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The Golden Cord THE GOLDEN CORD A SHORT BOOK ON THE SECULAR AND THE SACRED ' " ' ..I ~·/ I _,., ' '4 ~ 'V . \ . " ': ,., .:._ C HARLE S TALIAFERR O THE GOLDEN CORD THE GOLDEN CORD A SHORT BOOK ON THE SECULAR AND THE SACRED CHARLES TALIAFERRO University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana Copyright © 2012 by the University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Taliaferro, Charles. The golden cord : a short book on the secular and the sacred / Charles Taliaferro. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-268-04238-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-268-04238-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. God (Christianity) 2. Life—Religious aspects—Christianity. 3. Self—Religious aspects—Christianity. 4. Redemption—Christianity. 5. Cambridge Platonism. I. Title. BT103.T35 2012 230—dc23 2012037000 ∞ The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 CHAPTER 1 Love in the Physical World 15 CHAPTER 2 Selves and Bodies 41 CHAPTER 3 Some Big Pictures 61 CHAPTER 4 Some Real Appearances 81 CHAPTER 5 Is God Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know? 107 CHAPTER 6 Redemption and Time 131 CHAPTER 7 Eternity in Time 145 CHAPTER 8 Glory and the Hallowing of Domestic Virtue 163 Notes 179 Index 197 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am deeply grateful for the patience, graciousness, support, and encour- agement of the University of Notre Dame Press’s senior editor, Charles Van Hof. For help in preparing the manuscript and for editorial com- ments and research, I am in debt to Tricia Little, Olivia James, Therese Cotter, Rebecca Dyer, Elisabeth Granquist, Aaron Stauffer, Matt Rohn, Alexis Anne Arnold, Sam Dunn, Andrea Ohles, Eric Erfanian, and Julia Megumi Ortner. For comments on earlier versions of this text, I am most grateful to Elsa Marty, Natasha Fredericks, Joshua and Jenna Farris, and two anonymous reviewers for the University of Notre Dame Press. I also thank Ann Aydelotte for her expert copyediting. I have learned a great deal from Jil Evans through our co-authorship of The Image in Mind, and I am infinitely grateful for our many exchanges on the themes of The Golden Cord. As always, I dedicate this work to Jil with love. It is also for The Great Conversation, a two- year course on great works of literature, philosophy, and art with Kathryn Ananda- Owens, and David Booth, for truly great conversations that surround the central themes of the book. In their company I found (as I hope all who read this may find) an ex- traordinarily deep and caring fellowship, in which disagreements were surrounded by an evident, ardent care for each other. At best, I suggest that Augustine’s account of philosophical camaraderie is ideal: And friendship had other charms to captivate my heart. We could talk and laugh together and exchange small acts of kindness. We could join in the pleasure that books can give. We could be grave or gay together. If we sometimes disagreed, it was without spite, as a man might differ with himself, and the rare occasions of dispute were the very spice to season vii viii THE GOLDEN CORD our usual accord. Each of us had something to learn from the others and something to teach in return. If any were away, we missed them with regret and gladly welcomed them when they came home. Such things as these are heartfelt tokens of affection between friends. They are the signs to be read on the face and in the eyes, spoken by the tongue and displayed in countless acts of kindness. They can kindle a blaze to melt our hearts and weld them into one.1 I also must express my utmost gratitude to Mr. and Mrs. T, who were at the beginning and who impressed on me the important difference be- tween cleverness and wisdom and the vital need to love wisdom, espe- cially when this seems profoundly unfashionable. Some of the arguments on naturalism, the mind-body relationship, the problem of evil, redemption, and glory have been explored in public presentations at St. Olaf College (especially the Last Lecture of 2009, 2010, and 2011), Oxford University, St. Andrews University, Washington and Lee University, Marquette University, Macalester College, Augustana College, Ursinus College, Pennsylvania State University, Indiana Univer- sity, Grand Valley State University, Middlebury College, Copenhagen University, and the University of Wisconsin. I am deeply grateful for dia- logues on each of these occasions. The work on redemption is seriously influenced by discussions with Paul Reasoner and by our collaboration on a manuscript on redemption. I am also indebted to Craig Lindahl- Urben for many years of conversation on the seductive nature of glory. And I gratefully acknowledge my immense debt to David Weir, a friend, wise counselor, and mentor throughout my life, who has taught me great things about the secular and the sacred. 