The Barque of Dante by Eugene Delacroix
Anthony Esolen is a professor of English at Providence College, where his classes are featured in the college’s Western Civilization Core Curriculum. He is the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization, Ironies of Faith: Laughter at the Heart of Christian Literature and is the translator of several epic poems of the West, including Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things: de Rerum Natura, Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, and the three volumes of Dante’s Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. Anthony Esolen has published many scholarly articles and essays, including several on Renaissance literature. A graduate of Princeton and the University of North Carolina, Esolen is proficient in Latin, Italian, Anglo-Saxon, French, German and Greek.
As you know, I am on an eternal read of the Divine Comedy and it is one of my favorite topics for posts. This essay, appearing in First Things several years back, is a splendid read and I don’t think you can find a better piece that correlates the Christian faith to Dante’s work. The Christian faith is rooted in a narrative, the narrative of the Gospels. You can also find it in Dante’s creation. Selections from the essay here:
The Modern Suspicion Of Heritage
Woodrow Wilson once remarked that the purpose of the modern university was to make young men as unlike their fathers as possible, fathers who had immersed themselves in business and could no longer see the grand sweep of history. Otherwise, their sons would be hard to enlist in the progressive movement, man’s march toward greater enlightenment and freedom.
Wilson’s dictum was, in a way, Immanuel Kant’s philosophy, translated into practical politics. Man is growing at last into adulthood, Kant suggested in his 1784 manifesto What Is Enlightenment? Man is learning to think for himself, liberating himself from the malign influence of traditional authorities and the past. “Reason,” wrote Kant, “must regard itself as the author of its principles, independent of foreign influences; consequently, as practical reason or as the will of a rational being, it must regard itself as free.” Those foreign influences include the claims of loyalty impressed on us by those among whom we live: the “book which understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a physician who decides my diet, and so forth.”
There is something chilly about Wilson’s vision of liberated men, marching, like Christian soldiers, away from their forefathers — individuals all, and good party members. And there is something treacherous in Kant’s dismissal of tradition and community, as though they were not gifts to be received in gratitude, whatever their limitations.
Nonetheless, we in the West have inherited this suspicion of heritage. We share the assumption that freedom must mean freedom from — freedom from the limitations imposed on us by the old institutions: church, community, family. It seems not to matter that such freedom presupposes our alienation from one another. Existential alienation is a small price to pay for enlightenment, the fulfillment of the progressive movement, or the satisfaction of appetites.
The Medieval Definition Of Freedom
It is hard to recall the medieval definition of freedom, which was not the political license to follow our bellies or the philosophical encouragement to send our elders packing. Freedom was understood, rather, as a growing into the habits, the virtues, that allow us to fulfill our end as human beings without the impediments of vice.
In the Divine Comedy, the pilgrim Dante, having climbed the mountain of Purgatory and scoured away the effects of habitual sin, hears Virgil say that the fruit of joy once lost in Eden is now near. And so he fairly rushes into the freedom of being what he has been created to be:
Will above will now surged in such delight
to climb the top, that with each step I took
I felt my feathers growing for the flight.
Dante’s callow soul will soon be welcomed into the community of the blessed saints, for whom freedom means the grace-filled incapacity to will anything but the good for themselves and for one another. Thomas Aquinas steps forth from the constellation of the wise to express this freedom as the now utterly natural and supernatural virtue of love. Says he to Dante, who has been too stunned with wonder to ask his name:
When the radiance
of the Lord’s grace, which lights the flames of true
love and by love still grows in eminence,
With such multiplication shines in you
it leads you up these stairs no man may take
descending, without climbing up anew,
He who’d deny his flask of wine to slake
your thirst would not be free, would have such power
as rivers not returning to the sea!
Thomas cannot do other than love. In that very propensity, as of a rushing river, consists his freedom.
Dante’s Rejection of Wilson and Kant’s Modern Notion of Freedom
In his way, Dante has foreseen our modern notion of freedom — the notion expressed by Wilson and Kant — and he has rejected it. That is not because such false freedom is often directed toward evil, as when it becomes the license to snuff out the life of an unborn child. It is, rather, because any freedom that severs us from one another, from our memories of those who came before us, is built on a lie about being. It is a misunderstanding of that Being whose essence is to exist. It is autonomy collapsing into antinomy [vocab: A contradiction between principles] , the denial of law itself and of our created being. Dante knows both that there is an autonomy in accord with the structure of created existence, which is truly free, and that there is an autonomy that violates it, caught by its own snare.
