I was wrong.  The Press struggled along for about four years before I removed it from life-support.  I was left with a stock of several fine books whose appeal, alas, had nothing of the pop-cultural about it.  To be sure, I have never been a "pop" kind of person.  I have devoted my half-century of life to learning other languages, reading and writing literature, trying unsuccessfully to build a stable academic career on today's politically correct campus, and serving the God of goodness with as little ostentation as possible.   I should not, in other words, have supposed that I might establish the kind of rapport with the Internet which would allow me to hook my few fish hidden away in a sea of millions (which turns out to be an immensely complicated technical challenge).  I remain convinced that there must be a small audience for works of taste, reason, and humane sentiment... yet I am almost as convinced that the Net conceals rather than reveals small markets to small enterprises, and vice versa.  Like it or not, we are all being "mainstreamed".

I have dedicated this page, however, to the highly improbable event that some wandering eye might happen upon my closeted stock of books and take an interest.  Respected political commentators like Jeffrey Hart and various distinguished academics have praised many of my works: I simply never had the budget to manufacture and massively circulate standard marketing hyperbole.  These books are discounted at below-production costs, and each listed price includes shipping and handling.  I believe the thoughtful reader will be sure to find something entertaining and instructive here--especially the social conservative who does not allow his or her ideas to be dictated by old-boy party bosses, ivory-tower elitists, or the fair-weather faithful who have God far more often in their mouths than in their hearts. 

I am a "classical" writer in the following ways.  I am convinced that human nature exists and that it imposes limits upon realistic possibilities in our behavior (though, as a Christian, I also believe that individuals may stunningly "surpass themselves").  I am convinced that beneath the changing surface of human culture, a rather narrow set of narratives continues to be enacted throughout history.  I am convinced that the only ultimate goodness for the human being lies the service of moral principle and of the eternal spirit which inspires it--and given the previous convictions stated, I must also assent to the belief that most people are truly unhappy most of the time, since their nature is to deny or evade or postpone the higher calling of their nature.  Yet I am convinced, finally, that unhappiness--that profound suffering, especially--can be extremely fertile, inasmuch as it sometimes drives people to heed their higher calling.

Order by contacting me at clvpres@yahoo.com.  Or you may post your request (with or without payment) to John Harris at 2707 Patriot Drive, Tyler, TX, 75701-6604.

ISBN 0-9676054-7-4

$8.95

John Harris taught language (Latin, French) and literature (English, World) for two decades at various levels before retiring from a college professorship to found Arcturus Press.  He is not a trained theologian, has never attended a seminary, and frankly admits that he struggles to feel at home in any of contemporary Christendom's formal settings.  This book, then, was not written to garner points with a circle of colleagues, employers, or neighbors: it is, instead, the sincere and vigorous (though also well reasoned and documented) response of one man--a man who pays bills and worries over his child, like all "real people"--to the agonizing shallowness and disturbing worldliness which have beset Christianity from either extreme.  "This is the book," he says, "which I had to write after leaving my last teaching job at a Protestant college.  I had other reasons for leaving, and other things I wanted to write; but this book--its frustration, its indignation, its appeal to common sense and fair play--lay at the bottom of everything else.  Parts of it were composed three or four years ago, but its basic idea has been nagging at me throughout my adult life.  And that is just this: that a Christian must love goodness if he claims to love God, and must strive to do good if he claims to serve God.  The rest is mere chaff in the breeze." 

Chapter One: If Not Goodness, Then What? An initial assertion based upon reason that the preeminent attribute of a God called All-Good must be moral perfection.

Chapter Two: Denominational Odyssey A brief personal excursus, delving only deeply enough to substantiate the claim that the author has not deliberately favored any denomination over another for sentimental reasons.

Chapter Three: A Word about Works An explanation that "works" in the study refers not to programmatic behavior aimed at social engineering, but to intensely intimate, often irreproducible struggles.  excerpt

Chapter Four: The Question of Authority—Why Knowledge of Goodness Cannot Rest Solely on the Bible The clear thrust  of Western thought about goodness, both Christian and pre-Christian, is that moral truth cannot originate in cultural quirk.  Mere Bible-reading without moral analysis cannot separate human universals from Hebrew conditionals.

Chapter Five: The Question of Authority (continued)—How Fundamentalism Undermines Good Deeds and Distorts Grace A  more abstract argument is built upon the bare necessity of deliberation, choice, and mortification of selfish interests in all cases involving moral behavior.

Chapter Six: How the New Literalism Has Severed Its Conservative Roots The image of "old-time religion" cultivated so meticulously in some quarters of  the Religious Right is shown to be grossly distorted.

Chapter Seven: Fundamentalism Plugs In—The Role of Television in Creating the New Literalism Like liberal anarchy, right-wing literalism gained momentum in the early seventies, owing largely to televangelism.

Chapter Eight: Fundamentalism and Empiricism—Strange Bedfellows with Backs Turned The much-touted adversarial relationship between the Religious Right and science results from their sharing a common standard of proof and a common belief that ultimate reality is material.

Chapter Nine: Conscience Versus Self-Indulgence—Homage to Thomas Molnar The traditional Catholic point of view deserves to be singled out for honoring moral reason, yet it sometimes stops short of granting God’s goodness the highest priority

Chapter Ten: Neo-Liberalism, Sex, and the Perversion of Love and Forgiveness The single most visible failure of the liberal church to provide moral leadership over the past half-century must surely reside in its ineptitude at resisting the sexual revolution.  excerpt

Chapter Eleven: Neo-Liberalism, Lies, and Moral Chaos Closely related to the liberal church’s catering to a degenerate culture by debasing the Christian view of love is a broad "softening" of terms and boundaries often equivalent to routine lying.

Chapter Twelve: Neo-Liberalism, Utopia, and the Pathology of Social Decay   Inevitably, the well-intentioned liberalism of the nineteenth century allowed its social conscience to lure it into irreverent varieties of twentieth-century utopianism.  excerpt

Chapter Thirteen: Positivism, Scientific Faith, and the New Liberal    The impact of empirical science upon liberal Christianity is a matter of historical record and, indeed, was not always deleterious; but today the cosmologist’s materialism is, if anything, more self-effacing than the hedonistic social reformer’s.

Chapter Fourteen: The Electronic Media, Hollywood Chic, and the New Liberal The unholy alliance between the liberal church, the academy, the entertainment industry, and politics is fusing more solidly every day as it courts an ever more agenda-driven vision of the perfect social commune.

Chapter Fifteen: The Fundamentals—Back to the Basic Facts of Life and Death As the book concludes, the opening focus on "mere Christianity" is recovered and a perspective upon contemporary Christian practice sought.  excerpt

Chapter Sixteen: Varieties of Mystical Experience—Are There Any? The answer to the title’s question is essentially "no"—not unless one considers the mystery of moral inspiration, which is infinitely closer to God’s true nature than an unusually clear dream, job-hunting or fund-raising auspices, etc.

Chapter Seventeen: The Role of Organization and Ritual—Confessions of a Neo-Kantian  This final chapter is an apology for public ritual in the light of reason’s vulnerability to obsession and, specifically, moral reason’s vulnerability to paranoia and depression.

"I am not accusing the Christian church or any several denominations of wholly abandoning moral philosophy. Like other human institutions, churches have bills to pay, and in a culture devoted to shallows pleasures, a stern message requires a very brave messenger. Yet if I may draw an example from what is our most topical crisis as I write, the formal response of organized Christianity to Islamic terrorism has been woefully 'under-deliberated'. We are told in one kind of congregation to trust that God will keep our own families and property from harm; in another occupying the spectrum’s opposite end, we are treated to the theatrical humility of mutilated history lessons wherein Christians are always aggressors and Muslims victims. Nowhere do we hear (or nowhere have I heard) that death must come to all, that the style of urban living we have chosen lends itself to occasional calamity, that no one who chooses to kill is primarily a victim, and that no one who breathes is wholly incapable of killing.

"We have lost our moral way. Our guiding light has been extinguished by opposing gales of hedonistic generosity and programmatic ideology. Both major political factions howl from either direction at different times. The Right would have us regard our material prosperity as God’s blessing when, in some ways, it perniciously undermines our moral fortitude. Yet we are to view Islam with no such indulgence, since its sacred book is sometimes harsh and its more liberal interpretationists cannot be true believers! The Left, on the contrary, would have us flail ourselves (always excluding its own anointed prophets, who are our conscience) while awarding villains of every stripe the special dispensation usually reserved for young children and lunatics. In love with their Mosaic pose, its progressive orators will overlook a ghastly ruin of atrocities and debauches in the modern world’s carnival-gone-berserk as long as they may blare "Onward! Onward!" from the prow of the pageant’s leading float.

"I have been warned that a work so critical of both extremes can succeed only in alienating all possible readers. What I find most wrong-headed about this admonition is its imagery. The positions I have just challenged have no more to do with polarities, really, than my own position does with moderation. My complaint is precisely that both 'extremes' are in fact alike in founding their worship of God somewhere other than upon His supreme moral goodness. Personally, I see no excuse for being moderate in adoring such goodness. This simplest of criticisms is 'fundamentalist', if you will—and I suspect that it will resonate in all simple hearts. If there are too few of these among all of us who profess a real love of the true God, then Creation has greater problems than my lack of marketability."

