The Separation of Church and State in Early 19th Century England

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When my brother-in-law died a cou­ple of years ago, I inher­ited from him a pris­tine set of The World’s Ora­tors, a mul­ti­vol­ume col­lec­tion of “the great­est ora­tions of the world’s his­tory,” edited by Guy Car­leton Lee and pub­lished by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1900. The other day, I opened Vol­ume 7, Part 2 com­pletely at ran­dom and came upon Sir Robert Peel’s speech, “On the Dis­abil­i­ties of the Jews,” which, accord­ing to the edi­to­r­ial note, Peel made in order to sup­port a bill intended “to place the Jew on the same foot­ing, so far at least as civil rights, as the Chris­t­ian.” The edi­to­r­ial note con­tin­ues, “Peel, who was usu­ally to be found on the side of tol­er­a­tion and jus­tice, [gave a] speech replete with a dig­ni­fied breath of tol­er­ance.…” I have not yet fin­ished the entire speech, but, early on, he makes an argu­ment for the sep­a­ra­tion of church and state that I find dis­turb­ing, not because any­one is explic­itly endors­ing this way of think­ing today, but because I think it is implicit in the notion put forth by some Repub­li­can can­di­dates for pres­i­dent, and cer­tainly by more than a few Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian voices I have heard, i.e., that the United States is, at heart, a Chris­t­ian nation and that our gov­ern­ment and our laws ought to reflect that fact. This is what Peel said:

I must in the first place dis­claim any con­cur­rence in the doc­trine that to us, in our leg­isla­tive capac­ity, reli­gion is a mat­ter of indif­fer­ence. I am deeply impressed with the con­vic­tion that it is our para­mount duty to pro­mote the inter­ests of reli­gion and it influ­ence on the human mind. I am impressed by a con­vic­tion that the spirit and pre­cepts of Chris­tian­ity ought to influ­ence our delib­er­a­tions; nay, more, that if our leg­is­la­tion be at vari­ance with the pre­cepts and spirit of Chris­tian­ity we can­not expect the bless­ing of God upon them. I may, indeed, say with truth that whether my deci­sion on this ques­tion [of the Jews’ civil rights] be right or wrong, it is influ­enced much less by a con­sid­er­a­tion of polit­i­cal expe­di­ency than by a deep sense of reli­gious obligation.

Between the tenets of the Jew and of the Chris­t­ian there is, in my opin­ion, a vital dif­fer­ence. The reli­gion of the Chris­t­ian and the reli­gion of the Jew are opposed in essen­tials. Between them there is com­plete antag­o­nism. I do not con­sider that the con­cur­rence of the Jew with the Chris­t­ian in rec­og­niz­ing the his­tor­i­cal truths and divine ori­gin of the moral pre­cepts of the Old Tes­ta­ment can avail to rec­on­cile the dif­fer­ences in respect to those doc­trines which con­sti­tute the vital prin­ci­ple and foun­da­tion of Chris­tian­ity. If, as a leg­is­la­ture, we had the author­ity to deter­mine reli­gious error and a com­mis­sion to pun­ish reli­gious error, it might be our painful duty to pun­ish the Jews. But we have no such com­mis­sion. If the Jews did com­mit an inex­pi­able crime nearly two thou­sand years ago, we have had no author­ity given to us – even if we could deter­mine who were the descen­dants of the per­sons guilty of that crime – to visit the sins of the fathers upon the chil­dren, not unto the third or fourth, but unto the three hun­dredth or four hun­dredth gen­er­a­tion. That awful power is not ours. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”

In other words, if we were a reli­gious Chris­t­ian gov­ern­ment, not merely a sec­u­lar gov­ern­ment guided by Chris­t­ian prin­ci­ples, we would, per­haps, be in a posi­tion to make the Jews pay for their sins – in par­tic­u­lar the sin of killing Christ, but, more gen­er­ally, the sin of being Christianity’s antithe­sis. We are, how­ever, not that kind of gov­ern­ment and so (this sum­ma­rizes Peel’s argu­ment as far as I have got­ten) we really have no choice; if we are going to be con­sis­tent, but to grant the Jews their civil rights.