On The Nature Of Hell and Satan
In the first part of his epic, Dante and his guide Virgil descend ring by ring, down into the sludgehole of the universe. This is the funnel of hell, leading to an icy and windswept wasteland. Students who read the Divine Comedy for the first time may be surprised by the relative absence of fire from hell. Dante employs fire as punishment for sins that affront the majesty of the Deity: blasphemy, for instance. But, for the poet, the activity, freedom, and divinity of fire, and the love that fire suggests, make it less fit for the worst sinners — the traitors — than the hard, dead stasis of ice.
So there Dante and Virgil are, picking their way among the ice-encased traitors, slowly making their way toward Satan, the creature of fundamental sin, error, and falsehood — fundamental, because traitors mistake what it means for any of us to be. This is not a Satan who spits out a volley of abuse, like the demonic stooges of the popular drama. Nor does Dante create a grand antihero, uttering Milton’s great words of defiance: Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven! Indeed Satan does not speak at all. The creature called by Christ “the father of lies” says nothing. He seems sublingual, even subsapient. And his speechlessness reveals the poet’s deep insight into the nature of truth and love and created being.
Though he says nothing, Satan does do a few things, with the terrible regularity of an automaton. He has three mouths, from three faces, joined ignobly “where the cock sports his crown,” and in those mouths he gnaws forever the naked bodies of the great traitors of Church and empire, the two great communions Dante believed were ordained by God. Satan gnaws Judas Iscariot headfirst, in the central mouth, and Brutus and Cassius feet first, to the left and right. With his claws he strips the leather off their backs — blood is a rich part of this diabolical communion. He strips and chews, strips and chews. And he does one thing more:
Beneath each face extended two huge wings,
large enough to suffice for such a bird.
I never saw a sail at sea so broad.
They had no feathers, but were black and scaled
like a bat’s wings, and those he flapped, and flapped,
and from his flapping raised three gales that swept
Cocytus, and reduced it all to ice.
Consider the flapping of those wings. It is natural for earthbound human beings to see in the flight of birds a symbol of freedom — a disconnection with the earth. If we could fly, we think with our misty apprehension of infinity, we would make contact with a terrestrial world only when and where we wanted. We should be princes of the air.
Yet it is that very motion of the wings that raises the gale above the River Cocytus and freezes Satan in his place, along with all the other traitors. If he could cease to move those wings, the gale would subside and the Cocytus would melt. In other words, if he could cease to act on his will to rise, he would be able to rise.
Now the foolish way to regard this is to see in it only an adventitious connection between Satan’s flapping and the ice that locks him in place. That is, God has decided, with malice, to stick Satan in just that hole wherein his sin — if it be a sin to wish to rise and be free — would be self-thwarted and self-punished. It is exactly as if God were to plunge a thirsty man into saltwater, with the added zest that the man would never die.
The Essence Of The Sin Is Made Manifest In The Punishment
But readers of Dante’s Inferno who have traveled with him all the way to the bottom know that the essence of one’s sin is made manifest in the punishment — that the punishment is the sin repeated endlessly and inexorably. And appropriately so. Thomas Aquinas, in justifying the eternity of hell, notes that mortal sin is an infinite and self-defining act of enmity against the peace of the City of God. Such sinners long for immortality, he says (quoting Gregory the Great), so that they might sin forever — for, even more than they love life, they love the sin to which they have given their lives.
What exactly, then, is the sin made manifest here in hell’s deepest pit? The flapping of wings, the ice, the act of treachery, and the temptation of Satan that penetrates time all derive from falling to the temptation, “Ye shall be as gods.” These four motifs have much to teach us about freedom and autonomy, rightly and wrongly understood.
The Psalms lend a hint: All things, says the psalmist, declare that “he made us; we did not make ourselves.” Even the atheist must agree that we did not make ourselves. The statement expresses contingency and dependence, and these are plainly discernible by reason. I did not come into the world self-made. Indeed, I came into a world already present for me to enter: an intelligible world, not a congeries of arbitrary and unrelated forces. Had there been no such world, I would not have existed.
