From a certain point of view, I am precisely the wrong reader of Ephraim Radner’s rich volume Mortal Goods. I am, after all, a political functionary—deeply entangled, by vocation, in the business of government. And against whatever idealism I might still harbor, Radner’s book is an intellectual cold shower: a sober reminder not to expect too much from human strivings, political or otherwise. Better, rather, to simply tend the good things of life that God has given.
I have little to add to James Wood’s excellent review, recently published here at Ad Fontes. But I must admit that a particular question kept recurring for me as I engaged with Radner’s book: are our mortal lives quite as bleak as all that?
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A deep and abiding sorrow—a strong sense of human life’s tragic character—pours from virtually every page of Mortal Goods. No matter what “progress” we may appear to make, Radner stresses, “the days are evil as they have always been.”[1] Where such a cloud lingers, to pursue a politics of amelioration—conscious “world-betterment” in a universalizing sense—is, for Radner, to ask too much of an intransigent world. Thus the normal condition of Christian political life, Radner contends, ought to be one of comparative disengagement, focused on tending life’s “mortal goods” of natality and catechesis and family and mortality.
Perhaps, Radner even argues, our political problems are unfixable in principle. “The extent of today’s intertwined global network of political challenges represents a size of a kind Aristotle could hardly conceive,” he notes.[2] Where consequences and institutions and motivations comprise so vast a web of decision-making, “the actual ability of politicians, even within a single party, to effect significant change is fundamentally constrained by the complexity of the issues they face and by the multiple demands and allegiances—cultural and economic—of individual lawmakers.”[3]
There is truth in this—particularly in Radner’s comments on systemic complexity as a problem for Christian political thought. Despite the dogged efforts of scholars like Adrian Vermeule, efforts to map the categories of classical or scholastic political thought onto the vast machine of modern administrative governance verge on the impossible. They lead to a politics of the “common good” so capaciously defined, with “prudence” conveniently invoked to sidestep the demands of any second-order principles, that the inevitable destination is the centralization and consolidation of power in a single authoritarian nexus. That is far from ideal.
Instead of trying to bridle this leviathan, Radner suggests a more radical turning-away, towards an older mode of being-in-the-world. For Radner, “one might wonder whether the moral economy of the peasantry—not much different across societies and epochs—is not a better foundation for Christian politics than are most other theories on offer.”[4] This is so because “[a]lmost everything about the peasant existence is aimed at ordering the goods of birth, family, toil, neighbors, suffering, friendship and joy, and finally death, goods that are understood to be exhaustive of life in this world.”[5] Such a perspective may even be written into the Gospel: within in the silent years of Jesus’s life in Nazareth, Radner identifies “several decades of a peasant moral economy, assumed by the Son of God.”[6] Again, surely there is truth here.
But is this the full truth? When offered the option, it is telling that so much of the world nonetheless chose to modernize, in full knowledge of the disruptions it would bring. Consider the words of Ethiopian Lutheran theologian Gudina Tumsa, writing at the tipping point of economic modernization in his own country: while critical of Western failure to recognize “values in life beyond those of modern technology and economic betterment,” Gudina nevertheless conceded that “[w]e know that we need more of modern technology. We need more equipment and know-how to use it.”[7] When given the choice—go on in the old ways, or adapt and suffer modernity’s distinctive evils—many Christians have chosen the latter.
Radner insists he has no desire to romanticize the “peasant” life. But a life centered on subsistence, for all its foregrounding of “mortal goods,” may harbor shadows of its own, of which Radner says little. I’m reminded of a particularly haunting passage from John Williams’s novel Stoner, depicting the eponymous protagonist’s upbringing on a desolate Midwestern farm:
It was a lonely household, of which he was an only child, and it was bound together by the necessity of its toil. In the evenings the three of them sat in the small kitchen lighted by a single kerosene lamp, staring into the yellow flame; often during the hour or so between supper and bed, the only sound that could be heard was the weary movement of a body in a straight chair and the soft creak of a timber giving a little beneath the age of the house.[8]
There is something achingly tragic about this picture. This is a life of hard labor—punctuated by rests that are no true leisure, but merely pauses in a flow of toil. It is a life without learning, without the conceptual apparatus for deep thought and reflection, without much if any room for creativity. Radner, to be sure, recognizes that “the degree to which the commands of God inform this ordering [of peasant life] has determined a vast, varied range of, in Christian terms, ‘happiness’ that can be ascribed to such societies.”[9] But even so, isn’t there some deep dimension of human life—some mortal good—missing from this picture?
For the young Stoner in Williams’ novel, there certainly is. Upon encountering English literature for the first time, he sees the world ablaze with new light, bursting forth as an intergenerational community of minds past and present: “The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive[.]”[10] Wonder dawns, for the first time.
Among our mortal goods, I would submit, is the gaze of love, the recognition of things in the world as more than their use-value, as complex and rich with meaning. To cultivate such a gaze is to learn to see the world’s things, and its people, as beautiful, as ever-more-disclosive of something beyond and within and before themselves. As Paul Griffiths explains.
