Mortal Remains
Complexity & Judgment
Amon was two and twenty years old when he began to reign, and reigned two years in Jerusalem. But he did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, as did Manasseh his father: for Amon sacrificed unto all the carved images which Manasseh his father had made, and served them; And humbled not himself before the Lord, as Manasseh his father had humbled himself; but Amon trespassed more and more. . . . (2 Chr. 33:21f.)
The Chronicler's blunt post-mortems on the kings of Israel and Judah as having done good or evil (often qualified good or qualified evil, but one or the other notwithstanding) is something that has impressed me strongly, particularly since acknowledgement of such judgments is not only a vital part of the faith of both Testaments, but wholly contrary to the temper and habit of those who claim that learned objectivity and appreciation of the complexity of things does not permit them to think in such rude fashion.
These are frequently marked by an aversion to taking sides, for one of the prejudices of their caste is that resolute opinion on complex matters is a mark of ignorance. His hearers noted that Jesus was different, for he taught with authority and not as an intellectual. As a reader and editor, I have found that the error of insufficient knowledge is commonly alleged by members of the intelligentsia in their attacks on opinions they do not like and would rather not risk attempting to argue on the merits, since this always contains the temptation of vulgar lawyering—presenting for some personal profit firm opinions on complex matters.
That every issue is infinitely complex, and can be presented as simple or complex as desired seems to have escaped them. This attitude deserves to be associated with a logical fallacy—let us call it the fallacy of weight—since there is no necessary connection between depth of knowledge and right judgment—a point Shakespeare's fools often made at the expense of his doctors, doubtless to the delight of his sixpenny audience.
Eschatological Categories
If the learned profess to be believers, however, they must acknowledge that the God they serve is offensively binary in respects many of them are trained in the prejudices of their caste to dislike, for his judgments, and those which follow his, carry an ultimacy in which good and evil are eschatological categories he freely assigns, by which he divides the human race and judges its history. Those categories assigned by the Chronicler to good and evil-doing kings are suspiciously like those of One who separates humanity into sheep and goats, the saved and the damned, and who calls some children of the devil and others the blessed of his Father in anticipation of the final disambiguation to which the Creed refers: "He shall come again in glory to judge the quick and the dead. . . ."
In him complexes of good and evil are eschatological impossibilities, and there is no learned virtue in refusing to settle one's mind on which paths (be they intellectual or otherwise) to take, even when they present themselves not as absolute, but as no more than better or worse, that is, only tending toward Lowell's "good or evil side." One notes, however, that there are specific issues about which the Chronicler says the Lord is concerned, for which simple yea or nay, do-or-not-do choices were required for the good. The same must be true in our day, not for all issues, but very unmistakably for some.
An actual mistake in path-choosing may be repented of and made right, to some degree in this world, but the reflexive refusal of deep but prideful comprehension to make a choice when a choice is acutely present to hand is the trahison des clercs writ very large. It is the story of those who agreed, for example, that Nazism was a very wicked thing—after the war against it had been won by more binary people, and the pictures of the corpses stacked in the camps were published. Such include intellectuals who had had Mein Kampf in German since 1925 and English since 1933—the sophisticated who thought Hitler had a lot of good ideas about the ordering of society, and who had regarded those simplistic folks who denounced him early on as a wicked man whose empowerment would lead to horrors as lacking in the complexity of informed detachment—a trap into which Winston Churchill, the twentieth century's greatest statesman, is famous for not falling.
Magisterial Simplicities
God's justifications and condemnations of (perhaps even equally) faulty people are summarized in Scripture in ways natural to us and easy to understand. One imperfect king does evil in the sight of the Lord specifically because he fails to cut down the groves of pagan worship and break the idols. Another likewise imperfect king is called good because he breaks the idols, cuts down the groves, and encourages true worship of the true God, even if he was in other respects less than impressive. (The image of the repeatedly and very seriously blundering Peter, the greatest of Christ's disciples, comes to mind.) In like manner, the Lord tells some that they will be sent to hell because they did not care for the needy, and others that they shall join him in paradise because they did.
These are also authoritative evaluations of lives, as is that of the rich man in Luke 16. In light of these divine summations, the maxim that complexity (for Dives, like Ahab, is not pictured as a wholly bad man—which I find the most frightening thing in the Bible) justifies refusal to judge rightly is greatly weakened, ultimately because there is a Final Winner whose histories are, in the end, the only ones that count, and are illuminated in the magisterial simplicities of both the Chronicler and the Son of God. This does not negate the value or uses of complex knowledge, but it does relativize them. And it affirms, in the face of those who wish that superior knowledge, or even wisdom, justifies non-partisan detachment in things that matter most to God, that this attitude will have to be answered for.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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