What I find dis­turb­ing in these words is the, to me at least, clear impli­ca­tion that there is a part of Peel that would not mind hav­ing “the painful duty” of pun­ish­ing the Jews, though, to be fair, I don’t know where the logic of the rest of the speech leads Peel and so it is pos­si­ble that these two pas­sages are part of a rhetor­i­cal strat­egy that does not nec­es­sar­ily reflect the actual posi­tion that he takes. Nonethe­less, Peel’s impli­ca­tion that a theo­cratic gov­ern­ment would, indeed, be jus­ti­fied in dis­crim­i­nat­ing against, if not out­right pun­ish­ing the Jews is one that I hear echoes of in the US-is-a-Christian-nation rhetoric of some of our Chris­t­ian politi­cians; and per­haps I will trace that echo in another post when I have the time. For now, though, while I am not sug­gest­ing that any of those politi­cians are out to get the Jews or even that any of them actively desire a theoc­racy, I will not deny the fact that their rhetoric makes me wary.

 

Fragments of Evolving Manhood: The “Cunt Poem” Challenge

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I have not posted a Frag­ments of Evolv­ing Man­hood piece on a long while, mostly because my atten­tion has been focused else­where, but I have been work­ing these past cou­ple of weeks on an essay that is pretty impor­tant to me and since it fits in the “Frag­ments” series, I thought I’d share some of it. I’d love to be able to call the essay “The ‘Cunt Poem’ Chal­lenge,” and I will prob­a­bly send it out with that title, but I am bet­ting not a few edi­tors will have a hard time with it. In any event, here is the excerpt. Please be aware as you read that the first para­graph is the intro­duc­tion, which I think you need for con­text, while the sec­ond and third para­graphs are from later on in the essay.

The leader of my first grad­u­ate poetry work­shop — this was 1985 — was telling us about a chal­lenge she’d issued to the men in the group of poets she hung out with when she was younger. “None of you,” she said she told them, “will ever write a suc­cess­ful ‘cunt poem,’ because, when it comes to cunts, men only under­stand clichés.” We all laughed, the three of us who were men per­haps a lit­tle uncom­fort­ably, and then she informed us that a poem her chal­lenge had inspired was in the anthol­ogy she’d assigned as our text. I read that poem four times when I got home that night, find­ing it harder to believe with each read­ing that any­one could have thought it deserved pub­li­ca­tion. Not only did it rely on pre­cisely the kinds of clichés I under­stood my teacher to have been talk­ing about, end­ing, for exam­ple, by call­ing women’s gen­i­tals, with­out irony, “the gates of par­adise;” but the entire poem was built on the biggest cliché of all, treat­ing The Vagina it dis­cussed — because I still can­not help but think of the word as cap­i­tal­ized and in ital­ics, even though it never appears in the poem — as noth­ing more than an object of the poet’s con­tem­pla­tion, like the Gre­cian urn had been for Keats, as if all the vagi­nas The Vagina rep­re­sented were not in real­ity attached to the liv­ing, breath­ing bod­ies of actual women.

///

The first thing I did was trash every poem I’d writ­ten to that point. Then, once I’d let go of the bag­gage all that old work rep­re­sented, the poems that became my first book, The Silence of Men (CavanKerry Press 2006), began to take shape. At last, I felt like I’d found a lan­guage in which I could speak about my body as my own, in which my desires and my fears, my vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties and regrets, my joys and my fail­ures, were mine and no one else’s to give mean­ing to. Com­mit­ting to that lan­guage meant com­mit­ting to a rad­i­cal hon­esty about who I was, both as a sur­vivor of child sex­ual abuse and as a man; it meant reject­ing utterly the rhetoric of invis­i­bil­ity with which the man who forced his penis into my mouth had so effec­tively and for so many years hijacked what I had to say.