In fact, nothing can be exhausted: no artifact, no feature of the nonhuman world, no person, no set of relations, no abstraction. The set of real numbers may seem, at first blush, sufficiently clear in its definition and parameters to need ten minutes’ thought and no more, but in fact it opens out into an endless world of abstract relations. (You’ll quite soon be thinking, for instance, about such things as the cardinality of the set of natural numbers.) The good mathematician knows how to attend in such a way that this world shows the inexhaustibility of seemingly simple, matter-of-fact numerical properties, and in such a way as to yield, sometimes, with luck and application, new paths of thought and solutions to old problems. So, mutatis mutandis, for camels, novels by Henry James, the American Civil War, the algorithmics of meliorating traffic jams, the doctrine of the Trinity (no less than the Trinity itself)—and, to ratchet upward for a moment, for the question of how to individuate one topic of thought from another, answers to which are assumed by everything written in this paragraph.[11]
Books, as Stoner learns, are one such mode by which such a gaze is learned. Over time, to learn to see in this way is to experience a distinctive kind of joy, “a delight in extending knowledge-that.”[12] But also, rightly ordered, this gaze of love is an aspect of Christian catechesis itself. We diminish; God and His good gifts increase.
As you learn to cultivate attention over time, you’ll find that your first-personal sense of being the one who is attending will become attenuated. You’ll become filled with and conformed to what you’re attending to, and for one so filled, there’s little room for self-awareness, much less self-congratulation.[13]
The days may be evil. But every individual thing points beyond itself to the primordial act of grace that forms and fills it. Learning to see this, to see how wondrously deep the currents of giftedness flow, is one of the great privileges and glories of human existence. It is surely true that Jesus inhabits a “peasant” world. But he grows in wisdom and stature. And he learns to read the words of God.[14] The gaze of love is bound up with the act of study.
Radner, no doubt, would agree with this. But what I want to emphasize is that over time, the careful cultivation of this gaze of love calls for the maintenance of certain economic and political conditions—that is to say, it requires a movement beyond a bare struggle for survival. As John Adams famously wrote:
I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.[15]
One can describe this as a decline into decadence, into softness. But that strikes me as a poor reading. From a Christian vantage, I would venture that Adams speaks of a real movement here, a deepening, a genuine advance in the capacity to grasp reality’s truth. Doesn’t Mozart’s Requiem Mass add something glorious to the world? Does it perhaps reveal a dimension of our Creator’s perfection? And is it futile to seek a culture capable of producing a figure like Mozart? I think not.
This is certainly not to imply that cultural refinement makes one a good person. Far from it; many of the Nazis were sophisticated aesthetes. It is merely to say that one must be taught to love well, and to see the world as God-suffused. In a world whose politics are so often defined in terms of violence and its mediation, where “sovereignty” means merely a monopoly on the use of violence in a given territory,[16] can we not say that the cultivation of this gaze—especially among those called to a political vocation—is a task of Christian duty? Might those who have learned to see in such a way, sometimes and in small ways, blunt the pitiless edge of a calculative political rationality? Perhaps, in Radner’s terms, this is too “ameliorative” an aspiration. But I would contend it is only modestly so.
Radner doesn’t think much of even such chastened hopes. For him, there are simply too many contingencies involved: “because everything belongs to God, our entwinement with all of creation cannot be humanly manipulated. We can only sense, not appropriate, what Another alone can do.”[17] I think Radner overstates his claim. Of course, God alone is sovereign. But to bear the image of God is, in however small and analogous a way, to image His work of creation in the creation of finite goods. When made in love, those finite goods may themselves be beautiful. But we must learn to see them thus.
No human can immanentize the eschaton—nor should they attempt it. Our hopes for temporal politics must remain modest. But in an effort to correct the excesses of a certain Christian transformationalism, I wonder if Radner’s sights are set perhaps too low. To seek the world’s beauty in the midst of its sadness, as discerned by the well-formed gaze of Christian love, is a “mortal good” in its own right. And securing the conditions for such seeking is, quintessentially, a political question.
John Ehrett is a Commonwealth Fellow, and an attorney and writer in Washington D.C. His work has appeared in American Affairs, The New Atlantis, and the Claremont Review of Books. He is a graduate of Patrick Henry College, the Institute of Lutheran Theology, and Yale Law School.
Ephraim Radner, Mortal Goods: Reimagining Christian Political Duty (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2024), 21. ↑
Radner, Mortal Goods, 157. ↑
Radner, Mortal Goods, 162. ↑
Radner, Mortal Goods, 45. ↑
Radner, Mortal Goods, 45. ↑
Radner, Mortal Goods, 190. ↑
ECMY Officers, “On the Interrelation Between Proclamation of the Gospel and Human Development,” in Witness and Discipleship—Leadership of the Church in Multi-Ethnic Ethiopia in a Time of Revolution: The Essential Writings of Gudina Tumsa, 2nd ed., ed. Paul E. Hoffman (Hamburg, Germany: WDL Publishers, 2007), 88. ↑
John Williams, Stoner (New York: NYRB Classics, 2006), ebook ed. ↑
Radner, Mortal Goods, 45. ↑
Williams, Stoner, ebook ed. ↑
Paul J. Griffiths, “Letter to an Aspiring Intellectual,” First Things (May 2018), https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/05/letter-to-an-aspiring-intellectual. ↑
Griffiths, “Letter to an Aspiring Intellectual.” ↑
Griffiths, “Letter to an Aspiring Intellectual.” ↑
Lk 4:16–22. ↑
Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, post 12 May 1780 [electronic edition], Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive (Massachusetts Historical Society), http://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/. ↑
Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), 54. ↑
Radner, Mortal Goods, 33. ↑
*Image Credit: Wikiart