundly, failure to create an overall environment of love, honor, and respect undermines the relational spirit that brings the letter of the marital covenant to life.

The success of any marriage depends on meeting the creation-based needs of the spouse in at least a minimally satisfactory fashion and on maintaining faithfulness to the marriage covenant. These basics of marriage are not merely cultural but “natural,” that is, they relate to our humanity as created yet fallen beings. We are not talking here about the relational possibilities that marriage holds when every aspect of creation and covenant is maximally fulfilled. That’s the ceiling; here we are talking about the floor. If the basic minimum is not met, either or both spouses will suffer—and will probably look for some way to find relief.

What Shall We Do with Our Suffering?

Many Christians have joined their societal compatriots in seeking relief from suffering through divorce. Sometimes they offer little evidence that they have considered what the Bible really says about suffering itself. This is a great tragedy. It has led to the unnecessary destruction of many marriages and the collapse of Christian credibility on this issue.

The Bible is an infinitely realistic book. Coursing through its pages are dozens of references to suffering: its various types and sources, its costs, its meanings, its possibilities, and how a faithful people of God are to interpret and respond to it. Few themes receive more attention in Scripture. Let’s linger over the biblical witness and see if it can speak helpfully to seasons of suffering in marriage—without in any way underwriting victimization or oppression in marriage and family life.

In God’s good and perfect creation before the fall there was no suffering. But human disobedience introduced suffering into God’s good world. Sin and suffering have been linked, from the very beginning of both.

In the Genesis account, sin introduces suffering into creation as a form of divine punishment. The serpent is punished with a lifetime of crawling, eating dust, and being feared and hated by human beings (Gen. 3:14–15). The woman is punished with great pain in childbearing and subordination to her husband (Gen. 3:16). The man is punished with uncooperative soil and arduous labor (Gen. 3:17–19). All are punished with mortality (Gen. 3:19). Adam and Eve are punished with exile from the garden, symbolizing their broken relationship with God (Gen. 3:21–24).

So in biblical terms there is an inextricable connection between suffering and sin. Sin causes suffering; suffering exists because of sin; if there had been no sin there would be no suffering. Sin often brings judgment that causes suffering (Num. 14:33, Lam. 1:12). And yet, as Pope John Paul II has noted, “it is not true that all suffering is a consequence of a fault and has the nature of a punishment.”5

A proper biblical understanding of sin identifies it not just with particular acts or our propensity to do wrong but with a broader degradation of the human condition. Sin is not just violation of God’s moral order but also the disordered state of the human heart, human relationships, and human society. This disorder is the context in which we all live. It affects not just human beings but the entire creation, which also has become disordered and fallen into corruption as a consequence of human wrongdoing. As Paul put it, “the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time” (Rom. 8:21–22).

With the entire human and global order in such spiritual travail, it is inevitable that each particular human being, and the human family as a whole, will experience suffering. Sometimes this suffering will clearly be linked to particular sinful acts, our own or someone else’s; other times it is impossible and inappropriate to draw such a connection (see John 9).6

Whenever we are tempted to forget this point, we would do well to return to the book of Job. For Job is the story of an innocent man’s suffering. Afflicted with the loss of his family, all his animals and property, and finally his health, Job protests bitterly to God at the injustice of his fate. For thirty chapters his three friends try to help Job make sense of his suffering by attributing it to some wrong that Job has done. Appropriately, Job denies this. He has done nothing wrong, but suffering has come upon him anyway. In misery, he seeks an explanation from God—as most of us do when suffering comes.

God finally makes his appearance in chapters 38-41. He never gives Job an explanation of his suffering; and yet the point of the passage is not so much what God says but that he responds at all. God recounts for Job the glories and complexities of the universe that he has made and challenges Job’s right to “correct” him (Job 40:2). Job ends his questioning with a kind of submissive gratitude for God appearing to him at all: “My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:5–6).

God has shown up and has been with Job in his suffering. After days of questioning and challenging God, it is God’s presence that finally satisfies his need, or at least ends his struggle by overwhelming him with the view from God’s perspective.7 The epilogue, in which Job’s family and properties are restored, is not the heart of the story. God’s response to Job’s innocent suffering is not so much to make all things right again, but simply to be present to Job in his despair.

This is the next main strand of the biblical witness about human suffering: God is present to and with his suffering people. God hears the cries of the afflicted. At times, though not always, God in his grace acts to rescue those who suffer, as in the Exodus (Ex. 3:7) or the healing acts of Jesus toward the suffering (Mt. 4:24, 8:6, 15:22, 17:15). Other times God’s activity is limited to comforting his afflicted ones (2 Cor. 1:3). God is present with sufferers as they suffer, offering care and love. This is not deliverance from the situation of suffering but merciful divine presence in the midst of suffering. Scripture is honest in recording times when God’s presence seems very elusive, when God’s comfort is not found. And yet believers are called to turn to God and ask for his presence in times of suffering, with the promise that God is faithful, just, and loving.

The New Testament witness about Jesus clearly teaches that part of his mission was to suffer for the sake of the world: “From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, chief priests, and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life” (Mt. 16:21; cf. Mk 9:12; Lk. 24:26). That Jesus must suffer to fulfill his mission was clearly a part of the apostolic proclamation (Acts 3:18, 17:3, 26:23).

The primary Old Testament text that informed this concept was Isaiah 52:13-53:12, the famous “Suffering Servant” passage. Here the servant is “despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering” (53:3). This suffering is not an end in itself, however, but is undertaken for the sake of redemption. By enduring suffering as an innocent and without resistance on behalf of the sins and wrongs of others, the suffering servant has won salvation for his people. “For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors” (Isa 53:12). Jesus the Son of God takes human suffering upon himself and therefore into the very heart of the Deity.

New Testament writers were transfixed by the vision of Jesus as the suffering servant, whose torture and death atoned vicariously for the sins of the world, and whose glorious resurrection vindicated his identity as God’s Son and the world’s Savior. Identifying deeply with him, they promoted to their readers and faith communities a cruciform vision of discipleship in which Christians would follow the path of their master. They would, if necessary, suffer for the cause for which Jesus suffered and for the name of Jesus, even rejoicing and counting themselves blessed to have the privilege of doing so (Acts 5:41; Phil. 1:29; 1 Pt. 4:13).

As suffering came amidst various persecutions, the early Christians further developed a profound practical theology of what might be called the discipleship value of suffering. John Paul II finds in the entire biblical witness, in fact, the same theme: suffering “creates the possibility of rebuilding goodness in the subject who suffers.”8 Because suffering hurts we naturally flee from it, but New Testament writers teach that it is precisely through suffering that growth in discipleship occurs.

This is articulated in a rich variety of ways. Paul says that in suffering we experience God’s comfort, which we can then share with others who also suffer. As we plunge into levels of suffering we could never have imagined, and find God’s comfort and presence there, we grow profoundly in patient endurance and dependent trust in God (2 Cor 1:3–11). Suffering also produces virtues such as perseverance, character, and hope (Rom. 5:3), which cannot be produced under conditions of comfort and ease.

The entire first epistle of Peter is essentially a meditation on suffering for Christ. Written to Christians under severe persecution, this letter reflected deeply on the trials these communities in Asia Minor were experiencing and the meaning that could be drawn from them. Peter finds in trials an occasion for purification. Like a refiner’s fire, trials test the believer’s faith, showing its real quality and at the same time strengthening and toughening it (cf. 1:7).

Peter finds in suffering a morally purging power. “He who has suffered in his body is done with sin” (4:1b). The persecutor’s lash, in a sense, brings people to their senses, leading them to put sin behind them with ever more decisiveness and to die to the world and its enticements (4:2-6). They now live for God rather than themselves. It is interesting that the writer of Hebrews claims that “the author of their salvation,” Christ himself, was “made perfect through suffering” (Heb. 2:10).

Rather than succumbing to instincts for violence or retaliation, unjustly persecuted Christians are called to identify all the more closely with Jesus, who suffered without retaliation and died vicariously in our place (1 Peter 2:20–25). Out of gratitude for him, in obedience to his command, and in imitation of his pattern, Christians are called to “follow in his steps” (2:21), patiently enduring all persecution and awaiting a future hope that no one can ever take away because believers are “shielded by God’s power” (1:5). Suffering creates a deep sense of solidarity and connection between the believer and Jesus, as many Christians have attested through the centuries.9

Peter, like other New Testament writers, is entranced by the glory that is coming when God will bring about his ultimate triumph in Jesus Christ. That inheritance awaits those who persevere, who don’t give up or give in, who cling tightly to the suffering Savior even as they themselves suffer greatly. An inheritance is coming that can never “perish, spoil, or fade” (1:4). The “Chief Shepherd” will appear and we will receive a “crown of glory” that can never fade (5:4).

At the heart of this vision of suffering is hopeful trust in a faithful God. The psalmist had written “My comfort in my suffering is this; your promise preserves my life” (Ps. 119:50). Peter calls his readers to trust the one who “entrusted himself to him who judges justly” (1 Pt. 2:23). God will triumph. His enemies will be defeated and his promises will be fulfilled (2 Th. 1:5). Current trials can be endured because God is trustworthy and ultimately will do what he has promised, just as he has done in the past.10 Don’t be among those who collapse under persecution and ultimately must be counted among the faithless who disown Christ (2 Tim. 2:12-13). Instead, “Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you the crown of life” (Rev. 2:10).

When suffering comes in marriage, the person seeking to be formed by the biblical witness has rich resources for redeeming his or her suffering, or for at least making sense of it. These convictions do not resolve all issues related to particular decisions Christians must make, but they do help set the context in which they should be considered.

Suffering is inescapable in a sinful world. Therefore, I will not imagine the possibility of creating a life for myself in which there will be no suffering. I will be realistic about the boundaries the human condition sets on all human aspirations. I will consider the suffering faced in my current situation over against the suffering I would face in realistic alternative situations.

God is present to his suffering people. Therefore, I will cry out to him in my times of frustration, sadness, and despair. I will not attempt to endure my suffering apart from the presence of God. With confidence, I will turn to God and draw comfort from his presence. I will not necessarily expect to get all my questions answered, or even to be delivered from all my suffering, but I will be comforted by his presence.

Jesus was a Savior whose innocent suffering brought redemption to the world. Therefore, I will be alert to the redemptive possibilities of the suffering I am now experiencing. Perhaps I can be an example to my children of patient endurance in times of trial, and thus help build character in them that will strengthen them for their future marriages. Perhaps my steadfast love amidst suffering will have a transforming impact on my spouse, or can serve as a good example to friends who know the situation. This does not mean I will endure mistreatment indefinitely. But I will assess the situation with Jesus’ example in mind.

Suffering has discipleship value for the follower of Christ. Therefore, I will look for ways in which my current suffering can deepen my faithfulness to him and enable me to grow both spiritually and morally. My focus will shift from whether I am happy, as Gary Thomas has written, to how this situation can help me become more holy.11

When Is It Permissible to End a Marital Covenant?

The aggrieved and suffering spouse who is loyal to the marriage covenant will not lightly end a marriage under any circ*mstances. Many steadfast men and women have endured the acute suffering caused by episodes of infidelity, acts of violence, and desertion and worked hard for change and for reconciliation. In some cases, hearts and lives have been changed and marriages saved. This indeed, is grace and mercy.

But still we must ask the question of whether, and when, it is morally permissible to end a marital covenant. Divorce is never formally introduced in the Old Testament. It simply makes its appearance as an existing practice, most significantly in Deuteronomy 24:1–4. This text assumes the practice of divorce, describes it and its grounds in passing, and then offers a case law application related to remarriage. This text became foundational for the Jewish rabbinic tradition, which debated the grounds for divorce based on Deut. 24:1a: “If a man marries a woman who becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her … ” Two poles of interpretation emerged, a conservative school limiting the grounds for divorce to “indecency,” and a more liberal school permitting (a man to) divorce for nearly any reason based on the language of “becomes displeasing to him.”

For historic Catholic thought, marriage is indissoluble because a metaphysical entity has supernaturally come into existence that literally cannot be destroyed. In shifting to the biblical language of covenant, the Protestant Reformers changed metaphors. For them, marriage is a human relationship with particular ends and particular obligations. Though the marriage covenant is solemn and binding, it is still relation-based—that is, it can be destroyed by the misdeeds of those human beings who participate in it. Divorce under such circ*mstances can be understood as the legal acknowledgment that the marriage covenant has been irreparably broken.

