When Susan Schreiner came to speak at our college, we noticed that, even more than the orderly arguments of her guest lecture, her mid-afternoon chat with the faculty offered the observations, shrewdly penetrating and wryly seasoned by turns, that made for a good interview. Some months later, Michael and I sought that interview over a shared dinner with Susan at the Thai Smile in Palos Heights, Illinois. We sat talking long enough that the evening sun moved from being a powerful glare through the restaurant’s western windows to being a kindlier glow at the dinner’s end—an apt scene for talking about living between the glare of polarized oppositions and the gentle uncertainties that come with cultural eventide.
Michael: Would you talk a bit about the relationship between the history of ideas and cultural studies? How much has cultural studies been affected by the return of more phenomenological studies? How is the history of ideas, which we haven’t ever really got over, been altered by cultural studies?
Sometimes intellectual historians are dismissed because they deal with written texts, literate classes, the educated, the elite, etc. And sometimes those who are very adept at looking at other aspects of the past get impatient with us. What’s at stake in that debate is, I think, assumptions about what’s real, who is more real. Instead of just admitting that there are different contexts in every society, you are supposed to choose one or the other. The common person—or the little people, or whatever they’re called—they’re more real somehow than the elite. And that’s a judgment call.
There’s no doubt that the peasants of Germany in the 16th century—or at least a lot of them—didn’t know much of what was going on at all in the course of the Reformation. That doesn’t make them more real than those who did. So it’s not a question of whether they’re less important or more important. Social history matters—so does intellectual history.
Craig: There’s an assumption in critical theory that the perspective of everyday folk is more truthful, more objective than that of societal elites. This assumption is based on another: because the disempowered have to think about their own place as well as the place of the people at the center of society, the down-and-outers have a double awareness. Where do you come down on this?
If you go to the 15th century and you’re studying merchants or even peasants or illiterate people, they’re not aware of the disputes that are going on in the history of philosophy, often in the history of theology, even. They’re concerned with their own issues, but they don’t have the sense that we do of how political power influences them or how inflation, say, affects their lives.
Take the Hussites, for instance. There are a lot of explanations for the Hussite Rebellion, many of them centered on the agrarian crisis and inflation. But then you have to ask, well, why did the Hussites themselves focus on the chalice [that is, on the right of the laity to receive the wine at the Eucharist, then restricted to priests]? What the hell does a chalice have to do with the agrarian crisis? Because that’s how they focused their anxiety. They didn’t think in social and economic terms; they thought in religious terms. So the chalice became the symbol of their discontent for reasons that were coherent to them. And I think both ways of looking at the rebellion are true. I mean, they did have an agrarian crisis!
In the academy today we’re comfortable with the language of psychology and economics and politics. That’s our natural vocabulary, so that religious language just seems strange to us: that has to be a mask or that has to be a pretense or that has to be not real. Well, somebody’s going to look back at us someday with totally different assumptions and a totally different vocabulary and say, “Well, they may have thought it was economic or social or political, but we know what it really was.” And that condescending view bothers me. I want to know what the people we’re studying thought it really was. I want to know what they were worried about, what they understood themselves to be in the grip of.
I think our own political liberalism got fused into methodological disputes of this kind. There’s nobody more liberal than a university faculty. In a generation or so, that probably won’t be true, because of the conservative backlash. But right now, the faculty is more liberal than the students are. Okay, so if you’re liberal you’re supposed to be worried about poor people and outsiders and heretics and all of this. Well, they are very interesting subjects, but it doesn’t make them absolutely parallel [to subjects in our liberal democratic situation]. That’s us! That’s our own political democratic worldview imposing itself on a culture that didn’t think like us. This tendency started in the 1960s and the ’70s, and it’s still lingering. There’s an anti-intellectualism to it, but there’s also a kind of social decision, a political, social bias as to what’s important and what’s real. And there’s a conviction that ideas don’t have any power.
Craig: How has the early modern pursuit of certainty participated in the oscillations that the Western tradition has always been heir to—between idealism and materialism, nominalism and realism, rationalism and empiricism? Does the preoccupation with certainty suspend that oscillation? Or is it merely one pole in a pendulum swing?
The person I have found very helpful on this is a German scholar, Berndt Hamm. There’s a collection of his essays in English translation [The Reformation of Faith in the Context of Late Medieval Piety]. And one of them has an odd title, but it’s a wonderful essay. It’s called “Normative Centering.” He acknowledges all the ruptures and the divisions that took place during the Reformation period, but he also wants to see it as a whole, wants to see what binds these things together. And he thinks that you can do this by finding what he calls a center, what becomes a normative way that a society talks. He suggests that for this period, sola—”This Alone”—became a principle that permeated all of these divisions, whether framed as Faith Alone, Scripture Alone, or in some other form. Even though it was a polemical era, and even though, in the 15th century, say, there were fierce battles between the nominalists and the realists, nevertheless—and here’s the notion of “normative centering” at work—those bitter disputants had more in common than they have with us. There may be a thousand different rival answers, but it’s the question that binds them. And in my research I found over and over and over again that regardless of how much they were burning each other at the stake, the question was always something about certainty.