That kind of hon­esty is pre­cisely what is lack­ing in the clichés my teacher defined as the lim­its of the male imag­i­na­tion when it comes to writ­ing about women’s gen­i­tals. Take, for exam­ple, the cliché that ends the “cunt poem” I spoke about at the begin­ning of this essay, “the gates of par­adise.” The dis­hon­esty in this metaphor lies pri­mar­ily in the way it objec­ti­fies women’s bod­ies, describ­ing not women’s expe­ri­ence of being embod­ied, and not even men’s expe­ri­ence of women’s bod­ies as bod­ies inhab­ited by women, but rather the par­tic­u­lar expe­ri­ence men have of our own bod­ies when we have sex with women. It praises women’s gen­i­tals, in other words, not for being what they are, but for how men can use them, and so, on a cul­tural level, ren­ders women as invis­i­ble and voice­less as I was ren­dered by the men who used me. To meet my teacher’s chal­lenge, then, to be a male poet who writes a suc­cess­ful “cunt poem,” is not sim­ply to find a non-cliché way of call­ing women’s gen­i­tals “the gates of par­adise.” Rather, it is to dis­cover lan­guage that will make vis­i­ble the women whose gen­i­tals they are, unwrap­ping from within a male per­spec­tive the lay­ers of mis­con­cep­tion and mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion in which they are bound by the sex­ual objec­ti­fi­ca­tion of women that is so cen­tral to our cul­ture. It is, in other words, a pro­foundly polit­i­cal endeavor, one that requires a man not only to refuse com­plic­ity in the inher­ent vio­la­tion that sex­u­ally objec­ti­fy­ing women is, but also to artic­u­late a way of being a man who sees women as sex­ual beings that does jus­tice to who they are as human beings.

A Pretty Good Working Definition of Religious Fundamentalism

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I found this in Bar­bara C. Sproul’s intro­duc­tion to Pri­mal Myths: Cre­ation Myths Around the World. It has been a long time since I have thought of myself as a reli­gious per­son or had much to do with peo­ple who are reli­gious in the ortho­dox way many of my teach­ers were when I was in yeshiva. The descrip­tion below would not fit most of those men and women, whose com­mit­ment to their faith I con­tinue to respect and even learn from; but there were oth­ers for whom Sproul’s words seem tailor-made; and these oth­ers, of course, have broth­ers and sis­ters in all faiths.

Hold­ing lit­er­ally to the claims of any par­tic­u­lar myth…is a great error in that it mis­takes myth’s val­ues for science’s facts and results in the worst sort of reli­gios­ity. Such lit­er­al­ism requires a faith that splits rather than uni­fies our con­scious­ness. Think­ing par­tic­u­lar myths to be valu­able in them­selves under­mines the gen­uine power of all myth to reveal value in the world: it trans­forms myths into obsta­cles to mean­ing rather than con­vey­ors of it. Frozen in time, myth’s doc­trines come to describe a world removed from and irrel­e­vant to our timely one; its fol­low­ers, con­se­quently, become strangers to moder­nity and its real progress. Those of such blind faith are forced to sac­ri­fice intel­lect, emo­tion and the hon­esty of both to sat­isfy their creeds. And this kind of lit­er­al­ism is revealed as fun­da­men­tally idol­a­trous, the oppo­site of gen­uine faith.

Responding to a question someone asked on Alas about my “Reading is Fundamental” post

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RonF, in my recent post on read­ing, Because Read­ing is Fun­da­men­tal, which I cross-posted over at Alas, asked if I could give an exam­ple of the kind of read­ing I was talk­ing about when I wrote

but it has been years since I have been able to cre­ate at the cen­ter of my life a space for the kind of read­ing that nour­ishes me as a writer, read­ing that puts me back in touch with myself just for the sake of that expe­ri­ence, that con­nects me to lan­guage in ways that are chal­leng­ing and revi­tal­iz­ing, that affirms my right to claim a place in this world sim­ply because I am, that shapes who I am and shows me pos­si­bil­i­ties of being I would not oth­er­wise have imagined.