To claim, then, that we did make ourselves would be to deny the real contingency of our beings — which would also be to deny the web of relations into which we have entered by our being and without which we must cease to be. Deep at the heart of this denial is the prideful sin of ingratitude. We see that we are provided with what we could not have provided for ourselves: not only the material conditions that support our existence — our food and drink, the care of our parents — but the fact of our existence itself. Yet we respond with a lie. We repeat what Satan implicitly affirms at the bottom of hell, the loneliest words ever uttered: “I am my own, I am my own! My mind is my own, to fashion what truth I shall please. My body is my own, to dispose of as I please. My will is my own. I rise — by my power. I exist — by my power.”
A Chaos Of Isolated Atoms Of Will
If this is autonomy, if this is what it means to be a law unto oneself, then law is the first thing that must die. No genuine communion among such autonomous beings is conceivable. We would be left with a chaos of isolated atoms of will, sometimes rebounding against one another in war or in the falsely called love that is often worse than war, but always essentially alone. To deny that “we did not make ourselves,” either explicitly or by our behavior, is to betray the natural debts we owe to the world and the community into which we have entered.
The man who says, “I am my own, good and evil are what I declare them to be,” may happen to have a gentle temperament, never lifting his hand in anger. But when he dies, he dies a traitor nonetheless. If we missed it in the murderous history of the twentieth century, we can still see it in the frozen Cocytus of Dante’s hell. Frozen in isolation from one another are the traitors — those who partake most fully of the fundamental lie that is also the fundamental mistake, those who in their treachery most clearly say, “I am my own, I rise by my power.” They are free in the sense in which a being, cast out of the universe and severed from true connection with every other being, would be free. They have made their law, and they obey it; they are bound to it.
With every flap of his wings, Satan sins again, commits treachery against God and also against all contingent and dependent beings. That treachery locks him in the ice of his self-imposed law. While he flaps those wings, he engages in an act that should remind him of his contingent being, but it becomes a sign of his brute power over other beings: He eats Judas and Brutus and Cassius, everlastingly. Not that he derives nourishment from them. His wings never manage to lift his hide out of the ice.
Why Satan Does Not Speak
It is no surprise that Satan does not speak. What would he say? The idea of a word, for a contingent being, implies the existence of one who is not myself (the one to whom I speak) and the existence of a truth that is not myself (that about which I speak). Language is a robe for love. The fundamental lie is that we are not for or from one another. Such a lie distorts existence itself. The devil is a liar and the father of lies, says Dante, quoting the Word of God, and that is why, in the end, Satan has nothing to say.
Freedom Is A Good Thing And Good Has Substance
Let us affirm, as Dante did, that freedom is a good thing and that the word good has substance to it. What, then, is freedom good for? If it is supposed that some contingent beings are free, then freedom must be good for them, and for them as contingent beings. But then freedom must unite them, precisely because they do not possess their existence from themselves. Such beings can be, together, a law unto themselves — autonomous — if they recognize that the law in question is not one they give themselves. That is, if they recognize and accept their contingency.
They will then see that the law that binds them together depends not on any one contingent being nor on all contingent beings taken in a collective but rather on the fact of contingency itself. It will depend on what it means to depend — one on another, and all together on a world that no contingent being has made. They will thus be free in their gratitude for that world, in their humble recognition that their existence is not necessary, and in their love for all those who share their mode of being and on whom they rely.
Purgatory Where We Learn How To Be Free
Gratitude, humility, love — we do not see these in hell. But we do enjoy them in that realm of the Divine Comedy where souls go in fellowship to learn how to be free; we enjoy them in purgatory. At the base of the island-mountain of purgatory, Dante and Virgil see a light swiftly approaching them through the mists of dawn. Virgil recognizes what is coming and cries:
Now fold your hands in prayer! Fall to your knees!
Behold, it is the herald of the Lord!
Now you will see such ministers as these.
See how he holds man’s instruments in scorn:
he needs no oars nor any other sail
but his own wings, between such distant shores.
See how he lifts his pennons to the sky,
sweeping the air with his eternal feathers,
changeless — unlike the hair of those that die.
Their crossing of the waters of hell required many of man’s instruments, notably the long pole that Charon, the ferryman of the dead, plants in the mud of the Acheron to punt his miserable vessel along, bringing the damned to their eternal loss. The angel pilot in purgatory, however, needs no oar, no sail; he sweeps the air with his wings and speeds the blessed souls across the ocean with a swiftness that befits their journey to freedom.
