On The Resurrection of the Dead

This is part 2 in a series which started HERE. In part 1 I introduced the idea of counter-hagiography and argued for it as a necessary process.

Resurrection is, as I understand it, the whole point in dying. To a kill a thing so that it might simply no longer exist is, unavoidably, an act of mere destruction. At the end of the day there are really only two possibilities. Either all that is dead is gone—whether in a year, in a thousand years, or in a million all memory, all effects, all traces will ultimately be erased—or all that is dead will one day be raised to new life. In the Judeo-Christian tradition we were told to “throw our bread upon the waters that it might return after many days”(Ecclesiastes 11:1). The great, overarching understanding of the ancient and persecuted church was that rebirth into a new life may only be achieved through the death of the old. Put into more psychological terms, the only hope I can have of hanging onto the good in a teacher, thinker, or school of thought is if I am willing to lose it by subjecting it to the most scrupulous and rigorous criticism that is to subject it to counter-hagiography. Otherwise the teacher must, in the end, be reduced to a tyrant, the thinker to a dogmatist, and the school of thought to an -ism.

So what happens once a thinker's pedestal has been destroyed, their dirty laundry aired, their flaws admitted and demonstrated to the world so that they are inevitably known to be all that is summed up in the epithet problematic? Must they remain dead to us and to the world, or is there something beyond? To conclude that they must remain dead is, it now seems to me, an error which is mirror-image of those who refused counter-hagiography to begin with. For surely there was good in those thinkers as well as evil—the very epithet problematic hints at it. We do not describe wholly evil things as problematic we call them evil. Problematic is reserved for those things which, while good, also have significant problems. If the existence of evil in their lives or their work required that we kill them, the existence of good must also demand that they be resurrected. If it is unjust to imagine that evil does not exist; it must also be unjust to imagine that good does not.

But I fear that I am already too eager for this step. There is something in me which wants very badly to use this line of thinking as an excuse to take back the original sacrifice. It is an impulse which justifies itself in almost mathematical terms. "You see," it crows, "the two facts—brokenness and goodness—cancel one another out; best to return to the beginning and go on as if none of this had ever happened." This will not do. The fact of goodness alongside the evil in my one-time heroes does not "balance out" the situation at all, and going back—undoing counter-hagiography—would be nothing but a capitulation to that evil. The problem seems almost insurmountable, but not quite.

There is a difference of kind between resurrection and re-animation. We delight in stories of resurrection; our initial hesitance to believe them stems from the feeling that they are "too good to be true". To stories of re-animation we react in quite the opposite way: we pray that they might not be true. The desire to use the goodness of our heroes to "cancel out" the counter-hagiographic process is no more than the tragic desire of the widower who dooms his whole village because he is determined to have his wife back at any cost—the zombie he raises is not his wife but his demise. So too, an un-doing of counter-hagiography—re-animation of our dead heroes—must turn out to be necromancy, a twisted imitation of resurrection.

So wherein lies the difference and how do we move forward? Well I should hope that the answer is beginning to come clear: where re-animation is an attempt to un-do a death, resurrection passes through death and out into a new life; where re-animation is the un-doing of death, resurrection is the incorporation of death into a new life. Yes, the goodness which was always in our heroes must "win out" in the end, but it can never do so by denying the coexistant evil which was also there. The evil must be addressed, it must be dealt with, it must be killed. But if death is the result of evil does it not stand to reason that life is the result of good? And who among us is so cynical as to believe that good is, in the last instance, less powerful than evil? No, I must trust—I find I cannot help myself—that good must triumph in the end, not simply by besting evil, but by transforming it. 'Which, after all, is better,' asked one hero who is presently dead to us*, "to destroy my enemy or to make my enemy into my friend?" there is goodness in that question and it is a goodness which cannot remain in the ground.

The transformation of a killed evil into a good is, I find, precisely what the doctrine of resurrection describes. Christianity has given the process a name, we call it glorification. In glorification our faults, our errors, our imperfections, and our evils are, in one sense, erased or cleaned up. But in another sense, and at the same time, they are integrated into the total narrative and become integral to the final glory of the one resurrected. In the resurrected person we find someone whose faults are not hidden but known, and the faults are part of the story of resurrected existence. In fact, resurrection is not possible without the faults just because resurrection is not possible without death and death cannot be apart from evil. This does not, of course, make evil into a good thing—the very suggestion is necromantic rather than resurrectionist—what it does is recognize the glory of overcoming an evil. Resurrection celebrates the perfect and only possible victory of good over evil.

And, after all, one aspect of the glorified person is that there is no element of untruth or shifty denial about them. A post-resurrection life which could not unselfconsciously own all of its pre-resurrection failings would be one of desperate anxiety, shame, and embarrassment. Shame cannot rest on a person who knows both that they have done wrong and that they are infinitely valuable nonetheless. The great mistake which is made by those who resist counter-hagiography is that they are thereby dooming their own heroes to exist forever in shadow and suspicion. There is at first, a time of naif appreciation when they remain perfectly unaware of their thinker's failings and flaws, but that time cannot last forever and once counter-hagiography has been suggested it will never leave them alone. In trying to preserve, rather than surrender, their hero's innocence, those who resist counter-hagiography will often find that they lose all joy in the very thinker they hoped to defend.

