Dei Sub Numine Viget (Princeton), In Deo Speramus (Brown), Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae (Harvard), Lux et Veritas (Yale). I don’t know when Harvard dumbed down their motto to Veritas, leaving Christ and the Church out of it, but the mottos of Ivy League schools are part of a long-ago history the colleges washed their hands of for reasons having to do with expedience. It wasn’t the first time. One thinks of a middle-management bureaucrat asking Jesus, “Quid est veritas?” If you’ve the eyes to see Pilate in the best possible light your heart almost breaks for the guy. Almost.

In contrast, Wheaton’s motto is in plain English; For Christ and His Kingdom. One of my great teachers during my graduate studies at Wheaton, Frederick Buechner, in his memoir Telling Secrets wrote of his experiences teaching at Harvard and Wheaton. The latter he compares favorably to the former. “What made it different from any [college] I have known can perhaps best be suggested by the college motto, which is more in evidence there than such mottos usually are… . [I]t seemed to me that insofar as their resounding motto can be true of any institution, it was true of Wheaton.”

When my son Evan took a course at Wheaton called “Classics of Western Literature” he asked me what I thought of Dante’s Divine Comedy. I said I had met Beatrice, actually, and it turns out that her name is Victoria. The way he and his roommate kept their room, I added, would remind his mother of Dante’s description of hell. He smiled and changed the subject, saying he had also read again Augustine’s Confessions — he’d read it in high school — a book which he knows to bring up is to get me started.

We live in confessional times. Secrets once deliberated behind closed doors, sins once examined between priest and penitent, crimes once addressed by blind justice — all have become fodder for newspaper features, radio shows and TV news and programming. Victim and offender alike think nothing of appearing together on Dr. Phil or Oprah or 60 Minutes.

The guiding premise seems to be that if people tell their story — with enough anger, passion and candid details — they forget the past; they will have justified themselves before and/or absolved themselves of whatever burden they’ve laid at the public’s feet. Even a Christian is encouraged, above everything else, to tell his or her own story, as if its very uniqueness commands priority over the story of the faith.

By its very title, St. Augustine’s Confessions ought to attract a wide audience, promising as it does to be a tell-all book of the same genre as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Many of us who opened it first as adolescents scanned through it quickly in hopes of discovering salacious revelations and lurid stories of low life in pagan antiquity. Little did we realize how much we mirrored the young Augustine by these very expectations!

The Confessions ought to be a handbook for the would-be storyteller, but it isn’t. Not that there isn’t a story contained therein: Precocious army brat from a small town, gifted student with a penchant for public speaking, academic forever exploring different life-styles. But given the stories that now assault us, Augustine’s is pretty mild stuff regarded simply as story. The stolen pears pitched at pigs, his fondness for Latin literature, even his mistress (more like a common-law wife) from whom he parts — these hardly seem to us the black-as-night sins which Augustine depicts them to be. Comparatively, the outlines of Augustine’s story differ not all that much from those of many a clever graduate student pursuing a tenured-track job at a small college.

But Augustine’s purpose in sitting down in 397 A. D. to pen his Confessions was not primarily to confess his story — at least not to start, not at the beginning of the Confessions Book One wherein our hero is introduced. We need to flip ahead to Book 10, the point past which most bookmarks never venture. Read quickly, Book 10 offers us a dry, philosophical tract on human memory. Studied closely, it provides us with the wondrous key by which to comprehend Augustine’s overall purpose.

For Augustine, memory is much more than the simple ability to recount past events. Memory is best pictured by several different metaphors: the abyss of human consciousness, a vast warehouse from which we can call up a variety of past impressions, even the stomach of the mind. Augustine tells us, “I find in memory what I have to say and produce it from that source.” Memory is a land to be entered, explored and inhabited.

But, most important, memory provides Augustine with a ladder and road to God. In exploring the mystery of what we remember, Augustine exclaims, “As I raise above memory, where am I to find you? My true good and gentle source of reassurance, where shall I find you? If I find you outside my memory, I am not mindful of you. And how shall I find you if I am not mindful of you?”