From Chapter Three:  A Word About Works

But just what is a deed of mercy? The medieval church lapsed into a Pharisaical legalism. One was to give generously to the Church, and one was to give generously to the poor: in those two destinations of charity, we see the prevailing thrust of good works today among both conservative and liberal denominations. The conservative believer is too often led to suppose that the status of his salvation depends vaguely, but significantly, upon his tithes and other support of church projects. There may be no other conduct so underscored—the doctrine of salvation by faith alone, with which Martin Luther turned the medieval machine upside-down, may otherwise be waved about as a license to desist from brooding about one’s conduct. Yet where the paying of tithes is involved, conservative denominations expect the faithful to stand and deliver. The more liberal ones have more taste about such things. One doesn’t find them building communes and Disneyworlds of comfy lounges and recreational facilities with money browbeaten from their parishioners. Instead, they tend to invest heavily in projects for the sick, the hungry, and the homeless. In this, their activity is wholly laudable; yet, oddly enough, they resemble the conservatives very narrowly once their money has accomplished its crusade. The liberal minister of today (whom I call neo-liberal later in the book, since I believe the Left lost its once-healthy sense of identity), rarely chasten their congregants for divorcing, living together out of wedlock, or devoting themselves to the expensive pleasures of the cosmopolitan epicure. What, after all, has self-discipline to do with a deed of mercy?

Here we come to the crux of the matter. Scriptural references to the importance of good works (I have listed the New Testament’s at the end of Chapter Five) are often outspokenly clear about self-discipline: it is a requisite part of the Christian life. Paul stresses so often in such strong terms the need to control carnal desires that to discount his advice on the subject would be to undermine his credibility across the board. The passage from John’s first epistle from which I drew the title of this book also appears in the context of strict self-governance, not almsgiving. No one who has any regard for scriptural authority whatever can be in doubt that such acts as suppressing one’s anger, one’s envy, and one’s lust are to be considered good deeds.

I take the position (endorsed by Paul in his letter to the Romans) that knowledge of goodness has been breathed into the human spirit by a loving God—though the embers demand constant fanning and may, indeed, go out. Let me, then, explain the nature of this goodness from a rational perspective instead of simply playing the scriptural trump card. The good deed is one not performed for selfish motives. The doer’s personal good has been factored out of the calculation as much as is humanly possible. That isn’t to say, naturally, that everything contrary to the doer’s self-interest is automatically good (a snare into which well-meaning people stumble). The deed, besides not unfairly advancing one’s own cause, should also advance the cause of others in a responsible way which will encourage their own inclination toward the good. If we were castaways on a desert island, for instance, my making do with a half-ration of food so that the suffering children could have more would be noble. My doing without any food so that everyone could dine in comfort would be a sterile gesture of false martyrdom. I would have given my life for nothing, and the people I "helped" would be spiritually demeaned to the extent that they were physically fattened up.

Thus the good deed requires suppression of self-interest and intelligent calculation of what is in the moral interest of others. The two elements are equally important. If I simply seek to take myself out of the picture without determining whether or not such a sacrifice will be likely to bring others into accord with God’s will, then I am worshiping the idol of vanity, as surely as if I were trying to make myself king over my neighbors. Some people who routinely perform works of public service suffer from this very pathology. Their egotism utterly depends upon having others about them at whose feet they may fling themselves. Their sin is deceptive in that it bears the look of humility—but there are a couple of tell-tale signs. First, they invest very little time in thinking: they have virtually separated thought from their "moral" tours de force. They regard as a further badge of honor their habit of hurling themselves into each new project without stopping to estimate its likely effects. Mere public recognition that the project is worthy suffices for them. And that is the second diagnostic sign: their need of an audience to view their spectacular martyrdom. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus recommends metaphorically that the right hand not know what the left is doing: he says that people who play for an audience already have their reward here on earth and need not expect God’s smile upon them, as well. The word often used for such types is "exhibitionist".

If the False Martyr is not pleasing to God, then how much less so must be the Jolly Good Fellow! Here you have a person who neither ponders long and hard about the ultimate affect of his sacrifice upon others nor, indeed, subjects himself to kinds of sacrifice that are particularly uncomfortable. This type is well represented among all denominations. He’s always ready to loan a few bucks which will probably not be paid back, or to roll up his sleeves and pitch into any enterprise undertaken by his set of beautiful people. Some of his loans and his little missionary jaunts may actually serve a good cause. Statistically, an occasional jewel would be bound to occur… but how much of the credit for that occasion devolves upon him rather than upon blind chance? A deed can have beneficial consequences for sympathetic people without deserving the name of good work. A disreputable mechanic could so poorly repair your car that it stalls tomorrow morning, resulting in your not driving onto a certain bridge whose center has been washed out. The Jolly Good Fellow’s "works" often partake of the felix culpa—the lucky blundering—which we find in some acts of nature. If he lends money to someone who really is going to make the house payment instead of finance another trip to Vegas, you may usually chalk it up to good luck. If the Flyfishing for Heart Disease fundraiser goes well, he certainly won’t pout; but he took particular pleasure in seeing old Curt and Chuck again, and in catching the ever delightful Louise’s eye. He does his bit to make the world one big happy family, all right—both by chipping in his money (quite generously sometimes) and by keeping his own happiness in excellent repair. He has his reward.

Must one, then, be miserable to do good? Of course not: but one must be highly suspicious of one’s pleasure in doing good. There is most certainly a satisfaction which comes of having helped another human being in a worthy cause—but it is a difficult, if not impossible, kind of satisfaction to refine into its purest form. Les vertus se perdent dans l’intérêt commes les fleuves se perdent dans la mer, wrote La Rochfoucauld acidly: "Virtues dissolve into self-interest as rivers merge into the sea." We are immensely complex creatures, with a nature at once animal and spiritual, at once self-seeking and self-despising. Our motives are almost always tainted with some degree of selfish profit (I toss in the "almost" in deference to rumors of a few saintly examples, not because of any personal encounter with that exalted level). Even the proverbial charity of assisting the old lady to cross the street could be a suppressed longing to compensate for ignoring one’s own mother, a desperate bid to think well of oneself after having just cheated a client, a performance staged for the benefit of the beautiful woman watching at the curbside, or any of countless other little favors to one’s egotism.

I am not saying that good deeds do not exist—far from it! The whole point of this book is to plead for their revival in the Christian spirit of serving a higher cause. The very fact that our best deeds (at least mine, and probably yours) are vitiated by some tiny fleck or streak of self-interest must simply remind us of our fallen state, not persuade us to give up the struggle. A large part of the struggle, however, is precisely to stare our selfish motives in face. To declare that toiling with a Habitat for Humanity crew is automatically good displays as much moral blindness as to insist that one’s gift of millions to the Christian Children’s Fund qualifies one for canonization. The liberal denominations are quick enough to scoff at the latter type of person: rich swell with guilty conscience trying to buy himself a good night’s sleep with a check. What about their own "compassionate" undertakings? Why is working in the soup kitchen indisputably the act of a modern St. Francis? Their very stridency in the political arena about the superior merit (and preemptive right to full funding) of all their favorite projects strikes me as alien to the virtuous frame of mind. In pressing for the IMF to forgive poor nations their debt, does the World Council of Churches really give any thought to the number of extortionate tyrants who will see their sinking ship of state thus bailed out? Is it prepared to take moral responsibility for the innocents who may be subsequently starved and murdered by these resuscitated despots? Why does it at least not lavish a few hours of consideration upon the matter before publishing its categorical pronouncements from the moral high ground? Would negotiating a condition or two for the debt-pardoning skew its halo?

I find that I repeatedly have the same misgivings about liberal Christians on a personal level. They are "stand-up" people when almost any variety of communal work requires staffing. They will stake out street corners, walk door to door, or distribute blankets at shelters. I truly admire their easy extroversion; and I probably envy it, as well, since it is a quality which I lack miserably. On the other hand, I often observe their personal lives to be governed by no principle other than having maximal pleasure with minimal commitment. If they donate generously to charitable causes, they do not stint on their own cars, vacations, and nights on the town. They frequently enjoy lucrative employment, and also tend to come from backgrounds where they were denied very little. Their lives are so brimming over with love for the human race that they have difficulty limiting themselves to one sexual partner or, indeed, understanding why anyone would be so "cheap" as to suggest such a constraint. They are sincerely aggrieved when a past companion "gets the wrong idea" and "can’t let go": they will shower this pitiful neurotic with friendly phone calls and notes to help her along to… to her next hook-up, I suppose. And this, too, they call charity.