In that angel’s beating wings, there is no likeness to Satan’s. The blessed spirit lifts his pennons “to the sky,” to the heavens, and thence comes his power. He is immersed in the curious freedom of one who acknowledges that he is not his own, that he is neither from himself nor for himself. For though he need not bother with an oar, the angel pilot is not too haughty to deal with air and boats and human souls. He assists those souls, and his last act is to bless them with the sign of the cross as they disembark. He is free to love them. The exaltation whereby he can ferry them across the seas is one with the free humility whereby he will do it; though an angel, he is a member of their community.
As for those souls, they’re glad to be in the boat and are eager to reach the mountain where their purgative suffering will begin. They are singing their burial hymn, In exitu Israel de Aegypto, the psalm that the priest and acolytes chanted as they took the body from the church to the grave. Yet it is a jubilant song of freedom, not from the body but from the bondage of sin, which is itself a living death, a turn toward nonbeing. They rejoice to have begun their journey of liberation from Egypt, with all its worldly might, its fleshpots and vast tombs, across the sea and desert to the Promised Land.
The Souls In Purgatory
The souls in purgatory do not seek a freedom to be found after death. They seek, instead, a freedom from death to be found by dying to themselves. As Christ says, “Whosoever loses his life for my sake, he will save it.” These souls in the boat have made their final and complete confession of being from and being for.
That gives them the strength and the freedom to do a few things the reader has not yet seen in the Divine Comedy. They are together, not just in space but in spirit, as they sing with one voice. They reverse the curse of the traitors, because they reverse the sin. They can form a community. By their song they assist one another in hope and worship. They are not disconnected Israelites but Israel, and it is only in their being together that they individually find themselves. To paraphrase Aristotle, man, the contingent being — not self-sufficient even for his modest material needs, let alone for his intellectual thirst — is the sort of being that thrives only in the context of a community. Man is an ecclesiastical animal.
Thus the blessed souls of purgatory can be trusted to love. They do not need to be “herded like sheep into hell,” as Psalm 49 puts it. No Minos confronts them, slinging his bull’s tail round his waist to indicate the number of their prison cell. No one in purgatory pushes them. The discipline of the mountain, embraced by all the souls, will cure them of the remaining effects of the lie they no longer accept, until finally they will enjoy autonomy, needing no one to enforce from without the law of their created beings. Lord of yourself I crown and mitre you are Virgil’s last words to Dante after he has passed through the final stage of purgation, the wall of fire separating the mountain slopes from earthly paradise at the peak.
There Is No Prayer In Hell
To be free of the delusion that I am my own: This is what the souls, praying and singing in the boat, illustrate and foster. Prayer is impossible for a soul trammeled up in itself, and therefore there is no prayer in hell. There is also no song in hell, for song would require bursting the prison walls in the freedom of exuberance. But we may justly say that song and prayer are what purgatory is, as a foretaste of and preparation for paradise. The prayer is a confession of dependence, and the song is an expression of gratitude for what has been given. What the angel does with his wings, they do with their hearts and voices.
But the song means more. Consider again the mystery of singing. There is something about song that is playful and gratuitous, like the splendor of finches’ wings. It swells forth from the abundance of the heart. Whence should contingent beings derive this plenty, if not from a being that possesses it in himself? It is insufficient to say that God is capable of love. God, as the Gospel of John puts it in one of the most misunderstood verses of Scripture, is love. His love is not contingent on creation. God is Love, before he ever spoke the light into existence and saw that it was good. Love is essential to his being, his life. He is, as Dante puts it, “the One who moves all things,” loving them into being and loved by them in turn, whence comes their motion.
To dwell on the meaning of God’s love, for the Christian poet, is to stand at the brink of a glorious and unfathomable sea. When Dante has risen to the utmost heights of paradise, he stands before a vision of that one God — the unity that comprehends plurality. There is a plenty in the being of God, and this plenty admits of love, receives love, and is love:
O Light that dwell within thyself alone,
who alone know thyself, are known, and smile
with love upon the knowing and the known!
Dante revels in the plenitude of God, for whom even the ancient Israelites, to whom we owe the clearest expressions of his oneness, used the plural Elohim to describe a power and glory that burst the bonds of what we can comprehend as single and alone. “Let us make man in our image,” says God (Genesis 1:26).
The Trinity and Freedom
The Trinity, then, has something to teach us of freedom. Even had he never created a universe, God would himself have been a universe of love. As Benedict XVI has written, God, in his own being, comprehends being from and being for; “man is in the image of God precisely because the being for, from, and with constitute the basic anthropological shape.” Thus, if any contingent being longs to be truly free, he must reflect that ultimate freedom of God. His autonomy can make sense only in the self-emptying of love.