As Augustine recounts his story, what is most significant are not his individual, sinful deeds, as important as these may be. What is most significant is that these deeds come to assume a shape in the telling. And this very shape comes to witness to God’s gracious existence. God may not be contained in his memory but, by reviewing his memory and rehearsing his life, Augustine discovers himself moving toward the mystery of God.

What is radical, then, about Augustine’s Confessions is not the story he confesses. Augustine did not write to catalogue his sins; that is, to tell all. Others in Late Antiquity wrote “confessions” — life stories about their moral progress from Point A to B to C. They were often more graphic in their depictions of sin than Augustine. What gives the Confessions its radical power is that Augustine is concerned not to move neatly from Point A to Point B, from tempestuous sin to placid redemption; instead he rejoices to remember everything, to remember correctly before God’s eye. Light and darkness, sin and redemption, immortality and corruption become wondrously juxtaposed before God’s gaze. Thus, Augustine can immediately follow a vivid account of his mother’s almost beatific vision at Ostia with a dark account of her stroke and death. The woman whose mind was lifted to the very frontiers of heaven is the very same woman who “explained her thoughts in such words as she could speak, then fell silent as the pain of her sickness became worse.” His writing that recounts her dying and death give us some of the most heartbreaking sentences in any literature.

The Confessions is not a seamy exposé addressed to a prurient audience; from beginning to end, it is a prayer addressed to God — a prayer for the Holy Spirit. And in being found by the Holy Spirit, Augustine discovers a truth at which every saint seems finally to arrive: Unlike the New Age pabulum which passes for spirituality, the Christian life is not a matter of forgetting, of moving smoothly onward and upward, of letting the inner child blurt out past mistakes in order to become the master of your own story. The Christian life is a matter of being able to discover and confess, confess to God, that in Christ we are enabled to remember all things; and that all things, good and bad, come to possess, through Christ, their glorious unity, even a sacrifice of praise offered to the Most High.

Auden always argued that few could match Kierkegaard’s acuity of insight into the historical (choice-driven) aspect of human experience. But he came to believe that for Kierkegaard—and many who succeeded him, “bowled over” by his brilliance as Auden had been—our life in nature is at best an embarrassment. (With perhaps pardonable exaggeration, Auden remarked of Kierkegaard that one “could read through the whole of his voluminous works without discovering that human beings are not ghosts but have bodies of flesh and blood.”) And for Auden this deficiency is properly described as theological: Kierkegaard, and other Christian thinkers who share his disregard for embodied human nature, neglect clear and vital Christian teaching about God’s redeeming love for this physical world, this whole Creation.

Much later in his life, Auden would borrow a musical metaphor from Dietrich Bonhoeffer and say that Kierkegaard was a “monodist, who can hear with particular acuteness one theme in the New Testament—in his case, the theme of suffering and self-sacrifice—but is deaf to its rich polyphony.” And for the Auden who emerges in the pages of this volume, the unique power of Christian doctrine is its polyphonic character, its capacity to address every dimension of our being, to give a comprehensive account of how history and nature relate, and—decisively in Christ’s incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection—how they may be reconciled. In a 1955 essay about his conversion—the only straightforward one he ever wrote—he put the main point in this way:

As a spirit, a conscious person endowed with free will, every man has, though faith and grace, a unique “existential” relation to God, and few since St. Augustine have described this relation more profoundly than Kierkegaard. But every man has a second relation to God which is neither unique nor existential: as a creature composed of matter, as a biological organism, every man, in common with everything else in the universe, is related by necessity to the God who created that universe and saw that it was good, for the laws of nature to which, whether he likes it or not, he must conform are of divine origin.
And it is with this body, with faith or without it, that all good works are done

