The Theology of Invective

         I can see no other way.

         We must learn once more to confront nonsense in all its forms and to call things by their real names.  We must learn that euphemisms are lies and that patience and gentleness sometimes do no good.  Worse still, they often do injury.  Count on it, when you treat a fool with nothing but kindness, he remains a fool.  If you pat him on the back and stroke his ego, he does what any fool does:  he mistakenly concludes that everything is alright with him, rather than realizing that you are simply being kind to ignorance the way you are kind to all other forms of poverty.

         We must revive the ancient and honorable art of invective, which is to language what justice is to law -- a means of giving people what they deserve.  What some of them deserve is a good kick in the pants.  This article, therefore, is dedicated to telling the fools to bend over and grab their ankles.  The beatings will now commence.

The New Testament

         If, like me, you are a Christian, you often encounter brothers and sisters in the faith who are, to put it plainly, well-intentioned but mush-minded invertebrates.  They seem unwilling and unable to grasp with clarity or conviction that some things are wrong and some are wicked.  Even if they could grasp that fundamental truth about the world, they lack the courage to call evil and error by their real names.  They do not understand that, if you fail to call evil evil, then you are treating it no differently than you treat goodness, which you do not call evil either.  The only thing they seem able to oppose publicly is that small collection of Christians who speak forthrightly, Christians who are less afraid of giving offense to the offensive than they are of aiding and abetting wickedness and error with sloppy and unjustifiably lenient language.

         This will never do.

         We Christians rightly recognize Christ as the very embodiment of love.  But Christ was no bleeding heart, and He was no invertebrate.  The "gentle Jesus meek and mild" never existed.  He is a nineteenth and twentieth century fiction.   The historical Jesus was another matter altogether.  At various times, and when the situation demanded, the real Jesus publicly denounced sinners as snakes, dogs, foxes, hypocrites, fouled tombs and dirty dishes.  He actually referred publicly to one of his chief disciples as Satan.  So that his hearers would not miss his point, He sometimes referred to the objects of his most intense ridicule both by name and by position, and often face to face. 

         No doubt His doing so made the invertebrates around him begin to squirm because they realized how offensive this tactic would be to outsiders.  Nevertheless, Jesus persisted.  He did so because He knew better than his jellyfish camp followers that alluding to heinous acts, and to those who continue to practice them, in only the most innocuous and clinical language does no one, least of all the offenders themselves, any good.  I cannot say it forcefully enough:  Christ did not affirm sinners; He affirmed the repentant.  Others He often addressed with the most withering invective.  God incarnate did not avoid using words and tactics that his listeners found deeply offensive.  He well understood that sometimes it is wrong to be nice.  I deny that we can improve upon the rhetorical strategy of Him who was Himself the Word, and who spoke the world into existence.

         The objection raised by the invertebrates that Jesus spoke aggressively only to self-righteous Pharisees simply misses the point.  Any sinner who rejects repentance, or any sinner who holds repentance at bay because he somehow believes it is not for him, is self-righteous.

         Paul talked the same way. 

         Although his invertebrate comrades probably considered it offensive and indelicate of him to do so, Paul did not hesitate to suggest to several churches -- publicly, plainly, and in writing -- that his many detractors ought simply to emasculate themselves (Gal. 5: 12).  If you believe that circumcision makes you right with God, he argued, why not go the whole way and really get right with God?  If Lorena Bobbitt was reading the Bible on the night that made her famous, this was the verse she read.

         Furthermore, in the same letter, (in fact, in the space of but three verses) Paul twice refers to his Galatian readers, the very people he is trying to convince, as fools (Gal. 3: 1, 3).  Subsequent events indicate that his shocking words, though clearly offensive, were not ineffective.  The Galatians chose to follow Paul rather than the Judaizers, whose tactic was, in Paul's words, to "win the approval of men," the very tactic urged upon us so indefatigably by the invertebrates -- though never in gender specific language.

         In short, if the religion and practice of the New Testament offend them, the invertebrates need to argue with Jesus and Paul, not me.

Christian Literature

         Furthermore, like Christ and his chief apostle, the greatest Christian writers of the Western world also refused to subscribe to the principle that language deeply offensive to one's readers or listeners ought always to be shunned.  Neither the greatest writers of Western tradition (such as Dante, Erasmus, Milton, and Swift) nor the best of the present day permit their language to be censored or vetoed by the hyperactive sensitivities of the spineless.  Great writers select one word over all other words because that word, and that word only, most fully conveys their meaning, and because that word, and that word only, can best be expected to produce the author’s intended effect.  That meaning and that effect are occasionally, and sometimes intentionally, offensive.

The Rules 

         Verbal precision, not inoffensiveness, is the traditional hallmark of the West's best writing and the West’s best books, some of which were deeply and intentionally offensive to great numbers of those who first read them.  Dante's Inferno consigns a number of Catholic notables -- including popes -- to Hell.  Erasmus's Praise of Folly excoriates monks and theologians as a shameless and squalid mob.  His Julius Excluded locks Pope Julius out of Heaven because he was an adulterous, blood-thirsty, syphilis-ridden, mammon hound.  Some of Milton's political pamphlets and poetry are, among other things, timeless handbooks of insult and invective.  Great portions of the works of Jonathan Swift constitute a veritable scatologist's Bible.  These works and many like them would never have been written or published had the modern preoccupation with inoffensiveness been then the controlling consideration.  Because that preoccupation now prevails, these books and many like them are being harried out of the literary canon.  In other words, the guidelines according to which the invertebrates want us to write are guidelines that not only would have radically recast many of our culture’s great books had they been followed, but would have prevented some of them from ever being written at all.  Had modern guidelines been previously in effect, they would have banished many of our civilization’s most important and memorable texts far more effectively and extensively than has the politically correct curriculum at Stanford, Harvard or Oberlin.

Freedom and Virtue

         Invertebrates cannot comprehend that despicable conditions inevitably arise in a fallen world.  Those despicable conditions sometimes require us to employ the language of shock and of confrontation in our unflagging efforts to push back the frontiers of evil and error.  But the spineless do not like it when we do.  They want to police the way we speak.  They want, literally, to erase words from our language.  I have been told by one Christian professor, whom I like and whom I respect, that there was never a time when shock language was right.  Such language, I am asked to believe, ought to be eliminated.  But though others delete it, I shall not.  The fewer words you have at your disposal, the fewer thoughts you are able to think or to articulate with full precision, and the fewer points you are able to make with your desired effect.  When the range of words is small, the range of thought is small and the power of speech is diminished.  In that sense, word police are thought police.  The invertebrates want to put you under arrest. 

         Resist.

         Language, like liberty, is not normally lost all at once.  It slips through our hands a little at a time, almost imperceptibly.  Don't let it happen.

         Slang words and shock words have their legitimate use.  Sometimes the right word is a slang word or a shock word because no other word conveys your meaning as fully or as accurately, and because no other word elicits the response you desire.  Sometimes the right language is language that falls beyond the pale of polite discourse –- but not of virtue. 

The Right Word (2)

         Here and there in The Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis seems to long wistfully for that future moment when all names return to their rightful owners.

         To call things by their rightful names is the privilege (and the distinguishing mark) of wisdom.  Lamentably, ours is not an age of wisdom, and that is nowhere more obvious than in the fact that we call the slow-motion barbarization, which is the main focus of our schools, “education.”  It is anything but.

         To understand that fact is not something you’d likely learn in most schools, at whatever level, from the pre-kindergarten to the post-graduate, because our schools themselves are the foremost advocates of barbarism in our entire culture, except perhaps Hollywood.

         To the degree that sloppy language makes sloppy thought possible, our verbal confusions engender confusions of countless sorts and results, none of which is exemplary.  Nearly all labels, normally useful things, are frayed at the edges and, for that reason, serve as impediments to wisdom, not as its support.  This degeneration of language is not accidental, not at all.