Does this mean that the marriage covenant was conditional, rather than unconditional? If so, how can it be said to be a covenant? If not, how can it be ended? This vexing question cannot easily be settled with reference to the Bible, because Old Testament covenant language is at times both unconditional (“I am making between me and you and every living creature a covenant for all generations to come”—Gen. 9:12) and conditional (“If you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession”—Ex. 19:5).

Margaret Farley has proposed a very wise answer to this dilemma. God’s covenant promise is unconditional in that “it cannot be undone or withdrawn.” Especially in light of the decisive act God undertook on the Cross, it is clear that “God’s love is not pledged conditionally.” But on the other hand, the nature of human response to God’s unconditional love does matter, because the goal of God’s covenant efforts is to establish and maintain relationships with people, and there can be no relationship that is not mutual, not two-sided. God reaches out to people in love and implores them to love him wholeheartedly in return (Mt. 22:36-40). God’s goal in doing this cannot be reached unless people freely respond in love. And this God will not compel, indeed cannot compel, if he would respect their freedom as persons.14

The same thing is true in marriage. The covenant promises made on the wedding day are unconditional in that they are not revocable at will. They cannot simply be withdrawn. However, the nature of the covenant partner’s response does matter. If you eventually respond to my covenant love with rejection, hatred, and infidelity, it does not affect the nature of my promises to you. But it does break my heart, because it annihilates the possibility of achieving the very goals to which we both once promised to give our lives. And if it becomes clear that the relationship the covenant was intended to establish, the goals we both committed to, the sacred vows we took, and the rules that were stipulated to achieve those goals, all stand in ruins, then even the most faithful covenant partner may have to acknowledge that the covenant is damaged beyond repair.

One puzzle remains: whether frustration in getting creation-based needs met might also constitute grounds for divorce. The case of fundamental covenant violations directly addressed by Scripture, like adultery and desertion, is fairly clear. But what about problems that go to the heart of the creation purposes of marriage: companionship in labor, life, and love, sexual relations, and family partnership?

My response remains a covenantal one. Part of what spouses promise to each other is to devote themselves to meeting one another’s God-given sexual needs, bringing new life into the world together and raising that new life responsibly, sharing in the labors necessary to support a family, and providing for one another a measure of good-willed companionship. In other words, a good faith effort to meet one another’s creational needs is itself part of the marital covenant.

Because human beings are imperfect sinners, we all fall short of fulfilling such promises in all their potential. Falling short in a way that can be expected of normal sinful human beings is not grounds for divorce. However, situations emerge in which a pattern develops of willful and repeated violations of both the letter and the spirit of such promises. Remember that covenants don’t just stipulate behavior but they also establish a kind of marital community. This covenant-formed community hinges on a good-faith effort on the part of both parties to live out the relationship promised at its inception.

It is obvious that a pattern of physical and emotional abuse, the steady refusal of conjugal relations, the willful mistreatment or abuse of the couple’s children, the refusal to contribute any effort to shared family labors either paid or unpaid, and the creation of an environment of unremitting hostility or hatred are all examples of violations of the covenant promises made on the wedding day. The circ*mstances in which such promise-breaking could create sufficient suffering to morally justify divorce cannot be determined by way of a general statement, but certainly such circ*mstances exist.

Covenants protect valuable relationships from harm. In Margaret Farley’s words, “They take their meaning from the love they are designed to serve. They are relative in meaning and in value to the substance they help to frame.”15 Biblical prohibitions against divorce support marital covenants and are aimed at protecting the innocent, especially women and children, from abandonment and harm. A certain measure of suffering is a reasonable price to pay to preserve a marriage covenant. But when a marriage relationship itself becomes fundamentally and irreparably harmful and oppressive, then it is probably the case that the marriage, rather than a divorce, poses the greater threat to the well-being of the most vulnerable.

The spouse suffering in such a marriage will likely consider divorce. But the Christian spouse in such a situation should not attempt to determine alone whether the state of affairs in his or her marriage constitutes a fundamental and irreparable breach of the covenant. One key role of the Christian community is to stand in the gap with suffering spouses and help them discern the nature of their moral obligations in times of great suffering—rather than turn away from them in their sorrow. In so doing, the community must take seriously both the marriage covenant and the current suffering. Mike Mason says that the marriage vows ask this question: “How dark a night are you prepared to pass through” with this person?16 In the middle of such a dark night—in the midst of a marital nightmare—no believer should find herself alone.

A Personal Word

This reflection on suffering in marriage could not have been written by a blissfully happy young newlywed. Neither, however, could it have been written by an unhappily married cynic. It is instead the product of a man whose own marriage has experienced a couple of very difficult seasons of suffering, primarily of my own making, before coming out in a healthier place on the other side each time.

While originally drafting this essay I discovered a fragment that I wrote at perhaps the worst moment that my wife Jeanie and I have ever faced. I was in great anguish, and was trying to think my way through it.

At the top of the page I wrote “Status of a Marriage.” Under this heading I listed eight options:

1. Ecstatic Union
2. Intimate Partnership
3. Cordial Friendship
4. Peaceful coexistence
5. Tense silence
6. Active hostility
7. Full-scale belligerence
8. Irreconcilable brokenness

Finally, at the bottom of the page, I jotted these thoughts: “A marriage’s status can vary over time. What to make of our swings between ecstatic union and active hostility? Should I seek to narrow the range (say, options 3-4) so the swings are not so intense? Right now I just want to move from 7 to 5 and perhaps to 4 for a goal.”

I record these words publicly because they teach better than anything else a very important truth. Suffering comes in marriage, but if we endure, if we hold true, it does not necessarily stay. Darkness may come with the night, but joy comes in the morning.

As I write these words, I would place the “status of our marriage” at a 1. For several years now, we once again have had the joyful experience of consistently living at 1 or 2. Of course, these numbers are symbols and approximations. But they symbolize and approximate something very important. Seasons of suffering in marriage push individuals and couples to levels of endurance they may never have imagined having to reach. Such seasons test the strength of the marital covenant beyond what the blushing bride and groom could ever have envisioned on the day they took their vows. Those who have not (yet) gone through this vale of tears have no idea what it is like. Those who have been there know exactly what I am talking about.

Mike Mason was right in saying that we don’t keep vows; the vows keep us. When covenant structures our marriage relationship, that covenant sometimes is the only thing that holds us. When my spouse for a time becomes my enemy, and none of those lovely creation-needs are getting met, still we have our covenant. Unless that covenant has been irreparably breached by my spouse, I have no moral right to breach it either, despite a time of misery. That remains my best statement of an ethic for divorce. Our covenant held, the crisis passed, and today we enjoy an immensely joyful marriage. What about you?

David P. Gushee is Graves Professor of Moral Philosophy and senior fellow of the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Christian Leadership at Union University. This article is excerpted from his book Getting Marriage Right: Realistic Counsel for Saving and Strengthening Relationships (Baker Books). Copyright 2004 by David P. Gushee. Used by permission of Baker Book House.

1. Simone Weil, “The Love of God and Affliction,” Waiting for God (Putnam, 1951), p. 119.

2. Dorothee Soelle, Suffering (Fortress, 1975), p. 16.

3. On the connection between suffering and desire, see Jamie Mayerfeld, Suffering and Moral Responsibility (Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 19–22.

4. Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage (Multnomah, 1985), p. 171.

5. Pope John Paul II, On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering (Pauline Books and Media, 1984), p. 16.

6. For a strong discussion of this issue, see Daniel Harrington, S.J., Why Do We Suffer? (Sheed and Ward, 2000), ch. 2.

7. Ibid., pp. 46-47.

8. John Paul II, On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering, p. 17.

9. Ibid., p. 44.

10. Margaret Farley, Personal Commitments: Beginning, Keeping, Changing (HarperCollins, 1990), p. 122.

11. Gary Thomas, Sacred Marriage (Zondervan, 1998).

12. Chrysostom, Homily XIX, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vol. XII, 4. Accessed at.

13. Philip Turner, “The Marriage Canons of the Episcopal Church: Scripture and Tradition,” Anglican Theological Review, Vol. 65, p. 387.

14. Farley, Personal Commitments, pp. 118–120.

15. Farley, Personal Commitments, pp. 127.

16. Mason, The Mystery of Marriage, p. 117.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Pray do not ask me, dear reader, how the following correspondence fell into my possession. Suffice it to say that the C.S. Lewis Estate’s legal counsel prevents me from revealing very much on that subject, and my own legal counsel says I mustn’t tempt fate on this score. I chafe sorely at these constraints; nonetheless, the litigious nature of modern society is not easily gainsaid.

In any case, to the point: if you ever doubted that devils desire to destroy marriages between humans as much as they desire to destroy the marriage between a soul and its creator, here is some evidence for you. The names have been changed to protect those innocent of copyright infringement.

Eric Metaxas New York, 2004

My dear Gallstone, The question as to whether you shd. encourage yr. male subject to covet his neighbour’s wife made me shriek with laughter. You are such a literal devil! Of course if opportunity presents itself, you certainly should. But our Enemy’s command can be broken in much more general ways, so there’s no need to try and focus yr. patient toward any one specific person. Badness, no! Getting your man to covet anyone at all, including fictional characters, is just as good, and sometimes even better, about which more later. But this brings up a subject I’ve long meant to expand upon and now shall: that of creating unrealistic expectations.

Traditionally this is one of the most effective techniques by which our tribe has weakened and sundered marriages since the hateful institution began, and you would do well to master it. The simplest way of doing this is immed. following some kind of row (great or small, it doesn’t much matter), by drawing yr. patient’s attention to someone who appears, at that moment, to have all of the qualities yr. patient’s spouse so pointedly lacks. For example, if the man’s wife had during their squabble been screaming at him or loudly criticizing him, all you must do is put in his path some reasonably attractive human female who is for some reason not talking and lo! he will see her as the perfect embodiment of demure womanhood, and as the very sort of person he ought to have married all along! Never mind the fact that the reason she is not talking is because she is sitting on a bus, reading her horoscope in one of those “women’s” magazines—or that away from these rare quiet moments on the bus she is an incessant chatterer a malicious gossip of the first order. He wouldn’t believe it if you told him anyway. Only let her read about how she might meet a darkly handsome Aries that month and say nothing and he will be inflamed with ingratitude for every good thing his wife has ever done, and simultaneously beside himself with rage that he didn’t somehow marry this mute woman two rows ahead of him.

But creating unrealistic expectations in general has become infinitely easier than it was a mere century ago, owing to the rise of our Father’s ingenious invention, what our fatuous patients call the “media culture.” Good hell! What real spouse today can ever compare with the surgically and digitally enhanced models of perfection that are everywhere! In fact today, thanks to the proliferation of our technologies, these fictitious sirens are often more in our patients’ lives than their actual spouses. Fiction is the new reality, Gallstone! Take advantage of it. You see, inasmuch as our annoyingly inventive Enemy created reality, we are in a bit of a bind—so whenever one may encourage a substitute for it, one mustn’t lose the opportunity! It doesn’t matter if the substitute is a rouged, mascaraed face on a magazine cover in a convenience-store checkout line; a bewigged tartlet on a billboard as yr. drowsy patient “commutes” to work; or an intensely sophisticated and clever actress in a banal sitcom (never mind that her witty words were scripted by a tubby, chainsmoking bald man!). Any of these can be used to great advantage in creating absurdly unrealistic expectations every bit as much as a real “neighbour’s wife”, so to speak. More on this later. Till then I remain,

Yr. most divisive Uncle, etc.,WASPHEAD

My dear Gallstone, In re: my previous comments on the subject of unrealistic expectations, always and ever endeavour to put in yr. patient’s mind the idea that the most beautiful siren the screen is presently offering is someone he deserves. Whether it be Gloria Swanson or Joey Heatherton or someone more current—I am eternally old and can hardly remember these “tomatoes” from one decade to the next—make him think that she is the standard he shd. expect. Again, it doesn’t matter who it is, because these are hardly actual people anyway, certainly not what he sees. What he sees is 99 percent image and surface and this is exactly what we want for our purposes. (Viva Las Vegas, Gallstone!) So whoever is the image du jour (Lola Falana? Cher?) will do. But to keep current in this you might attend more of our media training classes down here. But even we can hardly keep up; I suppose we’re victims of our own success, eh? In time we will be able to create actually fictional characters, digital to the core, and keep yr. warty fingers crossed that this happens as soon as possible!