Such works just don’t work. The Right is wrong, I admit—I emphasize—to release its born-again hordes upon a vulnerable society with the carte blanche of irrevocable salvation. Yet the Left is no less wrong to designate certain earthly causes as salutary, then absolve everyone who "signs on" of all other obligations as if he were a sailor in port between tours of duty. What makes a deed of mercy crinkle and wither into a burnt offering? A heart which offers no real sacrifice—which places what is pleasing upon the altar of its own vanity. The virtues involving self-control, such as chastity, temperance, modesty, and soft-spokenness, do not feed or clothe another human being. They prepare the spirit, however, to feed and clothe other human beings in a reflective and efficient manner which does not have self-aggrandizement at its foundation. Yes, an abstinent sort of person may also be a miserly Scourge. He is so more often than conservatives would like to think (though less often than liberals make out). Just as giving generously to fight world hunger is not automatically a Christian act, though, so abstaining from mood-altering intoxicants and recreational sex is not necessarily a discipline of the spirit. Vanity has myriad forms. Some people fear being laughed at if they become tipsy, or being manipulated if they form an amorous attachment. Egotism, not God, is at work in them, just as in the unreflective, highly visible donor whose whopping contribution ends up correcting a maniacal autocrat’s trade deficit.

Liberal theologians are fond of pointing out that spirit and flesh are not divided in Christianity: that was the heresy of Manichaeus. They’re right. And it is also true, and true for the same reason, that the mind’s subjugating of carnal desire to rational objectives cannot be distinguished from its expressions of charity toward others. A man dedicated to serving his own appetite does not mysteriously cease doing so when he takes out his wallet or goes slumming with a bunch of pamphlets, just as a man who truly has control of his own appetite will not watch a child starve for the sake of his bank account. The spirit acts through, with, and in the flesh; but in order to act spiritually, it must first assert its authority over the flesh.

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My intention is simply to demonstrate that the material "horrors" and decadent bourgeois "luxuries" concerning which neo-liberal philanthropy loves to hyperventilate can be highly subjective. I haven’t been to a movie in over a decade, nor has my family enjoyed an American-style vacation (i.e., a drive to a scenic resort) for at least that long. We live very close to the "poverty level"—yet we get by comfortably, because our life is cautious and frugal. My first-grader can at this moment recite Cicero’s cupidem non esse pecuniam est (free translation: "Give yourself a raise by not buying costly frivolities"). This sentiment, I concede, would hardly endear itself to the caliber of thinker now styled "neo-conservative": a believer, that is, in the God-given joy of material acquisition and the divinely sanctioned engine of unfettered capitalist money-making—a eudemonist, in short. But then, the Left is equally eudemonist in wanting to provide everyone an equal share of the same loot. What I deplore is eudemonism, and what I deplore most about the New Left (as about neo-conservatism) is its wholesale betrayal of the classical liberal resistance to the crude, the shallow, and the carnal.

When someone, for instance, who can’t pay his heating bill drives a $40,000 van, or someone who can’t afford Christmas presents for her kids sets out to "do Vegas" with her boyfriend over the holidays, a neo-conservative would advises that we are witnessing stimulation of the economy, the neo-liberal that we must abstain from judging the "victim" of unenlightened rearing and a corrupt society’s heavy "pressures". Yet it seems to me that we behold a rational being who, through a kind of intellectual laziness which both sides very much encourage, has not calculated the transparent consequences of a few familiar actions. I cannot help but reflect upon the immense complexity of human nature at such moments; and upon the heels of that reflection, another follows about the immense complexity of genuine help. Will it help the single mother of three if we give her children presents while she continues throwing money away on a deadbeat Romeo? I tend to buy the presents, anyway, when such circumstance crop up… but I scarcely harvest the philanthropic glow of a job well done. Haven’t I merely done my bit to ensure that these waifs will spend another year without a mother who can confront reality?

I hasten to add that I have the utmost respect of those inner-city ministries like Jim Wallis’s where homeless people are given food and beds, fatherless children find a wholesome place to play ball, and immigrants with no English learn how to function in an alien environment. I am not in the least disparaging such worthy enterprises. What I resist is the notion that all the homeless must be fed, all kids matched with mentors, and all immigrants rendered fluent in English before a single denizen of suburbia deserves a good night’s sleep. I resist this notion first because it aspires to an impossible goal, as I have been suggesting—but also because it degrades the good of the soul, and does so in that very fashion for which Wallis and others chide bourgeois materialism. Even if homeless people wanted homes (many do not: they are often quite well educated and have prosperous relatives worrying after them in suburbia’s hypocritical wastes), would they necessarily do better managing Kentucky Fried Chicken or publicizing the latest Adidas shoes? Something in them has rejected that kind of life, and maybe we should honor the something. Every child should be surrounded by caring adults; but there is a difference between charitably donating time (which is easier for childless men like Mr. Wallis) and being berated into playing dad for a child whose mother holds marriage in utter contempt. If everyone could speak English, I suppose we would have a lot more up-and-coming sales clerks and legal secretaries in the suburbs—and a lot less cultural diversity. Is that the goal? Is this the neo-liberal "game plan"? Wear a tie and get a job… demand generous government funding for child support of all kinds… get that diploma and start raking in bucks… it all sounds so noxiously bourgeois; and indeed, one need only follow any liberal social crusade to its indefinitely recessive "omega point" to discover that the route finally circles back to paralyzing mediocrity. Happy little bureaucrats donating a quarter out of every dollar to create more happy little bureaucrats, with "happiness" being defined ever downward to include ever more frivolous pursuits… is this a vision of lower heaven, or a glimpse of outer hell?

Can’t we feed the homeless without denouncing our neighbors because homelessness exists? Can’t we support Big Brother programs without denouncing our neighbors for less than full participation in them? Can’t we offer free English education without denouncing our neighbors because more people enter the United States than it can readily absorb? Maybe we need the homeless to remind us that the eight-to-five existence is highly artificial. Maybe we need the fatherless to remind us that our self-indulgent hedonism has a cost. Maybe we need people speaking strange tongues to remind us that the world is a big place. Wouldn’t it do us good to reflect that life goes on if you fling your wretched job in your dishonest employer’s face; that life will not go on—not very smoothly—if you decide to desert you wife for the cute young sales rep; that life goes on all the time in far more than two languages? Isn’t there something condescending, and even unhealthy, about the mission to erase all abnormality, suffering, and inconvenience from existence? Is it in this cause, then—materialist and orthodox to the point of fascism—that we must all surrender ourselves to the sound flailing of neo-liberalism?

I repeat that generous gifts and charitable services are to be highly prized wherever one may find them, even if God’s ineluctable eye perceives a muddy mix of motives in the benefactor. An event may have morally salubrious consequences without so much as being the product of any human intent at all. A sudden thunderstorm which prevents a man with murder in his heart from seeking immediate vengeance may force him to cool off quite as effectively as a brave and saintly friend would have done. Obviously, we cannot measure goodness only by results (unless, of course, we want to award moral points to the thunderstorm). In the same way, we should not stray from the pragmatic goodness of feeding a hungry man to the conclusion that all who feed the hungry are necessarily good, let alone to the conclusion that all who would be good must feed the hungry. Look at it this way. If you have ever been fortunate enough to see a little-known Tyrone Power movie called The Luck of the Irish, you recall that the central character at last turns down a powerful and lucrative position to marry a country lass and live in happy obscurity. Now, as head of a major publishing enterprise, he would not only have earned a salary capable of lavishing charity upon the hungry and the homeless: he would also have enjoyed such influence through the printed word that he might greatly have advanced charitable political causes. Yet he declines this option in what is convincingly portrayed as an act of conscience. He rejects luxury, glory, and worldly might for an inner peace which courts no special favors and cuts no shady deals. Would the liberal crusader of today consider this man a hero, or even be able to comprehend him? Just think of all the hungry he has allowed to go unfed merely for the "selfish pleasure" of appeasing his conscience!

But most of our utopian clergy, I think, are well aware (beneath their incendiary rhetoric) that their best efforts are in no danger of annihilating life’s diversity, its fertile friction, or its anguish. I have perhaps done them an injustice in implying that they do not recognize the pure fantasy of universal happiness—or have been too charitable. For if they realize that the promised land will always recoil to the next horizon, they do not for that reason exhort us to seek ultimate peace in the heavens above the horizon. They prefer to draw righteous authority from leading their benighted pilgrims upon an endless trek. Who knows what might become of that authority if the landscape ever did spout milk and honey? What would they do with themselves? What would become of their life’s work? Everyone would be drawing a nice check from Wal-Mart or H&R Block, grazing junk food as a family unit in front of the tube, and chattering away in monochrome English-lite. Everyone would be… bourgeois, or post-proletarian in some Marxist sense (which really amounts the same thing, it turns out). Utopia would stand revealed in all its anodyne vacuity.

And there is, I believe, a danger of achieving this brave new world of material satiety, in all its suffocating affluence if not in its transformation of well-fed idleness into bliss. In fact, we have very nearly arrived in the United States. People who own color-TV’s, microwaves, and cell phones consider themselves unjustly pinched because they cannot buy their child the latest fad in dolls or scooters. People who hit McDonald’s and Red Lobster three times a day (my household also gave up eating out some yeas ago) apply at the local church for a Thanksgiving turkey. We are missing something about this puzzle, even though we have all its pieces. We will find the missing element in the mirror: it is the log in our own eye which prevents us from seeing our neighbor’s true need. No, we shouldn’t begrudge children their Christmas toys or families their Thanksgiving feast… but we should re-examine our own commitment—all of us, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief—to toys and feasts.