         It is the intentional purpose of leftist word warriors who would rather master others by means of language than simply to master language itself.  That’s why they want to police your speech.  They know that when the power of words is small, the power of thought is small.  So they set about outlawing your language.  That way you will have fewer words by which to conceive, articulate, or defend your ideas and worldview, which they hope to make, literally, impossible.

         So here’s the upshot:  Clarify your words as soon as possible, and thereby enable yourself to clarify your thoughts.  For clarity of thought there is no suitable mental substitute.  Do it or else suffer the burdens of foolishness and verbal tyranny.  That is the choice reality gives you.  Ideas have consequences.  Bad ideas have bad ones.  It’s that straight forward.

         But our culture wouldn’t recognize a bad idea even if it jumped up and bit us in the eye.  After all, we elected Bill Clinton and Barack Obama – twice.  Both made the country noticeably worse and got rewarded for doing so with a second term.  You do know, don’t you, that idiots elect idiots?  Both in the delivery room and at the polling place, we reproduce after our own kind.

The Chronicle of an Undeception

The Chronicle of an Undeception    

            "The central myth of the sixties was that [its] wretched excess was really a serious quest for new values."

                                                                                                George Will

 

I.  The Tragic Vision of Life

            I confess to believing at one time or another nearly all the pervasive and persistent fantasies of the sixties.  In the words of Joni Mitchell's anthem for the Woodstock nation, I thought all I had to do was "get back to the land to set my soul free."  I thought that flowers had power, that love could be free, and that the system was to blame.  By 1968, I had the whole world figured out.  I knew the cause of every evil -- America -- and I knew the solution to every problem -- freedom and tolerance.

            If truth be told, of course, I knew nothing, at least nothing worth knowing.  I knew how to posture, but not how to stand.  I knew how to protest, but not how to protect.  I knew how to work up an impressive case of moral outrage, but I didn't know morality.  I knew about peace, but I didn't know enough to fight for it.  I knew about self-indulgence, self-preservation, self-esteem, and self-expression, but I didn't know about self-sacrifice and self-control. 

            Worse still, I didn't even know myself.  I didn't know what Socrates knew about me -- that I entered this world in a state of total and seamless ignorance, and that my ignorance could never be breached as long I remained blissfully unaware of it.  I didn't know what St. Augustine knew about me -- that the well of my soul was poisoned, and that whatever was down in the well would come up in the bucket.  St. Augustine also knew this about my soul:  No matter how hard it tried, no matter where it looked, it could never find its rest anywhere but in God.  I didn't know what Edmund Burke knew about me -- that no government could fix what ailed me, either by the things it did or by the things it did not.  The most any state could do was to help protect me from myself and from others.  Most importantly, however, I didn't know that I was Everyman.  When I learned that, I stopped being a liberal.     

            Like almost all dissidents of my generation, I was a protestor without a plan and a visionary without a vision.  I had not yet learned that you see only what you are able to see, and I was able to see only the egalitarian, relativistic, self-gratifying, superstitions of the secular, wayward, left.  Please do not think that this was simply a case of prelapsarian innocence.  It was not.  It was ignorance and it was evil, although I would have denied it at the time. 

            Only slowly did I come to understand that my fellow dissidents and I had taken for ourselves the easiest and least productive of all tasks, that of denigrator.  And only slowly did I come to understand that to destroy is easy, that to build is hard, and that to preserve is hardest of all. 

            But it was worse even than that, because my fellow dissidents and I were blind to the most obvious truths, especially to what Russell Kirk and others have called the tragic vision of life -- the profound realization that evil is not something “out there,” it is something “in here.”  The tragic vision of life arises from the fact that we are flawed -- deeply, desperately, tragically flawed -- and we cannot be trusted.  We are broken at the heart; our defect is life wide and soul deep.  Though we are capable of reason, because of our selfish passions and our moral weaknesses we are rarely reasonable.  We ourselves are what is chiefly wrong with the world.  We are this planet’s most malignant and enduring ailment.  We have our dignity, to be sure, but we have our horror as well.  I can tell you this:  I did not wake up until I met the enemy face to face.  I met him in the mirror.  We all do. 

            I had to learn to stare squarely into that face in the mirror, into the face of hard, fallen reality, and not to flinch.  I did not, in fact I could not, comprehend the tragic vision of life until I learned that the problem of the human heart is at the heart of the human problem.  Once I examined with care and honesty the habits of my own heart and those of my dissident friends, I learned that C. S. Lewis was right:  to be one of the sons of Adam or the daughters of Eve is both glory enough to raise the head of the lowest beggar and shame enough to lower the head of the highest king.  I am a human being.  That is my wealth; that is my poverty. 

            Before that undeception, I was like all other cultural and political liberals.  I had fallen prey to what Jeane Kirkpatrick identified as the error of misplaced malleability.  I thought that human institutions could be reshaped at will to fit the plans already existing inside my head.  It cannot be done.  Human institutions arise from human action; human action arises from human nature; and human nature is notoriously intractable.  Apart from the grace of God, human nature cannot be fixed, no matter how badly it needs fixing.  I finally learned that my deepest need was not more freedom.  I needed the grace and guidance of God.  Until I understood that, I remained shamelessly superficial.

            I had to put my insipid and airy romanticism where it belonged, on the burgeoning junk pile of the fatally flawed and conclusively overthrown fantasies to which the human mind seems continually to give rise.  Not romanticism but religion, not Byron but the Bible, not poetry but Paul, not Voltaire but virtue, not trends but tradition, not idealism but ideas, not genius but grace, not freedom but faith could cure me.  I had to exchange Wordsworth for the Word and revolution for repentance.  Thus, while some of the things I valued were useful and good, they were not properly fundamental.  I had to put first things first.

            The tragic vision of life humbled me.  From it I learned that it was not my prerogative to invent wisdom and virtue.  That had already been done.  My responsibility was to listen to the One who invented them and to those whom He taught.  Wisdom and virtue, I had to learn, were not born with my generation, or with Rousseau's, or Matthew Arnold's, or even Eugene McCarthy's.  I had to learn in the last half of the twentieth century what was already old news even in the days of Jeremiah, the ancient prophet, who wrote,             

                        Stand at the crossroads, and look,

                        and ask for the ancient paths,

                        where the good way lies;

                        and walk in it, and find rest for your souls (Jer. 6: 16).

Wisdom is found by walking the "ancient paths."  Those "ancient paths" led through the wilderness, through the sea, even through the valley of the shadow of death, and not through Berkeley, not Columbia, not the Village, not Watts, not Haight-Ashbury, not Altamont, and not Woodstock. 

            The tragic vision of life also taught me that order is the most fundamental of all political and social needs.  Because it is, I learned that the police are not pigs.  They never were, and are not now, an occupying army intent upon destroying my freedom.  Quite the opposite; imperfect as they sometimes are, the police are the guardians of freedom and the paid protectors of life and property.  In the line of duty, some of them even died for me, and for you.  The tragic vision of life taught me that you cannot reject authority -- whether civil, familial, cultural or divine -- and yet live in an orderly world.  When you “off the pigs,” (of whatever sort) you give birth to an outlaw culture, not to freedom.  To live outside the rules, to live outside authority, to live without the wisdom of the ages and of God, is to court slavery and death.  Enforceable law and law enforcement are requirements of the first rank.  Because human nature is what it is, without great volumes of enforceable law, freedom is impossible.  As Dean Clarence Manion observed in the very last line he wrote before his death in 1979, “a society that is not held together by its teaching and observance of the laws of Almighty God is unfit for human habitation and doomed to destroy itself.”  

            When is freedom not enough?  Every time truth and righteousness are at stake.  In a fallen world, that is almost always.  Freedom must be exercised according to the dictates of truth and virtue, never the other way round.  Freedom must be limited by the demands of justice, love and revelation.  The most important consideration regarding any action is not “Is it free?” but “Is it good?”  When I learned that, I stopped being a libertarian.  Freedom, furthermore, is an incomplete concept.  Whenever someone insists upon freedom, you must ask "Freedom to do what?"  You must ask that question because freedom, like tyranny, has its unintended and unforeseen consequences, some of which are colossally vile.  In passing, I name but one -- abortion. 