Now, yr. female patient is slightly less susceptible to this sort of thing from the physical side of things, but she can easily be convinced that her man isn’t enough of a “leader” or sensitive enough or some such balderdash if you’ll put in her path at some weak moment a screen “hero” who possesses these qualities. This is a crude stratagem, but it is endlessly effective, and since she is recently unemployed and at loose ends, I recommend the mild soporific of an afternoon television drama.

Yr. ever disengaging Uncle,WASPHEAD

My dear Gallstone, I am gratified and favorably impressed that you should immediately upon my canny suggestion have begun to draw yr. female patient into the warm, soapy shallows of afternoon drama! These melodramatic dinosaurs have been a staple in our quiver for decades now. They are the sine qua non of televised unreality, and if you are able to get her genuinely addicted to one of these stories, you will have cut your work in half. It oughtn’t take very long to convince her that the finest example of manhood on the planet is the evil doctor from such-and-such a show, if only someone could love him properly—and if she is typical, she will be deeply convinced that she can, that she must. … If ever a patient seems more the “bookish” sort try and put in her path one of those “romance” novels (we invented this genre ourselves, and it is surefire—get it? Sure fire?? Ha!). In any case, the ability of these “books” to pull a woman out of reality and into our world is unparalleled. If she has enough scruples to feel any guilt over reading this, suggest to her that she is only doing it to relax, or to take her mind off the myriad things that plague her. It is only a cup of herbal tea for her mind, a bubble bath with a plot … in a word, it’s not only completely harmless, it’s positively therapeutic. Besides, her husband doesn’t make enough money to send her to a “real” spa, so what choice does she have?

Also, if you can get hubby to make a negative comment about this new habit of hers (do try to do this), she will likely snarl at him and it will further convince her that he doesn’t understand her at all—certainly not the way “Lance” would if only she could somehow meet him, or someone like him. Are you beginning to “catch my drift”, dear nephew?

Yr. cleaving Uncle,WASPHEAD

My dear Gallstone, I have thus far neglected to say that the marriage-busting division to which you have been assigned was in my day one of our less glamorous outposts, with so few assignments that it consisted of just a few old devils who hardly bothered to put in a full day’s work. Although being assigned there was as close as we come to having a holiday in hell. But today! Ever since our comprehensive “down-with-marriage” initiative in the Sixties and Seventies there is no busier more bustling division in our North American headquarters, and you’d best leap up to speed immediately, or expect to be quickly demoted to something far less glamorous, like Asst. Poltergeist Manager, hey?

Now then, one of our chief stratagems in sundering marriages—one with which you must become thoroughly familiar—has to do with what the humans now call finding their “soulmate.” Don’t snigg*r, Gallstone. Many of them have bought into this ingenious folly and you must press your advantage here whenever possible. If you can push this paradigm well enough, every spousal difficulty may immediately cause one or perhaps both spouses to realize that he/she has made the ghastly error of marrying someone other than that perfect “soulmate.” Thus, rather than trying to remedy the difficulty, they will spend their energies in how they might get out of the current marriage and into the “right” one as soon as legally possible! It’s the only thing to do—one must be “true” to oneself, no? Anything else is sheer hypocrisy! But perhaps some background on this wondrous “soulmate” paradigm is in order.

According to this felicitously popular idiocy, each person on Earth is “meant” for someone else—one “special” person who will at last understand them, like just what they like (pepperoni pizza, early Billy Joel, etc.), dislike just what they dislike (amorous dachshunds, Sting, etc.), and so on. This person will magically anticipate their needs and telepathically read their minds. Just like our ersatz doc, “Lance”, when he’s not switching medical charts, what?

That such persons do not exist is to be kept TOP SECRET, Gallstone. Let’s be blunt: these humans are scouring the globe for someone with whom a relationship will require absolutely no work or compromise whatever. I asked you not to snigg*r. Many adult humans who have long ago dismissed Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny as myths somehow persist in believing this special person to exist. And of course the fact that many Hollywood movies come across like some version of “Yes, Virginia, there IS a soulmate” is all to the good! In fact, many people who don’t even believe in the existence of our Heavenly Enemy nonetheless stick to their faith in this “soulmate.” Don’t let them see the contradiction in this, Gallstone, whatever you do. The moment they realize that if there is such thing as a soulmate, then there must be Someone up there doing the coordinating, your goose is cooked. Of course if they knew the Someone doing the coordinating they would know that His idea of love and marriage has nothing to do with this soulmate nonsense, but do not let them realize this contradiction! Do and you’ll be herding poltergeists in condemned mansions before you can say “whoopsie!”

Even if they aren’t entirely convinced there is just one person out there who fits this description, they often have a vague sense that they may find something close to such a person—if only they could get out of this hateful marriage and be free! Our strategy in all of this is effectively twofold: if they have married someone with whom they get along reasonably well, we encourage them that this magically special and truly perfect match is still out there, somewhere, “just around the bend”—and with a kind of predictability that would stun Nostradamus they’ll soon enough think about this the moment things go sour, often dashing an otherwise solid marriage in the process. If they destroy their marriage and run off with their supposed “soulmate”, then we watch and wait till their new partner inevitably dissappoints them, perhaps even in the same way their ex-spouse did! Then we simply sit back with a bowl of popcorn and watch them collapse in unravelling misery and self-torture. Who says there are no perks to this job, Gallstone?

Yr. rupturing Uncle,WASPHEAD

My dear Gallstone, Yr. female patient’s recent employment scotches our plans to continue using the dreamy, stubbled spectre of “Lance” effectively, and for this I am sorry, but perhaps he’s served his purpose. Also, her newfound financial independence from hubby is all to the good! It makes a clean exit all the likelier should the opportunity present itself, and we’ll see what we can do along those lines. I love the idea that she is already working late hours with a male colleague—and a Latin-complexioned one at that! Perhaps he’s just the soulmate she’s been looking for, of which “Lance” was just a type and shadow! Can you encourage this new chap to leave off shaving for a day or two so that he might look somewhat stubbled like his faux-medical predecessor? Just a thought. But do try and keep our patient in close and extended proximity with this wonderful fellow! The worm turns! Au revoir, “Lance”; hola, Ramon!

Yr. eternally disassembling Uncle,WASPHEAD

My dear Gallstone, So hubby is already jealous of Ramon, eh? Excellent, Gallstone. Now comes the delicious part: you must now coax him into doing something really foolish, something that might make his wife see him as hopeless, pathetic, beyond the pale, unmanly. If he’s really desperate you will have several opportunities to get him to do something self-destructive, something he’d never otherwise have considered. Perhaps he can take the first steps toward getting hair plugs—or better, a prosthetic chin implant! They’re all the rage. Or perhaps he can seize upon his wife’s wandering affections as an excuse to throw caution to the winds himself and make a date with that everlastingly giggly 22-year-old with the tattoos in the far cubicle. Must think about this. Be inventive, Gallstone! Desperation is our chiefest ally. Carpe diem, etc.

Yr. Uncle,WASPHEAD

My dear Gallstone, I am inconsolable with fury. That yr. male patient has fallen so low as to become involved with those “Promise Keepers” folks is not—how shall I say this, Gallstone?—a gold star on yr. chart. This was most emphatically not the sort of desperate act I had in mind! Our side has let thousands and thousands of nicely percolating divorces slip through our greasy talons as a result of these blasted PK meddlers—but I thought their day had come and gone? Was it not merely a “Nineties” phenomenon? How have you let this happen?! Are they still having their execrable “stadium events” or is this some other version of their shenanigans?? Oh, how I loathe those nitwits with their ludicrous fanny packs and water bottles and tacky “witnessing” t-shirts! Can they be serious?? And those absurd beachballs! Gah!

But the idea that you waited so long to report on this wretched development—so long that his spouse has responded favorably to his flowers and apologies—is enough to make me self-incinerate with rage! Already I have a foul blistery rash that worsens with each irritating moment!

I really am beside myself, Gallstone. You shall not embarrass me this way again. As warned, you’ll pay dearly for yr. error. To wit: yr. spook mansion is ready and waiting. Happy ghost herding. I really could just implode! This unrelenting itching will drive me to distraction!

Yr. unpalliated Uncle, WASPHEADEd. note: At this point the manuscript seems to have become hopelessly charred.

Eric Metaxas is a writer living in New York. “Screwtape Proposes a Divorce” is excerpted from a forthcoming book on marriage, cowritten with Roger Tirabassi.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.” That eloquent and desolate line comes near the very end of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and it sounds Max Weber’s discordant note amidst our chorus of capitalist triumphalism. The lyrical bleakness of Weber’s assertion could be easily dismissed as the weltschmerz of a German mandarin, the dying gasp of a highbrow humanism marked for historical extinction. Indeed, separated from its author, Weber’s indictment could even be mistaken for the rant of a Muslim cleric, or at least as the “unhelpful” and “anti-American” spite of some Tory leftist egghead.

Which is why the centenary of Weber’s classic couldn’t come at a more appropriate moment. Despite its many errors and misconceptions, The Protestant Ethic remains indispensable, even urgent, precisely because of its humanist resistance to the authority of experts and moneybags. For all Weber’s insistence on “value-free” social science, he produced a work of historical sociology that doubles as cultural criticism. It confronts the clichés that pass for wisdom among our punditocracy—”globalization,” “the New Economy,” “democratic capitalism”—and reminds us that the current victory of capitalism is as pyrrhic as it is global. It exposes our manic culture of labor as historically contingent, and invites us to wonder if Adam’s sweat is really an oil of anointment. And despite Weber’s brooding resignation to the “disenchantment of the world,” it compels us to revisit some basic issues in Christian theology.

The Protestant Ethic clearly emerged from its author’s personal turmoil. The eldest son of a prosperous but mismatched couple, Weber bore all of that role’s ambitions and pathologies. His mother was intellectual, religious, and reform-minded; his father, heir to a sizeable mercantile fortune, was the prototype for the driven capitalist who shadows Weber’s masterpiece. Unsurprisingly, their son became a workaholic who embraced and maligned the work ethic. He played the Rising Academic Star at Freiburg and Heidelberg, whose youthful work in sociology was, to use one of academia’s most ambiguous compliments, “solid”: the research was massive, the notes were copious, the imagination was bridled.

The pressures of climbing the academic ladder arguably triggered Weber’s four-year bout with depression—”neurasthenia,” in Victorian parlance. Though his wife Marianne attributed his malady to “renunciations and repressions,” it also stemmed from the diligence always rampant among the over-achieving classes. It seems more than fortuitous that Weber began researching Protestant Ethic just as his depression was lifting in the spring of 1902. Without reducing greatness to convalescence, we could read Protestant Ethic as a classic case of therapeutic transformation.

Weber’s book appeared alongside other turn-of-the-century assaults on bourgeois modernity: Freud’s essays on infantile sexuality, Sorel’s reflections on political violence and mythology, James’ examination of religious experience. Like them, Weber impugned some rationalist piety of middle-class culture. To be sure, Weber certainly never renounced reason, and even after his illness he let up only a little in his scholarly labors. (“Specialized work,” he writes with furrowed brow, “is a condition of any valuable work in the modern world.”) But Weber’s subsequent preoccupations with rationality, bureaucracy, and disenchantment testify, I think, to a real if comparatively muted sense that bourgeois reason aborted the flowering of a “full and beautiful humanity,” as he put in Protestant Ethic.

Like Marx’s Manifesto (which, my students are routinely shocked to discover, features a celebratory account of capitalism), Protestant Ethic can be easily misread. Weber himself anticipated facile readers, clearly rejecting the “foolish and doctrinaire thesis” of a causal link between Protestantism and capitalism. The connection, for Weber, inhered both in the “elective affinity” between Protestant theology and capitalist enterprise and in the “psychological sanctions” for accumulation afforded by religious doctrine. The “affinity” originated in the Protestant repudiation of Catholic sacramentalism and ecclesiology. In Weber’s view, the marrow of Protestant (and especially Calvinist) divinity was its mistrust of “magical and sacramental forces,” its “complete elimination of salvation through the Church and the sacraments,” and its affirmation of predestination. Lacking the assurance provided by material and communal mediation, the Calvinist believer allayed the resulting anxiety through “intense worldly activity” in the form of a “calling.” In the process, Calvinist capitalists achieved a “sanctification of worldly activity” once reserved for monastic contemplation, and cultivated a “worldly asceticism” which, once loosened from its theological moorings, became the classic trinity of bourgeois virtues: diligence, thrift, and self-restraint.

