I suspect that you already know the phenomenon I am describing: Columbus enslaved Native Americans and introduced genocidal diseases to the Americas; many of the "founding fathers" were slave holders and, while there is much to be said in favor of Declaration of Independence, it is also true that Thomas Jefferson raped the enslaved Sally Hemmings; Martin Luther started the protestant reformation, challenged corruption and bad doctrine within the Roman Catholic church and ended his life a vicious antisemite; in my own Anabaptist tradition, the beginnings of the movement included a murderous, polygamous, apocalyptic cult, and our most famous contemporary theologian—John Howard Yoder—sexually manipulated and assaulted women. The whole history of patriarchy in the global west is such that it is rare to find even a female author (never mind a male author) of more than two hundred years whose writing is not tainted by it. Conservative Christians are quick to point out that homosexuality was condemned by the church for two thousand years* but have little to say about the fact that the church was just as wrong about slavery for very nearly the same amount of time. If you want to find serious, and important fault with a thinker, philosopher, or author you will have little trouble doing so. Plato believed that slavery was natural; Aristotle thought democracy foolish; Augustine taught that men were inherently superior to women; Dante and Aquinas shared the view that gay men experienced a perversion of natural love (and theirs were some of the less homophobic views of the time). The list could go on and on. If "western" history can be represented as a bridge from the past to the present, it is evidently a bridge built of rotten planks. I have decided to refer to this process of pulling back the sheet on the moral failings of historical and religious figures as counter-hagiography: the process of revoking sainthood**.
The counter-hagiographic process may be usefully divided into two stages, one necessary and the other consequential. The first stage is counter-hagiography proper: the process of discovering, recognizing, and promulgating the failings of a given subject. The second stage, while not logically consequent to the first, is very much entailed in it for other reasons: it involves stepping back from the subject, disavowing their failings, and either not citing them or, at most, citing them with an attendant disclaimer in our work.
Now I do not here mean to suggest that this sharpened conscience is somehow a bad thing. Quite the contrary, I have seen much that is good coming from it. First, the whole counter-hagiographic impulse has, first and foremost, caused many of us who would not otherwise have done so, to seek out and take some first steps towards a fuller exploration of the human experience by studying and learning under voices "from the margins". At the risk of engaging in to banal a simile, developing a sharper conscience is somewhat like developing a more delicate palate. The discovery of subtleties of flavor drives any connoisseur to broaden her experience of food and drink. In the same way, discovering a greater degree of moral complexity (often based on a dawning awareness of the ways in which possession of power has blinded us to the experience and perspective of those with less power) will motivate a person to broaden their sources of learning. Second, a more delicate conscience is in many ways an integral part of the whole process of human improvement (sanctification for those of us who are Christians). So long as we remain blind to the faults of our saints, so long as we refuse to engage in counter-hagiography, we must also remain blind to those faults when they appear in our own selves. Until I can recognized Jefferson's racism, I am far less likely to recognized the way and degree to which white supremacist thinking has infected my own life, formation, and thinking. The process of naming and renouncing our own distortions and confusions is difficult enough, how can we hope to accomplish it if we remain obstinately unwilling to recognize them in our heroes? Third, counter-hagiography is utterly necessary if we want to have any hope of an accurate history. Whether we are talking about secular or religious history, resistance to counter-hagiography must inevitably result in distorting our knowledge of the past. While the job of history often and properly ends with high and complex conclusions and speculation—the patterns, structures, and forces which guide our thoughts, ideas, and actions and much besides—it always begins with straightforward investigation into the basic facts of the past. The counter-hagiographic project is necessary for the discovery and dissemination of those facts which often prove to embarrassing to power to have been well known or well incorporated into our analysis. Finally a practical level counter-hagiography critically undermines the fascist/totalitarian desire to construct a false mythological national past in order to inculcate a motivating nostalgia.