And what does resurrection look like in practice? Well on one level I have to admit that I cannot fully know. So long as we remain imperfect we can apply counter-hagiography and resurrection only imperfectly to our heroes. Indeed, counter-hagiography and resurrection are not, in this instance, linear processes which can be accomplished once and-and-for-all; rather they must form a perpetual cycle wherein each subject is forever open to counter-hagiography and subsequent resurrection. The final glorification of our heroes, must ultimately await the glorification of our own selves. Still there are backwards echoes of future glorification into the present and so there are hints to be found.

The resurrected hero, work, school of thought, or other reference must inevitably behave differently for us than before their counter-hagiography began. Before they died to us their faults were—when we could bear to acknowledge them at all—an embarrassment, now they must become integral to their development. C.S. Lewis' writing is powerful, full of wit and truth, and at the same time his thinking was entwined with paternalistic colonialism and sexism, and homophobia. That the good in his work could thrive alongside those very great evils is both true and somehow miraculous. Each good thing that he said, taught, and wrote must be seen to have persisted despite a mental environment which was making every effort to poison it. And once I have seen the evils, insofar as they have been exposed, laid bare, and owned; they lose power over his work. So long as my understanding of Lewis is a resurrected one rather than an understanding in denial, I will be far more able to separate the wrong from the good. This does not mean, I must hasten to add, that usage of Lewis’ thought (or the the thought of any thinker) can be deployed willy-nilly without caveat or acknowledgement of his faults. The opposite is true. Now that the evil is acknowledged I am empowered to discern where and in what contexts he can be profitably referenced or cited, and in which he cannot. The person who refuses to admit that a knife is sharp will end up cutting a hand half the time they grip the knife, recognition of the knife's power to cut does not dull the blade, it tells us to grip only the handle.

And with Lewis back "on the plate" I find that all of this is something he recognized as well (and can I doubt that it was from him that I may have first learned it?) In The Great Divorce, he uses distant mountains as a metaphor for heaven. The story contains an account of one man/ghost (a rather apt description of one who has died but who may yet come to life again) who hopes to "go on to the mountains" but is troubled by his own lust which manifests, in the story, as a small lizard perched on his shoulder. The account merits a lengthy quotation:

'Yes. I'm off,' said the Ghost. 'Thanks for all your hospitality but it's no good, you see. I told this little chap' (here he indicated the Lizard) 'that he'd have to be quiet if he came—which he insisted on doing. Of course his stuff won't do here: I realize that. But he won't stop. I shall just have to go home.

This is, I notice, the very problem we are struggling with. The counter-hagiographic project has made it all too clear to us that "his stuff won't do here". The cleaning up of our intellectual and moral lives just won't mix with the presence of our erstwhile heroes' failings. Fortunately the scene continues:

'Would you like me to make him quiet?' said the flaming Spirit—an angel, as I now understood.
'Of course I would,' said the Ghost.
'Then I will kill him,' said the Angel, taking a step forward.
'Oh—ah—look out! You're burning me. Keep away, said the Ghost, retreating.
'Don't you want him killed?'

The idea of killing the Lizard proves, over the next few paragraphs to be as upsetting to the ghost/man as a full and rigorous counter-hagiography is to us. Finally though, the man/ghost submits to the necessity.

'Have I your permission?' said the Angel to the Ghost.
'I know it will kill me.'
'It won't but supposing it did?'
'You're right. It would be better to be dead than to live with this creature.'
'Then I may?'
'Damn and blast you! Go on, can't you? Get it over. Do what you like,' bellowed the Ghost, but ended whimpering, 'God help me. God help me.'

It is still far to close to home. The dawning, terrible realization that we cannot move forward with our tainted heroes and having no idea how we might possibly move on without them. But the encounter does not end there.

Next moment the Ghost gave a scream of agony such as I never heard on Earth. The Burning One closed his crimson grip on the reptile: twisted it, while it bit and writhed, and then flung it, broken-backed on the turf.
'Ow! That's done for me,' gasped the Ghost reeling backwards.
For a moment I could make out nothing distinctly. Then I saw, between me and the nearest bush, unmistakably solid but growing every moment solider, the upper arm and the shoulder of a man. Then, brighter still, and stronger, the legs and hands. The neck and golden head materialised while I watched, and if my attention had not wavered I should have seen the actual completing of a man—an immense man, naked, not much smaller than the Angel. What distracted me was the fact that at the same moment something seemed to be happening to the Lizard. At first I thought the operation had failed. So far from dying, the creature was still struggling and even growing bigger as it struggled. And as it grew it changed. It's hinder parts grew rounder, the tail, still flickering, became a tail of hair that flickered between huge and glossy buttocks. Suddenly I started back, rubbing my eyes. What stood before me was the greatest stallion I have ever seen, silvery white but with mane and tail of gold. It was smooth and shining, rippling with swells of flesh and muscle, whinneying and stamping with its hoofs. At each stamp the land shook and the trees dindled.
The new-made man turned and clapped the new horse's neck. In nosed his bright body. Horse and master breathed each into the other's nostrils. The man turned form it, flung himself at the feet of the Burning One, and embraced them. When he rose I thought his face shone with tears, but it may have been only the liquid love and brightness...which flowed from him. I had not long to think about it. In joyous haste the young man leaped upon the horse's back. Turning in his seat he waved a farewell, then nudged the stallion with his heels. They were off before I knew well what was happening.