Two key points emerge from Weber’s epic tale. First, the “spirit of capitalism” is not just another term for greed; it is the rationalized accumulation of wealth, undertaken, at least at first, for the sake of God’s glory. Second, the nexus of Protestantism and capitalism lay in a “disenchantment of the world” which, by evacuating the material world of any sacramental significance, unleashed upon it (and human beings) the capitalist’s energies of mastery and acquisition.

As scholars from Lujo Brentano and R. H. Tawney onward have pointed out, problems abound in Protestant Ethic. It caricatures both Protestant and Catholic theology, reducing the former to voluntarism and the latter to magic. (This is true but, as I’ll argue shortly, misleading.) It erases craft guilds, accounts of which have emphasized the “sanctification of worldly activity” conferred by medieval economic culture. And it misrepresents Puritan capitalism itself, Weber’s depiction of which relies on evidence from 17th-century England, not 16th-century Geneva. (Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism is more reliable and astute on all these counts.)

Still, Protestant Ethic remains valuable as a critical document charged by its author’s own contradictions. Take, for instance, Weber’s subtle but perceptible disparagement of bourgeois rectitude, leavened, in part, by Oedipal and professional stresses. His unforgettable portrait of the Puritan divine Richard Baxter is a warning against any philistine inclination to read the parable of the talents as a lesson in venture capitalism. Weber writes with a fine contempt for the “pharisaically good conscience” of capitalists who, then and now, preach the virtues of thrift while cutting wages. And his consignment to the notes of a paragraph on industrial labor’s “joyless lack of meaning”—whether enforced, he adds, “for conscience sake” or “without transcendental sanctions”—hides a pearl of wisdom we need in the age of the air-conditioned sweatshop.

Yet for all its humanist magnanimity, Weber’s book is virtually hopeless. Once pursued as a calling, the production of worldly goods becomes an “iron cage” of merely terrestrial duties and compulsions. Is there no escape? Perhaps, Weber mused, “new prophets” will arise to herald a “great rebirth of old ideas and ideals.” But Weber thought more likely a drearier prospect of “mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance”—the world, that is, of his soulless, technically proficient barbarians, convinced that they lived at the end of history. As intellectual history, that’s Nietzsche in sociological drag; as prophecy, it’s not a bad premonition of our command economy of pleasure. Disguised as “consumerism” or “hedonism,” the work ethic rears its joyless head in the office and at the mall. Perpetually unsatisfied by our purchases, we transform the primrose path of destruction into the treadmill of delight.

Weber remains the Gloomy Gus of sociology, but he also gestures, albeit lamely, in two hopeful and liberating directions. While he sometimes identified economic “rationality” with the imperatives of accumulation and profit—acquisition “rationally pursued” must be calculated “in terms of capital”—he recognized, unlike neo-con heroes like Friedrich von Hayek, that capitalist reason was a historical and “particular concrete form of rational thought,” and that there was something profoundly irrational in human terms about the rationalized vice of avarice.

One could, like the Frankfurt School Marxists, affirm this critique of “instrumental reason” without any theological warrant. Yet, for Christians, theology permits and (I would maintain) even mandates an argument against the account of “disenchantment” that Weber did so much to make a cornerstone of modern intellectual life, and which forms the foundation of capitalist rationality. Though propagated in every undergraduate economics survey, the disenchanted rationality of capitalism should be rejected for two reasons. First, it posits a scarcity about the world that is contradicted by the opening lines of Genesis. If abundance is the true condition of the world, then the skinflint virtues of bourgeois probity become at least historically tragic and at most perennially vicious.

Second, capitalist rationality rests on a conception of matter as pure “stuff,” bereft of any enchanted—or, more precisely, sacramental—capacity to put us (literally) in touch with divinity. Though it’s awkward for a Catholic to recall in this ecumenical review, Protestant theology and religious culture (which, I’ll concede, Weber frequently distorts) do advance an understanding of sacrament which supports a disenchanted, de-sacramentalized view of the material world. So, in one sense, Weber was right to argue that the “disenchanted” universe posited in Calvinist Protestantism was the original cultural matrix for capitalist economics.

But even the sociologist who once described himself as “religiously unmusical” heard faint notes of enchantment in capitalist culture. The enchanted beings who once inhabited the material world did not simply hobble off to die. “Many old gods ascend from their graves,” Weber would later write in “Science as a Vocation,” reappearing to “take the form of impersonal forces,” one of which was the Invisible Hand of the market. Like the ancients, “we live,” he concluded, in a world “not yet disenchanted of its gods and demons.” This, I think, is a far more suggestive line than Weber’s readers, and perhaps even Weber, ever reckoned. Did capitalism disenchant the world, or did it recast the forms of enchantment? If the latter, then we must reject or at least reconsider Weber’s implicit endorsem*nt of Calvinist metaphysics.

So let me cheerfully propose to my (mostly) Protestant readers that Catholic theology enables us to tell a different tale about capitalist modernity, and offer a different critique of accumulation and its discontents. Perhaps the story of capitalist modernity is not one of “disenchantment” but of the repression, displacement, and perversion of sacramentality—that is, of the capacity inherent in material things to be portals onto divinity. Perhaps it is Marx’s notion of “commodity fetishism,” rather than Weber’s notion of “disenchantment,” that offers the more fruitful connection between Christian theology and secular theory. (And Marx was more right than he imagined when he wrote that the commodity “abounds in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”) Perhaps capitalism perverts and imprisons our longing for a sacramental way of being in the world. Our cage is enchanted, not iron.

Eugene McCarraher is professor of humanities at Villanova University. He is writing The Enchantments of Mammon: Corporate Capitalism and the American Moral Imagination.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

A century ago, Harvard psychologist William James rocked the academic world with his insights into the potency of religious ideals and religious experience. Though a pragmatist and a skeptic, James was deeply moved by the lives of people transformed through a profession of faith. “St. Paul long ago made our ancestors familiar with the idea that every soul is virtually sacred,” James wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience. “The belief in the essential sacredness of every one expresses itself today in all sorts of human customs and reformatory institutions. … The saints, with their extravagance of human tenderness, are the great torch-bearers of this belief, the tip of the wedge, the clearers of the darkness.”

It’s a sign of the times that James’ unremarkable observations about religion have become so contested. Critics have assailed President Bush’s “faith-based initiative,” for example, not only on church-state grounds but on the assumption that religious organizations don’t offer any distinctive resources to people in need. Indeed, many thinkers are agnostic, even cynical, about the link between faith and social stability. In the wake of 9/11, theologians and religious studies scholars such as Charles Kimball (When Religion Becomes Evil) went so far as to label truth claims in the public square as a telltale sign of the corruption of religion. Nevertheless, Bush has forced a national debate over religion and government social policy. “I believe it is in the national interest that government stand side by side with people of faith who work to change lives for the better,” he told supporters at a recent White House conference on his initiative. “I’m telling America we need not discriminate against faith-based programs.”

Three recent books suggest that the argument over the Bush agenda is far from over. In Of Little Faith: The Politics of George W. Bush’s Faith-Based Initiative, political science professors Amy Black, Douglas Koopman, and David Ryden recount the twists and turns of the initiative over a three-year period. Based on interviews with key players in the White House and Congress, the book explains in exacting detail why the president’s legislative effort flopped. There’s plenty of blame to go around. Supporters introduced their bill too quickly, the authors claim, and House Republicans retooled it as a “payoff to the GOP’s traditional religious base.” At the same time, liberal Democrats were desperate to prevent a Bush victory that might draw away African American voters, who mostly love the idea. “The mischaracterizations and distortions that marked the debate were more than mere ignorance or uncertainty about the law,” the authors conclude. “They reflected intentional political strategies designed to ensure defeat of the proposal.” Of Little Faith offers even-handed analysis that nonetheless rejects the “crabbed version of religion” which colors so much public discourse.

In A Revolution of Compassion, Dave Donaldson and Stanley Carlson-Thies deliver a sturdy apologia for the president’s agenda. They sketch the history and accomplishments of the initiative and examine the obstacles that remain. Carlson-Thies, who served in the White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives, brings to the issue a sober and straightforward style. Donaldson, founder of We Care America, keeps the responsibility of congregations always in view. The authors take note of the hostility to religion in public life (with a bizarre story of churches turned away by grief counselors on 9/11), though they place the burden of reform on the evangelical community. “Why have so many churches—unfettered in this country to be as generous as they wish toward their hurting neighbors—done so little to help the poor?” they ask. Good question.

A Revolution of Compassion lacks the prophetic bite of Ron Sider’s Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (aimed at the church’s embrace of capitalism) or the trenchant critique of Marvin Olasky’s The Tragedy of American Compassion (aimed at the welfare state). Instead, much of the work is a practical guide for churches and charities seeking government or corporate support for their outreach. The authors recommend, for example, that organizations avoid becoming dependent on public funding and offer a warning: “When it comes time to sign the paperwork for the money, you need to have an experienced and faith-friendly lawyer looking over your shoulder.” A Revolution of Compassion may not read like Paine’s Common Sense, but it aspires toward a radical rethinking of America’s social-safety net—a rejection both of the liberal welfare state and the libertarian dream of a privatized system of charity. “Government does have a proper place,” the authors write. “Yet government is no substitute for caring neighbors and friends, thriving businesses that provide jobs and careers … and faith-based organizations that show God’s love as they teach skills or help a person escape an addiction.”

Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow isn’t as sanguine. In Saving America? Faith-Based Services and the Future of Civil Society, Wuthnow uses survey data and qualitative research to explore the character and capacity of faith-based organizations. He frames his research findings as a challenge both to advocates and to critics of the president’s initiative. Yet his tortuous arguments cast doubt on nearly every important aspect of religiously inspired social outreach.

One of Wuthnow’s main conclusions, for example, is that church-state watchdogs don’t have much to worry about—because most faith-based organizations aren’t very religious after all. He suggests that the most valuable asset of church-based charities is that they foster social relationships, not that they inculcate religious ideals. Wuthnow is right to emphasize the relational aspect of social ministries, and hardly any researcher has explored this dimension of religious commitment as carefully as he has. But his broad conclusion, that these organizations function in ways which “depend little on their connections with religious traditions,” is grossly overstated. Wuthnow relies too heavily on a survey of human service agencies in New York City, which found scant evidence that groups were engaged in “religious advocacy”—meaning evangelism or discrimination of recipients on religious grounds. That’s a shallow view of how religious values might inform programs for the poor. Another problem is a skewed sample: New York, arguably a command post for secularization, is militant about enforcing church-state separation in publicly funded services.

Behind Wuthnow’s work creeps an assumption: that neither churches nor faith-based charities are adept at assuming a much greater role in meeting social needs. Indeed, at times he seems to denigrate the emphasis on character and personal responsibility that typifies evangelical organizations. He slights groups that assist prison inmates, for example, because they believe that convicted felons “are supposedly there as a result of their own actions.” He laments the fact that many people view religious truths as “an unrivaled source of personal meaning and purpose” in life. He downgrades the importance of small-scale acts of service compared to the organizational capacity of the welfare state. “Religious programs … often encourage people to think more compassionately about the poor,” he writes, “but they channel this thinking in individualistic ways that may encourage charity more than public advocacy on behalf of the poor.” Does Wuthnow really think that an unwed mother facing eviction prefers the help of a welfare lobbyist over that of Mother Teresa’s Sisters of Mercy?

It all makes the reader wonder what kinds of organizations find their way into Wuthnow’s research—and why. They don’t bear much resemblance to the tough-minded poverty-fighters profiled in the works of Marvin Olasky (Renewing American Compassion), Charles Glenn (The Ambiguous Embrace), Joel Schwartz (Fighting Poverty With Virtue), or Barbara Elliott (Street Saints). Nor do they look like those this reviewer has encountered over the last ten years of research and interviews. Social scientists rightly believe that many “faith-based” organizations are about as religious as fly-fishing clubs along the Great Basin stillwaters. Wuthnow acknowledges great diversity among charitable groups, but he seems to camp on the most secularized varieties, those heavily involved with public funding. Left unexamined, however, is what his data suggest about the vast number of religious programs unattached to government—the very groups the Bush initiative hopes to engage.