What does this mean for our now dethroned heroes? I am afraid that my first response is that they must die. Just as writers of fiction are encouraged to "kill your darlings" if they want to avoid having their stories become either bathetic or banal, we who want to write lives of complexity, poignancy, and nuance will need to bury the very heroes who may well have started us on this journey. This experience is sharpest for me in my relationship to C.S. Lewis and so, if you will indulge me, I will attempt to undertake it here.
I have no shortage of personal praise for Lewis. It was in his fiction that I first encountered, in Aslan, an image of Jesus with whom I could imagine a relationship that was more than transactional. It was Lewis who taught me that relational knowing (looking along) is a different thing from observational knowing (looking at). In The Great Divorce Lewis pried apart the first bars of my evangelicalism; in Till We Have Faces he introduced me to mystery as power deeper than mere certainty; A Grief Observed has been, to me, a balm in times when doubt gives rise to fear, and The Discarded Image breathed living enchantment back into a world which was turning to a thing of cold gears and harsh
You see, but of course you already know, how difficult this is. Even in trying to bury Lewis I find that I must praise him. There is, I believe—I must believe—a time for that, but I have begun too early. While the above, and more, is true. The following is true as well: C.S. Lewis' writing about women and the relationships between the sexes often reflects a troubling patriarchy and occasional outright misogyny; Lewis did much in his generation to further baptize the cause of Christian violence; he was very much a "man of his time and place" when it came to the way he spoke and wrote about peoples outside of the western tradition, his writing is liberally sprinkled with terms like savage, barbarian, redskin and other dehumanizing epithets—one winces reading many of the passages he wrote even against white colonialism due to his terminology and condescension; the most that could be said of Lewis on the subject of LGB persons is that he was not as bad as his contemporaries and that he worked to withhold judgement due to the fact that their experience was apparently opaque to his imagination.
This last point is well worth an extra paragraph since I suspect that exploring it may help to clarify the counter-hagiographic project. Beginning with the urge to praise my subject, I notice that Lewis' views on homosexuality were several decades ahead of their time. Lewis abstained from public comment on gay sex in anything but the vaguest terms on the grounds that he felt he had no right to condemn acts which he felt no temptation towards; he anticipated the celibate gay movement and expressed sympathy in his private letters for the idea that lesbian and gay folks might have a particular gift to offer the world as a result of their orientation. One expects that he would have been more at home in the company of contemporary "side B" Christians—who believe that God affirms their identity as LGBT Christians—than with the more fundamentalist "side X" types who tell LGBT Christians to deny their identities and often blatantly and explicitly denigrate and devalue them. If C.S. Lewis is to be graded on the curve and is set against his own contemporaries, it would be unfair to award him a grade lower than B+ on the subject of LGBT Christianity; but grading on a scale is one of the tools for escaping counter-hagiography. Grading on a scale is not a mistake in and of itself, but I am afraid that those of us determined to see the counter-hagiographic project through must resolutely lock it away until the funeral rights are complete—the temptation to use the sliding scale to keep our heroes alive is far too strong. As a twenty first century US citizen I cannot avoid the conclusion that Lewis' views have been used by an unholy alliance of Republicans and white Evangelicals to propagate a homophobic political programme. As a Christian who is convinced that God affirms lesbian and gay relationships in the same way as straight relationships I cannot avoid the conclusion that Lewis was wrong about this and that his very wrongness has had damaging impacts on vulnerable persons. A water-sctrychnine solution may well have some positive effect on a glass of undiluted poison but that does not recommend it as an aperitif, nor will it prevent your becoming sick if you drink it as one.