            From the tragic vision of life I learned that you have to do what is right whether it suits you or not.  In the sixties, we hardly did anything that did not suit us.  I also learned that the enemy is not the CIA, not the FBI, and not the GOP; it's the NEA, NOW, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, DNC, WCC and NPR, indeed the entire grab bag of alphabetized, leftist, subverters of culture, of tradition, and of revelation.  I learned that those who deprive themselves of the wisdom of western tradition are no more free than a baby left alone by its parents to do as it pleases.  I learned that politics is not about equality, but justice; that personal action is not about freedom, but righteousness; and that sex is not about pleasure, but love and privilege and posterity. 

            Those things and more I learned from the tragic vision of life.  I commend them to you.  They taught me that in many ways the sixties were twisted and misshapen.

            The sixties are over, and it's a good thing.  The sixties were a bad idea, if for no other reason than because the sixties had no ideas, only selfish desires hiding behind the shallow slogans and freelance nihilism emblazoned on psychedelic bumper stickers, slogans like “I dissent, therefore I am.”  The only things about which we were intellectually modest in the sixties were the claims of objective truth.  We seemed unable to wrap our minds around even the most obvious ideas.  We seemed unable to realize, for example, that you cannot raise your consciousness until you have one.  The sixties were perhaps the most unconscious decade in centuries.  It was a time of suffocating intellectual mediocrity, from which our nation has not yet recovered. 

II.  Sixties Redivivus  

            I can imagine a student reading these remarks and wondering, "This all might be well and good, but what does it have to do with me?  I wasn't even alive in the sixties."

            My answer is simply this:  While the sixties are over, they are not dead, not by a long shot.  They live, indeed they thrive, not only in the White House juvenocracy (which is tragic enough), but in the faculty lounges and endowed chairs of nearly every college and university in the United States.  Tenured faculty members everywhere have traded their tie-dyed T-shirts and their bell bottom jeans for a cap and gown, if not a cap and bells.  Those faculty members are the entrenched purveyors of an unexamined and indefensible hand-me-down Marxism, and of what Allan Bloom called nihilism with a happy ending.  They have become paid agents of the very colleges and universities they once tried to burn to the ground, and not because they gave up on the dreams of the sixties.  What they failed to do as protesters they have succeeded in doing as professors.  Quite possibly they have done it to you, because the entire teaching profession, from the pre-kindergarten level to the post-graduate, has become a political captive of the cultural left.  Like roving street gangs prowling the halls of academe, power hungry bands of leftist professors everywhere have instigated countless institutional turf wars, most of which they won.  They succeeded in burying the accumulated wisdom of the ages in the name of learning; in overthrowing academic freedom in the name of tolerance; in stifling debate in the name of openness; in exalting egalitarianism above all other ideas in the name of equality; and in segregating and tribalizing the university, the nation, and the culture by gender, by age, by religion, by race, and by sexual preference, all in the name of unity.  The schools and colleges that hire and then tenure them commit academic treason.  I simply remind you that any intellectual community that is unwilling or unable to identify its enemies cannot defend itself.  David Horowitz was exactly right:  Those who cherish free institutions, and the culture of wisdom and virtue that sustains them, must stand up boldly against the barbarians already inside the gates.

            Because the sixties live, this decade has become irrational, ignorant, and morally illiterate.  If the sixties were majestically self-indulgent, this decade is perhaps the most self-congratulatory decade our nation has ever seen, and not because we have succeeded where all other generations have failed, but in spite of the fact that we have failed where all other American generations have succeeded -- in learning to learn, in learning to work, in learning to listen, and in learning to worship.  This is a decade determined to ignore, if not belittle and malign, beauty, truth and goodness, three things most moderns foolishly believe are in the eye of the beholder.  Our decade is the sworn enemy of revelation and of righteousness.  If the threefold mantra of the sixties was "tune in, turn on and drop out," that of today is comprised of that earlier mantra’s four silly children, four sentences that no thinking man ever permits himself or herself to utter in the face of a moral challenge, sentences like: "Everything is relative," “There is no right or wrong," "There are no absolutes," and “Who's to say?" 

            If you cannot now figure out why belief in those four sentences is the death of learning and of virtue, then perhaps for that very reason you can understand why I spend nearly all my time and energy as a professor and as a writer defending the ancient liturgy of the enlightened mind -- that right and wrong are matters of fact, not matters of feeling; that without God there is no good; that justice is not equality; that new is not necessarily better; and that relativism, secularism, and pragmatism are not the friends of truth and goodness.  The denizens of modernity probably do not realize and probably do not care that they are the befuddled and bedeviled lackeys of designer truth, of made-to-order reality, and of ad hoc morals making.  If you follow them, you walk into the night without a light and into the woods without a compass.  I want to tell you as plainly as I can that their vision of academic tolerance lacks intellectual virtue.   It dilutes the high cultural inheritance of the past with the petty and insupportable leftisms of the present.

            A moment ago, I imagined a student that might be wondering about the relevance of my semi-autobiographical musings.  I also can imagine someone thinking that all I’ve done since the sixties is simply to change sides in the culture war that rages around us.  To think so, however, is to assume that flower power and Christianity are morally equivalent and that hippies rank equally with saints, two false assumptions that, if you make them, show just how much a child of the sixties you really are.  

            I have often wondered why today feels like a sixties renaissance.  I discovered the answer to that question in a college cafeteria and in conversations with some of my students’ parents. 

            First, the parents:  I have often noticed my students saying and thinking the same sorts of things their parents say and think when I speak with them.  Such things happen because the acorn seldom falls far from the oak tree.  That fact is more than a little significant because the parents of today’s college students were probably the young men and women of the sixties.  Many of the responses my students learned to give to life are responses they learned from their parents.  More often than not, those responses are the stock responses of the sixties.  In one way, of course, that is good; I want my students to learn all the truth they can from their parents.  But insofar as my students’ responses mimic the responses of the sixties, they too must learn the lessons I had to learn.  They must come to understand, with all the clarity and courage they can muster, the truth of the tragic vision of life:  We are, every one of us, morally defective, ethically twisted, and spiritually broken.  If my students fail to come to that realization and to act upon it, both they and their world shall suffer. 

            Second, the cafeteria:  I often notice my students echoing some of the things they hear their teachers say.  When talking with students in the cafeteria, for example, I sometimes have the eerie feeling that I’m not in the cafeteria at all; I’m in a faculty meeting.  I say so because I frequently hear the clear and unmistakable intonations of my colleagues’ voices, but coming from other people.  Sometimes I even hear my own voice.  Again, that’s good; I want college students to learn all the truth they can from their professors.  But here’s the rub:  Like me, many of their teachers were children of the sixties; and like me, many of those professors have made only an incomplete break with the mistakes of that era.  From their other professors and from me, my students have gotten many of their ideas.  Like my students themselves, their ideas have parents.  Worldviews and attitudes, just like the people who have them, show marked family resemblances.  For that very reason, I often want to ask my students this question:  From where do you imagine your rampant relativism and your not-very-carefully-hidden contempt for authority arise?  In most cases, when I consider asking such a question, I already know the answer -- from the sixties and from the people (like me) who reached their emotional and intellectual maturity at that time.

III.  Undeception Redivivus? 

            Here’s my point:  If you believe in the sixties, or if you believe in today, you believe a lie.  As I did, you need an undeception.  In order to get it, you need to go back well beyond the sixties, back to a wisdom that is older than time.  You need to go back to God and to the wisdom that spoke this universe into existence.  You need to go back to the God who made you and redeemed you.  Real answers are found nowhere else.