What might all of this mean for policymakers? The books reviewed here reflect the current argument, ranging from those who want a vast expansion of church-state partnerships to those who see only a marginal role for religion in social services. A recent front-page article in the New York Times, about a ministry to California prisoners led by Saddleback Community Church, suggests where the tide might be heading. The article quoted a prison official impressed by evangelical Christians helping inmates abandon careers in crime and drug abuse. “We manage behavior very well,” he told the Times. “But we’ve not done as much trying to change and shape behavior. That’s what these guys are doing effectively.” That sounds a lot like the observations of William James. What captured his interest most were stories of encounters with the divine: a religious experience that transforms the human heart and makes possible an entirely new set of choices about one’s life.

Government may not be able to finance this kind of work, but neither should it hinder or demean it. “Let us agree, then,” James wrote, “that Religion, occupying herself with personal destinies and keeping thus in contact with the only absolute realities which we know, must necessarily play an eternal part in human history.” Religion as an eternal part of the human story. Yes—for all the public disagreement, let us agree on that.

Joseph Loconte is the William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and a Free Society and editor of the forthcoming The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront Hitler’s Gathering Storm (Rowman & Littlefield).

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

I will with care call the person WS, from the lead of Anthony Burgess in his novel, Nothing Like The Sun. Too many variations on his name, often in his own hand, exist to pinpoint its spelling with certainty, though it helps to know that English was in the midst of a sea change in his era, in its shifting mutations to its present state, and he seems to have used the vowels and constants, in his own name, even, that felt right.

He was above all a writer of feeling. The symphonic interchange of emotion between every variation of class and gender in his work, but especially between men and women, yields mouthfuls of magnificent poetry—an achievement in itself. We read him in this century to learn about those relationships in ways that others are unwilling or unable to describe; Freud’s grasp was only of an undercurrent in WS.

People and the situations they work themselves into (always of attraction and repulsion) revolved through his mind as the planets of our system revolve around the sun. He had a nearly perfect trust in the fruitful art of the creative process he sensed in himself as the center of the universe. Stars revolved in orderly perpetuation through the seasons as kings and queens and princes and clowns and fools appeared and disappeared and then reappeared again in an endless pageant that swam through his mind and sensitive senses. He watched with the liturgical attentiveness of a spaniel, those same eyes, and then reconstructed actions as songs and translated into words the dreamlike cast of the visions and fantasies of those he observed in the most relaxed and textured containers of measured verse that have ever entered the English language.

He was an actor by trade and a wanderer, anyway in his imagination, setting his plays across the global landscape, and a bardic poet who tried to keep the range of variations he could orate under formal control. He admired Latin poets for their georgics and their agrarian acumen (the pastoral trend in him), plus the oddities of love in Ovid, and the Greeks for their insight into the tragedy of life lived on the earth with no outlet, no hope, no exit. He had an affinity for those who viewed life in such terms, as Marlowe did. Other contemporaries glimpsed the predicament as we tend to define it, but WS faced it head on, with a pacific smile of patience behind his variety of poses. It is his view of that exit, first in furtive glimpses and then fully—all this dramatized in every line of his work, including The Rape of Lucrece and the Sonnets—that allows us to live in hope and leads us to acknowledge him as the master of world literature. Other writers don’t seem to sense the intersection of one’s words on a page with immortality quite as he did, and his plays can be seen as variations on enacting immortality.

The psychiatrist Gerald G. May notes in the first sentence of Addiction & Grace, “After twenty years of listening to the yearnings of people’s hearts, I am convinced that all human beings have an inborn desire for God. Whether we are consciously religious or not, this desire is our deepest longing and most precious treasure.”

However an adherent may define the road to faith, that deep longing and treasure, once reached, gives to the inner (if not outer) edges of an otherwise humdrum everyday life a weight of glory and meaning. After more than 40 years of reading WS and enacting roles in which I had memorize his lines, I have come to believe that he, more than any writer in my native tongue, bore this inborn gravitation to God. The will or quest to know Him as fully, through others, as WS was able to do is the enigma that takes a visceral hold on us as we follow him to a play’s conclusion through words.

A book that enables us to view WS with renewed clarity found its route via an Oxford bookstore to me. It is by George H. Morrison, MA, DD, who explains its genesis in his preface: “The following pages embody the notes which I used for a series of addresses given in Wellington Church, Glasgow, on Sunday nights at the close of the evening service. The very large attendance, and the keen and unfailing interest displayed, have led me to publish them, in the hope that they may prove helpful to others.” That is half the preface. The remainder is a low bow to textual scholars—”those masters of criticism and exposition at whose feet I have sat in discipleship since my college days”—and how he “deliberately confined myself to a few of the greater plays which one might assume to be familiar to an audience gathered from all classes of the community.”

However fortune delivered the book to me, I opened it (as now, at random, its insight apparent at every turn), and read:

Lady Macbeth, whatever she may be, is not an utterly callous woman. A careful reading of the play makes that evident. She has to pray to be unsexed (I, v, 42); she needs wine to make her bold (II, ii, 1); she cannot slay Duncan for he is like her father (II, ii, 12-14); after the murder she cannot bear the darkness (V, i, 25-27). And the awful revelation of her sleep-walking [the blood she tries to wash from her hands] betrays a nature different in the deeps from that of an utterly heartless, callous woman.

She was a woman of an indomitable will, who never let “I dare not” wait upon “I would.” She has far less imagination than her husband, for Macbeth was of “imagination all compact.” [MND: V,i,8] She saw intensely but not imaginatively; she thought that “a little water” would put all things right (II, ii, 67); she failed to picture the remorse and agony that would make bloodstains burn like fire.

The book is entitled Christ in Shakespeare. Its London publisher, James Clarke and Co., provides no date, but evidently it appeared in 1928 (the preface is dated thus) or soon thereafter. Morrison may seem a quaint distance from the our 21st-century American versions of WS, but the comparison isn’t entirely to our credit.

America, as it happens, is undergoing a revival of interest in WS, a phenomenon we can date to the Mel Gibson film—not The Passion of the Christ but 1990’s Hamlet. Never, since the 18th century, entirely out of fashion, WS nevertheless seems to undergo a revival every few decades, his corpus tottering onstage to be revealed as a young man (or woman) in tights, but a greater momentum is stirring the air this time around. As we become more “global,” in the parlance that is popular (which means more than a McDonald’s everywhere, as an embassy attachÉ put it), we have come to appreciate more the sanguine wisdom of WS and its application to external and internal affairs, a solid sense of consanguinity with the best and the worst in us.

Gibson’s durable Hamlet was truncated to adhere to the theme of revenge—a source of excessive joy to young men, especially when directed against one’s father. A year earlier, in 1989—perhaps after all it was this that got the latest revival rolling—Kenneth Branagh had strolled onscreen in Henry V as a star-struck warrior exuding the celestial dimension that royalty once enjoyed, warring in this case against compassion. Then Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing broadcast the magic musicality of the celestial, and then his robber-baron of an Iago, down to his uncut version of Hamlet, into which he seemed to pour personal woes—a slow-mo version redeemed by Claudius, Horatio, and batty little Robin Williams—with little connection to the glory of the celestial, its omnipresence like stars through the text.

Then an intuitive and not unkind look at the fellow himself, in the moving Shakespeare in Love. Academy Awards to Will! And on and on until it seems the producers of films and TV specials and picture books (and picture books of TV specials, such as Michael Wood’s Shakespeare) will never rest yet not quite displace the primary occupants of the WS arena, the scholars; rather an outpouring, a widening stream of a variety of books on WS keeps up an ungainly tumble into the present, always redefining and perfecting itself as it grows.

WS was not so omnipresent decades ago, as we hear from our most fruitful and professional American reader, Harold Bloom, in a report from his meditation, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. But with the book-laden current coming at us, another force arrives: the never-say-die anti-Stratfordians, once the Baconians—who for a century insisted Sir Francis Bacon invented WS. A present contender is Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford (Baconians evolving to Oxonions), and one need go no further; one finds their backtrackings and screeds sprinkled through the tidal flood of “Shakespeare” books.

If nothing other rises out of the recent revival than The Invention of the Human, it will have been worth enduring the deus ex machina of Hollywood for it. Bloom sees WS as a nonpareil, the measure of literature since, and Bloom truly is a professional reader, perhaps the best-read man alive, not to mention his acuity, his charm, and the unfazed way in which he looks to the rock bottom of a book, without hauling in a shipload of equipment to create a superstructure that will render him superior to the text. Though I suspect that few doubt (or the too few near his capacious brilliance) how often he is.

His contention is that Hamlet and Falstaff are bipolar representations of the heights and depths the human being is capable of, as we understand humankind down to the present. The thought feels agreeably Platonic, as filtered to us by Aquino-Thomists, but Bloom, mild as a March pasque flower, argues that our conception of our species was forged by WS, and has not been superseded or improved upon. Let me second that, and say that I find most of the observations in his 745-page thunking tome artfully woven and well arranged. For instance:

But that is typical of Hamlet’s consciousness, for the prince has a mind so powerful that the most contrary attitudes, values, and judgments can co-exist within it coherently, so coherently indeed that Hamlet nearly has become all things to all men, and to some women. Hamlet incarnates the value of personality, while turning aside from the value of love. If Hamlet is his own Falstaff (Harold Goddard’s fine formulation), he is a Falstaff who doesn’t need Hal, any more than he needs poor Ophelia, or even Horatio, except as a survivor who will tell the prince’s story. The common element in Falstaff’s ludic mastery and in Hamlet’s dramaturgy is the employment of great wit as a counter-Machiavel, as a defense against a corrupted world.

Well, yes, yet there is a point at which I stick (if I may also), which seems to leak through the last part of this paragraph: Bloom’s insistence on “Hamlet As Nihilist” (part 7, first chapter). Hamlet does love Horatio, it appears, or he wouldn’t take him into his confidence as he does; and Horatio loves Hamlet as an adoring younger brother might.

In each of his primary speeches Hamlet voices Christian forebodings, as here, at their declaratory source:

Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! Oh, God! God!
(I, i, 131-132)

an idea alien to a rational nihilist, as the next is not:

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on it! Ah, Fie! ‘Tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed, things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
(I, ii, 133-137)

though a good metaphor for the world. Hamlet’s reflex-swift response to his father’s appearance as a ghost is

Angels and ministers of grace defend us!
(I, iv, 39)

And when he contemplates the same moment later:

… The Spirit that I have seen
May be the Devil, and the Devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape. Yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me.
(II, ii, 627-632)

See his speech to the players (II, ii, 305-321) or in that best-known soliloquy, at the turning tide of the play, when he breaks off his contemplation on suicide—the logical conclusion for a true nihilist who wants out—to say instead:

perchance to dream. Aye, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
(III, i, 65-69)

“Sleep,” a new covenant term for death, reminds us how he claims he “could be bound in a nutshell and counted a king of infinite space, where it not that I have bad dreams.”

No need to go further restate the obvious, except to note that at the turning point of the play, when Hamlet starts to draw his sword to do in Claudius, he thinks

Now might I do it pat, now he is praying,
And now I’ll do it. And so he goes to Heaven,
And so I am revenged. That would be scanned:
A villain kills my father, and for that
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To Heaven.
Oh, this is hire and salary, not revenge.

He would become the Devil’s salaried emissary, saving from damnation the one he hopes to damn by execution, and from that moment the play spins from the pivot of “Heaven,” circled by the silence of that absent line. In the end Hamlet pays, like Macbeth, not for his inability to wreak revenge (WS’s twist on “revenge plays”) but for his hapless drive toward murder, dispatching his culture-attuned school chums on the way, harried by the one who has the power to assume not only a pleasing shape—note all the references to Hell—but even the habiliments of one’s father.

The British biographer Park Honan is an exemplar of the scholarly tack toward humility that renders scholarship resonant. When he entered graduate school, he told his supervisor, James Sutherland, that he intended to write a biography of WS. Before sending Honan on, Sutherland advised him, “over sherry, to look into other writers ‘first.’ ” Over his academic tenure Honan wrote biographies of Browning, Arnold, and Austen, always researching for the work on WS, and finally when he was a professor emeritus he published the biography he envisioned as an aggressive grad student in postwar London, Shakespeare: A Life.

