Souls Bound & Unbound
Peter J. Leithart on the Surprising Madness of the Gospel
In her forties, the Jewish philosopher Gillian Rose discovered she had ovarian cancer. Chemotherapy did nothing to arrest the disease as it ate through her peritoneum and pleura, and when the surgeons treating her could not agree on either her condition or her prospects for recovery, she said goodbye to conventional medicine.
She dabbled briefly in alternative medicine, but soon left that behind too, not for practical but for philosophical reasons. Alternative medicine’s upbeat message, she commented acidly, was “poor psychology, worse theology and no notion of justice at all.” Unless you live a perfectly happy life, alternative healers told her, you are predestined to death. Ordinary, unhappy, fractured mortals are reprobates.
Though apparently more pessimistic, religious “tradition is far kinder in understanding that to live, to love, is to be failed, to forgive, to have failed, to be forgiven, forever and ever.” Tradition has it right in exhorting suffering humans to “keep your mind in hell, and despair not.”
Rose especially bristled at the exhortations to become “edgeless” and at the endorsement of “unconditional love” that filled the literature of alternative medicine. Instead of being a time for release and unconditionality, for the destruction of bonds and boundaries, Rose took her illness as an “opportunity to make contact with deeper levels of the terrors of the soul, to loose and to bind, to bind and to loose. A soul which is not bound is as mad as one with cemented boundaries.”
Removing boundaries doesn’t nurture love anyway. On the contrary, learning to love is “to accept the boundaries of oneself and others, while remaining vulnerable, woundable, around the bounds. Acknowledgement of conditionality is the only unconditionality of human love.” So she put aside her shark oil and her aloe vera, along with her last rounds of chemo and further surgery, and reached for her whiskey bottle with the thought, “If I am to stay alive, I am bound to continue to get love wrong, all the time, but not to cease wooing, for that is my life affair, love’s work.”
Protest Against Reason
Rose’s illness and her philosophical musings on it are worth pondering for many reasons, but what caught my attention was a single sentence: “A soul which is not bound is as mad as one with cemented boundaries.” In that aphorism, Rose both captured the pathos of modernity and illuminated a path of escape.
One of the great twentieth-century experts on Continental philosophy, Rose understood that, since the Reformation, modernity purposed to solve the problem of imprisoned, cemented souls. It aimed to free souls enslaved to corrupt priests, souls beaten down under the indifferent brutality of an ancien régime, souls wrung dry by the machines they oil and repair, souls treated as soulless because of their color or geography, artistic souls with wings clipped by dead forms. In describing post-Enlightenment culture as a secularized form of “protestantism,” Rose recognized the continuity of impulse from Luther’s “ Hier ich stehe” (“Here I stand”) to Kant’s “ Sapere aude” (“Dare to know”) to Marx’s “ Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch!” (“Workers of the world, unite!”).
Eventually, inevitably, protest turned against protest itself. Luther denounced popes and cardinals from the platform of the Bible; Kant challenged metaphysics from the dais of Reason. But Reason’s protest couldn’t stop until it turned against Reason itself, and we now live with the vertigo induced by the discovery that Reason floats above an infinite abyss. What the secular protestant tradition did not foresee was that, in the process of breaking the chains that bound souls, it would create its own kind of madness, the madness of the unbound soul.
Age of Acedia
Peter J. Leithart is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and the president of Trinity House Institute for Biblical, Liturgical & Cultural Studies in Birmingham, Alabama. His many books include Defending Constantine (InterVarsity), Between Babel and Beast (Cascade), and, most recently, Gratitude: An Intellectual History (Baylor University Press). His weblog can be found at www.leithart.com. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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