Life isn’t about diversion and gluttony: not the life of conscience. We should aspire to alter what our poor yearn for and envy—what they find themselves poor in relation to—by altering ourselves. They are too like us: that is the source of their true poverty. Non qui parum habet sed qui plura cupit pauper est, opines the Roman Stoic Seneca in his second epistle: "not he who has little, but he who wants more, is a pauper." A vast mansion isn’t vaguely obscene because everybody doesn’t have one, but because nobody really needs one. The three-foot depth of wrapped presents around the Christmas tree isn’t latently outrageous because some trees are only swamped in two feet, but because all such flashy clutter drowns the meaning of new life in God’s love.

Here, it seems to me, is the calling of the conscientiously liberal minister: here should be the source of the new "cry for renewal". The neo-liberal crusader, however, has recognized that turning away from the world will not make him popular among his bored, resentful, highly educated peerage unless he does so in a manner which brings him belligerently face to face with the bourgeoisie; for the real point of turning away from the suburbs is to insult them, and one must quickly snap back around to make sure that one’s defiance has been duly observed. This is pure counter-conformity: not God instead of the world, but anti-suburbia instead of suburbia. Not the spiritual instead of the material, but the mainstream pattern of material emphasis precisely reversed. Where the bourgeoisie has actually scored modest triumphs over lucre and the flesh—in its elevation of monogamy, for instance, or in its dedication to child-rearing—the new liberal agenda calls for immersion in secular squalor (e.g., free love and freedom from offspring at all costs). As a recipe for utopia, this agenda taps far less idealism than an Amish settlement or an agrarian cult. At its best, it may lure a few noble hearts into medicine or the Peace Corps for the right reasons; but most of its footsoldiers require an audience of outraged folks back home, and a lonely life of individual sacrifice therefore draws charges of not changing "the system" fast enough.

And the charge is true, after all. The system is not really changing at all, because it cannot: inequity is embedded in the human condition. The poor are always with us. We understand this admonition of Christ’s in the wrong sense if we receive it merely as an assessment of material resources or of the human complexity behind destitution. The capitalist system has arguably created, or could soon create, enough abundance to feed everyone on the planet; and the fact that some needy would trade their loaf of bread for a jug of wine might as readily be viewed as a medical as a spiritual problem (at any rate, the problem could be symptomatically alleviated by medicine). The real catching point is the giver: the poor are always with us because some of us must always be slaying the dragon of poverty. Otherwise, our armor would rust and our charger drop dead of inaction. We must have our beau geste. How could we play Jesus if there were no bare feet to shoe? Here, by the way, I speak more of those noble hearts toiling away in obscurity than of the contrarian exhibitionist, whose artifice is as easy to diagnose as his motives are shallow. Though the most vocal exponents of contemporary liberalism may consist more of the latter, the former are far more interesting, and probably more common among true leaders. In their greater depth lies a greater fervor with more ability to inspire, even when a crowd of admirers has not been sought.

I do feel the seductions of social works: they are indeed powerful. I recently stopped to converse in my broken Spanish with an immigrant woman whom nobody else on the scene could comprehend. She apparently needed directions to a pizza parlor where she had just been given a job, which happened to be on the other side of town. Since she was on foot, I unstrapped the toddler seat from the passenger side of the pick-up and motioned her in. She got to work on time, and I… I had a most exhilarating sense of having helped another human being. If she had requested me to take her back home that afternoon, or even to become her daily chauffeur, I might well have consented at that instant—out of selfishness. For the selfish purpose of renewing that exhilaration. Yet I am a little too subtle to deceive myself in such a manner. The sight of someone less fortunate materially than we are always stirs guilt in us, so that the chance to redistribute some of our means relieves a nagging doubt even as it fulfills an innate desire to play the hero. A powerful emotion, as I said… but not especially difficult to see as self-serving from both directions. Where have we left the needy in our duel quest to be rid of guilt and full of heroism? The creation of a dream world where we may consider ourselves Templar knights and our beneficiaries may evade an essential error in their practical calculations does not strike me as a very healthy, or even happy, answer to the problem.

One reason for my "subtlety" in these matters, no doubt, is an encounter I had while hiking around Ireland as a young man. In the coastal town of Westport, I was virtually held up by a gypsy woman (the Irish call them "tinkers"). She didn’t stick a weapon in my face—only her wall-eyed stare, as flat and unblinking as if it had been carved from marble. In a monotonous drone whose words I couldn’t at once discern, she kept repeating the same formula: "a couple of pounds, please; please give me a couple of pounds". Since I had scarcely enough for my own expenses, I first tried to ignore her. She merely followed me along the sidewalk as though she were laced into my backpack, murmuring her refrain all the way. I then had the not-so-bright idea of depositing her at the local Catholic church. That maneuver only drew more indignant glares than ever—aimed at me, it seemed, rather than at her. After all, she was part of the local furniture: I was the stranger, and my tactics betrayed that I obviously didn’t know how to handle myself. When this burlesque had dragged on for about half an hour, I finally gave her a couple of pounds which I could ill afford to part with (I supped on bread and cheese, as I recall). Without so much as a "thank you", she vanished in thin air, leaving me with a sense of humiliation every bit as profound as the later exhilaration of my pizza-parlor shuttle was lofty.

For I did not vow never again to help lost souls on the sidewalk—not in the least. What I learned from the Irish incident was what I read in the tinker woman’s eyes: that shame, when it becomes utterly extinguished in one person, can be turned around and used as a blunt weapon against another. This woman had the dead, cold eyes of a stray dog—a dog which has been beaten so many times that it sees the blows in time to dodge them, and will risk one, in any case, for a scrap. No visible humanity was twinkling in them. Nothing she might do, and nothing I could expose her to, could bring her to reflect upon her situation and its future. She merely wanted my money, and she bullied me. Having identified me easily as an outsider, she made her appeal so persistently that shame overpowered me. I only wanted her to leave, to take from my presence not the sight of her poverty (for she was no worse off than I), but of her shamelessness. I found the prospect of a human being who could baldly exploit our natural surges of guilt and obligation and decency without ever batting an eyelash to be terribly depressing. Thank God she didn’t hold out for my last penny: she probably would have gotten it, leaving me to sleep in a ditch.

The poor will always be with us because we will always be poor inside. Along with our ebullient self-satisfaction at having slipped some hapless wight a bill, we shall always (most of us—certainly I myself) be saddled with an eminently manipulable self-suspicion. We shall allow shameless people to shout claims of poverty in our faces and to extort whatever they want from us, because we can never escape the knowledge that our most secret motives are, after all, not quite pure.

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From Chapter Fifteen: The Fundamentals:

Back to the Basic Facts of Life and Death

Let us imagine that a supernatural power whose nature is wholly beyond divining or intuiting in any respect to the human psyche has rewarded this élite group for surrendering to its arbitrary decrees. Or rather, since even a surrender implies a choice initiated in the miserable and corrupt human breast, let us say that the Power selects these happy few to respond to its message for no humanly apparent reason at all. An eternity of singing the Power’s praises and standing joyfully in the sublime majesty of its presence is their unearned reward. For the rest of us, an eternal separation from the Power… but that in itself could hardly affect us as hellish, since our psyche has no point of intersection with this force, in any case, and could not become more separated from it than we already are (in a benighted dedication to goodness, for instance). Some supplemental regimen of tortures would have to be added so that the experience would be more anguishing than our daily lives on earth. For some lost souls, I have no doubt that an unending Sisyphean ordeal of rolling boulders up slopes with Tantalian taunts of food and water just out of reach would indeed be insupportable. Again, though, some of us would agree with Camus that life in the present world follows pretty much the same routine; and some of us would take much more comfort than Camus ever did in knowing that no amount of such suffering could undermine our admiration for goodness.

And I put it to you that a hell in the company of this great Comforter—that is, the knowledge that our afflictions were arbitrary and unconnected to the moral inklings within us—would be closer to heaven for us than an eternity in the presence of a power which so afflicts the souls at its mercy. Though our agony should be constantly renewed, we would always have the hope of relief. For we should still have our god of goodness, the god whom we know in our hearts: the more inscrutably and vindictively our tormentor flailed us, the more certain we should be that the ruler of our hearts was elsewhere—perhaps in a deeper vault of the same dungeon. Of course, Milton represents the fallen angels as placing a similar hope in Satan. It was Milton’s right to do so, courtesy of epic convention and dramatic license. Dante was more accurate, however, in stressing that all hope is left behind at the Gates of Hell. Why? Because the soul knows its own guilt, the justice of its own damnation: any hell which seeks to dispense with this one indispensable element must remain entirely a poetic fiction. Hell is the soul’s separation from God, which is its separation from a vital, illuminating energy at its very essence. A damned soul has lost its energy, its will—its love. The light of goodness has been utterly extinguished in it while the knowledge of goodness lingers to weigh it down.