            It should not surprise you when I tell you that, if you do what I suggest, you shall meet energetic and determined opposition, sometimes even from those who call themselves the friends of God and of tradition.  As Socrates observed long centuries ago, most men do not take kindly to the preacher of moral reform, to the pursuer of the good.  There is no telling, he said in the Gorgias, what might happen to such a man.  But do not let that stop you.  Do it anyway.  Do it because you need it; do it because it is right; and do it because it ought to be done.  Your task will be difficult.  It's always easy to be a modernist; it's always easy to go with the spirit of the age.  But in the face of the world's downward slide you must be vigilant, strong, perceptive, and courageous.  The world needs people like that, people unafraid to turn around and walk back into the light.  Our world needs people like that more now than perhaps it ever has because everywhere you look the adversary culture of the sixties has become the dominant culture of today. 

            Our cultural patrimony is being embezzled from under our very noses.  If you think of yourself as a Christian, or as a conservative, or as both, the view from here is haunting:  We don’t own the public square; we don’t own the media; we don’t own the arts; we don’t own the sciences; we don’t own the arena; we don’t own the marketplace; we don’t own the academy; we don’t own anything.  We don't even own the Church.  It’s all owned by the sixties.

            Therefore, if, as I did, you find yourself an unwilling or unwitting child of the sixties, I invite you, I exhort you, to turn with an open mind and an open heart to the prophets and apostles in Scripture and to the great poets and sages outside Scripture.  They are your only liberation from modernist thralldom and from slavery to your own fallen desires.  (Did you know that you can be a slave to your own will?)  Put yourself on a quest for eternal truth, and never give up until you find Him.  

            While you are on this quest, you must always remember that most of the powers that be are of no help to you.  Those who loved the sixties own today.  The left still hates America, and it still hates what made America possible:  faith in God, the sacredness and inviolability of the family and of life, individual responsibility, local and limited government, and traditional morality.  The leftists of today are the enemies of heartland values.  They want you to keep quiet.  They want you to sit meekly in the corner of the room, hands folded and mouth shut.  They want you to be nice.  They want the friends of beauty, truth, and goodness to speak only when spoken to and, when they do speak, to speak only those things that offend no one.  That they have offended you seems not to matter.  They want you to stick to the script.  They want you to keep your views to yourself and to act as if your views were not true, indeed as if there were no truth.  That's what political correctness -- Or should I say political cleansing? -- is all about. 

            Consider it for just a moment:  What kind of man or woman would you be if you let yourself be controlled by the empty criticisms of the rootless left, and what kind of world would you be creating for those who came after you if you neglected to restore realism to human thought and turned your back on the only thing that can make you content even in dungeons, even in slums, even in the face of death?

            My desire for you is that you throw off the vestiges of leftist cultural subversion, that you make yourself a devotee and guardian of the wisdom of the ages, that you become the sworn enemy of nonsense in all its forms, and, most importantly, that you become the faithful and ardent friend of God.  Then, and only then, can you be free. 

            What has been given you as a heritage you must now accept as your quest.  If you wish to be wise, you must learn to learn from your ancestors.  You must learn to make peace with the wisdom of the ages and with those who gave it, regardless of their sex, their race, or their ethnic background. You must do so because wisdom and truth are not gender based, race based, or nation based. They are thought based, and thinking is very hard work.  Knowledge is not parochial.  It is not the private property of any race, any gender, any era, or any ethnic group.  It belongs to those determined to get it, to those who seek it resolutely and who will not be denied, no matter how difficult the circumstances arrayed against them.

            In that light, I invite you today to make one of the most important choices of your entire life:  Which will you have, truth or rest? 

            You cannot have both.  

           

Abortion: By Any Other Name. . .

         Language is a weapon.

         In the hands of a skilled wordsmith, it can sensitize peoples' consciences to injustice and motivate them to heroic virtue and reform.  A propagandist, by contrast, can apply it as the verbal veneer needed to camouflage some wildly horrific crime under apparent respectability.  When the Nazis, for example, resorted to genocidal barbarism in their quest for an allegedly purer race and nation, they called on their word warriors to help them cloak their wickedness in terms of decency in order to make the unspeakable speakable.  Dachau and Buchenwald were painted with the brush of inoffensive clinical jargon.  "We have implemented," the Nazis said, "the final solution."

          Their word ploy was largely and regrettably effective.  Rather than stating the facts plainly and forcing the German people to face the unimaginable horror around them and to risk life and family to eradicate it, the Nazi subterfuge provided a respectable verbal veil behind which to hide their grotesque villainy.  Who, after all, can be opposed to a "purer" nation or to a "solution"?

         I can.

         Whereas great evils are often disguised by clinical language, accurate words call the ghosts out of the closet.  That is why we must learn to call things by their real names.  That is why we must beware of every euphemism.

         But, even now, all these decades after Hitler, we fail to speak plainly.

         We hide the fetal holocaust that surrounds us every day just as effectively as the Nazis hid their extermination of the Jews.  And we do it the same way.  We cannot bring ourselves to utter the "M" word, though we commit the "M" act.  That is, we do not murder unborn children; we "abort fetuses."  That terminology, we wrongly believe, helps to remove our heinous deeds from the realm of the morally reprehensible.  It allows us to view ourselves and our neighbors with more self-respect and more ethical complacency.  After all, that nice young woman next door would never pay her doctor a handsome sum to murder her unborn baby.  That is unthinkable.  She merely aborted her fetus because she is unmarried and did not want to sentence her inconvenient offspring to a life of unwantedness or poverty.  Never mind that she is an adultress.  Never mind that she sentenced her child to the garbage can.  Described in her less graphic and less accurate terms, to murder her child seems not only not evil, it seems downright virtuous.

         Beware of every euphemism.

         Some of the more squeamish among us are unable even to say the "A" word.  Though by aborting fetuses rather than murdering babies our linguistic sleight of hand has hidden the real nature (murder) of our action and the real identity (baby) of our victim, some people require a still heavier dose of verbal opium.  For them we need to make the accursed deed even more palatable by making it even more impersonal.  We must tell them they are merely "terminating a pregnancy," which eliminates overt reference to any living thing.  Unlike fetuses and children, which are undeniably alive, and unlike abortion and murder, which seem to imply nasty things like blood and death, simply to terminate a pregnancy sounds as innocuous as ending a radio transmission or pulling into the station after a pleasant railroad journey.

        If terminating pregnancies is still too overt a verbal description because the word "pregnant" tends to evoke unfortunate images of happy women large with child, we can hide the crime behind an even more impersonal wall of words.  We can say that the murdering of unborn children is nothing more than the voluntary extraction of the "product of conception."  If that does not work, then we can talk the way nearly all abortion clinics talk:  we can resort to an acrostic and say that we are merely "removing the P.O.C."  What could be more innocent?

         Nearly everything.

         Beware of every euphemism.

         Pleasant words can be a fraud.  A sterile idiom can be a defense mechanism behind which we conceal the grossest reality.  But, defense mechanisms do not change that reality.  They merely disguise it.  The evil facts themselves remain the same.  Never forget that the disease you hide you cannot heal.  For jargon wizards like us, therefore, there remains no therapy.  Rather than facing the facts and owning this great wickedness for what it is, rather than calling an unconditional halt to the war we wage on our unborn young, rather than confessing our guilt and casting ourselves on the immense mercy of God, we mask our shame behind a veil of words and sell our souls to the verbal charlatans and quacks who tell us what we want to hear, not what we need to hear.  We hide the crime with a lie.

         Beware of every euphemism.

         A murder by any other name...