Love opens our eyes, allowing one contingent being to reveal the mysteries of beauty to another. But it also gives us wings, prompting the intellect to soar in contemplation of that beauty. Throughout the Divine Comedy, Dante’s beloved Beatrice has been preparing the pilgrim for the ultimate and yet infinite flight, to see the Beloved face to face.
In harsh contrast is the vision of Satan and his trinitarian heads. They are seamed together, but incongruously. There is no harmony among them, as there is no interaction among the traitors he gnaws. No community, no exit from the self. “Hell is other people,” said Sartre, and he was correct in this sense: If for you hell is other people, then you are in hell, and so are your fellow traitors.
Satan’s lie, then, is also Satan’s mistake. He who is not God wants to be God, to rise by his own power and be his own. But God is his own precisely in his love — in his being for. “You should be as gods,” Satan says to Eve, and he unwittingly speaks the truth. We should be as gods, and we can be, in gratitude and humility and love. For the outpouring of a grateful heart, which loves because it receives what it has not deserved, reflects the exuberant power of God, who loves into existence beings whom he does not need. And the self-emptying that is essential to love — the humble willingness to acknowledge that, as we did not make ourselves, we do not exist for ourselves — reflects the plenitude of God, who in his creation deigns to put himself at the disposal of the contingent beings he loves.
He is the cup that runneth over — in love. He can be sung about; he can be prayed to. If we would be laws unto ourselves, Dante would say, we must wisely and freely embrace the laws of our contingent being, obeying them as an obedient and beloved son cheerfully obeys his father, growing into the father’s authority by deeper and wiser and freer acts of obedience. And in obeying those laws we will find ourselves great-souled, able to love one another. We should be as gods.
Contingent Intellect Grasps Incontingent Love
Therefore, Dante’s last vision is not of God as Creator but of God as the power and wisdom and love that lie at the heart of reality — the three Persons that Christians adore in the Trinity. Within that Trinity, Dante beholds the central mystery of God, the ultimate being for: the Word made flesh. He sees two rings, with a fire proceeding between them, and in the second ring the image of a man. He cannot fathom how this can be: “Mine were not the feathers for that flight.”
The pilgrim poet is straining to understand with his contingent intellect what incontingent love is all about. He is flapping his wings, to no avail. Yet it is God who has given him these wings, and it is he who descends to speed Dante on an instantaneous flight, smiting his mind like a bolt of lightning.
This is, finally, what it means to be a law unto oneself, utterly free from the shackling self-will of the traitor. The law is Love, who freely gives the freedom to fulfill the law:
Here ceased the powers of my high fantasy.
Already were all my will and my desires
turned — as a wheel in equal balance — by
The Love that moves the sun and the other stars.
The Pornography Culture
July 29, 2009One of my favorite writers is David Bentley Hart who was at the core of one of my disagreements with a fellow Catholic recorded in Failing Fellowship. His essay on “Tsunami and Theodicy” is one of the pages on this blog. The David B. Hart Appreciation Site has much more of his writings. This is one of my favorite pieces:
“Writing not as a lawyer, I am able to address the Supreme Court’s recent decision regarding the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) only somewhat obliquely. Concerning the legal merits of the case, certainly, I have little to say. This is not necessarily because I believe one must be a lawyer to understand the Court’s decision, but because I am largely indifferent to the legal arguments contained within it, and am convinced that even the question of whether or not it was dictated by genuine constitutional concerns deserves very little attention (as I shall presently argue).
I can begin, however, by confessing my perplexity at some of the reasoning behind the court’s majority ruling, most especially the curious contention that COPA might prove to be unconstitutional on the grounds that there exists filtering software that provides a “less restrictive means” of preventing access to pornography on the Internet and that does not involve “criminalizing” any particular category of speech. Surely, if we are to be guided by logic, the existence or nonexistence of such software (which is, after all, merely a commercial product that parents may purchase and use if they are so inclined and have the money) cannot possibly make any difference regarding the question of whether the act violates constitutional protections. Moreover, it is difficult for me to grasp why the Court works upon the premise that whatever means are employed to protect children from Internet pornography should involve the barest minimum imposition possible upon the free expression of pornographers.