Then a little later:

'Do ye understand all this, my Son?' said the Teacher.
'I don't know about all Sir,' said I. 'Am I right in thinking the Lizard really turned into the Horse?'
'Aye but it was killed first. Ye'll not forget that part of the story?'
'I'll try not to Sir. But does it mean that everything—everything—that is in us can go on to the Mountains?
'Nothing, not even the best and noblest, can go on as it now is. Nothing, not even what is lowest and most bestial, will not be raised again if it submits to death.'

And there is the rub. We resist the death of our saints and heroes, we twist and scream and rage against the prospect of losing them, never remembering that that which is good cannot truly perish. Finally we admit defeat, we hang our heads, and offer our saints on the altar, and they are crushed. But they do not always remain crushed; sometimes they are resurrected to a new life; one which shines with all, and more of, the goodness we first saw in them, and which retains, too, the benefits of their counter-hagiography. They are no longer lone voices and perspectives, their individually myopic views are always being corrected and ameliorated by the more diverse authors, and thinkers we turned to as we buried them, those voices from the margins which the death of our heroes drove us to find, remain so that what was once a single melody now gains texture as part of a great harmony. The whole process will have had the effect, not only of sharpening our consciences—as critical as that was—but resurrection now strengthens it by teaching us not to shy away from the application of that sharpened conscience. Our histories (which we shape and which shape us in return) are now more likely to contain the fullness of both cautionary critique and inspiration. And of course, evil and totalitarian false-myth making will find no purchase in the imaginations of a public which has learned that all aspects of the past contain both good and bad—the real past, dead and resurrected, provides no material for sentimental nationalism. The process is not one of simple transformation but one of growth: that which was nascent has bloomed into new and healthy life.

Finally, beyond these broader and probably more important gains, there is an additional benefit which I am only now beginning to know. Before I sacrificed Lewis but after I began to know the problems in his work, there was always a certain embarrassment in talking about him. The problems had to be covered up or explained away. The post resurrected Lewis is free of this miasma. His work is problematic—yes. He would not have denied it and neither need I. The flaws were real, the damage they have done no less so, but now they are exposed they do not sting quite do much.

' All which thy child's mistake Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home: Rise, clasp My hand, and come!' Halts by me that footfall: Is my gloom, after all,Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly? 'Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest, I am He Whom thou seekest!Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.'

From The Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson

Some caveats and clarifications

1. The process of counter-hagiography and resurrection is not a single event or process. It is something much closer to a life-style or attitude. The figure whom we subjected to counter-hagiography last week may well need to undergo it again tomorrow when more that is wrong comes to light or as our conscience sharpens.
2. Counter-hagiography can and should be applied to more than just individuals. It is critical that we apply it to institutions, ideologies, schools of thought, and nations. We need counter-hagiographies of the United States, the protestant reformation, Marxism, and the church just as much as we need counter-hagiographies of C.S. Lewis, Adam Smith, Martin Luther, and President Obama. 
3. We cannot know before we begin counter-hagiography whether the subject will finally be resurrected. My own theology tends in a hopeful-universalist direction (I hope but do not know that all will one day be glorified) and so I also hope that all subjects of counter-hagiography might one day be resurrected. I know that I am neither wise enough nor good enough to see the way to resurrection in all cases. Regardless though, counter-hagiography cannot fully accomplished with the assurance of resurrection in the background. That is one reason I was hesitant to publish this second part of the essay. A counter-hagiography which takes place while taking comfort in an assurance of resurrection can result only in necromantic re-animation. The death has to be real if the resurrection is to take place. 
4. While counter-hagiography and resurrection is, I think, properly understood to be a single complete process, the two parts of it (counter-hagiography and resurrection) can be accomplished by different people and need not be done all at once. I will take great umbrage if anything I have suggested is used to criticize counter-hagiographers who do not themselves engage in resurrection. We need counter-hagiographers. 
5. Resurrection in this context should come as a relief but only to those who have already committed themselves to counter-hagiography. I say again (I cannot say to often) that if resurrection makes you think that counter-hagiography is unnecessary then you are engaging in necromantic re-animation and not resurrection.

*Abraham Lincoln