The wait was worth it. Honan’s Life stands above the tide of numberless others, not only in the way it builds on recorded history recently exhumed—as by S. Schoenbaum in his chronicling of every shred of documentation, legal and otherwise, that exists on WS—but equally in Honan’s gentle dispelling of anecdotal and unproved legends and myths, many first formed in a 40-page sketch by Nicholas Rowe in 1709, and clung to as certitude for centuries.

Honan knows Ivor Brown, E. K. Chambers, G. Wilson Knight, A. L. Rowse, Dover Wilson, M. C. Bradbrook, Frank Kermode (whose The Age of Shakespeare is just out), and the rest of the more dependable crowd, besides the naysaying anti-Stratfordians who have raised their voices in protest. Honan presents historical documentation of the era into which WS was born, the matrix in which he lived, so it becomes clear that x and y could not have occurred, because the potential for such an event did not exist at the time, or it is clear that WS experienced x and y, because it was the experience of all Stuart youth in the rigid society of the era—Honan a trustworthy scholar, no sniper at jots and tittles.

Honan’s prose is compressed, direct, uncluttered, with a tug to it of wrapping the exact words within a telling phrase, and it registers a probity and sifting acuity that lifts each passage into a realm of luminous accuracy, a book of such finish and precision I’ve enjoyed it for two years and can’t quite finish, due to the angles of thought even a paragraph has the power take me down.

A penetrating glimpse of the history leading up to the Stuart and Jacobite renaissance is rendered by W. H. Auden in his introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Poets:

It is nonsense to say that the men of the Middle Ages did not observe nature, or cared only about their own souls, ignoring social relations: indeed it would be truer to say that their intellectual weakness was an oversimple faith in the direct evidence of their senses and the immediate data of consciousness, an oversimplification of the relation between the objective and subjective world. Believing that the individual soul was a microcosm of the universe and that all visible things were signs of spiritual truths, they thought that to demonstrate this, it was enough simply to use one’s eyes and one’s powers of reflection to perceive analogies. For example:

As the soul aspires to God, so the stone of the Gothic arch soars.

As individuals and armies fight for territory, so the virtues and vices struggle for possession of the soul …

When Bacon defines science as putting nature to the question—that is, the torture—he is rebuking this trust in direct observation, for he implies that nature is secretive and must be compelled against her will to reveal the truth. Modern science begins when, instead of asking what a thing is like, for which simple observation is enough, one asks how long it is or how heavy, questions which cannot be answered without performing experiments. When the break came it was drastic. Luther denied any intelligible relation between Faith and Works, Machiavelli any intelligible relation between private and public morality, and Descartes any intelligible relation between Matter and Mind. Allegory became impossible as a literary form, and the human Amor seemed no longer a parable of the Divine Love but its blasphemous parody.1

It was into this world that WS stepped, and the path he took has never been so fairly seen as in Honan’s Life—my candidate for the definitive biography, insofar as there can be any such, in its unassailable and well-shaped assurance.

Yet it is Bloom who exposes the other side, the ruse that lies beneath academic interest, which tends to avoid the personal diminishment that can arrive from extensive contact with a canonical writer of such a wide-ranging spectrum, such clear mastery, as WS, in its rush toward the generic and fashionably au courant. Distant academies want to keep up with Yale, and yet here is Yale in a Yale professor’s words, at a time when interest in WS had waned to the point Bloom describes as a contributor to a Harper’s cover story that re-examined the plausibility of de Vere and other pretenders to the throne:

The academy, as everyone knows, is shot to pieces. Even at Yale, I am surrounded by courses in gender and power, transsexuality and queer theory, multiculturalism, and all the other splendors that now displace Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, and Dickens. But the worst may well be over. A decade ago, I would introduce my Graduate Shakespeare seminar (never my Undergraduate) by solemnly assuring the somewhat resentful students that all of Shakespeare, and not just the Sonnets, had been written by Lucy Negro, Elizabethan England’s most celebrated East Indian whor*. Anthony Burgess in his splendid fictive life, Nothing Like the Sun, had identified Lucy Negro as the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, and thus Shakespeare’s peerless erotic catastrophe, resulting in heartbreak, venereal disease, and relatively early demise. Stone-faced (as best I could), I assured my graduate students that all their anxieties were to be set aside, since the lustful and brilliant Lucy Negro actually had composed the plays and Sonnets. Thus they could abandon their political reservations and read “Shakespeare” with assured correctness, since Lucy Negro was, by definition, multicultural, feminist, and post-colonial. And also, I told them, we could set aside the covens of Oxfordians, Marlovians, and Baconians in the name of the defrauded Lucy Negro.

On the same shelf as Bloom’s Invention you should make room for Berryman’s Shakespeare, by the poet John, which has the textual finickiness you might expect from a poet, yet a prayerful admiration; and Auden’s lectures, delivered off the cuff at the New School, throw a scattering of sparks from a poetic genius rubbing against his master. Both are books of creators enamored of The Creator, and John Updike, never a laggard in a landslide, contributes his thoughtful but prickly Gertrude & Claudius; he dislikes Hamlet, and has an avowed aversion to rustics and gravediggers, as many intellectuals and anti-Stratfordians (he is not one) do.

It’s not the official custodians of high culture, after all, that we have to thank for preserving WS’s works in the first place. In Elizabethan England a playwright’s position was so low in that laddered society it fell beneath the prostitute—for what was a playwright but an untrustworthy practitioner of scurrilous half-magic that could not be called art, if the practice weren’t downright seditious? Jonson was hauled to court on a homicide charge, a valid one, and was released not because he wasn’t guilty but because he held a divinity degree from Oxford. He was, however, branded at the base of his thumb with a T, which meant Tyburn, or death at his next capital offense.

The rebellion of the Earl of Essex was ascribed to the effects of performing Richard II, and the Lord Chamberlain forbade WS’s company to stage the play for a time. Christopher Marlowe, the only contemporary who seems a contender but who served more as an inspiration to the possibilities of spoken poetry to WS, was stabbed in a pub brawl, a poniard entering an eye socket, according to witnesses. Such was the practice of theater.

So it was players and playwrights, not the court or the academy, who took up the cause of WS. John Hemmings and Henry Condell, fellow actors and managers, gathered the plays extant after his death. Who else dared, given that no one knew how royalty would act next, after Bloody Mary and shilly-shallying Elizabeth (who had Mary Queen of Scots and others beheaded, however, along her tergiversatory route) and then the braying fop who took the throne and seemed compelled to prove via the theology of the Scots Presbyterians he hated, as only an English schoolboy hates a master, that he was equal to the pope. He believed himself superior to British prelates and scholars on the theology of witchcraft, a true Richard II, and proclaimed his intent to publish his own Bible. His interest in it, as with most of his projects except those involving young men, soon waned, and the translation appeared unhindered by his royal touch: the King James Version, as it is called. (WS appears to have had no hand in it, though the rumor is another that has circulated at times.) It wasn’t until Victoria, 300 years down the line, that Henry Irving brought such aristocracy to the office that he became the first actor in British history to be knighted, in 1895.

WS appears in the glimpses that remain to have been happy in London, enjoying the work in camaraderie, not only with his players but Jonson, Marlowe, Alleyn, and Kyd spurring him on. The best and worst of the advances in metaphysics and science and Western philosophies and religions were present in the city then, besides a polyglot language of the kind we encounter in Chaucer, with foreign accents and overtones and meanings stirring in every word, so that Defoe, a century later, still referred to it as “your Roman-Saxon-Danish- Norman-English.” The residents of Europe’s grand city were well aware of Machiavelli’s The Prince, that scary treatise on political power that memorialized their fears of royalty; most of them opposed Roman Catholicism as the true church, at least pro forma, but especially in this metropolitan center of a prodigy of a country that was incorporating a dozen languages into its vocabulary and in the midst of managing the spelling and pronunciation and general onrush of it; printing coming into its own, moving from the purview of the church to cut-rate booths encircling St. Paul’s, the center of the city—all this present, plus “the little Latin and less Greek” that a rural schoolboy would know, each day a shifting storm of separate cultures you had to name in their manifestations and separate parts, only to find your words melted by the next morning.

The society he observed was composed of the strata of classes that persist even today in England. The fenced-off fortress of privilege, the bastion of the upper class, forbade communication with people one rung below, much less the hayseed no-account who might lead to you the horse you had a servant saddle, all the way down to a household factotum. WS and a few of the backwoods bumpkins he depicted were barely of the class to hold a horse’s bridle. No aristocrat would dare imagine or put down on a page such dunderheaded dolts as Dogberry and Verges. Peasants.

But he was an astute businessman and manager; two of his acting companies enjoyed the royal prerogative, employed by two separate courts; both incarnations of his Globe Theatre prospered. Through all this he kept investing in his home place, Stratford. He saw to it that his father, John Shakespeare, was granted a shield of arms; he bought New Place in Stratford in 1597, a commodious manor of ten rooms, “much as it was in the poet’s youth,” Honan observes; his wife Ann was able to move their three children from his father’s house; he is listed by the Queen’s Council as one of the hoarders of barley in Stratford in 1598, owner of 80 bushels; and in the only extant handwritten letter to WS, two Stratford alderman beg him for a loan. Sharers in his acting company, Honan writes, “were earning about L1 a week (perhaps the equivalent of L500 or more in London at the end of the twentieth century). This was four times the fixed wage of a skilled city worker, and his income would have been between L100 and L160 a year from all sources.” In his will, WS left tokens of the time, memorial rings, to Hemmings and Condell, among others; they are also listed (with W. Shakespeare) in the court records of Elizabeth I and James I, as members of The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later altered, in honor of the odd monarch from Scotland, to The King’s Men.

Note to the anti-Stratfordians: It would require a conspiracy of infinite devising to deceive two royal courts, attended to by influential hangers-on and gossips, or to delude the Lord Chamberlain, responsible for every entertainment held in Britain; both monarchs commissioned performances by WS’s companies.

Robert Frost, who hoped to shape American blank verse into a form as subtly complex as the work of WS, and whose poems tend toward the dramatic, either internally or in the form of dialogues or mini-dramas or masques, said, “I look at a poem as a performance. I look on the poet as a man of prowess, just like an athlete. He’s a performer.” He also notes that “probably way back somewhere” somebody noted that poetry is “the marrow of wit. There’s got to be wit.”2 About Bacon, considered as rival for authorship, we can say that the wit in him is conjured from eloquence—he smells of the closet of ratiocination—while WS, even in the midst of tragedy, keeps weaving through it the balancing antidote of wit. The “meaning” of most of his tragedies, and many comedies, too, is made plain to any in the audience by the base, simplistic, even obnoxious words and gestures of clowns, rustics, and unfettered spirits of fun.

That was the route WS continually took, an irritant to those who expect him to be a stoic classicist. Louise Bogan pictures him better in a quatrain entitled “To An Artist, To Take Heart”:

Slipping in blood, by his own hand, through pride,
Hamlet, Othello, Coriolanus fall.
Upon his bed, however, Shakespeare died,
Having endured them all. 3

The master-maker, in Bogan’s suggested serenity at his death, or anyway his ability to endure the onslaughts on personality and conscience and consciousness that the production of his characters—the release of them! the outpouring of them!—must have caused, overarches every iota of his accomplishment. His smile assumes the enigmatic lines of the Mona Lisa, a retreating gaze in a face like a mask, so that WS as elusive person becomes the subject of inexhaustible fascination. He continues to set off electricity along our edges from his assured residence within the immortality he best describes himself (see Shakespeare as Literary Artist, by Lukas Erne, or the strange story of the likeness of him in Stephanie Nolen’s Shakespeare’s Face).

He understood his characters from the inside, liked to mimic them (through the characters in low-comedy scenes), and knew how to enact them; few ring false notes, as actors affirm. He had an affinity and affection for all of his characters, every one. Yet in many ways, as an artisan, he is as distanced from them as from the people he brushed by each day on London streets, those we never hear about, and so was detached as he needed to be, poking fun at one aspect or another of a character in a few lines, consistently hitting a sort of sore comic hot spot.