This is what I propose must be done to our heroes, academic, theological, philosophical, and historical; and not our heroes only but also our language, our treasured metaphors, and our schools of thought. I have heard rumblings recently—which make me uncomfortable but are more likely to have merit than not for all of that—that the imperial language in our Christianity—King, Lord, Prince, Kingdom of Heaven etc...—justifies and reinforces an imperial and colonial theology among white Christians. Counter-hagiography will remorselessly demand the death of each and every one of its subjects. And I must urge you (as I urge myself) not to become complacent in this project. Death comes for all people and (if modern scientists are to be believed) it comes for the whole of the universe. All must end in cold and dark as as planets degenerate into their suns and the suns burn out. The heat death of our universe stands as the final consummation. As we dethrone our monarchs and bury our heroes, we will surely turn and discover replacements for them. That is to the good; we will likely focus on heroes and prophets who spoke out against the sins for which we buried the last crop. But can we expect that they will not have sins of their own? If Crenshaw's theory of intersectionality has taught us anything—and I hope that it has taught us a great deal—it has taught us that systems of oppression are vast and intertwined. J. K. Rowling seems to be transphobic. The writer who first taught us to see the veins of white supremacy in our old heroes may well turn out to be infected with liberal colonialism. J. K. Rowling may turn out to be transphobic. The LGBT activist may yet be an abelist, or might indulge regularly in the language of colonialism. The Muslim author you just discovered may turn out to be a homophobe. Christ and Crenshaw both call us to the highest of standards: Perfect love of all persons. Of course they are joined in that by a great many thinkers, prophets, and dreamers throughout the history of humanity—thinkers whom we must inevitably bury as they fail to have lived up to the ideals they professed.
I realize that this project can become as uncomfortable we who are political and religious "progressives" as it already is for our conservative and reactionary siblings. It is great fun (and I think very much necessary) to tear down monuments to confederate generals; it may well be our duty to one day tear down the Jefferson memorial; at the base of the Lincoln memorial are inscribed Lincoln's commitment to retaining slavery in the south if that would only have avoided the civil war. For that and for his crimes against Native Americans, we may one day have to bring down the monument from which Dr. King declared his dream. I do not know that it will ever come to that, in fact I know that I have neither the wisdom nor the conscience to even attempt such a determination.
But I fear that I am straying into a equivalence which I must avoid at all costs. Of course, all equivalences are finally false, but I do not want to allow any space at all for some reader to conclude from these rites that all our saints and heroes are equally infected and therefore equally laudable—they are not. The fact that each of our heroes must, in some respect, turn out to have been villains does not speak to the critical question of degree. Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln may both have been racists infected with the poison of white supremacy, but Jefferson Davis was nonetheless far worse than Abraham Lincoln. Strychnine is deadly, even in a water solution, but I would rather it be diluted all the same. A gangrenous limb has got to be removed whether it shows only the faintest signs of infection or has rotted away almost entirely—there is no one point at which we can safely declare an end to counter-hagiography.
And so the saints and sinners are buried together and, if we have been careful, our own prejudices and sins are buried with them. We have found their faults; we have ruthlessly pried open their, and our, capitulation to the Powers and Authorities which hate and oppress humanity. The king is dead and kingship with him, and we find that we ourselves have had to die. We cannot stand above this mass grave—one of the first lessons of counter-hagiography has always been to bury that in ourselves which we first saw reflected in the object of our endeavors—we must descend into its depths, our own thought patterns too must die.
So far as I can tell, it is here that Virgil turns back and I can be led only be Beatrice. For me, the journey past this point of death is informed more by what I believe to be true than by what I can argue from shared premises and logical consequent. To say that the path forward is not based on logic is not, of course, to say that it is anti-rational or illogical, only that it is not directly informed by logic but by relationship, mythopoeia, and is structured in the idiom of my own Christian faith. Still, it may be that others have suggested that there may be a path here. Some poets, a few naturalists, and some story tellers do speak of resurrection.
Part 2 - On the Resurrection of the Dead
I FLED Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
From The Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson
*I would argue that there are important exceptions to this claim and that it rests on an anachronistic application of the modern concept "homosexuality" but the fact remains that people whom we would currently describe as "LGB" have been treated very badly by the church for most of the church's history.
** I am using/coining the term counter-hagiography in a non-theological sense.
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