His ques­tion is a good one, but I don’t really have the time to dig into any of the books I was think­ing about when I wrote that pas­sage, so I thought I would answer him by shar­ing an excerpt of an essay I am work­ing on. The excerpt, though not the essay, tells the story of how I began to read poetry and how that read­ing led me to want to write poetry, and so it is about read­ing that took place a long time ago, but the expe­ri­ence it talks about is the kind of expe­ri­ence I was talk­ing about in the post. Reg­u­lar read­ers of this blog will likely not need any back­ground to under­stand some of the larger con­text, since I have writ­ten about it many times before, but for those of you who may not have read some of my pre­vi­ous post, it may be use­ful to know that part of the con­text for the excerpt is the fact that I was sex­u­ally abused as a boy and that read­ing and writ­ing played a cen­tral role in my com­ing to terms with that fact. Here’s the excerpt:

The first vol­ume of poetry I remem­ber tak­ing down from the shelf in the pub­lic library across the street from where I lived was Con­rad Aiken’s Selected Poems. I was four­teen or fif­teen years old. I read the first eigh­teen lines or so of the first poem in the book, “Palimpsest: The Deceit­ful Por­trait” (Aiken’s poem is the first one in the pdf), and I knew I needed to make poetry part of my life.

Well, as you say, we live for small hori­zons:
We move in crowds, we flow and talk together,
See­ing so many eyes and hands and faces,
So many mouths, and all with secret mean­ings,—
Yet know so lit­tle of them; only see­ing
The small bright cir­cle of our con­scious­ness,
Beyond which lies the dark. Some few we know—
Or think we know. Once, on a sun-bright morn­ing,
I walked in a cer­tain hall­way, try­ing to find
A cer­tain door: I found one, tried it, opened,
and there in a spa­cious cham­ber, brightly lighted,
A hun­dred men played music, loudly, swiftly,
While one tall woman sent her voice above them
In pow­er­ful incan­ta­tion… Clos­ing then the door
I heard it die behind me, fade to whis­per,—
And walked in a quiet hall­way as before.
Just such a glimpse, as through that opened door,
Is all we know of those we call our friends.

To say that I iden­ti­fied with the woman in these lines would be an under­state­ment. I might have been keep­ing my own door well hid­den and tightly locked — I did, after all, have real secrets to keep — but I also needed some­one to open it who would hear my voice, as Aiken’s speaker had heard the woman’s, car­ry­ing it back into his own life and thus reduc­ing, by how­ever small a degree, her iso­la­tion. What I thought con­sciously at the time, how­ever, was that I wanted to under­stand how Aiken had made that woman so real for me, how his words had left me feel­ing that his speaker had heard me too; and so I started read­ing a lot of poetry, tak­ing books off the library shelf pretty much at ran­dom, jump­ing from Aiken to Frost to Sand­berg to Eliot to Williams — I don’t remem­ber if I read any women at the time — and finally to e. e. cum­mings, whose work, espe­cially his sex­ual love poems, spoke to me at least as pow­er­fully as Aiken’s poem did. Take, for exam­ple, the first three lines of the last poem in & [And], cum­mings’ sec­ond pub­lished volume:

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite a new thing.
Mus­cles bet­ter and nerves more.

Nowhere else in my life — not in the pornog­ra­phy I was look­ing at or the sex edu­ca­tion clas-ses I’d taken, not in what my male friends who’d had sex had to say or in the sex­ual wis­dom the adult men I knew occa­sion­ally chose to share, and cer­tainly not in own expe­ri­ence — nowhere else had I heard a man state so plainly that, what­ever else it might mean, being sex­ual with some­one could also be about lik­ing his own body. I des­per­ately wanted to feel that way myself, and so I de-voured as much cum­mings as I could, try­ing to inter­nal­ize his vocab­u­lary and tech­nique and then to use them in my own poems about sex, which I failed at for years, well into my early twen­ties, when I was sit­ting in the work­shop where my teacher told us about her “cunt poem” chal­lenge. In part, this fail­ure had to do with my imma­tu­rity both as a poet and as a lover, but it also had to do with the fact that I couldn’t just write the con­se­quences of hav­ing been sex­u­ally abused away. Learn­ing to like my body meant unlearn­ing the self-hatred, phys­i­cal and oth­er­wise, that I’d been taught by my abusers, and that meant puz­zling through the par­tic­u­lar form this self-hatred took in me.