For the power of goodness, as every true Christian knows, is inextinguishable. Hence eternal punishment by some mogul of the universe whose whim is law, to whose magnetism nothing in human nature is magnetized, cannot serve goodness; for everything about such a frightful figure is ephemeral. This Moloch is, indeed, a nightmare of the shallow and the temporary made eternal. When the nightmare passes, the light of that love which never sets in a healthy heart will again command the skies.

I imagine that the enemies of rational faith would object to many of the positions which I have ascribed to them. Their god is by no means arbitrary, they would tell me: what he bestows upon them in an act of grace is precisely the knowledge of true goodness and the strength to conform their conduct to it. But this is mere rhetorical flim-flamming. There are basically four possible relationships between humans and the divine: wicked people and good god, somewhat good people and good god, somewhat good people and malevolent god, and wicked people and malevolent god. Obviously, the enemies of natural theology wish the first condition to reign. Fallen humanity may enjoy faint flashes of moral insight—but these are few, and no courage of conviction stands ready to carry them forward into behavior. Good only appears when God accepts a selected group of souls as His, whether through their submission to some inscrutable rite of passage or (since that submission, as I have noted, implies choice) through a kind of thunderclap tap on the head. After such conversion, however, everything changes. Good conduct either becomes irrelevant (since all is forgiven to the select few) or mysteriously godly. And who is to judge the conduct of the Chosen, anyway? A bunch of unregenerate heathen?

The problem with this line of reasoning is that the élite, being formerly incapable of right action, could hardly have "come to God" through any but ignoble motives: cowardice, laziness, self-interest, etc. Or if their response was dictated by a sense of higher calling already within them (a notion which haunts Arminianism and Moravianism), then they could not have been entirely wicked by nature. No, say the misanthropes, you have it wrong again. God miraculously usurped the will of His elected: there was no moment of decision on their part to respond or not to respond. But in that case, how do we distinguish between a "pagan" who declares, "I refuse to let this lynch mob do its work!" because his conscience nettles him and a "believer" who does so because God has suddenly usurped his will? Is it because the latter has joined, or will proceed to join, the right church? I trust that no one capable of mature thought will advance that distinction. Is the former person, then, just imaginary?

The fact is that the two cases are indistinguishable. True conscience is inner revelation—a conversion oriented to specific circumstances, if you will. And if it pleases some ideologues to insist that all such moments are alien to human nature, and were so even when they were observed in a Cato or a Socrates, then let these moments stand as a history of divine inspiration. So, indeed, they are, since our nature is surely divided against itself: for the better part to dominate the worse no doubt requires some supplementation of benign vigor which we shall never understand. I admit that Immanuel Kant would not have approved of my bestowing a mystical aura upon conscience. He chides both the Pietists and the Moravians specifically, the former for delivering moral insight through supernatural intrusion, the latter for requiring such intrusion to sustain moral insight.⁶ I accept his criticism, for I interpret it in this manner: enlightenment straight from God could not be mistaken, but we stumbling children of God must always allow that our guiding light may be slightly refracted. Otherwise, we risk a very long fall—from humble righteousness to imperious self-righteousness.

Need I say, however, that the determinists will view any fine-tuning of this "bad men/good God" alternative as yielding an insufficiently squalid estimate of human nature? I can only keep asking why, especially since they are so giddily naïve as to believe that their own nature has been utterly integrated into God’s perfect will. Here, indeed, the seeds of self-righteousness find fertile soil.

Of course, I join Kant in preferring the simplicity of the second alternative above: i.e., that human beings naturally possess a certain knowledge of God’s goodness, even though it is often insufficient to keep them from pitfalls and never sufficient to guide them perfectly straight.⁷ The apostle Paul defends this position about as plainly as one could ask, although Karl Barth and his heirs have sought to erase the first two chapters of Romans by muddying the semantic water or preserving the icy silence of a "gentleman’s agreement". James Barr’s resplendent pages on "St. Paul and the Hebrew Background" lay to rest any reservations which a reasonable person might entertain about God’s convicting voice within the human heart.⁸ Professor Barr is moved to lament, "On the whole, people are far more heavily influenced by the strong dogmatic convictions which they have inherited or to which they adhere [than by objective textual evidence], and only with the greatest difficulty can they find it in themselves to admit that the Bible actually points in a direction different from these convictions."⁹ That realization is indeed as depressing (in Barr’s word) as it is inevitable.

For surely the final two alternatives above should not make us hesitate for an instant… yet what others remain? If we are not permitted to concede the minutest particle of moral insight to the human mind’s operations upon its environment and its own motives, then the sole reason for our calling God good can only be because God is powerful. First we dwell in an unrelieved chaos of values: then a celestial voice declares the boundary lines. Whatever the Voice says goes. Why? Because it packs the power to enforce behind its stentorian tones. When I write "enforce", I mean physical duress, since moral enforcement (which employs the strong hands of guilt and contrition) would require pre-programming in the human heart. To use the word "good" of such herding and hazing would be moral nonsense, as would using the word "evil" of it. Both God and man are beyond good and evil in this Nietzschean universe of raw power—and beneath good and evil, as well. Morality is not possible in such circumstances, unless you wish to call Darwin’s mechanism whereby the fittest survive at the expense of the frailest a moral system.¹⁰

Now, I am not recommending the defiance of authority as a virtue. I concur with Professor Molnar (see Chapter Nine) that resistance to authority, far from being an absolute virtue, comes much closer to absolute vice. To violate all commandments simply because they exist is a sterile, parasitic kind of egotism. We see it exemplified in Milton’s portrait of Satan, an ultimately ludicrous figure whose one rule—to defy God’s rules—ironically makes him dependent in every smallest motion upon God’s rules while, besides, depriving him of an obedient dependency’s rewards and comforts. Were it not for Adam and Eve, Paradise Lost would be a genuine comedy! Nothing can be said to win for the moral nullity of Milton’s spiritual counter-conformist (or any other) the slightest degree of respectability.

Yet this is because the authority we know in God is moral, and we can only know it as moral if the basis of understanding it has already been laid within us. Otherwise, we should indeed merely be responding to an autocrat’s whip like slaves and cowards; and should we defy the autocrat on the basis that his authority had no inner basis, we should indeed be in a very odd position of moral superiority over our god. In fact, classical mythology is replete with such figures, heroes whose persecution by the Olympians is deeply troubling to us (thanks to Christianity’s insistence on moral divinity). Why should Prometheus be tortured for taking pity upon the human race? Why should Oedipus be hounded to the brink of insanity for circumstances entirely beyond his knowledge or control? Should the shepherd who saved him as a baby, then, have left him to the wolves—would that have been the "moral" thing to do?

I think I understand why many religious conservatives are opposed to the notion of inner enlightenment. I should like to imagine that my lengthy section on neo-liberalism has well proved how far I, too, am out of sympathy with the abusive invocation of conscience, meditating, and other such inwardly based searches after truth. Professor Barr himself warns, "I share many of the doubts and objections that modern theologians have voiced against the whole idea of it [natural theology]…. I start out on the whole subject as one who is distrustful of the entire box of tricks that makes up traditional natural theology, and ultra-modern theology as well."¹¹ The very phrase "natural theology" (which I have placed in quotation marks more often than not because it makes me so uncomfortable) implies that one may rightly give free reign to nature—but that’s a slippery business. Human nature has something unnatural about it; or to put it another way, the highest calling of human nature is to replace natural law with higher law. Nature would have us clubbing our enemies, stealing more than our fair portion of food, and seducing or violating comely members of the opposite sex. It would have us living like animals rather than human beings; and for a human being to live thus naturally, I repeat, is unnatural, since our essential nature is divided against itself.

Seven Demons Worse

 by Ewen Harris

(pen name of John Harris)

An optimistic novel chronicling a journey through the moral chaos of the contemporary academic world

When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none.  Then he sayeth, I will return unto my house from whence I came out.  And when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished.  Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first.       Matthew 12.43-45

This work could be classed as a Catholic novel (in the broad sense of "classically Christian", à la C.S. Lewis), and certainly as a conservative novel; yet Seven Demons Worse tends to make the faint hearts of some "family values" types fidget with its psychologically (not anatomically) blunt depictions of moral chaos in academia.  You may not wish to give your kids a copy before you send them off to college... but then again, maybe you should read the book yourself before you let them choose a college.  No one ever avoided a collision by covering his face!

Four decades of academic nihilism and have mired us deeper in servitude to things material and carnal than any capitalist nightmare could ever do: such is the discovery of Huston Evans, the novel's main character.  Physical pleasure, careerist ambition, and nihilist derision so predictably motivate Evans's colleagues in the Ivory Tower that they are grotesque caricatures of free human beings.  Grappling with the sudden loss of his family, he embraces the cynical ways which he had always rejected before as a man might walk into the desert without water: suicidally.  His descent into our peculiarly postmodern delirium of grabbing and discarding partners as one might drink to get drunk is a fully convincing journey to hell... and back.  For Evan's ordeal is ultimately redemptive.  If a traditional novel needs any single credential, surely it is this confidence that happiness lies in the acceptance of limits.

synopsis

By now, Evans has begun to recognize the longing for self- destruction lurking behind his revenge.  He attempts to snap out of his moral tailspin.  Unfortunately, his new habit of life is not easy to dispose of.  In "Ariadne", he walks away from two kind-hearted women from his past who wish only to find something like love.  Looking desperately for a way out of his moral labyrinth, he renews a relationship with Jane, a diffident woman with profound psychological problems which keep her from wanting any man she might have.  Evans had once loved her, and he now seeks to guide that love toward permanence; yet their immediate sexual intimacy robs him of his former mystique and renders him so suspect to Jane that she figuratively freezes beneath his touch: hence she is "Daphne".

