R.I.P. Jonathan Bennett

A distinguished philosopher. More: A servant to philosophy. I wonder how many students have been helped by the website he curated during his retirement. It hosts “versions of some classics of early modern philosophy, and a few from the 19th century, prepared with a view to making them easier to read while leaving intact the main arguments, doctrines, and lines of thought.”

He wrote, among other things, a classic historical study – Kant’s Analytic (1966) – and a classic article, “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn” (journal version here) which contrasts Huck’s conscience with Heinrich Himmler’s and Jonathan Edwards’s. He especially abhorred Edwards’s doctrine of hell. (To put it mildly: this doctrine sits poorly with my having titled this blog entry “R.I.P.”) (Bennett: “I am afraid that I shall be doing an injustice to Edwards’ many virtues, and to his great intellectual energy and inventiveness; for my concern is only with the worst thing about him – namely his morality, which was worse than Himmler’s.”)

He and his wife took their own lives: she, apparently without assistance, in 2014; he “through Canada’s MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) program.”

Browsing his writings, I found this review of The Shorter Pepys; it ends with a quotation from the diarist about dreaming … and death.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 17: The funeral

In 1995, Abel Ferrara released The Addiction, which was about a philosophy graduate student/vampire. The characters in his 1996 movie, The Funeral, also live as if they’re damned.

They’re philosophizing mobsters, not vampires. One of them, the youngest brother – Johnny, played by the skeletal Vincent Gallo – has just been killed. The family is in mourning. They’re keenly aware that death is their lot, too.

For the oldest brother, Ray – played by Christopher Walken – the event of dying is just another cinder in the lake of fire.

“I’ll roast in hell,” he says several times (and since it’s Walken saying it, it’s compelling).

He’s already roasting. It’s been that way since, as a child, he was brutally inducted into the family’s line of work.

A priest comes to Johnny’s funeral. Ray can’t stand to be near him, so he goes outside and sits in his car. It’s not that he doesn’t believe, it’s that he’s damned already. The priest goes through the motions, attending to the corpse and comforting the family, and then he summons Ray’s wife, Jean (Annabella Sciorra), for a chat. Your family goes to church, he says, but it needs to do a complete reversal of its “practical atheism” to climb out of this rut of violence.

The problem is, this isn’t an atheistic family, it’s a satanic one. One of their gangster minions is even named Ghouly, and he does a macabre dance.

Of the three brothers, it was Johnny who relished his satanic role. In flashback scenes, he dabbles in pro-union political activity – not idealistically, but out temperamental skewedness, since his own family is paid by industrialists to persecute the unions. After the funeral, Ray can’t acknowledge this fact about Johnny. Johnny was a communist, he insists. Not an anarchist. But other scenes make it clear that whatever Johnny did, he did out of perversity.

Ray rationalizes other things, too:

Ray: “All them Catholics gone insane. Everything we do depends on free choice, but at the same time, they say we need the grace of God to do what’s right. I don’t follow that, Jeany. If I do something wrong, it’s because God didn’t give me the grace to do what’s right. If this world stinks, it’s His fault. I’m only working with what I’ve been given.”

Jean: “Is that why the people they find with the bullet holes in their skulls is God’s fault? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

Ray: “I’m ashamed of nothing. I didn’t make the world.”

Jean: “But you’re not doing anything to make it better.”

Ray: “Yeah, and I’ll roast in hell.”

Damnation, he reasons, is something he can’t do anything about. It isn’t his fault: it’s God’s. And since he’s damned and it isn’t his fault, he may as well keep killing.

The middle brother, Chez (Chris Penn), is the most human. He lacks the coldness of his brothers. This doesn’t make him any less brutal. In one scene, he offers to extend mercy to a prostitute. When she doesn’t respond to his liking, he punishes her, angrily, but also with a terrible logic. “You sold your soul,” he tells her.

The wives live in fear and resignation. Chez’s wife, Clara (Isabella Rossellini), prays to Agnes, the patron saint of chastity, whose killer martyred her in a frenzy of lust. Clara doesn’t pray to obtain Agnes’s help, but to remind herself that the men will always take whatever they desire.

What do the men desire, then? Relief from their constant torture? Maybe Johnny wants this. He tells a friend: “I would say life is pretty pointless, wouldn’t you, without the movies.” He is gunned down in a relatively good mood, outside a cinema.

Chez and Ray enjoy no such relief. They always suffer. Their quest is for justice, which they go around pretending to administer to others – although they know it can never console them. Because they’re damned.

One technical note. The soundtrack is superb. It consists of period jazz (the year is 1939, I believe) and also of brief, piercing strains of orchestral strings. This isn’t only a ponderous, gloomy movie. It’s also a razor-sharp one. The string music makes the scenes feel more knife-like.

R.I.P. Rachel Held Evans

Her earthly race is all run.

RHE – blogger, book author, speaker – ecumenical Episcopalian, ex-evangelical, biblical anti-literalist, feminist – U.S. Southerner, Bryan College alumna, daughter, sister, wife, mother – and much more – has suddenly died at thirty-seven (my own age). Her body seems to have reacted severely against routine treatment for infection and flu.

I used to read her blog when I lived in Ithaca. I liked watching her wrestle, in near-real time, with difficult questions of biblical interpretation, theology, and practical ethics. I liked the humility with which she responded to critics. I liked how she made room on her blog for respectful Q&A sessions with representatives of different faith traditions.

The last couple of days, I’ve been skimming through entries that I missed after I stopped reading her blog around 2013.

She wasn’t formally trained in the topics she wrote about, but she was a persistent student. We can see this from her notes on Justo L. González’s The Story of Christianity, vol. 1 and vol. 2. Reading the latter volume, she learned that …

… at a time when Christians were condemning, expelling, and killing one another over doctrinal differences, a guy named Georg Calixtus had the crazy idea that perhaps one could hold to one’s convictions (his were Lutheran) without condemning as heretics those with whom one disagrees. He argued that there was a difference, after all, between heresy and error. This made far too much sense, and Calixtus was largely written off by his contemporaries. But he sounded cool to me so I gave him hipster glasses and a hat:

(Yes, alas, this sometime Proverbs 31 aspirant normally clothed herself in hipster garb. But she wore it lightly.)

Since few of us are professional scholars, it was valuable to have someone publicly exemplifying what she did, which was to approach serious questions with candor and humility, as a confirmed amateur, untainted by the presumptions of the guilds …

… which she skewered, graciously, in another blog entry, “Why a Seminary Degree Doesn’t Have to Make You a Jerk.”

She wasn’t afraid to take authoritarians to task. She was a skillful gadfly, judiciously choosing her targets, as we can see from her entry “The Bible Was ‘Clear’ …”

Playing the gadfly brought her enemies, maybe especially from among the Southern Baptists. Here is what one of them says. Without spelling it out, he insinuates that RHE has been sent to hell.

I’m not nearly so pessimistic. Whether her race was well run is for God to decide; but, having read much of her blogging, I have reason to hope that the best for her is still to come.

I’m terribly sad, though, for the husband and two young children she leaves behind.

(Photo by Dan Evans)

Update: Here are three of the better tributes to RHE, all on one page. (Hat tip to David Swartz.)

Update: Here’s a merciful conservative Christian reaction to RHE’s death. (Hat tip to my pastor.)

Update: One more article (this one from the Atlantic).