I also thought it might be fun to list some of the books and writ­ers that have had this kind of effect on me since then, even though the specifics might be very dif­fer­ent. Here are some, in no par­tic­u­lar order, that I see on my book­shelves right now, though most of them are books I read years, and some of them decades, ago:

Because Reading is Fundamental

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I miss read­ing. I really do. In a big, big way. And it has, espe­cially over the past cou­ple of days, been mak­ing me very, very sad. It started after I read Joshua Bodwell’s arti­cle in the most recent issue of Poets & Writ­ers, “You Are What You Read.” “Not long ago,” he begins

I had an unset­tling epiphany that prob­a­bly shouldn’t have come as a sur­prise but nev­er­the­less left me dis­heart­ened for the bet­ter part of an afternoon.

I won’t get to all the books I want to read in my lifetime.

For the aver­age reader, this is one of life’s rel­a­tively benign epipha­nies; as a writer it’s a seri­ous lim­i­ta­tion. After all, writ­ers are read­ers first. Most of us were con­sum­ing books long before we ever picked up a pen or pen­cil, and con­fronting the fact that there is a limit to the num­ber of them we will read feels a bit like real­iz­ing there’s a finite amount of oxy­gen in the room.

I don’t really buy the oxy­gen metaphor, but I endorse wholly the idea Bod­well is try­ing to get at. Indeed, a jolt of regret ran through me more strongly than I have felt in a long time when I read the words “writ­ers are read­ers first,” because I can’t remem­ber the last time that state­ment would have been say­ing some­thing true about me. Sure, I read. I read for school, both mate­r­ial that I am teach­ing and that my stu­dents write; I read the news­pa­per and arti­cles in mag­a­zines; I read blog posts and occa­sion­ally the dis­cus­sion threads they spawn; I read emails and memos and occa­sion­ally schol­arly arti­cles and other sim­i­lar mate­r­ial that feeds my aca­d­e­mic work; but it has been years since I have been able to cre­ate at the cen­ter of my life a space for the kind of read­ing that nour­ishes me as a writer, read­ing that puts me back in touch with myself just for the sake of that expe­ri­ence, that con­nects me to lan­guage in ways that are chal­leng­ing and revi­tal­iz­ing, that affirms my right to claim a place in this world sim­ply because I am, that shapes who I am and shows me pos­si­bil­i­ties of being I would not oth­er­wise have imagined.

It’s easy to lay the blame for this state of affairs at the feet of my adult respon­si­bil­i­ties – hav­ing a job, need­ing to work extra hours because we need money, being a part­ner to the woman I mar­ried nearly twenty years ago and a par­ent to a thir­teen year old boy – and, to some degree, putting the blame there is not inac­cu­rate. Those respon­si­bil­i­ties do take up time I could oth­er­wise spend read­ing. It is also true, how­ever, that I sim­ply have not pri­or­i­tized read­ing the way I used to, not so much in terms of how much time I can give to it, but in the sense that I’ve made choices about how to use my time that have pushed the kind of read­ing I am talk­ing about here to the mar­gins of my life. I did not start this post think­ing about New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions – since I don’t really believe in them any­way – but it is appro­pri­ate that I should be start­ing it on New Year’s Day, the day after I fin­ished the first book in a very long time that I read just because I wanted to read it – though I didn’t start read­ing for that rea­son (about which more below) – Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sen­tence and How to Read One.

Fish divides his book into the two sec­tions named in the title, treat­ing the first, roughly, as a dis­cus­sion of form and the sec­ond, more or less, as a dis­cus­sion of con­tent. Of course, since the two are not really sep­a­ra­ble, his analy­sis of one often bleeds over into an analy­sis of the other. Nonethe­less, the dis­tinc­tion is use­ful, since it allows Fish to ground a lot of what he has to say in the notion that a sen­tence is a mate­r­ial thing, like paint, an object with a struc­ture and char­ac­ter­is­tics inde­pen­dent of the par­tic­u­lar con­tent the sen­tence has been fash­ioned to con­vey. Too many peo­ple who want to write – at least this is true of too many of the stu­dents I meet who say they “lo-ove” to write (and they almost always turn “love” into a two syl­la­ble word) – just don’t get this. Here is the first para­graph of Fish’s book:

In her book The Writ­ing Life (1989), Annie Dil­lard tells the story of a fel­low writer who was asked by a stu­dent, “Do you think I could be a writer?” “‘Well,’ the writer said, ‘do you like sen­tences?’” The stu­dent is sur­prised by the ques­tion, but Dil­lard knows exactly what was meant. He was being told, she explains, that “if he liked sen­tences he could begin,” and she remem­bers a sim­i­lar con­ver­sa­tion with a painter friend. “I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, ‘I like the smell of paint.’” The point, made implic­itly (Dil­lard does not bela­bor it), is that you don’t begin with a grand con­cep­tion, either of the great Amer­i­can novel or a mas­ter­piece that will have in the Lou­vre. You begin with a feel for the nitty-gritty mate­r­ial of the medium, paint in one case, sen­tences in the other. (1)

There are few plea­sures that I enjoy more than get­ting my hands dirty in the tan­gled mess that the sen­tences of my first drafts usu­ally are; and if we’re talk­ing about poems, in which case you need to add to that mess the lines over which the sen­tences break, and per­haps a meter and/or a rhyme scheme, then the plea­sure is even greater. Right now, there are two piece I am work­ing on, an essay and a poem, each one need­ing revi­sion. I have set them aside until I fin­ish prep­ping my tech­ni­cal writ­ing class for next semes­ter – I am writ­ing this post to take a break from that prepa­ra­tion – and I can’t wait to be able to pick each one up again and give to revis­ing it the solid chunk of time that it will need (and deserve).

Con­tinue read­ing →

From “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” by Joseph Campbell

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So I have been read­ing The Hero with a Thou­sand Faces to prep for my myth and folk­lore class, and I really like this quote, not so much because I agree with every­thing it says or implies – that is some­thing I would need to think more about – but because the com­plex­ity of what it says appeals to me:

And like­wise, mythol­ogy does not hold as its great­est hero the merely vir­tu­ous man. Virtue is but the ped­a­gog­i­cal pre­lude to the cul­mi­nat­ing insight, which goes beyond all pairs of oppo­sites. Virtue quells the self-centered ego and makes the transper­sonal cen­tered­ness pos­si­ble; but when that has been achieved, what then of the pain or plea­sure, vice or virtue, either of our own ego or of any other?

I also found myself think­ing when I read this pas­sage, and I con­tinue to think this as I make my way through the book, that Robert Bly and most of those who relied on Camp­bell in fash­ion­ing the ide­ol­ogy of the mythopo­etic men’s move­ment back in the 1980s and 90s really nar­rowed and impov­er­ished Campbell’s vision when they hung it on the polit­i­cal agenda of recov­er­ing and repair­ing (or what­ever) tra­di­tional mas­culin­ity and man­hood. They clearly did not take to heart what Camp­bell says is the “prime func­tion of mythol­ogy and rite:”

to sup­ply the sym­bols that carry the human spirit for­ward, in coun­ter­ac­tion to those other con­stant human fan­tasies that tend to tie it back.

I mean this not as a defense of Camp­bell, or even, really, an endorse­ment of what he has to say; but as some­one who spent an awful lot of time read­ing and cri­tiquing Bly and oth­ers, I am struck by how wrongly they seem to have read him – at least as far as I can tell from my lim­ited expo­sure to what Camp­bell is say­ing in this book.

I Have Decided I Will Be Changing Blog Themes

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For a vari­ety of rea­sons that I will prob­a­bly write about over the next cou­ple of months, I have decided I want to change the nature of my online pres­ence, begin­ning with the look and focus of this blog. I need to start putting writ­ing and my iden­tity as a writer, a pub­lished writer, back at the cen­ter of my life, where it has not been for far too long, and while the pri­mary way I will be doing that is by mak­ing more time in my life for my writ­ing and the read­ing that feeds it – not to men­tion try­ing more sys­tem­at­i­cally to get my work pub­lished – I have also been think­ing that I need a more dynamic web­site and that means chang­ing Word­Press themes. I liked Eru­dite, the theme I’ve been using for a while now; but I want a site that will make it eas­ier for peo­ple to see where I am read­ing, what I have pub­lished, how to buy my books, to con­nect with me if they want to – and Eru­dite is not really set up for that. So that means that the look of this blog will be very fluid while I decide which theme I am going to use, so please be patient with me.