The semester ends as Part One concludes; but before he can escape the campus, Evans is compelled to meet with his quondam mentor Eliot --after whom the chapter "Teiresias" is named.  Eliot is indeed a kind of blind seer.  He cannot comprehend Evans's reluctance to dance the mad bacchanal of campus politics in pursuit of success.  The rupture of this fragile friendship puts the finishing touch upon Evans's spiritual exhaustion.

For, to top off his ordeal, Evans has just suffered the loss of his mother.  This stoical woman's high expectations are vaguely the subject of Part Two.  More directly, this section sees Evans return home to a small southern town for the funeral and settling of affairs.  "Hypnos", or Sleep, traces his awkward reunion with his younger brother Mace, largely a stranger to him.  Upon returning him to the airport, Evans discovers that Mace is both married and awaiting the imminent birth of his first child--secrets which the mother's prejudices forced him to bottle up, since his wife is Hispanic.

Stung by his own unfairness to Mace, Evans is now poised for another bout of despair.  In "Oneiros" (Dream), he allows his erstwhile acquaintance SuEllen to rope him into the singles circle at the local church.  He resists her personal advances; but upon attending church, he is treated to a sermon which explains all suffering as failure to put enough in the collection plate (a chapter called "Kokytos", the wailing river of Hell).  This perversion of Christianity so revolts him that he loses his newfound bearings.  Only the naive Sharyn lends support --a simple country girl who attaches herself to him during Sunday school.  The support extends far into the evening; and in "Moira" (the goddess of fate), events reach the same old climax with an inevitable rhythm.  Evans had sworn off further sexual adventures, so his lapse with Sharyn convinces him that he is truly irredeemable.  In "Lethe" (Oblivion), he passes several introverted days at his mother's house pondering how to repair his exploitation of the girl while digging up mementos of past futility.  When SuEllen renews her pursuit in the middle of his gloom, he angrily and blindly heads off on the interstate.

Part Three opens as Evans flees to an unknown destination.  After hours of driving, he recognizes this objective in the vast nullity of the desert (a sea of sand for which the chapter is named: "Thalassa").  He spends the next several days picking around a tiny town.  The desert's nothing- ness slowly becomes courage, simplicity, and endurance to him.  The chapter title "Aster" is drawn both from the night sky's infinite beauty and from Stella, the woman who all alone runs the motel where he stays.  Evans's heart finally thaws here.  He sees that he has demanded a comprehensible happiness from God rather than accepting that the world's misery is deeply rooted in human nature.

To rededicate himself, Evans plunges into the desert on foot.  He intends a kind of penance of bodily pain-- perhaps death; but as he proceeds, he realizes that this passionate act is misguided.  His ultimate test must be to re-enter the world of the living.  By midday, he has renounced his trek and resolved to ask Sharyn to marry him.  In her simple heart he will find the vigor to begin a new life.  This chapter is named "Helios" (Sun), both for the desert and also for the streaming inner light which the dunes ignite.

The final chapter, "Gaia" (Earth), does indeed bring Evans back to earth.  He is opportunely picked up by a couple of roving geologists whose comic friendship opens up another side of existence to him, a life of the mind but not of campus pseudo-intellectualism.  The story ends as he dials Sharyn's number that evening.  His new beginning is well under way.

ISBN: 1-57579-106-4 (paperbound: Arcturus Press, 1999)

$5.95

Order by contacting me at clvpres@yahoo.com.  Or you may post your request (with or without payment) to John Harris at 2707 Patriot Drive, Tyler, TX, 75701.

two excerpts

In this early chapter, Professor Huston Evans, having lost the wife whose chaste love indemnified him for years of loneliness in the academic world of ruthless hedonism, adopts the lifestyle of those he most abhors.  It is a kind of vengeance which he himself has not thought through, and which immediately begins to pollute his own spirit.

She surprised him yet again (despite his earlier resolve that she would never more surprise him) in a display of tenderness when the last hold was released. She allowed him to slide down slowly over her ribs, so that his cheek came to a pillowy rest against her small, compact breast. At the same moment, she passed an arm (which he had inadvertently pinned against a cushion) around his waist, whose nakedness she sought and found easily beneath the loose folds of his disheveled clothing. Her other hand, its fingers flexing in and out, ran through her close-cropped hair. Then, as if measuring his hair against her own, she repeated the gesture once from his forehead to his ear. With this last movement, her eyelids finally lifted and her wide, dark pupils focused on him distantly, meditatively, as on a pleasant vista revealed from a great height.

"That was beautiful," she announced in a small, matter-of-fact voice--the very voice which she had used to sing the praise of that evening's Sauvignon blanc.

Evans was awkward in his utter comfort. Even his wife had never cradled him so intimately, so shamelessly, into the feminine swellings of her chest, like a young mother trying to suckle her babe... even his wife? Would he, then, have found in this a greater degree of intimacy with Sheila? Was this tenderness--to rub against another the most densely wired parts of one's epidermis? Was this love--had he always been wrong, after all, and the others always been right? Had Sheila, then, been just as hung-up and backward as he, and was he only now discovering... what? What was he now discovering?

For five minutes, ten minutes, they said nothing more... but her words kept fluttering through his mind like a bird trapped in a house. Like the bird, the words eventually found an open window.

"Beautiful... you said it was beautiful... in the sense of aesthetic?" he frowned vocally. "Beautiful like a work of art?"

"Ah, yes--I forgot that you believed in aesthetics... `something immutably human', wasn't that it? Well, if you wish, certainly! Would not any human have found that beautiful? Haven't we always--won't we always? What other species enjoys love-making as we do?"

She sang these words from deep in her throat. Finally she gave a little laugh, a little flash of her brilliant teeth, and rolled her eyes ceiling-ward in philosophical triumph.

Evans shifted and fidgeted more than ever. For some reason, although he had never lain more luxuriously in his life, he had to straighten his spine and lift himself upon an elbow. "But is there no difference..." he mumbled, and then trailed off, scrutinizing in disbelief the face which no longer saw him.

"No difference between what?" she retorted beatifically, still tracing the wrinkles in her ceiling's plaster map like a god about to pronounce that his creation was good.

He couldn't hold it back. Even the neurological excitement which had stolen away his will just now could not quite muzzle the voice that he heard speaking with his tongue. "No difference between... pleasures of the body and pleasures of the mind? Between good food and Pachobel? Shouldn't there be a difference... or if there isn't... in those cases where there isn't... doesn't that deserve to be called love? But that's not... that's certainly not us, is it?"

He might have been melting into her private dream for all she detected of his unease. She murmured, almost as if dozing off, "I don't see why our act should not be considered one of love, and one of beauty, too. Why not both lovely and beautiful? The human act of love is a very highly evolved behavior, as I was just saying. What other animal do you know that can make love just right, so that it produces a pleasure rather than relieves a pain? And there are so many gradations to love, so many ways to make it a little better... a little slower or deeper. The highest act of love requires an artist's touch, a blend of long experience and inborn genius. You, I am happy to say, have the genius!"

Ignoring the compliment and the purring that went with it, Evans quickly answered, "There are a lot of things the human animal does which make us distinct, but few of them are... artistically elevating."

"Whether this one was artistic or not, there was certainly a very fine elevation!"

And she guffawed, obviously quite pleased with the obscene double entendre.

The jollity of her eighth-grade coarseness shocked him as nothing else this evening had yet done--shocked him in a way that she could neither have designed nor, perhaps, imagined. Until this instant, he had remained somewhat awed by her intelligence, her self-assurance, her effortless suavete; but now--what a coarse fool he himself had been for holding in secret veneration her laureated, gilt-edged brand of book-smarts! He rose on his arm a little farther, hiding in the activity an attempt to cover some of his nakedness, and merely grunted.

"Why do you keep moving around? Turn off the lamp, if you like."

"Sorry, I didn't mean to disturb you. Maybe I'll go get a drink."

But for once he found his body languid; and he wondered, propped rather painfully on an elbow, what new snares and oubliettes might be involved in a trip to the kitchen and back. Would he be settling in for the night? Did he want to settle in for the night? The prospect of another "beautiful" excursion into her body--and another, and another-- was terrifyingly attractive to him. He realized at that moment that he might never tire of the symphonies conducted by her thighs, her hands, her scarlet lips and ivory teeth--that she would tire of and discard him in a week, as he had done Felicia, and that he would be less able to face a day without her then than he had already proved himself able to face these many months without Sheila. He understood now why men bequeathed their ties to her in utter capitulation. Under the circumstances, her exaction was quite charitable: she might have demanded furs, jewels, promotions, honors, murders, or suicides. She had been decidedly restrained.