Calling the Abortion Lobby by its Real Names

If you don't like confrontational language, turn away now.  I intend here to call baby killers by their real names and to describe them according to their deplorable actions.  If it offends you for me to call them by their deserved names, I do not care.  As my late friend Russell Kirk once said, when introduced to an abortion doctor, "You, sir, are a murderer."  Kirk was right.  That's why I say this, in response to the Democrats' desire for taxpayer-funded abortions:

Forget it.  We're not paying for you to slaughter unborn children.  Abortion is the greatest evil of our time. Because of it, more than 50 million Americans are dead.  Compared to American abortion doctors and the mothers who hire them, even Hitler and Stalin were rank amateurs.  Yet you Democrats are proud of abortion and want everyone to be complicit in it.  You want others to foot the bill for your murderous self-indulgences.  No freakin' way, pal.

Let me put it plainly for you:  If you practice or support abortion, you are a death-dealing, scum-sucking, child-murdering, perversity-spewing, child-dismembering, bottom-feeding sewer trout.  You slaughter babies.  That makes you the lowest of the low, the killers of the innocent, the exterminators of the voiceless, and the executioners of the defenseless.

Yet you flaunt your towering evil as if it were a point of pride.  You are not broken-hearted or repentant for the colossal wickedness you commit, support, and defend.  Rather, you push it shamelessly off onto others and try to suck them into the vortex of your shameless and depraved atrocities.

The leading figure in your party is so cravenly immoral on this point that he actually voted in support of killing the babies who survived abortion, babies who were already delivered and who were alive outside the womb.  Your leader votes for infanticide, and yet you think the other party has radical views on abortion.  Think again, killers.  Your party is so morally reprobate that even your leader's support of infanticide itself does not disqualify him in your eyes.  You are so morally reprobate that you think those who oppose the slaughter of the innocents are evil, not those who slaughter them.

Shrinking Texts: Hermeneutics under Freudian Auspices

Tis you that say it, not I.”

John Milton (quoting Electra)

“What could ever be written at all so carefully that it could never be twisted by an angry opponent into some sinister meaning?”

Erasmus (to Jacob Hoogstraten, the Inquisitor)

“If you give me six sentences written by the most innocent of men, I will find something in them with which to hang him.”

Cardinal Richelieu

A good friend of mine, a man who had mentored my dissertation on John Milton, once chided me for dismissing, out of hand, a book of Milton criticism written from a Freudian point of view. This book, as it happens, was written by the mentor of his dissertation on Milton. “You must not,” my friend said, “reject a book without ever having read it.”

That, of course, is perfectly reasonable advice. I accept it enthusiastically and with conviction—as a general principle. This rule, however, has exceptions. By their very nature, some books do not deserve this courtesy. Books that advocate a flat earth, for example, fall into such a category. So also do books of Freudian criticism. The burden of this chapter is to explain why I believe as I do, and in so doing to debunk Freudian hermeneutics by means of the methods and principles of Pilgrim Theology.

Simply put, I reject Freudian hermeneutics because I reject the Freudian conjectures upon which it is based. These conjectures tell us, for example, that dreams “mean,” and that they mean symbolically. Kings and Queens, Freudians say, represent fathers and mothers. Journeys represent death. Small animals represent brothers and sisters. Landscapes, gardens, fruit, and blossoms represent either the female anatomy or various parts of it. Furthermore, when these images appear in art (verbal or representational), the same exegetical and iconological deductions can be made concerning them.

I disagree.

Every schoolboy knows how easy it is to foist sexual overtones onto almost every sentence one hears in normal conversation, asexual though those sentences might actually be. If we put our minds to it, we can transform countless words and notions into sexual innuendo. When a young wit exercises his ingenuity in this way, and is brash enough (or disrespectful enough) to voice his indiscretions publicly, he usually succeeds only in embarrassing those around him and dis- crediting himself. We who hear him know that his perverse projections are merely that — projections. They have no real bearing on the original speaker or on that speaker’s language, character, or mo- tivations. We hear such indiscreet interjections and dismiss them, (if our standards of morality and of social decorum are not too severely offended) as the immaturity of youth. When he is older, we hope, he will put away childish things.

In some portions of academia, however, such indiscreet interjections are called Freudian hermeneutics and are thought to be scholar- ship. Freudian interpreters, after all, like some teenage boys, are experts at creating double entendre — with someone else’s words. This, they tell us, is what the writer really meant, whether he knew it or not. When, for example, John Milton employs latently sexual images, Freudian critics say, it is evidence of Milton’s “predicate thinking,” that distorted form of thinking which confuses two roughly similar objects or actions. Such thinking is said to occur when, for instance, “a tree and a male sex organ are equated in a person’s mind because they both share the same physical characteristic of protruding.”1 Thus, “as we read Paradise Lost, we should remember the serpent as phallic symbol.”2 The fallacy (“phallusy?”) here lies in attributing confusion (i.e., “predicate thinking”) to someone else other than the interpreter. I reject any effort to employ adolescent sexual innuendo as a legiti- mate exegetical device. I do not classify either as literary scholarship or insight the assertion that, because the narrator in Paradise Lost is sometimes portrayed in birdlike images, we “should recall that in dream psychology a bird and flying have sensual significance” and that “flying dreams are erection dreams.”3 I stridently dissent when such interpreters tell us that “we cannot help being struck by the sexual overtones of the metaphor of inspiration”4 employed in Paradise Lost. We can avoid it, and most of us, I dare say, have done so. Sexual and/or pornographic intrusion, after all, is not a hermeneutical requirement or existential necessity.

What Freudian hermeneutics misconstrues is not simply the na- ture of the literature under scrutiny, but also its own unsuitability as an exegetical tool. Freudian criticism is not legitimate exegesis and does not illumine the text at hand any more definitively than school- boy jokes honestly elucidate the character, intention, or meaning of their victims. In the hands of Freudian critics, writers are victims too. That is because Freudian criticism is a mirror, not an eyeglass. It reveals the critic, not the text or the author under examination. Rather than explicating a text, Freudian hermeneutics merely interposes the perverse machinations of the interpreter between the reader and the text and, as a result, genuine understanding is injured, not aided. I re- ject the idea that we understand Milton’s theological epic poem better when we realize the sexual overtones and implications of Satan (the phallic symbol turned toad) whispering disturbing things into Eve’s ear (“a symbol of the womb”5). To say that such “exegesis” is hopelessly over-subtle or that it is wildly speculative is not enough; it is schoolboy perversity and chicanery, unworthy of serious scholarly consideration.

In other words, I do not believe that dreams mean, that they mean symbolically, that their unconscious iconography is either universal or interpretable, that their interpreted meaning ought to be understood as extensively sexual, or that their sexuality is of the sort described by Freud. Nor do I believe that these same symbols, and the iconic significance with which Freudians invest them, are appropriate ways of interpreting art, whether textual or visual. We have only the unconvincing assertions of Freudians that they are. What these interpreters fail to understand is that their theories reflect far more on them than on the text or author under consideration at the moment. Perversity, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder.

I reject as the worst sort of hermeneutical fiction any interpretation of Milton’s “Lycidas” (a pastoral elegy dealing with, among other things, the problems of fame, of a corrupt clergy, and of death) that, despite Milton’s conscious aims, identifies the rose (line 45), the hyacinth line 106) or the violet (line 145) as parts of the female anatomy. Nor should anything sexual be made of the fact that water is a dominant and recurring theme in the poem. One could hardly expect something very different from a poem occasioned by a col- lege friend’s death at sea by drowning. Any physical element in which Edward King’s death had occurred would likely find prominent and repeated expression throughout Milton’s monody. If King had died in fire, that element would likely have been employed by Milton in various symbolic and/or ironic ways, none of which necessarily would be indicative of the sexuality of Milton’s infancy. Freudian interpreters, nevertheless, in a plethora of audaciously bizarre articles and mono- graphs, would have told us what the fire images unconsciously signify about Milton and his fear of castration.