Again, not being a lawyer, I have no idea what shadowy precedents might be slouching about in the background of the Court’s decision, and I am aware that the alliance between law and logic is often a tenuous one. I can even appreciate something of the Court’s anxiety concerning the scope of the government’s control over “free expression,” given that the modern liberal democratic state — with its formidable apparatus of surveillance and legal coercion, and its inhuman magnitude, and its bureaucratic procedural callousness, and its powers of confiscation, taxation, and crippling prosecution, and its immense technological resources — is so very intrusive, sanctimonious, and irresistible a form of political authority. Allow the government even the smallest advance past the bulwark of the First Amendment, one might justly conclude, and before long we will find ourselves subject to some variant of “hate speech” legislation, of the sort that makes it a criminal offense in Canada and Northern Europe for, say, a priest to call attention publicly to biblical injunctions against homosexuality.
We have, as a society, long accepted the legal fiction that we are incapable of even that minimal prudential wisdom necessary to distinguish speech or art worthy of protection from the most debased products of the imagination, and so have become content to rely upon the abstract promise of free speech as our only sure defense against the lure of authoritarianism. And perhaps, at this juncture in cultural history, this lack of judgment is no longer really a fiction.
In a larger sense, however, all human law is a fiction, especially law of the sort adjudicated by the Supreme Court. As much as jurists might be inclined to regard constitutional questions as falling entirely within the province of their art, the Constitution is not in fact merely a legal document; it is a philosophical and political charter, and law is only one (and, in isolation, a deficient) approach to it. Constitutional jurisprudence, moreover, is essentially a hermeneutical tradition; it is not the inexorable unfolding of irrefragable conclusions from unambiguous principles, but a history of willful and often arbitrary interpretation, and as such primarily reflects cultural decisions made well before any legal deliberation has begun. And since legal principles — as opposed to exact ordinances — are remarkable chiefly for their plasticity, it requires only a little hermeneutical audacity to make them say what we wish them to say (one never knows, after all, what emanations may be lurking in what penumbras).
Just as the non-establishment clause might well have been taken — had our society evolved in a more civilized direction — as no more than a prohibition upon any federal legislation for or against the establishment of religion, so the promise of freedom of speech might have been taken as a defense of political or religious discourse, and nothing more. There is certainly no good reason why “free speech” should have come to mean an authorization of every conceivable form of expression, or should have been understood to encompass not only words but images and artifacts, or should have been seen as assuring either purveyors or consumers of such things a right of access to all available media or technologies of communication.
We interpret it thus because of who we are as a society, or who we have chosen to be; we elect to understand “liberty” as “license.” How we construe the explicit premises enshrined in the constitution is determined by a host of unspoken premises that we merely presume, but that also define us. This is why I profess so little interest in the question of the constitutionality of COPA; the more interesting question, it seems to me, concerns what sort of society we have succeeded in creating if the conclusions we draw from the fundamental principles of our republic oblige us to defend pornographers’ access to a medium as pervasive, porous, complex, and malleable as the Internet against laws intended to protect children.
The damage that pornography can do — to minds or cultures — is not by any means negligible. Especially in our modern age of passive entertainment, saturated as we are by an unending storm of noises and images and barren prattle, portrayals of violence or of sexual degradation possess a remarkable power to permeate, shape, and deprave the imagination; and the imagination is, after all, the wellspring of desire, of personality, of character. Anyone who would claim that constant or even regular exposure to pornography does not affect a person at the profoundest level of consciousness is either singularly stupid or singularly degenerate. (DJ: Leave it to PBS to dissent.)
Nor has the availability and profusion of pornography in modern Western culture any historical precedent. And the Internet has provided a means of distribution whose potentials we have scarcely begun to grasp. It is a medium of communication at once transnational and private, worldwide and discreet, universal and immediate. It is, as nothing else before it, the technology of what Gianni Vattimo calls the “transparent society,” the technology of global instantaneity, which allows images to be acquired in a moment from almost anywhere, conversations of extraordinary intimacy to be conducted with faceless strangers across continents, relations to be forged and compacts struck in almost total secrecy, silently, in a virtual realm into which no one — certainly no parent — can intrude. I doubt that even the most technologically avant-garde among us can quite conceive how rapidly and how insidiously such a medium can alter the culture around us.