He felt Gervaise's hand slip away from his waist, and heard a faint sigh of resignation. Entirely without intending it, he had won a very small battle of wills. The thought perversely panicked him: he was losing her, perhaps--he was letting her get away--letting himself get away from her. He barely managed to suppress a lunge back upon the divan's arm which would have steeped his senses in her once again.

Her teeth flashed now in a new kind of laugh--a laugh that either made no sound or died in her lean white throat. In a flicker of lashes, her eyes appeared to lower, not yet to his level, but to an angle of the ceiling and the wall, their descent somewhat stealthy, somewhat coiling, as if preparing a defense or an attack. "So you didn't enjoy it--is that what you're trying to say?"

"No!" he blurted, almost betraying his new resolve. He found an enticing taste of salt against his teeth, and imagined her body's touch first reflexively, then reflectively; but the muscles in his slack cheeks, frozen by some mystery of grace, failed to register the leer. "No, I did not say I didn't enjoy it! I said that the beautiful and the enjoyable are not necessarily the same thing... or maybe I'm trying to say that there's joy, and then again, there's joy. Oh, what's the use? I... I don't know why I'm trying to explain something like this to someone like you. I knew your politics and your convictions. It's my own problem. I should never have come. In fact... I'd really better be going."

He heaved himself up with a profound sigh, as if the noise of exhalation might hide the flurry of readjusted clothing. Behind him, she cried out in a new voice, an inarticulate, interrupted shout of dismay, of indignation, which stabbed at his back between the shoulder blades.

"What are you leaving for? You don't have to leave! We're just getting started! I've got two guest bathrooms--you can take your pick. The pipes may be old, but the water runs. Or if you prefer, I'll draw you a bath with an old pewter pitcher and scrub your back." The stiff, steely edge of irritation in her voice had already metamorphosed back into a caress. "I even have a closet full of men's clothes--Rhett Butler must have left them here. Or maybe Daniel Boone. You can take your pick of those, too. Maybe a warm tub bath and something more comfortable will improve your mood. Seriously, I'm a good masseuse..."

"I'll bet you are!" he smiled malignly, giving in--and then, as if another part of him were answering an alarm, he heard himself muse aloud, "I wonder if old Dan'l ever wore a necktie?"

"What did you say?"

Almost imperceptibly, his shoulder lifted a little higher between them, as if to ward off a blow. Which part of him would claim his tongue next?

"Look, what I mean is... well, come on! Why draw this out between us? You know we have no future together."

"Who said anything about the future? I thought we were talking about tonight!"

"Okay, okay!" He fought his way loose from himself to the surface, sitting straight up in a gesture that roughly tossed his partner on the cushions. "I said `ties', didn't I? So what about the ties? You tell me. Rumor has it that your closets are full of them--and you don't do anything to kill the rumors. I hear you joked about them during your speech in Chicago."

"Ah! So that's it!" she laughed unmerrily--her laugh seemed to have as many registers as a flute. He turned to face her fully, and found the glistening teeth--but also two eyes drawing fiercely into a squint. Her head was lifted, now propped up (still comfortably, still dominatingly) by the thin, laced fingers joined behind her hairless neck. He could not help but admire the naked elbows, matched perfectly, pointing upward in curves like rare ivory carvings on either side of the lampshade. "I do believe you're jealous, Professor Evans. If you felt that way about it, why did you come here in the first place? Why are you saying this now, after making love to me?"

"That's it!" he cried. "It's the making love! Yes, I enjoyed it--I enjoyed you! Do you identify yourself with it--is that love?"

"Well, what do you call it?" she bandied imperially from the throne of her splendid arms--but a miraculous blush began to stain her cheeks. "Whatever it was, you were quick enough to join in! Or did you just come for the pop? Downtown's the other way--maybe you missed your exit."

"Oh, how very funny... and what compassion for the sisters!"

"I have compassion for anyone who has to make her living off of cowboys like you, Duke." The stain was already gone--had it ever existed? "If you hurry, you can still round up three or four more before daylight."

Evans clenched his teeth over the words that were scalding them: adolescent volleys of sarcasm, snide ironies that would have brought him to the level of what he most detested. At the same time, sitting coolly behind the curtain where his strings were pulled, that resistant part of himself was delighting in this surge of resentment, which might just sweep the foolish little man out the way he had entered. Even at this instant, however, if she had said, "Please stay"... but no, of that there was absolutely no possibility. For if she had done so, would she not have been Felicia? Wouldn't Felicia have said that if given the chance? (And if she had, wouldn't he have refused?)

"In the first place," he stammered, standing square and straight before her, "I have never in my life... done the vile thing you suggest. I have never taken advantage of any woman, either by paying her money or toying with her affections... or never, at any rate, before I started studying at your school."

"If that's what's bothering you," she laughed--yet another laugh, its peal echoing off the ceiling like a bell, "you may put your conscience at ease. You haven't robbed me of anything! Don't flatter yourself."

"No, but you've robbed me of something--or would have if I hadn't given it away. Would you believe I used to be free? I used to be able to get free of myself, and all of you. There were things... above us all... and then you liberators arrived in your tanks. Now I have to live in your laid-back nothing-matters Disneyworld of blast-offs and happy landings! I've turned into the same piece of crap as... as all the rest of you."

"Welcome to the twenty-first century, where everybody and everything is a piece of crap... yes, I'd say that about sums it up. What's the matter, Cyrano--did you have an American dream that got lost? A chirping little housewife slinging Hamburger Helper and shuttling the kids to Roller Rink? `Honey, please balance the checkbook! Honey, please give Bobby a good talking to! Honey, I'll love you for ever and ever!' Did the cowboy want to settle down and hang up his pistola? The future, you said? Jesus Christ, man, were you going to propose holy matrimony to me just because we had good sex?"

And she laughed and laughed and laughed like a tipsy debutante at a New Year's Eve party, her white teeth and fully extended throat turned into an orchestra of merry crystal sounds.

He ignored the laughter, or rather talked between its holes. "So now beauty is just plain old good sex. Fine... now we're getting somewhere. Do you say, then, that you loved each of these men that donated his necktie? I mean, were you in love with each one? Did you feel love for him at the time? Or was all that just good sex, too?"

"Once upon a time--it seems ages ago now, doesn't it?--I said we made love," she countered with a sigh, her laughter exhausted. "We created together a difficult experience called love--like two collaborating artists, to use your own metaphor."

"Not my metaphor," he winced.

"All right... we made something together which was lovely."

"Without reference to you or the other person--just lovely in itself?"

Her hands came flying loose in a stunning display of naked white flesh. "Okay, have it your way! It was just sex! Sex! Everybody else enjoys sex, but you--you alone, of all the men I've ever known--you have to have your guilt, too! And you have to share it with me, like some kind of Seventh Day Anal Repressive knocking on doors! I'm not into guilt, okay? Just go! Just leave! Try another door! I can't hack you possessive types! I can't imagine what you think you came here to prove, with all your patriarchal--"

"I'm not upset about the number of men," he intruded, not angrily but earnestly, his shirt now fully buttoned up, his unoccupied hands thrust into his trouser pockets (where their flexing fists were poorly hidden). "It's not the number of ties--it's the ties! Why ties? There are other fabrics in the world, or I'm much mistaken. Why must you advertise these little conquests? Or if they don't signify conquests, why do you let on that they do? What's the joke? What does it all prove--what did you come here to prove, to this sick city, to this university? Are you proving that you just don't care? That you've never cared? That you're above and beyond caring? That sex is just sex--a little work of art that you mount, frame, and hang, a dish that you season and swallow until you get peckish again? I thought your whole thing was to denounce the bourgeois morals of modern Western society. What could be more bourgeois than wearing a ledger of transactions around your waist? You might as well tie an abacus to your sleeve. Why the counting? That's what I don't get. Do you win a prize? Do you go into a drive-through chain at some point, or merge with Wal-Mart? It's really just an object with you, isn't it--a countable object, a coin clinking into your piggy bank. You're not looking for anything. You're not missing anything. You have nothing to share and nothing to say. And if your books sell well, you'll have a whole generation of confused little bourgeois cheerleaders and princesses counting up their times like rings of the cash register, nothing missing, nothing to share, no wants, no needs--just like the guy who won the lottery. Well, wake me when the revolution's over."

"Just go," she said. "Just go."

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Evans drives west without any specific intent (other than a vaguely suicidal one) upon realizing the squalid futility of his "vengeance".  As the novel nears its climax, her begins to assemble from the desert's seeming emptiness some of the answers he seeks.

That evening, after cleaning up very carefully, he went again to the diner, which was empty now as at every other time he had seen it. He heard voices in the kitchen, and eased himself into the doorway's light. The young woman was dishing up supper for two small children (one of whom had brought him his silverware last night). Without intending to stare, he became briefly mesmerized by the two heads of thick, splendid, tawny hair that bobbed over their plates like tethered balloons. The cough which cleared his throat was not engineered.