What Freudian hermeneutics fails to appreciate sufficiently is that things like flowers and water are common and time honored images in pastoral poetry. As elements of pastoral convention, the nature and use of such things was determined long before Milton ever appropriated them. As a result, insofar as Milton is a conventional pastoral poet (or, in the case of Paradise Lost, a conventional theological epic poet) his poetic/Biblical images come to him largely as given elements. And, he passes them on, frequently, in the same way he received them. As such, these images are less and less indicative of his own psychological history or makeup. They have little, if anything at all, to do with his sexual desires, conscious or otherwise.

Despite its tendency to universalize the iconic significance of images in dreams and in literary texts, Freudian interpretation fails to realize the culturally relative nature of its iconology. That kings and queens represent one’s parents is a hypothesis likely to arise only in times and places near to kings and queens. It may even be true that royalty dreams themselves will arise only in such conditions. If my memory serves (and Freudians, who think they know my mind better than I do, say it does not), I have never dreamed of or written about kings and queens, or even about the President and his wife, for that matter. Their presence and/or absence in my dreams and poetry is of no psychological or sexual significance whatsoever and has no bearing at all upon my relationship to my mother or father. The only small animal I remember dreaming about at the moment is my dog, Zeke. His appearance in my dreams “means” nothing beyond himself. Zeke is Zeke, not my brother, Chris. In the only poem I ever wrote about Zeke, he is himself, nothing more. I reject as the most blatant form of eisegesis any attempt to construe him otherwise. Apart from Freudianism’s bold assertions, where is the proof that kings and queens, roses and violets, or dogs and cats “mean” anything at all, in dreams or in art? Exegesis built upon the hypothesis of unconscious metaphor does not deserve to be called literary criticism. Books that unabashedly advocate it do not deserve to be read.

Modern Freudians are not the first of Milton’s readers to invent sexual overtones for Milton’s words or to imagine a perverse sexuality behind them. The anonymous author of A Modest Confutation (1642) thought he detected such things in Milton’s Animadversions, where he found mention of “old cloaks, false beards, night-walkers, and salt lotion.”6 From these, the author concluded that Milton “haunts play- houses and bordellos; for if he did not, how could he speak of such gear?”7 Milton met such scurrilous libels with denial, indignation, and (best of all) refutation. He brought “his inmost thoughts to the front” so that, if his “name and outward demeanor” were not sufficient to defend him in the eyes of the reader, then perhaps “the discovery of [his] inmost thoughts” would be.8 When Milton himself examined his “inmost thoughts,” he found very different things there than do the Freudians. Nourished, as he was, on Dante’s praise of Beatrice, on Petrarch’s praise of Laura, on Spenser’s allegory on “Chastitie,” and on the Bible’s warnings against licentious thoughts and actions,9 Milton said that he learned “the love and steadfast observation of that virtue which abhors the society of bordellos.”10 More significantly for our point, Milton also said that from such books he learned the practice of “sublime and pure thoughts, without transgression,” mental sublimities which kept him above “low descents of mind.”11 Yet, even after he had carefully laid out his “inmost thoughts” to the reader, and even after he had set forth the details of the growth of his mind for all to see, Milton knew that some people would persist in their perverse and unjustified interpretation of his life and words, people who, like Freudian critics, were “good at dismembring and slitting sentences.”12 He also knew that the scope of invention for anyone who read his works in that fashion was nearly unlimited. “By such handicraft as this,” Milton asked, “what might he not traduce?”13

Freudianism is a mirage in the sphere of literary criticism be- cause it is a mirage in the sphere of human existence and knowledge. It is like that inspiring, but illusory, optical phenomenon of the des- ert. It has its own peculiar fascination and allure, but it is devoid of almost all objective reference. Freudianism is a deflection of the light of truth, a deflection that gives rise to images of things that do not exist. Its findings, if such they can be called, are merely chimerical. They have no objective or verifiable basis in reality. They are scientifically suspect. I agree with those who say that, when they are subjected to the close scrutiny of empirical testing, Freud’s theories have failed miserably.14

Freudianism is but one more modern and perverse academic mysticism. It is one more intellectual deviation by which substantial and objective scholarship is woefully bedeviled. It might be that Freudians see what I cannot. It might also be that they see what is not there. That is because psychoanalysis pretends to psychic awareness. It confidently claims to be able to organize and to interpret the mysterious and the irretrievable.

But I am unconvinced. I deny that ids, egos, and superegos exist, either as discreet entities in themselves or as mechanisms or processes in the mind. Ids, egos, and superegos have no independent existence in the human being under analysis. We seem not to have noticed that Freud invented the id, the ego, and the superego; he did not discover them. These “things” are merely a part of the interpretive grid of the Freudian critic, not a part of the author that critic imagines he under- stands through the author’s text. Nor do these “things” relate to one another in the way Freudians hypothesize. The existence of, and inter- action between, ids, egos, and superegos are a psychologist’s fiction. It is much the same as the old faculty psychology of the Middle Ages, which posited emotion, intellect, and will as separate faculties within us. The faculty psychologists had fallen into the functional fallacy. They reasoned that because I emote, think, desire, and do, that I have an emotion, an intellect, and a will. But I do not possess, as separate entities within me, these three faculties. Nor do they relate to one an- other in the ways imaged by Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, or William of Occam. We know better, now that Locke has undeceived us. But, having escaped that misconception, we have fallen into an- other: Freud’s fabrications concerning our inner composition and function have led us back into the Middle Ages. Sadly, some modern scholars do not know enough to perceive the gaffe. They welcome it.

Some Freudians try to explain the admittedly elusive character of these inner phantoms by telling us that “the names, id, ego and super- ego, actually signify nothing in themselves. They are merely a short- hand way of designating different processes, functions, mechanisms, and dynamisms within the total personality.”15 In addition to sounding like an expedient adopted at the last moment to protect a cherished but endangered theory, this explanation is manifestly absurd. It speaks as if “processes, functions, mechanisms, and dynamisms” were “nothing in themselves.” This is mere verbal sleight of hand. Despite this Freudian’s convoluted language, a process is a thing. To process is an action. An action is a thing. But, we are told, “processes, functions, mechanisms and dynamisms,” when referred to by the words “id,” “ego,” and “superego,” are “nothing in themselves.” If the Freudians had said simply that ids, egos, and superegos are nothing, we all could have agreed. But they did not. Freudian criticism is not known for stating the obvious and then stopping.

Put another way, I deny that Freudian criticism is methodologically sound. After all, it is not real authors we are psychoanalyzing but, rather, ancient bits of yellowing paper, or else modern editions of them. When a psychoanalytic critic poses questions to a text, it is not the author who responds. “Comus,” for example, is not written in answer to questions posed to Milton about the Oedipal pressures churning within him. If such questions were posed to Milton, and if he desired to answer them at all, we have no reason to think that he would point to “Comus” in response. In the end, it is the Freudian critic himself, not the author under examination, who both poses the question and answers it. And, when he answers it, he answers it in the way a schoolboy invents an off-color joke, by foisting unintentional sexual overtones upon someone else’s words. Furthermore, because these sexual overtones cannot be ascribed to the author’s conscious intention itself, they are relegated to his unconscious mind, as if such things actually existed and were accessible to us through texts, and as if the concept of an unconscious mind was not, in some sense, a contradiction in terms.

I am not saying that a text cannot answer questions toward which it was not specifically addressed. Such “answers,” when they are to be found, are to be identified or extracted with the greatest possible care, always bearing in mind that, though we might wish it other- wise, many things from the past are not easily retrievable through texts, if at all. In a theological poem like Paradise Lost, a poem that is intended to “justify the ways of God to man” (I, 26), the poet’s theology is both present and largely accessible. His unconscious psycho- logical motivations and his psychic history (especially as interpreted by Freudian critics) are neither. Paradise Lost, after all, is not about Milton. Neither does it concern his alleged constituent psychological “functions” — id, ego, and superego. I begin to think that those who find such things in theological poetry have become so skilled at reading between and behind the lines of a text that they have lost the ability to read the lines themselves.