We are already, as it happens, a casually and chronically pornographic society. We dress young girls in clothes so scant and meretricious that honest harlots are all but bereft of any distinctive method for catching a lonely man’s eye. The popular songs and musical spectacles we allow our children to listen to and watch have transformed many of the classic divertissements of the bordello — sexualized gamines, frolicsome tribades, erotic spanking, Oedipal fantasy, very bad “exotic” dance — into the staples of light entertainment. The spectrum of wit explored by television comedy runs largely between the pre- and the post-coital.
In short, a great deal of the diabolistic mystique that once clung to pornography — say, in the days when even Aubrey Beardsley’s scarcely adolescent nudes still suggested to most persons a somewhat diseased sensibility — has now been more or less dispelled. But the Internet offers something more disturbing yet: an “interactive” medium for pornography, a parallel world at once fluid and labyrinthine, where the most extreme forms of depravity can be cheaply produced and then propagated on a global scale, where consumers (of almost any age) can be cultivated and groomed, and where a restless mind sheltered by an idle body can explore whole empires of vice in untroubled quiet for hours on end. Even if filtering software were as effective as it is supposed to be (and, as yet, it is not), the spiritually corrosive nature of the very worst pornography is such that — one would think — any additional legal or financial burden placed upon the backs of pornographers would be welcome.
I am obviously being willfully naïve. I know perfectly well that, as a culture, we value our “liberties” above almost every other good; indeed, it is questionable at times whether we have the capacity to recognize any rival good at all. The price of these liberties, however, is occasionally worth considering. I may be revealing just how quaintly reactionary I am in admitting that nothing about our pornographic society bothers me more than the degraded and barbarized vision of the female body and soul it has so successfully promoted, and in admitting also (perhaps more damningly) that I pine rather pathetically for the days of a somewhat more chivalrous image of women.
One of the high achievements of Western civilization, after all, was in finding so many ways to celebrate, elevate, and admire the feminine; while remaining hierarchical and protective in its understanding of women, of course, Christendom also cultivated — as perhaps no other civilization ever has — a solicitude for and a deference towards women born out of a genuine reverence for their natural and supernatural dignity. It may seem absurd even to speak of such things at present, after a century of Western culture’s sedulous effort to drain the masculine and the feminine of anything like cosmic or spiritual mystery, and now that vulgarity and aggressiveness are the common property of both sexes and often provide the chief milieu for their interactions.
But it is sobering to reflect how far a culture of sexual “frankness” has gone in reducing men and women alike to a level of habitual brutishness that would appall us beyond rescue were we not, as a people, so blessedly protected by our own bad taste. The brief flourishing of the 1970s ideal of masculinity — the epicene ectomorph, sensitive, nurturing, flaccid — soon spawned a renaissance among the young of the contrary ideal of conscienceless and predatory virility. And, as imaginations continue to be shaped by our pornographic society, what sorts of husbands or fathers are being bred? And how will women continue to conform themselves — as surely they must — to our cultural expectations of them?
To judge from popular entertainment, our favored images of women fall into two complementary, if rather antithetical, classes: on the one hand, sullen, coarse, quasi-masculine belligerence, on the other, pliant and wanton availability to the most primordial of male appetites — in short, viragoes or odalisks. I am fairly sure that, if I had a daughter, I should want her society to provide her with a sentimental education of richer possibilities than that.
My backwardness aside, however, it is more than empty nostalgia or neurotic anxiety to ask what virtues men and women living in an ever more pervasively pornographic culture can hope to nourish in themselves or in their children. Sane societies, at any rate, care about such things — more, I would argue, than they care about the “imperative” of placing as few constraints as possible upon individual expression. But we have made the decision as a society that unfettered personal volition is (almost) always to be prized, in principle, above the object towards which volition is directed. It is in the will — in the liberty of choice — that we place primary value, which means that we must as a society strive, as far as possible, to recognize as few objective goods outside the self as we possibly can.
Of course, we are prepared to set certain objective social and legal limits to the exercise of the will, but these are by their very nature flexible and frail, and the great interminable task of human “liberation” — as we tend to understand it — is over time to erase as many of these limits as we safely can. The irreducibly “good” for us is subjective desire, self-expression, self-creation. The very notion that the society we share could be an organically moral realm, devoted as a whole to the formation of the mind or the soul, or that unconstrained personal license might actually make society as a whole less free by making others powerless against the consequences of the “rights” we choose to exercise, runs contrary to all our moral and (dare one say?) metaphysical prejudices. We are devoted to — indeed, in a sense, we worship — the will; and we are hardly the first people willing to offer up our children to our god.