The woman straightened herself, apologized, and seated him out front. "We don't get many customers," she said. "Most people go downtown... but you know," she added, knitting her brow in grim earnestness, "that place ain't very clean. I wouldn't eat there. That's why I keep the diner open." She was slender--a bit too slender, as if she had worked herself to the bone--but her quick, accurate movements showed no sign of weariness. He thought of Sheila more than once as he watched her. When he had finished at last (with a piece of the same pie which he heard her dole out to the little girl and boy in back--it was the lure in her strategy to keep them quiet), he left an enormous tip.

The sun had not yet set. He settled himself into an iron-frame chair placed under the awning at his door. (Even in the shade, it had held the day's warmth, and its sudden dry embrace sent a shiver of pleasure through him.) He watched the desert mellow, its white waves of sand subsiding into a blue glow and the stark arms of drowning cactus massing into tranquil islets. He remembered his first thoughts upon seeing the desert (was it only yesterday?) and was surprised at their nihilism. The desert, a mere sun-bleached skeleton--a stunned hulk stripped of all living pomp and circumstance? It was so much more, so entirely different: it held the very essence of life, the majesty of suffering. Stripped of pretense, yes--but the mercilessly eroded dross of hypocrisy, far from leaving a nothingness exposed, allowed the pure power of endurance to sweat beneath the sun and thrust its racked arms into the infinite sky. By no accident had Moses and Mohammed and the prophets all brought faith from their desert wilderness. He remembered even farther back than yesterday, incredibly far back, to his last curt words aimed at SuEllen, her town, and their pseudo-religion. He had been right, through no fault of his own, when he had implied that they believed in nothing. They believed in what they could touch and possess, which would one day make new deserts from its decay; and they believed in a god who would resist the desert--who would exempt them from it and let them touch and possess through all eternity. They believed in an idol carved after their own image and dedicated to Unbelief.

Like Jonah, he had sprung out of the dark pit into which he had been swallowed alive just so that he could denounce them... yet wherein was he different? Had he, too, not wanted a happiness made according to his specifications for the length of his natural life? He hadn't been greedy--he didn't expect to live forever, and after this life he would even have been content with oblivion, as long as he and Sheila had enjoyed thirty-five good years together to make up for the thirty-five without her. God had owed him for those lean years, and the debt was payable now, please, and in terms that he could comprehend. Even if there were nothing afterward--even if there turned out to be no God--there should be someone or something to see that he got paid... not much, just everything--just exactly what he wanted. And so he had created exactly the kind of universe that would exist if there were no God, where everything had to make sense here and now, and then had expected his God to come dwell in it. Or rather, he had been shocked to find that his God did not dwell in it when Sheila died senselessly. And his faith had worn away like dross, leaving a lifeless skeleton rather than the crystal-hard but malleable paradox of sand.

His hostess briefly disappeared with a clean pillow into the cabin next to his, then emerged with the final words of an energetic assurance ("Just let me know!") trailing over her shoulder to someone inside. He nodded to her, and she hovered over him.

"Did you say something to me just then, Mr. Evans? I'm sorry, she wanted an extra pillow--"

"No, no, I..." He shrugged languidly in his warm chair, following a rare car down the highway with his gaze. "I must have been talking to myself."

"You do that a lot out here!" she laughed--a short, blunt, honest laugh, ever so much like Sheila's. "The desert will make you talk to yourself."

"I can think of worse things to do," he murmured.

There was a pause, during which the car heading out on the highway flicked on its lights. Dusk had already filled some of the furrows between the dunes, and the sun had perhaps already set somewhere behind the adobe buildings, somewhere in the far west.

"You like the desert, don't you, Mr. Evans--I mean, you really like it?"

He ran his hand over his chin and frowned, frowned into the disheveled eastern horizon whose patches of cholla and Spanish dagger were far less prickly now than the first star... but the woman didn't move a muscle and made no effort to withdraw or subdue her question. "It helps me to believe in things," he said at last, very quietly.

There was yet another pause--the right kind of pause, which showed that she had understood. Then, for the first time since she had stopped at his side, she made a perceptible gesture, and he found a wide-brimmed, slightly creased sombrero in his face, his nostrils filling with the sweet scent of straw.

"Take this. It's my husband's, but he's never worn it much. Says the brim gets in his way when he hammers. Between you and me, those guys kid him about it. They called him Pancho Villa the one time he wore it out. But the Mexicans--I tell you what, they know how to survive out here. Besides..." and she paused just long enough to lay the hat in his lap, "Dan could buy him a new one with that tip you left me."

"Thank you," he said simply, his head bowed over the gift.

"Just be sure you wear it," she pursued, as if she were talking to the little boy in the kitchen. "You don't need to be walking around with your head uncovered." And she cocked a finger at him, turning her earnestness to irony. "We that live here know better."

As he watched her slender figure work speedily, accurately, through the long shadows to the front office and vanish on yet another mission, his recollections of Sheila became more numerous and aggressive than they had ever been. It was as though he had walked into an ambush. He remembered her in blue jeans--not a designer name with artificially tattered cuffs and holed knees such as his students wore in some costume-ball attempt at a proletarian gesture, but the off-brand from K-Mart, faded but never ragged, sometimes stained with a spot of oil (there wasn't much she didn't know about tractor engines, even though her small hands could scarcely open a fresh jar of preserves). He remembered her in her homemade dresses, clean and earnest like a black-and-white photograph, ready to laugh but never willing to feign laughter, ready to say "no" to a bad idea but never to crush anyone's hopes or wishes. He remembered her with children, always nieces and nephews and strangers' children, more at ease with them than were their own parents, because nothing of importance to them was quaint or cute or silly or anything less than important to her--because she herself had the heart of a child.

"How I miss you, Sheila," he thought after the vanished figure--and then realized that the words had been spoken out loud. He reared himself up noiselessly, withdrew into his room, and wept for the first time--the first time since that night in the hospital more than a year ago.

And there was much to weep for. There was much distance between them now, perhaps more than he could ever traverse. If there was nothing after death, of course, then she was gone to him forever, and he might as well finish blowing up the world... but if there were something after death, as she had believed unshakably and as he had always claimed to believe, then... then she was still gone to him forever--for an infinitely longer forever, since he would forever be conscious of the separation--all because he had thrown away his faith. Just when it had counted. Now he would never, ever see her again, and the best he could hope for was a finite never.

But then they would all have been right, Gervaise and Max and the elders of SuEllen's church--they would all have been right to slash and plunder in their various ways and amass their various heart's desires, because there could be no realizable desire except for what one might touch and possess, and there could be no reckoning to pay later for undetected, unwitnessed murders. What had he been trying to prove in all those miserable weeks of settling scores, of ripping off masks, if not that they could not be right--that their falsehood was manifest even in this world, and that the love of truth would spew them out, whole and raw? He had not proved the necessity of something else, but he had proved beyond his own obscurest visions of success--beyond his satisfaction, and well into his numbest horror--the futility, the utter insanity, of life devoted to touching and possessing.

There was nothing left to do, then, but start over. Somehow he had to erase his new identity, his new anonymity, and start again from scratch.

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Order by contacting me at clvpres@yahoo.com.  Or you may post your request (with or without payment) to John Harris at 2707 Patriot Drive, Tyler, TX, 75701.      

The Entelechy Kid: His Life and Times 

   An Epic in Progressively Polysyllabic Prose... Or Maybe Just Another Bad Novel

by John Harris

"I've had just about enough, about as much as I can take.  Liberators who bomb shopping malls... feminists who loathe kids, men, and all women who don't agree with them... self-ordained evangelists who soil the name of God and appeal to our basest nature... narcissistic professors attending conferences on Marx in Frisco or Tampa, their expenses paid by taxes levied on working stiffs... post-lobotomy dating rites, cue-card news coverage, juiced baseballs, talk shows, dirt bikes, chat rooms... Madre de Dios, I'm so sick of it all!  Now I've gotten even.  Just about."  author's comments

ISBN: 0-9676054-2-3

$5.95  (paperbound)

Juan de Dios may not be perfect, but look at what he has to put up with.  Politicians, televangelists, college professors, Irish ancestors who won't die, feminist stormtroopers who won't clean their boots, beautiful people from California... it's enough to try any saint's patience!  Actually, given our current state of cultural meltdown, Juan has a poignant coherence about him.  (As one of Peer Gynt's tormentors once said, only lunatics are healthy in an insane world.)  He practices a serene self-discipline of the most rigorous and manly sort at all times, except when he blows his top.  So why do twenty-first century McCulture, e-life, and the great norteamericano Victim Sweepstakes all keep conspiring to get on his nerves?

The jokes start on the back-cover blurbs and proceed through the footnotes! Throughout this "epic" ramble, however, our reluctant Central American revolutionary remains a highly sympathetic character who just wants to settle down with an honest woman and raise a family. Miraculously, his essential innocence survives sniper fire, the snares of secret police, recruitment by Major League Baseball, intense media hype, exposure to academia, sexual overtures from feminists, subjection to Irish nationalism, success in a computer-based business, and failure at having a baby via the Internet. No tawdry moments—but a lot of humor at the expense of political correctness and America’s prevailing "feel good" culture.