Because of its method, I deny that Freudian criticism is actually criticism. If criticism is, as my dictionary says, “the art of judging or evaluating with knowledge and propriety the beauties and faults of a work of art or literature,” then Freudianism, I repeat, is not criticism. Studies that abuse literary texts by making them a means to the solution of other, non-literary, problems are not genuine literary criticism. Their pursuit may, indeed, proceed via literature, but it is not legitimately a literary pursuit. True literary criticism must make literature its focus, not merely the vehicle of the critic’s own private agenda or interests.

Some Freudian interpreters try to maintain their claim to legitimacy by insisting that their “discoveries” bear upon our understand- ing of the text because they bear upon our understanding of the author. They proceed, they say, from text to author to text. Perhaps they do. But I deny that what they find at either end of their return trip is truth. Forays into extraliterary a do not always lead us back into the perimeter. In fact, they often end in foreign ports. Freudian criticism, despite the claims of some of its practitioners, is just such a foray. While a critic needs (and should welcome) all the help he can get from other disciplines, the critic must be sure that what is received actually constitutes hermeneutical assistance and not hindrance. Not every hand is a helping hand.

Perhaps Freudian interpreters do not take sufficient account of the fact that every intellectual discipline is fraught with ambiguity. As a result of this ambiguity, every discipline entails a number of schools of thought and each of those schools of thought, in turn, is colored by various shades of disagreement concerning interpretation and/or implementation. As an interdisciplinary study, Freudian criticism is doubly tenuous. On the one hand, it is racked by tensions and conflicts in psychology in general and in Freudianism in particular.16 On the other hand, it also is buffeted by the warfare within literary criticism. I, for one, believe that Freudian criticism fails on both sides of its double life. It is bad science and it is bad criticism; bad science because of its natural inability to subject its conclusions to scientific verification (It is, we are told, a “postdictive science,” not a “predictive” one.17) and bad criticism because it mistakenly thinks that not only is a writer accessible to us in his text, but so also is his subconscious.

My belief that Freudian criticism is an interdisciplinary failure should not be taken to mean that I oppose interdisciplinary re- search in general or “extrinsic” criticism in particular. In fact, I am very much in favor of them. I do not oppose Freudian criticism be- cause it takes things into account other than the text; rather, I oppose Freudian criticism because what it takes into account is Freudianism. External frames of reference are not necessarily faulty; Freudian ones are. Freudian hermeneutics respects no boundaries. It exhibits no caution. It posits forces, factors, and functions in things that may not even be things. As usually practiced, Freudian criticism has usurped the subject matter. In becoming psychographers, Freudian critics often have become less than literary critics. Despite claims to the contrary, Freudian criticism’s primary pursuit is not the explication of the text at hand. Its objective is almost always one well beyond the text, even well beyond the author’s intention or even his conscious- ness. Those who write 300 page monographs on the “psychogenesis of Paradise Lost”18 are doing a great deal that lies beyond the pale of literary criticism. Not surprisingly then, Freudianism’s grotesque fabrications do not enhance our understanding of our language’s great theological works of verbal art. Freudianism has not succeeded in deepening our understanding and appreciation of Paradise Lost, for example, because Freudianism has shown itself incapable of detecting either beauty or sanctity. It detects only the earthquake of sexuality and its aftershocks. Sanctity, despite the title of one Miltonist’s book, is not a complex.19 Nor, despite the same book, are complexes sacred.

Put another way, Freudian criticism often misconstrues theological art because it misunderstands the origin or generation of art. Art, to Freudianism, is traced to fantasies: to wish fulfillment and day dreams.20 Such a causal connection, however, is utterly insupportable and is the merest of conjectures. As George Watson has explained concerning Freudianism’s wildly speculative theories of literary causation and generation, Freud

“compares the human mind, where ‘it is the rule rather than the exception for the past to be preserved’, to the city of Rome as it might appear if most of its ancient monuments had not vanished, with pagan temples standing among medieval and Renaissance build- ings and modern thoroughfares. In history itself, the past may die and leave no trace. But in the individual mind, in the Freudian view, memories are stored and stand ready for use. Looked at from the angle of the literary historian, such a view seems like an ecstasy of Victorian historical enthusiasm. The most biographical critic before Freud — Sainte-Beuve, for instance — would not have ventured so far as to suppose that remote infantile experience, and even pre-natal experience, could be formative in what ultimately appears as a work of literature. He would have been content, more modestly, with the outward facts about the schooling, reading and acquaintanceship of the poet whose por- trait he drew. The Freudian critic would intensify these biographical elements to the point of seeing the poem as minute evidence of the past of the poet; not of one past only, or the experience immediately preceding the act of creation, but of a whole succession of states of mind stretching back into childhood and causally interconnected.”21

Obviously, human beings are interested in, and motivated by, much more than sex. I imagine that a great deal of theological poetry, perhaps nearly all poetry, has a source other than infantile sexual- ity and its alleged repercussions. Only a schoolboy’s fascination with things genital allows us to posit sexual causation for art in such a facile manner. I say, along with C. S. Lewis, that “poetry is not a substitute for sexual satisfaction, nor sexual satisfaction for poetry.”22 I reject as perverse supposition the assertion that the motive for poetic creation lies beneath the consciousness and is linked to internal sexual turmoil, especially for Milton, whose poetic craft is conscious, deliberate, meticulous, precise, decorous, purposeful, and highly intellectual. The unarticulated methodological arrogance of such Freudian suppositions is staggering. Though Milton himself says that his poetry was motivated by a love for God, for country, and for freedom, and that it was intended to promote all three, the Freudian critic, who must imagine himself clearly aware of the many complicated factors within Milton that escaped even Milton’s own notice, can see not only what the poet repressed, but why he has done so and what exactly was its artistic and theological residue. The Freudian critic believes he can identify and explain, with precision and confidence, what prompted a certain blind Englishman to write a theological epic poem more than 300 years ago. Milton’s plain affirmations to the contrary not- withstanding, we are told “that the Oedipus complex is the generative center of his character and his art.”23 And, as if that staggering insight were not enough, we are assured that “this could be predicated of all authors who are not psychotic.”24 Perhaps I am hopelessly skeptical, but I hesitate to say things about all writers of nearly any category, especially something that pertains to their character and their art.

But this is one of those places where Freudian criticism breaks down so noticeably. It allows the Freudian critic to assert what the author denies and to deny what the author affirms. It entitles the critic to operate as if he knows Milton’s motives and character better than Milton did. It is arguable, of course, that such a critic does not know Milton at all. The poet himself might prove to be very different from all the Freudian (or non-Freudian) speculations about his long-dead psyche and its hidden “processes, functions, mechanisms, and dynamisms.” Unlikely as it is that Milton will return to dispel such myths (or that many Freudian critics would recognize him if he did) the fearless psychoanalyzing of writers who have been in their graves for centuries will continue unrestrained.