Precision of focus underscores tragedy, as WS seems to have recognized early, perhaps as he copied out a Latin poem in Stratford day school or, better, as most boys in middle schools had to do to the time of Randall Jarrell and Auden, translate a poem from Latin into his own verse; as a country boy he was attuned to Latin pastoral poetry. He delivered gloves for his father, and one of his trips likely took him to the Hathaways, at Shottery, just beyond where, today, soccer fields border Stratford and the woods begin. If we try to enter him, in the way he did his characters, an apt analogue might be a person in prayer entering the presence of God. Writers in English sooner or later have to acknowledge that anything estimable they achieve somehow has its origins in him, considering his efforts to straighten and broaden a language inclusive of multitudes, his unabashed double-entendres centuries before Freud, the ease of his mastery over the simplest yet most complex phrase, especially in the years after Hamlet, the play in which he unloaded most of whatever in him remained unresolved in a rat-pack of words, then moved on.

In his native isolation and affinity for the actual, the original, the primitive, he is the best linguistic guide to entry into the English language, and we step into his provinces by his words and their rhythms and the multitude of characters he fitted together as messengers for his many permutations. Through them, in a further way, he speaks to us as an integrated bearer of the ultimate Good News. Above all, he placed the impress of Christ, whose outlines are love and mercy and reconciliation, into more universally appealing characters than any other writer in English in the history of the Western world.

Lore has him returning home at least once a year, and it is likely he went back in spring to check on how the lamb crop came in (along with perhaps cattle, possibly swine) and to oversee the seeding of his barley and wheat; he would want to be present in late summer or early fall as well, for harvest. He seems to have known from the start that Stratford (its farming populace and handicraft merchants) was the source of his accomplishments, and he paid it homage, dying in New House only blocks from where he was born, leaving a largesse for Stratford’s poor. Only a person who was nurtured by and nurtured the earth over its diurnal and seasonal changes could have written his plays—rural boy that he was, farmer or farming-inclined son of a rural tradesman and farmer.

The older, unmarried Hathaway daughter had a way about her that caught his shopkeeper-herdsman’s eye, a sharp-tongued beauty, Beatrice to any Benedick. He talked to the older woman—she was 26—lying at her feet along the Avon, perhaps (a courtly country swain if not yet a courtier), head propped on a hand propped by his elbow, and perhaps only intimated that they might try a non-marital yet marital relation before they were betrothed, just once—WS in love; the try and just once gaining him leverage—and when she turned up pregnant and they married (both were from churchgoing families, WS’s father in a quandary that may have included WS over the Catholic Church, or so recent evidence suggests), it was for life.

She, the older, wiser woman, should have known better and couldn’t quite forgive him; she told him so and didn’t care if he moved out; she let him know her mind, as Beatrice did, and would endure what she must with his black spot of tuppery shadowing her. In The Winter’s Tale we receive a sense of how he gained forgiveness: let her thaw from his separation (and perhaps defensive accusations) and begin anew. She added verbal fire to his feminine edge, and by the time she started asking him to spend time away from the house, now that her female organs were ruined by the birth of twins (still living with his parents), he had every scene with her set in his mind on his first long walk to London.

The most violent of his lover’s spats, from The Taming of the Shrew to Winter’s Tale, were sweetened at the end through reconciliation, and the way he reconciled himself to the city, to its artistic and cultural ambiance, while separated from his wife and family, is yet another mystery, although a compressed sonnet, dating from his early career, before success fully struck, offers an array of clues:

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me more like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

He was a tender and gardener, and on his walks in rural Stratford he observed flowers and crops and wildlife with the eye of an ecologist; it is doubtful you will find in any writer so many varieties of plants given voice in their seasonal differences and profusion. What he saw once he preserved in an unassailable ether inhabiting his mind.

He saw himself as disunited, out gathering blackberries when he would rather hunt a buck; from the beginning viewing himself as filled with pinpoints and fissures and cracks of little meaning (except for the light they shed on another of the characters he released as an analogue)—or anyway saw himself as no better than any he mocked and so entered their tableaux and served at the foot of kings, a durable Stratford lad, the internal equipoise he seems to have found in himself (or perhaps felt set for him), and, as gladly as he could when the torrent of words arrived, tried again to reinvent himself as integrated and whole, the Many in the One.

Larry Woiwode, novelist and poet, is the author of many books, including most recently What I Think I Did (Basic Books), the first volume in a projected trilogy of memoirs. The second installment, My Dinner with Auden, is scheduled for 2005.

1. Medieval and Renaissance Poets, ed. W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson (Viking Portable Library, 1957).

2. Writers at Work: Second Series, ed. George Plimpton (Viking, 1963), p. 30.

3. Louise Bogan, The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968).

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

My husband and I have an airline mantra that we strictly adhere to: “Don’t give up the armrest.” Which means: when the person sitting next to you asks if he or she might please raise the armrest, our response is a courteous but firm “no.” Why? Because most often the person asking is obese and cannot squeeze his plump derrière into the space allotted by the airlines. My husband and I reason that we paid for a full seat, and in the past, we’ve experienced the uncomfortable effect of someone else’s spillage causing us to sit knock-elbowed the entire flight. And to be embarrassingly truthful, such encounters often lead to disgusted dialogue once we’re safely out of the plane: “How can he live that way? Does he know how he looks? What a lack of self-control!” Paul Campos, the author of The Obesity Myth: Why America’s Obsession with Weight is Hazardous to Your Health, would like to strangle us. Americans have created a false and unfounded hysteria about fat in general, Campos argues, and obese people are one more segment of the population that we have ostracized unfairly. They cannot help who they are. They are programmed to fluctuate around a predetermined genetic weight. And the rest of us who are frantically attempting to look like the slim, sleek magazine models are dieting ourselves to death—literally. Campos identifies study after study in which, he alleges, researchers have erroneously misrepresented and manipulated their data to pinpoint fat as the culprit. Why? Oftentimes, the studies are funded by the very organizations—diet and weight-loss programs—that want us to become obsessed with losing weight.

In medical terms, whether or not a person is obese is determined by the body mass index, or BMI, a measurement of body fat based on height and weight. (To check your own BMI, go to www.nhlbi.nih.gov.) Today, more than 60 percent of Americans are either overweight (BMI >25), obese (BMI >30), or morbidly obese (BMI >40). Generally speaking, a BMI of 19 to 25 indicates a healthy weight.

A particularly compelling study done in 1996 by the National Center for Health Statistics and Cornell University analyzed dozens of previous studies to investigate whether or not the relationship between body weight and mortality was meaningful. The results were startling:

Among non-smoking white men, the lowest mortality rate was found among those with a BMI between 23 and 29, which means that a large majority of the men who lived longest were “overweight” according to government guidelines. The mortality rate for white men in the supposedly ideal range of 19 to 21 was the same as that for those in the 29 to 31 range (most of whom would be defined currently as “obese”). The researchers were sufficiently struck by this to point out that since their analysis of existing studies had found “increased mortality at moderately low BMI for white men comparable to that found at extreme overweight, which does not appear to be due to smoking or existing disease,” it followed that “attention to the health risks of underweight is needed, and body weight recommendations for optimum longevity need to be considered in light of these risks.”1

Even more astounding was what they found for women. The authors concluded that, for non-smoking, white women, the BMI range correlating with the lowest mortality rate was extremely broad, from around 18 to 32, meaning a woman of average height could weigh anywhere within an 80-pound range without seeing any statistically significant change in her risk of premature death.2

Like Campos, Dr. Jeffrey Friedman, a researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Rockefeller University and the scientist who led the team that discovered the obesity hormone leptin in 1995, believes the obese get a bad rap. He says, “People often reserve their harshest judgments for those conditions about which the least is known.”3 Friedman believes obesity is not a personal failing; typically it is a result of genetic factors beyond our control.

True, says Dr. Katherine Flegal of the National Center for Health Statistics. The general population has gained 7 to 10 pounds over the past 20 years, but the much larger increase at the upper end of the bell curve—an average increase has been of 25 to 35 pounds among the obese.4

Friedman begs us to take a closer look at our body mechanics—systems that are not yet fully understood. Hormones are responsible for balancing our caloric intake and energy expenditure (the amount of calories we burn off) within a 10- to 20-pound range. For example, one hormone produced by fat tissue, leptin, helps maintain body weight, but if there are mutations (or mix-ups) in the gene that codes for leptin, a decrease in metabolism or increased appetite can result. And this in turn leads to obesity.5

Because our weight is not primarily subject to volition, Friedman argues, over the long term dieting generally fails. We are going against our body’s inner drives. Campos agrees and goes one step further. Not only is it extremely hard to lose weight, it’s positively dangerous in many cases to lose a substantial amount of weight. He cites two leading dissenters in obesity research, Paul Ernsberger and Paul Haskew: “the astronomical death rate of crash dieters that regain their lost weight [as in fact almost all do] suggests that the hazards associated with fatness may be mainly related to rapid weight loss and regain of weight, not to obesity itself.”6

If you think back to your introductory physics class and the first law of thermodynamics, which states that all energy within a closed system must stay constant, then you’ll understand that in order for our weight to stay constant, our calorie intake must equal our energy expenditure.:

The implications of this simple equation are frequently underappreciated in discussions about the causes of obesity. Body weight is remarkably stable in humans. The average person consumes one million or more calories per year, yet weight changes very little in most people. These facts lead to the conclusion that energy balance is regulated with a precision of greater than 99.5 percent, which far exceeds what can be consciously monitored.7

To tabulate our calorie intake is quite easy. But energy expenditure is vastly variable. In a 1999 study published in Science, 16 subjects were overfed 1,000 calories per day for six weeks. Scientists measured each subject’s non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT), a baseline measurement of how much energy one needs to perform all the routine activities of daily life, including fidgeting and involuntary movements. What the scientists found astonished them. The change in the subjects’ NEAT value varied anywhere from 0 to 692 calories (the latter being equivalent to running 6.2 miles).8 In short, weight is far less a matter of personal control than has been supposed.

“Come on,” we say. “Are you blind? Can’t you see all the fat people? But Friedman responds, “Are we going to put our faith in anecdotal experiences or real numbers?”9 Think Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe. Think ample Miss Americas of the 1950s. And what about the furor caused by Twiggy’s waif look in the 1960s? Times have changed; the coffee-Altoids-cigarette look is all the rage.

Alas, even if we buy into this notion of fat being genetic—even if we boycott dieting and instead focus on our exercise because now we know we can be fit and fat—this would have little effect on the social stigmas that go along with being overweight. We want the unattainable bodies of the airbrushed and corseted.

It seems we have created a monster. Ludwik Fleck, in his Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, argues that “once a structurally complete and closed system of opinions consisting of many details and relations has been formed, it offers enduring resistance to anything that contradicts it.”10 Can you imagine what would need to happen for us to fundamentally change our attitude to obesity?

But I have only nudged the sleeping dragon. Granting that Campos, Friedman, and other mavericks are right about the genetic basis for obesity, there are still many questions to answer. Why are there more poor fat people than rich fat people? Why is there an alarming increase in child obesity? Why are corporations signing multimillion dollar contracts with schools to put their fatty foods in kids’ sweaty hands? (For a scathing account of how we’ve lost control of our eating habits, read Greg Critser’s book, Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World.) We are, without question, an eating-disordered culture, quite apart from genetic predispositions.

As for our in-flight mantra, my husband and I still maintain the armrest rule. It’s just more comfortable. But we’ve begun mentally placing ourselves in our fat neighbor’s shoes and giving him a little respect.

Elissa Elliott is a writer living in Rochester, Minnesota.

1. Paul Campos, The Obesity Myth: Why America’s Obsession with Weight Is Hazardous to Your Health (Gotham Books, 2004), p. 11.

2. Campos, p. 12.

3. Dr. Jeffrey Friedman, “Modern Science versus the Stigma of Obesity,” Nature Medicine 10 (June 1, 2004): 563-69.

4. Dr. Katherine M. Flegal, “Trends in Body Weight and Overweight in the U. S. Population,” Nutrition Reviews 54 (April 1996): S97-S100.

5. Friedman, p. 563.

6. Campos, p. 220.

7. Friedman, p. 567.

8. Campos, p. 177.

9. Dr. Jeffrey Friedman, personal communication, June 2004.

10. Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 27.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Home from work, I sort through the mail and latch on to the latest issue of The New York Review of Books (August 12, 2004). Even in these days, when the proportion of agitprop is lamentably high, there’s still plenty to choose from: Pankaj Mishra on the recent elections in India, Alma Guillermoprieto on Mexican scandals, James McPherson on Lincoln, Gabriele Annan on a Gert Hofmann novel which I read and liked, James Fenton on an Enlightenment exhibition, and a good deal more of interest. I’ll skip Garry Wills on Clinton’s autobiography (I’ve had more than enough of both of them for the time being) and Russell Baker on Robert Byrd’s Losing America (the dial on the agitprop meter is way into the red zone) and a piece on John le Carré by a writer I don’t know (ditto on the meter). And I’ll skip Dworkin’s latest on the Supreme Court. But to read first—to read right now, stretched out on the couch with a tall glass of iced coffee, before I do anything else—I’m torn between Geoffrey O’Brien on Fahrenheit 9/11, Edward Mendelsohn on Auden’s anthology of light verse, and Charles Simic on the American South. All three are writers I enjoy, whatever our differences. I end up choosing Simic’s essay, “Down There on a Visit,” because I’m curious: the subject is outside his usual territory.