Of course, early modernity is so messy, and that’s one of the reasons postmodernists love it. We [early modern scholars] used to just toil in our little garden, and do our research—and now we’re sexy as hell and everybody loves us. But they think it’s great for reasons that are totally different from what early moderns would have thought was great. Postmoderns love early modernity because it’s fluid. All these ideas are changing, and it’s a very creative century, whereas modernity is looked upon as reifying things and making things too static. I have no problem with that diagnosis, and I’m glad that we now are sexy for a while, but the reason we love early modernity is the very thing that made them nervous. Because change was not welcome; change was always looked upon as something very dangerous.
There was this book, Arthur Ferguson’s The Indian Summer of English Chivalry. I love that book, because that’s us today—in a time when things are changing and, as William Bousma says, the tradition can no longer invest experience with meaning. During those ages people look backwards. They go to what was supposed to be the golden age of the past. Whether it was the 1950s, when families were all supposed to be happy and they had values, or whether it was chivalry in the 15th century, they go backwards to try to anchor things. It’s an Indian summer, and Indian summers can last generations, but it’s already over, it’s already over. I’ve always said whatever a culture’s talking about the loudest is already gone.
Michael: Your teaching career overlaps with that of the theologian David Tracy. Could you talk about the role of that friendship in your work?
When I came to Chicago, I came as the so-called “Protestant historian.” Nobody loves Luther and Calvin more than I do. I’m second to none. Zwingli? Not the sharpest knife in the drawer. But anyway, I love these guys. But I changed the curriculum in such a way that I also teach the Catholic Reformation, I teach humanism, Renaissance, and all this kind of stuff. So David’s the Catholic theologian—and here I come! He’s about ten or fifteen years older, and of all the odd couples, it was David and I that were the closest of friends for decades. We taught Augustine together, we taught early modernity together. I spend every Christmas at David’s house. His nieces and nephews are like my kids, all this kind of thing. But I think the last thing they expected to have happen when they hired me was that I would be best friends with the Catholic theologian.
In fact, I was just telling someone today: Everyone has their own sleeping pattern, right? I used to go to bed at a certain time and wake up every morning at exactly ten minutes after eight—until I met David. You see, David wakes up about nine at night, and he goes to bed about eight in the morning. And he would like to talk, so he and I would start. He would call. I would always know when it was him: ten-thirty at night, eleven o’clock, it’s got to be Dave. And we would talk and talk and talk. I couldn’t keep up! I mean, now I can’t sleep at all. I don’t know when I’m supposed to sleep, because my sleeping pattern from knowing him has been so completely destroyed. But now he’s not as healthy as he used to be, and I’m left with no one at eleven o’clock at night when I’m wide awake.
Craig: Could you talk a bit about your institution’s relation to various religious traditions?
The climate that I work in, the context that I work in, isn’t governed by a tradition, so it ends up being identity politics disguised as theology. Give me a tradition, even if it’s a tradition I don’t like—just give me a little depth, that’s all I’m asking! Even if you have to say the tradition is over, that’s deeper than what’s going on now, and that takes more thought and more intellectual courage than a lot of this sort of sloppy—”Well, let’s use the Exodus story for this, and let’s use Mary for that, and let’s use Sarah for that.” It just puts me over the edge.
I had to review a book that cited Calvin constantly, and then it veered toward the suffering of women. Now, never mind that Calvin’s not asking that question. Let’s just let that go. There are assumptions all over this book about suffering that are totally unexamined: suffering is always bad, it’s always to be avoided, and the only attitude toward suffering is to alleviate it. You never listen to the sufferer, you never learn from the sufferer, and you never read anything like Julian of Norwich. This whole tradition of self-inflicted suffering makes no sense whatsoever, because you have a political, democratic, liberal-platform view—I’m your basic, straight-ticket Democrat, okay?—you have this view of suffering that comes out of a liberal, democratic, upper-class, limousine-liberal viewpoint: “All suffering, the only attitude, the proper attitude, is to alleviate it.” Now nobody is against alleviating suffering, but you render the sufferer invisible. You’re telling them that their life is meaningless until it changes, until you alleviate it. Maybe they have something to teach you. Maybe if you listen to them they might become more important in their own suffering.
If you question it, it sounds like you’re a masochist or you’re a Republican, which is even worse—you just don’t care about these people. I’m sorry, that’s not the issue. Nobody is against alleviating suffering, but I am against acting as if these are people that have become objects of your goodwill or objects that you work on. Instead of, “Maybe they may actually know things that I don’t know; maybe they have an insight or depth that I can’t have.”
I remember when Mother Teresa was asked in an interview, “How do you feel taking care of all of these lepers or sick people when you’re not ill yourself? Do you ever think about how come you’re not suffering, you’re not ill, but they are?” And her answer was, “I’m not worthy to be suffering.” That just doesn’t sound right to us, but that’s a very traditional answer. I knew exactly what she meant. Even throughout early modernity, the worse thing God could do was to leave you alone.
Craig Mattson and Michael VanderWeele are both based at Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, Illinois, where Mattson is professor of communication arts and VanderWeele professor of English.
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