The history of modern political and social doctrine is, to a large degree, the history of Western culture’s long, laborious departure from Jewish, classical, and Christian models of freedom, and the history in consequence of the ascendancy of the language of “rights” over every other possible grammar of the good. It has become something of a commonplace among scholars to note that — from at least the time of Plato through the high Middle Ages — the Western understanding of human freedom was inseparable from an understanding of human nature: to be free was to be able to flourish as the kind of being one was, so as to attain the ontological good towards which one’s nature was oriented (i.e., human excellence, charity, the contemplation of God, and so on).
For this reason, the movement of the will was always regarded as posterior to the object of its intentions, as something wakened and moved by a desire for rational life’s proper telos, and as something truly free only insofar as it achieved that end towards which it was called. To choose awry, then — through ignorance or maleficence or corrupt longing — was not considered a manifestation of freedom, but of slavery to the imperfect, the deficient, the privative, the (literally) subhuman. Liberty of choice was only the possibility of freedom, not its realization, and a society could be considered just only insofar as it allowed for and aided in the cultivation of virtue.
There would be little purpose here in rehearsing the story of how late medieval “voluntarism” altered the understanding of freedom — both divine and human — in the direction of the self-moved will, and subtly elevated will in the sense of sheer spontaneity of choice (arbitrium) over will in the sense of a rational nature’s orientation towards the good (voluntas); or of how later moral and political theory evolved from this one strange and vital apostasy, until freedom came to be conceived not as the liberation of one’s nature, but as power over one’s nature.
What is worth noting, however, is that the modern understanding of freedom is essentially incompatible with the Jewish, classical, or Christian understanding of man, the world, and society. Freedom, as we now conceive of it, presumes — and must ever more consciously pursue — an irreducible nihilism: for there must literally be nothing transcendent of the will that might command it towards ends it would not choose for itself, no value higher than those the will imposes upon its world, no nature but what the will elects for itself.
It is also worth noting, somewhat in passing, that only a society ordered towards the transcendental structure of being — towards the true, the good, and the beautiful — is capable of anything we might meaningfully describe as civilization, as it is only in the interval between the good and the desire wakened by it that the greatest cultural achievements are possible. Of a society no longer animated by any aspiration nobler than the self’s perpetual odyssey of liberation, the best that can be expected is a comfortable banality. Perhaps, indeed, a casually and chronically pornographic society is the inevitable form late modern liberal democratic order must take, since it probably lacks the capacity for anything better.
All of which yields two conclusions. The first is that the gradual erosion — throughout the history of modernity — of any concept of society as a moral and spiritual association governed by useful ethical prejudices, immemorial reverences, and subsidiary structures of authority (church, community, family) has led inevitably to a constant expansion of the power of the state. In fact, it is ever more the case that there are no significant social realities other than the state and the individual (collective will and personal will). And in the absence of a shared culture of virtue, the modern liberal state must function — even if benignly — as a police state, making what use it may of the very technologies that COPA was intended somewhat to control.
And that may be the truly important implication of a decision such as the Supreme Court’s judgment on COPA: whether we are considering the power of the federal government to penalize pornographers or the power of the federal court to shelter them against such penalties, it is a power that has no immediate or necessary connection to the culture over which it holds sway. We call upon the state to shield us from vice or to set our vices free, because we do not have a culture devoted to the good, or dedicated to virtue, or capable of creating a civil society that is hospitable to any freedom more substantial than that of subjective will. This is simply what it is to be modern.
The second conclusion is that every time a decision like that regarding COPA is handed down by the Court, it should serve to remind us that between the biblical and the liberal democratic traditions there must always be some element of tension. What either understands as freedom the other must view as a form of bondage. This particular Court decision is not especially dramatic in this regard — it is certainly nowhere near as apocalyptic in its implications as Roe v. Wade — and no doubt there are sound legal and even ethical arguments to be made on either side of the issue, within the terms our society can recognize. But perhaps the COPA decision can provide some of us, at least, with a certain salutary sense of alienation: it is good to be reminded from time to time — good for persons like me, with certain pre-modern prejudices — that our relations with the liberal democratic order can be cordial to a degree, but are at best provisional and fleeting, and can never constitute a firm alliance; that here we have no continuing city; that we belong to a kingdom not of this world; and that, while we are bound to love our country, we are forbidden to regard it as our true home.”
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