As Mendelson points out in Later Auden (1999), the best book anyone has yet written about the poet, it was in 1948 that Auden “began to write poems about the inarticulate human body”—the part of us that does not and cannot talk, or think, or have faith in God, but which Christ died to redeem, along with the rest of creation which, as St. Paul says, groans in anticipation of its deliverance. Cardinal Newman distinguished between “notional” and “real” assent, and while Auden gave notional assent to the physical Resurrection of Jesus, and to the credal claim that “we look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come,” he always struggled to make that assent real. But he understood these affirmations to be absolutely central to orthodox Christianity and necessary to a true embrace of the goodness of Creation.

from Alan Jacobs’ The Poet’s Prose, in B&C

Like a figure from Israel’s ancient history, Lincoln was arguing with God. But it was no longer a domesticated deity, an American God, but the ruler of the nations. The truth had begun to dawn to Lincoln that this God was not at the nation’s beck and call, but the nation at his. His thinking was beginning to diverge from the paths followed by Beecher, Dabney, and the overwhelming majority of his contemporaries.

The stunning Second Inaugural
These notions developed more profoundly as the lists of casualties grew. They reached their climax in words Lincoln prepared for his second inauguration as president in March 1865. That address stands as the most remarkably Christian public statement by any American president.

The critical section of the address, complete with citations from Matthew 18:7 and Psalm 19:9, deserves to be quoted in full:

“Neither [side] anticipated that the cause of the conflict [i.e., slavery] might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!’ If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ “

How could Lincoln point to the commanding sovereignty of a great God, while professional clerics spoke almost exclusively of a “house god” completely in league with the North or the South? How could such a profound grasp of God’s grandeur come from an ordinary lawyer and politician, who during his lifetime was scorned for lack of culture?

The eminent historian Mark Noll, from The Puzzling Faith of Abraham Lincoln. See his The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, during the writing of which he spoke to us at Saint Francis in an adult forum.

A great wave boomed against the ship, and cannoning white seawater that seemed high and heavy as a house hit Sister Henrica full on, joining her to its onwardness. She screamed and could hear other men and women screaming as she and they were carried on the raft of its swift, stinging journey across the width of the ship. She flailed in a last chance for the ship’s railing, but she was plunged over the side of the Deutschland and into the coldest cold of water she’d ever felt. She lost all air; she lost a shoe; she could not tell up from down. She was suffering and terrified and helpless, and she could not claw up to the surface. Her black veil smothered her face, her black cloak furled around her like the strips of burial cloths binding Lazarus in his tomb, and she could not help it: she gasped, and seawater filled her. She coughed and convulsed and took in more. Weakening and in pain, she slashed out with her hands and kicked her feet in the finality of a wild rage. But she was burdened and yoked by her habit, and demanded by the sea. She remembered as she sank: Jesus wept.

See Hansen’s Exiles, which tells the story of the five Roman Catholic nuns exiled from Germany by Bismarck, the wreck of their ship off the coast of England near the Thames, and Gerard Manley Hopkins’s writing of The Wreck of the Deutschland to commemorate their deaths. The five nuns are commemorated every year in a memorial service held on 6 December by the Wheaton Franciscan Sisters of Wheaton, Illinois, the destination of the five Sisters.

This essay by Philip Jenkins can stand in for many, many books and articles — and cocktail party conversations — about interreligious dialogue. People have been making just this kind of argument for more than a hundred years now. It goes like this: “As trade and technology shrink the globe,” “teaching different faiths to acknowledge one another’s claims, to live peaceably together side by side, [is] a prerequisite for human survival.” Now, it’s not at all clear what Jenkins means by “acknowledge”? Must we agree that all religions have equally valid (or invalid) claims upon us and there is no reasonable way to choose one in preference to another? He doesn’tquite say that, but he does lament the way the Catholic church has “cracked down on thinkers who have made daring efforts to accommodate other world religions.” And makes the old the-Church-must-change-or-die argument: “Many Christians are coming to terms with just how thoroughly so many of their fundamental assumptions will have to be rethought as their faith today becomes a global religion.”