Perhaps it is its unrestrained nature that renders so much Freudian interpretation fiction and not fact. In that system of literary analysis, after all, the wall dividing those two realms is virtually nonexistent. Even if ids, egos, and superegos existed, Lewis Carroll’s Alice does not possess them. She does not even possess a she. She does not exist. That minor consideration, however, has not prevented critics from psychoanalyzing her, or Hamlet, or Captain Ahab. But, though it is frequently attempted, one cannot profitably psychoanalyze the non- existent. That the Electra complex has no real connection to the psychic development of a fictional character like Alice, a character who has no psyche to develop, has not kept Freudian hermeneutics out of Wonderland. Freudian hermeneutics seems to specialize in fictional characters, characters like the Milton that it imagines stands behinds his theological poems, spewing forth a stream of unconsciously sexual and/or pornographic metaphors. Perhaps one of the reasons Freudian criticism proceeds as confidently with fictional characters as it does with historical persons is because Freudian criticism is not rooted in verifiable reality. In its hands, historical persons are fictional. After all, we have only the psychoanalytic critic’s (not unbiased) word that such a Milton ever existed. Or, to paraphrase I. A. Richards, despite what psychoanalytic critics might assert, the imagined mental processes of a writer are not a very profitable field for investigation because they are too happy a hunting ground for unbridled speculation.25

Its nonfactual nature accounts for some of Freudian criticism’s apparent profundity, a “profundity” which arises from its ability to see what is not there. Readers of Freudian criticism, for example, some- times come away from a Freudian work surprised at all they missed when they read the Faerie Queene or the Pentateuch,26 especially when compared to all the Freudian critic claims to see. But, seeing is the one thing Freudian criticism does not do — unless one classifies exegetical hallucination as vision. Though they tell us that the iconic significance of flowers and puppy dogs is unknown or unrecognized in the writer’s own consciousness and that it lies buried deep within the recesses of his psyche, though they tell us the psyche operates by means of the mysterious transference of hidden “psychic energies” (whatever they are) between the inscrutable “processes, functions, mechanisms, and dynamisms” we label id, ego, and superego, despite all this shadowy ambiguity — or perhaps because of it — Freudian literary analysis often fails to exercise anything remotely resembling skepticism or modesty concerning its hypotheses. (Evidence for this is the fact that Freudians often label their ideas “conclusions,” not “hypotheses.”) It apparently matters little that the verification of Freudian theories concerning literary cause and effect, if it exists at all, lies well beyond (or below) what many cautious and reasonable scholars would allow as either relevant or analyzable data. In this light, one may be permitted to speculate that the Freudian critic’s own imagination (as it feeds upon a number of perverse schoolboy speculations concern- ing literary meaning and origin) has been doing duty in place of a close, responsible, treatment of the text itself, as understood against its historical and literary background.

Freudian hermeneutics proceeds by hooking up a sexual and/or pornographic view of psychic reality to a religious text like Paradise Lost, a poem that draws upon the long standing conventions of epic genre and upon the content of the Bible and its traditional interpretation. It then tries to interpret that poem in light of the view of psychic history it posits for the author, a history based both upon its hypothetical id, ego, and superego paradigm and upon its assumptions concerning the iconic significance of unconscious metaphor. This imagined psychic history, in turn, is brought back into play not only in conjunction with the poem’s unconscious meaning, but also as an explanation for the poem’s very existence. In other words, the hypothetical psychic background that Freudians deduce from the text is used as a hermeneutical aid for the text from which it was derived. It proceeds by transforming its highly suspect hermeneutic for dreams into a hermeneutic for verbal art. This truncated and misshapen method brings us, exegetically, exactly nowhere. Understanding an epic poem from a Freudian slant is not to be identified with under- standing an epic poem.

All this is not to say that suffering people have never been aided through psychoanalysis. They certainly have. But their improvement is not justification for Freudianism as an exegetical device. In fact, their improvement is hardly justification for Freudianism as therapy. These instances of therapeutic success do not offset the instances (and they are legion) where not only no healing occurred, but actual damage was inflicted. Some studies have shown, in fact, that Freudian therapy’s healing powers are hardly better than no therapy at all.27 I would expect as much from any therapy not rooted in reality.

Finally, if I may be permitted to turn the tables for one paragraph and to psychoanalyze the psychoanalysts, I speculate that Freudian criticism is itself a wish fulfillment. Perhaps Freudian critics want to make this fallen world understandable when it often is not. Perhaps they want to make the world simpler by imposing upon it their own narrow system of causes and effects. But they cannot and they have not. And, they don’t know they’ve failed.

That, at any rate, is why I no longer believe I ought to read every book about John Milton. Some simply do not repay the time and effort required to study them seriously. The time I waste on such books is time I could have invested studying genuinely useful books about Milton, books by Masson, Hanford, French, Kelley, Verity, and Lewalski, to name but a few. In short, I have reconfirmed for myself what Milton had earlier discovered about useless books: “if the compendious recital of what [one man misthought] was so tedious and unprofitable, then surely to sit out the whole extent of their tattle in a dozen volumes would be a loss of time irrecoverable.”28

Should you wonder why I stop here, having merely exposed one method of how not to read, but not having explained how reading should be done, I reply that I need not bother. Such a demonstration has already been produced — twice.29

End Notes

1 Calvin S. Hall, A Primer of Freudian Psychology (New York: New American Library: A Mentor Book, 1954, 1979), p. 40.
2 John T. Shawcross, With Mortal Voice: The Creation of “Paradise Lost” (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1982), p. 178 n. 3.

3 Ibid., p. 18.134

4  Ibid., p. 20.

5  Ibid., p. 179 n. 9.

6  John Milton, The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols., Don M. Wolfe, General Editor (New Haven: Yale: 1953-82), 1: 886. The words to which Milton refers come from the preface of A Modest Confutation.

7  Ibid., p. 886.

8  Ibid., pp. 888-889.

9  Ibid., pp. 890-892.

10  Ibid., p. 891.

11  Ibid., p. 890.

12  Ibid., p. 894.

13  Ibid.

14  One of the most devastating critiques to date of Freudianism’s failures is Hans J. Eysenck, The Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire (Washington: Scott-Townsend Publishers),1985/1990. See also Hans Eysenck and Glenn Wilson, The Experimental Studies of Freudian Theories (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1974); Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Psychotherapy (New York: Doubleday, 1978); David E. Stannard, Shrinking History: On Freud & the Failure of Psychohistory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), Andrew Salter, The Case against Psychoanalysis (New York: Henry Holt, 1954), and Richard Webster, Why Freud was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis (London: Fontana, 1995).
15 Hall, pp. 34, 35.
16 Oddly, some Freudian critics will use the variegated nature of current Freudian studies as a defense against my strictures. In conversations with me, they often say that my negative judgments do not take into account the fact that Freudianism is a spectrum, not a monolithic entity. But that defense will not do. It serves only to underscore my contention that most Freudian conclusions are neither demonstrable nor convincing, even to other Freudians. The anarchy within Freudian studies has been recognized by many scholars. For example, Jacques Barzun, Clio and the Doctors: Psycho-history, Quanto- history & History (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1974), p. 71, observes: “The theorists of psycho-history invoke Freud and speak of psychoanalysis or of dynamic psychiatry as if those names covered unified teachings. Yet a slight acquaintance with the literature is enough to show that radical conflicts exist.”

17.Hall, p. 53, 135

18 William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of “Paradise Lost” (Cambridge: Harvard, 1983).
19 Ibid. According to Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 193: “Freud’s psychoanalytic theory . . . wants to found itself on biology and at the same time to account for spiritual phenomena,” and it does so “to the detriment of both.”

20 Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Heron Books, n.d.), Lecture 23, p. 306.
21 George Watson, The Study of Literature (London: Allen Lane, 1969), pp. 157-158. Elsewhere (p. 18) in the same text, Watson makes another pertinent observation concerning the modern criticism of Paradise Lost: “. . . Milton, if he could know that interest in his epics is no longer primarily theological, would be contemptuous in the last degree.”

22 C. S. Lewis, Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge at the University Press, 1969), p. 295. As T. S. Eliot taught us, “nothing in this world or the next is a substitute for anything else; and if you find you must do with- out something, such as religious faith or philosophic belief, then you must do without it,” quoted in F. W. Bateson, Essays in Critical Dissent (London: Longman Group Ltd., 1972), p. 194.

23 Kerrigan, p. 6.
24 Ibid., emphasis added.
25 I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1925), p. 29.
26 For an example of a psychoanalytic interpretation of the Pentateuch, see Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (New York: Random House, 1939). 27 From among the many scholars and studies that support this conclusion, see, for example, the two articles by Thomas Oden: “A Populist’s View of Psychotherapeutic Deprofessionalization,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 14 (1974): 3-18; and “Consumer Interests in Therapeutic Outcome Studies: A Reply to Herron,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 15 (1975): 74-84.
28 Milton, p. 944.
29 I believe one does best by combining the insights of C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961); and E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967).