1. Confessions of Saint Augustine, trans. R. S. Pine- Coffin (New York: Viking Penguin, 1961), Book 4, p. 79. INTRODUctiON A woman once told the author of For Whom the Bell Tolls and Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway, that she preferred stories with happy endings. Hemingway is said to have replied: “Madame, all stories, if con- tinued far enough, end in death, and he is no true storyteller who would keep that from you.”1 It certainly appears that Hemingway has a point. After all, as Jerry Walls points out in an otherwise cheerful book on Christian views of the afterlife, all marriages will end in death or divorce.2 His observation may be extended: All friendships, romances, family ties, professor-student relations, author- editor- and- reader relations, business partnerships, and so on, appear to end either at death or some time before death by way of quarrels, breakups, accidents, a failure of energy or interest, and the like. Beyond our individual fate, and the ending of all our relationships in this life, it seems that our story as a species on earth is not bound for a cheerful conclusion. Modern cosmologists claim that our sun is roughly halfway through its life, and that in about 4.5 billion years the sun will have run out of hydrogen, collapse, and then (using contemporary jargon) become a “red dwarf” and then a “black dwarf.” In this process the earth will be vaporized, and then what is left of our former solar system will drift along with the rest of the Milky Way on its collision course with our neighbor- ing Andromeda galaxy. All this seems to get rather close to what Pierre 1 2 THE GOLDEN CORD Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit paleontologist and mystic, called “absolute death.” Multiply to your heart’s content the extent and duration of progress. Promise the earth a hundred million more years of continuous growth. If, at the end of that period, it is evident that the whole of consciousness must revert to zero, without its secret essence being garnered anywhere at all, then, I insist, we shall lay down our arms—and mankind will be on strike. The prospect of a total death (and that is a word to which we should devote much thought if we are to gauge its destructive effect on our souls) will, I warn you, when it has become part of our consciousness, immediately dry up in us the springs from which our efforts are drawn.3 Whether or not “total death” is as dispiriting as Teilhard de Chardin sug- gests, it would be the ultimate ending of the story of the cosmos from a Hemingway perspective. This book is a response to the secular naturalism that lies behind Hemingway’s conjecture and the above portrait of life’s passing signifi- cance. While “naturalism” will need to be more carefully defined later, at the outset it can be taken as the thesis that nature alone exists and that there is no transcendent God, soul, or afterlife. The key thesis of natural- ism is that, while you and I may be passionately committed to values, the cosmos itself is utterly impersonal and without purpose. In The View from Nowhere, an important book that includes a section on the mean- ing of life, Thomas Nagel observes that “[f]rom an external view of the universe, which abstracts from our own position in it, it . wouldn’t have mattered if we had never existed.”4 Nagel writes eloquently about the ten- sion between the importance we feel (from our own point of view) about our life and death and the complete indifference of the cosmos itself. “From far enough outside my birth seems accidental, my life pointless and my death insignificant, but from inside my never having been born seems nearly unimaginable, my life monstrously important, and my death catastrophic.”5 Of course, naturalists relish and profoundly value life, and even the cosmos. But, by their lights, the cosmos is not something that can or does care about its constituents. The cosmos does not itself have Introduction 3 some kind of objective meaning or purpose, nor does it exist because it is good or valuable in itself. The main thesis—or question—that this book addresses is whether there are signs all around us that we live in a created order and are made for something other than absolute death. I will nail my colors to the mast at the outset: I side with a form of Christianity that received a brave, ex- traordinary expression in a mid- seventeenth- century movement in Eng- land called Cambridge Platonism.
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