So, familiar stuff. I just want to make one point, which I have developed at greater length elsewhere. What always fascinates me about these arguments is that, in their focus on how proponents of different religions can get along, they invariably forget to raise the issue that for most religious believers is the central one: truth. If “intolerance” of other religions means denying that they are equally valid means of accessing the divine, that’s only a bad thing if all religions are equally valid means of accessing the divine — but that is just the point at issue. The constant and never-questioned assumption of people like Jenkins is that, if there is a God, that God will be tolerant and open-minded and accepting of a great variety of ways of trying to get to Him or Her or It. But as far as I can tell, the only reason for believing in so all-embracing a God is that we’d prefer to. Looking around at the world — the natural world as well as the human world — I do see some reasons (none of them definitive, of course) for believing in a God, but I don’t see much warrant for believing in a God who is nice.

Alan Jacobs, The American Scene. Alan follows up the above with this post.

Yale, this second half of the twentieth century, is a corpse; which is to say, it resembles the real Yale in no more than accidental qualities, and even deserves the name “Yale” only analogically.

The destruction of the College in New Haven dedicated to the preparation of Christian men for ministry is in no way mitigated by the survival of its name. Nonetheless, that Yale is no more, and that what is called Yale merely inhabits the same buildings and takes the same symbols and trappings, has, to the extent that it has been recognized, been more celebrated than mourned. This itself is further tragedy.

But blindness to tragedy is to be expected from a population that has no sense for the reality of institution. Mourning requires recognition of tragedy, and recognition of tragedy requires apprehension of the real. Even Nietzsche, in his own peculiar way himself in touch with reality, saw that the force of tragedy was its horrible arresting insight into the essence of things. Those that lack such insight, or who, through unbelief in essences, deny that such insight is possible, cannot be expected to recognize even such a tremendous tragedy as the loss of a human monument to God.

That was, to be sure, the essence of Yale, an institution consecrated to divine service. It was because such an essence was signified by the name “Yale” that the utterance of the name alone could inspire a sort of awe. And it is little wonder that the power of the name fades with the aspirations which were its source.

The properly acculturated historian of ideas will explain the “evolution” of Yale by pointing out—quite believably—that the institution simply had to change when people stopped believing the old ideas, and started believing new ones. But such an interpretation implies that Yale is as much a real and unified institution under the new ideas as under the old. This it most manifestly is not; it seems that one of the disregarded and yet to be replaced old ideas included the very belief in the possibility of real and unified institutions. Institution requires purpose, discipline, and a source of authority. These things are not recognized by the new institution, which is as a result not any sort of institution at all, and cannot begin to educate its RstudentsS out of their ignorance of institution.

It seems this very ignorance at least explains why, for instance, the majority of women and men in the College today are so basically unfit for the institution of marriage. Fitness for marriage requires at the least a recognition of its significance, a recognition which must be supported by belief in the reality of moral institutions. But here, unchecked and untrained by the guidance of substantive institutions, moral weakness and ignorance are abundant to the point of celebration. Students attempt to dignify sexual degradation by organizing in its name; others, their moral convictions beaten out of them, stand by permissively. Is it any wonder that so many of the students courageous enough to recognize that something is wrong seek refuge in the relative strength of that most basic of children’s institutions, the fraternity?

In the midst of this devastated landscape, the individual can only begin again and try to be a student. But for what could the student muster a student’s enthusiasm? For God? Apparently we are supposed to believe that we have been persuaded of His death. For country? For our State it is difficult to pretend enthusiasm, and those few who manage border on the excess of fascism. For Yale? She is destroyed, her spirit separated from her body. Those who remember her life are left to wonder whether her spirit could survive the separation, and, if so immortal, whether the body will admit to resurrection.

Joshua Hochschild, Yale ‘95 (Jonathan Edwards). First published in the Yale Free Press, 1994, and in the Yale Journal, 1996.