Simic is a poet who was born in Yugoslavia and came to the United States in the Fifties, in his mid-teens. He’s written a lot—if you read the poetry mags, you are bound to encounter him—and translated (Vasko Popa, for one), and he’s a regular in the NYRB. No one poem can capture his variousness, but “Breasts” is a good place to start. (The poem is readily findable on the web; some of the postings, be warned, are likely to include visual aids.) This is the source of the memorable lines, “I spit on fools who fail to include / Breasts in their metaphysics,” a poem slightly marred by some huffing and puffing but wonderful nonetheless.

So here is Simic, “driving around Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia” just a couple of months ago, in June. He finds nearly deserted town centers, country churches boarded up, evidence of profound dislocation. Some places are still thriving, like Oxford, Mississippi, with its “pretty courthouse square, a bookstore that could match any in New York City or Boston, fine cafés and restaurants” where people sit for hours. “One could live here—one thinks—in a kind of timeless present.”

But then Simic is rudely jerked back to reality by a letter in The Clarksdale Press Register. He quotes the entire letter, which speaks of God’s certain wrath if America doesn’t soon return to the path of righteousness, concluding thus: “Get these liberals out of government, and get conservative Christian leadership in government.”

There are more shocks more to come:

During my trip, I was asked several times point-blank whether I was a Christian. The first time it happened, I was so surprised I didn’t know what to reply. Finally, I mumbled that I was brought up in the Eastern Orthodox Church and to further buttress my credentials, I mentioned that I had priests in my family going back a couple of centuries. As far as I could tell, that didn’t seem to make much impression. What they wanted to know was whether I had accepted Jesus as my Savior.

Yes, Simic reports to readers of the NYRB, this is what it’s really like Down There, among the believers. “They enjoy hearing about the torments of the damned,” as might be expected, and they don’t hold much with book-learning or any such atheistical foolishness:

Skepticism, empirical evidence, and book learning are in low esteem among the Protestant evangelicals. To ask about the laws of cause and effect would be a sin. They reject modern science and dream of a theocratic state where such blasphemous subject matter would be left out from the school curriculum. Their ideal, as a shrewd young fellow told me in Tuscaloosa, is unquestioning obedience and complete conformity in matters of religion and politics. … If evangelicals haven’t gone around smashing TV sets and computers, it is because they recognize their power to spread their message. Aside from that, they would like to secede intellectually from the rest of the world.

This report is immediately followed by a curious paragraph in which Simic speaks of the danger of “such sweeping statements” as he has just made—after all, consider the exhibition of Baroque art he attended at the Mississippi Arts Pavilion—but with no follow-up, no indication where his summary judgment might be in error, and indeed he concludes the essay by once again summoning the specter of those joyless “protectors of virtue” whose theocratic ambitions he has already laid bare.

I don’t know if I should let Simic and his NYRB readers in on our secret. You know what I mean—that the situation for them is far worse than they imagine. After all, those hellfire Christians he encountered in the South are pretty easy to identify as the enemy. But we Protestant evangelicals are wise as serpents. Some of us are double agents. We learn to speak the language of culture, to penetrate the networks of the soon-to-be-damned. Simic might bump into us at a concert or a poetry reading, where we sip Starbucks and speak easily of Neruda and pretend that we believe in cause and effect. All the while, of course, we’re thinking to ourselves who will be the first to go when the theocratic revolution finally comes.

Be afraid, Charles Simic. Be very afraid.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Our impressions of Africa have been informed for many years by the mysterious jungle seething with evil depicted verbally in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and visually in numerous Hollywood films. As Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe lamented in an influential lecture first presented in 1975, such representations have created an image of Africa that emphasizes savagery, chaos, and violence. News stories about the catastrophic spread of AIDS, endless civil wars, and decades-long droughts afflicting the continent only add to a common perception of Africa as a dark inferno.

Alexander McCall Smith’s best-selling series, the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, paints an alternative picture that celebrates the rich variety of African life, even in the midst of poverty and trouble. In the founding novel, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, we meet Precious Ramotswe (pronounced Ram-ot-swáy), who establishes the first detective agency in Botswana with the proceeds from the sale of a herd of cattle left by her beloved Daddy at his death. Mma Ramotswe, as she is properly addressed, uses this conventional African dowry to establish herself as an unconventional modern professional. She is repeatedly described as being “traditionally built” (in other words, she’s a large woman), but Mma Ramotswe is actually an exemplar of the new urban African, a far cry from Conrad’s incomprehensible savage.

When an officious lawyer questions whether a woman can be a detective, the decidedly feminist Mma Ramotswe thinks, in an aside typical of the gentle humor pervading the series, “how dare he say that about women, when he didn’t even know that his zip was half undone! Should she tell him?” She retorts, “Women are the ones who know what’s going on. … They are the ones with eyes. Have you not heard of Agatha Christie?” Indeed, Mma Ramotswe has the eyes, ears, and heart to help people solve their problems. Ably assisted by her competent secretary, Mma Makutsi (who earned an unprecedented 97 percent average at the Botswana College of Secretarial and Office Skills, and a reserved but kind automobile mechanic with the imposing name of Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni,1 Mma Ramotswe pursues her cases, fueled by numerous cups of strong bush tea.

The New York Times Book Review dubbed Mma Ramotswe “the Miss Marple of Botswana,” and her ability to listen sympathetically to her clients’ problems is reminiscent of Christie’s deceptively demure detective. Like Miss Marple, Mma Ramotswe draws on her knowledge of human nature and social norms to solve her cases. One of the charms of the traditional British “cozy” mystery, at least for me, is the chance to immerse myself in the domestic details of a new society. I confess to longing for an invitation to the vicar’s for afternoon sherry or to attend a garden fete with eccentric British villagers. McCall Smith’s mysteries work in a similar fashion, bringing us into a tightly knit community with strong social bonds and carefully articulated manners and morals.

Mma Ramotswe has considerably more chutzpah than Miss Marple, however, as she impersonates a nurse, confronts a witch doctor, approaches strange men in bars, and tracks down a crocodile. And in contrast to the classic mystery story, these books do not revolve around a single meticulously plotted murder; in fact, few of Mma Ramotswe’s cases involve death. Instead, she helps her clients solve problems that are most frequently associated with restoring family unity-straying husbands, rebellious teenagers, disputed fathers, disappearing sons, questionable suitors.

The cases are lazily interspersed throughout the course of each book (a typical book includes three or four), but the primary narrative, such as it is, concerns Mma Ramotswe herself. The first book tells of her happy childhood with Daddy, her ill-advised and short-lived marriage to an abusive musician, and her blissful but brief experience as a mother. In the conclusion, Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni proposes, and she accepts, after having initially turned him down, but throughout the next several installments, their marriage is repeatedly delayed. First, Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni, overcome by the pushy Mma Potokwane, the matron of the Orphan Farm, adopts two orphans without informing his fiancée (Tears of the Giraffe), and then he suffers a serious bout of depression (Morality for Beautiful Girls). The wedding is still on hold in The Kalahari Typing School for Men, during which Mma Makutsi branches out into a new business. In the fifth and latest book, The Full Cupboard of Life, Mma Potokwane is at it again-browbeating Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni into undertaking a parachute jump to benefit the Orphan Farm-while the wedding date still has not been set.

These meandering tales reflect the relaxed rhythm of Botswanan life. In the first book, McCall Smith writes that Mma Ramotswe is “a good detective, and a good woman … in a good country,” and this conjunction is significant. The stories unfold against the backdrop of contemporary Botswana, a peaceful, politically stable country with far fewer social problems than its African neighbors, despite poverty and the shadow of AIDS. Mma Ramotswe is a true patriot, as much in love with her country as with the memory of her revered Daddy and the presence of her kindly mechanic. She celebrates and epitomizes the natural beauty of the land, the life-affirming sense of community, and the traditional morality of the Botswanan people. The conclusion of The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency beautifully reflects this symbolic conjunction:

The sun went, and it was dark. [Mr. J.L. B Matekoni] sat beside her in the comfortable darkness and they listened, contentedly, to the sounds of Africa settling down for the night. A dog barked somewhere; a car engine raced and then died away; there was a touch of wind, warm dusty wind, redolent of thorn trees.

He looked at her in the darkness, at this woman who was everything to him-mother, Africa, wisdom, understanding, good things to eat, pumpkins, chicken, the smell of sweet cattle breath, the white sky across the endless, endless bush, and the giraffe that cried, giving its tears for women to daub on their baskets; O Botswana, my country, my place.

The trope of “Mother Africa” has a long history in African literature, beginning with Leopold Senghor’s poem “Femme Noire,” and we might be tempted to associate Mma Ramotswe with the image of the black woman as an earth goddess: warm, sensuous, nurturing, fertile. Some African women writers, such as Buchi Emechetu, have taken exception to this stereotype. Is McCall Smith succumbing to the same essentialized image? I don’t think so. Originating in the Negritude movement of the 1950s and ’60s, the Mother Africa trope idealizes precolonial life, often in strongly sexual terms. Mma Ramotswe is a modern, or we might even say postmodern, African woman. Strongly independent, she runs a detective agency and drives her own (albeit decrepit) white van. With deep respect for democracy, education, religion, and good manners, she represents a new Africa that is virtuous, resilient, and hopeful.

Also refreshingly different is the depiction of religious belief as part of the normal operations of Botswanan life. Representatives from both the Dutch Reformed Church and the Anglican Church make appearances, and in The Kalahari Typing School for Men, one of the apprentices becomes religious, joining an indigenous African church. Characters often reflect on God and God’s actions in the world. The satisfying final scene of The Full Cupboard of Life concludes with an apt biblical reference that affirms the profound sense of gratitude for life that pervades all of these books.

The No. 1 series is the creation of a quiet-spoken and astonishingly productive Scotsman. Born in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, Alexander McCall Smith currently is a professor of medical law at Edinburgh University (and lives in the same neighborhood as J. K. Rowling). While helping to set up a school of law at the University of Botswana, which makes brief appearances in some of the books, he fell in love with the country about which he now writes so lyrically. His fictional world honors moral commitments and compassion, and he has said that he considers it “legitimate to write about virtue.” As an advisor to UNESCO and the British government on bioethics, McCall Smith is familiar with ethical conundrums, and his internationally renowned work on forensic pathology undoubtedly lies behind some of Mma Ramotswe’s deductions. He has written more than 50 books, including academic monographs, such as Forensic Aspects of Sleep; short story collections; and a number of popular children’s books, including The Perfect Hamburger. His fans will be happy to hear that he has begun a new series of novels set in Edinburgh, featuring a new heroine, Isabel Dalhousie, editor of The Review of Applied Ethics, who is half Scottish and half American. The first volume in the series, The Sunday Philosophy Club, is scheduled for publication in September.

Susan VanZanten Gallagher directs the Center for Scholarship and Faculty Development at Seattle Pacific University.

1. On National Public Radio recently, McCall Smith revealed the secret behind Mr. J. L. B Matekoni’s extended moniker (in the books, he is always identified thus): his full name is John Lempopo Basil, but he’s embarrassed by the Basil, and his author is pleased to honor his preference for initials.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Marriage is in trouble, yes, eroded by casual cohabitation, haunted by abortion, battered by divorce, redefined by rogue judges. And no, it isn’t enough to say with a world-weary air that it has always been thus—there has never been a Golden Age of Marriage—for that’s a partial truth, useful as a corrective to apocalyptic rhetoric but hardly adequate to the unprecedented realities of this time and place. Still, praise God, as Greg Brown growls in his “Marriage Chant,” marriage muddles on: “Marriage is impossible, marriage is dull / Your dance card is empty, your plate is too full / It’s something no sensible person would do / I wish I was married / I wish I was married, to you.”

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.